The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Judaism, Christianity and Islam

Judaism, Christianity and Islam
Posted by pancho (Guest) - Wednesday, October 31 2007, 20:52:18 (CET)
from 12.199.144.42 - mail.shpl.org Non-Profit Organizations - Linux - Mozilla
Website:
Website title:

In the order of their creation. Judaism has its Sanhedrin and Islam its Ulema…both of them spiritual as well as legal assemblies….in both of them religion is law and law is religion…in both the civil laws are fixed, as are the religious laws…they are one and the same. In Christianity not so….in western Christianity the religious head, the pope or bishop, is separate from the emperor or king who enforces the law….religious laws are separated from civil laws…that could be because Constantine and not a saint or prophet, brought his people to Christianity by force, so that it was important to keep force in his hands. There was a long battle in Christianity between popes and kings to determine who would be supreme….during the Dark Ages the popes were all powerful, wielding the threat of excommunication and interdict over crowned heads, even reaching over them to threaten their subjects empowering them to rebel against their kings…the Jesuits even condoned the murder of tyrants…and the emperor Henry was forced to go to Canossa and submit to a pope.

But the popes soon lost their hold over kings as one after another crowned head ignored their decrees, the French even imprisoning a pope and moving the entire papacy to their lands.

This is a crucial difference between Christianity and the other two and it’s what allowed the Reformation and Renaissance, the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment to further erode the chokehold the popes kept on Europe. From the start Christianity was spread through force…it’s very adoption by the Roman Empire only came about through force as the early emperors, barring Julian, “The Apostate”, closed pagan temples, cashiered the priesthood, starved them of funds, outlawed them, destroyed temples or converted them to churches and forbade, under penalty of death, all pagan worship while at the same making attendance at Church mandatory, also on pain of death…and this is what gave people a handle to break the back of Christianity…this separation of the religious from the civic power from the very beginning.

Christianity also taught that God ruled everything on earth and nothing happened without his direction and approval…just as in Judaism and Islam, fate dictated lives and no one could change its workings….all was the will of God and would be done according to his command and not your desire…

Slowly, very slowly, there was rebellion in Christianity…perhaps the Church was more wicked and corrupt than the Sanhedrin or Ulema ever had the chance to be…but people began grumbling about the excesses of the church, the frauds and impositions…fast forward to the last decade of Voltaire’s life when he became the champion of the Calas and Sirvens families who’d been horribly tortured and their members killed through religious intolerance…winning them some measure of justice by shaming France before Europe…also at that time the Lisbon earthquake took over 30,000 people…and some couldn’t help but ask why a merciful god had chosen Sunday morning when thousands were trapped and killed in falling churches…as with Judaism and Islam, Christianity said the people had been killed by divine order, because they had displeased god….this rationale was common among the Jews and Muslims(Pat Robertson would say it on 9/12)…both of whose religions had a strong fatalistic tendency and explained away such devastation as just rewards and warnings for human wickedness and backsliding….Voltaire and others rejected this, loudly. They only got away with it because the civil authorities were becoming equally bold, people were already questioning the church and its handy excuses…all of which was only possible in Christianity because there had been a separation from the start between church and state, king and pope…with the tide shifting in favor of kings.

This one fact, and the means it gave to eventually pull the fangs and claws of the church, is what makes the people of western Christianity, at least, able to grow and develop beyond what religion would like….the western church was as hidebound and dedicated to maintaining traditions as the Ulema and Sanhedrin…but the early separation of popes from kings, in time, allowed kings to limit and in time ignore religion….or reshape to their ends…at the least it made it possible to break a church law without also being subject to the king’s police.

Born through force, imposed and expanding through the force of kings, it was kings and the protection they offered to the Voltaires, Diderots, D’Alemberts and others which eventually broke the Church…and a good thing too. If not, to take only one example, priests would still be fucking young children and getting away with it…because it wasn’t the church that blew the whistle but civil authorities who brought jail with them…the Church would never have “reformed” itself…never.

What force imposed, a greater force, the force of Law, Human Law not divine, beat down and liberated humanity…that we’ve had a tough time of it since is due more to the mess the Church made of our lives than to a mistake in disemboweling it….2000 years of obscurantism leaves pupils a little dull and unsure, liable to stumble and fall often as they leave the prisons of their minds….and this evangelical reawakening is nothing more than the same church, in different clothing, trying to terrorize people back…also insinuating itself into civil government where it can apply its teachings behind the scenes…for now.

Judaism had enough too…always taught to believe that yahwe was testing them when the Hebrews got thrashed time and again…one Jew, Theodore Hertzl, father of Zionism, had enough. Seeing the travesty of the of the trial of Dreyfus in Paris in the 1890s, he sensed that something particularly wicked was coming for the Jews…and he didn’t accept that this was more of yahwe’s “chastisement”…at least he refused to sit calmly and accept it…instead he went on a speaking tour warning Jews to leave Christian lands….some did, mostly from Eastern Europe…the rest waited out the Holocaust…after which many of them also began to question leaving it in “God’s hands”.

Islam desperately needs to reject fate…to not leave things to Allah…accepting whatever they suffer on earth, at the hands of other people, as a “test” or visitation from on high…Washington is not an agent of Allah…Muslims don’t have to bow to the West…indeed they waited far too long to fight back…so long that the only weapons they’ve taken up are actual weapons…a mistake born of desperation until some finally rejected their “fate” and decided to have a say in it.

But violence is a desperate last stand…the real revolution has to happen within Islam itself…perhaps it will take their own Holocaust for them to throw off god’s apparent “will”…as Christians did long ago and as Jews finally did a century ago…at least to taking their destiny in their own hands. Inshallah.



---------------------


The full topic:



Content-length: 7510
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Accept-encoding: identity,gzip,deflate
Cache-control: max-age=259200
Connection: keep-alive
Cookie: *hidded*
Host: www.insideassyria.com
Keep-alive: 300
Referer: http://www.insideassyria.com/rkvsf5/rkvsf_core.php?.cWlz.
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.13) Gecko/20060501 Epiphany/1.6.5
Via: 1.1 localhost:3128 (squid/2.5.STABLE13)
X-forwarded-for: 127.0.0.1



Powered by RedKernel V.S. Forum 1.2.b9