(p xiv)The predilection precept of the Doctors of every brand of Divinity forever is: "Catch ‘em in the cradle and get ‘em inoculated before they know." In the bib and rattle period the childish brain is a soft clear surface. "soft as wax to be moulded into vice," as His Holiness says: helpless it receives and retains whatever is first impressed or imposed upon it: true religion or false. Christ or Krishna or Santa Claus. Holy Ghost or the ghosts of Afric superstition. "Give us a child until he is seven and we’ve got him cinched for life," is the ghoulish axiom of all the Faiths: "Suffer little children to come unto me for such is the Kingdom of Heaven," - as of the heathen Nirvana. (p xv)The famous Petrine text - "Upon this Rock I will build my church" - the cornerstone of the gigantic fabric of imposture. - and the other. "Go teach all nations," - were never uttered by the Jew Jesus but are palpable and easily -proven late Church forgeries. (p xix)In my previous work: Is It God’s Word? I devote some five hundred pages to "An Exposition of the Fables and Mythology of the Bible and of the Impostures of Theology," as my thesis is defined in my sub-title: "A farrago of palpable nonsense." (p xviii)The gospels are all priestly forgeries over a century after their pretended dates. (p xviii)Catholic-Protestant-Skeptic Bayle of seventeenth century vintage said: "I am most truly a Protestant; for I protest indifferently against all systems and all sects" of religious imposture. Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea the great "Father of Church History" (324 A. D.) was one of the most prolific forgers and liars of his age of the Church and a great romancer. (p xxiii)…the clerical habit of pious lies… (p xxvi)The True Church lays down this amazing limitation of learning: "When a clearly defined dogma contradicts a scientific assertion the latter has to be revised"! (CE xiii. 607.) (p xxxi)The benighted State of Arkansas declares infamously in its Constitution: "No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil government of this State nor be competent to testify as a witness in any court"! (Const. Ark.. Art. XIX. Sec. 26.) (p xxxii)Sunday as we shall see being a plagiarization from the religion of Mithras and created a secular holiday - not a religious Holy Day - by law of the Pagan Constantine. (p xxxiii)The Church exists mostly for wealth and self-aggrandizement; to quit paying money to the priests would kill the whole scheme in a couple of years. (p xxxvi)"What profit has not that fable of Christ brought us!" -Pope Leo X (1513-1521) (p. 1)Of the countless sects of Christians one alone it avers is of the True Faith; all the others are false and beyond the hope of heaven: "Whoever will be saved it is necessary above all else that he holds to the Catholic Faith." (p. 3)The new spiritualist would pretend to get into communion with the Old Man’s spirit and to receive from him "revelations" of his will and commands for the obedience of the clan. Thus began spirit-worship or religion - the fancied relations between man and the spirits of the dead or gods. Here too we have the first shaman medicine-man magician witch-doctor or what-not; in a word the first priest; and the priestly game was on. (p. 5)As the Roman poet Lucretius said: "Fear was the first thing on earth to make gods." (p. 8)The Hebrews had no word for "religion"; their nearest approximation to the idea is the oft-repeated Bible phrase. "The fear of Yahveh (the Lord)." The ancient Code of Hammurabi graven on the stela discovered by De Morgan in the ruins of Susa at the beginning of the 20th century and now preserved in the Louvre at Paris represents the King humbly receiving the Code of Laws from the great god Bel through the Sun-god Shamash; this for its greater sanction to obedience by the superstitious people who knew no better than to believe the pious fraud of the priests and King. A thousand years more or less later the Hebrew God Yahveh along with many divine laws delivered to Moses his Code of Commandments neatly scratched with his own finger on two stone slabs; of these like the grave of Moses no man knows the whereabouts unto this day. (p. 9)The Attorney General of England in a celebrated State trial for the sale of a copy of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason urged to the jury the necessity "to prevent its circulation among the industrious poor"; for he declaimed. "Of all human beings they stand most in need of the consolations of religion;… because no man can be expected to be faithful to the authority of man who revolts against the government of God"!The professional religionists of today forever ding-dong the old "Morality Lie," that without the God-given Ten Commandments and like divine laws ministered by them and re-enacted and enforced by the State - there can be no morality no human virtues no decent government. (p. 10)False prophecies and miracles and fraudulent relics were the chief reliance among the Pagans as among the Christians for stimulating the faith or credulity of the ignorant and superstitious masses. The images of the gods were believed to be endowed with supernatural power. Of some the wounds could bleed; of others the eyes could wink; of others the heads could nod the limbs could be raised; the statues of Minerva could brandish spears those of Venus could weep others could sweat; paintings there were which could blush. The Holy Crucifix of Boxley in Kent moved lifted its head moved it lips and eyes; it was broken up in London and the springs exposed and shown to the deriding public. (p. 11)Apollonius of Tyana was born about the same time as Jesus of Nazareth; the legends of their lives and deed were very similar. (p. 13)Virgin-births of demigods by the intervention of gods and human maids were common-places of Pagan faith as were Virgin-mothers and god-child: the Christians imported theirs from Egypt - the Madonna statues of Isis and the child Horus - of universal vogue at the beginning of this era of the Christ - may be seen in almost any first-class Museum as the Metropolitan in New York and the University in Philadelphia. (p. 17)The Pagans had their holy days (from which the Christians plagiarized their Christmas. Easter. Rogation Days etc.); their monks nuns religious processions carrying images of idols (like those of saints today); incense holy water holy oil chants hymns liturgies confessions of sins to priest forgiveness of sins by priests revelations by gods to priests prophecies sacred writings of "holy bibles," Pontiffs. Holy Fathers holy crafty priesthoods. All these sacrosanct things of Christian "Revealed Religion," were age-old pre-Christian Pagan myths and superstitions. (p. 18)Mithraism or the Persian Zoroastrian religion the closest and all but successful rival of Christianity in the Roman world and which might indeed have been successful but that soon after Constantine prostituted the Empire to the Church. -"with the triumph of Christianity Mithraism came to a sudden end. The laws of Theodosius signed its death warrant." (p. 18)The Religion of Zoroaster known as Mithraism is one of the oldest religious systems on earth as it dates from the dawn of history before the primitive Iranian race divided into sections which became Persian and Indian as this same religion is contained both in the Persian Avesta and Indian Vedas. (p. 20)MITRAISM - PRE-CHRISTIAN CHRISTIANITYMithraism was a religion consisting mainly of the cult of the ancient Indo-Iranian Sun-God Mithra. Its origin dates from the time that Hindus and Persians still formed one people for the god Mithra occurs in the religion and sacred books of both races i e in the Vedas and in the Avesta… (p. 21)Mithraism was emphatically a soldier religion. (p. 21)"Three times a day prayer was offered the sun towards east south or west according to the hour. SUNDAY was kept holy in honour of Mithra and the sixteenth of each month was sacred to him as Mediator. The 25th December was observed as his birthday the Natalis Invictis the rebirth of the winter-sun." (p. 22)Christianity is but an adaptation of Mithraism… (p. 22)Mithraism had a Eucharist but the idea of the sacred banquet is as old as the human race and existed at all ages and amongst all peoples. (p. 23)The names of the angels were introduced from Babylon… (p. 24)…The belief in guardian angels… was also the belief of the Babylonians and Assyrians” (p. 24)"The name of the Supreme God of the Avestic system is Ahura Mazda (or Ormuzd)." (p. 25)The vast majority of the adherents of Buddhism cling to forms of creed and worship that Buddha if alive would reprobate - [as would Christ in the case of Christianity]. Northern Buddhism became the very opposite of what Buddha taught to men and in spreading to foreign lands accommodated itself to the degrading superstitions of the people it sought to win - (precisely as we shall see that Christianity did to inveigle the Pagans)… (p. 28)As elsewhere recounted the Holy Ghost made a curious mistake in inspiring the certification of sundry Saints and the Lord Buddha was himself canonized by Holy Church as St. Josaphat and the "Life" of this holy Saint was highly edifying to the Faithful as well as effective in spreading the Christian truth: "During the Middle Ages the ‘Life of Barlaam and Josaphat’ has been translated into some twenty languages. English included so that in reality the story of Buddha became the vehicle of Christian truth in many nations"! (p. 28)Thus was the ultimate merger and total identity of Paganism with "the new Paganism called Christianity" finally established by law and by Imperial policy of "One State and One Religion," to which conformity was enforced by laws of confiscation and death; all the other religions of the Empire were fused by fire and sword into a bastard Christianity; and the mental and moral benightedness known as the Dark Ages of Faith fell as a pall over Christendom for a thousand years until the renaissance of Pagan culture and freedom of thought darkly dawned over the world and has fearfully struggled into a brightening day whose motto of Hope is again "Cesset Superstitio" (p. 31)Vast hordes of utterly illiterate and stupid Faithful go into the True Churches every day kneel before and pray to these same Pagan gods conjured into Christian saints. (p. 42)Mythology has well been called the Theology of dead religions. The celebrated Dictatus of Pope Gregory VII (1073-085) stating the presumptuous pretences of the Papacy:‘’The Roman Church has never erred nor will it err to all eternity. No one may be considered a Catholic Christian who does not agree with the Catholic Church. No book is authoritative unless it has received the papal sanction”…. (p. 49)An examination of the Bible texts demonstrates that the holy "Law of Moses" was totally unknown and unobserved through all the history of Israel from its beginnings until Josiah and was then composed by his priests and enlarged into the present Pentateuch during and after the captivity in Babylon. (p. 57)The Septuagint by the 72 Doctors of Israel (the translation from Hebrew to Greek). (p. 59-60-61)Solomon who was son-in-law to nearly everybody in the heathen nations had 700 wives and 300 concubines. The Hebrew God Yahveh was but one of the many gods worshipped by the Hebrews. (p. 71)OUR "PHONY" CHRISTIAN ERAIt was a monk of the 6th century (532 CE) named Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis the Little) who fixed our present Christian era laying down that Jesus Christ was born on the 25th of December. A. U. C. [Ab Urbe Condita (from the founding of Rome in 753)] and commencing the new era from the following year in 754. (p. 71)The new Era of Christ was however very slow in gaining recognition; the first official secular document dating by it was a charter of Charlemagne after 800 A. D. and it did not come into general use until about 1000 A. D. I may mention a fiery sermon I once heard in which the expounder of truth vindicated the glory of God by declaiming that every Jew and Infidel confessed to Jesus Christ every time he dated a letter or mentioned the year of an event. Being simply a hearer of the Word. I could not rise to suggest that by the same token we confess more to the Pagan gods than to the Christian. - for more than half the months and every day of the week are named for Pagan deities and we name them much more often than we do the years of grace and salvation of Christ. (p. 72)"We know on the authority of Moses that longer ago than 6000 years the world did not exist." (p. 73)Faith clings fatuously to its fetishes: Arkansas. Mississippi. Tennessee three States of the 20th century United States have made it crime by Law to teach the sciences which discredit the Genesis Myth upon which Christian Superstition utterly depends. (p. 73)Thus was the Hebrew tribal god YAHVEH distinguished from Bel and Chemosh and Dagon and Shamash and the scores of "gods of the nations". (p. 78)In Fourth Esdras as in the Apocalypse of Baruch we find for the first time the fatal phrase and doctrine. "all mankind sinned with Adam" whence Paul forged his fearful and accursed dogma of original sin and eternal damnation. (p. 87)…the so-called Pauline Epistles. - which Paul never wrote… (p. 89)All these divine and "revealed" doctrines of Christian faith we have seen to be originally heathen Zoroastrian mythology taken over first by the Jews then boldly plagiarized by the ex-Pagan Christians. Dean Milman of St. Paul’s thus describes the universality of these notions among the heathens and the borrowing by the Jews and Christians of what were originally Pagan superstitions - now become articles of Christian revelation:"Satan angels immortality resurrection - all Persian and Zoroastrian doctrines imbibed by the Jews… During the whole life of Christ and the early propagation of the religion it must be borne in mind that they took place in an age and among a people which superstition had made so familiar with what were supposed to be preternatural events that the wonders awakened no emotion or were speedily superseded by some new demand on the every-ready belief." (Milman. History of Christianity. I. 93.)Thus again the most precious Christian truths of supposed divine "revelation" through God. Christ and apostles - were plagiarizations from forged Jewish pseudo-Scriptures taken over into them from long contact with the Zoroastrian Persians. These myth and superstitions Jesus the Son of God found ready at hand "in the popular consciousness" of the ignorant wonder-craving Jewish peasantry; and. Lo our "revealed" Christian religion! We may begin to suspect the later "inspired" books of the "Apostles" as not beyond the taint of Pagan superstition and of the suspicion of Christian forgery. (p. 90)The 27 New Testament booklets attributed to eight individual "Apostolic" writers and culled from some 200 admitted forgeries called Gospels. Acts and Epistles constitute the present "canonical" or acceptably inspired compendium of the primitive history of Christianity. (p. 91)"The greater the Saint the greater the Liar."
(p. 123)The Fathers of our country framers of our Constitution and form of government were men of personal honour and of public probity; the most of them were Infidels. The "Fathers" and founders of the Christian religion and Church of Christ were all of them ex-Pagan charlatans - "we who formerly used magical arts," as Father Justin Martyr admits who took up the new Christian superstition and continued to ply the same old magical arts under a new veneer upon the ignorant and superstitious pagans and near-pagans. (p. 123)The Apostles (p. 128-129)Origen born in Alexandria. Egypt about 165; was a wild fanatic he made himself “a eunuch for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake". He was badly tainted with the Arian heresy which denied the divinity of Jesus Christ and was deposed from the priesthood but his deposition was not generally recognized by all the Churches. - which proves that they were not then subject to Rome. (p. 149)Father Origen clung to the pagan superstition that comets and new stars portend and herald great world events and urges that this undoubted fact gives credibility to the fabled Star of Bethlehem. (p. 150)The true reason however for four finally "chosen" and accepted Gospels is that stated by Reinach after quoting Irenaeus and other authorities: "The real reason was to satisfy each of the four principal Churches each of which possessed its Gospel: Matthew at Jerusalem. Mark at Rome or Alexandria. Luke at Antioch and John at Ephesus." (Reinach. Orpheus p. 217.) (p. 189)No written Gospels existed until shortly before 185 A. D. (p. 189)Genealogy of Jesus: p. 206-207The Constitutions pretending to be written by the apostles laid down in minute detail all the intricacies of organization of several centuries later; there being elaborate chapters "concerning bishops," presbyters deacons all kinds of clergy liturgies and Church proceedings and services undreamed of by "apostles," or in the "apostolic age." (p. 240)"The Acts of St. Sylvester," and "The Donation of Constantine," documents which mendaciously represented the emperor Constantine as giving most of Italy to the papacy and which were fabricated in Rome in the eighth century and were used by the popes to maintain this gigantic fraud. (p. 251)There were patrons or protectors in various forms of illness as for instance: St. Agatha diseases of the breast; Apollonia toothache; Blaise sore throat; Clare and Lucy eyes; Benedict against poison; Hubert against bites of dogs.” (CE xi. 566.) (p. 274)When Mohammed was forging his inspired Book of Koran the illuminating spirit in the guise of a dove would perch on his shoulder and whisper the divine revelations into his ear. - a miracle which none but quite devout Mohammedans believe. (p. 277)The decree of the second council of Nice. A. D. 787 reaffirmed by the Council of Trent in 1546 forbade the consecration of any Church without a supply of relics. (p. 281)St. Helena sainted mother of the new "Christian" Emperor Constantine... (p. 281)The Holy Stairs may only be ascended on the knees…. Finally Pius X on 26 February 1908 granted a plenary indulgence - [i e permanent escape from Purgatory] - to be gained as often as the Stairs are devotedly ascended after confession and communion. (CE viii. 505.) It is related that Father Luther was performing this holy penitential climb of the "Scala Sancta," when suddenly the vast sham and fraud of his religion burst upon his consciousness; the Reformation of 1517 was a consequence. (p. 286)RELICSIn the cathedral of Cologne are preserved the skulls of the Three Wise Men who followed the Star of Bethlehem. (p. 290)The miraculous bones of Santa Rosalia in Palermo are the bones of a deceased goat! (p. 290)But perhaps none of these impostures surpassed in audacity that offered by a monastery in Jerusalem which presented to the beholder one of the fingers of the Holy Ghost! (
) (p. 290)[Surprising they don't have his saintly penis somewhere...]Our Lady’s girdle was shown in not less than eleven places and Our Lady’s milk in a condensed form in eight places. One of these girdles the good Queen-mother procured for Catherine of Aragon on her marriage with Henry to present to her when the expected time should come. (p. 291)There seems to have been enough of the milk of the Virgin - some of it was still exhibited in Spanish churches in the 19th century - preserved in Europe to feed a few calves. There was hair enough to make a mattress. There were sufficient pieces of true cross’ to make a boat. There were teeth of Christ enough to outfit a dentist (one monastery at Charroux has the complete set). There were so many sets of baby-linen of the infant Jesus in Italy. France and Spain that one could have opened a shop with them. One of the greatest churches in Rome had Christ’s manger-cradle. Seven churches had his authentic umbilical cord and a number of churches had his foreskin (removed at circumcision and kept as a souvenir by Mary. One church had the miraculous imprint of his little bottom on a stone on which he has sat. (p. 291)The fanatic Hebrew religion and its derivatives Christianity and Islam are the only religions ever known on earth based on and maintained by systematic persecution and murder. God-given laws of murder for disbelief were decreed at Sinai. (p.296)Constantine’s Edict of Milan of 313 was the first charter of religious freedom and toleration securing equality and liberty of worship to the Christians. - and very quickly repudiated by them as against all others. (p. 301)Paul III (1542) established and Sixtus V organized the Roman Congregation of the Inquisition or Holy Office a regular court of justice [!] dealing with heresy and heretics. The Congregation of the Index instituted by St. Pius V has for its province the care of faith and morals in literature; it proceeds against printed matter very much as the Holy Office proceeds against persons. (p. 309)The Church instituted the Index of Prohibited Books which is intended to deter Catholics from the unauthorized reading of books dangerous to faith or morals for it is notorious that clever sophistry coated with seductive language may render even gross errors of faith palatable to a guileless and innocent hearts. (p. 311)It was in Rome by law and command of His Royal-Holiness Clement VIII that the defier of the "Triumphant Beast," Giordano Bruno was burned alive in Rome in 1600. (p. 313)In the beginning of the thirteenth century. Innocent III instituted the Inquisition. (p. 315)In cold blood. Charlemagne beheaded in one day 4,500 persons at Verdun in A. D. 782. Under such circumstances is it not wonderful that clerical influence extended so fast? (p. 318)Aryanism was very simple: it held that there was but a One-Person God and denied the Blessed Trinity of Three-in-One. (p. 319)Philosophy - the love of Wisdom - the highest reach of the uninspired human intellect into the mysteries not of faith and godliness but of mind and soul. (p. 326)Vesalius the first real surgeon; the Inquisition nearly got him because his anatomical researches disclosed that man had the same number of ribs as woman not one less to represent that taken for Eve. (p. 329)When Galileo ascended the Leaning Tower of Pisa and dropped two iron balls one of one pound the other of one hundred pounds and both struck the ground at the same instant the pious Christians of Pisa refused to accept the demonstration and drove him out of the city. (p.329)The vital germs of virtually every modern science has their origin and some notable development in the fertile minds of the Greek thinkers and in their great schools of thought in the centuries which preceded the Advent of the "Perfect Teacher" and his divinely instituted successors in schoolcraft. If these profound researches in Nature had been included in the Curriculum of the Church rather than fire and sword employed to extirpate them and all who ventured to pursue them. Holy Church would not have had the "Dark Ages of Faith2 to record and apologize for. To what perfection of Civilization and Knowledge might Humanity have arrived in these 2000 years wasted on the Supernatural and the "Sacred Science of Christianity"! (p. 333)The splendours of the intellect and culture of Pagan Greece its whole harmonious system of education mental moral and physical which were the glory that was Greece were transported thus to Rome and kindled anew there the torch of Reason which illumined and made splendid the power that was Rome. (p. 334-335)For over a millennium Christian "education" was virtually limited to candidates for the priesthood and to the vain mummeries of monks (p. 335)Morals is from mores. "custom"; it is social not supernatural in origin; humanly conventional not of divine imposition and sanction. The "morals," customs of an age or a people depend always on what is then regarded as socially convenient. (La moralité de nos actes dépend de la coutume de notre pays et de l'opinion courante de nos pairs. Le cannibalisme est moral chez une tribu d'anthropophages. -Samuel Butler)Pope Alexander VI (1492-1503) was so notoriously infamous and his history is so large and so well known with his six bastards including Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia and his numerous Vatican mistresses and dissolute Papal Court under whose regime again "the Vatican was a brothel," that he is simply mentioned in his order. When one of his bastard sons "was fished out of the Tiber with his throat cut…" that it was a warning from Heaven to repent no one felt more keenly than the Pope himself. (p. 349)We shall see that every scrap of Greek and Latin learning which after twelve centuries slowly filtered into Christendom came from the hated Arabs through the more hated Jews after Christian first contact with civilization through the Crusades: "Indeed whatever influence came from the Mosque passed through the Synagogue before it reached the Church." (p. 357)The "golden period of Roman jurisprudence" had been replaced by Christian superstitions in the administration of justice during many centuries of the middle Ages and known as ordeals or ‘judgments of God.’… (p. 359)The Middle Ages as generally understood. "is a term used to designate that period of European history between the Fall of the Roman Empire and about the middle of the 15th century," (CE x. 235). - the era of the discovery of printing. - a full thousand years. (p. 364) - 476 - 1453."When a clearly defined dogma contradicts a scientific assertion. THE LATTER HAS TO BE REVISED"! (CE xiii. 598-607) (p. 365)Arabian medical science forms an important chapter in the history of the development of medicine. [largely] because it preserved Greek medical science… (p. 368)…The Middle Ages which some profess to admire were in reality times of low civilization. (p. 369)At last. Galileo fitted two bits of glass into an old Church organ pipe poked it at the "firmament of heaven" which has cost Jehovah a whole day’s work and. Lo! The whole of the "sacred science" of the Church collapsed into universal ruin! The truth of God’s revelation became an exploded myth and its inspired Bible a book of Fable. The holy Church screeched in terror its unholy anathemas. (p. 370)The Holy Inquisition which in 1542 the Church declared to be "the supreme tribunal for the whole world" and its sacred "Index of Prohibited Books," instituted in 1557 it murdered men and thought for yet several centuries. The up-to-date edition of 1929 closed the minds of the "Faithful" to over 5,000 books of the highest intellectual merit. (p. 370)Before the art of printing was discovered it sufficed to burn a few manuscript copies to prevent the spreading of a doctrine. (p. 371)Through the Ages of Faith two careers only were open to men - priestcraft and military. With rarest exception only clerical persons could read or write; the great masses of the peoples were utterly illiterate ignorant superstitious devout slaves of priestcraft; their civil status serfs; they lived in filth and squalor unbelievable wearing their coarse fabric or leathern garments until they rotted off their unwashed bodies. (p. 374)Faith thus flourished on ignorance and credulity. As none but priests could read and write while kings and public men were mere soldiers and illiterates and public business must be carried on through written documents the public offices of State from the King’s chancellor and ambassadors to the lowliest clerks were priests and thus priestcraft and Church increased their sinister power and dominance and wealth. The facts explain the sinister motive of the priestly monopoly of literacy and fully account for the crass ignorance of Christendom which the vaunted Teaching Mission of the Church entailed. (p. 374-75)For six or seven centuries after the overthrow of the Roman government in the West [476] very few outside of the clergy ever dreamed of studying or even of learning to read and write. (p. 375)Moreover the civil government was forced to rely upon churchmen to write out the public documents and proclamations. (p. 375)These Holy Wars were essentially a papal enterprise. The idea of quelling all dissensions among Christians of uniting them under the same standard and sending them forth against the Mohammedans was conceived in the 11th century at a time when there were as yet no organized states in Europe. (p. 377)Indeed the Crusades were the beginning of European civilization. (p. 377)…Christian brutality and Moslem humanity… (p. 377)It was the Arabs who brought learning literature and science to benighted Christendom and created the Renaissance which ended the Dark Ages of Faith. (p. 378)The one dangerous rival with which Christianity had to contend in the Middle Ages was the Mohammedan religion. Within a century of its birth it had torn from Christendom some of its fairest lands and extended like a huge crescent from Spain over Northern Africa. Egypt. Palestine. Arabia. Persia and Syria to the eastern part of Asia Minor. (p. 383)…the increased secularism of everyday life… (p. 385)The motive and raison d’être of priestcraft confessedly was greed and graft wealth and power and privilege. When Paganism later was called Christianity. - No man can deny history by alleging any difference: we have seen too many analogies and identities. At the advent of Christianity scores of religions flourished throughout the Roman Empire; the Roman world was thick covered with sumptuous Temples and swarmed with plutocratic Priestcraft. So rich were the "pickings" from the superstitious masses and rulers and so alluring the "Get-rich-quick" possibilities of religion that new creeds and cults were ever in the making. (p. 386)"Rich widows were surrounded by swarms of clerical sycophants who addressed them in tender diminutives studies and consulted their every foible and under the guise of piety lay in wait for their gifts or bequests." (p. 388)"The English people at large complained of the enormous revenue which the pope and the Italians drew from their country…" (p. 389)"The luxury of bishops and the worldly possession of monks" lead to violent rebellion in Italy in the 12th century. At this and most times the "prelates were the most powerful and the wealthiest subjects of the Sate." (p. 389)"Simony the most abominable of crimes… was the evil so prevalent during the Middle Ages." (p. 390) SIMONY: Sale of spiritual ingredients. INDULGENCESAmong the greatest and greediest mints of ecclesiastical finance was Simony several times above mentioned. - the sale of every kind of hierarchical office and dignity from the popedom to the jobs of the meanest servitors of the Servants of God; and the sale of Indulgences or remissions of the pains of Purgatory. This non-existent place of expiation of "Sin," acquired or "Original," to fit the befouled soul for Heaven was first charted if not invented by His Holiness Gregory the Great about 600 A. D. "An indulgence offers the penitent sinner the means of discharging his debt [to God] during the life on earth" (CE vii. 783). - provided that "debt" is adequately liquidated by cash into the coffers of God’s Vicars on earth. These indulgences are of various kinds efficacy and price: "The most important distinction however is that between plenary indulgences and partial. By a plenary indulgence is meant the remission of the entire temporal punishment due to sin so that no further expiation is required in Purgatory. A partial indulgence commutes only a certain portion of the penalty. …Some indulgences are granted in behalf of the living only while others may be applied in behalf of the souls of the departed". Leo X he who perpetrated the celebrated aphorism - "What profit has not that Fable of Christ brought us," rose in defence of the revenues and in his Bull "Exurge Domine" in 1520. "condemned Luther’s assertions that ‘Indulgences are pious frauds of the faithful’." (p. 391)[The witless followers of Joel Osteen or Billy Sunday or Billy Graham… or Bakker or Jerry Falwell or Swaggart or Pat Robertson or all of them…witless!]Crass ignorance credulity and superstition were then imposed and enforced upon Christendom in order to "preserve the purity of the faith" in the unthinking minds of unknowing dupes of the Church and the Priests who waxed in wealth and in dominion over witless Christendom. (p. 398)In all these holy Ages of Faith in this "civilization thoroughly saturated with Christianity," the Siamese Twins of Creed and Crime. Faith and Filth popular Poverty and Ecclesiastical Opulence stalked hand in hand - "the inseparable companions of Religion." (p. 399)"The rich they pray for pounds the poor they pray for pence." (p. 399)"The healing power of nature," bears destructively upon one of the most insistent of religious superstitions the efficiency of prayers and saints and relics and shrines and pious mummeries to which millions of the afflicted and deluded of God’s children resort for the relief of their torments and he cure of their diseases. - which their loving Father God inflicts or prevents. From the earliest times of priestcraft until this very year of grace the priests and parsons and charlatans of every stripe preach and encourage this ancient heathen superstition. - and reap rich rewards through the imposture. (p. 400)Modern science recognizes that strong mental impressions can powerfully influence the nervous system and through it the bodily organs leading in some instances to sudden illness or death in others to remarkable cures. Such is the so-called mind cure or cure by suggestion. It explains naturally many extraordinary cures recorded in the annals of many religions. Still it has its recognized limits. It cannot restore of a sudden a half-decayed organ or heal instantly a gaping would caused by a cancer. (CE xii. 743.) (p. 400)Not a flicker of intelligence is required to believe: millions of the most illiterate and ignorant of earth’s teeming populations are the firmest in their "faith" in every form of religious superstition known to the priests of the world the most devout believers of this or that imposture. - "most assured of what they are most ignorant" withal. (p. 404)Disbelief doubt inquiry of truth rejection of superstition is distinctly an act of Intelligence; it often requires heroic virtue of bravery and independence of mind to disbelieve to revolt against and reject the creeds and credulities of the ignorant community. (p. 404)The noblest and most blest worker for Humanity is the Humanist. (p. 405)The Church is very like the firefly: it needs darkness in which to shine. (p. 406)Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest! -Zola
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http://platypus-thatslife-cestlavie.blogspot.com/2007/11/forgery-in-christianity-joseph-wheless.html
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