Christianity
Miracles, Prophecies and Precepts
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, October 05, 1999
Sunday, 11 September 2005
Prophecy
Every religion and none has its prophets and seers, who claimed to be able to foresee events of the future. And there is little difference in the proofs each one has left to the world that they possessed this power.
Prophecies are supernatural, and beyond the ability of humans, because only a god knows the future thus proving that the person who is a successful prophet is guided by a god. The prophecies of Christ were prophecies in the Jewish scriptures of his coming and were fulfilled, Christians believe, when he arrived in the person of Jesus. The theory is that God spent countless æons sending prophets of the coming of His son, the saviour of the world, so that when he arrived people would know.
The same evidence proves the divine inspiration of the Christian bible, including the Jewish scriptures which contain all the prophecies of Christ. All stand or fall together, the divinity of Christ, the inspiration of the bible and so the Christian religion. The holy book has in it prophecies of the coming of the holy man. The holy man fulfils the prophecies of the holy book, adding further proof with supernatural miracles and superhuman precepts.
Tacitus, the Latin historian, prophesied the downfall of the Roman empire and its attendant calamities more than five hundred years before its occurrence. And Solon, one of the seven wise men of Greece, foresaw and foretold a series of calamities which befell the Athenians two hundred years before they were realized. Marcus Tullius Cicero about 50 BC prophesied:
There will arise after many ages, if we may credit the Sibylline oracles, a hero who will deliver his oppressed countrymen from bondage.
This was General Washington… Or Nelson Mandela? Giuseppe Garibaldi? Bernardo O’Higgins? Chaim Weizmann?… It shows that prophecies can be expressed so generally that they must come true. Cicero’s or this Sibylline prophesy has been fulfilled over and over again.
Jewish Prophecies Not Fulfilled
The texts of the Christian bible called prophecies, if claimed as predictions of future events beyond the powers of the natural mind to foresee, are wrong. Few of them have been fulfilled in any sense, and those few required no divine prescience to foresee the result.
Many events have happened in every country, anticipated by studious people, as the result of natural causes such as the ravages and downfall of cities and the overthrow of empires. Jewish prophets protested angrily at Israel and the dangers of dissolution that would lead to more powerful nations overpowering Israel, and helding the people in subjection. God would right the wrongs to His chosen people if they were nice and obedient—“righteous”, in biblical terminology. The prophets were propgandists seeking to keep the people lawful, and the benefactor of this, besides the people themselves, was the king! The king was God. Needles to say, some of the threats were never realised. They were meant to impress and intimidate the people.
To impress the people, various oppressors were promised terrible vengeance. Babylon, Tyre, Damascus, and other cities of hostile neighbours so much envied and execrated of the Jews were not destroyed and some survive to this day. The prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, all poured out thunders upon Damascus. Isaiah declared it should be a “ruinous heap” (Isa 17:1). Jeremiah predicted its destruction by fire (Jer 49:27). Damascus still stands, with a large population. It has suffered less by ravages of war and the scythe of time than almost any other city of the east. It has stood nearly three thousand years without becoming anything like a “ruinous heap”.
The prophecy against Tyre has failed also. Ezekiel declared it should be destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar and never be found again (Ezek 26-29), but two hundred and fifty years after Nebuchadnezzar’s time Alexander had to seige it into submission, having found it a strong commercial city. It still is. S Jerome, of the fourth century, declared it to be, then, the finest city of Phœnicia and was astonished that Ezekiel’s prophecy had so utterly failed. Christians try to pretend it is a different city because it has been rebuilt on a slightly different site. You might as well claim that London is a different city after the Great Fire or San Francisco is a different city after the earthquake.
Ezekiel prophesied “the fall of Egypt, the desolation of Egypt, the destruction of Egypt”, not one of which has occurred. In 2,500 years Egypt has been conquered several times but is bigger and more populated than ever. Prophecies about the restoration of the lost tribes and the perpetuity of the throne of David are complete failures.
Babylon
Isaiah’s prediction against Babylon yields more proof of the failure of Jewish prophecy:
It shall never be inhabited, neither shall it be dwelt in from generation to generation: neither shall the Arabian pitch tent there; neither shall the shepherds make their fold there.Isaiah 13:20
It never suffered such a calamity. Babylon was not destroyed according to the prophecy. For centuries after Isaiah’s time, it repeatedly resisted some of the most powerful sieges and the mightiest armies led by some of the most skilful generals that ever held a baton—Cyrus, Darius, Alexander the Great, Antigonus, Demetrius, Poliorcetes and Antiochus. The predictions of Jeremiah 51:8, “Her end has come”, and of Isaiah 13:22, “Her days shall not be prolonged”, and “desolation shall come upon her in a day” were simply wrong. Babylon gradually declined by the migration and removal of her inhabitants to other and newer cities.
Jeremiah further predicted that her sea and springs should dry up (Jer 51:38) and then declared the waves of the sea should come upon her (Jer 51:42) and finally that she should sink to rise no more (Jer 51:64). And Isaiah’s prediction (Isa 1:39) of ruin and destruction covered not just Babylon but “the land of the Chaldeans”. It all implies that the whole of the land of the two rivers would be flooded by the sea to a depth of about two hundred feet, at least, since Babylon is 300 miles inland. Yet the country is a powerful Arab state whose leader was not to everyone’s taste but is able still to cause the USA considerable trouble.
Babylon eventually fell into ruin all right but Jeremiah’s prophecy was that it “shall become a wilderness, wherein no man dwelleth” (Jer 51:43) and Isaiah’s was that it should not be dwelt in from generation to generation. Yet Babylon has been rebuilt, and from 1101 AD has been called the town of Hillah. Hillah is situated within the precincts of ancient Babylon thus proving it is not “a wilderness, wherein no man dwelleth”. What remains of the old town is just north of the new one. Furthermore archaeologists confirm that Arab tents have often been pitched on the old site.
Is the prophecy true or false? Well, in the fulness of time all cities will be in ruins, but Babylon was not utterly and finally destroyed suddenly, but declined gradually to be rebuilt at a later date under a new name. It is pure sophistry to pretend that a town which is rebuilt when an earlier one is ruined is a different town. Jerusalem itself has been repeatedly rebuilt, sometimes after total destruction. And it has had different names. It is plainly wrong that no Arab would pitch a tent on the site of Babylon. The prophecy is false.
Prophecy Cannot Prove Divinity
The bible itself shows that truthful prophecy can do nothing toward proving the prophet divinely inspired and a religion true. A heathen and an unbeliever could and did succeed as well as the true disciples of the faith. The proof is found in the history of Balaam.
His representation of a star coming out of Jacob and a sceptre out of Judah (Num 24) is often quoted by Christian writers as presaging the coming of Christ, thus making an unbeliever the oracle of a messianic prophecy. The Christian subterfuge that “God might make a righteous man of any nation the vehicle of prophecy” is not possible here, for the bible declares he was not a righteous man, but the very reverse. He was a heathen of sinful and ungodly habits.
The author of 2 Peter tells us that, at the very time this so called prophecy was uttered:
He loved the wages of unrighteousness.2 Peter 2:13
This negates any Christian plea that he might have possessed the true spirit of prophecy by virtue of being a righteous man, and drives us to admit that an ungodly unbeliever can make a true prophecy. How then does prophecy, even if proved correct, show that the prophet is genuine or the religion true?
Another case, and one similar to that of Balaam in its essential points, is found in the New Testament. Caiaphas, whose name means “prophet”, though not claiming to be a believer, utters a prophecy in the interest of the Christian religion for which the bible itself gives him full credit as a prophet (Jn 11:51).
All argument for Christianity based on the “gift of prophecy”, must be invalid. The power to foretell future events is not restricted by the bible itself to any nation, to any religion, to any faith, to any belief, or to any moral or religious qualification. What, then, is prophecy worth, or what does it prove?
Moral Precepts—Golden Rules
Another proof given by Christians of the divine hand behind their religion is the perfect life and moral standards of the son of god.
Jesus Christ spake as never man spake.John 7:46
If this were true, then gods must have been plentiful before the Christian era. Not one of the moral maxims which Jesus uttered cannot be found in the older bibles of other nations, or the writings of the Greek philosophers long before the birth of Christ or the Jewish scriptures.
No dissertation on the excellence and originality of Christ as a moralist, would pass muster unless it proclaimed triumphantly the “Golden Rule” as the utmost of fresh morality:
All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.Matthew 7:12
Does this famous rule not place Jesus eminently above any other moralist that ever lived? Er… No! Christians flaunt their usual ignorance of classical and oriental history by pinning this wrong-headed label on to their hero. Confucius gave the same rule six centuries earlier but the Christian disparages it as being in “a merely negative form”. It is untrue.
A disciple, one day asked Confucius to put in a single word the essential rule of life. A word, in Chinese, means a single Chinese character, or even two characters combined in one. So, Confucius gave his rule in an ultra short form. The character he used was the composite character “as heart”; have one heart with your fellow men, or behave to them as you would have them behave to you. To express it in one word in English is harder but is usually given as: “Reciprocity”. Lao-tse, his contemporary, expressed it also.
The Golden Rule was proclaimed by Pagan moralists and a Jew of the sect Jesus opposed—the Pharisees—in a variety of ways long before the founder of Christianity was supposed to have originated it. It is a natural sentiment of any human being who is not a psychopath. “Would I like to be treated thus?” is the question that should arise in the mind of anyone ready to inflict pain or punishment. Regrettably, we now know it is too easily overruled by the voice of authority. The Golden Rule is proverbial in many variations all over the world:
Do as you would be done by.
Golden Rule by Pittacus, 650 BC:
Do not to your neighbour what you would take ill from him.
Golden Rule by Thales, 560 BC:
Avoid doing what you would blame others for doing.
Golden Rule by Confucius, 500 BC:
Do unto another what you would have him do unto you, and do not to another what you would not have him do unto you. Thou needest this law alone. It is the foundation of all the rest.
Golden Rule by Sextus, a Pythagorean, 406 BC:
What you wish your neighbours to be to you, such be also to them.
Golden Rule by Aristotle, 385 BC:
We should conduct ourselves toward others as we would have them act toward us.
Golden Rule by Aristippus, 365 BC:
Cherish reciprocal benevolence, which will make you as anxious for another’s welfare as your own.
Golden Rule by Isocrates, 338 BC:
Act toward others as you desire them to act toward you.
Golden Rule by the Pharisee, Hillel, 50 BC:
Do not to others what you would not like others to do to you.
By the time the gospels were written Golden Rules were given on every hand, and the sentiment of the Golden Rule of Confucius and Jesus was as familiar as the belief in God. The same rule, often chosen as the most characteristic saying of Jesus, is:
Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
Yet, Jesus was merely quoting the Old Testament (Lev 19:18). Indeed, Jesus recognises that he is indebted to the Jewish scriptures for his Golden Rule when the passage in which he cites it in the gospel (Mt 7:12) ends with: “For this is the law and the prophets”, meaning the writings the Christians call the Old Testament.
A saint may seem to love his neighbour as himself but also loves the reward in heaven his altruism will yield. Others might enjoy praise even on earth. There is nothing wrong in such altruistically expressed selfishness. At least it directs good rather than ill at others and the world.
Love of Enemies
Love to enemies is also erroneously credited to Jesus Christ. Most of the religious books and religious teachers of the eastern religions breathe forth a spirit of love and kindness toward enemies:
Forgive thy foes, nor that alone;
Their evil deeds with good repay;
Fill those with joy who leave thee none,
And kiss the hand upraised to slay.
Search the Christian bible in vain to find a moral precept superior and better expressed. Never was love and forbearance toward enemies more sublimely expressed than in the old Persian ballad. A more modest admonition than Christ’s “Love thine enemy,” which seems morally impossible, is that of a Roman slave, Publius Syrus, who urged people to…
Treat thine enemy as though a friend, and he will become thy friend.
Others are:
- To strike a man, or vex him with words, is a sin. Avesta, Persian bible
- Even the intention to strike is a sin. Avesta, Persian bible
- Desire not the death of thine enemy. Confucius
- Acknowledge benefits, but never revenge injuries. Confucius
- We may dislike an enemy without desiring revenge.Confucius
- To revenge yourself on an enemy, make him your friend.Pythagoras
- It is much better to be injured than to kill a man.Pythagoras
- It is not permitted to a man who has received an injury to revenge it by doing another.Socrates, in Plato’s Crito
- Return not evil for evil.Socrates
- Let no man be offended with those who are angry at him, but reply gently to those who curse him.Code of Menu
- Let him endure injuries, and despise no one.Code of Menu
- Commit no hostile action for your own preservation.Code of Menu
- To be revenged on enemies, become more Virtuous.Diogenes
- Pardon the offenses of others, but never your own.Publius Syrus
- The noble spirit cures injustice by forgiving it.Publius Syrus
- You can accomplish by kindness what you cannot by force. (Publius Syrus)
- Better overlook an injury than avenge it.Publius Syrus
- It is enough to think ill of an enemy without avenging it. Publius Syrus
- It is a kingly spirit to return good deeds for evil ones.Pubius Syruls
- Receive an injury rather than do one.Publius Syrus
- Be at war with men’s vices, but at peace with their persons.Publius Syrus
- Endure all things if you would serve God.Sextus
- Desire to be able to benefit your enemies.Sextus
- Cultivate friendship for an enemy.Pittacus
- Be kind to your friends that they may continue so, and to your enemies that they may become so.Pittacus
- Prevent injuries if possible; if not, do not revenge them.Pittacus
- Speak evil of no one, not even your enemies.Pittacus
- An enemy should not be hated, but cured.Seneca
- To act unkindly toward an enemy will increase his hate.Antonius
- Be to everybody kind and friendly. (Antonius)
- All nature cries aloud, Shall man do less
Than heal the smiter, and the railer bless?Hafiz, a Moslem - Learn for yon orient shell to love thy foe,
And store with pearls the hand that brings thee woe;
Flee, like yon rock, from base, vindictive pride,
Emblaze with gems the wrist that rends thy side.Hafiz - Bridle thine anger, and forgive thine enemy; give unto him who takes from thee.Quran
- Seek him who turns thee out, and pardon him who injures thee.Quran
The Christian who supposes all goodness to be confined to Christianity or that Christianity is superior to other religions is just ignorant and smug. Love and kindness toward all human beings, both friends and enemies, is not confined to the teachings of Jesus, or to the Christian religion, as many have supposed, but is a natural sentiment of social beings, however poorly applied in practice. It is no proof that whoever teaches them is either a god or divinely inspired.
Conversion and Repentance
One of the worst follies ever seen under the sun and one displaying the greatest ignorance of history, science, and human nature is the mistake of evangelical conversion or “getting religion”. When conversion is plainly an emotional release or the acceptance of a psychological prop, how can we excuse those people called evangelists who still claim it to be “the power of God operating upon the soul of the sinner?” Ignorance or insanity are the only pleas that can acquit them of the charge of dishonesty. It is the psychological and emotional manipulation of uncertain and often unstable people for dubious purposes often selfish and morally evil.
Do the thousands of people who still undergo this conversion process as the hands of some charismatic preacher know that it is an old Pagan custom? It was practised in heathen countries before a soul was converted to Christianity. God must be indifferent to the means whereby people come to the Christian truth. He must be concerned only with ends not with means. The practice of converting people from one sect to another by the popular priesthood was prevalent under the ancient Persian system, and was carried on there quite extensively more than two thousand years ago. The process was essentially the same as that now in vogue amongst modern evangelical churches, and the effect the same.
At their large revival meetings the whole congregation would sometimes become so affected under the eloquent ministrations of the officiating priest, as to cry, and shout, and prostrate themselves upon the ground, which was afterward found to be drenched. On these occasions, they would confess their sins to each other, and to their priests. Those very sins they condemned were, perhaps, amongst the best acts of their lives, while their real crimes were overlooked and justified, instead of being condemned, thus showing that an honest, just, and sensible god could have had nothing to do with it.
In times past “revival meetings” were observed in Arabia, carried on by one of the Moslem sects.
Turn, turn, sinner, unto God; confess he is good, and that Mohammed is his prophet. Wash, and become clean of your sins, and paradise is open before you. Without this nothing can save you from eternal fire.
Tears flowed plentifully and everybody appeared to be affected. One of his hearers, upon being converted, fell upon the floor shouting:
Your words pierce my soul.
The Christian churches stigmatize and condemn Mohammed as a false prophet. If God is the god of us all, what is He doing converting people to a false religion, or even allowing His conversion techniques to be used for false ends. If it is not the work of God, why does he allow the so-called evangelic preachers of Christianity to use the methods of a false religion. Either way, if God is almighty why is he again being confusing? To say one is the work of the devil and the other the work of God, when both are so clearly and obviously the same in method, is to insult the brains God allegedly gave us.
Origins and Explanations.
There are several circumstances which point unmistakably to the mundane origin of the phenomenon of conversion. The character of many of the conductors of revivalist meetings, in the USA at any rate, is sufficient to exclude any divine agency in the matter. Among the most powerful revivalists—those who could deal out damnation to the people, and convert an audience quicker than Old Nick can strike a match, are those who themselves are guilty of criminal acts whilst they convince souls of their sin and convert them to God. Despite their terrible record, they are so charismatic, and their converts so enthralled, that they are themselves almost treated as gods able to do no wrong. Often they finish up very rich indeed—which is, of course, the point! These reverend crooks usually claimed to be “called” by God to their ministerial burden and God rewards them amply.
What is called conversion and repentance for sin is the emotional manipulation and revival of early impressions. No sound minded person has ever been persuaded charismatically to embrace any religion unfamiliar to them before their conversion. The failure of missionaries in any country with a well developed religious culture is proof enough. The exception is children received by Christian schools set up by the missionaries to indoctrinate the young, thus welding them to the Christian faith before they are able to think.
Charismatic conversions are not made amongst intelligent or learned people—except the emotionally unstable—but amongst the ignorant and superstitious classes, who have not sense or intelligence enough to see the lack of difference between the religion they are converted to and that they are converted from. When the religions are different, God can do little toward converting any nation to Christianity which has always been biased to another religion. What happens in Christian countries is that some people are “born again”, into the Christianity they thought they had lost as guileless children, a sort of Peter Pan Christianity or, a better analogy, a Wizard of Oz Christianity. There are few real converts.
Death Bed Repentance.
The whole process has been with Christianity since before its birth. Jesus was sent out as the Nazarene to convert the Simple Of Ephraim, meaning the sinning Jews who had turned apostate and had allied themselves with the Greeks and Romans for gain or even just for an easy life. For the Nazarene and the Essenes the importance of the conversion was twofold.
- To try to ensure that as many of the Chosen People as possible would enter God’s kingdom on earth, which was imminent then.
- To ensure that God’s armies on earth would be strong enough to evict the gentiles from God’s holy city of Jerusalem, a prerequisite of God’s introducing the kingdom.
Gentile Christians were told by renegade Jews like Paul that they too were included among those who might be saved from eternal death and so the whole process began of attempting to convert people before the kingdom arrived. Now the first Christians expected the return of their messiah after forty years. So the habit of conversion had forty years to develop before anyone started to puzzle about the failure of the saviour to return. By then the bishops had their excuses ready and Christianity or Judaism for gentiles had got a firm bridgehead.
Much importance is attached by the orthodox churches to the act of getting religion in the dying hour, death bed repentance, after the fashion of Constantine who made Christianity official but refused to repent until he died to give him half a lifetime of guiltless sin. The church that can get a mortally sick person to repent can forever claim them as their own. No matter that the person is aged and senile, wracked with pain or fever, delerious or even unconscious, the professional Christian by the bedside will accept them as a lost soul found by simply assuming the dying person wants to be saved!
People do not condemn their wrong acts or a wrong course of life, in their dying moments, unless they had previously believed them to be wrong. What does repentance add to this? It is supposed to be sincere regret and self-condemnation for being a sinner, but who is to know this but God. So what is the use of it?
When it happens, the phenomenon of repentance is simply the operation of a natural law, by which fever, disease or the passing of the light generally cancels from the memory the last impressions made upon the mind first, thus leaving the earlier impressions to rule one’s failing judgement. Dying people are then virtually children, controlled by their early convictions which, if their late belief and conduct disagree, cause a mental conflict called repentance. Thus in their ultimate confusion, some Christian soul stealer will have them negate a lifetime of convictions. Instead of being the visitation of God, as Christians claim, repentance is terminal senility, a natural effect of a failing mind.
Conversion, repentance, getting religion and being born again are simply natural psychological disorders the exploitation of which goes back into antiquity.
