Subject: Re: The Ultimate Irony
I don't understand the repeated attempts by Christians, Muslims, Russians, Germans, and assorted Muslim nations, to persecute Jews.

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Part of the challenge with understanding this history lies in FORGETTING this history, stepping backwards a bit and contemplating the underlying human psychology. What does that mean?

The current history we all think we know, including all of the labels we use for the various "peoples" involved is itself so encrusted with faulty history and pointless debates about who did what to who first that any discussion of the underlying mechanisms is swamped by debates over factors that don't explain the underlying social behaviors.

I've thought for a long time that if it were possible to rewind the human world as we know it back to some random but DIFFERENT starting point one hundred thousand years ago, gave the dice a new roll then watched it evolve back to the "present" and compared states, we would find a nearly identical world, only with different names for everything. As an example (and on-topic for this board...), we'd still have multiple organized religions. They would have different names, different "origin stories" and maybe slight differences in their dos and don'ts but the overall dynamic of overlapping / competing / conflicting religions would exist exactly as we now it today.

Why?

Organized religions might be a social mechanism for trying to ensure some minimum set of pro-social norms amid collections of highly socialized animals but the concepts of "sin" and "guilt" involved with virtually every theology prove to be HIGHLY effective in coercing other behaviors that have nothing to do with helping the collective and instead benefit those skilled in using those manipulative techniques. How much human history elapsed before one particularly observant local shaman noticed a consistent pattern of solar activity each year that only that shaman could predict because of his special tie with "the gods"? How long did it take that shaman to realize that his "predictive power" led the people in his collective to shower him with food, gifts, etc. because of his special tie with "the gods?" How long did it take that shaman to realize that setting up a list of do's and don'ts then claiming to damn people for eternity for violating them generated enormous psychological control? How long did it take these crude religions to land upon the ultimate psychological jackpot of tying innate human sexual behaviors to guilt, then to shame, then to silence and coercion against the powerless in the community, especially women but also children?

This distortion of "religiosity" didn't just occur in the late 1980s when stories of sexual abuse began emerging from evangelical ministries and the Catholic Church. Hindsight is now showing that sexual abuse of minors in the Catholic Church dates back as far as modern records can be reverse engineered and re-interpreted back to the late 1800s. We know multiple Popes had illegitimate children and relationships with women and men so it is one hundred percent certain that priests have ignored their vows for centuries and likely sexually abused women and children from inception. It seems obvious in hindsight that this abuse flourished because the priests understood how to leverage the appearance of their power over their victims' eternal fate to silence them.

At its root, what we call "anti-Semitism" today has nothing to do with the Jewish faith or the Jewish race if you think in those terms. Back to my original point, if you could roll time back one hundred thousand years, re-roll the dice and watch the world through a different one hundred thousand year period of evolution, you would wind up in a nearly identical state only with different names for everything and everyone. But the names don't define the behavior. They're just numbers on the back of the jerseys of the players on the field. The GAME is what's important. And the rules of the game are driven by human psychology and the fight-or-flight mechanism which is driven by FEAR. While humans are highly social, our brains are wired with a hyper-sensitive trip wire based on perceived "differences" so we can rapidly deduce who can be trusted and who cannot. That trip-wire fear of "others" is EXTREMELY difficult to disable and requires repeated "conditional training" to turn off. If humans don't understand that mechanism and how misleading it can be, the "other-ism" overwhelms any "us" instinct and drives the behaviors experienced through history.

Making this point is not merely a means of cynically waving one's hands, saying "what's the point?" and ignoring current issues as unsolvable. The point is that any attempts to address these problems that fixate on current labels and current understandings of past events trying to unwind the clock to determine who was wrong first will utterly fail to solve the problems. These problems can only be solved by explicitly re-conditioning the people stuck in the current cycle to at least scale down the fight-or-flight fear that has completely overwhelmed their judgment.


WTH