You can hardly hit up the Jblogsphere without running into 10,000 complaints about the “Gedolim”. The Gedolim, for anyone not in the know, are Rabbis who are considered very great and authoritative by some people, but not by others, whose level of authority changes depending on who you talk to.
But for a reality check, feast your eyes on Iran, where the Shiite Gedolim are in a civil war, killing and raping each other’s followers, over control of Iran’s oil. The Catholic Church’s Gadol Pope is an ex-Nazi who on retirement would have a solid contract from Hollywood to play every villain in every movie ever.
And then we can take a step back further, to the conflict of two great Christian Gedolim, Sir Thomas More and Martin Luther.
Martin Luther is the founding father of Protestantism and Nazism. Sir Thomas More was canonized by the Pope as the Patron Saint of Politicians and Statesmen. Which seems about right, since Thomas More was a vicious homicidal sociopath who wanted to kill everyone who disagreed with him.
Martin Luther was a crazy German monk who was a German nationalist and against the tyranny of the Church, because he wanted more local German tyranny. Also he really hated the Jews, I mean really really hated the Jews.
Here’s a sample
They rulers must act like a good physician who, when gangrene has set in proceeds without mercy to cut, saw, and burn flesh, veins, bone, and marrow. Such a procedure must also be followed in this instance. Burn down their synagogues, forbid all that I enumerated earlier, force them to work, and deal harshly with them… If this does not help we must drive them out like mad dogs.
In other words Martin Luther had a lot in common with Shmarya Rosenberg of Failed Messiah.
But that wasn’t enough for Marty, who was sure that even if you burned down all the synagogues and banned Judaism, Jews would still be praying… in his own imagination!
But what will happen even if we do burn down the Jews’ synagogues and forbid them publicly to praise God, to pray, to teach, to utter God’s name? They will still keep doing it in secret. If we know that they are doing this in secret, it is the same as if they were doing it publicly. For our knowledge of their secret doings and our toleration of them implies that they are not secret after all and thus our conscience is encumbered with it before God.
But if Martin Luther was nothing else, he was a magnificent wordsmith
Did I not tell you earlier that a Jew is such a noble, precious jewel that God and all the angels dance when he farts?
This is why Germans don’t have any concept of comedy that doesn’t involve killing people.
But on the other hand there was Sir Thomas More, who coined the term Utopia and is treated as a Catholic hero and martyr, because after killing a whole bunch of people… eventually King Henry VIII killed him.
You might know Sir Thomas More from his fictional incarnations, particularly as the great and ethical humanist of A Man for All Seasons. And this image has about as much relation to reality as Christopher Walken trying to play Princess Diane in a broadway musical.
There are a ton of Catholic schools named after Sir Thomas More, and he’s considered a brilliant orator and man of letters. So here is a sample of Sir Thomas More replying to Martin Luther
Come, do not rage so violently, good father; but if you have raved wildly enough, listen now, you pimp. You recall that you falsely complained above that the king has shown no passage in your whole book, even as an example, in which he said that you contradict yourself. You told this lie shortly before, although the king has demonstrated to you many examples of your inconsistency ….
But meanwhile, for as long as your reverend paternity will be determined to tell these shameless lies, others will be permitted, on behalf of his English majesty, to throw back into your paternity’s shitty mouth, truly the shit-pool of all shit, all the muck and shit which your damnable rottenness has vomited up, and to empty out all the sewers and privies onto your crown divested of the dignity of the priestly crown, against which no less than against the kingly crown you have determined to play the buffoon.
Something tells me that Sir Thomas More would have had an easy transition to blogging or the Huffington Post. Because it’s pretty obvious that the Patron Saint of all Politicians and Statesmen liked to spend a lot of time playing with his own shit.
Of course calling Martin Luther a pimp, which based on his outfits he probably wasn’t, and claiming that his mouth was a giant toilet and he was a raving madman, which were two problems that More himself seemed to suffer from, wasn’t the ultimate. Because Sir Thomas More had his own dungeon for torturing heretics.
Sir Thomas More had already brought back the burning of heretics after becoming Bishop of London. Being a heretic often involved selling bibles translated into English, which was considered a major crime by the Catholic Church. One of the bible sellers that Sir Thomas More caught was taken to his house, “pinioned `hand, foot, and head in the stocks’, for six days without release… whipped and also twisted his brows with small ropes, so that the blood started out of his eyes.”
In More’s defense, this was actually mild by the torture standards of the day. The Spanish would have considered More a liberal for not breaking him on the wheel.
Eventually More, like pretty much every power mad cleric, in England, ran afoul of Henry the Eight, who had his head chopped off. This was a kindlier means of execution than burning at the stake, which Sir Thomas More had dispensed to Tyndale, the first translator of the bible. Since then More has been canonized by two churches and in fiction too. The British biographer Jasper Ridley though described Sir Thomas More as “a particularly nasty sadomasochistic pervert”… which you know is not exactly shocking when you consider the guy had people tortured in his own house.
More’s refusal to sign the Act of Supremacy made him into a Catholic hero, never mind all the butchery and psychotic behavior. Just as Martin Luther is a Protestant hero, despite being a psychotic madman who wanted to kill pretty much everyone.
Just as Robert Novak is a big ass conservative hero, even though he supported Hamas. And Ann Coulter is a big ass conservative hero, even though she hates Jews. And Bill Moyer is a liberal hero, even though he claimed Jews are genetically coded for violence. And Jimmy Carter is a liberal hero… even though… you get the drift. Can’t question the “greats”. It’s the same everywhere.
Peace. Out.
Samurai Mohel 