The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Apistol to Don

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Friday, February 9 2007, 18:58:07 (CET)
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Too often I shoot from the hip without taking careful aim and I miss. My last response to you was of just such a nature and I apologize for not taking better aim and dropping you at the first shot. In all seriousness I admire your intellect and the fact that you haven’t left the state this time…there is hope that your soul can be salvaged…as you see I can barely refrain from using sarcasm every other sentence…but it’s because I truly lament to see yet another young person caught in the snares of these wily priests…it makes me furious to think they would dare reach into the cradle and corrupt a human mind before it knows enough to beware of them…but there you have it…you’re fully grown and so must take responsibility for yourself and your ideas…and I have to put aside my useless desire to undo the past and deal instead with the challenge you present.

I abhor the idea of converting anyone to adopt my way of thinking because it would be as inauthentic for anyone else as I say the ideas the church implants are, therefore don’t confuse my passion with an evangelical desire to convert you to or away from anything. If I can just get you thinking, I don’t care if you decide to join a Voodoo cult on Haiti next.

How will I know you’re thinking? When you can refute my ideas with ideas of your own…without bringing anyone else into it, unless it’s back up a claim you make…when that claim is part of an argument that you can mount and maintain from start to finish…sort of like a thesis you must write in which you can’t simply say whatever you want but must back up such parts as need support and not just placed there because they help you make your point…also you must plagerize, that is simply copy out what exists in another source, which is what I call all the stuff you bring from your religion.

Imagine having to write a master’s thesis on say human psychology and you use as a reference the most famous and weighty book on phrenology..the “science” of determining human personality from the shape and lumps on the human head. This was a much respected science only a short 150 years ago with people writing learned books and dissertations and holding conferences…prison wardens, school administrators, doctors and judges all relied on it at one time and took it all very seriously…and this occurred, not 2000 years ago but merely 150 years ago.

Needless to say it’s entirely discredited now…and one day, the gods permitting, Christianity will be too along with all the rest of them that are tying us to the morality of a Dark Age. My point is that in any serious endeavor it matters very much not only that you provide source material but also the nature of the material…and as I said, this bible of yours is so chockfull of sheer madness and nonsense that it’s difficult to know when to laugh or scream. Plus which the fathers of this book have no scruples when it comes to lying for their god and passing off the most absurd impossibilities as if they really happened…and then calling the miracles to boot. Indeed…the book is a miracle itself.

It’s late at night here in Mexico. I’m at the beach in a quaint fishing village, writing to you from a little apartment above a laundry, in a family neighborhood far from the few tourist hotels along the beach. I just returned from dinner which consisted of two delicious tacos from a street vendor washed down by an icy beer…everything Mexico should be. It’s a warm semi-tropical night after a brilliant day in which the sea blazed in splendor, the breeze is lovely in the palms…below my open windows and balcony street sounds come up…families sitting out of doors, children in the street and a far away sound of a traveling circus that pitched its tent by the outer road.

I spent the day working on a sculpture and now is the time of day when I like to think and write…and I thought I’d take my time and compose a civil, non-sarcastic letter to you…which I’m sure you won’t mind others reading as well.

There are several points I’m sure you and I agree on. The difference, the major difference, is that I don’t believe a single word the church says…and you believe some. It’s not a very big thing by itself…but still I think it’s worthwhile to question why you believe any of it at all.

I wasn’t there and don’t know really how Assyrians converted to Christianity…but then neither were you and in all honesty you must admit that you’re taking the word of others, people you never knew and still have no way of knowing if they existed at all, or were reliably translated and sent down to us…in other words you take the whole thing on faith…and I have no problem with faith, so long as it doesn’t stand natural law on its head, because that shows to me a person who is so dull as not to see that the sun is already a miracle without having to be told that some hoary Hebrew made it stand still…it’s the difference between believing in your own power of mind over whatever fantastical tales you’re told as a child and accepting whatever bag of tricks comes your way. And since our human intellect is the one thing that distinguishes us from animals, we should exercise it as devotedly as the bird its wings, the horse its legs and the fish their fins.

When I let my mind roam out over the human landscape, recognizing that here too I’m taking the word, at times, of people, historians etc., I never knew…I ask myself what makes sense…from all that I’ve seen and learned of human beans and their ways…what makes sense. Now, if you’re going to tell me that the whole point to faith is that it doesn’t make sense, and therefore it is real and true in every fantastical aspect and story just because it’s SO improbable and even impossible…then we might as well stop right here because to me such a response comes from a non-human.

But I don’t think you’re that far gone.

You claim the Assyrians converted to Christianity. I’m willing to believe that individuals did…as people are always on the look-out for new spiritual experiences and since Christianity offered eternity, I can see simple souls buying into it. But if you tell me that ASSYRIANS…the entire culture, converted en masse, then I say that’s impossible…because such a thing not only flies in the face of all reason and experience, but it’s never been documented or verified…indeed in those cases where we know exactly how the church converted people, we know it was done with great violence and force. It is merely our own conceit which insists others LOVE our religion.

Now, to try to deal in facts…though none of us can be certain…the Roans were about as far from being Christian as is possible and indeed they killed more Christians after becoming Christian then when they were pagan. Therefore it appears as a great puzzle why they would convert…until you realize what Christianity tries to make of people…especially of groups of people. Constantine had to force his own people into Christianity…they did not go without a fight…indeed his grandson or grandnephew rather, Julian, the nephew of Constans, son of Constantine, is called the Apostate because he tried to take the empire back to paganism, but it was too late…for the new priesthood was already all-powerful. And, futher, not even all the majority of the Jews who heard and saw Jesus in the flesh were impressed enough…so right there we see that this religion was all that attractive.

No culture, no culture ever, left its traditions, customs and gods for another….not willingly. And if Hottentots and cannibals wouldn’t give up their shrunken heads and surfboards for Jesus, I doubt the cultured and civilized Assyrians would have.

During Constantine’s lifetime and well after, the Sassanians were in constant wars with the Romans with the front or border dividing them alternating between the Tigris and Euphrates…I don’t have to tell you where that is. The Romans adopted Christianity, not from the goodness of their Imperial hearts but because it was a marvelous way to keep people rendering unto Caesar in quiet submission…but whatever their reasons, they did not stop their forced conversions with Rome..or the Italian Peninsula or any of the counties along their Roman roads….but expended the same energy, with the same ruthless means and perhaps even more so, at the fringes and borders of the empire, especially where that border was a war zone…That to me, makes perfect sense and it is in keeping with every other “conversion” practiced by the kingdoms and empires which succeeded Rome…especially the Byzantines…who fought the Sassanians over BetNahrain and Syria for several hundred years until the Arabs took advantage of their mutual exhaustion to seize both provinces and then Persia too.

Maybe you saw the film My Big Fat Greek Wedding….remember the father of the bride who could trace anything back to its supposedly Greek origins? Do you recall or have you heard of a fellow in Turlock named Tooman? Well he had the same amazing ability to trace everything in the world to an Assyrian origin. What you say about the teacher of Nestorious is true…it was Theodore, though I find no mention of the dual nature of Christ in either the belief of Theodore or Nestorious…Theodore, besides declaring that Mary is the mother of Christ´s human form only and therefore can´t be considered a mother God...is known for linking Christianity to pagan roots etc. But let that ride, it isn’t central to anything right now.

What I find suspect is the claim that Assyrians taught Theodore, who taught Nestorious who then converted the Romans to Nestorianism…that sounds too much like Fred Tooman´s wild claims…or right out of My Big Fat Wedding…it could be true, of course…but we know how Constantine converted the Romans, by force and closing down their own temples and firing the priests and then outlawing paganism on pain of death..in other words you either converted to Christianity or were killed…I see the motive for Constantine, but for the life of me I can find no motive for the Assyrians to adopt a Hebrew heresy, which for all your thrill and joy in it, is all Christianity is.

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