Posted by pancho from pool0006.cvx25-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.216.6) on Thursday, January 16, 2003 at 4:31PM :
In England, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Scotland, Ireland and the Netherlands... almost wherever Christianity came, it divided the native populations into murderous sects willing to commit the most unspeakable atrocities against people exactly the same as them...within the borders of the same country...within the same villages...within the same parish...within the same church...within the same family. This is the "gift" of god...that people will kill for him, he means SO MUCH to them. That's how he survives...through the madness of his followers.
The religious wars in Europe killed as many people as any other rat borne and flea infested plague. People who had every reason to be friends and neighbors, people who were family, bled their homes, their neighborhoods, their fields and farms and countries white...in preparation for the disease and famine that followed close behind.
Today in Ireland it goes on...and in Bosnia where it was Muslim against Christian...where it had once also been Christian against Christian, Latin against Greek...the same identical people slashed the throats of each other's children...whom you couldn't tell apart and wouldn't need to unless you had the same Christian Disease.
And it's been true of us as well. First we left Ashur and became something called a Church of The East...then missionaries came...spies and shills by any other name...they came to convert us, again, to Christianity...though we'd been Christian for centuries...didn't matter, it was a lot easier than trying to convert Muslims...a lot handier too for the goals of the governments that allow the church breathing room and tax benefits because they compliment the secular arm's robbery and murder.
Pretty soon we were divided into Jacobite and Melamine...Protestant and Lutheran and Baptist and Presbyterian and High Church and Methodist and later Evangelical and Pentacostal. And we want to maintain that, unlike all the other people, who had countries, but were riven with religious dissent, WE remained purely and ONLY one thing...one secular thing...ASSYRIAN? And not only that, but "one people"?
Are we saying we clung fiercely to a common sense of shared community when in France and Germany and England they killed each other left and right over ridiculous doctrinal distinctions not worth a dead cat? And we did it in limbo...floating adrift in the world?
Of course Christianity drove us apart...of course it weakened us...ESPECIALLY us because we had no other anchor...as this new and improved religion morphed into a hundred sects right before our eyes. We jumped into a raging ocean with what we thought was a life preserver only to have it turn into a sponge as soon as we hit the water and need it the most.
We stepped out into the world thinking we would walk on solid ground when it shifted to a hundred rocks and grains of sand, slidding and bumping and slitthering against each other till we were nauseated and lost our bearings it all shifted underneath us so.
We are a band of travelling, squabbling, squawking Christians...that's all. We've painted ourselves over with a thin veneer of Assyrianism because we hate the idea of being Christian Arabs.
And we've fought and hated and cut down each other along religious lines just as all those other people did...except we forgot that we had no country...no other force whatsoever that could hold us together...unlike the Jews who became even more fiercely Jewish and nationalistic, because the two were always the same...as they were once for us...we sold our soul for the promise of a chance to make it up in heaven...so that even the spit we would earn here on earth could be put to good use...get us an even better seat next to "Him".
This way madness has lain...and look at us...listen to us...watch us lock ourselves up and throw our key away.
-- pancho
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