The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> How To Make Pan Fried Scrambled Brains

How To Make Pan Fried Scrambled Brains

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Sunday, February 25 2007, 2:12:16 (CET) from 189.162.7.18 - dsl-189-162-7-18.prod-infinitum.com.mx Mexico - Windows XP - Internet Explorer Website: Website title:

I said once that religion makes you stupid…well, this “we are modern Assyrians” can make you even more so. That’s because while religion comes from God, supposedly, and we can see how often HE got it wrong…this Assyrian business comes from people…and even though we get things WAY wrong, we insist on believing in and taking our claim to being modern Assyrians on faith, as “religiously” as we do the God stuff. That’s scary. It’s the religious model again…it infects everything. We react to a scholarly and intellectual debate the same way Torquemada would listen to a purely scientific treatise in his day; looking for anything at all that challenged his religious beliefs etc…even though the subject at hand was pure science…because his entire basis for existence was religiously inspired and maintained and science or reason or logic threatens religion and faith. The same with us modern “Assyrians”. No matter how much we may intellectually deny the bible and Christian lore or say we are free from them when dealing with our “national” business and secular history, the same religion that gets shoveled into us at an early age before we know what to think of it or think much at all, plus our Assyrian identity gets shoveled in at the same and with the same command to "believe" unquestioningly... this "damage" of the Church has been inflicted on us…that damage being the way in which we’re taught to react to “Heresy”....which we must never tolerate nor allow to escape severe punishment etc.…and we react with the same vehemence and almost religious fanaticism when confronted with the "heresies" in Dr Joseph’s book, or any idea at all which threatens our “political/national” beliefs…because they are as burned into us in our defenseless youth, through the medium and manner of religion, as was our purely religious faith…a faith we are told “saved us”…and so you have the wild reactions to challenges to our “faith” in our Assyrian identity, through Reason and Science and Logic, in classical writers, missionary letters, embassy letters and any other “secular” or historical proof, as we insist on calling it...because the basis of our “survival”, as Assyrians and not Christians this time, is being “threatened” all the same..and we react in the only way we learned to us as children...with fear, anger and unreasoned combativeness...fighting desperately this "threat" to our very sense of self. Religion, taught to us at an early age and by rote, permitting no challenges nor any intellectual curiosity…something we go on sorely lacking all our lives. Religion first opens us up and makes us “tender” and disarms our intellectual sensors and rational capacities…and in that breech is poured in, unresisting, our “national nonsense” along with church doctrine…which, even when we rid ourselves of religious nonsense and think we are therefore free from nonsense-in-general, yet those religious-style certainties and unreasoning beliefs in wild things, beyond measure, still tie us to that model, to that way of reacting when anything dealing with our “faith” or beliefs is broached…whether in God or in an “expert” or in ourselves as modern Assyrians. It isn’t nonsense per se we respect…for we laugh at the mumbo-jumbo of other people’s religions, faiths and certainties easily enough…what grabs our fancy is our OWN, personal, nonsense which, although of the same overall stamp and quality as that of other people, is “ours”… so while we have no trouble “seeing through” the other person’s “nonsense”, we hardly dare to even look at our own...because it is as treasonous and "herettical" as to call into question the religion we wee taught, in the very same way. Except it’s a very selective sort of criticism for without knowing it we scoff at one irrationality while accepting, blindly and on “faith”, mountains of our own, personal, irrationality…and call that “truth” when all we mean by that word is MY truth…as the”truth” of our modern Assyrian identity, which we also take on faith…as we agreed to take the church on faith. This can help explain why otherwise rational and intelligent people, like Maggie is and Don is and Michael Youash probably is and so many others, who obviously are, break down when challenged on this subject…they don’t break down at an intellectual level no, no…but, rather, at the level of those blind faiths, learned under stress of childhood insecurity and total dependence on parents, priests and teachers, when we are all emotion and very little intellect, which now threaten our emotional state as adults without the benefit of our full and free intellectual power…so that no matter how “adult” the adult, or accomplished in other ways, reduces him or her to the level of a screaming, peevish brat, pounding his feet and fists on the floor or blocking his ears so as not to hear what is unpleasant and threatening to his emotional well-being or pleasures…which, to a child, is very existence itself. These quite harmless and innocent-in-themselves questions and musings don’t have the chance of reaching or even getting close to the intellect where other subjects might gain access…there’s almost a warning buzzer that goes off in our head which shuts down the pathway to the brain, re-routing the potentially threatening stimuli to our EMOTIONAL centers of security and well-being, as happens with every child, or adult in an arrested state of development. In even posing these questions we challenge, first of all, the methods and rules by which our adults were taught to “think” of themselves as modern Assyrians…all of it based on hearsay, which is all their religious beliefs are based on too…so that even when, we insist, the religion has been stripped away or put aside, the only responses ever allowed to us, on this subject too, remain entirely emotional and irrational…as if a hypnotic code-word had just been issued and the unreasoning “child” in us took over, speaking with the tone of voice and vocabulary of the adult we recognize, except that he or she is now doing or saying strange and unusual things, miles away from the self-possessed and rational person who was a minute ago standing before us. Raising the subject of our claims to being modern Assyrians and opening it to higher reason and criticism triggers the defenseless child in us all who instantly recalls and then reverts to those early lessons, drilled into us as uncomprehending and dependent children with vigor and irrational force, or sweet and honeyed words, which are worse in the long run…words and ideas we were never allowed to challenge…not then and not as adults. That’s why I say this Assyrian stuff can make you as stupid if not more so than religion can…for the religious have that time-honored cop-out of saying “it’s just a matter of faith…you either believe or you don’t”…which allows them to get out of difficult situations, even the most intellectually challenging and therefore most stimulating kind…but is entirely inappropriate if we are to be “scholars” and “scientific” and “empirical”…in these areas you practically admit defeat if you say, “you’ll just have to take the flatness of the earth on faith, OR it’s roundness”…in these areas you need EVIDENCE, and then the mature and well-honed Reason and Discipline and an ability to order your thoughts and work through and with the evidence, sifting, comparing and selecting or rejecting, while remaining personally detached so your mind isn’t hampered by a high-strung emotional state. The children we all were and the child-like adults many have remained where this subject is concerned and a higher reasoning capacity called for, don’t know what that is because for the most important nonsense they ever learned, none was forthcoming AND, if they demanded any, were severely reprimanded or guilt-inducted. All we learned to expect was, ” you just have to believe”...and that’s the awful bind our “thinkers” place themselves in and were placed in before they knew what hit them, when they try to “reason” their way to being modern Assyrians, or when they’re challenged, for they’ve learned to take intellectual refuge as well in that old religious dodge of; “you’ll just have to take it on faith”, which, as I say, leads to irrational and highly emotional responses more suited to the Catholic Inquisition than to intellectual INQUIRY.. In fact it’s very like the torturous and half-baked nonsense the Scholastics were forced into when they tried to enlist logic and reason to “prove” the bible and religion. It simply can’t be done…because it’s so damn ludicrous and irrational, by definition, that you can ONLY take it on faith, as it was intended and constructed to be taken, never through the “intellect”…and this is what all our “intellectuals” and their “books” and “prooooves” come down to…mental and moral gymnastics and shouting matches and excommunications and all the Medieval weaponry for silencing the human mind, shot-through with wild-assed improbabilities as un-provable as any religious faith, which is ALL we were ever taught...with supposedly “intellectual” proofs and methods and evidence which you have to take entirely on faith, because the “logic” is so tortured and infantile and primitive too that you want to spit. This is not an atmosphere in which the human mind can truly excel...it produces “hot blood” and even hotter heads…which we sort of like because it seems so much like religius fervor…but it leaves us unable to deal effectively in the world, where THIS subject is concerned, no matter how many businesses we run, degrees we earn in other fields or monuments we build or anything else…it’s also why most talented people leave to get away from it all, because to “believe” all this on “faith..while it may do for church and religion, is a disaster when it comes to understanding or winding our way through the political labyrinth and the demands of higher functions and standards of real achievements the world stage confronts us with. It’s like cutting the achilles tendon on all our fastest and most athletic youngsters…teaching them to hobble up to the starting line anway and in "pride" at the difficult path the lord has chosen especially for them, as a mark of his love and esteem…and waiting at the end with all the parents of other participating athletes to cheer them on to victory…what chance do they stand? --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

The full topic: No replies.

Content-length: 11330 Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/x-shockwave-flash, application/vnd.ms-excel, applicatio... Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate Accept-language: es-mx Cache-control: no-cache Connection: Keep-Alive Cookie: *hidded* Host: www.insideassyria.com Referer: http://www.insideassyria.com/rkvsf5/rkvsf_core.php?.NdUz. User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)

Powered by RedKernel V.S. Forum 1.2.b9