The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> A Little History

A Little History
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Tuesday, January 20 2009, 19:21:34 (CET)
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The following doesn’t come from my grandmother but from Will Durant, serious historian/philosopher and winner of a Pulitzer Prize, among many other achievements. It’s taken from the third volume of his eleven volume “The Story of Civilization” titled “Caesar and Christ”....pp. 639-641.

“Ascribing Rome’s moral and political chaos in some degree to religious disunity, and impressed by the political services of religion in the East, he (Aurelian) sought to unite old faiths and new in a monotheistic worship of the sun-god and of the Emperor as the vicar of that deity on earth.”

This took place in around 270 A.D. about fifty years before Constantine would choose Jesus over a sun-god as the only allowable deity for the Romans.

“Aurelian’s religious policy suggested that the power of the state was falling, that of religion rising; kings were now kings by the grace of God. This was the oriental conception of government, old in Egypt, Persia and Syria; in accepting it Aurelian advanced that Orientalization of the monarchy which had begun with Elagabulus (A Baal-worshipping Emperor) and would complete itself in Diocletian and Constantine.”

This may also be a clue to the almost psychotic violence and blood-lust of Europeans; the crossing with the essentially humanistic/republican ethic of Athens and the Goths and Gauls, from whom we derive our law codes and democratic forms, with the divine right of oriental god-kings. Perhaps the mix created instability.

“This adoption of Oriental despotism by the son of a slave (Diocletian), this identification of god and king, meant the final failure of republican institutions in antiquity, the surrender of the fruits of Marathon (where the Greeks defeated the Persians); it was a reversion, like Alexander’s, to the forms and theories of Achaemenid and Egyptian (and Assyrian) courts, of Ptolemaic, Parthian, and Sassanid kings. From this Orientalized monarchy came the structure of Byzantine and European kingdoms (and the power of the pope, mine) till the French Revolution.”

”All that was needed now was to ally the Oriental monarch in an Oriental capital with an Oriental faith.”

In other words, Christianity as the official religion.

The adoption, promotion and spread of Christianity was a political decision having nothing to do with Jesus except as the one to whom the religion could be attributed. It was a conscious decision, not spiritual at all, and a cynical one...it was an attempt by a political machine to weld the various peoples brought under Roman rule into one mass....a mass easier to control if controlled by a god who was to become the only allowable god. Individuals here and there were certainly attracted to Jesus, of such individual seekers the world has had plenty from the beginning of time. But the institution of Christianity was achieved by force, by design and with political ends in mind. It was NOT a matter of choice for the vast majority of converts.

How did we come to be Christian? That’s easy. We too were forced.

“Galerius (co-Emperor) defeated the Persians (who at the time ruled all of Mesopotamia, mine) so decisively that they surrendered Mesopotamia and five provinces BEYOND the Tigris.”

At the time Constantine decided to forcibly convert the Romans, and those living in the provinces under Roman rule, we Assyrians were under the power, and influence, of Rome. Constantine closed all pagan temples, disbanded pagan priests, gave money and buildings to the new Christian faith, gave it official protection and forced all Romans and subject peoples into Christianity, on pain of death and worse. Read about it...it’s in all the history books, except the ones your grandmother read to you from.



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