THE JUDAIC GOD’S POLITICALLY INSPIRED EARTHLY ORIGIN

A Mind-Expanding Exploration of the

Sordid History of the Abrahamic Faiths,

Judaism, Christianity and Islamism

Everyone knows a mind that’s closed “is a worrisome thing that’ll lead you to sing the blues in the night”, but curiosity has an open mind, where you’ll always find that reasonable ideas are indubitably right.

Doesn’t the Pentateuch’s unreasonableness challenge your faith?

 Sumer’s historical records date to 2600 BCE, but remained obscure until they were conquered by Semitic-speaking Akkadians, who deciphered a syllabary writing system; recording our oldest creation myth, the Enuma Elish, about Marduk’s creating humankind. Also the tower-of-Babel legend and the Epic of Gilgamesh, a search for Utnapishtim, hero of  Sumer’s flood myth (See MESOPOTAMIA), A thousand years later, King Josiah (639-609 BCE); fabricated his tribal propaganda, i.e., his epical legend of the jealous vengeful wrathful Yahweh’s intimidating the Israelites; commanding death for apostates, blasphemers, nonbelievers, and proponents of other gods; an irrational regressive dogma; killing foreigners, and the Israelite’s discerning erudite dissenters.

 Josiah’s tribal propaganda’s version of creation, flood, etc. was adopted as the Hebrew bible’s Pentateuch, but Yahweh’s total ineffectiveness against Christianity’s Crusades, Inquisitions and Holocaust, exposes the Judaic god as an ineffectual patron of the Abrahamic faiths’ prestigious professional proponents. See JUDAISM; also see CHRISTIAN ANTI-JUDAISM.

History has found 50 “redeeming gods”, such as Persia’s Mithras, 500 BCE. Rome worshipped Mithraism 200 years before approving Christianity, but the biographies of the earlier gods and the biography of Jesus, are virtually identical. See CHRISTIANITY.

Mohammad claimed that during 22 years of visitations, Judaic-Christian archangel, Gabriel, provided the precepts for his holy book. See ISLAMISM.   

 

CONTENTS

DEFINITIONS 3

INTRODUCTION 4

FOREWORD 7

OUR BEGINNING 10

SOURCE of the SEMITES 13

MESOPOTAMIA 15

JUDAISM 17

CHRISTIANITY 27

ISLAMISM 43

SYNOPSIS 51

THOMAS PAINE 64

EDUCATION 85

MATTER VS SPIRIT 89

MY FAITH & NOTES 91

DRINK MY WINE 95

CHRISTIAN ANTI-JUDAISM 96

EVOLUTION 98

PARTY REVERSAL 99

MIDDLE EAST FIASCO 100

UNITED STATES 101

U.S. ECONOMY 102

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

41,777 words of mostly 14pt font on 103 pages of  8.5 x 11 inches.

Copyright © 2012; Samuel Terrill Redwine Sr. All rights are reserved.

 

DEFINITIONS

 

Antinomianism: “Christian theological doctrine; that faith alone, not obedience to the moral law, is required for salvation”.

Blasphemy: “any remark deliberately mocking or contemptuous of God”.

Cult: “a system of religious worship or ritual”.

Fable; fabulous; fancy; fantasy; fantastic; legend; legendary: “connote imaginary, unreal or fictitious”.

Faith: "unquestioning belief that does not require proof or evidence".

Fundamentalism: “religious beliefs based on a literal interpretation of everything in the Bible and regarded as fundamental to Christian faith and morals; the twentieth century movement among some American Protestants, is based on those beliefs”.

Gods: “any of the various beings conceived of as supernatural, immortal, and having special powers over the lives and affairs of people and the course of nature. In a monotheistic religion, the single god is considered omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and creator and ruler of the universe”.

History, historical: “a chronological record of the past”.

Ignorance: reassures the uninformed, who are unaware of what they don’t know.

Life: “that property of plants and animals which makes it possible for them to take in food, get energy from it, grow, adapt themselves to their surroundings, and reproduce”.

Myth; mystical; mythology; mythological; mystical;  mythical; mythological;  “connote imaginary and unreal or any fictitious story, unscientific account, theory or belief”.

Philosophy: “the use of reason and argument in seeking truth and knowledge of reality, especially of the causes and nature of things and of the principles governing existence”.

Propaganda: “any systematic, widespread, dissemination or promotion of particular ideas, doctrines, practices, etc. to further one’s own cause or to damage an opposing one”.

Reason: means “to think coherently and logically; to draw inferences or conclusions from facts whether known or assumed”.

Religion: “the belief in a personal god or super-human controlling power to be obeyed and worshipped as the creators and rulers of the universe”

Science: “systematized knowledge derived from observation, study and experimentation carried on in order to determine the nature or principles of what is being studied”.

Secularism’s doctrine: “disregards or rejects any form of religious faith; especially that religion and ecclesiastical affairs should not enter into the functions of the state”. Secularists advocate tolerant worldly views and believe that it is ignorant and unfair to inculcate the minds of little children with supernaturalism’s inherent fallacies.

Supernatural: “that which exists or occurs outside the normal experience or knowledge of man; not explainable by the known forces or laws of nature”.

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

The following quotations are from The Age of Reason; by Thomas Paine, an American Revolutionary patriot, (1737-1809); who succinctly, expressed what I wish to say.

 “IT has been my intention for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion; I am well aware of the difficulties that attend the subject, and from that consideration, had reserved it to a more advanced period of life. I intended it to be the last offering I should make to my fellow citizens of all nations, and that at a time when the purity of the motive that induced me to it could not admit of a question, even by those who might disapprove the work.”

“The circumstance—appertaining to compulsive systems of religion, and compulsive articles, of faith, has not only precipitated my intention, but rendered a work of this kind exceedingly necessary, lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government, and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity. I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy. But, lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.”

“I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. INFIDELITY does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving: it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe”.

“It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society.—in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion. The adulterous connection of church and state, wherever it had taken place, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, had so effectually prohibited, by pains and penalties, every discussion upon established creeds, and upon first principles of religion, that until the system of government should be changed, those subjects could not be brought fairly and openly before the world; but that whenever this should be done, a revolution in the system of religion would follow”.

Samuel P. Huntington’s 1996 book: The Clash of Civilizations; said Islam is a political ideology; that religion is the principal defining characteristic of civilizations, that Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world’s population, and in the 1990s were far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization. (I’m apprehensive because America is the most religious of Western democracies.) Mr. Huntington said that the world’s great religions antedate Western civilization; that our world is moving out of its Western phase; that ideologies typifying Western civilization will decline, replaced by religions and other culturally based forms of identity and commitment; that the Westphalian treaty’s separation of internal politics from religion is ending; that religion is likely to intrude into international affairs; that intercivilizational clash of political ideas spawned by the West is being supplanted by an intercivilizational clash of culture and religion.—He said late twentieth century saw a global resurgence of worldly religions; intensifying religious consciousness and the rise of fundamentalist movements; reinforcing their differences— that the world’s Christians peaked at about 30% in the 1980s, leveled off in 1996 and would be about 25% by 2025— that the world’s Muslims will continue to increase dramatically, amounting to 20% of the world’s population by the turn of the century, surpassing the number of Christians some years later; probably accounting for 30% of the world’s population by 2025.

Mr. Huntington also said that indigenization and the revival of religion are global phenomena; most evident in the dynamic civilizations of the last quarter of the twentieth century, Asia’s and Islam’s cultural assertiveness and challenges to the West; that Islam’s challenge manifests in its pervasive cultural, social, and political resurgence in the Muslim world; accompanying rejection of Western institutions and values; and that Asia’s challenge is manifest in East Asian civilizations—Sinic, Japanese, Buddhist, and Muslim, emphasizing their cultural differences from the West and, at times, the commonalities they share, often identified with Confucianism; that Asians and Muslims stress the superiority of their cultures to Western culture. In contrast, people in other non-Western civilizations, i.e., Hindu, Orthodox, Latin American, and African—may affirm the distinctive character of their cultures, but as of the mid-1990s had been hesitant about proclaiming their superiority to Western culture. Asia & Islam stand alone; at times together, in an increasingly confident assertiveness with respect to the West. He said

“Related but different causes lie behind these challenges. Asian assertiveness is rooted in economic growth; Muslim assertiveness stems in considerable measure from social mobilization and population growth. Each of these challenges is having and will continue to have into the twenty-first century a highly destabilizing impact on global politics. The nature of those impacts, however, differs significantly. The economic development of China and other Asian societies provides their governments with both the incentives and the resources to become more demanding in their dealing with other countries, and particularly the expansion of the fifteen to twenty-four-year-old age cohort, provides recruits for fundamentalism, terrorism, insurgency, and migration. Economic growth threatens Muslim governments and non-Muslim societies.—To ignore the impact of the Islamic Resurgence on Eastern Hemisphere politics in the late twentieth century is equivalent to ignoring the impact of the Protestant Reformation on European politics in the late sixteenth century.—The Resurgence will also have shown that ‘Islam is the solution’ to the problems of morality, identity, meaning, and faith, but not to the problems of social injustice, political repression, economic backwardness, and military weakness. These failures could generate widespread disillusionment with political Islam, and a search for alternative ‘solutions’ to these problems”.

Life teaches: the golden rule is the first step toward world peace. The bible teaches: hate and revenge are sacred obligations, and that the Judaic god is partial to Jews, but during their ignominious history the god failed to save innocent Jews from the Vatican’s Inquisitions, Persecutions, Crusades and the Vatican’s complicity in the Holocaust, (See CHRISTIAN ANTI-JUDAISM).

This treatise explores our misconceptions about Yahweh, God, Allah and their holy books. Where, when, how, why and who conceptualized the fabrications?  Believers profess blind-faith: that the bible’s perfidious god is our source of all goodness. It is absurd that people grovel and worship the bible’s egomaniacal, death-dealing “God”. Deceitful interpretations by the prestigious professional proponents of Abrahamic religions’ mystical gods prompted my search for reasonable explanations. I have not found an iota of tangible evidence supporting authenticity of the bible’s Pentateuch, but lots of evidence explaining why our world is fraught with a plethora of blind-faith believers in an Abrahamic faith; that succeeded by slaughtering all naysayers. About 1000 years ago, Judaism and Christianity forewent the killing, but Islam still kills their dissenters. Who abides faith in religions that murdered millions of the innocent, to gain an illogical imposition upon society, but hypocritically consider family planning sinful? I have no faith in ignorance, which sired the Abrahamic religions; they thrive on it and beget it. My only fear is the dogmatic killer instinct of religious zealots, which was instilled by the fictitious Judaic-god-Yahweh, who commanded “believers” to destroy all foreigners, apostates, blasphemers, nonbelievers, and the proponents of other gods.

FOREWORD

You say you don’t believe in evolution? Not surprising; a 2008 Gallup poll found that only 15% of Americans accepted the proposition that humans developed over millions of years; revealing our nation’s ignorance about scientific facts versus religious beliefs; it’s inimical for our future political wellbeing. Wait! Don’t leave; I’m a little slow; trying to see the punctuation; working with 14 pt. font, zoomed 100%, on a 24 inch monitor. Prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods blame evolution on the educated nonbelievers, but evolution’s a natural process of all living things. “Survival of the fittest”, is best explained by noting that the quantity of seeds, eggs and sperm produced is an excessive potential for life because it far exceeds Earth’s ability to support them all, so each faces a life and death struggle against all other living things; a natural progression, allowing the stronger healthier living things to survive and reproduce. For billions of years, with occasional mutations, all living things gradually improved; beginning with single cell microorganisms, which evolved into today’s living things, where each struggles, competing against other living things. Man abets evolution by selectively breeding his domestic plants and animals. Consider this very implausible proposition: for millennia, ignorant religious societies killed their most intelligent citizens and became less intelligent; this evolutionary state of affairs is pertinent to my premise. (See EVOLUTION)

Another fact essential to my premise is our plethora of nonthinkers and dearth of thinkers and their relationship to man’s ignoble fabrications of three superficial religions, who nonthinkers worship, but thinkers have been aware of man’s conspiratorial ideas; his conceptualizations seeking opportunities to challenge fellowmen, etc. Since our beginning, thinkers explored and reasoned the insignificance of mystical gods. Ancient Jews and Christians murdered their thinkers who professed disbelief, and today’s Islamic Muslims continue to slaughter nonbelieving thinkers.

You say you’ve pondered the mysteries of the bible’s Judaic God to no avail? I lost faith about fifty years ago, after a family disaster, when our preacher explained: “God” was testing us. I was familiar with the bible and suspected a god that destroyed the world’s population with a flood, except for one family, was a stupid egomaniacal pathological killer; not benevolent and forgiving, which is appropriate for a biblical “God”. My skepticism was confirmed; religion is illogical, but I presumed there was a logical reason for the Pentateuch’s incongruity and perverse stories where “God” commands Israel’s army to destroy nations, but to save young virgins for the soldiers. A monstrous god that commands obeisant propitiation, but kills innocent foreign women children and infants, is now acclaimed by many of our world’s people as their creator and daily guide. They fear it; grovel on their knees reverently seeking the fatuous promise of eternal life. Reliance on the intangible “holy books” cries-out for rational explanations. For fifty years, I have searched history for clues. The bible and two extraordinary books by Jewish professors published earlier this century, connected-the-dots and provided clues to why an ancient king was motivated to compose a legendary epic; unequivocally resolving the incongruous equivocations of the biblical Pentateuch’s specious “Judaic God”-character: Yahweh.

Marvin A. Sweeny’s book: King Josiah of Judah, The Lost Messiah of Israel; plus Israel Finkelstein’s and Neil Asher Silberman’s: The Bible Unearthed; plus our education problems and Islamic terrorism; inspired and prompted this treatise. Many have postulated the bible’s origin. Amalgamated results from two centuries of explorations by archaeologists and epigraphists reveal that the bible’s “Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy” were extrapolated from Josiah’s politically inspired, tribal propaganda. Its leading character was portrayed as a hard-nosed, death-dealing tribal god that coerced Josiah’s subjects away from polytheism’s pagan gods; assuring their allegiance by killing apostates, blasphemers, etc. Josiah’s propaganda reveals the origins of the Hebrew bible’s Pentateuch and Judaic God. I am responding to the Abrahamic religions’ absurd dogma by comprehensibly and truthfully delineating their sordid bloody histories.

The universe’s infiniteness is incomprehensible, and is crucial to what 95 years taught me. The Hubble’s powerful telescope, above the atmosphere, enables today’s astronomers to view the awesome cosmos billions of light-years away. Without countervailing evidence, we nonbelievers realize that it was not created for the exclusive convenience of Adam & Eve, or for the progeny of Abraham Isaac & Jacob. Life taught: we are obliged to treat our Earth, with respectful affection; and I’m obliged to treat others honestly and respectfully; also that we are attracted to opposing poles; positively, by our humane desire for an undiscriminating inclusiveness, our curiosity, creative-initiative, and craving, for additional knowledge, or negatively, by foregoing inclusiveness and worldly knowledge; relying on the Pentateuch’s egomaniacal, intolerant, jealous, death-dealing god character, Yahweh.

 

Sunday school impressed “Jesus’s altruism” on me, but as an adult, I could not believe a genocidal tyrannical “Judaic God” commanded believers to kill nonbelievers, even if the victim is a family member.  Why was the “Judaic God” portrayed so iniquitously? I’m swimming upstream against hordes of believers who inherited their faith from ancient ancestors who were forced to believe in aristocracy’s wrathful god or die; and whose progeny taught children that “God” must be obeyed as He commands or they would die. Why do descendants worship spurious gods; why do Religion-Lites satiate them with righteous self-satisfaction; and why does Islam enforce Josiah’s ossified vengeful dogma’s totalitarianism? It’s because the “holy books” precepts are from Josiah’s tribal propaganda, his fabulous biblical saga. Christianity and Islamism were extrapolated from the Hebrew bible’s Holy Scriptures, whose origin was deduced by correlating a few biblical clues with other information. Bible scholars confirm that the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy were composed during the reign of Judah’s King Josiah, and that after his death, his scholars revised them in Babylonian exile; adding Joshua, Judges, 1&2Samuel and 1&2Kings. Josiah’s self-aggrandizing propaganda proclaims himself Yahweh’s ideal, most righteous king; deceitfully denigrating earlier Israeli and Judahite kings. This is the bible story I have long wanted to tell.

 Once upon a time, a long time ago, in the year 648 BCE, Prince Josiah was born in small restive Judah. His father’s assassination left 8 year old Josiah to rule the kingdom for 31 years, but inadvertently he created the Hebrew Bible’s Holy Scriptures. Josiah did not intend to author a bible, but to survive polytheism’s divisiveness, and to impress the Israelites with their tribe’s epical uniqueness, his team of political and religious leaders fabricated a tract of royal tribal propaganda; the fabulous legend of his tribe’s mythical ancestors and a tribal god. Misunderstandings, resulting from worshiping polytheism’s divisive gods had destroyed several Judahite kings. To fully appreciate young King Josiah’s political precariousness, we must explore humankind’s historical beginning and our primitive god-ideas.

However, if you are interested in the Earth’s beginning, see Wikipedia’s History of the Earth, “describing the most important events and fundamental stages in the development of Planet Earth from its formation to the present day”, including Human Evolution and Civilization.  “Earth formed around 4.54 billion years ago, and is about one-third the age of the universe”.

 

OUR BEGINNING

1.      As life’s decisions are influenced by the consequences of our earlier experiences, I’ll begin this saga at the primordial spark of life, 3.5 billion years ago; in the shallows of some African lake with single cell organisms, which through eons of time, multiplied, mutated, and developed through innumerable biological stages via natural selection, when only the fittest survive to repeat the reproductive process, known as evolution. Thence, we reached the developmental stage of genus Homo or primate, and after evolving the ability to stand erect and walk on two legs, we became what we now know to have been species Homo erectus. During the Pleistocene geological age, when continental ice sheets were spreading and receding, our brains evolved into the sagacious, discerning species, Homo sapiens.

2.     Mystical gods were vital features of primitive humanity. It’s obvious that Homo erectus wasn’t interested in self-delusion. Indulgence with gods awaited arrival of Homo sapiens’ exuberant curiosity before we questioned the how or why of our existence. “You are probably aware that our first fearsome gods were the terrifying unpredictable forces of nature”. Natural phenomena, our slowly evolving intellects, and imaginations, prompted us to ponder god-ideas, i.e., the use of occult powers to politically organize and manipulate the ignorant disoriented members of our tribal community.

 3.     Female’s wellspring was venerated as “Nature’s life-giving, energizing power”. Our Mother-Earth provided our sustenance. Our long evolutionary development sensitized us to our environment. Our “Earth’s mother was the Sun, which arose each morning, as we did, and traveled across the sky”, keeping watch over her plant and animal life; nourishing us with warmth and rain. We eventually realized the Sun’s magnificent influence as the moving force that constituted the god-idea. “The productive power in all plants and animals emanated from Sun, which we worshipped as nature’s great energizer. The god of light and creation”, able to manipulate us with unanticipated rewards of goodness or punish us with nature’s fearsome outbursts. This is the source of our god-idea, where we first assigned occult powers to the sun and poisoned our minds with its mythologies. To please the seemingly fanciful churlish whims of our sun-god, we performed rituals and sacrificed our children to appease or appeal to Sun. We celebrated Sun’s summer and winter solstices and its spring and autumn equinoxes.  Sun could not be ignored. It appears that early names of the gods were compounded or derived from words that originally meant the sun. We primitive ignorant males venerated fire and serpents with no consideration for the lives of rival tribes. The Lotus and Fichus Religiosa or banyan trees were religiously significant. Trees were designated as either female or male, but most gods were thought to be androgynous.

 4.     We men worshiped women as our Sun’s dearest creation, part of Sun’s vital system; our source of new lives; we considered them androgynous; their regenerative powers requiring only the Sun’s consent. Females were the political-social leaders of communal groups. A mothers’ eminence was proportional to the new lives she had brought forth and to their wellbeing, and the Sun-god was accountable for each child’s welfare.

5.     Matriarchal arrangements fulfilled us males; convinced that female leadership served our best interests, we never felt the pangs of unsatisfied sexual desire and the Sun-god received credit for women’s ability to create new lives. If our community needed new sons, we appealed to the Sun-god. We were not part of the female families, but as our community’s guardian-hunters, we lived separately and at puberty, boys were sent to live with us.  Matriarchal communities tolerated and accommodated us males without jealousy. Women dominated, but welcomed men; their maternal instincts blossomed throughout that golden era, and communal life thrived, under their velvet yoke, but was destined to implode when nature’s secret was revealed. We assumed the Sun-god was punishing women, who failed to regularly bring forth a new life, so the disclosure was slow to materialize, but eventually we males realized the significant consequences of coition to our low social position in our community; we lost our old equiponderance and saw women through a new lens. Without our male complicity, women were unable to create new lives, and we stupidly repudiated their divinity. Ignorance poisoned our perspective, our disposition, our attitude and our opportunities for convivial fornication.

6.     We men were no longer the compliant gender; we were gods and we demanded women worship us. The yoni was no longer our sacred religious symbol; we men worshipped our own genitals; our favorite symbol was the phallus. Today’s places of worship feature towers, spires and minarets. The Washington Monument is another phallic example, as well as New York City’s twin erections, the World Trade Center towers, that were destroyed recently by Islamic extremists. Significantly, today’s world’s newest, tallest towers, i.e., symbolic phallic erections, are in two Islamic countries; these are an addition to their religion’s ubiquitous minarets.

7.     Male testes have been man’s only god, since the end of primitive matriarchy. “After male reproductive power had become God, and when, through superstition and sensuality, the masses of the people had descended to the rank of slaves, monarchs, representing themselves to their ignorant subjects as the source of all blessings, even of life itself, appropriated the titles of the sun, and claimed for themselves the adoration which had formerly belonged to it”.

8.     After our awakening, gender roles of gods were reversed, depravity ruled; decency was the first casualty of our dominance. Male vanity, ego, pride, jealousy, greed and our stupidity, limited our scope of influence. As we could no longer depend upon the cooperation of women, and fellowmen were challenging competitors who formed contentious cliques vying for tribal leadership; we fought as we collected women for sexual service.

 9.     Astute conniving jungle men conceived of voodooist’s sorcery, with gods, fetishes, and sacrificial rituals; a religious scam to outwit their tribe. All gods were male with male prerogatives. We fought and divided into competitive sects. Male homosexual priests prostituted women to fund their sect; formed under the guise of celibacy. Professionals perpetuated this perfidious scam during polytheism’s history as we followed receding ice sheets into North Africa and established Egyptian dynasties; then to East Asia, and Mesopotamia’s Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian Empires, where monarchs appropriated the con-game, and proclaimed gods; building altars within their lands to facilitate sacrificial slaughtering, and the prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods collected their portions of the meat; perpetuating the scam. Then to ancient Greece, and to Rome, which forced Christianity onto Europe’s pagan inhabitants.

10.     Our male obsession with righteous self-importance subdued women. Their progeny belonged to us males. Primitive professional priests enforced dynastic monarch’s commands by sanctifying the murder of the discerning astute contemptuous infidels. Judah’s King Josiah salvaged his Judahites from polytheism’s divisive gods by decreeing a tribal god. Josiah’s saga is the source of the original Abrahamic faith’s Judaism. You’ll enjoy the story about a young man who inherited Judah and created eleven of the bible’s first twelve books. I don’t know who wrote the bible’s book of Ruth.

All quotations and much information were gleaned from Eliza Burt Gamble’s: God Ideas of the Ancients.

SOURCE of the SEMITES

Vatican’s Dionysius Exiguus, in the 6^th century invented the Anno Domini era, which is used to number the years of both the Gregorian and the Julian calendar. Today’s bible scholars prefer the designation CE (Common Era), and BCE (Before Common Era).

I love the following story; although skeptical, I have not attempted to disprove it.

Dr. Lipovisky’s www.biblicaltheology.com/Research/Lipoviskyl01.pdf

 says that about 8,000 years ago the Black and Azov Seas didn’t exist; that at that time the area was a huge basin of below sea-level-land where the Danube, Dniester, Bug, Dnieper, Don, Kuban and Kizil-Irmak Rivers fed a small freshwater lake, and that the plentiful fresh water, mild climate and flat lands of the basin supported a population of Indo-European agrarians; and that 6^th-4^th millennia BCE seismic movements in the Bosporus allowed the Mediterranean Sea to begin filling the basin with sea water; forcing the populations’ gradual migration outward. He says available histories of the Indo-Europeans’ movements, show that the Celts and Germans occupied the northwestern borders of the great empty basin, the Balts and Slavs occupied the northern borders, the ancestors of the Cimmerians, Sarmatians and Scythians occupied the northeast, the Indo-Iranian tribes, the southeast, the ancestors of the Italians and Greeks lived in the northern portion of the Balkan Peninsula; also that the Hittites, Luwains, Palaics and all those whom we classify with the Anatolian group of Indo-European languages, occupied the southern most regions of the great empty basin, and were forced to move out to northern Asia Minor or Anatolia. Subsequently, the Celts, and then, the Germans gradually occupied northwestern Europe, while the Slavs and Balts spread into northern and eastern Europe, already occupied by the Finno-Urgric peoples. The Indo-Iranian languages speakers invaded the territory of Iran, Central Asia and northern India.

Dr. Lipovisky says the prolonged archaeological excavations in Palestine unearthed proof that the Canaanites were a Western Semitic people, who also came from the north in the 4^th-3^rd millennia BCE, and at the end of the 3^rd millennium BCE, large groups of Western Semitic peoples, specifically the Amorites, began settling in mass in Mesopotamia, Syria and Canaan, and took control over a majority of the cities, forming their own Amorite countries, for example Babylon—during the reign of the infamous ruler Hammurapi in the 18^th century BCE.

He says northwestern Mesopotamia was the fatherland of Semitic peoples, and that this significant area, in terms of territory is portioned off from the remaining portion of Anatolia by the imposing mountain range Taurus from the north and the east, and from the west by the mountain chain Nur; a three-sided shelter that beneficently effected the people’s lives during their early period.

He says the Indo-Aryans mingled with and displaced the Hurrians of Eastern Anatolia. Ayrianized Hurrians first displaced the Eastern Semites (Akkadians) from the upper courses of the Tigris River, and then at the end of the 3^rd millennium BCE, occupied the land of Western Semites (Amorites) in the upper courses of the Euphrates River. The last wave of Western Semites in the 12^th-11^th centuries BCE was also caused by the movements of Hurrians and Indo-Europeans into northwestern Mesopotamia.

He says “the Indo-Europeans’ movement to the south and east resulted in the displacement of the Semites from their original homeland in the northwest of Mesopotamia”, and that an analogous situation happened to the Hurrians in eastern Anatolia; highly oppressed by the Indo-Europeans in that region, they were forced to move south and settle in northern Mesopotamia and Syria in the12^th-11^th centuries BCE; also that Akkad was the first Semitic country founded in central Mesopotamia by Eastern Semites, who subsequently subordinated Sumer, their southern neighbor.

He says the ancient Near East represented a world dominated by Semitic peoples. Akkad and Assyria, Babylon and Phoenicia, Israel and the Syrian kingdoms were all offspring’s of active Semites, and Sumer, the world’s oldest country had been fully assimilated with the Semites, and had, since ancient times, become an integral part of their world. Dr. Lipovisky says that Egypt had long resisted the supremacy of the Semitic peoples, but had adopted their language and culture, and that the Indo-Europeans appeared later; their first countries, including the Hittite Empire remained on the periphery within the northern and eastern boundaries of the Near East.

Dr. Lipovisky says that this model of the Indo-European’s expansion in all directions from the Black Sea finds circumstantial evidence in the ancient historians’ sources, covering the life of the Germanic tribes of Ostrogoths in the Crimea in the early centuries of the Common Era. These sources also deal with the eastern Slavic people, the Drevlians, as a neighbor of the “lost” German tribe in the territory of today’s Ukraine, as well as with the sojourn of the Baltic Lats in the upper Volga region.

MESOPOTAMIA

The following information was gleaned from Wikipedia.

1.     “Land of Rivers” is a toponym for the Tigris-Euphrates River system, largely corresponding to modern day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey, and southwestern Iran; widely considered to be the cradle of civilization. Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and the Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian Empires. The indigenous Sumerians and Akkadians (including Assyrians and Babylonians) dominated Mesopotamia from the beginning of written history.

2.    Prehistoric “Urbaidians” evolved from the Samarra culture of northern Mesopotamia, and the cities of Sumer in southern Mesopotamia were the world’s first civilizing force; draining marshes for agriculture, developing trade, and establishing industries such as weaving, masonry, and pottery. In the 5000s BCE, they were the first civilization to practice intensive, year-round agriculture, using large-scale mono-cropping, organized irrigation, and a specialized labor force; an economy allowing the population to settle, and store surplus food; accommodating a denser population; providing a divided labor force, instead of migrating; searching for better grazing lands.

3.     By the late 4^th millennium BCE, Sumer was divided into about a dozen independent city-states, which were divided by canals and boundary stones. Each was centered on a temple dedicated to the particular patron god or goddess of the city and ruled over by a priestly governor or by a king who was ultimately tied to the city’s religious rites. Sumerians were probably the first to record their beliefs, which became the inspiration for much of later Mesopotamian mythology, religion, and astrology. Citizens’ owed labor-duty to the temple, which organized the mass labor projects needed for irrigated agriculture. Wealthy citizens could avoid laboring by payments in silver. Sumner’s temple-centered farming communities’ social stability enabled them to survive for around four thousand years.

4.     Sumer’s historical records date to the 2600s BCE, historians theorize they date to Egypt’s first Dynasty, about 3000 BCE; remaining obscure until the Sumerian civilization was conquered by the Semitic-speaking kings of the Akkadian Empire around 2270 BCE, who deciphered a syllabary writing system; producing our oldest written history. The dynastic period began about 2900 BCE and includes such legendary figures as Enmerkar and Gilgamesh—who are supposed to have reigned shortly before the historic record opens. As the Epic of Gilgamesh shows, it was a violent period. Cities increased in size and became walled, others disappeared.

5.     Sumerians developed a complex system of metrology; resulting in the creation of arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. The earliest Babylonian numerals date from 2700-2300 BCE, when the abacus first appeared and they wrote multiplication tables on moist clay tablets, dealing with geometrical exercises and division problems; also a table of successive columns which delimited the successive orders of magnitude of their sexagesimal number system. The Sumerians were the first to use a place value numeral system.

6.     Classical Sumer ended with the rise of the Akkadian Empire in the 23^rd century BCE. Following the Gutian period, there is a “Sumerian renaissance in the 21^st century BCE, cut short in the 20^th century by Semitic Amorite (Babylonian) invasions. The city of Babylon claimed to be the successor of ancient Eridu; attaining independence with the rise in the First Amorite Babylonian Dynasty in 1894 BCE. Babylon eclipsed Nippur as the holy city of Mesopotamia around the time Amorite king, Hummurabi first created the short lived Babylonian Empire, which quickly dissolved upon his death and Babylon spent long periods under Assyrian, Kassite and Elamite domination. Babylon again became the seat of the Neo-Babylonian Empire from 612-539 BCE when it was conquered by the Achaemenid Empire. It fell to Alexander the Great in 332 BCE and, after his death; it became part of the Greek Seleucid Empire. Around 150 BCE, Mesopotamia was under the control of the Parthians. Mesopotamia became a battle ground between the Romans and Parthians, with parts of Mesopotamia (particularly Assyria) coming under periodic Roman control. It fell to Sassanid Persians in 226 CE, and remained under Persian Rule until the 7^th century Arab Islamic conquest of the Sassanid Empire. All information was gleaned from Wikipedia.

7.     Ancient Mesopotamia is a historical example of how political leaders used a belief in mystical gods to persuade their ignorant subjects to martyr themselves in order to enhance their leader’s career. Man’s divisiveness is directly proportional to the number of gods involved. It is why King Josiah of Judah presciently proclaimed his own exclusive monotheistic tribal god. You will fully comprehend and enjoy how a very young king resolved his kingdom’s polytheism problems which he postulated had destroyed the nation of Israel and contributed to his father’s assassination. Inadvertently, his solution became eleven of the bible’s first twelve books. The story is my next chapter: JUDAISM.

 

JUDAISM

1.    Egypt’s first dynasty (3000 BCE), on the Nile river and Mesopotamia’s Babylon (2100 BCE), in the Tigris-Euphrates river area, worshipped gods, and prepared for an after-life. “Mesopotamia invented writing; theirs is the oldest written history. Their Enuma Elish, a Creation Myth, includes a story of the tower of Babel and legendry Babylonian King Giglamesh’s Epic flood was adopted from Sumerian mythology about 2000 BCE”; later copied in Genesis. Egypt and Babylon vied for the lands between them. Egypt’s forts protected the northern Sinai’s coastal road, leading to its military garrisoned Canaan area. By the 10^th century BCE, roaming Mesopotamian Semitic nomads had settled in the delta of the Nile, and in Canaan  near the Mediterranean Sea’s southeastern end; forming two small kingdoms; Israel in the northern agrarian area and Judah in the southern semi-desert region. Assyria was amalgamating its future, empire; to be centered in the Tigris River’s upper valley, which eventually extended from the head of the Persian Gulf to Egypt and Asia Minor. With only folktales, but without a written history, young King Josiah fabricated an epical legendry fable, discombobulating their contentious polytheistic pagan world.

 2.     My story begins in 734 BCE, when Tiglathpileser 3, king of Assyria, (745-727 BCE), marched against King Pekah of Israel and King Rezin of Syria, (2Kings 15:29 &16:7-9); they made war against his vassal, King Ahaz of Judah. He punished Israel; carrying some of its people into exile, (2Kings 17:1-6). Israel was destroyed and taken in 722 BCE after a three year siege by Shalmaneser 4, king of Assyria (727-722 BCE) who enslaved Israel’s more skillful people, moved them to Assyrian territories, replacing them with deportees. Political leaders, scholars, scribes, priests and many others eluded capture, making their way south to Jerusalem in Judah where King Hezekiah reigned over his war-weary nomadic shepherds. He died in 698 B.C.E; his 12 year old son, Manasseh, became king; reigned for 55 years. His son, Amon, became king at age 22, but when 24 was assassinated in a coup d’état, (2Kings 20-23); and 8 year old son, Josiah, inherited the restive little kingdom in 639 BCE. He was scared. As an astute eager young man, feeling his virility, he attributed his father’s death to the worship of polytheism’s divisive gods. Fearing for his life, he sought sanctification for his reign, and at age 26 renovated the temple, where a Torah scroll of tribal laws was found. In the intervening years, since Israel’s loss, the migrants had sought duties commensurate with their expertise; bible scholars assume Josiah’s political team composed and planted the scroll to promote his ideas for a tribal god. The discovery initiated Josiah’s reform program. He corrected the “cultic transgressions of his predecessors”, removed all pagan worship sites, and prohibited polytheism, plus the “sacrificing of small children on religious alters”, and dreamed of an influential Judahite nation’s exclusive god and culture. Josiah’s political team initiated his aspirations; coalescing, invigorating, motivating and inspiring his people with tribal uniqueness; fabricating an inspirational conspiratorial tribal fable; a tract of “political and religious tribal propaganda, as they imagined a retrospective of their history should have been”. How King Josiah’s alter ego, mystical Yahweh, created the world and its first inhabitants, Adam & Eve, in the Garden of Eden, plus the sagas of sons Cain & Able and Noah & the flood (ideas from Mesopotamian mythology) Yahweh chose Abraham to father a nation, through his son Isaac, whose son Jacob’s twelve sons fathered the twelve tribes of Israel. While seeking succor from famine in Egypt, they multiplied, and were enslaved by the Pharaoh. It told of Moses’ birth and that Yahweh promised them a land of their own, overcame the mighty Pharaoh, helped them escape, provided tribal laws and for forty years guided their search, throughout Sinai for the Promised Land. Moses did not survive the long drawn-out search, but genocidal Yahweh intervened and Joshua destroyed Canaanite cities; killing everyone including innocent mothers and children, allowing David and Solomon to base empires in Jerusalem.  The fable tells that when Solomon died, Yahweh divided the tribes; ten selected Jeroboam’s leadership and developed the nation of Israel. The two remaining tribes went with Reroboam’s Judah, (1Kings 11-12). Josiah composed his fabulous tale especially to reassure his Judahites of Yahweh’s relationship to all Israeli tribes. However, the deceitful fable failed to relate the realistic history of the two highly esteemed, very significant little kingdoms.

3.     Josiah’s self-aggrandizing fable portrays Yahweh naming Josiah the righteous ideal king, Israelites his chosen people, and Jerusalem’s Temple the only legitimate place of worship. His fable also included Yahweh’s code of laws, (Deuteronomy); covering all aspects of tribal life, with death threats for anyone who dared defy them; promising that King David’s progeny would rule Judah forever.

4.     Egypt’s dynastic empires left a history carved in stone. Epigraphists have found no record of the Israelite’s Egyptian bondage, extensive search, or of Solomon’s vast empire except in Josiah’s propaganda; his legendary epical theological fable, falsely claiming Judah’s dominance over Israel and events they imagined had happened a millennium earlier; its main themes were the Judahites righteous fidelity to Yahweh, the god’s disallowance of all other gods and prohibiting Israelites marrying  foreign women. His fabulous saga included deceitful ancient prophesies of recent genealogical and political events; not miraculous revelations; but simply aggregations of mythological adventures which reinforced Josiah’s tribal propaganda. Its success was two-fold; mystical Yahweh sanctified Josiah’s reign; and was partial to its chosen Israelites, but decreed that foreigners, apostates, blasphemers, nonbelievers, and the proponents of other gods were to be hated, avenged and killed; assuring the compliant allegiance of Josiah’s subjects, who treasured his fable as their tribe’s legendary epic.

5.     Josiah was 39 (609 BCE) when Pharaoh-Necho’s army killed him at Megiddo (2Kings 23:29), and Egypt reclaimed Judah. Necho, (2Kings 23-24); consecutively appointed Josiah’s sons; Jehoahaz age 23; Eliakim age25, known as Jehoiakim, then his son Jehoiachin age 18; followed by third son, Zedekiah age 21, as Kings of Judah. Crown prince Nebuchadnezzar, of Babylon, (Daniel 1:1-7); advanced to Jerusalem in 608, spared rebellious King Jehoiakim, but carried off several princes. Nebuchadnezzar was King of Babylon (608-562 BCE; 2Kings 24:1-16), conquered Jerusalem again. King Zedekiah (2Kings 24:18- 20 and 25:1-30) pledged allegiance to the Babylonian king, (Jeremiah 39:1-10); but proved disloyal. Nebuchadnezzar besieged Jerusalem for nineteen months, ending in 586 BCE, executed its community leaders, burned the city and exiled survivors, who revised and redacted  their legendary epic while in Babylon; bible scholars call them Deuteronomistic Histories; DtrH1, the Josianic edition and DtrH2, the exilic edition, which includes their tribe’s subsequent history plus the convoluted solutions to Yahweh’s promises, in the Josianic edition to David and Josiah, which could no longer be fulfilled. Bible scholars have studied the revisions for centuries. The Josianic edition was in Hebrew, but all corrections and additions were in the Aramaic lingua franca.

  6.     Forty eight years after Jerusalem’s  fall, Cyrus, Persia’s king, destroyed the Babylonian Empire in 538 BCE and issued a decree permitting Jews to return to Judah  (Ezra 1-10 & Nehemiah 1-2). They returned under aegis of Artaxerxes 1, king of Persia (464-424 BCE). Furnished with royal power, Ezra, in 458 BCE and Nehemiah in 445 BCE brought back exiles, rebuilt the wall, reestablished a Jewish community and in 444BCE, with the exilic edition of King Josiah’s tribal propaganda for their Holy Scriptures, established new monotheistic Judaism. Monotheism’s doctrine: “there is one God who rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked; everyone must worship God as He commands or die”. Monotheism’s Holy Scriptures were: “Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. These narrate the story of the people of Israel from the creation of the world, through the period of the flood and the patriarchs, to the Exodus from Egypt, the wanderings in the desert, the giving of the law at Sinai”.& “The Former Prophets—Joshua, Judges, 1&2 Samuel and 1&2 Kings—tell the story of the people of Israel from their crossing of the river Jordan, conquest of Canaan, through the rise and fall of the Israelite kingdoms, to their defeat and exile by Assyrians and Babylonians”. Holy Scriptures became the Hebrew bible’s first books; followed by: “Writings, a collection of homilies, poems, prayers, proverbs and Psalms, apparently from the fifth to the second century BCE—in the Persian and Hellenistic periods”.

7.     “The Persian Period (400-330 BCE);-----For about 150 years after Nehemiah’s time, the Persians controlled Judea; ruled by high priests who were responsible to the Jewish government, but the Jews were allowed to carry on their religious observances without interference”. Persia’s god Mithras dated to 1500 BCE, but in the 6^th century BCE, the Persian mystic Zarathustra subordinated the story of Mithras to a grand struggle between a god and a devil that supposedly culminates in judgment day. Mithras was worshiped across Asia from the Indus River to the Black Sea.

8.     “The Greek Period (330-166 BCE); -----In 333 BCE the Persian armies stationed in Macedonia were defeated by Alexander the Great. He was convinced that Greek culture was the one force that could unify the world. Alexander permitted the Jews to observe their laws and even granted them exemption from tribute or tax during their sabbatical years. When he built Alexander in Egypt, he encouraged Jews to live there and gave them some of the same privileges he gave his Greek subjects”. This led to the Holy Scriptures translation into Greek (Septuagint), revealing to the Hellenistic world that Jew’s God disavowed marriages to foreigners, and preferred to kill them.

9.     “The Hasmonean Period (166-63 BCE); -----When this historical period began, the Jews were being greatly oppressed. The Polemics had been tolerant of the Jews and their religious practices, but the Seleucid rulers were determined to force Hellenism on them. Copies of the Scriptures were ordered destroyed and laws were enforced with extreme cruelty. Led by Judas the Maccabee, the Syrians were defeated in a series of battles, which secured the independence of the province of Judea and were the foundation of the Hasmonean dynasty. This time period was filled with numerous political struggles, posing many problems to the religiously-oriented Jews”.

10.     “The Roman Period (63 BCE-CE 135); -----In year 63 BCE, Pompey, the Roman general, captured Jerusalem, and the provinces of Palestine became subject to Rome”. Martin Goodman’s book; Rome and Jerusalem, describes in great detail how the Roman troops attacked a Jerusalem market in 66 CE, killing 3,600 including children and infants, beginning a cycle of increasing violence and rebellious Jewish mobs retaliating. “In the first months of the ensuing conflict in Jerusalem the Romans themselves were not directly involved. Factional strife within the Jewish population led to heavy loss of life”. For years the Jews harassed and killed Roman troops, which quietly withdrew, but the rebels cornered and devastated retreating troops; humiliating the empire, and delaying their attack until 70 CE, when a massive Roman army arrived outside Jerusalem’s walls and began a five month siege, starving and murdering rebellious inhabitants, then burned and leveled the entire city to the ground. “Rome continued its war against Judaism by refusing to allow Jews the freedom permitted to all ordinary subjects of the emperor, to rebuild their destroyed sanctuary”.  The resulting Jewish diaspora’s resentment disrupted surrounding regions with deadly attacks, impelling Roman over-reaction. “Jews in the Roman empire hated Roman rule”. The emperor Hadrian ruled (117-138). Early in his reign he visited Judaea. “The Judaea that Hadrian had in mind was not to be Jewish. ‘At Jerusalem, he founded a city in place of the one which had been razed to the ground, naming it Aelia Capitolina, and on the site of the temple of the god he raised anew temple to Jupiter’.—Hadrian’s reformed province was to have at its heart, not a rebuilt Jewish Temple but a Roman colony, named ‘Aelia’ in recognition of his own family and himself and ‘Cappitolina’ in honor of Jupitor Capitolinus, whose cult was to be of central importance in the new city—war broke out because ‘the Jews deemed it intolerable that foreign races should be settled in their city and foreign religious rites planted there’. Aelia Capitolina was not to be refounded as a Greek city in which Jews might settle and be ‘civilized’, but as a Roman colony, inhabited by gentiles, from which Jews were to be excluded.—By planting a Roman Colony on the site where the Jewish Temple had once stood, he [Hadrian] made it crystal clear that the Temple was not to be rebuilt. Leaving the site of Jerusalem empty for sixty years had proven an invitation to the Jews to agitate for a return to their former glories”. While Hadrian was visiting his distant provinces in year 132, the Jews revolted and occupied their strengthened rural positions, underground refuges, etc. Hadrian’s best generals intercepted small groups; starved, exhausted and exterminated them. “In the event these Jewish fighters were to maintain their independence for some three and a half years, inflicting heavy losses on the Roman force sent to suppress them, until in 135 they were finally overwhelmed.—‘very few of the Jews in fact survived. Fifty of their most important outposts and nine hundred and eighty-five of their most famous villages were razed to the ground. Five hundred and eighty thousand men were slain in the various raids and battles, and the number of those that perished by famine, disease and fire was past finding out. Thus nearly the whole of Judaea was made desolate—many Romans, moreover perished in this war.’—After seventy years of tension and conflict, Jews could never again realistically hope to live in the Roman empire with the same freedom as other minorities to practice their ancestral customs and worship their God in their own land”.---- “When Augustus, the first Roman emperor (27 BCE-14 CE), died it was his divinity that was celebrated—the imperial cult, the worship of emperors dead and alive, rapidly became one of the most powerful forces toward the unification of the Roman world—some of the temples and altars dedicated to this worship were set up on local initiative, and can be seen as a means for provincials to make religious sense of the irruption of Roman power into the lives of their communities”. The city, Aelia Capitolina, flourished as the home of Rome’s legions. There had been no Jewish state for 175 years, when in 306 CE emperor Constantine ascended to power and converted to Christianity in year 325. In year 361 emperor Julian ordered reconstruction of the Temple, but it was soon stopped.

11.     Hebrew bible was translated into Greek Septuagint, about 250 BCE; 600 years later, Saint Jerome, (340?-420 CE), translated much of Septuagint into Latin; then translated the Hebrew bible into Latin Vulgate and adopted it as the first part of Christianity’s canon. Known as the Douay Bible; its verses incriminating Yahweh were excused or removed.

12.     Martin Luther, (1483-1546), translated the New Testament into German. More than 1100 years after Saint Jerome’s translation, Luther, with collaborators tailored their translation of the Old Testament to his doctrine, which influenced William Tyndale’s English bible, a precursor of the King James 1 Version for Protestants, published in 1611 CE as the Authorized Version. In late nineteenth century, it was redacted, revised; and known as the Revised Version. In 1901 the KJV was revised again and called the American Standard Version. In the mid twentieth century, it was revised and renamed the Revised Standard Version. Recently revised again, it is now called: Today’s New International Version; TNIV.

13.     The Hebrew bible, purports to represent historical events for two thousand years, from the twentieth century BCE, until its completion by edict of the Rabbinical Council of Jamnia, 90 CE. Deuteronomistic History concocted by King Josiah was a deceitful ruse to convince his people that Yahweh, had guided their ancient ancestors and would protect them as long as they obeisantly worshipped Yahweh and Josiah, the specious god’s Earthly emissary. His people needed to believe that their ancestors were epically heroic, and that Josiah’s kingdom was assured a great future with its exclusive tribal god, who later in the bible vicariously enjoys destroying his enemies, e.g., commanding the Israelite army to kill them all, including children, but to save young virgins for their own pleasure. It was classic BS. King Josiah’s tribal propaganda’s tyrannical Yahweh is the Judaic “God”, which precludes the bible being the “word of God”. We know how the Jews fared with fraudulent Yahweh during their consequential history of Christian, inquisitions, persecutions, executions, and midtwentyth century’s Holocaust.; when some six million Jewish mothers, fathers, children, etc. were maliciously murdered with the Vatican’s active complicity. (See CHRISTIAN ANTI-JUDAISM).

 14.     Ezra and Nehemiah adopted Josiah’s tribal propaganda for Judaism’s Holy Scriptures; proclaiming an exclusive god, ethnological superiority to rival kingdoms, and that Yahweh’s commands to kill nonbelievers assured their tribe’s future, but Yahweh’s egomaniacal stupidity and malevolent lust for the blood of foreigners has been a feverish boil on Israel’s bottom. Killing all nonbelievers assured Judaism a successful first millennium; an egregious error that rid Jewish culture of its sagacious discerning citizens; leaving the ignorant to propagate believers, which explains our plethora of believers and dearth of thinkers. Josiah’s tribal god, Yahweh was adopted by other political leaders because it sanctified killing nonbelievers, etc. Abetted by prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods, progeny adopted specious beliefs; propagating more ignorant believers. Belief in a god is an aberration requiring blind faith. Everything is possible, but blind faith by billions has caused innumerable conflicts that contentiously divide us. Another fact: men determined sacredness, composed fables, legends, songs and dance; establishing the eminence of spurious gods. We are a restless people; a few seek knowledge; others remain devoid of knowledge, goals or beliefs; while the majority grovel on their knees, clinging to the  Big-Lie of devils in a nether world, and righteous gods up in the sky.

15.    The bible’s first five books divulge Josiah’s “theological hopes”, i.e., his imagination’s fabulous tribal god’s creation of the world. The adventurous tales of Yahweh with the patriarchs depicts Josiah’s grandiose visions. He composed a tribal code threatening death for all who dared investigate or criticize his monotheistic god-idea; attributing the code to Yahweh; intending the god’s death threats, and his own compliant killing, to convince his subjects of his divinity. He aspired to be divine, and portrayed himself as “God’s” ideal, most righteous king and administrator of the god’s laws; which convinced his followers of his spurious divinity. Josiah rid his kingdom of nonbelievers, and his fable served as Judah’s legendary epic for two centuries before Jews  adopted it for their Holy Scriptures, whose origin was not a miraculous revelation, but a youthful king’s insurance to protect himself from polytheism’s divisiveness. He was astute and prescient; and Yahweh was an effective vengeful propagandist, but an ignorant, disruptive, vindictive, rapacious failure, as “God”; concocted by Josiah’s sanctimonious, ambitious, ignorant, vindictive, rapacious scholars. Supernatural was not responsible for our Moral Code; and the “holy books” are not axiomatic, but are simply divisive intimidating deceitful propaganda; copied from more ancient fabrications from Egypt and Mesopotamia.

16.     King Josiah’s concept of the genesis of humanity, i.e., Creationism: is the doctrine that “ascribes the origin of matter, species, etc. to acts of creation by God”; it’s also the doctrine “that God creates a new soul for every human being born”: opposed to Traducianism, defined as “the theological doctrine that the soul is inherited from the parents”. Antinomianism: is a Christian theological doctrine decreeing: “faith alone, not obedience to the moral law, is necessary for salvation”. It is clear that this allowed clergy and believers to lie, steal, etc. as well as kill nonbelievers, with divine impunity. Man’s concocted specious godly doctrines are deemed indisputable; but are obviously designed to present religion’s ordure in a palatable manner.

17.     Josiah did not seek to mislead posterity, but to coerce his people away from polytheism’s many gods by proclaiming his alter ego as their exclusive tribal god, for their psychological advantage; to unite, inspire and invigorate them; it also protected his personal security. Should Josiah be held accountable for the despoliation and desecration caused by a belief in the malevolent god of his pernicious ruse? Josiah was not composing the Holy Scriptures, but unholy propaganda he deemed necessary to manage his Judahite kingdom. King Josiah‘s deceitful ruse, the bible’s early books, is the basis of Judaism’s, Christianity’s and Islam’s subjugated multitudes that have been forced to obey specific specious gods and murder all naysayers.

18.    Yahweh’s exclusivity is stupid, and is opposed to the heterogeneity necessary to sustain our existence on Earth. Doubts about King Josiah’s biblical fable persist. For the past 200 years, epigraphists, archaeologists, scholars, and others searched biblical regions and found a history much simpler than the bible’s; which is the only reference found of the Patriarchs, the Exodus, the Conquest of Canaan, and the empires of David and Solomon.  

“Hebrews were originally Canaanites who worshipped Israelite’s angry jealous God”. And “The Jewish sects: Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes flourished in Jerusalem from the 2^nd century BCE to the 1^st century CE”.

19.   The most egregious consequences of King Josiah’s self-aggrandizing pernicious ruse: is religion’s deceptive perpetration and perpetuation of it upon an ignorant gullible humanity for the past twenty six centuries. Why did the Israelites and progeny believe Josiah’s tribal propaganda was Holy Scripture? What resulted, and why, after their ignominious history, is it considered sacred? It’s because semi-developed intellects follow paths of least resistance to resolve conundrums; and gods are simple solutions to unfathomable queries. Faith in specious gods does not require developed intellects, as ignorance, imagination, and emotion are sufficient; therefore: blind faith in mystical gods is inversely proportional to intelligence. To comprehend Yahweh’s adamant barbarity toward all Jewish opposition you must read the bible. “God’s” irrational criminality is a strange unbelievable behavior for peace-loving people to emulate, but Josiah’s fable, the Pentateuch has been believed by billions of the ignorant and gullible. Its obvious unreasonableness is blatantly mythical and untrue. It is impossible to understand how “God” can be perceived as good as the bible’s portrayal is not commendable. To know “God’s” true character, read the following bible verses: Genesis 7:20-23 and 19: 3-8/Exodus 12:29-30 and 17:14-16 and 21:7-8 and 22:24/Leviticus 24:16 and 25:44-46/Numbers 21:31-35 and 25: 3-9 and 31: 1-18 /Deuteronomy 6:10-12 and 7: 1-6 and 13:6-16 and 20:10-18 and 22:20-21 and 25:11-12 and 28:15-68 and 31:3-5/Joshua 6:20-21 and 7:24-25 and 8:1-8 and 10:12-14 and 11:12-15/ Judges 11:30-31 and 19:22-24/ 1^st Samuel; chapters 5 & 6 and 15:1-3/2^nd Samuel; chapters; 11 & 12/ 1^st King 14:10/1^st Chronicles 21:8-12/ Ezra 10:10-11/ Esther 2:2-4/ the book of Job/Isaiah 3:16-17 and 13:15-20/Jeremiah 3:1-3 and 7:29-34 and 19:9/Ezekiel 3:20 and 4:12-13 and 6:3-7 and 9:5-7/Psalm 109 and 137:8-9; (From KJV) these verses expose the Judaic-god’s true character. The original Holy Scriptures were tribal propaganda; fabricated because the assassination of Josiah’s father indicated a rift of tribal non-allegiance. Fear of rebellious subjects inspired Josiah’s famous biblical fable, but fictional god-Yahweh is impotent; unable to help his chosen people in their struggle to survive, to replenish, to sustain, and to promote their primitive Judaism’s regressive self-repressive beliefs.

20.     King Josiah’s deceitful fabrication of his tribe’s ancient history with Yahweh’s, commands for Jewish-purity, human sacrifices, circumcision, hateful revenge and death for all foreigners, apostates, blasphemers, nonbelievers and the proponents of other gods; as sacred principles, proved to be self-defeating; begrudged by neighboring kingdoms who resented Jew’s exclusive god, and their ambitious resourceful culture. In order to ameliorate their deteriorating situation in a contentious polytheistic pagan world, Jewish political leaders once again resorted to a fable, a sequel to: Yahweh’s creating the world. Their new fable’s recompensive gesture told of Jesus’ Immaculate Conception by a propitious Yahweh with a betrothed Jewish virgin in order to sire a sane sensible benevolent Jewish messiah. The fable adopted a 6^th century BCE Persian legend (500 years before Jesus) about the birth of god Mithras, who was born of a virgin at the winter’s solstice with a nativity scene of shepherds attracted by a holy light. Christianity’s ancient fable of the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, was adopted from Egyptian mythology’s black mother Isis and child deity Horus, the Sun god.

Mithraism was about a century older than Judaism and was 600 years old when Jews fabricated their Jesus fable in the 2^nd half of the 1^st century, and plagiarized Persian god Mithras’ biography for their new messiah, Jesus.

21.      Christianity is based on the Jesus-fable, but Christians blamed Jews for killing Jesus, further vilifying all Hebrew. Christians persecuted and killed Jews unmercifully during the Crusades, the Christian Inquisitions and the Holocaust because of misguided ignorant Christian hatred. (See CHRISTIAN ANTIJUDAISM); plus www.truthbeknown.com/victims.html        also see www.freewebs.com/thetruth/inguisition.html      Also see POST SCRIPTS and my next chapter: CHRISTIANITY, which relates the destiny of the Jew’s new Jesus-fable.

 Quotes & information were gleaned from: The Bible Unearthed, by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. Quote in paragraph 1 is from Wikipedia. Quotations in paragraphs 7; 8; 9 are from Zondervan’s KJV bible, and Paragraph 10 is from Martin Goodman’s: Rome and Jerusalem.  The Persian legend and the Egyptian mythology are from Wikipedia.

 

CHRISTIANITY

See JUDAISM’S paragraph’s 7 & 20. Jew’s Jesus-fable became Christianity’s first Gospel; others were careless copies. Bart D. Ehrman’s lectures: Lost Christianities, says in the 2^nd & 3^rd centuries CE, a mélange of books about the gospels were written and that copies of the gospels were hand-lettered; that each was subject to errors and omissions, often complying with the scribe’s views; that no originals exist; the earliest copies extant are from the Middle Ages, 476-1450, but no two are identical. Dr. Ehrman says many ancient books about the lives of Mary and Jesus are considered forgeries; that all books were anonymous, pseudonymous, or forgeries, as none were written by an apostle, including the 27 proposed in 367 CE by Athanasius (296?-373), the Bishop of Alexandria, for Christianity’s New Testament. 

Dr. Ehrman says at the Common Era’s beginning, virtually everyone was pagan; that ancient religions emphasized sacrifices and prayers, rather than beliefs; essentially polytheistic; the only exception being monotheistic Jews. Dr. Ehrman says “ancient religions had no beliefs to confirm, theologies to embrace, or creeds to recite. There was no such thing as heresy in religions. There were no ethics; ethics was a matter for philosophy, not religion”. Dr. Ehrman says Jewish Eboinites may have been the earliest Christians, who believed Jesus was the Jewish messiah, appointed by the Jewish God as the Jewish savior for the Jewish people in fulfillment of the Jewish law, and that to be “right with God” one had to be Jewish; consequentially, converting other Jews to their faith in Jesus. If Gentiles converted, they had to convert to Judaism also. Jesus disappointed Jews’ idea of a messiah, they expected the messiah to be great and powerful, but Eboinites thought Jesus was the perfect sacrifice for all sins, no more sacrifices were needed. “In the ancient world, most people ate meat only after it had been sacrificed in a religious ceremony; for this reason, the Eboinites became vegetarian”.

 Ehrman says Eboinites insisted on remaining Jewish and did not believe in Jesus’ virgin birth or his divinity, but was “fully human, born of the sexual union of Joseph and Mary, and adopted to be God’s son at baptism—that the Eboinites understanding of Jesus was probably correct. By the second century, most Christian converts were former pagans who converted to believe in one God after worshipping many gods, but who were not interested in becoming Jews. Starting with Apostle Paul, Christianity began appealing to Gentiles by urging that they did not have to become Jews [be circumcised] in order to accept the salvation brought by the Jewish God. Paul himself went further: A person is made right with God completely by faith in Christ’s death and resurrection alone, not by doing the works prescribed by the Jewish law”.  Ehrman says that Gentiles who wanted to be right with God and followed the law had fallen from grace; that after Jesus’ death, Eboinites claimed to follow Jesus’ brother, James, the head of Jerusalem’s church, who had their own sacred writings; supposedly derived from Jesus’ disciples.

Dr. Ehrman says that Jesus was a Jewish rabbi who accepted the authority of the Hebrew bibles Pentateuch. But the Marcionites insisted that Jewish law had no relation to Jesus or his God; “that Jesus was not actually born into this world or part of it. He was not a flesh and blood human but a phantasm”. Professor Ehrman says that two to three hundred years after Jesus’ time; diverse groups still disagreed about his views. “Ebionites used the Gospel of Mathew. Those who separated the Jesus from the Christ used the Gospel of Mark. Marcionites used the Gospel of Luke”. Followers of Valentinus used the Gospel of John. Ehrman says Eusebius’s 4^th century’s Ecclesiastical History, figured prominently in theological disputes of his day, and is one of antiquity’s most important writings. “Rather than being the original view always shared by the majority of Christians, what later came to be known as orthodoxy was just one of the numerous forms of Christianity in the early centuries, the one that ended up acquiring the majority of converts over time, then rewrote the history of the conflict to make it appear that this view had always been systematically eliminated from the historical record”. A foot note: Saint Jerome was the son of Eusebius.

In 63 BCE the provinces of Palestine became subject to Rome. There is no public record of Jesus and inexplicably he left no writings for his followers. Authors, who have analyzed the bible, claim that historians active during Jesus’s alleged lifetime did not mention Jesus in their prolific writings, e.g., the “Hellenistic Jewish philosopher of Alexandria, Philo (Judaeus), (20 BCE-50 CE)”, and other contemporaneous historians didn’t know about Jesus or his momentous miracles. The writings of Josephus (37-95?), Jewish historian are considered untrustworthy because he was Jerusalem’s propagandist, and double-agent with Rome’s legions. Persia’s mystical god, Mithras and the Jewish Jesus-fable share the same biography; both feature immaculate conceptions with virgin births at the winter solstice and both emphasize humankind’s redemption resulting from their sacrificial death followed by their resurrection and ascent to heaven at the spring equinox. Both tell of their last supper linked with the blood sacrifice whose symbolic recreation by eating bread and wine provided salvation for all worshippers. There were similarities in religions because a process of diffusion was practiced without restraint, and competitive near-eastern religions shared numerous stories and rituals that appealed to worshippers. As the youngest of these religions, Christianity was especially skillful in adopting for its purposes those features of other religions that would enhance and enlarge its appeal. The information about Mithras is from Wikipedia.

“The apostles convened the first Church council, the Council of Jerusalem, around the year 50, which affirmed that Gentiles could become Christians without adopting all of the Mosaic Law. Growing tensions soon led to a starker separation that was virtually complete by the time Christians refused to join the Bar Khokba revolt of 132”. (From Wikipedia)

Bible scholars agree that Jesus was crucified, that Christianity has always been divided, and that there were many Christian cults in the 2^nd and 3^rd centuries with varying views of Jesus. Dr. Ehrman says “significantly the dominant view was found to be held by a group located in the capital of the Roman Empire, which was able to use its vast resources and administrative skill to exert influence on churches in surrounding areas and, then throughout the world. Thus by the beginning of the fourth century, it was the Roman form of Christianity that was dominant, with the Roman Catholic Church, that determined the course of future Christianity”.

The following was gleaned from Wikipedia

 “Rome annexed Egypt in 30 BCE. Destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple in 70 CE, started Jewish migration to Egypt and the failure of the Jewish state in 135 CE increased it, especially to Alexandria, the center of commerce between Europe, Asia, India and beyond. In the syncretization of Alexandra’s various cults, Christianity was supreme. Jew’s fantasy of a messiah, Jesus was endemic in Egypt’s religious milieu, but before Christianity received Rome’s approval, Rome destroyed Alexandra’s Great Library of invaluable volumes. Egypt’s Athanasius served as bishop of Alexandra for 45 years, but was exiled five times by four Roman emperors, spending 17 of the 45 years in exile. In the end his theological enemies were exiled, and the church’s future was shaped by Athanasius’s writings”.

 Persia’s Mithraism emerged in Rome some 200 years before Christianity became a major religious movement competitive with the Roman Empire’s many other cults. Christianity gained support in the 3^rd century, but unlike other near-eastern cults with the exception of Judaism, Christian doctrine prohibited the worship of other gods and goddesses, including the Roman emperors who demanded treatment as deities. Christianity was considered subversive and prohibited. Both the Emperors Commodus (180-92) and Diocletian (284-305) took up the cause of Mithraism, with Diocletian as late as 307 having proclaimed Mithras to be the protector of the Roman Empire. However, upon the conversion of Roman Emperor Constantine, followed by his Edict of Milan, 313 CE; guaranteeing freedom of worship to all religions Christianity suddenly prevailed. As gleaned from Wikipedia.

Before Constantine’s conversion, Rome had persecuted early Christians, but the fact that Christianity sanctified the murder of all infidels, simplified Constantine forcing Christianity throughout pagan Europe, and abetted his establishing and managing Constantinople’s new Eastern Roman Empire and its Eastern Christian Church.

 David P. Goldman, in his book: How Civilizations Die says:--“between the conversion of Constantine in 325 CE and the crowning of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor in 800 CE, the population of Europe fell by half or more; the great engineering, manufacturing, and trading network of Rome disappeared; cities were abandoned; and the great culture of the classical world was for the most part lost”.----“The bonds of blood and tradition that gave cohesion to the peoples of the ancient world disintegrated. The Christian message—that every individual must undergo a second birth, to replace his sinful Gentile nature with a rebirth into a new people (the ‘tribe of Christians’ and ‘the race of those who honor God’ in the words of Eusebius)—resonated through the rubble of ancient paganism. Obstacles to evangelization had been torn down by circumstance”.

“The conversion of the ancient world did not proceed mostly by baptizing individuals ready to abandon their pagan roots, however. Christianity became a state religion by imperial edict, and the peoples of the Greek and Latin worlds accepted the new cult in more or less the same way that they had accepted other cults before it”. (My emphasis)

“After the fall of Rome, the Church stood as the only cohesive entity between the Atlantic Ocean and the Black Sea—even if it held on in just a few remote islands of faith and learning in a sea of anarchy. The Church did not have the means to evangelize individual souls. Instead it recruited kings, who could make their peoples Christian. And it enlisted these kings to conquer their neighbors who might resist. From the Gothic invasion of Italy in 401 CE to the defeat of the Magyars at Lech in 955 and the conversion of St. Vladimir in 1015, the barbarians entered Christian life not as individuals adopted into the new People of God, but as tribes incorporated into Christendom through conquest or alliance”.

“Charlemagne earned his title ‘Holy Roman Emperor’—by conquering the pagan Saxons. Six thousand pagan nobles who refused the cross were slaughtered on a single day in 782. The Europe that emerged from the alliance of throne and altar was a different entity, settled by different people, from the Rome whose authority and symbols it invoked. Christianity created Europe.—the Church taught illiterate tribal chieftains to read and made them kings of nations under the unifying sign of the cross. The nations took letters, culture, statecraft, and authority from the Church, but they joined Christendom with their traditions, customs, and superstitions intact”.

Ancient dynasties derived authority from the sovereignty of specious gods, whose prestigious professional proponents enforced surveillance, torture and censorship. “The original Inquisition was initiated in the 13^th century by the Church to deal with heretics and other undesirables, and continued off and on for 600 years, but it’s a mistake to think of the Inquisition as just a metaphor, or as relegated to the past. For one thing, within the Church, it has never quite ended; the office charged today with safeguarding doctrine and meting out discipline occupies the Inquisition’s old palazzo at the Vatican. More to the point, the Inquisition had all the hallmarks of a modern institution; with a bureaucracy, a memory, a procedure, a set of tools, a staff of technocrats, and an all-encompassing ideology that brooked no dissent. It was not a relic but a harbinger. You can see this in the work of someone like Bernard GUI—a historical figure. He was a Dominican priest, and in 1307 he was indeed made an inquisitor by Pope Clement V, with responsibility for a broad swath of southern France. Gui’s most productive day was April 5, 1310, when he condemned 17 people to death. Over a period of 15 years, Gui pronounced some 633 men and women guilty of heresy. We know of the disposition of these cases because Gui wrote everything down—the record survives in his Liber sententisrum, his ‘Book of Sentences’.—He was methodical, learned, clever, patient, and relentless—all of this can be inferred from the paper trail. Gui was a prodigious writer. Among other things, he compiled a lengthy manual for inquisitors called Practica officii inquisitionis heretice pravitatis, or ‘Conduct of the Inquisition into Heretical Depravity’. The manual covers the nature and types of heresy an inquisitor might encounter and also provides advice on everything from conducting an interrogation to pronouncing a death sentence. Inquisition records can be highly detailed and shockingly mundane. An itemized accounting of expenses for the burning of four heretics in 1323 survives from Carcassonne”; its suffice to say: the large wood, the vine branches, the straw the four stakes, the ropes and the executioner’s fee totaled 8 livres, 14. “And then there is the matter of torture. Pope Innocent IV authorized its use by the Inquisition in 1252 in the papal bull Ad extirpanda. Few words summon the Dark Ages as quickly as torture, but the uncomfortable reality is that the emergence of torture as an instrument of justice marks the advent of a modern way of thinking; the truth can be ascertained without God’s help; thus the [Churches’] reliance, not on judges or juries, but on iudicium Dei—the judgment of an all knowing God—to determine guilt or innocence. This often took the form of trial by ordeal. The accused would be submerged in water, or made to walk on red-hot coals, or forced to plunge an arm into boiling water. If he or she suffered no harm, or if the wounds healed sufficiently within a certain period of time, then it was the judgment of God that the accused was innocent. This regime was common in Europe for many centuries”.  Quoted from Cullen Murphy’s article in The Atlantic; Feb.1, 2012.

During Middle Ages’, (476-1450), period of medieval serfdom, governing authorities and land holding aristocracies found Christianity an essential political force. Blind-faith was mandatory, especially serf tenant farmers who served land owners as knights, i.e., men-of-war-on-work horses, but Martin Luther’s Protestant Reformation movement in the 1500s, when King Henry 8^th broke with Rome, stimulated competition as rival Catholic and Protestant nations competed to replace the Jews as God’s chosen. Each, through deceitful intrigue, tried to destroy its competition; finally igniting the Thirty Years’ War in 1618, which began with German Catholics killing each other, but then French Cardinal Richelieu’s collusive support for the Protestant Reformation’s movement against West Central Europe’s Holy Roman Empire, spread the devastation and extended the fighting for years to enhance France’s position in the race to be God’s chosen people. David P. Goldman says: “Two rival versions of Christianity fought to the death in the Thirty Years’ war: the Catholic concept of universal empire, and the obsession of the French that they, among all the nations of Christendom, were chosen by God as his proxy on earth. Both of these were religious passions, and thus the Thirty Years’ War was a religious war. But it was not the Catholic-Protestant war.—It was a war between Christianity and neo-pagan national idolatry, and Christianity lost.—in place of universal empire, the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the war established nation-states, and the Catholic Church delegated its authority to Europe’s Catholic dynasties”, which spread and enforced Christianity at the point of a sword.

Strobe Talbott, in his book: The Great Experiment says: “The Peace of Westphalia—1648—established a pattern that would continue for the next three hundred years: increasingly destructive wars led to increasingly ambitious treaties—the peacemakers resolved that the religion of each state would be determined by its king or prince—Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist; if a ruler changed his religion, he would forfeit his lands. The Catholic proponents of this feature of the treaty intended it to discourage rulers from converting to Protestantism and accelerating the spread of the Reformation. They hoped in that fashion to preserve the European status quo and the Holy Roman Empire as its bulwark. The effect was the opposite. Westphalia enhanced the power of political leaders within their own domains and thereby further weakened the empire by creating a mélange of about three hundred largely autonomous polities—looking back on Westphalia and seeking to explain its result, nineteenth-century scholars came up with the term ‘nation-state’. The hyphen meant that nationality and statehood were closely aligned. It was a designation for a supposedly new non-ecumenical political constructs—the cobbling together of ‘nation’ and ‘state’ into a single term lent credence to national as the basis of statehood”.

Goldman says “For centuries Christianity was burned, tortured, and starved out of the European peoples”. Talbott says “By the end of the Thirty Years War, combat, along with disease, famine, and migration caused by marauding armies and the resulting devastation of economies, had reduced the population of central Europe by about a third”. I must add that in order to survive, the starving people resorted to cannibalizing the most recently killed.

The two wonderful books quoted above, emphasize and reiterate my point: vanity and righteous self-satisfaction assures ignorant virile male believers they are religiously following the path of their vain, jealous, vengeful, virile male “God”. Leaders are reduced to stupid bloodthirsty despots when their misperceived godly powers replace a state’s sovereignty. Male followers are the same ilk and ken; proud to die, killing nonbelievers.

Christianity’s fervor produced the “European Dark Ages, (476-1000), responsible for wide spread ignorance, pervasive poverty and cultural decline during a period of intellectual stagnation brought about when Christian regimes closed libraries, banned books, scientific inquiry, etc., impoverishing all human progress”. “The world failed to regain the knowledge until many centuries afterward”.

 

The following quotations were gleaned from Google’s Timeline Vatican City

“On July 15, 1205, Pope Innocent III decreed that the Jews were doomed to perpetual servitude and subjugation due to crucifixion of Jesus”.

“On July 23, 1253, Jews were expelled from Vienne, France by order of Pope Innocent III”.

“On May 28, 1731, all Hebrew books in Papal states were confiscated”.

“In 1864 Pope Pius IX issued the encyclical ‘Quanta cura” which included The Syllabus of Errors in contemporary beliefs; including 80 negative points condemning modern ideas such as freedom of speech and religion and separation of church and state”.

“On Feb.2, 1906 a Papal encyclical denounced the separation of church and state”.

“On Dec. 31, 1930, Pontifical encyclical Casti connubial was against mixed marriages”.

“On July 20, 1933, Vatican secretary of state Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) signed an accord with Hitler”.

“On Oct. 23, 1946, A Vatican document advised French church authorities on how to handle information requests from Jewish officials, asking them not to put anything in writing. ‘Children who have been baptized must not be entrusted to institutions that cannot ensure their Christian education’. The document surfaced in 2004”.

“On Feb. 13, 1953, Pope Pius XII asked the U.S. to grant clemency to convicted spies Ethyl and Julius Rosenberg”.

“In 1964 Saul Friedlander published ‘Pius XII and the Third Reich’”.

“In 1992 Jason Berry authored ‘Lead Us Not Into Temptation’, a work on clerical sex abuse”.

 “On Feb. 20, 1994, Pope John Paul II demanded juristic discrimination of homosexuals”. “On April 7, 1995, Pope John Paul II made remarks, at the conclusion of a concert in commemoration of the Shoah (holocaust), in which he acknowledged the Nazi Holocaust killing of Jews for the first time”.

“In 1998, Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland sent a letter to the Vatican seeking advice on how to proceed with charges of sexual molestation by Rev. Lawrence Murphy, who had worked at the former St. John’s School for the Deaf in St. Francis, Wisconsin (1950-1975), died in July 1996. Murphy had molested as many as 200 deaf students. Cardinal Ratzinger, who had led the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 1981 until 2005, when he was elected pope, did not respond. The case was made public in 2010”.

“In 1999, John L. Heibron, a historian of science, authored ‘The Sun in the Church’”. In 1999, Monsignor Luigi Marinelli authored ‘Via col Vento in Vaticano’; alleging intrigue and corruption in the Vatican”. “In 1999 John Cromwell published ‘Hitler’s Pope’”. “In 1999, Thomas Plante edited ‘Bless Me Father for I Have Sinned: Perspectives on Sexual Abuse Committed By Roman Catholic Priests’”.

“In 2000, Gary Wills authored ‘Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit’”.

“In 2002, the Bishop of the Diocese of Dorchester, NH, named 14 priests implicated in the sexual abuse of children from 1963-1987; and the Archdiocese of Boston identified 80 priests as having abused children over the last 40 years; and Anthony J. O’Connel, Palm Beach Catholic bishop, resigned after admitting to the sexual abuse of a teen-age seminary student, 27 years earlier; and Pope John Paul II accepted the resignation of Julius Paetz, archbishop of Poznan, Poland, due to a sex scandal and accusations of molesting young seminarians”.

“On Nov. 29, 2005, the Vatican published its document on gays in the clergy, saying men with ‘deep-seated’ homosexual tendencies should not be ordained, but those with a ‘transitory problem’ could be if they had overcome them for three years”. “In 2005 John Cromwell authored the ‘Pope in Winter: The Dark face of John Paul II’s Papacy”.

“On Feb. 2, 2006, the Vatican announced that Pope Benedict XVI has accepted the resignation of an auxiliary bishop of Detroit, Thomas Gambleton, who recently revealed that a priest abused him 60 years ago”. “On Feb. 26, 2006, in Canada 19 Catholic priests signed an open letter in Montreal’s La Presse newspaper denouncing Vatican opposition to gay marriage and having homosexuals in the priesthood”.

“On Jan. 11, 2007, a U.S. federal judge ruled that the Vatican can be sued for damages by victims of clerical sex abuse”.

“On July 21, 2008, in Sidney, Pope Benedict XVI met privately with Australians who were sexually abused as children by priests”.

“On Dec. 17, 2009, the Vatican said Donal Murray; a Roman Catholic bishop in Ireland has resigned after a probe of child sex abuse by clergymen accused him of ignoring reports of crimes by priests in his diocese from 1982-1996”.

“On April 18, 1010, Pope Benedict XVI met in Malta with a group of clerical sex abuse victims, and promised them that the Catholic church would seek justice for pedophile priests and implement ‘effective measures’ to protect young people from abuse. Ten Maltese men said they were abused by priests at a Catholic orphanage”. “On April 22, 2010, Pope Benedict XVI accepted the resignation of Irish Bishop James Molarity of Kildare, who acknowledged failing to report abuse to police, while a German bishop also offered to step down”. “On May 8, 2010, Bishop Walter Mixa, has acknowledged slapping children and is being investigated for sexual abuse of minors and financial misconduct, lost his job”. “On Dec.6, 2010, in Ireland Tony Walsh was convicted of raping 3 boys over a 5 year period three decades earlier. Investigators had concluded that Walsh had raped and molested hundreds of boys and girls while serving as a Dublin priest from 1978 to 1996. Investigators also reported that the Vatican had tried to stop the Dublin church from defrocking Walsh”.

“On Feb. 18, 2011, the Vatican said Fernando Karadima, a prominent Chilean priest, has been found guilty of abusing minors and must retire”. “On May 4, 2011, the Vatican condemned former Canadian Bishop Raymond Lahey, after he pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography”. “On July 20, 2011, Ireland’s lawmakers declared that the Vatican encouraged Catholic bishops not to tell police about suspected pedophile priests”.

“On Jan. 26, 2012, the Vatican defended its transfer of a top official to Washington after he exposed alleged corruption”.

The following quotations are from Thomas Paine’s 18^th century book: The Age of Reason. “We know from history, that one of the principal leaders of this church, Athanasius, lived at the time the New Testament was formed; (he died in 373 CE.); and we know also, from the absurd jargon he has left us under the name of a creed, the character of the men who formed the New Testament; and we know also from the same history that the authenticity of the books of which it is composed was denied at the time. It was upon the vote of such as Athanasius that the Testament was decreed to be the word of God; and nothing can present to us a more strange idea than that of decreeing the word of God by vote. Those who rest their faith upon such authority put man in the place of God, and have no true foundation for future happiness. Credulity, however, is not a crime, but it becomes criminal by resisting conviction. It is strangling in the womb of the conscience the efforts it makes to ascertain truth. We should never force belief upon ourselves in anything. — Christianity grounds itself originally upon the Bible, and the Bible was established altogether by the sword and that in the worst use of it—not to terrify, but to extirpate. The Jews made no converts: they butchered all. The Bible is the sire of the [New] Testament, and both are called the word of God. The Christians read both books; the ministers preach from both books; and this thing called Christianity is made up of both. It is then false to say that Christianity was not established by the sword”.—“It has been by wandering from the immutable laws of science, and the light of reason, and setting up an invented thing called ‘revealed religion’, that so many wild and blasphemous conceits have been formed of the Almighty. The Jews have made him the assassin of the human species, to make room for the religion of the Jews. The Christians have made him the murderer of himself and the founder of a new religion—The philosopher knows that the laws of the Creator have never changed, with respect either to the principles of science, or the properties of matter. Why then is it to be supposed they have changed with respect to man”?  Paine was an American patriot; a dedicated deist, he believed “in the existence of a God on purely rational grounds without reliance on revelation or authority; especially the 17^th & 18^th century doctrine that God created the world and its natural laws, but takes no further part in its functioning”. The Age of Reason, sold eight editions the first year.

In 1933, Eugenio Pacelli, Vatican’s Assistant Secretary of State, negotiated an agreement between Adolph Hitler and Pope Pius XI allowing the Vatican to select Germany’s bishops, clergy, teachers, etc. with Germany paying the bill. Hitler acquiesced only after the pope conceded that Hitler should have complete political control. Pacelli persuaded Germany’s Bishops to disband Catholic’s powerful Center Political Party, assuring Nazism’s successful rise to power unopposed by Catholicism. The agreement “created an area of trust that was particularly significant in the developing struggle against international Jewry”. Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope Pius XII in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War. Gleaned from Hitler’s Pope by John Cromwell,.

To recap: it appears obvious that a confluence of the points listed in the first paragraph, indicate a pathway to convert Jews to a more benevolent, saner Jewish god or messiah, than their problematic Yahweh, but the ruse failed. The sagacious Jewish majority didn’t accept the Jesus-idea, even though they had proffered innumerable possibilities in their hodge-podge of books, which left the door open to Jerusalem’s Roman subjugators, who welcomed the idea of exchanging Mithras for a Jewish god; using Jewish law to sanctify killing apostates, blasphemers, nonbelievers, proponents of other gods plus non-allegiants, while exploiting pagan Europe’s foibles, and thereby replace the Jews as Yahweh’s chosen people. They succeeded in a big way, with the Vatican becoming the nerve center of all Christendom.

Professor Bart D. Ehrman, in his new book: “Did Jesus Exist?” says “belief in Jesus is a problem”; explaining that it is not because Jesus was mythical, but that Jesus is too historical; that he was a first century apocalyptic Jew, who preached the end of the world was near, when God would destroy all who defied Jewish law, which included the Romans, but when he preached his beliefs in Jerusalem and did not deny being King of the Jews, the Romans, who appointed all kings, crucified Jesus. Dr. Ehrman deplores the Gospel’s portrayal of Jesus’ biography as that of antiquity’s many mythical gods, such as Persia’s god Mithras, but failed to explain why the author of Jew’s Jesus fable (Christian’s Gospels) adopted the biography of the earlier gods. Ehrman carefully analyzed Jesus’ life, and decries professional proponents, who present Jesus as a discerning modern “God”, but says Jesus spoke only in supernatural terms; unconcerned about family values, abortion, same-sex marriage, etc. This contentious confusion is difficult to unravel, but supports my viewpoint, that clergy has misrepresented both the Judaic god and Jesus. The Pentateuch’s vengeful god isn’t benevolent or forgiving and Jesus did not create miracles; both were contrived and neither is divine.

The following quotations were gleaned from The Christ Conspiracy by Acharya S

Female author D.M. Murdock’s 1999 thought provoking book: The Christ Conspiracy should be read by “every thinking individual concerned about the moral, ethical, and spiritual aspects of our culture.—It may well be the most dangerous and important book of our time, for it reveals beyond a shadow of a doubt that Jesus Christ is not a historical figure but simply a mythological toehold by which power mongers provide the dope of hope to the needy, malleable and violent masses”. Murdock’s extraordinary wealth of knowledge “about the world’s many ancient religions relentlessly brings to light many lost, hidden and destroyed religious, mythological and spiritual traditions that reveal “the same tales around the world about a variety of godmen and sons of God, a number of whom also had virgin births or were of divine origin; were born on or near December 25^th in a cave or underground; were baptized; worked miracles; held high morals, were compassionate, toiled for humanity and healed the sick; were the basis of soul salvation and/or were called Savior, Redeemer, Deliverer; had Eucharist; vanquished darkness; were hung on trees or crucified; and were resurrected and returned to heaven, whence they came. The list of these saviors and sons of God includes the following:” Adad and Mararduk of Assyria; Adonis, Aesciepius, Apollo, Dionysus, Hercules and Zeus of Greece; Alcides of Thebes; Attis of Phrygia; Baal or Bel of Babylon/Phoenicia; Balder and Frey of Scandinavia; Bali of Afghanistan; Beddru of Japan; Buddha and Krishna of India; Chu Chulainn of Ireland; Codom and Deva Tat of Siam; Crite of Chaldea; Dahzbog of the Slavs; Domuzi of Sumeria; Fo-hi, Lao-Kiun, Tien and Chang-Ti of China; Hermes of Egypt/Greece; Hesus of the Druids and Gauls; Indra of Tibet/India; Ieo of China; Issa/Isa of Arabia; Jao of Nepal; Jupiter/ Jove of Rome; Mithra of Persia/India; Odin/Wodin/Woden/Wotan of the Scandinavians; Prometheus of Caucasus/Greece; Quetzalcoatl of Mexico; Quirinius of Rome; Salaviahana of southern India; Tammuz of Syria; Thor of the Gauls; Universal Monarch of the Sibyls; Wittoba of the Bilingonese and Telingonese; Zalmoxis of Thrace; Zarathustra/Zoroaster of Persia; and Zoar of the bonzes; a total of 50.

“This list does not pretend to be complete, nor is there adequate room here to go into detail of all these mythological characters. It should be noted that as with Jesus, a number of these characters have been thought of in the past as being historical persons, but today almost none of them are considered as such”. The major players, which Murdock describes in great detail are as follows: Attis, Buddha, Dionysus/Bacchus, Hercules/Heracles, Horus & Osiris of Egypt, Krishna of India, Mithra of Persia, Prometheus of Greece, Quetzalcoatl of Mexico, Serapis of Egypt, and Zoroaster/Zarathustra. Ms. Murdock also details many other Saviors and Sons of God and several “daughters of God” and goddesses such as Diana Soteira, the Arabian Issa, Aescleoius, Esculapius, the Greek god Orpheus.

D.M. Murdock’s conclusion: “It is evident that Jesus Christ is a mythical character based on these various ubiquitous godmen and universal saviors who were part of the ancient world for thousands of years prior to the Christian era. As Massey says: The same legend was repeated in many lands with a change of name, and at times of sex, for the sufferer, but none of the initiated in the esoteric wisdom ever looked upon the Kamite Iusa, a gnostic Horus, Jesus, Tammuz, Krishna, Buddha, Witoba, or any other of the many saviors as historic in personality for the simple reason that they had been more truly taught”.

“The existence and identity of all these mysterious characters who are so identical in their persona and exploits, constituting the universal mythos, have been hidden from the masses as part of the Christ Conspiracy”.—The miraculous and implausible exploits of other cultures, however are to be tossed aside as being unhistorical, mythological and downright ridiculous. As we have seen and will continue to see, these other cultures had the identical stories as those found in the bible; therefore, following the ‘logic’ of biblical proponents, we should also toss out the Judo-Christian versions as ‘merely’ mythological and allegorical at best, and diabolical at worst. As history, these various biblical tales are no more factual than the stories of the Greek gods or the Arabian Knights. As allegory, however, they record an ancient wisdom that goes back well beyond the founding of the Hebrew nation, into the deepest mists of time.

“It has been demonstrated that Christianity got it all wrong—except the end to its erroneous means: it succeeded in enriching and empowering its most effective ‘prestigious professional’ proponents many times over. According to the same astrological system used to create Christianity, the age for such divisiveness, fascism and hierarchical exploitation is now drawing to a close, and lying, deceit, cheating and stealing will fall by the wayside ‘the truth will be shouted from the rooftops’; exposing Earth’s ‘dirty little secret’. As Jacolliot says: ‘Apostles of Jesus, you have counted too much upon human credulity, trusted too much that the future might not unveil your maneuvers and your fabricated recitals—the sanctity of your object made you too oblivious of means, and you have taken the good faith of peoples by surprise in reproducing the fables of another age, which you believed buried forever’”.

“But the future is now, and the maneuvers are being unveiled. As far as Christianity’s role in this ‘New Age’, Carpenter states: ‘Christianity must either now come frankly forward and, acknowledge its parentage from the great Order of the past, seek to rehabilitate that and carry mankind one step forward in the path of evolution—or else it must perish. There is no alternative’”.

“Despite the vilification of the so-called New Age movement, the fact is that we are entering into a new age. ‘I am with you always to the close of the age’—so ends the Gospel of Mathew. What does this mysterious statement mean, and why was this all-important book ended with it? The age referred to in the gospel tale is that of Pisces, and through contrivance and duplicity, coercion and slaughter, the fish-god ‘Jesus’ the Piscean Solar Avatar, has indeed been with us, but now it is the close of the age, and his time is over.

“Traditionally these times of transition between one age and the next have been regarded as  the ongoing destruction of the Earth and the endless warfare over ideology will indeed produce the ‘Armageddon’ so long awaited and planned for by those who cannot live for today but must look towards an afterlife. By realizing the cultural unity revealed behind the Christ conspiracy, humanity can pull together and prevent this fall, to create a better world. The above quotations were gleaned from The Christ Conspiracy by Acharya S

.On the contradictions within the Judeo-Christian scriptures eminent freethinker Robert Ingersoll commented, ‘If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would strictly follow the teachings of the New, he would be insane’”.

Apostle Paul decreed the unrealistic proposition: that to be saved one must believe Jesus died to atone for man’s sins. I believe: ignorant Christians have slaughtered more innocent people than ignorant Jews and ignorant Muslims combined.(See CHRISTIAN ANTI-JUDAISM). My main interest is thwarting Christian control of our government. Majorities of our electorate are “born-again” Christians whose religiosity, supported by “talk radio’s” millions of ignorant followers, can rescind our “Bill of Rights”. Today, many white Christians appear resentful of our president’s blackness and have formed a “tea party” of segregationists in opposition. Can anyone explain why America’s conservative voters have more faith in ancient suppositions and ignorant conjecture than in nature’s immutable forces and scientific principles, which includes evolution? It is obvious to many people that they must remain alert for unsubstantiated propositions, which confront us daily. However con-games and the scamming arts are as old as man’s cognition. I mentioned earlier that religious beliefs began in the jungles of primitive Africa, but in spite of our world’s magnificent trove of knowledge prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods always find eager audiences of credulous believers; although Christian principles, such as: “love thy neighbor”, are wonderful, they belie Christianity’s historic gruesome authoritarianism, death and devastation with hearsay the only evidence for a living Jesus. Another point: allegedly Jesus was crucified in year 29, but the New Testament was not assembled until 338 years later, in year 367; which is perplexing, as our United States is only 236 years old. Retelling dubious religious legends over a protracted period of time, assures their enhancement by each god’s prestigious professional proponents.

Prussia, a principality of west-central Europe’s Holy Roman Empire (800-1806) was Catholic, but Martin Luther’s 16^th century religious movement aimed at reforming the Roman Catholic Church resulted, in establishing Protestant churches, which converted my family to Protestantism. In order to marginalize England’s Catholicism, Queen Ann financed the immigration of European Protestants and my Redwine ancestors were among the many Palatines from Prussia’s lands within the Rhine Palatinate, who traveled down the Rhine River to Holland and thence to England. “Lists of Germans from the Palatinate Who Came to England in 1709”, (taken at Walworth, May 27th, 1709), show three Redwines: Frederick, age 32 and his wife, also his son age 2, accompanied by 22 year old Jacob. On September 29, 1750, the good Ship Osgood arrived in Philadelphia, from Rotterdam, last from Cowes,. Among its numerous Palatines from Cowes was Ludwig Redwine, possibly the 2 year old son of Frederick in 1709, if so he would have been 43, and Johan Michael who was 18. Followers of English clergyman John Wesley, they popularized Methodism in colonial America. Ideas of liberty and freedom from religious tyranny were minimal in medieval Europe, but British subjects in colonial America soon declared their independence and both they and France’s citizens fought revolutions; freeing themselves from mandated church-state subjugation. Today America’s Christian hierarchy plans to collusively manage our nation’s government. Comprehension of the horrific crimes against humanity, caused by man’s stupid emulation of “God”, should have sensitized Christian hierarchy, eons ago, but prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods’ perpetuated King Josiah’s tribal propaganda as sacred doctrine; demonstrating that religion’s duplicitous delusions stem from the complicity of divination’s illusionists. During its first millennium, Christianity permitted no dissent, but slaughtered their astute discerning thinking nonbelievers. Can Christians explain this?

My only interest in the Abrahamic faiths’ misinformed multitudes is their reliance upon their mystical gods’ spurious sovereignty. I hope to thwart Christian hierarchy’s plans to control of our secular democracy. Religious ignorance has always opposed undiscriminating inclusiveness, as well as Confucius’ proposition: that we are all the same except for our experiences.

Secularism’s doctrine: “disregards or rejects any form of religious faith; especially that religion and ecclesiastical affairs should not enter into the functions of the state”. Secularism advocates tolerant worldly views. We think that it is ignorant and unfair to inculcate the minds of little children with the fallaciousness inherent in any supernatural doctrine.

It is obvius: that worldwide propogation of the Abrahamic religions, by their prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods, brainwashed believers. Evidently they are aware of their particular god’s mythology, but remain unaware of their god’s inscrutable perfidious unforgivable bloody history, which today’s professionals are apt to repeat, while attempting to salvage their confidence game from the disclosures of modern science.

Thomas Jefferson said: “in every country and every age the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot—they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer for their purposes”.

ISLAMISM

The following quotations about Muhammad are from Wikipedia

“Muhammad 570-June 8, 632 was a leader from Mecca who unified Arabia into a single religious polity under Islam. He is believed by Muslims and Baha’is to be a messenger and prophet of God, and by most Muslims as the last prophet sent by God for mankind. Muhammad is generally considered to be the founder of Islam, although this is a view not shared by Muslims. Muslims consider him to be the restorer of an uncorrupted monotheistic faith of Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and other prophets”.

“Born in about 570 CE in the Arabian city of Mecca, he was orphaned at an early age and brought up under the care of his uncle Abu Talib. He later worked mostly as a merchant, as well as a shepherd, and was married by age 25. Being in the habit of periodically retreating to a cave in the surrounding mountains for several nights of seclusion and prayer, he later reported that it was there, at age 40, that he received his first revelation from God. Three years after this event Muhammad started preaching these revelations publically, proclaiming that ‘God is One’, that complete ‘surrender’ to Him (lit. Islam) is the only way acceptable to God, and that he himself was a prophet and messenger, in the same vein as other Islamic prophets”.

“Muhammad gained few followers early on, and was met with hostility from some Meccan tribes; he and his followers were treated harshly. To escape persecution, Muhammad sent some of his followers to Abyssinia before he and his followers in Mecca migrated to Medina (then known as Yathrib) in the year 622. This event, the Hijra, marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar. In Medina, Muhammad united the tribes under the Constitution of Medina. After eight years of fighting with the Meccan tribes, his followers, who by then had grown to 10,000, conquered Mecca. Muhammad destroyed the pagan idols in Mecca and then sent his followers out to destroy all of the remaining pagan temples throughout Eastern Arabia. In 622, a few months after returning to Medina from The Farewell Pilgrimage, Muhammad fell ill and died. By the time of his death, most of the Arabian Peninsula had converted to Islam, and he had united Arabia into a single Muslim religious polity”.

John L. Esposito’s lectures on Islam say that tribal and family honor were central virtues in pre-Islamic Arabian polytheistic religions; that Islam has more than a billion followers in 56 countries, and its geographic, cultural, and religious diversity reflects its status as an Abrahamic faith, with global presence and impact, but that threats of political Islam’s fundamentalism challenge the world. He says that for many Muslims, religion and society, faith and power, are closely intertwined—that religious doctrines, laws, and practices result from sacred texts and from fallible interpreters, whose conclusions reflect their intelligence, political and social contexts, customs, power & privilege; and that male interpreters, live in patriarchal societies, which affects their development of Islamic law, especially on women and family; that the five pillars of Islam; all refer to religion, except the third, which requires an annual contribution of 2.5 percent of an individual’s wealth and assets including annual income.

Esposito says: in 610, Muhammad received a call to prophet-hood with his first revelation; “the message of Islam was revealed during and responded to a time of great socioeconomic transition in Arabia. Mecca was emerging as a major mercantile center at the heart of a new political, social, and economic order. New wealth and the rise of a new commercial class led to the greater division between social classes and a growing disparity between rich and poor”. Mohammad received revelations for 22 years, until his death in 632 CE. They were collected later and compiled into the quran. Dr. Esposito says “Muhammad’s reformist message posed an unwelcome challenge to the religious and political establishment, the priests, tribal leaders, and business men of the community. The new religious message that Muhammad preached—denounced the status quo and called for social justice for the poor and the most vulnerable in society: women, children, and orphans”. The quran’s message is essentially the same as the Hebrew bible and Old Testament, but Islam is both a faith and a political order; “it split into a Sunni majority and Shii minority over issues of leadership. These differing religious and political views led to different interpretations of history. Sunni’s claim a ‘Golden Age’ when they were a great world power and civilization, which they believe is evidence of God’s favor upon them and a historic validation of Muslim beliefs. Shii, as an oppressed and disinherited minority see in these same developments the illegitimate usurpation of power by Sunni rulers at the expense of a just society”. Muhammad consolidated Muslim authority over Arabia by force and diplomacy; a century after his death, his rule extended from North Africa to South Asia, an empire greater than Rome’s. Islam was to be a community of believers—who lived according to Islamic law—adopting and adapting existing political institutions and sciences—motivated by religious fervor and economic rewards. “The inhabitants of newly conquered areas were given three options: (1) convert to Islam, (2) accept ‘protected’ status and pay a poll tax, or (3) face battle or the sword, if they rejected the first two options”.

The period of Muhammad (632-66) serves as the idealized past to which Muslims look for inspiration and guidance. From 8^th-12^th centuries, Islam and Muslim political power expanded exponentially; that from750-1258 Islamic regimes became an empire of wealth, political power, and cultural accomplishments. : “Enormous wealth enabled the Abbasid caliphs to become great patrons of art and culture resulting in the florescence of Islamic civilization—Europeans, emerging from the Dark Ages, turned to Muslim centers of learning to regain their lost heritage and to learn from Muslin advances. The Crusades (1095-1453) established a paradigm of confrontation between Islam and Christianity and Islam and the West, the legacy of which continues to affect Muslim-Christian relations and relations between the Muslim world and the West. The Christian West experienced the spread of Islam as both a religious and political threat. Europe engaged—a struggle to reconquer territories in Spain, Italy and Sicily, and the Crusades, a holy war. The Crusades ended in 1453 when Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, fell to the Turks and was renamed Istanbul”; the seat of the Ottoman Empire.

“The Abbasid caliphate was replaced by a variety and series of sultanates. They extended from Africa to Southeast Asia. Three imperial sultanates emerged: the Turkish Ottoman Empire (1281-1924), the Persian Safavid Empire (1501-1722), and the Indian Mughal Empire (1520-1857), all of which experienced political power and cultural florescence. By the turn of the 18^th century, the power and prosperity of the sultanates was in serious decline. This decline coincided with the Industrial Revolution and modernization in the West, leading to clashes in the era of European colonialism”. The dynamic expansion of imperial Islam gave way to political disintegration and social and moral decline, from the 17^th to the 20^th centuries, followed by European colonialism throughout much of the Muslim world. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, Arabia, Africa, and India experienced a revival of Islam’s politicized religion. “A series of revivalist movements led to the establishment of several Islamic states: the Wahhabi in Arabia and Africa, the Fulani in Nigeria, the Sanusi in Libya, and the Mahdi in the Sudan”. In the last decades of the 20^th century, the Muslim world experienced the impact of another revival or resurgence of Islam in personal and in public life. On the personal level, many Muslims have become more religiously observant. In the public sphere, new Islamic governments or republics have been established in Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan. At the same time, radical Islamic organizations have engaged in violence and terrorism to topple governments.

During the 20^th century, Islamic empires and sultanates were obliterated and replaced by modern nation-states. Many countries in the Middle-East were quite literally newly created, ’mapped out’ by European colonial powers (Britain and France) after World War 1”. The West expected these modern nation-states to generally follow a Western secular path of development, but the majority, such as Egypt, Syria, Iran, Malaysia, and Indonesia, whose populations were mostly Muslim, created Muslim states, whose progress and prosperity depended on the degree they conformed to Western secular values. Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, and Iran were seen as the more advanced and secular. Saudi Arabia, the Persian Gulf states, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan were regarded as more traditional, religious and backward. The Arab-Israeli war and a series of wars and riots, during the 1960s and 1970s revealed the weaknesses of many states. The 1978-1979 Iranian Revolution alerted the West to Islam’s profound change. Illiteracy, poverty, failed economies, high unemployment, and malapportionment of wealth, caused Muslims to question national identity, political legitimacy and the meaning of their religious faith.

Their dissatisfaction with modernity was marked by their quest for self-identity and greater authenticity, as many reaffirmed the importance of Islam in their daily lives. Islamic ideology, and politics reemerged as a major force that both Muslim and Western governments had to accommodate. Muslims are experiencing an identity crisis precipitated by a sense of utter impotence and loss of self-esteem; a disillusionment with West’s models of development, and as an ally. Islamic movements and organizations sprang up across the Muslim world. The Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, the militants who seized the Grand Mosque in 1979, the religious extremists who assassinated Anwar Sadat in 1981, and the Afghan freedom fighters in the late 1970s and early 1980s; made it clear by the late 1980s-early 1990s that the Islamists had moved into mainstream politics and society. “Other extremists were convicted in America and Europe for terrorist acts, such as the bombing of New York’s World Trade Center in 1993, of the American barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1995, and of American embassies in Africa in 1998”, “leading some governments & analysts to identify: ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ as a major threat to global stability”. [Terrorists, in the name of Islam destroyed the World Trade Center’s two towers in in New York, killing more than 3000 innocent people, and attacked the Pentagon in Washington D.C. on September 11, 2001], leading President G.W. Bush to invade Iran and Afghanistan in 2003. (See MIDDLE EAST FIASCO).

“At the heart of this “struggle for the soul of Islam” between conservatives and reformers, mainstream Muslims and extremists is the question of who should interpret Islam and how reform should be achieved. Its major issues include the relationship of religion to state and society, the role of Islamic law, the status of women and non-Muslims, the compatibility of Islam and democracy, and relations with the West”. Muslims were brought to America as slaves before the 19^th century; presently some 6 million Muslims reside and work in secular America. “Significant numbers of immigrants from Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan settled in the Midwest and Canada as blue-collar workers and assimilated into American society”. Some 15 million Muslim immigrants reside and work in secular Europe, but are not assimilated.

“Since September 11, 2001, the processes of adaptation and change have become more difficult as Muslims face those who charge that Islam is incompatible with or a threat to Western societies. This is compounded by legislation and policies that threaten the civil liberties of Muslims. The agenda facing Islam in the 21^st century is daunting. Unlike Judaism and Christianity, which had decades, indeed centuries to undergo their own processes of modern reform, Muslim societies have a far more telescoped time frame. They do so in response not only to the realities in their societies and communities, but also to a Western-dominated world and era of globalization”.

“Islam today is at a crossroads. Mainstream Muslims from conservative and traditional to fundamentalists or extremists often engage in a ‘holy war’ that pits Muslim against Muslim, as well as Muslim against non-Muslim.

All of the above information was gleaned from John L. Esposito’s lectures on ISLAM.

 David P. Goldman, in his book: How Civilizations Die says: “between the conversion of Constantine in 325 CE and the crowning of Charlemagne as Holy Roman Emperor in 800 CE, the population of Europe fell by half or more; the great engineering, manufacturing, and trading network of Rome disappeared; cities were abandoned; and the great culture of the classical world was for the most part lost”. During this wretched period when Rome was forcing Christianity onto European pagans at the point of a sword;

 Mohammed (570?-632 CE), realized that suppressing knowledge and killing nonbelievers, would work for Muslims just like it was doing for Judaism and Christianity. He claimed the Hebrew archangel Gabriel provided his Koran’s precepts. An adherent of Islam, Muslimism’s an Abrahamic faith, subscribing to King Josiah’s dogma; which is identical in the Old Testament and the Koran. One can embrace it, but Islamic apostates, blasphemers, etc. are killed; Their goal: convert or destroy the world; as the Christians did during their first sesquimillenniums. Islamism is a perfect example of how religions govern nations. The crux of Abrahamic faiths is male superiority; during our existence man has instigated many perturbing decisions; the least exemplary was his niggardly, vainglorious domination of woman. The Middle East shows what subjugating women do to a society. Muslim’s male dominated culture is an extreme example of men’s attitude toward women; repressing them. Poorly educated, and their virginity considered sacred, they experience a brutal surgical removal of the clitoris to circumvent pleasurable coition. Her husband is selected by her parents and premarital sexual experience or adultery is punished by beheading in the public square, or by her family as “honor killing”. Incited by Allah’s prestigious professional proponents, ignorant and sexually deprived males, filled with religious fervor, sacrifice themselves by killing a few infidels to assure their lasciviously anticipated eternal-life. Ponder Islam’s aggressive vengeful male dominated culture; furthering ignorance by withholding knowledge and killing their more erudite discerning complaining citizens. Is this the goal of America’s Religious Right Coalition; Christian Fundamentalism?

  Islamic Muslims, engrossed in memorizing the Koran, murdering infidels, etc. are incapable of thinking, inventing or developing science. They did not participate in the industrial revolution and their fundamentalist concept of Abrahamic faiths are a perfect example of religion in action, which we should avoid, but 86% of our nation’s semi-civilized society admits to being guided by an Abrahamic faith. Possibly our faithful would prefer to have a typical ecclesiastical dictator such as Iran’s, etc.

  In Islam’s drive to rid the world of non-Muslims it is often reported that the last sound victims hear from suicide bombers or executioners, are the shouts of “Allahu Akhbar” or “God is great”. Judaism and Christianity each spent a thousand years adhering to Yahweh’s demands that blasphemers, apostates, nonbelievers, proponents of other gods, etc. must be killed by believers even when members of one’s family; not an excuse for Islam whose godliness is just as deceitful as those of the Jews and Christians.

 Allah’s prestigious professional proponents govern and see opportunities to be humankind’s only religion and thereby rule a worldwide despotic theocracy. Demographics favor them, as their women’s birthrate averages three times that of U.S. women’s and five times that of European, Russian and Chinese women’s. European nations’ increasing Muslim migrants have not assimilated. In a few generations Western Europe will assimilate them by embracing Islam’s religious totalitarianism, as Muslims follow Yahweh’s commands to rid the world of infidels, which excludes only Muslim’s true believers. Similar to Judaism and Christianity, Islam adopted King Josiah’s tribal propaganda. We understand ancient ignorance and should understand Religion-Lite’s vacuousness. Also, please understand: the Islamic regimes’ “will-to-succeed” has sucked us dry of blood, treasure, and will, fighting on their turf. They want us to continue fighting, but not resort to a scorched-earth type of revenge; in order to prevent their pursuit of nuclear weapons.

 Muslims missed the civilizing influence of Europe’s 18^th century period of Enlightenment and can avoid additional self-destruction by denying King Josiah’s vengeful dogma. Ignorance can’t expand civilizations; and blind faith in a god is inversely proportional to one’s worldly knowledge. Allah’s specious sovereignty is Islam’s license for religious tyranny without any accountability”.

  Allah is one of the aliases of Yahweh, the Jew’s God-character, which was King Josiah’s occult superego; onto which he projected his vilest intentions to punish his tribe’s non-allegiant troublemakers with death. I have noted: subsequent political leaders employed similar deceptive ploys to confound and manipulate their subjugated; always with the complicity of religion’s prestigious professional proponents; which Islam continues. The Religious Right wants to use the dominionist movement as their means to dominate life in the “born again” U.S.A. I’ve explained the fallacies in all Abrahamic faiths and have recommended a better way, but unless the international community reaches a communal agreement about how to resolve global warming’s problems and Islam’s religious terrorism, which the Pentateuch advocates, fallacious beliefs will convince Allah’s prestigious professional proponents to nuclearly obliterate the world’s infidels, which, by the way, include Muslim females and everyone except Islamic male true believers; assuring a revered position is reserved in heaven for them and that their sharia law governs worldwide.

The following quotation is from www.handbookforinfidels.com

“This life sucking ideology has survived for fourteen centuries because it has been sheltered from criticism by the combined forces of violence (on their part)—its devotees have been insulated from the ideas of non-believers who tend to be far more adept at critical thinking. It’s time for all progressives to do what we can to help eradicate this deadly mind-virus, by resisting its spread in the west, and by undermining its central truth-claims via honest conversations in all available venues. We need to create an environment in which myth based religions such as Islam [plus Judaism and Christianity] are constantly being confronted by Reason, Skepticism and Reality [in addition to hearty measure of Ridicule]. These religions have bullied, brutalized and befuddled mankind for centuries. It is time to fight back! And Islam, the biggest meanest bully of them all, is just begging to get its ass kicked. So, let’s make that happen, on a global scale. Let’s show the True Believers that we Infidels still have a little grit and determination. And that militant progressives, armed with Reason and Science, and firmly grounded in Reality, can prevail over ignorant zealots motivated by ancient superstitions”.

“If you believe in progressive ideals, and support progressive agendas, you need to get involved before the essential tools/weapons of free speech and freedom of the press are sacrificed completely in the interest of multiculturalism and political pandering. The struggle over free speech is the front line in this war. And we’ve already lost a lot of ground here, and in Western Europe (where, in some countries, criticizing Islam has become a criminal offense) and in the U.S. (where making a honest, sensible statement about Muslims, on airliners can get you fired by National Public Radio). For the concerned citizen in the western world the first order of business is reversing this dangerous trend. We need to halt the steady erosion of our essential liberties, and vigorously reassert our right to speak plainly and openly about important issues, even if this means ‘offending’ our ideological enemies—who have no qualms about giving offence to us”.

The following is paraphrased from www.infidels.org

“Infidels are intellectual discovers who sail unknown seas and find new isles and continents in the realms of thought—one who has a new fact—an idea of his own—an intellectual capitalist, who excites the envy and hatred of the theological pauper. Man saw cruelty and mercy in nature, because he imagined that phenomena were produced to reward or punish him.—When some town or city was swept away by flood or sea, he imagined that the crimes of the inhabitants had been avenged”.

 

SYNOPSIS

First we’ll enumerate the significant religious wars:

(a)     Muslim’s military conquests: from 634-1800. “Most historians agree that the Sassanid, Persian and Byzantine Roman empires were militarily and economically exhausted from decades of fighting one another”. The Muslim Empire’s area of influence stretched from the borders of China and Indian subcontinent, across central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula, to the Pyrenees.

(b)     Christianity’s military Reconquista: almost 800 years of fighting to retake the Muslim controlled areas of the Iberian Peninsula, end when “the Alhambra Decree (also known as the Edict of Expulsion) was issued on 31 March, 1492 by the joint Catholic Monarchs of Spain (Isabella 1 of Castile and Ferdinand 2 of Aragon) ordering the expulsion of Jews from [their kingdoms, territories and possessions]. The edict was formally revoked on 16 December 1968 following the Second Vatican Council”.

(c)     Christian’s 11^th,12^th and 13^th century unsuccessful Crusades to retake the “Holy Lands”, unmercyfully slaughtered Jews and Muslims wherever they were found.

(d)     France’s 8 religious wars: from March 1562-April 1598, pitted French Catholics against early French Protestants, (Huguenots).

(e)     Europe’s 30 year war (1618-1648) pitted the Catholics against Martin Luther’s Reformation’s Protestants. The above information was gleaned from Wikipedia.

Next: what we’ve determined:

(a): We know: prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods first conned us in primitive jungles with polytheism’s gods; then enforced the commands of dynastic monarch’s specious gods, with torture and death.

 (b): We know: the bible is NOT “the word of God” as the bible’s books of “Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy were fabricated by King Josiah’s team of scholars as tribal propaganda, to motivate, invigorate, inspire, and intimidate his subjects. There is no evidence for a “God”. 

(c): We know the biblical Judaic God is fraudulent, because it is the evil Yahweh, the fictional god in King Josiah’s tribal propaganda.

(d): We know the fraudulent Hebrew bible inspired the so-called holy books of Christianity and Muslimism.

(e): We know the Gospels are fables, because the fraudulent Judaic God allegedly sired Jesus, destroying any possibility of divinity.

We know the origins of the Abrahamic faiths; they are tragic atrocities; their fictitious gods were foisted upon humanity by two ancient Eastern cultures whose uninformed multitudes have suffered utmost. Now we’ll examine the problems that have bedeviled most of humankind due to their thoughtless blind-faith in the Abrahamic religion’s fraudulent gods.

2.     Our imagination produced all gods. Our ignorance deluded us into the self-inflicted impulse to be dominated by King Josiah’s, monotheistic god; and feel compelled to worship his perverse dogma. Our problems began when we condescended to worship the god we had created; complicating our lives by disagreeing and fighting over the god; dividing into multiple sects, attempting to settle unanswerable questions. I argue: all gods are mythical; we created and manipulated them as per our aspirations. Wishful fantasies and ritualistic groveling cannot make them more than cerebral aberrations. Without evidence of gods it’s absurd for believers to kill others because of a fanatical adherence to a particular version of a mystical god; an irrational situation that remains incomprehensible to logical thought.

3.     Religion, when contemplated by inquisitive minds, reveals confusion about the unknown, but prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods, continue promulgating incomprehensibility with foolhardy certainty. Answers to queries based on conjecture are not valid and is the crux of skepticism; we’ve divided into the gullible and skeptics; such as agnostics, deists, free-thinkers, nonbelievers, infidels, secularists, and atheists; each doubting group claims an intrinsic definition.

4.     This thing we call religion has been a horrific nightmare. Our problems began when prestigious primitive professional proponents of mystical gods’ enhanced their careers with divination; promising salvation, urging suckers “to get right with god”. Abrahamic faiths perpetuated the myths, but without an iota of evidence it is daunting. Credulity is not a crime, but because of slight differences in religious beliefs, Christians slaughtered each other; proving we are easily brain-washed, and that blind-faith clouds our mind and warps our thinking. For 300 plus years, Rome worshipped a state-god, either Jupitor or Mithras, but during Emperor Constantine’s reign, (306-337) they exchanged gods, and Rome killed Europe’s pagan kings who refused the cross and, at sword’s point, appointed Christian kings; forcing Europe’s conversion to Christianity; imposing the Vatican over all Christendom. Martin Luther’s Reformation movement in the 1500s, ignited Europe’s smoldering conflagration of despotic Christian regimes; culminating in the 30 year war (1618-48).

 

5.     “Beginning of the seventeenth century, absolute monarchy triumphed over the ruins of European Middle Ages’ oligarchical and feudal liberties. The rights of man were completely confounded in the midst of Europe’s splendor and its literature. Ideas concerning liberty, political activity and freedom of religion were minimal. At that time in America, independence from England plus freedom from church-state tyranny were uppermost in the minds of all citizens, and humble communities put the boldest theories of human reason into practice”.

6.    The bible’s miracles have been discredited by the scholars, epigraphists and archaeologists who sought proof of its credibility. Their two hundred year search of the biblical region included excavations and carbon-dating of each level of destruction, at each of the ancient ruins of destroyed centers of habitation, and all histories including those carved in stone, in the lands between the Nile River and the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which has been amalgamated and conclusions published, authored by bible scholars and archaeologists.

7.     I’ve explored man’s god-ideas and hasten to add: early Homo sapiens, i.e., modern man, ventured away from the equatorial jungles, followed the receding ice sheets and occupied the more temperate regions of the world. Evolution improved the brains and dexterity of adventurous challengers. The positive pole enticed the erudite, sagacious and discerning who perceived of mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, etc.; they furthered knowledge, developed science beneficial for all humankind, e.g. plans, tools and machinery to cope with the prodigious problems in the agricultural, bronze, iron, industrial, electronics and space ages. Ten thousand years ago we became agriculturists; and our adventurous progress continues. Man’s ingenuity is undeniable his ability to think, to invent and resolve realistic conundrums, provided us a more fruitful life, but his infamous calumnious efforts to exploit supernatural god-ideas, i.e., the development of his Judaic god proved unsuccessful as his ego and ignorance deluded him into killing nonbelievers. Comparing history’s thinkers, who chose the positive pole, with those who chose the negative pole’s “God”, reveals religion’s irrational beliefs, which inhibit initiative and proliferate our misinformed multitudes.

8.     As I age, past experiences leads my mind to contemplate political and religious conundrums, e.g., humanity’s obeisance to King Josiah’s vengeful “God”, which for 2600 years, prompted us to pusillanimously wallow in the self-deprecating, idea that humans and other species were deposited in full bloom on Earth, by a superhuman god, for a special purpose; subjugating each of us forever. The tortuous ratiocinations required to justify Josiah’s tribal propaganda as divine revelation are not warranted, as the successful Abrahamic faiths spread bogus beliefs worldwide. Religion’s incongruity, combined with our imagination, ignorance and fear was unfathomable; we instinctively conceded to a god’s political promoters and saved our lives by acquiescing to specious beliefs, but blind-faith has been our Nemesis, i.e., “The goddess of retributive justice; anyone or anything by which one must inevitably be defeated or frustrated”.

9.     The god-idea is as old as our primitive cognition; based on fears and imagination, it explained and confirmed our relationship to all we failed to comprehend. Taught to children, it increased believers at the exponential rate of population multiplicity. Humanity’s history of despoliation, torture and malicious, killing in the name of their god, all of which today’s ignorant believers are unaware, belies reasons for berating us nonbelievers who are more sagacious, discerning and erudite about “God”  than our protagonists, the misinformed proponents of “Creationism” and “Intelligent Design”.

10.   Abrahamic faiths succeeded because their gods commanded that nonbelievers, apostates and blasphemers must die. Believers are unaware that Abrahamic faiths were extrapolated from King Josiah’s tribal propaganda. For 2000 years Judaism and Christianity were monarchal theocracies; like the Islamic regimes. Religion’s essence is male superiority; responsible for contentious global divisions, but our diplomatic, perspicacious women will resolve our religious and racial distinctions. In addition to generating new lives, women’s sensibilities and capabilities equal those of men, except for brute strength and male sperm. Free man of obligations, provide adequate sex and a little sustenance and, like stallions, he can be domesticated. Males were intrigued with matriarchal life and miraculous god-ideas. When King Josiah required a monotheistic god to manage his restive subjects, it had to be like man; therefore “God’s” vanity, jealousy and vindictive prejudices; creating a partnership; women weren’t included, an unfortunate oversight. The bible’s god’s inconsideration of women was concocted by males. Men’s blind faith in a vengeful, egomaniacal, tyrannical tho mythical male god, rather than our intelligent, empathetic, sensuously beautiful, real women, is inexplicably perverse and stupid.

 

11.     The Abrahamic faiths’ history of inquisitions, persecutions, stonings, burnings, beheadings and religious wars, all in the name of their god, belies their claims of godliness. They worship King Josiah’s despicable god; we can’t blame religion’s militancy on a fictional god character; the problems are men’s imaginations, testosterone and conspiratorial minds. Religions’ perceived militancy is that of man; his indifference to its past persecutions, degradation and killing only adds to the confusion, amid questions about religion’s purpose. They, hypocritically, avoid references to their less than holy past and present gods as sacred; supported by billions who inherited misguided beliefs without investigating the god vs. secularism situation. If there is a god and a heaven, it’s reasonable to assume we would be allowed a more sensible arrangement, as unsubstantiated theories, concepts, etc. are invalid, even though they were conjured by the ancients. “Illusion and faith aren’t sensible substitutions for sound science”, which accepts only the provable; advancing knowledge, but Abrahamic religions are obstructive, stagnant, backward, waste- lands of hypocrisy; unable, for 2600 years, to add to world knowledge. Islamic fundamental totalitarianism remains in the 7^th century CE when Mohammad claimed Hebrew archangel; Gabriel revealed his koran’s precepts. The region had once been a progressive knowledgeable civilization, but today’s Islamic regimes are theocratic tyrannies, exporting “sacred” terrorism and enforcing sharai law. After its numerous historic religious wars, Western Europe forewent the Abrahamic religions’ illogical divisiveness and formed their secular European Union.

 12.     We are a plague that has infested the Earth’s skin, an infestation of organisms consuming our host while we contemplate global agreements on ways to avoid self-destruction before our host collapses. Alternatively, we may be a malignancy, developing at the exponential rate of population multiplicity. When our host becomes uninhabitable, we will need to move onto another host and begin a new infestation. Globally, we haven’t considered mutually agreeable plans to further enhance our tolerance of each other’s ethnic peculiarities. Earth accepted the single cell microorganisms of life and nourished them for billions of years while they developed into our numerous species of animal life; microscopic viries and bacteria, plus the aquatic, the avian, and mammals including us. All life depends upon global willingness to agree to stabilize and reverse our thoughtless destruction of the Earth’s natural benevolence. We’ve adapted and thrived beyond expectations and our infestation is beyond humane control. We’ve polluted two of life’s necessities, air and water, and must convince global nations to take emergency measures that require compliant agreements to eliminate all elements contributing to global divisiveness or else humankind must anticipate our irreversible extermination as an endangered species.

13.     People believe because they don’t know any better. Our lexicon is rife with words meaning unreal or unknown, which may be used to describe a pseudo universe devoid of human knowledge, where organized religion’s alliance has staked its unholy claim and touts its worthless stock to gullible congregations. Religions allusion to supernaturalism’s gods, ghosts, etc. is unfamiliar territory and opens unlimited fields of thought just as extensive and complex as we will allow our imagination to develop. It’s a fertile field on which to grow fairytales, visions, claims of gods, etc. For instance: if you compose a fable of your grandparent’s adventures with a miracle working god and your ignorant friends believe it and teach their children, and they, teach it to their children ad finitum, believers will about double each generation. A millennium later, innumerable ones will support your fable as factual. If believers have been killing nonbelievers, a majority will have developed a blind-faith and believe your fable is true; that God exists because multitudes, regularly, grovel on their knees, worshipping it.

14.     The Abrahamic faiths credit humanity’s beneficence to “God”, but in reading the bible there is no benevolent god; the Pentateuch portrays the god as a mad monstrous killer, but Religion-Lites prestigious professional proponents credit a god with our moral code. I disagree; the professionals began as jungle scam artists and for millennia aided despotic monarchs and aristocracy by sanctifying their murders of apostates, blasphemers, nonbelievers, proponents of other gods, etc.; all in an attempt to coerce people into ignorant submission. Our concern should be for each other from whom all goodness flows. Our primitive evolutionary experiences developed conviviality and consideration for our fellow humans along with our Moral Code and Golden Rule; primitive guides to morality, kindness, empathy and maternal love which evolved millennia before King Josiah’s god-Yahweh produced its Ten Commandments in Exodus 20: 2-17; eleven  verses, (2-12), pertain to the god’s egomania, leaving only five verses for killing, adultery, stealing, lying and coveting thy neighbor’s possessions.

15.     Among our human masses, ignorance, misinformation and religions flourish; they worship supernatural gods, known only via conjecture, ruse, subterfuge, and lies. Their blind faith in the illogical reveals mortal fears of exclusion by Father, Son or Holy Ghost; similar to Hindu’s supreme trinity. Brahma created the universe, Vishnu is Preserver and Siva is the god of destruction and reproduction. Holy Ghost is undefined. Realistically, the unholy trinity I have gleaned from my 95 years and the Abrahamic religion’s despicable history is: “ignorance, dogma & despotism”.

16.    Abrahamic faiths have no knowledgeable facts; their biblical fables reveal how King Josiah misled our ancestors into believing their salvation required them to torture and murder all those unwilling to obey Josiah’s monotheistic god. Religion’s responsibility for the millions slaughtered by our ancestors, in “God’s” name, is an irreconcilable stain on our collective conscience. I have learned how god-ideas became imbedded in primitive minds amid vast ignorance, and developed religion’s malevolent history. Our delusions, concerning humankind’s purpose, began in primitive times when non-comprehension was explained by the occult powers of mythical gods; there’s no evidence supporting simple-minded solutions devised by primitive imaginations. As I became more familiar with bible’s tyrannical god’s methods for dealing with nonbelievers, critics, etc., curiosity led me to search for why the god was portrayed as vain, vile, vicious, and vengeful and why was man so enthralled with the idea of an immoral violent god? I found that man had created all gods, and was especially enamored with the bible’s god because man had created that particular god in his own exalted, self-image, the perfect male, mean spirited, ready to destroy all who failed to worship the god’s egomania; I learned of the bible’s contrived godliness; its mythology, false prophesies and inherent fallacies. The only goodness in our semi-civilized world comes from fellow humans; we must be tolerant and respectful of each other.  Confucius said: “We are all the same except for our experiences”, but Abrahamic faiths’ intolerant divisive “Gods” are incompatible with our desire to become undiscriminating and inclusive. Gods are offered by their prestigious professional proponents as man’s ideal of holy behavior, but the bible’s Pentateuch does not support them. There is no “God”, heaven, etc. Religion’s gift to man is “hell on Earth” with its deceptive professional proponents. It is wrong to believe threats of hell and promises of eternal life prevent our becoming uncivilized and backward, because the Islamic regimes are the most uncivilized, violent, backward and most religiously devout societies on Earth.

17.     Our only exposure to supernaturalism is in the Holy Books and other fairytales. Supernaturalism is religion’s subterfuge; so why do we worship supernatural gods and why are civilized societies guided by King Josiah’s vengeful dogma?  The bible’s “God” is portrayed as a perfidious tyrant; but believers attribute all goodness to the spurious evil aberration.

 18.     My reasoning is derived from the diametrically opposed positions of King Josiah of Judah, and Charles Robert Darwin, the nineteenth century English author of, On the Origin of Species and of, The Descent of Man. My remarks are unambiguous; uncomplicated by Deuteronomistic History’s convoluted meaninglessness and its consequential theological dogma. As blind-faith reveals more trust in our ignorance than our intellect, I’ll explain how religion’s irrationality came from man’s conspiratorial ruminations, wishful thinking and persistent search for propositions to exploit his fellow man. So when our political leaders promised us suckers eternal life; we didn’t challenge it. Since superstitions ruled the land; we have deceived our stupid selves about the god problem. Our imagination led us to follow leaders espousing a close personal relationship to a fearsome tho specious god. King Josiah’s unabashed desire to unify, inspire and motivate his war weary subjects, led him to deceive them with an epical fable about the personal relationship of their miracle working tribal god, with their mythological ancestors very ingeniously portrayed as Josiah’s political and religious scholars “retrospectively imagined it all should have been”.

19.     Abrahamic faiths promulgate faith in King Josiah’s mystical god that commands death for infidels; an immoral unlawful act, but congregations worship the unholy violent phantasm. There is not a remote connection to an ever-present, all-knowing, all-powerful superhuman God. Promoting unknowns under the guise of personal salvation convinces humankind they must submit their will to a god’s prestigious professional proponents and refuse information that’d set them aright.

20.     Religion’s unsubstantiated dogma is insidious hearsay. Suffering is not virtuous; and each child born is not burdened with original sin. It is masochistic to confess and plead mercy from the perfidious Judaic god’s prestigious professional proponents, or worship a savior god to access heaven or avoid hell’s fires; self-serving threats by clergy, who appear to be unaware that Heaven’s God, Jesus and Allah plus Hell’s Devil are all legendry.  It is vital for us to treat the world’s people as we wish to be treated.

21.     Ignorance embraced Abrahamic religions’ fallacies. Our brains and computers, both require rational, factual input in order to develop rational factual solutions, but Abrahamic religion’s lack thereof forced it to rely upon conjecture, blind faith, and murdering millions of nonbelievers, to obtain its illogical imposition upon the world’s trustful societies.

22.     Archaeologists & epigraphists have found history simpler than King Josiah’s biblical fable about the Patriarchs, the ancient Israelites, etc.; a good reason to reject the holy books’ prophesies and miracles; which are the sole source of Abrahamic faiths’ relevant knowledge; Disclosure, leaves large segments of our world’s population suffering from delusive blind faith in stultifying beliefs that encourage religious terrorism, but inhibits proposals for global programs to reduce world apprehensions.

23.     Ralph Waldo Emerson warned us not to follow the crowd; but to think and reason independently. I argue for a world managed by its perspicacious peace-loving women; dedicated to ethnological sameness, undiscriminating inclusiveness and global harmony. The idea of world-government was promoted “by eleven U.S. presidents from Franklin Roosevelt through Bill Clinton”. The possibility of a peaceful healthy world for humanity to enjoy should encourage the worlds astute and discerning to temper their contentious attitudes about ethnological disparities, and diplomatically and reasonably organize, socially, politically, religiously and otherwise to promote and work toward a more peaceful ecumenical world.

24.     Dear reader, to understand the magnificent release I experience by sensing freedom from gods, and other mythical delusions see Ingersoll’s Vow in FINAL NOTES. Also recognize the historical clues of the Abrahamic religion’s deceptive fearsome illusions which misled our ignorant ancient ancestors, and  provided religions’ bloody success. Everyone wants to live forever, but from the seventh century BCE, until the sixteenth century CE, nonbelievers were killed by either Jews or Christians. Religion subjugated the faithful, which makes me question why today’s believers don’t know about the bible’s egomaniacal pathological killer, “God”; as they inherited an instinctive fear of the specious god’s wrath. Please be aware of what is expected if Christianity ever gains its anticipated opportunity to govern us, because Christian ideology embraces the Old Testament’s fundamentalism; relegating our secular democracy to another Islamic tyrannical theocracy; constraining government’s flexibility and stemming its ability to expand and improve beyond the limited capabilities of the prestigious professional proponents of the government’s god, who since man’s earliest cognitive experiences have convinced him to believe in their gods; it’s a competitive business. There has never been tangible evidence that gods exist and in spite of the Jesus fables, no one claims they do. Creeds say “I believe”, but billions fought and died defending a particular religion’s stupid beliefs.

25.     Like many of history’s curious individuals, I have explored religion’s devious quandaries. I’m satisfied biblical faith is erroneous. I presume believers are not curious and regret their disinterest. There is something mentally devastating in believing we are subjugated to imaginary spiritual powers; although evidence is plentiful that fearsome gods were created by monarchs and promoted by priests, in order to subjugate the people. Our Founding Fathers warned us to remain alert to religion’s deathly threats and its devious ruses directed toward ecclesiastical control of our nation’s governing apparatus.

26.     Non-thinking men depended upon gods, thus it remains, but now we consider ourselves informed and understand how our ancestors’ faults were due to their lack of knowledge, which encouraged the worship of false gods. But how do we explain to progeny why we inexplicably grovel before mythology’s misbegotten gods?

27.     Our Electorate’s enthusiasm for specious Jesus is our Nemesis, which will probably destroy us. Whatever evil deeds ancient clergy decreed, modern clergy’s misperception of their “holy powers” will tempt them to replicate. I reject religion’s spurious salvation; my main interest is saving our country from deceptive divinity and religious tyranny. Our America was organized as a secular democracy; the first 10, plus the 14^th amendments to our constitution, guarantees us freedom from religion and a separation of Church & State, plus freedoms of speech, press, etc. Each of us is sovereign and has natural rights of  “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

29.     Having read this far, you surely realize that the bible’s Pentateuch’s stupid god character was teaching the Jews revengeful hatred toward all foreigners, and not to marry them, but It was written specifically to serve as King Josiah’s enforcer. Such a menacing intimidating god, threatening death for every infraction and eliciting revenge and death for foreigners is frighteningly unsuitable to influence a peace seeking world, but the Jews and Christians followed their bible’s teachings, and killed their apostates, blasphemers, nonbelievers, proponents of other gods, and in the 30 year war, Christians slaughtered Christians. Believing in false gods drove man to commit inconceivable brutal bloody crimes as per today’s religious Islamic regimes. The deaths, despoliation and ignorance caused by those particular religious ideas are regretted. Realistically, our world’s salvation depends upon global agreements to stop global-warming; and that depends upon a respectful cooperation of global humanity. Jewish exclusiveness resulted in resentment and their ignominious existence. The racial purity of nation-states is inimical to world peace and consanguinity accentuates debilities. Charles Darwin’s research accentuated the inherent advantages in cross-breeding plants. I have observed superb individuals whose parents were racially diverse, and haven’t heard anyone complain. Like plants, humans are improved by cross-breeding; we must conclude that NATURE’S grand plan for us includes the eventual interbreeding of all races; so why not now? I oppose Yahweh’s stupid racial purity and advocate undistinguishing inclusiveness and unfettered knowledge as our path to world peace.

30.     Prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods are bogymen, who, like Santa Clause promise us joy if we’re good and disappointment if we’re bad. It is analogous to a childhood scare; older boys explained that I would live forever if I scratched my name on a magnolia’s blossom; I did it and was then told to keep it safe from harm forever or else I would die. I panicked; as the blossoms were so delicately fragile and I was so young.

Primitive humans’ prelogical mentality believed in magic and accepted the hype of professional proponents of all sorts of imaginary gods; having imperceptible powers to punish or reward; similar to our children dealing with the idea of Santa Clause; except that It grew to be governing monarchs manipulating their multitudes; collecting work or taxes in payment for the protection a specious wrathful god’s prestigious professional proponents.

Male superiority demeaned female’s brainy influence. It also created our 2^nd oldest profession; pimping for mystical gods; finding its niche, supporting despotic monarchs and creating three superficial faiths. I seek truth in all things; including man’s fascination with mystical deities; his disdain for intellectualism, his overt militancy, his neglect of planet Earth, and global divisiveness. I believe our world’s contentious societies could be enriched when and if all humankind has the same color skin and speak the same language. You say that is too idealistic? But an “omniscient omnipotent omnipresent” benevolent sensible “God” would have created the ideal in the beginning instead of nature’s thoughtless happenstantial erratic system of evolution that creates and sustains all Earthly life.

My premise: gods have not materialized, but slaughtering our discerning sagacious nonbelievers for 2000 years has limited philosophers, thinkers and scientists who have revealed that life began about 3.5 billion years ago when Earth’s chemicals evolutionarily mutated into single-cell organisms that multiplied by dividing; occasionally mutating; eventually evolving into all of our life forms (See Wikipedia’s History of the Earth). Primitive man’s experiences and experiments evolved his undeveloped intellect into more astute Homo sapiens; groping for answers; mystified by small seeds that produced huge trees; unaware atmospheric pressure gradients developed nature’s terrifying storms, which led to our 2^nd profession, the prestigious primitive proponents of mystical gods who devised divination’s simple solutions for unfathomable conundrums. Gods were pawns serving scheming scammers and the priests of dynastic kings; meting out justice, upholding order, and sanctifying the riddance of their realm’s more discerning, erudite, non-allegiant dissidents.

King Josiah’s father’s assassination was due to polytheism’s divisive gods; and Israelite’s had only folktales for history, Josiah’s scholars fabricated an inspirational motivating epical tribal legend that subjugated them. It was tribal propaganda; its evil quixotic character, Yahweh, coerced them away from polytheism’s gods by demanding death for apostates, etc. Yahweh named Josiah his ideal king and limited all worship to Jerusalem’s Temple. Egypt killed Josiah, and Babylon burned Jerusalem, but scholars revised the tribal legend while in Babylonian exile; adding Joshua, judges, 1&2 Samuel and 1&2 Kings. Persia’s King Cyrus seized Babylon and Ezra and Nehemiah returned Jews to Jerusalem, rebuilt its wall, and proclaimed Josiah’s tribal legend Holy Scripture; culminating in Jerusalem’s newly established Jewish community founding its new sect of monotheistic Judaism.

 Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity; and established Constantinople’s Eastern Christian Church. He then killed Europe’s pagan kings who refused the cross; appointing Christian kings; forcing them to convert pagan Europe to Christianity, which thrived with surveillance, censorship, torture and killing infidels, heretics,  etc. for 1000 years, but a 30 year religious war, pitted Christians against Christians, reducing Europe’s population by a third; starving Christians into eating their most recently killed fellow-Christians. (See CHRISTIANITY)

Americans declared independence from England’s Church-State dynasty; proclaiming: freedom of/from religion, but multitudes continue groveling and worshipping Abrahamic religions’ perfidious inscrutable gods, which have caused more persecutions, premeditated malicious murder and debilitating contentious wars, than all of our other idiotic idiosyncrasies, but now Christianity is pursuing our nation’s management, where a god’s spurious sovereignty rescinds our constitution and nulifies laws; leaving us citizens impotent; subject to the gods’ prestigious professional proponents.

My conclusion: although billions believed their particular religion’s creed, have been baptized and “born again”, or whatever; seeking eternal life after death; why do today’s prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods continue promulgating incomprehensible unsubstantiated beliefs? I realize credulity is not a crime, but it’s injudicious; misleading and consequentially it warps one’s cognitive processes. My search found no reason to believe in the Abrahamic faiths’ mythological suppositions; which remain our world’s most magnificent confidence games, but at some point throughout history the conspiring vainglorious professional proponents of their mystical gods became discombobulated and self-righteous; believing their own deceitful hype. The Abrahamic religions have no historical basis, but are hearsay; plagiarized from antiquity’s many “redeeming-godmen”, whose mythology was often worshipped as living gods; although most of the ancient records, of our world’s religions, appear to have been repetitiously corrupted.

My goal: is to expose Abrahamic religions’ deplorable perfidious history and introduce reason, honesty and truth to believers, or else multitudes of our “born again” Christian electorate will rescind our secular democracy, and retroact Christianity’s ancient surveillance, censorship, inquisitions, tortuous persecutions and its tyrannical death-dealing totalitarianism. If this is extreme; recall: ancient clergy misrepresented their misperceived powers and colluded with politicians. Laws must govern; not intimidating threats of self-righteous prestigious professional proponent’s imaginary gods. We cannot achieve nirvana by killing all those who disagree with our particular brand of absolutism, but we, the world’s people must forego the bible’s stupid exclusivity and expound upon our secular nation’s undiscriminating inclusiveness. Any goodness we receive is bestowed upon us by fellow human beings, which obligates each of us to follow the golden rule.

 

THOMAS PAINE

 

The following is An Oration on the Life and Services of Thomas Paine; by Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899) delivered at Fairbury, Ill. on the evening of January 30, 1871.

To speak the praises of the brave and thoughtful dead is to me a labor of gratitude and love. Through all the centuries gone, the mind of man has been beleaguered by the mailed hosts of superstition. Slowly and painfully has advanced the army of deliverance. Hated by those they wished to rescue, despised by those they were dying to save, these grand soldiers, these immortal delivers, have fought without thanks, labored without applause, suffered without pity, and they have died execrated and abhorred. For the good of mankind they accepted isolation, poverty, and calumny. They gave up all, sacrificed all, and lost all but truth and self-respect.

One of the bravest soldiers in this army was Thomas Paine; and for one, I feel indebted to him for the liberty we are enjoying this day. Born among the poor, where children are burdens; in a country where real liberty was unknown; where the privileges of class were guarded with infinite jealousy, and the rights of the individual trampled beneath the feet of priests and nobles; where to advocate justice was treason; where intellectual freedom was Infidelity, it is wonderful that the idea of true liberty ever entered his brain.

Poverty was his mother—Necessity his master.

He had more brains than books; more sense than education; more courage than politeness; more strength than polish. He had no veneration for past mistakes—no admiration for ancient lies. He loved the truth for the truth’s sake, and for man’s sake. He saw oppression on every hand; injustice everywhere—hypocrisy at the altar, venality on the bench, tyranny on the throne; and with a splendid courage he espoused the cause of the weak against the titled few.

In England he was nothing. He belonged to the lower classes. There was no avenue open for him. The people hugged their chains, and the whole power of the government was ready to crush any man who endeavored to strike a blow for the right.

At the age of thirty-seven, Thomas Paine left England for America with high hope of being instrumental in the establishment of a free government. In his own country he could accomplish nothing. Those two vultures—Church and State—were ready to tear in pieces and devour the heart of anyone who might deny their divine right to enslave the world.

Upon his arrival in this country, he found himself possessed of a letter of introduction, signed by another Infidel, the illustrious Franklin. This, and his native genius, constituted his entire capital; and he needed no more. He found the colonies clamoring for justice; whining about their grievances; upon their knees at the foot of the throne, imploring that mixture of idiocy and insanity, George the 3^rd by the grace of God, for a restoration of their ancient privileges. They were not endeavoring to become freemen, but were trying to soften the heart of their master. They were perfectly willing to make brick if Pharoah would furnish the straw. The colonists wished for, hoped for, and prayed for reconciliation. They did not dream of independence.

Paine gave to the world his “Common Sense”. It was the first argument for separation, the first assault upon the British form of government, the first blow for a republic, and it roused our fathers like a trumpet’s blast. He was the first to perceive the destiny of the New World.

No other pamphlet ever published accomplished such wonderful results. It was filled with argument, reason, persuasion, and unanswerable logic. It opened a new world. It filled the present with hope and the future with honor. Everywhere the people responded, and in a few months the Continental Congress declared the colonies free and independent states.

A new nation was born. It is simple justice to say that Paine did more to cause the Declaration of Independence than any other man. Neither should it be forgotten that his attacks upon Great Britain, were also attacks upon monarchy; and while he convinced the people that the colonies ought to separate from the mother country, he also proved to them that a free government is the best that can be instituted among men. In my judgment Thomas Paine was the best political writer that ever lived. “What he wrote was pure nature, and his soul and his pen ever went together”.

Ceremony, pageantry, and all the paraphernalia of power, had no effect upon him. He examined into the why and wherefore of things. He was perfectly radical in his mode of thought. Nothing short of the bed-rock satisfied him. His enthusiasm to be right knew no bounds. During all the dark scenes of the Revolution, never for one moment did he despair. Year after year his brave words were ringing through the land, and by the bivouac fires the weary soldiers read the inspiring words of “Common Sense”, filled with ideas sharper than their swords, and consecrated themselves anew to the cause of freedom.

Paine was not content with having aroused the spirit of independence, but he gave every energy of his soul to keep that spirit alive. He was with the army. He shared its defeats, its dangers, and its glory. When the situation became desperate, when gloom settled upon all, he gave them the “Crisis”. It was a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, leading the way to freedom, honor, and glory. He shouted to them, “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier, and the sunshine patriot, will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman”.

To those who wished to put the war off to some future day, with a lofty and touching spirit of self-sacrifice he said: “Every generous parent should say, ‘If there must be a war let it be in my day that my child may have peace’”. To the cry that Americans were rebels, he replied: “He that rebels against reason is a real rebel; but he that rebels against tyranny has a better title to ‘Defender of the Faith’ than George the Third”.

Some said it was not to the interest of the colonies to be free. Paine answered this by saying, “To know whether it be the interest of the continent to be independent, we need ask only this simple, easy question: ‘Is it the interest of a man to be a boy all his life’”? He found many who would listen to nothing, and to them he said, :That to argue with a man who has renounced his reason is like giving medicine to the dead”. This sentiment ought to adorn the walls of every orthodox church.

There is a world of political wisdom in this:--“England lost her liberty in a long chain of right reasoning from wrong principles”; and there is real discrimination in saying, “The Greeks and Romans were strongly possessed of the spirit of liberty, but not the principles, for at the time that they were determined not to be slaves themselves, they employed their power to enslave the rest of mankind”.

In his letter to the British people, in which he tried to convince them that war was not to their interest, occurs the following passage brimful of common sense: “War never can be the interest of a trading nation any more than quarreling can be profitable to a man of business. But to make war with those who trade with us is like setting a bull-dog at the shop door”.

The writings of Paine fairly glitter with simple, compact logical statements that carry conviction to the dullest and most prejudiced. He had the happiest possible way of putting the case: in asking questions in such a way that they answer themselves, and in stating his premises so clearly that the deduction could not be avoided.

Day and night he labored for America; month after month, year after year, he gave himself to the Great Cause, until the banner of the stars floated over a continent redeemed, and consecrated to the happiness of mankind.

At the close of the Revolution, no one stood higher in America than Thomas Paine. The best, the wisest, the most patriotic, were his friends and admirers; and had he been thinking only of his own good he might have rested from his toils and spent the remainder of his life in comfort, and in ease. He could have been what the world is pleased to call “respectable”. He could have died surrounded by clergymen, warriors and statesmen. At his death there would have been an imposing funeral, miles of carriages, civic societies, salvos of artillery, a nation in mourning. And above all, a splendid monument covered with lies.

He chose rather to benefit mankind.

At that time the seeds sown by the great infidels were beginning to bear fruit in France. The people were beginning to think. The Eighteenth Century was crowing its gray hairs with the wreath of progress.

On every hand Science was bearing testimony against the Church. Voltaire had filled Europe with light; D’Holbach was giving to the elite of Paris the principles contained in his “System of Nature”. The encyclopaedists had attacked superstition with information for the masses. The foundation of things began to be examined. A few had the courage to keep their shoes on and let the bush burn. Miracles began to get scarce. Everywhere the people began to inquire. America had set an example to the world. The word liberty began to be in the mouths of men, and they began to wipe the dust from their knees.

The dawn of a new day had appeared.

Thomas Paine went to France. Into the new movement he threw all his energies. His fame had gone before him, and he was welcomed as a friend of the human race, and as a champion of free government.

He had never relinquished his intention of pointing out to his countrymen the defects, absurdities and abuses of the English government. For this purpose he composed and published his greatest political work. “The Rights of Man”. This work should be read by every man and woman. It is concise, accurate, natural, convincing, and unanswerable. It shows great thought; an intimate knowledge of the various forms of government; deep insight into the very springs of human action, and a courage that compels respect and admiration. The most difficult political problems are solved in a few sentences. The venerable arguments in favor of wrong are refuted with a question—answered with a word. For forcible illustration, apt comparison, accuracy and clearness of statement, and absolute thoroughness, it has never been excelled.

The fears of the administration were aroused, and Paine was prosecuted for libel and found guilty; and yet there is not a sentiment in the entire work that will not challenge the admiration of every civilized man. It is a magazine of political wisdom, an arsenal of ideas, and an honor, not only to Thomas Paine, but to human nature itself. It could have been written only by the man who had the generosity, the exalted patriotism, the goodness to say, “The world is my country, and to do good my religion”.

 There is in all the utterances of the world no grander, no sublimer sentiment. There is no creed that can be compared with it for a moment. It should be wrought in gold, adorned with jewels, and impressed upon every human heart: “The world is my country, and to do good my religion”. In 1792 Paine was elected by the department of Calais as their representative in the National Assembly. So great was his popularity in France that he was selected about the same time by the people of no less than four departments. Upon taking his place in the Assembly he was appointed as one of a committee to draft a constitution for France. Had the French people taken the advice of Thomas Paine there would have been no “reign of terror”. The streets of Paris would not have been filled with blood. The revolution would have been the grandest success of the world. The truth is that Paris was too conservative to suit the leaders of the French Revolution. They, to a great extent, were carried away by hatred, and a desire to destroy. They had suffered so long, they had borne so much, that it was impossible for them to be moderate in the hour of victory. Besides all this, The French people had been so robbed by the government, so degraded by the Church, that they were not fit material with which to construct a republic. Many of the leaders longed to establish a beneficent and just government, but the people asked for revenge.

Paine was filled with a real love for mankind. His philanthropy was boundless. He wished to destroy monarchy—not the monarch. He voted for the destruction of tyranny, and against the death of the king. He wished to establish a government on a new basis; one that would forget the past; one that would give privileges to none, and protection to all.

In the Assembly, where nearly all were demanding the execution of the king—where to differ from the majority was to be suspected, and where to be suspected was almost certain death. Thomas Paine had the courage, the goodness and the justice to vote against death. To vote against the execution of the king was a vote against his own life. This was the sublimity of devotion to principle. For this he was arrested, imprisoned and doomed to death.

   Search the records of the world and you will find but few sublimer acts than that of Thomas Paine voting against the king’s death. He, the abhorrer of monarchy, the champion of the rights of man, the republican, accepting death to save the life of a deposed tyrant—of a throneless king. This was the last grand act of his political life—the sublime conclusion of his political career.

All his life he had been the disinterested friend of man. He had labored—not for money, not for fame, but for the general good. He had aspired to no office; had asked no recognition of his services, but had ever been content to labor as a common soldier in the army of progress. Confining his efforts to no country, looking upon the world as his field of action, filled with a genuine love for the right, he found himself imprisoned by the very people he had striven to save.

Had his enemies succeeded in bringing him to the block, he would have escaped the calumnies and the hatred of the Christian world. In this country, at least, he would have ranked with the proudest of names. On the anniversary of the Declaration his name would have been upon the lips of all the orators, and his memory in the hearts of all people.

Thomas Paine had not finished his career.

He had spent his life thus far in destroying the power of kings, and now he turned his attention to the priests. He knew that every abuse had been embalmed in Scripture—that every outrage was in partnership with some holy text. He knew that the throne skulked behind the altar and both behind a pretended revelation from God. By this time he had found that it was of little use to free the body and leave the mind in chains. He had explored the foundations of despotism and had found them infinitely rotten. He had dug under the throne, and it occurred to him that he would take a look behind the altar.

The result of his investigation was given to the world in the “Age of Reason” from the moment of its publication he became famous. He was calumniated beyond measure. To slander him was to secure the thanks of the Church. All his services were instantly forgotten, disparaged or denied. He was shunned as though he had been a pestilence. Most of his old friends forsook him. He was regarded as a moral plague, and at bare mention of his name the bloody hands of the Church were raised in horror. He was denounced as the most despicable of men.

Not content with following him to his grave, they pursued him after death with redoubled fury, and recounted with infinite gusto and satisfaction the supposed horrors of his death-bed; gloried in the fact that he was forlorn and friendless, and gloated like fiends over what they supposed to be the agonizing remorse of his lonely death.

It is wonderful that all his services were thus forgotten. It is amazing that one kind word did not fall from some pulpit; that someone did not accord to him, at least—honesty. Strange, that in the general denunciation someone did not remember his labor for liberty, his devotion to principle, his zeal for the rights of his fellowmen. He had by brave and splendid effort, associated his name with the cause of progress. He had made it impossible to write the history with his name left out. He was one of the creators of light; one of the heralds of the dawn. He hated tyranny in the name of kings, and in the name of God, with every drop of his noble blood. He believed in liberty and justice, and in the sacred doctrine of human equality. Under these divine banners he fought the battle of his life. In both worlds he offered his blood for the good of man. In the wilderness of America, in the French Assembly, in the somber cell waiting for death, he was the same unflinching, unwavering friend of his race; the same undaunted champion of universal freedom. And for this he has been hated; for this the Church has violated even his grave.

This is enough to make one believe that nothing is more natural than for men to devour their benefactors. The people in all ages have crucified and glorified. Whoever, lifts his voice against abuses, whoever arraigns the past at the bar of the present, whoever asks the king to show his commission, or question the authority of the priest, will be denounced as the enemy of man and God. In all ages reason has been regarded as the enemy of religion. Nothing has been considered so pleasing to the Deity as a total denial of the authority of your own mind, Self-reliance has been thought a deadly sin; and the idea of living and dying without the aid and consolation o superstition has always horrified the Church.

By some unaccountable infatuation belief has been, and still is considered of immense importance. All religions have been based upon the idea that God will forever and eternally damn the man who doubts or denies. Belief is regarded as the one essential thing. To practice justice, to love mercy, is not enough. You must believe in some incomprehensible creed. You must say “Once one is three, and three times one is one”. The man who practiced every virtue, but failed to believe, was execrated. Nothing so outages the feelings of the Church as a moral unbeliever—Nothing so horrible as a charitable Atheist.

When Paine was born, the world was religious. The pulpit was the real throne, and the churches were making every effort to crush out of the brain the idea that it had the right to think.

The splendid saying of Lord Bacon that “The inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, are the sovereign good of human nature”, has been, and ever will be, rejected by religionists. Intellectual liberty, as a matter of necessity, forever destroys the idea that belief is either praise or blame-worthy, and is wholly inconsistent with every creed in Christendom. Paine recognized this truth. He also saw that as long as the bible was considered inspired, this infamous doctrine of the virtue of belief would be believed and preached. He examined the Scriptures for himself, and found them filled with cruelty, absurdity, and immorality.

He again made up his mind to sacrifice himself for the good of his fellowmen.

He commenced with the assertion, “That any system of religion that has anything in it shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system”. What a beautiful, what a tender sentiment! No wonder that the Church began to hate him. He believed in the God, and no more. After this life he hoped for happiness. He believed that true religion consisted in doing justice, loving mercy, in endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy, and in offering to God the fruit of the heart. He denied the inspiration of the Scriptures. This was his crime.

He contended that it is a contradiction in terms to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. He asserted that revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication, and after that it is only an account of something which another person says was a revelation to him. We have only his word for it, as it was never made to us. This argument never has been and probably never will be answered. He denied the divine origin of Christ, and showed conclusively that the pretended prophecies of the Old Testament had no reference to him whatever; and yet he believed that Christ was a virtuous and amiable man; that the morality he taught and practiced was of the most benevolent and elevated character, and that it had not been exceeded by any. Upon this point he entertained the same sentiments now held by the Unitarians, and in fact by all the most enlightened Christians.

In his time the Church believed and taught that every word in the bible was absolutely true. Since his day it has been proven false in its cosmogony, false in its astronomy, false in its chronology, false in its history, and so far as the Old Testament is concerned, false in almost everything. There are but few, if any, scientific men who apprehend that the bible is literally true. Who on earth at this day (January 30, 1871) would pretend to settle any scientific question from the bible? The old belief is confined to the ignorant and zealous. The Church itself, will before long, be driven to occupy the position of Thomas Paine. The best minds of the orthodox world, today, are endeavoring to prove the existence of a personal Deity. All other questions occupy a minor place. You are no longer asked to swallow the bible whole, whale, Jonah and all. You are simply required to believe in God, and to pay your pew rent.

There is not now an enlightened minister in the world who will seriously contend that Samson’s strength was in his hair, nor that the necromancers of Egypt could turn water into blood, and pieces of wood into serpents. These follies have passed away, and the only reason that the religious world can now have for disliking Paine is that they have been forced to adopt so many of his opinions.

Paine thought the barbarities of the Old Testament inconsistent with what he deemed the real character of God. He believed that murder, massacre, and indiscriminate slaughter, had never been commanded by the Deity. He regarded much of the bible as childish, unimportant, and foolish. The scientific world entertains the same opinion. Paine attacked the bible precisely in the same spirit in which he had attacked the pretentions of kings. He used the same weapons. All the pomp in the world could not make him cower. His reason knew no “Holy of Holies”, except the abode of truth. The sciences were then in their infancy. The attention of the really learned had not been directed to an impartial examination of our pretended revelation. It was accepted by most as a matter of course. The Church was all powerful and no one, unless thoroughly imbued with the spirit of self-sacrifice, thought for a moment of disputing the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. The famous doctrine that salvation depends upon belief—upon mere intellectual conviction—was then believed and preached. To doubt was to secure the damnation of your soul. This absurd and devilish doctrine shocked the common sense of Thomas Paine, and he denounced it with the fervor of honest indignation. This doctrine, although infinitely ridiculous, has been nearly universal, and has been as hurtful as senseless. For the overthrow of the infamous tenet, Paine exerted; all his strength. He left few arguments to be used by those who should come after him, and he used none that have been refuted. The combined wisdom and genius of all mankind cannot possibly conceive of an argument against liberty of thought; neither can they show why anyone should be punished, either in this world or another, for acting honestly in accordance with reason; and yet, a doctrine with every possible argument against it has been, and still is, believed and defended by the entire orthodox world. Can it be possible that we have been endowed with, reason simply that our souls may be caught in its toils and snares, that we may be led by its false, and delusive glare out of the narrow path that leads to joy into the broad way of everlasting death? Is it possible that we have been given reason simply that we may through faith ignore its deductions, and avoid its conclusions? Ought the sailor throw away his compass and depend entirely upon the fog? If reason is not to be depended upon in matters of religion, that is to say, in respect of our duties to the Deity, why should it be relied upon in matters respecting the rights of our fellows? Why should we throw away the laws given to Moses by God himself, and have the audacity to make some of our own? How dare we drown the thunders of Sinai by calling the ayes and noes in a petty legislature? If reason can determine what is merciful, what is just, the duties of man to man, what more do we want either in time or eternity?

Down, forever down, with any religion that requires upon its ignorant altar the sacrifice of the goddess Reason that compels her to abdicate forever the shining throne of the soul, strips from her form the imperial purple; snatches from her hand the scepter of thought and makes her the bond woman of a senseless faith!

If a man should tell you that he had the most beautiful painting in the world and after taking you where it was should insist upon having your eyes shut. You would likely suspect, either that he had no painting or that it was some pitiable daub. Should he tell you that he was a most excellent performer on the violin, and yet refuse to play unless your ears were stopped, you would think, to say the least of it, that he had he had an odd way of convincing you of  his musical ability. But would his conduct be any more wonderful than that of a religionist who asks that before examining his creed you will have the kindness to throw away your reason? The first gentleman says “Keep your eyes shut, my picture will bear everything but being seen”; the next “Keep your ears stopped, my music objects to nothing but being heard”. The last says, “Away with you reason, my religion dreads nothing but being understood”.

So far as I am concerned I most cheerfully admit that most Christians are honest, and most ministers sincere. We do not attack them; we attack their creed. We accord them the same rights that we ask for ourselves. We believe that their doctrines are hurtful. We believe that the frightful text, “He that believes shall be saved, and he that believeth not shall be damned”, has covered the earth with blood. It has filled the heart with arrogance, cruelty and murder. It has caused the religious wars; bound hundreds of thousands to the stake; founded inquisitions; filled dungeons; invented instruments of torture; taught the mother to hate her child; imprisoned the mind; filled the world with ignorance; persecuted the lovers of wisdom; built the monasteries and convents; made happiness a crime, investigation a sin, and self-reliance a blasphemy. It has poisoned the sprigs of learning; misdirected the energies of the world; filled all countries with want; housed the people in hovels; fed them with famine; and but for the efforts of a few brave Infidels it would have taken the world back to the midnight of barbarism, and left the heavens without a star.

The maligners of Pane say that he had no right to attack this doctrine because he was unacquainted with the dead languages; and for this reason, it was a piece of pure impudence in him to investigate the Scriptures.

Is it necessary to understand Hebrew in order to know that cruelty is not a virtue, and that murder is inconsistent with infinite goodness, and that eternal punishment can be inflicted upon man only by an eternal fiend? Is it really essential to conjugate the Greek verbs before you can make up your mind as to the probability of dead people getting out of their graves? Must one be versed in Latin before he is entitled to express his opinion as to the genuineness of a pretended revelation from God? Common sense belongs exclusively to no tongue. Logic is not confined to, nor has it been buried with the dead languages. Paine attacked the bible as it is translated. If the translation is wrong, let its defenders correct it.

The Christianity of Paine’s day is not the Christianity of our time. There has been a great improvement since then. One hundred and fifty years ago the foremost preachers of our time would have perished at the stake. A Universalist would have been torn to pieces in England, Scotland, and America. Unitarians would have found themselves in the stocks, pelted by the rabble with dead cats, after which their ears would have been cut off, their tongues bored, and their foreheads branded. Less than one hundred and fifty years ago the following law was in force in Maryland:

“Be it enacted by the Right Honorable, the Lord Proprietor, by and with the advice and consent of his lordship’s governor, and the upper and lower houses ot the Assembly, and the authority of the same:

That if any person shall hereafter, within this province, wittingly, maliciously, and advisedly, by writing or speaking, blasphemy or curse God, or deny our Saviour, Jesus Christ to be the son of God, or shall deny the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, or the God-head of any of the three persons, or the unity of the God-head, or shall utter any profane words concerning the Holy Trinity, or any of the persons thereof, and shall thereof be convict by verdict, shall, for the first offence be bored through the tongue, and fined twenty pounds to be levied of his body. And for the second offence, the offender shall be stigmatized by burning in the forehead with the letter B, and fined forty pounds. And that for the third offence, the offender shall suffer death without the benefit of clergy.

The strange thing about this law is, that it has never been repealed, and is still in force in the District of Columbia. Laws like this were in force in most of the colonies, and in all countries where the Church had power.

In the Old Testament, the death penalty was attached to hundreds of offences It has been the same in all Christian countries. Today, in civilized governments. The death penalty is attached only to murder and treason; and in some, it has been entirely abolished. What a commentary upon the divine humbugs of the world!

In the day of Thomas Paine the Church was ignorant, bloody and relentless. In Scotland the “Kirk” was at the summit of its power. It was a full sister of the Spanish Inquisition. It waged war upon human nature. It was the enemy of happiness, the hater of joy, and the despiser of religious liberty. It taught parents to murder their children rather than to allow them to propagate error. If the mother held opinions of which the infamous “Kirk” disapproved, her children were taken from her arms. Her baby from her very bosom, and she was not allowed to see them, or to write them a word. It would not allow shipwrecked sailors to be rescued from drowning on Sunday. It sought to annihilate pleasure, to pollute the heart by filling it with religious cruelty and gloom, and to change mankind into a vast horde of pious heatless fiends. One of the most famous Scotch divines said: “The Kirk holds that religious toleration is not far from blasphemy”. And this same Scotch Kirk denounced, beyond measure, the man who had the moral grandeur to say, “The world is my country, and to do good my religion”. And this same Kirk abhorred the man who said “Any system of religion that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system”.

At that time nothing so delighted the Church as the beauties of endless torment, and listening to the weak wailings of damned infants struggling in the slimy coils and poison folds of the worm that never dies.

About the beginning of the nineteenth century, a boy by the name of Thomas Aikenhead, was indicted and tried for having denied the inspiration of the Scriptures, and having on several occasions, when cold, wished himself in hell that he might get warm. Notwithstanding the poor boy recanted and begged for mercy, he was found guilty and hanged. His body was thrown in a hole at the foot of the scaffold and covered with stones. Prosecutions and executions like this were common in every Christian country, and all of them were based upon the belief that an intellectual conviction is a crime.

No wonder the Church hated and traduced the author of the “Age of Reason”

England was filled with Puritan gloom and Episcopal ceremony. All religious conceptions were of the grossest nature. The ideas of crazy fanatics and extravagant  poets were taken as sober facts. Milton had clothed Christianity in the soiled and faded finery of the gods—had added to the story of Christ the fables of mythology. He gave to the Protestant Church the most outrageously material ideas of the Deity. He turned All the angels into soldiers—made heaven a battlefield, put Christ in uniform, and described God as a militia general. His works were considered by the Protestants nearly as sacred as the bible itself, and the imagination of the people was thoroughly polluted by the horrible imagery, the sublime absurdity of the blind Milton.

Heaven and hell were realities—the judgment day was expected—books of account would be opened. Every man would hear the charges against him read. God was supposed to sit on a golden throne, surrounded by the tallest angels, with harps in their hands and crowns on their heads. The goats would be thrust into eternal fire on the left, while the orthodox sheep on the right, were to gambol on the sunny slopes forever and forever.

The nation was profoundly ignorant, and consequently extremely religious, so far as belief was concerned.

In Europe, Liberty was lying chained to the Inquisition—her white bosom stained with blood. In the new world the Puritans had been hanging and burning in the name of God, and selling white Quaker children into slavery in the name of Christ, who said, “Suffer little children to come unto me”.

Under such conditions progress was impossible. Someone had to lead the way. The Church is, and always has been, incapable of a forward movement. Religion always looks back. The Church has already reduced Spain to a guitar, Italy to a hand-organ, and Ireland to exile.

Someone not connected with the Church had to attack the monster that was eating out the heart of the world. Someone had to sacrifice himself for the good of all. The people were in the most abject slavery; their manhood had been taken from them by pomp, by pageantry and power. Progress is birn of doubt and inquiry. The Church never doubts—never inquires. To doubt is heresy—to inquire is to admit that you do not know—the Church does neither.

More than a century ago Catholicism, wrapped in robes red with the innocent blood of millions, holding in her frantic clutch crowns and scepters, honors and gold, the keys of heaven and hell, trampling beneath her feet the liberties of nations, in the proud moment of almost universal dominion, felt within her heartless breast the deadly dagger of Voltaire. From that blow the Church never can recover. Livid with hatred she launched her eternal anathema at the great destroyer, and ignorant Protestants have echoed the curse of Rome.

In our country the Church was all powerful, and although divided into many sects, would instantly unite to repel a common foe. Paine struck his first grand blow.

The “Age of Reason” did more to undermine the power of the Protestant Church than all other books then known. It furnished an immense amount of food for thought. It was written for the average mind, and is a straight forward, honest investigation of the bible and the Christian system.

Paine did not falter from the first page to the last. He gives you his candid thought, and candid thoughts are always valuable. The “Age of Reason” has liberalized us all. It put arguments in the mouths of the people; it put the Church on the defensive; it enabled somebody in every village to corner the parson; it made the world wiser, and the Church better; it took power from the pulpit and divided it among the pews.

Just in proportion that the human race has advanced, the Church has lost power. There is no exception to this rule.

No nation ever materially advanced that held strictly to the religion of its founders.

No nation ever gave itself wholly to the control of the Church without losing its power, honor, and existence.

Every Church pretends to have found the exact truth. This is the end of its progress. Why pursue that which you have? Why investigate when you know?

Every creed is a rock in running water: humanity sweeps by it. Every creed cries to the universe, “Halt”! A creed is the ignorant Past bullying the enlightened Present.

The ignorant are not satisfied with what can be demonstrated. Science is too slow for them, and so they invent creeds. They demand completeness. A sublime segment, a grand fragment, is of no value to them. They demand the complete circle—the entire structure.

In music they want a melody with a recurring accent at measured periods. In religion they insist upon immediate answers to the questions of creation and destiny. The alpha and omega of all things must be in the alphabet of their superstition. A religion that cannot answer every question, and guess every conundrum is, in their estimation, worse than worthless. They desire a kind of theological dictionary—a religious ready reckoner, together with guide-boards at all crossings and turns. They mistake impudence for authority, solemnity for wisdom, and pathos for inspiration. The beginning and the end are what they demand. The grand flight of the eagle is nothing to them. They want the nest in which he was hatched, and especially the dry limb upon which he roosts. Anything that can be learned is hardly worth knowing. The present is considered of no value in itself. Happiness must not be expected this side of the clouds, and can only be attained by self-denial and faith: not self-denial for the good of others, but for the salvation for your own sweet self.

Paine denied the authority of the bibles and creeds—this was his crime—and for this the world shut the door in his face, and empyied its slops upon him from the windows.

I challenge the world to show that Thomas Paine ever wrote one line, one word in favor of tyranny—in favor of immorality; one line, one word against what he believed to be for the highest and best interest of mankind; one line, one word against justice, charity, or liberty, and yet he has been pursued as though he had been a fiend from hell. His memory has been execrated as though he had murdered some Uriah for his wife; driven some Hagar into the desert to starve with his child upon her bosom; defiled his own daughters; ripped open with the sword the sweet bodies of loving and innocent women; advised one brother to assassinate another; kept a harem with seven hundred wives, and three hundred concubines, or had persecuted Christians even into strange cities.

The Church has pursued Paine to deter others. No effort has been in any age of the world spared to crush out opposition. The Church used painting, music and architecture, simply to degrade mankind, But there are men that nothing can awe. There have been at all times brave spirits that dared even the gods. Some proud head has always been above the waves. In every age some Diogenes has sacrificed to sll the gods. True genius never cowers, and is always some Samson feeling for the pillars of authority.

Cathedrals and domes, and chimes and chants—temples frescoed and groined and carved, and gilded with gold—altars and tapers, and paintings of virgin and babe—censer and chalice, chasuble, paten and alb—organs and anthems and incense rising to the winged and blest—maniple, amice and stole—crosses and crosiers, tiaras and crowns—mitres and missals and masses—rosaries, relics and robes—martyrs and saints; windows stained as with the blood of Christ, never for one moment awed the brave, proud spirit of the Infidel. He knew that all the pomp and glitter had been purchased with liberty—that priceless jewel of the soul. In looking at the cathedral he remembered the dungeon. The music of the organ was not loud enough to drown the clank of fetters. He could not forget that the tapor had lighted the fagot. He knew that the cross adorned the hilt of the sword, and so where others worshiped, he wept and scorned.

The doubter, the investigator, the Infidel, have been the saviors of liberty. This truth is beginning to be realized, and the intellectual are beginning to honor the brave thinkers of the past.

But the Church is as unforgiving as ever, and still wonders why any infidel should be wicked enough to endeavor to destroy her power

I will tell the Church why.

You have imprisoned the human mind; you have been the enemy of liberty; you have burned us at the stake—wasted us upon slow fires—torn our flesh with iron; you have covered us with chains—treated us as outcasts; you have filled the world with fear; you have taken our wives and children from our arms; you have confiscated our property; you have denied us the right to testify in courts of justice; You have branded us with infamy’ you have torn out our tongues; you have refused us burial. In the name of your religion you have robbed us of every right’ and after having inflicted upon us every evil that can be inflicted in this world, you have fallen upon your knees, and with clasped hands, implored your God to torment us forever.

Can you wonder that we hate your doctrines—that we despise your creeds—that we feel proud to know we are beyond your power—that we are free in spite of you—that we can express our honest thought, and that the whole world is grandly rising into the blessed light?

Can you wonder that we point with pride to the fact, that infidelity has never been found battling for the rights of man, for the liberty of conscience, and for the happiness of all?

Can you wonder that we are proud to know, that we have always been disciples of Reason, and soldiers of Freedom; that we have denounced tyranny and superstition, and have kept our hands unstained with human blood?

We deny that religion is the end or object of this life. When it is so considered it becomes destructive of happiness—the real end of life. It becomes a hydra-headed monster, reaching in terrible coils from the heavens, and thrusting its thousand fangs into the bleeding, quivering hearts of men. It devours their substance, builds palaces for God, (who dwells not in temples made with hands), and allows his children to die in huts and hovels. It fills the earth with mourning, heavens with hatred, the present with fear, and the future with despair.

Virtue is a subordination of the passions to the intellect. It is to act in accordance with your highest convictions. It does not consist in believing, but in doing.

This is the sublime truth that the Infidels in all ages have uttered. They have handed the torch from one to the other through all the years that have fled. Upon the altar of Reason they have kept the sacred fire, and through the long midnight of faith, they fed the divine flame.

Infidelity is liberty; all religion is slavery. In every creed, man is the slave of God—woman is the slave of man, and the sweet children are the slaves of all.

We do not want creeds; we want knowledge—we want happiness.

And yet we are told by the Church that we have accomplished nothing; that we are simply destroyers; that we tear down without building again.

Is it nothing to free the mind? Is it nothing to civilize mankind? Is it nothing to fill th world with light, with discovery, with science? Is it nothing to dignify man and exalt the intellect? Is it nothing to grope your way into the dreary prisons, the damp and dropping dungeons, the dark and silent cells, where the souls of men are chained to the floors of stone, to greet them like a ray of light, like the song of a bird, the murmur of a stream, to see the dull eyes open and grow slowly bright, to feel yourself grasped by the shrunken and unused hands, and hear yourself thanked by a strange and hollow voice?

 Is it nothing to conduct these souls gradually into the blessed light of day—to let them see again the happy fields, the sweet green earth, and hear the everlasting music of the waves? Is it nothing to make men wipe the dust from their swollen knees, the tears from their blanched and furrowed cheeks? Is it a small thing to leave the heavens of an insatiate monster and write upon the eternal dome, glittering with stars, the grand word—Freedom?

Is it a small thing to quench the flames of hell with the holy tears of pity—to unbind the martyr from the stake—break all the chains—put out the fires of civil war—stay the sword of the fanatic, and tear the bloody hands of the Church from the white throat of Science?

Is it a small thing to make men truly free—to destroy the dogmas of ignorance, predudice and power—the poisoned fables of superstition, and drive from the beautiful face of the earth the fiend of Fear?

It does seem as though the most zealous Christian must at times entertain some doubt as to the divine origin of his religion. For eighteen hundred years the doctrine has been preached. For more than a thousand years the Church had to a great extent, control of the civilized world, and what has been the result? Are the Christian nation’s patterns of charity and forbearance?

On the contrary, their principal business is to destroy each other. More than five millions of Christians are trained, educated, and drilled to murder their fellow-Christians. Every nation is groaning under a vast debt incurred in carrying on war against other Christians, or defending themselves from Christian assault. The world is covered with forts to protect Christians from Christians; and every sea is covered with iron monsters ready to blow Christian brains into eternal froth. Millions are annually expended in the effort to construct still more deadly and terrible engines of death. Industry is crippled, honest toil is robbed, and even beggary is taxed to defray the expenses of Christian warfare. There must be some other way to reform this world. We have tried creed, and dogma and fable, and they have failed in all the nations dead.

The people perish for the lack of knowledge. Nothing but education—scientific education—can benefit mankind. We must find out the laws of nature and conform to them.

We need free bodies and free minds—free labor and free thought—chainless hands, and fetterless brains. Free labor will give us wealth. Free thought will give us truth.

We need men with moral courage to speak and write their real thoughts, and to stand by their convictions, even to the very death. We need have no fear of being too radical. The future will verify all grand and brave predictions. Paine was splendidly in advance of his time; but he was orthodox compared with the Infidels of today.

Science, the great Iconoclast, has been busy since 1809, and by the highway of progress are are the broken images of the past.

On every hand the people advance. The Vicar of God has been pushed from the throne of theCaesars, and upon the roofs of the Eternal City falls once more the shadow of the Eagle.

All has been accomplished by the heroic few. The men of science have explored heaven and earth, and with infinite patience have furnished the facts. The brave thinkers have used them. The gloomy caverns of superstition have been transformed into temples of thought, and the demons of the past are the angels of today.

Science took a handful of sand, constructed a telescope, and with it explored the starry depths of heaven. Science wrested from the gods their thunderbolts; and now the electric spark freighted with thought and love, flashes under all thr waves of the sea. Science took a tear from the cheek of unpaid labor, converted into steam, created a giant that turns with tireless arm, the countless wheels of toil.

Thomas Paine was one of the intellectual heroes—one of the men to which we are indebted. His name is associated forever with the great republic. As long as free government exists he will be remembered, admired and honored.

He lived a long, laborious and useful life. The world is better for his having lived. For the sake of truth he accepted hatred and reproach for his portion. He ate the bitter bread of sorrow. His friends were untrue to him because he was true to himself, and true to them. He lost the respect of what is called society, but he kept his own. His life is what the world calls failure, and what history calls success.

If to love your fellow men more than self is goodness, Thomas Paine was good.

If to be in advance of your time, to be a pioneer in the direction of right, is greatness, Thomas Paine was great.

 If to avow your principles and discharge your duty in the presence of death is heroic, Thomas Paine was a hero.

At the age of seventy three, death touched his tired heart. He died in the land of his genius defended—under the flag he gave to the skies. Slander cannot touch him now—hatred cannot reach him more. He sleeps in the sanctuary of the tomb, beneath the quiet of the stars.

A few more years—a few more brave men—a few more rays of light, and mankind will venerate the memory of him who said:

“Any system of Religion that shocks the mind of a child cannot be a true system”.

“The world is my country, and to do good my religion”.

“Justice is the only worship”.   “Love is the only priest”.

“Ignorance is the only slavery”.   “Happiness is the only good”.

“The way to be happy is to make others so”.

“They say the religion of your fathers is good enough.—why should your father object to your inventing a better plow than he had? They say to me do you know more than all the theologians dead? Being a perfectly modest man I say I think I do”.

“An infinite God ought to be able to protect himself, without going into partnership with state legislatures”.

“There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments—there are only consequences”.

“I belong to the Great Church which holds the world within its starlit aisles that claims the great and good of every race and clime; that finds with joy the grain of gold in every creed, and floods with light and love the germs of good in every soul”.

“The book called the bible is filled with passages equally horrible, unjust and atrocious. This is the book to be read in schools in order to make our children loving, kind and gentle! This is the book they wish to be recognized in our Constitution as the source of all authority and justice”.

“The instant we admit that a book is too sacred to be doubted, or reasoned about, we are mental serfs—if we have the right to use our reason, we have the right to act in accordance with it, and no god has the right to punish us for such action”. The above is Robert G. Ingersoll’s Oration on the Life and Services of Thomas Paine, with a few quotations from other lectures.

EDUCATION

1.     Elementary and secondary schools, in the U.S., are managed like home-grown enterprises. Poorly educated citizens usually beget and rear poorly educated children. If we could interrupt that paradigm, and initiate a new pattern, we might educate an entire generation and get ahead of our population’s climbing curve. Indolence is insupportable. To divert children from worse pursuits, each should become interested in investigating something that has attracted their attention. It’s important for them to explore new sources of information, where they’ll discover developments they’ll enjoy learning more about; curiosity expands with new knowledge. Children can’t start too early and the pursuit will fill their lives with exuberant pleasure; exercising their developing brain; it is the secret of successful lives supplanting their need to be constantly entertained. A preschoolers’ curiosity embraces natural phenomena, which can lead them to science, and research in the physical sciences. Middle school and high school youth have with too many distractions, and an average drop-out rate of 22.5%. Without the benefits of parental restrictions, this age is not wise enough to make meaningful decisions about their future. History and current news extoll activities of 15-24 year old male cohorts, whose inexperience, lack of responsibility and natural virility have “set them up” to risk their life for a few worthy causes and many unworthy ones, and they are apt to ignore education’s obstacle course. It is essential for children to develop a VOCABULARY; it makes reading comprehensive and enjoyable. Ignorance is endemically debilitating for all those with an inadequate education, and incapable of self-education. Improving vocabularies is our first step toward reducing our nation’s ignorance.

2.     Our method of funding elementary and secondary education with local real estate taxes is archaic and inadequate, as our children are our nation’s future and everyone’s responsibility. We should be taxed by the state or nationally to provide professional management, and classroom teachers with a commensurate compensation.

3.     Magazine polls emphasize the deficiency of our secondary schools; how only 77.5% of students graduate, while other nations produce college-entry students’ superior to ours; arousing consternation as to why this is true and why we cannot improve. Surveys show a number of fine high schools in the U.S.A. graduate exceptional students. However many schools are evidently mediocre and some dysfunctional. Polls also show 84-86% of our population admits to a blind-faith in unproven suppositions; and only 15 % will accept the proposition that we humans developed over millions of years, which suggests a relationship between our inadequate, locally guided, schools and a population with more faith in ancient ignorance than in proven scientific evidence. Religiously motivated managers, principals and teachers are contributing their faith’s ignorance to our schools, helping to degrade the learning experience. It is essential that our very young be scientifically motivated; that high schools and colleges explore and explain the natural forces of the universe plus our planet’s physical laws, scientific principles, etc. Anything less allows ignorance to expand exponentially; further inhibiting our nation’s future capabilities, i.e., less able to solve global warming’s forthcoming conundrums, our stupid god-problems, etc.

4.     The U.S., occasionally experiences influxes of illegal workers, seeking employment, but much of our manufacturing and assembly work is out-sourced to less costly locations, (See U.S. ECONOMY). Poorly educated and discouraged male youth is one source of our less than erudite electorate; they consider intellectualism effeminate, unmanly, and drop out of school with meager educations and low-skill opportunities. Solution: stabilize and invigorate middle and secondary schools with male professionals who must certify their qualifications and be licensed to practice, e.g., architects, nurses, etc.; they will challenge our growing numbers of uninspired and discouraged young males who are taxing our schools, courts and prisons.

5.     Our goal: provide all students equal opportunities to reach their level of incompetence; unable to absorb more. A successfully completed high-school education, either an academic or vocational one should be required nationally; military style if necessary; with college available to all qualified graduates; each is to be engaged in work within their level of competence.

 6.     I emphasize how divisive religion has always been. Our discriminating faiths destroyed each other and millions of innocent people in attempts to replace the Jews as the chosen subjects of a spurious “God”. Our wickedest enemies could never have caused us that much harm. If we ignore world thinkers, IGNORANCE will imprison us in religion’s coveted xenophobia, so please understand: “global warming” is destroying our atmosphere. Think about Islam’s violent despotic regimes, which are replicating the first 2000 years of Judaism and Christianity; they are brain-washed with King Josiah’s specious dogma and have bloody hands. EDUCATION is Abrahamic faiths’ Nemesis, but narrow minded IGNORANCE is humanity’s Nemesis, which must be overcome, as it is propelling us toward imminent extermination. RELIGION’S myths are, inadvertently, instilled into our publicly supported EDUCATIONAL system’s limited scope of influence.

7.     “God’s” prestigious professional proponents are theologians who do not question, but zealously study and promulgate religious doctrines and matters of divinity. Bible scholars critically study the bible, seeking more knowledge about its history, its incongruity, duplicity, who wrote each book, etc. Professor Bart D. Ehrman is an authority on early Christianity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Ehrman confesses to having no faith. This is not unusual as most lose their faith because of their biblical knowledge; erudite and cognizant of the bible’s inscrutability.

I appeal to our nation’s people: please THINK, and get beyond our ignorant ancestors’ primitive professional proponents of mystical gods; who were scamming semi-developed intellects. EDUCATION is our salvation; not the condescending specious beliefs; defying EVOLUTION’S scientifically proven natural progression. Abrahamic religions denigrate science and knowledge. IGNORANCE demeans our democratic government and public-education system simply because “born again” voters predominate.

8.     EDUCATION is more important to our nation’s welfare than religion, which emphasizes the absurd idea of eternal salvation, and deemphasizes knowledge. Education, i.e., knowledge, builds confidence and character, but religion only builds false hopes, while failing to add to our trove of worldly knowledge. Middle and High school males are vulnerable to their virility. It sways male brains for most of life, but is particularly deleterious in youth where the biggest dumbest boys become bullies. Middle and high school is no match for testosterone’s influence, but slower boys must be educated. Military type high-schools are not ideal, as they emphasize military action, which we wish to deemphasize, however, male high schools, academic and vocational, with male faculties were successful in many cities last century.

  9.     There is a great deal more that should be said about education and best ways to transfer knowledge, for instance; if one wishes to excel; to be better than the crowd; even the best schools can’t do that. The secret: it takes more than perfect homework. Beginning in the early grades one must exceed what state tests require; otherwise you only know what other top students know, which means one must be open-minded and inquisitive to enjoy learning. It is perverse to fear nerd-hood. Exceptualism is the name of life’s game and a fertile curiosity makes learning entertaining. So get off your bottom, put the remote-control and telephone aside and give yourself time to think. Can you think of anything you don’t already know? Do you have questions; your school work; your future goals; your personal relationships; trouble at work? Television and the internet are great sources of information, but you need something that you can refer to at your pleasure; like a book, maybe from the library, on the subject of your interest. Think about it, broaden your scope; develop the habit of searching for answers; use the dictionary for words you don’t know. Learn something new every day; it will keep your mind occupied and thoughts evermore positive. In composing this treatise, my problem was that I knew a words’ definition, but didn’t know the word. Curiosity implies an eagerness to learn things; a desire to be informed. Inquisitiveness implies a habitual tendency to be curious. Together they are the wellspring of knowledge.

A curious inquisitive mind is open to new information; and if facts change, it is eager to embrace them. Some minds are satisfied with what they know, and not open to conflicting information, which contributes to undeveloped intellects and dull personalities, e.g., non-curious self-righteous blind-faith believers dare not read this treatise’ iconoclastic information concerning Abrahamic faiths, but agnostics and atheists have open minds; curious, and eager to examine any tangible evidence that becomes available, but I doubt there is a school-board in our nation that would employ an atheist teacher.

10.     Historically, Abrahamic faiths; Judaism, Christianity and Islamism strangled new knowledge in the womb of its inventor; quelling all dissent for 2600 years; failing to add to our world’s trove of knowledge. Their schools and colleges, endowed after the Enlightenment, disseminated a particular sect’s theological doctrines; not to expand knowledge or enable society to see beyond their faiths’ constricted views of scientific progress. America’s founding fathers had experienced religion’s tyranny in Europe; migrating to the American colonies to avoid the hell of Abrahamic religion’s limited freedom and unlimited regressive demands. Our problem is: how to deal with our electorate’s enthusiasm for “God” as our nation’s sovereign; under the aegis of its prestigious professional proponents; ostensibly to negate our nation’s legislators’ responsibilities to reduce our national debt by fairly taxing the wealthiest contributors to their political campaigns.

11.     To gain an idea of what nonbelievers can accomplish, simply search for Wikipedia’s List of Atheists in Science and Technology; total of 93.

MATTER VS SPIRIT

1.     Matter is “whatever occupies space and is perceptible to the senses in some way”. Spirit is “the thinking, motivating, feeling part of man, often as distinguished from the body”. Spiritual is “supernatural or imaginary and is all that’s opposed to matter”.

2.     Primitive humanity feared attacks from both animals and humans; somewhere in our early development we found reasons to believe that the nonphysical was part of our physical world, and vice versa. Our fear of the paranormal developed sensitivities to the presence of animate beings, and our imaginations presumed the possibility of earthly gods. At some point in our primitive or ancient times, we realized: the deities we had identified as being most important, were all perceptible matter; things we could see, feel, or hear. We imagined that gods had imperceptible powers over us which we call fanciful or imaginary such as religion’s spiritual powers.

 3.     My view of the unresolved question of matter vs. spirit, is that our brain, the center of our nervous system, is of matter; receiving the sensory impulses from our senses and transmitting motor impulses to our muscles. What we speak of as our mind, is actually a division of our brain which handles our memory, recollection, our intellect and intelligence; what we think, what we feel or will, etc., the seat of our conscious and unconscious.

4.     Religion is an abstraction, dealing with our condescension, to obey and worship an abstruse mystical deity; something we permit our minds to do, but our brains remind us that the concept is unfathomable and that we are misleading our brain’s logic. Our mind accepts religion’s irrational concepts by giving our imagination the benefit of doubt; ignoring our brain’s logic.

5.     I believe our mind is free of our brain’s logic and free to wander, to wonder, to imagine, to suppose, to wish-for, to consider possibilities, and to either accept or reject them; our will is free and often not encumbered by our brain, a convenience for wishful thinking; our brain’s logic cannot consider details of the non-existent and our mind is unconcerned about the impossible or non-existent. We willingly accept conjecture or the spurious or prejudice, etc. without evidence for our brain to contemplate its probability. I’m aware: religions regard the mind as the “Soul, an entity which is the immortal or spiritual part of a person and having no physical or material reality is credited with the functions of thinking and willing hence determining behavior”; BS! My argument: religion’s forceful influence in our world is misdirected, that the idea of life after death, is impossible, that our mind (or soul) is not separate from our body, and is not spiritual, but is a part of our brain and is of matter. When our brain dies, our mind also dies and our essence is no more. Religion’s fatuous promises clouds reasoning and people accept unintelligent definitions without question.

6.       Neuroscientists assure us: our minds do not exist independent of our body, but are mental; which is not possible after the brain is denied oxygen. Our brain can mislead us; brain imaging shows that regions which become active when we only imagine we see or hear something are identical to those that become active when we actually do see or hear something. I think of the mind as integral to the brain but acts independently. If our mind doesn’t avail itself of our brain’s logic, it’s free to believe anything, even when no favorable evidence exists. Our mind’s freewill permits us to ignore the brain’s assistance in correcting fanciful unrealistic thoughts with more reasonable possibilities. So I’ll repeat the following: Ignorance and wishful thinking embraced religion’s fallacies. Our brains and computers, both require rational, factual input to develop rational factual solutions, but Abrahamic religions’ lack thereof forced it to rely upon conjecture, blind faith, and killing millions of nonbelievers, to obtain its illogical imposition upon the world’s ignorant gullible trustful societies.

 7.     I’ve experienced religion; contemplated its biblical messages; pro & con, for most of my 95 years, and found them woefully wanting of reason, truth and common sense. This treatise succinctly explains my successful search for a truthful reason for the bible’s irrational incoherence; where King Josiah’s god-fearing tribal propaganda is used for the bible’s early books; the Pentateuch. My choice for learning about the machinations of today’s religions is the American Fascist: The Christian War on America by Chris Hedges, and The Christ Conspiracy by Acharya S; worthy authors who “tell it like it is”. Reading them helps one better understand the politically conservative Religious Right Coalition’s calumnious schemes to amend our Constitution from a freedom loving secular democracy into a tyrannically controlled, book-burning autocracy without benefit of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms and rights.

German philosopher Kant, (1724-1804), said we individuals are sovereign; a rational concept replacing the sovereignty of the politician’s god, “which has always been a license for religious tyranny without accountability”.

MY FAITH & NOTES

Greetings, dear reader, I’m so very proud of you because you have an open mind, are curious and eager to learn; otherwise you would not be reading this. Your comprehension of my exploration of the origins of the Judaic god and holy books proves you are now better informed about this matter than some eighty percent of our world’s people; congratulations!

I have no faith in the Abrahamic faiths Judaism, Christianity or Islamism, whose vengeful intolerant dogma decreed the slaughter of multimillions of apostates, blasphemers, unbelievers and proponents of other gods, while fighting history’s religious wars, including Islam’s terrorism, but increasing numbers of us are learning about religion’s bloody history; dismissing god-ideas; realizing that, figuratively, God is the sum of Earth’s natural forces, processes and scientific principles. The Religious Right Coalition’s stupidity, e.g., its Middle East wars, financial meltdown, etc. must not be our future, as people must awake and realize that Abrahamic religions accentuate the supernatural, and denigrate knowledge, because knowledge will expose organized religion’s conspicuously vulnerable underbelly.

My faith is in REALITY, i.e., NATURE’S immutable forces and scientific principles, including evolution’s erratic progression. World scientists revealed the immutable forces controlling the motions of the cosmos and all life, enabling astronomers, mathematicians and scientists to develop productive concepts; beginning with the lever and the wheel; also steam engines, electricity, trains, automobiles, airplanes, computers, space flight and wireless transmission’s radios, televisions, our ubiquitous telephones and other electronic devices. Man didn’t create the forces; he discovered them in spite of the Church’s opposition to knowledge. These natural forces never demean, redeem nor threaten us with infinite damnation; so nature’s ramifications created life. I don’t worship nature; I respectfully appreciate its bountiful sustenance, wondrous beauty, and abhor its despoliation.  Confucius said “we are all the same except for our experiences”. Possibly a little undiscriminating inclusiveness might smooth and level our troubled road to international agreements, and help rectify our world’s contentious situations, and develop mutually beneficial ways to compromise. It’s taken since the Ice Age to get where we are today. Let’s encourage our reservoir of perspicacious women to collectively demand a voice in all international-policy-making-decisions because we men have failed.

   

 In their attempt to explain the universe; primitive prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods rationalized; a superhuman god created their incomprehensible world with all life. It is analogous to my word processer; unable to comprehend its miraculousness—there must be a god inside the electronic device reading as I work; thoughtfully coaching my grammar, spelling, etc. In Arthur C. Clarke’s book Profiles of the Future, his third law is that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.

Despite Abrahamic religions’ perfidious unforgivable history, I wish to thank Religion-Lites for the extensive efforts they have made to provide schools and help for needy members plus hospitals for communal use, but I extend them no credit for their extensive, self-promotional proselytation.

All gods are speculative, but possibly science will discover some semblance of a universal power-center, or maybe our world’s scientific community will develop a more detailed analysis of the “big bang” theory; at that time, open minds of discerning individuals will reconsider all tangible evidence.

Advanced age has made me cognizant of a few important things I hadn’t thought about; especially how much more tolerant and understanding we men become after our testis haven’t functioned for decades, our libido is an ancient memory and our brain is devoid of the extracurricular; surprising us with its great interest in life’s mysteries; how sagacious, discerning and astute women are, and how irresponsible we men have been, thinking that women’s brains were marginalized by the bible’s god. We erred; female’s intellect is intact, but male intelligence is attenuated by their testosterone’s insidious stimulus. We ignored women’s intellect and accentuated their sexuality; conforming to evolution’s natural system, most of us found a compliant mate and promptly reproduced.

Although I have no consideration for conventional man’s imaginary gods, I am highly concerned for the multitudes of my fellow human beings; from whom all goodness flows, who appear secure in their religious ignorance, but their intentions, are good; it simply divides them into different kinds of bigots who insist upon worshipping Abrahamic religion’s three intolerant gods. Conventional males, even after marriage, prefer male companionship. They don’t love men, but seek their approval; evincing man’s innate instinct to lead fellowmen. Unconventional men are thinkers; uninterested in leading, who only tolerate other males, but excel as attentive loving husbands and able fathers. I suspect approximately 80% of humans are non-thinking believers and that only about 20% are nonbelieving thinkers.

I began writing this treatise with a ball point pen in September, 2008, a month after my 91^st birthday. Sometime later my grandson, Bradley Hess provided this word-processer and guided me. I will complete my 95^th year and have my 95^th birthday in August of 2012, and begin my 96^th year. I live alone in Plano, a part of greater-Dallas, Texas. I am in hospice with visiting nurses, etc.  The first year, after my wife Marie expired, was devoted to producing my 36,000 word Recollections & Reminiscence. I do not have a television or radio, but I have a Kindle, and order magazines, books, etc. from Amazon; adjusting font size to resolve a major vision impairment. In February of 2012 I was connected to the internet, and the world’s vast trove of information became available, which has helped me explain my views of the three Abrahamic faiths.

 As a free-thinking nonagenarian, living alone in H. L. Mencken’s “bible belt”, I know it’s unwise to expound upon my neighbors’ foibles, but such is life; many are convinced all nonbelievers are unreliable devil’s workers; and should go to Hell—immediately. Maybe some religious idiot will ring my doorbell and announce: “God sent me”; and terminate me, but all of my doctors and caregivers are considerate kind and generous individuals who I respect, cherish and will always remember, including my dear chaplain.

Wisdom isn’t limited to experienced adults; a grandson, Samuel T. 3^rd, at age five asked his parents if religion wasn’t make-believe.

 A four year old granddaughter, Sidonie, was stumping me with numerous riddles, so I asked her: which came first, the chicken or the egg. A moment later she inquired if I knew the story about Noah’s ark. I allowed as how I did and she said, “You know how all the animals had to march on the ark two by two; well an egg can’t march”. To further questions she replied: “Everybody knows an egg can’t march”.

As a matter of fact the Abrahamic religions are “adult-make-believe”; based entirely upon mythology: contrived by ignorant vindictive rapacious men; the prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods, who scammed people into submitting to the subjugation of their religious and political leaders, and thereby avoid total confiscation, persecution, torture or death; all as described earlier in this treatise. Ever since the Enlightment that same enterprising profession continues to preach inscrutable dogma, but their careers depend upon the extent of their community’s ignorance of the Abrahamic religion’s perfidious ancient history. “Think of the thousands and thousands of men who depend for their living upon the ignorance of mankind! Think of those who grow rich on credulity and who fatten on faith”! Do the prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods, tacitly understand that they only pretend to believe their perfidious inscrutable creeds, or like their congregations, they just stupidly accept them.

Free at last; ROBERT G. INGERSOLL’S VOW personifies my own reaction:

“When I became convinced that the Universe is natural—that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light, and all the bolts and bars, and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world—not even in infinite space. I was free—free to think, to express my thoughts—free to live to my own ideal—free for myself and those I loved—free to use all my faculties, all my senses—free to spread imagination’s wings—free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope—free to judge and determine for myself—free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the “inspired” books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past—free from popes and priests—free from all the “called” and “set apart”—free from the fear of eternal pain—free from the winged monsters of the night—free from devils, ghosts and gods. For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought—no air or space where fancy could not spread its painted wings—no chains for my limbs—no lashes for my back—no fires for my flesh—no master’s frown or threat—no following another’s steps—no need to bow, cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously, faced all worlds”.

“And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heros, the thinkers who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain—for the freedom of labor and thought—to those who died in dungeons bound with chains—to those who proudly mounted scaffold’s stairs—to those whose bones were crushed, whose flesh was scarred and torn—to those by fire consumed—to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom to the sons of man. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they had held, and hold it high, that light might conquer darkness still”. Robert G. Ingersoll,(1833-99)

Mr. Ingersoll was an American lawyer and a lecturer on agnosticism.

Search Google: Robert. G. Ingersoll; his iconoclastic works are available on line.

 

DRINK MY WINE

SEEK TRUTH IN ALL THINGS

QUESTION EVERYTHING

BEGRUDGE NO ONE

CHECK ALL FACTS

AVOID TRIVIA

ACCEPT LIFE

BE DISCREET

DO NO HARM

BE DIPLOMATIC

AVOID THE UNREAL

REMAIN BONA FIDE

KEEP AN OPEN MIND

LOVE REASONABLENESS

OBSERVE THE GOLDEN RULE

FORM INDEPENDENT OPINIONS

DON’T BLINDLY FOLLOW OTHERS

BE HELPFUL; AVOID CONTRARINESS

LIVE WITH SENSE OF JOYOUS WONDER

RESPECT OTHERS; DO NOT CENSOR THEM

ALLOW INNATE REASON TO BE YOUR GUIDE

IGNORE THE INCONSIDERATION OF OTHERS

POLITENESS IS LIFE’S ESSENTIAL LUBRICANT

ALWAYS STRIVE TO LEARN SOMETHING NEW

CULTURAL HARMONY ASSURES WORLD PEACE

RELAXATION CONCEIVES POSITIVE THOUGHTS

BE SKEPTICAL OF IDEAS LACKING TANGIBILITY

TREAT ALL LIFE WITH RESPECT AND HONESTY.

  THE LITTLE SPERM THAT WAS YOU SURVIVED.

 VALUE THE FUTURE ON A TIMESCALE LONGER THAN YOUR OWN,

 AS LIFE’S AN ADVENTURE, STRESSING PERSEVERANCE, TENACITY,

 RESILIENCY AND ENDURANCE, WITH AN OPEN INQUIRING MIND SEEKING, KNOWLEDGE & LIBERTY; FREE OF RELIGION’S BIGOTRY.

TO LOVE AND BE LOVED, WITH LITTLE CHILDREN, ARE WONDEROUS

GIFTS. I WISH YOU LONG LIVES, WONDROUS LOVE, MUCH HAPPINESS AND CONTENTMENT WITH INTERESTING, CREATIVE, UNRESTRICTED PROFESSIONAL CAREERS AND SUSTAINED ILLIMITABLE PROSPERITY.

Samuel Terrill Redwine Sr.

CHRISTIAN ANTI-JUDAISM

Regions controlled by the papacy have persistently tyrannized the Jews. Pope Innocent III, in early thirteenth century demanded they mark themselves as Jews with a particular type of headgear and in the seventeenth century, Pope Paul IV insisted that Jews be ostracized in special ghettos and wear yellow identification badges. They had not been allowed to own land, hold public office or work at most forms of trade. Church law forbade Christians to loan money at interest; Jews became licensed money lenders with interest rates defined by the Vatican.

During the European Middle Ages, (476 -1450), Jews were persecuted unmercifully; the problem originated with Christianity’s accusation that Jews had killed Jesus. “The Crusaders made it part of their mission to torment and kill Jews on their way to the Holy land”. The papacy’s repression of Jews persisted into nineteenth century Rome and during Pope Leo XIII’s reign more extreme forms of anti-Judaism erupted among Vatican clerics who alleged Jewish perfidy, obstinacy, etc.; reinforcing the Catholic view, “that the Jews were responsible for their own misfortune—a view that was to encourage Catholic Church officials in the 1930s to look the other way as Nazi anti-Semitism raged in Germany”, the most powerful Catholic community.

In 1933, Eugenio Pacelli, Vatican’s Assistant Secretary of State, negotiated an agreement between Adolph Hitler and Pope Pius XI allowing the Vatican to select Germany’s bishops, clergy, teachers, etc. with Germany paying the bill. Hitler acquiesced only after the pope conceded that Hitler should have complete political control. Pacelli persuaded Germany’s Bishops to disband Catholic’s powerful Center Political Party, assuring Nazism’s successful rise to power unopposed by Catholicism. The agreement “created an area of trust that was particularly significant in the developing struggle against international Jewry”. Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope Pius XII in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War.

The above information and quotations were gleaned from John Cromwell’s book, Hitler’s Pope. All Christians would benefit by reading Mr. Cromwell’s book. He says: “I applied for access to crucial material in Rome, assuring those who had charge of the archives that I was on the side of my subject. By the middle of 1997, nearing the end of my research, I found myself in a state I can only describe as moral shock. The material I had gathered, taking the more extensive view of Pacelli’s life, amounted not to exoneration but to a wider indictment”.

Cromwell’s book relates the Vatican’s version of future pope, Eugenio Pacelli’s constant involvement with Hitler’s final resolution for Germany’s Jewish population; the midtwentyth century Holocaust, where Christians were instrumental in killing six million innocent Jews, all due to envisioned ancient hatreds, fostered by a belief that Jews crucified Jesus. When these six million Jews are added to the innumerable nonbelievers persecuted and killed throughout Christianity’s history, it refutes any claim they have to represent a sacred religion. Ignorance is inexcusable.

 I’ll also call attention to the Vatican’s midtwentyth century agreements with Italy’s Mussolini and Spain’s Franco; two other totalitarian dictators.

The following information and quotations are from the Holocaust Encyclopedia

“Since the night of ‘Broken Glass’ pogrom (Nov.9-10, 1938), the German government had sought to accelerate the pace of forced Jewish emigration—also hoping to exploit the unwillingness of other nations to admit large numbers of Jewish refugees to justify the Nazi regime’s anti-Jewish goals. On May 13, 1939, the German transatlantic liner, St. Louis, sailed from Hamburg, Germany, for Havana, Cuba with 937 refugees, most all were Jews fleeing from the Third Reich”. In addition, “two smaller ships, the French, Flandre, and the British, Orduna with a total of 176 Jewish refugees, sailed to Cuba in May 1939”; neither was allowed to dock in Cuba. The Flandre returned to France. “The Orduna proceeded to a series of Latin American ports; its 72 passengers finally disembarked in the U.S. controlled Canal Zone in Panama.  The United States eventually admitted most of them”.

“The majority of the (St. Louis’) Jewish passengers had applied for U.S. visas, and had planned to stay in Cuba only until they could enter the United States.—When the St Louis arrived in Havana harbor on May 27, the Cuban government admitted 28 passengers: 22 of them were Jewish and had valid U.S. visas; (of) the remaining six, four Spanish citizens and two Cuban nationals had valid entry documents. One further passenger, after attempting to commit suicide, was evacuated to a hospital in Havana The remaining 908 passengers (one passenger had died of natural causes in route)---743 had been waiting to receive U.S. visas. The Cuban government refused to admit them or allow them to disembark from the ship”. On June 2, the ship was ordered out of Cuban waters after the U.S.-based Jewish Joint Distribution Committee refused to post a $453,500 bond; “sailing so close to Florida that they could see the lights of Miami, some passengers on the St Louis cabled President Franklin D. Roosevelt asking for refuge. Roosevelt never responded. A State Department telegram sent to a passenger stated that the passengers must ‘await their turns on the waiting list and qualify for and obtain immigration visas before they may be admissible into the United States. In 1939, the annual combined German-Austrian immigration quota was 27,370 and was quickly filled. In fact, there was a waiting list of at least several years.”

“Following the U.S. government’s refusal to permit the passengers to disembark, the St. Louis sailed back to Europe on June 6, 1939. The passengers did not return to Germany. However, Jewish organizations, (particularly the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee), negotiated with four European governments to secure entry visas for the passengers”: Great Britain took 288; the Netherlands admitted 181; Belgium took in 214 and 224 found at least temporary refuge in France. One of Great Britain’s passengers was killed during an air raid in 1940. “Of the 620 passengers who returned to continent, 87 managed to emigrate before the German invasion of Western Europe in May 1940. (And) 532 were trapped when Germany conquered Western Europe. Just over half, 278, survived the Holocaust; 254 died: 84 who had been in Belgium; 84 who had found refuge in Holland, and 86 who had been admitted to France”. Faith’s divisiveness prevents undistinguishing inclusiveness.

EVOLUTION

The following is gleaned from Wikipedia’s Evolutionary History of Life.

Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old, but present day organisms indicate the presence of a common ancestor, from which all known species have diverged through the process of evolution.

Life began along with oxygenic photosynthesis 3.5 billion years ago, which eventually led to the oxygenation of the atmosphere, beginning around 2.4 billion years ago. The earliest evidence of complex organisms dates from 1.8 billion years ago; their diversification accelerated when they started using oxygen in their metabolism. Later, around 1.7 billion years ago, multicellular organisms began to appear, with differentiated cells performing specialized functions.

Evidence suggests that algal scum formed on the land as early as 1.2 billion years ago, and that the earliest land plants date to around 450 million years ago.

Invertebrate animals appeared between 630-542 million years ago, while vertebrates originated about 525 million years ago, during the Cambrian explosion. In the middle to late Permian period, 299-251 million years ago, synapsids dominated other terrestrial animals The Permian-Triassic extinction event 251 million years ago almost wiped out all complex life.

During the recovery from this catastrophe archosaurs became the most abundant land vertebrates, displacing threrapsids in the mid-Triassic. One anchosaur group, the dinosaurs, dominated the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. The ancestors of mammals survived only as small insectivores. After the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event 65 million years ago killed off the non-avian dinosaurs, mammals increased rapidly in size and diversity. Such mass extinctions may have accelerated evolution by providing opportunities for new groups of organisms to diversify.

Fossil evidence indicates that flowering plants appeared and rapidly diversified in the Early Cretaceous; 130-90 million years ago, probably helped by coevolution with pollinating insects. Flowering plants and marine phytoplankton are still the dominate producers of organic matter. Social insects appeared around the same time as flowering plants. Although they occupy only small parts of the insect family-tree, they now form over half the total mass of insects. Humans evolved from a linage of upright-walking apes whose earliest fossils date from over 6 million years ago. Although early members of this linage had chimpanzee-sized brains, there are signs of a steady increase in brain size after about 3 million years ago.

Also see Wikipedia’s Earliest History of Earth.

PARTY REVERSAL

President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, Proclaimed his Emancipation, of Black slaves in September 1863. President Lyndon B. Johnson convinced the U.S. Senate to approve the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and Voting Rights Act in 1965; his Democratic party abandoned him. The decision reversed the positions of our two political parties. Segregationists were religious as “God approves of slavery”, and had resisted racial integration and fought this eventuality since the Civil War, having always voted the Democratic ticket. Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party sponsored integration, and when Blacks became eligible to vote and hold public offices, segregationist changed political party affiliations from Democrat to Republican. It was not limited to the South; ever since the Civil War, segregationists had migrated into the Midwest and far west; their movement into the Republican Party sufficiently controls its platform. So the party that elected Abraham Lincoln and freed the slaves is now the Religious Right’s Segregationist party which opposes integration.

The Democratic Party, now rid of the segregationist, who voted against the Civil Rights Act, is now controlled by moderate former Republicans who voted for the Act, but now fight Republican segregationists who voted against the Act, who now blame their old Democratic Party for opposing the Act, although they actually approved the Act. The reversal of political platforms in addition to Religious Right Coalition’s intrusion into politics during the past fifty years has seriously divided our electorate. Voting and legislating have deteriorated into confused contests controlled unilaterally; without bipartisanship, creating excruciating awkward political situations.

Our nation’s constitution is world’s initial endeavor to meld religion with the ideas of independence, freedom and equality. Its success was not fully achieved until after our midnineteenth century Civil War and midtwentyth century’s Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. But it is beginning to unravel; Christian televangelists via their hot-line to God have convinced millions of ignorant misguided, segregationist viewers that Christian leadership is necessary in our state and our federal governments. The Religious Right Coalition’s campaign of obduracy in our Congress and Senate, plus its use of religion to stir up discontent, in the multitudes, smells a lot like sedition.

MIDDLE EAST FIASCO

A news article many months ago explained: to that date, the total cost of the U.S’. Afghanistan-Iraq invasion exceeded one trillion dollars, which is 1000 billion dollars and a billion is equal to the number of seconds of time in 31.668 years, so a trillion equals the number of seconds in 31,668 years, an unimaginable treasure which could have provided 10 million students with a college education at 100,000 dollars each. In addition to our wasted wealth, 4000+, young Americans were killed and 20,000+, permanently crippled. So far, that’s what political and religious revenge has cost us. Had we not succumbed to the taunt of Islam’s extremists on 9/11 how costly might it have been? President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to bring order to the Middle East, with its oil and religious terrorism; it’s reminiscent of the failure of the 12^th -13^th centuries’ Crusades. Ours has been much more destructive and with a greater loss of lives, treasure, etc. Apparently we have a tiger by the tail and are afraid to turn it loose. Islamic radicals wanted this war and hope to continue it indefinitely. Their goal: worldwide sharai law, as they believe “Allah”  requires the war to rid the world of infidels. Their game: bankrupt the secular nations with terrorism. Their method: goading secular nations into self-destruction by responding to their terrorism, which is proving successful and they are not apt to abandon the ploy. Our President’s eagerness to respond to their 9/11 bait has brought the Islamic regimes’ desired results. In addition to our cost in lives and treasure for religious revenge, it has broken the back of our Army’s ground forces, reduced any prestige we may have enjoyed in world affairs, stiffened the resolve of the terrorists and aggravated our god problem. Kevin Phillips, in his book, American Theocracy says: “In the months after 9-11 Washington could have shaped a multilateral response able to maintain much of the goodwill volunteered to the United States in the wake of the shocking attacks, instead the administration’s response was fundamentalist, unilateralist, and Manichean, trumpeting—briefly even termed a ‘crusade’—pitting good against evil. The invasion and occupation of Iraq, another poorly planned agenda, provided an environment that enabled overseas terrorism and radicalism to renew itself around a more acceptable anti-American cause. If terrorism remains center stage in a Middle Eastern war of attrition, that battle could last long enough—flaring into guerrilla wars and even civil wars—to wear the United States down militarily and economically. Osama bin Laden has hinted at exactly these hopes”

UNITED STATES

We are fortunate; our founding fathers, a prudent rational group of deists, free of religion’s irrationality, managed to reorganize England’s thirteen American Colonies into the independent United States of America, with a constitution dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal; embracing the idea of an open society, welcoming immigrants of all races and religions while avoiding the tragic traps of a deadly state religion.

Adventuresome ambitious people come to the United States; immigration has benefitted us immeasurably. Our universities attract foreign students who, in turn, provide the world’s scientists, educators, business people, etc. Too many of our males never finish high-school and many graduates are incapable of college work, adding to unemployment problems and filling prisons, encouraging us to welcome foreign students and intellectuals to become U.S. citizens. One fourth of National Academy of Sciences’ members are foreign born. Presently we are handicapped, due to our religious wars in Iraq and Afghanistan plus a religious, anti-intellectual electorate that is misinformed by conservative radio talk shows. James Madison, our fourth president, warned us, in the Federalist Papers, that religion’s control of government would destroy our democracy.

In a recent issue of ATLANTIC, James Fallows observes:“ The United States has in the past decade committed $1 trillion to the cause of entirely remaking a society. We know that such an investment could happen here—but we also know that it won’t. That is the American tragedy of the early 21^st century: a vital and self-renewing culture that attracts the world’s talent and a governing system that increasingly looks like a joke. The most charitable statement of the problem is that the American government is a victim of its own success. It has survived in more or less recognizable form over more than two centuries—long enough to become mismatched to the real circumstances of the nation. Gradually but persistently, special interest groups nibble at our nation’s total wealth via tax breaks, special appropriations, etc. No single nibble is that dramatic or burdensome, but over time they threaten to convert any stable democracy into a big inefficient, favor ridden state”.

Our United States of America has a democratically elected, representative type of government with a constitution, a president and a bicameral legislature; Congressional membership is proportional to our population. Each state has 2 Senate votes. “More than half of all Americans live in the 10 most populous states—which account for only 20 of the Senate’s 100 votes. California, our most populous state has 69 times as many people as Wyoming, our least populous; yet each has only 2 votes in the Senate. Since it takes 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster on controversial legislation, 41 votes is, in effect, a blocking minority”. This denies the benefits of majority rule.

“Without a propensity for tolerating and managing differences, rival groups can easily reduce democracy to a ruthless struggle for power that ultimately wears down liberal institutions”.

U.S. ECONOMY

This was adapted from Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money In the 21^st Century.

United States’ manufacturing economy created America’s middle class by employing some 17 million out of 68 million available workers. Since 1980 manufacturing has been out-sourced and our national leaders have kept interest rates low, encouraging us to borrow and spend. “Consumerism” and its complex of services; namely: Financial, Insurance and Real Estate, (known as FIRE) has displaced manufacturing as our major economy. Although the U.S. financial services economy provides a substantial income for the wealthiest segment of our society, in 2004 it only employed about 8 million out of the 131 million available workers. In 2000, the FIRE sector of our economy increased to 20% of gross domestic product, exceeding manufacturing. FIRE’s combined assets in 2004 were $45.3 trillion, their earnings were 44% of all U.S. profits and an American filed for bankruptcy every 15 seconds. By year’s end consumer debt represented 85.7% of GDP; overall, the U.S. economy added $2.7 trillion in debt. The above transformation is the result of thirty years of federal regulatory dismantling that unleashed credit vendors to take advantage of humanity’s greed and gullibility. Consumer spending accounts for around 70% of our gross domestic product and borrowing to consume is at the heart of U.S’. current account deterioration The top one percent of Americans in 2000 had as much disposable (after tax) income as the bottom 35 percent. Our unemployment rate is accelerating and our self-evident income disparity is another historically proven problem that presently threatens our middle class, in addition to the loss of manufacturing jobs. This will lead to some kind of rebellion by the growing numbers of young people entering the job market in addition to the long-time unemployed, of whom many are filing for bankruptcy but may also lose their heavily mortgaged homes.

FIRE contributed $1.3 billion (1990-2000) to national elections: As debt became more important, lenders became more important, more powerful; and more influential over the policies chosen to regulate and control the financial services complex. It continues to feed on our downward spiral of religiosity and wars. From 1980 to 2005, while the our nation’s economy was undergoing financialization, Germany, Switzerland and Japan, each had stronger growth rates than the U.S., due to their ability to manufacture and export very high quality merchandise. European history is replete with self-sufficient nations whose leaders became ambitious; challenging other nations while accumulating debt; accentuating religiosity and ignoring an accelerating inability to design and manufacture products our world needs; investing in military adventurism instead of creating wealth. Our banking industry is a consequence of prosperity’s new wealth which is created by agriculture, mining, manufacturing, etc. Banking can’t create new wealth, but only profits from packaging, managing, trading and investing it.

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