Posted by panch from customer-148-233-71-98.uninet.net.mx (148.233.71.98) on Wednesday, April 16, 2003 at 1:41PM :
Muhammad died in bed...wasn't necessary to have him stripped and beaten. Moses was jerked up to Heaven by his beard...again, there was no call to brutalize him. Buddha died of old age...Confucious likewise died an old man...peacefully in bed...years after his wife ran out of the house screaming. The whole point and meaning to Christianity derives from the fact that Jesus had to be murdered. It's misleading to say he "died"...they all died. But only one of them was murdered...HAD to be murdered...his father, your God, demanded it.
That Christianity derives its strength and meaning through murder can be seen in that innocuous looking instrument of torture and death...the Cross. Had Jesus been electrocuted, the pope would have a gold electric chair on the end of his shaft. Had Christ been hanged, Nuns would be wearing a hangman's noose round their necks. If Jesus had been killed with an Uzi, children would proudly carry golden machine guns round their necks and churches around the world would have one carved in neon on the building, or done up in fillagree over the altar. The religion glories in Christ's murder, derives it's meaning and strength from his brutal execution, for the Resurrection of his body and the fulfillment of your hopes would have lacked the necessary drama, that element of guilt..."He was killed FOR YOU", had he died peacefully in bed. Only through his execution, apparently, does his rebirth have any meaning or power. Christianity has transformed murder into a divine dispensation...a means of gaining Paradise for those who would seek to profit by such an act...certainly something without which all the benefits that flow from Christianity leading up to the greatest one of all, eternal life, would have been impossible.
What would have been the attraction if Christ had died an old man, peacefully, in bed...surrounded by family and friends? Very little, obviously. If you are a lapsed Muslim or Jew or Buddhist, your God may be displeased, may send a plague or famine, but so long as you can hide or don't much care, you're safe. A lapsed Christian knows he or she is an ungrateful wretch for refusing Christ's "sacrifice"...making his awful murder meaningles, a waste...something you refuse to benefit from. The rest of Christian dogma is nothing to get excited about. Especially among the followers of the ever more popular Evangelical movement where Christ's kindness and simplicity aren't touted but rather this thing about him having been murdered for YOU...to win you a supreme benefit you could gain in no other way. This whips people up into a fervor that drives them to gut environmental laws and increase spending on the Military...something Jesus never intended.
There is nothing particularly potent in the example of Christ that I've been able to discern...or anyone has been willing to share with me. He was kind, good, decent and humble. His injunction to non-violence and his claim that the meek would inherit the earth (so would cockroches), or Paradise, was simply wise policy. The Jews had been roundly beaten and carted off by everyone who cared to do it for centuries down to his own day when the Romans ruled them so that any form of violent resistance was obviously foolish. What else could a compassionate Jew counsel if not forebearance and patience?
Jesus was born to be slaughtered...we celebrate his resurrection at Easter, but that happy event, for which there is no proof anyway, could not have happened had he not been murdered. From all the flock born that year, the Jew God picked the cleanest, the purest, the whitest, the least blemished...and said, "this one must have its throat slit in order that you get_________", you fill in the blank.
Yuck!
Am reading an intersting book by an Assyrian minister, Peter H. Talia, called, "Our Yesterday, Today,and Tomorrow". The guy is fully Christian and evangelical but makes some slight sense anyway. The beginning chapters, it's a short book, deal with Assyrian history. He makes a point of reminding us that Yahwe said nice things about Assyrians too...and that the Old Coot reserved his worst comments for his own chosen people. I don't see much to be amazed at in that...they had it coming while we deserved a lot better than we got. He does stress that the ancient Assyrians did no more than anyone else would have liked to do back then, I mean in terms of their supposed savagery and bloodthirstiness...and that nothing they did surpassed what has been done since by Christian nations...down to the present. I take exception to that...the ancient Assyrians were nowhere near as bloody and cruel as the Americans. He does make one tiny error that I could find...it's no big deal, except I wonder if he would have made such a blunder on the Christian side...as he does on his Assyrian side. He calls Ashurnasirpal, Ashurbanipal instead...and when he gets to the proper time frame, gives us a second Ashurbanipal, when any Jew knows there was only one. I find it odd he didn't catch that obvious of an error...unless he was just rushing to get us out of the way so he too could get to the "real" point...which is that a Jew god had some good things to say about Assyrians so, "hold your heads up, what does it matter how many Ashurbanipals there were".
After ancient history, Peter launches into what ails us now. He is writing from around 1974 to the early 80's. There he hits it on the head. He discusses our tribal jealousies, our working dilligently only at tearing each other down...our penchant for farting out experts and journalists as we need them...our disdain for real education, our dislike for the brilliant among us as if they carried the Plague...and our appalling lack of leadership and the terrible specimens we put their instead. I'd like to report that Jackie tried to whang him too...but he doesn't mention it.
The book ends with a condemnation of our clergy and the sad state of "our" faith. He appears to be genuinely puzzled at the fact that Christianity receives such short shrift from us these days...that we barely pay lip service to it. He contrasts that with others, such as the Swedes...who number even less than we did in America yet have all sorts of churches and church wealth. He is most appalled by our lack of interest in preserving the language which he claims is the most noble and grand thing left to us today...long after all the others have faded away. He sings the praises of the early church, when Assyrian missionaries and "Fathers" went to the ends of the known earth, spreading Christ's teachings like manure...from China to Japan and India. He waxes sentimental for the glory days, the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries when Assyrians produced the scholars and pillars of the Christian faith etc. The fact that in all that time they were simultaneously kicking out the legs of our Assyrian identity escapes him, but then he is as besotted by Yahwe as any Jew.
I don't know how intellectually honest Peter is...if he could bear to consider that the very church he shills for also did us in...that if the early centuries were a time of brilliance for us it was only as a form of compensation for what we had lost of this world, a place to pour all that energy and wisdom that used to go into ruling the world's largest empire till that day..but that, like the Jews, we too had finally lost everything... lived to see our lands overrun and ourselves reduced in status in those same lands and in the eyes of our children, where we once used to be lords.
Peter, of course, takes it as a given that the universal god is, and must be, this same Yahwe of the two bloody testicles...that he is the one true and supreme god, so that when Assyrians "accepted" this god, they were not taking on a tribal Jew religion, but seeing the "Truth"...the one and only and real and true god. Now, it's curious to me...suppose Yahwe wasn't supreme...suppose it really was Ashur all along. I wonder if any Jew would have remained a Jew in anyone's eyes, or even wanted to...if he had renounced Yahwe for Ashur? We modern Assyrians must be the only shmucks in the world who seriously maintain that to abandon our ancestral god for a "better" one...makes us even MORE true to our essential nature, than to have remained faithful...curious indeed.
Let Peter look no further. It has taken several centuries for the Assyrian spirit to finally dissolve...for it to come to mean nothing for present day survivors...but that is only a testament to how strong Ashur was in us at one time...that we maintained even lip service for this long. We weren't able to erradicate Assyrian learning, pride, culture or achievements in one or two centuries. It took much, much longer...but we are indeed getting there, if we haven't arrived already (Monument in Chicago anyone?). Peter's church isn't directly to blame, certainly...but it did provide a balm, a consolation for all those years it took to undo us as Assyrians...to humble us and make us powerless...as we saw ourselves becomming in the eyes of the world, except for the memory of our once having been savage and bloodthirsty. We didn't have much resiliance as it turned out...one serious, major defeat and we lost faith in ourselves and our God. The Jews were used to being dragged from pillar to post...nothing...no set back, no divine reaming, could discourgae them in their desperate belief that Yahwe loved them most when he kicked the shit out of them the most.
For Assyrians Christianity was solace, comfort...a place to hide, but not in the usual sense, not a hide-out but rather a place to exhaust themselves and pour their once limitless energy. For others...for slaves and their owners...it was a step up in the world, and out of the world...a world they only toiled in and suffered in. For Assyrians it was a place to run to when your world collapsed. We channeled all our energy, that used to go into building empire...into spreading the Christian "word"...the Gospel...the Good Word...that you could lose your asshole here in this life, but still be a king in Paradise. It has taken Assyrians centuries to finally run out of energy...out of steam...out of drive and a sense of purpose...and Christanity no longer offers the outlet for all their repressed and frustrated drive and capacities. Those who call themselves Assyrian yet are totally Christian, finally...they accept this Jew god completely...and what did Peter think would come at the end of this long slide except the lack of interest or will he sees today in being EITHER Assyrian or Christian? It was in our destiny that ultimately, one day, we would become neither Assyrian nor much of any kind of Christian. But we were THAT strong once...that it took this long to rid the planet of us. More Christianity, which is what he finally recommends, is only more of the effort to replace being Assyrian with being Christian. It is no longer necessary...it has worked, totally and completely...though not really, not from the inside out, where it truly counts...that's why to Peter we make such poor Christians...it ain't really us...but then neither is being any sort of an Assyrian a part of our character (just think of the ones who "talk about it" the most). We died long ago...just forgot to be buried.
This last war in BetNahrain makes that abundantly clear for we have finally turned against ourselves...something we started to do way back when...we just couldn't find anyone to help us wipe ourselves out...it took a Christian killing machine like the United States and that other great friend to Dark People, the British, to do it to us...for us. We can handle what little remains to be done from here.
-- panch
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