The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> In The End...

In The End...

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Saturday, March 3 2007, 17:32:55 (CET) from 189.162.7.18 - dsl-189-162-7-18.prod-infinitum.com.mx Mexico - Windows XP - Internet Explorer Website: Website title:

In the end this, “we are Assyrians” business, and always were and always want to be”…may be no different than my oft stated belief that we came by our Christian religious identity the same way…through sleight of hand, through tricks, through a belief in tangible benefits to be gained(and even a promise of heaven, though heaven itself is an intangible, can create a definite and tangible change in a person’s reality and, for much of Christian history, in whether or not a man could keep such tangible items as his thumbs or pass his testicles on to his progeny)…through the approval sought from more powerful others or through force…as we can see even a “true” Assyrian identity can be maintained through force and threats…and both the Christian and Assyrian identity carry severe penalties for heresy. No one, absolutely no one, with the power to do something about it, has ever allowed people to live in peace and go on in their own preferred beliefs, who refuse, no matter how politely, to join up with a religious “faith”…or political identity…and least of all today. It may just be that the forces used in “making” Assyrians out of Nestorians, the forces of circumstance, gullibility, personal advantage and maybe just plain “force”, were no different than the force used to bring several people under one imperial rule, also with a “new name” by which to call themselves. These same methods might have been used to bring people to an overarching religious and imperial faith, also with a new name to call themselves...like, maybe, “Christian” or “Roman Catholic” to begin with and, later, Nestorian too. As an empire is made by subjugating and submerging individuals, their personal beliefs and loyalties, against their will, under one overriding and all-controlling Imperial Ruler thereby “convincing” future generations, born into the empire, that this is what is best for them, what is “real” and the “best of all possible worlds” or, to enlist god in the service of the state: “why else would He have made it so”…thereby causing future generations to “forget’ their own political past and adopt the newer one, almost from the womb…so too did the mania for One God and one god only and he is “MY GOD”, the “universal” god, the god OF the universe and everything and everywhere in it, impose a Divine Imperialism on a variety of people until then content to live and let live, each with their own Mugwhump of a god and his godlings. When Pagans fought(as monotheists later would and in increasingly horrendous wars), they fought, honestly, over the means of sustenance (land, crops, water, fishing grounds, gold etc) here on earth and not over a place in an afterlife, the very belief in which already indicates a certain screws-loose and dangerous gullibility. They did not fight, as Monotheists would and still do, over which version of the many “one “Gods” must prevail…which has always been merely a divine ruse with which to sanctify greed, to hide it from plain view but, also..and I believe this is what made Christians out of Romans..or rather a Roman out of Christ…because the unreasoning fanaticism needed to continue believing the admittedly “unbelieveable” could be channeled into a new sort of hatred for an enemy which did not merely posses the river or silver mine your king went to war for…but who, through his denial of your God, caused “sadness” to your God as well as doubt to arise in your own mind as to His supposed universality…a doubt best eased by murdering the man and his family too…because that would be “pleasing” not only to the king and your generals, but to your god as well…for then his existence and undisputed right to reign supreme, plus your now “justified” faith in him would triumph…and who doesn’t want to win a war? After all, a side of beef is something tangible and real and necessary and worth fighting over, or you die…while heaven isn’t real, but has to be swallowed with mountains of faith, which might nourish the soul, whatever that is, but leaves the body, housing that soul, hungering… and you can’t sit down to a meal in heaven until you’re dead. It could be that those smaller villages and city-states, those independent communities of like-minded souls, in either faith or politics, that were engulfed and smashed together to make “One” great big thing, not for their own spiritual growth and not hardly for the physical betterment of the overwhelming mass of new citizens or new congregants...but to benefit the few in their eternal quest to control the many, especially with the alarming growth in the world’s population…have been as damaged in their souls as any subjugated people ever were in their politics, bodies, homes and prospects when forcibly made part of an empire which could not afford to play favorites or allow each to maintain what he came in with, but rather had to strip them of all personal possessions and past identities, as they do when entering a prison or the army or even, oddly enough, the Church. We have all, perhaps, come by our “identity” through force applied from outside, in one manner or another. Who doubts that new-born babies couldn’t be shuffled around among all the various ethnic, religious and political communities around the world and each grow up behaving and believing like the community members among whom they’d been plunked down…as happens to us anyway when we’re born and “plunked” wherever we pop out. Our complete dysfunction as modern Assyrians, this strange “Push me—Pull you” two- headed beast of a “nation” we’ve spawned in just a few decades and, as well as our Christian identity itself which, though much older…could have come about through the same method, in both cases; force of circumstance, as well as brute force, applied from outside and not a conviction, as we’re told and encouraged to believe from the day we are born, dawning and growing and therefore, hopefully, taking strong root from within. As Dr Joseph says in his book; the actual mechanisms by which Christianity was spread in the very beginning can never be known...factually. At the least, however, we can know the mechanisms by which we became modern Assyrians...and we may be so terribly afraid to know more about how we came to think of ourselves as modern Assyrians, or even look into it…as Maggie went apeshit at only page nine, because it could be uncomfortably close to the way we became Christians as well…through force and fraud and pressure from without and with a “willingness” no more spiritual or profound than to avoid arousing the displeasure of powerful others, or going along for the “benefits” dangled before us…as the myth of Abgar clearly shows the shallow and self-seeking motivation behind the diseased king’s new -found “faith”. Had the cure not worked, Abgar would not have signed up for future treatment. This may also explain this terrible puzzle of why the world’s Christians increasingly make such a poor showing, as Christians..but make tremendously powerful Imperialists…because it was through empire and the weapons of empire that they were “brought” to Christ..even as it was through the weapons of war that they were herded into empire. In the last five thousand years, beginning with the first political empire of Sargon of Akkad, human beans have been harried and harassed to join and attach themselves to and came to believe they were “naturally” a part of, something OTHER than they’d developed within their own hearts and minds, villages and communities… grown and developed over untold centuries from the very core of their being … to be forced to accept a powerful and unifying lawmaker’s laws, even where they conflicted with their own traditions. Whether or not this was better for them, in the long run, is of secondary importance to how these people came to “believe” in and adapt to their new and enforced reality. I may think you look better with blue hair…and you might…but it isn’t my place to forcibly paint your hair blue for you…and if your children, whose hair you paint blue at the moment of birth and whose friends have all their hair painted blue at the same time, come to believe they all look better that way…it still was a tradition, a preference, that did not grow from within the community of ancestors they came from and not even from a desire they expressed…and while they might have come to prefer it in the “natural” course of their development, which is by then a matter of gaining the approval of peers and “getting along”, to rush them into it on the assumption that they would eventually prefer blue hair, or that they should so that laws are passed making it compulsory on pain of severe punishment...is to add an element of force, of violence, or of deceit in the quest and service of a “good”…which, not only belies your intent, but will never have the opportunity over time and the more natural development of a healthy and responsible will, to become ” real” with them or their community, as a good thing, on its merits alone…but will always be tinged with the violence and other forcible means, even if consciously forgotten, by which it was made mandatory, so that a Christian, no matter how grateful, now, to be a Christian…and even with full knowledge that half the Christian world was known to be dragged kicking and screaming into Christianity…and that it may well be true that the other half was as well…may develop a crying need to not look, not there and not much of anywhere else…but learn to accept force and violence as legitimate ways to do “good”…which is exactly what Bush claims America MUST do, for the betterment of the world…and what the Church has been doing since it grew claws, three days after receiving its first sizeable donation. We may turn out to make such poor modern Assyrians for the same reason people are such shockingly poor modern Christians…because both identities were “foreign” to the essential person or community when confronted by them for the first time and so were forced on people against their wishes, from the earliest times…and neither has ever been “normal” or natural for the people who were “brought” to believe in either. --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

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