The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Scrambled Brain...better and coherent version

Scrambled Brain...better and coherent version

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Sunday, February 25 2007, 19:07:53 (CET) from 189.162.7.18 - dsl-189-162-7-18.prod-infinitum.com.mx Mexico - Windows XP - Internet Explorer Website: Website title:

...my own brain was fried when I first wrote this...after a day spent sunning myself on the beach like any lizard...I couldn`t half-understand it myself when I read it here...another reason not to rush to judgement, even your own. 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 modern Assyrian business comes from people…and even though we get things WAY wrong, we insist on believing and taking our claim to being modern Assyrians on a faith as “religious” as we were taught to believe the God stuff, also on faith and faith alone. 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 in his day; looking for anything at all that challenged religious beliefs and to whom EVERYTHING challenged religious belief…even though the subject at hand might be pure science…because his, and our, entire basis for existence was religiously inspired and maintained and science, reason or logic threatens religion and faith, ANY kind of blind 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 it when dealing with our “national” business and secular history, the religion was shoveled into us at an early age before we knew what to think of it or “think” much at all. Likewise with the subject of our modern Assyrian identity, which was shoveled into us at the same time that the rest of the damage of the Church was inflicted on us, we remain equally as “blind” in our faith…that “damage” being, not so much the specific doctrines and ritual beliefs of Christianity, but the WAY in which we’re taught to accept and believe; without thought or question… and especially how to react to “heresy”, unacceptable and even “actionable” thoughts in church or state...which we must never tolerate or allow to escape severe punishment etc. We react with the same vehemence and religious fanaticism in responding to Dr Joseph’s ideas about our modern claims to an Assyrian heritage and the threat we perceive contained therein to our “political/national” beliefs, as if someone had called into question our faith in Jesus and the Bible…because they were both burned into us in our defenseless youth, through the medium, and almost through the very teachings and beliefs, of our religious faith and very often by church personnel as well, whose classrooms were all under shadow of the cross, so that the association of the two and their confounding, in our young minds, into one huge FAITH is almost complete and to be a heretic in one is just as much anathema and to be dreaded, resisted and fought as to be heretical in the other. Our faith in Christianity, we are told from the earliest age, “saved us” as modern Assyrians…and so you get the wild reactions to challenges to our “faith” in our modern Assyrian identity, that is equally as visceral and impassioned as our reaction to any challenge to our “faith” in Christianity would be… a faith which is as strong and murderously certain, requiring no scientific evidence but, on the contrary, “reveling” in the very un-science of it all, as the “faith” we have in the “evidence” for our claim to a modern Assyrian identity, for which we also need no evidence at all…except the loaded dice we insist the game must be played to be “fair” to us, beyond what every Christian or person of faith says when confronted by intellectual challenges…”I know I’m right because I KNOW I’M RIGHT”. To such a person, real evidence or even the presence of it within easy reach, as on the internet and in Google, is almost disdained as a sign that one’s faith is not strong enough, or “real”…this is to lift ignorance and willful stupidity, in matters intellectual, to dizzying heights from which we’ve been leaping in “faith” and shoving our children off to break all our necks below. The end result, over time, has been that reason, calm debate, serious inquiry, the scientific method, rigorous discipline and a patience and integrity when marshalling ones “facts” as well as scrutiny of those “facts”…the SCIENCE of logic and not sophistry, it’s bastard offspring…even among our scientists and highly educated people, are all perceived as “threats”, just as they were perceived by the Grand Inquisitor, and the stake or abject humiliation is the only remedy, now as then. We “use”, we don’t understand, 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 still dependent on and conditioned by our religious faith, in which NO proof is required or even desired, so that the feeling of being “threatened” to our very core…is treated the same whether we are asked about our claims to being Christians or being modern Assyrians. Religion, taught to us at an early age and by rote, permitting no challenges or any intellectual curiosity or deviations from revealed “truth”…something we go on sorely lacking and suffering by that lack all our lives, first opens us up and makes us “tender” and disarms and then cripples our intellectual sensors and rational capacities. And in that breech is poured, unresisting, our “faith” in our modern Assyrian heritage, along with church doctrine…which, even when we rid ourselves of strictly religious teachings and think we are therefore free from rigid beliefs, 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 “our” expert, chosen, uncritically, by us because he validates what we believe already, or in ourselves as modern Assyrians…because the very dearest things of all to us, our parents, religion and modern Assyrian identity, were all accepted and expected to be accepted WITHOUT the critical use of our intellectual faculties and indeed, in mortal fear of our wilted, shriveled and most despised human intelligence. It isn’t unreasoning beliefs, per se, that we prefer and respect…for we laugh at the mumbo-jumbo of other people’s religious faiths or claims to “exaggerated” ethnic identities and wooly tribal histories easily enough…what grabs our fancy and gets our complete and undying devotion is our OWN, personal beliefs in our own personal religion and modern history 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 never even bother to look at our own. Except it’s a very selective sort of criticism we indulge in of the beliefs of other people. For, without realizing, 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, which mostly taught us and our parents through their “schools”…or madrassahs if you will, and all of it on faith. This might be the reason that while we’ve produced great men and women of science and technology and in business and now politics too, people who’ve been able to excel in their fields because, where higher education in those professions was required, there was no “church school” available or allowed so that a real education at real universities under real discipline was demanded of them…we’ve produced next to nothing in the Arts and Humanities, especially in history and letters at the highest levels, because advanced schooling in those areas meant being confronted with “lies” put out by “deluded professors”, in “Ivy League” schools “I wouldn’t go to anyway” where all of them are “paid by Jews” who only want to “teach lies” so they can “maintain their position” and publish “books of delusions and untruths”, contrary to what “I KNOW I KNOW BECAUSE I KNOW” etc. We feel perfectly comfortable saying these things and believing them in no other field, indeed we know we would be ridiculed, other than our own modern “history”. To our brilliant scientists and engineers and successful business people and politicians, and those young people of ours we wish to inspire to compete with the best the world has to offer, we would never say, “you must remain faithful to the truths uttered during the classical age and by Xenophon and Herodotus, or the Medieval age, or by missionaries and explorers regarding science and medicine and astro-physics, politics and business practices…or to our women, “you must understand that what men said about you in Xenophon’s day and at the witch trials in Europe is the TRUTH for ever and ever and must not be challenged with LIES”…and etc. Yet that is exactly what we feel and say about the study of history and the Humanities and all those things it is so easy for every butcher’s boy to think himself an expert in. …except for this one, lone man… Dr. John Joseph, 84 years of age, now retired after a lifetime spent in study and teaching, a published author, a “seriously published” author, a distinguished man any other “people” would be proud to call their own, a man soon to be honored by his students as well as his university by having a new building named after him on the campus of his university, in recognition of all he’s achieved…a man who, had he been a scientist or doctor in fields in which we, fortunately, have no schools of our own , would have been honored by us to the very skies…instead of being treated as Judas incarnate, for the “crime” of studying our own history, examining it as it deserves and seeking after the truth of it, or more than we care to admit, who is recognized by us, if at all, a “liar” who has threatened both church and state in us. Something which, if we held the same Medieval ideas about science and mathematics and biology and medicine and engineering and accounting and dentistry, as we do about the real study of history, culture art and the humanities, for which we DO have schools of our own; our churches… would have consigned all of us to a mental hospital, or kept us in the most servile occupations on earth, periodically howling our “faith” at the moon.. 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 could be, break down when challenged on this subject…they don’t break down at an intellectual level no, no…but, rather come emotionally disconnected, like any frustrated and unreasoning child…their flap “A” slipping away from their slot “B”, at the challenge to those “blind faiths”, learned under the stress of childhood insecurity and total dependence on parents, priests and teachers, a time when we are ALL emotion and very little intellect…so that no matter how “adult” the adult, or accomplished in all 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 all of 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’s higher functions, re-routing the potentially threatening stimuli to our EMOTIONAL centers of basic 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 and then taught us…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 remain entirely emotional and irrational…as if a hypnotic code-word, implanted in our semi-conscious state of childhood and through the love and trust we were encouraged to feel for our first teacher/parents, 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, discussing the Peloponessian War. Raising the subject of our claims to being modern Assyrians and opening them 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, “or else”…not then and not later as adults. That’s why I say this Assyrian stuff can make you as stupid if not more so…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, inevitably, the most stimulating and growth-producing kind…but is entirely inappropriate if we are to be “scholars” and “scientific” and “empirical”…for, 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 plus the ability to order your thoughts while remaining personally detached so your mind isn’t hampered by a high-strung emotional state. Children and child-like adults, where this subject is concerned and where a higher reasoning capacity is called for, don’t know what that is because for the most important “lessons” they ever learned, none was forthcoming and, if they demanded any, were severely reprimanded or guilt-inducted. All they learned, at that early age, to expect was, ” you just have to believe”…and that’s the awful bind our “thinkers” place themselves in 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 reactions to “heretical” thoughts 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 is intended and expected of you… and as it was constructed to be taken, never through the “intellect”. 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, even to making a pseudo-religion out of our claim to a modern Assyrian identity and the “evidence” for it we’ve cobbled together from bits and pieces of dubious authenticity…and not a disciplined science… whose methodology, on this subject only, we take an unseemly pride and barbarous joy in spitting on. This is not an atmosphere in which the human mind can truly grow or excel...it produces “hot blood” and even hotter heads…which we sort of like…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 the reason our 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 cultural riches 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 anyway with “pride”…and cheering them on to victory when they cross the finish line in Kurdistan…what chance do they stand? --------------------- - BACK TO INDEX - REPLY - QUOTE - EDIT - DELETE -

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