« on: October 18, 2006, 04:59:15 PM »
2000 years of Christianity - haven't we wasted enough time!?The great trouble is that the preachers get the children from six to seven years of age and then it is almost impossible to do anything with them.
My captors stole everything from me...Those who captured me, in front of me, divided up my money, and later they led me into the hands of the torturers. In the long hours of torture, they asked me constantly about other pastors...of some churches in the capital; They asked me also about my views on liberation theology and about the liberation of the people of Israel. The torturers, tired of doing so much damage to me, rested for awhile; then, I recognized some of them: two are members of a singing duo from these churches [Verbo and Mission Elim]; I begged [them] to recognize me because I recognized them; then they asked me questions about my capture, my complete name, my address, my church and my activities. When they realized I was not the person they were looking for, they begged my forgiveness, saying,"Brother, we are also Christians.
I have made the experience that even a carnivore is more humane than two Christians pitted against each other.
During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What has been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in the laity; in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution.
For centuries, the mystics of spirit had existed by running a protection racket--by making life on earth unbearable, then charging you for consolation and relief, by forbidding all the virtues that make existence possible, then riding on the shoulders of your guilt, by declaring production and joy to be sins, then collecting blackmail from the sinners.
As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, and legends has been blended with both Christian and Jewish revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that has ever existed?
You will notice that in all disputes between Christians since the birth of the Church, Rome has always favored the doctrine which most completely subjugated the human mind and annihilated reason.
In no instances have...the churches been guardians of the liberties of the people.
Christianity persecuted, tortured and burned. Like a hound it tracked the very scent of heresy. It kindled wars and nursed furious hatreds and ambitions. It sanctified...extermination and tyranny...it dreampt of infinite blisses and crowns it should be crowned with before an electrified universe and an applauding God.
No kingdom has ever had as many civil wars as the Kingdom of Christ.
No nations are more warlike than those that profess Christianity.
Organized religion has always managed to provide prayers and thanks for victories in bloody wars...In more recent history, is there any evidence that organized religion anywhere did anything but bless the battles on both sides?
If all the bones of all the victims of the Catholic Church could be gathered together, a monument higher than all the pyramids would rise.
We are well aware that religion is not as bad an influence as it was a short time ago, as history is counted. But it is a sufficiently bad influence even in modern times, and its reduced viciousness (in practice) is due plainly enough to its reduced power.
In Italy the Inquistion was condemning people to death until the end of the eighteenth century, and inquisitional torture was not abolished in the Catholic Church until 1816. The last bastion of support for the reality of witchcraft and the necessity of punishment has been the Christian churches.
Christians have burnt each other, quite persuaded that all the apostles would have done as they did.
If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because we can't burn him.
Before August, 1914, it was the correct thing to proclaim Christ as the Prince of Peace and Christianity as the religion of love and the brotherhood of man. We had a Peace Sunday each year when lip-service was paid to peace from thousands of pulpits. After August, 1914, these same pulpits resounded with praises of the Lord as a man of war (Ex. 25:3) and declarations that the great European War was a Christian war, sent directly by Almighty God himself. The earlier attitude, disassociating Christianity from war, was both dishonest and, to say the least of it, ungrateful; for Christianity has been nursed, nourished and spread abroad by war and by what we now call frightfulness.
Under Hitler, 'Jesus' prayers became mandatory in all schools. Abortion was a crime. Homosexuality was criminalized. Hitler put into practice everything our Republican leaders are now pushing for America.
The leaders of the Protestant church, with only a few exceptions, endorsed in general the establishment of the Nazi regime in Germany...The establishment of the Third Reich represented for Protestant leaders...the triumph of national religious faith. They generally welcomed that victory with joy.
I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes--a justifier of the most appalling barbarity, a sanctifier of the most hateful frauds, and a dark shelter under which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection. Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me...I hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land.
We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen, all for the glory of God and the good of souls. The slave auctioneers bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heartbroken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals of the slave trade go hand in hand.
For ten centuries Christiantiy, armed with the omnipotence of the church and state and opposed by no competition, was able to deprave, debase, and falsify the mind of Europe. It had no competitors, because outside the Church there was neither thinkers nor educated persons. It alone thought, it alone spoke and wrote, it alone taught.
What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era? Where are fifty gospels, condemned as spurious by Pope Gelasius? Where are forty wagonloads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France by order of another pope, because suspected of heresy? Remember the 'Index Expurgatorius", the Inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter and the guillotine.
The canon of saints was the Christian technique for preserving the pagan polytheism that people wanted, while pretending to worship only one God. In fact, a good many of the same pagan deities were brought into the church, refurbished as phony saints so that popular devotion to them would bring profit to the church instead of diverting it elsewhere. The great age of saint-making began about the ninth century when hagiographers busily attached fictional life stories and martyrdoms to former heathen heroes, and ransacked old cemeteries in their highly lucrative treasure hunt for purported relics.
« Last Edit: March 17, 2011, 03:05:13 PM by Unbeliever »
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"Some say God is living there [in space]. I was looking around very attentively, but I did not see anyone there. I did not detect either angels or gods....I don't believe in God. I believe in man - his strength, his possibilities, his reason."
Gherman Titov, Soviet cosmonaut, in The Seattle Daily Times, May 7, 1962
God Not FoundI looked for God in my family - I didn't find Him.
I looked for God in my culture - I didn't find Him.
I looked for God in science - I found I didn't need Him.
