The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Confusing Murder With Love

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Tuesday, March 27 2007, 19:56:10 (CEST)
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I don’t believe people converted to Christianity willingly. Certainly not in great numbers and never as an entire cultural or religious group. Christ was an outcast during his ministry and attracted similar people on the margins of his society. The Christianity we know, I believe, has little to do with Jesus Christ and far more to do with the Roman Empire and its need for a new imperial religion that could bind together the over 100 different nations it subjugated and ruled.

Neither is there any truth to the apostolic tradition that the original followers of Jesus spread his good word and won hordes converts by the force of anything in his message. The true history of Christianity, as a separate religion, begins with the conversion of Constantine…everything before that is conjecture or self-serving myth created after the fact to lend some substance to the idea that people saw anything of novel value in the Church’s teachings…even with paradise dangled before them and hell chasing after.

Dr Joseph states that the only two churches to grow outside of the Roman Empire were the Nestorian and the Armenian…that may be true if you credit the hoary myths about Mar Addai or St Thomas and whatever fairy tale the Armenians put together to claim they were the first nation to “embrace” Christianity. But if you discount these two bits of self-promotion and put the actual spread of Christianity to the time of Constantine, you find Mesopotamia overrun and at times ruled by Rome…as was the case for Armenia. It is far more likely that the people in these two areas were brought to Christ at that time, in the 4th century, and in the same way as all the other subjects of Rome were…through force.

One hint of this is the eruption of the Christological controversies in the 5th century. Their mind-numbing trivialities seem, in accordance with what Durant states, more an attempt to retain political distance from the centralizing Roman Church, as well as autonomy from the central imperial government. In themselves they make absolutely no sense, not then, not ever…and if they were to actually have mattered for anything to do with theology, they would have started further back in time when the religion was, supposedly, first being spread through peace and quiet. It’s odd that it took the Roman Emperor to get the ball rolling on deciding how many natures Jesus had, what he was to his father and what to call his mother…where, until then, if we are to believe the apostolic position, all had been peace and harmony with no one much caring about these later “important” issues from which so much blood, profit and history ensued.

Constantine wanted his new religion to be uniform and universal, to mean one thing and one only; to serve the interests of the empire…and he wanted it done any way it had to be done and as quickly and efficiently as possible…in true Roman tradition. The debates over Christ were nothing more, as Durant says, than attempts made to avoid being swallowed up politically…expressed through religious dissent over doctrinal niceties…but Constantine was not fooled…he knew a religious heretic was a front for a political revolutionary and treated the heretic, no matter how meek and mild, the same as a political traitor to the state

It’s no doubt true, as Dr Joseph says, that Christianity first spread among Jews in Mesopotamia. Having left their Holy Land and the Temple at Jerusalem, the only place they could make sacrifice to their god, they may have been more disposed to believe in the idea that their Messiah had come, but had been rejected by the Jews back home…as they themselves rejected Israel and may have felt rejected in turn. However, it’s plain as the nose on Constantine’s face that had Rome not made a good Roman of Jesus, adopting and transforming his message to serve the state for the next 2000 years, Christianity would have gotten nowhere and soon died out as so many minor sects had.

The ecstatic first Christians who actually believed Christ was coming back, the ones who left family and work to go await him in the desert, may have been the first Jewish converts outside Palestine. But that movement, along with the hermits and pillar-dwellers and starving skeletons was rejected by the Church and eventually suppressed…Rome had use of Christians in this life, as soldiers, workers, parents…the afterlife it didn’t much care about, except to squeeze all it could from their subjects, before they dropped dead from exhaustion and ill use, to “go to glory”.

It’s too much of a miracle to believe that Christianity spread almost spontaneously…that all it took was the mere repetition of the story of Jesus, especially his “suffering”. There was nothing odd or new to a Roman, with his Greek heritage, in the idea of a god having a tryst with a mortal and producing a son…nothing wildly strange in the son living among mortals…even of doing great deeds like any Hercules with twelve labors, performed successfully through miraculous powers. The idea of the god who is killed as a sacrifice, to rise again in the spring, was a common story of a vegetation god whose sacrifice, like the harvesting of wheat where each stalk “allows” itself to be cut off from life, gave back life to the community in the form of bread, allowing it to survive until the spring when the god would be resurrected in the form of new growth in the winter-blasted fields.

By the 7th century at least we know the Roman emperor was ordering Jews to baptism on pain of death…we know many chose exile but many were killed. This pattern of killing those who refused to be converted is a mainstay of the “spread” of Christianity…it occurred in Europe several times and was visited on Muslims and Jews again during the Crusades as well as the inhabitants of Africa and the New World. The Holy Inquisition carried on the work and in its second incarnation targeted those Jews who’d been forced to convert because their forced conversion was thought to have produced “insincere” Christians.

Even today, in Iraq and in the wake of the destruction wrought by yet another Christian army, evangelical, carrying on the real “apostolic” tradition, are swarming over the country looking for converts….something they dared not do before their armies rendered the people incapable of resistance and vulnerable in every way.

And if that wasn’t enough, we have only to follow Cortez and the rest of the Conquerors to the New World, where the natives were “converted” by a handful of priests spreading the “good word”…with an army at their back to enforce compliance…just as Constantine had done and every evangelizing son of a bitch since.

But even before, we can look at China, India and Japan where evangelicals made the mistake of going alone, relying only on their “good word”…given every opportunity by the tolerant pagans in those countries, Christians managed to attract hardly anyone, except again the outcasts from their own societies…and in over 1000 years of “work” have next to nothing to show for it in the way of converts…nothing more than would come from a boatload of evangelicals screwing each other and no one else for all those years.

And each of us, who is not of an evangelical, apostolic, turn of mind…even though we may be Christian, knows all too well how obnoxious evangelicals are…how pious, self-righteous and downright grating to the nerves...and this is after 2000 years of honing their skills…to credit these kinds of people with being able to turn others away from the religion and therefore customs and oftentimes languages too of their parents and ancestors is just too absurd to be taken seriously…unless you believe in miracles that are nine-tenths fraudulent and easily attributable to a human, never mind a god.

To conclude this jolly rant I refer to Dr Joseph again. In chapter ten he speaks of the hard-learned lessons taught to the evangelizing missionaries…people we may think of as modern Apostles of the “Good Word”. All this evangelizing among Muslims had not produced a single church…nothing more than here and there a convert or two, again no doubt found at the margins of Muslim society. To the argument that the evangelicals had been opposed and “fought” by Islam we have only to refer to China, India and Japan, where no Muslims fought anybody…and where hardly any converts were made. Not only had the missionaries not won over any Muslims to speak of, they had not even managed to bring all Christians to any one of their churches.

And here we quote what all Apostles, from the first one, no doubt encountered….if they went anywhere at all and did any evangelizing in the first place…”Veteran missionaries in Muslim lands were beginning to realize that to the Muslim his community was a noble and sacred thing…a socio-political-religious fellowship for which the believer is willing to give his life. When a man (or woman, mine) stood forth to become a Christian, wrote a discerning missionary, ‘whether he will or not he usually finds himself separated from his own people and hence his own religious, moral and cultural background’”.

Does anything more need to be said about the preposterous claims to peaceably winning over countless millions to Christianity?

It was through force, through violence, through murder that people were brought to Christ en masse…and it shows, for they have confused murder with love ever since.

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