Posted by panch from pool0381.cvx20-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.251.126) on Saturday, October 12, 2002 at 8:27PM :
I'm shifting gears here big time. I'm beginning to see what I think is the crux of this problem of ours...it is most definitely religious. We Christians resent and feel superior to the Muslims back home...and we have made of ourselves a most strange hybrid...against all odds and common sense we're convinced that through thousands of years we have remained pure Assyrians or Chaldeans or Arameans or whatevers...when what each of these groups means is that it must be considered as separate and distinct from ANY Muslims group...because of course the Muslims are supposedly ALL from Arabia, hence, foreigners etc.
It's like the religious wars of the Reformation, but with the same people divided between Islam and Christianity...and not Catholic and Protestant. Chirstians and Muslims...all of them about equally indigenous to that region,,, AS RELIGIONS...are fighting against each other...just as the French Catholics thought the newly converted Protestant French were foreign...or exotic, traitors and enemies to the true FRENCH national religion etc.
We will be at each others throats for ever...or until the last Christian is driven out or killed...or until our Christians get enough of their religious allies to kill the Muslims.
We have to bury this religious toxic dump somewhere else but in the hearts and minds of our children or we will lose it all.
From now on...as far as I'm concerned, being Muslim or Christian or Buddhist has nothing to do with your ethnicity or your nationality. What is important is that we are all one...and if our Christian brethren would stop cozying up to the Christian West that still seeks a final Crusade over there...there might be a chance for us ALL to live together with our various religions...as they used to do in the Ottoman Empire...and the more educated we become and the more peace and stability there is for the ENTIRE country...the greater the chance that extremists on ALL sides will lose their power to poison the air with their petty distinctions and bloody hatreds.
-- panch
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