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.

SOURCE of the SEMITES

CHRISTIAN ANTI-JUDAISM

EVOLUTION

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.

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.

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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Second Segment of

THE JUDAIC GOD’S EARTHLY ORIGIN

Samuel Terrill Redwine Sr.

OUR DISCOMBOBULATIONS 2

OUR SAVIORS 6

RELIGIOUS TYRANNY 13

ETCETERA 17

RECAPITULATION 24

OUR FUTURE 30

EPILOGUE 33

12,607 words of mostly 14pt font on 34 pages of 8.5 x 11 inches

OUR DISCOMBOBULATIONS

1. Our world is burdened with god problems, including Islam’s religious terrorism, plus our shortage of potable and agricultural water, plus global-warming, plus pathogens that spread internationally. Nationally, we are challenged with excessive public and private debt, bankruptcies, mortgage foreclosures; decreasing savings, an inflationary monetary system, failing infrastructure, faltering schools, crowded prisons, high unemployment, and our dependence on imported oil, plus our population sprawl, and recent reduction in our nation’s worldwide prestige.

2. We’ve made great progress in agriculture, industrialization, medical research, science, communication, global trade, and travel, but face major problems, e.g., proliferation of nuclear weapons & fissionable materials, which demand international surveillance. Global warming & divisiveness are major problems. We have finally realized our effect on global warming, and are considering ways to reduce the use of fuels emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

3. The main causes of global divisiveness are religion, nationalism, race and language, which preclude undiscriminating inclusiveness, cultural harmony, and world peace. I have pondered global divisiveness to no avail, but after President George W. Bush resorted to divination and said a higher-power had approved his plan to invade and renovate the Middle East, I followed his example; the method of primitive prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods, for eons, to consult the occult, but unlike the president, I’m aware: divination is a ruse, to convince us into believing a god can add credence; depending upon public rituals, and ceremonial cant, dances, etc. it limited responsibility, preserved prestigious positions, where priests’ divination decided life vs. death propositions for kings. Egyptians, Babylonians, Grecians and Romans had coteries of gods. The Israelites and Judahites were polytheists before King Josiah’s propaganda, introduced the illusion of a monotheistic god.

4. Religion’s lack of information is tantamount to ignorance; thus, ignorance is responsible for our blind faith in mind warping ancient sorcery, confusing us with vacuous conjecture and mendacious spiritualism. Ignorance of our origin conjured fears and ignited our imaginations, producing suppositions and gods for all occasions. Ancient kings’ specious gods demanded death for unfaithful non-allegiant subjects; forcing people to endow the gods with irrational non-compromising religious powers.

5. Since men first presumed their guise of self-righteous godliness, they have dreamed of eternal life and without evidence, believe they are above our planet’s natural laws and that an “omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent” mystical god will redeem their sins and save their souls, in spite of their disrespect for Earth’s myriad forms of life. We men are inconsiderate, and insist upon religious and ethnological competitive distinctions, but female sensibilities will outwit our simple minded conspiratorial schemes. Male guile disseminated religion’s erroneous message and developed its large organizations and built its grand buildings, but failed two of our important world challenges; advancing knowledge and living together peacefully.

6. Intellectualism’s doctrine: “knowledge comes from reason, without aid from the senses”. Our electorate insists that candidates for public office certify their anti-intellectualism plus a strong belief in biblical miracles; preferring candidates like themselves. I prefer candidates like me, free of religious constraints; without a need for miracles. Our third president, Thomas Jefferson, opined that “our democracy’s success depends upon an informed electorate”. Our communication system is impressive as we are allowed the freedom of non-seditious speech, which invites a plethora of political and religious spin; keeping our pot of ethnological distinctions boiling. Our government leaders have been slow to realize the benefits of togetherness for anything other than war; and religions’ leaders continue proving they’re the problem, without a clue how to be tolerantly inclusive.

7. We males, presume ourselves god-like, requiring adoration, worship, obedience, etc. Although “God” assigned the management of women to us, they are no longer considered chattel, and civilized men no longer use force with women, so we must realize that women are the superior gender; their brains are not addled by a testis and we men must value and emulate their sensibilities. I argue for female’s freedom from subservience and advocate their promotion to prominent leadership positions, as their extraordinary sensibilities are conducive to congeniality, inclusiveness, purposefulness, etc. Women’s new role is a necessary emergency solution to help resolve our male world’s contentiously divisive political and religious problems.

8. Most people in Iceland, Denmark & Sweden believe in evolution. In all European countries, including Greece, believers exceed those of the U.S., where a Gallup poll in 2008 found only 15% agreed with the proposition that humans developed over millions of years. This exposes our nation’s ignorance; (Turkey has 25% believers, 25% not sure and 50% deny it) but most of our population believe King Josiah’s biblical fable, and feel compelled to follow the majority’s acceptance of religion’s irrational absurdity rather than scientific evolution and Secularism’s realistic doctrine which promotes reason and truth.

9. The Abrahamic faiths’ challenge is reconciling twenty six hundred years of King Josiah’s regressive dogma with more reasonable goals, e.g., convincing believers Earth’s life forms are worthy survivors, but they will continue to exploit our fears with the bible’s and koran’s vengeful lessons. The holy books’ precepts were extrapolated from King Josiah’s tribal propaganda, where god Yahweh was portrayed as a vengeful killer for the exclusive benefit of Josiah’s people, to resolve problems inherent within his kingdom, and are not related to our present situation. Can we ever relieve the self-incriminating stupor, which grips believers? Religions’ denigration of knowledge is challenging our nation. (See EDUCATION)

11. The Abrahamic religions’ gods are frauds. Considering the revengeful history of Judaism, Christianity and Islamism, my arguments are justified; but problems will be difficult to reconcile and repercussions momentous, depending upon prestigious professional proponents’ lust for naysayer’s blood; or “hate-crimes” by unhinged believers. Truth, offers humankind an opportunity to be free of religion’s deceptive message. In any case, we must forego the “Judaic God’s” intolerant xenophobia, and enhance the development of mutual global opportunities. Global-warming threatens life. Religious-Right Coalition’s conservative legislators stymy any reduction in the amount of carbon our nation releases into the atmosphere; endangering life by playing chicken with other developed countries; Erudite individuals blame the Dominionist movement’s theology and man’s destructive exploitation of our world’s environment on Genesis 1:26-28, 9:2-3, and Psalms 8:5-8. In addition www.religioustolerance.org says “There is a powerful movement within U.S. Christian fundamentalism that interprets the book of ‘Revelation’ as justifying the destruction of the environment. They believe by exhausting our natural resources they will hasten the rapture, the second coming of Jesus, and the Apocalypse”.

12. Christianity’s obdurate intrusion in our government bodes ill; Islam’s “Arabic Spring”, i.e., young Muslims denouncing and eliminating despotic leaders’ bodes chaos which will get worse unless our world’s prestigious professional proponents, of mystical gods, condemn their old professional colleagues who were complicit in murdering millions; forcing their faiths on discerning nonbelievers; and find honest realistic goals for innocent, but gullible congregations. Spurious gods could command believers to hallow the exuberant rejuvenation of our Earth. Think about it: These three great religious organizations have benefitted by developing world-wide support by hallowing the idea of supernaturalism; think what they could do with an honest idea that would help us survive the asphyxiating effects of global-warming. I challenge them to see the light of reason; to encourage scientific inquiry; to acknowledge evolution, and to further worldly learning, instead of stifling it. From our beginning until today, belief in supernatural gods has done far more harm than good. Islam controls America’s destiny and American Christianity’s prestigious professional proponents are poised; to join Islamic Muslim’s prestigious professional proponents’ enforcement of the Pentateuch’s fundamentalist precepts by killing all infidels, heretics etc., much like the Christians’ “ 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”.

13. There is a high probability that religious idiots will obtain nuclear weapons. To better our odds of survival, we must expound, to the world, the profound benefits of a secularist government free from politicized-religious tyranny. Ancient tyrannical monarchs’ proclaimed fearsome gods, and religious leaders manipulated mutinous multitudes; killing apostates, blasphemers, nonbelievers and proponents of other gods; forcing beliefs. The brain-washings left indelible aberrant mental impressions, which often bring believers to their knees, worshipping; begging the forbearance of a vain wrathful god. Europe’s history is full of despotic Christian politics, (see CHRISTIANITY), and politicized religion tyrannizes Islamic regimes, but America’s Christian hierarchy presumes “born-again” voters will trade their freedoms and rights in our secularist democracy for absolutism, as televangelists and talk-radio will excitedly explain how “God” overrules all contentious unholy views of America’s innumerable liberty lovers. Ancient professional proponents of mythical gods developed their misperceived godly powers by accommodating their ancient despotic political powers.

OUR SAVIORS

1. The world’s women are our potential saviors. My imaginary female god is compassionately reasonable; her undiscriminating inclusiveness sensitivity to nuance and comprehension of humans are vital to resolving global divisiveness. She is adamant regarding the attitudes of disparate ethnicities toward other races, religions and languages; advising us to stop emphasizing distinctions and accentuate similarities; that our divisiveness will take generations to resolve; that a tolerant respect for others is essential for success. She says we must integrate the races with miscegenation; and cohabit until all children’s skin is the same color. She says we must develop a common language; warning that systems of education, healthcare, pollution control, agriculture, and food distribution are needed and that violence is insane; that her proposal can be accomplished without violence, and that undiscriminating inclusiveness will dissolve ethnocentric divisions. Uniqueness is cherished, and many fear losing their ethnicity. Socrates (470?-399 BCE) claimed to be a citizen of the world; was judged treasonous and murdered because he refuted the Grecian state’s gods. Our divisiveness discourages world citizenship and world peace. Male leaders of nations and religions will resist changes that might dilute their personal prestige and power, but Earth can provide us ideal lives if we limit indulgence and do not squander resources; nature will restore the forests, endangered species, sources of water, etc., but can’t support us if we kill all living things which displease us. Deforestation is frightening, as forests absorb excess carbon dioxide, and produce the oxygen, essential for the survival of most of Earthly life.

2. Our World’s women are capable of organizing, designing and controlling an initiative to bring us together to reduce intolerance and save Earth. They are natural diplomats; essential for international compromise, and I encourage them to see the advantages in undiscriminating inclusiveness; and to initiate a global campaign to accomplish the endeavor. It’s our only way to avoid our extermination as a critically endangered species. Males kept women at bay, and made tragic, godly, blunders by themselves, but today, we urgently need global women to ignore male egos, and to assume responsibility for global tranquility and decide our world’s big decisions.

3. Women’s innate sensibilities are essential capabilities required by a global team to design and develop the proposed program. We seek a world free of xenophobia, where children have adequate food, housing, health- care, education, same color skin, and speak a common language, with a representative authority that encourages xenophilic self-confidence and provides equal opportunities to attain an optimum level of competence.

4. If Josiah’s scholars had been female; “God” would be female and world history would be less brutal, sexual repression unknown and matriarchy would enhance authority; but women weren’t well represented in Josiah’s tribal propaganda, and televangelists’ “hot-lines to God” imply the attitude prevails. Men rival god while women, the source of men’s relaxation, keep a restful home, bearing and nurturing the next generation into adulthood. Women are our opportunity, to pacify a contemptuous world. Men disdain intellectualism and resent competent individuals, but women admire scholarship and exceed men matriculating in college. Female sensibilities are essential for leadership positions. They will be superior national and international leaders. A woman will be a more discerning Pope and a much more appropriate, more reliable “God” figure. Although women are not considered believers, their influence has been more helpful than a virile immoral god, who exploited man’s insecurities, but a nanny to guide him would have been more appropriate, as he and his egomaniacal male god, have cluttered history with their unlimited bounty of blood stained debris.

5. I’m not arguing for world acceptance of matriarchy, but advocate an unencumbered change in attitude that will bring global women out of the utility closet; into the forefront of human endeavors to leadership positions around the globe. Men’s insistence on leading was an experiment in wasted money and lives, which leaves us where we began: fighting over religion’s vagaries, male vanity and national prestige. Women appreciate men for their cleverness and its largesse; women add tranquil togetherness to our existence; they have always supported men’s efforts to change world policies, even when we employed a god-sanctioned dividing, conquering, and destroying. I hope the world’s men will support women’s efforts without proffering unsolicited interference as they spend a few hundred years untangling our world’s man-tied knots. Women’s sensibilities provide attributes required by all demanding professions. Questions arise concerning a proper division of labor. During their first 40 years, women will bear and nurture our next generation; its maturity may determine mother’s professional pursuit. Women’s ability to compromise is essential to success; they ameliorate situations; their equiponderance intelligence and comprehension match or exceed those of men and it’s done gracefully. I advocate for women’s global leadership as our national and international decision makers, which will moderate world anguish. Men are exemplary adventurers, but are usually engrossed in tactical schemes of attack, rather than the strategy necessary to avoid wars. We’ve devoted time, money, and lives’ to improve world congeniality, but haven’t considered miscegenation to attain ethnological integration, a freedom from religion and a peaceful coexistence. Miscegenation should not be considered compulsory; young people need opportunities to study and work together; intimacy will solve our problem, and in time, we humans will produce a conglomerate strain.

7. The bible’s god is portrayed as a vengeful divider, not a unifier. But to save humankind from destruction, the persuasive powers of Churches are essential. We’ve a desperate need to restore Earth and our atmosphere to more pristine conditions. The improbability of solving global-warming’s problems and problematic water problems; depends upon major world governments’ willingness to cooperate. If they don’t agree before life on Earth becomes unbearable or religious idiots nuclearly achieve “End Times”; what are primitive man’s stupid scheming ideas about imaginary superhuman gods’ really worth?

8. Religions have progressed unevenly along diverging paths, devoid of ideas to improve cultural harmony. It isn’t too late; everything is possible. People have many talents; some have a talent for creating extraordinary things from ordinary stuff and extraordinary conditions from simple situations. The Abrahamic faiths conjured their gods and belief systems from a young king’s deceptive tribal propaganda and deceived most people with a vision postulating the spurious gods’ propensity for killing nonbelievers.

9. Josiah’s biblical fable, the Pentateuch, was specifically composed for use as tribal propaganda proclaiming his own tribal god, which in turn commanded death for apostates, etc. It terminated polytheism and decreed Josiah an ideal king, etc. thus we have determined that the essence of the Abrahamic religions is deception. This provides hierarchy an opportunity to pursue their deception further by implying that “God” won’t return until our Earth is presentably sustainable and that recent revelations command the faithful to lead everyone in rehabilitating Earth, in preparation for the god’s anxiously anticipated return; Cultural Harmony is also a realistic goal for “God” to pursue; it provides religion an honest purpose that humankind understands. When no longer burdened with supernaturalism’s quandary, religion can contribute to our natural world’s knowledge by promoting world peace. Realistically, this has greater potential for people’s worldly progress than faith in the bible’s incomprehensible egomaniacal killer of foreign women, children and innumerable other innocent people. Tragic assumptions were made in the jungle by Abrahamic faiths’ professional predecessors who traded security in a promised hereafter for treasure-in-hand. The scamming entrepreneurial enterprises evolved into monarch’s tyrannical religions, (See CHRISTIANITY); their goals remain the same i.e. scamming salvation except that Religion-Lite’s Judaism and Christianity no longer kill apostates, nonbelievers, etc.

10. Everyone should be excited with the idea of hybridizing the human race; since our beginning, the process has produced some very astute and beautiful people. DNA diversity’s, biological & psychological advantages makes it the universal answer to racial prejudice and consanguinity. We need to reorganize our worldwide exchange programs for high school and college students; with an ever expanding participation of countries, it could become a universal educational system, and our global situation could well benefit from the better-quality interracial and interfaith relationships.

11. The 19^th chapter of Exodus has “God” explaining to Moses, that, under the threat of death, neither the people nor the priests shall be allowed on Mount Sinai, or see god while Moses is receiving the Ten Commandments. Andy Rooney said: “Those to whom His word was revealed were always alone in some remote place, like Moses. There wasn’t anyone around when Mohammad got the word either. Mormon Joseph Smith and Mary Baker Eddy had exclusive audiences with God. We must trust them as reporters----and you know reporters. They’ll do anything for a story”. Abraham Lincoln said: “You can fool all of the people, some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people, all of the time”. Lord Acton said: “All power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely”. King Josiah’s minions concocted a god with absolute power over Josiah’s people.

12. As a child, mother warned: the “boogey-man” would get me; later I was consigned to hell. I will not go to hell; I will return to oblivion, from whence I came prior to conception in a passionate act of conjugal pleasure. Biblical mythology’s imaginary gods have undue influence over the lives of millions of people; a mental aberration, accepted as normal by the mental health profession. The subterfuge of religion’s effusive inerrancy convinces the superstitious they must follow the crowd to the promised hereafter; thus, religion feeds and thrives on our fears. We seek a queue to join or a crowd to follow. I’m thankful for our skeptics. Skepticism is rational; Judge Learned Hand often said that he would like to see some particular words by Oliver Cromwell placed over portals of every church, courthouse and at every cross-road in our nation, which were: “I beseech ye, in the bowels of Christ, think ye may be mistaken”. Judge Hand thought that if we are to be saved, it must be through skepticism.

13. As a youth, I “believed”, but questioned the unreasonableness of my belief. Religion’s illogical believers both fear and revere the bible’s vengeful obnoxious Judaic god’s wrathful recrimination; which served King Josiah’s and religion’s purpose; by instilling mortal fears that torment people into believing supernaturalism’s unknowns. Since the end of our matriarchal period when man became god, he has considered himself godly and the promise of eternal life assures his immortality. Man’s self-assigned, exalted position is received with equanimity, assured he is above all other Earthly life-forms including that of women. An obvious question: why do women worship Abrahamic faiths’ mystical gods, despite the biblical gods’ unjust disregard for the female gender? The answer: men are natural promoters, that is, confidence-men, capable of selling snake oil, etcetera. Ever since primitive males proclaimed their superiority, females have been relegated to religion’s outer fringe; their knowledge of the bible limited to clergy’s sanctimonious sermons; unfamiliar with the stories where god commands Israeli’s army to destroy entire populations, including innocent mothers and children, but to save young female virgins for the soldiers. Apparently believers rationalize that the “God’s” revengeful pathological killing and egomaniacal demeanor is fundamental to their faith; as the bible tells us: this murderous god sired and later killed his own son.

14. Biological and psychological gender distinctions can resolve global divisiveness. We men are greedier, more contentious, our ego and vanity are sacrosanct, and we compulsively dominate. Our predispositions might be needed to follow “God’s” precepts, i.e., to divide conquer and destroy all infidels. Women’s sensibilities, predispositions, etc. are more suitable for our needs; they are ameliorable, empathetic, sharing, and equally staunch, loyal, and steadfast. Underestimated, they win graciously, even when their successes are credited to men. I argue in favor of the proposition: that after multimillennia of male domination and our world has reached the stage where we have a compelling urgency to develop communal solutions for global problems; that women’s predispositions to detect common-ground and thereby resolve impending international agreements are essential.

15. U.S. was founded as a Secularist, not a Christian nation. Many early American colonists came to this country to escape the rigid freedom-limiting religious dogmas of Christian Europe. Puritans brought a more strict dogma with them, which prompts Australians’ wry comments, that they were lucky to get the convicts. The early thinkers in the Colonies were deeply suspicious of organized religion. Thomas Paine (1737-1809), American Revolutionary patriot, published, The Age Of Reason, an attack on the bible and orthodox religious beliefs; eight editions sold out in the first year. Our astute founding fathers were determined that authoritarian religion wouldn’t disrupt democracy’s principles. Most signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 were deists. Benjamin Franklin & Thomas Jefferson were outspoken atheists. John Adams, a Congregationalist, was opposed for our second president because voters thought: he favored a monarchal theocracy, much like Islam’s totalitarianism.

16. I respect Religion-Lite, the least disingenuous for a civilized society, but continuing growth and development of Islam’s religious extremists and America’s Protestant Fundamentalist movement will lead to upheaval as civilized societies will not abide compliance with Fundamentalism.

17. The world’s thinkers advanced a civilized philosophy and science in spite of religion’s appeal to a non-thinking majority. It is most evident in secular nations; free from religion’s interference, e.g., a believers’ insistence that a spurious god overrules all opposition. Theocratic regimes have burned books, suppressed scientific inquiry, freedom of speech and information. Believing in gods clouds the mind and deadens reasoning powers with unrealistic ideas, e.g., believing that Godly power exists, without the remotest evidence, indicates more faith in one’s ignorance than their knowledge, i.e., what one does not know is more credible than what one does know. This explains believer’s righteous self-satisfaction and lack of curiosity to learn the historical facts about their omniscient fearsome, but imaginary god. Everyone should question their faiths past performance.

18. Dear reader, a small percentage of our world understands that beliefs in “God” are male concocted subterfuges, and that religion’s absurdities are humorous, deserving ridicule; with vast numbers meeting regularly, and exercising distinctive rituals of particular sects, hoping to influence specific deities; much like gathering around jungle fires in the night dancing and chanting; repeating the aberration ad finitum without meaningful results, but Secularism’s reason and truth will sustain you.

19. My reason for dwelling on religion’s confidence game is because the bible’s “God”, along with the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1&2 Samuel and 1&2 Kings were adopted from a tract of tribal propaganda, concocted by King Josiah of Judah about six centuries prior to the New Testament’s Jesus. Both gods were fictional characters, especially contrived to deceptively subjugate unbelievers with “original sin” and mortal fear of the unknown, but with repentant groveling testimony to clergy, one is promised eternal life. A confidence game indeed, conning the unsuspecting who listen to clergy’s sermons, but their “God” is portrayed in their bible killing millions of people; genocide, infanticide; even gang-rape; all in an effort to promote his chosen people. It is fictional; compare it with the horrific brutal history of Jews at the hands of Christian believers, whose god, Jesus, was Jewish. It’s all stupidly contradictory and unbelievable and it was all wrought by ignorant men’s desire to manipulate their fellowmen. The bibles Pentateuch is King Josiah’s tribal propaganda. I emphasize: we have no god; that all goodness comes from our fellow human beings, and I abhor Abrahamic religion’s insistence that unfounded beliefs (ignorance) supersedes knowledge; they’ve found no wrong in their devilish history of killing millions, but continue to grovel and worship their culpable sanctimonious fallacious beliefs.

20. Women are more interested in having a real, free, peaceful, healthy, moral, progressive world for their family’s welfare than in being on their knees groveling to denigrating supernatural nonsense. Organized religion keeps female leadership at bay, allowing few hierarchal opportunities. The fatuous promotion of eternal life is a nice fantasy, but it should not take precedence over rational ways to save Earth’s life forms. Male leadership in government and religion has been costly. The intrinsic qualities of women inspire congeniality and trust. We can’t trust pious male clergy who preach King Josiah’s tribal propaganda as inerrant certainty. Religions are belief systems based on god-ideas fabricated by man to achieve an advantage, but our intangible beliefs produced eons of mortal conflict. I want to expose the history of our three fallacious faiths, and thereby show what perpetuating primitive ignorance does to societies, as our beliefs are incompatible with undiscriminating inclusiveness. We are fortunate to have a worldwide team of ambitious, educated, perspicacious women while men are in their descendancy, and shouldn’t procrastinate this rare opportunity to right an ancient wrong.

RELIGIOUS TYRANNY

1. Today’s conservative political movement began in 1980; resulting in legislation harmful to the middle class; ravaging trade unions, deregulating utilities and banks; plus reducing taxes on our wealthiest, who colluded in reducing interest rates to encourage consumerism, and out-sourcing our manufacturing economy, to reduce labor’s cost; (see U.S. ECONOMY). The Religious Right’s Republican Party promoted our Middle East wars, which have cost us more than $1.5 trillion. We owe China $1.6 trillion, which they invested in U.S. treasury notes, rather than their people. Deregulations, etc. caused our banking system’s recent “melt-down” and recession; prompting Federal Reserve to initiate “quantitative easing”, e.g., printing new money and buying locally owned government bonds; putting cash into consumers’ hands, thereby increasing inflation. The U.S.A.’s total debt is $14.3 trillion.

2. Religions thrive during our times of despair; people sense a need for “inerrant certainty”; increasing “born-again” voters and electing additional “born-again” officials such as President George W. Bush, who favored low taxes for corporate wealth, and low interest-rates; encouraging gullible consumers, to build and buy. In 2008 tax-payers bailed out our collapsed banking system, but mortgages were foreclosed on thousands of homes; increasing unemployment, additional desperate “born-again” voters. This recessionary spiral was created by the Religious Right’s conservative Christian legislators, and hierarchy proposed managing our federal government. Their ignorance of “God” is only exceeded by their ignorance of our realistic worldly needs. A constitutional amendment could nullify our freedom of/from religion allowing religion to nullify all contentious speech, press and assembly sacrificing our freedoms to religious tyranny. Deceptive attempts by monarch’s prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods, subjugated and manipulated their subjects; leading to the creation of the bible’s fictitious gods. I fear our electorate is initiating the end of its own Bill of Rights. History shows that believing “God” demands specific political action encourages unlimited Christian abuse and cruelty. Remember the torture and slaughtering during the Inquisitions, Crusades, the 30 year war, and recent Holocaust, of innocent Jewish men women and little children. (See CHRISTIAN ANTI-JUDAISM).

3. Historically, political tyranny was enforced by prestigious professional proponents of specious wrathful intimidating gods, portrayed as tyrants, e.g., King Josiah’s propagandist, Yahweh, commanded death for everyone who failed to follow Josiah’s commands; its precepts were adopted by the “holy books”. I’m concerned for literalists or fundamentalist, who believe the bible is the “word of God” and death correct punishment for breaking biblical commandments. Our world’s vast trove of knowledge is unable to provide facts about our imaginary gods. Like other malevolent anecdotes, god-ideas were eagerly promulgated, worldwide as creeds to manipulate the ignorant gullible multitudes of ancient despotic monarchs.

4. I don’t contest facts; religion has no facts, only beliefs. I argue against our misguided electorate’s full-throated enthusiasm for adopting a mystical sovereign god to glorify government with creeds and defer all national and international questions to the god’s prestigious professional proponents. Our Founding Fathers meant to prevent such a religious ruse’s unfortunate outcome for world’s first democracy dedicated to the proposition that all humans are created equal and that our democracy be free of ecclesiastical interference. Their intentions can be found in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay’s: The Federalist Papers; 85 articles, published; 1787-1788, analyzing the Constitution of the U.S. and urging its adoption. When and if a god is declared sovereign, America with all of its rights and freedoms loses its sovereignty and will be a Christian theocracy, obligated to literally obey the bible’s laws; much like the Middle East Islamic regimes. The Coalition also plans for a majority of non-thinkers in our electorate by proselytizing them as potential believers. Once believers submit their will to a god, they will learn how the god’s professional proponents want them to vote, and televangelists will control our government; not as a secular democracy, but an authoritarian theocracy. Historically, political leaders’ specious gods’ threats of death for apostates, nonbelievers, etc., implicated their subjects in occult mysticism to gain their submission. The god-idea was ingrained into our ancestors for millennia, and the survivors, including little children, believed the Big Lie, which is very seldom questioned.

5. The conservative Religious Right Coalition awaits an opportunity to rescind our constitution’s Church-State separation and our freedom from religion; our nation will then become their theocratic fiefdom; interpreting their “God” literally; demanding that apostates, blasphemers, nonbelievers, etc., be killed by believers. Much of our world is tyrannized by Islamism’s totalitarian regimes, but our founding fathers were determined to separate our ecclesiastical affairs from our governing apparatus.

6. Believers, cognizant of Christianity’s familiar fantasies, but unfamiliar with their faith’s degenerative history, may be surprised to learn about the Religious Right’s Evangelicals’ preparations to subvert our democracy by packing our government with officials favoring a theocratic nation, where their version of the Pentateuch’s perfidious Judaic god will supplant our Supreme Court, and like the Islamic regimes, professional proponents of mystical gods will rule by disallowing other points of view. This will set the stage for Evangelical’s, long awaited cataclysmic “End Times” with the Abrahamic faiths decimating each other, to determine which is eligible to welcome their god’s descendancy from heaven as believers ascend to heaven and we nonbelievers experience a gory end. This is my allegorical parody of our humanity’s regressive ignorance and allegiance to imaginary gods.

7. Supreme Court’s selection of George W. Bush as our president in 2000 was inopportune. Reliance on faith instead of reason changed our nation’s course to an irrational one. Political and religious militancy brought the U.S. to our degraded position in the world. Kevin Phillips’, book, American Theocracy, The Perils and Practice of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money, In The 21^st Century, documents how the Religious Right Coalition’s Republican Party’s unfortunate assistance brought our country to its knees. President Bush’s administration was an expensive disaster.

8. It is presumptuous to presume that today’s Christian government would be less fundamentalist or totalitarian than primitive Judaism’s were or the ancient Christian despots were or the tyrannical Islamic Muslim’s are today; all of which worship the Pentateuch; the original Holy Scriptures of the Hebrew bible, which was originally fabricated in 7^th century BCE for tribal propaganda by King Josiah of Judah in order to maintain command over his tribe of Israelites. Since blind-belief in “God” led millions to kill nonbelievers, it is unintelligible that individuals, so divorced from reality that they need a mystical god to guide them, are considered qualified to hold a high public office. The bible’s “God”, which was King Josiah’s tribal god, is portrayed as a death-dealing egomaniac devoid of impartial goodness or love; except for the Jews, whose own innocent children their god failed to save from the holocaust’s gas chambers, furnaces, etc.

See CHRISTIAN ANTI-JUDAISM for evidence of Vatican complicity.

9. Mythical gods should be of good character. Believing in the criminal behavior of King Josiah’s tribal propaganda’s vile & vengeful Yahweh has proved detrimental to world peace. Josiah’s god set bad examples for man. Males with their mighty male god challenge all who disagree. Women excel at peaceful leadership, with evolutionarily developed sensibilities that seek compromise. Men developed alertness for things lurking out there, and King Josiah’s god commanded us to dominate the world. Men resist ideas of world-citizenship. I’m not describing all men; fortunately, our world has produced innumerable exceptional male nonbelievers who developed our great fund of worldly knowledge. Being a male for 95 years provides a fair appraisal of our limitations. I understand our predicament. Virility is vital to our self-esteem; it influences thoughts, distorts equiponderance, disturbs amicable diplomacy’s contentious negotiations. Most males believe King Josiah’s god provided women to service them, while we convert the world to the service of a spurious god.

10. Every word spoken or written, from the primitive jungles until today, promoting mystical gods as our savior has been deceitful. King Josiah’s scholars conjured the tales about patriot Abraham, and the, creation. The question is; were they purposely deceptive, such as the Pentateuch, the gospels, and Mohammad’s revelations?

11. Before the eighteenth century’s Enlightenment and prior to America’s independence, and to its Religion-Lites; belief in a god had been insisted upon by political leaders who killed apostates, blasphemers, nonbelievers and proponents of other gods. Gods were the hand-maidens or pawns that prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods used, psychologically, and otherwise to enforce the tyrannical commands of monarchal despots.

12. Dear reader, please don’t fear; just because prestigious professional proponents of Abrahamic faith’s mystical gods have been exposed as frauds doesn’t change the facts of life; gods have always been phantasmal illusions. Maybe what I say will prevent religious idiots from following the holy book’s specious gods’ commands to destroy our freedom of thought and our dearth of nonbelieving thinkers.

“Beware the sanctimonious when they make laws. Scratch a moralist, and you will find a hypocrite”. Shakespeare’s: Measure for Measure.

ETCETERA

1. We humans should not consider ourselves above and beyond Earth’s natural physical laws which control all living things. Information indicates we are part of an orderly system. Every part consists of matter; I have no concept of the unreal or spiritual, despite religion’s allusion to it. We’ve not found anything considered supernatural. Evolution provides transparent answers about how life on Earth developed. We don’t know why we are here; is the answer worth killing others over hypothetical questions? The more we learn, the more we want to know; just because I cannot explain supernaturalism’s unknowns, but it is not beyond my comprehension, when and if, the information becomes available. Without answers we can’t assume poetic license to publicly proclaim divine gods. Indeed the absence of verifiable information is not an excuse for inventing answers, which only confuse people with misleading assumptions. Apprehension, ignorance and over-active imaginations have brought about our undoing. History reveals that civilizations faltered wherever religion was a zealous consideration. Many believe we are on oblivion’s slippery slope and fear Religion-Lite’s inundation by the growth of Fundamentalism.

2. Israelis and Palestinians share racial characteristics and speak Semitic languages; both are Abrahamic faiths and worship King Josiah’s fictitious god, but have distinctive religions. Israelis worship the holy land’s Judaism, but Palestinians worship Arabia’s Islamism; the basis of their rivalry and inability to live together peacefully. American Colonies welcomed Jewish immigrants; but not the Puritans in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, who burned the Salem witches, and forbade infidels to own land. Jewish culture, in the United States has been an intellectual stimulant but occasionally an ignorant Christian will voice his simmering anti-Semitism.

3. Evolution’s system of natural selection provides numerous benefits, but it also accentuates the imperviousness of deleterious bacteria and the submicroscopic viries. Medical research is too often stymied, by dogmatic ignorance. Scientific experimentation advances knowledge, but religious faiths denigrate scientific inquiry, preferring ignorance contemporaneous with the bible. Recent examples of religion’s ludicrousness are the Pope’s condemnation of Africa’s condom distribution to thwart further H.I.V., and President George W. Bush’s refusal to allow further research on lines of particular stem-cells.

4. Mark Twain, our nineteenth century satirist, said a lot about religion, but for obvious reasons none was published until after his death; its great material, read it, you’ll enjoy it. Like Mark Twain and many others who find mystical gods absurdly unreasonable, I, personally fear religious zealotry, such as Islam’s misperceived godly powers to kill the world’s infidels.

5. Religion is an imperative in many lives, and a complication for those burdened with feelings of inadequacy or guilt, to which they desperately cling with only blind faith. I am free from the influence of specious religions and regret that for masses of people, religion is tantamount to an infected feverish boil on their bottom that continuous to threaten hell-fire, but we remain reluctant to interfere or medicate for fear of yet another painfully destructive eruption.

6. The pert answer that: god works in mysterious ways, is unacceptably stupid. Many believers sense self-righteous satisfaction in promoting god-ideas which they consider too-good to ignore regardless of authenticity. This wouldn’t be a problem if religion was not so divided and diverse; its lack of essential information creates uncertainties that disrupt its Systems and sectaries creating additional distinctive problematic, religious sects.

7. Author, Bernard Lewis, in his Crisis of Islam, mentions: “in the Middle Eastern Arab world the idea of Equality is very basic in Islamic belief; all true believers are equal, although nonbelievers and women are excluded and are not equal”. The political leaders are obsessed with a god-idea and kill all who disagree; their minds are closed; refusing opportunities to learn about the origin of the three Abrahamic faiths. However Kuwait, an Islamic country, permits women to vote and become members of Parliament.

8. Galileo was condemned for heresy by Inquisition’s general tribunal, which was established in the 13^th century for discovery and suppression of heresy and punishment of heretics. Copernicus developed the Copernican system, the basis of modern Astronomy. He theorized that planets in our solar system revolved around the sun and the turning of earth on its axis accounted for the rising and setting of the sun and stars. Galileo’s telescope demonstrated the truth of Copernicus’ theory; he spent seven years under house-arrest for questioning the Church’s position. When King Josiah’s minions composed his ruse of royal propaganda little was known about our solar system. Aristotle (384-322 BCE), proclaimed Earth at the center of the universe, encircled by the moon, sun and stars. Nicolaus Copernicus, (1473-1543), found inconsistencies with that theory and placed the sun at the center. Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), corrected Copernicus’s famous but incorrectly formulated description of the solar system, and established the laws of planetary motion on which Isaac Newton (1642-1727), based his work.

9. Knowledge is power; religions wield prodigious powers supported by ignorance; they resist knowledge and tout fear, deceit and a specious concept, i.e., supernaturalism; under the guise of personal salvation. Our concurrence will degenerate our Democracy into a Tyrannical Theocracy. Our view of history will determine our destiny; primitive political leaders, ancient and medieval kings depended upon the idea of imaginary gods to manipulate and control their multitudes; the history of Western Europe is replete with Christian nations brought to ruin by their zealous insistence that citizens be converted or else classified heretics, subject to inquisitions, persecutions, and death. Central Europe’s Holy Roman Empire (800-1806) had organized the Teutonic Knights’ unsuccessful Crusade to retake the Holy Land. In 1618, militant Catholic principalities provoked 30 years of religious wars (1618-48) against both Catholics and Protestant sects, who also fought each other with unrivaled fury. (See CHRISTIANITY).

10. After two centuries of divisive Christian wars, Western Europeans tempered their religious fervor in favor of old fashioned secularism and reason, while the U.S.A. has become religiously contentious, narrower minded, less understanding and more divisive; suffering self-imposed disillusionment; many think we are the international leader; others, more knowledgeable of history, are aware of Christianity’s militant influence on Europe. We are too religious. Skepticism and tolerance could help us a lot. The confluence of religion and nationalism; historically has produced only death-dealing incapacitating tyrannical theocracies as per King Josiah.

11. Our mid-nineteenth century Civil War, was a religious war; pulpits in both North and South justified it. Ireland’s Catholic terrorism of England and Serbia’s Christian terrorism of the Muslims were religious wars; plus, President G. W. Bush’s Iraq-Afghanistan wars concern religion. When the Abrahamic religions are not partaking in wars, they accommodate them. Islamic religious extremists succeeded in destroying New York City’s World Trade Center towers and goaded the U.S. into unwinnable wars within their hot-bed of radicalism where their announced goal is ridding the world of infidels, but they are fighting for worldwide Islamic sharai law.

12. Presently, the Religious Right Coalition controls many electorate plus political leaders who supported Pres. Bush’s Middle East misadventure and promote Israel’s effort to rid the Holy Lands of Palestinians in preparation for Evangelicals’ “End Times”. Mr. Phillips’ book, documents Christianity’s political influence in the implosion of: the Roman Empire—late 15th to 17th century; Spanish centered Hapsburg Empire—16th to 18^th century; the Netherlands or Dutch Empire—17th to 18th century; Great Britain’s British Empire—18th to 20th century, and says that “Each of these countries, in its day, was the leading world economic power and principal naval or military power and each believed in their own exceptionalism, a wellspring of encouragement and reassurance for early and middle generations but a source of strategic blindness during the last years of illusion”.

14. Our nation is relegated to a less than exalted position in world affairs. We are pondering ways to make our world undiscriminating and inclusive; the love and trust-thy-neighbor, philosophy propounded by Christianity, but when considered seriously religion’s irrationality defies common sense; its absurdity and diversity prevents it being the intended fantasy. Several Christian Protestant sects in the U.S. are becoming more intense, fervid, feverish, charismatic, exclusive and intolerant; waiting expectantly for Armageddon. They won’t be disappointed; nations and empires have been destroyed before when the people depended upon a political leader’s spurious god to save them from righteous self-destruction.

15. Historically, our world has settled religious differences with mortal conflict, but our only opportunity to save our planet and us, is global compromise and understanding. Men are contentious; women have proven themselves the saner. Maybe, civilized human beings can agree that man’s god-ideas have been devastating deceitful ruses and be rid of them. The bible’s god is portrayed as a divisive pathological killer, unfit to guide a peace loving people. Reason & Truth are basic to any belief. The world’s God delusions require reconsideration. “Religion is especially liable to reflect the vagaries and weaknesses of human nature; and, as the forms and habits of thought connected with worship take a firmer hold on the mental constitution than do those belonging to any other department of human experience, religious conceptions should be subjected to frequent and careful examination in order to perceive the extent to which we are holding on to ideas which are unsuited to existing conditions. In an age when every branch of inquiry is being subjected to reasonable criticism, it would seem that the origin and growth of religion should be investigated from beneath the surface, and that all facts bearing upon it should be brought forward as a contribution to our fund of general information”; quoted from: God-Idea of the Ancients, by Liza Burt Gamble

16. Neither God nor Jesus criticized slavery or polygamy, which were common throughout much of history. Slavery was abolished in civilized countries in the nineteenth century. But polygamy, banned in many parts of the world, is practiced surreptitiously in the U.S. and Canada. Biblical treatment of women as chattel is why today’s religious leaders’ do the same. Today civilized nations accept a woman’s vote, in an election or on a jury is equal to a man’s vote. Enlightened societies no longer regard women as property. They were granted the vote as follows: New Zealand 1893; Australia 1902; Finland 1906; Norway 1913; U.S. 1920; Britain 1928; France 1945; Belgium 1946; Switzerland 1971; Kuwait: 2006.

17. Racial purity is a national identification for many nations; but the U.S. has thrived by accepting miscegenation. We are destined within the foreseeable future, via assimilation and intermarriage, to become a browner people, (See PARTY REVERSAL). Racial-centric nations, such as France and Japan overlook the obvious benefits of DNA diversity and are reluctant to assimilate foreigners. A peaceful world will benefit everyone; it depends upon our world’s willingness to forego ethnic uniqueness and encourage global harmony along with ethnological undiscriminating inclusiveness.

18. I don’t think governments should forbid the practice of religion as long as it forsakes hate, embraces tolerance, accepts new scientific knowledge, remains peaceful and does no harm. Karl Marx was correct: a large percentage of believers have a desperate need for an onerous opiate of self-righteous self-satisfaction. Our U.S. government is woefully inept to encourage the proliferation of religions with tax abatements because our Constitution guarantees us freedom from religion, as well as freedom of religion so why the free ride? We nonbelievers consider tax supported “faith based” services unconstitutional.

19. Uncritical acclaim of self-righteous religious leaders is oblique and disingenuous. We must assume they are familiar with the bible’s incorrigible unforgiving god, which no one should emulate. Is it sheer ignorance or the evil intent of King Josiah’s tribal propaganda that has propelled both political and religious leaders since the propaganda’s evil god was adopted as the Hebrew bible’s god? Religions have been blind to their responsibility to help keep peace in our world; which, historically, has been torn asunder by their militancy. They are also responsible for unsuspecting humanity’s gullible attraction to their thoughtless, or possibly intentional, calumny.

20. You’ve read my treatise and know our primitive fears, ignorance and longing for a better future, led us to believe our welfare depended upon imaginary gods. I have an imaginary female god and I’ve described how Yahweh, God and Allah became gods in the minds of billions of misguided, trusting unthinking hopeful people. Gods have always been just ideas. At no time in recorded history have we been aware of the supernatural. We men concocted all gods and practiced divination which secured our path to leadership; the control and manipulation of tribes, tribal councils, political and social groups, thenceforth our nations, and the world’s empires.

21. One hundred and thirty seven years prior to America’s Independence an English clergyman in the American Colonies, John Harvard, endowed Harvard College, founded in 1639, as a religious school. Presently, there is not a department of religion at Harvard University. Religion is founded upon ancient sorcery; Just because billions of people have believed in “God” does not change the fact that prestigious professional proponents of “Gods” have no tangible evidence, but deceitfully promulgate beliefs in a specious god, leading large segments of our world to anticipate heaven with loved ones; and respond passionately to suggestions of its unavailability. False promises bring disappointments and more bloodshed. I regret there is not a heavenly existence, as per fantasies; my understanding is: that only our “essence” would be affected. Believers have been led to believe they and all of their ancestors will be in prime human form with their god for eternity.

22. Religion’s position is awkward & embarrassing, having spent twenty six hundred years promulgating unfounded doctrine; based upon young King Josiah’s tribal propaganda. Groups or individuals that claim to speak for “God” are misinformed; not qualified to do so; the Judaic god was an evil character in Josiah’s political tribal propaganda; information about “God” is in bible’s Pentateuch; Josiah’s propaganda.

23. Author, Strobe Talbott duly warns: “In championing reason, science, and humanism against ignorance, dogma, and despotism, the great figures of the Enlightenment were waging, with their minds and their pens, what was often a losing battle against blunter instruments—In a world where disputes between individuals and states were so often resolved not by reason or merit or virtue but by force, the power of ideas alone did not stand much of a chance against the power of violence”, which was due to forced religious beliefs and religious sect’s competiveness. I’m undeterred.

I’ve shown religion began in the jungles with voodoo gods that the Judaic god was fabricated by King Josiah of Judah in the seventh century BCE; composed as tribal propaganda to confound and maneuver his subjects with sanctimonious tyranny. Deceitful believers desecrated humanity by slaughtering its nonbelievers; thereby developing a religion industry which promotes primitive promises of forgiveness of sins and salvation in heaven for the righteous and hell for the wicked. Twenty six hundred years of inquisitions, persecutions, despoliation and wars prove that the gods of the Abrahamic faiths’ Judaism, Christianity and Muslimism are, as King Josiah’s scholars concocted; fictional dividers and ruthless killers.

24. The fraudulent backward Abrahamic religions found it necessary to slaughter millions of dissenters in order to force false beliefs onto innocent societies; recall Spain’s invasion and exploration of both North and South American continents; killing the natives and taking their land in the name of “God”; all because they believed mystical gods would salvage their souls. Religious beliefs are inconceivable; their historical death and devastation almost destroyed their world; all progress was accomplished by a few clear minded thinkers, who had to survive organized religions’ gauntlet of inquisitions, persecutions, banishment and death. Abrahamic religions’ hierarchies know that knowledge will expose them to shame, ridicule and failure. It’s why they stymy inquiry. Why do today’s hierarchies promulgate primitive and ancient fallacious dogma? Could it be because professional proponents of mystical gods have been prestigious positions since their jungle experiences, or is it their blind-faith in King Josiah’s fabulous tribal propaganda? Think about it. Obviously additional knowledge could have saved us from intangible beliefs; thus we are obligated to improve public education by ignoring the Creation Myth, and emphasize the proven facts of Evolution.

RECAPITULATION

1. You say you love science-fiction’s unbelievable stories; like H.G. Well’s Time Machine? Tell you what I’m going to do; there is a story I want to tell about microscopic life beginning 3.5 billion years ago on an extraordinary planet where evolution naturally developed a new species, Homo sapiens, whose political and religious leaders, under the guise of alleviating people’s fears and restless anxieties, conjured imaginary gods, to better manipulate them, plus the gods provided simple solutions to fathomless conundrums. Innumerable future generations inherited and embellished the gods, whose specious threats and rewards gradually became essential to maintaining an obeisant tribal allegiance. Money influences power. Political and religious leaders found that god-ideas were career enhancing; profitably developing divination, with its professional shamans, medicine-men, priests, etc. who represented gods and collected portions of the sacrificed meat and grain. Ancient kings built religious alters throughout their kingdoms facilitating the slaughter of sacrificial livestock. This sordid practice continued until King Josiah of Judah proclaimed his monotheistic god and destroyed the pagan altars, limiting worship to Jerusalem’s Temple. He and subsequent tyrannical monarchs, killed non-allegiant nonbelievers, convincing their ignorant gullible believers and their progeny that they were subjugated, under threats of death, for non-obeisance, to an ever-present, all-knowing, all-powerful, egomaniacal superhuman god. It’s not science-fiction, but a true, strange, tragic saga, about the perfidious fictional gods and Abrahamic religions that humankind embraced. Gods have always received tithes and gifts; there is a childhood story about a rabbi, catholic priest and protestant preacher discussing how they shared Sabbath’s gifts with “God”, and the rabbi explains: “I simply throw it all up into the air and let God decide”.

2. Primitive man was ignorant of his planet’s natural laws and scientific principles. He imagined imperceptible powers manipulated and controlled his world. Without evidence humankind’s imagination, ignorance, fear and underdeveloped intellects, devised devious schemes to use the occult for personal advantage, e.g., tribal leaders, priests, etc. leading to King Josiah of Judah’s monotheistic god idea. Belief in a particularly vicious god instilled fear of vengeful retaliation into subjects; subjugating and organizing them, assuring their unquestioning allegiance. European history is replete with despotic church-state dynasties. America’s prescient founding fathers founded the first secular democracy with a Constitution and Bill of Rights.

3. I have explained how young King Josiah’s tribal propaganda’s fictional tribal god character, Yahweh, decreed the killing of apostates, blasphemers, nonbelievers and proponents of other gods. The killing assured Josiah’s successful reign. His propaganda was proclaimed Holy Scriptures of the Hebrew bible, which portrays the god as an egomaniacal pathological killer who destroyed nations, demanding death for millions including innocent women, children, even infanticide and gang-rapes, which assured “God’s” notoriety; all in order to benefit Josiah. A majority of our U.S. population believes in “God”; which I question. Why would anyone worship bible’s genocidal, merciless god and believe we should emulate it? Why do adults worship what they are ignorant about? The bible confirmed my skepticism, improved my life immeasurably and made an atheist out of me. Knowledge is glorious, but ignorance robs one of self-worth, confidence, and initiative. Gods are helpless, hopeless, nonentities invented by man. Recall the Judaic god’s fulltime neglect of its “chosen people” during their brutal history including the Holocaust? As for Jesus, I’m not impressed by the conflicting gospels, which were composed more than a century after the purported miracles. Prolific writings by contemporaneous historians do not mention Jesus or his “miracles”. Jesus was just another fictional god; contrived by the Jews to support their original menacing Yahweh with a less virile, more empathetic benevolent son. The Jesus fables are as incredulous as those of King Josiah, but Jews denied the lurid tale of Yahweh killing his own son.

4. The world is divided between haves & have-nots, i.e., thinkers & non-thinkers, e.g., leaders & followers; about 85% are non-thinking followers. Don’t be one of them. Religion connotes intolerance and if anyone suggests that “God” can help you, thank them and run; don’t discuss impossibilities with organizations built upon subterfuge, bigotry and the extermination of dissenters. Converts are attracted by creating mortal fear of unknown gods. Abrahamic faiths are cults, awaiting prestigious professional proponents’ opportunity to govern us with fundamentalism’s theocratic absolutism. I fear that U.S.’s “born again” electorate will rescind our secular democracy and return to Christianity’s former totalitarianism, forbidding freedom of information, speech, religion, etc. Islamic regimes are totalitarian, where true-believers are equal, but women and nonbelievers are not equal. The Abrahamic religions’ politicians control their “born again” electorate, and postulate exchanging our secular democracy’s Bill of Rights for theocracy’s absolutism. Religion-lite is a decoy; attracting ignorant innocent prey into the maw of theological totalitarianism; destroying the sovereignty of our nation and our freedoms of religion, speech, press, etc. including their own voting rights.

5. It’s disturbing to contemplate why much of today’s society rejects our accumulation of evidence proving that all gods, including the Judaic “God” are man’s creations, and that innumerable contradictions, misstatements, misrepresentations, and general incongruity, indicates the bible’s lack of authenticity. Also my chapter; JUDAISM, reveals how the bible’s early books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1&2 Samuel and 1&2 Kings, were originally king Josiah’s tribal propaganda.

6. How wonderful life could be if Muslimism would forgo its tyrannical killing, and if all religions would surrender thoughts of political dominion, and forgo preaching Pentateuch’s incredulous precepts and vicious stories, where “God” calls for slaughtering all peoples, of several nations, including innocent mothers and children, but cautions the soldiers to save the young virgins for their pleasure. Why do clergy consider “God’s” crimes sacred? I understand it’s a farce; but clergy intentionally misleads congregations by deceptively presenting their spurious god as a benevolent do-gooder.

7. Religion’s history is replete with tyranny, persecutions, beheadings, burnings, wars, despoliation, desecration, and general mayhem. Serious consideration should be given to cleaning-up our religions’ ungodliness. Fallacious promises are like false advertising; if congregations weren’t so ignorant and gullible, it might be ok, but it’s unfair; like shooting fish in a barrel, because ignorance eagerly clamors for the opportunity to be fooled, and religions compete for opportunities to satisfy their egotistical desire to live forever. Although promulgating unfounded doctrine may be unworthy and vexing, religions, apparently reason that someone has to do it; that it shouldn’t be neglected, because if congregations adequately tithe, sins are absolved forthwith, and requirement of righteous self-satisfaction either meets the approval of the membership’s majority, or they are apt to scout for a new minister, or leave and organize a new church. It’s a precarious business, void of scientific principles; dealing only with the supernatural.

8. Religion-Lite is man’s inane, incomprehensible, competitive enterprise. It consists of numerous distinctive sects, each offering a pseudo insurance against risks of an imaginary hell plus forgiveness of sins and promise of eternal life in an imaginary heaven. It is supported by gifts, etc. Eligibility qualifications are defined by each sect. Fear of retaliation, by an imaginary god, brain-washes congregations into eager believers. However, Abrahamic faiths: Judaism, Christianity and Muslimism, hark back to the despotic reign of King Josiah, twenty six centuries ago, and cannot deny their documented compliance with their holy books’ commands to kill apostates, blasphemers, nonbelievers, proponents of other gods etc.; Millions subscribed to a monarch’s specious god in order to save their lives, thereby agreeing to do the killing. From their infamous bloody background Religion-Lite presents a holier-than-thou face to the world, but they are neither holy nor a benign fantasia; Christian religion wields great power in our U.S. Congress and Senate. Most of our legislators endorse the bible’s vengeful fictitious god, and patronize our “born-again” electorate; hoping to attain hierarchy’s stated goal of a Christian managed U.S.A., i.e., a totalitarian theocracy; where, like in ancient times, Christians will substitute a specious god for brains and supported by a “born-again” electorate, insist their prestigious professional proponents overrule all contentious opposition.

9. Our world’s ethnic cultures are divided into two opposing groups. The larger, more populated, older group respects and values authority above all else. Their combined, church-state, governments assure authority and security, and along with the community and tribe, are more important than the individual. China, Japan, East Asian nations and the Middle East are among this despotic group of nations, known as the East. The smaller, less populated, younger group of ethnic cultures cherishes independence and liberty. Sovereign individuals elect governing authorities, and choose belief systems, not necessarily a religious ones; with freedoms of speech, assembly, the press, etc. West Europe and America are among this group, known as the West, but if Christianity governs all is lost.

10. All goodness comes from fellow human beings in spite of religion’s perfidious presumptions. I have explained that the Judaic God, Jesus and Allah are fraudulent, and the discerning astute thinkers were slaughtered because they refused to kill other nonbelievers. That is how it was: from King Josiah’s contrivance of a monotheistic god until about 1450 CE when the Christians finally forbade it; but fanatical Muslims continue it, which corroborates my earlier statement, that the world’s Islamic regimes are the most backward, violent, and the most religious societies on Earth.

11. We must never forget that: throughout the ages, millions were killed and horrific crimes committed by monarchs, clergy and zealous believers in response to the commands of the bible’s specious “God”. I presume that zealous religious government officials will replicate the evil deeds of ancient clergy, when and if a mythical god is our ultimate decision maker. Congregations profess blind faith in deceptive dogma rather than their intellect, because clergy do not reveal the truth about the specious “Judaic God’s” criminal behavior.

12. It is incumbent upon us nonbelievers, to be a little more considerate and polite than church attendees; or we will be considered devil-workers. We must prove to be high-principled, tolerant, unbigoted, exemplary seekers of the truth; searching for pertinent knowledge of religion’s perfidious history, and we must seek society’s respect by establishing ourselves as considerate, helpful, congenial, convivial individuals, whose critical explorations into the history of the bible’s Judaic god, challenge religion’s deceit with reason, truth and complete honesty. We have determined the truth; we have no “Gods”; bible’s Pentateuch is fraudulent; and we believe civilized society can accept the truth without destroying the world; that blind-faith in the bible’s unfounded “rewards for the righteous, and punishments for the wicked” are good adages, but empty promises. We must not gloat over our ability to recognize that “God’s” slaughter of innocent mothers, children and infants is, criminal; unworthy of our consideration.

13. I began this treatise with excerpts from Thomas Paine’s introduction to: The Age of Reason and now end it with excerpts from its final chapter.

Following excerpts are from Mr. Paine’s concluding remarks:

“It is incumbent on every man who reverences the character of the Creator, and who wishes to lessen the catalogue of artificial miseries, and remove the cause that has sown persecutions thick among mankind, to expel all ideas of a revealed religion as a dangerous heresy, and an impious fraud. What is it that we have learned from this pretended thing called revealed religion?—nothing that is useful to man and everything that is dishonorable to his Maker. What is it the Bible teaches us?—repine, cruelty, and murder. What is it the [New] Testament teaches us?—to believe that the Almighty committed debauchery with a woman engaged to be married; and the belief of this debauchery is called faith.—I here close the subject. I have shown in all the foregoing parts of this work that the Bible and Testament are impositions and forgeries; and I leave the evidence I have produced in proof of it to be refuted, if anyone can do it; and I leave the ideas that are suggested in the conclusion of the work to rest on the mind of the reader; certain as I am that when opinions are free, either in matters of government or religion, truth will finally and truthfully prevail”.

I, Sam Redwine; author of this iconoclastic harangue, fully agree with Thomas Paine. I don’t expect refutation, because the bible’s incongruity cannot be authenticated. I will not be surprised if some religious idiot stones me to death; however, I am confident of NATURE and REALITY. Man has experienced both since our beginning. Although they are sometimes undependable; we understand how to cope with their surprises, but have not agreed on how to survive our self-inflicted global warming. Abrahamic religions’ prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods convinced humankind to divide up and slaughter each other over diverse opinions of King Josiah’s fabricated royal tract of tribal propaganda. I invite you to write a cogent explanation for the bible’s incomprehensible Pentateuch; since Yahweh is portrayed as an egomaniacal killer of innocent foreigners. How is that supposed to help the world? Recall: subsequent ignominious Jewish history; their god did not help, simply because it was fictitious.

OUR FUTURE

1. Our species’ future depends upon what thinkers understand were the reasons why history took its recorded course. My thoughts are less on our well documented ignoble past than on our future, I have no clues, but great interest. Who will we become; will evolution ever improve us physically or intellectually; will our scientists develop more beneficial knowledge for humanity, or will the world’s wisdom persuade us to peacefully nurture an international government; or will religious idiots obtain nuclear weapons, who imagine a “God” commands them to rid the world of thinkers, but if thinkers are killed, idiotic religious tyranny is waiting to rule the world.

2. Islamic regimes, the world’s fastest growing religion, control our destiny. When Iran attains nuclear bombs, Islam will control all nations reachable by their delivery system. Religious rivalry and propaganda about imminent Armageddon indicate an ominous prognosis for a semi-civilized world. Belief in “God” disrupted many formidable nations and I fear our electorate’s religiosity will rescind our “Founding Father’s freedoms” and replace them with Islam’s biblical tyranny. Religion’s future depends upon future humankind’s ignorance and its fears of an erroneous biblical god’s insinuated subjugation. The world’s discerning, thinkers, dismiss all religious beliefs; but our religious majority’s ignorance might destroy our world’s trove of knowledge. Where religion’s controlled government, they burned books, stifled scientific inquiry, and their critics, by denying them freedom of information, the press, etc., i.e., their own Bill of Rights.

3. David P. Goldman, in his informative book; How Civilizations Die says Islamic women’s average birth rate has dropped precipitously, indicating they’ve lost faith along with their dying civilization, and that America’s birth rate assures survival. However, we view religion quite differently. He values it, but I find its sanctimonious fallaciousness unfitting. Primitive professional proponents of mystical gods began deceit as scamming voodooists in the jungles and prospered as priests whose dogma enforced the tyranny of ancient monarchs and landed aristocracy. The 1700s American religious freedom’s rid churches of the Pentateuch’s evil death-dealing god, and developed the Religion-Lite industry, which evinces an ironic deceitful message; that religions’ perceived purpose is saving man from his innate calumny, which he initiated in the jungles.

4. Life taught me that a small percentage of men developed our world’s philosophical and scientific knowledge; always with the aid and support of women, and that the Judaic “God” persuaded most men that women were inferior beings, meant to be subjugated. History has proved that women, when confronted with daily life’s irrational problems are more flexible, wiser, and more rational than conventional men.

5. Mara Hvistendahl’s book: Unnatural Selections; Choosing Boys Over Girls, And The Consequences Of A World Full Of Men; exposes an invidious custom. Her world history of Gender Selection describes debacles created when excessive numbers of testosterone-laden young men are unable to find wives. Unbalanced genders led to serious crime wherever occurring in history, e.g. the settlement of our “wild-west”. The latest census of small children in our world alerts us to future problems—within fifteen years, South Korea, China, India and Azerbaijan, collectively, will need 160 million additional young women, (equivalent to U.S. female population), in order to domesticate a like number of ambitious, vindictive, rapacious young males. The situation, at minimum, will exacerbate their customary trafficking in women and children. “Men love the power of pre-eminence and dominion. They often abuse the confidence of others and sacrifice their scruples to personal advantage”; Statistics indicate: U.S. men’s probability for committing violent crimes is 4 times higher than women’s; we men are 3 times more likely to commit robbery; 5 times more likely to commit aggravated assault; 8 times more likely to be arrested for murder, and 13 times more likely to be arrested for a sexual offense. Although little girls are life’s loveliest, most wonderful creations; true believers cannot right the rampant wrong of killing girl babies because the unforgivable custom is too much like the Judaic “God’s” common practice of infanticide and genocide, as related in the bible. Emulating “God” is our Nemesis.

6. I’m not optimistic. Our nation’s government is the best money can buy. It is beholden to Finance, Insurance, Pharmaceuticals, Utilities and other major contributors to national political campaigns. Our nation’s legislative bodies are cooperative recipients of the conservative Religious Right Coalition’s influence and largesse; they advocate for a “born-again” electorate’s disgraceful god. Income disparity is the result of conservative legislator’s effort to convert our nation’s economy into religiously controlled medieval serfdom; in order to better enrich campaign’s contributors at the expense of our electorate. It is obvious that the Republican Party’s obduracy campaign within our House and Senate results from the reversal of political platforms in the South in 1965 the religious segregationist voters, annoyed by the enactment of the Civil Rights Act, left the Democratic Party and took over Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party. (See PARTY REVERSAL).

7. Conservative voters are depending upon “God” to pay our national debt. They voted for President Reagan who doubled our national debt, and for all subsequent conservative administrations which added to it. Liberal, President Clinton, balanced the budget during his two terms; but President G.W. Bush wasted it on a Middle East fiasco, and then lowered income taxes for the wealthiest campaign contributors. “Born-again” voters elected the presidential administrations that increased our nation’s debt. Presently, conservative legislators are blaming the debt on President Obama, who inherited it. They are trying to ruin our Black President without losing the Black’s vote. After the Civil War, southern segregationists settled the Midwest and the West; many voters are zealous segregationists, and I fear for the president’s life. Washington’s political stupidity emphasizes how blind-faith in ancient speculation often supersedes scientific evidence. I’ve shown herein that there is no God. I have cursed “God” daily for 50 years without pejorative response; the misbegotten SOB did not help innocent Jewish children. Some religious idiot, reading this, can prove me wrong by killing me, demonstrating how Abrahamic religions successfully imposed their faiths on trusting societies for 2000 years by murdering nonbelievers, etc. Any fool idea will be successful if naysayers are killed. It explains why today’s non-thinking believers fear erudite discerning naysayers. The volume of naysayer is increasing because religion’s hierarchy favors lowering taxes for the wealthiest contributors to legislator’s political campaigns; also for killing the Consumer Protection Act, which was to replace the much needed regulations for banks, credit cards, loan sharks, insurance companies, and monopolies which were removed by President Ronald Reagan. Capitalism must be regulated; otherwise it devastates consumers. Peaceful competition is capitalism’s game and must be encouraged; free of price-fixing, but all monopolies such as utilities, should be permitted to earn only a reasonable profit for its stockholders, when establishing users’ rate fees. Otherwise free enterprise will create a market for the utility’s product; driving up consumer’s rates by buying large portions of the service and reselling it to the highest bidder ad finitum, which is how our electric utilities presently distribute their monopoly’s essential public service. Prior to Reagan’s stupidity the Interstate Commerce Commission allowed public utilities a profit of about 7%; consumer’s rates were adjusted regularly; securing the stockholders’ highly valued position.

EPILOGUE

1. Although I am old and enjoy each day with therapeutic projects that keep my brain entertained, similar to this venture, I fear that our nation is mistaken in supporting the elderly to their bitter end, at the expense of care for expectant mothers, their babies, and children in general, who are being short-changed by a lack of funds; why else is our infant mortality rate so high and why are millions of children without health-insurance?

2. I’ve experienced enough life to appraise it, and find old-age palatably uncomfortable and painless, worthy of its problems and expense, but must seriously consider what to do when I become bedbound; having avoided senility, to this point; nursing homes are unacceptable. Since euthanasia is not available, suicide is the sensible alternative. Our Social Security system in the U.S. is presently unsustainable because an increasing percentage of our population is eligible for benefits. Consensual euthanasia is a sensible alternative that would solve our dire situations involving only bedbound patients with dire maladies; including those who are very old, depressed, maybe feeling hopeless, but that doctors consider a survivable quality of life. It’s devastating to be unable to care for oneself, and nursing homes are not for everyone, so I encourage euthanasia for the physical or emotional relief of the desperate or hurting. My body has been willed to a medical school for more than twenty years, but I fear premature institutionalization to rot in some nursing home while painfully waiting for bodily systems to shut down. I prefer to skip the preliminaries and go directly to college as a prize cadaver. Euthanasia avoids prolonged suffering, but is considered possible only in Oregon, although it would be welcome relief for many. The situation could develop into a memorial gathering with family, guests and patient, all in attendance, replacing the somber funeral as a memorial; the patient, if feasible, visits with guests and bids goodbye to everyone prior to an intravenous injected terminus. Everyone would know that the service is available for them when and if their medical situation ever qualifies.

3. The Perils of Aging: I don’t recall ever dwelling much on the subject of old-age, until, in my mid-seventies a young physician prefaced his verbal instructions with, “Due to your advanced age”----I assumed myself elderly and thence have worn the mantle and born the stigma. It’s not easy being old. While most individuals look forward to an enjoyable retirement, odds do not favor them. Poor health, fatigue and money problems, often reduce options, but Medicare’s support for the elderly is of immeasurable help.

4. A doctor recently explained my problem; he said: the reason I am outliving my savings is that I have had too good of medical care. I graciously accept the benefits. However when we consider the increasing number of seriously debilitated older citizens with the decreasing birthrate of the world’s developed countries, the obvious disparity is apparent: too few young people who must support too many elders to their bitter end.

5. This treatise on man’s contrived religion’s devastating influence on humankind is information for the consideration of my grandchildren and their descendants. I have often wished that my grandparents could have done something similar; how wonderful it would be to have a sense of their ideas and to know the truth about our situation, that: fortunately we are alone, free from the curse of an imaginary fearsome “God”; I rejoice! Active curiosities and open minds are cognizant they might be wrong. Closed minds will bring civilization to closure; and civilized segments of our world’s population must organize, in non-challenging, ways. We can preserve humanity and all beneficial species of plants, animals, etc., over time, naturally and simply, by promoting intermarriage of races and religious faiths, developing a common language, an unlimited student exchange and by recognizing that “God” was extrapolated from King Josiah’s tribal propaganda. Just don’t fight about it.

6. You had the foresight and fortitude to read my treatise; I thank you. If you consider me blasphemous, I won’t agree ; religion is a man-made subterfuge and is not sacred, but was originally devised to exploit others in order to develop political support for leaders. My life approaches its end and many may see an error in my ways, but I accept that I am a part of Earth’s physical system and not outside its natural laws.

7. Our world’s only solution is to forego the bibles false beliefs. Humanity must organize a global effort to salvage our planet and in time restore all beneficial species including plants, animals and essential microorganisms which sustain us, or else our position on the endangered species list will ever become more critical. Internationally, everyone must work toward an eventual ideal for humankind, by attenuating our differences, recognizing our benefits and gradually eliminating our distinctions while increasing our similarities and eventually becoming the same race of Homo sapiens, speaking the same language, and truely become “the same except for our experiences” as Confucius propounded.

Third Segment of

THE JUDAIC GOD’S EARTHLY ORIGIN

Samuel Terrill Redwine Sr.

CONTENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY 49

20,961 words of mostly 14pt font on 50 pages of 8.5 x 11 inches

HISTORICAL DATES

1. Stone Age: precedes the Bronze Age and constitutes the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic periods; the period in human culture when stone implements were used.

2. Agriculture: developed in Mesopotamia, in the Neolithic period about 4,000 BCE

3. Bronze Age: 3500-1000 BCE, a phase of human culture characterized by the introduction of bronze tools and weapons.

4. Egyptian Dynasties: began 3000 BCE, during the Stone Age, and continued through the Bronze Age and the Iron Age.

5. Babylonian Empire: in the Tigris and Euphrates River valleys; was famous for its wickedness and flourished from 2100-500 BCE

6. Biblical Period: about 2000 BCE-90 CE

7. Israelites: King Josiah’s tribal propaganda put the Israelites in the Egyptian18^th dynasty, about 1200 BCE, and King Solomon’s reign about 1000 BCE. The actual history of the Israelites is known to be much simpler than King Josiah’s biblical fable.

8. Hebrew Writing: first dated between 1200-1100 BCE

9. Iron Age: 1000 BCE-100 CE

10. Ancient Greece: began 776 BCE, during the Iron Age.

11. Assyrian Empire: in the region of the upper Tigris River, extending from the head of the Persian Gulf to Egypt and Asia Minor and was at its height during 600s BCE.

12. King Josiah of Judah: authored a tract of political & religious tribal propaganda during his reign from 640-609 BCE, which was later adopted by Ezra & Nehemiah as Judaism’s Holy Scriptures and adopted by St. Jerome as Christianity’s first canon and its precepts were adopted by Mohammed for his koran.

13. Persian Empire: founded by Cyrus the Great in 500 BCE, the area is now known as Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan; conquered by Alexander the Great about 328 BCE

14. Roman Republic: began 509 BCE

15. Ezra and Nehemiah: in 444 BCE, adopted King Josiah’s propaganda as Judaism’s Holy Scriptures, which included Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, 1&2 Samuel and 1&2Kings.

16. Roman Empire: established 27 BCE; in 395 CE divided into Eastern & Western Roman Empires

17. Jesus: purportedly born about 4-8 BCE and crucified about 29 CE

18. Old Testament’s: completion by edict of the Rabbinical Council of Jamnia 90 CE

19. End of Jewish State: 135 CE

20. Christianity Established: about 367 CE

21. Dark Ages: 476-1000 CE; 500 years of European Christian fervor, intellectual stagnation, wide spread ignorance, poverty and cultural decline.

22. Crusades: 1095-1291

23. Christian Inquisition: 13^th century

24. Middle Ages: the medieval period of European history, between ancient and modern times, 476 to 1450 CE

25. Renaissance: the great revival of art and literature: it began in Italy and spread gradually to other countries and marked the transition from medieval world to the modern, 1300s-1500s CE

26. Thirty Years’ War: a series of European wars (1618-48) on political and religious issues, fought originally between German Catholics and German Protestants, but later involving the Swedish, French and Spanish.

27. The Enlightenment: a 1700s European philosophical movement characterized by rationalism, an impetus toward learning, and a spirit of skepticism and empiricism in social and political thought.

28. Independence of American Colonies: 1776

29. United States: our nation is 236 years old, however it has been 6,000 years since the development of agriculture; 5,000 years since Egypt’s first dynasty; 2,600 years since King Josiah of Judah’s tribal propaganda; 2,454 years since Judaism’s establishment; about 1,650 years since Christianity was established and 1,400 years since Mohammed claimed he received the Hebrew Angel Gabriel’s messages.

SECULARISM

The following is from Wikipedia

Due in part to the belief in the separation of church and state, secularists tend to prefer that politicians make decisions for secular rather than religious reasons. In this respect, policy decisions pertaining to topics such as abortion, contraception, embryonic stem-cell research, same sex marriage, and sex education are prominently focused upon by American secularist organizations such as the Center for Inquiry.

Most major religions accept the primacy of the rules of secular, democratic society but may still seek to influence political decisions or achieve specific privileges or influence through church-state agreements such as a concordat. Many Christians support a secular state—however some Christian fundamentalists (notably in the United States) oppose secularism, often claiming that there is a “radical secularist” ideology being adopted in current days and see secularism as a threat to “Christian rights” and national security. The most significant forces of religious fundamentalism in the contemporary world are Fundamentalist Christianity and Fundamentalist Islam. At the same time, one significant stream of secularism has come from religious minorities who see governmental and political secularism as integral to preserving equal rights.

Some of the well-known states that are often considered “constitutionally secular” are the U.S.A., France, India, Mexico, South Korea, and Turkey although none of these nations have identical forms of governance.

In studies of religion, modern western societies are generally recognized as secular. This is due to the near-complete freedom of religion (beliefs on religion generally are not subject to legal or social sanctions), and the lack of authority of religious leaders over political decisions. Nevertheless, religious beliefs are widely considered a relevant part of the political discourse in many of these countries. This contrasts with other Western countries where religious references are generally considered-out-of-place in mainstream politics.

The nature of a secular society is one which:

1. Refuses to commit itself as a whole to any one view of the nature of the universe and the role of man in it.

2. Is not homogeneous, but is pluralistic.

3. Is tolerant. It widens the sphere of private decision making.

4. While every society must have some common aims, which implies there must be agreed-upon methods of problem-solving and a common framework of law; in a secular society these are as limited as possible.

5. Problem solving is approached rationally, through examination of the facts. While the secular society does not set any overall aim, it helps its members realize their aims.

6. Is a society without any official images; nor is there a common ideal type of behavior with universal application.

Positive ideals behind the secular society:

1. Deep respect for individuals and the small groups of which they are a part.

2. Equality of all people.

3. Each person should be helped to realize their particular excellence.

4. Breaking down the barrios of class and caste.

Modern sociology has, since Max Weber, often been preoccupied with the problem of authority in secularized societies and with secularization as a sociological or historical process. Twentieth century scholars whose work has contributed to the understanding of these matters include Carl L. Becker, Karl Lowith, Hans Blumenberg, M.H. Abrams, Peter L. Berger, Paul Benichou, and D. L. Munby, among others.

Some societies become increasingly secular as the result of social processes, rather than through the actions of a dedicated secular movement; known as secularization.

George Holyoake’s 1896 publication English Secularism defines secularism as a code of duty pertaining to this life, founded on considerations purely human, and intended mainly for those who find theology indefinite or inadequate, unreliable or unbelievable. Its essential principles are three:

(1) The improvement of this life by material means.

(2) That science is the available Providence of man.

(3) That it is good to do good. Whether there be other good or not, the good of the present life is good, and it is good to seek that good.

Holyoake held that secularism and secular ethics should take no interest at all in religious questions (as they were irrelevant), and thus was to be distinguished from strong free thought and atheism. In this he disagreed with Charles Bradlaugh, and the disagreement split the secularist movement between those who argued that anti-religious movements and activism was not necessary or desirable and those who argued that it was.

Contemporary ethical debate is often described as “secular”, with the work of Derek Parfit and Peter Singer, and even the whole field of contemporary bioethics, having been described or self-described as explicitly secular or non-religious.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The following quotations are from Wikipedia.

“The Enlightenment or Age of Reason was a cultural movement of intellectuals in 18^th century Europe and America whose purpose was to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted science and intellectual interchange and opposed superstition, intolerance and abuses in church and state. Originating about 1650 to 1700, it was sparked by philosophers Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), John Locke (1632-1704), Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), physicist Isaac Newton (1643-1727), and philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778). The wide distribution of the printing press, invented in Europe in 1440, made possible the rapid dispersion of knowledge and ideas which precipitated the Enlightenment. Ruling princes often endorsed and fostered figures and even attempted to apply their ideas of government in what was known as Enlightened Despotism. The Enlightenment flourished until about 1790-1800, after which the emphasis on reason gave way to Romanticism’s emphasis on emotion and a Counter Enlightenment gained force”.

“The American Enlightenment is the intellectual thriving period in America in the mid-to-late 18^th century (1715-1789), especially to how it relates to the American Revolution, on the one hand and the European Enlightenment on the other. Influenced by the scientific revolution of the 17^th cent., and the humanist period during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment took scientific reasoning and applied it to human nature, society and religion”.

“Politically, the age is distinguished by an emphasis upon liberty, democracy, republicanism and religious tolerance—culminating in the drafting of the United States Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Attempts to reconcile science and religion resulted in a rejection of prophecy, miracle and revealed-religion, often in preference for Deism. Historians have considered how the ideas of John Locke and republicanism merged to form republicanism in the United States. Enlightened founding fathers, especially Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and George Washington, fought for and eventually attained religious freedom.—According to the founding fathers, America should be a country where peoples of all faiths could live in peace and mutual benefit. James Madison summed up this ideal in 1792, saying, ‘Conscience is the most sacred of all property’”.

“In France, Enlightenment was based in the salons and culminated in the great Encyclopededie (1751-72), edited by Denis Diderot (1713-1784) with contributions by hundreds of leading intellectuals such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu. Some 25,000 copies of the 35 volume set were sold, half of them outside France. The new intellectual forces spread to urban centres across Europe, notably England, Scotland and German states, the Netherlands, Russia, Italy, Austria, and Spain, then jumped the Atlantic into the European colonies, where it influenced Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, among many others, and played a major role in the American Revolution. The political ideals of the Enlightment influenced the American Declaration of Independence, The United States’ Bill of Rights, the French Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and the Polish-Lutheran Constitution of May 3.1791.

“Baruch Spinoza,(1632-1677), was a Dutch philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, The breadth and importance of Spinoza’s work was not fully realized until years after his death. By laying the groundwork for the 18^th century Enlightenment and modern biblical criticism, he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17^th century philosophy. His magnum opus, the posthumous Ethics, in which he opposed Descartes’s mind-body dualism, has earned him recognition as one of Western philosophy’s most important contributors. In the Ethics, ‘Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely. Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said of all contemporary philosophers, ‘You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all. Spinoza was raised in the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. He developed highly controversial ideas regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew bible and the nature of the Divine. The Jewish religion’s authorities issued a cherem—effectively excluding him from Jewish society at age 23. His books were also put on the Catholic church’s Index of Forbidden Books”.

“Spinoza lived quietly as a lens grinder, turning down rewards and honors throughout his life, including prestigious teaching positions, and gave his family inheritance to his sister. Spinoza’s philosophical accomplishments and moral character prompted 20^th century philosopher Gilles Deleuze to name him ‘The prince of philosophers’”.

“Spinoza died at the age of 44 allegedly from a lung illness, perhaps tuberculosis or silicosis exasperated by fine glass dust inhaled while grinding optical lenses. Spinoza is buried in the churchyard of the Christian Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague”.

“John Locke, (1632-1707), was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Thomas Bacon, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work had a great impact upon the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire, Rousseau and many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence”.

“Sir Isaac Newton, (1642-1727, was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been ‘considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived’. His monograph Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, lays the foundations for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws, by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the Scientific Revolution”.

“The Principia is generally considered to be one of the most important scientific books ever written, due, independently, to the specific physical laws the work successfully described, and for the style of the work, which assisted in setting standards for scientific publication down to the present time. Newton built the first practical reflecting telescope and developed a theory of colour based on the observation that a prism decomposes white light into the many colours that form the visible spectrum. He also formulated an empirical law of cooling and studied the speed of sound. In mathematics, Newton shares the credit with Gottfried Leibniz for the development of differential and integral calculus. He also demonstrated the generalized the binomial theorem, developed Newton’s method for approximating the roots of a function, and contributed to the study of power series. Newton’s work on infinite series was inspired by Simon Stevin’s decimals. Newton, although an unorthodox Christian, was deeply religious and wrote more on Biblical hermeneutics and occult studies than on science and mathematics. Newton secretly rejected Trinitarianism, and feared being accused of refusing holy orders”.

“Pierre Bayle, (1647-1706), was a French philosopher and writer best known for his seminal work the Historical and Critical Dictionary, published, beginning in 1695. Bayle was a self-pronounced Protestant, and as a fideist he advocated a separation between the spheres of faith and reason, on the grounds of God being incomprehensible to man. As a forerunner of the Encyclopaedists and an advocate of the principle of the toleration of divergent beliefs, his works subsequently influenced the development of the Enlightenment”.

“Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu,(1689-1755), generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French social commentator and political thinker who lived during the Enlightenment. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of the separation of powers, which is taken for granted in modern discussions of government and implemented in many constitutions throughout the world.

“Voltaire, (1694-1778), was a French Enlightment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, freedom of expression, free trade and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poetry, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken supporter of social reform, despite strict censorship laws with harsh penalties for those who broke them. As a satirical polemicist he frequently made use of his work to criticize intolerance, religious dogma and the French institutions of his day”.

“Voltaire was one of several Enlightment figures (along with Montesquieu, John Locke, Richard Price, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Emilie du Chatelet) whose works and ideas influenced important thinkers of both the American and French Revolutions”.

“Jean-Jacques Rousseau, (1712-1778), having converted to Roman Catholicism early in life and returned to the austere Calvinism of his native Geneva was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of 18^th century romanticism of French expression. His political philosophy influenced the French Revolution as well as the overall development of modern political, sociological and educational thought. Rousseau’s autobiographical writings—his Confessions, which initiated the modern autobiography, and his Reveries of a Solitary Walker—exemplified the late 18^th century movement known as the Age of Sensibility, featuring an increasing focus on subjectivity and introspection that has characterized the modern age, His Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and his On the Social Contract are cornerstones in modern political and social thought.—during the period of the French Revolution, Rousseau was the most popular of the philosophes among members of the Jacobin Club. His views on religion presented in his works of philosophy, however, may strike some as discordant with the doctrines of both Catholicism and Calvinism”.

“David Hume, (1711-1776), was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British empiricist”.

“Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature, (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic ‘science of man’ that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In stark opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behavior, saying: ‘Reason is and ought only to be the slave of passions’. A prominent figure in the skeptical philosophical tradition and a strong empiricist, he argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding instead that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. Thus he divides perceptions between strong and lively ‘impressions’ or direct sensations and fainter ‘ideas’, which are copied from impressions. He developed the position that mental behavior is governed by ‘custom’; our use of induction, for example, is justified by our idea of the ‘constant conjunction’ of causes and effects. Without direct impressions of a metaphysical ‘self’ he concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only a bundle of sensations associated with the self”.

“Hume advocated a compatibilist theory of free will that proved extremely influential on subsequent moral philosophy. He was a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on feelings rather than abstract moral principles. Hume also examined the normative is-ought problem. He held notoriously ambiguous views of Christianity, but famously challenged the argument from design in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1777)”.

“Kant credited Hume with waking him up from his ‘dogmatic slumbers’ and Hume has proved extremely influential on subsequent philosophy, especially on utilitarianism, logical postivism, William James, philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive philosophy, and other movements and thinkers. The philosopher Jerry Fodor proclaimed Hume’s treatise the ‘founding document of cognitive science’. Also famous as a prose stylist, Hume pionered the essay as a literary genre and engaged with contemporary intellectual luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith (who acknowledged Hume’s influence on his economics and political philosophy), James Boswell, Joseph Butler, and Thomas Reid”.

“Richard Price, (1723-1791). Was a Welsh moral philosopher and preacher in the tradition of English dissenters, and political pamphleteer, active in racial, republican, and liberal causes such as the American Revolution. He fostered connections between a large number of people, including writers of the Constitution of the United States. He spent most of his adult life as minister of Newington Green Unitarian Church, where possibly the congregant he most influenced was feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who extended his ideas on the egalitarianism inherent in the spirit of the French Revolution to encompass women’s rights as well. In addition to his work as a moral and political philosopher, he also wrote on issues of statistics and finance, and was inducted into the Royal Society for these contributions”.

“Immanuel Kant, (1724-1804) was a German philosopher from Konigsberg (today Kaliningrad of Russia), researching, lecturing and writing on philos ophy and anthropology at the end of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. At the time, there were major successes and advances in the sciences (for example, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Robert Boyle) using reason and logic”.

“Kant’s major work, the Critique of Pure Reason,1781, aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He hoped to end an age of speculation where objects outside experience were used to support what he saw as futile theories, while opposing the skeptism of thinkers such as Descartes, Berkeley and Hume. He stated: ‘It always remains a scandle of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us—should be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be able to answer him with a satisfactory proof”.

“Kant proposed a ‘Copernican Revolution in reverse, saying that: ‘Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but—let us once try whether or not we get farther with the problems with metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition”.

“Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history. These included the Critique of Practical Reason, 1788, , and the Metaphisics of Morals, 1790, which dealt with ethics. And the Critique of Judgement,1797, which looks at aesthetics and teleology. He aimed to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches. The former asserted that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintained that reason and innate ideas were prior. Kant argued that experience is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason. He also said that usig reason without applying to experience will only lead to theoretical illusions. The free and proper exercise of reason by the individual was both a theme of the Enlightment, and of Kant’s approaches to the various problems of philosophy”.

“His ideas influenced many thinkers in Germany during his lifetime. He settled and moved philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists and the empiricists. The philosophers Ficht, Schelling, Hegel, and Shopenhauer amended and developed the Kantian system, thus bringing about various forms of German idealism. He is seen as a major figure in the history and development of philosophy. German and European thinking progressed after his time, and his influence still inspires philosophical work today”.

“Thomas Jefferson,(1743-1826), rejected the orthodox Christianity of his day and was especially hostile to the Catholic Church as he saw it operate in France. Throughout his life Jefferson was intensely interested in theology, biblical study, and morality—in terms of belief he was inclined toward Deism and the moral philosophy of Christianity”.

“In a private letter to Benjamin Rush (1803): Jefferson refers to himself as Christian. ‘To the corruptions of Christianity, I am, indeed, opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished anyone to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence’. In a letter to his close friend William Short, Jefferson clarified, ‘it is not to be understood that I am with him [Jesus] in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist; he takes the side of spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentance toward the forgiveness of sin; I require a counterpoise of good works to redeem it. Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others, again, of so much ignorance, of so much absurdity, so much untruth and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being. ...... Jefferson was firmly anticlerical saying that 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’”.

POST SCRIPT

“Knowledge is based upon innumerable experiments by world scientists. It has greatly benefitted humanity; the vitality of scientific knowledge to society and culture, plus its role in shaping who we are and who we will become is invaluable”. Source of quotation is unknown.

The following quotation is from Ron Bynum’s 2010 web page www.examiner.com/article/christian-inquisition-crusade-will-destroy-america

“Throughout history, every atrocity committed on humanity had its roots in religion, and American Christianity is no different. America’s Inquisition and Crusade has begun, and those that scream the loudest about loss of liberty (Christian Teabaggers) are those who will deprive other Americans of their liberties…..”

I’m one of the innumerable admirers, of Acharya S, author of “The Christ Conspiracy”, and of Bart D. Ehrman, author of “Did Jesus Exist?”, but believe they are both “beating a dead horse”, as there is the unsettled conundrum of the “Judaic God”, who’s fabulous incredulous, story was fabricated by King Josiah’s scholars in the 7^th century BCE, which is no less ambiguous than the fables fabricated by the Jews about Jesus; as multitudes believed the primitive prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods because only about 20% of us have been thinkers and 80% followers, but thinking professional proponents of mystical gods began to believe their own hype and joined the crowd with circular explanations. How can we intelligently resolve unintelligent beliefs in the unknowns when the world’s majority is convinced a mythical god controls the universe; makes all of our ultimate decisions, including our daily lives? Although religion is bereft of facts, its specious beliefs in the supernatural have proven to be the world’s perfect confidence game—bringing righteous self-satisfaction to the irresponsible multitudes; a thriving international enterprise; perpetuated by prestigious professionals, ostensibly to salvage souls. Think about it; where will you find a more seductive proposal; how do you counter its claims and how much thought have you given to religion’s unreasonable absurdities and to its background of despotic surveillance, inquisitions, torturous systems of persecution and death for all heretics, naysayers and nonbelievers ? The Pentateuch’s fabulous “God” is the extreme of unforgivable heartlessness against worldly societies except for the Jews, who, outside of the biblical fables; their god failed them during Christianity’s Crusades, Inquisitions, Persecutions, etc., including the Holocaust.

The importance of “faith” in the creed of each Abrahamic religion’s beliefs is fundamental to their intimidating confidence-game and is emphasized because FAITH is "an unquestioning belief that does not require proof or evidence"; encouraging multitudes of ignorant blind-faith-believers to embrace the promulgation of mythological gods under the guise of the perfidious biblical Pentateuch’s ancient pernicious historonic sagas. Truthful and logical knowledge has supporting evidence, hence faith is unnecessary, but the “holy books”` lack of logic & reason, forced compliant believers to depend upon blind-faith. Thus ignorant blind-faith is inversly proportional to knowledge.

Religion, a belief in supernatural gods, is a futile indulgence of the masses; devised by ancient monarchs to politically organize and manipulate their multitudes of unruly subjects, but today the masses clamor for religious subjugation, in order for their essence, the soul to reside forever in an imaginary heaven. The bible’s unreasonable Pentateuch with its myriad of prestigious professional proponents, who pimped for the Abrahamic faith’s three mystical gods, produced our world’s political-religious despots, and their innumerable religious-political wars, with their despoiliation, and desecration of the combatting unholy Abrahamic religions.

Primitive prestigeous professional scammers, first proposed gods to their jungle-pushovers or marks and then with the finacial support of ancient despotic monarchs—they successfully developed Judaism and Chrisianity, by killing all those too intelligent to forego independent thought, and too honorable to bow down to the bible’s ignorant mean-spirited incongruity.

Today’s prestigeous professional proponents of mystical gods, still propose and recommend the bible as a scource of knowledge—ignoring our world’s vast trove of verifiable information; proving the three Abrahamic religions are based on ancient mythologies.

Man’s destructive exploitation of our global environment is credted to Genesis 1: 26-28, & 9: 2-3, and Psams 8:5-8 by many erudite individuals.

The following is excerpted from

www.infidels.org/library/modern/fred edwards/patriot.html

“American fundamentalists feel duty-bound by the pervasiveness of Americanism to admire our nation’s founders and claim them as our own. It just won’t do to suggest that they were anything less than good Christians, for that might imply that Christianity is unpatriotic and Americanism is heresy! It would also require belief that most of the nation’s great Heros are now burning in hell. Christian Reconstructionist, however, frequently take such a view because, harboring new illusions about the religion of our forebears, they really mean to overthrow the present order and set up a theocracy”.

“But in spite of the fact that blind patriotic belief, like any other belief, is dangerous, there is a positive side to it as well. By its very nature, it is the glue that holds this diverse nation together. As such it is the best reply to the charge that America will collapse in a post-Christian era, floundering without roots or religious moorings, even without Christianity. The Christian Reconstructionist sense this and are none too happy about it”.

“Heretic” is an ecclesiastical term, meaning “One who opposes church dogma” and “Infidel” means “One without faith”. The following are history’s most impressive atheists who were leaders in their field, plus their date of birth: Democritus 400s BCE; Diagoras of Melos 400s BCE; Epicurus 341 BCE; Theodorus the Atheist 300s BCE; Nicolaus Copernicus 1473; William Tyndale 1494; Geordano Bruno 1548; William Shakespeare 1564; Galileo 1564; Johannes Kepler 1571 Rene Descartes 1596; Benedict Spinoza 1632; Voltaire 1694; Benjamin Franklin 1706; David Hume 1711; Denis Diderot 1713; Gotthold Lessing 1729; Thomas Paine 1737; Thomas Jefferson 1743; Pierre La Place 1749; Wolfgang von Goethe 1749; Robert Burns 1759; Friedrich von Schiller 1759; Alexander von Humbolt 1769; Ludwig van Beethoven 1770; Percy Byshe Shelley 1792; Auguste Compte 1798; Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803; Abraham Lincoln 1809; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807; Charles Darwin 1809; John W. Draper 1811; Charles Dickens 1812; Richard Wagner 1813; Herbert Spencer 1820; Robert Ingersoll 1833; Mark Twain 1835; Andrew Carnegie 1835; Ivan Pavlov 1849; Sigmund Freud 1856; Elbert Hubbard 1856; Clarence Darrow 1857; Richard Strauss 1864; Bertrand Russell 1872; Albert Einstein 1879; Jawaharlal Nehru 1889; Aldous Huxley 1894; Linus Pauling 1901; Paul Dirac; 1902; Ayn Rand 1905; Katherne Hepburn 1907; Jacques Monod 1910; Subrahmanyan Chandresekhar 1910; Alan Turing 1912; Francis Crick 1916; Claud Shannon 1916; Richard Feynman 1918; Noam Chomsky 1928; James D. Watson 1928; Peter Higgs 1929; Warren Buffet 1930; John Searle 1932; Steven Weinberg 1933; Carl Sagan1934; David Suzuki 1936; George Carlin 1937; Bruce Lee 1940; Leonard Susskind 1940; Stephen Jay Gould 1941; Richard Dawkins 1941; Daniel Dennett 1942; Stephen Hawking 1942; Mick Jagger 193; Richard Leakey 1944; David Gilmour 1946; Brian Eno 1948; David Sloan Wilson 1949; Steve Wozniak 1950; Douglas Adams 1952; Steven Pinker 1954; P.Z. Myers 1957; Jodie Foster 1962; Russell T. Davies 1963; David Chalmers 1966; Sean Carroll 1966; Mark Zuckerberg 1984; Ayaan Hirsi Ali; Salman Rushdie; Azam Kamguian.

The famous atheists listed above must be supplemented with Wikipedia’s List of Atheists in Science and Technology.

The following alphabetical list are some of the 21^st century’s infidels who have made themselves well known by publishing books sympathetic to the growing movement called New Atheism: Dan Barker; Richard Carrier; Kenneth W. Daniels; Richard Dawkins; Daniel Dennett; Will Foote; Sam Harris; Chris Hedges; Christopher Hitchens; Michael Hogue; David Mills; G. M. Jackson; Loyal Rue; Victor J. Stenger; and C. J. Werleman.

Wikipedia says:

“New Atheism is the name given to the ideas promoted by a collection of 21^st century atheist writers who have advocated the view that ‘religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises”.

There have always been innumerable non-famous Infidels in our world whose intellect assured them of reality, and their reason assured them that a belief in supernaturalism is irresponsible. However ancient prestigious professional proponents of mystical gods were instrumental in denigrating condemning and sentencing infidels to torture, burning at the stake, etc., and their public denigration and condemnation of Infidels continues today.

It is obvious that our prestigious professional proponents of the Abrahamic faiths promulgated the specious “sin of blasphemy”, which has intimidated most people into remaining ignorant of the truth. But it has been derigueur for everyone to observe that lie, ever since King Josiah created his fabulous tribal propaganda; an epical tribal legend, which within 230 years evolved into the Holy Scriptures; i.e., eleven of the first twelve books of the original Hebrew bible, which was later adopted as the first part of Christianity’s canon.

I have revealed where, when, how, and why the Hebrew bible’s Pentateuch and Judaic God were fabricated during the reign of Judah’s King Josiah, strictly to intimidate his rebellious subjects after his father, king Amon, was assassinated in a palace coup, thereby maintaining control. I’ve explained that the Abrahamic faiths persecuted, tortured and slaughtered all of their dissenters, thereby allowing only believers to survive and reproduce more believers. The Abrahamic religion’s bloody history deprives them of any claim to sacredness despite the success of the prestigious professional proponents’ perfidious con-game. In addition: natural evolution explains how life first appeared and developed, with no need for supernaturalism.

The following quotations are excerpts from the public lectures of Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899); an American lawer, whose lectures range from 1770 unil 1799.

“The history of the world shows that religion has made enemies instead of friends. That one word ‘religion’ paints the horizon of the past with every form of agony and torture, and when one pronounces the name of ‘religion’ we think of 1,500 years of persecution, of 6,000 years of hatred, slander and vituperation”.

“Strange, but true, that those who have loved God most have loved men least; strange that in countries where there has been the most religion there has been the most agony; and that is one reason why I am opposed to what is known as religion. By religion I mean the duties that men are supposed to owe to God; by religion I mean, not what man owes to man, but what we owe to some invisible, infinite and supreme being. The question arises; can any relation exist between finite man and infinite being? An infinite being is absolutely conditional. An infinite being cannot walk, cannot receive, and a finite being cannot give to the infinite. Can I increase his happiness or decrease his misery? What can I do for him? I say nothing.—What can we do? We can help man; we can help clothe the naked and feed the hungry; we can help break the chains of the slave; we can help weave a garment of joy that will finally cover this world. That is all that man can do. Wherever he has endeavored to do more he has simply increased the misery of his fellows”.

“Four thousand years ago, if the bible is true, God was in favor of slavery, polygamy, wars of extermination and religious persecution. Now we are told the devil is in favor of all those thinga, and God is opposed to them; in other words, the devil stands now where God stood 4,000 years ago; yet they tell me God is just as good now as he was then, and the devil just as bad now as God was then”.

“….the Jewish people—are as good a people as live today. I will say—they never had any luck until Jehovah abandoned them”.

“They tell us Judas betrayed Christ. Well, if Christ had not been betrayed, no atonement would have been made, and then every human soul would have been damned, and heaven would have been for rent”.

“They say I must believe a certain thing or I will be eternally damned. They tell me that to believe is the safer way. I deny it. The safest thing you can do is be honest.—If I find at the Day of Judgement that I have been mistaken, I will say so, like a man. If God then tells me he is the author of the old testament I will admit that he is worse than I thought He was, and when He comes to pronounce sentence upon me, I will say to Him: ‘Do unto others as you would that others should do unto You’”.

“If you throw away your reason, your soul is not worh saving. Salvation depends, not upon belief but upon deed—upon kindness, upon justice, upon mercy. Your own deeds are your savior, and you can be saved in no other way”.

“Infinite wisdom has no right to make a failure, and a man who is to be eternally damned is not a conspicuous success”.

“Ah, but they tell me ‘You have no right to pick the bad things out of the bible’ I say, an infinite God has no right to put bad things into His bible. Does anybody believe if God was going to write a book now He would uphold slavery; that He would favor polyigamy; that He would say kill the heathen, stab the women, dash out thhe brains of the children? We make our own God, and we make him better day by day”.

“Nothing can be more wonderful than the majestic, sublime, and eternal march of cause and effect. Reason must be the final arbiter. An inspired book cannot stand against a demonstrated fact. Is a man to be rewarded eternally for believing without evidence or against evidence? Do you tell me that the less brain a man has the better chance he has for heaven? Think of a heaven filled with men who never thought”.

“The religion of the future is humanity. The religion of the future will say to every man, ‘You have the right to think and investigate for yourself’. Liberty is my religion—everything that is true, every good thought, every beautiful thing, every self-denying action—all these make my bible. My bible is all that speaks to man. Every violet, every blade of grass, every tree, every mountain crowned with snow, every star that shines, every throb of love, every honest act, all that is good and true combined, make my bible”.

“…..I am saying what little I can to induce everybody in the world to grant to every other person every right he claims for himself.—I claim that in the presence of the unknown, and upon a subject that nobody knows anything about, and never did, I have as good a right to guess as anybody else. The gentlemen who hold views against mine, if they had any evidence, would have no fears—not the slightest.—Any doctrine that will not bear investigation is not a fit tennant for the mind of an honest man. Any man who is afraid to have his doctrine investigated is not only a coward but a hypocrite—I say all that I claim is the right to give to others, and any man who will not give that right is a dishonest man, no matter what church he may belong to or not belong to—if he does not freely accord to all others the right to think, he is not an honest man. I said some time ago that if there was any being who woud eternally damn one of his children for the expression of an honest opinion that he was not a God, but that he was a demon…..”.

“If you give us liberty, you will have in this country a splendid diversity of individuality; but if on the contrary you say men shall think so and so, you will have the sameness of stupid nonsense”.

“Leave out the history of the church, and there is nothing left in this world to prove the depravity of man.—A god that cannot make a soul that is not totally depraved, I respectfully suggest, should retire from the business”.

“It has been demonstrated again and again that the atoms that are in us have been in millions of other beings; grown in the forest, in the grass, blossomed in the flowers, been in the metals; in other words, there are atoms in each one of us that have been in millions of others, and when we die these atoms return to the earth, and again spring in vegitation, taken up in the leaves of the trees, turned into wood. And yet we nave a church, in the nineteenth century, getting up this doctrine, presided over by presidents of colleges, and by theologians, who tell us they believe in the resurrection of the body”.

“They know better. There is not one so ignorant but what knows better”.

“‘And in the final judgement’. It will be a set day. All of us will be there, and the thousands, and millions, and billions, and trillions, and quadrillions that have died will be there. It will be the day of judgement, and the books will be opened and our case will be called. Does anyone with the slightedst bit of sense believe that”?

“You know when Christianity came into power it destroyed every statue it could lay its ignorant hands upon. It defaced and obliterated every painting; it destroyed every beautiful building; it destroyed the manuscripts, both Greek and Latin; it destroyed all of the history, all of the poetry, all of the philosophy it could find, and burned every library that it could reach with its torch, And the result was the night of the middle ages fell upon the human race. But by accident, by chance, by oversight, a few of the manuscripts escaped the fury of religious zeal—the result was, that these manuscripts became the seed, the fruit of which is our civilization of today”.

“Of course I have not time to recount the enemies of the church. Every fact is an enemy of superstition. Every fact is a heretic. Every demonstration is an infidel. Everything that ever happened testified against the supernatural. I have only spoken of a few of the blows that shattered the shield and shivered the lance of superstition. Here is another one—the doctrine of Charles Darwin. This century will be called Darwin’s century, one of the greatest men who ever touched this globe. He has explained more of the phenomena of life than all of the religious teachers. Write the name of Charles Darwin there (on the one hand) and the name of every theologian that ever lived there (on the other hand), and from that name has come more light to the world than from all those. His doctrine of evolution, his doctrine of the survival of the fittest, his doctrine of the origin of species, has removed in every thinking mind the last vestige of orthodox Christianity. He has not only stated, that the inspired writer [of the bible] knew nothing of this world, nothing of the origin of man, nothing of geology, nothing of astronomy, nothing of nature; that the bible is a book written by ignorance—by the instigation of fear! Think of the man who replied to him, Only a few years ago there was no parson too ignorant to successfully answer Charles Darwin; and the more ignorant he was the more cheerfully he undertook the task. He [Darwin] was held up to the ridicule, the scorn, and the contempt of the Christian world, and yet when he died England was proud to put his dust with that of her noblest and her grandest”.

“Charles Darwin conquered the intellectual world, and the doctrine of evolution is now an accepted fact. His light has broken in on some of the early clergy, and the greatest man who today occupies the pulpit is a believer in the evolution theory of Charles Darwin—and that is Henty Ward Beecher—a man of more brains than the entire clergy of the entire church put together. And yet we are told in this little creed that orthodox religion is about to conquer the world, It will be driven to the wilds of Africa. It must go to some savage country; it has lost its hold upon civilization, and I tell you it is unfortunate to have a religion that cannot be accepted by the intellect of a nation, It is unfortunate to have a religion against which every good and nobel heart protests. Let us have a good one or none. O! my pity has been excited by seeing these ministers endeavor to warp and twist the passages of scripture to fit some demonstration in science”.

“I keep going back to this book; I keep going back to the miracles, to the prophecies, to the fables, and people ask me, if I take away the bible, what are we going to do? How can we get along without the revelation that no one understands? What are we going to do if we have no bible to quarrel about? What are we to do without hell? What are we going to do with our enemies? What are we going to do with the people we love but don’t like? They tell me that there never would have been any civilization if it had not been for this bible. Um! The Jews had a bible; the Romans had not. Which had the greater and the grander government? Let us be honest. Which of those nations produced the greatest poets, the greatest soldiers, the greatest orators, the greatest statesmen, the greatest sculptors? Rome had no bible. God cared nothing for the Roman Empire. He let the men come up by chance. His time was taken up by the Jewish people. And yet Rome conquered the world, and even conquered God’s chosen people. The people that had the bible were defeated by the people who had not. How was it possible for Lucretius to get along without the bible? How did the great and glorious of that empire? And what shall we say of Greece? No bible. Compare Athens with Jerusalem. From Athens comes the beauty and intellectual grace of the world. Compare the mythology of Greece with the mythology of Judea; one covering the earth with beauty, and the other filling heaven with hatred and injustice. The Hindu’s had no bible; they had been forsaken by the creator, and yet they became the greatest metaphysicians of the world. Egypt had no bible……..What became of the Jews who had a bible? Their temple was destroyed and their city was taken; and as I said before, they never found real prosperity until their God deserted them”.

“Now I come again to the New Testament. There are a few things in there—I cannot believe. I cannot believe in the miraculous origin of Jesus Christ. I believe He was the son of Joseph and Mary; that Joseph and Mary had been duly and legally married; that he was the legitimate offspring of that marriage, and nobody ever believed the contrary until He had been dead 150 years.—His mother never wrote a word upon the subject. His father never wrote a word upon the subject”. [And I, Sam Redwine must add that Jesus never wrote a word on the subject. See chapter CHRISTIANITY for my up to date views on this subject.]

Excerpts from Robert G. Ingersoll’s lectures continue.

“Now, there is another miracle I do not believe. I want to speak about it as we would about any ordinary transaction in the world. In the first place, I do not believe that any miracle was ever performed, and if there was, you can’t prove it. Why? Because it is altogether more reasonable that the people lied about it than that it happened. And why? Because, according to human experience, we know that people will not always tell the truth, and we never saw a miracle, and we have got to be governed by our experience, if we go by our experience, it is in favor that the thing never happened; that the man is mistaken. Now, I want you to remember it. Here is a man that comes into Jerusalem, and the first thing he does he cures the blind. He lets the light of day visit the darkness of blindness. The eyes are opened and the whole world is again pictured upon the brain. Another man is clothed with leprosy. He touches him, and the disease falls from him, and he stands pure, and clean, and whole. Another man is deformed, wrinkled, and bent. He touches him and throws upon him again the garment of youth. A man is in his grave, and He says, ‘Come forth’! And he again walks in life, feeling his heart throb and beat, and his blood going joyously through his veins. They say that happened. I don’t know. There is one wonderful thing about the dead people that were raised—we don’t hear of them anymore”.

“What became of them? Why, if there was a man in this town that had been raised from the dead, I would go see him tonight. I would ask, ‘Where were you when you got the notice to come back? What kind of country is it? What kind of opening is there for a young man? Did you like it? But nobody ever paid the slightest attention to them there. They didn’t even excite interest when they died the second time”.

“Nobody said, ‘Why, that man isn’t afraid. He has been there’. Not a word. They pass away quietly. You see I don’t believe it. There is something wrong somewhere about that business. And then there is another trouble in my mind, Now, you know I may suffer eternal punishment for all this. Here is a man that does all these things, and thereupon they crucify Him. Now, then, let us be honest. Suppose a man came to Chicago and he should meet a funeral procession, and he should ask, ‘Who is dead? And they should say, ‘The son of a widow; her only support’, and he should say to the procession, ‘Halt’! And to the undertaker, ‘Take out that coffin, unscrew that lid’. ‘Young man, I say unto thee, arise’! And the latter should step from the coffin and in one moment after hold his mother in his arms. Suppose he should go to your cemetery and should find some woman holding a little child in each hand, while the tears fell up on a new-made grave, and he should say to her ‘Who lies buried here’? And she should reply, ‘My husband’, and he should say, ‘I say unto thee oh grave, give up the dead’, and in a moment after have his lips upon his wife’s, and the little children with their arms around his neck. Suppose that is so. Do you think that the people of Chicago would kill him? Do you think anyone would wish to crucify him? Do you not rather believe that everyone who had a loved one out in that cemetery would go to him, even upon their knees, and beg him and implore him to give back their dead? Do you believe that any man was ever crucified who was the master of death? Let me tell you tonight if there shall ever appear on this earth the master, the monarch of death, all human knees will touch the earth; he will not be crucified. All the living who fear death; all the living who have lost a loved one will stand and cling to him. And yet we are told that this worker of miracles, this man who could clothe the dead in the throbbing flesh of life, was crucified by the Jewish people. It was never dreamed that he did a miracle until 100 years after he was dead”.

“There is another miracle I do not believe, I cannot believe it, and that is the resurrection. And why? If it was the fact, if the dead got out of the grave, why did He not show himself to his enemies? Why did He not again visit Pontius Pilate? Why did He not call upon Caiaphas, the high priest? Why did He not make another triumphal entry into Jerusalem? Why did He not again enter the temple and dispute with the doctors? Why didn’t He say to the multitudes: ‘Here are the wounds in My feet, and in My hands, and in My side. I am the one you endeavored to kill, but Death is My slave’. Why didn’t He? Simply because the thing never happened”.

“Then there is another miracle that I cannot believe, and that is the ascension—the bodily ascension of Jesus Christ. Where was He going? Since the telescope has been pointed at the stars, we know that New Jerusalem is not there, and the abode of the gods is not there, so where was He going? Which way did He go? That depends upon the time of day that he left. If He left in the night He went exactly the opposite way from what He would in the day. Who saw this miracle? They say the disciples. Let us see what they say about it. Mathew did not think it was worth mentioning. He doesn’t speak of it at all. On the contrary, he says that the last words of Christ were: ‘Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world’. That is what he says. Mark, he saw it. ‘So then, after the lord had spoken unto them He was received up into heaven and sat on the right hand of God’. That is all he has to say about the most wonderful thing that ever blessed human vision—about a miracle great enough to have stuffed credulity to bursting; and yet we have one poor little meager verse. So, then, after He had quit speaking, He was caught up and sat on the right hand of God. How does he know He was on the right hand? Did he see Him after He sat down? Luke says: ‘And it came to pass while He blessed them He was parted from them and was carried up into heaven’. But John does not mention it. He gives as His last words this address to Peter” ‘Follow thou Me’. Of course He did not say that as He ascended. In Acts we have another account. A conversation is given not spoken of in any of the others, and we find there are two men clad in white apparel, who said: ‘Men of Galilee, why stand ye here gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus that was taken up into heaven shall so come in like manner as ye have seen Him go up into heaven’. Mathew didn’t see that; Mark forgot it; Luke didn’t think it was worth mentioning, and John didn’t believe it; and yet upon that evidence we are led to believe that the most miraculous of all miracles actually occurred. I cannot believe it”.

“The church must not give up the devil. He is the right bower. No devil, no hell; no hell, no preacher; no fire no insurance”.

Robert Ingersoll’s erudite public lectures, given between the Civil War and the 20^th century, (1870-1899), were about the follies and foibles of man’s beliefs in specious supernatural gods. They enlightened an ignorant people. I am positive that only honest heart-felt ridicule can eventually overcome the stupid fears of the spurious blasphemy-sin that constrains our “born-again” subjugated believers. Mr. Ingersoll’s lectures are available on line. Excerpts continue below.

“First, what is the origin of the crime known as blasphemy? It is the belief in a God who is cruel, revengeful, quick tempered and capricious; a God who punishes the innocent for the guilty; a God who listens with delight to the shrieks of the tortured and gazes enraptured on their spurting blood. You must hold this belief before you can believe in the doctrine of blasphemy. You must believe that this God loves ceremonies, that this God knows certain men to whom He has told all His will. It then follows that, if this God loves ceremonies and has certain men to teach His will and perform these ceremonies; these men must have a place to live in. This place was called a temple, and it was sacred. And the pots and pans and kettles and all in it were sacred too. No one but the priests must touch them. Then the God wrote a book in which He told His covenants to men, and gave this book to priests to interpret. While it was sacrilege to touch with the hands the pots and pans of the temple, it was blasphemy to doubt or question anything in the book. And then the right to think was gone, and the right to use the brain that God had given was taken away, and religion was entrenched behind that citadel called blasphemy”.

“God was a kind of juggler. He did not wish man to be impudent or curious about how He did things. You must sit in audience and watch the tricks and ask no questions. In front of every fact He has hung the impenetrable curtain of blasphemy. Now, and then, all the little reason that poor man had is useless. To say anything against the priest was blasphemy and to say anything against God was blasphemy—to ask a question was blasphemy. Finally we sank to the level of fetishism. We began to worship inanimate things. If you will read your bible you will find that the Jews had a sacred box. In it were the rod of Aaron and a piece of manna and the tablets of stone. To touch this box was a crime. You remember that one time a careless Jew thought the box was going to tip he held it. God killed him”.

“It has always been blasphemy to say ‘I do not know whether God exists or not’. In all Catholic countries it is blasphemy to doubt the bible, to doubt the sacredness of the relics. It always has been blasphemy to laugh at a priest, to ask questions, to investigate the Trinity. In a world of superstition reason is blasphemy. In a world of ignorance, facts are blasphemy. In a world of cruelty, sympathy is a crime, and in a world of lies, truth is blasphemy. Who are the real blasphemers”?

“In lands where there has been no bible there have been mild and beneficent philosophers, like Buddha and Confucius Is it possible that the bible is the only restraint, and yet the nations among whom these men lived have been as moral as we? In Brooklyn and New York you have the bible, yet do you find that the restraint is a great success? Is there a city on the globe which lacks more in certain directions than some in Christendom, or even in the United States? What are the natural virtues of man? Honesty, hospitality, mercy in the hour of victory, generosity—do we not find these virtues among some savages? Do we find them among all Christians? I am also told—that the time will come when the infidel will be silenced by society. Why that time came long ago. Society gave the hemlock to Socrates; society in Jerusalem cried out for Barabbas and crucified Jesus. In every Christian country society has endeavored to crush the infidel. Blasphemy is a padlock which hypocrisy tries to put on the lip of all honest men. At one time Christianity succeeded in silencing the infidel, and then came the Dark Ages, when all rule was ecclesiastical, when the air was filled with devils and spooks, when birth was a misfortune, life a prolonged misery of fear and torment, and death a horrible nightmare. They crushed the infidels, Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus, wherever a ray of light appeared in the ecclesiastical darkness.—that day is passed. All the churches in the United States cannot even crush me. The day for that has gone, never to return.—I’ll tell you what blasphemy is. It is blasphemy to live on the fruits of other men’s labor, to prevent the growth of the human mind, to persecute for opinion’s sake, to abuse your wife and children, to increase in any manner the sum of human misery”.

“I’ll tell you what is sacred. Our bodies are sacred, our rights are sacred, justice and liberty are sacred. I’ll tell you what is the true bible. It is the sum of all actual knowledge of man, and every man who discovers a new fact adds a new verse to this bible. It is different from the other bible, because that is the sum of all that its writers and readers do not know”.

“Are men’s character fully determined at the age of thirty? It depends, first, upon what their opportunities have been—that is to say, on their surroundings, their education, their advantages; second, on the shape, quality and quantity of brain they happen to possess; third on their mental and oral courage; and fourth, on the character of the people among whom they live”.

“The natural man continues to grow. The longer he lives, the more he should know, and the more he knows, the more he changes the views and opinions held by him in his youth. Every new fact results in a change of views more or less radical. This growth of the mind may be hindered by the ‘tyrannous north wind’ of public opinion; by the bigotry of his associates; by the fear he cannot make a living if he becomes unpopular; and it is to some extent by the ambition of the person, that is to say, if he wishes to hold office the tendency is to agree with his neighbor, at least to round off and smooth the corners and angles of difference. If a man wishes to ascertain the truth, regardless of the opinions of his fellow-citizens, the probability is that he will change from day to day and from year to year—that is his intellectual horizon will widen—and that what he once deemed of great importance will be regarded as an extremely small segment of a greater circle”.

“Growth means change. If a man grows, he must necessarily change. Many men probably reach their intellectual height long before they have lived thirty years, and spend the balance of their lives defending the mistakes of their youth. A great man continues to grow until his death, and growth—as I said before—means change. Darwin was continually finding new facts, and kept his mind as open to a new truth as the East is to a rising sun. Humbolt at the age of ninety maintained the attitude of a pupil, and was until the moment of his death, willing to learn”.

“The more a man knows the more willing he is to learn—the less a man knows the more positive he is that he knows everything”.

“Science built the Academy, Superstition the Inquisition. Science constructed the telescope, religion the rack; science made us happy here, and says if there’s another life we’ll all stand an equal chance there; religion made us miserable here, and says a large majority will be eternally miserable there. The next thing we ask is a perfect divorce between church and school. We say every school should be secular, because it’s just to everybody.—Let us teach not the doctrines of the past, but the discoveries of the present; not the five points of Calvinism, but geology and geography. Education is the lever to raise mankind, and superstition is the enemy of intelligence”.

“Only a few years ago the pulpit was almost supreme. The Palace was almost in the shadow of the cathedral, and the power behind every throne was a priest. Man was held in physical slavery by kings, and in a mental prison by the church. He was allowed to hold no opinions as to where he came from, nor as to where he was going. It was sufficient for him to do the labor and believe the kings would do the governing and the priests the thinking—and, my God, what thinking! If the world had obeyed the priests we would all be idiots tonight. The eagle of intellect would have given way to the blind bat of faith. They were the rack, the faggot, the thumbscrew in this world, and hell in the next. Only a few years ago no man could express an honest thought unless he agreed with the church”.

“You know what happened to Adam and his wife for her transgressions?

In another account of what is said to have been the same transaction—which is the more sensible account of the two—the Supreme Brahma concluded, as he had a little leisure, that he would make a world, and a man and woman. He made the world, the man, and then the woman, and then placed the pair on the Island of Ceylon. (Bear in mind there were no ribs used in this affair.) This island is said to be the most beautiful that the mind of man can conceive of. Such birds you never saw, such songs you never heard! And then such flowers, such verdure! The branches of the trees were so arranged that when the winds swept through, there floated out from every tree melodious strains of music from a thousand Aeolian harps! After Brahma put them there, he said: ‘Let them have a period of courtship, for it is my desire and will that true love should forever precede marriage’. And with the nightingale singing, and the stars twinkling, and little brooklets murmuring, and the flowers blooming, and the gentle breezes fanning their brows, they courted, and loved! What a sweet courtship. Then Brahma married the happy pair, and remarked: ‘Remain here; you can be happy on this island, and it is my will that you never leave it’. Well, after a little while the man became uneasy, and said to the wife of his youth, ‘I believe I’ll look about a little’. He determined to seek greener pastures. He proceeded to the western extremity of the island, and discovered a little narrow neck of land connecting the island with the mainland, and the devil—they had a genuine devil in those days, too, it seems, who is always ‘playing the devil’ with us—produced a mirage, and over on the mainland were such hills and dales, such lofty mountains crowned with perpetual snow, such cataracts clad in bows of glory, that he rushed breathlessly back to his wife, exclaiming:--‘O, Heva! The country over there is a thousand times better and lovelier than this; let us migrate’. She, woman-like said ‘Adami, we must let well enough alone; we have all we want; let us stay here’. But he said: ‘No we will go’. She followed him, and when they came to this narrow neck of land, he took her upon his back and carried her across. But at the instant he put her down there was a crash, and looking back they discovered that this narrow neck of land had fallen into the sea. The mirage had disappeared, and there was nothing but rocks and sand, and the Supreme Brahma cursed them to the lowest hell. Then Adami spoke—and it showed him to be every inch a man.—‘Curse me, but curse not her; it was not her fault, it was mine’. (Our Adam says, with a pusillanimous whine;--Curse her, for it is her fault: she tempted me and I did eat’! The world today is teeming with just such cowards!) Then said Brahma, ‘I will save her, but not thee’. And then spoke his wife, out of the fullness of the love of a heart in which there was enough to make all her daughters rich in holy affection, ‘If thou wilt not spare him, spare neither me; I do not wish to live without him. I love him’. Then magnanimously said the Supreme Brahma, ‘I will spare you both, and watch over you and your children forever’! Now tell me truly, which is the grander story? The book containing this story is full of good things; and yet Christian style as heathens those who have adopted this book as their guide, and spend thousands of dollars annually in sending missionaries to convert them!”.

“It has been too often conceded that because the New Testament contains in many passages, a lofty and terse expression of love as the highest duty of man, Christianity must have a tendency to ennoble his nature. But Christianity is like sweetened whisky and water—it perverts and destroys that which it should nourish and strengthen”.

“Christianity makes an often fatal attack on a man’s morality—if he happens to be blessed with any—by substituting for the sentiments of love and duty to our neighbors, a sense of obligation of blind obedience to an infinite, mysterious, revengeful, tyrannical God! The real principle of Christian morality, is servile obedience to a dangerous power! Dispute the assertions of even your priest as to the requirements, dislikes, desires and wishes of the Almighty, and you might as well count yourself as lost, sulphurically lost! If you are one of God’s chosen, or in other words, have been saved, and are even so fortunate as to attain to the glories and joys of the gold-paved streets of heaven, you are expected, in looking over the banisters of heaven down into the abyss of eternal torture, to view with complacency the agonized features of your mother, sister, brother, or infant child—who are writhing in hell—and laugh at their calamity! You are not allowed to carry them a drop of water to cool their parched tongue! And if you are a Christian, you at this moment believe you will enjoy the situation! If a man in a quarrel cuts down his neighbor in his sins, the poor miserable victim goes directly to hell! The murderer may reasonably count on a lease of a few weeks of life, interviews his pastor, confesses the crime, repents, accepts the grace of God, is forgiven, and then smoothly and gently slides from the crudely constructed scaffold into a heaven of joy and bliss, there to sing the praises of the lamb of God forever and forever! Poor unfortunate victim! Happy murderer”!

“Since the death of Voltaire, who was innocent of all else than a desire to shake off the superstitions of the past, the curse of Rome has pursued him, and ignorant protestants have echoed the curse. I like Voltaire”.

“Whenever I think of him it is as a plumed knight coming from the fray with victory shining upon his brow. He was once in the Bastille, and while there he changed his name from Francis Marie Aloysius to Voltaire; and when the Bastille was torn down ‘Voltaire’ was the battle cry of those who did it. He did more to bring about religious toleration than any man in the galaxy of those who strove for the privilege of free thought. He was always on the side justice. He was full of faults and had many virtues. His doctrines have never brought unhappiness to any country. He died as serenely as anyone could. Speaking to his servant, he said ‘Farewell my faithful friend’. Could he have done a more noble act than to recognize him who had served him faithfully as a man? What more could be wished”?—let me ask, who dies in the most fear, the man who, like the saint exclaims: ‘My God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken me’? The question is not who died right, but who lived right. I look upon death as the most unimportant moment of life, and believe that not half the responsibility is attached to dying that is to living properly”.

“Orthodoxy has not advanced upon the religion of the Figi Islander. It is the same yesterday, today and forever. Now we are told that there is a god; and nearly every nation has had a god; generally a good many of them. You see the raw material was so cheap, and Gods were manufactured so easily, that heaven has always been crammed with the phantoms of these monsters. But they say there is a god, and every savage tribe believes in a God. It is an argument made to me every day. I concede to you that fact; I concede to you that all savages agree with you. I admit it takes a certain amount of civilization, a certain amount of thought, to rise above the idea that some personal being, for his own ends, for his own glory, made and governs this universe. I admit that it takes some thought to see the universe is good and all that is good, and every star that shines is a part of God, and I am something, no matter how little, and that the infinite cannot exist without me, and that therefore I am a part of the infinite. I admit that it takes a little civilization to get to that point”.

Now every nation has made a god, and every man that has made a god has used himself for a pattern’ and men have put into the mouth of their god all their mistakes in astronomy, in geography, in philosophy, in mortality, and the god is never wiser or better than his creators. If they believe in slavery, so did he; if they believe in eating human flesh, he wanted his share; if they were polygamous, so was he; if they were cruel, so was he. And to the extent that man has become civilized, he has civilized his god. You can hardly imagine the progress that our God has made in four thousand years”.

“Four thousand years ago He was a barbarian; tonight He is quite an educated gentleman. Four thousand years ago He believed in killing and butchering little babes at the breasts of their mothers; He has reformed. Four thousand years ago He did not believe in taking prisoners of war. He said kill the old men; mingle their blood with the white hair. Kill the women. But what shall we do , O God with the maidens? Give them to satisfy the lust of the soldiers and the priests! If there is anywhere in the serene heaven a real God, I want him to write in the book of His eternal remembrance, opposite my name, that I deny that lie for Him. Four thousand years ago our God was in favor of slavery; four thousand years ago our God would have a man beaten to death with rugged rocks for expressing, his honest thought; four thousand years ago our God told the husband to kill his wife if she disagreed with him upon the important subject of religion; four thousand years ago our God was a monster; and if He is any better now, it is simply because we have made him so”.

I am talking about the God of the Christian world. There may be, for aught I know, upon the shore of the eternal vast, some being whose very thought is the constellation of those numberless stars. I do not know;; but if there is he has never written a bible; he has never been in favor of slavery; he has never advocated polygamy, and he never told the murderer to sheath his dagger in the dimpled breast of a babe. But they say to me, our God has written a book I am glad he did, and it is by that book that I propose to judge them. I find in that book that it was a crime to eat of the tree of knowledge. I find that the church has always been the enemy of education, and I find that the church still carries the flaming sword of ignorance and bigotry over the tree of knowledge”.

“And if that story is true, ought we not after all to thank the devil? He was the first school master; He was the first to whisper liberty in our ears; he was the author of modesty. He was the author of ambition and progress. And as for me, give me the storm and tempest of thought and action rather than the dead calm of ignorance and faith. Punish me when and how you will, but first let me eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. And there is one peculiar thing I might as well speak of here. While the world has made gods, it has also made devils; and as a rule the devils have been better friends to man than the gods. It was not a devil that drowned the world; it was not a devil that covered with the multitudinous waves of an infinite sea the corpses of men women and children”.

“That was the good God. The devil never sent pestilence an d famine; the devil never starved women and children; that was the good God. The meanest thing recorded of the devil is what happened concerning servant Job. According to that book God met the devil and said: ‘Where have you been’? ‘Oh, been walking up and down’. ‘Have you noticed my man Job; nobody like him’! ‘Well who wouldn’t be; you have given him everything; but take away what he has, and he will curse to your face’. And so the devil went to work and tried it, it was a mean thing. That was all done to decide what you might call a wager on a difference of opinion between the serene highnesses. He took away his property, but Job didn’t sin; and when God met the devil, he said, ‘Well, what did I tell you, smarty’? ‘Ah’, he said, ‘That is all very well, but you touch his flesh and he will curse you; and he did, but Job didn’t curse him. And then what did God do to help him? He gave him some other children better looking than the first ones. What kind of an idea is that for a God to kill our children and then give us better looking ones! If you have loved a child, I don’t care if it is deformed if you have held it in your arms and covered its face with kisses, you want that child back and no other”.

“I find in this bible that there was an old gentleman a little short of hair. And as he was going through the town a number of little children cried out to him ‘Go up, thou bald head’! And this man of God turned and cursed them. A real good-humored old fellow! And two bears came out of the woods and tore in pieces forty-two children! How did the bears get there? Elisha could not control the bears. Nobody but God could control the bears in that way. Now just think of an infinite God making a shining star, having his attention attracted by hearing some children saying to an old gentleman, ‘Go up thou bald head’! And then speaking to his secretary or somebody else, ‘Bring in a couple of bears now’! What a magnificent God! What would the devil have done under the same circumstances? And yet that is the God they want to put into the constitution in order to make our children gentle and kind and loving—and yet little children in Sabbath school are taught that infamous lie”.

“Take every country in the world, and the least religious country is the most prosperous and the most religious country is in the worst condition. In the vast cemetery called the past, are most of the religions of men and there too, are nearly all their gods”.

“The sacred temples of India were ruins long ago. Over column and cornice; over the painted and pictured walls, cling and creep the trailing vines. Brahma, the golden, with four heads and four arms; Vishnu, the somber, the punisher of the wicked, with his three eyes, his crescent, and his necklace of skulls; Siva, the destroyer, red with seas of blood; Kali, the goddess; Draupadi, the white-armed, and Chrishna, the Christ, all passed away and left the thrones of heaven desolate. Along the banks of the sacred Nile, Isis no longer wandering weeps, searching for the dead Osiris. The shadow of Typhon’s scowl falls no more upon the waves. The sun rises as of yore, and his golden beams still smite the lips of Memnon, but Memnon is as voiceless as the Sphinx. The sacred fanes (temples) are lost in desert sands; the dusty mummies are still waiting for the resurrection promised by their priests”.

“Broken are the circles and the cromlechs of the ancient Druids; fallen upon the summits of the hills, and covered with the centuries’ moss are the sacred cairns. The divine fires of Persia and of the Aztecs have died out in the ashes of the past, and there is none to rekindle, and none to feed the holy flames. The harp of Orpheus is still; the drained cup of Bacchus has been thrown aside; Venus lies dead in stone, and her white bosom heaves no more with love. The streams still murmur, but no naiads bathe; the trees still wave, but in the forest aisles no dryads dance. The gods have flown from high Olympus. Not even the beautiful women can lure them back, and Danae lies unnoticed, naked to the stars. Hushed forever are the thunders of Sinai; lost are the voices of the prophets, and the land once flowing with milk and honey is but a desert waste. One by one the myths have faded from the clouds; one by one the phantom host has disappeared, and, one by one, facts, truths and realities have taken their places. The supernatural has almost gone, but man is the natural remains. The gods have fled, but man is here”.

“Nations, like individuals, have their periods of youth, of manhood and decay. Religions are the same. The same inexorable destiny awaits them all. The gods created with the nations must perish with their creators. They were created by men, and, like men, they must pass away. The deities of one age are the by-words of the next. The religion of our day, and country, is no more exempt from the sneers of the future than others have been. When India was supreme, Brahma sat upon the world’s throne. When the scepter passed to Egypt, Isis and Osiris received the homage of mankind. Greece, with her fierce valor, swept to empire, and Zeus put on the purple of authority. The earth trembled with the dread of Rome’s intrepid sons, and Jove grasped with mailed hand the thunder bolts of heaven. Rome fell, and Christians from her territory, with the red sword of war, carved out the ruling nations of the world, and now Jehovah sits upon the old throne. Who will be His successor”?

“Go around the world, and where you find the least superstition, there you will find the best men, the best women, the best children. Two powerful levers are at work; love and intelligence. The true test of a man is generosity, which covers a multitude of sins”.

“They have got so now they damn a man on a technicality. You must be baptized by immersion, sprinkling or pouring. If you come to the day of judgment and can’t show the watermark, you’re damned”!

“What more: that a fellow named Adam, whom you don’t know and never voted for, is your representative. You are charged with his sins”.

“Equally abused is the doctrine of atonement, that you are created with the sacrifice of another. If Christ had more virtue than Adam had meanness, then you are ahead”.

“Atonement is the corner-stone of the Christian religion. But there is one great objection. It saves the wrong man, and it is not honest. (In holding up the atonement to ridicule the orator said: ‘If Judas had failed to betray Christ, the mother of Christ would be in hell today’. Then he ridiculed the miracles recorded in the New Testament, pronounced them absurdities. He said that the four apostolic writers were very contradictory in their statements, and did not even agree as to the last word of this great man.)”

“The ascension was the most striking, the grandest of the miracles, if true, yet the ascension is only recorded by two of these writers. If He was God, I know he will forgive somebody for not believing the miracles, unless convinced. Another contradiction in the book: in one gospel the condition of salvation is ‘whosoever believeth shall not be damned’, and in another we are promised that if we forgive our enemies God will forgive us—and there is sense in this last promise. The first I believe is a lie—it was never spoken by God”.

“Christ said: ‘Love your enemies. Nobody can do that. The doctrine of Confucius is sound—to love one’s friends and to do justice to ones enemies without any mixture of revenge”.

“If Christ was God, did He not know on His cross what crimes would be done in His name? Why didn’t He settle all disputes about the trinity and about baptism? Why didn’t He post his disciples? Because, He could no more see into the future than I can. Only in this way can you acquit him of the crimes committed in His name.—God can’t turn into hell a man who makes on this earth a little heaven for himself, a wife and babes”.

“Any minister who preaches the doctrine of hell ought to be ashamed. I want, if I can while I live, to put an end to all belief in this infamous doctrine. That doctrine has done incalculable harm, wrought incalculable injury. I despise it, and I defy it”.

“Without heresy there could have been no progress. The highest type of the orthodox Christian does not forget. Neither does he learn. He neither advances nor recedes. He is a living fossil, imbedded in that rock called faith. He makes no effort to better his condition, because all his strength is exhausted in keeping other people from improving theirs. The supreme desire of his heart is to force al others to adopt his creed and in order to accomplish this object, he denounces all kinds of free thinking as a crime, and this crime he calls heresy. When he had the power, heresy was the most terrible and formidable of words. It meant confiscation and imprisonment, torture, and death. In those days the cross and rack were inseparable companions. Across the open bible lay the sword and fagot. Not content with burning such heretics as were alive, they even tried the dead, in order that the church might rob their wives and children. The property of all heretics was confiscated, and on this account they charged the dead with being heretical—indicted, as it were, their dust—to the end that the church might clutch the bread of orphans. Learned divines discussed propriety of tearing out the tongues of heretics before they were burned, and the general opinion was that this ought to be done, so that the heretics should not be able, by uttering blasphemies, to shock the Christians who were burning them. With a mixture of ferocity and Christianity, the priests insisted that heretics ought to be burned at a slow fire, giving as a reason, that more time was given them for repentance”.

“No wonder that Jesus Christ said, ‘I came not to bring peace but a sword”!

“Every priest regarded himself as the agent of God. He answered all questions by authority, and to treat him with disrespect was an insult offered to God. No one was asked to think, but all were commanded to obey”.

“In 1208 the inquisition was established. Seven years afterward; the fourth council of the Lateran enjoined all kings and rulers to swear an oath that they would exterminate heretics from their dominions. The sword of the church was unsheathed, and the world was at the mercy of ignorant and infuriated priests, whose eyes feasted upon the agonies they inflicted. Acting as they believed or pretended to believe under the command of God, stimulated by the hope of infinite reward in another world—hating heretics with every drop of their bastille blood savage beyond description—merciless beyond conception—these infamous priests in a kind of joy, leaped upon the helpless victims of their rage. They crushed their bones in iron boots, tore their quivering flesh with iron hooks and pinchers, cut off their lips and eyelids, pulled out their nails, and into the bleeding quick thrust needles, tore out their tongues, extinguished their eyes, stretched them upon racks, flayed them alive, crucified them with their head downward, exposed them to wild beasts, burned them at the stake, mocked their cries and groans, ravished their wives, robbed their children, and then prayed to God to finish the holy work in hell”.

“Millions upon millions were sacrificed upon the altars of bigotry. The Catholic burned the Lutheran, the Lutheran burned the Catholic; the Episcopalian tortured the Presbyterian, the Presbyterian tortured the Episcopalian. Every denomination killed all it could of every other; and each Christian felt duty bound to exterminate every other Christian who denied the smallest fraction of his creed”.

“In the reign of Henry the VIII, the pious and moral founder of the Apostolic Episcopal church, there was passed by the Parliament of England an act entitled, ‘An act for abolishing of diversity of opinion’. And in this act was set forth what a good Christian was obliged to believe”.

“First: that in the sacrament was the real body and blood of Jesus Christ.

Second: that the body and blood of Jesus Christ was in the wine. Third: that priests should not marry. Fourth: that vows of chastity were of perpetual obligation. Fifth: That private mass ought to be continued. And sixth: that auricular confessions to a priest must be maintained”.

“This creed was made by law, in order that all men might know just what to believe by simply reading the statute. The church hated to see the people wearing out their brains in thinking upon these subjects. It was thought far better that a creed should be made by Parliament, so that whatever might be lacking in evidence might be made up in force. The punishment for denying the first article was death by fire; for the denial of any other article, imprisonment, and for the second offense—death”.

“Your attention is called to these six articles, established during the reign of Henry VIII, and by the Church of England, simply because not one of these articles is believed by that church today. If the then made by the church could be enforced now, every Episcopalian would be burned at the stake”.

“Similar laws were passed in most Christian countries, as all orthodox churches firmly believed that mankind could be legislated into heaven. According to the creed of every church, slavery leads to heaven, liberty leads to hell. It was claimed that God had founded the church, and that to deny the authority of the church was to be a traitor to God, and consequently an ally of the devil. To torture and destroy one of the soldiers of Satan was a duty no good Christian cared to neglect”.

“Nothing can be sweeter than to earn the gratitude of God by killing your own enemies. Such a mingling of profit and revenge, of heaven for yourself and damnation for those you dislike, is a temptation that your ordinary Christian never resists”.

“In short, every virtue has been a crime, and every crime a virtue. The church has burned honesty and rewarded hypocrisy, and all this she did because it was commanded by a book—a book that men had been taught implicitly to believe, long before they knew one word that was in it. They had been taught that to doubt the truth of this book, to examine it, even, was a crime of such enormity that it could not be forgiven, either in this world or the next”.

“The bible was the real persecutor. The bible burned heretics, built dungeons, founded the Inquisition, and trampled upon all the liberties of men”.

“How long, O how long will mankind worship a book? How long will they grovel in the dust bef0re the ignorant legends of the barbaric past? How long, O how long will they pursue phantoms in darkness deeper than death”?

“Unfortunately for the world, about the beginning of the sixteenth century a man by the name of Gerard Chauvin was married to Jeanne Lefranc, and still more unfortunately for the world, the fruit of this marriage was a son, called John Chauvin, who afterward became famous as John Calvin, the founder of the Presbyterian Church”.

“This man forged five fetters for the brain. These fetters he called points; that is to say, predestination, particular redemption, total depravity, irrestible grace, and the perseverance of the saints”.

“About the neck of each follower he put a collar, bristling with these five points. The presence of all these points on the collar is still the test of orthodoxy in the church he founded. This man, when in the flush of youth, was elected to the office of preacher in Geneva. He at once, in union with Farel, drew up a condensed statement of the Presbyterian doctrine, and all the citizens of Geneva, on pain of banishment, were compelled to take an oath that they, believed this statement. Of this proceeding Calvin very innocently remarked, that it produced great satisfaction. A man by the name of Caroli had the audacity to dispute with Calvin. For this courage he was banished”.

“To show you what great subjects occupied the attention of Calvin, it is only necessary to state, that he furiously discussed the question, as to whether the sacramental bread should be leavened or unleavened. He drew up laws regulating the cut of the citizen’s clothes, and prescribed their diet, and all whose garments were not in the Calvin fashion were refused the sacrament. At last, the people becoming of this petty theological tyranny, banished Calvin. In a few years, however, he was recalled and received with great enthusiasm. After this, he was supreme, and the will of Calvin became the law of Geneva.—Liberty was banished from Geneva, and nothing but Presbyterianism was left; honor, justice, mercy, reason and charity were all exiled; but the five points of predestination, particular redemption, irresistible grace, total depravity, and the certain perseverance of the saints remained instead”.

“Calvin founded a little theocracy in Geneva, modeled after the Old Testament, and succeeded in erecting the most detestable government that ever existed, except the one from which it was copied”.

“A trial for heresy means that the spirit of persecution still lingers in the church; that it still denies the right of private judgment; that it is still thinks more of creed than truth; that it is still determined to prevent the intellectual growth of man. It means that churches are shambles in which are bought and sold the souls of men. It means that the church is still guilty of the barbarity of opposing thought with force. It means that if it had the power, the mental horizon would be bounded by a creed, that it bring again the whips and chains, and dungeon keys, the rack and fagot of the past”.

“But let me tell the church it lacks the power. There has been, and still are, too many men who own themselves—too much thought, too much knowledge for the church to grasp again the sword of power. The church must abdicate. For the Eglon (biblical king of Moab) of superstition, science has a message from truth”.

“The heretics have not though and suffered and died in vain. Every heretic has been, and is, a ray of light. Not in vain did Voltaire, that great man, point from the foot of the Alps, the finger of scorn at every hypocrite in Europe. Not in vain were the splendid utterances of the infidels, while beyond all price are the discoveries of science. The church has impeded, but it has not and it cannot stop the onward march of the human race. Heresy cannot be burned, nor imprisoned, nor starved. It laughs at presbyteries and synods, at Ecumenical councils and the impotent thunders of Sinai. Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the new day. Heresy is the last and best thought. It is the perpetual new world; the unknown sea, toward which all the brave sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress. Heresy extends the hospitalities of the brain to new thoughts. Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy a coffin”.

“Why should a man be afraid to think, and why should he fear to express his thoughts? Is it possible that an infinite Deity is unwilling that man should investigate the phenomena by which he is surrounded”?

“Is it possible that a God delights in threatening and terrifying men? What glory, what honor and renown a God must win in such a field! The ocean raving at a drop; a star envious of a candle; the sun jealous of a firefly”!

“Go on, presbyteries and synods, go on! Thrust the heretics out of the church. That is to say, throw away your brains—put out your eyes. The infidels will thank you. They are willing to adopt your exiles. Every deserter from your camp is a recruit for the army of progress. Cling to the impotent dogmas of the past; read the 109^th Psalm; gloat over the slaughter of mothers and babes; thank God for total depravity; shower your honors upon the hypocrites, and silence every minister who is touched with that heresy called genius”.

“Be true to your history. Turn out the astronomers, the geologists, the naturalists, the chemists, and all the honest scientists. With a whip of scorpions, drive them all out. We want them all. Keep the ignorant, the superstitious, the bigoted, and the writers of charges and specifications. Keep them, and keep them all. Repeat your pious platitudes in the drowsy ears of the faithful, and read your bible to heretics, as kings read some forgotten riot act to stop and stay the waves of revolution. You are too weak to excite anger. We forgive your efforts as the sun forgives a cloud—as the air forgives the breath you waste”.

“How long, O how long will man listen to the threats of God, and shut his ears to the splendid promises of nature? How long, O how long will man remain the cringing slave of a false and cruel creed.—The real oppressor, enslaver and corrupter of the people is the bible.—That book is the chain that binds, the dungeon, that holds the clergy. That book spreads the pall of superstition over the colleges and schools. That book puts out the eyes of science, and makes honest investigation a crime. That book unmans the politician and degrades the people. That book fills the world with bigortry, hypocrisy and fear”.

“By this time the whole world should know that the real bible has not yet been written, but is being written, and that it will never be finished until the race begins its downward march or ceases to exist.—The true bible appeals to man in the name of demonstration, It has nothing to conceal, It has no fear of being read, of being contradicted, of being investigated and understood. It does not pretend to be holy or sacred. It simply claims to be true. It challenges the scrutiny of all, and implores every reader to verify every line for himself. It is incapable of being blasphemed. This book appeals to all the surroundings of man. Each thing that exists testifies of its perfection. The earth, with its heart of fire and crowns of snow; with its forests and plains, its rocks and seas; with its every wave and cloud; with its every leaf and bud and flower, confirms its every word, and the solemn stars, shining in the infinite abysses, are the external witnesses of its truth”.

“The great men are the heros who have freed the bodies of men; they are the philosophers and thinkers who have given liberty to the soul; they are the poets who have transfigured the common and filled the lives of many millions with love and song. They are the artists who have covered the bare walls of weary life with the triumphs of genius. They are the heros who have slain the monsters of ignorance and fear, who have out gazed the Gorgon and driven the cruel Gods from their thrones”.

“They are the inventors, the discoverers the great mechanics, the kings of the useful who have civilized this world. At the head of this heroic army, foremost of all, stands Voltaire….a name that excites the admiration of men, and the malignity of priests.—Voltaire was the greatest man of his century, and did more for the human race than any other of the sons of men”.

“When Voltaire came to this ‘great stage of fools’, his country had been Christianized—not civilized—for about fourteen hundred years. For a thousand years the religion of peace and good will had been supreme. The laws had been given by Christian kings, sanctioned by ‘wise and holy men’”.

“Under the benign reign of universal love, every court had its chamber of torture, and every priest relied on the thumbscrew and rack. Such had been the success of the blessed gospel that every science was an outcast. To speak your honest thoughts, to teach your fellow men, to investigate for yourself, to seek the truth, these were crimes, and the ‘Holy Mother Church’ pursued the criminals with sword and flame”.

“The believers in a God of love—an infinite father—punished hundreds of offenses with torture and death. Suspected persons were tortured to make them confess. Convicted persons were tortured to make them give the names of their accomplices. Under the leadership of the church cruelty had become the only reforming power. In this blessed year 1694 all authors were at the mercy of king and priest. The most of them were cast into prisons, impoverished by fines and costs, exiled or executed”.

“The little time that hangmen could snatch from professional duties was occupied in burning books. The courts of justice were traps in which the innocent were caught. The judges were almost as malicious and cruel as though they had been bishops or saints. There was no trial by jury, and the rules of evidence allowed the conviction of the supposed criminal by the proof of suspicion or hearsay. The witnesses, being liable to torture, generally told what the judges wished to hear”.

“When Voltaire was born the church ruled and owned France. It was a period of almost universal corruption. The priests were mostly libertines, the Judges cruel and venal. The royal palace was a house of prostitution. The nobles were heartless, proud, arrogant and cruel to the last degree. The common people were treated as beasts. It took the church a thousand year to bring about this happy condition of things”.

“The seeds of the revolution unconsciously were being scattered by every noble and by every priest. They were germinating slowly in the hearts of the wretched; they were being watered by the tears of agony; blows began to bear interest. There was a faint longing for blood…….. In those days the witnesses were cross-examined with instruments of torture; the church was the arsenal of superstition; miracles, relics, angles, and devils were as common as lies……..In that day the religion was defended, was protected, or supported by the state. Behind the entire creed were the bayonet, the ax, the wheel, the fagot, and the torture chamber”.

Is it any wonder that the survivor’s brains were indelibly impressed (brainwashed) with the specious god-idea.

“Voltaire began to think, to doubt, to inquire, he studied the history of the church, of the creed. He found that the religion of his time rested on the usurpation of the scriptures—the infallibility of the church—the dreams of insane hermits—the absurdities of the fathers—the mistakes and falsehoods of saints—the hysteria of nuns—the cunning of priests and the stupidity of the people. He found that the Emperor Constantine, who lifted Christianity into power, murdered his wife Fansta and his eldest son Crispus the same year that he convened the council of Nice to decide whether Christ was a man or the son of God. The council decided, in the year 325, that Christ was consubstantial with the Father. He found that the church was indebted to a husband who assassinated his wife—a father who murdered his son—for settling the vexed question of the divinity of the Savior. He found that Theodosius called a council at Constantinople in 381 by which it was decided that the Holy Ghost proceeded from the Father—that Theodosius, the younger, assembled a council at Ephesus in 431 that declared the Virgin Mary to be the mother of God—that the Emperor Martian called another council at Chalcedon in 451 that decided that Christ had two wills—that Pognatius called another in 680 that declared that Christ had two natures to go with his two wills—and that in 1274, at the council of Lyons, the important fact was found that the Holy Ghost ‘proceeded’ not only from the Father, but also from the Son at the same time”.

“So Voltaire has been called a mocker! What did he mock? He mocked kings that were unjust; kings who cared nothing for the sufferings of their subjects. He mocked the titled fools of his day. He mocked the corruption of courts; the meanness, the tyranny, and the brutality of judges. He mocked the absurd and cruel laws, the barbarous customs. He mocked popes and cardinals, bishops and priests, and all the hypocrites on earth. He mocked historians who filled their books with lies, and philosophers who defended superstition. He mocked the haters of liberty, the persecutors of their fellowmen. He mocked the arrogance, the cruelty, the unspeakable baseness of his time”.

“He has been blamed because he used the weapon if ridicule. Hypocrisy has always hated laughter, and always will. Absurdity detests humor and stupidity despises wit. Voltaire was the master of ridicule. He ridiculed the absurd, the impossible. He ridiculed the mythologies and the miracles, the stupid lives and lies of the saints. He found pretense and mendacity crowned by credulity. He found the ignorant many controlled by the cunning and cruel few. He found the historian, saturated with superstition, filling his volumes with details of the impossible, and he found the scientists satisfied with ‘they say’. Voltaire had the instinct of the probable. He knew the law of average; the sea level; he had the idea of proportion; and so he ridiculed the mental monstrosities and deformities—the non sequiturs—of his day”.

“For many years this restless man filled Europe with the product of his brain. Essays, epigrams, epics, comedies, tragedies, histories, poems, novels, representing every phase and every faculty of the human mind. At the same time engrossed in business, full of speculation, making money like a millionaire, busy with the gossip of courts, and even with the scandals of priests. At the same time, alive to all the discoveries of science and the theories of philosophers, and in this babel never forgetting for a moment to assail the monster of superstition. Sleeping and waking he hated the church. With the eyes of Argus he watched, and with the arms of Briarieius he struck. For sixty years he waged continuous and unrelenting war, sometimes in the open field, sometimes striking from the hedges of opportunity, taking care during all this time to remain independent of all men. He was in the highest sense successful. He lived like a prince, became one of the powers of Europe, and in him, for the first time, literature was crowned. Voltaire, in spite of his surroundings, in spite of almost universal tyranny and oppression, was a believer in God and in what he was pleased to call the religion of nature. He attacked the creed of his time because it was dishonorable to his God. He thought of the Deity as a father, as the fountain of justice, intelligence and mercy, and the creed of the Catholic Church made him a monster of cruelty and stupidity. He attacked the bible with all the weapons at his command. He assailed its geology, its astronomy, its idea of justice, its laws and customs; it’s absurd and useless miracles, its ignorance on all subjects, it’s insane prophecies, it’s cruel threats, and its extravagant promises. At the same time he praised the God of nature, the God who gives us rain and light, and food and flowers, and health and happiness—he who fills the world with youth and beauty”.

“In 1755 came the earthquake at Lisbon. This frightful disaster became an immense interrogation. The optimist was compelled to ask, ‘What was my God doing? Why did the Universal Father crush to shapelessness thousands of his poor children, even at the moment when they were upon their knees returning thanks to him’? What could be done with this horror?—This frightful fact changed the theology of Voltaire. He became convinced that this is not the best of all possible of all worlds. He became convinced that evil is evil here, now and forever”.

“Who can establish the existence of an infinite being? It is beyond the conception—the reason—the imagination of man—probably or possibly—where the zenith and nadir meet this God can be found”.

“Voltaire, attacked on every side, fought with every weapon that wit, logic, reason, scorn, contempt, laughter, pathos and indignation could sharpen, form, devise or use. He often apologized, and the apology was an insult. He often recanted. He took it back by giving more. In the name of eulogy he flayed his victim. In his praise there was poison. He often advanced by retreating, and asserted by retraction. He did not intend to give priests the satisfaction of seeing him burn or suffer”.

“Upon this very point of recanting, he wrote: ‘They say I must retract. Very willingly, I will declare the Pascal is always right. That if St. Luke and St, Mark contradict one another it is only another proof of the truth of religion to those who know how to understand such things; and that another lovely proof of religion is that it is unintelligible. I will even avow that all priests are gentle and disinterested; that Jesuits are honest people; that monks are neither proud nor given to intrigue, and that their odor is agreeable; that the Holy Inquisition is the triumph of humanity and tolerance. In a word, I will say all that may be desired of me, provided they leave me in repose, and will not prosecute a man who has done harm to none’.

“He gave the best years of his wondrous life to succor the oppressed, to shield the defenseless, to reverse infamous decrees, to rescue the innocent, to reform the laws of France, to do away with torture, to soften the hearts of priests, to enlighten judges, to instruct kings, to civilize the people, and to banish from the heart of man the love and lust of war. Voltaire was not a saint. He was educated by the Jesuits. He was never troubled about the salvation of his soul. All the theological disputes excited his laughter, the creeds his pity, and the conduct of bigots his contempt. He was much better than a saint. Most of the Christians in his day kept their religion not for everyday use but for disaster, as ships carry lifeboats to be used only in the stress of storm”.

Voltaire believed in the religion of humanity—of good and generous deeds. For many centuries the church had painted virtue so ugly, sour and cold that vice was regarded as beautiful. Voltaire taught the beauty of the useful, and the hatefulness and hideousness of superstition. He was not the greatest of poets or of dramatists, but he was the greatest man of his time, the greatest friend of freedom, and the deadliest foe of superstition".

“You may think that I have said too much; that I have placed this man too high. Let me tell you what Goethe, the great German, said said of this man: ‘If you wish depth, genius, imagination, taste, reason, sensibility, philosophy elevation, originality, nature, intellect fancy, rectitude, facility, flexibility, precision, art, abundance variety, fertility, warmth, magic, charm, grace force, an eagle sweep of vision, vast understanding, instruction rich, tone excellent, urbanity, suavity, delicacy, correctness, purity, cleanness, eloquence, harmony, brilliancy, rapidity, gayety, pathos, sublimity, and universality perfection, indeed behold Voltaire”.

“Even Carlyle, the old Scotch terrier, with the growl of a grizzly bear, who attacked shams, as I have sometime thought, because he hated rivals, was forced to admit that Voltaire gave the death stab to modern superstition. It was the hand of Voltaire that sowed the seeds of liberty in the heart and brain of Franklin, of Jefferson, and of Thomas Paine”.

“Science, thou art the great magician! Thou alone perform true miracles. Thou alone work the real wonders. Fire is thy servant, lightening thy messenger. The waves obey thee, and thou know the circuits of the wind. Thou art the great philanthropist. Thou hast freed the slave and civilized the master. Thou hast taught man to chain, not his fellow man, but forces of nature—forces that have no backs to be scared, no limbs for chains to chill and heat—forces that never know fatigue, that shed no tears—forces that have no hearts to break. Thou gave man the plow, the reaper and the loom—thou hast fed and clothed the world. Thou art the great physician. Thy touch has given sight. Thou hast made the lame to leap, the dumb to speak, and in the pallid cheek thy hand hath set the rose of health. ‘Thou hast given thy beloved sleep’—a sleep that wraps in happy dreams the throbbing nerves of pain. Thou art the perpetual providence of man—preserver of life and love. Thou art the teacher of every virtue, and the enemy of every vice. Thou hast discovered the true basis of morals—the origin and office of conscience—and hast revealed the nature and measure of obligation. Thou hast taught that love is justice in its highest form, and that even self-love, guided by wisdom, embraces the human race with loving arms. Thou hast slain the monsters of the past. Thou hast discovered the one inspired book. Thou hast read the records of the rocks, written by wind and wave, by frost and flame—records that even priest craft cannot change—and in thy wondrous scales thou hast weighed the atoms and the stars. Thou art the founder of the only true religion. Thou art the very Christ, the only savior of mankind”!

Now we return to more excerpts from the public lectures of Robert G. Ingersoll.

“Theology has always been in the way of the advance if the human race”.

“There is this difference between science and theology—science is modest and merciful, while theology is arrogant and cruel. The hope of science is the perfection of the human race. The hope of theology is the salvation of a few and the damnation of almost everybody”.

“We have in the United States no ‘religious system’, that this is a secular government. That has no religious creed; that it does not believe nor disbelieve in a future state of reward and punishment; that it neither affirms nor denies the existence of a ‘living God’; and that the only god, so far as this government is concerned; is the legally expressed will of a majority of the people.—This government is an infidel government. We have a constitution with man put in and God left out; and it is the glory of this country that we have such a constitution”.

“Religion is an individual, not a national matter, and where the nation interferes with the right of conscience, the liberties of the people are devoured by the monster, superstition”. This concludes my excerpts from the public lectures of Robert Green Ingersoll.

After searching approximately 50 years for the origin of the Old Testament, I succeeded a few years ago, with the assistance of authors Marvin A. Sweeny, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman. I have concluded that the sanctimonious Abrahamic religions all began when Judah’s King Josiah fabricated his royal tract of tribal propaganda, in order to intimidate the Israelite tribes into obeying his commands. It was adopted as tribal legend (later falsely assumed historical), but the tribal propaganda became eleven of the first twelve books of the bible (The book of Ruth was not included). After Josiah’s death and the destruction of Jerusalem his scholars took their tribal epic, e. g., the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy with them into Babylonian exile, and added Joshua, Judges, 1&2 Samuel, and 1&2 Kings. After Ezra and Nehemiah returned the people from exile, they deemed their epical legend to be Holy Scripture, and established Judaism’s monotheistic sect. And from that unfortunate beginning, which sired the Abrahamic religions featuring Yahweh, God and Allah; the world’s ignorant peoples were doomed to suffer through the bloody history of the deceitful religions as I have described earlier within this treatise.

http:www.usatoday.com/NEWS/usaedition/2012-06-08-lynn-trial_ST_U_htm

Gleaned from Case reignites sex-abuse crisis; by Cathy Lynn Grossman.

Ten years ago, the Roman Catholic sex-abuse scandal dominated the headlines with horrific stories of priests preying upon vulnerable youths and a church hierarchy more concerned with protecting clergy instead of kids.

Now it’s back. A Philadelphia jury is deliberating whether, for the first time, a high ranking church official will be held criminally accountable.

However they rule, the case carries symbolic freight far heavier than the grim details in the trial of Monsignor William Lynn, former secretary for the clergy in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. It revives the breadth and depth of the abuse crisis, its extraordinary costs and unending frustrations.

“Lynn’s trial brings the ugly mess to mind like it was yesterday”, said Mary Jane Doerr, associate director of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Office of Child and Youth Protection “It’s still shocking, the degree of damage a handful of priests have done. When will it ever stop?”

The statistics are staggering: Mary Doerr said that since 1950, more than 6100 priests, and more than 16,000 victims, chiefly teen age boys. She draws the number from two reports: a 2011 analysis by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City and the latest annual report by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA), which tracks U.S. Catholic statistics. However, Mary Gautier, senior researcher for CARA said “since there is no national database tracking clergy abuse, we may never really know how many victims there are across all the dioceses and across time”. $2.5 billion in settlements and therapy bills for victims, attorney fees, and costs to care for priests pulled out of ministry from 2004 to 2011, according to the CARA report released in April.

The Lynn trial brings up all the worst aspects of a scandal rooted decades before when victims were ignored—or blamed—and accused priests were quickly shuffled to unsuspecting parishes across town or the country.

www.guardian.co.uk/2011/oct/01/atheism-america/religious/right

Trinity College’s Professor Barry Kosmin conducts the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS), says, “The trending in American history is toward secularization”, and that “When religion was doing well, it did not need to go into politics. Secularity of our population and culture is obviously growing and so religion is on the defensive”. The ARIS recently found that 34.8 million of U.S, adults described themselves as “without religion”.

If you have not been brainwashed by the “God’s” prestigious professional proponents’ enigmatic doctrines of religion, then you are one of the wiser, more secular infidels, who believe it is saner to respect fellow humankind than worship the bible’s Pentateuch’s perfidious inscrutable egomaniacal monster of a “God” whose disdain for undiscriminating inclusiveness has wreaked all manner death and destruction throughout history. The god’s prestigious professional proponents have deceitfully perpetuated the god-idea by ignoring the bible’s true portrayal of the god, that is, King Josiah’s tribal propaganda, which became eleven of the bible’s first twelve books. It’s confusing, because their beliefs have no reasonable historical basis.

As my last post script, I wish to tell you about my hospice-volunteer who visits me each week. Laurie Ruth Smith has a very successful photography business; Google for Laurie Ruth photography. Laurie has brought each member of her family to visit. Her dad, Jeffery is an international pilot for American Air Lines, her two older sisters Holly and Kelly, plus her mom Katherine have visited separately. Katherine sang beautiful love-songs. Her dad took me sailing and, her mother recently returned and sang Happy Birthday a few weeks before my birthday. I must mention that Laurie’s late grandmother was a singer with Bob Hope’s United Service Organization’s tours in Europe during the Second World War.

Laurie has created blogs on the web for earlier versions of my iconoclastic treatise, and I hope she will do so for this version when she returns from her summer in Salt Lake City. I am thankful for dearest Laurie and her wonderful family.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. THE AGE OF REASON/Thomas Paine; 1737-1809

2. ON THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES/Charles Robert Darwin; 1809-82

3. PROFILES OF THE FUTURE, an Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible /Arthur C. Clarke: Harper & Row; 1963

4. CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS and the Remaking of World Order/ Samuel P. Huntington: Simon & Schuster; 1996

5. HITLER’S POPE/John Cromwell: Penguin Group; 1999

6. THE CHRIST CONSPIRACY the greatest story ever sold/Acharya S: Adventures Unlimited; 1999

7. KING JOSIAH OF JUDAH, the Lost Messiah of Israel/Marvin A. Sweeny: Oxford University Press; 2001

8. THE BIBLE UNEARTHED/Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman: Free Press; 2001

9. LOST CHRISTIANITIES/Bart D. Ehrman: The teaching Company; 2002

10. ISLAM/John L. Esposito: The Teaching Company; 2003

11. THE CRISIS OF ISLAM, Holy War and Unholy Terror/Bernard Lewis: Modern Library; 2003

12. THE CAGED VIRGIN, an Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam/Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Free Press; 2004

13. AMERICAN FASCIST: The Christian War on America/Chris Hedges: Free Press; 2006

14. AMERICAN THEOCRACY, The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money/Kevin Phillips: Viking’s Penguin Group; 2006

15. THE LOOMING TOWER/Lawrence Wright: Knoff; 2006

16. AMERICA ALONE, the End of the World as We Know It/Mark Steyn: Regnery Publishing; 2006

17. THE INFIDEL/Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Free Press; 2007

18. ROME AND JERUSALEM, The Clash of Ancient Civilizations/Martin Goodman: Alfred A. Knopf; 2007

19. THE GREAT EXPERIMENT, The Story of Ancient Empires, Modern States and the Quest for a Global Nation/Strobe Talbott: Simon & Shuster; 2008

20. THE NEW ATHEISM/Victor J. Stenger: Prometheus Books; 2009

21. THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS/Louis Ginsberg and Henerietta Szold

22. GOD-IDEA OF THE ANCIENTS/Eliza Burt Gamble

23. THAT USED TO BE US; How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back/Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2011

24. BACK TO WORK, Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy/Bill Clinton: Alfred A. Knopf; 2011

25. HOW CIVILIZATIONS DIE, And Why Islam is Dying Too/David P. Goldman: Regnery Publishing; 2011

26. DID JESUS EXIST?/ Bart D. Ehrman: Harper One; 2012

27. BAD RELIGION, How We Became a Nation of Heretics/Ross Douthat: Free Press; 2012

28. ITS EVEN WORSE THAN IT LOOKS, How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism/Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein: Basic Books; 2012

29. STILL THE BEST HOPE, Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph/Dennis Prager; 2012

Thank You for reading my treatise. Thursday the16th of August, 2012 was my 95^th birthday and I am beginning my 96^th year.

See my 36,000 word RECOLLECTIONS AND REMINISCENCE, which I hope can become a part of my blog.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

ISLAMISM

DRINK MY WINE

CHRISTIAN ANTI-JUDAISM

MIDDLE EAST FIASCO

U.S. ECONOMY

CONTENTS

OUR DISCOMBOBULATIONS

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