The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Open Letter to Dr John Joseph

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Saturday, March 10 2007, 17:31:17 (CET)
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The first chapter of your book I found most stimulating, as you can probably see. It got me thinking about a theory of my own which you touch upon in passing and that is; how people, en masse and with no coercion, will leave the religion of their ancestors, especially in ancient days when religion meant more than church on Sundays, for a new one…a new one which looks disparagingly on their older religion and which causes these converts to adopt similarly negative views about the religion they’d been born in etc.

Your account of the conversion of great numbers of Zoroastrians to Christianity I find hard to credit, only because, like Aprim before me, this rubs my theory the wrong way. You hint that the Sassanian officials reluctantly intervened whenever there were “unseemly” disputes among rival Christians sects. I can understand people leaving their Zoroastrian religion when confronted by Jesus meek and mild…I find it puzzling when they leave their old faith for those unseemly bishops whose follower were cracking each other’s heads and ripping rival prelates limb from limb.

I don’t recall the source now but a good friend of ours by name of Tiglath had posted references to one form of this “unseemly” behavior, one manifestation being that Christians were apparently burning down fire temples and the fines levied against them for that sort of thing. Were the Christians burning down the places of worship of other religions those original meek and mild ones, were they the blood-ripping, fire-bug kind, were they the new converts to Christianity from Zoroastrianism and if so, where in the teachings of Christianity did they get the sense of humor to destroy sacred fire temples with fire? In other words, what in the world attracted anyone, least of all Zoroastrians to join rival Christians gangs?

You admit we have no real evidence for how this religion spread in its first two centuries. That being the case we’re all left to guess as best we can. There doesn’t seem to be much to go on except, to me, what we think we know of human psychology in matters such as these. I’ve said elsewhere that only Christians believe their religion introduced love and kindness and self-sacrifice into the world. From where I stand not only were these alive and well before Jesus drew breath…but some of Christian teaching has made this an ever nastier world…never mind that for now. The one indisputable thing Christianity introduced was the fulfillment of the promise of the Jewish messiah…the very idea, the invention, of a messiah and savior being a Jewish notion, and the belief that he has actually arrived is what makes a Christian…never mind about them being any more loving than anyone else.

I suppose people can be so unhappy with their lot in life that they could be induced to believe they will get an unheard of reward after they die…a very handy way to keep common folk content to sweat their lives out, especially at the lower levels…and maybe even at the top where the wealthy figure they might as well live in palaces “up there” too. Self-interest, weariness, the desire for all the blessings the church says will come your way, both now as a convert and up there might appeal to certain kinds of people…but entire cultures, or parts of them, with their own hoary traditions? This is the part I find difficult to swallow and not just because of what I don’t understand of the “techniques of psychology” which Aprim seems so familiar with, “as an amateur”,….of course.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Will Durant and are familiar with his work. In his volume titiled “The Age of Faith” he gives instances of just how people were “brought” to Jesus and it ain’t pretty. It seems people put up a great struggle to avoid Jesus and his benefits. People were tortured, they were beheaded for refusing, they had snakes forced through their gastro-intestinal tract etc. It isn’t so much that their own religion was better, it’s just that, in the words of one king, nearing the final stages of conversion, when told that his ancestors were all rotting in hell, including Grams, pulled back saying he preferred to be with his family in the afterlife…a most sane and noble sentiment if you believe in that sort thing at all. How can a decent person leave his family to eternal torture and take the easy way out himself…and Christianity IS the easy way out…because all religions have their asinine rituals, but Christianity was the first to offer a luxury cruise at the end.

Those lying Syriac manuscripts you hear tell about are filled with whoppers about how mothers resisted SAYING the words, “Jesus go away”, preferring to remain “true”, no matter what, even as their children’s throats were slit like so much livestock. I understand the lying priests trying to show that Christianity was the type of thing no one EVER dumped willingly, while all the rest of the religions in the world were JUST the kinds of religions people were thrilled to leave for Christianity. Something doesn’t make sense.

Leaving psychology for the moment let’s sail off into History and the New World with Cortez where we get an eyewitness account of how you “bring” people to Christianity…but do we really want to revisit a history, cleared of its ancient mists, that tells us plainly what was the preferred way of making converts out of orphans? Next let’s hop over to Africa by way of the slave ships bringing those people to a new life in America…a new life under the blessings of Christianity…stripped of their own languages, customs, traditions, music, art forms and religion, the slaves soon “adopted” Christianity, only sneaking as much Jazz into it as they could to keep themselves from falling asleep during sermons. Talk to an African American today and even though he knows what was done to his parents to make Christians of him, still sings the blessings of this new religion of love and goodness…do people ordinarily adopt the religion of the men who rape their mothers…unless some powerful damage is done to the offspring…some elemental damage from which they never recover, so long as they are willing captives to the rule of their mother’s rapists?

This is not a pretty religion and it seems that, rather then being the sort of religion that people rushed into(and when has there ever been one?) it was the sort people were dragged into, kicking and screaming and trying to defend their children from…but that once in it, those children would somehow “forgive” the brutality visited on their ancestors and the very core of their own identity built up laboriously over millennia…and if you can do that much damage to a child, of course you will have a convert for life…as, in the words of one Jesuit, “Give me a child till its six and I’ll have it for life”.

And going back for a moment to those infamous monks who walked to China and Japan and India to “spread Jesus”…who went without Hernan Cortez, foolishly believing in the rightness of their mission. In over 1000 years of evangelizing, with the permission and even indifference of the pagan authorities, those monks attracted handfuls of new converts and for the rest, went on multiplying from among their own select group, which about accounts for the numbers of Christians in those countries today. Not an impressive showing for a religion which at other times, whenever there was an army at its back, claimed people “rushed” to sign up.

You can see that same dynamic today when Christian Evangelicals waited until after Iraqis had been “softened up” by the U.S. Army before daring to bring the message of “Love” and Christ’s “redeeming blood” (and at that only to other Christians)….supposed to be more precious to them than the blood of their own children, killed by Christians…and the Iraqis were not happy with these missionaries of mayhem and said so.

Getting back to your major contention; that the modern Assyrian identity began from a series of errors which led people to mistakenly call those living in the vicinity of the ancient ruins by the “name” of the ancient people associated with those ruined treasures…could it not be the case that people “believe” they are Christian from just such mistakes as well? In other words that the evolution of the modern Christians is as much based on errors and deliberate or unintentional, plus overwrought and fevered imaginations desperate to find or create a link between themselves and the ancient Christians of that “name”?

Modern Assyrians, you claim, are nothing more than excitable Nestorians…could it be that modern Christians, Nestorians among them, are nothing more refined than sloe-eyed Heathens and Pagans?

I have no doubt that individuals or family groups or even tribes were attracted by Christianity…for there are always individuals on the look-out for something more promising to believe in, who come to accept the notion that this god will deliver what your last god couldn’t and that converts may well be so evangelically bloody and belligerent because they know there was nothing spiritual in their conversion but merely an eye out for the main chance and so have to smother their guilt and fraud with large gobs of pious and self-righteous cant…as well as violence towards anyone whose reluctance reminds them of what opportunists they were in “converting”.

But entire nations? And willingly?

You say in your second chapter that Christianity spread most easily in those areas of the Parthian empire among the Jewish communities settled there…as Islam was not that hard for Arab tribes, living among the Sassanians, to adopt. Perhaps. But then how to explain the adamant refusal of Jews to be baptized later…or Muslim resistance too? What made people so “willing” to convert peaceably, when no one was looking, in those first two centuries, but so damned stubborn, even unto death, later, when the whole world was watching? While it’s theoretically plausible that five natives living on an atoll, praying faithfully to Mugwhump to send them another rat for dinner, might be induced to join a religion that arrives with tea and cookies...what on earth induced any members of a refined culture to adopt the Mugwhump of the Jews? And, by the way, whenever those missionaries arriving on the atoll forget to pack their sidearms, the natives forgot the rat, and had the tea and cookies after feasting on the missionaries…after which they built an even bigger fire to Mugwhump for his munificence in sending the biggest rats ever.

A perennially defeated people, such as the Hebrews, who even made something positive out of their humiliations by turning them round to mean signs of god’s favor and periodic pop quizzes, can be forgiven for placing their entire hopes on an afterlife or, rather, on a Messiah who will lead them to triumph on earth. Perhaps when others become as demoralized, especially if they began life at the top, through a similar drubbing, all the harder to bear because so complete and thorough, they too might yearn for someone to help them even the score. Christianity might have its greatest “natural” appeal among such people, as converts, after which corrupting their children is a snap…so that all Christian people alive today come either from the historically defeated and humiliated…or descend, lineally, from those who were tortured into Christ…which might explain why both modern Assyrians and modern Christians are neither.

So that, as much as myth-making and making hasty assumptions based on geographical names etc. caused people to believe they must be what they were told they must be i.e., Assyrians, descended from the very first of that name….so too did hasty assumptions, made under equally fuzzy “evidence” from the first two centuries of Christianity, dealing with how this religion was caused to spread, really spread…is the initial error, followed by a slew of just such errors which were only too happily accepted as the truth by “Christians”, under which modern Christians erroneously think of themselves as descended lineally form the ancient Christians, of the first two centuries, who seem, against all psychological and historic indicators, to have come quietly and peacefully and willingly with a song in their hearts to Christianity…and that the unbridled and ever increasing violence of the followers of this Christian faith may be caused in part by the fact that violence was used to bring the vast majority to knell, in abject fear and humiliation, at the feet of Jesus…and violence does indeed beget violence.

And, one last thing..that a religion which hangs the likeness of a its greatest cadaver, dripping blood and showing all the pain and anguish any cow would when nearing the butcher’s knife, above an “altar” and then requests its children to, symbolically because the real thing is a heinous crime, eat this human sacrifice’s flesh and drink its blood, goes a long way to explaining why Christians are in Iraq now feasting on the blood of Innocents…and the reason they seem to never get enough of this sort of diet.

Imagine, if you will, the great Temple in Jerusalem, at which Jesus must have made animal sacrifices….the altar, with the upended corpse of a goat, or lamb…or bull…even one carved of wood and gilded, hanging there in the best position to drain its blood at one go…and imagine that we kept that sort of religion, cleaned up, to this day.

It seems no more foolish or baseless to believe there are modern Assyrians than to believe there are modern Christians,, take your choice, or that each should take any “pride” in their self-identification.

There may have been, originally, decent people who emulated the teachings of Jesus, his message of humanity etc. But those kinds of people, who either believed in these things already or who had the sort of personalities and qualities which made them “convert” easily and readily, were not completely swept off their feet by the weird and new and never-heard-of-before teachings of a Jewish carpenter and “son of God”, like any Hercules or Achilles before him, a man credited, by the Romans, with the founding of their imperial state-run religion.

Even before Constantine made a Roman of Jesus, the battling bishops made either a muddle of his teachings or used them as the pretext for street brawls among competing gangs of thugs…so that by the time of Constantine a “new” direction and use for Christianity was already taking shape and it remained only for the Romans to harness this potential for rearing multitudes well used to mouthing platitudes of love and peace while continuing the rape of humanity which the Empire was able to prolong for another 1,400 years, in the East and to this day in the West.

There may have been excellent qualities, as well, in the ancient Assyrians we should like to emulate today…but the best of their qualities, like those of Jesus, were evident or easily acquired by all people, regardless of ethnicity or religion…and were not the sole preserve of one only…and really, neither can either be “taught”, strictly speaking…even less so can it be forced on people…no matter the rewards dangled before them or punishments chasing them. The process of making modern Christians, like that of making modern Assyrians assumes that one can pick up at any time on the inherent and better qualities in a religion or ethnic group which MAY have been there in ancient days gone by…and pass them on, even by force or by simply attaching the name.

However, the best of Christian qualities, qualities shared by many before and after Jesus, who either lived before him or went on living without his teachings, like the best qualities which made the Assyrians, or any other group, what they were…and which existed before the Assyrians and have gone right on passing through the ages even with the demise of the ancients themselves…are the kinds of qualities shared by Humans…all humans, to varying degrees and in this may be said to descend “lineally”, not from the man or the religion or empire…but from the precursor and antecedent and ancient “qualities” we think of as the best in them..and in that sense there may be some modern Christians and Assyrians…but…they may not even know they are.

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