Another reply

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), May 7, 2007 at 18:36

Dear Seamus MacNemi, you wrote :

> Your words drip with your hatred and your contempt for the simple truth. I was born in war and I have lived in war all of my life and I am sick of it, as are all of my relatives near and far.

Do you come from South-Eastern Europe as I do ? If so , then believe me it was the war (both the second and the first ) that most adversely affected my family's fate and broght much suffering and injustice to it. But it was no reason to me to look at war as something metaphysical and theological as you do. The more I thought on that the more I admired what Heraclitus said : "War is the father of all things".

> I speak of MY FOLK. We are a reality and not some myth for you to play with. We are all related at length through marriage and by birth and we comprise a fair segment of the human race on this planet. True, we are not Jews, but that does not mean that we believe differently from the Jews. That we are successful in our endeavours is no matter of mere luck but it is the result of hard work and diligent study.

Sure , it's the foundation of the Protestant work ethics , as Max Weber has demonstrated.

> Your hatred puts you on a par with those who you hate and it is that hate that is the source of all of the evil in this world.

Reading that I had the impression you're an apostle of love . How then can I reconcile your condemnation of hatred with implacable hatred which you show to Christianity as the sentence below proves :

"(...)and the Church be damned."

or

" Anti Semitism was endemic in the Christian community long before the advent of Islam and if there was any true source of antiSemitism in history it was the Christian Church. Christians killing Muslims, Jews, so called Pagans and anybody else who didn't buy into their idea of G-d. Accepting Jesus came to mean accepting tyrrany at the hands of a Christian/Roman/German/Russian/ Englishman, it makes no difference. They're all the same underneath." ?

Can you help me about that ? To my simple mind your two statements are contradictory.

Haven't you made Jesus' mistake ? The sermon on the mountain is charming . But Jesus' attitude towards Judas and the pharisees glaringly inconsistent with the sermon.

> Wars are not won by the defeat of an enemy but only through the winning of a friend..

With respect , dear Seamus MacNemi , I prefer definitely K. Clausewitz' view on that significant topic. It's based on deep knowledge of history and human nature and logic . Yours instead - I am sorry to say - isn't.

> My folk do not seek to rule over others but neither will we be ruled over. We will rule ourselves as we see fit (...)

If so, then I do respect your folk although I can't share their world-view.

> You may think you've done away with the clan system but that does not hold true for other folk. My family is my clan and my clan is my family and we will persist in our thinking as we do despite the modern world notions of some so called elite intellectuals.

I respect your choice .

> Do you think you can excuse the church by blaming the Muslim?

Have you ever tried to study history ?

> Who are you trying to convince anyway?

Someone who would like to check and rationally criticise what I say .

> Shabti Zvi? He was once a great and highly respected Rabbi. A Gaon in fact. His mistake was in indulging in Cabballa to the exclusion of all reason. It drove him quite mad. He began to lose all ability to discern right from left, up from down, night from day. He lived in an impossible dream world and tried to make it a reality in a world which was not yet ready. I can quite understand his predicament. That is what happens to anyone who hopes too much and who is too often hurt. I do not hate him as some do.

Some do ? So you see there are serious differences on how to interpret his career .

> What is all this business of religious warfare any way?

Monotheism is in fact Panodra's box from which reigious wars and intolerance sprang. In polytheism wars of religion are not known , nay unthinkable .

> What is religion but a cloak that men put on to seem to make themselves presentable to G-D? G-d does not care for your religions or your for professions of piety. HE cares only for the quality of your living in the world. HE does not want you bowing and scraping at HIS knees. HE would rather you stand up like a man and be counted for the right. Shabti Zvi saw that much but he was born into a world which could not share his vision and he paid dearly for it.

I am not the right person to direct the above remarks to as I have nothing good to say about religion (although for aesthetic reasons I am fond of polytheistic religions) .

> You cannot make peace by perpetuating hatred.

I'd like to read an explanation on the above contradiction in your statement. (You upbraid hatred and at the same make an ample use of it ) .

> Continually calling up the demons of the past does no one any good.

On the contrary. It helps a lot against amnesia - avery garve condition which is alas so widespread nowadays. We are what history has made of us. If we lose our past we lose our identity. Forgetting the past make we become nothing. We are spiritually dead.

> All that does is to cause those demons to live in the present. It is those demons we must defeat and not the poor benighted souls who are possesed by them.

Tell the Serbs they should forget Kosovo ; tell the Greeks they should forget Ionia and Constantinople. Tell the Jews they should forget Auschwitz ... Tell Seamus MacNemi he should foget his folk's past ... Medice , cura te ipsum!

> Amalek the rodef, the pursuer. It seems that you have chosen to be my personal rodef, my personal Amalek.

I'd rather choose a different archetype and say I've chosen to be Socrates' gadfly .

> You do not come to me as a friend but with your teeth bared in a snarl of contempt.

I come to you with a few questions. If you wish you can answer them. If not , feel free not to reply. Forget my false teeth (I have too many of them alas) and remember that I only show them to Moslems and you're none of them.

> That much is evident in your words. What do you seek to defend? What do you seek to prove?

Rationalism , Enlightenment , the intrinsic value of the the Western civiliaztion whose ruin I see as an even more disastrous and sinister event than the fall of the Roman Empire ... To someone fed on Oriental obscurantism such things don't mean so much perhaps. To me they do.

> I see my words have provoked you which is what I had intended.

Again I wonder how this confession is correlated to your first sentence : "Your words drip with your hatred and your contempt for the simple truth." ? Did you intend to make me angry with "the simple truth"? Very puzzling !

> But I wanted to provoke you to thought and prehaps reflection.

Perhaps we have a semantic problem here. What you call "thought" and "reflection" seems rather to mean "religious obscurantism" to me. I did read the Bible you know and I found the sort of "thought" and "reflection" almost on every page there . And that's why I am so grateful to destiny and history that it ahs preserved a few much better books than the Bible.

> Instead all you have to offer me is your anger. What a pity.

If you haven't found a single rational thought in what I have written , then I fully agree with you , dear Seamus MacNemi . What a pity!

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