Alternative Religion/ Library

 “Being crafty, I caught you with guile” ... For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my LIE unto his glory; why yet am I also adjudged a sinner?” St. Paul.

“What profit has not that fable of Christ brought us!” Pope Leo X.

CHAPTER I   PAGAN FRAUDS—CHRISTIAN PRECEDENTS

       “Neither in the confusion of paganism, nor in the defilement of heresy, nor yet in the blindness of Judaism, is religion to be sought, but among those alone who are called Catholic Christians.” (St. Augustine, De Vera Religions, v.)

EVERY RELIGION, PRIESTCRAFT, and Sacred Book, other than the Roman Catholic Christian, is thus branded as false in fact and fraudulent in practice. The Jews, however, excluded by those who have expropriated their ancient faith,make the same imputations of falsity and fraud against the Christian religion,based on their own ancient sacred Scriptures, and founded, as the Christians claim, by a Jewish Incarnation of the Hebrew God,—which, say the Jews,is a horrid blasphemy; and they brand the Sacred Books of Christian origin as false and forged.

The Christians, all their hundreds of warring Sects, in their turn impute to the Jews the blasphemous repudiation and monstrous murder of the Son of the ancient Hebrew God, Yahweh; and with ample usury of blood and torture have visited that fabulous iniquity upon the hapless sons and daughters of Jewry unto half a hundred generations of “God's Chosen People.”

But, of the countless Sects of Christians, one alone, it avers, is of the True Faith; all the others are false and beyond the hope of heaven: “Whoever will be saved, it is necessary above all else that he hold to the Catholic Faith,”—so reads the venerable forged Athanasian Creed. (CE.ii, 33, 34.) The Protestant Sects, however, though they all admit the same origin and accept in full fatuity of faith most of the same forged sacred writings for their rule of faith as the One True Church, yet apply the scornful epithet “Antichrist” to their venerable Mother in Christ; freely dub a dozen of her canonical sacred Books of Jewish origin, and most of her thousands of canonized Saints, forgeries and frauds; and assert many of her most holy dogmas and sacraments to be blasphemous and degrading superstitions. The while their own scores of hostile factions mutually recriminate each the other as blind leaders of the blind and perverters of the sacred Truth.²⁴

It will serve a useful purpose to take a look behind all this dust-and-smokescreen of “Odium Theologicum” and make a brief survey of the origins of religious superstitions and priestcraft, and of the known and admitted falsities and frauds of Paganism, and some venerable other religious ‘isms.' This will demonstrate that these same things are now part and parcel of Christianity.This induces the inquiry, Wherein the data of Christianity as a whole may haply differ from the admitted frauds of the false religions and priestcrafts of the Past. We shall learn whether and to what degree truth may be found in any of the confused and confusing Christian claims of Truth.

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