Heh, yeah... well I just don't buy the whole "chosen people" thing. Y'know, I can't go with that. I think it's far more Jewish wishful thinking or delusions of grandeur, or as I say, a convenient justification for them being exempt from the same standards that others are expected to show towards them, and for obliterating people and war crimes etc.
I can't go along with the idea that the loving God we met in Jesus Christ is the kind of god who would create an entire species, and then abandon the vast majority of it to its fate whilst concentrating on this one particular race, purely because one of their ancestors happened to be a nice guy. It's just that human tendency to want to "own" The Truth, y'know they had a good thing going there, "we have The Truth because we're the chosen people! bow before us and let us conquer you or take you as slaves, none of your arguments or objections are valid!"
Personally I can't see any valid argument, except those of the Jews themselves in the various passages of the Bible, for God not having 'bothered' with the rest of humanity just as much as with the Jews. If you think that at the same time as the Jews were sacking Jericho and when King David was having it away with that chick he liked after having her husband conveniently disposed of, there were Hindus in India who had a fully developed spirituality based on non-violence and disciplined meditation and y'know, all that stuff... well, it just makes me think really, that God showed himself to other peoples in other ways too.
Lao Tzu's ideas of leadership and how to rule wisely and benevolently strike me as being much more in line with what Jesus taught than anything in the Old Testament.
Oberon - would you say that was a good thing though? what's better - to change and update your identity by way of trading and absorbing ideas from others, or keeping it rigidly 'pure' for the sheer hell of it, even though there are other people with some better ideas?
You may now begin chanting "Burn the heretic!"
edit - by the way, there's no such thing as a 'pure' race. Etruscans? Well, who were they before they were Etruscans? How did they get there? Did they just evolve independently from different apes? Did they just appear in their part of the world randomly? Did any people or tribe or race 'just appear'? Of course not. They came from somewhere, and who they were and what tribes or now-vanished races they were a mixture of before they became known in their earliest form that we know about, is anyone's guess. Likewise, Abraham himself would've been a cocktail of all the different breeds/brands of homo sapiens that had evolved by his time.
All of us are just overgrown chimpanzees ffs, and what our distant ancestors in pre-history got up to and where they moved to and from and how they mixed with each other will always be a mystery.