A History of Christianity
The Critic, Michael Roll, is a free thinker - A Secularist
A History of Christianity by Paul Johnson was published in 1976 by Weidenfeld & Nicholson. This criticism is based on the 2005 edition, published by Borders Books, USA.
© 2013 Michael Roll
If you obtain A History of Christianity from the library, then you will need a very strong stomach, especially when you find out what the priests and their academic allies have done to the trusting minds of little children in order to 'defend their faith' and therefore keep themselves in the manner to which they are accustomed. There is only one way to defend a supernatural faith and that is to make sure the truth is never even just presented to people in mass. Torturing the mind is a greater crime than torturing the body. The religious hatreds in Northern Ireland and the Middle East stand as monuments to this statement.
“Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst; every other species of tyranny is limited to the world we live in, but this attempts to stride beyond the grave, and seeks to pursue us into eternity.”
(Thomas Paine: The Age of Reason, 1794)
A History of Christianity: Introduction
“Somehow, everybody just knows that Christianity is the Church and the Church is a power-structure, an apparatus for limiting freedom in belief and morals.”
And what did Professor Sir A.J. Ayer, Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, mean when he was reported on the front page of the first Mail on Sunday to have said:
“Christianity is morally outrageous and intellectually contemptible.”
To find the answers to these questions, read on…
A History of Christianity: Page By Page
From: A History Of Christianity |
Comment by Michael Roll |
Prologue “It is now almost 2000 years since the birth of Jesus Christ set in motion the chain of events which led to the creation of the Christian faith...” | There is no historical record of the birth, life or death of a Jewish man called Jesuah. Jesus is a Greek translation of this Jewish name. However, just because people did not come to the attention of contemporary historians it does not mean that they did not exist. There may have been a teacher called Jesus, but not a saviour-god called Christ. “To confuse Jesus, the Jewish teacher and healer, with Christ, the Pagan saviour-god, is a gross historical blunder.” Jesus was officially made into the 17th anointed (Christ) pagan saviour-god known to historians at the Council of Nicaea in 325 of the Christian era. To check this, look up Nicene Creed. |
Page 3 “...church [Jesus] brought into being.” | The Church was started by his followers and priests, not Jesus. There are no original records of any of the writings of Paul (Saint Paul). A very shaky foundation on which to base historical writing. Paul admits he never met Jesus and came on the scene long after the reported death of Jesus. |
Page 4 “... Apocryphal Acts of Paul ...” | Surely these outrageous documents cannot be taken seriously? Even at this early stage in the book, it is obvious we are dealing with the ramblings of simpletons and fanatics - men who actually believed a ball of fire went round a flat Earth every day. What truth? So God spoke to Paul did he? Who said so? I thought this was a history book! |
Page 5 “... Christ’s doctrine. ” | What on earth is Christ’s doctrine? A saviour-god invented by priests cannot put forward any doctrine. Surely this should read: the reported teachings accredited to Jesus? |
Page 7 “But it is unlikely the Hellenic world could have produced such a system from its own resources. Its intellectual weapons were various and powerful. It had a theory of natura and a cosmology of sorts.” | The Greek and Roman scientists, engineers, philosophers and educationalists were brilliant compared with the writers of the Bible. Even a cursory glance at many passages in the Bible and early Christian documents confirm that these writers were not in the same class as Thales , the founder of astronomy and philosophy, Pythagoras who was the father of mathematics, Eratosthenes who proved the Earth was round and even measured its circumference, Hippocrates the first person we could call by the name of doctor. Aristarchus said the Earth revolved round the sun, and so it goes on. |
Page 9 “For the Jews not merely had a god; they had God.” | The Jews did indeed have a god, their god, not“The God”! Paul Johnson’s early Jesuit brainwashing is showing through. |
Page 11 “...passionate admirers of the Roman system, like the historian Josephus, or the philosopher Philo.” | Is it not strange that Josephus and Philo never heard of this“superman” Jesus? |
Page 16 “When Jesus said that the sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath...” | Surely this should read,“When Jesus was reported to have said.” All scholars agree that we have no record of anything Jesus said. |
Page 21 “The fact that Jesus was baptized by John does not imply any inferiority...” | All these“facts” seem to be coming from the canonical gospels. John the Baptist is an historical character because the historian Josephus mentions him, but very little is known about John, especially any connection with the unhistorical Jesus. |
Page 21/22 "This view is reflected in other non-Christian references, which are few but clearly confirm Jesus's historicity." | This is arguably the most important passage in the book. I am prepared to spend time researching this if any person can send details . Paul Johnson refused to help. Apart from the obvious interpolation in Josephus , no scholar has been able to find an historical reference to Jesus. |
Page 23 “Paul is the first witness to Jesus, the start of any historical inquiry. He is the wirter who gets closest to the actual Messiah.” | Who says Jesus was the actual messiah? Only a priest or an indoctrinated victim of priestcraft could write such nonsense. |
Page 23 “...was quite adequate to cloud everything connected with the historical Jesus, as men, dazzled by the fact of the Resurrection...” | FACT? Could it be possible that the Jews picked up this physical resurrection nonsense from their Egyptian neighbours? |
Page 27 “...his Davidian descent, necessary for his role, is traced through Joseph, though this is incompatible with the theory or fact of the virgin birth.” | Fact? A number of the saviour-gods from Bel to Christ were said to have virgin mothers. |
Page 39 “The difference between the theology of Jesus and Paul is not merely that one is implicit, the other explicit; it is that Jesus saw as a God, Paul thought as a man.” | Who says Jesus is a god? This is quite pathetic in a history book. The tragedy is that brainwashed Christians like Paul Johnson always enjoy unrestricted access to the mass media and, until quite recently, free thinkers have been blocked from giving any balance to this supernatural claptrap. |
Page 40 “Paul insisted [Jesus] was God: it is the only thing about him that really matters, otherwise the Pauline theology collapses, and with it Christianity.” | So“Saint” Paul insisted that Jesus was God. That’s it then, the oracle has spoken. Nothing else to be said! This is what“defending the faith” is all about. Making sure uncomfortable facts never come to the attention of people in the millions. When the truth eventually reaches these millions, some very powerful people will be destroyed. Whatever we think of the priests and their allies, one thing we have to give them credit for is their incredible efficiency in reaching top positions. For example, as I am writing this, the chairman of the BBC is a Roman Catholic and so is the director general. |
Page 46 “Marcion had no doubt that Paul's essential teachings were sound and he knew they were closest to Jesus in date.” | This simpleton living in the so-called 2nd century may have no doubts, but scholars in the 21st century most certainly do. |
Page 46 “The Old Testament [Marcion] rejected in toto since it seemed to him, as it seemed to many Christians since, to be talking of a quite different God: monstrous, evil-creating, bloody, the patron of ruffians like David.” | Good, but Paul! “The chief actor in the great human tragedy, entitled —“Christian Civilisation”, which has occupied the stage of the Western world for sixteen hundred years, was Paul of Tarsus, who was the first cause of all the disharmony which followed. In consequence of his mistaken zeal in transforming Jesus into another Pagan Christ, this sincere fanatic, cursed by ignorance, set the stage for this prolonged era of misery and suffering — by misrepresenting the life and teaching of Jesus, by the distortion of facts, by false claims, and by being guided by mystical emotionalism instead of his reason. No other man, not even Hitler, has been responsible for more human anguish than has this man, now known to us as Saint Paul, though of course this was never his intention.” Arthur Findlay, 'The Curse of Ignorance’ (Volume 2), 1947 |
Page 55 “Many epistles accredited to Paul are acknowledged as fakes.” | Every academic in this line of research knows this, but not the ordinary people. They have all kept their mouths shut in order to keep the old-boy network intact. |
Page 58 “Origen ... dismissed the Greek philosophers as false and constructed a new synthesis out of profane and sacred knowledge.” | Just what one would expect from a lunatic that castrates himself. One thing that can be said in this fanatic’s favour was his poor opinion of the clergy - their“avarice and ambition”. |
Page 60 “The only other apostolic foundation was Rome, since both Peter and Paul were believed to have been martyred there.” | There is no historical evidence for this, pure myth. Rome’s connection with Peter and Paul certainly is disputed, but I agree it was exploited from the earliest times. |
Page 61 “[Rome] was appealed to as the best apostolic authority, and responded eagerly. It had an early reputation for robustness in the faith: it was the first Chrurch to undergo a systematic state persecution and to survive it triumphantly.” | “systematic state persecution” - This is the great Christian lie. Gibbon in“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” making use of the figures supplied by Eusebius, which would certainly not err on the side of understatement, computes that in all the persecutions of the Christians by the Romans, a number not greatly exceeding two thousand suffered death. The Romans had a whole stack of gods and never got fanatical about religion. The reason for the few Christians that were killed is because they tried terrorist tactics to sell their supernatural beliefs, like smashing statues of Roman gods. It is the one-god merchants who are the persecutors, especially the Christians, the greatest killing machine the world has ever witnessed. They have killed millions of men, women and children for no logical reason whatsoever. “Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster ever to be inflicted on the human race.” Gore Vidal |
Page 61 “[Rome] seems to have excluded gnostic tendencies right from the start. It set the pace in defining the canon, eliminating the spurious and producing authorized texts.” | It is very clear from what has been written so far that there is no genuine doctrine, just ignorant peoples’ opinions. Men who thought the sun circled a flat Earth every day are not to be taken seriously. Therefore, how can one“eliminate the spurious?” |
Page 62 “...a reflection of its founder's clear desire to establish a religion of diversity as well as universality, to be 'all things to all men'.” | Rubbish! Religion is priestcraft, anathema to every free thinking philosopher who has ever lived. Let’s pretend just for a moment that there really was a wandering Jewish teacher known to us as Jesus. I picture a kind loving man, teaching people to do unto others as they would have others do unto them. Not to take any notice of the supernatural, divisive hatred invented by priests. Surely he would have taught people to love one another and all nature’s creatures. The same power in the universe, whatever that is, that put life into a sparrow, also put life into us. In a way I hope Jesus never existed because he would be disgusted to see what has been done in his name. |
Page 62 “Jesus's ministry was conducted in an atmosphere of dissension, angry argument and party spirit; it ended in death by violence.” | There is no record of this, you have already made this very clear. |
Page 67 “[Constantine] himself appears to have been a sun-worshipper, one of a number of late-pagan cults which had observances in common with Christians.” | Exactly, I cannot find one original thought in the whole Christian religion. |
Page 69 “Jesus had told his hearers to pay taxes.” | No record of anything Jesus said. Professor Guignebert says: “There is not the slightest doubt that Jesus never uttered the discourses attributed to him by the gospels. They are artificial compositions. Even the Sermon on the Mount is no exception to this rule.” Guignebert and every scholar who has read the history of Christianity. Professor Guignebert of the History of Christianity at the Sorbonne in Paris in the 1930’s has been proved correct. The Christian priests plunged the known world into the Dark Ages after the infamous Council of Nicaea in 325 of the Christian era. Ignorance reigned supreme for the best part of two thousand years. It is no exaggeration to say that when the victims of the Christian priests took over the Roman Empire that it is the greatest curse that ever hit this planet. |
Page 71 “The doctrine of the eucharist, under which 'flesh' and 'blood' were eaten, was understood to mean the practice of cannibalism.” | This was the principle rite in most pagan religions and is cannibalistic in origin. Drinking the blood and eating the body of the dead saviour-god. |
Page 72 “The Church would not compromise on the matter of emperor-worshop or the divinity of Christ...” | This is meant to be a history book for goodness sake. Believing a man is a god is intellectually beyond the pale. |
Page 73 “The pagan propagandist Celsus, writing his True Word c. 180, claimed: 'Some do not even want to give or receive a reason for what they believe, and simply say“Do not ask questions; just believe”, and“Thy faith will save thee”." | Celsus was correct. The Christians fought with all their might to destroy education. The bishops in the British House of Lords successfully kept education from the majority of people until the end of the 19th century. In 1902, the Secondary Education Bill was passed in Great Britain. The priests knew their religion was doomed once the masses could read, write, and therefore think for themselves. Any teachings that cross the laws of nature and modern scientific discoveries are rejected by educated people. All except those with a vested interest in keeping up the deception. |
Page 73 “[Christianity] was now a universalist alternative to the civil religion and a far more dynamic (and better organized) one: it had either to be exterminated or accepted." | No doubt about this statement, but is it teaching the truth, moral codes of ethics and righteousness? The Christians were certainly dynamic when they killed every person in the Roman Empire who could read and write after the Council of Nicaea, along with destroying every library and every school. |
Page 75 “It was the Christian spirit of mutual love and communal charity which most impressed pagans." | This implies that all non-Christians were ignorant. One imagines wild painted savages. This is what we have been indoctrinated to think. What about Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, and Eratosthenes who actually proved the world was round over a thousand years before the Renaissance scientists in our Christian paradise? |
Page 75 “The Emperor Julian, seeking to revive paganism in the fourth century, tried to introduce similar charitable funds for the poor." | This means he tried to stop the world going mad and get back to following the great scientists, philosophers and educationalists of Greece and Rome. Sadly, Julian lost and the religious maniacs took over the known world. Christianity is paganism mixed up with Judaism and other supernatural doctrine surrounding Jerusalem. Christ means“The Anointed One.” Many pagan saviour-gods were Christs, going right back to tribal leaders who were made into gods. When their leader (“god”) died, he was covered in oil, cooked and eaten. |
Page 75 “[Christianity] told husbands to treat their wives with as much consideration as Christ showed to his 'bride', the Church." | Jesus would have had a fit to see the words that have been put into his mouth. No quarrel with the sanctity of marriage, codes of ethics, but alas this is so small a part of Christian teaching. |
Page 79 “In the second half of the fourth century, for the first time, we get hints of public complaints against the wealth of Christian clergy and the splendour of its buildings. Some Christian writers took note: 'our walls glitter with gold', wrote Jerome, 'and gold gleams upon our ceilings and the capitals of our pillars; yet Christ is dying at our doors in the person of the poor, naked and hungry.' " | Nothing has changed much. Our Lord Bishops are still living in palaces in the lap of luxury. |
Page 84 “The Donatists were a fully organized church, with over 500 bishops, most of them, of course, of small sees. They were basically orthodox in their ritual and teaching; as they saw themselves, ultra-orthodox. Their priests consciously re-created the attitudes of Zealots, and went around in parties armed with clubs, which they called 'Israels', to chastise backsliding, pro-Roman clergy." | Nice people, I wonder what Jesus would have thought of this bunch. |
Page 86 “In a letter defending [Julian's] religious policy of withdrawing state military support from the orthodox brand of Christianity, he points out passionately that this has ended bloodshed. 'Many whole communities of so-called heretics', he claims, 'were actually butchered, as at Samosata, and Cyzicus in Paphlagonia, Bithynia and Galatia, and among many other tribes villages were sacked and destroyed; whereas in my time exile has been ended and property restored.' " “By the 390s, Filastrus, the elderly Bishop of Brescia, who had spent his entire life collecting information about heresy, had compiled a list of 156 distinct ones - all, it would seem, still flourishing. Heresy held particular attractions for dispossessed tribesmen, or tribes within the frontiers which had been subjected to collective punishments...” | The killing had to start again because the diversity of Christian religious belief was incompatible with the purely secular needs of the Imperial administration. All this from a Christian writer, a Roman Catholic! Now it is clear why Emperor Theodosis called The Council of Constantinople in 381 AD: To enforce the Nicene Creed, an all-embracing universal (Catholic) religion that must be obeyed by all on pain of death. Into this confusion came the Christian Visigoths who took Rome in 410 AD. This writer at the end of this book makes the following incredible statement: “Certainly mankind without Christianity conjures up a dismal prospect.” Only somebody who has had their brains scrambled from birth by priests could make such a stupid statement. |
Page 87 “[Constantine] knew that Athanasius, though orthodox, was a violent man, who regularly flogged his junior clergy and imprisoned or expelled bishops.” | This man is held in high regard by modern Christians. |
Page 88 “From Eusebius's descriptions of Constantine presiding at the Council of Nicea in 325 and at other great ecclesiastical gatherings we see the emperor in his element, arranging elaborate ceremony, dramatic entrances and processions and splendid services. He brought his skill in public relations to the management of Church affairs.” | Even Paul Johnson, who has not really pulled any punches so far, is careful not to go into any details regarding this most important date in human history - the infamous Council of Nicaea that took place in 325 of the Christian era. It was here that Jesus, an unhistorical Jewish teacher, was officially elevated to the position of a pagan saviour-god and the second person in a trinity of gods. Bishop Arius and his followers refused to recognise this majority decision. This is the move that started to plunge the known world into the Christian Dark Ages. |
Page 88 “Again, in 333, in the first instance of censorship being employed in defence of Christian interests, he ordered savage action against Arian writings: 'If any treatise composed by Arius is discovered, let it be consigned to the flames... in order that no memorial of him whatever be left... [and] if anyone shall be caught concealing a book by Arius, and does not instantly bring it out and burn it, the penalty shall be death; the criminal shall suffer punishment immediately after conviction.” | Ask yourself, what were the qualifications of these men at Nicaea that enabled them to make such a momentous decision as turning a man into the god called Christ? They had no qualifications. They did not know what the sun was or how big it was. They thought their little world was flat with a ball of fire going round it every day. They knew nothing about medicine and thought that disease was caused by evil spirits and a crop failure by an angry god. It is the conclusions of these ignorant fanatics that still have command of our education system today. Christians still control television and national radio. There is hardly any balance to what the Christians are pumping into the minds of people in this so–called free country of ours. How is it that this outrageous victory at Nicaea is still going strong in the 21st century? It is because the Christians fought and won. By overwhelming power combined with utter ruthlessness. It is as if Hitler had won and every dictator that followed carried out the same policies. |
Page 92 “But as the Trinitarian doctrine evolved in the orthodox Church, the emphasis changed from an insistence on One God, to an insistence on One God Christ, with a single, divine nature, not two. This appeared to preserve the centrality of Christ along with the monotheistic principle, yet at the same time it differentiated Christianity decisively from Judasism, which rejected the Christ altogether. Among the less sophisticated, especially the desert tribes, there was still lingering fear of the old gods dispossessed by Christianity.” | This is beyond the pale! How can an historian carry out all this excellent research and then at the end of the book declare“I am a Christian”? It is just as daft as an astronomer declaring that he is a member of The Flat Earth Society. |
Page 108 “Ambrose seems to have assumed that the clergy, at least of the higher grades, should normally be drawn from the wealthy and ruling orders, or at least conform to their social behaviour; he admitted he did not like presbyters or bishops who were unable to speak correct Latin, or who had provincial accents. Thus another aspect of the medieval pattern falls into place: a clerical career open to the talents but structured to the possessing class.” | And the possessing class stayed there by making sure only they could read and write. This was only broken by the invention of printing spreading to Europe in 1450. The priests could not kill fast enough to keep up with the printing press. From this date, we have slowly but surely freed ourselves from the curse of priestcraft. We ought to have our own Council of Nicaea and make Gutenberg into a god! |
Page 108 “And Ambrose was also the first bishop to deal at length with the question of sex. Sex had seemed of no importance to the earliest Christians. Believing, as most of them did, in an imminent parousia [the coming of their god Christ to judge - ed.] , it seemed needless to devise rules for the correct means of perpetuating the species.” Page 109 “A virgin suspected of sexual intercourse, [Ambrose] ruled, should not be medically examined by force, except in certain special cases, and then only on the authority and under the supervision of a bishop. If found guilty, she should not be executed (Ambrose did not believe in capital punishment, but in redemptive justice), and certainly not tortured to death. Head-shaving and penance for life would suffice. A virgin threatened with rape or imprisonment in a brothel would be justified in committing suicide.” |
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Page 110 “[Jerome] was a wild man of God, not an urbane prelate. Jerome found sex an enormous difficulty. He was quite convinced it was evil: 'Marriage is only one degree less sinful than fornication.' ” “To Jerome, sex was dirty in a literal or concrete sense; he writes often of his favourite virgins that they were 'squalid with dirt'. Dirt, to him, both epitomized the sexual act and the therapeutic process by which the virgin concealed her charms.” | This is the favourite saint of painters. Sounds to me more like another one for Broadmoor Hospital. |
Page 112 “Christianization has also accelerated the downwards drift in the social origin of the empire's cultural impulses.” “[The Christians] allowed the great classical universities to decline, then closed them down: Alexandria in 517, the school of Athens in 529.” | A most amazing admission by a Christian writer that Christianity was the cause of the fall of civilization and the destruction of the Greek and Roman educational system. |
Page 113 “For a thousand years Augustine was the most popular of the Fathers; medieval European libraries contained over 500 complete manuscripts of his City of God , and there were, for instance, twenty-four printed editions between 1467-95. Above all, Augustine wrote about himself: he issued his so-called Confessions in 397, two years after he became bishop. He was a tremendous egotist: it is characteristic of him that his spiritual autobiography should have been written in the form of a gigantic address to God.” Page 116 “Even after a long bout of imperial persecution, inspired by Augustine, the Donatists were still able to produce nearly 300 bishops for the final attempt at compromise at Carthage in 411. Thereafter, in the course of the two decades before Vandals overran the littoral, the back of the Donatist church was broken by force. Its upper-class supporters joined the establishment. Many of its rank and file were driven into outlawry and brigandage. There were many cases of mass suicide. Augustine watched the process dry-eyed. Of course the times were horrific. (...) State torture, supposedly used only in serious cases such as treason, was in fact employed whenever the State willed. Jerome describes horrible tortures inflicted on a woman accused of adultery. A vestal virgin who broke her vows might be flogged, then buried alive. (...) Why not? [Augustine] would ask. If the State used such methods for its own miserable purposes, was not the Church entitled to do the same and more for its own far greater ones? He not only accepted, he became the theorist of, persecution; and his defences were later to be those on which all defences of the Inquisition rested.” | A few years ago I saw Malcolm Muggeridge praising this man Augustine on television. How can a highly intelligent and well educated man like Muggeridge be taken in? Is he really a genuine victim of priestcraft or is he acting like the professional priests in order to protect the old-boy network? “Ever winding in and out of our story we shall observe the repeated attempts made by the Church to achieve world domination, based on the scheme of Augustine in his book The City of God , which was the Mein Kampf of Christianity, to end in complete failure after thirteen centuries of effort. Both works envisaged a scheme of absolute world rule and both attempts relied on aggressive and ruthless methods. The Christian priests, to achieve their purpose, relied on torture, imprisonment, banishment, the Inquisitors of the Faith, intrigue and on Christian rulers, backed by their armies of cruel and plundering soldiers, while the Nazis relied on the gestapo, intrigue, concentration camps, ruthless brutality, quislings, tanks and bombers. The similarity of the two attempts by two organisations, made up of tyrants seeking power and wealth, at the expense of the liberty and happiness of their victims, is obvious and there is nothing to choose between them.” Arthur Findlay: The Curse of Ignorance (Volume 1), 1947 |
Page 119 “As a matter of fact it is hard to discover when, before Augustine, the Church had accepted original sin as a matter of faith.” | Here is another little bombshell from this Christian writer. We have all been taken for a terrible ride by our leaders and teachers. Every single one of these academics knows exactly what they are doing. They no more believe these supernatural Christian fairy stories than the rest of us believe in Father Christmas. The name of the game is the same as it has always been: Keep the masses -“The poor bloody infantry” in ignorance. |
Page 120 “From their exchanges, fragmentary alas, Augustine emerges in an unpleasant light, a clever man stooping low for the purpose of vulgar appeal, remorselessly exploiting popular prejudice, an anti-intellectual, a hater of classical culture, a mob orator, and a sex-obsessive. In the infinitive wisdom of God, he noted, the genitals were appropriately made the instruments for the transmission of original sin: 'Ecce unde ' That's the place!” (...) “Did not every man, he asked his cringing congregation, feel shame at having a wet dream?” | We have found another one for Broadmoor. |
Page 122 “In 398 there was a very different sequence of events. The official told his bishop, who preached an alarmist sermon. At sunset, a red cloud was seen approaching the city; men thought they could smell sulphur, and many rushed to the churches demanding baptism. The next week there were more alarms, culminating in a general exodus from the city, led by the emperor in person. For several hours Constantinople was deserted, while its terrified inhabitants camped in the fields five miles away. Such human stampedes were to become a feature of medieval Europe. The incident at Constantinople in 398 was an indication that the classical era was over, and that men were now inhabiting a different mental universe.” | What a superb euphemism for saying the religious maniacs were now running Europe. |
Page 128 “Both the Vandals, who settled in North Africa, and the various gothic tribal groupings - Visigoths in Spain and Southern Gaul, Ostrogoths in Italy - were Arians [They would not accept three gods in one, which was invented at the Council of Nicaea in 325 -ed.] . This fact quickly became the chief differentiation between the ‘barbarians’ and the Romans, who accepted the Trinitarian doctrine worked out by Augustine. [Father, Son and Holy Ghost - ed.] . The tribesmen were also hungry Arians. Most of them were after food rather than booty. There was no food in Rome when Alaric took it in 410: most of the food supplies came from North Africa. Where the tribes could buy or obtain food peacefully they seldom resorted to violence. (…) The Arians did not as a rule persecute; they were tolerant to orthodox Christians, as well as to Jews and other sects.” | If the followers of Bishop Arius at the Council of Nicaea had been successful, then this history, without the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, would have a very different story to tell. |
Page 129 “The Arians, at any rate among the Goths and Vandals, were never able to develop an episcopate [hierarchy of bishops etc. - ed.] of comparable prestige and resolution. This was one reason why orthodox Christianity in the West was eventually able to de-Arianize the tribes, a process which began in the fifth century and continued for the next two hundred years.” | Another glorious euphemism for the Christians murdering every person who disagreed with whatever supernatural absurdities were in fashion at the time. |
Page 130 “The damage to the structure of Rome occurred in the mid sixth century, when it was repeatedly besieged and plundered during attempts of the Emperor Justinian to re-attach Italy to the Byzantine Empire. The ruin of ancient buildings was completed in 664, when the Emperor Constans II made the last Imperial visit: He stripped it not only of its remaining metal statues, but of the metal parts of the buildings, bronze and lead tiles and roofs, which kept out the rain, and metal clamps and ties which held the massive walls together - all these were pulled out to be melted down into armaments. The destruction of classical Rome was the act of the Byzantines, not the barbarians.” | Now we can understand what Henry Ford meant when he said“History as taught in our schools is bunk.” We have all been told a pack of lies that our civilisation is thanks to Christianity; nothing could be further from the truth. It is never made clear to students that the so-called Barbarians were Christians and that the people who sacked Rome were also Christians. |
Page 132 “(...) Bishop of Rome, Gregory I. Later ages called him ‘the Great’, but he does not seem to have been popular in his own lifetime, or for long after.” | Pope Gregory I (The Great) (590-604) - The man who had to admit that Christianity had turned hell loose over an empire where there had previously reigned peace, tolerance, justice and concord. He owned a thousand slaves. He ordered the destruction of all non-Christian books. He put down all attempts at education, closed the Roman schools. He it was who started the Church on its policy of keeping the people ignorant, and was therefore one of the main causes of plunging the known world into the Christian Dark Ages. |
Page 136 “(...) the Church possessed from the start a monopoly of the writing of history.” | Not half! Only now in the 21st century is the truth about the great religious hoax on the human race starting to get through. |
Page 138 “Dark age man saw his past, as he saw his future, through exclusively Christian eyes. To him, there was no other way of looking at history except as the working out of God’s purposes.” | Now we can understand why the Christian priests and their allies in The House of Lords fought so hard against the education bills in the 1800s. They knew very well that once the ordinary people could read and write it would be the end of their supernatural doctrines and dogmas. |
Page 139 “(...) St Ambrose's ruling: trade and commerce were necessarily evil, but farming an estate was honourable in the eyes of God.” | Just the sort of stupid statement one would expect to hear from this“great” Christian statesman. |
Page 140 “(...) Makarios of Alexandria claimed he had not spat on the ground since his baptism. For seven years he ate only raw vegetables; had a bread-fast for three years; never slept for twenty nights; exposed himself for seven months to sqamp-mosquitoes; and fasted for forty days, remaining in one corner of his cell without speaking or moving, and eating only raw cabbage on Sundays. He lived to be a hundred, having lost his teeth, and with only a few hairs to mark his beard. Makariios had many exotic or miraculous adventures with animals. So did all the successful eccentrics. St Gregory and St Malo saved the damned by pulling them out of hell. St Malo also changed a stone into a chalice of rock-crystal so he could celebrate mass.” | These tales of mad saints and monks tell the story of Christianity. No wonder the works of the Greek and Roman scientists philosophers and educationalists had to be destroyed. The tragedy is that it is the thoughts of these lunatics that set the seal on the Western world for over a thousand years. They still have incredible influence on the air waves, the national press and education today. I do not think the word lunatic is too strong. There is no doubt that blindly believing in priestcraft, without access to any balance, sends many people stark, staring bonkers. |
Page 144/145 “St Columbanus, born c. 540, was like Columba an Irish tribal leader, head of a family monastery. (...) In 575 he landed in Brittany with a shipload of monks. (...) By the time Coumbanus died in 615, he, his entourage and their immediate followers had spread Celtic monasticim across a huge area of France, Italy and the Alps, and had founded about forty monasteries. (...) The rule he drew up for his new establishment was very severe, and corporal punishment harsh and frequent. (...) More serious was their refusal to celebrate Easter according to the calculations made by Rome. (...) And how could the Church claim unity if it could not even agree on the date of the resurrection, the core of its belief?” | Resurrection of the physical body is completely against the laws of nature. It is supernatural; nothing is above or beyond the laws of nature. |
Page 150 “The Cistercians claimed to be the only true followers of St Benedict, in the stark and true simplicity of primitive monasticism.” | So different to what we have been taught at school about monks. |
Page 152 “We have seen how the early Benedictines prospered by replacing slave labour by a peasant tenantry.” | Slaves. A vital part of Christianity, not banned from the British Empire until 1843 and in America until 1865. Not surprising when people have all been brainwashed to seriously believe that every word in the Bible is the wish of their God! This is still believed by some people even today. “Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover, of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land; and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen forever.” “The law officers of the Crown, namely the Attorney-general and the Solicitor-general, moreover, declared in 1729 that slavery was, and always had been, legal in the British Isles, and that slaves under British bondage anywhere need not be released when they became Christians.” |
Page 153 “[The Church] had the chance not merely to establish a stranglehold on education, but to recreate the whole process and content and purpose of education in a Christian setting.” | This Christian writer makes it quite clear that the Christians destroyed education. Again, completely opposite to what we have been taught at school. |
Page 154 “In the next two generations, the Cassiodoran system was taken up in Seville, under Bishop Leander, a friend of Gregory the Great, and his successor, Bishop Isidore.” | Pope Isidore in 636 founded a type of education system that was to last until the Renaissance. But it was only for a privileged few within the Church. Sadly, most of the teaching was only connected with the Bible, which apart from a few passages containing codes of ethics, it was quite useless as far as gaining knowledge was concerned or improving the living standard of the poor people. The evidence of this book shows these Christian leaders took most notice of the terrible passages where this big daddy god clearly instructs simpletons to kill people who are in possession of land who do not believe in a certain brand of priestcraft. Sadly there are many passages like this. “And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them: thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.” (Deuteronomy 7; 1-2) |
Page 156 “Eighth- and ninth-century monks believed that under the Romans mankind had possessed virtually the sum of ascertainable human knowledge, nearly all of which had since been lost (...).” | Lost! Destroyed by the Christian barbarians. Shall we just pretend that the previous pages did not exist? Hypatia, the female principal of the great library in Alexandria , was not really murdered by Saint Cyril’s mob in 415; that the magnificent work of Greek and Roman philosophers, scientists and educationalists were not really destroyed; that the libraries and schools were not all burnt to the ground by the Christians. |
Page 156 “In destroying Pelagianism [Augustine] had snapped the tradition of speculating on first principles, and banned the practice of critical re-examination of accepted conclusions. 'Rome has spoken; the debate is over' - those were his very words.” | I am a complete loss to understand how an academic like Paul Johnson could possible make the following statement: “It can be argued that, in the long run, civilization has benefited from the intellectual self-abasement of these centuries.” Without knowledge there can be no wisdom. Do away with education, kill every person who tries to find out something or improve their living standard. I suppose it could be argued that if Hitler had won the war it would have benefited civilization in the long run. |
Page 157 “Perhaps only one in a hundred manuscripts prepared during these centuries had a function or interest which was not directly Christian. Moreover, the Christian element impregnated not merely the written word, but every other aspect of culture. The idea of secular art virtually disappeared, along with secular [ non-religious - ed. ] education.” | |
Page 158 “The Christian device of the cross gave pagan technology the opportunity to develop a unique art-world of its own, with a multitude of periods and schools, and an increasing elaboration of the message conveyed.” | The cross is not Christian. Krishna (the Hindu Christ) was portrayed as being crucified on a cross, and many other religions much older than Christianity had the cross as a symbol. |
Page 161/162 “These Dark Age scholars believed that God had imposed definite limits on what knowledge man might acquire in this world without sin. In accepting these limits they were motivated by fear (…) They were, indeed, fearful and superstitious men. The Christian Church of Alcuin in the late eighth century was still, in certain basic essentials, recognizably the same as the Church of Paul's letters to the Corinthians, around AD 50-60. (…) Nothing exactly new was created; but certain elements already present in 'imperial Christianity' were enormously inflated and so transformed. Of these by far the most important was the cult of relics. (…) Relics rapidly became, and for some 800 years remained, the most important single element in Christian devotion. They were the Christian's only practical defence against inexplicable suffering, and the constant and malignant activities of devils. (…) Important relics were approached with terror, and frequently revenged themselves on the profane and the skeptical. They conveyed a sense of supernatural power constantly humming through the world (…). (…) Bede, for instance, was an educated man, who knew how to use evidence and who did not rule out natural explanations - the sudden rise and fall of storms, and so on. For him miracles occurred for a moral and didactic purpose. (…) he described how the air and sea (…) obeyed the saint. Man, says Bede, had originally exercised such dominion over his environment, but had lost it through the first sin; but it was possible for individuals to recover it by showing exceptional virtue. (…) With an absolute belief in miracles worked by saints, the possession of relics became for ordinary people the most important aspect of religion..” | This is the result of the Christian destruction of education. The known world was now in the hands of religious maniacs. |
Page 164/165 “Gregory I found some Greek monks had been digging up ordinary bodies at Rome by night, and when arrested and questioned they said they were taking the bones back to Constantinople to pass them off as relics of saints.” “Successive popes made efforts to check the worst abuses; on important relics it was necessary for the Pope's personal signet to be stamped, as a guaranteee of authenticity.” | Incredible stories of popes, kings and bishops all trading in bones as relics of saints. |
Page 169 “In 710, the Pope, as the imperial official in Rome, accused the Archbishop of Ravenna of rebellion and ordered his eyes to be put out. The sentence was presented as coming direct from St Peter, who imposed it because the Archbishop had disobeyed his vicar.” | When we read passages in the Bible in the name of God urging us to kill non-Christians and unorthodox Christians, it is clear what sort of people it was who latched into the men in power. Exactly the same as the grisly gang who surrounded Hitler. |
Page 170 “So Augustine argued that when an Emperor ordered what was good, Christ himself gave the order.” “Honorius and his imperial brother Arcadius issued edicts equating heresy with treason, and vice versa; and in the next century the Justinian code established the emperor as judge of dogma and the worthiness of priests (…).” | In order to make absolute power corrupt absolutely, who better than God to give the orders? |
Page 172 “The Pope had now become a king-maker.” | Therefore, if it is power one is after, the Pope is the position to aim for. In AD 800, Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne (Charles 1st, Charles the Great, King of the powerful Franks) Holy Roman Emperor. This provided the Pope with some measure of security against numerous enemies. |
Page 172/173 “When Paul died in 768, a local duke, Toto of Nepi, seized the Lateran and carried out a coup in conjunction with his three brothers, one of whom, Constantine, was proclaimed Pope. The primicerus, Christopher, who resisted the coup, was blinded and mutilated in the square in front of the Lateran, dying a few days later of his injuries. (…) But the two rival popes were made in quick succession, and the coup collapsed in a welter of blood and barbarity. One of the brothers was blinded, and their chief clerical supporter blinded and his tongue slit in addition..” | Nice fellows these Christians. |
Page 176 “The Carolingian State was also timid over slavery. None of its legislation impugned or attacked the status of slavery or even questioned whether this condition was compatible with Christian principles.” | Why should they when the word of their god, the Bible, clearly states it is correct to have slaves? “Slaves be obedient to your masters" |
Page 177 “The profound pessimism which Christians drew from Augustine's writings itself seemed to mirror the uncertainties of life as they knew it. There grew at this time a strong sense of the pointlessness of earthly life, which persisted long after horizons had widened — indeed, until the Renaissance.” (...) “There is something enormously impressive, almost heroic, about the work of such men as Charlemagne and Alfred.” | A staggering admission of misery created by Augustine’s writings and then praise for Charlemagne for forcing the misery on the people. Torture, perpetuating mythology as fact,“heroic”? |
Page 177 “Never again was Christianity to attempt so comprehensively to realize itself as a human institution, as well as a divine one.” | What in the name of reason does this writer mean? “Human”,“Divine” put out peoples’ eyes, slit their tongues, castration, enslave and kill every person who does not believe a set of doctrines and dogmas that were invented by a gang of ignorant religious fanatics at the Council of Nicaea in 325 of the Christian era? Arthur Findlay says: “Charlemagne was an ignorant king who could never quite master the art of writing. The only knowledge that centered round his court was theological. Priests were his teachers. This simpleton believed all their fairy stories. This powerful, ignorant fanatic set the cauldron boiling once more, to bring disruption, hatred, wars and persecution to Europe up to the 19th century. Charlemagne was so impressed by the savagery of Jehovah that he made it an offence punishable by death for anyone to refuse to become a Christian and be baptised. Charles' army killed everyone who would not accept the Christian faith. ‘Join us or be damned’ later changed to ‘Remain with us or be damned’.” Would this writer also describe Hitler as HEROIC? Another outstanding Jew-hater. Channel 4 Television put out an appalling programme called ’Testament’ on Sunday 11th December 1988. The presenter described the Bible as the word of God and had the audacity to say that it is Charlemagne that we have to thank for law and order as well as education and learning. It’s the old story, repeat a massive lie often enough and in the end people actually start believing it, especially if the people who control the means of mass communication and education are part of a conspiracy to make sure no genuine historian is ever allowed to give a balance. I was refused permission to put the record straight. |
Page 180 “Thus the ninth century became an age of intense missionary rivalry. The presence of two Christian Churches in the area of central Europe, each seeking to convert kings and nations and so enlarge its sphere of influence, helps to illuminate the obscure subject of why pagan societies chose to become Christian.” | Now we come to the pathetic quarrel between Rome and Constantinople. Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee had a much better reason for a fight, at least they were fighting over something, even if it was only a baby’s rattle. These Christians were fighting over nothing whatsoever, but mythology gone completely mad. |
Page 180 “Another factor was the failure of Germanic pagan societies to produce a satisfying explanation of what happened after death. In contrast to the certitude of salvation which Christianity provided.” | Very hazy indeed, just lying in the grave waiting for a saviour-god to come back to earth and judge the living and the dead, time unspecified. Could be in a thousand million years time. Those who do not believe in what the priests say will rot in the flames of hell forever without any chance of getting out. On this page is confirmation (from a Roman Catholic writer) of this word ‘ filioque ’ (and from the son) which was added to the Creed. It means that the Holy Ghost came from the Son as well as from the Father. Constantinople would not agree to this. This is Christianity, nothing even remotely connected with a philosopher known as Jesus. It is pure priescraft. |
Page 181 “the faith not only had answers, but definitive and compulsory answers, to questions on almost every aspect of human behaviour and arrangements.” | Answers? What answers? Definitive and compulsory, yes. Woe betide any poor person who dared to disagree with these inquisitors of the faith. |
Page 183 “Missionaries were, in fact, keen on using the vernacular - as they were to be in a wider world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The papacy was, at first, ambivalent. Hadrian II issues a bull in 867-8 authorizing the use of Slavonic liturgy. John VIII imposed a temporary ban on Slavonic in 880, but agreed, in a letter to the Moravians: 'It is certainly not against faith and doctrine to sing the mass in the Slavonic language, or to read the Holy Gospel or the Divine Lesson in the New and Old Testaments well translated and interpreted, or to chant the other offices of the hours, for he who made the three principal languages, Hebrew, Greek and Latin, also created all the others for his own praise and glory.' Nevertheless, this was in fact the last papal pronouncement in favour of the vernacular. The Frankish governments, in their almost ideological quest for unity and standardization, were strong Latinists; they argued passionately that, while Hebrew and Greek might be permissible for divine service in the East, Latin alone was the liturgical and scriptural language of the West. This argument, urged by Rome's political masters, also appealed strongly to the authoritarian element which was always present in papal thinking, and after John VIII all the Popes banned the use of local tongues.Thus the western Church locked itself into the world of Latin, from which it was only to emerge in the twentieth century. Once again, as with the filioque, it was the Frankish ideologues, rather than the papacy itself, who made compromise impossible.” | One reason why Rome lost out to Constantinople in the Balkans was their insistence on Latin being used in Church and not the native tongue. This rule has only just been changed in the twentieth century. The Byzantine side preferred Greek to be used but did not feel quite so strongly as Rome. |
Page 186 “For one thing, the Greeks did not think the barbarous Latins capable of serious theological discussion.” | Both as daft as one another. Fasten your safety belts we are now entering cloud cuckoo land. |
Page 187 “In 1274 at the Council of Lyons, the Emperor Michael Paleologos, in extremis, submitted to Gregory X and accepted filioque [that the Holy Ghost came from the son as well as from the Father -ed.] . The Pope's vicar in Sicily, Charles of Anjou, who was hoping to lead an attack on Constantinople, was so furious at the news that he bit the top off his scepter. But the reaction from the Byzantine clergy and people was far more violent. The emperor savagely enforced compliance with his surrender. The public orator was flogged and exiled. One leading theologian was ordered to be scourged daily by his own brother until he submitted. Four of the emperor's relatives were imprisoned and blinded; another died in prison; monks had their tongues torn out.” | It all sounds like something out of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but this is real. This is Christian civilisation, totally different to the pack of lies that the law of Great Britain insists is pumped into our children masquerading as religious instruction in our schools. Every academic in this field of research knows the truth and they did nothing to stop Kenneth Baker, the Secretary of State for Education and Science, from introducing legislation to actually strengthen the religious provisions in the 1944 Education Act. This amounts to nothing less than brainwashing the young trusting minds of our children with dangerous and divisive doctrines and dogmas that send many people mad. The blame for this tragic state of affairs rests squarely on the shoulders of all those who refused to speak out. |
Page 187 “when Michael died he was buried as a heretic in unconsecrated ground, and orthodoxy was restored in 1283, when filioque was again repudiated. The Pope got another submission from the eastern emperor at Florence, in 1439. Once more, the Greeks agreed to include the wretched word, and admit that 'Filioque has been lawfully and reasonably added to the Creed'. The submission was finally proclaimed, to an apathetic congregation in St Sophia, in 1452. On this occasion the papal promise of aid against the Turks was as insincere as the Greek acceptance of Rome’s doctrinal position. Six months later [Constantinople] had fallen, and the eastern empire no longer existed.” | In 1453 Constantinople fell. A most important date in history because this eventually led to the First World War. Crazy religious fairy stories invented by priests causing all the trouble. The Turks (Ottoman Empire) were eventually stopped in Austria and pushed back to the toehold they now have in Europe - Istanbul (Constantinople). The collapse of the Ottoman Empire caused a vacuum in the Balkans and the spark that started the First World War was caused by the big powers fighting over the scraps. Germany and Austria waded in on the side of the Roman Catholics in Croatia, and Russia backed their Orthodox Christian brothers in Serbia. Turkey joined Germany because of the Muslims deep hatred of Orthodox Christians. Britain and France used this as an excellent chance to smash the German war machine. |
Page 188 “Christ had founded a universalist Church which would be all things to all men.” | What utter rubbish! A mythical saviour-god invented by priests cannot start anything. The whole shooting-match was invented by priests in order to keep them in the manner to which they are accustomed. This has been made very clear all the way through the book. These outrageous statements seem like priestly interpolations because they are out of character with most of the book. I can only think they have been inserted by Paul Johnson to get the book accepted. |
Page 191 “One of the great tragedies of human history - and the central tragedy of Christianity - is the break-up of the harmonious world-order which had evolved, in the Dark Ages, on a Christian basis.” | I flatly refuse to believe this was written by Paul Johnson. This little beauty must be a priestly interpolation. |
Page 194 “Wipo, chaplain to [ The Holy Roman Emperor King ] Conrad II, writes in his biography of his master: 'Although he was ignorant of letters, nevertheless he prudently gave instructions to every cleric, not only lovingly and courteous in public, but also with fitting discipline in secret.' ” | So after one thousand years of Christian civilization, not even the King could read and write. The next time a pseudo-historian, priest or media personality trots out the usual rubbish that education and our civilization is thanks to Christianity, we will recognise it for the lie it is. We are what we are today solely because a handful of philosophers and scientists have had the courage to stand up to those who have used the Judaic-Christian ladder to obtain all the top positions. |
Page 197 “It is significant that it began with a statement that the Pope could be judged by no one. (...) The Roman Church, continued [Pope Gregory VII], has never erred and can never err. It was founded by Christ alone. The Pope, and only the Pope, can depose and restore bishops, make new laws, create new bishoprics and divide old ones, translate bishops, call general councils, revise his own judgements, use their imperial insignia, depose emperors and absolve subjects from their allegiance. All princes should kiss his feet, and his legates took precedence over bishops. Appeals to the papal court automatically inhibited judgements from any other court. Finally, a duly ordained pope was made a saint ex officio by the merits of St Peter.” | This lunatic seriously believed he was receiving his orders from St. Peter who presumably was getting his orders from his boss Jesus. God no less, nothing like going to the top. Yet another one for Broadmoor. |
Page 198 “Unspeakable ferocity was throughout the hallmark of these death-struggles between popes and emperors. (…) Jordanus of Sicily had a red-hot crown placed on his head and fixed to his skull with nails; others were burnt at the stake, flayed alive or covered in tar and ignited.” |
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Page 199 “Innocent III placed the papacy in the centre of the world's motions.” | When it comes to the forces of evil this man must be at the top of every historians list. The Childrens’ Crusade. 50,000 little boys and girls sent to the holy land. They were all killed or captured as slaves. This is so horrific, and has been so successfully suppressed by our teachers who have used the Judaic Christian ladder to get their jobs, that hardly anyone knows about it. During the crusades against heretical Christians in Europe, the Pope was asked how to distinguish between us and them. The answer came back from the Pope,“Kill all, God will know his own.” A thousand years of total Christian brainwashing had put the fear of Christ up everybody. |
Page 199 “We have a picture of the wretched Emperor Otto IV, created as a papal puppet, then a renegade and papal victim, dying of dysentery; in his horror of Hell flames, he caused his weak and emaciated body to be 'vigorously scourged'; but he still clung, gibbering, to the imperial insignia which were also potent relics, radiating spiritual forces... .” |
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Page 200 “(...) who did not know which to fear most - an armed imperialist or a cursing papalist cleric.” (...) “in 1239 [Pope Gregory IX] produced the relics of two unassailable guardians of the papal city: 'the heads of the apostles Peter and Paul' were carried 'in solemn procession' through Rome, and in front of a huge crowd Gregory removed his tiara and placed it on the head of St Peter.” | This page also includes incredible stories of Jesus’s foreskin and the tablets of Moses, all in the Pope’s palace. All this is the result of people believing in priestcraft, following a supernatural saviour-god invented by priests called Christ, instead of following the great Greek philosophers. |
Page 201 “In credal terms, Frederick was strictly orthodox, though his wide reading, knowledge of the world - especially the East and Islam - had bred in him a spirit of speculative tolerace.” | This King, Frederick II, sounds a bit more sensible than most. He denied the virgin birth. Said of the Eucharist,“How long will this hocus-pocus continue?” He was widely read. He said that the Church was against reason and contrary to nature. He made the assertion that the monstrous growth of papal power made a fundamental reform of the Church necessary. He said,“The clergy were insatiable leeches.” What a breath of fresh air, but this did not please the ‘defenders of the faith’ |
Page 202 “Frederick thus anticipated the attempts to revert to the conciliar system as a counterweight to the regal pontiff.” “ Of Frederick’s children and grandchildren, ten died by papal violence or in papal dungeons. ” | Unfortunately after Frederick died, the papal victory over the Staufen family was total. |
Page 203 “Not long after [Charlemagne's] death we hear of complaints from monasteries that it was not their job to educate men unless they intended to be monks.” | The terrible destruction of education by the Christians cannot be stressed enough. The Romans had a minister of state for education Quintillian AD 35-96. Something we did not achieve in the United Kingdom until 1868 solely because of Christian opposition to educating the masses. Those with a great deal to lose knew they were finished once ordinary people could read and write. Even a cursory glance at what we have been led to believe are holy books it is obvious that they are no more the word of the creator of the universe than any other book that has ever been published. |
Page 208 “Many were not clergy in any but a legal sense. Often they took minor orders to get an education, and then entered the service of lay masters; they never intended to be an ordained priest. Many clerks in secular service lived like laymen, and then married.” | As the Church had complete control of education, people realised that to join the Church was the only chance they had of learning to read and write. This is the clue to how the Renaissance came about. These clerks were not totally brainwashed. Many began to query the Christian doctrines and dogmas and much of Church ritual did not match up with teachings they read in the Bible. Many years had to pass before Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Darwin and Arthur Findlay came on the scene, but this was the beginning of the end of the curse of priestcraft. |
Page 208/209 “At this level, a good deal of crime among clerics was inevitable. (...) The Becket episode really began when Henry arrived back in England in 1163 and was told that more than a hundred murders had been committed by clerks since his coronation on 1157. There were too, vast numbers of cases of clerical theft and robbery with violence. Henry might have had more sympathy with Becket's absolutist claims if Becket had shown better sense in the running of the courts. But often their verdicts seemed intolerable to a king dedicated to stamping out lawlessness. A canon of Bedford had killed a knight and then, in open court, furiously abused the judge, a local sheriff: the offence was doubly capital, yet Becket merely had the man banished. Again, a Worcestershire clerk had seduced a girl, then murdered her father; Becket had the clerk branded. This was open to four objections: it was inadequate; it was a sentence unknown to canon law; it was, indeed, a usurpation of royal authority; and it flatly contradicted Becket's own argument that clerks should not suffer mutilation, normal in royal courts, 'lest in man the image of God be deformed'. (...) The clergy, by reason of their Ordered and distinctive office, have Christ alone as King.” | The main reason for this appalling behaviour by priests is that they actually believed their own propaganda — well, some of them did — that their God was going to forgive all their sins committed while on Earth. This is also what people who belong to the Mafia and IRA are banking on. |
Page 212/213 “The Black Prince got his illiterate friend Robert Stretton the bishopric of Coventry and Lichfield, despite the fact that his profession of canonical obedience had to be read out on his behalf; (…) On the other hand, some papal appointments were just as bad, or worse. In 1246, with the object of 'liberating' the Church from the Hohenstaufen, Innocent IV forbade any episcopal elections on the Lower Rhine without permission of the Holy See. The next year he appointed to Liège Henry, brother of the Count of Gueldre, who was only nineteen and illiterate. (…) In fact he was a scoundrel, and eventually, when the Staufen were smashed, he lost his usefulness: in1273, Gregory X accused him of sleeping with abbesses and nuns, fathering fourteen bastards in twenty-two months, and providing all of them with benefices. Disgraced, he reverted to his natural bent, and became a brigand. Such men were exceptions. The trouble with most bishops, under the royal-papal carve-up, was that they were wordly and mediocre.” | Another first class example of illiteracy at the top. |
Page 213 “Odo Rigaud, the Archbishop of Rouen 1247-76, was an exemplary prelate by the standards of his time.” | 1247-76. Extraordinary tales of exemplary bishops indulging in outrageous extravagance, while all around were starving. How like the stories we hear from Africa about King Borkassa, Idi Amin, and many others. The only difference is that modern despots are immediately recognised for what they are. Not so these Dark Age and Medieval despots masquerading under the cover of the Christian Church. They have been protected by the common law offence of blasphemous libel, which was not abolished until 2009. The true history of Christianity was not allowed to be told to people on mass on the grounds that it would upset people who call themselves Christians. Now the reader can understand why they have not had access to these historical facts before. |
Page 214 “it was really only the poor and humble who were in practice forced to conform to the Christian ideal, or rather punished when they did not. Powerful men would not have their morals controlled by bishops, let alone rural deans.” | Just the same with most countries today. A few fat cats at the top, and the vast majority picking up the scraps. Darwin’s theory working with people, survival of the fittest or most ruthless. |
Page 217 “In all except doctrine, the king was the effective head of the English church long before Henry VIII assumed it by parliamentary statute. This was the position in virtually all western countries.” | It shows that whoever controls the power in the land, the army, is really in control of the situation. |
Page 218/219 “In June, Philip had Boniface charged at the court of the Louvre with illegal election, simony, immorality, violence, irreligion and heresy, and the court gave the crown authority for the Pope to be seized. William of Nogaret (...) arrested the Pope at Anagni on 7 September (...). Boniface was soon released, but died in October. It was the end of the papal afflatus. The papacy had discovered, again, that secular power, however inferior, was necessary to the protection of the Holy See. (...) In the meantime the national secular state had emerged, and the total Christian society had ceased to exist.” | The beginning of the end of the curse of priestcraft. However, it was the invention of printing arriving in Europe in 1450 that really began to free us from this priest-ridden hell hole. The priests could not kill fast enough to keep up with the printing presses, but they had a very good try as the Holy Inquisition moved into top gear. |
Page 219/220 “In the Dark Ages, the Church had stood for everything that was progressive, enlightened and humane in Europe; it had made, as we have seen, an enormous material contribution to the resurrection of civilization from the ashes and the raising of standards.” | Here is one of these amazing statements that seem to be a priestly interpolation. The ashes were caused by the Christians taking over the Roman Empire after the Council of Nicaea in AD 325 — the total destruction of the Roman education system, torture and death to all who did not believe in the supernatural rubbish that the priests had invented at Nicaea. How can this be written? It must be some sort of a joke. |
Page 220 “Even around 1300 hardly anyone questioned either the spiritual supremacy of the Pope, or the validity of his legislative acts and appointments.” | How could they? Nobody but the priests could read and write. Anyone who dared to challenge what the priests said was tortured in order to find out if there were any other heretics around. However, not long to wait now for printing to arrive in Europe. |
Page 220/221 “The papacy never really recovered from the move to Avignon. It lost the magic of the imperial connection. (...) It was a brilliant court, with up to thirty cardinals in residence, each with his palace. But it was totally without a spiritual atmosphere. The English parliament officially termed it 'the sinful city of Avignon'. Its concerns were power, law and money. Petrarch wrote: Here reign the successors of the poor fishermen of Galilee. They have quite forgotten their origins ... Babylon, the home of all vices and misery ... there is no piety, no charity, no faith, no reverences, no fear of God, nothing holy, nothing just, nothing sacred. All you have ever heard or read of perfidy, deceit, hardness of pride, shamelessness and unrestrained debauch ... in short every example of impiety and evil the world has to show you are collected here ... here one loses all good things, first liberty, then successively repose, happiness, faith, hope and charity. ” | Not a great deal has changed when we read about the antics of Roman Catholic priests who have been interfering with children and the murder of a recent Pope. Please read ’In God’s Name’ by David Yallop. An investigation into the murder of Pope John Paul 1. Corgi Books, 1987. This Pope was murdered because he was going to bring in changes like birth control, allow priests to marry, and expose the Mafia. He only lasted just over 30 days. |
Page 222 “Mortuaries were so much hated, and led to so much trouble, that secular authorities tried to ban them. But by the latter part of the medieval period the Church, as an organization, had become totally insensitive to this type of appeal; and it was imbued with the philosophy of canon law which tended to insist that to abandon a customary right might actually be sinful.” | Terrible stories of Church wealth and corruption. Of Mortuaries: a tax on the dead person’s family. Any moment now I expect we will get from Paul Johnson one of those priestly interpolations telling us how good Christianity is for the poor people. |
Page 223 “The abuse continued, even increased, right up to the Reformation (…) [Townsmen in the later Middle Ages] supported an enormous number of clergy — about twenty times as many, per head of the population, as today. (…) And the sums mortuaries contributed to the building or rebuilding of their parish churches, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, were enormous.” Page 224 “Christianity in these centuries — led by the clergy as a caste — was in the direction of the pursuit of eternal self-interest. Clergy used their privileges, and the laity their money (when they had it), to buy the mechanical means to salvation.” | Nothing on education, nothing on health. Hippocrates’ work (460-370 BCE) had, of course, been destroyed by the Christians. All illness was considered God’s will or the work of the devil. Nothing on science or the pursuit of knowledge. A vast army of priests had completely brainwashed the people of Christendom into parting with their money, in effect to make sure their souls would get to heaven. We are now approaching the time of Columbus. Remember that nobody, not even the priests, knew what the Greek scientists and philosophers knew, that the world was round and that we are on a planet that circles the sun. |
Page 225 “But the master-masons, who can be identified in about 300 cases, were almost always the men who mattered. They were grand figures.” | There is no doubt that these cathedrals are magnificent buildings, but if only all this wealth and energy had been put towards education, health and improving peoples’ living standards instead of perpetrating mythology solely to keep priests in luxury. |
Page 226 “To build cathedrals meant raising enormous quantities of hard cash. (...) But most of the money was raised by the sale of spiritual privileges.” | That is selling Indulgences — give the priests money, land, goods etc, and in return the priests will make sure your soul and the soul of your loved ones will go to paradise. On the other hand, if you do not pay the priests, things could go desperately wrong for you after death. We now have a word for this. It is called blackmail. |
Page 227 “Indeed, it is hard to see the cathedrals as serving Christians as a whole. They were built essentially for the clergy and the upper classes, and to some extent for well-to-do townsmen.” |
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Page 228 “When, in the sixteenth century, relics were discredited and masses for the dead forbidden in northern Europe, the cathedrals lost much of their purpose; the radical reformers were puzzled what to do with them. No wonder; an analysis of the building, growth and functioning of the cathedrals explains many of the reasons why the Reformation occurred. (…) Most country priests were ignorant men themselves, though in theory they had to be literate. (…) In 1222, out of seventeen priests serving livings held by the dean and chapter at Salisbury, five could not construe the first sentence of the first collect of the canon (…) Selection and training of clergy was the bishop’s responsibility; yet not one built a seminary [ training college for priests -ed. ] throughout the Middle ages — There was no such thing until the sixteenth century.” | Here is the proof that not even all the priests could read and write. What chance had the ordinary people in this Christian paradise? |
Page 229 “Documents often refer to the excommunication (and hanging) of animals for antisocial offences. In 1531, a French canon lawyer, Chassenée, (…) claimed it had often worked, citing eels expelled from lakes, sparrows from churches, and so on. Caterpillars and similar pests would laugh if proceeded against in a secular court; therefore they should be struck ‘with the pain of anathema [a priestly curse -ed.], which they fear more, as creatures obedient to the God who made them’.” | Even as recently as the inauguration of President George Bush senior, the religious fanatic Billy Graham was brought forward. Bush's son, President George W. Bush, actually believed he had the Christian God on his side, as did his friend the British Prime Minister Tony Blair. |
Page 229 “Above all. however, what the peasant wanted from the Church was some hope of salvation. This was the overwhelming reason why Christianity replaced paganism; it had a very clear-cut theory of what happened after death.” | This is absolute rubbish. The Christian priests teach that we all have to lie in the ground waiting for their saviour-god Christ to return and sort the living and the dead into believers in priestcraft and those who don't. The believers will sit by God and the rest of us will rot in hell forever without any chance of ever getting out. There is no time mentioned for this Judgement Day; it could be in a thousand millions years or even longer. “Rest in Peace” is on nearly all Christian grave stones. The priests have declared war on what Jesus was reported to have said to the man next to him who was dying on the cross,“This day you will be with me in paradise.” This gives a much better hope of survival after death. When the priests forced Socrates to drink poison, his friends asked him where he wanted to be buried. He laughed at them and said,“Catch me if you can.” The sole reason why Christianity was supreme was sheer brute force, every person who stood up the priests were murdered. The Christians fought and won. This book has made this very clear. |
Page 231 “The Christian promise of salvation, so hugely attractive to the Mediterranean world and, later, to the northern barbarians, was balanced by a horrifying theory of the alternative for sinners. The existence of Hell, as some of the early Fathers had argued, helped to justify Heaven; at any rate, it seemed to unsophisticated minds to make salvation seem more credible.” (…) “most later medieval preachers put the saved as one in 1,000 or even one in 10,000. Hence, (…) the difficulty of obtaining full remission for sin naturally increased. (…) often a man might spend the rest of his life in terror at failure. And what if he died before the penance was over? The Church only slowly adopted the theory of purgatory to meet this difficulty.” | Apart from brute force and killing, every person who disagreed with the priests, fear was the main reason for the Christian success. The priests had total control of peoples’ minds in Christendom. The only way people could escape was by education and, of course, the priests knew it. This is why they fought so hard against educating the masses. |
Page 234 “Christianity retained an astonishing dynamic, and great powers of spontaneous expression; the theological wisdom of Christ, in providing a whole series of matrices for future experiment, was demonstrated again and again as new varieties of Christian action came into existence, flourished and declined.” | This makes the antics of these religious fanatics sound virtuous. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Attila the Hun were all“dynamic”. Again, there is no record of anything Jesus said and much that was put into his mouth by priests has caused death and misery to millions. |
Page 235 “In theory, discipline in all the religious houses, even the least rigorous, was very strict. (...) If anything, most rules were neurotically oppressive. There was a convention that monks, even in private, should not do anything to offend the sensitive tastes of the angels, believed to be very elegant beings. Hugh of St Victor, in his Rules for Novices , forbids listening with the mouth open, moving the tongue round the lips while working, gesturing, raising the eyebrows while speaking, rolling eyeballs, tossing the head, shaking the hair, smoothing garments, wrinkling the nostrils and ‘all contortions of the lips which disfigure the comeliness of a man's face and the decency of discipline‘. (...) Both monks and nuns were scourged for comparitively minor faults, especially for murmuring at correction. For the Brigittine nuns of Syon in Midlesex, corporal punishment was mandatory for any fault, however venial, which a nun failed to report herself, and which was later noted. Five lashes was the norm, 'but if the default be of the more grevious kind, or she or they show any token of rebellion, the discipliners shall not cease till the abbess chargeth them to cease‘.” | Confirmation that the monks and nuns of the Middle Ages were very different to the sort of people we imagined. Very unstable fanatics. |
Page 237 “From the twelfth century abbots were under fire for living like territorial magnates.” | Appalling tales of extortion and extravagance by the clergy. |
Page 239 “English bishops, for instance, spent over two hundred years trying in vain to keep nuns within their cloisters; they were still hard at it when Henry VIII dissolved the lot.” | “It’s an ill wind that blows no good.” |
Page 240 “The Dominicans, for their part, took over the routine conduct of the Church’s anti-heretical machinery, especially the Inquisition. They also invaded the universities, which in the thirteenth century replaced monasteries as the centers of western culture.” | They were the Pope’s Gestapo and just as nasty. |
Page 241 “The crusades were not missionary ventures but wars of conquest and primitive experiments in colonization; and the only specific Christian institutions they produced, the three knightly orders, were military. This stress on violence was particularly marked in the West [ Catholic as opposed to Eastern Orthodox -ed. ] (…) Again, it was Augustine who gave western Christianity the fatal twist in this direction.” |
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Page 242 “In Augustine’s view, war might always be waged, provided it was done so by command of God. (…) What made Augustinian teaching even more corrupting was the association in his mind between ’war by divine command’ and the related effort to convert the heathen and destroy the heretic — his 'compel them to come in' syndrome, not only could violence be justified: it was particularly meritorious when directed against those who held other religious beliefs. (or none). (…) The success of Islam sprang essentially from the failure of Christian theologians to solve the problem of the Trinity and Christ’s nature.” | Just think, if it was not for the infamous Council of Nicaea in AD 325 the people in the Middle East may not be Muslims! |
Page 243 “Generally, [the Christians under Moslem rule] preferred Arab-Moslem to Greek-Christian rule, though there were periods of difficulty and persecution. There was never, at any stage, a mass-demand from the Christians under Moslem rule to be ‘liberated’.” |
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Page 244 “The idea that Europe was a Christian entity, which had acquired certain inherent rights over the rest of the world by virtue of its faith, and its duty to spread it, married perfectly with the need to find some outlet both for its addiction to violence and its surplus population.” |
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Page 246 “Thus, in the villages attacked around Nicea by Peter the Hermit's band, non-Latin Christians were slaughtered in great numbers, and it was said their babies were roasted on spits.” “But from the start the crusaders learnt to hate the Byzantines almost as much [as the Moslems], and in 1204 they finally attacked and took Constantinople, ‘to the honour of God, the Pope and the empire’. The soldiers were told they could pillage for three days. (…) Sacred books and ikons were trampled under foot, nuns were raped and the soldiers drank the altar wine out of the chalices. The last of the great international crusades, in 1365, spent itself on a pointless sacking of the predominantly Christian city of Alexandria: native Christians were killed as well as Jews and Moslems (…). The racialism of the crusaders vented itself particularly against any sign of alien culture. (…) In general, the effect of the crusades was to undermine the intellectual content of Islam, to destroy the chances of peaceful adjustment to Christianity, and to make the Moslems far less tolerant. Crusading fossilized Islam into a fanatic posture.” | Horrifying stories of Christian atrocities during the Crusades. Roasting babies on spits. The effect was to unite all the inhabitants against the Christian barbarians. It was only the Catholic Christians who had completely destroyed education and all non-Christian books. This was not so pronounced in Byzantine (The Eastern Orthodox Christians who ruled Constantinople); they were more tolerant at this time. Also the Moslems were very keen to gain knowledge. This is the sole reason why we have any record at all of the Greek and Roman civilizations. When Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, the books that had been preserved by the Moslems and Byzantine Christians again saw the light of day. This coincided with the invention of printing reaching Europe from China. This is what we can thank for the deliverance from the curse of priestcraft. |
Page 248 “The whole crusading movement was dogged by intellectual bankruptcy.” | A crusade was little more than a mob of armed fanatical Christians bent on destruction of Moslems, Jews, or heretics. |
Page 251/252 “The Cathars [Albigensian people of Southern France] were well organized and orderly people. They (…) led admirable lives. (…) In 1209, Arnold Aimery exulted to the Pope that the capture of Beziers had been ‘miraculous’; and that the crusaders had killed 15,000, ‘showing mercy neither to order, nor age nor sex’. Prisoners were mutilated, blinded, dragged at the hooves of horses and used for target practice. Such outrages provoked despairing resistance and prolonged the conflict. It was a watershed in Christian history.” |
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Page 254 “Pegna [ the leading Inquisition commentator ] said that pregnant women might not be tortured, for fear of abortions: ‘We must wait until she is delivered of her child’; and children below the age of puberty, and old folk, were to be less severely tortured.” | Terrible tales of torture by the Catholic Christians on anybody who questioned any aspect of their religion. Heretics these people were called. When a Christian writer uses the word“heretic” it almost seems to justify the antics of these Christian savages. |
Page 255 “The total Christian society of the middle ages was based on an intense belief in the supernatural. It tended to live on its nerves. Lacking any kind of system for determining the truth scientifically and objectively, society was often bewildered. Today’s heterodoxy might become tomorrow’s orthodoxy; and vice versa. The enthusiasm of faith so easily toppled over into hysteria, and so became violently destructive.” | On these pages are the most appalling tales of the Holy Inquisition. This true history of Christianity has been deliberately kept from students and the public in general. This was no accident, it is the direct result of brainwashing by evil fanatics, the only ones who could read and write. This proves that there is no greater crime than to indoctrinate people with false teachings. |
Page 256 “...the millennium had already begun with Christ...” | Only a victim of priestcraft could make such a stupid statement. This supernatural nonsense was invented by priests. The philosopher known as Jesus had nothing to do with the religion of Christianity. Christians only follow the saviour-god called Christ that was invented by priests, they have declared war on a great deal of what Jesus stood for and was reported to have said. |
Page 256 “Christians continued to believe in the millennium, the coming of antichrist, cosmic battles, giant dragons, total upheavals of society — and endless series of signs which would presage these events.” | Of course most people who could not read or write will believe anything the semi-educated priests told them, however outrageous. How could they do otherwise? They had no way out of their mental hell. Even as I write this, so-called intelligent men and women are challenging Darwin’s theory of evolution by quoting from the book of Genesis! Challenge Darwin by all means, but not by quoting from Genesis. The fact that this nonsense is still believed today is the result of brainwashing over generations, but most important of all because the Christian Church still has incredible power over television, the radio, the national press, as well as compulsory religious indoctrination in our schools. Hardly any alternative philosophy is allowed to be presented in this“free” country of ours. Thank goodness for the Internet. |
Page 257 “Thus hateful devices like the Inquisition, or the Crusade against 'heretics' were seen by many — not just the rich, but anyone who liked stability — as indispensable defences against social breakdown and mass terrorism.” | This is a typical statement from a Christian writer. A case could be made out along the same lines for Hitler’s mass murder of the Jews, Stalin’s purges, and Pol Pot’s killings. |
Page 257 “Was not the Church itself based on credulity? Kill belief, and where was the total society?” | Exactly, on belief only, not one iota of proof, just pure mythology. This Joachim fellow may have been of above average intelligence for his time, but his thoughts can have no influence on twenty first century thinking. Our access to knowledge now is a million times greater than any man or woman, even up to the 1900’s. |
Page 258 “Because the Christian society was total it had to be compulsory; and because it was compulsory it had no alternative but to declare war on its dissentients.” | This Christian writer makes excuses for the Holy Inquisition and almost makes it sound like a virtue. |
Page 259 “Religious hysteria expressed itself in almost every imaginable form of outrageous behavior. Self-flagellation, for instance, had been a feature of certain sophisticated pagan sects absorbed into Christianity in the fourth century. (...) The flagellants marched in procession, led by priests, with banners and candles, and moved from town to town, parading before the parish church, and lashing themselves for hours on end. The German flagellants (...) were particularly ferocious: they used leather scourges with iron spikes; if a woman or a priest appeared, the ritual was spoiled and had to be started again; it culminated in the reading of a ‘heavenly letter’, after which spectators dipped pieces of cloth in the blood and treasured them as relics.” | These terrible stories of self-flagellation just go to show what happens when priests are let loose on the minds of people who cannot read or write. No wonder the Christian priests fought so hard against education for every man and woman. However, even in the 21st century, some educated people are capable of falling under the spell of priestcraft. Members of Opus Dei, for example. |
Page 260 “The belief that the millennium was imminent was the signal for an attack on the rich — they were to be dragged to the ground in an earthly apocalypse before being committed to eternal flames in the next world.” |
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Page 261 “They were an indisputable part of the Christian tradition, shaped by one of the matrices which Christ had implanted in the human minds in the first century.” | This theme keeps creeping in. For goodness sake, there is no record of anything Jesus said, let alone a mythical saviour-god called Christ. Anyway, if we do take notice of the nice things Jesus was reported to have said, what shall we do with the nasty bits? |
Page 262 “(…) in 1534, millenarians seized the German town of Munster, which they held until the following summer. This was by no means the first time Christian fanatics had seized a city in the West. (…) All books, except the Bible, were to be burnt. A long list of offences, including blasphemy, swearing, adultery, backbiting, complaining, and any form of disobedience, were to be punished by instant execution.” | This is 1534, just nine years before Copernicus published his work proving that we are on a planet that circles the sun. This was not the work of Copernicus; it belonged to the Greek scientist Aristarchus living in the 3rd century before the Christian era. This was the result of books being released after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. This is another great Christian lie. Our history books credit Copernicus with this discovery because they do not want people to find out that clever people lived before the birth of their baby god. |
Page 262/263 “The regime was violently anti-women. A man sexually dependent on one wife, thought Beukels, was led about ‘like a bear on a rope’; women ‘have everywhere been getting the upper hand’ and it was high time they submitted to men. Hence any women who resisted polygamy were to be exeuted; and unmarried women had to accept the first man to ask them. (…) This gaudy terror was particularly hard on women, forty-nine of whom were killed for infringing the polygamy decree alone; (…) Munster itself was betrayed and retaken by the bishop, and Beukels was led about like a performing animal until January 1536, when he was publicly tortured to death with red-hot tongs. The atrocities perpetrated by both millenarians and orthodox Christians on this occasion were roughly equal, each side being anxious to ‘compel them to come in’.” | Here is the result of the thoughts of St. Augustine again. |
Page 263 “Christian societies in this world, whether conducted by popes or revolutionaries, have tended to degenerate into red terrors or white ones. Pontifical theocracies and dictatorships of the proletariat both employ compulsive procedures involving suspension of the rule of law, torture, judicial murder, the suppression of truth and the exaltation of falsehood.” | This just about sums up what happens when philosophers and scientists are pushed aside, and priests and their victims take over. Surely no person is now in any doubt that religion is the greatest curse that ever hit this planet? |
Page 264 “This analysis of medieval Christianity thus presents two types of social experiment in moulding society around moral principles — an orthodox experiment and the radical alternative it provoked. Both tend to fail because both, in different ways, are too ambitious; and in the process of trying to fend off failure each type of experiment is liable to betray its Christian principles.” | Only a Christian who has been indoctrinated from birth could make such a stupid statement. For goodness sake, what on earth are“Christian principles”? |
Page 267 “Some time between 1511 and 1513, two of Europe’s leading scholars paid a visit to the shrine of St Thomas à Becket at Canterbury. John Colet, Dean of St Paul's and founder of its new grammar school; the other was the Dutchman Erasmus, author of the leading spiritual handbook for Christian laymen, and of a much-admired satire on the Church, In Praise of Folly. (…) Erasmus's account makes it clear they were deeply shocked by what they saw. The riches which adorned the shrine were staggering. (…) treasures ‘before which Midas or Croesus would have seemed beggars’; thirty years later, Henry VIIIs agents were to garner from it 4,994 ounces of gold, 4,425 of silver-gilt, 5,286 of plain silver and twenty-six cartloads of treasure. Colet infuriated the verger who accompanied them by suggesting that St Thomas would prefer the whole lot to be given to the poor.” |
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Page 268 “(…) they taught that many of the basic elements of Christianity could not be demonstrated by logic but must be accepted by blind faith; and in the fifteenth century scholars turned increasingly to re-examine the fundamental credentials of Christianity: the scriptures, the documents of the church, the writings of the early fathers. (…) Political changes in the Mediterranean world at this time brought to the attention of European scholars a large number of ancient books, sacred and profane, Greek, Latin and Hebrew, which had not been systematically examined for centuries. Where their Byzantine and Jewish custodians had been content to preserve these texts, Italian Renaissance scholars, like Valla, Marsilio Ficino and Pico de Mirandola, treated them as keys to the future (…).” | At last, all this thanks to the invention of printing reaching Europe and the capture of Constantinople by the Turks. Unlike the Christians, the Muslims had not destroyed their records of the Greek and Roman civilizations. But many thousands were going to die at the hands of the Christians. They were not going to give up their power without a tremendous struggle. The Holy Inquisition now shifted into top gear. |
Page 269 “(…) by the exposure of fraudulent documents; by the establishment of wholly accurate and authentic texts; by the re-examination of these texts in the light of new knowledge to discover their full meaning; and — the meaning of the scriptures having been finally established — by the elimination from the Church’s life and activities of all beliefs and practices which lacked biblical authority or sanction of the early Church.” | This is rubbish because this book has already proved that the writers of the Bible had no more authority than any other writer who has ever lived. Nor did the early Church fathers have any authority. We have been tricked, the priests are frauds and their religion is a hoax. |
Page 269 “The rapid development of printing, with its tremendous concentration on works of seminal interest to religion and reform, posed an entirely new problem to the Church and state authorities which traditionally controlled the dissemination of knowledge. Censoring or preventing the circulation of printed books was essentially the same as controlling manuscripts; but the difference in speed and scale was absolutely crucial. It took at least a generation for the censors to tackle it, and they were never able to exercise the same degree of effective supervision as in the days before cheap printing.” | This is a very important passage. The priests knew very well that printing would be the end of them eventually. Thankfully most people who can read and write do not blindly believe in supernatural absurdities that fly in the face of scientific discoveries and the laws of nature. |
Page 270 “[Erasmus] was one of many thousands who, while members of the privileged order, were emotionally committed to its destruction.” | Just the same as Professor Dr. David Jenkins, the former Bishop of Durham, who caused a sensation in the 1980’s. He thought that getting the truth through to the people was more important than keeping his colleagues in the manner to which they are accustomed. |
Page 271 “Paul's Epistle to the Romans brought about a spiritual revelation and a new approach to the Christian life.” | Here again we have confirmation that the whole Christian religion rested on one man, St. Paul (Saul of Tarsus). Take away this man and there is no Christian religion. We have no original records for anything Paul wrote. Half of what has been accredited to St. Paul, Paul Johnson, and all modern scholars admit are flagrant forgeries. The whole world is a victim of a gigantic confidence trick which has cost the lives of millions of people, condemning all but a tiny privileged class to abject physical and mental misery. Somebody has written,“The smell of printers’ ink was indeed the incense of the Renaissance.” |
Page 273 “The Church still claimed the right to control teaching but more and more schools were being endowed by laymen and run by them.” | This was in 1500. Let’s make it very clear, these schools were for the privileged class only and the pupils strictly Christian-indoctrinated. Primary education was not made compulsory until 1876 and secondary education in 1902. The Church schools were started in 1811, most certainly not to teach ordinary people to read and write, only to indoctrinate them with Christian doctrines and dogmas. This was solely in self defence because some brave men and women dared to start up some secular schools for the poor just before this date, notably by Joseph Lancaster. Church of England schools: Under the direction of a priest named Andrew Bell from“The National Society for the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church”. Bell announced that he did not desire to instruct the lower classes in the art of writing or arithmetic because it would: “Elevate above their station those who were doomed to the drudgery of daily labours.”
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Page 274 “With the introduction of printing, the efforts of the censors became hopeless.” | Now with the Internet and so many radio and television stations, it will be impossible for the priests and their allies to keep the truth from reaching people across the world. |
Page 274 “For Erasmus, as for all reformers, the Bible then was at the centre of Christian understanding, when presented in its authentic form.” | Another outrageous statement. What is its authentic form? Most of this book has been showing us that there is no authentic form for the Bible. The whole supernatural story was invented by priests to keep them and their successors in luxury, and the masses in ignorance and servitude. |
Page 275 “In his own investigation, [Erasmus] had found himself obliged to eliminate the famous Trinitarian verse from 1 John 5:7, since it was not in the Greek manuscript.” | Erasmus was torn between his desire to fully accept the doctrines of the church, and his own reasoning and common sense regarding the distorted paths of logic followed by established churchmen in reaching“exact certitudes in any theological situation”. He accepted only the Greek version of the Bible, but defended that document as authentic. To him, the essence of Christianity was in the virtues Jesus had reportedly outlined in the New Testament. Many people who have not been totally brainwashed have no quarrel with the codes of ethics that Jesus was reported to have put forward. But this book, and many others, proves that the Bible is no more the word of the creator of the universe than any other book that has ever been published or ever will be published. This is the great confidence trick on the human race: seemingly educated people claiming that the book they are selling has divine authority.
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Page 277 “As [Erasmus] wrote to the Duke of Saxony: ‘Tolerating the sects may appear a great evil to you, but it is still much better than a religious war. If the clergy once succeed in entangling the rulers, it will be a catastrophe for Germany and the Church ... Ruin and misery everywhere, and destruction under the false pretext of religion’.” | Like Thomas Paine, Erasmus was years ahead of his time. If only there had been more like him in the 1st, 2nd and 3rd centuries. I expect there were, but they would have been murdered as heretics by the fanatics who invented the religion. |
Page 278 “Erasmus privately dismissed Luther as a ‘Goth’, a man of the past, but also in a sinister way the portent of a horrific future -- ‘the tree which bears the poisonous fruit of nationalism.’ (…) To Luther, [Erasmus] was now ‘a snake’, ‘a piece of shit’, ‘the“insane destroyer of the church’, the ‘inflamer of the base passions of young boys’: He told his circle he had seen Erasmus walking ‘arm in arm with the devil in Rome’.” | And no doubt the poor uneducated masses believed every word. Why not, if they are quite prepared to believe all the other supernatural fairy stories that the priests were pumping into them? Martin Luther was a dreadful man, but as we are a so-called Protestant country, he appears in our history books as a good man. The Nazi party carried out Luther’s anti-Jewish policy with great efficiency. |
Page 280 “(...) Fifth Lateran of 1512. This council, the last of the undivided Church, was a mere manoeuvre and contemporaries saw it as such; (...) it concentrated on the arid topic, dear to old-fashioned theologians, of the exact status of the soul between the death of the body and the Last Judgment.” | Talk about the blind leading the blind. |
Page 281 “(…) Luther, a thirty-four year old Augustinian monk, intervened by nailing his ‘Ninety-five theses against indulgences’ to the church door of Wittenberg Castle. (…) The scriptures said plainly that man was saved by faith, not by good works — the fact that he performed good works was merely an outward confirmation of his consciousness of being saved.” | This fits in perfectly with the actions of the Christian fanatics. There is no doubt they certainly had faith in priestcraft. |
Page 283 “(…) in 1524, the explosion detonated by the Lutheran protest became inextricably mingled with economic discontent and took the form of a peasants’ revolt.” |
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Page 285/286 “(…) as [Luther] put it, ‘I would rather drink blood with the papists than mere wine with Zwinglians.’ ” | Luther seriously believed in the Eucharist and all the other Catholic fairy stories that were invented at the Council of Nicaea. His protest was against the power of the Pope — indulgences, give me money and I will make sure your soul gets to heaven. [Transubstantiation = Not pretending, but actually drinking the blood and actually eating the body of the dead saviour-god called Christ.] |
Page 286 “When the general council finally met at Trent five years later, Contarini was dead, the moderates were scattered, the Catholic Church was a defiant and intransigent rump, no longer thinking of anything but fire and sword, and Charles V had virtually despaired of unity. Luther died during the first session, and the fact was scarcely noted except for a savage expression of regret that it was no longer possible to burn him.” | This infamous Council of Trent lasted 20 years from 1545. At the end of it, the Roman Catholics agreed with Martin Luther’s protest about indulgences, that the only way into the next world was to believe in priestcraft. The paradox is that the Roman Catholics actually became Protestants in the sixteenth century, and all so-called Protestants are Catholics. The Protestants chant in their creed,“I believe in the Holy Catholic Church.” The fight in priest-ridden Northern Ireland is between those who recognise the Pope as head of the Catholic Church and those who accept the British monarch as head. Most ordinary people have no idea they are fighting over nothing at all, they have no idea what Catholic means. Catholic = The all-embracing, universal Christian doctrines and dogmas that were invented by appallingly ignorant priests at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. This is where the unhistorical philosopher Jesus was officially turned into the saviour-god called Christ. Christians = People who follow the saviour-god called Christ, not the philosopher called Jesus. Differences in belief of some of the principal religious leaders of the era: LUTHER ... A form of state catholicism, shorn of its mechanical aspects. ZWINGLI ... Unlike Luther, he had no reverence for the past. No feeling of catholicism. BUCER ... Tried to effect a reconciliation between Luther’s and Zwingle’s ideas. CALVIN ... No bishops, much more Puritan. |
Page 288 “By the mid sixteenth century, therefore, there were three varieties of state religion in the West: papal Catholicism, State Christianity (Lutheranism), and Calvinist theocracy. Each, at any rate in theory, was universalist in its aims: it foresaw a future, and to some extent worked for it, when its doctrines and institutions would be imposed on the whole of Christendom. Each was organically linked to the state where it existed. Each was a compulsory religion, claiming a monopoly of the Christian ministry where it held power.” | The Christian stage was now set for appalling conflict, all over nothing at all, it’s still going on all over the world with the added horror of Muslims wading in. We can only hope that we are now witnessing the death throes of the great religious hoax on the human race. |
Page 289/290 “[Luther] agreed that anabaptists and other Protestant extremists ‘should be done to death by the civil authority’. (…) the Basque Erasmian polymath Michael Servetus, who worked and wrote in many parts of Europe as a printer, geographer, astrologer, physician and surgeon. (…) Servetus, who had become prior of a Catholic confraternity at Vienna, published his Christianismi restitutio , under the initials MSV, proving from scripture that Christ was man only. The Catholic Inquisition at Lyons was alerted to it (…). In the event, [Servetus] escaped from the Inquisition but fled to, of all places, Geneva, where he was promptly recognized in church and handed over to Calvin’s consistory. He was condemned to death under the Justinian code (…) Against Calvin’s advice, he was burned -- Calvin wanted a simple execution. (…) Four months after Servetus died, Calvin published his own Declaratio orthodox fade : ‘One should forget all mankind when His glory is in question ... God does not even allow whole towns and populations to be spared, but will have the walls razed and the memory of the inhabitants destroyed and all things ruined as a sign of his utter detestation, lest the contagion spread.’ ” | Another Christian maniac for the funny farm, but the tragedy is that Calvin still has a huge following even today. |
Page 290 “But the burning was approved in advance by most of the Swiss protestant cantons and later defended by many protestant intellectuals, such as the professor of Greek at Lausanne, Theodore Beza: ‘What greater, more abominable crime could one find among men [than heresy]? ... It would seem impossible to find a torture big enough to fit the enormity of such a misdeed.’ ” | No wonder these“intellectuals” fought so hard to stop education for the masses all over Europe. They knew very well that they would be finished when ordinary people found out just how badly they were being deceived. |
Page 298 “Thus the Counter-Reformation acquired a single-minded secular champion, and one with vast means. The gold and silver of the New World was thrown into the struggle. Philip II was always short of money, and on occasions actually bankrupt. But he still disposed of funds which were more than three times as great as any other Christian state;” | Gold and silver stolen from the natives of South America. The Christians were driven on by the following terrible quotation from their“ holy” Bible. They had all been brainwashed to seriously believe this evil nonsense was the word of their God. “I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron, thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” (Psalm 2:8,9) |
Page 298 “The inquisition was set up in Rome, under the fanatical Neopolitan papalist Cardinal Caraffa (later Pope Paul IV), whose watchwords were: ‘No man is to abase himself by showing toleration towards any sort of heretic, least of all a Calvinist’; and ‘Even if my own father were a heretic, I would gather the wood to burn him.’ The new atmosphere in Rome was puritanical and intolerant, but not reformist. The Index of Forbidden Books was set up, and there were massive book-burnings; Jews were forced to wear the Yellow Star; Daniel of Volterra, ‘the Trouserer’, was employed to clothe the nudes of the Sistine Chapel; Protestants were burned and liberals silenced.” |
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Page 300 “At subsequent sessions, which lasted until the 1560s, the Council of Trent improved both in attendance and decorum.” | As mentioned previously, the Council of Trent was called to bring unity. In this, it was a complete failure. However, these priests did manage to pass a resolution, by three votes, that women also had souls! |
Page 300 “Where Trent did introduce an important change was in instructing bishops to create seminaries for the training of clergy. Charles Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan 1560-84, founded three in his diocese, and set about the creation of an educated and resident clergy by insisting on minimum standards before ordination and frequent visitations thereafter. (…) It is astonishing that no provision for training priests in their specific duties had ever existed before. This was the curse of the Church until Borromeo’s system was widely imitated.” | A curse indeed. Priestcraft is the curse of mankind. |
Page 300 “That monopoly had been undermined in the fifteenth century, when wealthy townsmen began to endow schools outside the clerical system. The laymen entered the field decisively, at all educational levels, and the Renaissance fueled the Reformation by presenting clericalism as an obstacle to learning and truth.” | So a Roman Catholic historian has the courage to tell the truth that Christian priests are“an obstacle to learning and truth.” Now all we have to do is tell the school teachers because this is completely opposite to what we have all been taught at school and through media outlets. We have all been taught that education and knowledge is all thanks to Christianity. |
Page 302 “(…) what better way was there of ensuring orthodoxy than that the schooling of the well-born be in the hands of Catholic experts absolutely dedicated to the Tridentine faith? Jesuits provided education at all stages, from primary to university.” | 1530’s Ignatius Loyola. Society of Jesus. The Jesuits. In other words, the only people who had access to learning were the ruling classes, and they were totally brainwashed or frightened into believing that the doctrines and dogmas of the Catholic Christian religion were actual facts and not just mythology gone mad. |
Page 304 “The Jesuits were instrumental in turning the tide in Austria, Bavaria, in the prince-bishoprics of the Rhineland, and in Poland. Their city schools had a marked success in deflecting the bourgeoisie from reform to orthodoxy. (…) In fact the Jesuits were at all stages, and in all countries, deeply involved in the physical, as well as the moral aspects of the Counter-Reformation.” |
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Page 305 “Above all, the Jesuits were widely identified with the view that the moral code could in some way be suspended when Catholic interests were at risk. The Jesuits not only advocated war as a legitimate instrument against heresy but defended the selected murder of Protestants, especially if they held important positions. It was an extension of their educational techniques: if a ruler could not be converted, let him be slain. Thus in 1599, Juan Mariani (…) wrote of Protestant sovereigns: ‘It is a glorious thing to exterminate the whole of this pestilential and pernicious race from the community of mankind. Limbs, too, are cut off when they are corrupt, that they may infect the remainder of the body; and likewise this bestial cruelty in human shape must be separated from the state and cut off with the sword.’ ” |
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Page 307 “By an almost magical process, Protestantism was simply identified with impure blood, that is with the Jewish taint. (…) But Spaniards of Jewish decent were duly identified by the Inquisition as Protestants and burned (…).” |
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Page 308 “The last official Spanish execution for heresy was in 1826 when a schoolmaster was hanged for substituting ‘Praise be to God’ in place of ‘Ave Maria’ in school prayers.” | Confirmation on this page that the Inquisition in Spain, which started in the 16th century, did not really finish until 1834. |
Page 309 “The two leading German Dominican inquisitors, who specialized in witch-hunting, Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Spender, compiled a huge dossier based on confessions extracted under torture; (…) In reality there is no reason to suppose that such a phenomenon as witchcraft ever existed. The myth was on a level with the supposed ritual murders of Christian children, of which the Jews were accused in the twelfth century. Witches simply replaced Jews as objects of fear and hatred, and torture supplied ‘proof’ of their existence and malevolence. Indeed, witch-hunting could not survive, or even become a powerful movement, without torture. The European craze really dates from about 1468, when the papacy first declared witchcraft a crimen exceptum , and made those accused subject to torture. Once torture was authorized the confessions multiplied, the number of victims and accusations increased, and the movement generated its own momentum. Once torture was banned, the process was reversed, and the movement gradually died. (…) Luther thought that witches should be burnt for making a pact with the devil even if they harmed no one, and he had four of them roasted at Wittenburg. The Protestants relied on Exodus 22:18 ‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’ As Calvin said: ‘The Bible teaches us that there are witches and that they must be slain ... this law of God is a universal law.’ ” | And this from a writer who calls himself a Christian! Every day we are told on the radio and television that the Bible is the word of God. In Great Britain the law demands that an act of Christian worship take place every day in every school. Does any reader of this criticism now doubt that this is nothing less than criminal deception? |
Page 310 “Burning of witches increased wherever they triumphantly carried the Counter-Reformation, especially in Germany, Poland and Franche-Comté; and in the Low Countries, where they were less successful, they identified witch-hunting after a proclamation by Philip II in 1590, which declared witchcraft ‘the scourge of the human race'. Jesuits were associated with the most savage campaign, conducted around Trier by Archbishop Johann von Schoneburg and his suffragan, Bishop Binsfield. In the years 1587-93, the archbishop burned 368 witches in some twenty-two villages, leaving two of them with only one female inhabitant each. As with the Inquisition against heretics, officials who dragged their feet were liable to become victims: thus Schoneburg had the University Rector, Dietrich Flade, chief judge of the electoral court, arrested for leniency, tortured, strangled and burned. The hunters constantly alarmed the authorities by stories of vast and growing conspiracies of witches; (…) Some hunters were paid by results: Balthasar Ross, minister to the Prince-Abbot of Fulda, made 5,393 guilden out of 250 victims, 1602-5.” |
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Page 311 “The Catholic witchcraft terror in Germany was remarkably like the Inquisition's ‘Protestant-Jewish’ terror in Spain, since it might strike at anyone. Philip Adolf von Ehrenberg, bishop of Wurtzburg, burned over 900 during his reign 1623-31, including his own nephew, nineteen priests and a child of seven. (…) The worst hunt of all was at Bamberg, where the ‘witch-bishop’, Johann Georg II Fuchs von Dornheim burned 600 witches, 1623-33. His chancellor, accused of leniency, implicated under torture five burgomasters; one of them, arrested and tortured in turn, accused twenty-seven colleagues, but later managed to smuggle out a letter to his daughter: ‘It is all falsehood and invention, so help me God ... They never cease to torture until one says something. ... if God sends no means of bringing the truth to light, our whole kindred will be burned.’ The hunt led a Jesuit, Friedrich Spee, who had acted as confessor to witches in the Wurtzburg persecution, to circulate in manuscript an attack on hunting called Cautio Criminalis : ‘Torture fills our Germany with witches and unheard-of wickedness, and not only Germany but any nation that attempts it. ... If all of us have not confessed ourselves witches, that is only because we have not all been tortured.’ ” “This revealing Catholic document fell into the hands of Protestants, who printed it in 1631. But exposures of Catholic enormities did not prevent Protestants from doing the same. (…) Many intellectuals shared the sceptical attitude of Montaigne: ‘It is rating our conjectures highly to roast people alive for them’: and even in the worst affected areas the judicial authorities were eventually persuaded to discountenance torture.” |
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Page 312 “The Church ceased to be in the van of progress, and quite rapidly became an obstacle to it.” | Here is yet another of these crazy priestly statements. When was the Christian Church ever in the“van of progress”? |
Page 313/314 “Vast numbers of Christians had feared Hell and its fires at all periods. These anxieties naturally tended to generate work. Anxious men assuaged their worries, in medieval society, by paying for masses to be said for them, or buying indulgences.” | Some “van of progress”! |
Page 318 “(…) Sebastian Castellio (1509-63). His protest was particularly courageeous since, though a convert to Calvinism, he was suspect in both Geneva and Basle, and owed his livelihood as a teacher to Calvin’s favor. (…) ‘I have carefully examined what a heretic means, and I cannot make it mean more than this; a heretic is a man with whom you disagree.’ ‘To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine; it is to kill a man.’ ‘The better a man knows the truth, the less he is inclined to condemn.’ ” | Another breath of fresh air in this Christian hell on earth. |
Page 319 “Beza, on behalf of the Geneva Calvinists, denounced toleration in 1570 as a ‘purely diabolical doctrine’. To support freedom of conscience was sinful.” |
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Page 322 “Less foolhardy than Bruno, Galileo made a full submission: ‘… with sincere heart and unfeigned faith I abjure, curse and detest the aforesaid errors and heresies.’ ” | (Bruno was burned alive in Rome 1600.) Galileo’s“crime” was to confirm what the Greek scientist Aristarchus had discovered in the 3rd century before Christianity was invented: That the sun was the centre of our solar system and that we are on a planet that orbits the sun. |
Page 323 “As head of the house of Navarre, Henri [IV] was a Huguenot; as king of France he found it necessary to embrace Catholicism. But his policy was eirenic [ peaceful -ed. ] rather than sectarian (…) He disliked the Protestant militants almost as much as the fanatics of the Catholic League, and tended to be sceptical on the merits of organized religion. His follower, Montaigne, argued on the same lines in elegant essays. How could Catholics and Protestants be so sure they had the truth? (…) We should admit our ‘uncertainty, weakness and ignorance’. (…) ‘There is no hostility that excels Christian hostility. How wonderful is our zeal when it is aiding our tendency to hatred, cruelty, ambition, avarice, lying, rebellion. ... Our religion is made to extirpate vices: in fact, it protects them, fosters them, incites them.’ ” | Notice how we are only told what the priests and their allies want us to hear in our schools and through the means of mass communication. Giving the general public only one side of the story amounts to nothing less than criminal deception. |
Page 326 “(…) the Renaissance third force, which had been about to emerge as what was later termed the Enlightenment, was thrust underground by war, persecution, witch-hunting, censorship, bigotry and priestcraft. The Counter-Reformation rolled across Germany, everywhere triumphant until Gustavus Adolphus intervened.” |
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Page 331 “The two decades of the 1640s and 1650s from one of the great watersheds in the history of Christianity. Up to this point, the ideal of the total Christian society, embracing every aspect of man’s existence, still seemed attainable; and masses of men were prepared to wage war, to massacre, hang and burn to realize it.” | All over nothing at all but a gigantic hoax that is still being perpetuated today. |
Page 335 “In Christianity, above all other religious systems, there is an absolute connection between faith and truth.” | Here we go again, one of these crazy statements that only a victim of priestcraft can make. Truth! The creator of the universe coming to Earth two thousand years ago, a“Holy Ghost” impregnating a virgin to bring this about, dead bodies all rising out of the ground on an unspecified Judgement Day, supernatural miracles, every person who does not believe in priestcraft to rot in the flames of hell forever without any chance of getting out, and so it goes on. This would be very funny if it were not for the fact that millions have suffered and are still suffering at the hands of the Christians — the priests and their academic allies. |
Page 340 “(…) Charles Blount, who treated most of Revelation as superstition and Christ as little better than a pagan wonder-worker.” | Absolutely correct. |
Page 341 “Augustine said [Hell] was peopled by ferocious flesh eating animals, which tore humans to bits slowly and painfully, and were themselves undamaged by the fires.” | Here he is again, that charming pillar of Christianity,“Saint” Augustine. |
Page 342 “Thomas Bolton thundered: ‘God shall not pity them but laugh at their calamity (...)’.” | These pages clearly show how these evil Christian fanatics taught the poor uneducated masses the horrors of hell. This text should be sent to every school in the country. This dreadful religion, more than any other, has been the cause of unspeakable suffering. It is nothing less than an abattoir of the mind. |
Page 343 “During the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, a series of Acts, extending capital punishment to cover 300 offences, tried to repair the yawning gaps in Locke’s system of ethical enforcement.” |
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Page 350 “The philosophes ransacked the past to expose Christianity as the generator of evil — Raynal’s Philosophical and Political History of the Indies , for instance, demonstrated how contact with Christianity destroyed societies. Voltaire wrote to Frederick the Great: ‘Your Majesty will do the human race an eternal service in extirpating this infamous superstition (…).’” | But they all underestimated the incredible power of the Christian priests and their allies. Even today, most of the top positions in society are held by those who have used the Judaic-Christian ladder to get there. |
Page 350 “[Diderot:] ‘Posterity is for the philosopher what the next world is for the religious man.’ ” “[Voltaire:] ‘I believe in God, not the God of the mystics and the theologians but the God of nature, the great geometrician, the architect of the universe, the prime mover, unalterable, transcendental, everlasting.’ ” | Very good for a man of his time. However, we cannot use the word God anymore. It has been too debased by the killings of the religious fanatics, and too many associate the word God with an invisible big daddy in the sky, which of course is absurd. |
Page 353 “In 1766, there was a further outrage, when the young Chevalier de la Barre failed to doff his hat in respect while a Capuchin religious procession passed through the streets of Abbeville. (It was raining.) He was charged and convicted of blasphemy, and sentenced to ‘the torture ordinary and extraordinary’, his hands to be cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and to be burned alive.” | Again, not taught to us in schools. Now we can understand what caused the French Revolution in 1789. The people rose up against this monstrous tyranny carried out by the Christian priests and their close allies, the aristocrats. I have read the Epilogue of this book again to make sure I was not dreaming the first time. Paul Johnson says:“Certainly, mankind without Christianity conjures up a dismal prospect.” I am not making this up, this highly educated writer of this history book actually says this in the Epilogue. Now that people are at last finding out the true nature of Christian“civilization”, they will be able to understand the driving force behind the writings of Voltaire and Thomas Paine. Also, why the Christians who control the BBC fought so hard to make sure the documentary about Thomas Paine“The Most Valuable Englishman Ever” was not repeated at peak viewing time on BBC 1. It somehow crept passed the censors and was shown on BBC 2 in 1982. |
Page 354 “But differentials in income, bad enough in England, were nearly ten times worse in France, ranging from a statutory 300 livres minimum for a priest up to 4000 for leading bishops, a ratio of 1:1300. Virtually all the bishops were nobles and most non-resident.” | Now we can understand why the priests fought so hard to keep their supernatural religion going by torturing and killing every person who dared to tell the truth. With their revolution, the French ushered in the age of reason. French schoolchildren are taught about their great free thinker, Voltaire, but ours, Thomas Paine, has been written out of our history books. The powerful forces ranged against the truth are praying with all their might that people never bother to read Thomas Paine’s masterpiece on the Internet —“The Age Of Reason”. Those caught reading this book in 1792 were heavily fined or deported to Australia. |
Page 355 “When a medieval tomb was opened in the cathedral in 1757, word got around that a new saint had been discovered, and a frenzied mob tore the remains to pieces, making off with bits of bones and rags.” |
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Page 356 “In Angers, four Benedictine houses provided four high eccliasistics (non-resident) with supplementary stipends, and an easy life for fewer than fifty monks (...).” | On this page are outrageous tales of the luxurious life styles enjoyed by priests, nuns and monks. |
Page 359 “(…) thus it had overtones of the Emperor Julian’s pathetic attempts to revivify imperial paganism.” | Earlier in this book the author admitted that this Emperor Julian would not allow the Roman army to be used in killing rival Christian sects, or so-called unorthodox Christians. Julian was a good man for his time and tried to bring the Roman Empire back under the influence of the thoughts of the Greek scientists and philosophers, and away from the ignorant, superstitious Christian priests. It was a tragedy that Julian failed. He was killed after a two-year reign. |
Page 361 “Christianity, with its many insights and matrices, had found no difficulty at all in absorbing elements of pagan ceremonial.” | No difficulty at all as Christianity was copied lock, stock and barrel from the so-called pagan religions. All these stories of de-Christianisation are simply the natural law of cause and effect, people reacting against being tortured and killed by priests. |
Page 362 “(…) Carnot ended the discussion by saying that a successful religion needed absurdity and unintelligibility — and in these respects nothing could beat Christianity.” | In spite of the fact that every single academic in this field of research knows this statement is true, the Government of Great Britain in 1988 actually strengthened the religious provisions in the 1944 Education Act to brainwash the minds of our children with supernatural Christian absurdities as stone cold facts. |
Page 367 “John Wesley deplored the decline in witch-hunting.” | So this modern pillar of Christian society, who we are continually told is a good and wonderful man, was all for the murder of “witches”. |
Page 367 “[The Methodist] William Seaward, first blinded, then torn to pieces at Hay in 1741.” | Nice people these Christians. What’s all this we keep hearing on television and radio about“Christian” kindness,“Christian” forgiveness,“Christian” tolerance,“Christian” love? We are all being taken for a terrible ride. |
Page 372 “But the wealthy Evangelicals had long campaigned to abolish Sunday work. In 1809 one of them, Spencer Percival, stopped Parliament sitting on Monday so that M.P.’s would not have to travel on the Sabbath.” | This is not in the Dark Ages, but recent history. It proves that the religious fanatics were still very much in charge, just as they are today. In 1987 the Conservative government, by a huge majority, was defeated when they tried to free the people from this crazy“Sabbath” nonsense. |
Page 372 “It was an axiom of the Evangelicals that religious scoffers, atheists and so forth invariably died horribly. They frequently quoted the cases of Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire and Paine, without taking the slightest trouble to verify the accuracy of their accounts. Thus Paine’s doctor, Manly, specifically denied that his patient changed his views while dying, or suffered moral distress.” | Good for Paine’s doctor. |
Page 372 “But Hannah More wrote an account of Paine’s death which was ‘widely circulated among the lower classes of society’ stating that in America he ‘lived in brutal violence and detestable filthiness … during the whole of the week preceding his death he never failed to get drunk twice a day … His last words were:“If ever a devil had an agent on earth, I AM THAT MAN!” ’ ” | This is a diabolical lie, but who, until now, has bothered to challenge these“good” Christian men and women who have been writing our history books and taking total control of education and the means of mass communication? |
Page 373 “Cobbett argued shrewdly in 1802: ‘The clergy are less powerful from their rank and industry than from their locality . They are, from necessity, everywhere and their aggregate influence is astonishingly great. When, from the top of every hill, one looks around the country, and sees the multitude of regularly distributed spires, one not only ceases to wonder that order and religion are maintained, but one is astonished that any such things as disaffection or irreligion should prevail.’ ” | This is the clue to why the Christian religion was such a phenomenal success. This great army of priests were actually in among the people. Because the masses were deliberately kept from being able to read and write, they thought the local priest was very clever because he was“educated”, and they believed every word he said. This is what happens when people who can’t read and write take notice of people who can. Here is a lesson from history. Be very wary of“experts” or those who you think are clever. They may only be experts or clever at deceiving people in order to feather their nests. |
Page 374 “In fact [Evangelicalism] had no structure at all, other than the Bible which it took quite literally.” | Yes, this is the tragedy of the history of the Christian religion. These poor brainwashed simpletons believed the Bible was the word of their God. The whole shooting-match, the good philosophical writing and unfortunately the evil rubbish as well. This is why the Christian religion has the most appalling record of misery, torture and killing. |
Page 374 “Christianity, as we have noted before, is essentially an historical religion, and is giving absolute priority to the historical documents -- the scriptures -- the Protestants had appeared to be on infinitely stronger ground than the Catholics (…).” | Historical? What absolute rubbish, a large part of this book has shown that there are no historical documents, only peoples' opinions written long after events took place. This must be another of these priestly additions to get the book published. |
Page 383 “Redemptorists often preached Hell-sermons at Catholic schools. One of them, the Reverend Joseph Furniss, wrote a number of books for children, in which Hell figured prominently. In The Sight of Hell he showed Hell as a mid-earth enclosure (thus following Liguori), with streams of burning pitch and sulphur, deluged with sparks and filled with a fog of fire. Tormented souls shrieked, ‘roaring like lions, hissing like serpents, howling like dogs and wailing like dragons.’ There were six dungeons, each with an appropriate torture — a burning press, a deep pit, a red hot floor, a boiling kettle, a red hot oven and a red hot coffin. ‘The little child is in the red hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out; see how it turns and twists itself about in the fire. It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor. (…)’ About four million copies of Furniss’s works were sold in English-speaking countries.” | After reading this I was so angry I could not sleep. The average person has no idea that these crazy Christian fanatics have done to the young, trusting minds of children. Torture and burning alive is one side of the coin, but the other side involves the destruction of childrens' minds. There is no greater crime than this. I remember in 1948, as a ten year old, coming across one of these fanatics. I had just started at a private school and this mad divinity master started on about Hell, and ended up foaming at the mouth. He literally put the fear of Christ up the class. We could not wait to get home to tell our parents and find out if what he was saying was true. The relief next day on the faces of my class mates was something I will always remember. We hated that divinity master and would not give him any satisfaction however hard he beat us. Yes, at this time any sadist could get stuck into little children with the cane. But the point here is, when hardly anybody could read and write and when children turned to their parents for guidance they backed up what the priests and their teachers were pumping into their children. |
Page 384 “(…) for keeping, and exalting, the papal institution, as a barrier against barbarism and proletarian terror.” | Surely this book has made it very clear that it is the Christians who are the Barbarians? Burning people alive; torturing to death; genocide; burning and suppressing uncomfortable books; keeping education from the masses; destroying the minds of little children. |
Page 399 “From the early thirteenth century, the Teutonic knights, assisted by the Dominicans, undertook the systematic conversion of Prussia and the Baltic. Force was used. One of the treaties specified: ‘All who are not baptized must receive the rite within a month.’ Those who declined were banished from the company of Christians, and any who relapsed were to be reduced to slavery.” |
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Page 401 “Some of the conquistadores were pious; Cortes had a devotion to the Blessed Virgin, carried her image with him, and her standard; his orders were ‘… the first aim of your expedition is to serve God and spread the Christian faith ... you must neglect no opportunity to spread the knowledge of the true faith and the church of God among those who dwell in darkness.’ (…) Pizarro admitted brutally: ‘I have not come for any such reasons. I have come to take their gold away from them.’ Was it a case of Cortes being hypocritical and Pizarro honest?” |
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Page 402 “The whole conversion process was an extraordinary mixture of force, cruelty, stupidity and greed, redeemed by occasional flashes of imagination and charity.” | Again, not surprising as these Christian Barbarians believed it was the wish of their God to get stuck into the natives: “I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron, thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.” (Psalm 2; 8-9) |
Page 402 “The Aztecs were polytheists, practicing human sacrifice and, in some areas, ritual cannibalism; but there were also points of comparison with Christianity — their chief god was born of a virgin, they ate pasty images of him twice a year, they had forms of baptism and confession, and a compass-point cross.” |
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Page 403 “Efforts were undoubtedly made to convey the subtleties and truth of Christianity.” | What subtleties, what truth? |
Page 403 “Luis Caldera, a Franciscan, who spoke only Spanish, taught the doctrine of Hell by throwing dogs and cats into an oven, and lighting a fire under it: the howls of the animals terrified the Indians.” | A Franciscan? What would St. Francis think of this? This appalling cruelty to animals shown by Christians all down through the ages is the direct result of the priestly doctrine that animals do not have souls. With this in mind, it is important to quote some recent remarks of a Roman Catholic Archbishop, Alfredo Battisi: “Animals do not count. They are not people, and therefore have no souls ... To beat up a dog or to leave it to die of starvation is not a sin in the eyes of god, as the dog is not a person, has no soul, so no sin has been committed.” |
Page 403 “In 1555 the first Mexican synod ordered the seizure of all sermons in the native language; and ten years later a further synod forbade the Indians access to the scriptures, in any language.” | Once again this is the clue to the incredible success of Christianity. The golden rule is never let the natives read or write. The very existence of the priests depends on it. |
Page 404 “To what extent should Christianity, in penetrating new societies and cultures, take on a native coloration and adapt its presentation of the essential truth?” | Once again only a biased Christian historian could write such rubbish. What essential truth? The tragedy is that it is these biased history books that students have been working from. |
Page 406 “The Dominicans refused to found any secondary schools, and it was always against their policy to teach Latin — the key to advance of any kind — to Indians. The Franciscans and Augustinians were less dogmatic, and they discovered that the natives took more easily to Latin than Spaniards. (…) Even so attempts to educate the Indians met bitter criticism. Jeronimo Lopez wrote in 1541: ‘It is a most dangerous error to teach science to the Indians and still more to put the Bible and holy scriptures into their hands ... Many people in our Spain have been lost that way, and have invented a thousand heresies.’ Teaching Latin bred insolence and, worse, exposed the ignorance of European priests. (…) One complaint was that ‘reading the holy scriptures, [the Indians] would learn that the old patriarchs had many wives at the same time, just as they used to have.’ ” | This, of course, is the sole reason why the Christians destroyed the Roman education system and did away with all their records of the Greek scientists and philosophers. The priests know very well they are done for when the masses find out just how badly they are being deceived by the great religious hoax on the human race. If there should ever be a philosophical balance, all priests will be treated just the same as fully paid-up members of the Flat Earth Society — with contempt. If they fail to control the Internet, this should happen very quickly. |
Page 408 “Thus Spain forfeited the New World by reforming its colonial pillar, the Church. The attempt failed; the Church emerged stronger; it retained its political and financial privileges. But it now reigned in isolation, without the support of the crown (…).” | This explains why Central and South America have remained so backward for so long — it has been priest-ridden. All the children had been brainwashed from birth. However, just the same as in modern Ireland, Spain and Italy, they are beginning to free themselves from the curse of priestcraft. |
Page 409/410 “Far too often the Christian churches presented themselves as the extensions of European social and intellectual concepts, rather than embodiments of universal truths (…).” | Here we go again. What universal truths? |
Page 414 “Was Christianity to throw off its European chrysalis and become at last the world religion, united in its central truth (…)?” | What central truth? This is getting pathetic. |
Page 415 “Xavier perceived that the Japanese had no answer to the question Christians had always been able to face fully and confidently: what happened to us after death?” | Rubbish, the Christians teach nothing about life after death whatsoever, just a hazy notion that we all have to rot in the ground waiting for their god to return on Judgement Day, time unspecified. After this. all non-believers will rot in hell forever without any chance of escaping. The Christian priests have deliberately gone against what Jesus was reported to have said to the fellow next to him who was dying on the cross:“This day you will be with me in paradise.” |
Page 416 “[The Jesuit priest Alessandro Valignano made the following statement:] ‘We have no jurisdiction whatsoever in Japan. We cannot compel them to do anything they do not wish to do. We have to use pure persuasion and force of argument. They will not suffer being slapped or beaten, or imprisonment, or any of the methods commonly used with other Asian Christians. They are so touchy they will not brook even a single harsh or impolite word.’ ” | Good for the Japanese. The Christian priests, like all bullies then and now, only understand a good sock on the nose. |
Page 416 “Unfortunately, neither Rome nor Portugal was willing to take the risk of a native clergy.” | Unfortunately? A stroke of good fortune for the Japanese. |
Page 420 “On 27 January 1614 the Japanese government published an edict which accused the Christians of coming ‘to disseminate an evil law, to overthorow true doctrine, so that they may change the government of the country and obtain possession of the land.’ ” “As it was, they became the victims of ne of the most ruthless and prolonged persecutions in the lng, bloody story of confessional cruelty. From 1614-43, up to 5,000 Japanese Christians were judicially murdered, nearly always in public.” | Terrible stories of the killing of Japanese Christians by the Japanese. If the Christian priests had minded their own business and not tried to inflict their supernatural nonsense on other people, then these killings would not have taken place. |
Page 427 “As John Adams, who had lost his original religious faith, put it in his diary: ‘One great advantage of the Christian religion is that it brings the great principle of the law of nature and nations, love your neighbour as yourself, and do to others as you would that others should do to you — to the knowledge, belief and veneration of the whole people. Children, servants, women and men are all professors in the science of public as well as private morality. (…)’ ” | This is the great mistake so many people make — confusing codes of ethics with religion. Codes of ethics are natural laws that are applicable to all mankind. To make out that Christianity or any other ancient religion has a monopoly on ethics is absurd. The cave man soon learnt the hard way that if he went to another man’s cave and killed and stole, then somebody was going to come to his cave with the same intention. It is much better to treat the chap in the other cave like you would like him to treat you. If the Christian religion was just a long list of moral codes, then I would not be writing this criticism. From the facts contained in this book it is obvious that this is not the case. |
Page 430 “The Augustinian total society had come into being in Carolingian times in great part because the Christian clergy operated a monopoly of education (…).” | Education? There was no education in this Christian paradise! Time and again this has been made clear in this book. There were not even any priests’ training colleges until the Renaissance. The priests certainly had a monopoly on ignorance, but not on education. Education was started by those who were determined to escape from priestcraft. |
Page 436 “On the other hand, weren’t the Southern slave-owners Christians too?” | Yes they were, just the same as most of the slave-traders. All completely brainwashed to seriously believe that every word in the Bible was the word of their God. There are a number of passages in the Bible that make it very clear that it is in order to enslave people. Even today, in religious radio and television programmes, priests still have the gall to tell us that the Bible is the word of God. |
Page 437 “(…) and that no real case for slavery could be constructed, in good faith, from Christian scripture. The fact that Southerners from a variety of Christian churches were prepared to do so, in the second half of the nineteenth century, was a shocking and flagrant stain on the faith.” | This is just not true. The Bible is very specific on slavery and, as the Southerners were brainwashed Christians, why shouldn’t they quote these passages from the Bible to uphold their cause? St. Paul, Ephesians 6:5, Titus 2:9, Psalm 2; 8:9, and worst of all, Leviticus 25; 44-46 |
Page 438 “[The American Civil War:] Thus Christianity on both sides contributed to the million casualties and 600,000 dead.” | Exactly, if the Bible did not contain these pro-slavery passages it is possible that the slave trade may never have taken place and there would not have been an American Civil War. |
Page 443 “The East India Company did not want missionaries at all, and approved of clergymen only to minister to the European community.” | The traders knew that it was much easier to do business with people of different belief systems if the natives were not upset by Christian priests trying to force an alien religion down their throats. |
Page 444/445 “Slave-trading had become a huge English industry by the 1780s. In four centuries, the European slave trade carried over ten million slaves from Africa, over sixty per cent of them between 1721 and 1820. (…) The trade was shared out between the French, British and Portuguese, with Britain taking half. After 1792, the French dropped out, and the British took up the slack, making 1798, for instance, a record year, with 160 British slaving ships operating, mostly from Liverpool. (…) As it was, Britain made the trade illegal in 1807, and in 1824 it was legally ranked with piracy, and punishable by death; nine years later slavery was outlawed in all British territories.” |
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Page 445 “One of the founders of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, Thomas Thompson, (…) wrote The African Trade for Negro Slaves shown to be Consistent with the Principles of Humanity and the Laws of Revealed Religion , setting out the kind of case made by Southern State Christians in the 1840s and 1850s. In fact the SPG itself actually owned slaves in Barbados.” |
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Page 449 “In the ensuing trouble, the missionaries, seconded by European traders, persuaded the Consul that he would be ‘forwarding the work of civilization’ if he got HMS Antelope to bombard Old Town [West Africa]; and this was done. A CMS missionary, the Reverend C. A. Gollmer, commented: ‘I look upon it as God’s intervention for the good of Africa.’ Two years later, Gollmer instigated another naval attack, this time on the Ijebu tribe. Vessels like HMS Scourge were repeatedly used on the coast to frighten chiefs into complying with missionary demands to operate freely.” | Notice how we are never told this at school. The tragedy is that our history teachers are not acting from a base of ignorance. In order to keep their jobs, they are forced to teach children only what those in power want children to hear. |
Page 450 “By 1815, the Catholic missions had been virtually extinguished; they had only 270 field-workers in the entire world. The recovery was due not so much to the restoration of the Jesuits in 1814 as to the emergence of popular French ultramontanism, and its close alliance with a reinvigorated papacy.” |
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Page 451 “The French could conquer Arab territories, and annex them, or establish protectorates; and they planted huge numbers of Christian settlers in Algeria; but they could not make Moslem converts.” |
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Page 453 “To the shrewd and analytical observer the salient fact remained the almost unrelieved failure of the missions to penetrate the heartlands of the great Imperial cults: Islam, The Hindu Family, Confucianism, Buddhism or for that matter Judaism. But among the primitives and the pagans, the hills tribes and the mountains, in swamps and islands — everywhere where cultural standards were low or Imperial religions had not yet penetrated — Christianity made spectacular conquests.” | Surprise, surprise! People have to be uneducated to receive a supernatural religion in the first place or to be captured from birth by priests and parents working together. |
Page 454 “The Reverend Colin Rae, from the Anglican South African mission, spoke for the majority: ‘The native must be kept under control, and subjected to discipline, and the keynote must be work! work! work!’ How much discipline? There was constant criticism of Catholic missions for inflicting corporal punishment on natives. But then, so did colonial (and native) governments; and, it soon emerged, so did Protestant missions, especially the Scots ones. In 1880 there was much criticism of the Free Church of Scotland mission in Nyasaland, which had a pit-prison, and where a man died after receiving two hundred lashes. Andrew Chirnside reported to the Royal Geographical Society: ‘Flogging with whip is an everyday occurrence, three lads in one day getting upwards of 100 lashes; and it is a fact that after being flogged on several occasions, salt has been rubbed on their bleeding backs.’ He claimed he had seen a man executed without trial. In 1883 there was a similar case in Nigeria where a woman died after she had been beaten and had red pepper rubbed in her wounds. (…) More damaging, in the long run, was the gentle deprecation of missionary work by travellers like Mary Kingsley, whose Travels in West Africa (1897) was a huge success; she hinted that natives were probably better if left alone, polygamy and all, and she poured scorn on missionary efforts to dress African women in the asexual ‘Mother Hubbard’.” | Only now in the 21st century is the truth really being told about the antics of these believers in priestcraft to millions throughout the world. Not only on the Internet, but thanks to best selling books exposing the great religious hoax on the human race — Richard Dawkins“The God Delusion”, Christopher Hitchens“God is Not Great” and“Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris. |
Page 457 “Just as America was now the leading missionary force, so the Anglo-Saxons in particular, but the white races as a whole, would succeed in bringing to reality Christ’s vision of nearly two millennia before -- a universal faith.” | Here is another of these crazy statements that can only come from a priest or a victim of priestcraft.“A universal faith?” This is the great tragedy and the cause of all the misery and killing. Forcing people to believe something that is completely outrageous and against the laws of nature. |
Page 464 “[Pope Leo XIII 1887:] Freedom of thought and publication was ‘the fountain-head of many evils’. It was ‘not lawful for the state … to hold in equal favour different kinds of religion’; on the other hand ‘No one should be forced to embrace the Catholic faith against his will’, a retreat from the papal position held at least until the 1820s, when toleration had been again condemned as ‘madness’.” | Note the dates, not the Dark Ages, not the Middle Ages but recent history. |
Page 464 “In 1888, noting that Brazil had finally abolished slavery, [Leo XIII] aligned the Church with what was now conventional wisdom: In Plurimus declared the Church ‘wholly opposed to that which was originally ordained by God and nature’, thus neatly reconciling the Church’s new alignment with majority opinion with her failure to condemn slavery before.” | This would be very funny if it were not so tragic. |
Page 466 “In the 1880s the anti-republicans, searching for a popular issue, began to whip up anti-semitism. The tone was set by Edouard Drumont’s La France Juive , which concluded: ‘At the end of this history, what do you see? I myself see but one thing, the figure of Christ, insulted, covered with opprobrium, torn by the thorns, and crucified. Nothing has changed in 1800 years. It is the same lie, the same hate, and the same people.’ ” | Here it is again, that sinister passage in Matthew 27;25. The Jews being blamed for killing the Christian saviour-god called Christ. This nonsense culminated in the massacre of 6 million Jews under the Nazis. Unlike most of us in Britain many Germans are still under the spell of priestcraft. They even have a political party called the Christian Democrats. The following was reported in The Daily Telegraph on 10th November 1988. Headlines: “DR. RUNCIE REPENTS FOR SINS OF HOLOCAUST”. The report goes on to say,“The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Runcie, and the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Britain, Cardinal Hume, publicly repented last night for the Churches’ past lack of protest against anti-Semitism, and particularly the Holocaust. Dr. Runcie said: ’Without centuries of Christian anti-Semitism, Hitler’s passionate hatred would never have been so fervently echoed ... The travesty of Kristallnacht and all that followed is that so much was perpetrated in Christ’s name ... Many Jews knew that it was Christians who pushed them into the gas chambers ... For centuries Christians had held Jews collectively responsible for the death of Jesus ... On Good Friday Jews have in times past cowered behind locked doors for fear of a Christian mob seeking revenge for deicide’. Cardinal Hume said: ’We have to admit with shame that the all-too-frequent silence of those in authority and the lack of protest made possible the wholesale destruction of the Jewish people.’” |
Page 469/470 “[Pope Pius X 1903] saw the universe in black and white terms. The Tridentine papacy and the Church it represented was white; the rest was black, and in the rest he mingled democracy, republicanism, science, modern biblical exegesis, communism, atheism, free thought and any form of Christianity which was not clerical-directed. He believed Protestantism to be a mere staging-post on the inevitable progression to atheism.” | For this little lot he was made a Saint! The first Pope since 1570. |
Page 472 “[Pope Pius X in 1908] was determined to prevent the Catholic clergy from being contaminated by the errors, as he saw them, of the historical and physical sciences. In his very first encyclical, (…) he promised: ‘We will take the greatest care to safeguard our clergy from being caught up in the snares of modern scientific thought — a science which does not breathe the truths of Christ, but by its cunning and subtle arguments defiles the mind of people with errors of Rationalism and semi-Rationalism.’ ” | It is incredible to think that this nonsense was written in my parents’ lifetime. |
Page 482 “The fact is most of the bishops were monarchists. They hated liberalism and democracy much more than they hated Hitler. (…) Moreover, once Hitler attained power, German Catholicism dropped its ‘negative’ attitude and assumed a posture of active support.” | On these pages are confirmation of 100% support for Hitler from the Catholics and Protestants. Why not? Hitler had made it very clear that he was going to rub out the most deadly enemies of the Catholic and Protestant priests: Communists, Jews and Orthodox Christians. |
Page 490 “ ‘As for the Jews’, [Hitler] told Bishop Berning of Osnabruch in April 1933, ‘I am just carrying on with the same policy which the Catholic Church had adopted for 1,500 years.’ ” | For once in his life Hitler was unfortunately telling the truth. Further confirmation of this comes from John Toland in his book“Adolf Hitler” (1976):“In 1933 Hitler had a meeting with the Roman Catholic priests, Bishop Berning and Monsignor Steinmann. He explained to them that he was only going to do to the Jews, but more effectively, what the Church of Rome had been attempting for many centuries.” The following quote from Hitler nails the lie that he and the Nazis were not Christians: “My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God’s truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was His fight for the world against the Jewish poison ... as a Christian I have also a duty to my own people.” Hitler said this in a speech on April 12, 1922 (Norman H. Baynes, ed.“The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922-August 1939. Vol. 1 of 2, pp. 19-20. Oxford University Press, 1942). |
Page 493 “Thus the Second World War inflicted even more grievous blows on the moral standing of the Christian faith than the First. It exposed the emptiness of the churches in Germany, the cradle of the Reformation, and the cowardice and selfishness of the Holy See. It was the nemesis of triumphalism, in both Protestant and Catholic forms.” | Again this is only the result of cause and effect. For nearly two thousand years, the Christians killed or enslaved all who opposed them. The tide was bound to turn sooner or later. |
Page 498 “A confident native Christian clergy, running their own national churches, might have played a formative role on the construction of the new societies, as Christianity and the Christian clergy did in western and central Europe between the fifth and ninth centuries.” | Here we go again, another priestly interpolation. The fifth and ninth centuries! All education had been destroyed because only a few fat cats were allowed to read and write. Anybody who resisted was tortured to death. Shall we just pretend that the previous 497 pages did not exist? |
Page 501 “Nevertheless, the African churches are the one form of Christianity which is growing at spectacular speed. (…) Many of these churches teach there is a reverse colour-bar in heaven, with a black ‘Holder of the Keys’. Sometimes they specify there are two gates into heaven, sometimes only one, but with a black Christ in control.” | This can now only happen in this exciting scientific age of reason where the masses are poorly educated. The African continent is on fire with brainwashed Christians and Muslims murdering each other as fast as they can go. |
Page 503 “[Pope Pius XII] was very conscious of his unique, and divinely warranted, powers as a supreme pontiff. These were reinforced, from the autumn of 1950, by supernatural visions which, it appeared, he saw on a number of occasions.” | Only an indoctrinated Roman Catholic could write such rubbish. Divinely warranted! Who says? Supernatural visions! Nothing is outside or above the laws of nature. Above mankind’s current understanding of the laws of nature but never, ever“supernatural”. |
Page 508 “[Pope John XXIII]’s speech was rightly seen as an incitement to action and an optimistic acceptance of change.” | If only the popes and saints of the past had been like this man. What a different story this book would have had to tell. The good work done by Pope John, especially transferring the power of the Pope to a council, was spoiled by the next Pope, Paul VI, who removed clerical celibacy and contraception from the hands of the council. The so-called scriptural authority for these two controversial Roman Catholic laws is non-existent. Therefore it was a source of disobedience, scandal, disaffection, and ridicule from the secular world. The authority for so much of these doctrines and dogmas comes from“Saint” Augustine, a lunatic, as exposed by this book quoting his writings. But this dreadful man set orthodox Church teaching on sex for fifteen hundred years. Unfortunately not only Roman and Anglo-Catholic teaching, but Lutheran, Calvinist, and many others. |
Page 512 “The Anglican Church reluctantly accepted artificial contraception at the Lambeth conference of 1930, and shifted the moral theology to a consideration of whether the married couple's intention was selfish or not. This analysis was later adopted by most other Protestant churches.” |
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Page 513 “The reign of Paul VI thus signalled the end of populist triumphalism. It was marked by general erosion of ecclesiastical authority, the assertion of lay opinion, the defiance of superiors, the spread of public debate among Catholics, the defection of many clergy and nuns, and the decline of papal prestige. And, for perhaps the first time since the Reformation, the number of practising Catholic Christians owing allegiance to Rome began to contract. Catholicism appeared to have joined Protestantism and Orthodoxy in a posture of decline.” | This was the result of education for the masses and access to the true history of mankind. That is, the influence of secular writers gaining access at last to the means of mass communication, our schools and the invention of the Internet. |
Page 514 “Whether the churches reunite will depend entirely on the question of authority, which always has been, and remains, the real source of division within Christianity. [Footnote:] The point can be illustrated by comparing the oaths sworn by bishops on their consecration. The oath of allegiance of all Roman Catholic bishops includes the promise: ‘with all my power I will persecute and make war upon heretics’. The homage performed by Anglican bishops reads: ‘I ____ lately of ____, having been elected Bishop of ____, and such election having been duly confirmed, do hereby declare that Your Majesty is the only supreme governor of your realm in spiritual and ecclesiastical things as well as temporal and no foreign prelate or potentate has any jurisdiction within this realm.’ ” |
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Page 517 “[Epilogue:] Certainly mankind without Christianity conjures up a dismal prospect.” | What staggering unadulterated rubbish, coming after a long and detailed account of what happens when children are indoctrinated from birth to actually believe in supernatural absurdities as facts. This leads to wars, genocide, mass executions, murders, rapes and other unspeakable atrocities committed by this barbarous institution. |
Now We Can Understand Why...
Now we can understand why Rev. Don Cupitt, Dean of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge, made the following statement in 1988:
“Somehow, everybody just knows that Christianity is the Church and the Church is a power-structure, an apparatus for limiting freedom in belief and morals.”
Now we can understand what Professor Sir A.J. Ayer, Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford, meant when when he was reported on the front page of the first Mail on Sunday to have said:
“Christianity is morally outrageous and intellectually contemptible.”
Now we can understand why Professor Dr. David Jenkins, the former Bishop of Durham, received such a hammering from the Establishment for daring to tell the truth in the 1980s. This academic made public what was being taught by theologians to university students: that there was no virgin birth, no Resurrection, there will be no Second Coming and that no book has divine authority. One newspaper headline read:
“For God’s Sake Shut Up.”
Now we can understand why Dr. John Baker, The Bishop of Salisbury in 1983, wrote to me saying:“I find myself very largely at one with you. The main substance of your criticism is obviously sound and something that quite a number of us have said from within the Christian Church from time to time, and I would entirely agree that there is no hope for the Churches unless they try to get back to what their Founder taught.”
Now we can understand why the Christians in the House of Lords officially“silenced” Lord Sefton as he attempted to stop the Government strengthening the religious provisions in the 1944 Education Act, instead of abolishing them as recommended by the Swann Report.
Now we can understand why a local vicar made the following statement when I asked him when he realised that the ancient doctrines and dogmas of Christianity were fictional mythology, and most important of all, that the Bible is no more the word of God than any other book that has ever been published? He answered:“We all do at Theological College.”
Christian Justification for Atrocities
“Hanging has scriptural authority”
says Sir Rhodes Boyson, ex-headmaster, ex-education minister. This statement raises a terrifying spectre. Perhaps I am wrong about thinking that our leaders are only pretending that they believe in priestcraft in order to obtain votes. Maybe some of them are really genuine victims of indoctrination. Perhaps Prime Ministers and the Presidents of the United States are not just pretending. This means they really do look upon non-believers as “anti-Christs”.
Is the so-called free world really being led by gullible brainwashed religionists? If this is correct then we are all in very serious trouble. They have their fingers on the nuclear button.
As the great French philosopher Voltaire made very clear:
“All it takes for the forces of evil to triumph is that good people continue to do nothing."
“People who believe absurdities commit atrocities.”
Most French people escaped from the clutches of priestcraft with their Revolution in 1789. Our Revolution is taking place at this very moment. We must quickly introduce the French system of secular education, with philosophy taking the place of religion in our schools.
The powerful Christians who still control education and the means of mass communication in Great Britain are so frightened of the English philosopher Thomas Paine that his name was hardly mentioned during the bicentennial coverage of the French Revolution on British television, even though Paine was the author of “Rights of Man” and “The Age of Reason”, the very reason for the Revolution. On one television programme, “Crisis”, another work of Paine, they managed to go through the whole programme without once mentioning his name.
A news item showed President Bush of the United States lending President Mitterrand of France the key to the Bastille. Again we were not told that the French thought so highly of Thomas Paine that they gave him the key, and he in turn gave it to President Washington.
Never believe anything anybody tells you, check the facts very carefully and be masters of your own ship. Remain sceptical at all times. This criticism is dedicated to young people throughout the world.
Thomas Paine can have the last word:
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent if we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind; and for my part I detest it as I detest everything that is cruel.”
The Age of Reason, 1794
Reaction to this Criticism
“Your little booklet is terrific. It deserves wide distribution. It highlights the absurdity of the situation in this country where everybody pussyfoots around a religion that nobody (except the wilfully ignorant) believes anymore. This has been the state of things for over a century now.”
Tony Grist, former priest, now freelance journalist.
“Michael Roll’s analysis of Paul Johnson’s A History of Christianity. It is a meticulous demolition of the basis of Christianity as organised superstition, leaving only superstition. There’s no historical record of the birth, life or death of a Jewish man called Jesuah. Jesus is a Greek translation of this Jewish name. Virgin births are a feature of saviour-gods in other religions. There’s no record of anything Jesus said, only reported teachings accredited to him ... There are no historical records of any writings of Paul. Ancient historians, such as Josephus and Philo, seem never to have heard of Jesus. Josephus mentions John the Baptist, but very little is known about him and even less about his association with Jesus. There’s no evidence that Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome. This is a stimulating pamphlet.
Professor Robert Giddings - Tribune (25 April 2003)
“Born again Christians, and Muslim Fundamentalists, really are a menace to civilization ... I was able to do some extensive dipping into your Commentary of Paul Johnson, and accompanying documents, and found much of value in them.”
Professor V.G. Kiernan, Department of History, Edinburgh University.
| Vital Books to Read |
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