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CHAPTER VII THE “TRIUMPH” OF CHRISTIANITY
“Destruction to the Triumphant Beast!” Giordano Bruno.Even MORE INDUCIVE than its own sweet reasonableness and persuasive truth, as accredited by the records and vouchers we have examined, were several very effective forcible aids to the propagation of the new Faith in the hearts and minds—and upon the bodies—of the Pagan populations. The strange phenomenon of the persistence of Christianity into the XXth Century can be understood only by consideration of the means employed for, and the medium of un-culture permitting, the propagation of this forged faith through the centuries of the Dark Ages of Faith, with its medieval “hangover” into the present scientific era.“Ecrasez l'Infame!” - Voltaire.
PRIESTLY TERRORISM
GOD-ORDAINED MURDER FOR UNBELIEF
The Jewish forgers of the near-sacred Books of Enoch, Esdras, etc., had pilfered from the Sacred Books and System of Zoroaster of Persia, their superstitions of angels and devils and hell-fire, and had invented the infernal doctrines of Original Sin and eternal damnation therefor,—all which counterfeit passed to and became current among the religious zealots of the debased Judaism then in vogue. Attributing their “revelation” or invention to Jesus Christ himself, the second-century forging Fathers of the new Faith bodily plagiarized these ready-made Pagan-Jewish superstitions, and by the potent “Sign of the Cross” metamorphosed them into holy “revelations” and inspired truths, the which to doubt was to be damned.
The fanatic Hebrew religion and its derivative Christianity are the only religions ever known on earth based on and maintained by systematic persecution and murder. God-given laws of murder for disbelief were decreed at Sinai. A holy monopoly of priests was founded, and the divine ukase ordained: “They shall keep their priesthood, and the stranger that cometh nigh shall be put to death.” (Num. iii, 10.) Murder was God-decreed: “The man that will do presumptuously, and will not hearken unto the priest. ... even that man shall die.” (Deut. xvii, 12.) Again the Jealous God decrees: ”He that sacrificeth to any other god—[thus admitting the other gods]—save unto Yahweh alone, he shall be utterly destroyed.” (Ex. xxii, 20; Deut. xvii, 2-5.) The ne plus ultra of inspired atrocity of Divine legislation is this infamy devised by priests and attributed to their mythic God: ”If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go serve other [more civilized] gods, ... Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shalt thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: But thou shalt surely kill him: thine hand shall be the first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die”! (Deut. xiii, 6, 8-10; xvii, 2-7.) Old Elijah murdered by his God's help two 238 companies of soldiers and their captains by calling down fire from heaven, and 450 priests of Baal and 400 priests of the phallic Asherahs, to prove by these 850 murders “if I be a man of the gods.” (2 Kings, i, 12.) His old side-partner Elisha stood by and watched God-sent bears which he had invoked tear and eat forty small children who ill-manneredly thumbed their noses at his old bald pate; and throughout the blessed Old Testament of God some hundreds of thousands of people were murdered by God outright and by his holy priestly agents, simply for differences of opinion or of conduct with respect—or disrespect—to the holy Hebrew God and religion. Only, fortunately, probably little of it is true.
The Son of the Hebrew God came in course of time to Jewry ostensibly to make amends for some of his Father's damning vengeances. He came “to fulfill the law”; not only that, he overdid it and added to it sundry fiery climaxes of cursing and damnation, religious bigotry and intolerance unique to the “Gospel of Love” and of redemptive salvation. For sanctions ad terrorem of the new preachments of Christ who “came to bring not peace but the sword,” Jesus himself kindled the fires of Hell and decreed eternal damnation for unbelief: “He that believeth not shall be damned”; “Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire”; “Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish”; “He that believeth not the Son, the wrath of God abideth on him”! These genial persuasions to belief in the priests were added to by Paul the Persecutor; harking back to his God's Law of Sinai: “He that despised Moses' law died without mercy; ... Of how much sorer punishment ... shall he be thought worthy who hath trodden under foot the Son of God?”—”The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, and shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb: And the smoke of their torment ascendeth forever and ever: and they shall have no rest day or night” from “the fierceness of the wrath of Almighty God”! All this is for the happy Hereafter; but the pious deviltry begins by Hell-on-earth, as the gentle Jesus himself prescribed: “Those mine enemies, which would not that I reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me.” (Luke, xix, 27.) The whole body of Apostles appealed for Divine permit, that “we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them” (Luke ix, 54), who sought to imitate their pious devil-enchantments. Peter, Prince of Apostles, takes up the bloody cue: Every soul which will not hear that prophet shall be destroyed” (Acts, iii, 23); and Bigot Paul enjoins persecution, boycott and murder for the dissentient: “For there are many unruly and vain talkers ... whose mouths must be stopped” (Titus, i, 10, 11): and “He that troubleth you ... I would they were even cut off” (Gal. v, 10, 12), The Church Persecutrix is thus amply warranted of its holy task of “preserving the purity of the Faith” by fire and sword. Right quickly it began to “deal damnation‘ round the land on all they deemed the foe” of the Faith and its priests. The rule of death to heretics was proclaimed by the “Prince” and executed by sword and stake by his holy “Successors” so long as they were let: “There shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in heresies, ... and bring upon themselves swift destruction” (2 Peter, ii, 1); and his arch-coadjutor Paul continued to go up and down the land “breathing out threatenings and slaughter” against all who despised his holy preachments. 239
As we shall hear confessed: “Toleration came in only when Faith went out; lenient measures were resorted to only where power to apply more severe measures was wanting”! (CE. vii, 262.) The infernal fact that Intolerance is the “natural accompaniment” of Religion, and that obsessed religionists are no different from a man-burning mob of lynchers, is thus again confessed: “A kind of iron law would seem to dispose mankind to religious intolerance. (p. 35.) ... When Christianity became the religion of the Empire, and still more when the peoples of Northern Europe became Christian nations, the close alliance of Church and State. ... heresy, in consequence, was a crime which secular rulers were bound in duty to punish. ... The heretic, in a word, was simply an outlaw whose offense, in the popular mind, deserved and sometimes received a punishment as summary as that which is often dealt out in our day by an infuriated populace to the [supposed] authors of justly detested crimes. That such intolerance was not peculiar to Catholicism, but was the NATURAL ACCOMPANIMENT OF DEEP RELIGIOUS CONVICTION in those, also, who abandoned the Church, is evident from the measures taken by some of the Reformers—[ex-children of True Church, who were there schooled and drilled in the infamies]—against those who differed from them in matters of belief. ... Moreover, ... the spirit of intolerance prevalent in many of the American colonies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may be cited in proof thereof.” (CE. viii, 35, 36.) The only way to kill the pernicious flower of Faith is to uproot and destroy the noxious weed with truth!
THE GOSPEL OF FEAR AND TREMBLING
Such as this, repeated ad infinitum for terror, coupled with the threats of the quick “Second Coming,” when the Unbelievers should receive reward “unto the resurrection of damnation” (John v, 29), effectively seared the Gospel of fear and trembling into the superstitious Pagan dupes of Christianity.
Hear for a moment the zealous Father Tertullian throw the fear of Hell into the trembling Pagan patrons of the theater and the circus. As quoted by Gibbon from the De Spectaculis (Ch. 30), they are introduced with some pertinent words descriptive of the spirit of bigoted Christianity: “These rigid sentiments, which had been unknown to the ancient world, appear to have infused a spirit of bitterness into a system of love and harmony. The ties of blood and friendship were frequently torn asunder by the difference of religious faith; and the Christians, who, in this world, found themselves oppressed by the power of the Pagans, were sometimes seduced by resentment and spiritual pride to delight in the prospect of their future triumph.‘ You are fond of spectacles, exclaims the stern Tertullian;‘ expect the greatest of all spectacles, the last and eternal judgment of the universe. How shall I admire, how laugh, how rejoice, how exult, when I behold so many proud monarchs, and fancied gods, groaning in the lowest abyss of darkness; so many magistrates, who persecuted the name of the Lord, liquefying in fiercer fires than they ever kindled against Christians; so many sage philosophers blushing in red-hot flames with their deluded scholars; so many celebrated poets trembling before the tribunal, not of Minos, but of Christ; so many tragedians, more tuneful in the expression of their own sufferings; 240 so many dangers—.' But the humanity of the reader will permit me to draw a veil over the rest of this infernal description, which the zealous African pursues in a long variety of affected and unfeeling witticisms.” (Gibbon, Ch. xv, p. 146-7.)
UNBORN BABES TO BURN FOREVER
The damnable doctrine of Infant Damnation was one of the most terrifying and effective impostures of the Church to drive helpless victims into the fold of Christ. Infamous enough was the earlier doctrine of exclusive salvation, that the unbaptized adult, the individual outside Church was the heir to eternal damnation. But soon the terror was extended to the just-born infant, to even the fetus in its womb. St. Augustine affirmed this atrocity with all his vehemence; all the Fathers without exception dinned it eternally,—as yet today. A treatise of the greatest authority, De Fide, long attributed to Augustine, but now known to be the work of Bishop St. Fulgentius (CE. vi, 317) thus states the horrid doctrine: “Be assured, and doubt not, that not only men who have attained the use of their reason, but also little children who have begun to live in their mothers' womb and have there died, or who, having been just born, have passed away from the world without the sacrament of holy baptism, administered in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, must be punished by the eternal torture of undying fire; for although they have committed no sin by their own will, they have nevertheless drawn with them the condemnation of original sin, by their carnal conception and nativity.” (sec. 70.) Lecky, who quotes the passage, thus comment the effects as witnessed in practice throughout the Middle Ages: “Nothing indeed can be more curious, nothing more deeply pathetic, than the record of the many ways by which the terror-stricken mothers attempted to evade the awful sentence of their Church. Sometimes the baptismal water was sprinkled upon the womb; sometimes the still-born child was baptized, in hopes that the Almighty would antedate the ceremony; sometimes the mother invoked the Holy Spirit to purify by His immediate power the infant that was to be born; sometimes she received the Host or obtained absolution, and applied them to the benefit of her child. For the doctrine of the Church had wrung the mother's heart with an agony that was too poignant for even that submissive age to bear.” (Rationalism in Europe, i, 362-364.) And all this on account of an apple eaten four thousand years before they were born; willed by the Deity who had foreordained their birth and premature death, before His Holy Church could come at the Baptismal fees!
A CONTRAST IN TOLERANCE
With the miraculous “conversion of Constantine”—to at least the practical advantages of Christianity as providing numerous partisans to his ambitious cause and great numbers of recruits to his armies, the Church of Christ emerged from obscurity and catacombs; by dint of servile flatteries, bold impostures, and shameless forgeries, of which we have seen examples, it quickly insinuated itself into imperial favor and popular regard, and soon dominated the superstitious court and populace. This was a signal triumph for Faith, which now became popular and the means to preferment; the truth of the Christ did now more rapidly spread and 241 abound. That such considerations, much more of this material world worldly than of the other-world of the spiritual, best further the cause of Christ and are its most powerful propaganda, is thus delicately confessed: “ When a Government, for instance, reserves its favors and functions for the adherents of the State religion, the army of civil servants becomes a more powerful body of missionaries than the ordained ministers”! (CE. vii, 259.) Thus began that fullest League with Death and Covenant with Hell between State and Church, persistent yet to this day!
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