Adelphiasophism
The Patriarchal Religion: Christianity, Mass Insanity
Abstract
Christian charity is less reliable than Christian malice.Frederic Raphael
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Sunday, March 07, 1999
Truth, Ignorance and the Priesthood
If eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge gave mankind an awareness of right and wrong, it is sometimes difficult to believe Adam and Eve ever ate it. Many people seem not to know the difference and consequently make many more people unhappy. The Christian God forbade the parents of mankind to eat of the tree. Perhaps their sin was that they were too obedient. The did not eat the fruit and have remained in ignorance ever since. People today are dying of ignorance, not of knowledge. We, their descendants must now acquire the knowledge that their forebears neglected, or our descendants will die prematurely for it.
To know more is what we need. They who are keeping the world from the knowledge of good and evil, who are preaching falseness and trying to mislead us from the of truth, are the enemies of mankind. We learn everything by living. The truth is not revealed to us by gods or priests—we discover it. Knowledge will not hurt us so much as ignorance and deception.
Priests pretend to have exiled truth to some far-off kingdom, remote and transcendental, where it can only be met after death. They pretend it is supernatural, and can only be known by being revealed with the help of—the priests! For countless centuries, people have believed this, but truth is natural, it is everywhere, it can be heard and seen in everything when people trouble to listen and look.
Mankind has sought truth in holy books. It is not there, but a clever caste of magicians called priests pretend it is. They invented mysterious concepts to fool us into thinking we had found knowledge—knowledge so profound and arcane that only the priests properly understand it. Because it is so difficult, and we do not have time to grasp it—but the priests have all the time to do so because it is their job—the priests offer to help us understand it. And all we have to do is keep them in sufficient comfort to study the arcane volumes and carry out the esoteric rituals that are necessary. What a bargain we have!
Even if the superstitious contents of a book are declared sacred, Adelphiasophists will still contest its assertions. The surrender to faith puts a jackboot on the mind. Doubt disappears and enquiry ceases. Allegiance to a creed becomes a substitute for truth and the next person is branded an infidel. Natural truth demands that we should neither bind ourselves in this way nor bind others. Opinions pollinate the tree of discovery and so they must disperse freely. Independence of thought is sacred and no one should be condemned for disbelief or unbelief.
Nature is everything, and in it is all truth. When humans read Nature properly, they learn what is true. The priesthood decries our natural knowledge compared with their own, saying it is always changing while theirs is constant and therefore more fundamental. But dogmas, being written on tablets of stone are solid and immovable whereas Nature is made of the most subtle of substances. We try to catch Nature in our finest nets but, though we think we have her for a while, closer investigation shows that she has escaped and we must try again. For the simple followers of the priesthood with their fixed tablets, this is all a futile exercise. Yet the approximations to the truth that Nature successively reveals to us prove far more useful in practice than the illusory truth of religion.
Throughout human history, we have tried to catch the butterflies of truth in the universe. God planned it, keeps it in motion, and guards its hidden mysteries, the priests tell us. Why is God guarding it? Would he stop us from studying it? If we find out why it is in motion and how it came to be in motion, would God suddenly stop it in a peevish fit? No! God is a figure of speech, a word invented by ancient magicians, but Nature is real.
The old habit of inventing words to hide our ignorance has been adopted by science as well as by religion. Naming the hypothesis of the development of life, Evolution, does not explain it—we must fully understand the ramifications of the hypothesis to do that. Nor is any theory the last word of truth. What we call truth is more than we have yet found. The unknown waits to expose every discovery and it is with doubt as our taper and inquiry as our torch that we shall illuminate the next darkened corner. Doubt is the first step of progress, and inquiry is the way to knowledge.
Adelphiasophists must resist scientific dogmas as well as religious ones. The dragon of scientific orthodoxy always blocks the way of new discovery. Once an orthodoxy is established it finds its own priesthood and begins its own inquisitions if anyone should question the current dogmata. No one can be blamed for seeking a little security but when they becomes barriers to discovery, ivory towers have to be demolished.
Christianity and Pagan Culture
Christianity makes much of its roots in the Hebrew religion but sneers at any connexion with the Greek culture called Hellenism. This tradition goes back to the foundation of Christianity within the Roman Empire.
Judaism was defeated as a rival to Christianity by the suppressions consequent on the Bar Kosiba rebellion in 135 AD. But the Mystery religions remained as legitimate rivals for nearly another 300 years. In that time and in subsequent centuries when the Christians laid waste to Pagan culture, it had to distinguish itself from these other Hellenistic religions, in its own mythology at least. With Judaism down and out, the Christians could claim that Christian roots were entirely Jewish, the Christian teacher being a reformer reviled by the Jews themselves. Maintaining this, they could take any popular custom from the Mystery cults and use it themselves while claiming it had nothing to do with them because of their quite different origins.
Thus the tradition that lasted until the present day was that Christianity was Jewish not Greek. Though manifest nonsense, at least in fair measure, it is defended tooth and nail by the theologions who cannot accept their religion evolved, and loath any thought that it might be indebted to Paganism.
Christian Argument
There are many leaders of opinion, usually with evangelical or “everyman” columns in conservative newspapers, who pooh-pooh the Adelphiasophist idea that knowledge, and therefore study, is important to treading correctly through life. Studying, weighing the arguments and trying to reach a fair conclusion for them is a great waste of time.
Good conservatives and Christians (of course, any good conservative “is” a Christian) know all they need to know without anything as hard as studying. The reason is that their opinions are ready made and laid down in unarguable texts. Their outlook is to ignore fact and reason, live entirely in the world of their own fantastic and myth-producing passions, do this whole-heartedly and with conviction, and they become the prophets of our age.
Their arguments are pontifical, depending for their effectiveness on a pious or pompous style and prejudice, rather than argument. A degree of bigotry is helpful to them in giving a vehemence that proves their convictions. They freely appeal to prejudices and passions which sensitive people consider provocative or insulting but they do it in the name of reason—but it is God’s reason and needs no study except sufficient to be able to quote some saint or evangelical psudepigraph. Whatever is most ancient is offered as the latest fad.
The most important element of success in becoming an authority is to learn the art of denunciation. Authorities denounce people such that their Christian readers can never see themselves amongst those being denounced. It is obvious really, because Christians do not believe they merit being denounced especially by a Christian authority. They have the same philosophy as the denouncers and could not recognize their failings even with their noses pushed in them. Authority can scorn unbelievers and foreigners with impunity but let there be a hint of criticism of the pews and loyalty to the authority will evaporate overnight.
The technique is that of Carlyle. An authority might write:
The population of the USA is three hundred million, mostly fools.
Some American readers might be offended but many would agree, and those who agreed naturally discount themselves as being among the fools. Every reader of such words is among the excluded minority.
Words such as those herein are considered in bad taste or even offensive by Christians, so they will take no notice of them. They are not authoritative words because they identify and openly criticize a section of the community. Authorities only do this if the community criticized no longer exists or is unimportant. Pharisees and Philistines can be criticized because they have long gone and minorities and socialists can be criticized because they are unimportant. Otherwise, abstractions are always used so that people can position themselves in respect to the comments. Everyone knows who the authority means in denouncing generalized sins and failings, and see people just like that all around, yet exclude themselves. Astrologers use the same technique, but invite people to identify with certain good or at least neutral or acceptably human characteristics. Adelphiasophists like to hear plain talk, even if it is critical, because all else is self-delusion and the slope to bigotry.
Bad Faith and Sour Motives
If truth is had by examining evidence and understanding it, those who nevertheless deny it cannot be doing so in good faith even if it is Christian faith—or they are too unintelligent. Most people, even Christians, profess an interest in truth, but Christians cannot come to deny what they have believed for a lifetime, despite the evidence to the contrary, so they deny the evidence. Indeed, many, if not most Christians cannot bear to be faced with the evidence. The few who are willing to face it try to argue a rational case until they can retreat no further, whereupon they reveal their true colours—”It is a matter of faith!” (QED). Their attempts at rational justification are bogus like everything else in their synthetic religion.
Some Christians, who do not like their motives impugned, impugn our motives instead. They say our accusations of their bad faith, our intolerance of Christianity and our arrogance hides weaknesses in our own arguments. Well, all arguments have weaknesses because human beings are not angels, even Christian human beings, and arguments have to be examined to show the weaknesses in them.
Christians delight in exposing the weaknesses of the arguments of the simple folk they persuade to be “born again” but refuse to examine the manifold weaknesses in their own case when faced by competent opponents. A critic of Christianity enrolled for a Christian course for new punters. In his application he confessed to being a skeptic but was nevertheless welcomed as a man with something to gain from the experience. After the introductory lecture, he had a polite letter telling him that the course was too basic for him! The Christian lecturer, a lawyer, had prepared for the usual gullible victims and had been shocked and embarrassed by the skeptical pupil and suggested to the church authorities that he be removed!
Another man, a Christian scholar, entered on a course of original research into the migrations represented by the scriptural stories of Abraham. Most Christian scholars are not interested in truth, but that oddity called Christian truth—lies to anyone else—but this man was too honest for his own good in the Christian community. He was astonished to find that there was no evidence in the least outside the bible that any such migrations had happened, and indeed that Christian scholars had translated certain ancient tablets from Nuzi fraudulently to lend a bogus credence to the patriarchal stories.
He found it impossible to get his doctoral thesis accepted and could only get it published in Germany. He could not get a posting even after he got his degree and had to spend ten years as a painter and decorator. He is now a respected Professor in Copenhagen—Professor Thomas L Thompson. A few hundred years ago he would have been burnt at the stake.
Christians might plead that these are unfortunate exceptions, but if they are it is only because generally nobody is willing to rock the Christian boat. If anyone does, they are quickly thrown overboard because the crew know how rickety the vessel is!
So, if we appear arrogant, it is only to the extent that anyone who wishes to remain so willfully blind to the evidence and so gullible as to believe the legends of ancient and ignorant people deserves to be treated that way.
And we are notably not intolerant. Pagans have had no choice but to tolerate Christian claptrap for two millennia on pain of death. Now that we have the chance to say something openly about it, we wish to say it clearly. Criticism, however barbed it is, is not intolerance. Burning people alive is, and so is victimizing honesty. Christians have a long and undeniable history of murderous intolerance that no one except a fool deluded into ignoring it to “protect” God can ignore. Christians prove that they are wilfully determined to remain ignorant so as not to trouble their consciences. It is just one more example of the bad faith that Christianity is. There is doubtless more profound truth than Adelphiasophist truth, but no truth can be built on profound ignorance.
God
There is a huge gap today between those who believe in the church’s literal God and those who think god is a confidence trick or do not care one way or the other. Many of this middle group accept Christianity in some dilute way. It was a way to explain to simple people what they did not understand and a way to restrain the headstrong and wicked with fears of hell fire. They accept Christians as some sort of do-gooders but are too busy to bother about it themselves.
The other two camps are at loggerheads, though no one would know it from the newspapers. There is some sort of consensus in the media that Christianity should be supported, even though most newspapermen themselves are hard-bitten cynics. As George Orwell observed, the British press is centralised in the hands of extremely wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest. This tiny cabal of men supports the religions of the world because they are deeply conservative—and these are the men with most to conserve.
Newspapers will often feature Christianity and Christian spokespeople. They have regular columns on "Faith" but it is rare indeed that anything is printed that points out the history of the purveyors of this "Faith". The churches do not want it known and so pretend that the vile history of Christianity “is already” well known—it is old hat. Everyone knows poor Christians were martyrs, fed to the lions and burnt as human torches. If it ever were true, the Christians got their own back on the world big-time!
Anyway, today the church is different. They hope a new generation will grow up to put renewed "Faith" into the soiled hands of those of the Apostolic Succession, a magic baton that makes priests official. But if these priests were devils for a thousand years as history proves, why are they different today? What has changed in the apostolic magic? Arguments such as this will not be seen on the pages of the newspapers.
Nevertheless, the arguments will not go away. At the centre is, of course, God. Christians want a God as a creator and, because they cannot stop bending at the knee, as a potentate. Eastern potentates have disappeared into the dustbin of history but Christians will insist on having a supernatural one to genuflect to. This God invents the rules of Nature so that he can break them to impress his worshippers, whose belief in mystery far exceeds their common sense.
Jonathan Miller once said that to say God used miracles and that supernatural events happened other than in the imagination should be considered blasphemous. He is a clever man who sees how silly it is and, unlike Christians, takes God to be a reasonable being, like himself.
It is indeed absurd to say that God breaks his own rules in petty and almost unseen ways when he could impress everyone with a mighty gesture visible to all. Nothing condemns Christianity as a confidence trick more than its harping on miracles that only happen on lonely roads or in deserted tombs at night. Nature is miraculous enough in herself without the help of an imaginary father to adorn her with tawdry candles and plastic baubles that seem more wondrous to the simple minded than the lilies in the field.
Moreover, what sort of faith is it that objects to people discovering more about the world we live in? Traditional Christians think that science diminishes God. They treat exploration as an extension of the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden. Curiosity and inquisitiveness are sins—Adam and Eve prove it! This conception of God is as a torturer who offers a child a toy but smacks them every time they reach for it. Indeed, the history of Christianity is enough to prove in any unbiased court that God is the Devil.
Hell
It is surprising even to some Christians—the minority of liberal ones—that so many of their co-religionists believe in Hell as a place of eternal fiery torture. Why? There is nothing in the teaching of the apostles about it. What Christians believe comes from Jesus himself, but his examples are all parables, notably the rich man and Lazarus, and therefore allegorical. Paul speaks of "tribulation and anguish on every soul of man that doeth evil" but can this be stretched to mean Hell?
That God will judge is clear but how can the doctrine of eternal torture fit into the universe of an all-loving God. In “Matthew” 25:46, Jesus speaks of eternal punishment but did he mean the punishment was continuous for eternity or that the one off punishment would last for eternity. The passage in Matthew implies the latter for the contrast with eternal punishment is eternal life. That means that the punishment cannot be perpetual burning in Hell for that requires life. The opposite of eternal life is eternal death so the proper interpretation of eternal punishment is death, a once-and-for-all punishment.
What sort of eternal bliss awaits those who arrive in heaven to find that friends and loved ones they expected to meet, were not there? Will they spend the rest of eternity wandering through the many rooms of God’s mansion, like the shades of Hades, trying to find them—not much of a Heaven this—or will they know they are being punished by burning continuously in agony in Hell? When the good get to Heaven, are they glad that the wicked—all of them, even their friends and relatives—are burning in Hell? Is that part of Heaven’s joy? When Christ rules, does he rule knowing that the wicked are being burned forever? Or is it that when Hell itself is consumed in the lake of fire (Rev 20), the lost souls will be released into the bliss of death? So, eternity is not really eternity as far as the burning’s concerned?
Furthermore, we are led to believe that God knows who will be good and who will be evil. The doctrine of “election” tells us that God himself chooses some to be saved and some to be lost, so he is an arbitrary torturer! Christian theologians tell us we are all sinners but, through Jesus Christ, we can avoid God’s righteous anger at our sins. God is therefore a religious mugger. He says: "Hand over your soul or I’ll torture you forever." So people hand over their souls. No wonder liberal Christians cannot accept it.
The Judaeo-Christian Scotoma
James Hope Moulton, a Christian professor with an admiration for missionaries, wrote: “Parsism, with a doctrine of God greater than any gentile faith possessed, might have become a world religion, if only Iran had produced men worthy to follow and extend the work of Zarathustra!” What he fails to see, as all Jews and Christians fail to see, a result of a religious scotoma that thay all suffer from out of unreasoning commitment to their own exclusive view, is that it did! Whether the propagators were Iranians we no longer know but it was at the command of the Iranians that Judaism began and out of it came Christianity. Both are Parsist heresies!
The arrogance of Christians could not be better illustrated than by Dr S L Gulick, a US missionary in Japan:
The trouble with native religions is not that they possess no truth, but that the truth they have is so mixed up with folly and superstition.
Modern Christian missionaries are not familiar with the humility of their Christ, and, though philosophers might have trouble discerning truth from falsehood, Christians have no problems at all. Scotoma manifests once more. They are quite unable to see that their own religion is neither true nor free of folly and superstition. Their whole religion is one massive superstition as Roman writers 2000 years ago knew. Their neuralogical lesion is so huge that their scotoma is complete. They see only lies and fantasy while reality is obscured to them.
Christians warn against substituting an imaginary figure for a prophet then claiming his sanction for some of the ideas he most repudiated. It is the Christian scotoma that they cannot see that they have ignored this warning in respect of Jesus in almost every particular. The Jesus of the synoptic gospels was not a Christian!
The clearest example is Jesus’s absolute commitment to poverty, now utterly ignored on the most indulgent grounds by all but a few Christian ascetics. All but these few are the rich young man of the synoptics who could not give up his wealth and were warned: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” Christians are utterly convinced that they will be saved but ignore the most fundamental principles of their god in his earthly incarnation. Since they profess a belief in God and in Jesus, do they really think these teachings are irrelevant. When did God appear since then to cancel them out? Asceticism in material desires is one of the things that would help the unnecessary exploitation of the Goddess’s earthly resources. It is therefore ignored by Christians.
Anyone can create a god by writing some oppresive tract that will win popular support from those inclined to support tyranny or even hierarchies. The Christian theologian will tell us: “The laws of the spiritual world are often the reverse of those of the natural world.” It sounds very mysterious and profound, but simply means that anyone, like the Christian professor, the astrologist and the fantasy fiction writer can make up imaginary rules and call them spiritual laws. They may or may not correspond with some natural laws according to the purpose of the writer. The plain difference between a natural law and a spiritual law is that the natural law can be verified or refuted, but the believer has to take the spiritual law on the word of someone who knows about them. Anyone who can prove or refute a spiritual law can also extract sunbeams from cucumbers. Both are about equally possible and equally useful.
The archives of Christianity are written in blood and punctuated with tears. Lucretius wrote long ago that “monstrous wrongs are prompted by religion.” The reason is that religions do not value earthly things whether they are trees or human lives. The world the religious desire is the imaginary “world of the spirit.” So, any evil can be committed in God’s name in the natural world. The religion of the Goddess puts Nature first. Crimes against Nature are the true evil—anything that offends the Goddess, directly or indirectly, is wrong!
The Rev William Goudie, a missionary in India, tells the budding Christian missionary how to effect a conversion:
The first grip on the heart and mind of a new convert is almost invaraiably through some point of contact, and its first impact on his own faith is nearly always destructive. The first effect of Christianity on the Hindu systems must be to disintegrate. The constructive and inclusive process will come later.
No Christian will consider that the destruction that they welcome might be as damaging to the psyche of non-Christian people as the importation of cheap manufactured goods was on their craft industries and therefore their economic wellbeing. Third world countries have not yet, in the main, recovered from the nineteenth century imposition of cheap produce and the Christian religion. People who formerly lived in concert with the earth were divorced from it in both ways.
More recently, Hindu activists have accused Christian missionaries of fraudulent conversions—the practice of luring poor, unsophisticated lower caste people to Christianity by promising health and wealth. Patrap Kumar Sarengi, a Hindu who heads the Bajrang Dal in Orissa, says:
These people are insecure and vulnerable. They may have TB, and they are told if they pray to Jesus Christ, he will cure them. This is conversion by fraud and allurement, and it is dangerous and illegal.
Now, westerners are hurt and surprised that other people do not like them. What NeoPagans have yet to realise because they have always had such a liberal outlook towards other people and religions themselves is that Christianity cannot be treated with respect. It always turns and bites in the end. That is its purpose—to subdue, and it lies and cheats to do so. NeoPagans should not cease to respect those who respect them, but will treat others the way they treat others!
Paganism and Christianity
Only a century after the crucifixion, Justin Martyr was freely accepting, in his debate with Pagans that Christianity had its parallels in Paganism. Famously, it was the work of the devil in mocking the true faith in advance! Modern thinkers, even Christian ones, find it hard to believe this, and find it easier to imagine that Christianity took on some of the common features of the popular religions that preceded it. Christians generally cannot accept such a simple and feasible explanation because it shows that their religion evolved and was not revealed once and for all. In fact, Kirsopp Lake, the old scholar, averred early Christianity was a mystery religion.
A black marble column of the time of the emperor Hadrian was found near Lindus in Rhodes. It stood before a temple and gave the conditions for anyone desiring to enter:
First and foremost, being pure and healthy in hands and mind, and with no awareness of wrongdoing.
It does not sound like the image of Paganism given by the Christian missionaries and evangelists. But they have a scotoma in respect of lying too. The inscription was followed by restrictions on entry caused by various degrees of defilement. It reveals that the Jewish laws of personal cleanliness, though possibly unusually strict, were known also in the classical Pagan world.
James Hope Moulton disparaged the constant motif of miraculous birth in ancient religions as applying in Christian myth on the grounds that the “details” are different. This is so foolish a reason in a world when cultures varied so greatly over distances that are today negligible, that it can only be seen as the worst kind of Christian apology based on gullibility or ignorance. Religious distinctions can only depend on the details because the core of all western religions is the same.
“John” 3:22,26;4:1-2 say Jesus did not baptize but the disciples did, yet Peter bids others to baptize Cornelius after he had converted him and Paul thanks God he is not sent to baptize but to preach the word. Christianity, if anything, was characterized by its initiation ceremony of baptism and still is. Baptism is a rite of the Christians that harks all the way back to the forerunner of Jesus, John the Baptist. John can be neither a Pagan nor an heretic but the “New Testament” seems to regard his baptism with disdain. In “Acts,” the “baptism of John” is not good enough for Christians.
The whole of this confusion is a result of the sect of Nazarenes who foollowed John the Baptist instead of Jesus and came to be called Mandaeans. John’s baptism after repentance seriously rivalled Christianity in the gentile world and the early Christians had to make Jesus look superior to John. Jesus therefore did nothing so menial as baptising, and nor did his later chief lieutenants. They left it to the lesser lights of their budding religion, but claimed, nevertheless that it was superior to the baptism of John and the Mandaeans.
The first Christians seemed to take it that every meal was a messianic meal because the kingdom could come in the next minute, but it later formalized into a ritual akin to that of some of the mysteries, performed according to fixed practices to bring about salvation by magic. The same became true of baptism when the water had to be poured, the cross made and the triune name uttered reverentially. Without such care, the soul was lost! The Christian might be liberal enough to recognize this as all primitive, but justifies it on the grounds that the means of admitting God’s grace into a life are unimportant. If God choses, He will admit His grace how He pleases, and liberal Christians will not pretend there is only one way!
The mass might be Pagan but it is all right because God reognizes Christian sincerity in it as much as in a Protestant communion or a Quaker supper. Liberal Christians advocate sincerity not ritual. Why then not accept a proper religion of sincerity—sincerely believing that the Goddess of Nature has been abandoned over 4000 years of patriarchy and needs sincere hands to help revive her from a critical fever. It is hard to be sincere over a lot of patriarchal mumbo jumbo but sincerely wanting to secure a decent world for our children means something to us all. Believe that Jesus is properly the Goddess Wisdom, depict her as a crucified woman and then worship her in truth before she really dies!
Christians are happy to see Paul de-Paganizing the Greek games in the interest of lifting their souls “above the material world into fellowship with “Something” which they worshipped in ignorance but yet sincerely.” The result of this is that, in the year 2000, Christians think the Olympic Games are a Christian institution. On TV, a pastor, a priest and parishioners from Sydney, Australia, were praising the wonderful Christian fellowship of the Sydney Olympics! One might imagine they are ignorant, but they are not. They depend on the ignorance of the audience—they themselves are just dishonest.
Paul’s opportunistic adoption of Pagan symbols, Protestants like to think, was merely utilitarian, not meant to be taken lierally, yet that is not what happened. Christians took Paul to mean what he said. Baptism was not just a symbolic washing but actually incorporated the convert into the body of Christ, and the Eucharist did not merely symbolize the granting of eternal life but granted it in fact by the participant really eating the mangled and bloody body of the crucified god. That is how Paul actually saw it, according to the Catholic Church, because that is what really happened! So, who says Christians do not believe in magic?
Paul evidently did and most Christians still do. Even if they do not believe in this particular magic, and take the Protestant view that it is symbolic, they do believe in the power of black magic. There can be few people in the most advanced civilization in the world, the USA, that do not believe in Satan, even if they are indifferent to Christ. Protestants will preserve their faith in their “first missionary” by persuading themselves that Paul’s imagination and emotional involvement were such that he saw reality even in his symbols, but that has to be a desperate cop-out or an admission that Paul verged on insanity.
Evolution
Physical science shows the principle of evolution as prescribing the Goddess’s method in the material world. All things organic or inorganic seem to evolve, whether in themselves or through external actions, from the galaxies of distant space to the institutions built by humans, like the churches. Christians will insist that in their formulation, God not the Goddess being in charge of Nature, the laws of Nature can be violated at a whim simply so that God can impress a particular animal he created called Homo. Christians are vain enough to think that God will violate the laws of Nature He has carefully prepared to persuade them to be “saved.”
NeoPagans think that, if the Goddess has used a law called evolution to effect change in the world, that she will not ignore it willy nilly to impress a species that has emerged from life in general through that very process of evolution! Evolution is good enough to produce the astonishing wonders of Nature that can be experienced by anyone, more amazing wonders than any religion can invent, yet it is not good enough for the self-indulgent Christian’s salvation. Vanity! Vanity! The Goddess has been suppressed for millennia by those who want to magnify themselves in Nature at the expense of the rest of creation. She is now beginning to take a revenge on the human patriarch worshippers for whom reality is evil and fantasy is the only good. Along with it is a slowly dawning consciousness of the gross error humanity has made—possibly an error fatal to higher vertebrate life.
There never was a need for an imaginary father except to glorify the son. Fathers have never been more than catalysts of life, never its source. Life exists perfectly well without fathers. Nature is a Mother Goddess! It is obvious! Why do we persist in worshipping a figmentary father? Our hope for salvation as a species depends on rejecting fantastic fathers in favour of love of our Mother—Nature! By loving her, we have a chance of preserving the biosphere in some state of health instead of ploughing it into dust. Our salvation is Nature’s salvation!
Sacrificing your Friends
Christians like to claim to be God’s friend, perhaps because Abraham was a “friend of God.” But this patriarchal God is no friend of humanity even according to the “Holy Book.” The “friend” of Abraham destroyed the whole population of cities like Sodom and Gomorrha. “Sinners!” the Christians will reply. What then of the innocent soldiers of the Assyrian army killed in battalions-full? They were not sinners. Indeed, they were supposedly God’s own agents, punishing the sinful Israelites. If, nevertheless, they were enemies of God’s chosen people, what of Jephthah’s noble daughter, who was not saved from sacrifice to Yehouah like Isaac? She was only female. Doubtless she was rewarded in heaven, serving the messianic meal! No wonder women have flocked to the patriarchal religion. Better to be a drudge than a sacrifice.
Christians find merit in Jephthah’s barabarous sacrifice to have the favour of his fancied god, Yehouah. J H Moulton writes: “There is an ethical value here for which the price paid was not too high.” A civilized Christian professor of the twentieth century is saying this, not a primitive human-sacrificing native. He is justifying human sacrifice! Perhaps the ethical value was that the noble daughter of the story was made to share in her father’s vow and voluntarily give her life for a victory in battle. She is made to die willingly so that the lives of many mothers sons would be extinguished by Yehouah, the good God!
Ah, well! “She was an inspiration to mankind.” Roll up, you unsullied virgins to be an inspiration to mankind and a sacrifice to the Judaeo-Christian god of love! “Unspeakable anquish” is the “travail pains of a higher life!” “What use can God make of a soul so noble in the eternal world!” These outrageous rantings are what Christians believe. Yet when modern Christian apocalyptic sects poison themselves “en-masse” or cook themselves in incendiary churches, they are decried by the orthodox as extreme. Well, the extremist saying this was a professor at Manchester, and a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. He had a DD and a D Theol, so spoke with authority. What more is needed to prove Chistianity is primitive, insane and hates women despite their devotion?
The End of the World
Christian belief is incompatible with natural religion. Christianity is founded in the supernatural not the natural. It was revealed by God, a universal demon who allegedly fights evil but seems not to be doing too well at it. The culmination of God’s fight against evil occurs when he destroys the world and restores it with no evil. What stops him from doing this sooner rather than later. He is all powerful is he not? Meanwhile this insane belief is helping to bring about its own forecast. Jesus himself warned about the last days:
The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven.(Mk 13.24-25)
On the day when Lot went out from Sodom fire and sulphur rained from heaven and destroyed them all—so it will be on the day when the Son of man is revealed.(Lk 17.29-30)
A Catholic friend asked me to find “Three Days of Darkness” for him on the web. “Prepare to meet thy doom.” It is an insane apocalyptic rant, that only the insane can believe, but apparently this is standard Catholic fodder. The Church might not publish it but it makes no attempt to stop it. It is no more than we read repeatedly in the Jewish and Christian bibles, but purports to be a new revealtion by none other than the Mother of God! Mohammed warns in similar vein:
When the stars are extinguished
And the skies are riven asunder;
When the mountains blow away like dust,
And the messengers’ time is fixed;
When is the time appointed?
On the Day of Decision.Quran 77:8-13
Belief in an apocalyptic end to the world, common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is self fulfilling. It is quite reasonable to argue, if God himself will one day roll up the heavens like a scroll and burn the earth to a cinder, then why should we struggle to preserve it? Not only is there no point in it, some Christians think the environmental destruction we are wreaking today is God’s way of bringing about his plan for the end of the world, and we should assist Him in it. It is impossible for any Christian to avoid the obvious fact, well known and disliked by the Romans, that Christianity prays for the world to end, and so they cannot reasonably try to prevent it when they see it happening.
The Foundation of Christian Belief
Natural religions evolve as all natural things do, but, though Christianity “does” in fact evolve, many believers resist the idea passionately on the grounds that what is once revealed by God must be unchanging. On this, Christians themselves are in perpetual conflict, some resisting change absolutely and others arguing that what was once revealed and is unchanging can nevertheless, as Aquinas said, be better understood with the passage of time. It is like the dispute of the Essenes and Pharisees. Essenes thought they preserved God’s true revelation but inevitably had to interpret it, While the Pharisees interpreted it in every conceivable way, adding quantities of additional laws to preserve God’s revelation—to the Essenes, violating the law they sought to preserve.
Christians say they believe Christianity to be true “because” God revealed it. The falseness of Christianity is not something that can arise in the Christian mind—scotoma! Since they could not believe that God would reveal something false, their belief is really simply their belief in God. If Christianity is false it could not have been revealed by God. God, a cosmic demon, revealed the object of their faith, and Christianity is necessarily supernatural. In fact, of course, the revelation of Christianity is set out in the bible, a book that admits that God happily reveals falsehoods if it suits him! Christians avert their eyes from this admission and so their belief in the truth of revelation condenses to belief in the book that tells them about it. Except, that is, the bits they do not wish to know.
Really, Christians reason backwards from this belief in Christian truth to the belief in God and his revelation. Christianity, they believe, is true. Truth cannot be improved upon, cannot become more true, by the application of reason. So, there is no point in developing it by reason. Truth has to be recognized as it was given—supernaturally—and cannot become more true through evolution. Futhermore, truth cannot have been revealed by God if God is not real. So, the existence of revelation proves the reality of God, not the other way round. But revelation in the modern, natural world, comes to us in the form of a book—the bible. So, it is the bible that proves the reality of God, not the other way round!
Stress on the content of the bible as the Word of God has led to a disastrously bigoted form of fundamentalism, and stress on the incarnation of God in Jesus has led to a Jesus who is often not recognisable as a human figure.John Bowden
Christian belief is seen really to be belief in the bible as revelation, which is why Fundamentalists are so aggressive in defending this book of old Jewish mythical history, written by their Persian governors. But, however much they might argue, no one can deny that the book itself, and its millions of words, exist in this, quite natural, world and are subject to the laws of Nature. In Nature, things evolve over time. That is precisely what the bible did, as anyone who cares to study it can tell, until particular recensions of its various books were accepted by the religious authorities of the time as canonical. Then its evolution was curtailed and limited to the natural errors of scribes.
All of this can be seen in the bible and cannot reasonably be denied. So, Christians, who began with the premise of a God-given revelation faithfully recorded in His Holy Book, have to admit that the actual recording of the revelation occurred piecemeal by many scribes. They wriggle a little but tell us that God influenced the scribes through the Holy Ghost whose subtle presence kept their hands writing the right things—except, of course, when they made mistakes! The inquisitive Christian, if this is not an oxymoron, must wonder why an almighty power would want to choose such a tortuous, uncertain and apparently natural way of revealing His truth instead of offering an unmistakable miracle to each doubting generation. Christians have no answer to this question except, “God knows”.
The real truth about Christianity is this: no Christian can accept that Christianity is anything other than true, whether it is or not, and whether it can be shown to be false or not. All Christians are bound by their commitment to it and are justified by nothing more than the millions more Christians who also believe it. Some of them know it is bogus, but they are the priests and preachers who gain by it. Obviously they will not tell. The rest reassure each other. It is the Emperor’s New Clothes writ as large as it is possible to write it. The Emperor is stark naked, but no Christian dare admit it.
But, if Christianity contains a perennial truth revealed by God in person, why is it so subject to doubt and slander? Why do Fundamentalists, Catholics, Protestants, Progressives and the rest disagree so vehemently and squabble like starlings on a waste heap. Ah, it is the world that is wrong, not the Christian revelation. Here is another fundamental difference between Christianity and the natural religions—Christians have always blamed the material world, natural religions have always revered it.
Christianity is a religion of conscious and unconscious opportunists, of knaves and dupes, of fanatics and fools. It is the religion of the unthinking and uncritical members of the human race, happy to be exploited by frauds and happy to punish the world for being wicked—that is, not agreeing with them.
Mass Insanity
Christians fear for the continuation of their faith if they appear to concede a single tenet of it. Christian truth therefore is rightly described as dogma—fixed and immovable. Yet if even a cursory check is made on the items taught by their own god, Jesus, there is little in it that they have not conceded! They know full well that if Christians were expected to do as Jesus taught, then there would be no Christians at all, other than the mentally ill sitting on pillars or living in solitude.
This began within only a few years of the supposed date of the crucifixion, with the first universal evangelist, Paul. For Paul, the teaching of Jesus was of no interest whatsoever because he knew that it would alienate potential gentile converts. No evangelist since has placed Jesus, despite his being a god, over Paul who everyone accepts as only a man. Christianity evokes Jesus only in death, despite the four long works devoted to his life. In his life, Christianity is not interested except insofar as his reported miracles prove him to be a god. His teaching is irrelevant because Jesus is only an imaginary dolly for babies of all ages.
His relevant life is imaginary from unnatural birth to ascent into heaven. If the teaching of Jesus were relevant, then item after item of it would prove that Christians are hypocrites by the standards of their own master. Yet they protect themselves with the oppressive crime of blasphemy, a crime that still carries severe penalties in some countries to this day. It is precisely the Christian awareness of the emptiness of their faith at its core that has engendered the most destructive intolerance by them over the years, to Pagans, to Jews and to other heretics. Roll on a millennium that might see Christianity characterized as the mass insanity that it is.
Christian Heroes
Most people, not least women, consider Mother Theresa as a saint who has saved lives. Yet she too places her faith in male priests and the Galilaean imposter they made, and her fame was built on her hospices—places where the terminally sick could “die” in peace. Her critics say that she made little if any attempt to save the dying poor in the streets of Calcutta by offering them treatment. She simply offered them a clean palette to lie upon, away from the dogs and rats, and a minimum of care, until they died. Her main purpose in the Catholic Church was to raise funds most of which were used to expand her own Catholic order by building seminaries and retreats for her nuns all over the world.
Catholic heroes were often gruesome ogres when examined closely. The murderer of Hypatia was canonised rather than anathematised. Another canonised Catholic hero, father Junopera Serra in 1769 AD claimed California for Spain and set about converting the natives. Pope John Paul II made Father Serra a saint in 1993 for his zeal in starving the California Indians into conversion to Christianity. Serra had fed them only one bowl of maize each a day and on this meagre diet had made them build twelve Catholic missions to atone for their sins. Indian mothers killed their children at birth once they realised what slavery the dying and rising god, Jesus, had in store for them.
Christopher Columbus similarly exploited the innocence of the American Indians. He found the Arawak Indians of Haiti where he landed would offer him anything he admired or desired. His reward to them was slavery. He sent them in boatloads back to the Old World, saying:
Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity send all the slaves that can be sold.
Within two years, half of the original quarter of a million Indians had been killed. In little more than a hundred years they were extinct. The Spaniards in Mexico and Peru used to baptize Indian infants and then immediately dash their brains out, feeling no guilt because they had ensured that these infants went to Heaven. No orthodox Christian can find any theological reason for condemning their action, although in these secular times they will condemn it, as anyone would. American Comments
Matriarchs ought to feel no compunction about exposing the horrific record of Christianity, yet all we ever hear about are saints, martyrs and missionaries. Susan B Antony famously said:
I shall explode if some of you young women do not wake up and raise your voice in protest… How can you not be all on fire?
