It is standard information in all the big Dictionaries and Encyclopedias that Judaism, based on its Scriptures, believed God to be a single Person, a single undifferentiated Self. That is what I and many others call unitary monotheism or uni-personal monotheism. Often referred to as strict monotheism, although I see this last phrase could be ambiguous.

The Bible is turned into chaos if one superimposes philosophical language on to its simple realism. God is said to be a single Self (nephesh, He calls Himself a nephesh) thousands and thousands of times. This is the massive, pervasive and obvious evidence to be dealt with.

The Shema and Scripture convinced Judaism always to believe in unitary monotheism. Thus at Oxford, the Regis Prof lecturing on the Trinity said “Judaism was always unitarian.”

The major point to be taken in is that Yeshua (the real name of Jesus) affirmed that unitary monotheism of Judaism. The Jew who agreed with Jesus showed that Yeshua was entirely Jewish in his description of who God is: One single self.

The Jew echoed back Yeshua words by saying “there is no other except HIM.” It takes no special learning to know that He is one WHO! One Self. What good is a creed if it is so unclear? It really impugns the integrity of Holy Scripture (and Jesus said that “salvation is from the Jews”) if we are unable to give a clear meaning to the Shema.

I need only quote three sources which are echoed by many:

Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (Judaism): “Abraham, Moses and Elijah were all equally zealous monotheists and in none of their successors was there any retrogression from the highest and purest form of unitarian belief.”

Leonard Hodgson D. D., Regius Professor at Oxford:

Christian Faith and Practice, 1952, p. 74: “The monotheism of the Jews was then, as it is still, unitarian.”

The Jewish Encyclopedia, “Deism”, 1906: “Judaism has always been rigorously Unitarian.”

Emil Brunner, Dogmatic, vol. 1, p 205: “Judaism [is] Unitarian.”

Yeshua agreed with the Jews in Mark 12:29, and as Dr. Dennis Nineham says in his commentary on Mark, this passage is meant to demonstrate that Yeshua was thoroughly orthodox in his description of God.

These non-complicated facts should settle our discussion, since we are all agreed that our Christian task is to follow the teaching of Yeshua.

What Yeshua did so brilliantly, anticipating no doubt controversy about his own status in relation to the One GOD, YHVH, was to teach them about Ps. 110:1. That Psalm, vv. 1-4, is alluded to or cited 33 times in the NT and was decisive and should be decisive for us too. In the Psalm YHVH is still one single SELF (as 7,000 times in the OT). YHVH directs an oracle to some other SELF. This of course defeats Modalism, and Modalism shows how terribly mired in controversy our subject can become!

Surely one does not need a PHD to tell us that a Father cannot be his own Son! Yeshua never imagined such a thing.

What Yeshua shows in Ps 110:1 is that the exalted He is not a second YHWH or a second Person “in YHWH.” Rather he is the supremely exalted MAN Messiah, my lord, tragically mis-rendered in many versions (not all) as “my Lord”! Paul said it all very easily in 1 Tim 2:5!

“One God and one Man Messiah.” Two individuals, one of them is GOD.

The issues we are discussing are simply huge, since billions of human beings deserve to hear who HYWH and Yeshua really are. At present the very complex philosophical Trinity smothers good information. And few seem to know that the church fathers, the orchestrators of the Trinity, admitted that they were deliberately eliminating the “Jewish error”! That “Jewish error” was in fact that teaching of Yeshua.

How much does the public know of what really went on?

(Anthony F. Buzzard).

The Shady History of Big Sugar.

Credit Matt Chase

Charlottesville, Va. — On Monday, an article in JAMA Internal Medicine reported that in the 1960s, the sugar industry paid Harvard scientists to publish a study blaming fat and cholesterol for coronary heart disease while largely exculpating sugar. This study, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, helped set the agenda for decades of public health policy designed to steer Americans into low-fat foods, which increased carbohydrate consumption and exacerbated our obesity epidemic.

This revelation rightly reminds us to view industry-funded nutrition science with skepticism and to continue to demand transparency in scientific research. But ending Big Sugar’s hold on the American diet will require a broader understanding of the various ways in which the industry, for 150 years, has shaped government policy in order to fuel our sugar addiction.

Today’s sugar industry is a product of the 19th century, when the key federal sugar policy was not a dietary guideline but a tariff on sugar imports. In the decades after the Civil War, Americans’ per capita consumption of sugar more than doubled, from 32 pounds in 1870 to 80 pounds in 1910. As a result, the government got hooked on sugar, too: By 1880, sugar accounted for a sixth of the federal budget.

To protect domestic refiners, then the largest manufacturing employer in Northern cities, the tariff distinguished between two kinds of sugar: “refined” and “raw.” Refined sugar that was meant for direct consumption paid a much higher rate than did raw sugar crystals intended for further refining and whitening. But by the late 1870s, new industrial sugar factories in the Caribbean began to jeopardize this protectionist structure. Technologically sophisticated, these factories could produce sugar that, while raw by the government’s standard, was consistently much closer to refined sugar than ever before (akin to sweeteners such as Sugar in the Raw today). The American industry now faced potential competition from abroad.

The country’s largest refiners mobilized on several fronts. They lobbied the United States Congress to adopt chemical instruments that could measure the percentage of sucrose in a sugar cargo, and to deem sugar refined when its sucrose content was sufficiently high. Previously, customs officers had judged the purpose of a sugar cargo by its color, smell, taste and texture, as people throughout the sugar trade had done for centuries. Now refiners argued that such sensory methods were ripe for abuse because they depended on a subjective appraisal. They demanded a scientific standard instead — one that would reveal some “raw” sugar to be nearly pure and thus subject to higher tariffs — and they prevailed.

Their plea for scientific objectivity may have sounded sensible, but it masked nefarious aims. Like the tobacco industry in the 1960s, these refiners knew that scientific questions were hard for outsiders to adjudicate, and thus easier to manipulate to an industry’s advantage. If refiners were to bribe a customs chemist to shade his results in their favor — as they were routinely accused of doing for decades, beginning in the 1870s — such corruption would be much harder for the government to detect than it had been when everyone could see and smell the same sugar.

In addition to their lobbying, refiners waged a public campaign to dissuade Americans from eating raw sugar. One of their common advertisements featured a disgusting insect that supposedly inhabited raw sugar and caused an ailment called “grocer’s itch” in those who handled it. Other pamphlets suggested that Cuban factories operated by slaves or Chinese indentured workers would “give the people sugar teeming with animals and Cuban dirt.”

The refiners’ real agenda, of course, was not Americans’ health; it was to maximize their profits from selling sugar. Thanks in part to their influence over both tariff policy and the new methods of customs collection, the big refiners were soon able to form the Sugar Trust, one of the most notorious and successful monopolies of the Gilded Age. By the early 20th century, belief in the health benefits of refined sugar was so widespread that increasing Americans’ consumption of it actually became a goal of federal policy.

Looking back at the industry’s transformation of sugar (an edible substance derived from a plant) into sucrose (a molecule), we also see the roots of “nutritionism” in United States policy. That’s the idea that what matters to human health is not food per se but rather a handful of isolable biochemical factors. As food critics like Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle have argued, nutritionism is better at helping processed-food companies market their products as healthy (“with Omega-3 added!”) than it is at promoting our well-being.

Today, the sugar industry remains politically powerful, with consequences for both public health and the environment. The Miami Herald reported this summer, for example, that the industry contributed $57 million to Florida elections in the last 22 years; meanwhile, state officials have resisted efforts to make sugar companies pay for their damage to the Everglades.

If we want to check the power of Big Sugar, we’d be well served to acknowledge the long record (past as well as present) of the industry’s machinations… (By DAVID SINGERMAN).

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/opinion/the-shady-history-of-big-sugar.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0