Posted by panch from customer-148-233-93-71.uninet.net.mx (148.233.93.71) on Friday, March 07, 2003 at 1:01PM :
...My Aunti, the Semite
Let's go over this, real slow. Jews, Arabs and Assyrian/Chaldeans are all Semites. They can't be anti-themselves...actually of the three, Asstians ARE anti-themselves, but you'll never convince them of it. A person who doesn't like Jews because they are Jews...doesn't like Jews...that person is anti-Jew...he or she isn't anti-Semitic...not unless that person doesn't like all Semites.
I admire the hell out of Jews...always have. The more I learn about how they and not us, were the blodthirsty ones...how they had every reason to wish for a Divine Deliverer, their own kind being so damn inept...how envious they were of our success...how they longed for some other place cause Jerusalem sucked...how they managed to convince even us that Utnapishtim was "following in the footsteps of Noah"...how Solomonic buildings that can't be found were a far more significant achievement than all the Assyrian/Babylonian ones that can't be avoided...how their own scholars have been pouring over some fragments of Dead Sea Scrolls for fifty years trying to squeeze out some more drops of "greatness", while thousands of our tablets lie mouldering in vaults with nary a sign of interest from us...how the religion of "Love", even they didn't want, came to us because the predecessors of that line managed to kill everyone, but mostly their own people who opposed them...how they travelled round Mesopotamia picking up literature and ideas they then re-packaged and sold at a handsome profit...the more I realize how they set a brilliant and hopeful example for the rest of Mankind that whenever you find yourself surrounded by people greater then you...when you're own god sees fit to call down pestilence and foreign invasion periodically as a sign of his special concern for you, as if even He wanted you wiped out...that when you're surrounded with goat and sheepshit till your eyes water...you can STILL hornswaggle and bamboozle the dumb clucks who throught they were superior...if only you'll never accept defeat or admit the obvious.
I mean why would you "hate" the kid from the poorest family in town, who shows up for a baseball game with no uniform, torn clothes, barefoot, a taped together bat with great chunks missing from it...and STILL manages to hit the ball out of the park? Are you nuts? That's the kid to learn from!
Which brings me to the "Great Questions". People claim that Man has a burning need to know where he came from, that his logical and rational mind wont rest till he has the answers... why he came and where he goes next...who made the universe, when, how and why and etc. I don't believe it. I don't think any of this curiosity comes from a desire for answers...any fool knows there aren't any...but because people, men especially, are afraid of mysteries and loose ends...so afraid they'll do violence to their own intelligence and accept probable answers as iron clad...then get set to battle it out with those who disagree...whose unwillingness to buy their nonsense casts doubt on the integrity of the "answers" they lulled themselves to sleep with. That's the trouble with thinking you've answered those Big Questions...you get murderously mad at those who aren't impressed...somehow even one doubting person is enough to upset the "certainty" of an entire group...hence you have the stake and executions of people who simply said, "I pass".
Men are funny. They have an image of themselves as being logical...cool...calculating. They beleve they weigh everything...consider all the facts...that they use their minds more than their emotions...that they are never hysterical or irrational. What allows them to fool themselves so convincingly is that they are cold. They mistake damaged emotions for no emotions. They present their fear of emotions as "control" of emotions. They think they are thinking, when they're simply gushing with feelings all over the place but just don't acknowledge it.
From early on a boy learns that to feel is to be unmanly. He has to short-cicuit "understanding" by simply not registering raw feelings that might throw him for an unmanly loop. It's like he can't allow himself to go through a certain experience, but then feels perfectly "logial" about defining the experience anyway and setting down rules for it and a detailed description of what he DIDN'T experience. Girls can feel all they want to...if they want to. After plumbing the depths of their feelings they are in the better position to understand what the hell they went through...to attain some real measure of maturity. A boy has to skip all that...he has to fast-forward to a controlled appearance of "understanding"...when he not only hasn't a clue...but lives in terror of that feeling ever coming back again...especially as he gets older and should "know better". He doesn't know better...he doesn't know or understand at all...but he gets to set policy and make decisions that affect every tree and animal on this planet. That's why Woman has been dealt the unhappy task of civilizing Man...she knows both the feeling and what comes after...understanding. That's why Woman is fearless while Man is scared out of his wits but has to act brave...as he understands it...only to have it come out as savage and cold barbarity.
Take the Big Questions. Now why would anyone want to bother with them? You can't use logic or reason because they don't apply. Minds that can't balance checkbooks aren't about to figure out the Infinite. Back when the Great Thinkers were not only asking these Big Questions but ANSWERING them too...those same Great Thinkers didn't have soap, didn't understand the most elemental principles behind much of anything...ascribing whatever they couldn't understand to some supernatural force or other. One by one we've managed to answer many of those "mysteries"...like where does the sun go etc. The ones we haven't been able to put to rest we STILL ascribe to some Deity somewhere...as if we just don't want to admit we don't know or can't know some things.
Women have always been associated with mystery and Mysteries. That could be because they are comfortable with the Unknown...because there is so much they feel intuitively and because they make their peace early on with unfathomable mysteries, like what makes Men so damn fearfull they have to pretend and insist that THEY KNOW.
Men ask those Big Questions far more than women do. Men are the ones afraid of death...afraid of being insignificant, of being not much more than a bag of hot gasses because it offends their over-inlated image of their importance. They ask the questions because they're afraid, afraid of the Dark...afraid of being alone. Men don't call on the gods when they're dying...but on their mothers...at that moment they know enough, no...they FEEL enough to know that all the plaster idols and saints they've constructed...all the assumptions they've made about gods and heavens are worthless...that what they really want at the end is the comforting presence of the mother they were forced to deny almost from birth...if they wanted to be "true" men. At the end, when it's safe...when it doesn't matter...when they proved their manhood in bloody and useless battle...they want what they wanted all along...to be able to draw warmth from their mothers without feeling they were betraying some Grand Principle. Fear drives men more than anything else.
Men ask these Great Questions "logically"..."rationally"...and it makes me want to howl with laughter when I hear them do it. All I hear is a bunch of little boys pretending to think. All those Church Fathers bothering each other and killing scads of people over "logical" things like, "just how high are the sidewalks in Heaven". And they were SERIOUS...so damn serious they killed people who said there might not BE sidewalks in heaven. They think they're being scientific and logical because they are cold and detached, and because they can actually manage to stand there stoically, "manfully"...while they tie a poor old woman to a stake and light her on fire...while her children watch. These are children, cruel children who pluck wings off of butterflies...they aren't Great Thinkers at all...they are Great Murderers...THAT has been the gift of religions and the result of asking those Big Great and Greatly STUPID Questions.
And you can see it break down most clearly when another kid says..."Nah, I don't think I like your Great Answer". That's when you see the murderous little bastard revealed. A mature person might say something like, "Oh, you don't believe my answer for the Bg Questions...that's interesting, pray let us have a cup of tea while you tell me your answers, if you have any interest in that sort of thing...then I'll walk you home and meet the kids". No way! What happens is that armies of other scared-shitless-of-the-dark boys gather together and actually make war over these Greatly Silly things. What's it to them? If you found a really nice restaurant or deserted beach, would you mind too much if no one else wanted to go there...would you really want a line of people ahead of you pushing and shoving to get in or hurrying you out?
The Great Men who ask the Great Questions are great fools...little frightened boys afraid of the dark, unwilling to believe their unimportant little selves will just disintegrate to dust when they die...too afraid to go through a door they don't know leads to exactly what...and out of their great fear they concoct the wildest and silliest explanations for what HAS to be there for their "logical, "cool" and "rational" minds to be satisfied...in order to get shoved through the door without a final, unmanly, fit of the fan tods...cause want to or not brother, they ARE going to go through it, so why not go through fooling yourself all the way. There's manly logic for you.
Me...I could care less. All I know for sure is that every idea of heaven I've heard sounds like Hell, and every Great Answer and the Great Question that prompted it just so much fluff. I feel far more comfortable leaving it to chance...like everything else that's happened since we were born. I'd rather have no one at the wheel rather than any of the bloody and harebrained Gods who are supposed to be in control of this carnival ride. Men are great fools...especially when they pretend to be logical and rational. Maybe they don't see it, but all I see is a guy in petticoats standing atop a chair, screaming and weeping hysterically while "little mysteries" run round the floor.
-- panch
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