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Hide sidebars (Alt+S) 12 Browse Column (53) 13 Previous (24) 14 Next (28) Hate Thy Neighbor As Thyself Mark Ames By Mark Ames ( INS: INS: editor at exile ru :INS :INS ) 15 Browse Author (113) 16 Previous (52) 17 Next (60) The Bible by Yahweh Free in motels The Son of God practicing lapdances When I told my friends that I was reading the Bible cover-to-cover, an expression of worried nausea inevitably crossed their faces. A homosexual you can beat to death with a baseball bat and the problem's solved. But a Christian is impossible to kill, like George Romero's zombies. The whole point of a Christian's existence is to get martyred, so killing one only makes it grow stronger, sprouts another hundred zombies in its place; Everyone's sat next to a Christian at least once in their lives and had to listen to their drivel. You know that the EU expansion will have been foretold in the Bible too, as was the WTC attack, the war in Iraq, Putin's rise to power, the Slavneft auction, the price of whores at Night Flight and so on. The Book of Revelations is just Nostradamus for sports fans - meaning the majority of idiots, as opposed to the minority. Secular humanists tend to believe that the Bible has some kind of viral-infection power. That the very act of reading the Bible almost ensures that you'll be infected by Christianity, and you'll never be the same again-or that the act of reading the Bible is the last symptom of decay and mental illness. Folks, reading the Bible is not in the least bit dangerous to a healthy nihilist, trust me. The Bible is aesthetically primitive, mostly boring with a few great chapters, but compared to the truly sublime culture and literature of that time - the ancient Greeks - the Jews were just hicks with a lot of energy, nothing like the Jews of today. At times the Bible makes for decent toilet reading - The Iliad is too complex, the Greek gods too interwoven and profound to resonate during a five minute shit, whereas the Bible is so simple, its tales so easy to follow, that a Bible-reading-shit-a-day is reasonably satisfying. The bummer about the Bible is that it is much more interesting interpreted through others - Dostoevsky, Philip K Dick - than in the original. In the interests of disclosure, I should note that I am a Jew with Catholic blood. I spent more time as a child in various houses of worship than most people. As a Jew I went first to a Reform synagogue, then forced my parents to move me to an Orthodox synagogue because I hated all the guitar-strumming hippies in the Reform one; I attended an Episcopalian chapel every morning for four years, ages 6-9; I spent at least one Sunday a month at a Catholic church since all of my childhood friends were either Irish, Mexican or Sicilian; Even within my Jewish family I'm part Sephardic and part Ashkenazi, which inspired violent storms of cross-family intra-ethnic anti-Semitism on a scale you mere European anti-Semites couldn't possibly imagine. I first got interested in the Bible when I lived in Kentucky and my friend Allie passed on an expensive Bible as a gift, the type with gold-trim pages and soft-leather covers and all kinds of illustrations. I've read it now cover-to-cover, and now I'm going to review it just in time for Jesus's birthday. Unfortunately I don't have a lot of space due to the glut of ads this issue, so I'll just keep my review down to a few salient points. If you were to boil down the Bible to one theme, it would be Jewish self-hatred. All the problems that befall the Jews in the Old Testament are due to the Jews' ingratitude, deceitfulness and unfaithfulness. The New Testament is little more than Jewish self-hatred apotheosized: oh, we've finally done it now! The main difference between Old and New is that the Old Testament is racism raised to a level unimaginable in our time, whereas the New Testament reserves all its racism for Jews. The Old T's racism is a primitive, tribal racism, a racism common to its time but so dangerous today. Over and over and over, Yahweh tells the Jews to exterminate all the non-Jewish people in the land of Israel. When the Jews don't exterminate every last Chaldean or Moabite or whatever, Yahweh gets pissed off and strikes them down with a massive military defeat, or expulsion, or a venal king or a famine or something horrible. If you want to understand why the Israeli religious right (and the American religious right for that matter) is so hell-bent on exterminating the Palestinians, look no further than the Old Testament. It's all there, clear as day: all Jewish misfortune and pain comes from not exterminating their neighbors. There are really two great sins that the Jews commit over and over and over in the Old Testament: not exterminating their neighbors, and backstabbing Yahweh. In fact, Jews-as-backstabbers is an entirely Jewish invention. The Old Testament is the ultimate expression of Jewish self-hatred as well as Jewish self-love. If you don't understand this about Jews, their obsession with self-hatred and self-love, then you won't understand the Bible, you'll misread it as some kind of metaphysical enigma. The Old Testament has some interesting moments, especially as it approaches something of a Kafka voice and narrative. Genesis has the spare, creepy nihilism of Kafka, while Job is the closest thing to modern literature. Judges, Samuel and Kings are clearly the height of the book's aesthetic, coinciding with the height of Jewish national power. In those three books there are real, memorable stories there that evoke a strange half-familiar world with a common thread of brutality, frailty, heroism, betrayal and stupidity. The stories of King Saul and David are about as close to a second-rate competitor with ancient Greek literature as you'll find. Ecclesiastes (not to be confused with Ecclesiasticus, which sucksius assius) is the funniest, most eXile-ish book. It starts out like this: "Sheer futility, Qoheleth says. As the Jews' fortunes go from bad to worse in the last couple hundred years before Christ, the volume of loony self-hatred ratchets up to ear-piercing pitch. Pages and pages of horrible verse (Psalms) and incredibly primitive proverbs (Proverbs, Wisdom, etc) finally devolve into sheer torrents of anger and self-hatred, nay, anti-Semitism at its shrillest. Remember Samuel Jackson's line about the shepherd and the valley of darkness and his furious anger before plugging those skate rats? That's Ezekiel, when Yahweh has had enough of Jews and rants and raves and screams about how he's gonna fuck the Jews up big-time! And they's gonna be a savior comin' too to set y'all's straight. This is when the apotheosis of Jewish self-hatred arrives: The New Testament. When it comes to a book that makes you really hate Jews, the New Testament has no equal. I cannot understand, reading it now, how anyone can pretend that the Jews don't come off as the greatest villains in the history of mankind, and that the New Testament isn't the source and the end-all in Jew-hatred propaganda. The Koran has nothing of the sort of Jew-hatred that the New Testament has-which might explain why Jews were always much better off under Islamic rule than under Christian rule until recently. Then again, Jews wrote the New Testament, and like I said, there's no anti-Semitism like Jewish self-hatred, which is what lies at the heart of the New Testament. I want to repeat this: In terms of sheer anti-Semitism-inspiring power, the New Testament makes Mein Kampf look like The Nanny. I've read Mein Kampf, and I gotta tell ya, I was expecting that book to be a lot more evil than it was. The case Hitler makes against the Jews pales in comparison to the case that Jews make against themselves in the New Testament. Hitler would be booed off the stage of a Jewish self-hating convention; Hitler whines about the Jews being rich, manipulative backstabbers. After a few chapters of Mein Kampf, instead of getting some kind of evil rush, I wanted to say, like Hans and Franz, "Oo, listen to ze little girlie-man Hitler who cahn't even handle ze juden beekahz zey haff ze mah-nee. But accuse Jews over and over of killing God's own son, as the Jews do ...
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