Christianity Kills

“Christianity persecuted, tortured and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified…extermination and tyranny…it dreamt of infinite bliss’s and crowns it should be crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God.” George Santayana

When Christianity ascended as a legitimate religious power in the Fourth century AD you would think that they would bring order and peace to the strife torn world of their times, after all they preached universal love and forgiveness; to turn the other cheek, love your enemy, and help your neighbor. Their God was one of love, who only wanted all to worship and respect him. A Monotheistic God whom all should welcome as He was a God of peace.

Something went terribly wrong though. As the historian William Lecky wrote in 1877 in his book, A History of European Morals

“If we consider the actual history of the Church since Constantine, we shall find no justification for the popular theory that beneath its influence the narrow spirit of patriotism faded into a wide and cosmopolitan philanthropy. A real though somewhat languid feeling of universal brotherhood had already been created in the world by the universality of the Roman Empire.

In the new faith the range of genuine sympathy was strictly limited by the creed. According to popular belief, all who differed from the teaching of the orthodox lived under the hatred of the Almighty and were destined after death for an eternity of anguish … The eighty or ninety sects into which Christianity speedily divided, hated one another with the intensity that extorted the wonder of Julian and the ridicule of the pagans in Alexandria, and the fierce riots and persecution that hatred produced appeared in every page of ecclesiastical history.

The Donatists, having separated from the orthodox simply on the question of the validity of the consecration of a certain bishop, declared that all who adopted the orthodox view must be damned, refused to perform their rites in orthodox churches which they had seized till they had burnt the altar and scraped the wood, beat multitudes to death with clubs, blinded others by anointing their eyes with lime, filled Africa, during nearly two centuries, with war and desolation, and contributed largely to its final ruin.

The childish almost unintelligible quarrels between the Homoiousians and the Homoousians … filled the world with riot and hatred. The Catholics tell … how three thousand people perished in the riots that convulsed Constantinople when the Arian bishop Macedonius superseded the Athanasian Paul … In Ephesus, during the contest between St. Cyril and the Nestorians, the cathedral itself was the theater of a fierce and bloody conflict … Later, when the monophysite controversy was at its height, the palace of the emperor at Constantinople was blockaded, the churches were besieged, and the streets commanded by furious bands of contending monks.”

The new religion did not bring peace; it brought intolerance and hatred, not only of pagans and heretics, but of other Christians, and this hatred and killing of rival Christians went on for over a thousand years.

So if God exists, and is a God of Love and Peace, where the hell was he, and why didn’t he stop and fix this travesty?

Perhaps Jesus had already answered this question when he said a few hundred years earlier:
“Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Matthew 10:34

If one truly and honestly looks at the history of Christianity you will find that it is no more special and peaceful than any other religion we have ever had on earth. The only thing stopping it from doing now, what it did then, is the secular sovereignty of most Christian countries.

You want proof? Go look at Bill Maher’s movie ‘Religulous’ and the scene where he talks to some people visiting a Creationist Museum.

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The Exodus Never Happened

Israeli archaeologist Ze’ev Herzog⁽¹⁾ provides a controversial  consensus view on the historicity of the Exodus and some other parts of the Hebrew myth.

In 1999, Herzog’s Haaretz weekly magazine cover page article “Deconstructing the walls of Jericho” attracted considerable public attention and debates. In this article Herzog claims that “the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom. And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, Jehovah, had a female consort (Asherah) and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning period (c920-900 BC ) of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai”  Wikipedia

If the whole Exodus story itself is unhistorical we can safely dismiss the other parts of the story [the parting of the Red Sea (Exodus 14:21), the manna from heaven (Exodus 16:15-35) and the supply of water from the Rock in Horeb (Exodus 17:7)] as mythical addition to an already fictitious account.

⁽¹⁾Ze’ev Herzog (born 1941) is an Israeli archeologist, professor of archaeology at The Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University. Ze’ev Herzog is the director of The Sonia and Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology since 2005.

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The Theory of Evolution…is it True?

There is no doubt at all that evolution is a fact. That may upset you or not depending on what religious affiliation you have or don’t have. Bear with me though…I’m not talking about Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection right here.  I speak of the changes to the gene pools of all species that occurs every day due to births and deaths.  Members of a species do not all have the exact same DNA, which can be demonstrated easily, and sexual reproduction combines the DNA of two parents to form a little bit different combination of genes. Also, not all creatures survive to reproduce and some little bits are lost.

If you can understand and accept these facts that this is an observed, common, natural fact of life then you are understanding evolution at its basic level. This has been known and fully understood for over a hundred years, and there is NO doubt about it-at all-in the scientific community that it is working.

When you talk about the “Theory of Evolution” though, what you are talking about is the attempt to describe how and why life is doing what it is doing. You come up with the theory when you observe the facts and posit the reason behind them.  When you are talking or experimenting on live things and how they came to be and what changes they have, or are, going through and you find common threads then you are talking about evolutionary things, and when large numbers of your observations show many similarities then you make a theory to cover what you are seeing.

The theory that C. Darwin proposed to cover the observations he made in his long voyage on the HMS Beagle was the most eloquent and simple theory that seemed to work…and it worked so well that here we are 150 years later and it’s still the only “theory” that has any credence and continues to explain how life worked in the past and continues to work today.

The religious right continues to attack Darwin and his work precisely because it is the one explanation for life that really works, makes sense, unlike the error filled Bible, and it has tremendous explanatory power in the areas that it is used in, and is constantly being corroborated by dozens of different scientific disciplines.

A good theory can be used to produce predictions about future findings about known facts, and the theory of evolution has proven to be able do this…over and over again for 150 years.

The religious right, the evangelical fundamentalists have a big problem in that they have to advance magic/supernatural causes to explain natural phenomena and since this is not testable in any degree it has no real explanatory power. If a naturalistic explanation is capable of totally explaining natural phenomena on earth…what need is there for some lame…my magic God did it!

Evolution is a fact of nature…just like gravity.  I propose we now call it the Fact of Evolution.  🙂

Misc. thoughts

A government is the most dangerous threat to man’s rights: it holds a legal monopoly on the use of physical force against legally disarmed victims. Ayn Rand

The day will come when everything will be relieved of the Jews – even the stones and trees which were harmed by them.  Listen to the Prophet Muhammad, who tells you about the evil end that awaits Jews. The stones and trees will want the Muslims to finish off every Jew. Ibrahim Mudeiris

“We have ruled the world before, and by Allah, the day will come when we will rule the entire world again! The day will come when we will rule America. The day will come when we rule Britain and the entire world!” Ibrahim Mudeiris

The War on Terror Will be Never-ending

Alongside the willing sacrifice of privacy by a naive and lazy public, is the enforced forfeiture of civil liberties under the guise of the ‘War on Terror’. Government legislation has significantly increased surveillance, data collection, and security measures ‘for your own safety‘. And more sophisticated and intrusive methods are coming soon. England is already 90% of the way to an Orwellian society…we aren’t far behind…America is in the top 5 (or in the bottom 5 depending on your viewpoint) for the most surveillance of it’s own citizens.

We need to talk to all those computer and high technology geeks who keep inventing evil and intrusive technology to crush and take away human freedoms. Tell them to stop it. Buzz it up. Put on peer pressure. Let them know there are really evil people out there that misuse technology they invent and  that they themselves, and their children, will be negatively affected.

Americans need to get off their lazy asses and start talking to their Senators and Congressmen and let them know that we are really sick of what they are doing with our various rights. Are we going to have to fight for them again? I’m not sure that many politicians will actually try to fight the crap going on in Washington…we have to at least try. Talk to your friends and neighbors, your co-workers, your in-laws, anyone you can corner for a casual talk and plant a bug in their brain about how wrong it is.

House of Representatives

Senate

The Whitehouse

Ex-Boss of Englands MI5 service (James Bonds employer :-)) says that “Terrorist threat was ‘exploited to curb civil liberties’
Security measures brought in after September 11 attacks ‘undermined the rule of law’
Go here for full story.

This is something really important for all of us in this country…and the world actually.

Jesus and Adam and Eve

Jesus comments in the Bible that he knows of Adam and Eve.  If you go with the Trinitarian view of Christianity that would actually be God commenting on them…which of course “proves” that the Christian religion is true.  At least that is what evangelical fundamentalists would have us believe.

There is just one BIG problem with that belief (along with hundreds of little ones).  Adam and Eve, as described in the Bible, never existed.  There is no doubt among earth scientists, at all, that the earth has had real humans, living all over it,  for tens of thousands of years. There is not one bit of doubt among earth scientists that Neanderthals were living on earth for about a quarter of a million years.  There is no doubt among real biologists that evolution has been going on for millions of years.

You can go back 6,000 or 10,000 years and there was at the very least a million or two people living on this planet.

Think of the consequences of no Adam and Eve;  NO fall from grace, No expulsion from the Garden of Eden, NO original sin, NO need for Jesus to expiate our non-existent sins.

Think of where this leaves St. Paul…all that made-up theology is not needed any more.

Where does this leave the rest of the stories in the Bible?

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Creationists, ID, Muslims and England

America is not the only country that is facing the rising tide of creationist theory. England is also experiencing a flood of evangelical fundamentalists and Muslim students in sixth-form colleges (kinda’ like community colleges in the States) and universities who are trying to replace Darwin’s theory (fact) with their theory (not fact) that the earth is just 6,000 years old.

“A growing number of science students on British campuses and in sixth form colleges are challenging the theory of evolution and arguing that Darwin was wrong. Some are being failed in university exams because they quote sayings from the Bible or Qur’an as scientific fact and at one sixth form College in London most biology students are now thought to be creationists.”

“Earlier this month Muslim medical students in London distributed leaflets that dismissed Darwin’s theories as false. Evangelical Christian students are also increasingly vocal in challenging the notion of evolution.”

“There is an insidious and growing problem,” said Professor Jones, of University College London. “It’s a step back from rationality. They (the creationists) don’t have a problem with science; they have a problem with argument. And irrationality is a very infectious disease as we see from the United States.”

People from the US are apparently helping those across the pond in setting up organizations using methods and systems tested in America. Answers in Genesis have a British office and they are busy spreading the gospel of “Biblical Inerrancy” to all who would listen. Most of the kids who are questioning their teachers about Darwin’s “theory” (fact) are from homes that are following the lead of American sects such as Pentecostals and Baptists.

And then of course there are the Muslims, and they are a very strong presence in England. The Muslims are smack-dab in the middle when it comes to fundamentalist religious thought. Their Koran is different in many (most) ways than the Bible, but on matters of creation they pretty much sing the same song, and their young students in English schools are making big waves by denouncing Darwin and England’s mostly secular teaching and ways.

The whole story is HERE From Guardian.co.uk

The evangelical fundamentalists of religion are trying every diabolical, backhanded, cunning, and fiendish tricks they can to try and teach religion-as-science in schools, and of course their final goal would be to kick science out of school altogether.  You see they want “their” religion to rule everyone and everything…and of course the Muslims want the same thing…going to be an interesting war.

Fitna – Documentary about Islam – Watch more

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Early Christianity VI

Why Jesus? How did he get that kind of following?  That’s the real quest of people who work in the field of religion. It’s little wonder that the most popular explanation over the ages has been that this is the work of God.

Historians don’t work from divine theories though. Historians can only look at what did happen in time and space. What we can say with some certainty is that the early followers of Jesus came to believe that Jesus had been raised from the dead and they were able to convince other people that Jesus was raised from the dead.

At a time of its rise there was much instability and merging danger in the Roman Empire It was overextended, there was clearly incredulity in the traditional gods of the Empire, and Christianity offered something that appeared to be utterly and beautifully coherent about everything from the smallest detail of your daily life…through to eternity.  Some scholars say it was ultimately earthly power politics, with an emperor recognizing the power of the people and their faith and getting behind it.

What really made the difference, the turning point, was the whole Greco-Roman world turning to Christianity.  Christianity was spreading and it was getting bigger and bigger, but without that decision on Constantine’s part, what we know of as Christianity, as a world religion, probably wouldn’t have happened.

The church that arose from the Nicean Council was the Catholics and they managed to have a strangle-hold on Christianity for nearly 1200 years.  The history of this church is as much evil as good.  There is much evidence that they changed many original tenets of the faith, and their management style was not even close to being holy. The church was, and is, greedy and full of sexual criminals and those that would kill off dissent. They probably hold the single largest and most valuable amount of extralegal booty in the world.

Whatever accounts for Christianity’s success, the debates, over what the faith in Jesus is and what organized religion should be are far from settled. In the beginning of Christianity there is diversity and different points of view. There are different interpretations of Jesus and ways of understanding God and the world. In the beginning, there is no Orthodoxy and heresy. Much of the first 300 years of Christianity were spent defining that faith. The struggle regarding orthodoxy and heresy seems to never come to an end, and battles about truth and inclusion and exclusion are still with us today.

Some think if we could just get back to New Testament Christianity, then the church and people would live in unity. In reality, when we look at the pages of the New Testament, we find that from the very beginning, diversity and hostility characterized the believers. The Christian message and the Christian church have always lived in this tension and never seem to settle their differences.

Although Christianity has survived many powerful attempts to kill it off, today all religions faces what may be the toughest challenge of all…science.  Science seems to constantly invading the religious beliefs by proving that many things they speak of are either not true…or impossible.  This probably started in the early 1600’s as the naturalists, who were the scientists of the day, started to notice that the stratigraphic column that they were exploring was not consistent with the Biblical stories they were familiar with.

Most of the men of early science were men of letters and religion…and some were even ministers or priests. They started out trying to reconcile what they were finding, with their knowledge of the stories from the Old Testament.  The naturalists that were most religious probably just ignored the contrary evidence that was being found all about them as their understanding of the rocks and the greater world about them grew.  The sciences grew and grew while the religions tried to ignore it.  By the 1800’s almost all the sciences of the day were showing that the biblical stories were untrue and most likely just folk stories of a tribe of people trying to forge a common spiritual identity, and establish a homeland.

The fundamentalist believers of the 1900’s and later try their best to  explain the evidence in terms that are religion friendly, but the tidal wave of new knowledge is overwhelming and just keeps coming.  Some evangelical establishments such as the Institute for Creation Research (ICR), Answers in Genesis (AiG), and the Discovery Institute are actively recruiting members who hold higher science degrees to put on their letterheads and add prestige and credibility to their announcements that the bible is 100% in alignment with science and 100% accurate in all matters.

Whenever the established church has argued with science, the church invariably comes away the loser. The Bible and Scripture and science should not try to find common ground, as the effort is doomed to failure.  The proponents of religious explanations for earthly natural phenomenon tend to base their favorable beliefs on trivial evidence and sometimes ignoring large bodies of evidence contrary to their position.

People of religion that practice biological or earth sciences in their day job, such as Prof. Michael Behe of Pennsylvania University, and others tend to search for some small particles of information that can be slanted to their advantage.  Prof. Behe came up with the term of irreducible complexity to try to explain that many things in the natural world show signs that they had to be designed and created fully functional by a higher intelligence, and not naturally produced piece by piece over large amounts of time.  Although later research unrelated to Prof. Behe’s original examples proved this was not what was happening and that nature really could produce the complex pieces and systems that were in our bodies and the world around us.

Religion in Europe is quickly declining as the old world has come to recognize how much their world has suffered in the wars of century’s past and finally realize that a institution that has so many flaws cannot be for real.  American fundamentalists keep churning the waters and doing their best to keep that ‘Old Time Religion’ alive.  Because there are so many people that want to believe (and so many jobs at stake) or who are gullible and trusting that can be convinced by esoteric argument, religion continues to spread its suffocating pall over rational thinking in today’s American society.

Youngsters are being raised in evangelical fundamentalist homes to believe in a Literal truthfulness of the Christian Bible and spreading the ‘word’ in all their relations with the real world. They build and organize their world around religion and seem to think that they will ascend to heaven at any time; indeed they are wishing for it to happen. Although this kind of nihilist thinking has gone on for centuries among the religious nothing has ever shown that what they intellectualize about the Biblical is real and will ever happen.
Fitna – Documentary about Islam – Watch more

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Noah Wasn’t First Winemaker

Boy, I tell you it’s hard to keep up with all the science going on “out there.”  Came across an article in the magazine “Archaeology” just today, dated September/October, 1996 In the article a team of scientists from the University of Pennsylvania Museum have found potsherds from a Neolithic village in Iran’s northern mountains that show the earliest evidence yet of wine-making.

Seems old Noah of ‘The Flood’ fame is going to have to give up his title of “world’s first wine-maker” His Flood supposedly happened around 2300-2200 BC and he planted a vineyard, made wine, and got drunk (this takes about 3-7 years by the way…to grow grapes to make the wine that is) after leaving the ark.

According to the scientists in the article, the Iranians were making wine about 2700 years earlier than Noah.

“Residue on a potsherd dating to the time of the first permanent settlements in the Middle East suggests that wine-making began 2,000 years earlier than previously thought. The sherd, ca. 7,000 years old, came from one of six two-and-one-half-gallon jars excavated two decades ago from the kitchen area of a mud-brick building in Hajji Firuz Tepe, a Neolithic village in Iran’s northern Zagros Mountains. Using infrared spectrometry, liquid chromatography, and a wet chemical test, Patrick E. McGovern and a team from the University of Pennsylvania Museum found calcium salt from tartaric acid, which occurs naturally in large amounts only in grapes. Resin from the terebinth tree was also present, presumably used as a preservative, indicating that the wine was deliberately made and did not result from the unintentional fermentation of grape juice.

Analysis of the Hajji Firuz Tepe sherd comes in the wake of two other recent discoveries of early wine-making in this region where grapes grow in the wild. Residue from a jar from Godin Tepe, in the nearby middle Zagros Mountains, was dated to 5,100 years ago, until now the earliest evidence of wine-making. Grape presses dating to the late third millennium B.C. have been found at Titris Höyük in southeastern Turkey.”
Go to link HERE

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Fitna – Documentary about Islam – Watch more

Lies, Lies, Lies…

Once again major league baseball players (right now it’s Miguel Tejada) are paraded through Congressional committees and being charged with lying to said committees.  It seems many players in America’s pastime are now, or have been, using steroids to enhance their on-field performance.  That Congress is charging them with lying is totally specious.

Some of these players are going to spend jail time for the same thing that politicians do to the American public aaallll the time and never get charged with.  From the president on down to the lowly freshman congressman the politicians lie, lie, and lie, in a never ending stream of bull-crap and misdirection.

* We don’t torture prisoners.
* They have weapons of mass destruction.
* They are training terrorists.
* My opponent is a child predator.
* I am defending the constitution, not destroying it.
* We don’t wiretap ordinary Americans.
* I did not take bribes.
* I did not try to sell that Senate seat.
* Even though we are giving no-bid contracts to my former employer there’s nothing going on.
* Even though we deregulated the oil industry it’s not our fault that our oil buddies and former employers are enjoying record profits and gas prices are higher than they’ve ever been.
* Just because we deregulated the financial industry doesn’t mean it’s our fault they screwed you out of your retirement funds and lost trillions of dollars…which you and your descendants will have to replace to the industry with your taxes for the next 200 years.

The paragraph below from The Huffington Post, in a story by Geoffrey Stone, about political lies says volumes about our leaders and their scheming to mislead the people. HERE

“An essential element of this strategy is that the perpetrators of the lie will insist, no matter what, that the lie is true. Confronted with the facts, the perpetrators will reiterate the falsehood. The key to this strategy is the willingness to lie, and to lie repeatedly.”

I think it should be against the law for a government official to accuse or charge any American citizen of lying.

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