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<conspiracyFile>32 page printout, pages 24 to 55 of 322
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FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
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"Being crafty, I caught you with guile" ...
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For if the truth of God hath more abounded
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through my LIE unto his glory; why yet am
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I also adjudged a sinner?"
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St. Paul.
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"What profit has not that fable of Christ
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brought us!"
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Pope Leo X.
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<div> <div>
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CHAPTER I
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PAGAN FRAUDS -- CHRISTIAN PRECEDENTS
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"Neither in the confusion of paganism, nor in the
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defilement of heresy, nor yet in the blindness of Judaism, is
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religion to be sought, but among those alone who are called
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Catholic Christians." (St. Augustine, De Vera Religions, v.)
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EVERY RELIGION, PRIESTCRAFT, and Sacred Book, other than the
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Roman Catholic Christian, is thus branded as false in fact and
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fraudulent in practice. The Jews, however, excluded by those who
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have expropriated their ancient faith, make the same imputations of
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falsity and fraud against the Christian religion, based on their
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own ancient sacred Scriptures, and founded, as the Christians
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claim, by a Jewish Incarnation of the Hebrew God, -- which, say the
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Jews, is a horrid blasphemy; and they brand the Sacred Books of
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Christian origin as false and forged.
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The Christians, all their hundreds of warring Sects, in their
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turn impute to the Jews the blasphemous repudiation and monstrous
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murder of the Son of the ancient Hebrew God, Yahweh; and with ample
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usury of blood and torture have visited that fabulous iniquity upon
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the hapless sons and daughters of Jewry unto half a hundred
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generations of "God's Chosen People."
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But, of the countless Sects of Christians, one alone, it
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avers, is of the True Faith; all the others are false and beyond
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the hope of heaven: "Whoever will be saved, it is necessary above
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all else that he hold to the Catholic Faith," -- so reads the
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venerable forged Athanasian Creed. (CE. ii, 33, 34.) The Protestant
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Sects, however, though they all admit the same origin and accept in
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full fatuity of faith most of the same forged sacred writings for
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their rule of faith as the One True Church, yet apply the scornful
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epithet "Antichrist" to their venerable Mother in Christ; freely
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dub a dozen of her canonical sacred Books of Jewish origin, and
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most of her thousands of canonized Saints, forgeries and frauds;
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and assert many of her most holy dogmas and sacraments to be
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blasphemous and degrading superstitions. The while their own scores
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of hostile factions mutually recriminate each the other as blind
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leaders of the blind and perverters of the sacred Truth.
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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24
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FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
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It will serve a useful purpose to take a look behind all this
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dust-and-smoke screen of "Odium Theologicum" and make a brief
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survey of the origins of religious superstitions and priestcraft,
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and of the known and admitted falsities and frauds of Paganism, and
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some venerable other religious 'isms.' This will demonstrate that
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these same things are now part and parcel of Christianity. This
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induces the inquiry, Wherein the data of Christianity as a whole
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may haply differ from the admitted frauds of the false religions
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and priestcrafts of the Past. We shall learn whether and to what
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degree truth may be found in any of the confused and confusing
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Christian claims of Truth.
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THE DAWN-MAN AND THE SHAMAN
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"There is no origin for the idea of an after-life save
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the conclusion which the savage draws from the notion
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suggested by dreams." -- Herbert Spencer.
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Lo, the poor Indian, with his untutored mind, saw his god in
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clouds and heard him in the wind. Ages before him, the Dawn-man,
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the earliest Cave-man, saw his shadow in the sun, his reflection in
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the water, and crudely thought that he had a sort of shadowy
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double, which accompanied him and at times showed itself visible to
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him. At night, when the Dawn-man, gorged with raw and often putrid
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flesh, in a night-mare dream saw terrible monsters assailing him,
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or in more normal sleep wandered forth and visited distant scenes
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of his previous roamings, or saw, as in the flesh living and acting
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before his eyes, his dead father or friend, thus he got further
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immature notions of a double, "ka," or detachable spirit of man,
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dwelling within him, which could leave the body and return at will,
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or which survived the death of the body and lived on in spirit
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form, and could revisit the old habitation and hold converse with,
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do good or harm to, the frightened living. Thus came the belief in
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the existence and survival after death of this double or spirit-
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ghost, thus the notion of the immortality of the soul, it primitive
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belief held by every people of antiquity, and surviving yet by
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inheritance among the priest-taught of modern times.
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These strange phantoms of the night naturally worked further
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upon the fear-filled mind of the early child-men, terrified by the
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frightful vicissitudes of life, the violent deaths by wild animals,
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the storms and floods that killed and maimed them, the lightnings
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and thunders that terrified them. All these things were to them
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clearly the manifestations of the anger and revenge of the departed
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spirits, especially of the Old Man of the clan who had bossed it
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in life and had grudges against all who had not been sufficiently
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obedient to him. Awaking from these dread visions of the night, the
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frightened Down-man would relate the uncanny visitations to his
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fellows, who would have like ghostly dream-stuff to exchange;
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together they would wonder whether something could be done to
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propitiate or pileate the wandering ghost-men and to win their
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favor for benefits to be had from their superior other-worldly
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status and powers.
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It could not be long before some old and crafty member of the
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nomadic clan would hint that he had known the Old Man well during
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life, had been very friendly with him living and had a powerful
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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25
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FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
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influence with him; that he was wise to the ways and whims of
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ghosts or gods; and no doubt he could get in touch with his spirit
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and cajole him into reasonableness and favor. This suggestion
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meeting with awed acquiescence, it would quickly be followed by the
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forthright bold claim to super-ghostly powers, and by sundry weird
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mumblings and mystic rites and incantations the old faker would
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further awe the clan into credulous faith in the claim. The new
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spiritualist would pretend to get into communion with the Old Man's
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spirit, and to receive from him "revelations" of his will and
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commands for the obedience of the clan. Thus began spirit-worship
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or religion -- the fancied relations between man and the spirits of
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the dead or gods. Here, too, we have the first shaman, medicine-
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man, magician, witch-doctor, or what-not; in a word, the first
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priest; and the priestly game was on. The pretended ghost-cajoler
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would naturally be held in dread awe and reverence by his credulous
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dupes, and would gain enormous respect and prestige: he could quit
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the drudgery of hunting and fishing for his precarious living, and
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let the awed and believing members of the clan keep him in food and
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idle ease; here the first social parasite. This is priestcraft --
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by whatever name and in whatever age and guise pursued.
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A very modern instance comes to hand and is added for
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confirmation. Fortunately, or lamentably for Christian pretensions,
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there yet exist in the world races of very primitive descendants of
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Adam, who yet preserve their primeval forms of superstition and
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priestcraft, wherein may be seen their origins in yet active
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reality of operation. In no more remote a region of these our
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United States than the Diomede Islands of the Aleutian archipelago
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of Alaska, tribal superstition and primitive priestcraft may be
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seen in all their ridiculous crudity today. In the Report of the
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Stoll-McCracken Expedition of the American Museum of Natural
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History, 1928, primitive religious superstition and the power of
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the priest are graphically described; with simple change of form
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and ritual it is Religion through the Ages, the war-blessers and
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rain-makers in action to cajole and control the deity through his
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priests. As one reads the following extracts from the Report, let
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him see what differences he may discover, other than of technique,
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between the Diomeder and the Dupe of any other Cult. "For the
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Diomeder humbles himself before the imaginary forces of his spirit
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world, often disregarding the realities of life with typical
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primitive inconsistency. ... The only powers really worthy of his
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respect are the supernatural ones. This is why the Eskimo medicine
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man, or angutkok, as he is called, holds a position of such
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influence. He is the middleman between the natural and supernatural
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world. The Diomeders have no real chiefs or any system of
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government. Each family is able to manage its own affairs. The
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common events of life take care of themselves. But whatever is
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unusual, whatever cannot be readily understood, engages the
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attention of every Diomeder. Such things as sickness and weather,
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good or bad luck and the complicated workings of nature fascinate
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him because they are utterly beyond his comprehension. Indeed,
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superstition is the basis of the angutkok's hold over his people.
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It is chiefly for his supposed alliance with the forces of the
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supernatural that he is venerated. ... He is supposed to have
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marvelous powers over bodily ailments. ... The power of
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conversation with the ancestral spirits is one of the angutkok's
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strongest holds upon his public. For the ancestral spirits are said
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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26
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FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
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to exert a tremendous influence over the lives of the natives. The
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Diomeder's attitude toward them is more than one of wholesome
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respect. It is made up of a definite and deep-sated fear. This is
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because the spirits, if they choose, can send down either good luck
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or bad -- and usually elect the latter. And clever must be the
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ruses whereby they may be tricked into benignity. For a departed
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soul, no matter how kindly has been its earthly owner, is a
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potential agent of misfortune and must be treated accordingly" (New
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York Times Magazine, Dee. 16, 1928, p. 9.) The methods of
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incantation, of placating the spirits and gods, the charms and
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amulets used for these conjurations, differ only in material from
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those in holy vogue today in some very Christian countries.
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Angutkok, shaman, medicine-man, exorciser, priest, Pennsylvania
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Witch-doctors, nature-fakers and superstition-mongers, parasites
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preying on ignorance and fear -- the whole genealogy of dupe-craft,
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of priest-craft, -- what difference in kind and craft is
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discernible between the one and the others of the god-placating,
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devil-chasing Genus Shamanensis? Bombarding the irate god with
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eggs, as with the Diomedes, or by the prayer of faith as with more
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up-to-date God-compellers, the cause is the same, and the effect is
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equally ineffective and desultory.
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The Catholic Encyclopedia, describing the Doctors of Divinity
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as in vogue among sundry African tribes, well describes the entire
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confraternity in all religions: "Certain specialists, however,
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exist, known to us as sorcerers, witch-doctors, etc. who are
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familiar with the mysterious secrets of things, who make use of
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them on behalf of those interested, and hand them down to chosen
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disciples." (CE. i, 183.) One of the highest and most potent
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functions of all these primitive shamans and devil-doctors is the
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conjuring of the infinitude of devils which afflict the inner-works
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of the superstitious, and work havoc in weather, crops, herds,
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etc.; the practice and its ceremonial of incantation are very
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elaborate in some modern schemes: "This ceremony takes up over
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thirty pages of the Roman Ritual. It is, however, but rarely used
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-- [in these more enlightened and skeptical days], and never
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without the express permission of the Bishop, for there is room for
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no end of deception and hallucination when it is a question of
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dealing with the unseen powers"! (CE. i, 142). Thus the System is
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yet in vogue; and its priestcraft has waxed very powerful and very
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wealthy. Artificial Fear and Credulity are its sole source and
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sustenance. As the Roman poet Lucretius said: "Fear was the first
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thing on earth to make gods."
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Reinach, after a critique of many varied definitions of
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Religion, thus formulates his own -- which a moment's reflection
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upon the infinite sacred "Thou Shalt Not's" of Faith will fully
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justify: "A sum of scruples (Taboos) which impede the, free
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exercise of our faculties." (Orpheus, 1930 ed. p. 3.)
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As primitive society progressed towards organization, the
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Headman of the clan or tribe would find advantage in a close and
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not disinterested association with the Shaman, whose intimations of
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good from the spirits or dreadful evil would assist powerfully in
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the subordination and control of maybe otherwise ambitious or
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unruly subjects: thus began the cooperation of ruler and priest for
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the subjection of the ruled. Later yet, as government and
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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27
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FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
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priestcraft developed, the ruler was also priest or the priest
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ruler, as in early Egypt and Assyria, and as in ancient theocratic
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Israel before the Kings and after the return from Captivity. So
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too, later, in Greece and Rome. In Egypt and under the Empire in
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Rome the King was God, in Egypt by divine descent, in Rome by
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apotheosis. Even Alexander of Macedon was a god by divine
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generation, as declared by the Pagan Oracle of Jupiter Ammon, to
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the great scandal of Alexander's mother Olympias, who was wont to
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complain, "I wish that Alexander would cease from incessantly
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embroiling me with the wife of Jupiter!" Thus priestcraft thrived
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and gained immense dominion over the superstitious minds of men, to
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say nothing of powers and prestige unlimited, privileges,
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immunities, wealth and aggrandizement beyond rivalry -- in ancient
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Pagan times.
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The temples of the ancient gods throughout Pagandom were
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marvels of sumptuous wealth and beauty, thanks to the lavish
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munificence of rulers and the offerings of the votaries of the
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respective false gods. The Temple of Diana at Ephesus, the
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Parthenon or Temple of the Virgin-goddess at Athens, were wonders
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of the ancient world. The greatest ruins of antiquity yet standing
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in splendid ruin or unearthed by the excavations of the
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archaeologists, are the temples of the Pagan gods, testifying in
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their decayed grandeur to their pristine magnificence and wealth.
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Through the priests and the fear of the gods the rulers ruled:
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"Thus saith our god" was the awful sanction of their commands and
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of their legal enactments. The Hebrews had no word for religion";
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their nearest approximation to the idea is the oft-repeated Bible
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phrase, "The fear of Yahweh [the Lord]." The ancient Code of
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Hammurabi, graven on the stela discovered by De Morgan in the ruins
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of Susa at the beginning of this century and now preserved in the
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Louvre at Paris, represents the King humbly receiving the Code of
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Laws from the great god Bel through the Sun-god Shamash; this for
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its greater sanction to obedience by the superstitious people, who
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knew no better than to believe the pious fraud of the priests and
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King. A thousand years more or less later, the Hebrew God Yahweh,
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along with many divine laws, delivered to Moses his Code of
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Commandments neatly scratched with his own finger on two stone
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slabs; of these, like the grave of Moses, no man knoweth the
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whereabouts unto this day. It was plain but pious fraud for
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Hammurabi to issue his laws under the name of his god. Common sense
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and common honesty make us disbelieve and condemn the Hammurabi
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fraud, and no one chides us for disbelieving it. Perforce we must
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believe the Moses-tale of identical import, or be dubbed atheists,
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reviled and ostracized, and be damned in the Christian Hell
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forever, to boot. Both fables of Divine enactment were invented for
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and served the same purpose to dupe the credulous to believe and
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obey King and Priest. Is it honest?
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This principle, involved in the pretense of divine Sanctions,
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and effective through the cooperation of King and Priest for
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dominion over the ruled, was frankly recognized by many ancient
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writers, and even by some lauded as salutary for the ignorant.
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Critics, friend of Socrates, saw the State "with false reason
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covering truth," which by this device "quenched lawlessness,; with
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laws." Diodorus Siculus admitted it to be the duty of the State "to
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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28
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FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
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establish effective gods to do the work of police," and laid it
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down, that "It is to the interest of States to be deceived in
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religion." Livy admires the wisdom of Numa, who "introduced the
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fear of the gods as a most efficacious means of controlling an
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ignorant and barbarous populace." Polybius, the celebrated Greet
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historian, gives his philosophic admiration to the religious system
|
||
of the Romans as an effective means of government of the populace:
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"In my opinion their object is to use it as a cheek upon the
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common people. If it were possible to form a State wholly of
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philosophers, such a custom would perhaps be unnecessary. But
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seeing that every multitude is fickle and full of lawless desires,
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unreasoning anger and violent passions, the only recourse is to
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keep them in check by mysterious terrors and scenic effects of this
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sort. Wherefore, to my mind the ancients were not acting without
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purpose or it random, when they brought in among the Vulgar those
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opinions about the gods and the belief in the punishments in
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Hades." (Historiae, quoted by Grover, The Conflict of Religions in
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the Early Roman Empire, pp. 3-4.)
|
||
This pious notion of God and religion as the Big Policeman of
|
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the common herd, is not yet extinct. the Attorney General of
|
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England, in a celebrated State trial for the sale of it copy of
|
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Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason, urged to the jury the necessity
|
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"to prevent its circulation among the industrious poor"; for, he
|
||
declaimed, "Of all human beings they stand most in need of the
|
||
consolations of religion; ... because no man can be expected to be
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faithful to the authority of man who revolts against the government
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of God"! (Williams' Case, 26 Howard's State Trials, p. 719;
|
||
1798-99.) But times and creeds change; this is the Twentieth
|
||
century. The professional religionists of today, however, forever
|
||
dingdong the old "Morality Lie," that without the God-given Ten
|
||
Commandments and like divine laws, ministered by them and reenacted
|
||
and enforced by the State there can be no morality, no human
|
||
virtues, no decent government. The "True Church" makes mighty boast
|
||
of its "saving civilization" after the Fall of Rome by the
|
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industrious preachment -- as we shall amply see -- of pious lies
|
||
and practice of most unholy frauds among the semi-pagan Christian
|
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peoples who rose -- despite the Church -- on the ruins of Rome, --
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. . . Whilst human kind
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Throughout the lands lay miserably crushed
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||
Before all eyes beneath Religion -- who
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||
Would show her head along the region skies,
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||
Glowering on mortals with her hideous face."
|
||
(Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, I.)
|
||
PAGANISM AT THE CROSS-ROADS WITH CHRISTIANITY
|
||
At the time of the advent of "that newer form of Paganism
|
||
later called Christianity," the Greeco-Roman world seethed with
|
||
religions in a great state of flux and re-formation. Wonder-
|
||
workers, miracle-mongers, impostors in the guise of gods and
|
||
Christs abounded. Simon Magus, Apollonius of Tyana, Apuleius,
|
||
Alexander, Porphyry, Iamblichus, -- performed prodigies of divine
|
||
power and were hailed as genuine gods, -- just as were Paul and
|
||
Barnabas (Acts xiv, 11-12), and, later, Jesus the Christ. Of these
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
29
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||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
Pagan and Jewish "Christs" two will be briefly noted, for their
|
||
very important Christian contacts and analogies. But first, some
|
||
analogies of Pagan priestly fakeries.
|
||
The petty frauds of the Pagan priests to dupe their credulous
|
||
votaries would fill a large book; the ancient poets and
|
||
philosophers, and modern histories of Gentilic religions, abound in
|
||
instances. Simply for examples of a few of the more common frauds
|
||
of the Pagan priests, outdone a thousand-fold by the Christian
|
||
priests and church, as -- (out of the Catholic Encyclopedia) we
|
||
shall see, -- we may mention some well-known pious frauds of the
|
||
Greeks and Romans prevalent around the beginning of the Christian
|
||
era and forming the religious atmosphere of the times in which the
|
||
new faith was born and propagated.
|
||
False prophecies and miracles and fraudulent relics were the
|
||
chief reliance among the Pagans, as among the Christians, for
|
||
stimulating the faith, or credulity, of the ignorant and
|
||
superstitious masses. The images of the gods were believed to be
|
||
endowed with supernatural power. Of some, the wounds could bleed;
|
||
of others, the eyes could wink, of others, the heads could nod, the
|
||
limbs could be raised; the statues of Minerva could brandish
|
||
spears, those of Venus could weep; others could sweat; paintings
|
||
there were which could blush. The Holy Crucifix of Boxley, in Kent,
|
||
moved, lifted its head, moved its lips and eyes; it was broken up
|
||
in London, and the springs exposed, and shown to the deriding
|
||
public;, but this relation is out of place, -- this was a pious
|
||
Christian, not Pagan, fake. One of the marvels of many centuries
|
||
was the vocal statue of Memnon, whose divine voice was heard at the
|
||
first dawn of day, "the sweet voice of Memnon" which greeted the
|
||
sun, as sung by poets and attested by inscriptions on the statue
|
||
made by noted visitors, who credited the assertion of the priests
|
||
that the voice was that of the god Ammon; the secret was discovered
|
||
by Wilkinson: a cavity in which a priest was concealed, who struck
|
||
a stone at sunrise when the worshippers were assembled, thus giving
|
||
out a melodious ringing sound. Very famous was the Palladium or
|
||
statute of Minerva, thrown down from heaven by Zeus into Troy, and
|
||
guarded sacredly in the citadel as protection of the city, which
|
||
was believed to be impregnable so long as the statue was in the
|
||
city; Ulysses and Diomede entered the city in disguise and stole
|
||
out the sacred statue to the Greek camp; thence AEneas is said to
|
||
have taken it to Italy, where it was preserved in the Temple of
|
||
Vesta. Many cities of Greece and Rome claimed to have the genuine
|
||
original. Another miraculous statue of like divine origin was that
|
||
of "the great goddess, Diana" at Ephesus, which the Town-clerk (in
|
||
Acts 3 xix, 35) declared that all men knew "fell down from
|
||
Jupiter." Other holy relics galore were preserved and shown to the
|
||
pious: The AEgis of Jove, forged by Vulcan and ornamented with the
|
||
head of the Gorgon; the very tools with which the Trojan horse was
|
||
made, at Metapontum; the scepter of Pelops, at Chaeronea; the spear
|
||
of Achilles, at Pharselis; the sword of Memnon, at Nicomedia; the
|
||
hide of the Chalcydonian boar, among the Tegeates; the stone
|
||
bearing the authentic marks of the trident of Neptune, at Athens;
|
||
the Cretans exhibited the tomb of Zeus, which earned for them their
|
||
reputation as Liars. But Mohammedans show the tomb of Adam and
|
||
Christians that of Peter! There were endless shrines and
|
||
sanctuaries at which miracle-cures could be performed: oracular
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
30
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
temples full of caverns, and secret passages, -- that of the
|
||
Cumaean Sibyl has recently been explored, and its fraudulent
|
||
devices exposed. The gods themselves came down regularly and ate
|
||
the fine feasts spread before their statues. In the apocryphal
|
||
History of Bel and the Dragon, interpolated in the True Church's
|
||
Book of Daniel (Chapter xiv), the Holy Ghost tells how this hero
|
||
trapped the priests who stole at night through secret passages into
|
||
the throne-room of the god and ate the good things furnished by the
|
||
pious King and people. The gods came frequently to earth, too, and
|
||
with the connivance of the priests kept amorous tryst in the
|
||
temples with unsuspecting pious ladies, edifying instances of which
|
||
are related by Herodotus and Josephus, among other chroniclers of
|
||
the wiles of priestcraft.
|
||
Pagan prodigies of every conceivable kind were articles of
|
||
popular credulity, affectitig the commonalty as well as many of the
|
||
highest category. The great Emperor Augustus, obedient to dreams,
|
||
went begging money through the streets of Rome, and used to wear
|
||
the skin of a sea-calf to protect himself against lightning.
|
||
Tiberius placed greater faith in the efficacy of laurel leaves;
|
||
both remedies are highly praised by Pliny. Caligula would crawl
|
||
under the bed in thunder storms; the augurs had listed eleven kinds
|
||
of lightning with different significations. Comets and dreanis
|
||
portended the gravest crises. Cicero and Valerius Alaximus cite
|
||
numerous instances of dreams being verified by the event. Livy
|
||
relates with perfect faith innumerable prodigies, though he acutely
|
||
observed, that "the more prodigies are believed, the more they are
|
||
announced." The Emperors made numerous enactments against sorcery,
|
||
divination, and all kinds of magic; the "Christian" Emperor,
|
||
Constantine, prohibited all forms of magic, but specially excepted
|
||
and authorized "that which was intended to avert hail and
|
||
lightning," one of the specialties of the Christian priests. Such
|
||
puerilities of the prevalent superstitions might be multiplied to
|
||
fill volumes. (See case, Experiences with the Supernatural, etc.)
|
||
APOLLONIUS OF TYANA
|
||
Apollonius of Tyana was one of the most notable of these
|
||
wonder-working Christs. So extremely moral and pure were his
|
||
doctrines and his conduct, and so mighty the works he wrought, that
|
||
the Pagans insisted that Apollonius was the actual personage whom
|
||
the Christians called Jesus Christ. By all reports, implicitly
|
||
credited, Apollonius had raised the dead, healed the sick, cast out
|
||
devils, freed a young man from a lamia or vampire with whom he was
|
||
enamored, prophesied, seen in one country events which were
|
||
occurring in another, as from Ephesus the assassination of Domitian
|
||
at Rome, and had filled the world with the fame of his miracles and
|
||
of his sanctity, just as did Jesus Christ. Apollonius was born
|
||
about the same time as Jesus of Nazareth; the legends of their
|
||
lives and deeds were very similar; the former, at least, has been
|
||
justly described as "among that least obnoxious class of impostors,
|
||
who pretend to be divinely gifted, with a view to secure attention
|
||
and obedience to precepts, which, delivered in the usual way, would
|
||
be generally neglected." (Anthon, Clairsical Dictintiary, p. 165;
|
||
see generally, Lecky, Hist. of European Morals, i, 372, passim; any
|
||
good Encyclopedia.) Recall the current histories of Mohammed, the
|
||
Mormon Joseph Smith, Mother Eddy -- Jesus Christ -- for instances
|
||
of analogous pretensions.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
31
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
This customary pretense of wonder-workers is confirmed by the
|
||
great Church Fathers Lactantius, in his Divine Institutes,
|
||
dedicated to the "Christian" Emperor Constantine, in which he
|
||
combated the Pagan imputation that Jesus was a magician, like
|
||
Apollonius and Aputeius, whose wonder-workings he admits. Like all
|
||
the Fathers, as we shall see, Lactantius, an ex-Pagan, had firm
|
||
faith in magic, and believed all the magical wonders of the Pagan
|
||
magicians as veritable miracles wrought by the divine power of
|
||
demons or devils. He says that the Pagans "endeavored to overthrow
|
||
his [Jesus'] wonderful deeds [by showing] that Appllonius performed
|
||
equal or even greater deeds." But, "It is strange," he argues,
|
||
"that he omitted to mention Apuleius, of whom many and wonderful
|
||
things are accustomed to be related. ... If Christ is a magician
|
||
because He performed wonderful deeds, it is plain that Apollonius,
|
||
who, according to your description, when Domitian wished to punish
|
||
him, suddenly disappeared on his trial, was more skilful than He
|
||
who was both arrested and crucified. ... It was evident, therefore,
|
||
that he [Apollonius] was both a man and a magician; and for this
|
||
reason he affected divinity under the title of a name belonging to
|
||
another [Hercules], for in his own name he was unable to attain
|
||
it." (Lact. Div. Inst. Bk. V, ch. iii; ANP. vii, 138, 139,)
|
||
SIMON MAGUS
|
||
Most notorious and important, from the viewpoint of the rising
|
||
Christianity, was the Samaritan impostor, Simon Magus, the "great
|
||
power of God," vouched for by divine inspiration as having "used
|
||
sorcery, and bewitched the people of Samaria," he having "of a long
|
||
time bewitched them with sorceries," as the Holy Ghost of God
|
||
ridiculously assures us in Acts viii. Not content with his own
|
||
"great power of God," Simon, heaving seen some of the apostles at
|
||
work bestowing the holy Ghost on the peasants, offered money for
|
||
the gift of like power to himself, but was curtly rebuked and
|
||
refused by Peter. The especial importance of Simon Magus is his
|
||
legendary Scriptural contact with the fisherman Peter, which
|
||
developed, under the early Christian propensity for expansive
|
||
mendacity, into a veritable literature of pious lies and prodigies
|
||
associated with Simon and Peter, which was the chiefest if not sole
|
||
basis, be it remembered for the false pretense, later developed, as
|
||
we shall duly see, of the "sojourn" of Peter at Rome as Bishop and
|
||
Pope. As legends of the Samaritan impostor are wholly Christian
|
||
impostures, the Catholic Encyclopedia will be called upon for an
|
||
account of the Patristic canards. "By his magic arts," says our
|
||
exponent of "Catholic Truth," Simon was called Magus, or the
|
||
Magician, the account just given from Acts is "the sole
|
||
authoritative [?] report that we have about him": and it confesses
|
||
the chronic mendadacity of the Fathers by the remark, "The
|
||
statements of the [clerical] writers of the second century
|
||
concerning him are largely legendary, and it is difficult or rather
|
||
impossible to extract from them any historical fact the details of
|
||
which are established with certainty." Let us remember this
|
||
characterization of these same Fatherly writers, who, lying about
|
||
Simon and Peter together, in Rome, yet tell unvarnished truth about
|
||
Peter alone, or Peter and Paul together, in Rome.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
32
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
I may remark, that serious argument is made, that Paul himself
|
||
is maliciously intended by some of the Fathers under the name of
|
||
Simon, the constant conflict between Paul and Peter being disguised
|
||
under the accounts of the inveterate struggles of Simon and Peter,
|
||
(See Ency. Bib. vol. iv, Art, Simon Magus.) The childish and
|
||
fabulous histories of the Fathers regarding Simon and Peter and
|
||
Paul in Rome and their contests of magic powers, are thus related:
|
||
"St. Justin of Rome ('First Apolog.' xxvi, lvi; 'Dialog. c.
|
||
Tryphonem, cxx), describes Simon as a man who, at the instigation
|
||
of demons, claimed to be a god. Justin says further that Simon came
|
||
to Rome during the reign of the Emperor Claudius and by his magic
|
||
arts won many followers so that these erected on an island in the
|
||
Tiber a statue to him as a divinity with the inscription 'Simon the
|
||
Holy God.' The statue, however, that Justin took for one dedicated
|
||
to Simon was undoubtedly one to the old Sabine divinity Semo Sancus
|
||
(797) ... The later anti-heretical writers who report Simon's
|
||
residence at Rome, take Justin and the apocryphal Acts of Peter as
|
||
their authority, so that their testimony is of no value. [p. 798.]
|
||
"Simon plays an important part in the 'Pseudo-
|
||
Clementines.' He appears here as the chief antagonist of the
|
||
Apostle Peter, by whom he is everywhere followed and opposed.
|
||
The alleged magical arts of the magician and Peter's efforts
|
||
against him are described in a way that is absolutely
|
||
imaginary. The entire account lacks all historical basis
|
||
[citing several WORKS] ... The apocryphal Acts of St. Peter
|
||
give an entirely different account of Simon's condition at
|
||
Rome and of his death. In this work also great stress is laid
|
||
upon the straggle between Simon and the Apostles Peter and
|
||
Paul at Rome. By his magic arts Simon had also sought to win
|
||
the Emperor Nero for himself, an attempt in which he had been
|
||
thwarted by the apostles. As proof of the truth of his
|
||
doctrines Simon offered to ascend into the heavens before the
|
||
eyes of Nero and the Roman populace; by magic did he rise in
|
||
the air in the Roman Forum, but the prayers of the Apostles
|
||
Peter and Paul caused him to fall, so that he was severely
|
||
injured and shortly afterwards died miserably. ... This legend
|
||
led later to the erection of a church dedicated to the
|
||
apostles on the alleged spot of Simon's fall near the Via
|
||
Sacra above the Forum. The stones of the pavement on which the
|
||
apostles knelt in prayer and which are said to contain the
|
||
impression of their knees, are now in the wall of the Church
|
||
of Santa Francesca Romana." (CE. xiii, 797, 798.)
|
||
With respect to that statue erected in the Tiber to "Simon the
|
||
Holy Hod," the account, above mentioned, does not do justice to
|
||
Father Justin's invention; it is thus explicit: he says that Simon
|
||
"performed feats of magic by demonic arts in Rome during the reign
|
||
of Claudius, was held to be a god, and was honored by Senate and
|
||
people with a statue in the middle of the Tiber, between the two
|
||
bridges, bearing the inscription in Latin: 'Simoni, Deo sancto ...
|
||
To Simon the holy God.' The base of the pillar refereed to was dug
|
||
up on the island in the Tiber, at the place indicated by Justin, in
|
||
1574; the inscription, which was deciphered, runs: 'Semoni Sanco
|
||
deo fidio sacrum ... Sex. Pompeius ... donum dedit.' Thus the
|
||
pillar was dedicated to the Sabine god Semo Sancus, and not by the
|
||
Senate and people, but by the piety of a private individual." (EB.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
33
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
iv, 4538-9; cf. CE. xiii, 797-8.) The same authority, referring to
|
||
the clerical fabrications above mentioned, says: "The Pseudo-
|
||
Clementine Homilies and Recognitions contain yet another element of
|
||
the very greatest importance. In them Simon displays features which
|
||
are unquestionably derived from Paul, and plainly show him to be a
|
||
caricature of that apostle drawn by an unfriendly hand." (EB. iv,
|
||
4540, with citations in proof.) Simon proclaimed as his doctrine --
|
||
"asserting that none could possibly have salvation without being
|
||
baptized in his name" (Tert., adv. Haereyes, c.i; ANF. iii, 649);
|
||
which group plagiarized the sentiment from the other, Christians,
|
||
or Simoneans, I cannot verify.
|
||
SUPERSTITIONS AND REVELATIONS
|
||
The Pagans would appear almost to have been good Christians:
|
||
they had their gods, (whom they fondly called Savior and Messiah)
|
||
the death and resurrections of gods; devils, angels, and spirits
|
||
good, bad and indifferent; their heavens, hells and purgatories;
|
||
they believed in immortality of the soul, -- witness the Pyramids
|
||
and the tombs of the Kings, as of Tut-ankh-Amen in Egypt, and of
|
||
the Queen Shub-Ad, just unearthed in Ur of the Chaldees; their
|
||
elaborate sacrifices, animal and human, even of their dear little
|
||
children to appease their gods, as in Carthage and Canaan, -- a
|
||
chronic Hebrew practice. Virgin-births of demigods by the
|
||
intervention of gods and human maids were common-places of Pagan
|
||
faith, as were Virgin-mothers and god-child: the Christians
|
||
imported theirs from Egypt -- the Madonna statues of Isis and the
|
||
Child Horus -- of universal vogue at the beginning of this era of
|
||
the Christ -- may be seen in almost any first-class Museum, as the
|
||
Metropolitan in New York and the University in Philadelphia. This
|
||
popular Pagan device, the "Mother of God" and her God-baby-in-arms,
|
||
was taken over as a Christian sop to the crowds of Pagans who were
|
||
being enticed and forced into the Church; it was violently opposed
|
||
by many of the more intelligent Churchmen: "Nestorius [Bishop of
|
||
Constantinople about 404] had declared against the new and, as he
|
||
asserted, idolatrous expression 'Mother of God' (Theotokos),
|
||
thereby opposing the sentiments and wishes of the humbler people"
|
||
(CE. iii, 101); and in protest Nestorius left the Catholic Church
|
||
and founded one of the most wide-spread and powerful "heresies,"
|
||
which exists in the East to the present time. The Pagans had their
|
||
holy mysteries and sacraments, baptisms of water and of blood,
|
||
communions with the gods at their sacred altars, partaking of
|
||
sacred meals to ingest the divine spirit and become godlike. they
|
||
believed in the resurrection of the dead, and in final judgments
|
||
meting rewards and punishments according to the deeds done in the
|
||
flesh, -- the Egyptian Book of the Dead, 3000 years B.C., giving
|
||
priestly prescriptions for use before the judgment seat of Osiris,
|
||
is found in almost every tomb of those able to pay for the
|
||
hieroglyphic papyrus rolls. The Pagans had their holy days (from
|
||
which the Christians plagiarized their Christmas, Easter, Rogation
|
||
Days, etc.); their monks, nuns, religious processions carrying
|
||
images of idols (like those of saints today); incense, holy water,
|
||
holy oil, chants, hymns, liturgies, confessions of sins to priests,
|
||
forgiveness of sins by priests, revelations by gods to priests,
|
||
prophecies, sacred writings of "holy bibles," Pontiffs, Holy
|
||
Fathers, holy crafty priesthood. All these sacrosanct things of
|
||
Christian "Revealed Religion," were age-old pre-Christian Pagan
|
||
myths and superstitions.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
34
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
I puzzle myself to understand how there could be "divine
|
||
revelations," to Jews and Christians, of things which for ages had
|
||
been identically ancient Pagan delusions and the inventions and
|
||
common holy stock in trade of all Pagan priestcrafts. Indeed and in
|
||
truth, there can be no divine revelation of miraculous "facts" and
|
||
"heavenly dogmas" which for centuries had been, and in the early
|
||
Christian ages were, the current mythology of credulous Pagandom.
|
||
this I shall make exceeding clear.
|
||
CHRISTIAN "REVELATION" DEFINED AND DISPROVED
|
||
This paragraph is one of the most important in this book, and
|
||
to it I invite Specially serious attention and thought. It will
|
||
disclose the substantial identity of Christianity with the most
|
||
popular and wide-spread "Pagan" religion of the times, Mithraism,
|
||
or the Persian Zoroastrian religion, the closest and all but
|
||
successful rival of Christianity in the Roman world, and which
|
||
might indeed have been successful, but that, soon after Constantine
|
||
prostituted the Empire to the Church, -- "with the triumph of
|
||
Christianity Mythraism came to a sudden end. The laws of Theodosius
|
||
signed its death warrant." (CE. x, 402.) That there may be no
|
||
suspicion that the recital of these remarkable identities of
|
||
Christian "revelation" with Pagan inventions is fanciful or
|
||
exaggerated, the tale shall be told in the quoted words of the
|
||
Catholic Encyclopedia, which naively makes so many extraordinary
|
||
admissions without seeming to be aware of their fatal Implications.
|
||
"The essence of Revelation lies in the fact that it is the
|
||
direct speech of God to man," says the Holy Ghost speaking through
|
||
the Vatican Council (1870), thus confirming what I have above said,
|
||
that "divine revelation" cannot be of Pagan myths already current
|
||
and long known to everyone. The same Heavenly Instructor tells us
|
||
what Revelation is: "Revelation may be defined as the communication
|
||
of some truth by God to a rational creature through means which are
|
||
beyond the ordinary course of nature. The truths thus revealed may
|
||
be such as are otherwise inaccessible to the human mind --
|
||
mysteries, which even when revealed, the intellect of man is
|
||
incapable of fully penetrating. ... The Decree 'Lamentabili' (3
|
||
July, 1907) declares that the dogmas which the Church proposes as
|
||
revealed are 'truths which have come down to us from heaven' and
|
||
not 'an interpretation of religious facts which the human mind has
|
||
acquired by its own strenuous efforts.'" (Vatican Decrees, 1870;
|
||
CE. xiii, 1.) And, asserts CE.: "The existence of revelation is as
|
||
reasonably established as any historical fact"! (CE. xiii, 607.)
|
||
Isn't CE. funny!
|
||
Divine Revelation is thus of things not previously known and
|
||
which the revelationless mind of man is incapable of acquiring or
|
||
inventing by its own efforts. Divine Revelation rests thus upon the
|
||
same principle as the Law of Patents and Copyright, A book
|
||
published, that is made known and given to the world cannot be the
|
||
subject of subsequent copyright even by its author. When an
|
||
application for a patent is presented, the first act is to search
|
||
the records to ascertain whether a similar art or article has ever
|
||
previously been known and in use: if so, no patent can be obtained:
|
||
the thing lacks novelty. So exactly with "revelation": if some
|
||
impostor or deluded person (e.g. Mohammed or Joseph Smith) claims
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
35
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
that hie has received a personal -- and therefore necessarily
|
||
private -- "revelation" from some god, the only way whereby he can
|
||
get a valid patent of authenticity and credibility for his
|
||
"revelation," is to prove that its subject-matter has never before
|
||
been known and in credulous circulation, the moment that from the
|
||
search of the records -- of other, or comparative religions, -- it
|
||
is shown that the same proposition has been previously known and
|
||
current, in use and practice among some other priestcraft and its
|
||
votaries -- the thing is no revelation: the claim is a fraud. Let
|
||
us see how this indisputable rule works to the destruction and
|
||
proof of fraudulence of the "divine revelations" of Christian
|
||
credulity.
|
||
MITHRAISM -- AND CHRISTIAN MYTH
|
||
The religion of Zoroaster, known as Mithraism, is confessed by
|
||
CE. to be a divinely revealed Monotheism, or worship of a One God,
|
||
and having a divinely revealed Moral Code comparable to the
|
||
Christian, -- a sacred system claimed by Christians to be a
|
||
monopoly of the Hebrew-Christian religion to the exclusion of all
|
||
heathen systems. This notable confession reads: "The Avesta system
|
||
may be best defined as MONOTHEISM, modified by a physical and moral
|
||
dualism, with an ethical system based on a Divinely revealed moral
|
||
code and human free will." (CE. ii, 156.) Though it quotes a Jesuit
|
||
as saying: "Mithraism is the highest religious result to which
|
||
human reason unaided by Revelation, can attain." (Id.) Revealed or
|
||
invented, it is virtually identical with Christianity; but as the
|
||
mythic Mithraic god could not "reveal" anything, the human reason
|
||
which devised Mithraism was quite equal to the Christian God so far
|
||
as devising mythology and ethics is an attribute of godhead.
|
||
Mithraism is one of the oldest religious systems on earth, as
|
||
it dates from the dawn of history before the primitive Iranian race
|
||
divided into the sections which became Persian and Indian, as this
|
||
same religion is contained both in the Persian Avesta and Indian
|
||
Vedas. This its "revealed" or invented Monotheism by ages outdates
|
||
the "revelation" of Yahweh to Moses; and it is yet a living faith
|
||
to some thousands of surviving Parsees: "The religious cult is
|
||
[yet] scrupulously maintained as of old. The ancient traditional
|
||
and nationally characteristic national virtues of truth and
|
||
open-handed generosity flourish exceedingly in the small, but
|
||
highly intelligent community" of Parsees in India. (CE. ii, 156.)
|
||
The religion of Mithra anciently dominated Persia and the vast
|
||
regions of the Orient; it entered Europe following the conquests of
|
||
Alexander the Great. When in 65-63 B.C. the conquering armies of
|
||
Pompey were largely converted by its high precepts, they brought it
|
||
with them into the Roman Empire. Mithraism spread with great
|
||
rapidity throughout the Empire, and was adopted patronized and
|
||
protected by a number of the Emperors up to the time of
|
||
Constantine; it was only overthrown by the prescriptive laws and
|
||
sword of Constantine and Theodosius, who "signed its death warrant"
|
||
at the behest of the triumphant and intolerant Christians, who
|
||
absorbed virtually the entire system of Mithraism. But let CE,
|
||
proceed with the story. The reader is asked to cheek mentally each
|
||
of the uninspired details of Pagan invention with the "divinely
|
||
revealed" identities of the Christian Faith.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
36
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
"MITHRAISM" -- PRE-CHRISTIAN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
"Mithraism is a pagan religion consisting mainly of the cult
|
||
of the ancient Indo-Iranian Sun-God Mithra. It entered Europe from
|
||
Asia Minor after Alexander's conquest, spread rapidly over the
|
||
whole Roman Empire at the beginning of our era, reached its zenith
|
||
during the third century, and vanished under the repressive
|
||
regulations of Theodosius at the end of the fourth, [Of late it has
|
||
been] brought into prominence mainly because of its supposed [?]
|
||
similarity to Christianity.
|
||
"The origin of the cult of Mithra dates from the time that
|
||
Hindus and Persians still formed one people, for the god Mithra
|
||
occurs in the religion and sacred books of both races, i.e. in the
|
||
Vedas and in the Avesta. ... After the conquest of Babylon (538
|
||
B.C.) this Persian cult came into contact with Chaldean astrology
|
||
and with the national worship of Marduk. For a time the two
|
||
priesthood of Mithra and Marduk coexisted in the capital and
|
||
Mithraism borrowed much from this intercourse. ... This religion,
|
||
in which the Iranian element remained predominant, came, after
|
||
Alexander's conquest, in touch with the Western world. When finally
|
||
the Romans took possession of the Kingdom of Pergamum (in 133
|
||
B.C.), occupied Asia Minor, and stationed two legions of soldiers
|
||
on the Euphrates, the success of Mithraism was secured. It spread
|
||
rapidly from the Bosphorus to the Atlantic, from Illyria to
|
||
Britain. Its foremost apostles were the legionaries; hence it
|
||
spread first to the frontier stations of the Roman army.
|
||
"Mithraism was emphatically a soldier religion; Mithra, its
|
||
hero, was especially a divinity of fidelity, manliness, and
|
||
bravery; the stress it laid on good-fellowship and brotherliness,
|
||
its exclusion of women, and the secret bond among its members have
|
||
suggested the idea that Mithraism was Masonry among the Roman
|
||
soldiery." Several of the Roman Emperors, down to Licinius,
|
||
colleague of Constantine, built temples to Mithra, and issued coins
|
||
with his symbols. "But with the triumph of Christianity [after
|
||
Constantine] Mithraism came to a sudden end. The laws of Theodosius
|
||
[proscribing it under penalty of death, to please the Christians]
|
||
signed its death warrant. Though he was still worshiped a thousand
|
||
years later by the Manichees (p. 402). ...
|
||
"Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. -- This incarnate evil (Ahriman)
|
||
rose; with the army of darkness to attack and depose Oromasdes
|
||
(Ahura Mazda) They were however thrown back into hell, whence they
|
||
escape, wander over the face of the earth and afflict man. ... As
|
||
evil spirits ever lie in wait for hapless man, he needs a friend
|
||
and savior, who is Mithra. ... Mithra is the Mediator between God
|
||
and Man. The Mithraists... battled on Mithra's side against all
|
||
impurity, against all evil within and without. They believed in the
|
||
immortality of the soul; sinners after death were dragged down to
|
||
hell; the just passed through the seven spheres of the planets,
|
||
leaving at each planet a part of their lower humanity until, as
|
||
pure spirits, they stood before God. At the end of the world Mithra
|
||
will desectid to earth, ... and will make all drink the beverage of
|
||
immortality. He will thus have proved himself Nabarses, 'the never
|
||
conquered.' ...
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
37
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
"The fathers conducted the worship. The chief of the fathers,
|
||
a sort of pope, who always lived at Rome, was called 'Pater
|
||
Patratus' ... The members below the grade of pater called one
|
||
another 'brother,' and social distinctions were forgotten in
|
||
Mithraic unity. ... A sacred meal was celebrated of bread and haoma
|
||
juce for which in the West wine was substituted. This meal was
|
||
supposed to give the participants supernatural virtue. ...
|
||
"Three times a day prayer was offered the sun towards east,
|
||
south, or west according to the hour. SUNDAY was kept holy in honor
|
||
of Mithra, and the sixteenth of each month was sacred to him as
|
||
Mediator. The 25 December was observed as his birthday, the Natalis
|
||
Invictis, the rebirth of the winter-sun, unconquered by the rigors
|
||
of the season." (pp. 403-104.) It may be noted that Sunday was made
|
||
a Pagan holiday by edict of Constantine, In the fifth Tablet of the
|
||
Babylonian (Chaldean) Epic of Creation, by the great God Marduk, we
|
||
read, lines 17 and 18: "On the seventh day he appointed a holy day,
|
||
And to cease from all work he commanded." (Records of the Past,
|
||
vol. ix; quoted, Clarke, Ten Great Religions, ii, p. 383.)
|
||
To resume with CE.: "No proof of immorality or obscene
|
||
practices has ever been established against Mithraism; and as far
|
||
as can be ascertained, or rixther conjectured, it had an elevating
|
||
and invigorating effect on its followers. [So different from
|
||
Christianity!] ...
|
||
"Relation to Christianity. -- A similarity between Mithra and
|
||
Christ struck even early observers, such as Justin, Tertullian, and
|
||
other Fathers, and in recent times has been urged to prove that
|
||
Christianity is but an adaptation of Mithraism, or at least the
|
||
outcome of the same religious ideas and aspirations. Some apparent
|
||
[they are very apparent] similarities exist; but in a number of
|
||
details -- [it is substance that is identical] -- it is quite as
|
||
probable that Mithraism was the borrower from Christianity. -- [But
|
||
these essential identities are found in the Vedas and Avesta, of
|
||
maybe two thousand years before Christianity; Zoroaster, who, gave
|
||
final form to the creed, lived some 600 years before the Christ!]
|
||
-- It is not unnatural to suppose that a religion which swept the
|
||
whole world, should have been copied at least in some details by
|
||
another religion which was quite popular daring the third century
|
||
-- [and for nine, Or twenty centuries before!] Similarity in words
|
||
and names means nothing; it is the sense that matters. [To be sure;
|
||
we proceed to see more of the sense, -- the essence -- to be
|
||
identical] ...
|
||
"Mithra is called a mediator; and so is Christ ... And so in
|
||
similar instances. Mithraism had a Eucharist, but the idea of the
|
||
sacred banquet is as old as the human race and existed at all ages
|
||
and amongst all peoples. -- [Not much "divine revelation" in this
|
||
greatest of Christian mysteries!]. Mithra saved the world by
|
||
sacrificing a bull -- [just as the Jews saved themselves] Christ by
|
||
sacrificing himself. ... Mithraism was all comprehensive and
|
||
tolerant of every other cult; Christianity was essentially
|
||
exclusive, condemning every other religion in the world, alone and
|
||
unique in its majesty." (CE. x, 402-404.)
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
38
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
But this "unique majesty" was hidden away in the catacombs of
|
||
Rome for quite three centuries; coming out, it condemned and
|
||
persecuted to death every other religion because rivals for the
|
||
rich perquisites of priestcraft and dominion.
|
||
The above striking analogies, or identities, between the ages-
|
||
old Mithraism and the "newer Paganism called Christianity,"
|
||
compelling as they are of the certainty of "borrowing" by
|
||
Christianity, are dwarfed by the evidences now to be presented in
|
||
the confessions of CE., that the Jews first, then the Christians,
|
||
took over bodily from the Babylonians and the Persians, not only
|
||
the entire celestial and infernal systems of those two closely
|
||
related religions, but virtually that high ethic, or moral code --
|
||
"the highest religious result to which human reason, unaided by
|
||
revelation, can attain'" -- which Christians so loudly pretend is,
|
||
by "divine revelation" of their God -- theirs alone, while all
|
||
other peoples "sat in darkness and in the shadow of death" without
|
||
its saving light. Christianity looks with disdain on the Mithraic
|
||
religion because it is a "dualism"; that is, the Evil Spirit was
|
||
separately created apart from the Good God; while it is a
|
||
fundamental tenet of the Christian Faith, that its God himself
|
||
created the Christian Devil and all evil -- and is therefore
|
||
morally responsible for all his deviltry,
|
||
Speaking particularly of Angiology, -- though the admission
|
||
will be found to apply to all the other features to be noticed, --
|
||
CE. shows that all this is an importation into Judaism from the
|
||
Persians and Babylonians: "That the Persian domination and the
|
||
Babylonian Captivity exercised a large influence upon the Hebrew
|
||
conception -- [not, therefore, a revelation] -- of the angels is
|
||
acknowledge in the Talmud of Jerusalem (Rosh Haschanna, 56) where
|
||
it is said that [even] the names of the angels were introduced from
|
||
Babylon. ... Stress has been laid upon the similarity of the 'seven
|
||
who stand before God' and the seven Amesha-Spentas of the Zend-
|
||
Avesta. ... it is easy for the student to trace the influence of
|
||
surrounding nations and of other religions in the Biblical account
|
||
of angels" (CE. i, 481); -- which seriously cripples the notion of
|
||
divine revelation regarding these celestial messengers of God.
|
||
Again it indicates the "connection between the angels of the Bible,
|
||
and the greatt archangels' or 'Amesha-Spentas' of the Zend-Avesta";
|
||
also "we find an interesting parallel to the 'angel of the Lord' in
|
||
Nebo, 'the minister of Merodach.' ... The Babylonian sukalli
|
||
corresponded to the spirit-messengers of the Bible; they declared
|
||
their Lord's will and executed his behests." ... "The belief in
|
||
guardian angels ... was also the belief of the Babylonians and
|
||
Assyrians"; the origin of the Bible "cherubim" was the same, as
|
||
also of guardian angels, "as their monuments testify, for a figure
|
||
now in the British Museum might well serv for a modern
|
||
representation." For detailed accounts, see the articles "Angels"
|
||
and Guardian Angels." in CE. And so of Demons and Demonology, and
|
||
Demoniac possession: "In many ways one of the most remarkable
|
||
demonologies is that presented in the Avesta"; Ahriman being their
|
||
chief devil, or Daeva; "the original meaning of the word is
|
||
'shinning one,' and it comes from a primitive Aryan root 'div,'
|
||
which is likewise the source of the Greek Zeus and the Latin Deus.
|
||
But while these words, like the Sanskrit 'deva,' retain the good
|
||
meaning, 'daeva' has come to mean 'an evil spirit.' There is at
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
39
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
least a coincidence, if no deeper significance, in the fact that,
|
||
while the word in its original sense was synonymous with 'Lucifer,'
|
||
it has now come to mean much the same as devil" (CE iv, 714-15,
|
||
pasism; 764). Lucifer, in the Bible, having also been originally "a
|
||
shinning one" in Heaven, was cast out into Hell and is now the
|
||
Devil.
|
||
With these preliminaries of identity between the invention of
|
||
angels and devils of Mathraic Paganism and Hebrew-Christian
|
||
"revelation," we will now let CE. confess further identities, both
|
||
of "revelation" and of the "divinely revealed moral codes," --
|
||
summarized from the Mithraic Zend-Avesta. We seem to be reading the
|
||
Catechism or a tract on "Christian Evidences."
|
||
"The name of the Supreme God of the Avestic system is Ahura
|
||
Mazda, which probably signifies the All-Wise Lord. ... Ahura Mazda
|
||
is a pure Spirit; his chief attributes are eternity, wisdom, truth,
|
||
goodness, majesty, power. He is the creator of all good creatures
|
||
-- not, however, of Evil, of evil being, -- [as is the Christian
|
||
God]. He is the supreme Lawgiver, the Rewarder of moral good, and
|
||
the Punisher of moral evil. He dwells in Eternal Light, ... a kind
|
||
of manifestation of His presence, like the Old Testament Shekinah.
|
||
... We find frequent enumerations of the attributes of Ahura Mazda;
|
||
thus these are said to be 'omniscience, all-sovereignty, all
|
||
goodness.' Again He is styled 'Supreme Sovereign, Wise Creator,
|
||
Supporter, Protector, Giver of good things, Virtuous in acts,
|
||
Merciful, Pure Lawgiver, Lord of the Good Creations.' ...
|
||
"Opposed to Ahura Mazda, or Ormuzd, is His rival, Anro
|
||
Mainyus, (later Ahriman), the Evil Spirit. He is conceived as
|
||
existing quite independently of Ahura Mazda, apparently from
|
||
eternity, but destined to destruction at the end of time. Evil by
|
||
nature and in every detail the exact opposite of Ahura Mazda, he is
|
||
the creator of all both moral and physical. -- [But of the
|
||
Christian God: "I Jehovah create evil"; Isa. xlv, 7]. ...
|
||
"The specific name of Ahura Mazda in opposition to the Evil
|
||
Spirit is Spento Mainyus, THE HOLY SPIRIT: and Ahura Mazda and
|
||
Spento Mainyus are synonymous throughout the Avesta. [p. 154] ...
|
||
"Around Ahura Mazda is a whole hierarchy of spirits,
|
||
corresponding very closely to our 'angels.' ... Of the good spirits
|
||
who surround Ahura, the most important are the Amesha Spentas
|
||
('Holy Immortals' or 'Holy Saints'), generally reckoned as six in
|
||
number (but seven when Ahura Mazda is included). ... Most of all
|
||
Vohu Manah rises to a position of unique importance. ... Vohu Manah
|
||
is conceived as the 'SON OF THE CREATOR,' and identified with the
|
||
Alexandrian LOGOS [of John i, 1]. Asha, also, is the Divine Law,
|
||
Right, Sanctity (cf. Psalm 118), and occupies a most conspicuous
|
||
place throughout the Avesta. ... With him are associated in a trio
|
||
[TRINITY], Rashnu (Right, Justice), and MITHRA. -- [These Aryan
|
||
names sound unfamiliar; but as CE. has assured, "names mean
|
||
nothing; it is the sense that matters"; -- and here we have the
|
||
whole Jewish-Christian hierarchies of Heaven and Hell a thousand
|
||
years before Jewish-Christian "revelation" identities!l ...
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
40
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
"Face to face with the hierarchy of celestial spirits is a
|
||
diabolical one, that of the daevas (Pers. div or dev) and druj's of
|
||
the Evil Spirit. They fill exactly the places of the devils in
|
||
Christian and Jewish theology. ... perhaps the most frequently
|
||
mentioned of all is Aesmma, the Demon of Wrath or Violence, whose
|
||
name has come down to us in the Asmodeus (Aeshmo daeva) of the Book
|
||
of Tobias [Tobit]...
|
||
"In the midst of the secular warfare that has gone on from the
|
||
beginning between the two hosts of good and Evil stands Man. Man is
|
||
the creature of the Good Spirit, but endowed with a free will and
|
||
power of choice, able to place himself on the side of Ahura Mazda
|
||
or on that of Anro Mainyus. The former has given him, through His
|
||
Prophet Zarathushtra (Zoroaster) His Divine Revelation and law.
|
||
According as man obeys or disobeys this Divine Law his future lot
|
||
will be decided; by it he will be judged at his death. The whole
|
||
ethical system is built upon this great principle, as in the
|
||
Christian theology -- ["revelation"?]. Moral good, righteousness,
|
||
sanctity (asha) is according to the Divine will and decrees; Man by
|
||
his free will conforms to, or transgresses, these. The Evil Spirit
|
||
and his innumerable hosts tempt Man to deny or transgress the
|
||
Divine Law, as he tempted Zoroaster himself, promising him as a
|
||
reward the sovereignty of the whole world. -- [Exactly Jesus and
|
||
the Devil.] -- 'No,' replied the Prophet, 'I will not renounce it,
|
||
even if body and soul and life should be severed!' (Vendidad, xix,
|
||
25, 26). -- ["Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God, for it is
|
||
written," -- way sound more Godlike but maybe little more heroic.]
|
||
...
|
||
"The moral teaching is closely akin to our own. Stress is
|
||
constantly laid on the necessity of goodness in thought, word, and
|
||
deed. -- ["Through the Three Steps, the good thought, the good
|
||
word, and the good deed, I enter Paradise."] -- Note the emphatic
|
||
recognition of sin in thought. Virtues and vices are enumerated and
|
||
estimated much as in Christian ethics. Special value is attributed
|
||
to the virtues of religion, truthfulness, purity, and generosity to
|
||
the poor (p. 155). Heresy, untruthfulness perjury, sexual sins,
|
||
violence, tyranny, are especially reprobated. ...
|
||
"The soul of the just passes over the bridge into a happy
|
||
eternity, into heaven, the abode of Ahura and His blessed angels.
|
||
The wicked soul falls from the fatal bridge and is precipitated
|
||
into hell. Of this abode of misery a lively description occurs in
|
||
the later Pahlavi 'Vision of Arda Viraf,' whose visit to the
|
||
Inferno, with realistic description of the torments, vividly
|
||
recalls that of Dante. ...
|
||
"At the end of time, the approach of which is described in the
|
||
Pahlavi literature in terms strikingly like those of our
|
||
Apocalypse, will come Saoshyant (SAVIOR) under whom will occur the
|
||
Resurrection of the dead, the General Judgment, the renewal of the
|
||
whole world -- ["a new heaven and a new earth"] -- by a general
|
||
conflagration and terrible flood of burning matter ["the heavens
|
||
being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with
|
||
fervent heat"]. This terrible flood will purify all creatures; even
|
||
the wicked will be purified from all stains, and even hell will be
|
||
cleansed and added to the 'new heavens and new earth.' Meanwhile a
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
41
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
mighty combat takes place between Soashyant [the "Savior"] and his
|
||
followers and the demon hosts of the Evil Spirit, who are utterly
|
||
routed and destroyed forever. ...
|
||
"The highest religious result to which human reason unaided by
|
||
Revelation can attain"! (CE. ii, 154-156, passim.)
|
||
Thus "human reason unaided by revelation" had attained, ages
|
||
before Moses, the Prophets, and Jesus Christ, a system of religious
|
||
beliefs and a moral code in substantial identity with the "divine
|
||
revelations" of God to Moses, the Prophets, and his Son Jesus
|
||
Christ. At the time of the Advent of the Latter, and for three
|
||
hundred years later, throughout the Roman Empire, that is,
|
||
throughout the then known world, this wonderful Pagan invention,
|
||
with its "Pope" and Scat in Imperial Rome, and patronized by the
|
||
Emperors, lived along side with and mightily rivalled the
|
||
struggling Faith hid in the catacombs, -- until its rival
|
||
Christians got hold of the sword under Constantine, and
|
||
"triumphed," its "death warrant was signed" in blood by the laws of
|
||
the persecuting Christians. Did any God wondrously "reveal" to the
|
||
Christians these holy Pagan dreams and myths? What a waste of while
|
||
for a God to mysteriously "reveal" these "heathen deceits"
|
||
thousands of years old, and that everybody in the world already
|
||
knew!
|
||
BUDDHISM IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
The account given by CE. of the Lord Buddha and of Buddhism,
|
||
by the simple substitution of the names Christ -- [the Savior of
|
||
Buddhism is Crishna, the 'incarnation" of the supreme god Vishnu]
|
||
-- and Christianity, might well be mistaken for a homily on our own
|
||
holy faith and its Founder -- who would no more recognize present-
|
||
day Christianity than would Buddha the crass superstition which is
|
||
today tagged with his holy name. Says CE.:
|
||
"It is note worthy that Buddha was a contemporary of two other
|
||
famous religious philosophers, Pythagoras and Confucius. In the
|
||
sacred books of later times Buddha is depicted as a character
|
||
without a flaw, adorned with every grace of mind and heart. There
|
||
may be some hesitation in taking the highly colored portrait of
|
||
Buddhist tradition as an exact representation of the original, but
|
||
Buddha may be credited with the qualities of a great and good man.
|
||
... In all pagan antiquity no character has been depicted as so
|
||
noble and attractive. ...
|
||
"Buddha's order was composed only of those who renounced the
|
||
world to live a life of contemplation as monks and nuns. ... [In
|
||
the time of King Asoka, 3rd century B.C.) Buddhism was in a most
|
||
flourishing condition; it had become a formidable rival of the
|
||
older religion [Brahmanism), while a tolerant and kindly spirit --
|
||
[unknown to Christianity] -- was displayed towards other forms of
|
||
religion. ... [By the seventh century A.D. -- here it parallels
|
||
Christianity again] an excessive devotion to statues and relies,
|
||
the employment of magic arts to keep off evil spirits, and the
|
||
observance of many gross superstitions, complete the picture of
|
||
Buddhism, a sorry representation of what Buddha made known to men.
|
||
... The vast majority of the adherents of Buddhism cling to forms
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
42
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
of creed and worship that Buddha, if alive, would reprobate -- [as
|
||
would Christ in the case of Christianity]. Northern Buddhism became
|
||
the very opposite of what Buddha taught to men, and in spreading to
|
||
foreign lands accommodated itself to the degrading superstition of
|
||
the people it Sought to win -- [precisely as we shall see that
|
||
Christianity did to inveigle the Pagans). ...
|
||
"Between Buddhism and Christianity there are a number of
|
||
resemblances, at first sight striking. The Buddhist order of monks
|
||
and nuns offers points of similarity with Christian monastic
|
||
systems, particularly the mendicant orders. There are moral
|
||
aphorisms ascribed to Buddha that are not unlike some of the
|
||
sayings of Christ. Most of all, in the legendary life of Buddha ...
|
||
there are many parallelisms, some more, some less striking, to the
|
||
Gospel stories of Christ. A few third rate scholars [contend that
|
||
these are borrowings from Buddhism. Why not, as everything else is
|
||
"borrowed" or filched?]. ...
|
||
"One of its most attractive features was its practice of
|
||
benevolence towards the sick and needy. Between Buddhists and
|
||
Brahmins there was a commendable rivalry in maintaining
|
||
dispensaries of food and medicine" -- long claimed as a holy
|
||
monopoly of "Christian charity." (CE. iii, 28-34, passim.)
|
||
As elsewhere recounted, the Holy Ghost made a curious mistake
|
||
in inspiring the certification of sundry Saints, and the lord
|
||
Buddha was himself canonized by Holy Church, as St. Josaphat, and
|
||
the "Life" of this holy Saint was highly edifying to the Faithful
|
||
as well as effective in spreading the Christian truth: "During the
|
||
Middle Ages the 'life of Barlaam and Josaphat' had been translated
|
||
into some twenty languages, English included, so that in reality
|
||
the story of Buddha became the vehicle of Christian truth in many
|
||
nations"' (CE. i, 713.)
|
||
It is now evident, and will further so appear, that there is
|
||
no single novel feature nor "revealed truth" in all the Christian
|
||
religion: our Holy Faith is all a hodgepodge or pot pourri of the
|
||
credulitles of every superstition from Afric Voodooism to the
|
||
latest one anywhere in holy vogue among the credulous. Even our
|
||
"idea" of God with its superlatives of "revealed" high attributes
|
||
is very primitive: "The idea of a Being higher than man, invisible,
|
||
inaccessible, master of life and death, orderer of all things,
|
||
seems to exist everywhere, among the Negritos, the Hottentots, the
|
||
Bantu, the Nigritians, the Hamites; for everywhere this Being has
|
||
a name. He is the 'Great,' the 'Ancient One,' the 'Heavenly One,'
|
||
the 'Bright one,' the 'Master,' sometimes the 'Author' or
|
||
'Creator'. ... Nowhere is He represented under any image, for He is
|
||
incapable of representation." (CE. i, 183, 184.)
|
||
Cardinal Newman, commenting on Dean Milman's "History of the
|
||
Jews," groups a number of these Paganisms in Christianity, and says
|
||
that Milman arrays facts "admitted on all hands," to wit: "that the
|
||
doctrine of the Logos is Platonic; that of the Incarnation Indian;
|
||
that of a divine Kingdom Judaic; that of angels and demons (and a
|
||
Mediator) Persian; that, the connection of sin with the body is
|
||
Gnostic; the idea of a new birth Chinese and Eleusinian; that of
|
||
sacramental virtue Pythagorian; that of Trinity common to East and
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
43
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
West; and that of the rites of baptism and sacrifice equally
|
||
ubiquitous"! (Newman, Essays, Critical and Historical, 7th ed., p.
|
||
231; as summarized by the Rt. Hon. J.M. Robertson in A History of
|
||
Freethought in the XIXth Century, p. 145-6. London, 1929.)
|
||
Such is our holy Christian "Faith which was once delivered
|
||
unto the saints," which "superstition, drunk in with their mother's
|
||
milk," yet persists with the ignorant and those who do not or will
|
||
not know the truth.
|
||
That Christianity is indeed but a "new form of Paganism," and
|
||
especially after it became the official or State religion,
|
||
consciously and purposely, in furtherance of the Imperial policy of
|
||
"One State, one Religion," perfected the amalgamation of the
|
||
salient features of all the fluxing religions of the Empire so as
|
||
to bring all Pagans within the one State-Church, is accredited by
|
||
secular and Church history; and is quite ingenuously revealed by
|
||
CE., treating of the influence of Constantine on Christianity:
|
||
"Long before this, belief in the old polytheism had been
|
||
shaken. The world was fully ripe for monotheism or its
|
||
modified form, henotheism; but this monotheism offered itself
|
||
in varied guises, under the forms of Oriental religions; in
|
||
the worship of the Sun, in the veneration of Mithras, in
|
||
Judaism, and in Christianity. Whoever wished to make a violent
|
||
break with the past and his surroundings sought out some,
|
||
Oriental form of worship which did not demand from him too
|
||
great a sacrifice. Some ... believed that they could
|
||
appropriate [the truth contained in Judaism and Christianity]
|
||
without being obliged on that account to renounce the beauty
|
||
of other worships. Such a man was the Emperor Alexander
|
||
Severus (222-235); another so minded was Aurelian (270-275),
|
||
whose opinions were confirmed by Christians like Paul of
|
||
Samosata. Not only Gnostics and other heretics, but Christians
|
||
who considered themselves faithful, held in a measure to the
|
||
worship of the Sun. Leo the Great in his day (440-461) says
|
||
that it was the custom of many Christians to stand on the
|
||
steps of the Church of St. Peter and pay homage to the Sun by
|
||
obeisance and prayers.
|
||
"When such conditions prevailed it is easy to understand
|
||
that many of the emperors yielded to the delusion that they
|
||
could unite all their subjects in the adoration of the one
|
||
San-god who combined in himself the Father-God of the
|
||
Christians and the much-worshipped Mithras; thus the empire
|
||
could be founded anew on the unity of religion. It looks
|
||
almost as though the last persecution of the Christians were
|
||
directed more against all irreconcilable and extremists than
|
||
against the great body of Christians. ...
|
||
"It was especially in the West that the veneration of
|
||
Mithras predominated -- [after centuries of Christianity!].
|
||
Would it not be possible to gather all the different
|
||
nationalities around his altars? Could not Sol Deus Invictus,
|
||
to whom even Constantine dedicated his coins for a long time,
|
||
or Sol Mithras Deus Invictus, venerated by Diocletian and
|
||
Galerius, become the supreme god of the empire? Constantine
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
44
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
... had not absolutely rejected the thought even after a miraculous
|
||
event [!] had strongly influenced him in favor of the God of the
|
||
Christians, -- (who, however, worshipped the Sun!).
|
||
"For a time it seemed as if merely tolerance and equality
|
||
were to prevail. Constaintine showed equal favor to both
|
||
religions. As pontifex maximus he watched over the heathen
|
||
worship and protected its rights. ... In the dedication of
|
||
Constantinople in 330 a ceremonial half pagan, half Christian
|
||
was used, The chariot of the Sun-god was set in the market-
|
||
place, and over its head was placed the Cross of Christ --
|
||
[not the original, which his mother had not yet been reputed
|
||
by the priests to have discovered -- i.e. "invented," -- of
|
||
which more anon], while the Kyrie Eleison was sung. Shortly
|
||
before his death Constantine confirmed the privileges of the
|
||
priests of the ancient gods. ...
|
||
"In the same way religious freedom and tolerance could
|
||
not continue as a form of equality; the age was not ready for
|
||
such a conception; [with more of the like, p. 299; -- which is
|
||
untrue, as Constantine himself had proclaimed religious
|
||
freedom in the Edict of Milan of 313 and we have just seen it
|
||
admitted in Buddhism, and it prevailed at all tunes in the
|
||
Roman Empire, until the "Christian Emperors" gave the Church
|
||
the sword, as in Chapter VII exemplified]. ... Without
|
||
realizing the full import of his actions, Constantine granted
|
||
the Church one privilege, after another. As early as 313 the
|
||
Church obtained immunity for its ecclesiastics, including
|
||
freedom from taxation. ... Constantine moreover placed Sunday
|
||
under the protection of the State [as a Pagan holiday, as
|
||
cited. post]. It is true that the believers in Mithras also
|
||
observed Sunday as well as Christmas. Consequently Constantine
|
||
speaks not of the day of the lord, but of the everlasting day
|
||
of the Sun. ...
|
||
"Of Constantine's sons the eldest, Constantine II, showed
|
||
decided leanings to heathenism, and his coins bear many pagan
|
||
emblems; the second and favorite son, Constantius, was a more
|
||
pronounced Christian, but it was Arian -- [anti-Divinity of
|
||
Christ] -- Christianity to which he adhered. Constantius was
|
||
an unwavering opponent of paganism; he closed all the temples
|
||
and forbade, sacrifices under pain of death. His maxim was:
|
||
'Cesset superstitio; sacrificiorum aboleatur insania' -- ('Let
|
||
superstition cease; let the folly of sacrifices be
|
||
abolished'). Their successors had recourse to persecution
|
||
against heretics and pagans. Their laws (Cod. Theod. XVI v;
|
||
[post, Chapter VII]) had an unfavorable influence on the
|
||
Middle Ages and were the basis of the much-abused[!]
|
||
Inquisition." (CE. iv, 297-301, passim.)
|
||
Thus was the ultimate merger and total identity of Paganism
|
||
with "the new Paganism called Christianity" finally established by
|
||
law and by Imperial policy of "One State and One Religion," to
|
||
which conformity was enforced by laws of confiscation and death;
|
||
all the other religions of the Empire were fused by fire and sword
|
||
into a bastard Christianity; and the mental and moral benightedness
|
||
known as the Dark Ages of Faith fell as a pall over Christendom for
|
||
a thousand years until the renaissance of Pagan culture and freedom
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
45
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
of thought darkly dawned over the world, and has fearfully
|
||
struggled into a brightening day, whose motto of Hope is again
|
||
"Cesset Superstitio"! when Constantine's funest "League with Death
|
||
and Covenant with Hell" of State and Church will soon in reality be
|
||
a forgotten Scrap of Paper!
|
||
ALL DEVILISH IMITATIONS!
|
||
The pious Christian Fathers were themselves sorely puzzled and
|
||
scandalized by these same things; their books are replete with
|
||
naive attempts to explain the mystery of it, -- which they
|
||
attributed to the blasphemous wiles of the Devil, -- that "the
|
||
Devil had blasphemously imitated the Christian rites and
|
||
doctrines"; -- "always seeing in pagan analogies the trickery of
|
||
devils." (CE. 393.) "It having reached the Devil's ears," says the
|
||
devout Father Justin Martyr, "that the prophets had foretold the
|
||
coming of Christ, the Son of God, he set the heathen Poets to bring
|
||
forward a great many who should be called the sons of Jove. The
|
||
Devil laying his scheme in this, to get men to imagine that, the
|
||
true history of Christ was of the same character as the prodigious
|
||
fables related of the sons of Jove." (I Apology, ch. 54; INF. i,
|
||
181-182.)
|
||
Not only the Fathers, but the Bible, Hebrew and Christian,
|
||
recognized and affirmed the actuality and ever-living reality of
|
||
the Pagan gods, though the late post-exilic writer of the 95th
|
||
Psalm maliciously dubs them devils: "All the gods [Heb. elohim] of
|
||
the nations are devils" (Heb. elilim -- not much difference between
|
||
them -- in Hebrew; Ps. xevi, 5); and this view the Christian forger
|
||
of the Epistle under the name of Paul to the Corinthians confirms:
|
||
"The things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils"
|
||
(I Cor. x, 20). Though these malevolent flings at the venerable
|
||
divinities of Pagandom are in direct violation of the Siniatic Law
|
||
of God -- "Thou shalt not revile the gods" (Ex. xxii, 28); -- the
|
||
Hebrew Yahvah being, according to divine revelation, simply one of
|
||
many gods -- "a God above all gods," even "God of gods and Lord of
|
||
lords," who "judgeth among the [other] gods."
|
||
Father Justin, Tertullian, and many another, says the CE.,
|
||
could "see in all the gods, Moses"; the error and folly of which
|
||
notions argues our authority, is demonstrated by reference to
|
||
Middleton's letter from Rome, in which he, with Calvin, "saw an
|
||
exact conformity between popery and paganism." (CE. xii, 393.)
|
||
Whether Middleton and Calvin were so far in error and folly in this
|
||
opinion, our researches will reveal. Collins, too, in his
|
||
Discourse, supports with good authorities the opinions of Middleton
|
||
and Calvin. He cites Father Origen as "so far from disowning an
|
||
agreement between [Pagan] Plutonism and Christianity, that a great
|
||
part of his book Contra Celsum consists in showing the conformity
|
||
between them." Likewise, he says, Amelius, a heathen Platonist, who
|
||
flourished in the third century, upon reading the first verses of
|
||
St. John the Evangelist, exclaimed: "Per Jovem, barbarous iste cum
|
||
nostro Platone sentit -- By Jove, this barbarian agrees with
|
||
Plato"; and he quotes the celebrated saying of Cardinal Palavicino
|
||
-- "Senza Aristotele noi mancavamo di molti Articoli di Fede --
|
||
Without, Aristotle we should be without many Articles of Faith"
|
||
(Colins, Discourse of Free Thinking, p. 127.)
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
46
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
Not only did the Fathers and the Church admit with implicit
|
||
faith the living reality of the gods of heathendom, their powers,
|
||
oracles, miracles and other "analogies" to the Christian faith,
|
||
they even made of such anthologies their strongest apologies, or
|
||
arguments, in defense of the truth of the Christian tenets. In his
|
||
Apologia addressed to the Emperor Hadrian, Father Justin reasons
|
||
from analogy thus:
|
||
"By declaring the Logos, the first-begotten of God, our
|
||
Master, Jesus Christ, to be born of a Virgin, without any human
|
||
mixture, we [Christians] may no more in this than what you [Pagans]
|
||
say of those whom you style the Sons of Jove. For you need not be
|
||
told what a parcel of sons the writers most in vogue among you
|
||
assign to Jove. ...
|
||
"As to the Son of God, called Jesus, should we allow him to be
|
||
nothing more than man, yet the title of 'the Son of God' is very
|
||
justifiable, upon the account of his wisdom, considering that you
|
||
[Pagans] have your Mercury in worship under the title of The Word,
|
||
a messenger of God. ...
|
||
"As to his [Jesus] being born of a Virgin, you have your
|
||
Perseus to balance that." (Justin, Apologia, I. ch. xxii; ANF. i,
|
||
170.)
|
||
The good Fathers carried their argument by analogy into proof
|
||
of all sorts of holy Christian mysteries; the Pagan Oracles and
|
||
miracles were undeniably valid and true, why not therefore their
|
||
new Christian counterparts? "Without a single exception," says the
|
||
historian of European Mortals, "the Fathers maintained the reality
|
||
of the Pagan miracles as fully as their own. The oracles had been
|
||
ridiculed and rejected by numbers of the philosophers, but the
|
||
Christians unanimously admitted their reality. They appealed to a
|
||
long series of Oracles as predictions of their faith; not until
|
||
1696 was there a denial of their supernatural character, when a
|
||
Dutch Anabaptist minister, Van Dale, in a remarkable book, De
|
||
Origine Progressu Idolatriae, asserted in opposition to the
|
||
unanimous voice of ecclesiastical authority, that they were simple
|
||
impostures." (Lecky, History of European Morals, i, 374-375, et
|
||
seq.; see pp. 378-381, et seq.) The Christian Fathers and their
|
||
followers made themselves so ridiculous by their fatuous faith in
|
||
the Sibyls that they were derisively called "Sibyllists" by the
|
||
Pagans.
|
||
THE SIBYLLINE ORACLES
|
||
The most curious in all respects, and for our purposes the
|
||
most instructive of the ancient Pagan religious frauds, are the
|
||
Sibtlline Oracles, which, extensively reinforced by Jewish and
|
||
Christian forgeries, were perhaps the most potent and popular
|
||
"proofs" of the early Church for the divinity of Jesus Christ and
|
||
the truth of the Christian religion; thus they derive special
|
||
notice here. All will remember, from their school histories of
|
||
ancient Rome, the well-known legend of one of the Sibyls who came
|
||
to King Tarquin the Second with nine volumes of Oracles, which she
|
||
offered to sell to him for a very high price; being refused, she
|
||
went away and burned three of the books, and returning offered the
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
47
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
remaining six at the same price; again the King refused to buy, and
|
||
she departed, burned three more of the books, and returned with the
|
||
last three for which she demanded the original price. Astonished at
|
||
this conduct and greatly impressed, the King consulted his augurs
|
||
and was advised to secure the remaining treasures of prophecy
|
||
before it was too late; he did So, and immediately the Seeress
|
||
disappeared and was never seen again. The precious tomes were
|
||
deposited with great care and jealously guarded in the Temple of
|
||
Jupiter Capitolinus; a college of priests was instituted to have
|
||
charge of them; and the divine Oracles were consulted with great
|
||
solemnity only in times of the greatest crises of the State. The
|
||
books were finally destroyed when the Capitol was burned during the
|
||
wars of Sylla, but many ethers continued in existence.
|
||
The oracles were composed in Alexandrine verse, and claimed to
|
||
be the work of inspired Pagan prophetesses called Sibyls; they
|
||
enjoyed the greatest vogue and were believed with the most implicit
|
||
faith by Pagans and Christians alike. There were a number of these
|
||
Sibyls, and the number of the volumes of oracles is differently
|
||
estimated as a dozen or more; those with which we are chiefly
|
||
concerned are the Roman Cumaean and Greek Erythraean Sibyls and the
|
||
Oracles going under their names. The inveterate bent of the
|
||
priestly mind for forgery in furtherance of its holy mission of
|
||
imposture, led to the prompt adoption and corruption of these Pagan
|
||
frauds, for the propagation first of the Jewish, then of the
|
||
Christian Faith. "Because of the vogue enjoyed by these heathen
|
||
oracles," says the Catholic Encyclopedia, "and because of the
|
||
influence they had in, shaping the religious views of the period,
|
||
the Hellenistic Jews in Alexandria, during the second century b.c,.
|
||
composed [i.e. forged] verses in the same form, and circulated them
|
||
among the Pagans as a means of diffusing Judaistic doctrines and
|
||
teaching. This custom was continued down into Christian times, and
|
||
was borrowed by some Christians, so that in the second or third
|
||
century, a new class of Oracles emanating from Christian sources
|
||
came into being, Hence the Sibylline Oracles can be classed as
|
||
Paggan, Jewish, or Christian. In many cases, however, the
|
||
Christians merely revised or interpolated the Jewish documents, and
|
||
thus we have two classes of Christian oracles, those adopted from
|
||
Jewish sources and those entirely written by Christians. ... It
|
||
seems clear, however, that the Christian Oracles and those revised
|
||
from Jewish sources all emanated from the same circle [or band of
|
||
Christian forgers] and were intended to aid in the diffusion of
|
||
Christianity.
|
||
"The Sibyls are quoted frequently by the early Fathers and
|
||
Christian writers, Justin, Athenagoras, Theophilus, Clement of
|
||
Alexandria, etc. ... They were known and used during the Middle
|
||
Ages in both the East and the West. ... They all purport to be the
|
||
work of the Sibyls." (CE. v. xiii, p. 770.)
|
||
Most notable of these forged Christian addenda to the Pagan-
|
||
Jewish forged Oracles, 'Is found in Book VIII, a lengthy composite
|
||
of Jewish and Christian fraud, consisting of some 500 hexameter
|
||
verses. The first 216 verses, says the CE., "are most likely the
|
||
work of a second century Jew, while the latter part (verses 217-
|
||
500), beginning with an acrostic on the symbolical Christian word
|
||
Ichthus is undoubtedly Christian, and dates most probably from the
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
48
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
third century." (CE. xiii, 770.) Ichthus is the Greek word for
|
||
fish, and the fish was the fitting and universal symbol of the
|
||
early Christians as typical of the "catch" of the Apostolic fishers
|
||
of men. This cabalistic word Ichthus, worked into the professedly
|
||
Pagan Oracle in the form of an acrostic, is composed of the initial
|
||
letters of the popular name and title of the Son of the Christian
|
||
God, in the Greek: "Iesous Christos Theou Uios Soter -- Jesus
|
||
Christ, Son of God, Savior" This fish anagram was an ancient Pagan
|
||
symbol of fecundity, of great vogue and veneration throughout
|
||
Pagandom, and was adopted by Christendom for the double reason that
|
||
the initials acrostically formed the name and title of its new
|
||
deity, and that in the ancient science fish were supposed to be
|
||
generated in the water without carnal copulation, and were thus
|
||
peculiarly symbolic of the Virgin-born Christ. Says Tertuilian:
|
||
"We, little fishes, after the example of our Ichthus, are born in
|
||
water." (On Baptism, ch. i; ANP. iii, 669.)
|
||
The Church historian, Bishop Eusebius, preserves the Acrostic,
|
||
taken from the Erythraean Sibyl, but says: "Many people, though
|
||
they allowed the Erythrian Sibyl to have been a prophetess, yet
|
||
reject this Acrostic, suspecting it to have been forged by the
|
||
Christians"; which suspicion the good Bishop refutes by an appeal
|
||
to Cicero, who, he assures, had read and translated it into Latin.
|
||
(Eusebius, Oration on Const., chs. 18-19; I, 274-5.) Father St.
|
||
Augustine quotes the verses and says: "The Erythraean Sibyl has
|
||
indeed written some things clearly and manifestly relating to
|
||
Christ. ... There are some, who suspected all these prophecies
|
||
which relate to Christ and passed under the name of the Sibyl, to
|
||
have been forged by the Christians." (Aug., De Civ. Dei, xviii, 23;
|
||
N,&PNF. ii, 3723.) Father Clement of Alexandria attributes to the
|
||
Sibyls the same inspiration as the Old Testament, and cites Peter
|
||
and Paul as appealing to them for a prediction of the life and
|
||
character of Jesus Christ, Peter and Paul speaking thus: "Take the
|
||
Greek books in your hand, and look into the Sibyl. How clearly she
|
||
speaks of one God, and of the things to come; then take Hystaspes
|
||
also and read, and you will find the Son of God much more clearly
|
||
and evidently described." (Strom. I, 6, p. 761, Ed. Oxon.; also
|
||
Lact., De ver. sap., I, 4, 15; Free Inquiry, p. 34.)
|
||
The importance of the Sibylline Oracles, speaking through
|
||
countless "interpolations" forged by Christian pens, for not only
|
||
the propagation of the faith among the Pagans, but as actual proofs
|
||
of the truth of the fictitious "facts" of Christianity, cannot be
|
||
overestimated; this justifies the following extracts from the
|
||
Divine Institutes of Lactantius. The greater part, I dare say, of
|
||
the seven Books of that notable work, addressed to the "mighty
|
||
Emperor Constantine," is devoted to arguments and proofs of Jesus
|
||
Christ and the principal events of his recorded life and acts,
|
||
drawn copiously from the heathen gods and the forged Oracles of the
|
||
Sibyls. These proofs, to the minds of Father Lactantius and of all
|
||
the Fathers, as to the Pagans generally, were "more strong than
|
||
proofs of Holy Writ"; for, he says, "perhaps the sacred writings
|
||
[in the Old Testament] speak falsely when they teach [such and so
|
||
about Jesus); ... the Sibyls before taught the same things in their
|
||
verses." Citing scores of Sibylline "prophecies" forged by the
|
||
Christians for the belief and persuasion of the Pagans, who were
|
||
effectively "refuted by these testimonies" and thus "brought to
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
49
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
Christ," some of them, says Lactantius, urge that these prophetic
|
||
verses "were not by the Sibyls, but made up and composed by our own
|
||
writers," as the fact is above confessed by CE.; but not so, argues
|
||
the great Apologist; "do not Cicero and other Pagan authors, dead
|
||
long before Jesus, testify to the Sibyls?" -- Yes, to the Sibyls
|
||
and their utterances then extant; not to the later Christian
|
||
forgeries in their names. Moreover, these Christian
|
||
"interpolations" imputed to the Sibyls, exactly as the muddled,
|
||
ambiguous, meaningless "prophecies" of the Old Testament writings,
|
||
meant nothing and were not understood to mean anything, until Jesus
|
||
Christ came along, and these Jewish and Pagan mummeries were seized
|
||
upon by the avid forging Christians to make up and pad out the
|
||
pretended life and wondrous acts of the Christ. Even a cursory
|
||
examination and the marginal cross-references will demonstrate,
|
||
that virtually every act imputed in the New Testament Gospels to
|
||
the Nazarene, was cut to fit of some scrap of mummery or pretended
|
||
"prophecy" of Hebrew Scriptures and Sibylline Oracles. Of
|
||
numberless instances of the latter quoted in the, Divine
|
||
Institutes, a few typical ones only can be here cited, but they are
|
||
illuminating of the Christ-tales.
|
||
In Book I, chapter vi is entitled, "Of Divine Testimonies, and
|
||
of the Sibyls and their Predictions." Appealing for faith to
|
||
Constantine, the chapter begins: "Now let us pass to divine
|
||
testimonies?; and he cites and quotes, in numerous chapters, the
|
||
Pagan gods Mercury, Hermes Trismegistus, Apollo, and other mystic
|
||
deities and personages, all testifying to the One Christian God and
|
||
to his Son Jesus. After infinite such appeals for proofs, we come
|
||
to Book IV, a veritable arsenal of manufactured "divine
|
||
testimonies"; and we pause to con with wonder chapter xv, "Of the
|
||
life and Miracles of Jesus, and Testimonies concerning Him." Jesus,
|
||
after his baptism, says Lactantius, "began to perform the greatest
|
||
miracles, not by magical powers, but by heavenly strength and
|
||
power. ... His powers were those which Apollo called wonderful. ...
|
||
And he performed all these things not by His hands, or the
|
||
application of any remedy, but by His word and command, as the
|
||
Sibyl had foretold: 'Doing all things by His word, and healing
|
||
every disease.'"
|
||
Many chapters are replete with instances of the miracles of
|
||
Jesus, alleged each of them to have been foretold by one or another
|
||
of the Sibyls, and quoting the Christian-forged prophetic verses in
|
||
proof. The Christ came to fulfill the Law; "and the Sibyl shows
|
||
that it would come to pass that this law would be destroyed by the
|
||
Son of God: 'But when all these things which I told you shall be
|
||
accomplished, then all the law is fulfilled with respect to Him.'"
|
||
(c. xvii.) Of a few others, and the arguments above sketched, I
|
||
quote the text:
|
||
"What can be more wonderful, either in narration or in
|
||
action? But the Sibyl had before foretold that it would take
|
||
place, whose verses are related to this effect.
|
||
"With five loaves at the same time, and with two fishes,
|
||
He shall satisfy five thousand men in the wilderness;
|
||
And Afterwards taking all the fragments that remain,
|
||
He shall fill twelve baskets to the hope of many.'
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
50
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
"But perhaps the sacred writings speak falsely when they teach
|
||
that there was such power in Him, that by His command He compelled
|
||
the winds to obey Him, the seas to serve Him, disease to depart,
|
||
the dead to be submissive. Why should I say that the Sibyls before
|
||
had taught the same things in their one verses? One of whom,
|
||
already mentioned, thus speaks:
|
||
"But shall still the winds by His word, and calm the sea
|
||
As it rages, treading with feet of peace and in faith.'
|
||
"And again another which says:
|
||
'He shall walk on the waves, He shall release men from
|
||
disease.
|
||
He shall raise the dead, and drive away many pains;
|
||
And from the bread of one wallet there shall be a satisfying
|
||
[of men].'
|
||
"Some, refuted by these testimonies, are accustomed to
|
||
have recourse to the assertion that these poems were not by
|
||
the Sibyls, but made up and composed by our own writers. But
|
||
he, will assuredly not think this who has read Cicero [De
|
||
Natura Deorum, ii], and Varro, and other ancient writers, who
|
||
make mention of the Erythraean and other Sibyls from whose
|
||
books we bring forth these examples; And these authors died
|
||
before the birth of Christ according to the flesh. But I do
|
||
not doubt that these poems were in former times regarded as
|
||
ravings, since no one understood them. For they announced some
|
||
marvelous wonders, of which neither the manner, nor the time,
|
||
nor the author was signified. Lastly the Erythraean Sibyl says
|
||
that it would come to pass that she would be called mad and
|
||
deceitful. But assuredly
|
||
'They will say that the Sibyl
|
||
is mad, and deceitful: but when all things shall come to pass,
|
||
Then ye will remember me; and no one will any longer
|
||
Say that I, the prophetess of the great God, am mad.'
|
||
"Therefore they were neglected for many ages; but they
|
||
received attention after the nativity and passion of Christ
|
||
had revealed secret things. Thus it was also with the
|
||
utterances of the prophets, which were read by the people of
|
||
the Jews for fifteen hundred [!] years and more, but yet were
|
||
not understood until after Christ had explained them by His
|
||
word and by His works. For the prophets spoke of Him; nor
|
||
could the things which they said have been in any way
|
||
understood, unless they had been altogether fulfilled."
|
||
(Lact., Div. Inst., Bk. IV, chap. xv; ANF. vii, 115, 116.)
|
||
In view of these "divine testimonies" of Pagan Oracles forged
|
||
by pious Christians in proof of their Christ, need one wonder that
|
||
the like testimonies in the Gospels themselves may be under
|
||
suspicion of like forgery? We shall have the proofs in their due
|
||
order. Father Justin Martyr treats these Pagan books of Christian
|
||
evidences, as prophetic Scriptures and divine, and speaking of
|
||
their prohibition by the Roman Emperors, says: "By the contrivance
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
51
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
of Demons it was made a capital crime to read them, in order to
|
||
deter men from coming to a knowledge of what is good." (Apologia,
|
||
I, ch. 77; ANF. i, 178.)
|
||
That heathens and even devils may be specially endued with the
|
||
gift of prophecy by God for his glory, and God may make use of the
|
||
Devil-in-Chief for this purpose, is expressly asserted by Pope
|
||
Benedict XIV" (Heroic Virtue, III, 144, 150). And "the Angelic
|
||
Doctor," St. Thomas Aquinas, "in order to prove that the heathens
|
||
were capable of prophecy, refers to the instance of the Sibyls, who
|
||
make clear mention of the mysteries of the Trinity, of the
|
||
Incarnation of the Word, of the Life, Passion, and Resurrection of
|
||
Christ. It is true that the Sibylline poems now extant became in
|
||
course of time interpolated; but as Benedict XIV (1740-1758)
|
||
remarks, this does not hinder much of them, especially what the
|
||
early Fathers referred to, from being genuine and in no wise
|
||
apocryphal"! (CE. xii, 474.)
|
||
Thus the Holy Ghost of God, speaking through its official
|
||
mouthpiece, its Vive-God on earth, infallibly guarded by the Spirit
|
||
against the possibility of error, in the year 1742 of our Era of
|
||
Christ, sings the Doxology of these admitted frauds of paganish and
|
||
forging Christianity, and canonizes them as the God-inspired origin
|
||
of the holiest mysteries of Christian revelation. The inference is
|
||
inevitable, that Pagan Sibyls, Christian Church Fathers, and Vicars
|
||
of God, are strongly characterized by Ignorance and Imposture.
|
||
A noted classical and critical authority, Anthon,
|
||
contemplating the shifts of the new Christianity rising from the
|
||
debacle of Paganism, falls into a philosophical reflection,
|
||
pertinent alike to the old and the new systems of priestcraft:
|
||
"When a religion has fallen and been succeeded by
|
||
another, the more zealous advocates of the new belief
|
||
sometimes find themselves in a curious state of embarrassment.
|
||
So it is with regard to the heathen system and the Christian
|
||
code. Among the numerous oracles given to the world in former
|
||
days, some have chanced to find a remarkable accomplishment;
|
||
and the pious but ill-judging Christian, unable to ascribe
|
||
them to deities in whom men no longer believes, is driven to
|
||
create for them a different origin. 'God,' says Rollin, 'in
|
||
order to punish the blindness of the heathen, sometimes
|
||
permits evil spirits to give responses conformable to the
|
||
truth.' (Rollin, Histoire Ancienne, I, 887.) The only evil
|
||
spirit which had an agency in the oracular responses of
|
||
antiquity was that spirit of craft imposture which finds so
|
||
congenial a home among an artful and cunning priesthood."
|
||
(Anthon, Classical Dictionary, 4th ed., p. 929; Art. Orv
|
||
alum.)
|
||
The historian of European Morals, in his amazing review of the
|
||
infinite variety and number of superstitions, frauds, forgeries,
|
||
false miracles and lying oracles of Pagandom, which were taken over
|
||
almost 'in masse' by the Christians, and implicitly and with
|
||
childlike credulity accepted and believed, taught and preached by
|
||
every Christian Father of the Church, by the infallible popes, and
|
||
the millions of their ignorant and superstitious ex-Pagan lay
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
52
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
dupes, makes this very pertinent and just remark apropos the value
|
||
of their pious opinions, testimonies and "traditions" of the
|
||
origins of the Christian faith:
|
||
"To suppose that men who held these opinions were
|
||
capable, in the second and third centuries, of ascertaining
|
||
with any degree of just confidence whether miracles had taken
|
||
place in Judaea in the first century, is grossly absurd; nor
|
||
would the conviction of their reality have made any great
|
||
impression on their minds at a time when miracles were
|
||
supposed to be so abundantly diffused." (Lecky, Hist. Europ.
|
||
Morals, i, 375.)
|
||
The confession that the vast mass of Christian miracles were
|
||
Pagan frauds and lies taken 'en bloc' over into Christianity to
|
||
make a good showing as against the Pagans and to dupe the
|
||
superstitious new converts, is made by CE., with the notable
|
||
further admission that the only alteration made was that the Pagan
|
||
gods were made over into Christian saints: "This transference was
|
||
promoted by the numerous cases in which Christian saints became the
|
||
successors of local deities, and Christian worship supplanted the
|
||
ancient local worship. This explains the great number of
|
||
similarities between gods and saints. For the often maintained
|
||
metamorphosis of gods into saints no proof is to be found." This
|
||
immense confession of Christian fraudulence and imposture, in
|
||
conjuring fictitious Pagan gods -- which according to Christian
|
||
faith were all actual devils -- into canonized Saints of God and
|
||
Holy Church, is several times reported by CE., of which this
|
||
instance is before me: "It has indeed been said that the 'Saints
|
||
are the successors to the Gods.' Instances have been cited ... of
|
||
statues of pagan Gods baptized and transformed into Christian
|
||
Saints"! (CE. xv. 710; cf. Is It God's Word? 5, 7-9.) This truly
|
||
wonderful psycho-religious miracle is thereupon wrought: The
|
||
idolatrous Pagan who just before the "baptism" actually worshipped
|
||
these "statues of the Pagan gods," immediately afterwards simply
|
||
venerated or adored the same gods "baptized and transformed into
|
||
Christian saints" -- fully comprehending the non-understandable
|
||
hair-splitting theological distinction between pious "dulia" and
|
||
idolatrous "latria," as defined by Holy Church and droned by CE. in
|
||
its article on Idolatry. And vast hoards of utterly illiterate and
|
||
stupid Faithful go into the True Churches every day, kneel before
|
||
and pray to these same Pagan gods conjured into Christian saints --
|
||
with countless other counterfeit near-divinities of their near-
|
||
Idolatry -- and appreciate the difference to a split-second of
|
||
devotion and true faith. Tis passing strange.
|
||
A very remarkable confession of purposeful fraud, with the
|
||
mechanics of the fraud, and the vast extent of it in faking Pagan
|
||
miracle-lies into Christian truth of the most driveling nonsense,
|
||
reads:
|
||
"Manifold as the varieties of [miracle] legends now seem
|
||
to be, there are fundamentally not so very many different
|
||
notions utilized. The legend considers the saint as a kind of
|
||
lord of the elements, who commands the water, rain, fire,
|
||
mountain, and rock; he changes, enlarges, or diminishes
|
||
objects; flies through the air; delivers from dungeons --
|
||
(examples, Peter, Paul) -- and gallows; takes part in battles,
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
53
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
and even in martyrdom is invulnerable; animals, the wildest
|
||
and the most timid, serve him (e.g., the stories of the bear
|
||
as a beast of burden; the ring in the fish; the frogs becoming
|
||
silent, etc.); his birth is glorified by a miracle; a voice,
|
||
or letters, from Heaven proclaim his identity -- [all these
|
||
score for Jesus the Christ]; bells ring of themselves; the
|
||
heavenly ones enter into personal intercourse with him
|
||
(betrothal of Mary); he speaks with the dead and beholds
|
||
heaven, hell, and purgatory; forces the devil to release
|
||
people from compacts; he is victorious over dragons; etc. Of
|
||
all this the authentic [?] Christian narratives know nothing
|
||
-- [a confession that every saint-tale of Bible and Church is
|
||
a lie].
|
||
"But whence does this world of fantastic concepts arise? A
|
||
glance at the pre-christian religious narratives will dispel every
|
||
doubt. All these stories are anticipated by the Greek chroniclers,
|
||
writers of myths, collectors of strange tales, neo-Plutonism, and
|
||
neo-Pythagorism. One need only refer to the 'Ellados Periegesis' of
|
||
Pausanius, or glance through the codices collected by Photius in
|
||
his 'Bibliotheca,' to recognize what great importance was attached
|
||
to the reports of miracles in antiquity by both the educated and
|
||
uneducated." ...
|
||
Reversing only the order of the sentences, and CE. reversing
|
||
the truth of the answer it gives to its own question, the
|
||
confession of shame continues:
|
||
"But how was the transference of [these miracle] legends
|
||
to Christianity consummated? ... Hellenism had already
|
||
recognized this [fraudulent] characteristic of the religious
|
||
fable, and would thus have been obliged to free itself from it
|
||
in the coarse of time, had not the competition with
|
||
Christianity forced the champions of the ancient polytheism to
|
||
seek again in the ancient fables incidents to set against the
|
||
miraculous power of Christ. [!] In this way popular illusions
|
||
found their way from Hellenism to Christianity." (CE. ix,
|
||
129-30.)
|
||
And in 1900 years no priest, bishop, pope, depositaries and
|
||
guardians of divine truth, has ever said a word to prevent or put
|
||
end to this shameful prostitution of mind of their poor grovelling
|
||
dupes, but to this day perpetuate them in it. Far from ending the
|
||
shameful thing, many bishops and popes have won the title Mendax
|
||
Maximus by peddling these Pagan lies as God's truth; as witness
|
||
this one instance from the article we are quoting: "St. Augustine
|
||
(De Cura, xii) and also [Pope] St. Gregory the Great (Dialogues,
|
||
IV, xxxvi) -- [the greatest book of Lies outside the Bible] --
|
||
relate of a man, who died by an error of the Angel of Death and was
|
||
again restored to life, the same story which is already given by
|
||
Lucian in his 'Philopseudes.'" (Ib. p. 130.) Such, verily for
|
||
shame, is "that new Paganism later called Christianity."
|
||
Mythology has well been called the Theology of dead religions.
|
||
The world is a vast cemetery of deceased gods and teeming scrap-
|
||
heap of decayed and discarded priest-imposed religious beliefs --
|
||
superstitions. All the dead gods and religions of Paganism, all the
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
54
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
yet surviving but fast moribund deities and faiths of the XXth
|
||
Century world, all -- (except -- the Jews and Christians say, their
|
||
own), -- all were admittedly the fraudulent handiwork of priests
|
||
and professional god-and-myth makers. In a word, short and ugly,
|
||
but true -- every priest of every god and religion (saving, for the
|
||
nonce, the Jewish-Christian ones) -- was a conscious and
|
||
unconscionable falsifier and impostor, -- a common liar for his
|
||
god. All plied their artful, unholy priestcraft in the name of
|
||
gods; for power and pelf, those grafting Pagan priests. No
|
||
Christian will, or truthfully can, deny their portentous fact, The
|
||
verdict of lying guilt of Pagan Priestcraft is unanimous.
|
||
No one can now doubt that Lecky, after voluminous review of
|
||
pre-Christian frauds and impostures, spoke the precise historical
|
||
truth: "Christianity floated into the Roman Empire on the wave of
|
||
credulity that brought with it this long train of Oriental
|
||
superstitions and legends." (Hist. of European Morals, i, 373-4.)
|
||
The mainstream of Oriental superstition and priestly imposture
|
||
will now be seen to swell with the turgid flood of Hebrew fables
|
||
and forgery, before pouring the mingled flood of myth and fraud
|
||
into the pure tide of Christian Truth; -- where, Presto! change! it
|
||
is beheld transformed -- "baptized" -- into the "revealed
|
||
mysteries" and "Catholic Truth" of God!
|
||
<div> <div>
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
Abbreviations for most often used sources:
|
||
The libraries of the Union Theological Seminary and of
|
||
Columbia University, in New York City, were the places of the finds
|
||
here recorded. Cited so often, space will be saved for more
|
||
valuable uses by citing by their initials, -- which will become
|
||
very familiar -- my chief ecclesiastical authorities, towit:
|
||
The Ante-Nicene Fathers, cited as ANF.; A Collection of the
|
||
extant Writings of all the Founders of Christianity down to the
|
||
Council of Nicaea, or Nice, in 325 A.D. American Reprint, eight
|
||
volumes. The Christian Literature Publishing Co., Buffalo, N.Y.,
|
||
1885. [xxx]
|
||
The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, cited as N&PNF.; First and
|
||
Second Series; many volumes; same publishers.
|
||
The Catholic Encyclopedia, cited as CE.; fifteen volumes and
|
||
index, published under the Imprimatur of Archbishop Farley; New
|
||
York, Robert Appleton Co., 1907-9.
|
||
The Encyclopedia Biblica, cited as EB., four volumes; Adam &
|
||
Charles Black, London, 1899; American Reprint, The Macmillan Co.,
|
||
New York, 1914.
|
||
<div> <div>
|
||
Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
55
|
||
</conspiracyFile> |