Trouble is, Armenian ethnicity is rather like an exclusive golfing club, with the main preoccupation of its members being not actually playing golf, but working out ways of excluding potentual new members, expelling other members for not being pure-bred golfers, and looking down ones noses at those fellow members who do not wear the designated clothing, or use the correct putters, or act like the clubhouse rules say a proper golfer should act.
Always knocking nationalism as a sport in this day and age. God is knocked, and all religious sages have been dumped into the trash can. This level of arrogance is probably what gets people and their society disintegrated and destroyed.
come to think of it, we no longer are in possession of most of our lands! "ding! ding!"
Aha! Finally the mask comes off. You are as much an A-theist as I am A-rmenian. I have known all along that your rejection of the "theo" was in fact what our so called churches, be they Apostolic, Orthodox, Cathlic or Protestant have made of HIM to fit their particular agenda and politics. If, as you say you are an "atheist" why would you still look for HIM in places like Zen and other Zndans**? ** Whatever language it may be "zndan" means dungeon, tanjaran/darcharan, a dark place for punishment much like Khor Virap.
This is an old quote from Armat:
"The transcendent is unknowable and unknown. God is transcendent, finally, of anything like the name "God." God is beyond names and forms . . . . The mystery of life is beyond all human conception . . . . We always think in terms of opposites. But God, the ultimate, is beyond the pairs of opposites . . . . Eternity is beyond all categories of thought . . . . God is a thought. God is a name. God is an idea. But its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. The ultimate mystery of being is beyond all categories of thought. Joseph Campbell"
Campbell has another good one: He had recalled a colleague of his who had observed that the monks of the Catholic and Buddhist orders seemed understand each other. It ws the clergy of both that antagonized each other. What are the differences between a meditating monk who contemplates the "essence of God" in his meditatiions and the cleric who is a social functionary? Apparently the difference is very big.
The meditation of what life and being live, consciousness and what being conscious is is what drove these monks to arrive a agreement and mutual understanding, while the obsession with forms, formalities, literal interpretations, these are things that drove the Clergy to antagonize their counterparts. Therefore the boilerplate of "orthodox, catholic, blah blah, organized religions are bad blah blah" is also an extremist viewpoint that misses some colors in the middle there.
This brings us to another more neglected dimension of the cultural and spiritual genocide against Armenians, the loss of our monasteries, and therefore the loss of our meditating sages:
The Loss to Armenian Culture Caused by the Destruction of Armenian Monasteries and Churches During 1894-1896 and 1915-1925
by Rev Fr Dajad Yardemian
(107pp, Mekhitarist Publication, San Lazzaro, Venice, 1995)
This booklet should be compulsory reading. It is about a critical aspect of the 1915 Armenian Genocide that is not always recognised: the cultural destruction by the Ottoman State and the Young Turks. Their anti-Armenian policy was, among other things, informed by an equivalent of Nazi Goering’s infamous statement that whenever he heard the word culture, he reached for his gun. With shocking statistical evidence Dajad Yardemian catalogues the loss represented by the nearly ‘2500 plundered, burnt down or destroyed monasteries, Churches, libraries, refuges, chapels and other holy places (p11).’
Armenian Churches and Monasteries were more than just spiritual centres and places of worship. They constituted the social, cultural, educational and intellectual hub of Armenian life, its very organisational foundation and core. Historically religious establishments functioned also as universities and academies. They were centres of intellectual work by historians, philosophers and poets as well as being workshops for the production of hundreds of thousands of beautifully designed manuscripts and books. Many of their buildings were both architectural monuments and depositories, museums and treasure chests, for thousands of cultural objects. Church were in addition social centres, meeting places and gathering points for popular celebrations. One needs neither to be a Christian nor have any sympathy for the Armenian Church hierarchy to recognise this.
Churches and monasteries were, unsurprisingly, targeted repeatedly by foreign invaders. But none compares to the scale and finality of the 1895-1925 vandalism. In 1898 French lieutenant R Huber registered the existence of 218 Armenian monasteries and 1740 Churches in Ottoman territories. In 1904 an official census registered a higher figure, 228 and 1958 respectively. The figures for the period prior to the 1895-1896 massacres would of course have been even higher, for according to Henri Barbie during the 1895-96 ‘568 Churches and monasteries destroyed or turned into Mosques (p19).’ 1915 delivered the final fatal blow. By 1919 83 Archbishoprics, 1860 Churches and chapels, 229 monastic institutions, 26 secondary schools, 1439 elementary schools and 42 orphanages had been wholly or partially destroyed.
The scale of the cultural and intellectual loss is staggering and horrendous. During 1915-1925 up to 200,000 manuscripts and books, ancient classical literary, philosophic, historical and religious texts that harboured the legacy of centuries of human civilisation were destroyed (p73). The measure of the loss, as Yardemian writes, ‘cannot be established by any material criteria, nor can the loss be replaced by other values.’ ‘How many historians do we know of whose works now have not reached us, and still how many other authors and their works that now remain unknown.’ (p74) Symbolising the savagery and the vandalism is the fate of the Monastery of Narek, home to the greatest Armenian poet, Krikor of Narek, a man of the stature of Dante. In 1896 the monastery was destroyed and in 1915 the manuscript of the poet’s ‘Lamentations’ written in his own hand in the 10th century was burnt.
To the loss of invaluable manuscripts is to be added the loss of vast amounts of gold and silverware, bronze work, jewellery, woodwork, stone etchings, crosses, chalices, Church vestments and decorations, carpets, curtains, cushions and grave stones. Valued at millions upon millions of dollars all this irreplaceable cultural treasure was looted, sold or destroyed.
Sultan Hamid II’s regime in 1896 and the Young Turks later grasped well the role of Armenian Church and monastic institutions in sustaining Armenian nationhood with its contribution to education, to social and cultural organisation and to creating, protecting and harbouring the Armenian artistic, intellectual and philosophic legacy. So they identified the Church and its monastic establishments as primary targets. Their mobs ‘took their rage out most fiercely on Armenian monasteries, Churches, schools and libraries’ writes Ormanian that brilliant historian of the Armenian Church (p20). The story is repeated with greater savagery in 1915.
Of the vast heritage there once was, today virtually nothing remains. Where Churches were not turned into Mosques, storage depots or dumping grounds, they were demolished, used as military target practice and its stone plundered for local building work. To the crime against humanity represented by the one and a half million dead is the crime of cultural vandalism and barbarism.
But the 1896-1925 attempt to annihilate Armenian culture and society failed, despite the vastness of irreplaceable loss.
at 42 years old I find life becoming even more meaningless.Endless rat race,always trying to catch up and no end in sight.I find myself hardly believeing in anything.Religion?Think whatever you want but for me its a nice fairy tale.God? What God? I can't even express myself the void.No I don't need to discover "God" or anything spiritual in it but still part of me is jelous of people who can simply pray and believe without questions. This is a low point in my life.No denying it...
42 is that all mysterious number that means nothing but everything ---:0 since you are a well read sort of chap that seems to be interested in knowing the world around you, i am surprised that you are giving up at an age when the best things begin to happen.
Just look at old Wes Montgomery "Self taught musician" at age... huh,.... he began at... age 42!! I haven't heard a better and smoother improviser on the guitar.
In any case, the 40s are the best, the best years. Trust me. The sutures in your skill finally close. The brain says, "ok, I have arrived, no more swelling into the cranium. Now what can I do seriously?"
I personally like it, and quite frankly look forward to developing my brain to granfatherhood, God willing. God willing. Nothing wrong with saying that. It's always been a gamble and a mystery.
Each time the Աղոթարան shows its majestic splendor, remember how our ancestors bowed down to it everyt morning, swearing their allegiance and connection with the might creative spirit, whatever it was. They just named it "Ararich," the Creator. The they conjured images of the confusion in his creation and gave each "face" of the ararich its god like metaphor... it made the Physics and Metaphysics lessons to the general public easier, I suppose.
Joe Campbell - an author you seem to know well - swears to it as well that it all began on our mountains, that quest for the "Myrstery," as well as Flammarion and his colleagues who concluded through their science that indeed the Armenians were the first to map the skies into the constellations and into their mythology.
I still understand what they were doing. Religion has not always been what we think. Religion for our ancestors was about connecting and knowing, not about condemnation and judgement or the contemplation of the "end of days."
I have just been reading on the Avesta lately very extensively, and quite frankly the Avesta was rejected in our land by our people precisely because it was the first temporal and moralistic concoction that thought of an "end of days" scenario, thought of a dualist universe where destructive evil equally matched in strength to creative good. The "Hayauni" were condemned in the Avesta because they against and rejected such notions.
In our folklore and epic myth evil is merely a mistake, an error in nature, an aberration that is a temporary break in the natural balance. This is who we were, and this is who we are going to have to be, even according to Joe Campbell, who was clearly a biased admirer of the so-called "Bronze Age" cyclic conceptualization of nature.
wow, finally someone said the right word, and I was scared to death when i would turn 40 so Hagop jan tel us more about the 40's
Եդուարդ աղբերս, I don't know how else to describe it. The best I can do is say that you reach an age where you are yougn enough to have energy, and olf enough to have wisdom to make calculated yet energetic moves. This then spreads into alll your relations and interactions, family, children, wife, your parents for whom your respect simply grows. It's the age of settling away from the old insecurities, uncertainties, and complexes with enough vitality to build a new and better life, but this time not only for yourself.
