Posted by panch from customer-148-233-71-104.uninet.net.mx (148.233.71.104) on Monday, February 17, 2003 at 5:42PM :
The Case Of The Goring Bull
The greatest danger to the newborn child is that the mind doesn't kick in till a few years later... after just enough time passes to allow adults to grab hold of the emotions and scramble them up in ways the growing child will never be able to unscrable...because the psyche was influenced pre-cognitively...before the mind knew that was happening to the child...could reason that things weren't the child's fault or choice, or didn't "have to be"...or that the mumbo jumbo of religion or culture was only one way to think and behave. That's why the Jesuits said if they could get their hands on a child before it was six...they had him or her for life. That's also why no matter how dysfunctional the educational system, they all yammer about how important it is to get the child "educated" early...that it's the best time for learning...it is...it's the best time to make a citizen....screw the history or science OR the child as a separate, distinct and unique human bean...who might make a shitty Christian or Muslim and a lousy citizen or patriot...but just might be brilliant or at least capable of finding enough happness and fullfillment to get satisfaction out of this life...without clamoring for another shot in Paradise when this mess is all over...and ESPECIALLY if it ends soon and ends in fire and conflagration and mayhem, like that "good" book says it must before we all get our eternal reward.
The same thing happens to all of us...it's just the luck of the draw whether we get enlightened parents...or any parents, and what sort of cultural nuthouse we're born into. This is one reason it's so damn difficult to reason with our own Assyrians who were born into the Christian religion and couldn't help but swallow most of its ritual nonsense cause often it was washed down with the decency and caring we'd developed centuries before as Assyrians, before turning Christian. Just as we civilized Islam, so too did we clean up Christianity, put pants on it... only we have Pauls and the rest of them telling us it was the other way around...that Christianity brought civilization to US! All it brought was a consoling myth that we could go to heaven to get away from our shame on earth, shame at being the only remaining...and the worst possible examples of, Assyrians.
So damn hard to try to enlighten them without appearing to be "attacking" them at their "core" beliefs, because their core is a Christian one, not an Assyrian one...while at the same time their co-religionists are attacking our people and lands in BetNahrain as if they were entitled to. Christians have you coming and going...if you resent the bad ones, the rest raise their eyes piously to heaven and tell you to think of only them. If you do that, the rest of them, who are far in the majority, will come around and fuck you up...and if you protest, the good ones will say, "look over here, only at us, we're the GOOD ones"...and you get screwed both ways like they were a team...ahem. Their earliest "core belief" is the pleasant enough or terrifying but impresive Christian dogma they're fed with their mother's milk. Any thoughts of "Assyria" come later, so that later a non-Christian Assyria seems a heresy, almost a contradiction in terms. Consciousness, appreciation, understanding of "Assyria" come much later, come with reading and learning history and thinking about all of it in new, provocative ways. No Assyrian mother lulled her child to sleep with tales of Assyrian glory and creativty...but with baby Jesus stories meant to endear themselves to the toothless little thing long before it could understand the Code of Hammurabi. Not to mention those frightful stories of martyr mothers and the babes they gladly gave up to the sword, "for Jesus"...when Ashur would have been appalled.
I especially enjoyed Paul's observation that now I was, "as bad as the ones I criticized". That's the favorite and final argument when all else fails and the person is stomping out the door. It goes something like this...I'm sitting home minding my own business...a man breakes into my house and starts attacking my child with a stick. Everything else failing me, I pick up a stick too and beat him over the head as he beats my kid. The police finally come to haul the guy away and as he's led off he yells that I should be arrested as well, because look at how badly I beat HIM. Aren't I, "just as bad as the one I beat"?
Well no, I'm not. I was minding my on business in my own home...wasn't beating anyone. That shouldn't be interpretaed as a sign that I CAN'T beat anyone, that anyone can march into my home, or Homeland and start mucking about as he pleases. I won't start it...you can count on it...but I won't sit by and let it happen because I don't want to be accused of being, "as bad" as the ones who break into my home and beat my child. That accusation might give a Christian the fan todds...it makes an Assyrian fart.
You have to watch them Christians...they are, after all, merely reformed Jews, and Jews are very good at placing themselves in the best light while diddling the rest of us. I don't blame them for it...indeed I want to learn from them how you go about loving yourself and promoting yourself and working long and hard in the face of every obstacle to rise triumphant from the ditch your tormentors thought they'd stowed you safely in. Their knack for self-promotion makes the rest of us jealous and we condemn them for, "always being sure to promote themselves"..like it's the worst sin imagineable...and it is, to us Assyrians. The only thing we can think of promoting is Christianity. We give it a Assyrian veneer by chanting Jew nonsense in Aramaic, but hell even the Jews did that.
This brings me to a book by Cyrus Gordon and Gary Rendsburg titled "The Bible And The Ancient Near East" in which the authors examine Near Eastern influences on the Bible. Much of what is contained in it, the laws at least, were promulgated in reaction to Caananite practices. Apparently all through their history the Hebrews were ready at a moments notice to run after other gods and ways. To keep them loyal and focused on the Big One, Yahweh ordained laws whose only motive was to keep the Hebrews separate and apart. In other words if you were tempted to adopt another's religion, no matter how close it was to your own Hebrew religion...you could forget about being a Jew any longer (Christian Assyrians take note). They were also influenced by the culture of Ugarit, a coastal town far to the north, but apparently never directly by our own culture. While the authors admit the "striking similarities" between such Near Eastern laws as the Code of Hammurabi and the Bible, they are at great pains to say there is no evidence of "direct contact" that could have led to borrowing or influence..in other words any similarities are just coincidence. Funny..at the same time we are accused of having originated nothing...just copied others. No "coincidence" where we're concerned, just theft and plagerism. Okay...have it their way.
Let this be a lesson to us Assyrians...deny the "obvious" and do it from a "scholarly" source, and you just wrote AND re-wrote history, or interpreted it, which is even better.
What do Assyrians write? What Assyrian has seriously compiled and presented ONE book on us and our Heritage that isn't gathering dust somewhere in Homer Simpsons house? Or a book any serious reviewer could take seriously...one that would be open to criticism without causing the darling author to stomp out of the room? I don't mean Aprimcrap either. Besides Dr. John Joseph, that is, and we'd like to hang him from the highest tree because he doesn't stroke our pet notions about ourselves, so he is a "traitor" and a "sell-out". What the hell is WRONG with you people! Check out a library some time and see how many books, OF ALL KINDS, Jews have written. And don't come tell me we are miskeeneh and poor dears...no one on earth has been more reviled and persecuted than Jews...NO ONE. Rather than crying about it they've just about blinded the rest of us with their brilliance...perhaps for one thing they don't have short engineers who build deadly cars yet weld a Jew sculptors work for him...or remove a painting because it has the "wrong" Jew color. Maybe they know how to nurture the Arts...Reason and Humanity...even while they seek every means fair or foul to advance themselves...what the fuck is WRONG WITH THAT? Should they do like us...explore every possible means to trip each other up and break each other?
In one paragraph in a section of the book devoted to "proving" the Israelites were more humane and decent than the Babylonians, they bring up the case of the Goring Bull, which, "oddly enough", exists in both the Code and Exodus, (Well hell both people had bulls and all bulls gore...so???) This paragraph comes at the heels of two others that explain that slavery under the Isrealites was more benign...almost fun...and that the death penalty, though it was on the books in both cultures, was hardly ever used in Israel. Okay...whatever.
Then comes the following....
"One last example of the greater concern for human life will suffice. But this example differs from the above two. In the instances of slavery and the death penalty, the greter concern for human life in Israel led to a more lenient attitude. But this principle is a two-edged sword, because when a life is lost, the same concern will ensure retribution for the lost life. The example we can use is that of the goring bull. Above we addressed the remarkable similarity between HC (Hammurabi Code) 250-251 and Exodus 21:28-29, but an important difference needs to be stressed as well. In the case of a bull that gores someone to death the first time, according to HC 250 the case is not subject to claim. Exodus 21:28 agrees to the extent that the owner of the bull goes unpunished, but at the same time the law states that the bull must be stoned to death. The point is that a human life was lost, and while no human being will pay for the loss of life with his own life, retribution is necessary, so the bull receives the death penalty. In the case of a bull that gores a second time, according to HC 251, the bull still is not punished, and the owner simply pays a fine. In Exodus 21:29, not only is the repeat-offending bull to be stoned to death, but the owner of the animal suffers the death penalty, too. In these instances, we can see that the greater concern for human life leads to a harsher position in ancient Israel. Regardless of the circumstances, a human life was lost and that life needs to be recompensed by loss of life; not so in Babylonia where monetary payment suffices."
Now I ask you...where would you rather live if you owned a frisky bull...Israel or Babylon? Another Jew claim to fame: This is the origin of the term, "bullshit", used for something unbelieveably nonsensical.
Now mind you, we get our morals and ethics from these sorts of people...3000 plus years ago. People who would stone a bull...then kill its owner to show their "greater concern for human life". People who found, and apparently still do, much to dislike in the Babylonians whose wanton disregard for human life led them to allow bulls to be bulls...and to fine reckless owners instead of killing man and beast. This could explain the reason we're at each others throats...over these same religions and the load of bullshit they dump into every forming young mind they get a hold of. It's no accident that thousands of years later all the decsendants of Abaraham have gathered again like any collection of Mafia families from the "territories" to have a final go at it...right there in the bullseye region that gave that ancient Prick life...and they're killing US!
We had enough sense to send that kind of man packing...sent him to Israel. We didn't want that sort of family breeding among us. And now they've all come back. It was a mistake...we were too kind and forbearing...should have drowned Father Abraham in the nearest river, there were a lot to choose from. Everything of decency and good sense in all three religions exists because of humans...because parents are basically kind and loving and a community has enough sense to figure out what works and what doesn't. The rest of it...the rituals, the punishments and prophecies... the promises of life everlasting, especially that...have created all this mayhem and murder...and they were invented to provide a cover and a means by which murder could be enobled.
The worst thing you could have told humans was that they could do as they pleased...get forgiveness at the end if they were "sincere"...and who wouldn't be sincere at the end...and go to a place where they will be rewarded for ever and ever. And the worst of all them, Paul... was the Christian version that we picked up...that the more you suffer degradation on earth, like Christ did...the greater your reward in Paradise. No wonder the religion appealled to slaves and slave owners. And I ask you...given that the Assyrians were never used to rejoicing when their assholes blew up, like the Hebrews were...because it was supposedly a mark of how much god loved his wayward "children" that he wanted them to "mind" him...but instead had been used to success after glory after achievement, so that when THEIR world collapsed they felt abandoned, not "loved"...couldn't that be the reason this Christian thing was so appealling? As embarassing as it is now to claim descent from the glorious ancient Assyrians in public, if you have any self-respect or a moderate to a "howling" sense of humor... but only from deep inside the fetid bowels of a dank basement club in Chicago...it must have been as galling in 300 BC and 500 AD to admit the same. So Christianity, with its promise of the meek and disenfranchised inheriting the earth...of the poor and downtrodden rising in splendor from their beggarly ashes...would have been a balm to the scattered, dispirited Assyrians. At least the ones back then who were anything like the Peters and the Firas' and Aprims etc. that we're plagued with today like a swarm of so many ditzy locusts.
Like I said...the real Assyrians perished defending Ashur long ago...their bastard offspring who ran and denied what they were...and managed to get away with it because they were SUCH poor examples of what Assyrians were known to be...are our "true" ancestors.
-- panch
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