Invisible Children, Kony 2012, and criticisms

[essius]

The other day I noticed the Kony 2012 video by Invisible Children that has been receiving a great deal of attention on the Internet as of late (it’s received over 56 million views on YouTube). I watched the video and was immediately curious. Evidently, the video has received multiple lines of serious criticism. No one denies, of course, that Joseph

Comments

[essius]

To be fair, it is unclear to what extent their belief system more than nominally incorporates Christianity. Yes, they identify as Christian and use terms like "Holy Spirit," but so did many early sects of Christianity that would not have been regarded by the original disciples as orthodox. So it's not merely fundamentalist, which is bad enough, but it's heterodox as well. It's also a syncretism of nominally Christian doctrine with African and Jewish traditions. The Ugandan Catholic Church has apparently disavowed the LRA, and it's more than a little difficult to see how the LRA can claim to be truly Christian. "Christian militia" seems almost like a contradiction in terms. There's no basis in the New Testament or the hermeneutics of the historic Christian church for the moral permissibility of murder, sexual enslavement, rape, child abduction, or coercion of children to participate in warfare. On the contrary, everything in orthodox Christianity (a far cry from American fundamentalism, to be sure) demands the loudest and most relentless opposition to such atrocities. Kony's reported use of the Pentateuch to justify murder and mutilation is about as far from historic biblical Christianity as you can get.

[underlankers]

Blah Blah Blah. All of this equally applies to Islamists but anyone that points this out is accused of sympathizing with it. And frankly Henry Duke of Guise and a number of other heroes of the Faith would disagree that murder in the name of God is perfectly justifiable. Wasn't it a Christian tradition at one point to burn the local Jews whenever the harvest was bad? They, after all, commited the crime of Deicide......

But I expect that the only True Scotsmen are Glaswegians.

[essius]

Whether the Islamists are, as they claim, orthodox Muslims or detractors from Muslim orthodoxy is a matter for those better educated in Islam to decide. But I don't see a parallel here, because it is very clear that Kony and the LRA are a corruption of New Testament Christianity. That other "heroes of the Faith" may have wrongly believed in some kind of religiously justified killing is different from the kind of indiscriminate murder of the LRA, to say nothing of the repeated acts of rape, sexual enslavement, and coercion of children to participate in warfare. That is not to excuse the behavior of the former (for the Christianity of the New Testament would strongly condemn it), but rather to distinguish it from the atrocities of the latter.

As a rule orthodox Catholics, Protestants, Anglicans, Eastern Orthodox, Messianic Jews, etc. are all against indiscriminate murder (and anti-semitism), and would strongly reprimand those who think such actions are consistent with Christ's ethics of loving our neighbors. If Christ is our teacher and our example, then we should love our neighbor unto death-our own death, not our neighbors'. Moreover, Ephesians 1:14-16 makes clear the intention of Christianity vis-à-vis the Jews: "[Christ] himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility." (Incidentally, this isn't the kind of passage you're likely to find Kony using to support his bizarre syncretism of Christianity with ideologies that are diametrically opposed to Christ's life and teachings.)

[underlankers]

Yadda yadda yadda.

All this is an excuse to avoid facing up to the reality that these guys are Christians. Orthodox Catholics do that *now*, what with the Nazis having killed off most of Western Judaism. If you want to erase the medieval history and modern history of Christian anti-Semitism and complicity in wholesale atrocities, so be it. It just confirms you as a moral coward and hypocrite afraid to admit that Tomas de Torquemada, Henry, Duke of Guise, founder of the Catholic League, the architects of the great Pogroms from the 11th-20th Centuries, and the like who were indeed pious Christians were in fact Christians.

But I don't think this is an argument in good faith anyhow.

[essius]

The "reality that these guys are Christians" is apparently in your head, unless-contrary to the claims of Christ himself*-a person becomes a Christian simply by saying so (in which case religion in general becomes completely divorced from the psychology of real human beings, and the thought of Freud, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche et al. goes by the wayside). If, say, I declare that the Holy Spirit is speaking through me, ignore the hermeneutic of Christian Scripture, and claim that Jesus told me to commit mass genocide, am I really still in communion with the Body of Christ?

The truth is, neither the written rule of orthodoxy (Scripture) nor the living pattern of orthopraxy (Christ) have ever changed, regardless of the cognitive dissonance of many throughout the history of so-called Christendom. Now, if there were actual evidence that the LRA had some kind of robust ecclesiology and Christological hermeneutic, that would be another thing entirely, but I really doubt you're willing to engage the question on that level (because it actually involves asking the essential question: what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for being incorporated into the Body of Christ, on the accounting of Christ and his disciples?-as well as an empirical question concerning the doctrinal history of the LRA vis-à-vis the answer to the first question).

Incidentally, I wonder if your apparent view of "being a member of a certain religion" applies to political ideologies, too. Guess what? I'm a Republican, a Democrat, a Libertarian, and an Anarcho-Primitivist! And now I'm not! Wait, now I am again. This sure is fun.

*"Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'" (Mt. 7:22-24).

[underlankers]

So I suppose God allowed false agents of Satan to occupy the See of Rome during the Medieval ages, did He? God's not a very effective policeman of His Church, then.

See these quotes by Popes and two of the Gospels:

"And most falsely do these Christians claim that the Jews have secretly and furtively carried away these children and killed them, and that the Jews offer sacrifice from the heart and blood of these children, since their law in this matter precisely and expressly forbids Jews to sacrifice, eat, or drink the blood, or to eat the flesh of animals having claws. This has been demonstrated many times at our court by Jews converted to the Christian faith: nevertheless very many Jews are often seized and detained unjustly because of this. We decree, therefore, that Christians need not be obeyed against Jews in a case or situation of this type, and we order that Jews seized under such a silly pretext be freed from imprisonment, and that they shall not be arrested henceforth on such a miserable pretext, unless-which we do not believe-they be caught in the commission of the crime. We decree that no Christian shall stir up anything new against them, but that they should be maintained in that status and position in which they were in the time of our predecessors, from antiquity till now.

^Blood Libel

I know that you are descendants of Abraham; yet you seek to kill me, because my word finds no place in you. I speak of what I have seen with my Father, and you do what you have heard from your father. They answered him, "Abraham is our father." Jesus said to them, "If you were Abraham's children, you would do what Abraham did. ... You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies. But, because I tell the truth, you do not believe me. Which of you convicts me of sin? If I tell the truth, why do you not believe me? He who is of God hears the words of God; the reason why you do not hear them is you are not of God.

^John, showing Jesus's love for the Jews.

And Matthew:

"His blood be on us and our children", the rationale for many a pious Christian to butcher innoncent women and children for Jesus.

And last but not least, there's the brutal Jew-hatred at the root of Protestantism, and the strand of pious Christian rulers who invariably expelled Jews from Western Europe, the last two of which were the very same Los Reyes Catolicos who began Generalplan West and the extermination of Native Americans, also done for Christian purposes to civilize the heathen savages. As though endiing human sacrifice to replace it with arbeit macht frei is some moral improvement.

[essius]

First, you are ignoring my general point, which applies to all religions and political ideologies. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for being identified as holding to a given system of belief? If you maintain that it is simply and solely by saying that you believe according to that system, then it's easy to see why you ignored my satirical remarks above-you have no response, and tacitly recognize that your position commits you to absurd consequences. You prefer to define religion in terms of professed belief, rather than lived belief. If this is wrong, and your criteria consist in something else, let's hear it. What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for being identified as holding to a given belief system?

Second, you are ignoring my specific point concerning the words of Christ himself-viz., in Mt. 7:22-24. Does the founder of a religion have any say as to who does and does not count as a true follower of that religion, or not?

Third, I have a hard time knowing what was going through the heads of professing Christians throughout history who have commit atrocious acts against the Jews, or why they adopted the hermeneutics of Scripture (on which I'll respond below) that they did. I don't know enough about the social context of medieval anti-semitism to make a judgment. If, in the end, Christ decides that these were true Christians who were simply acting, in this serious way, diametrically contrary to Christ's gospel, that is his call. If he decides that they were only professing Christians, that is his call. All I can say is that they were not acting in accord with the commandments to love the neighbor in the way Christ showed us by means of his holy life and self-sacrificial death-and that needs explanation. As I said above, if Christ is our teacher and our example, then we should love our neighbor unto death-our own death, not our neighbors'.

Fourth, in the passage from John 8, Jesus is referring to specific Jews-Jews who accused him of being demon-possessed and later tried to stone him. Jesus could have said these very same things, without the Abraham rhetoric that his interlocutors introduced, to any Jew or non-Jew. So to anti-semitism into this passage is pretty disingenuous. Ironically, in this very passage Jesus makes the point I've been making all along: "To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, 'If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples'" (Jn 8:31).

Fifth, how could an anti-semitic hermeneutic ever make logical, coherent sense of the Ephesians passage I cited earlier, let alone Paul's statement that God has called "both Jews and Greeks" (1 Cor 1:24) and admonishes the church, "Do not cause anyone to stumble, whether Jews, Greeks or the church of God" (1 Cor 10:32)? Consider Paul's remarks in Romans 3:1-2: "What advantage, then, is there in being a Jew, or what value is there in circumcision? Much in every way! First of all, they have been entrusted with the very words of God." Consider, especially, the whole of Romans 11, and in particular v. 18: "do not boast over those branches [i.e., the Jews]. If you do, consider this: You do not support the root, but the root supports you"; and further: "I do not want you to be ignorant of this mystery, brothers, so that you may not be conceited: Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved" (vv. 25-26a). All these passages would have to be ignored or wildly distorted. But in actual fact, the Christian gospel holds that no one is righteous-neither Jew nor Gentile (Rom 3), and in both Romans and Colossians, Paul refers to all non-Christians as enemies of God. There is no discrimination.

(continued below)

[underlankers]

I have a response, I'm just engaging in a conversation with someone that doesn't admit the response is there. Which describes 99% of my interactions with a certain stripe of ideologue.

1) No, I define religion in terms of lived belief over professed belief. The spirit of Christianity is that of the destructive, annihilating vacuum that consumes all, giving little. The Church has burned books, buried scholars, and exterminated entire peoples. The Church created the largest religious war in human history. Only because it's Christianity this is all neglected and given various excuses under the No True Scotsmen fallacy.

2) No. The Founder of the religion does not, especially since His Followers only needed a generation to start whining about the Jews as Christ-Killers and to butcher them with impunity whenever opportunity presented itself. For the Jew, the Christian is the menace. The Muslims are capable of being friendly in sincerity, good faith between the Church and the Synagogue didn't exist until post-1945.

3) No True Scotsmen and moral cowardice, evading a point so you don't have to answer it. Answer the question, friend. This is called evading the question, using the No True Scotsman fallacy to do it. You're just too much of a coward to admit that when these men sincerely thought they were avenging deicide they were perfectly pious in it. This is how the Church that introduced disputations, Blood-Purity Laws, the Ghettoes, the vicious savage Pogrom, and the expulsion of Jews time after time against the express wishes of the state lies merrily about what it really is. The Church to the Jews is Torquemada, not St. Francis.

4) Again, this is an excuse and an evasion. I provide you with Jesus's words and you immediately leap to deny them the universality in the statement.

5) Don't ask me that, I'm not the one trivializing and minimizing 2,000 years of massacre, hatred, and oppression.

[jerseycajun]

You seem to be setting a very poor tone in this thread. Wouldn't you rather simply walk away and take a deep breath? That sounds nice, doesn't it?

[underlankers]

Well, given my original point was that people don't care about Christian terrorism, and the other guy's points are "split hair x and hair y" he's been proving my actual point the whole time.

[underlankers]

Let me rephrase one thing: if his response had been something more to the effect of "Yes, the Church should make it clear they entirely condemn this kind of thing and dissociate themselves from it entirely" or something like that, I'dve been fine. Instead he starts hairsplitting in classic Photian style instead of simply saying "These guys are bad and they give Christianity a bad name" and moving on. People's lives killed by such "heroes of the faith" mean more this kind of inanity on the Internet.

[jerseycajun]

"Let me rephrase one thing: if his response had been something more to the effect of "Yes, the Church should make it clear they entirely condemn this kind of thing and dissociate themselves from it entirely" or something like that, I'dve been fine."

As evidenced by his comments below, if you had simply stated what you just said to me, verbatim to him I do not think you would be having to deal with a thread this long. But you yourself have not limited yourself to these expectations, as you have repeatedly asserted that expected Christian behavior is the no different than how Christians have behaved.

And I would also note that if the no-true-Scotsman fallacy is meant to illustrate one who irrationally excludes members from a group, then there must be a counter-fallacy associated with those who irrationally include members into a group, on equally tenuous rationale. I think your usage of this, so frequent as it has become, verges very much into that territory, but I will qualify that as solely my own impression. Without at least having to come to terms with comparing observed behavior with expected behavior based on consistency with expectations that come with the name being adopted, then those who (rightly) exclude North Korea from being considered alongside commonly understood democracies, should be equally susceptible to being guilty of the "no-true Scotsman" fallacy as well.

[underlankers]

Well, as he opened this can of worms, I've simply shown him why one doesn't decide to start nitpicking about who is and isn't a Christian. As the Catholic League types of the days of the St. Bartholomew's Square Massacre would kill all living Christians today as Godless heathens.

And that comparison of North Korea is itself fallacious. People's Republic in this context is an unambiguous Communist identifier.

[jerseycajun]

And the use of "Resistance Army" in the LRA has unavoidable connotations often associated with various paramilitary factions in South America and Africa.

Why should the "People's Republic" identifier in one name materially bear more contextual mitigation of significance to the "Democracy" part than "Resistance Army" does towards it's supposedly Christian component?

My point is that clearly some standard for terminology must be necessary for determining accuracy of a name, and that simply stating such is not in itself a "no-true-Scotsman" fallacy. Simply questioning if the guy claiming to be a Scotsman was actually born, raised in, or even spent any time in Scotland, is not an unreasonable question to ask before going ahead and making the assertion that indeed, the man is a Scot.

What essius is saying, as I read it, is that the standard when it comes to matters of faith is that of the one whose name is on the label, and I can understand the line of thought, because Religion and faith has everything to do with behaviors and either living up to expectations set by such faith, or failing to do so.

[jerseycajun]

That's nice, but tell me how beginning with "Blah, blah, blah..." and "Yadda, yadda, yadda...", as well as making the argument personal in calling him a coward, were critical to proving those points.

[underlankers]

It's indicating by a simple phrase that I consider his argument gasconade and end-running things to avoid Montecristo-length megaposts about it. It's arguing on the Internet, man.