Posted by parhad (158.252.223.74) on October 12, 2001 at 09:34:59:
I know we've been around this thing before, but I can't help thinking it explains so much about how we maintain our status in the world today. It's that argument that being Christian saved us. I still can't see it.
To turn yourself into a lamb while surrounded by wolves seems the heighth of folly. We still try to blend in among the Christian lands we occupy ever since being shown to the door in what was once our homeland. Surrounded by potentially hostile forces and maintaining a Christian nature, meek and mild...seems just like "Asking" for it. And doing it here in the West where we are "safe" to be Christian has meant an unwillingness to proclaim proudly who we are descended from...for as Ross pointed out to us, our ancestors were "not well thought of" by the very people who gave us the religion they didn't want.
To persist in calling Jesus a Christian is not only ridiculous it's wrong as well, flies in the face of what we know better. Jesus was a Jew whose terachings were frowned upon by the Jewish community because among other things he pissed the Romans off and they eventually killed him for treason...it was treason to deny Caesar was a God, or that there was any God higher than him.
The Abgar myth just confirms the story for to all of his contemporaries Jesus was a Jew, there were no Christians back then especially not during his own brief ministry which lasted all of three years or so. Abgar was impressed by, was saved and healed by, made us all worship, A JEW. I have no problem with that, one of them is as good as the other for all three, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, spring from the same unholy book
But what has been the practical effect for us? Our peculiar brand of real and true Christianity gets you killed here on earth, as it's first proponent got just what he asked for. You can see that because we have been killed in great numbers until we had to run away somewhere else, somewhere where they NEVER practiced our brand of Christianity. We're now hiding behind a most ferrocious kind of Christianity which has stood the gentle and foolish terachings of Christ on their heads...these thugs are the people "protecting" us so we can practice a form of belief that just got us killed for our pains ,and would have and well might yet get us all killed in order to be "saved" by it. But wait....that IS the way it works isn't it...don't you have to DIE first in order to be saved at all? It says so right there, and not in the fine print but in bold and blood red letters at the top.
What good does it do your entire family to adopt a belief or take a medicine that kills everyone EXCEPT you...then claim you were SAVED by that medicine or creed? How "saved" is that? This impracticable docility, this inane trust in the "goodness' of brutes, this trusting the fate of your children and parents to the "conscience" of the bloodthirsty is about as good a way to destroy oneself, ones people, as ever devised. Instead of a will to murder, which most of history has shown us men have an urge towards...we have substituted a will to suicide and complicity in the murder of our own families. You can't claim to be a victim of a fire if you walk knowingly right into it...you are instead a victim of your own penchant to walk into fires, which means your own stupidity...that you got burned shouldn't then give you grounds to sue anybody, or call it a cold blooded and murderous fire. How about addmitting to being a stupid person and taking responsibilty for walking into the flames in the first place. And if you claim you didn't go seeking the fire but it came looking for you, then the best way to fight an out of control fire, the way in use today because it is the best, is to start a back fire, to meet fire with another fire...the passion "to get burned" is NOT another Fire...it is surrender to the flames, to the inevitability, even the desirability of getting burned.
While we may have been killed anyway had we remained Assyrian, we at least would not have committed suicide, we would not have stood by, as we still stand by, while that knife slices our children's necks. It would have been better to have lived and fought, even to the death, as Assyrians, than refuse to fight and led to slaughter as Christians...only to run from our home country in the end anyway and hide among these barbarians who claim that killing innocent children so long as they are THOSE kinds of children is acceptable.
The final irony, the final humiliation and kick in the teeth delivered to us by this religion, one as foreign to our experience for thousands of years as Assyrians as imagineable, is that today and for some time, it is Christians who are killing us, not our traditional enemy the Muslim. In a way it was always Christianity that killed us, either directly as these Christian nations do now...or by rendering us so weak and humiliated that the only one we dare spit on is a fellow Assyrian Christian.
Other enemies might have offered death, but it was a quick one, one which we had a hand in determining the manner of, the fight and grace and clamor with which we would leave this earth. This other kind has dragged on and on, humiliating us, making us witnesses to the deflowering of our women, the butchering of our children and parents...and through all of it we were expected to give thanks for there would be an eternal reward someday. My God...you want to remember THAT... for eternity no less?