<note to alt.atheism readers> I am writing a book, as a hobby for now,
about various things - one of them being religion. Just to warn you, it
is fairly derogatory. I have a short section on Judaism and
Christianity almost complete, with the Islam and Hinduism sections
lagging behind. I was hoping to get some of your feedback, critique,
comments, suggestions, counter-arguments, corrections, etc., etc. Thanks
in advance to all - Petrus </note to alt.atheism readers>
Christianity
Christianity is a religion sometimes falsely attributed to a Judean
named Jesus, who was executed by the Romans some two thousand years ago.
It would be more appropriately attributed to Saul or Constantine,
however.
Saul was a long-time religious persecutor and agent of the state, who
was responsible for stripping whatever may have been the actual teaching
of Jesus of any subtlety or wisdom, and thereby making them palatable to
the very masses he converted in droves. Saul’s most brilliant move was
to invent the story that Jesus' execution was part of a Divine
(Prankster God, remember?) plan to begin inviting non-Jews into heaven,
and so the cult of Christianity. If not for him, Europe today would be
home to a Roman variety of Hinduism, with a scattered few Jews, and even
fewer Jews for Jesus.
Constantine was a shrewd warlord, who faked a miraculous conversion to
Christianity to tip the scales in a brutal and senseless war of
interregnum. Afterwards, he moved to consolidate his power by convening
a puppet show wherein he directed a few subservient, power-hungry
sectarian leaders to come up with a proper organized religion. This sly
fox is supposed to have actually converted to Christianity, on his
deathbed and when it would cost him nothing; and his name was held in
good stead for centuries.
Coincidentally, the official religion formulated by Constantine's
Council of Nicea was an excellent tool to keep European peasants working
and breeding according to the wishes of their rulers. From out of a
staggering variety of Christian sects with contradictory teachings, the
fathers of the council were pressured to compromise and chose only a
few. The "Jesus was a man" camp was disfavored, and the "Jesus was a
fearsome God and man" was granted dominion. Likewise, out of hundreds
of gospels, letters of various leaders, and nutty apocrypha, the council
edited what is now known as the Bible. Saul’s letters were
characteristic of the kind of material selected for the newly-created
Bible. His admonitions for slaves to obey their masters and for wives
to obey their husbands were simply irresistible to Constantine and his
ecclesiastical lackeys.
Whereas pre-Christian Europe was relatively open-minded and tolerant
when it came to matters of religion, its Christian sectarians were a
dogmatic and proselytizing bunch. After Constantine took hold of Europe
by bloody force (with the help of a heavenly Jesus), he proclaimed
Christianity the empire’s official religion. Thereafter, generations of
Europeans would be afflicted with Christianity.
Although even the gospels chosen to become part of the Bible portray
Jesus as a wise, kind-hearted pacifist, his European followers were
largely ignorant brutes. Given free reign by Constantine, they got
right down to burning libraries full of heretical Roman, Greek, Arab and
Egyptian knowledge. If it were not for Arab efforts to save some Greek
writings, Greek culture would be lost to us today. Needless to say,
Europe under the sway of this barbaric religion made little if any
cultural progress.
It was a bunch of rich, libertine Italians who were the first Europeans
competent enough to escape the grasp of their stone age religion and
recover the thousand-year-old accumulated knowledge of the Greeks (who,
it is worth reminding, themselves simply pirated the knowledge of older,
more subtler civilizations). The Renaissance set in motion a process
whereby a minority of Europeans eventually climbed out of the bog of
Know-Nothing Christianity and into the light of science and philosophy.
It was the Renaissance, among other factors, that finally convinced
the Arabs that Europe would be worth invading and civilizing; or
'nation-building,' if you will.
Despite the valiant efforts of their freethinking countrymen, the
majority of Europeans and European-Americans have been quite unable to
remove the scales of Saul’s preaching from their eyes. They have even
endeavored to spread their virulent superstitions and their sick joke of
morality by proseletyzing, bread in hand, to poor, starving people all
over the globe.
One final absurdity about Christianity is worth mentioning. In The Acts
of the Apostles, one of many poorly written books in the Bible, the
author describes a certain Ananias and his wife Sapphira who wanted to
join the local Christian cult. The Good Book tells us that Christians
at the time owned all of their possessions in common, and all new
members had to surrender all of their wealth to the control of the first
priests. Well, this materialistic couple refused to give all of their
possessions to the commune, and the Bible tells us that God Himself
punished this act of counterrevolutionary selfishness by striking down
the two pre-capitalist sympathizers with lightning. A pretty strong
message, indeed, from God on the subject of the proper design of an
economic and political system. However, Christians of the past century
have generally been rabid anti-communist Ananians and Sapphirists, given
to killing suspected reds en masse for the glory of god. Being that the
early Christian community was the first recorded example of a functional
communist proto-state creates irony at its ripest; at least for those
with strong stomachs and a well-developed sense of black humor.
No discussion of Christianity would be complete, however, without a
mention of the religion out of whose oppressive and stifling environs
Christianity emerged.
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