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24 page printout, page 1 to 23+note of 322
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Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.
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This file, its printout, or copies of either
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are to be copied and given away, but NOT sold.
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Bank of Wisdom
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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**** ****
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FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
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A Documented Record of the Foundations of the
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Christian Religion
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by
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Joseph Wheless
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Lately Major, Judge Advocate, U.S.A.; Associate Editor
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(in section of comparative Law) of American Bar
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Association Journal; Life Member of American
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Law Institute; etc.
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**** ****
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Dedicated
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In grateful appreciation
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TO
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Henry L. Mencken
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Dean of American Letters and Critics
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Theologian Emeritus of
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a Treaties on the Gods
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Published by
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"PSYCHIANA"
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Moscow, Idaho
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Copyright 1930
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**** ****
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FOREWORD
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THE DISEASE AND THE CURE
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"ALL TRUTH is safe, and nothing else is
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safe; and he who keeps back the truth, or
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withholds it from men, from motives of ex-
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pediency, is either a coward or a criminal, or
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both."
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MAX MULLER,
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The Science of Religion, p. 11.
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"The time has come for honest men to denounce
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false teachers and attack false gods."
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Luther Burbank
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MAN IS A RELIGIOUS ANIMAL -- is incurably religious," are
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commonplaces of clerical rhetoric. The priestly "Doctors of
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Divinity" who unctuously utter these pious -- and apocryphal --
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platitudes -- fathered by the wish, -- urge the incurable state of
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mind -- the religious neurosis of their patients in proof of the
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BANK of WISDOM
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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1
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FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
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divinely ordered nature of the malady, as patent of the necessity
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and importance of their "sacred science" of soul-cure, and the
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divine warrant for their continuance in perpetuity in their
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practice upon otherwise damned humanity.
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It is the ghostly Doctors themselves, however, who by their
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quackeries have created the fiction of the disease, and who
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purposely keep the patient opiated and on the crutches of Faith, in
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order to "make their calling and election sure," and to perpetuate
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their thralling dominion over the mind and money of man. The first
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recorded priestly ban -- by threat and fear of death -- was on
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Nature's own Golden Specific for superstition and priestcraft, --
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the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge: "Thou shalt not eat of it: for
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in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." (Gen.
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ii, 17.) A warden with a flaming sword was posted to guard the
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Tree: sword, and rack, and stake, civil and political outlawry,
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social and business ostracism and loss of living, odious Odium
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Theologicum and foul calumny, have ever since been -- so far as
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possible yet are the consecrated weapons of priestcraft to keep
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mankind ignorant and obedient to the priests. "No beast in nature
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is so implacable as an offended saint," is axiomatic of those who
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prate of loving their enemies. As Jurgen picturesquely says: "The
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largest lake in Hell is formed by the blood which the followers of
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the 'Prince of Peace' have shed in advancing his cause," -- and
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their selfish own, -- as we shall abundantly see in the following
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pages.
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FAITH IN A FATAL DECLINE
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Howbeit, their pulpits and their press are lugubriously vocal
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with Jeremiads bewailing the ever-swelling tide of Unbelief in the
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land, -- throughout Christendom. The Church statistics, notoriously
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padded after the Biblical model of the Censuses in the Wilderness,
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can claim at most some forty-odd millions of adherents -- many of
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them by lip-service and non-paying (therefore negligible), and
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others many non-distinguished for piety or common honesty -- out of
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the hundred and twenty-odd millions of our American population. The
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Reverend Rector of Trinity Church in New York City -- (one of the
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wealthiest dead-hand tax-free land monopolists in America) -- thus
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bewails: "In America we are dealing with a country, the majority of
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whose inhabitants are pagans. ... Only forty percent of the
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population acknowledges affiliation with any Church." (N. Y. Times,
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March 15, 1930.) The ex-Secretary of the Home Missions Council of
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one of the great Churches bemoans: "There has been a tremendous
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revolution in the history of the Church. ... The country church is
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waning and dying. ... The revolution under our eyes is found in the
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mode of thinking of the whole country." (N.Y. Times, Jan. 8, 1930).
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An effective cause is found in the recent survey report of the
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Federal Council of Churches, to be in "the acceptance of a
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scientific view of life ... general questioning of formerly revered
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authority ... with absolute religious and ethical authority
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dethroned. ... Women have made no comparable advance in
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participation in church affairs. ... It can hardly be said that the
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church is an influential factor in the lives of the working
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classes." (N.Y. Herald-Tribune, Jan. 31, 1930.) A curious
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confession of likely cause and effect, -- in the mental calibre of
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the credent -- is stated by the Reverend publicity counsel of a
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[viii] national Church: "All sermons should be keyed to the
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BANK of WISDOM
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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2
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FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
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mentality of a fifteen-year-old youth. ... Half the people of the
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United States have the mentality of a fifteen-year-old youth. Most
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church-goers enjoyed the 'children's sermon' more than the one on
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religious philosophy. ... The average man can carry only one idea
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at a time." (Herald-Tribune, Jan. 28, 1930.) -- Verily, "Of such is
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the Kingdom of Heaven."
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All Fools' Day seems to be a sort of New Year's for
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ecclesiastical statistics and general stock-taking of the faithful:
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annually at that time the very religious Christian Herald publishes
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its collect of figures on Church membership; the Catholic Directory
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emits its own; and the generality of Divines gives voice to holy
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Lamentations and pious warnings to the Church and to the ungodly.
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From this year's extensive crop a little sheaf is added, the matter
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being important to our purposes, and curiously instructive as
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depicting the accelerated downward tobogganing of the Faith, The
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Report of the Christian Herald discloses: "The total of
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communicants last year (1929) was 50,006,566," of which number it
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assigns a total of 18,051,680 to the fourteen sects of Catholic
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dis-Unity (Herald-Tribune, April 26, 1930); though the figures of
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the Catholic Directory are 20,178,202. (Ib. April. 16, 1930). Under
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the alarming caption -- "Warns Protestant Church it is Lagging,"
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the Report of the Director of the Church Survey bemoans: "The
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Protestant Church in America is not keeping pace with the
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population. ... American Protestantism increased from 7 in each 100
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of the population in 1800 to 24 in each 100 of the population of
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1900. During the past thirty years Protestantism has not increased
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its ratio of the population as much as one member more per
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hundred." -- This is a very notable disclosure: that for a whole
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century the very vocal and intolerant Protestant population of this
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country has varied between 7% and 24% of the total population, and
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is today less than 25%: -- yet this petty minority dingdongs that
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this is a "Christian country," and imposes its ludicrous medieval
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"Blue Laws" and tyrannous proscriptions -- as will be noted -- upon
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the great anti-clerical majority of the people. And further
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striking figures follow from the same source: "A study made in 1912
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-- [i.e. before Woman Suffrage], -- "exclusively in cities, found
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two-thirds of the Protestant city membership consisted of [ix]
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women. ... There has been a steady proportionate decrease of
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interest in religion among women of the United States. ... It was
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also found [in this present Survey] that only 18 percent of the
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country population is in Church membership, although it is
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customary to think of country people as highly religious. -- [They,
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too, are becoming more educated.] In New York City, the Church
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population is reported equally divided among Protestants, Roman
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Catholics and Jews. Only about eight percent of the population are
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members of the Protestant churches," -- thus only some 24% of the
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people of New York City among all three much-divided sects. (N.Y.
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Times, May 5, 1930.) In a recent abusive set of letters by three
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True Believers of the same family name (one a Rev.), addressed to
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the Editor of a Metropolitan paper for writing sanely about the
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Tabooed Subject of Birth Control, this was denounced as an "insult
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to over 2,000,000" Faithful in this City. (Herald-Tribune, April
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12, 1930.) But the Faithful boast of their 444 churches in Greater
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New York: if each had the exaggerated membership of 1,000, -- let
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the reader do his own figuring and note the result. And foreign
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immigration of the Faithful has been sadly curtailed of late by
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law.
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BANK of WISDOM
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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3
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FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
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The true significance to the Church of the great slump in its
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membership -- and hence revenues, is crudely "given away" by the
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Very Rev. Episcopal Bishop of Long Island, lamenting like
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conditions in his Diocese: "The growth of population during the
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last decade on Long Island has been a challenge to the Church. ...
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The Episcopal Bishop of the diocese advocated [in a public address]
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a drive to bring into the church the wealthy residents of Long
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Island." (Herald-Tribune, May 6, 1930.) The Most Rev. Episcopal
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superior of the last-lamenting has made a famous discovery, and
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with oracular gravity which evokes a smile he assigns its cause:
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"There are no great poets, painters, writers, nor musicians --
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[only great Manikins of Bishops] -- today, and the cause of this
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artistic deficiency can be found in the moderns' total disregard
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for religion." (Episc. Bishop of Manhattan: Herald-Tribune, April.
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21, 1930.) And the Highly Rev. Bishop of the National Capital thus
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portentously, and truly, glooms: "There is an organized movement,
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world-wide in scope, to unsettle Christian ideals and Christian
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institutions, both in Russia and elsewhere" (Ib. May 13, 1930); --
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which, judging by the age-old gigantic failure of both -- as herein
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we shall see, -- is not so much to be wondered.
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So far as Russia is concerned -- (and the fact and the reason
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for it apply as well to every other "Christian" country), -- the
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reason is truly stated by the pious Editor of Atlantis in a
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Jeremiad of confession before the Institute of Citizenship just
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held in Atlanta: "For a thousand years, ever since Russia became a
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Christian country, and more especially in the last 200 years, when
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the Czar became the official head of the Church, the State religion
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in Russia was one of the means whereby the Russian people were
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oppressed, exploited and kept in ignorance. The Russian people had
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a score to settle with the Church after the revolution, and they
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took full advantage of it" (N.Y. Times, April 8, 1930), a like
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chance for which all Christendom is looking. The very religious
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Editor continues to confess: "It is useless to deny that the
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Church, in most instances, has lost its hold upon vast majorities
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of the people." (Ibid.) At the Christian Herald Institute of
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Religion held this year at Buck Hill Falls, Pa., a perfect
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symposium of Jeremiads bewailed Faith on the Toboggan: "Unless
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emphasis on elaborate creeds does not cease, we will deliver
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ourselves into the hands of the Humanists for the defeat which we
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deserve." ... "The Church is simply going to pieces in the small
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towns of the Middle West. ... The paganization of rural America is
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going on so fast that if we wait for even the union of closely
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allied denominations to be accomplished, it will mean ruination."
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... "The greatest difficulty in effecting mergers of churches lies
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in personalities and prejudices." (Herald-Tribune, May 15, 1930.)
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Thus today, after nearly two thousand years of the "Sweetness and
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light" of our Divine Christian religion, "personalities and
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prejudices" among those taught to love even their enemies persist
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and keep the Fold of Christ divided into mutually-hating Flocks;
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precisely so that the olden Pagan sneer at the early Christians is
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perfectly befitting their successors today: "There is no wild beast
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so ferocious as Christians who differ concerning their faith."
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(Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, ii, 31.)
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BANK of WISDOM
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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4
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FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
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To conclude this review of pregnant figures and confessions,
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two luminous revelations are in one day made of cause and effect.
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Says the eminent Rev. President of the National Bible Institute:
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"... because the Bible has ceased to have authority either in the
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pulpit or in the pew. Decline in church attendance and decrease in
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church membership are almost invariably traceable to unbelief in
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the divine inspiration and authority of the Bible," -- Due to
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increasing knowledge of its true character, as herein revealed.
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(Herald-Tribune, May 26, 1930.) And the ghastly irony and joke of
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the whole huge bankruptcy of Faith is thus exposed by the egregious
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Pastor of a Brooklyn Baptist Flock, who images the Missionary
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"selling" the Faith to the benighted Heathen: "'I have a religion
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here that will do you poor heathen a lot of good. Of course it
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hasn't succeeded very well at home, but we are sure it will do you
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a lot of good.'" (Ibid.) It's just like God told the Jews: You
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shan't sell the dead carcasses found by the way to the Chosen; "but
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thou shalt give it unto the stranger that is in thy gates, that he
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may eat it; or thou mayst sell it unto an alien"! (Deut. xiv, 21.)
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So the dead cats of Faith are flung out of the sanctuary as unfit
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for the Knowing, but are peddled to the ignorant heathen for
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whatever the refuse may bring of clerical revenue.
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Like conditions exist in all priest-ridden lands. The Rt. Rev.
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Archbishop of Canterbury in his call for the decennial Lambeth
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Conference for 1930, at which over sixty of the Episcopal bishops
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of this country are to attend, sounds a fateful monition: "The new
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knowledge of the Bible and still more of the universe in which we
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live still confuses and bewilders the beliefs of many of our clergy
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and people. There are tendencies in the life of our Church which
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suggest the prevalence of forms of belief ... which almost exclude
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belief in God the Father and God the Holy Spirit." (Herald-Tribune,
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March 12, 1930.) Wails the Rev. Pyke to the annual Assembly of the
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National Council of Evangelical Churches of England: "A large part
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of England has lapsed into semi-heathenism; ... our half-filled
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churches." (Herald-Tribune, April 20, 1930.) Such creed-searchings
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and churchly lamentations over their moribund condition may be
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multiplied into volumes.
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Some potent cure thus seems to be at work. This curative
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specific is simply increasing popular knowledge: "Know the truth
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and the truth shall make you free," is the Golden Recipe for the
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religious disorder. What Cicero said of the Pythian Oracles may as
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truly be applied to every form of priestcraft: "When men began to
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be less credulous, their power vanished."
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Day by day, as knowledge increaseth and spreads amongst the
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people in the pews as well as among the parsons, does it become
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more difficult and embarrassing for the pulpiteers to "put over"
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their tales of myth and magic to the hearers of the Word. Even the
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clergy are becoming awakened to the stinging truth aimed at priests
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and the priest-taught by Prof. Shotwell: "Where we can understand,
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it is a moral crime to cherish the ununderstood," and are beginning
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to feel the humiliation of their false Position. A noted clerical
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educator, Dr. Reinold Niebuhr, professor of Christian Ethics in
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that hotbed of every heresy, the Union Theological Seminary, in his
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textbook suggestively entitled 'Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed
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Cynic,' makes this confession of recognized Dishonesty in the mass
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BANK of WISDOM
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Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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5
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FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
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of clerical teaching and preaching: "As a teacher your only
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||
interest is to discover the truth. 'As a preacher you must conserve
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||
other interest besides the truth.' It is your business to deal
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||
circumspectly with the whole religious inheritance lest the virtues
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[?] which are involved in the older traditions perish through your
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iconoclasm. That is a formidable task and a harassing one; for one
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||
can never be quite sure where pedagogical caution ends AND
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DISHONESTY BEGINS"! (Quoted by Alva Johnston in N.Y. Herald-
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Tribune, March 8, 1930.)
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The great Church Father, Bishop St. Augustine (of whom more
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||
hereafter), was wise to the psychology of -- at least -- Pagan
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||
religion -- the mode of its incipience and the manner of its age-
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long persistence. The priests and the priest-taught, he tells,
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instilled the virus of superstition into their victims when "small
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and weak," when they knew not to resist or healthily to react
|
||
against the contaminating inoculation; "then, afterwards, it was
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||
necessary that succeeding generations should preserve the
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||
traditions of their ancestors, drinking in this superstition with
|
||
their mother's milk." (Augustine, City of God, xxii, 6.) Thinks one
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||
that this cunning modus operandi is confined only to Pagan
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priestcrafts and superstitions?
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||
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If, instead of the saintly Doctors of Hebrew-Christian
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||
Divinity, injecting their saving "opiate of the people" into the
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cradled babes of Christ, it were the abhorred Doctors of Mohammedan
|
||
or Mormon Divinity who got to the cradles first, -- those infant
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||
souls would all but surely be lost to the Christ, and in their
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||
God's tender mercy, as assured by the sainted Augustine, would
|
||
spend eternity crawling on the candent floors of Hell, playing with
|
||
the "worm that never dies": hardly from the cradle to the grave
|
||
could all the Christian purges for Sin and pills for Salvation of
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||
Soul, later administered, serve for effective catharsis of the
|
||
venom of those Christianly-hated "superstitions, drunk in with
|
||
their mother's milk."
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||
|
||
This truth is strikingly stated in an eloquent period by
|
||
Ingersoll, and stunningly confirmed and confessed by the syndicated
|
||
Prophet of Protestantism below to be quoted. The former opens his
|
||
classic Why I Am an Agnostic, with these trenchant words:
|
||
|
||
"For the most part we inherit our opinions. We are the heirs
|
||
of habits and mental customs. Our beliefs, like the fashions of our
|
||
garments, depend on where we were born. We are molded and fashioned
|
||
by our surroundings. Environment is a sculptor -- a painter.
|
||
|
||
"If we had been born in Constantinople, the most of us would
|
||
have said: 'There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his
|
||
prophet.' If our parents had lived on the banks of the Ganges, we
|
||
would have been worshippers of Siva, longing for the heaven of
|
||
Nirvana.
|
||
|
||
"As a rule, children love their parents, believe what they
|
||
teach, and take great pride in saying that the religion of mother
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||
is good enough for them. ...
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||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
BANK of WISDOM
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
6
|
||
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
|
||
"The Scotch are Calvinists because their fathers were. The
|
||
Irish are Catholics because their fathers were. The English are
|
||
Episcopalians because their fathers were, and the Americans are
|
||
divided into a hundred sects because their fathers were. ...
|
||
Children are sometimes superior to their parents, modify their
|
||
ideas, change their customs, and arrive at different conclusions."
|
||
|
||
The truth thus uttered by the great Agnostic finds its
|
||
confirmation curiously wrung from the lips of the Bellwether of
|
||
would-be "reconciliationists" of primitive Superstition and modern
|
||
Science. In a metropolitan newspaper carrying his syndicated "Daily
|
||
Counsel" to the lovelorn and the misty-minded, a Virginia Believer
|
||
puts to him challengingly the question direct: "Do you mean to
|
||
imply that belief is largely a matter of environment, and if so,
|
||
would you not have been as firm a follower of Mahomet as you are of
|
||
Christ if you had been born of Mahometan parentage and brought up
|
||
in that faith?" For once there was no chance for Conmanian
|
||
suppleness of evasion, so the blunt and confusing truth is forced:
|
||
Yes! "It is fairly certain that, had I been cradled in Mohametans
|
||
[sic] I should now have been turning toward Mecca at the appointed
|
||
hours"! (N.Y. Herald-Tribune, Oct. 29, 1929.) Thus the champion
|
||
special pleader for the fast fading faith of Christ confesses away
|
||
the divinely self-evident "truth" of his Christian faith, admits
|
||
that it is the result not of independent thought and convincing
|
||
proofs to his mind, but the inheritance of the cradle and the
|
||
nursery, -- that that towering intellect would today be bearing
|
||
witness to the "revealed truth" of a false God and religion, if he
|
||
had chanced to be "born that way"! Allah would to him -- and to
|
||
millions -- be true and living God and Jehovah a crude barbarian
|
||
myth, but for the accident of birth and teaching, -- a reversal of
|
||
the whole scheme of salvation! Thus the Cradle determines the
|
||
Creed; it is the virus of the superstition-germ first injected
|
||
which infects the credulity-center of the brain and colors too-oft
|
||
through life the whole concept of "religious truth" in the mind of
|
||
the patient.
|
||
|
||
The psychology of the priestly maxim -- "Disce primum quod
|
||
credendum est -- Learn first what is to be believed," and the
|
||
persistent virulence of the virus thus injected, is aptly signified
|
||
by the Rev. Wenner, 83-year old Bellwether of Lutheranism in
|
||
America, and for 61 years pastor of one of its oldest sheep-folds
|
||
in New York City: "I do not think that time has produced many
|
||
changes in the attitude of Lutheran worshippers, -- because of the
|
||
stable nature of the religious education we give the youth of our
|
||
sect. From the age of six onward we instruct them in the tenets of
|
||
our faith, and they usually abide." (N.Y. Herald-Tribune, Oct. 10,
|
||
1929.)
|
||
|
||
The predilect precept of the Doctors of every brand of
|
||
Divinely forever is: "Catch 'em in the cradle, and get 'em
|
||
inoculated before they know." In the bib and rattle period, the
|
||
childish brain is a soft, clean surface, "soft as wax to be molded
|
||
into vice," as His Holiness says: helpless it receives and retains
|
||
whatever is first impressed or imposed upon it: true religion or
|
||
false, Christ or Crishna or Santa Claus, Holy Ghost or the ghosts
|
||
of Afric superstition. "Give us a child until it is seven, and
|
||
we've got it cinched for life," is the ghoulish axiom of all the
|
||
|
||
|
||
BANK of WISDOM
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
7
|
||
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
|
||
Faiths: "Suffer little children to come unto me, for of such is the
|
||
Kingdom of Heaven," -- as of the heathen Nirvana. How godly a work
|
||
is it to sear the thoughtless child mind with the brand of Faith;
|
||
how infamous and damnable to offer to the "immature" and inept
|
||
youth in college freedom from the stigma of credulity! How crude
|
||
and cruel for the Chinese to bind and cripple for life the feet of
|
||
their girl children; how fiendish the custom of sundry savage
|
||
tribes, ignorant of the "Light of the World," to clamp the infant
|
||
heads between boards so as to produce the hideous deformity of
|
||
skull so aesthetically popular among them; but how pleasing to gods
|
||
and priests to fetter the child mind in the bonds of Faith, and so
|
||
to dwarf and deaden the mind's most precious faculty -- Reason! "To
|
||
succeed," eloquently said Ingersoll, "the theologians invade the
|
||
cradle, the nursery. In the brain of innocence they plant the seeds
|
||
of superstition. They pollute the minds and imaginations of
|
||
children. They frighten the happy with threats of pain -- they
|
||
soothe the wretched with gilded lies. ... All of these comforting
|
||
and reasonable things are taught by the ministers in their pulpits
|
||
-- by teachers in Sunday schools and by parents at home. The
|
||
children are victims. They are assaulted in the cradle -- in their
|
||
mother's arms. Then, the school-master carries on the war against
|
||
their natural sense, and all the books they read are filled with
|
||
the same impossible truths. The poor children are helpless. The
|
||
atmosphere they breathe is filled with lies -- lies that mingled
|
||
with their blood." This unholy cradle-robbing goes on with vehement
|
||
zest. The Churches, the Federal Council of Churches, the Vicar of
|
||
God and his adjutants, all ply amain the arts of enslaving the babe
|
||
in the cradle, the child in the school. In the Encyclical of
|
||
December 31, 1929, the right of the Church to the child is
|
||
proclaimed as above that of parents and State; the secular public
|
||
schools are damned, and the prole of the Faithful are forbidden to
|
||
attend and mingle with the "irreligious" State pupils: "the
|
||
frequenting of non-Catholic schools, namely, those which are open
|
||
to Catholic and non-Catholic alike, is forbidden to Catholic
|
||
children," as such a school is not "a fit place for Catholic
|
||
students," who must be baited with "the supernatural." (Current
|
||
History, March 1930, p. 1091, passim.) Yet the banned and cursed
|
||
Public Schools of New York City, forbidden to the Faithful child,
|
||
the ecclesiastical' City government fills with Faithful teachers
|
||
for the purpose of "boot-legging" the forbidden supernaturalism
|
||
into them; a work so wide-spread and active, that the Cardinal
|
||
Archbishop of the City, addressing over 2000 of the Catholic
|
||
Teachers Association, "praises their work of teaching faith in City
|
||
Institutions." (N.Y. Times, Nov. 25, 1928.) And every rationalist
|
||
effort to counteract such illegal propaganda and to free the
|
||
schools from the pernicious influences of superstition, is
|
||
denounced and opposed by the Bible bootleggers of every brand of
|
||
Faith; and in the brave instance of Russia, a medieval orgy of
|
||
prayer-assault on High Heaven is made, to counsel God what he ought
|
||
to do to the Russians for their "godless" efforts to save the
|
||
children of that Church-cursed land from the superstitions of
|
||
priestcraft.
|
||
|
||
In an ironical letter to the English press, in which he
|
||
"enters the lists against the British critics of Moscow's anti-
|
||
clerical policy," George Bernard Shaw, writing under a transparent
|
||
Russian pseudonym, says: "In Russia we take religious questions
|
||
|
||
|
||
BANK of WISDOM
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
8
|
||
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
|
||
very seriously. We protect our children very carefully against
|
||
proselytizers of our fantastic sects until they are old enough to
|
||
make up their own minds. To us, it is inconceivable that a
|
||
government would tolerate the inculcation upon helpless children of
|
||
beliefs that will not stand the most strenuous scientific
|
||
examination or in which the teachers themselves do not honestly
|
||
believe. ... We cannot understand why the so-called Articles of
|
||
Religion, which have been described. by one of the most learned and
|
||
intellectually gifted of your churchmen as capable of being
|
||
professed only by 'fools, bigots or liars,' are deliberately taught
|
||
as divine truths in your schools. ... Russia is setting an example
|
||
of intellectual and moral integrity to the whole world, while
|
||
England is filling its temples with traders, persecuting its
|
||
clergy, and bringing up children to be scoffers to whom religion
|
||
means nothing but hypocrisy and humbug." (Herald-Tribune, April 7,
|
||
1930.)
|
||
|
||
Thus the Church enchains the Reason. The proudest boast today
|
||
of the Church for its ex-Pagan Saint Augustine, is that: "as soon
|
||
as a contradiction -- [between his "philosophy" and his religious
|
||
doctrines] -- arises, he never hesitates to subordinate his
|
||
philosophy to religion, reason to faith"! (Cath. Encyc. ii, 86.) So
|
||
this great ex-Pagan Saint of the Church surrenders his reason to
|
||
faith, and avers: "I would not believe the Gospels to be true,
|
||
unless the authority of the Catholic Church constrained me"!
|
||
(Augustine, De Genesi.)
|
||
|
||
Ingersoll, in one of his glowing, devastating periods of
|
||
oratory, said: "Somebody ought to tell the truth about the Bible!"
|
||
That I have already essayed quite comprehensively to do. In my
|
||
recent work, Is It God's Word? (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York,
|
||
1926, 2nd and 3rd Editions), I devote some five hundred pages to
|
||
"An Exposition of the Fables and Mythology of the Bible and of the
|
||
Impostures of Theology," as my thesis is defined in my sub-title.
|
||
"A farrago of palpable nonsense," in the words of the Dean of
|
||
American critics, is about all that remains of Holy Writ as the
|
||
pretended "Word of God," as the result of that searching analysis.
|
||
|
||
That study was limited, in most part, to the sacred texts for
|
||
the internal evidences, which themselves so abundantly afford, of
|
||
their own falsity and primitive-minded fatuity. On the other phase
|
||
of inquiry I there limited myself to the suggestive remark: "The
|
||
gospels are all priestly forgeries over a century after their
|
||
pretended dates" (p. 279; cf. p. 400), purposing then to complement
|
||
the work by this sequel or companion volume, treating the frauds
|
||
and forgeries of religion and the Church.
|
||
|
||
Taking up now more particularly the second phase of my
|
||
subject, I here propose to treat of the inveterate forgeries,
|
||
frauds, impostures, and mendacities of Priestcraft and its
|
||
Theology. I shall be explicit and plain spoken, and unmistakably
|
||
state my purpose and my proofs. For nearly two thousand years the
|
||
priestcraft of Christendom, for purposes of domination by fear and
|
||
greedy exploitation through imposture upon credulity, has consigned
|
||
to earthly fire and sword, and to eternal damnation all who dared
|
||
to dissent or to protest; the priestly word "miscreant,"
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
BANK of WISDOM
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
9
|
||
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
|
||
misbeliever, has become the synonym for everything foul and
|
||
criminal in human nature. The day of reckoning and of repudiation
|
||
is at hand; Priestcraft has here its destroying answer, in very
|
||
plain and unafraid words.
|
||
|
||
This book is a grave indictment, impossible to be made or to
|
||
be credited unless supported at every point by incontrovertible
|
||
facts. These I promise to produce and array in due and devastating
|
||
order.
|
||
|
||
THE INDICTMENT
|
||
|
||
I charge, and purpose to prove, from unimpeachable texts and
|
||
historical records, and by authoritative clerical confessions,
|
||
beyond the possibility of denial, evasion, or refutation:
|
||
|
||
1. That the Bible, in its every Book, and in the strictest
|
||
legal and moral sense, is a huge forgery.
|
||
|
||
2. That every Book of the New Testament is a forgery of the
|
||
Christian Church; and every significant passage in those Books, on
|
||
which the fabric of the Church and its principal Dogmas are
|
||
founded, is a further and conscious later forgery, wrought with
|
||
definite fraudulent intent.
|
||
|
||
3. Especially, and specifically, that the "famous Petrine
|
||
text" -- "Upon this Rock I will build my church" -- the cornerstone
|
||
of the gigantic fabric of imposture, -- and the other, "Go, teach
|
||
all nations," -- were never uttered by the Jew Jesus, but are
|
||
palpable and easily proven late Church forgeries.
|
||
|
||
4. That the Christian Church, from its inception in the first
|
||
little Jewish-Christian religious societies until it reached the
|
||
apex of its temporal glory and moral degradation, was a vast and
|
||
tireless Forgery-mill.
|
||
|
||
5. That the Church was founded upon, and through the Dark Ages
|
||
of Faith has battened on -- (yet languishes decadently upon) --
|
||
monumental and petty forgeries and pious frauds, possible only
|
||
because of its own shameless mendacity and through the crass
|
||
ignorance and superstition of the sodden masses of its deluded
|
||
votaries, purposely kept in that base condition for purposes of
|
||
ecclesiastical graft and aggrandizement through conscious and most
|
||
unconscionable imposture.
|
||
|
||
6. That every conceivable form of religious lie, fraud and
|
||
imposture has ever been the work of Priests; and through all the
|
||
history of the Christian Church, as through all human history, has
|
||
been -- and, so far as they have not been shamed out of it by
|
||
skeptical ridicule and exposure, yet is, the age-long stock in
|
||
trade and sole means of existence of the priests and ministers of
|
||
all the religions.
|
||
|
||
7. That the clerical mind, which "reasons in chains," is, from
|
||
its vicious and vacuous "education," and the special selfish
|
||
interests of the priestly class, incapable either of the perception
|
||
or the utterance of truth, in matters where the interests of
|
||
priestcraft are concerned.
|
||
|
||
BANK of WISDOM
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
10
|
||
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
|
||
As the Catholic-Protestant-Skeptic Bayle, of seventeenth
|
||
century fame, said: "I am most truly a Protestant; for I protest
|
||
indifferently against all systems and all sects" of religious
|
||
imposture.
|
||
|
||
My accusal, therefore, is not limited in purpose, scope or
|
||
effect to any one Church or sect, but is aimed alike at all of the
|
||
discordant factions of ancient Jewish and more modern Christian
|
||
faith. For, as has been well said, "Faith is not knowledge, no more
|
||
than that three is four, but eminently contained in it; so that he
|
||
that knows, believes, and something more; but he that believes many
|
||
times does not know -- nay, if he doth barely and merely believe,
|
||
he doth never know." The same critical cleric at another place
|
||
said: "Still less was it ever intended that men should so
|
||
prostitute their reason, as to believe with infallible faith what
|
||
they are unable to prove with infallible arguments."
|
||
(Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, pp. 66, 412.) With
|
||
infallible facts I purpose to blast the false pretenses of Priest-
|
||
forged Faith.
|
||
|
||
It is matter of fact, that for some 1500 years of this Era
|
||
there was but one "True Church" of Christ; and that Church claims
|
||
with conscious pride the origin and authorship of all the New
|
||
Testament Books, out of its own Holy bosom, by its own canonized
|
||
Saints. The New Testament Books are, therefore, distinctively
|
||
Catholic documents. That Church, therefore, -- if these its
|
||
credentials and documents are forgeries, -- as from its own records
|
||
I shall prove -- itself forged all the Books of the New Testament
|
||
and all the documents of religious dogma and propaganda the forgery
|
||
of which shall be proved in this book, and did itself perpetrate
|
||
all the pious frauds herein revealed, and is their chief
|
||
beneficiary. All the other Christian sects, however, are sprung or
|
||
severed from the original One True Church; -- "all other forms of
|
||
the Christian religion . . . originated by secession from the True
|
||
Church, ... and their founders ... were externally members of the
|
||
Church." (CE. vii, 367.) All these Protestant sects, therefore,
|
||
with full knowledge of the guilty facts and partakers in the
|
||
frauds, found their claim to Divinity -- and priestly emoluments --
|
||
upon and through those tainted titles, and thus yet fully share the
|
||
guilt as accomplices after the fact. The "Reformed" Sects, on
|
||
breaking away from the old Monopoly of Forgery, appropriated the
|
||
least clumsy and more plausible of the pious Counterfeit of
|
||
Christianity, and for the centuries since have industriously and
|
||
knowingly been engaged in passing the stolen counterfeit upon their
|
||
own unsuspecting flocks; they are therefore equally guilty with the
|
||
original Forgers of the Faith.
|
||
|
||
OUTLINE OF CASE AND PROOFS
|
||
|
||
The proofs of my indictment are marvelously easy. They are to
|
||
be found in amplest retore of history and accredited ecclesiastic
|
||
authorities, and in abounding incautious admissions made by the
|
||
Recredited spokesmen of the Accused: upon these I shall freely and
|
||
fully draw for complete proofs of my every specification. These
|
||
damning things of the Church, scattered through many clerical
|
||
volumes and concealed in many archives, are not well known to the
|
||
pious or preoccupied layman. My task is simply to bring together
|
||
|
||
|
||
BANK of WISDOM
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
11
|
||
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
|
||
the documentary proofs and expose them before the astonished eves
|
||
of the modern reader; that is the prime merit of my work. To
|
||
accomplish this purpose with unimpeachable certitude, I need and
|
||
make no apology for the liberal use of quotation marks in
|
||
presenting the ensuing startling array of accusations and
|
||
confessions; to be followed by the plenary proofs.
|
||
|
||
As in the judicial process, I shall, before proceeding to the
|
||
concrete proofs, define first the crime charged, and outline the
|
||
scope of the evidence to be presented. I shall first make a prima
|
||
facie justification of the charges, by citing a few generalities of
|
||
confession of guilt, with corroborations by weighty supporting
|
||
authorities, and thus create the proper "atmosphere" for the
|
||
appreciation of the facts. Then shall come the shaming proofs in
|
||
astounding detail.
|
||
|
||
FORGERY DEFINED
|
||
|
||
Forgery, in legal and moral sense, is the utterance or
|
||
publication, with intent to deceive or defraud, or to gain some
|
||
advantage, of a false document, put out by one person in the name
|
||
of and as the genuine work of another, who did not execute it, or
|
||
the subsequent alteration of a genuine document by one who did not
|
||
execute the original. This species of falsification extends alike
|
||
to all classes of writings, promissory notes, the coin or currency
|
||
of the realm, to any legal or private document, or to a book. All
|
||
are counterfeit or forged if not authentic and untampered.
|
||
|
||
A definition by a high ecclesiastical authority may
|
||
appropriately be cited, as it thoroughly defines the chronic
|
||
clerical crime. The Catholic Encyclopedia thus defines the crime:
|
||
|
||
"Forgery (Lat. falsum) differs very slightly from fraud. It
|
||
consists in the deliberate untruthfulness of an assertion, or in
|
||
the deceitful presentation of an object, and is based on an
|
||
intention to deceive and to injure while using the externals of
|
||
honesty. Forgery is truly a falsehood and is a fraud, but it is
|
||
something more. ... A category consists in making use of such
|
||
forgery, and is equivalent to forgery proper. ... The Canonical
|
||
legislation [dealt principally with] the production of absolutely
|
||
false documents and the alteration of authentic ... for the sake of
|
||
certain advantages. ...
|
||
|
||
"Canon law connects forgery and the use of forged documents,
|
||
on the presumption that he who would make use of such documents
|
||
must be either the author or instigator of the forgery. In canon
|
||
law forgery consists not only in the fabrication or substitution of
|
||
an entirely false document, but even by partial substitution, or by
|
||
any alteration affecting the sense and bearing of an authentic
|
||
document or any substantial point, such as names, dates, signature,
|
||
seal, favor granted, by erasure, by scratching out or writing one
|
||
word over another, and the like." (Catholic Encyclopedia, vi, 135,
|
||
136.)
|
||
|
||
Under every phase and phrase of this its own clerics legal
|
||
definition, the Church is guilty, -- is most guilty.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
BANK of WISDOM
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
12
|
||
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
|
||
A "beginning of miracles" of confession of ecclesiastical
|
||
guilt of forgery of Church documents is made in the same above
|
||
article by the Encyclopedia, -- very many others will follow in due
|
||
course from the same source:
|
||
|
||
"Substitution of false documents and tampering with genuine
|
||
ones was quite a trade in the Middle Ages. Innocent III (1198)
|
||
points out nine species of forgery [of ecclesiastical records]
|
||
which had come under his notice." (CE. vi, 136.)
|
||
|
||
But such frauds of the Church were not confined to the Middle
|
||
Ages; they begin even with the beginning of the Church and infest
|
||
every period of its history for fifteen hundred years and defile
|
||
nearly every document, both of "Scriptures" and of Church
|
||
aggrandizement. As truly said by Collins, in his celebrated
|
||
Discourse of Free Thinking:
|
||
|
||
"In short, these frauds are very common in all books which are
|
||
published by priests or priestly men. ... For it is certain they
|
||
may plead the authority of the Fathers for Forgery, Corruption and
|
||
mangling of Authors, with more reason than for any of their
|
||
Articles of Faith." (p. 96.)
|
||
|
||
Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, the great "Father of Church
|
||
History" (324 A.D.) whom Niebuhr terms "a very dishonest writer,"
|
||
-- of which we shall see many notable instances, -- says this: "But
|
||
it is not our place to describe the sad misfortunes which finally
|
||
came upon [the Christians], as we do not think it proper, moreover,
|
||
to, record their divisions and unnatural conduct to each other
|
||
before the persecution -- [by Diocletian, 305 A.D.]. Wherefore we
|
||
have decided to relate nothing concerning them except things in
|
||
which we can vindicate the Divine judgment. ... But we shall
|
||
introduce into this history in general only those events which may
|
||
be useful first to ourselves and afterwards to posterity."
|
||
(Ecclesiastical History, viii, 2; N&PNF. i, 323-324.)
|
||
|
||
Eusebius himself fraudulently "subscribed to the [Trinitarian]
|
||
Creed formed by the Council of Nicra, but making no secret, in the
|
||
letter which he wrote to his own Church, of the non-natural sense
|
||
in which he accepted it." (Cath. Encyc. v, 619.) As St. Jerome
|
||
says, "Eusebius is the most open champion of the Arian heresy,"
|
||
which denies the Trinity. (Jerome, Epist. 84, 2; N&PNF. vi, 176.)
|
||
Bishop Eusebius, as we shall see, was one of the most prolific
|
||
forgers and liars of his age of the Church, and a great romancer;
|
||
in his hair-raising histories of the holy Martyrs, he assures us
|
||
"that on some occasions the bodies of the martyrs who had been
|
||
devoured by wild beasts, upon the beasts being strangled, were
|
||
found alive in their stomachs, even after having been fully
|
||
digested"! (quoted, Gibbon, History, Ch. 37; Lardner, iv, p. 91;
|
||
Diegesis, p. 272). To such an extent had the "pious frauds of the
|
||
theologians been thus early systematized and raised to the dignity
|
||
of a regular doctrine," that Bishop Eusebius, "in one of the most
|
||
learned and elaborate works that antiquity has left us, the Thirty-
|
||
second Chapter of the Twelfth Book of his Evangelical Preparation,
|
||
bears for its title this scandalous proposition: 'How it may be
|
||
Lawful and Fitting to use Falsehood as a Medicine, and for the
|
||
Benefit of those who Want to be Deceived'" -- (quoting the Greek
|
||
title; Gibbon, Vindication, p. 76).
|
||
|
||
BANK of WISDOM
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
13
|
||
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
|
||
St. John Chrysostom, the "'Golden Mouthed," in his work 'On
|
||
the Priesthood,' has a curious panegyric on the clerical habit of
|
||
telling lies -- "Great is the force of deceit! provided it is not
|
||
excited by a treacherous intention."' (Comm. on I Cor. ix, 19;
|
||
Diegesis, p. 309.) Chrysostom was one of the Greek Fathers of the
|
||
Church, concerning whom Dr. (later Cardinal) Newman thus
|
||
apologetically spoke: "The Greek Fathers thought that, when there
|
||
was a justa causa, an untruth need not be a lie. ... Now, as to the
|
||
just cause, ... the Greek Fathers make them such as these self-
|
||
defense, charity, zeal for God's honor, and the like." (Newman,
|
||
Apology for His Life, Appendix G, p. 345-6.) He says nothing of his
|
||
favorites, the Latin Fathers; but we shall hear them described, and
|
||
amply see them at work lying in their zeal for God's honor, and to
|
||
their own dishonor.
|
||
|
||
The Great Latin Father St. Jerome (c. 340-420), who made the
|
||
celebrated Vulgate Version of the Bible, and wrote books of the
|
||
most marvelous Saint-tales and martyr-yarns, thus describes the
|
||
approved methods of Christian propaganda, of the Fathers, Greek and
|
||
Latin alike, against the Pagans:
|
||
|
||
"To confute the opposer, now this argument is adduced and now
|
||
that. One argues as one pleases, saying one thing while one means
|
||
another. ... Origen, Methodius, Eusebius, and Apollinaris write at
|
||
great length against Celsus and Porphyry. Consider how subtle are
|
||
the arguments, how insidious the engines with which they overthrow
|
||
what the spirit of the devil has wrought. Sometimes, it is true,
|
||
they are compelled to say not what they think but what is needful.
|
||
...
|
||
|
||
"I say nothing of the Latin authors, of Tertullian, Cyprian,
|
||
Minutius, Victorianus, Lactantius, Hilary, lest I should appear not
|
||
so much to be defending myself as to be assailing others. I will
|
||
only mention the APOSTLE PAUL. ... He, then, if anyone, ought to be
|
||
calumniated; we should speak thus to him: 'The proofs which you
|
||
have used against the Jews and against other heretics bear a
|
||
different meaning in their own contexts to that which they bear in
|
||
your Epistles. We see passages taken captive by your pen and
|
||
pressed into service to win you a victory, which in volumes from
|
||
which they are taken have no controversial bearing at all ... the
|
||
line so often adopted by strong men in controversy -- of justifying
|
||
the means by the result." (Jerome, Epist. to Pammachus, xlviii, 13;
|
||
N&PNF. vi, 72-73; See post, p. 230.)
|
||
|
||
Of Eusebius and the others he again says, that they "presume
|
||
at the price of their soul to assert dogmatically whatever first
|
||
comes into their head." (Jerome, Epist. li, 7; id. p. 88.) And
|
||
again, of the incentive offered by the gullible ignorance of the
|
||
Faithful, for the glib mendacities of the priests: "There is
|
||
nothing so easy as by sheer volubility to deceive a common crowd or
|
||
an uneducated congregation." (Epist. lii, 8; p. 93.) Father
|
||
Jerome's own high regard for truth and his zeal in propaganda of
|
||
fables for edification of the ignorant ex-pagan Christians is
|
||
illustrated in numberless instances. He tells us of the river
|
||
Ganges in India, which "has its source in Paradise"; that in India
|
||
"are also mountains of gold, which however men cannot approach by
|
||
reason of the griffins, dragons, and huge monsters which haunt
|
||
|
||
|
||
BANK of WISDOM
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
14
|
||
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
|
||
them; for such are the guardians which avarice needs for its
|
||
treasures." (Epist. cxxv, 6; N&PNF. vi, 245.) He reaches the climax
|
||
in his famous Lives of sundry Saints. He relates with all fervor
|
||
the marvelous experiences of the "blessed hermit Paulus," who was
|
||
113 years of age, and for sixty years had lived in a hole in the
|
||
ground in the remotest recesses of the desert; his nearest neighbor
|
||
was St. Anthony, who was only ninety and lived in another hole four
|
||
days' journey away. The existence and whereabouts of Paulus being
|
||
revealed to Anthony in a vision, he set out afoot to visit the holy
|
||
Paulus. On the way, "all at once he beholds a creature of mingled
|
||
shape, half horse half man, called by the poets Hippo-centaur,"
|
||
with whom be holds friendly converse. Later "he sees a mannikin
|
||
with hooked snout, horned forehead, and extremities like goat's
|
||
feet," this being one of the desert tribe "whom the Gentiles
|
||
worship under the names of Fauns, Satyrs, and Incubi," and whose
|
||
strange, language Anthony was rejoiced to find that he could
|
||
understand, as they reasoned together about the salvation of the
|
||
Lord. "Let no one scruple to believe this incident," pleads Father
|
||
Jerome'; "its truth is supported by" one of these creatures that,
|
||
was captured and brought alive to Alexandria and sent embalmed to
|
||
the emperor at Antioch. Finally holy Anthony reached the retreat of
|
||
the blessed Paulus, and was welcomed. As they talked, a raven flew
|
||
down and laid a whole loaf of bread at their feet. "Sec," said
|
||
Paulus, "the Lord truly loving, truly merciful, has sent us a meal.
|
||
For the last sixty years I have always received half a loaf; but at
|
||
your coming the Lord has doubled his soldier's rations." During the
|
||
visit Paulus died; Anthony "saw Paulus in robes of snowy white
|
||
ascending on high among a band of angels, and the choirs of
|
||
prophets and apostles." Anthony dragged the body out to bury it,
|
||
but was without means to dig a grave; as he was lamenting this
|
||
unhappy circumstance, "behold, two lions from the recesses of the
|
||
desert with manes flying on their necks came rushing along; they
|
||
came straight to the corpse of the blessed old man," fawned on it,
|
||
roared in mourning, then with their paws dug a grave just wide and
|
||
deep enough to bold the corpse; came over and licked the hands and
|
||
feet of Anthony, and ambled away. (Jerome, Life of Paulus the First
|
||
Hermit, N&PNF. vi, 299 seq.)
|
||
|
||
So gross and prevalent was the clerical habit of pious lies
|
||
and pretenses "to the glory of God," that St. Augustine, about 395
|
||
A.D., wrote a reproving treatise to the Clergy, De Mendacio (On
|
||
Lying), which he found necessary to supplement in 420 with another
|
||
book, Contra Mendacium (Against Lying). This work, says Bishop
|
||
Wordsworth, "is a protest against these 'pious frauds' which have
|
||
brought discredit and damage on the cause of the Gospel, and have
|
||
created prejudice against it, from the days of Augustine to our own
|
||
times." (A Church History, iv, 93, 94.) While Augustine disapproves
|
||
of downright lying even to trap heretics, -- a practice seemingly
|
||
much in vogue among the good Christians: "It is more pernicious for
|
||
Catholics to lie that they may catch heretics, than for heretics to
|
||
lie that they may not be found out by Catholics" (Against Lying,
|
||
ch. 5; N&PNF. iii, 483); yet this Saint heartily approves and
|
||
argues in support of the chronic clerical characteristics of
|
||
suppressio veri, of suppression or concealment of the truth for the
|
||
sake of Christian "edification," a device for the encouragement of
|
||
credulity among the Faithful which has run riot through the
|
||
centuries and flourishes today among the priests and the ignorant
|
||
|
||
|
||
BANK of WISDOM
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
15
|
||
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
|
||
pious: "It is lawful, then, either to him that discourses,
|
||
disputes, and preaches of things eternal, or to him that narrates
|
||
or speaks of things temporal pertaining to edification of religion
|
||
or piety, to conceal at fitting times whatever seems fit to be
|
||
concealed; but to tell a lie is never lawful, therefore neither to
|
||
conceal by telling a lie." (Augustine, On Lying, ch. 19; N&PNF.
|
||
iii, 466.) The great Bishop did not, however, it seems, read his
|
||
own code when it came to preaching unto edification, for in one of
|
||
his own sermons he thus relates a very notable experience: "I was
|
||
already Bishop of Hippo, when I went into Ethiopia with some
|
||
servants of Christ there to preach the Gospel. In this country we
|
||
saw many men and women without heads, who had two great eyes in
|
||
their breasts; and in countries still more southly, we saw people
|
||
who had but one eye in their foreheads." (Augustine, Sermon 37;
|
||
quoted in Taylor, Syntagma, p. 52; Diegesis, p. 271; Doane, Bible
|
||
Myths, p. 437.) To the mind's eye the wonderful spectacle is
|
||
represented, as the great Saint preached the word of God to these
|
||
accphalous faithful: we see the whole congregation of devout and
|
||
intelligent Christians, without heads, watching attentively without
|
||
eyes, listening intently without ears, and understanding perfectly
|
||
without brains, the spirited and spiritual harangue of the eloquent
|
||
and veracious St. Augustine. And every hearer of the Sermon in
|
||
which he told about it, believed in furness of faith and infantile
|
||
credulity every word of the noble Bishop of Hippo, giving thanks to
|
||
God that the words of life and salvation had been by him carried to
|
||
so remarkable a tribe of God's curious children.
|
||
|
||
Pope Gregory the Great (590-604), in one momentary lapse in
|
||
his own arduous labors of propagating "lies to the glory of God,"
|
||
made the pious gesture, "God does not need our lies"; but His
|
||
Church evidently did, for the pious work went lyingly on; a work
|
||
given immense impetus by His Holiness Gregory himself, in his
|
||
mendacious Dialogues and other papal output, -- with little
|
||
abatement unto this day.
|
||
|
||
A further admission of the inveteracy of ecclesiastical
|
||
forgery and fraud may be cited from the Catholic Encyclopedia.
|
||
Speaking deprecatingly of the "incredible liberty of discussion"
|
||
which to the shock and scandal of the pious prelates "prevailed in
|
||
Rome under the spell of the Renaissance," -- when men's minds were
|
||
beginning to awaken from the intellectual and moral stupor of the
|
||
Dark Ages of Faith, the Catholic thesaurus of archaic superstition
|
||
and "Catholic Truth," admits:
|
||
|
||
"This toleration of evil [sic; i.e.: -- the free discussion of
|
||
Church doctrines and documents] -- bore one good consequence: it
|
||
allowed historical criticism to begin fair. There was need for a
|
||
revision which is not yet complete, ranging over all that has been
|
||
handed down from the Middle Ages under the style and title of the
|
||
Fathers, the Councils, the Roman and other official, archives. In
|
||
all these departments forgery and interpolations as well as
|
||
ignorance had wrought mischief on a great scale." (CE. xii, 768.)
|
||
|
||
To these preliminary confessions of the guilty Church may be
|
||
added the corroborating testimony of several eminently accredited
|
||
historical authorities.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
BANK of WISDOM
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
16
|
||
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
|
||
Middleton, in his epochal Free Inquiry into the lying habits
|
||
and miracles of the Churchmen, says: "Many spurious books were
|
||
forged in the earliest times of the Church, in the name of Christ
|
||
and his apostles, which passed upon all the Fathers as genuine and
|
||
divine through several successive ages." (Middleton, Free Inquiry,
|
||
Int. Disc. p. xcii; London, 1749.)
|
||
|
||
The same author, whose book set England ringing with its
|
||
exposures of the lies and fraudulent miracles of the Church, makes
|
||
this acute and accurate summing up of his evidences:
|
||
|
||
"It will not appear strange to those who have given any
|
||
attention to the history of mankind, which will always suggest this
|
||
sad reflection:' That the greatest zealots in religion, or the
|
||
leaders of sects and parties, whatever purity or principles they
|
||
pretend to have seldom scrupled to make use of a commodious lie for
|
||
the advancement of what they, call the truth. And with regard to
|
||
these very Fathers, there is not one of them, as an eminent writer
|
||
of ecclesiastical history declares, who made any scruple in those
|
||
ages of using the hyperbolical style to advance the honor of God
|
||
and the salvation of men." (Free Inq. p. 83; citing Jo., Hist.
|
||
Eccles. p. 681.)
|
||
|
||
Lecky, the distinguished author of the History of European
|
||
Morals, devotes much research into what he describes as "the
|
||
deliberate and apparently perfectly unscrupulous forgery, of a
|
||
whole literature, destined to further the propagation either of
|
||
Christianity as a whole, or of some particular class of tenets."
|
||
(Lecky, Hist. of European Morals, vol. i, p. 375.)
|
||
|
||
In his very notable History of Rationalism speaking of that
|
||
Christian "epoch when faith and facts did not cultivate an
|
||
acquaintance," the same author, Lecky, thus describes the state of
|
||
intellectual and moral obliquity into which the Church had forced
|
||
even the ablest classes of society:
|
||
|
||
"During that gloomy period the only scholars in Europe were
|
||
priest and monks, who conscientiously believed that no amount of
|
||
falsehood was reprehensible which conduced to the edification of
|
||
the people. ... All their writings, and more especially their
|
||
histories, became tissues of the wildest fables, so grotesque and
|
||
at the same time so audacious, that they were the wonder of
|
||
succeeding ages, And the very men who scattered these fictions
|
||
broadcast over Christendom, taught at the same time that credulity
|
||
was a virtue and skepticism a crime." (Lecky, Hist. of Rationalism,
|
||
i, 896.)
|
||
|
||
In the same work last quoted, Lecky again, speaking of what he
|
||
terms "the pious frauds of theologians," which, he shows were
|
||
"systematized and raised to the dignity of a regular doctrine,"
|
||
says of the pious Fathers:
|
||
|
||
"The Fathers laid down as a distinct proposition that pious
|
||
frauds were justifiable and even laudable, and if they had not laid
|
||
this down they would nevertheless have practiced them as a
|
||
necessary consequence of their doctrine of exclusive salvation.
|
||
Immediately all ecclesiastical literature became tainted with a
|
||
|
||
|
||
BANK of WISDOM
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
17
|
||
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
|
||
spirit of the most unblushing mendacity. Heathenism was to be
|
||
combatted, and therefore prophecies of Christ by Orpheus and the
|
||
Sibyls -- were forged, lying wonders were multiplied. ... Heretics
|
||
were to be convinced, and therefore interpolations of old writings
|
||
or complete forgeries were habitually opposed to the forged
|
||
Gospels. ... The tendency ... triumphed wherever the supreme
|
||
importance of dogmas was held. Generation after generation it
|
||
became more universal; it continued till the very sense of truth
|
||
and the very love of truth seemed blotted out from the minds of
|
||
men." (Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, i, 396-7.)
|
||
|
||
There is thus disclosed a very sharp and shaming contrast
|
||
between the precept of the Lord Buddha: "Thou shalt not attempt,
|
||
either by words or action, to lead others to believe that which is
|
||
not true," and the confessed debasing principle of the Church, that
|
||
the maintenance of its creed -- (even by the methods of fraud,
|
||
forgery and imposture above hinted and to be evidenced) -- is
|
||
superior to the principles of morality:
|
||
|
||
"To undo the creed is to undo the Church. The integrity of the
|
||
rule of faith is more essential to the cohesion of a religious
|
||
society than the strict practice of its moral precepts"! (CE. vii,
|
||
259).
|
||
|
||
With its consciousness of the shifty and shady practices of
|
||
it's "sacred" profession, the Christian priestcraft differs not
|
||
from the Pagan in the sneer of Cicero: "Cato mirari se aiebat, quod
|
||
non rideret haruspex, cum haruspicem vidisset, -- Cato used to
|
||
wonder how one of our priests can forbear laughing when he sees
|
||
another." (Quoted Opera, Ed. Gron., p. 3806.) We shall see all too
|
||
well that the Pagan estimate holds good for the Christian; that, as
|
||
said by the "universal scholar" Grotius: "Ecclesiastical history
|
||
consists of nothing but the wickedness of the governing clergy, --
|
||
Qui legit historiam Ecclesiasticam, quid legit nisi Episcoporum
|
||
vicia?" (Epistolae, p. 7, col. 1).
|
||
|
||
The universality of the frauds and impostures of the Church,
|
||
above barely hinted at, and the contaminating influence of such
|
||
example, are by now sufficiently evident; they will be seen to
|
||
taint and corrupt every phase of the Church and of the
|
||
ecclesiastical propaganda of the Faith. As is well said by
|
||
Middleton in commenting on these and like pious practices of the
|
||
Holy Church: "And no man surely can doubt, but that those, who
|
||
would either forge, or make use of forged books, would, in the same
|
||
cause, and for the same ends, make use of forged miracles" (A Free
|
||
Inquiry, Introd. Discourse, p. lxxxvii); -- as well as of forged
|
||
Gospels, Epistles, Creeds, Saint-tales -- vast extensions of pious
|
||
frauds of which we shall see a plethora of examples.
|
||
|
||
The proofs here to be arrayed for conviction are drawn from
|
||
original sources, chiefly those inexhaustible mines of priestly
|
||
perversions of fact and truth, the labored and ludicrous volumes of
|
||
the "Fathers of the Church," and its most accredited modern
|
||
American spokesman, the Catholic Encyclopedia. Hence it cannot be
|
||
justly complained that this presentation of facts of Church history
|
||
is unfair or untrue; all but every fact of secular and of Church
|
||
history herein recounted to the shame and guilt of Holy Church is
|
||
|
||
|
||
BANK of WISDOM
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
18
|
||
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
|
||
taken verbatim from the Church's own histories and historians.
|
||
These clerical works of confession and confusion are for the most
|
||
part three ponderous sets of volumes; they are readily accessible
|
||
for verification of my recitals, and for further instances, in good
|
||
libraries and bookshops; 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-Niceite 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.
|
||
|
||
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.
|
||
|
||
The clerical confessions of lies and frauds in the ponderous
|
||
volumes of the Catholic Encyclopedia alone suffice, and to spare,
|
||
to wreck the Church and to destroy utterly the Christian religion.
|
||
We shall see.
|
||
|
||
RELIGIOUS LAWS OF OUTLAWRY
|
||
|
||
The land, the religious world, even today is ringing with the
|
||
furious din of religious intolerance, bigotry and persecution;
|
||
pestiferous medieval laws are imposed to stop the voice of Science
|
||
teaching truths which impugn the ignorant myths of Bible and
|
||
Theology. Tennessee and several States of the Union have passed
|
||
laws making criminal the teaching of scientific facts which
|
||
contradict "the story of the divine creation of man as taught in
|
||
the Bible," and like Hillbilly legislation is sought in all the
|
||
States. The True Church lays down this amazing limitation on
|
||
learning: "When a clearly defined dogma contradicts a scientific
|
||
assertion, the latter has to be revised,"! (CE. xiii, 607.) The
|
||
civilized portion of the world has just been shocked at the
|
||
potential judicial murder and outrage sanctioned by law in North
|
||
Carolina, as likewise in a number of other States, making outlaws
|
||
of honest persons who, as parties in interest or witnesses in
|
||
actions civil and criminal, refuse to take the ridiculous and
|
||
degrading Form of Oath "upon the Holy Evangelists of Almighty God,
|
||
in token of his engagement to speak the truth, as he hopes to be
|
||
saved in the way and method of salvation pointed out in that
|
||
blessed volume, and in further token that, if he should swerve from
|
||
the truth, he may be justly deprived of all the blessings of the
|
||
Gospel, and be made liable to that vengeance which he has
|
||
imprecated on his own head." (Consol. Stat. N.C., 1919, sec. 3189.)
|
||
|
||
BANK of WISDOM
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
19
|
||
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
|
||
Under this infamous statute, in the late so-called Gastonia,
|
||
N.C. murder trial, the wife of one of the defendants, who had
|
||
testified that her husband was not present and had no part in the
|
||
shooting, was challenged as a witness and impeached, her testimony
|
||
discredited, and her husband convicted for want of her evidently
|
||
candid testimony: but true or not, the principle of infamy is the
|
||
same -- a citizen on trial for his liberty was refused the benefit
|
||
of evidence under this damnable statute, and he and his wife made
|
||
outlaws -- refused "the equal protection of the law"! In Maryland,
|
||
later in the same year 1929, a chicken-thief, caught in the act of
|
||
robbery by the owner, was discharged in court because the owner of
|
||
the property, a Freethinker, was not permitted under the infamous
|
||
similar statute of that godly State to give testimony in court
|
||
against the criminal: the case would have been the same, if the
|
||
life or liberty of the Infidel citizen had been at stake, -- he was
|
||
an outlaw denied the "equal protection of the law"! The benighted
|
||
State of Arkansas -- ("Now laugh!") -- declares infamously in its
|
||
Constitution: "No person who denies the being of a God shall hold
|
||
any office in the civil government of this State, nor be competent
|
||
to testify as a witness in any court"! (Const. Ark., Art. XIX, sec.
|
||
26.) Under this accursed act of outlawry, Charles Lee Smith, of New
|
||
York City, a native of Arkansas, went to his home city of Little
|
||
Rock in the Fall of 1928 to oppose the degrading proposition
|
||
proposed as a law in a popular initiative election, forbidding the
|
||
teaching of Evolution in the State-supported schools and
|
||
universities; he made some remarks reflecting upon the personal
|
||
integrity of the Almighty, as well as denying his existence; twice
|
||
was he arrested, thrown into jail, convicted, and was denied the
|
||
right to testify as a witness in his own behalf; he is today on
|
||
bail to answer to the decision of the Supreme Court of that State,
|
||
an outlaw, denied the "equal protection of the law" of the land!
|
||
The hypocrisy and self-stultification imposed by such detestable
|
||
laws, is finely illustrated: At the recent annual meeting of the
|
||
American Law Institute, I denounced this Article to a leader of the
|
||
Arkansas Bar, and appealed to him to "start something" to get rid
|
||
of it. He shrugged his shoulders, smiled in sympathy, and said: "It
|
||
is in the Constitution, and too difficult to get it out." Then,
|
||
dropping into Spanish, so that others at the table might not
|
||
understand, he added: "Yo no creo nada, -- y no digo nada -- I
|
||
believe nothing -- and I say nothing"! While these infamies are
|
||
inflicted upon the citizens of this country by law imposed by a
|
||
bigoted and ignorant minority of superstitious parsons and their
|
||
docile dupes; -- aye, even if imposed by an overwhelming majority,
|
||
or by authentic decree of God himself, -- the free and fearless
|
||
defiers of Church and despisers of its Superstition will fight it
|
||
on to the death, till every trace of these infamies is purged out
|
||
of the statute books of these sovereign States! This is due and
|
||
solemn notice and defiance to the intolerant religious oppressors
|
||
and their deluded dupes.
|
||
|
||
Medieval laws against the fictitious crime of "Blasphemy"
|
||
survive in a dozen American States, protecting by law the Christian
|
||
superstition of the old Hebrew God. A model of them all is this
|
||
infamous enactment of the Church-ridden Massachusetts: "Whoever
|
||
wilfully blasphemes the holy name of God by denying, cursing or
|
||
contumeliously reproaching God, his creation, government or final
|
||
judging of the world, or by cursing or contumeliously reproaching
|
||
|
||
|
||
BANK of WISDOM
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
20
|
||
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
|
||
Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost -- [the whole Divine Family], -- or
|
||
by cursing or contumeliously reprioaching or exposing to contempt
|
||
or ridicule, the holy word of God contained in the holy scriptures
|
||
shall be punished by imprisonment in jail for not more than one
|
||
year or by fine of not more than three hundred dollars, and may
|
||
also be bound to good behavior." (Gen. Laws Mass., 1921; Chap. 272,
|
||
sec. 36.) Expressed contempt is held in lighter pecuniary
|
||
estimation in the Yankee "Nutmeg State," the fine being only
|
||
$100.00, plus the year in gaol. (Gen. Stat. Conn., 1918, sec.
|
||
6395.) In both States, under these infamous laws, persons have been
|
||
indicted, tried and convicted within the past two years! Throughout
|
||
the Union are odious religious statutes, "Blue Laws" and Sunday
|
||
Laws, penalizing innocuous diversions and activities of the people
|
||
on days of religious Voodoo: Sunday, as we shall see, being a
|
||
plagiarization from the religion of Mithras, and created a secular
|
||
holiday -- not a religious Holy Day -- by law of the Pagan
|
||
Constantine. Such laws sometimes prove troublesome to the pious
|
||
Puritans themselves; an amusing instance of their boomerang effect
|
||
being now chronicled to the annoyed and sneering world. Some "400"
|
||
of the True Believers of the "Holy Name Society" of St. Peter's
|
||
R.C, Church of New Brunswick, in the saintly State of New Jersey,
|
||
including several City "Fathers" stuck their legs under the loaded
|
||
tables of the local hostlery for a "Holy Communion Breakfast" the
|
||
past Sunday; as they began to eat they discovered to their pious
|
||
dismay that there was no bread on the tables, although the
|
||
reservation had long before been made, with particular stress on a
|
||
special brand of rolls, made only in the godless town of Newark.
|
||
Consternation reigned, with much confusion and hurried telephoning
|
||
by the management. In the midst of it came a 'phone call from the
|
||
driver of the roll-delivery truck, from the local Hoosgow: "I've
|
||
been arrested for the violation of section 316 of the Laws of 1798,
|
||
which prohibits the delivery of bread and rolls on the Sabbath and
|
||
also forbids a man to kiss his wife on that day"! Some of the
|
||
sachems called the chief of police and angrily demanded that this
|
||
holy law be violated by delivering the blessed rolls; the driver
|
||
was arraigned before the Recorder, who "released him with a
|
||
warning," and he consummated the violation by delivering the
|
||
forbidden rolls to the angry Holy Namers. (Herald-Tribune, May 14,
|
||
1930.)
|
||
|
||
Now, throughout the State, and in far off Ohio, at the
|
||
instigation of the parsons, these pestiferous pious laws are being
|
||
forced into enforcement, headlined -- "Blue Law Net Busy in
|
||
Jersey," and recorded: "hundreds of names and addresses were in the
|
||
possession of the police today because their owners played golf,
|
||
tennis or radios, bought or sold gasoline, cigarettes or groceries,
|
||
or operated trolley cars, busses or trains in this capital city (of
|
||
Trenton) on the Sabbath," with much more of detail; and in the same
|
||
column, a dispatch from Dover, Ohio, that the police used tear-gas
|
||
bombs to dislodge the operator from the projection-box of a local
|
||
"movie" theater, who, with the owner and four employees, was
|
||
"arrested for violation of the Sunday closing law"! (N.Y. Sun, May
|
||
26, 1930.) And all this medieval absurdity of repressive penal
|
||
legislation to enforce obsolete religious observance by
|
||
disbelievers, in a land whose every constitution proclaims the
|
||
complete separation of State and Church! But for the defiance of
|
||
fearless heroes of Rationalism who have through the ages contended,
|
||
|
||
|
||
BANK of WISDOM
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
21
|
||
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
|
||
and suffered martyrdom by rack and stake in defense of human
|
||
liberty, rack and stake and fiendish torture would yet be the
|
||
penalty, rather than fine and jail, for violators of the odious
|
||
proscriptions of Church and Church-minded, Church-driven,
|
||
politicians. To know fully the insidious and intensive efforts
|
||
being made throughout our country by the dupes of priestcraft to
|
||
undermine and destroy the liberties and rights of free men in the
|
||
interest of canting religious Pharisaism, bent on rule and ruin,
|
||
every true friend of freedom and enemy of the Church, should read
|
||
intently and keep ever at hand for an arsenal of defense, Maynard
|
||
Shipley's stirring book, The War on Modern Science; A Short History
|
||
of the Fundamentalist Attacks on Evolution and Modernism -- (Knopf,
|
||
1929), -- which to rend doth "make the angry passions rise" in
|
||
righteous wrath against these pious conspirators against American
|
||
liberties and the innate rights of man. The Church, too, through
|
||
the ages has been and yet nefariously is "in polities," seeking to
|
||
dictate and dominate and impose its malign superstitions by law:
|
||
witness the two last presidential campaigns, and the pernicious
|
||
activities of the Methodist Board of Intolerance, Meddling and
|
||
Public Nuisance, as now being revealed by the Lobbying
|
||
Investigation Committee of the United States Senate, whereby it is
|
||
shown seeking to ruborn and subordinate all to its intolerant
|
||
superstitious dominance. In most European countries the True Church
|
||
maintains its blatant "Catholic Party" in the elections and in the
|
||
parliaments; here it operations are via the "grape-vine" route,"
|
||
but effective, as through the corrupt machinations of St. Tammany;
|
||
while the Methodist Party and the Baptist Party, and their allies
|
||
the Ku Klux Klan pursue the same evil ends through vocal
|
||
frightening of cheap politicians and of large sections of the
|
||
people and press. The very pious Editor of the Christian Herald has
|
||
just published a book on "The Church in Politics," in which with
|
||
cynical frankness he asserts its right and discloses its odious
|
||
methods.
|
||
|
||
These odious things are all the work and blighting effects of
|
||
the unholy 'Odium Theologicum' of Priestcraft, poisoning men's
|
||
minds with the rancor of obsolete superstitious beliefs.
|
||
|
||
Remove the cause, the cure is automatically and quickly
|
||
effected. To contribute to the speedier consummation of this
|
||
supreme boon is the motive and justification of this book. It gives
|
||
to the unctuous quack "Doctors of Divinity" a copious dose out of
|
||
their own nauseous Pharmacopaeia of Priestly Mendacity. As it takes
|
||
its deadly effect upon themselves, haply their "incurably
|
||
religious" duped patients may begin to evidence hopeful symptoms of
|
||
a wholesome, speedy and complete cure from their priest-made
|
||
malady.
|
||
|
||
"Fraud," says Ingersoll, "is hateful to its victims." The
|
||
compelling proofs of duplicitous fraud of priestcraft and Church
|
||
exposed in this book must convince even the most credulous and
|
||
devout Believer, that the system of "revealed religion" which he
|
||
"drew in with his mother's milk" and has in innocent ignorance
|
||
suffered in his system ever since, is simply a veneered Paganism,
|
||
unrevealed and untrue; is a huge scheme of priestly imposture to
|
||
exploit the credulous and to live in power and wealth at his
|
||
expense. Luther hit the bull's-eye of the System -- before he
|
||
|
||
|
||
BANK of WISDOM
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
22
|
||
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
|
||
established another to pass the same old counterfeit: The Church
|
||
exists mostly for wealth and self-aggrandizement; to quit paying
|
||
money to the priests would kill the whole scheme in a couple of
|
||
years. This is the sovereign remedy. Let him that hath ears to
|
||
hear, hear; and govern himself accordingly. Every awakened Believer
|
||
must feel outraged in his dignity and self-respect, and in disgust
|
||
must repudiate the Creed and its impostors.
|
||
|
||
When a notorious Criminal is arraigned at the bar of Justice
|
||
and put to trial for deeds of crime and shame, it is his crimes,
|
||
his criminal career and record, which are the subject of inquiry ,
|
||
-- which are exposed and denounced -- for conviction. No weight in
|
||
attenuation is accorded to sundry sporadic instances -- (if any) --
|
||
between crimes or as cloaks for crime -- of his canting piety and
|
||
gestures of benevolence towards his victims, the dupes of his
|
||
duplicity. Thus the Church and its Creed are here arraigned on
|
||
their record of Crime, -- "extenuating naught, naught setting down
|
||
in malice"; -- simply exposing truly its own convicting record and
|
||
confessions of its criminality, for condign judgment upon it.
|
||
|
||
Goliath of Gath was a very big Giant; but a small pebble,
|
||
artfully slung, brought him to a sudden and violent collapse, a
|
||
huge corpse. This TNT. bomb of a book, loaded with barbed facts, is
|
||
flung full in facie ecclesiae -- into the face of the Forgery-
|
||
founded Church and all her discordant broods. The "gates of hell"
|
||
will be exploded!
|
||
|
||
But yesteryear the Church of God in might
|
||
Has stood against the world; now lies she here,
|
||
And none so poor to do her reverence!
|
||
|
||
JOSEPH WHELESS
|
||
|
||
New York City
|
||
780 Riverside Drive
|
||
June 1, 1930
|
||
|
||
CONTENTS
|
||
|
||
Foreword: vii
|
||
|
||
I: PAGAN FRAUDS-CHRISTIAN PRECEDENTS 3
|
||
|
||
II: HEBREW HOLY FORGERIES 45
|
||
|
||
III: CHRISTIAN "SCRIPTURE" FORGERIES 91
|
||
|
||
IV: THE SAINTLY "FATHERS" OF THE FAITH 123
|
||
|
||
V: THE "GOSPEL" FORGERIES 172
|
||
|
||
VI: THE CHURCH FORGERY MILL 238
|
||
|
||
VII: THE "TRIUMPH" OF CHRISTIANITY 295
|
||
|
||
INDEX Follows page 400
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
BANK of WISDOM
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
23
|
||
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
|
||
NOTE:
|
||
|
||
You are reading
|
||
FORGERY IN CHRISTIANITY
|
||
by
|
||
Joseph Wheliss
|
||
|
||
1930
|
||
|
||
In order to better understand the text, it is necessary to
|
||
know the abreviated referances that Mr. Wheliss uses throughout the
|
||
text. If you are interested in knowing the source material it is
|
||
adviseable to take note of these oft-used references now. EFF
|
||
|
||
|
||
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:
|
||
|
||
ANF.; 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]
|
||
|
||
N&PNF.; The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, cited as N&PNF.;
|
||
First and Second Series; many volumes; same publishers.
|
||
|
||
CE.; The Catholic Encyclopedia, cited as CE.; fifteen volumes
|
||
and index, published under the Imprimatur of Archbishop
|
||
Farley; New York, Robert Appleton Co., 1907-9.
|
||
|
||
EB., The Encyclopedia Biblica, cited as EB., four volumes;
|
||
Adam & Charles Black, London, 1899; American Reprint, The
|
||
Macmillan Co., New York, 1914.
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
**** ****
|
||
|
||
Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.
|
||
|
||
|
||
**** ****
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
Bank of Wisdom
|
||
Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
|
||
|
||
|
||
UNCOUNTED NOTE PAGE
|
||
|