Posted by farid from ? (200.94.236.49) on Saturday, August 23, 2003 at 11:57AM :
Sometimes I think a Chaldean is just an Assyrian who came down from the hills, out of the trees on those hills and decided to get ahead in life and not crucify himself and his wife and children, "for Jesus", just to make a point.
There the Assyrians were, what was left of them...the courageous ones having died fighting to the end...and we looked at Jesus and said, "Okay, we'll try this one, what more could happen to us"?. Seemed harmless enough and what a pay-off. Then Muhammad came along and many of us said, "Okay, we'll try this one next". And if Buddha had come, or Confucious or Jim Jones we would have said, "Okay, tried the rest, let's give this one a shot."
The Christians who prospered in the MidEast didn't make their religion their entire life. They didn't crowd around the village idiot priest and weep and wail for better days to come up there. They sure as hell didn't offer their children's throats to the knife like we're so fond of bragging about that infamous Christian mother who allowed her seven, or forty-three, sons to be "martyred" for a Jew carpenter (it's odd how everything Yahwe did, or parents did in the name of Yahwe, would get you thrown in jail, if not hanged...but done by god or in god's name?..."go and do some more"). Some of us went to school, got educated, made Muslim friends, started businesses, participated in the life of the country we were born in...the rest refused to leave the past...stayed dumb and poor forced to live at the bottom where they associated mostly with the Muslim lower class and got all their patriotic nonsense and their sense of entitlement as "Assyrians" from that...from their feeling that they must be superior to those sharing the bottom rungs with them...like poor White Trash were encouraged to feel superior to Blacks, so they wouldn't mind their own squalor so much, when they were all in the same boat.
What's the difference...all three sisters tell you to honor your god and your parents, they all encourage marriage and expect some sort of fidelity...they all enjoin parents to protect their children and raise them as best they can...they all ask you not to kil, not to steal, not to cheat...to be fair and just and decent and honorable. What the hell's so important you have to go let your children be killed or kill someone else's? Was anyone asking them to eat snow tires...to eat shit...to jump off a cliff...to spit at their parents? No. All they wanted them to do was bow to the left instead of the right, pray on Saturday...or Friday...or Sunday...stand up instead of sit down...eat this before that... and refrain from doing just about the same things they all prohibited...so what was the difference...except for some distinguishing idiocies peculiar to each that shouldn't have cost a single life because their followers were already behaving in one idiotic way...so why not one or ten others? Or do people think that by hanging on to Idiocy to the bitter end, no matter how many of your children, or the other guy`s, get killed for it somehow sanctifies stupidity?
And when you consider the lives saved by not insisting on converting people...or converting whenever someone asked you to...it takes all the bluster out of them. But then, even if we all became one religion...hell we'd still break up into Orthodox and Reformed, Protestant and Catholic, Sunni and Shiia and go to killing each other's children over that.
Religion...it puts you in a state of mind to murder people and provides the forgiveness you need to sleep soundly anyway...that's its real function, it's real benefit and that's why its practitioners want to bring god "into our lives more"...they've got a lot more murder on their minds.
-- farid
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