The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum

=> Second Installment

Second Installment
Posted by The Nineveh Kid (Guest) - Wednesday, February 11 2004, 16:49:33 (EST)
from 64.108.203.163 - adsl-64-108-203-163.dsl.chcgil.ameritech.net Network - Windows 98 - Internet Explorer
Website:
Website title:

Sure there was kindness, love, goodness, gentleness, humility, peace and non-violence before Christianity, but all of these wonderful attributes were sorely lacking to a far greater extent, B.C., than, A.D., and to claim that anything bad or evil that occurred afterward was attributable to the tenet's of Christianity is nothing more than pure speculation on your part. You don’t know how the world would have fared, without Christ’s message. Even the facts as you relate them, are not really as clear as you would have us believe. Historians, even the most objective, are probably only 50% accurate in their telling of it. What they relate is not always based on first-hand accounts and much of it has been colored by personal bias, conjecture or embellishment for the purpose of dramatizing events to gain the reader’s attention, while the rest remains hidden for all time.

If all, Christians, are obsessed with death, they would be a pretty somber, sorry group of people. Personally, I don’t know any Christians like that, but hey, that doesn’t mean one or two of those rare birds doesn’t exist on planet Earth. Some people, like yourself it seems, believe that anyone who claims to be Christian, ipso facto, is a Christian. Claiming it, doesn’t make it so. Some people are just the opposite of what they claim to be. There are, in fact, a considerable number of people running around claiming to be, Joan of Arc, Jesse James, Elvis Presley, Rembrandt, Jesus, even the Almighty Three in One. No one, however, can become a, Christian; there is only one, there can only be one. The best, purely human example, would still be only an approximation. The Christian ideal as exemplified by Jesus is certainly something that people who claim to follow Jesus strive to emulate, but I don’t know of anyone who became Him. Christianity, is, silly if one views Christ as only having a human nature. This is also why anti-Christians don’t understand Him. Of course, if he is, only human, like us, His message wouldn’t make any sense at all. But He wasn’t, merely a prophet; he was, literally, the Son of God. Okay, you don’t believe it, neither did the Jews, but instead of rejecting that claim, out of hand, have you ever honestly set aside all of your prejudices and examined his life against the backdrop of what He claimed and not what others have said about Him, or your historical perspective? This is why I don’t think anyone can ever get to the end of this. Three people standing next to each other, on a corner, can’t agree about the details of an accident. Now take one of those three and put him a hundred miles away in another city. He’s in a different setting, practically speaking, a different world. Bring him back and put him on the same corner as the other two observers and let them explain to him what happened, the picture is still fuzzy. We can’t depend on time or space to fill in the blanks. We can’t depend on our own circumstances, our knowledge, feelings, or personal experiences either. How then, can you make judgments based on a puzzle containing billions of pieces of evidence, littering at least 6000 years of history, 99.99% of which, has not been collected and most of which is irretrievable anyway? Everyone would like to put the puzzle together, but without the pieces it seems impossible. So, what do we do, wring our hands in despair? No, most of us set about to make our own judgments based on the best evidence we can gather and then look at that evidence in the light of our own personal experiences. The result is our own unique viewpoint and belief. Now, if the whole body of concrete evidence that we have gathered combined with the experiences of all the people from former generations that has been handed down to us has led the world and all humanity to where we are today, imperfect as our institutions are and imperfect as all of us are personally, and all of this is based on a lie that was not merely invented as pure fiction, but actually lived, then not only does religion (especially Christianity) not make any sense, nothing else make sense either.

You weren’t there, I wasn’t there, so what do we have here to determine veracity. Should we rely on historians, bible scholars, artifacts and written accounts? Should we weigh the evidence against our personal prejudices or what we think is fair or unfair? Whatever the true historical facts are, this we can say for certain, they are fixed in time. The facts are there, but no one can lay claim to them, except the people who were part of that history. But we don’t need to merely study historical facts in order to arrive at a decision whether to follow Christ or not. He has exemplary followers in every generation that you have neglected to mention or talk about, who have kept the Christian tradition alive and well for more than 2000 years. It is a tradition, which has flourished in every age and every culture from Eden, through Ur, through Assyria and too many others to mention, up to our time.

You express doubts that Christianity saved the Assyrians. Maybe what you mean is it didn’t preserve us, but do we really want to remain in that same mold as our ancient forebears? It has only been during the last hundred years or so that we emerged from our mountain fastnesses and our tribal clans in Urmiah and the rural areas of northern Iraq. Many of the people that you rail against are part of that dark period of our history. Many, especially those who lived through the First World War and endured the refugee camp at Baqubah and even those following World War Two, retain unpleasant memories of extremely difficult times. They may seem stubborn, clinging to the past and the old ways. They may seem less resilient, pliable and open-minded, but the generations that follow us may look back with the same jaundiced eye at us.

You talk about mercenary armies of brutal Christians causing Muslims of the Mideast to fear and loathe Christians who raped and murdered and conquered in the name of the Lord. Wasn’t there plenty of that to go around on both sides? How about WWII? Muslims favored the Axis powers. Why? Because the Christian Allied powers brutalized them? C’mon!

You talk about, “Jew-born religions and Christianity being nothing more than reformed Judaism. If you extrapolate Christianity from Judaism, then I guess you must consider Islam as a hybrid form of both Judaism and Christianity. Look, I believe you have several valid arguments regarding many of the issues you bring up, but your criticism is directed, for the most part, toward the wrong target. If today, you attempted to characterize the Western Democracies as Christian, I would have to respond that they are anything but. There is a great apostasy spreading, especially throughout Europe, that has all but put the last nail in Christianity’s coffin there. And here, in America, it is apostasy with a frosting of hypocrisy. America is not a Christian nation, though it makes a great pretense of being one. Now, with the rapid anti-God precedents spreading like wildfire through our courts, we will soon be on an equal footing with our apostate European counterparts.


Your accusation that Nazi Germany was Christian is an outrageous claim. Hitler, and his army of brain-atrophied monsters, were not even sub-human. If you are going to refer to them as Christians then, define in what sense you regard them as Christian, so I can understand what you are talking about. It is your blanket associations with Christianity, like this, that I find so outrageous. Was all this part of a grand conspiracy then, between the Christian Nazis with their axis of evil and the Christian West, who we must presume then, were just pretending to try and defeat them, sacrificing their own blood, in some kind of perverted stage play?
You asked, “Why wasn’t Ashur worth being butchered over? You can’t hang that one on this generation of Assyrians. You better get in your time machine and ask the palace residents of the Ninevites back in 612 B.C. The short answer is that Ashur was more like Abraham, not Yahweh. Ashur was the father of our people and when he lapsed into old age, like many elderly, loving, overly indulgent fathers, he spoiled his children. Unlike the prodigal son, however, his children never returned, but instead lapsed into forgetfulness and obscurity.

You claim that as Christians we’ve made a dismal showing on Earth and, in fact, we can’t wait to get off of this Earth, where we can’t stand to be. Does that apply to just Assyrian Christians? How strange, it seems to me that Christians and Jews, generally, seem to be doing far better on this Earth than anyone else. Granted we, Assyrians, haven’t made as big a mark for ourselves as many other ethnic groups yet, but we are relatively new here by comparison and even those Assyrians who came to this country without a formal education and empty wallets, managed to do quite well for themselves. Many other ethnic groups who have been here much longer, than we have, are still struggling in ghettos. I think you’re selling our people short. Give them time. Yes, I know, the situation is urgent now, but you’re betting on the demise of our people, I’m not. I believe we will prevail.
The Nineveh Kid



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


The full topic:



Accept: image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/vnd.ms-excel, applicatio...
Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate
Accept-language: en-us
Cache-control: no-cache
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-length: 10119
Content-type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Cookie: *hidded*
Host: www.insideassyria.com
Referer: http://www.insideassyria.com/rkvsf/rkvsf_core.php?.EWsu.
User-agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; YComp 5.0.0.0; (R1 1.3))



Powered by RedKernel V.S. Forum 1.2.b9