Posted by panchmaster from pool0138.cvx24-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.210.138) on Sunday, November 17, 2002 at 10:15AM :
In Reply to: Re: Why Muslim Assyrians can't exist...... posted by sankho from CPE-203-45-1-117.vic.bigpond.net.au (203.45.1.117) on Sunday, November 17, 2002 at 0:46AM :
I didn't mean it that way. In general I'd say that the fighters (and I don't mean just soldiers) fought long and hard to maintain their culture and religion...and paid the kind of price fighters usually do. We all die, but some have the bad taste to do anything in order to stave it off.
The ones who would convert to a religion such as Christianity would have been those who lost hope for this world...ones who felt that by enduring pain and humiliation they would win the" Kingdom Lotto".
After all, had there been no Babylonian Exile...no finishing school at Nineveh...no sojorn to Egypt for graduate work and no Roman "work/study Abroad" program...if everything had been gefelte fish and honey for the Jews they wouldn't have needed a Messiah at all.
Messiah's pop up when the people who believe in these things have nothing else to hope for. Assyrian fighters would have had hope till the last breath...or at the least they would have expended it fighting hopelessly. It's no wonder that Christianity is strongest in villages...dirt poor ones at that...or at least where education, such as it is, is under church control. When times are good, in any society, religion falls by the wayside...when things go terribly bad, the gods are sought out for solace and to appease, for the people convince themselves bad times will end if they apologize, make obeisance to and beg forgiveness of their gods.
If the gods can be seen as having totally abandoned their people, for some great big infraction, the people could feel set adrift in a universe in which the only god who will take them in would be the type who isn't too picky...one who says, "come all ye unto me"...the kind who doesn't much care who he associates with...at least his salesmen here on earth would tell you that..."and drop a million in the poor box"...and, "would little Johnny like to wax his behind"?
This god business is a dirty business ultimately...would people have invented it if it had not been?
Times must have gotten very bad for the Assyrians...you know what kind of "pride" we have...especially when there's very little reason for it...sort of an over compensation...so damn humiliated we hold our heads up the higher...to avoid the sewer rats down in the gutter where we've fallen.
Besides what passes for history comes from those same dreary priests, the keepers of the Flame of Humiliation.
By the way...one doesn't hear much of the ongoing courageous work of Father Akbulut. That was a most humiliating chapter in a long list of them. How that guy ever became a hero to us can only be explained by the dismal condition we find ourselves in. The poor bastard made a comment in private and found himself the toast of of the Assyrian world,,,probably wished we'd all go away. Yet we did some good...we provided an audience for the Turks to display their legal finesse and "justice" before. And WE walked away with a new "Hero". The goodly father was a neo-hero...the kind suited to us modern Christian Assyrians. They would have hanged him in old Nineveh.
Lord, lord.
-- panchmaster
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