(9) Good Lord, is he still babbling about that? You'd think that he would have learned his lesson during that silly debate about the alleged harnessing of electricity in ancient Egypt, but apparently not. See the article "Formal vs Magical Usage" for my response to this bizarre fixation of his, considered as a philosophical position.

(10) How touching that he cares.

"Sachmis" is the Greek form of the name "Sekhmet". The reference is to John's earlier rant on the 'Pre-Ptolemaic electrification thread' (long since deleted) about the Greeks "ruining" Egyptian culture by speaking a language of their own, and referring to the gods and cities in Egypt by names other than those used by the Egyptians, much as a modern American will refer to the country of "Germany" rather than calling it "Deutschland", as it is named in the language he calls German (not Deutsch, as that language calls itself) and speak of a city of Munich located in Bavaria, instead of a city named M�nchen in the "staat" of Bayern. And yet German culture has managed to endure these 'horrors' and even thrive.

Nor is the 'horror' limited to secular matters, or even to Germans. That same American will often refer to his "Lord and Savior" by the Roman form "Jesus", rather than by Jesus' actual given name of "Yeshua" (the Hebraic form, translated in Old Testament contexts as "Joshua"), and it gets worse! In English, the speaker will often say "Jehovah" instead of "Yahweh", "The Lord" instead of the Hebrew form "Adonai" (not to be mistaken for "Ba'al"), or "God" instead of the Latin "Deus", to use the language of those who converted the ancestors of the English, their ancestors in turn having been converted by Judean missionaries who would have used the form "Elohim" ("the totality of the Divine"). So, now, by John's logic, we have Roman and Hebraic culture alike being "ruined". Oh, when will man's linguistic inhumanity to man cease?

An apologist for John's position might argue that perhaps Egyptian culture was fragile in a way which German and Jewish culture weren't. To this, I would respond, were Egyptian culture so fragile as to be damaged by a thing like this, so prone to naturally arise, then one would have to conclude that it wasn't much of a culture to begin with. Cultures exist in order to provide a stabile environment in which man overcomes the worst that is in him, so that he may enjoy a favorable environment in which the best that is in him may find expression. What is one to say of a shelter that will always blow over in the face of the faintest breeze, should it blow from the wrong direction? It is no shelter at all. Likewise, this fragile Egypt that never was, would be no sanctuary from barbarism, for the would-be barbarian would never be so cooperative as to not touch upon its weak points. It would be no culture at all. How could others damage that which could never have functioned in the first place?

One might well ask what John's issue is as he brings up this point. As I have already asked him, and heard no response, how did Egypt survive the horrors of translation between all of the centuries which passed between the founding of the Old Kingdom and the coming of Alexander? In reality, Pharaonic Egypt survived encounters with, and occasional conquest by an endless string of cultures, none of them Egyptian speaking, over a length of time greater than that seperating us from the Caesars and flourished all the same. In light of this, the reader can easily see that John's Grecophobic fixation is of far more interest to the psychologist than to the historian or theologian. It is nothing more than bigotry wrapped in the mantle of religion, with the House' approval and support.

Return to Kheru's missive