Truth
Christianity in Short Sentences
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, 10 July 2002
Christians are the best liars
Christians are the best liars. They lie innocently out of faith. Christianity is not concerned whether a thing is true or not, so long as it is believed to be true. Christianity is hatred of the intellect. Theologians are shifty and dishonourable, yet theological propaganda is the most widespread and the most unnoticed falsehood to be found on earth. Yet, anyone with modest pretensions to integrity will be able to see that a theologian, a clergyman, a minister of today actually lies when he speaks, and cannot escape blame for his lies through innocence or ignorance. Truth for a theologian is false. Whatever is false, the theologian regards as true.
Wherever the influence of theologians is felt there is a transvaluation of values, and the concepts “true” and “false” are forced to change places. The pathetic thing that grows out of this condition is called faith.Nietzsche
The clergyman knows that there is no God, and normal people are no more sinners than they are fish. Truth and faith are two wholly distinct worlds—two diametrically opposite worlds. When faith is exalted above everything else, it follows that reason, knowledge and patient inquiry have to be discredited. Then the road to the truth is a forbidden road. Not a word survives in Christianity of what was once called “truth.”
All the ideas of the church should be recognized for what they are—as the worst counterfeits in existence, invented to debase nature and all natural values. The clergyman is nothing but the most odious form of parasite. The other world, the last judgment, the immortality of the soul, the soul itself, are all instruments of torture, thumbscrews and racks whereby the clergyman becomes master and remains master. These sinister inventions of priest and church serve to debase humanity to a state of self-loathing.
The professionals of Christianity know it. What has become of decent feeling and of self-respect? What genuine human being would gladly and shamelessly call themselves a Christian—a monster of deceit? It is indecent to be a Christian today.
Christianity is at best self-delusion
Christianity is at best self-delusion. When a man is inflamed by the sound of God calling in his heart, he imagines he is beyond all human standards of judgment, and is sanctified by his mission. When a man feels he has a divine mission to save or redeem humanity, he believes he is the voice of God, and thinks he is a being of a higher order, standing far above all human laws! These are not saints but dangerous men.
The God of Christianity is the God of the psychologically inadequate—the mentally feeble. They do not call themselves mentally feeble but “the Good.” Though their own God denies it in his holy writings, Christians say their God is purely good, and all other people’s gods are devils and demons waiting to infect us with wickedness and capture our immortal souls for eternity.
Under Christianity, neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with reality. It offers imaginary beings—God, angels, devils—an imaginary anthropocentric science—unnatural, supernatural, miracles—an imaginary psychology—temptation by the devil, guilt, buddy Jesus, the presence of God, repentance, salvation—an imaginary teleology—the kingdom of God, the last judgment, eternal life—purely imaginary causes—God, soul, spirit, demons—and purely imaginary effects—sin, salvation, grace, immortality. This Christian world is purely fictitious—a fantasy. It is not even a dream world because dreams at least reflect reality, whereas Christianity falsifies it, cheapens it and denies it.
Psychologically, sins are indispensable to Christian society. They are the only reliable weapons of power. The clergyman lives upon sins. For him, sinning is not only necessary but essential. The church knows no one has to be actually saved from sin. The “sinner” does not have to have been actually sinful, but merely to have felt sinful. The “sinner” is then certain to feel grateful for being saved. Christian morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose!
Christianity finds sickness necessary
Christianity grew up as a sort of war to the death upon reality, and as such it has never been surpassed. In the Christian God, nothingness is deified, and the will to nothingness is made holy! In the Christian God, the whole of reality is demonized and love of life is reduced to the sin of carnality. God justifies every slander upon the here and now, and every lie about the beyond! One’s natural gratitude for existence is turned by Christians into a confession of unavoidable sin, and payment of appropriate penances.
The principles of the Christian minister prompt him to the lie that sickness is not sickness and lunatic asylums not lunatic asylums. Christianity finds sickness necessary, just as the Greek spirit had need of health. The purpose of the whole system of salvation of the church is first to make people feel sick. Not every one may be a Christian. One is not converted to Christianity—one must first be sick enough for it. Once anyone feels sick enough, any improvement will be recorded as a step towards salvation.
The moment at which a religious crisis dominates a people is always marked by epidemics of nervous disorder. The inner world of the religious is so much like the inner world of the overstrung and exhausted that it is difficult to distinguish between them. Since sickness is inherent in Christianity, it follows that the typically Christian state of faith must be a form of sickness too. Faith takes the side of everything that is idiotic. It pronounces a curse upon science and intelligent enquiry, and all straight, straightforward and scientific paths to knowledge must be banned by the church as forbidden ways. Doubt is thus a sin from the start. Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
Christianity opposes Nature to God
Christianity opposes Nature to God. The same instinct which prompts morally inferior people to reduce their own god to “pure goodness” also prompts them to deny genuine goodness in the truly divine—Nature—the divinity of their moral superiors. So the adjective “natural” took on the meaning of abominable—the fantasy world of Christianity demands hatred of the natural—the real.
Christians demonize their moral superiors by making their divinity into a wicked and tempting principle—Satan, materialism, Nature! To love Nature is Satanic. In the Christian God, war is declared on life, on Nature, on the wish to protect our lifegiver, on the desire to live! Thus all is explained. The very act of living in the real world is sinful. Life itself in Nature has to be atoned for through the church platter and submission to its commandments. Submit, pray and, above all, pay for forgiveness for even being born—that is the rule of Christianity.
When the purpose of human life is placed, not in life itself, but in the after-life—in death, in nothingness—then one has taken away the purpose of living altogether. The whole idea of natural death is absent from the gospels. The founder of Christianity, Paul, even had no use for the life of the Christian saviour. What he needed was the death on the cross. What he himself didn’t believe was swallowed readily enough by the underclass idiots among whom he spread his teaching.
The vast lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, and all natural instinct. Body is despised in Christianity, and hygiene traditionally was denounced as vain or sensual. The church historically set itself against cleanliness—closing the public baths, of which there were 270 in Cordova alone, was the first Christian order after the banishment of the Moors from Spain. Everything instinctive that is beneficial, that fosters life and that safeguards the future is a cause of suspicion. So to live that life no longer has any meaning. Why be public-spirited? Why take any pride in children? Why labour together, trust one another, or concern one’s self about the common welfare and try to serve it?
Christianity and Science
So, Christianity stands in opposition to all intellectual well-being—sick reasoning is the only sort that it can use as Christian reasoning. The methods and principles of science were the targets of the most profound contempt for thousands of years. Those who inclined to them were excluded from the society of “decent” people—defined as Christians—and were called enemies of God, and scoffers at “the truth.” Scientific objectives, methods, and quiet, cautious, distrustful manner, all appeared to Christianity as absolutely discreditable and contemptible. The world was in misery and squalor for a thousand years. In the modern US, nothing has changed. The whole pathetic stupidity of the Christian superstition still targets itself at the discoveries of science. Its every notion of what the truth ought to be, of what the service of the truth ought to be differs from those of honest Americans.
Insignificant bigots and conceited maniacs assume that the laws of nature are constantly suspended on their behalf. It is impossible to lavish too much contempt upon such a magnification of selfishness to insolence. And yet Christianity has to thank precisely this miserable flattery of personal vanity for its triumph—it was thus that it lured all the crooked, the dissatisfied, the imbecilic, the spoil heap and cesspit of humanity to its side. The salvation of the soul means “the whole world is less important than I am.” Such is Christian humility.
The conclusion that all idiots come to concerning such things as the deaths of the martyrs, is that there must be something in a cause for which any one goes to their death, or which sets off epidemics of death-seeking, as in early Christianity. The martyrs have damaged the truth. Even to this day the crude fact of persecution is enough to give an honourable name to the most empty sort of sectarianism. Why? Is the worth of a cause altered by the fact that someone, possibly deluded, had died for it? This was precisely the stupidity of the persecutors—that they gave the appearance of honour to the cause they opposed—that they made it a present of the fascination with martyrdom. Of course, the self-inflicted martyrdom of other religions is just terrorism.
Great intellects are skeptical and independent. Those of faith, believers of any sort, are necessarily gullible and dependent. The believer is not free to answer the question, “true or not true?” according to the dictates of their own conscience. Too many people listen to poseurs called priests and pastors rather than to reason. Pagans are all those who say yes to life, and to whom God means abandoning the personal duty to reason, and acquiescence in all things to empty priestly prattle.
