Posted by farid from ? (200.94.236.48) on Saturday, September 06, 2003 at 2:31PM :
How subtle and sublime the story of Gilgamesh is. So much so that it's no wonder Jew-Christians...get it wrong.
Had Gilgamesh been "king" of a goatturd "kingdom" in Israel...he'd have every reason to wonder..."is this ALL there is"? I'd go looking for someplace better too...and since back then all the better places were already taken and by people no Hebrew "army" was going to scare off, I don't care how awful their horn section was...you'd have to eventually come to the humiliating conclusion that there WAS no place better on earth for you...without which some Messiah didn't come down and get it for you...or, you'd just have to wait till you died and maybe there was a cloud up there, also unoccupied, you could claim for your own.
Had Gilgamesh been a Jew...and really and truly been forced, therefore, to go ask those Big Questions...upon his return to Sheepshitland he would have been as desolate and down-in-the-mouth and no wiser as when he'd left. There could be no growth...no realization born of experience...no having his eyes opened to what he'd kown perfectly well before...that Jerusalem was still a stinking place as far from a paradise as ever...only, "he hadn't been able to appreciate it before". There could be no point to the story at all if he came back to Jerusalem because he'd be back where he started from and back where HE stared from, he'd have every good reason to want to get the hell out again.
A story with a "moral" to it presupposes that our hero or heroine is blind to something through a character flaw or deficiency of some sort that leads them to believe in something...some "thing" that they later find out wasn't true and so they grow wiser and learn to find satisfaction in what they couldn't see before was a most satisfying situation all along...in other words their eyes get oppened to what they were previously blind to. It's the hero who changes...not the objective reality he was aggreived by or blind to before. Gilgamesh changes...Uruk remained the lovely place it was. Ergo...it would do no Jew heroine any good to change and grow and learn...because Jerusalem, remaining what it too was, was still a god-awful place to be....a person had every good reason to run from Jerusalem...but had NO good reason to be dissatisfied with Uruk. That's why the Gilgamesh story HAD to come out of a rich and bountiful and civilized society...just as the bible and it's "morality" HAD to issue from a sheepshit encrusted hillside populated by envious ne'er-do-wells constantly forced to be aware of their short-comings by being surrounded on all sides with people of Culture, Wealth, of every kind...Science and Architecture, Beauty and, of course, soap.
Any Jew leaving Jerusalem for better places...and encountering them...couldn't possibly learn anything on his return except that he was right all along for wanting to leave. Where would be the moral? You'd have to return to Jerusalem bereft of the good sense that drove you out and not with even MORE good sense...if you came back really enlightened...and if you returned, "glad to have your eyes opened to the beauty that had been there all along", it merely meant you'd gotten a good and hard kick to your hard head somewhere along the journey. Having truly had your eyes opened and seen that this really was ALL there was for you...you'd kill yourself...or your first born son, in "hopes" Yahwe would be convinced you were really unhappy and that squinting your eyes just wouldn't do any longer...but you'd begin slaughtering your children first and next ripping open your neighbor's belly etc. if He didn't find you a better place.
The whole point of the Gilgamesh Epic is that Gilgamesh doesn't realize how good he has it...doesn't appreciate his subjects...his beautiful city, the soft sweet air, his wife and babe, the mighty rivers...none of it, but like some petulant child who has yet to mature he derives satisfaction instead by wasting the gifts that lie at his feet. Demanding even more from life...like immortality for instance...(what was left he didn't have already?)...as any spoiled brat would...he's compelled to go searching for even more goodies. Along the way he learns his Big Lesson and returns to appreciate and really "see" the beauty and richness that was always his for the asking...and this realization makes him into a much better man and king etc.
Now...if he'd gone back to a Jerusalem...what lesson could he have learned except to have his distaste for the place reconfirmed and either give up any hope for a better place and sit down in the dust and turds and "discover morality", or leave again? That's why the bible makes so ittle sense...there was so little of that article in the people who, from sheer vexatious spite and feelings of abuse and a lack of self-worth as they were "given" one sheepshit hill after another to "conquer"...came up with it...as a sort of a "Nyah Nyah" to the entire Universe..."we really have it BEST"! Oviously they never learned anything except to glorify their utter poverty in everything, making it a mark of shame and degradation to have had hot running water and sewers, hospitals, libraries, observatories...and a rich and varied diet and resplendant clothing and buildings you could still see standing 100 years after they were built...in other words people like the Assyrians were "inferior"...and in what...in what did the Jews think they outshone them...why in MORALS...what else, in something that would HAVE to be invisible by it's very essence cause they couldn't build even a toilet to last ten years!!!
To their credit they supplied the Roman Empire with just the shot in the arm it needed to go on raping and pillaging down to the present day, only now with the earnest gratitude of its victims, in its various political manifestations...which shows you what those kinds of morals are worth...and what would you expect? It's now a kick-ass world we live in increasingly...which just happens to co-incide with the "rebirth" of an interest in that blood-soaked sheepshit god of theirs...and even THAT we had to give them...only we knew enough to throw the son of a bitch out! We're ripping innocent people apart all the time now, only they won't show you the pictures. You don't need mines and shells and machine guns...today's bullet can take away a kids head as it exits...women are being ripped apart, pregnant bellies and all...who needs bears anyway?
What a handy and a usefull god this god is...how he just happens to allow "interpretations" of His Word that allow us to kill and murder and execute and rob and steal whenever we have a need to anyway...what degradation what beastilness has been stopped cold in its tracks by reference to the teachings of this "god"? Name one. How convenient that just enough but "Not ALL" of his ardent and most feverish followers can find in Him divine justification to fuck their daughters even...when they feel like it. Hell, if there wasn't such a god, every disatasteful motherfucker in the world who ever lived would INVENT one to have the ready excuses at hand they'd need to polish their brutalities to a nice, holy, sheen. Look at how handy an invention "Evil" was...as opposed to merely breaking the Law...or doing wrong. When Mordechai Ashcroft calls you Evil...what's he just done really but distinguish himself as the opposite of Evil...and that is?...yes, "Good". Not legal or even right, but "Good". And in the name of that "Good" Bush and the rest were able to break law after law, national, international, universal...any one they wanted because that sheepshit god paved the way for them.
Surely there were laws against infanticide and murder and ripping open pregnant women back then...certainly among the Assyrians there were...possibly among the Hebrews. But they took to slaughtering each other anyway, one Jew making war on another...for what...his cattle...his tent...his sheckels..hell no, you KNOW that was illegal...but he could kill his neighbor's wife with impunity and even win praise for it because he was doing "God's work". That's the one thing that allows you to scuttle your Laws, crimminal first, environmental and the rest later...and look at what we just did...look at how we labored to make the people of Iraq "Evil"...and how much help we got from Christians of our own in this dastardly task...and once they were Evil...what COULDN'T you do to them. THAT's Why this fucking god has been so invaluable and protected by governments.
How much more god-fearing murder of the people and this planet and our air and water do you suppose this god demands before there is no place left for us on earth BUT the grave..and an idiotic "faith" and a "hope" of living on a cloud somewhere since we only managed to make a fucking mess of it here, under his tuteledge...just what them old Hebrews would have hoped we'd all do...make the rest of the planet, BetNahrain especially, as desolate as that sheepshit hillside of theirs...so they wouldn't feel so bad contrasting their miserable lives with those of the grand and civilized and accomplished people surrounding them.
And for those people, like a Beth-Shlimoon who would say I exaggerate and don't play fair and don't give all sides in these stories I pluck from thin air..let me just say that I take instruction from my betters, from the likes of Gordon and Rendsburg and Yahweh and his bible and all the scholars and experts and professors since that first liar, Adam. If being as one-sided, blind, arrogant, bigoted, racist, hypocritical, sloppy and prejudiced as they've been has brought them to where they are, with their collective foot on the neck of the rest of us...I'll foreswear ever telling the truth.
-- farid
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