Posted by pancho from adsl-64-160-45-79.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net (64.160.45.79) on Tuesday, February 19, 2002 at 4:10PM :
...we are constantly at each other's throats, and have been for years, because we are terribly insecure and frightened. We really DON'T know what makes us Assyrian or Chaldean or any of the rest of it. We, like Aprim, can prove NOTHING...and we see those experts and scholars and museum tour guide directors standing over there shaking their heads with disparaging smiles at the corners of their mouths because THEY don't believe us either...and we turn with fury and venom towards anyone of us who "breaks ranks"...and that can easily be defined as asking any questions at all thereby rocking this barely floating boat we are trying to cross an unchartered ocean in...and it LEAKS!!!
We are as the person hanging on by one fingernail from a cliff with no end in sight to the distance we will fall when that one slim finger gives out...but it will be an abyss, of that we are certain. People hanging on like that, who have all their resources concentrated in one finger...are not interested in having a dialogue, or shaking hands, or much of anything.
Our identity hangs on a very fragile hook and without that addmittedly weak and insufficient hook, we wouldn't have anything at all...or so we fear. These extreme reactions, this banning and deleting and cursing and calling each other names is all an indication of just how uncertain and insecure we are...or else why would a word, or a topic scare us so...make us pretend to be bored or uninterested when we are all really and trooly scared as hell when we aren't just plain indifferent...though that is caused by fear as well.
We HAVE to get off these religiously based arguments and identities...they are our one weak hook that everything about our Heritage rests upon. That's why we almost HAVE to stay stupid and backwards, and yes even behave in "NON"-Christian ways...because the kind of peace and love and forgiveness Christianity preaches will cause us to drop our guard and walk out into the world and who knows WHAT we'll being home for Mom and Pop.
We have to find something much more substantial than religion to base our identity on...and that scares the holy crap out of our holy types...and even the unholy ones like Peter and Firas, because although they themselves don't believe, still Christianity at least kept a girl marrying an Assyrian boy, cause they all happened to be Christian too.
We don't have to reject the religions at all...all we have to do is find a much more compelling and definitive Heritage...so that we can be Assyrian or Chaldean and be any religion or no religion we want to be. That will automatically mean that we have created...and we will have to create it...a sense of identity that rests on much more than arbitrary distinctions having to do with who got a hold of which kid and turned it into a follower of which religion.
We can MAKE children Assyrian...as we have been MAKING them Arab or American or French. We just need to put a little of the time and energy and money into supporting a CULTURE as we have into our religions.
note to the church: Please don't shoot me in the face...my children don't need that.
-- pancho
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