Christians could face one year prison sentence for encouraging conversion to their faith, according to a new controversial legislation being introduced in Israel. The legislation which is being proposed by ultra-Orthodox members of Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition would also proscribe Christians from engaging in religious discussion with Jews.
Titled Proposed Penal Law: Amendment – Prohibition of Solicitation for Religious Conversion – 2023, the legislation is introduced by United Torah Judaism's Moshe Gafni and Yaakov Asher. The law would apply to anyone who would attempt to persuade someone to change their religious beliefs, however the legislation specifically mentions the Christian faith, saying that "recently, the attempts of missionary groups, mainly Christians, to solicit conversion of religion have increased."
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Israel sucks but so do Christian missionaries. I would specify all missionaries but it's not like I have to listen to Jainists yell into megaphones on the street. The one time I was approached by some Hare Krishna weirdo I was frankly delighted for the change of pace
You have to consider how this is going to be used and abused and how it's probably just one more step on the way to creating a state with enforced ethnicity and faith. Just talking about the nature of the divine between a Christian and a Jew could be criminalized by this. And how handy would it be for Israelis to be able to claim that their Arab neighbor tried to convert them?
:this: there is 0 chance the reasoning behind the bill doesn't involve justifying their genocide further
it appears that the users in this thread don't know that Palestinian Christians exist and are obviously also oppressed by :israel-cool:
or maybe even that there are Christians who aren't rightwing white western evangelicals
I approve of this for that reason, in an accelerationist sort of way. If they go mask-off fascist even against Christians, they're alienating a huge part of their base of supporters here in the US. Which is bad for Israel, which is a good thing.
they have been oppressing Palestinian Christians for quite some time now
I'm afraid you're overestimating the amount of agency devout Evangelicals have. I joke in my own comment about how the ones who hear about it will be shocked that their Zionist buddies would do such a thing, but in actuality I don't think they'd turn on Israel for anything short of a drastic change to Evangelical theology
Zion is part of their apocalypse setup - they need it to exist for their god to finally come back, so they'll support it to the literal end of time
How many of these people pull the levers of power in the DC regime? You can round that number off to zero without losing much accuracy. Nobody needs them. Israel needs them about as much as a basketball team needs its fans. I.E. it doesn't. Can win perfectly well without them.
I think the motive is actually different. I think this law is being put out there pre-emptively, with the goal of allowing evangelical Christians to immigrate and take part in the Zionist colonial project as settlers.
If everyone else is joking in their approval, I'm also disappointed.
https://www.palestinechronicle.com/orthodox-patriarch-in-jerusalem-says-palestinian-christians-are-targeted-by-israeli-groups/
Dunking on Christianity (and Abrahamic religions in general) is alway morally correct
As if they need a reason. When has Israel ever followed their own laws regarding Palestinians?
My point is that they have never felt pressured to follow their own laws. Like, did you think there were no West Bank settlements before now or something?
This website really is full of euphoric Reddit atheists lmao
Here, let's go to the Wikipedia article on Christianity in Israel shall we:
75.8% of the Christians in Israel are Arab Christians.
This law is obviously designed as another tool of oppression on the Palestinian population. It isn't going after Evangelical weirdos because Evangelical weirdos don't, you know, actually live in Palestine. Palestinians live in Palestine, and like other Arabs, not all Palestinians are Muslim. The city of Nazareth is almost 1/3 Christian, which I'm sure is a complete coincidence and has absolutely nothing to do with the Christian faith and is just a completely random city that's never mentioned once in the Bible. Palestinians are just Christian in this random Palestinian city for some strange reason.
I'd say the common factor there is taking religious belief in isolation (in particular the heretical ev*ngelicals, who we know are whack af), which we might think is ridiculous, and not considering the broader concrete historical context, i.e. the apartheid state of Israel and how religion works there politically. I.e. it's methodological idealism.
It does remind me of the often very difficult topic of how to relate, as Communists, to religion which we think is not simply wrong, but often deeply reactionary, while also being, in the context under discussion, that of an oppressed minority. This is clearly a problem that the left has not really figured out how to properly relate to or solve. Obviously this doesn't apply so much in this case as we're talking about Palestinian Christians, not rabid yankie evangelicals.
I'd say that that's not an indication of a lack of a problem but more just a more mature way of approaching the issue, which is natural in specific social and cultural contexts where leftists are under more pressure to recognize the facts of religious majorities in politics, the deep, culturally and socially conservative religiosity of their working classes.
Obviously this doesn't only apply outside the West, given the importance of religion in many USAmericans' lives and the fact that if you simply trash their spirituality in the process of trying to radicalize them well then well done you blew it. As you note, in practice you are just insulting and alienating them and driving them towards right-wing (in particular religious) forces. White atheists in the West are also empowered by (at least implicit) white (including culturally) supremacy.
I'm not speaking just about this crude, insulting, arrogant and ineffective way that is characteristic of white, western interest atheists, but of how to relate to religion in general. I mean more broadly how communists should relate to religion, including when we are in positions of political hegemony. The discussions around secularism are thoroughly poisoned because in the West what this means has had little to do with any real concrete obstruction of the role of reactionary religious influence in politics (see USA), or because it has been used hypocritically as a cudgel as one state-mechanism among many for the oppression and dehumanization of minorities, above all Muslims (see, above all, France). But in a situation of communist political hegemony, how should you try to combat a variety of reactionary facets of the religions in your society? There will be inevitable backlash. Obviously the situation now is not hegemonic for us, so broad fronts and support are absolutely necessary and progressive, but honestly alot of this can at best be justified as critical support and even then I think only with certain groups. Also I'd add, to avoid the situation where certain westerners (especially the yankies), incl. on here doing their classic of larping as islamists or defending a non-western Communist Party of X just because they're called communist, that alot of communist parties, not only in the West, are deeply compromised wrt issues like reformism, corruption, opportunism, and sticking to undisputably reactionary social and cultural positions (above all wrt gender, sexuality, and race). The Russian and Greek communist parties are good examples of groups that have been deeply reactionary in these respects. This social conservatism can also afflict communist parties in countries under imperialist boots, and I think it worth bearing in mind when considering how they relate to religious groups.
It reminds me of an argument on here a few months ago about a US professor who was fired for showing a medieval Persian painting showing Mohammad in a class on the history of religious art and having alerted the students innumerable times that it would be shown, and the influence of modern liberal identity politics was (imo, unfortunately) very present (even on here) in justifications on the broad 'left' media sphere of the firing of this professor. This is obviously a more benign, less materially important example but it's symptomatic of the fact that, in general, the left has not been able to properly conceptualize its correct relation to the political claims, rights and obligations of religious groups.
I would agree with everything you've said. I personally don't have an issue with anyone trying to engage in experiences which could be called spiritual or even mystic, meaning a particular type of uniquely intense and meaningly type of experience, so long as it is not confused with or presentend as supplanting other, in particular materialist-scientific forms of knowledge, and so long as it doesn't lead to reactionary points of view. Ofc, it's not an easy question to what extent spiritual or mystical experiences can be separated from materialism. I'd call Nietzsche and Bataille (ontological) materialists, but also somewhat mystic (Bataille explicitly so).
As you note, organized religion insofar as it has historically existed has been deeply reactionary. This fact is a consequence of the historical, socio-economics contexts, i.e. the forms of society in which they existed, which they shaped and which shaped them, of which they were an intrinsic, organic component. The question then becomes: are there contexts in which the form that religion/spirituality/mysticism tape could be non-reactionary, taken as a complex whole? I've met Christians were deeply impressive people even if I didn't really agree with their politics, and it was clear to me that their spirituality played an important role in that. Unfortunately I've met more Christians who gave me the opposite impression of the function of their religion.
I'm not sure what form spirituality will take in the future, or in potential future socialist societies. On the one hand, if we consider the West, most people are not really deeply religious in any genuine sense as someone in one of the societies of Christendom would have understood it. Tbh most evagelicals and anglicans I've met have such gray, lifeless conceptions of their own spirtuality that I'd even hesitate to apply the word to them. On the other hand, the modern left is far less militantly atheist that it has been in the past, for better of worse. I think this has had both positive and negative consequences, e.g. it's promoted a far greater degree of understanding and sympathy for the religious and helped comabt prejudice and discrimination, but on the other had I think it's somewhat emblematic of a movement away from scientific socialism, which I definitely think has had a broad, negative impact on how the modern left thinks and acts (see the rebirth in popularity for anti-rationalist, anti-empiricist, neovitalist thought among many on the self-described 'left').
It's perhaps worth noting that even at the time, there were Bolsheviks who didn't share Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin's militant atheism (even anti-theism). The examples that first come to mind are Lunacharsky and Bogdanov.
This website really is full of euphoric Reddit atheists lmao
I think a lot of us just got sick of the uphill battle that is doing apologia for religions that we don't even believe in. We never attracted much of a religious user base so it sort of felt like who are we even defending here? I'm not saying that's the right course of action but I do think it's part of the explanation.
Yes, I hope the article makes that clear to people. I'm describing the phenomenon that led us to this point, not endorsing it.
We never attracted much of a religious user base so it sort of felt like who are we even defending here?
Palestinian Christians who have been Christian for 2000 years? Like, they're the OG Christians. Their ancestors straight up met Jesus. If anyone has claim to being the real Christians, it's them.
This seems pretty weird, wouldn't they not want to alienate their American evangelical support?
No they're at the stage where they want to crank global anti-Semitism to 11 so more diaspora Jews will want to move to Israel to escape. Literally Hitler's plan
Actual Israelites don’t like those people, being fetishized isn’t a good feeling and breeds resentment.
The support of Israel in DC doesn't depend on them.
Israelis feel weirded out by American evangelical support. Kind of like how Mr. Incredible felt about Buddy.
The evangelicals would enjoy nothing more than to actually face persecution. By the very Jews of the Bible no less. Their smugness would be off the charts.
extremely rare Israeli Wturns out its a very common Isntraeli L
Finding ways to further oppressive a particular segment of the Palestinian population is an " extremely rare Israeli W" apparently.
this is to to presuctue the Christian Part of Palestina more intensly , which for some reason is in existance in the their "holy land" , ..(something to do with a carpeter that worked there once ) , it has nothing to do with evengaliced christians .
It is NOT a rare israeli W.
I'm imagining Mormonism but for Islam where the :lmayo:s circle the Bass Pro Shops pyramid
still critical good if it gets some evangelical yankee freaks in jail
Agreed, didn’t mean to imply a lack of support for jailing Jesus freaks
the law would apply to anyone who would attempt to persuade someone to change their religious beliefs
this is fine as long as it doesn't apply to simply stating your affiliation.
It's Israel, so we can assume it's probably not going to be fine
Cheering on a bill (that is probably used against Arabs) made by fascists who are considered to be too extreme by other settlers is not a good look.
probably used against Arabs
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-christianity-proposed-bill-conversion-latest-target
Also: bunch of americans thinking that all christians are white evangelical chuds
My mom was an evangelical and I got a good dose of religious trauma over it, so I get why people can feel very antagonistic toward Christianity, but this thread is going way too far.
One religious group oppressing another religious group isn't good, you don't have to hand it to them, and you shouldn't have critical support for Israel's newest "deliberately oppressing Palestinians" law.
also this is very probably mainly intended to target Palestinian Christians
One religious group oppressing another religious group isn’t good
I mean, I agree in theory. But also, this just feels like classic "Leopards Ate My Face!" tier shit. You're talking about a group of wealthy expats who routinely travel to Israel in order to foist their religious beliefs on a public that has spent the last 2000 years very publicly rejecting the sales pitch. At the same time, this group is dogmatic in their support of Israeli religious convictions, purely on the theory that the new western colonial enclave will bring about The End Of The Fucking World.
And now they're getting the tiniest taste of the shit that locals unaligned with the current fascist government have been eating for the last century, and we're supposed to discover the problematic nature of religious oppression?
This is literally the "First they came for..." poem, except these people are at the bottom of the fucking list. If nobody is left to speak for the Evangelicals, its because they're a bunch of callous fucks.
And now they’re getting the tiniest taste of the shit that locals unaligned with the current fascist government have been eating for the last century, and we’re supposed to discover the problematic nature of religious oppression?
This is literally the “First they came for…” poem, except these people are at the bottom of the fucking list. If nobody is left to speak for the Evangelicals, its because they’re a bunch of callous fucks.
Do you think Pat Robertson is going to be impacted by this law? It's going to be used to target Palestinian Christians. It's going to be the same locals unaligned with the current fascist government that get screwed.
Do you think Pat Robertson is going to be impacted by this law?
Yes, in so far as rounding up a bunch of clueless midwesterners and having them pay him top dollar to visit the Holy Land on The Elder Abuse Crusades will no longer be as viable a scam.
It’s going to be used to target Palestinian Christians.
Palestinian Christians have already been eating shit. This expands the scope to anyone the new far-right government doesn't like, including everyone from Eastern Orthodox Slavic migrants to Palestinian-sympathetic Catholics to Americans the government finds annoying.
It’s really unfortunate that the country cracking down on Christianity as it should be is doing it as an extra way to further their ongoing genocide.
In any other circumstance I would support laws cracking down on Christianity in general, and definitely anything that could be defined as missionary work. Christianity is a scourge that should be wiped from this planet, but not the way you mean and I’d rather you not associate with me
