Posted by Iraqi Panch from customer-148-233-78-77.uninet.net.mx (148.233.78.77) on Thursday, April 17, 2003 at 4:21PM :
Stone Cold Sober
The Epic of Gilgamesh is not about Man's quest for the Big Answers and his disappointment at not finding them. It's about the idiocy of even asking those Big Questions...the Big Answers to which have all been comical. On the contrary, itīs about the wisdom, the Mesopotamian wisdom, of looking to what is immediate and life enhancing. This quest for eternal big questions makes people murderous because they can only buy their own answers when all others have been destroyed. "Live and let Live" is neither Christian nor Jew...and barely Muslim...it is more Mesopotamian than anything else.
The Divine Barmaid knows this all along and tells Gilgamesh after he comes back that he was on a fool's errand...that men and women will die, that only the gods live forever, PERIOD..."Get over it", and stop making life on earth such a Hell that people NEED to believe there must be a better place to retire to. Build a fine civilization like the Mesopotamians did and have all anyone could ask for on earth...stop glorying in sheepshit and goat turds on a buttressed hillside in Jerusalem, pining away for a, "better place"...and killing all those, including your own people, who think differently and thereby shatter your silly illusions.
Mankind's challenge is to live well on earth and not trouble about things we know nothing of and can't know anything of...especially when, in their determination to believe the idiotic explanations they come with, "Believers" murder all those who, by refusing to "believe", cause doubt to persist about what anyone knows of these things.
To the Mesopotamians, "Eternal Doubt" was far better, was more conducive to intelligent lives spent on earth, than "Murderous Certainty" ever was. "Murderous Certainty" is a gift to us all from the Jews who gave us Christianity and Islam...and look at all three of them. How much more do you think we can bear...when it isn't a sword or a chariot but a nuclear bomb and anthrax that will be wielded by those same righteous hands that ripped open pregnant women, "For the Lord"?
This advice will not satisfy everyone, certainly not a Puritan. A Puritan knows damn well he is a piece of shit, in this life...at least he piously says he is. That's why he has to believe so adamantly in an afterlife...he is usually having a miserable time of it here wanking away in musty corners, where god might not see and getting no pleasure from it anyway.
In his book, Peter Tallia, makes an issue of the evengelical zeal that sent missionaries as far away as India and China. But so what? The fact that they were allowed in and managed to build a church a two is more a testament to the hospitality and forebearance of their hosts than to any divine power in their mission. After all, none of those countries turned Christian. Had they tried to bring Christianity to Jerusalem they would have found their balls around their ears for decoration.
Our own friggin Western missionaries came to convert Christian Assyrians to their own brand of Christianity...a lot easier than trying to convert heathens. So what...in the end Japan, China or India hardly embraced Christianity...they gave it a polite ear...allowed a church or two to be built...allowed their people to go into them and come back out again...and the whole thing remained a curious footnote to the tolerance of those people...they would have accepted just about any lunatic.
And it is sheer lunacy. To travel around telling people you have "Good News" for them and the news is that a harmless and unoffending young Jew carpenter was put to death for "them" so they could get into his father's notion of a Heaven...and then threatening them with eternal damnation if they refuse to believe it...is insanity and the insane would be the first to sign up. The fact that Christian armies were waiting behind the missionaries to help convince the sane didn't hurt any...I mean in making Christ's murder somewhat more tangible..by murdering THEM.
-- Iraqi Panch
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