Adelphiasophism
The Horrors of Paganism according to Culture and Family
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Sunday, 10 March 2002
Culture and Family
A site called “Culture and Family” seems to be a cover for Christian propaganda of the most dishonest type, not because they particularly tell lies, but because they use the way preferred by Christians to avoid sins of commission, namely, sins of omission. An example is an item called “Oh My Goddess! Pagans and History,” by Martha W Kleder and Robert H Knight. It is a subtle article in some ways, giving a degree of credit to Paganism, to more make the wounds more painful when they come. What they write is mainly true, though no account is taken of context or human progress—all progress is Christian progress—and the sins of omission are to ignore the appalling history of the religion of love.
Thus the authors admit that our society has been enriched by contributions from some pagan cultures, “most prominently Greece and Rome, from which Western man developed systems of law, science and rigorous, rational thought,” but here comes the Christian obsession that this website is a cover for—sex! “The very practice of relaxed sexual mores that eventually destroyed Rome and Greece is now at work again in most pagan religions.”
It is an amusing theory that relaxed sexual mores lead to the collapse of society, but these authors have an authority for it, a Dr Joseph D Unwin noted in 1935 that societies that abandoned “pre-nuptial continence and marital fidelity soon lost energy and collapsed.” How this is reconciled with humanity ever evolving at all is impossible to say, except that these Christians doubtless believe that mankind did not evolve at all but were made by the holy potter in the sky out of some clay he found by a riverside. Nuptials, in other words, are a human institution and a result of the desire of churches to have control over who should marry whom and when.
Marriage, like all of the sacraments of religions, are about power. They give authority and power to someone whose business it is otherwise not! Doubtless there are people who are so stupid they do not realise this, but we can be certain that clergymen everywhere certainly do, and their determined defence of the holy sacraments are nothing to do with God and everything to do with keeping them in parasitic jobs that we can well do without.
Apparently, “defiance of the one, true God the Creator is at the heart of modern man’s problems,” and for this Pagans have no solutions. Whether this ia meant to seem profound to Christian withered-brains or is aimed at getting a gasp of astonishment from Pagans, only the authors know, but it is an astonishing cheek to blame Pagans for having no solutions for what only Christians perceive as a problem. For Adelphiasophists, it is the baseless acceptance of the propaganda of patriarchal religionists touting their phony father that has been the cause of much of the trouble in the world in the last 3000 years.
Human Sacrifice
Anyway, our Christian mentors want to get to their real point which is to claim that the heart of Paganism is human sacrifice.
Child sacrifice was common amongst the pagan religions. Fertility cults, such as those who worshipped Ba’al and Asherah, the Ammonites who worshipped Molech and the Phoenicians who worshipped Kronos, all practiced child sacrifice.
They will refuse to consider, if their thesis that Christianity is God’s revelation is correct, why the God of love was allowing people to suffer at the hands of devils for millions of years before he decided to appear in the form of his son to resolve such problems. To rational people this God looks perverse if not devilish Himself, but He has succeeded in destroying whatever critical powers these Christians ever had and replacing them with pre-programmed rejection of criticism of their Satanic God.
Their first point of call is the Phoenician Tophet, the sacred burial place of Canaanite children sacrificed to their gods. All the evidence is that these sacrificial burial places were deeply spiritual places to Phoenicians and were immensely respected. Usually the children were infants but exceptionally could be up to about twelve, the edge of adulthood. No one knows what the idea was behind them. The assumption is that they achieved some sort of favour from the deity, but whether the sacrifices were personal ones or were a condition of citizenship, or whatever, is not known. Most likely it was some sort of sacrament akin to Christening or marriage and was justified by no-brains in the same way as these Christian authors justify marriage—the world would cease to revolve without it!
If Pausanias tells us that the Messenian king, Aristodemus, consulted the oracle at Delphi for ways to defeat the Spartans, and that Apollo recommended as a sacrifice to the gods a virgin of his own royal race, so putting to death his own daughter, the Christian bible has an equal example in the sacrifice of the daughter of Jephthah to the Christian God Yehouah. Doubtless they have some excuse for this, but to those still not indoctrinated in the Christian way of dissimulation, the story is plainly a human sacrifice for victory in battle (Jg 11:30-31).
Child Sacrifice
In fact, there might have been a social purpose behind the Canaanite Tophet. It might have been a form of birth control. What all the Christian clappies never consider is the abject poverty of families forced to feed and attempt to sustain every child that is born to a woman. Modern Americans, cocooned in the richest society ever seen, mainly cannot even imagine the horror of another child being born into a family already unable to feed the children it has. “These children are gifts from God,” they yell, but, if they are, they are worse than white elephants—gifts intended to keep the recipient impoverished for life.
Other societies had less reverent ways than the Tophet of dealing with unwanted children, as the Culture and Family authors will soon remind us, but the aim was the same—to preserve the existing family. Pagan people did not have the idea that some odious father in the sky meant every child conceived to live. They had laws against murder but these did not extend to new born children because it was the right and the duty of every natural father of a child to decide whether he could feed his children, and if he could not the child was not wanted and was returned to the gods.
When missionaries went to nineteenth century China they discovered that baby girls were routinely disposed of by being put out as food for wild dogs and wolves. ‘Baby towers’ were common, where unwanted babies were left out to die of exposure and starvation, or to be eaten alive by birds of prey. Some towns had ‘baby ponds’ where unfortunate infants were thrown.
It is more than likely that the sacrifice of the Canaanites had this element in it. Poor families could offer up their youngest child to the god in the hope of getting a better deal in life. In India today:
Parents dedicate their daughters to a goddess because there is physical sickness or family problems or financial problems.Arun Massey, founder of Rahab’s Trust
Not one of the Christian empty-heads consider that the bible tells us that children were dedicated to the Hebrew God in just the same way, and probably for the same purpose. Indeed, it is likely that Jesus was himself offered to the Essenes because his mother could not keep him. An ancient tradition is that he was born out of marriage himself!
The sacrifice could have given Phoenician parents no better deal, but, by taking away another drain on the family’s scarce resources, the ones who remained lived a little better. We have no reason to believe therefore that the Canaanites would not regard the Tophet with the utmost respect. It was the place where they paid homage to beloved children whose life had been given to allow their parents and siblings to live the life they did. Parents would visit the Tophet where they could grieve in silence while giving thanks that the child they had been obliged to offer had been adopted by the gods, and through it they had been able to support the remainder of the family.
It was a way of giving a degree of nobility to an unpleasant but necessary deed. Doubtless, children were sacrificed for other reasons too, but no one should forget this aspect of it, or the downside, which is the filth, disease and poverty of Christian families throughout the Christian period, and indeed until only a hundred years or so ago. These same Christians will not even let a fertilised human egg be used to save a life, their religion has taken their self-appointed piety to such absurd lengths.
The subtle dishonesty of these people is illustrated as clearly as can be once it is pointed out. They quote some authority as saying that the prime symbol of Crete was “above all, the double ax, as an instrument of sacrifice magically enriched with the virtue of the blood that it sheds.” Well that might be so, but there is no implication here that the sacrifice was human though that, in this context, is what the authors want their readers to infer. It seems unlikely from the archaeology that the Minoans offered human beings in sacrifice. But these facts are not sacred and so can be disposed of so far as Christians are concerned.
Christian Aberrations
Human sacrifice, other than of children, was certainly common in the ancient world, and it is impossible not to accept that the biblical commandment that people should not kill has not influenced our present refusal to accept ritual murder. What Christians ignore is that Christians for more than ten centuries happily killed people in a variety of ways without any sacrifice being a part of the act. No excuse was offered for these myriads of deaths other than it was God’s wish. These authors of the cosy website “Culture and Family” dismiss these undeniable truths as aberrations! It is like saying it is an aberration that crocodiles eat gazelles, and Christians actually believe this too, because their infantile belief is that crocodiles will cuddle up with gazelles in heaven! No doubt in heaven, crocodiles have no need of food because God will feed them spiritually, but then again perhaps they will have no need of food because they are dead.
The family people highlight the principle of sutte in India as if it were a ritual human sacrifice to a god, when it was a statement of the abject dependence on men that patriarchal society had given women. When the woman’s husband died, living was worse than death for these women, and they would rather die than live a life of misery. The insistence of the Christian churches, following Augustine, even removed suicide from the choices of abject people. They would escape misery in this world but would suffer an eternity of it in another. Ha, ha! You are caught little flies in the Christian spider’s psychological web of deceit! There is no escape. We shall consume you slowly and discard the chitin but by then it will be too late for you to realise you were deceived.
Biblical Examples
These Christian authors have found their way to the AskWhy! publications site because they now cite Mike Magee (“Mystery of Barabbas”) in their argument:
The odd thing about the details of the crucifixion of Jesus is that it re-enacts ancient pagan rites of human sacrifice.
Mesha of Moab sacrificed his eldest son; King Hiel sacrificed his sons when Jericho was founded; Kings Ahaz and Manasseh burnt their children in sacrifice.
The comment they make is that “crucifixion was a Roman practice, not a Christian one.” They hoped to refute the accusation from some critics of Christianity that the crucifixion of Jesus was itself a sacrifice, so that Christianity is at root no different from the earlier religions that practiced sacrifice. Indeed, it preserves a purpose for the barbaric practice which otherwise would have been seen as pointless in the modern world.
As for the other cases cited, they are all biblical examples of human sacrifice, though the authors do not mention it. It might be argued that the sacrifice was excusable in ancient societies, but that would upset the argument presented here that there is no excuse for it. In any case, the example of God’s supposed wishes had already been given to Abraham when he intended to sacrifice his son Isaac. In other words, ancient people had already given up human sacrifice early enough for it to be registered in the Christian “Old Testament,” the Jewish scriptures. The Romans, for example, had declared human sacrifice illegal during the republic, long before Christ ever lived.
Sexual Aberrations
The authors of the website are fond of another Christian trick, and that is citing other Christians as if they had some independent authority to speak. They are, naturally, regurgitating the official party line.
Original pagan rites involved sexual aberration of all sorts—not just adultery and homosexuality but ritualized orgies at holy sites such as temples or sacred groves. Bestiality and possibly incest were also frequently involved.Linda Harvey, culture critic and director of Mission America
This woman says “original,” meaning the rites which applied when religions were fertility religions. She fails to admit, for obvious reasons, that the urbanites of the large empires that arose in the first millennium BC were no longer worshipping their gods as fertility symbols, but were already looking to them for immortality. It was on offer from the Pagan gods and goddesses in exchange for what Christians would call righteous living. People had to demonstrate that they lived impeccably correct lives to receive the salvation of the deity. Christians have never had to do this and that is perhaps why Christianity has provided a shelter for some of the worst rogues in history. No Christian will admit any of this because they want to reserve all such things for the revelation of their god through his son. Believing in Santa Claus is no different.
What Christians do not like to record is the squalor, filth, misery and perversions hidden by Christianity over the best part of two millennia. “Aberrations!” they tell us.
No one knows much about the purpose or practice of temple prostitution in ancient times, though it certainly happened. A social purpose in it can easily be seen and justified in any society other than one with the unnatural Christian distaste for sexual matters. Today, we have cities full of brothels, call girls, strip clubs, pole dancers and massage parlours. They make money mainly for criminals such as pimps and gangsters while the women mainly finish up worn out hags at a young age. Despite this proliferation of sexual services at the fringes of legality, society is plagued by serial murderers for whom sex is not exciting enough. We can guess that sexual access via a holy sexual service could have had moral strings attached that helped to keep order in these supposedly perverted Pagan societies.
What is certain, however, is that the Vestal Virgins, for example, of the Roman religion were more virginal than Christian nuns because they were buried alive if they indulged in any sexual activity! So from the time that priestesses were offering sexual favours in Babylon to the time when Christ was supposed to have lived, the nature of the temple priestesses had changed utterly, and no Christian until then had ever existed. Even in Babylonian times, the priestesses were treated properly and respectfully, and we have no reason to believe that they undertook whatever their work involved with as much cynicism as the average Christian TV evangelist in modern America.
Despite that, the family people feel that Christianity is more moral than Paganism, and they happily cite a variety of bizarre cults that base themselves on supposed ancient practices. Mostly, they are people rebelling against the hypocrisy of Christianity with its public-morality-private-squalor attitude, and thereby having a good time. Few of them know anything about ancient practices, and probably care less. It is their own practices today that interest them.
The Balanced View
It is never the purpose of Chriatian propagandists to give any sort of balanced view. They have to find Christ as the revelation of what they find acceptable, and therefore have to distort previous history so that it is never found before Christ! “Society before Christ was entirely perverted, but since then it has had the example of Christ, for the first time in history, a moral example.” No one with even a single brain cell could accept this as being true in any sense at all! All good came from Christianity. Yet all the major religions except Islam are older than Christianity, and most of their professed devotees are more moral and less hypocritical than Christians are.
The authors of this piece cannot bring themselves to admit, for their own theological reasons, that several Pagan religions before Christianity were utterly moral and far more principled and strict in their admission procedures than Christianity. Zoroastrianism was the first of the monotheistic religions that spawned the rest of the modern huge patriarchal religious groups. It was an utterly moral religion with an utterly moral and stern god. The modern Parsees are so strict in their membership rules that they do not accept members. Parsees are born Parsees. Consequently the religion may be dying. Only through a sectarian split, with the new sect accepting converts has it a chance of continuing.
In Classical times, the Stoics and the Epicureans were strictly moral philosophical religions, from which, no honest Christian historian will deny, Christianity stole some of its morality and philosophy. The Neo-Platonists were another such group, and even clergymen will accept that Christianity owes something to it. So, morality is not only not peculiar to Christianity alone, a few honest Christians admit that Christianity owes something to these Pagan philosophies.
The Culture and Family mentors conclude by reminding us that all things good in the modern world were Christian inventions. They cite some obscure Christian called Peter Hammond:
Most of the languages of the world were first codified and put into writing by Christian missionaries. More schools and universities have been started by Christians than by any other group. The elevation of women (from second-class status they were kept in by other religions) was a Christian achievement, as was the abolition of slavery, cannibalism, child sacrifice and widow burning. Almost every civilization and culture practiced slavery and human sacrifice before Christian influence.
We cover blatant lies like this elsewhere but concede that in an entirely Christian world, the people who discover or do anything can be described as Christians. What lying Christians do not point out is that for a thousand years these Christians discovered almost nothing at all because Christianity was opposed to knowledge. No Christian can deny this because it is written in every copy of their own holy book—yet they do deny it all the same. Paul is absolutely clear (1 Cor 3:18) that Christians must be fools and only thus can they be wise. He repeats similar outrages elsewhere, and Christians take him seriously. The bulk of them are fools. The rest are cynics.
Christians certainly founded universities in the late Middle Ages, when the dark ages were slowly beginning to lift after 800 years of abject ignorance and torment in daily life for millions of people. Their purpose was not to discover or propagate universal knowledge but to propagate Christianity. Missionaries did codify languages but not for the benefit of enlightening anyone about the rich tapestry of the world and cultures that we live among but to destroy it and them all the more efficiently to impose Christianity.
Christianity destroyed the growing emancipation of women under the Romans and set them back two millennia. They might now be just recovering. The Romans were beginning to debate the abolishion of Slavery and some Stoics were recommending it. Christianity set the whole process back and held it there for 1500 years, and for some such as the black slaves of America, until only a few decades ago. The feudal system was only a different form of slavery in which the serfs were not owned by the landowner but were tied to the land. But who owned the land? The landowner! So the serf was in fact a slave. Who owned a lot of the land that the serfs were tied to and still own it? The churches!
Comment
From Honest Courtesan
Shirlie, I have the following comments on: Adelphiasophism. The Horrors of Paganism according to Culture and Family.
Shirlie is ill in hospital at the moment, so I hope you will accept my reply for her.
I feel the need to refute this biased and uninformed statement: “Today we have cities full of brothels, call girls, strip clubs, pole dancers and massage parlours. They make money mainly for criminals such as pimps and gangsters and the women mainly finish up as worn out hags at a young age.” You couldn’t be more wrong. For a minute I thought I had stumbled across a conservative Christian site or a writing by Andrea Dworkin or Kathleen Barry or Catherine McKinnon. Have you ever actually investigated prostitution via prostitution rights organizations that are pro-sex worker who work to make conditions better for ALL sex workers? Or do you just rely on the biased media who only show that very small percentage because it’s more sensational?
For such an otherwise well thought out website, the staggering amount of condescendation in that statement knocks me out. In most major cities around the world street prostitution, where you will find the highest percentage of women working with pimps and other criminals hovers around 10-15%. These are the women and young people who practice survival sex, doing it only to get by. In the same way those homeless people who steal or beg are doing it for survival but you’d hardly compare them with those who do such things for a living as an actual job. The rest is made up of escorts/call girls, etc who are decidedly NOT strung out or working with pimps or gangsters. It is a great offense that you would conflate the two. Many women work as escorts in college paying tuition BY THEIR OWN CHOICE. Several others make a career out of it lasting as long as they want it to. Many like the sexual adventure or the extra money they can make in addition to their 9-5 jobs. All are fiercely independent and most love what they do. Like any other business sometimes you fail sometimes you succeed.
Some work via an agency, others are independent contractors. I have several girlfriends who are escorts and they have a variety of degrees ranging from baccalaureate to doctorate, ranging in age, race, body shape. Quite of few of them are pagan! As I said before, these women (and men) are rarely highlighted (unless they’re going to be somehow discredited) because they do not live up to the prevailing stereotype of the poor little women who have to be protected from themselves and their own sexuality. Because they do not stand out on the street they are unknown. You have probably met a lot more escorts than you think. If you wish to gain a more informed opinion of a large majority of women who are in The Lifestyle look at these sites:
http://www.bayswan.org/penet.html—gives statistics and information on all forms of prostitution.
http://www.iusw.org/—UK based and includes statistics
http://www.iswface.org/
http://www.escortsupport.com/
http://www.swop-usa.org/about.html
http://www.catherinelacroix.com/—Domme /courtesan /fetishist /businesswoman /activist
http://www.realm-of-shade.com/meretrix/books/—Links to lists of books about sex work, feministm, etc.
http://www.spreadmagazine.org/launch.html—Sex Work magazine
http://www.eros.com.au/ http://www.gigolo.com/home.htm
http://www.sexuality.org/workers.html
http://www.sexuality.org/l/workers/aspfaq.html
http://www.veronicamonet.com/
http://www.veronicamonet.com/presskit/menu.htm—She has a clip of a radio interview that is very informative.
And most importantly:
http://www.zetetics.com/mac/talks/—Click on the link under the Audio heading “Selling Sexuality: Women’s Freedom or Women’s Oppression” for a mp3 of a 28 minute lecture on this topic given by Wendy McElroy, a feminist. Free to download.
If my email comes off as strongly worded and offensive, I’m sorry. However I am sick and tired of these inaccurate stereotypes of sex workers continuing to be propulgated by the media and the ignorant populace. Thanks to the Internet information can be found from credible sources, namely the women and men themselves, and so continuing to buy into the 11 o’clock news version of prostitution is no longer needed. Other than this rather large bone of contention, I love the site. I’ll be passing on the link to my other non-Christian friends.
Adelphiasophism is pro-Nature and that includes sex, but it is against exploitation of it by criminals and gangsters. So, Shirlie would not disagree with your main complaint. Perhaps the sentences you cited were too all encompassing, but you accept that up to 15 percent of the sex business is accurately described by the words. The disgreement revolves around the validity of a percentage. The point Shirlie was making at that point was one of hypocrisy in Christian society rather than a scientific analysis of prostitution as a whole. Christian society is hypocritical about something that has always served a necessary purpose. Really there is no disagreement between you both, except one of expression.
I suggest that I add your letter to the page as a comment to ameliorate the impression you had. Let me know if you are happy with this proposal.
Firstly, please pass my well-wishes onto Shirlie. I hope she gets better soon!
Secondly, thank you for clearing that up. I have no problem with the adding of my letter to the page. I’m sure I won’t be the only one that will have that confusion only others who write to get explanation like I did, instead just complain about it. Amazing how much confusion arises from semantics and expression.
A thousand thank-yous for your prompt and eloquent response! As I said, I thoroughly enjoy all the AskWhy! sites and I will in fact be using some of the information on Celsus in a future post on my political blog.
She’ll see the correspondence when she gets home in about four weeks’ time, we hope. Meanwhile I’ll pass on your good wishes. Thanks for letting us use your letter. We are glad you like our pages and that someone finds them useful. They are meant to be an inspiration and a resource.
