MAJOR
SECTIONS
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Do
you really think it all began with a sanctimonious
Jewish wonder-worker, strolling about 1st century
Palestine? Prepare to be enlightened.
 Jesus – The
Imaginary Friend
Christianity
was the ultimate product of religious
syncretism in the
ancient world. Its
emergence owed nothing to a holy carpenter. There were many Jesuses but
the fable was a cultural construct.
The nativity yarn is a concatenation of nonsense. The genealogies of Jesus, both Matthew's version and Luke's, are pious fiction. Nazareth did
not exist in the 1st century AD – the area
was a burial ground of rock-cut tombs.
With
multiple authors behind the original gospel story it
is no surprise that the figure of "Jesus" is
a mess of contradictions.
Yet the story is so thinly
drawn that being a "good Christian" might mean almost anything.
The 12
disciples are as fictitious as their master,
invented to legitimise the claims of the early churches.
The original Mary was not a virgin, that idea
was borrowed from pagan goddesses. The pagan world knew all
about virgins getting pregnant by randy gods: The Mythical "Virgin Mother".
Scholars have
known all this for more
than 200 years but priestcraft
is a highly profitable business and finances an industry of deceit to keep the show on the
road.
"Jesus
better documented than any other ancient figure"? Don't believe a word of
it. Unlike the mythical Jesus,
a real historical
figure like Julius Caesar has a mass
of mutually supporting evidence.
The case for a mythical Jesus – Nailing Jesus. Book review: Ehrman - Did Jesus Exist? Popular scholar recoils from the abyss. A rescue mission for the "Jesus of history" – The New Apologists. |
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Still
holding to the idea that some sort of holy man lies
behind the legend? Better check out
 Godman – Gestation
of a Superhero
It
is intuitively satisfying to think that someone was
behind the towering legend. Yet like the worship of
Horus or Mithras a human life was neither
necessary nor helpful.
As
it happens, we have an excellent witness to events in Judaea in the
first half of the first century AD: Philo of Alexandria (c. 25 BC-47
AD). Yet Philo says not a word about Jesus or
Christianity!
Nothing
in the 'Christian message' was original. Brotherly
love and compassion had been taught
by the Stoics for centuries. The Christian
faith was a
vulgarised paganism, set to the theme of the Jewish
prophets and debased
by religious intolerance.
The early
Christian sects attacked each other as energetically
as they attacked pagans. 1st
century Palestine had rabbis,
radicals and rebels in abundance. But a
'life' conjured up from mystical fantasy, a mass
of borrowed quotations, copied story elements and
a corpus of self-serving speculation, does not
constitute an
historical reality.
The final
defeat of
militant Jewish nationalism and the eradication
of the Jewish
kingdom gave the incipient Christian churches the
final uplift they required.
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A
closer look at the glib assertion that the Jesus
story "got off the ground quickly and spread
rapidly."
What DID the
Early Christians Believe?
There
never was just one Christianity. Out of the milieu
of religiosity that infected the Roman world, dozens
of competing
and conflicting Jesus/Sun-god/Mystery cults emerged.
The first
believers in
Jesus maintained he was an ethereal spirit, much like
other sky/sun-gods. Only later did he acquire a human
death, a human life and finally a human birth.
The
composite 'Jesus Christ' character – god,
man, king, carpenter, conqueror, peace-maker, dispenser
of justice, advocate of love – was assembled
to try to unify a fragmented and fractious messianic
religious movement.
In
the mid-2nd century the Jewishness of the faith
was purged but apologists
had little
to say about a human Jesus. They took comfort
in noting similarities between their own ideas and
pagan myths.
The Christians
remained a minority until well after one
particular faction formed a political alliance
with the Roman State.
The orthodox creed remained
unpopular for centuries and persecution of its critics was necessary
to impose its will.
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Many
currents fed the Jesus myth, like streams and tributaries
joining to form a major river.
Sourcing
the legend – The
Syncretic Heritage of Christianity
Through the centuries, the
Christian godman has been made
and remade.
Egypt provided many of the themes
and much of the detail. From the age of the
Ptolemies, Alexandria was
the ancient cooking pot of religious fusion. Here, Hellenised
Judaism influenced the early Christians.
From Egypt, Catholicism copied its rituals
and ceremonies, including relics,
demonology, and monasticism. The Patriarchs
of Alexandria wrote much of Catholic theology
and it was probably in Alexandria that a profound
and detailed Buddhist
influence impressed itself
upon the faith.
From Persia, too, came a Saviour
God and notions of rebirth,
a Mithraic
dress rehearsal for Christianity, triumphant
in Rome but fatally weakened by its exclusion of
women. In Judaea itself, hatred for the Roman conquerors
bred a genre of apocalyptic
curses, anticipating
an end of the world.
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Much
of the mythology of Christianity is a rehash of
an older and even more transparent fabrication – Judaism.
Jew
Story – The
Way of the Rabbi
With God's blessing, misogynistic
Jewish scribes encoded a raft of sex crimes which sanctified
racial ambition. The sacred mission was to populate
and subdue the earth. Judaism bequeathed its unfortunate
mix of ignorance and intolerance to a wayward faction
of heretics known to the world as Christians.
Herod
the Great was a real king – but he did not
massacre any babies. He was an astute and successful
ruler. The Herodians and the Jewish elite became
Romanised but religious fanatics led an armed
resistance which ended in catastrophes under Titus, Trajan, and Hadrian.
In the aftermath, a collaborationist revision of
Judaism, later attributed to a 13th apostle "Paul",
allegedly of impeccable Pharisaic credentials,
competed fiercely with a reconstituted rabbinic
Judaism which fused piety with mercantile
success.
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Eye
Witness Reports? |
Human
ingenuity and cunning is matched by mankind's
equally monumental credulity and wishful thinking.
Christianity's Fabrication
Factory
There are actually some
200 gospels, epistles and other ancient documents concerning
the life of Jesus Christ. Writing
such material was a popular literary form, particularly
in the 2nd century. The pious
fantasies competed with Greek romantic fiction. Political
considerations in the late 2nd century led to the
selection of just four approved gospels and the rejection
of others. After three centuries of wrangling 23
other books were accepted by the Church as
divinely inspired. The rest were declared 'pious
frauds'. In truth, the whole lot belongs to a genre
of literary FICTION.
Would
the Christians lie? They
said it themselves – lying
for God! And non-Christian
testimony? – from the authentic pen of lying
Christian scribes! Would the early believers have
died for a lie? Consider the evidence for that supposed
" persecution" –
Holy Mother Church invented heroic origins!
Declared
fake – Official! The " James
Ossuary". How
an Israeli entrepreneur outwitted the 'experts'.
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Church
organisation, authority and membership preceded
rather than followed the justifying doctrine. As
the organisation and its needs changed so has the ‘Testament
of God’ adapted accordingly.
Dogma – Endless revision of the divine plan
The "Word
of God", far from being inerrant, has ever been
a work
in progress. Biblical
morality is archaic and savage. It reflects
a barbarous, pitiless age.
The priestly "protection
racket" required the criminalizing
of the whole of humanity through the doctrine
of Sin.
The gospel yarn began not with
the testimony of a disciple but with the musings
of someone who switched
the anticipated Jewish Messiah from future hope to "historic past": "Mark": Bringing
the Celestial Superjew Down to Earth.
Matthew revised Mark's story, grounding the holy hero firmly in a Jewish milieu by adding a "royal
genealogy" and "fulfillment of prophecy". "Matthew" – A
Gospel for Messianic Jews.
Ambitious bishops in Rome asserted their authority and laid claim to the Palestinian
fantasy with The Mythical "St
Peter".
Absolving Rome and embellishing the "birth" and "death" scenes: "Luke" – A
Gospel for Credulous Pagans. From the same pen, Caesarea, became the focus for the 'Acts of the Apostles'.
Did Jesus have a brother? Throwing some light
on the supposed sibling in the supposed ossuary: "Brother
James" – Radical Jew Sanitized into Pious
Christian Martyr. Mid-2nd
century: the Catholic ecclesia write a rebuttal to
the rival church of Valentinus: "John" – A
Gospel to Silence the Gnostics
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From
religious policeman to grandee
of the church,
from beast fighter in Ephesus to beheading in Rome,
Paul's story has more holes than a swiss cheese.
A detailed study of the great missionary that some
say "founded
Christianity".
St
Paul the Apostle – Dead
in the water?
The
trail-blazing Christian missionary and apostle, St
Paul, appears nowhere in the secular histories of his
age. Ironically, though supposedly in Jerusalem at
the right time, he can give no witness to a historical
Jesus.
But was
Paul himself a
genuine historical figure? Viewed
without the rose-tinted spectacles of Christian faith, the first
voyage of Paul is as fanciful as the first
voyage of Sinbad.
Man, Myth and Magic. Did Paul really visit the Galatians? Paul's presence in Philippi is decidedly dubious. Rome's imperial command post in Greece was Corinth – but was it Paul's?
Paul in Caesarea? – Trial and Error. Only in the Christian dreamscape are its fabricated heroes always the centre of attention.
In fact, no evidence links Paul to the major Christian churches – the story in the Acts of the Apostles is a ripping yarn.
Pauline letters certainly exist, but the epistles,
far from being genuine letters, originated in the
acrimonious doctrinal battles of the 2nd century – a
time when "pseudepigraphy" and forged
apostolic writings were weapons in the war of "Christianities".
Did Paul really invent Christianity? His theology of Christ, Parts 1 and 2.
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Orchestrated
by ambitious Christian clerics, a cancer of superstition,
fear and brutality was imposed across Europe.
The Criminal History of the Christian Church
As
it waited in the wings of pagan Rome, the Catholic
Church was already marked by corruption,
violence and sexual scandal.
The fanatics of
Christ proved useful to an ambitious prince who
set his sights on absolute
and undivided power.
In their struggle for power,
Christians waged their own "civil
war" in which a Catholic trinitarian nonsense triumphed
over Arianism. This so-called 'orthodoxy' suppressed
and persecuted its 'heretical' opposition.
The intellectual
centres of the empire
were ruined by murder
and prohibition and the Roman world sank into ignorance
and superstition.
The Church expropriated
the resources – both human and material – which
might have defended Roman civilization. While an
indolent army of clerics lived on the state, the
impoverished legions degenerated into a peasant
militia.
Once a particular Christianity – hierarchical
and authoritarian – became wedded
to the Roman state, it became a force of brutal
repression.
The "Church Fathers" transformed Romano-Hellenic culture by bigotry,
anti-Semitism, censorship and intolerance.
Law
was replaced by Divine
Right, scientific method criminalized, ancient medical knowledge lost
for a millennium.
The barbarian
tribes that overran the weakened Roman Empire
were, for the most part, Christianized; the forces
that opposed them, pagan. |
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The
Christian Heaven may have been a vain folly but the
Christian Hell has been real enough. The
Terrible Cost of "Christendom"
By aggressive
warfare, Christianisation of the heathen tribes followed.
In Spain, the German
lands, Britain,
and Ireland,
the despots of the Church imposed their tyranny.
A
triumphant Christianity was the active agent in
destroying knowledge and access to learning. An
ignorant and impoverished population was more readily
subjugated by Princes of the Church. The civilization that
had stretched from the deserts of Arabia to the highlands
of Scotland reverted
to a primitive village subsistence.
For more than a
thousand years,
the henchmen of Christ inflicted a cruel barbarism
on every community they encountered.
Women, fortunate
to be domestic slaves, might find themselves in
enforced celibacy, joyless marriage or burnt as a witch. Roasting
heretics became popular
entertainment and a religious duty. Fancy dress is an essential element of the religious circus.
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With
a Jewish father (stern patriarch) and a Christian
mother (obsession with guilt and heaven) it is
not surprising that Islam grew up a bit of a tartar.
Desert Storm – The challenge of Islam
Early
civilizations arose in many parts of Arabia, long
before Judaism, Christianity or Islam. Islam arose as
an adaptation of old ideas, not something new.
Yet initially,
far from imposing a severe theocracy, the
early caliphs were
tolerant, even urbane.
Despite the mutual hostility of
kindred monotheisms, Islam
endorsed a great deal of Judeo-Christian theology and
adopted many of its practices. In its heyday, from the
Atlantic to central Asia, Islam produced scholars
and refinement.
Europe's recovery owed a huge debt
to Islamic civilization. Battered by both East and
West the enlightenment failed and theology
triumphed.
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Heaven
help us. The richest, most powerful nation in history
has a psychotic infatuation with Jay-a-sus
the Lawd!
The Christianizing of
the Americas
Christian knights brought savagery
and racism to a whole new world.
When gentle Jesus
arrived in England's
North American colonies, a motley crew of venture
capitalists, criminals and self-righteous fanatics established
a precarious existence. But a
stolen land, worked by an enslaved labour force,
cultivating drug crops, could not fail to enrich the
colonial elite.
Jesus was there when the American republic
built the foundations of its economy
on slavery and was re-packaged into a convenience
Christianity suited to dreams of vast personal wealth.
Today a bunch of
crooks and hucksters, womanising egotists and dangerous
megalomaniacs choreograph extravaganzas of Jesus frenzy.
Alarmingly, they have serious
political influence and
an agenda for Armageddon. |
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