Posted by Iraqi Panch from customer-148-233-71-61.uninet.net.mx (148.233.71.61) on Thursday, April 10, 2003 at 11:07AM :
It's a great feeling...when something you've been puzzling over comes clear all of a sudden. A doorway opens, light floods in...you see everything differently, not just the thing you were puzzling over. One blind spot cleared up releases your entire vision...makes more than just itself clear up.
Feminism knocked me down like that and when I got back up, everything changed, not just my attitude towards women. You can't change your ideas about women without changing them about men too...and children and war and work and religion. The ideas we cart around about what Woman is are so distorted as to muck up our vision about lots of things.
It started from a spat with a lady friend after which she tried to show me that I was an asshole. I resisted at first, out of habit...but she came armed this time...armed with books and ideas...new ones neither of us had ever heard of or stumbled upon. The main ideas came from Simone De Beauvior's book, "The Second Sex". We stayed up till dawn there in Seattle...it didn't take much to knock my arguments flat and then for hours I listened as she shattered myth upon lie. No wonder I had never liked Hemmingway...no wonder I knew nothing about women...everything I'd ever learned came through a man...through a man's point of view. The women I'd read about were Man's creations and fantasies, usually bred from fear or contempt. All the stock characters, the Golden Hearted Prostitute...the man-eating bitch...the eternal virgin...the nymphomaniac...all of them were fabrications meant to play out some boy's problem...and the thing went on multiplying until even women came to believe they must be whatever a man needed them to be.
In those days Ms. magazine first came out and we read every issue cover to cover...the only magazine I'd ever done that with. I read Simone's book too, and then books by Shulamith Firestone, Betty Freidan, Kate Millet and that great Australian hussey, Germaine Greer and of course Gloria Steinam...glorious Gloria...and the diaries of Anais Nin. I still couldn't stand Hemmingway...but at least I knew why.
Feminism went way beyond clarifying Woman's incredible saga through Time at the hands of Man...it made you suspect all the other pet notions you'd been led to believe were "just the way things are"...or were, or had to be. It got you looking behind everything to see what really propelled it...cause if something you'd been led to believe as "basic" as what a woman is turned out to be a fabrication...then what else was really true or what it seemed to be. For centuries and millenia Woman had been fettered and cloistered and ravaged and beaten and had her body torn and ripped and broken...her mind warped and debased and shrouded in ignorance till she hated herself as well, for the most part, except when she found herself to be appealing to her rapist...that's how far the damage had gone.
And what of those women...those incredibly brave and powerful ones who saw through the whole thing...saw through the Universe to its other side and knew it was a lie...no matter how many believed it...no matter how many Gods proclaimed it...no matter what price they had to pay...women who whispered the truth to each other, or anonymously proclaimed it to those who might listen and did the one thing above all else all of Humanity is indebted to them for...they civilized Man...as much as it could be done.
It was an exhilirating feeling...like being released from prison...like getting your sight for the first time. There's nothing like "understanding"...like seeing clearly without priests and kings and generals hanging onto your eyelids, trying to obscure your vision...or worse yet, crawling into your head from the moment you're born and scrambling your senses.
It's the same now for me with Christianity. I see it clearly for the first time...innate dislike and contempt for it has been replaced by understanding...and it is truly wonderful and liberating, though what I see disgusts me, but at least I KNOW what I see. Never mind what the proponents say...the ones who've made their deal with the Devil to benefit form murder...never mind that you might shatter their illusions. What counts is that you see it for what it is and stop being taken in by its label... by what it "could" do and focus instead on what it DOES..what it is SUPPOSED to do.
First off you have to strip it of the things it got from our common humanity, developed over centuries before Christ was ever born. You have to peel away what it shares with other religions and narrow it down to what specifically belongs to it...it's core message. It is a religion founded upon murder. There is no more direct and simple way to put it. Get rid of the fairy tales...the resurrection "sworn" to by a handful of Hebrew laborers...the "miracles" meant to awe the simple and superstitious and that's what you have left. I asked a friend what was the core value,the central point and motif of Christianity that he believed in and he said, right out..."that Christ died for me so I could get into heaven". Even that fairly direct statement has lies in it...Christ didn't "die"...any more than six million Jews "died" or 500,000 Iraqi children "died". They, and Christ...were MURDERED.
Christ was murdered...tortured and then murdered, so that my friend and countless others like him who have no conception of what they are really saying...could benefit. And since that benefit is supposedly something as outstanding as to confer eternal life on one who accepts such an awful deal...the reasons to accept such a wondrous benefit..even at such a price, are too compelling...too wonderful to be denied...to be turned down, unless of course that person is beyond the pale, totally unworthy and without merit. And this, incidentally, could be at the core of Christian fury directed at Jews and others who are unimpressed...who refuse such a bargain. "My GOD"...they must wonder..."How can you NOT accept such a gift...even if it comes to you through the murder of a totally innocent person who never did you any harm"? And then they feel justified in killing you and sending your soul to "salvation"...just so you'll benefit anyway...even against your silly, ignorant will...and they feel good about it too...helps them get over having to confiscate your goods and children.
THAT's why the Romans took to Christianity. If you can get people to condone the most heinous murder of an Innocent...condone it because they benefit from it...what WON'T those same people tolerate...what won't they overlook...and more to the point, what won't they participate in to make sure other benefits come their way?
Christianity disgusts Muslims and others because of this insistence that a God came to earth to be murdered for people. It is blasphemy to them to talk about killing a god...to think of a god siring children on a human virgin...like any Greek satyr would do. And nothing makes their gorge rise as the idea of eating his body and drinking his blood does...I don't care how "symbollic" (and you may want to ask, "symbollic of what...cannibalism?). Any sane person would reject such a vile notion...but not the one who hoped against hope to benefit from the murder...from the "sacrifice" of the victim...where do you think kebobs came from?
Christianity...which touts itself as a religion of "Love", got its start in murder...and not just any murder...but the murder of the most innocent, the purest, the "whitest", the least offending...in other words the LAST person who deserved to be killed. And where did this notion come from? Why from them Hebrews of old who were constantly at each other's throats, killing and ripping each other apart for the "truth about God". That's also why it's such a foreign concept to Assyrians who never killed the innocent but went right for the gullet of those responsible.
The trick in it lies in getting people, in finding the right sort of people, who would accept any benefit, any gift, on such a basis. To smoke them out you have to promise them a really magnificent "gift", and eternal life fits the bill nicely. Once it succeeded in doing that...there would be nothing Christians would shrink from...and when have they been shy about murdering innocents? Everyone throughout history has killed...has killed innocent people. But Christianity is a religion FOUNDED upon...built upon...DEMANDING as the core belief and entire point, the MURDER of an Innocent. That is something terrible and dreadful and it pre-disposes its followers, prepares them...for additional murders...the more innocent the better. That's why we now make open war on children.
-- Iraqi Panch
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