Posted by farid from customer-148-233-78-77.uninet.net.mx (148.233.78.77) on Monday, June 16, 2003 at 2:29PM :
The Ten Commandments were hardly anything new. Maybe it was news to the Hebrews that you shouldn't kill, but the Assyrians and Sumerians and Egyptians had these laws on the books centuries before. No one could have a civilization and countenance murder, adultary, theft and disrespect towards parents or the gods...or god. What was the big deal. It isn't as if Moses came down with the first loaf of sliced bread. The very day he came down with those "laws" he had Joshua kill 3500 Hebrews for "straying". So much for, "Thou Shalt Not Kill". And the rest of them went the same way. They were silly enough in their own day, they hardly mean anything today.
In fact it would appear that the Commanments were aimed at the Hebrews exclusively. You'll recall it was their way to kill each other...they hardly ever in their history had the means to kill anyone else, till recently. They used to slit each other's throats and women's bellies over religous distinctions not worth a damn...what's it to one Hebrew what sort of a god another Hebrew wants to worship? So this Hebrew wanted to fuck a heifer...the other wanted to fuck his daughter...who's got the better idea? But it WAS a big deal...so big they killed each other, raped each other, stoned each other, stole from each other, fed each other to dogs, coveted what the other Jew had and generally carried on so that it was all their neighbors could do to tolerate them...hell it was their own Yahwe who got so fed up with them he tired his imagination finding ways to wipe them out or chastise them periodically into some semblance of civil behavior...and that was just towards each other.
Maybe it was news to them, came as a revelation that their god wanted them to stop killing each other...or cussing his name, or straying over to Baal or Molech or Milcolm. The Assyrians showed respect not only to their own gods but the gods of others as well... and where is it written anywhere, even in the bible, that Assyrians killed each other's wives and ripped their bellies open and worst of all killed their own first born sons whenever the going got tough? They didn't do that to anybody. It was the Hebrews who needed to be brought to heel, it was the Hebrews who several other people took under their wing, trying to improve...everyone else back then already knew you shouldn't do such things...their gods and kings had spoken out on the subject centuries earlier...and Hammurabi's laws were chiseld onto stone long before that other Chisler climbed down off a cow.
The major religions on this planet belong in a zoo somewhere, or muzzled if taken out in public. People still say that it's better to have those "moral" guides than not...that if things are this bad with them...imagine what the world would be like if there were no Commandments or religious scruples. In the first place, Laws that are enforced are all we need. There is no state anywhere where murder and adultry are NOT forbidden...and no one allows theives to run free, unless they steal a lot of money. Bush appealed to a "higher power", to God hisself, in order to BREAK laws, in his rush to STEAL Iraqi oil. He stepped all over good, solid, existing laws and well established means for making money honestly, by calling on god to JUSTIFY his covetous desires...to BYPASS International Laws against just such glorified THEFTS, not to mention MURDER. God has always been the murderer's best friend, contraray to what his minions here on earth say.
Had it not been for the Roman Empire, the "teachings" of Jesus would have died out like so many of the words of others. The Romans knew a good thing when they saw it...just took them a little while to grasp the subtle uses of Christianity. Just that fact alone, that the Roman Emperors turned Christian, should be all the warning any sane person needs to keep Christian dogma at arm's length. There was kindness and selflessness and charity and giving and forgiveness long before Jesus. Hell even the Roman Empire had decent and kind citizens in it. In the letters of Pliny the Younger to the Emperor Trajan there is mention of Christians and what to do with them. Even though this was a time of turmoil and great civil unrest, coming towards the decline of the empire, Trajan counsels Pliny to go easy on the followers of Christ. All he commands is that they be asked to light some incense on an altar and accept the emperor as a god on earth, something hardly any emperor believed. He expressly tells Pliny the authorities should under no circumstances seek the people out or deliberately bait them. Contrast that with the Dark Ages when the Church ruled Europe and had little to fear from kings even. At that time the Church was actively seeking out "heretics"...people who were often even more devout than the average, who merely had a question or two about some dogma or a differeing opinion...and torturing them, blinding them, suspending them in cages for decades and burning them alive.
There was nothing particularly new in what Jesus taught...except for what was taught ABOUT him...that you could get a benefit so great through him that the temptation to receive it would trump whatever shreds of decency, even Roman decency, were left in you. Didn't matter what Jesus was touting...it could have been Buddhism or even Islam, or soap or land in Florida. What mattered was that these benfits could be yours...for the asking...all you had to do was agree to participate in the ritual murder of this harmless man. If you agreed that it was a good thing he was betrayed, tortured and executed, the benefits were yours. And once a week if not more often, depending on how you were put together, you reaffirmed your "joy" in this murder by eating his flesh and drinking his blood...symbolically of course, but what a horrible and telling symbol.
At the time Jesus came along the Roman Republic was turning into an Imperial Dictatorship with increasingly mad and vicious men in control. The entire Empire was going nuts in some sense. It was a good time to begin to look elsewhere. The salvation of the Empire didn't depend on finding a new rapport with the gods...or even a new god altogether. It depended on the Roman people "accepting benefits" and doing their duty no matter what was asked of them, no matter what their leaders did "for" them. Christianity gave the Roman Empire a new lease on life, in the East that is. It was able to last another 1200 years, long after Rome itself collapsed. A new word was even aded to the vocabulary, "Byzantine"...and it sure as hell didn't mean "kindly" or "sainted". It meant the kind of place where every heinous crime was committed...from killing ones parents and children to blinding brothers and selling sisters into prostitution...and all for what? Why for a BENEFIT...that's what.
It was an Empire and a crown WORTH several murders and intrigues whose results usually derived through all manner of deceits, betrayals and barbarous crimes. And what set the pattern for all of this, what prepared people to revel in benefits no matter what the cost or means...what was the crime absolute that these Christians had agreed to benefit from alongside of which the murder of a mother even, one perhaps in some way culpable for crimes committed against her own children, was as nothing? Why...the murder of a sweet and innocent young man who NEVER DID ANYONE HARM. And heaven and eternity was the pay off, like the Imperial crown only more so, it was a benefit WORTH such a murder. Seek to benefit by that crime and what wouldn't you agree to benefit from...what benefit would you turn down...especially when you could devise, or have made up for you, reasons to dislike or hate your intended victims, who in any case could never hope to be as "innocent" as Jesus was, and here you are, 2000 year later, still feasting on his torn and bloodied corpse, still hoping to benefit.
Once a person takes part in the murder of Jesus...what won't he or she do to anyone only slightly guilty...like say the children of Iraq who were not entirely innocent, if you'll remember. It was their job to die miserably, in obvious agony so their devastated parents would be motivated to "rise up" and get rid of Saddam...remember that "policy"? Apparently they were guilty of failure, the didn't "do" what we expected them to...dying instead in quiet, hollow-eyed pain and suffering. Only Christians could come up with such a policy, or stand by and accept the benefits...and feel good about it. Feel good about it so completely and thoroughly that they could soon forget the little ones and get on to enjoying another set of benefits that would come to them through even more murder: the recent "war", against the even more not-so-innocent, in this case the people of Iraq, the parents of those murdered children, who never did a damn thing to the people of the United States...except have oil they expected a fair price for.
How can a person decry murder when he or she is eager to benefit through the murder of Christ? Why, you might ask, could eternal life not be granted without this barbarous act being the key that unlocks Heaven? Why? Because the Roman Empire and every Christian Empire since then, knew what it was doing.
Eternal Life is certainly something worth a murder...but to have Eternal Petroleum while still here on earth?...that's nothing to laugh at...that's something to kill for...
-- farid
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