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I Am Dude
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After reading this, you may change your minds.
Christianity was the ultimate product of religious syncretism in the ancient world. Its emergence owed nothing to a holy carpenter. There were many Jesuses but the fable was a cultural construct. Nazareth did not exist in the 1st century AD – the area was a burial ground of rock-cut tombs. Following a star would lead you in circles. The 12 disciples are as fictitious as their master, invented to legitimise the claims of the early churches. The original Mary was not a virgin. That idea was borrowed from pagan goddesses.
Scholars have known all this for more than 200 years but priestcraft is a highly profitable business and finances an industry of deceit to keep the show on the road. "Jesus better documented than any other ancient figure" ? Don't believe a word of it. Unlike the mythical Jesus, a real historical figure like Julius Caesar has a mass of mutually supporting evidence.
It is intuitively satisfying to think that someone was behind the towering legend. Yet like the worship of Horus or Mithras a human life was neither necessary nor helpful. Nothing in the 'Christian message' was original. Brotherly love and compassion had been taught by the Stoics for centuries. The Christian faith was a vulgarised paganism, set to the theme of the Jewish prophets and debased by religious intolerance. The early Christian sects attacked each other as energetically as they attacked pagans. 1st century Palestine had rabbis, radicals and rebels in abundance. But a 'life' conjured up from mystical fantasy, a mass of borrowed quotations, copied story elements and a corpus of self-serving speculation, does not constitute an historical reality. The final defeat of militant Jewish nationalism and the eradication of the Jewish kingdom gave the incipient Christian churches the final uplift they required.
There never was just one Christianity. Out of the milieu of religiosity that infected the Roman world, dozens of competing and conflicting Jesus/Sun-god/Mystery cults emerged. The first believers in Jesus maintained he was an ethereal spirit, much like other sky/sun-gods. Only later did he acquire a human death, a human life and finally a human birth. The composite 'Jesus Christ' character – god, man, king, carpenter, conqueror, peace-maker, dispenser of justice, advocate of love – was assembled to try and unify a fragmented and fractious messianic religious movement. In the mid-2nd century the Jewishness of the faith was purged but apologists had little to say about a human Jesus. They took comfort in noting similarities between their own ideas and pagan myths. The Christians remained a minority until well after one particular faction formed a political alliance with the Roman State. The orthodox creed remained unpopular for centuries and persecution was necessary to impose its will.
Through the centuries, the Christian godman has been made and remade. Egypt provided many of the themes and much of the detail. From the age of the Ptolemies, Alexandria was the ancient cooking pot of religious fusion. Here, Hellenized Judaism influenced the early Christians. From Egypt, Catholicism copied its rituals and ceremonies, including relics, demonology, and monasticism. The Patriarchs of Alexandria wrote much of Catholic theology and it was probably in Alexandria that a profound and detailed Buddhist influence impressed itself upon the faith. From Persia, too, came a Saviour God and notions of rebirth, a Mithraic dress rehearsal for Christianity, triumphant in Rome but fatally weakened by its exclusion of women. In Judaea itself, hatred for the Roman conquerors bred a genre of apocolyptic curses, anticipating an end of the world.
The Israelites did not come from Egypt – a palpable myth – but emerged from the local population. There was no ancient 'Jewish Empire': the Jewish priests drew their inspiration from the empire of the Assyrians and "Judaism" was a reaction to the loss of the northern kingdom and an instructive period spent in Babylon. Jerusalem in 10th century BC had been barely a village of huts and cave dwellings. Kings David and Solomon are purely mythical characters – warrior/priest heroes, invented in the 6th century BC. Herod the Great was a real king – but he did not massacre any babies. He was an astute and successful ruler. The Herodians and the Jewish elite became Romanized but religious fanatics led an armed resistance which ended in catastrophies under Titus, Trajan, and Hadrian. In the aftermath, a collaborationist revision of Judaism, later attributed to a 13th apostle "Paul", allegedly of impeccable Pharisaic credentials, competed fiercely with a reconstituted rabbinic Judaism which fused piety with mercantile success.
Eye Witness Reports?
Human ingenuity and cunning is matched by mankind's equally monumental credulity and wishful thinking.
There are actually some 200 gospels, epistles and other books concerning the life of Jesus Christ. Writing such material was a popular literary form, particularly in the 2nd century. The pious fantasies competed with Greek romantic fiction. Political considerations in the late 2nd century led to the selection of just four approved gospels and the rejection of others. After three centuries of wrangling 23 other books were accepted by the Church as divinely inspired. The rest were declared 'pious frauds'. In truth, the whole lot belongs to a genre of literary FICTION.
Would the Christians lie? They said it themselves – lying for God! And non-Christian testimony? – from the authentic pen of lying Christian scribes! Would the early believers have died for a lie? Consider the evidence for that supposed "persecution": Holy Mother Church invented heroic origins.
Laugh or cry? The pork salesman who became England's patron saint - the fabrication of "Saint George". Shrouded in deceit – Leonardo da Vinci's Last Laugh. How a sacrilegious 'sorcerer' outwitted the priests! Declared fake – Official! The "James Ossuary". How an Israeli entrepreneur outwitted the 'experts'. With multiple authors behind the original gospel story it is no surprise that the figure of "Jesus" is a mess of contradictions. Yet the story is so thinly drawn, that inventing alternative endings and conspiracy theories is a thriving industry
Church organisation, authority and membership preceded rather than followed the justifying doctrine. As the organisation and its needs changed so has the ‘Testament of God’ adapted accordingly.
A triumphant Christianity was the active agent in destroying knowledge and access to learning. An ignorant and impoverished population was more readily subjugated by Princes of the Church. "Mark" – Bringing the Celestial Superjew Down to Earth Switching the Messiah from future hope to "historic past". Copying the Competition – The Mythical "Virgin Mary". Vesta, Diana, Artemis, Isis – the pagan world knew all about virgins getting pregnant by randy gods. The Roman Church Asserts Authority – The Mythical "St Peter". How ambitious bishops in Rome laid claim to a Palestinian fantasy. "Matthew" – A Gospel for Messianic Jews Belt and braces. Adding a "royal genealogy" and "fulfillment of prophesy". "Luke" – A Gospel for Credulous Pagans. Playing to the gallery. Absolving Rome and embellishing the "birth" and "death" scenes. "Brother James" – Radical Jew Sanitized into Pious Christian Martyr. Throwing some light on the supposed brother in the supposed ossuary. "John" – A Gospel to Silence the Gnostics Mid-2nd century: the Catholic ecclesia write a rebuttal to the rival church of Valentinus.
From religious policeman to grandee of the church, from beast fighter in Ephesus to beheading in Rome, Paul's story has more holes than a swiss cheese. A detailed study of the great missionary that some say "founded Christianity".
The trail-blazing Christian missionary and apostle, St Paul, appears nowhere in the secular histories of his age. Ironically, though supposedly in Jerusalem at the right time, he can give no witness to a historical Jesus. But was Paul himself a genuine historical figure? Viewed without the rose-tinted spectacles of Christian faith, the first voyage of Paul is as fanciful as the first voyage of Sinbad. The later Pauline journeys, including the supposed transportation of the apostle to Rome, are similarly bogus. Characterized by incongruities, contradiction, and the absurd, they are a concocted fantasy. The Pauline epistles, far from being genuine letters, originated in the acrimonious doctrinal battles of the 2nd century – a time when "pseudepigraphy" and forged apostolic writings were weapons in the war of "Christianities".
Orchestrated by ambitious Christian clerics, a cancer of superstition, fear and brutality was imposed across Europe.
As it waited in the wings of pagan Rome, the Catholic Church was already marked by corruption, violence and sexual scandal. The fanatics of Christ proved useful to an ambitious prince who set his sights on absolute and undivided power. The Church expropriated the resources – both human and material – which might have defended Roman civilization. While an indolent army of clerics lived on the state, the impoverished legions degenerated into a peasant militia. Once a particular Christianity – hierarchical and authoritarian – became wedded to the Roman state, it became a force of brutal repression. Romano-Hellenic culture was transformed by the "Church Fathers" by bigotry, anti-Semitism, censorship and intolerance. This so-called 'orthodoxy' suppressed and persecuted its 'heretical' opposition. The barbarian tribes that overran the weakened Roman Empire were, for the most part, Christianised; the forces that opposed them, pagan.
The Christian Heaven may have been a vain folly but the Christian Hell has been real enough.
The priestly "protection racket" required the criminalizing of the whole of humanity through the doctrine of Sin. In a world run by clerical gangsters, the writ of Holy Mother Church was enforced by sadism and torture. For more than a thousand years, the henchmen of Christ inflicted a cruel barbarism on every community they encountered. Law was replaced by Divine Right, scientific method criminalized, ancient medical knowledge lost for a millennium. Women, fortunate to be domestic slaves, might find themselves in enforced celibacy, joyless marriage or burnt as a witch. Roasting heretics became popular entertainment and a religious duty.
Raised to the status of State religion the Christian Church reigned over the destruction of civilization. As the centuries passed religious barbarism grew ever more vicious.
In their struggle for power, Christians waged their own "civil war". A Catholic trinitarian nonsense triumphed over Arianism. The intellectual centres of the empire were ruined by murder and prohibition and Europe sank into ignorance and superstition. The civilization that had stretched from the deserts of Arabia to the highlands of Scotland reverted to a primitive village subsistence. By aggressive warfare, Christianisation of the heathen tribes followed. In Spain, the German lands, Britain, and Ireland, the despots of the Church imposed their tyranny.
With a Jewish father (stern patriarch) and a Christian mother (obsession with guilt and heaven) it is not surprising that Islam grew up a bit of a tartar.
Early civilizations arose in many parts of Arabia, long before Judaism, Christianity or Islam. Islam arose as an adaptation of old ideas, not something new. Yet initially, far from imposing a severe theocracy, the early caliphs were tolerant, even urbane. Despite the mutual hostility of kindred monotheisms, Islam endorsed a great deal of Judeo-Christian theology and adopted many of its practices. In its heyday, from the Atlantic to central Asia, Islam produced scholars and refinement. Europe's recovery owed a huge debt to Islamic civilization. Battered by both East and West the enlightenment failed and theology triumphed.
Christian knights brought savagery and racism to a whole new world. When gentle Jesus arrived in England's North American colonies, a motley crew of venture capitalists, criminals and self-righteous fanatics established a precarious existence. But a stolen land, worked by an enslaved labour force, cultivating drug crops, could not fail to enrich the colonial elite. Jesus was there when the American republic built the foundations of its economy on slavery and was re-packaged into a convenience Christianity suited to dreams of vast personal wealth. Today a bunch of crooks and hucksters, womanising egotists and dangerous megalomaniacs choreograph extravaganzas of Jesus frenzy. Alarmingly, they have serious political influence and an agenda for Armageddon.
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JESUS AND CHRISTIANITY ARE REVEALED AS MYTH (Read 73583 times)
