Give it no money! Have your name removed from its membership list.
OTHER
SITES
POPE
|
|
We live in an age that has the power to send every religion on earth a terminal illness. The illness we send is called thinking. Religion, particularly Roman Catholicism, is the prevalent form of exploitation and mental illness and means of legalised theft. As communication has advanced to an incredible degree, the information we need on any subject is present at the press of a computer button. It is important to stress simple refutations of religion for in this busy age people don’t have the time for in-depth examinations. So to simplicity I dedicate this volume. In this age in which we have the power to destroy all life on this planet, religion has no right to reverence for it leads to division and division leads to war and could lead to our final destruction. Help preserve the world by promoting this work!
Much religion says that only God knows what is best for us and if he makes rules we must simply obey and not criticise. This attitude indicates that even if war is commanded by God or an alleged revelation from him then war must be declared. It is evil in itself and evil in its implications.
Much religion says that sin is the worst evil. The Roman Catholic Church says that all religion that is not Roman Catholic is sinful. Clearly, then when a Catholic nation thinks it needs to go to war it must consider the religious benefits of doing so. For example, will the war break the hold of Islam an untrue religion on the other nation? Will putting a Catholic government in place stop all the pornography? Indeed the spiritual benefits as understood by the religion would matter more than freeing the people or otherwise helping them. Can you imagine how much strife such a doctrine as the duty to hate sin would cause especially when what is sinful in one religion may not be sinful in another?
If people believed that we should only have a faith that plays it safe there would be no need for religion. Such people would argue that if a woman needs an abortion to save her life, then let her have one. They would object to the Catholic claim that even then abortion is wrong. They play it safe. There is no harm done if their faith is wrong. Religion then is intrinsically evil.
The true sceptic will have beliefs. The sceptic will be open to revising those beliefs if the evidence warrants that. That is because the sceptic bases beliefs on evidence. He or she understands that believing means seeing that something appears to be likely to be true.
The pseudo-sceptic will tend to reject all paranormal and religious claims even if they have good enough evidence.
USING THE
DICTIONARY
The dictionary is in alphabetical order. If a word comes up that you do not understand,
its meaning will be found elsewhere in the dictionary.
The intentional killing of an unborn child or embryo.
The Roman Catholic Church
forbids abortion even when it is needed to save the mother’s life.
Bizarrely, the Church lets you kill adults when you are reasonably sure you have to in
order to prevent them killing you. To
make rules as inconsistent as this shows obvious hatred for women. The Church says that killing the baby is
rarely necessary to save the mother nowadays with medical advances. But one
thing is for sure, if we were still in the old days in which childbirth
frequently killed the mother it would make no difference to the Church. It is strange also that you can murder a
chimpanzee which is more advanced than a human foetus a few months old without
any condemnation from the God or priesthood of Catholicism.
Many apparitions that seem convincingly miraculous are proven to be not worth
listening to when they issue the same rabid and hysterical condemnations of
abortion as the Church does. Abortion on
demand should be allowed in the early stages of pregnancy. An embryo in the early stages is not a person
but something growing into a person.
As world population goes out of control, it is clear that abortion will be encouraged all over the world to help keep numbers down a bit. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that some people may justifiably use abortion as a means of birth control and even allow abortion on demand at the later stages of pregnancy.
The abortion pill is a great way to cut down on the number of late abortions and murderous abortions. The Church forbids it and thus ensures that murderous abortion rates are kept high. Later abortions can be very harmful psychologically to women.
The thought that a cluster of cells is equal in rights to a grown up adult is crazy. To ban abortion at that stage is just bigotry. The Church needs proof to say things like that. Where is it? The bigotry charge sticks.
The Church itself indirectly encourages believers in abortion rights to endorse or at least become desensitised to the murder of born babies - infanticide. The Church says they cannot disapprove of one while condemning the other!
The rite in the Catholic Church by which the priest forgives sin in the name of God and takes sin away.
The priest doesn’t ask God to
pardon you when he absolves. He does it on his own authority for he says, “I
absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Spirit.” This is an extreme case of
man standing in the place of God.
This sacrament was supposedly started by Jesus after his resurrection when he told the apostles in the John gospel that any sins they pardoned would be forgiven and any they did not forgive would not be. "If you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven," Jesus said. This means if you forgive in your own name the sins will also be forgiven by God. Those theologians who deny that priests forgive in their own name do not understand Catholicism. If you don't like this doctrine that priests forgive in their own name then you need to find an interpretation of the verse that rejects the idea of priests having power to forgive sins. We will look at one in a moment.
Suppose the Catholics are right. There is no evidence that the apostles passed the power to absolve or forgive sin on or were meant to and it is possible to translate it as saying that they can only forgive sins that have been forgiven already which would mean that they are not forgiving sins in the Catholic sense. If the gospel did mean the Catholic interpretation then the problem is that only one gospel says it. It is a very serious doctrine and you need two independent eyewitnesses according to God’s law.
The apostles would have been barred
from the
It is claimed by Catholicism that Jesus gave his apostles unique guidance from the Holy Spirit so that they were covered by infallibility and could write infallible scriptures if they wanted to. If that is true then the apostles may have been given the power to read hearts. So Jesus could have meant, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven (they are in the condition or state of being forgiven, that is they have been forgiven already and are still in a forgiven state)” as in “I give you the Holy Spirit so that anybody you forgive and allow into my Church and accept is forgiven by God for you will be inspired to see that.” That shows they are not causing God to forgive when they do what Jesus asked. Jesus didn’t say he meant they would forgive sins in God’s place as if they were God. It is totally dishonest of the Roman Catholic Church to use a text like that to bolster the outrageous claims of the Church.
There are two different kinds of forgiveness that Jesus would have believed in. There is forgiveness by the community as a community of sinners. And there is divine forgiveness, God forgiving sins. Nobody sees who God forgives so the former kind of forgiveness is necessary to have a community. Jesus then was giving the Christians authority to reject sinners and receive them back in forgiveness. It need not be an infallible authority, just an authority. Its just for order and Christ commands that it be respected.
God either forgives or he does not. If somebody said they would forgive you for doing wrong if you tasted their porridge that is not real forgiveness. A God who wont forgive until a priest does a ritual is not forgiving at all but mimicking forgiveness.
The denial that one can
know if God exists or not or the assertion that one doesn't know yet if God
exists or not. Agnosticism is
nonsense for if God existed he would make sure it would be observed that his
existence is at least plausible. A
person who believes there may be a creator but which is impersonal or amoral is
not an agnostic for this being is not God for it is not all-good and
all-happy. It is most likely the
creator, if any, is not a loving God for there are hundreds of alternatives to
the loving God hypothesis. Agnosticism
is very offensive for God is basically a misanthropic principle and it should
not be suggested even that he might exist.
The Roman Catholic Church practices the sacrament of the anointing of the sick. This sacrament supposedly gives supernatural preparation for death and above all forgiveness of sins so that the recipient can go to Heaven forever. It has to be done by a priest. This evil rite has brought much terror. People have found themselves dying after a car crash and alone with no priest in sight and this has caused horrific trauma and even death at the thought that they are not ready for God for the priest cannot be had. And they have the pains of eternal torment in Hell – dying people will naturally feel terrified. They will think and fear the worst and there is no priest to save them from Hell. The rite discriminates against sinners for those who are about to be executed cannot validly receive it. So God is more worried about the sick than converting sinners by the power of a sacrament. This is the God who pities sinners most for sin is the worst evil. Again this is a mystery, the excuse with which the Church papers over all its implausible tenets.
The Bible, authored by God, warns that though all sinners must be prayed for there is a kind of sinner who must never be prayed for. 1 John speaks of this sort of sinner. It is believed that the Bible speaks of the sin of those who refuse to repent of their sins on their deathbed. Since the Bible teaches that all sin can be pardoned, this sin can be the only candidate. Once such are dead, it is fruitless to pray for them for they will never repent and they will be damned forever. The Bible proves that the Church is merely pretending it can forgive people who have been dead for hours. 1 John implies that people who die when drunk, people who commit suicide and so on are damned. The Church knows that unless it ignores the text it will be held accountable for destroying half of the population with grief and despair about their loved ones being lost.
Christianity claims that
it can show that it has a reasonable, that is a non-contradictory - faith. A faith that is unreasonable is simply a
faith that is not inspired by God assuming God is reasonable. If he is not
then he is pure evil. For example, if it
makes no sense to say that Jesus is two separate natures God and man united in
one person then this doctrine isn’t true.
Christians feel that God gave us the power to think to help us work out the
truth. They say that silly religions insult God who gave us the gift of
reason and degrade our nature for we have the power to think for ourselves and
it is given to be used and not as an ornament.
We will look at how
useless and superficially convincing Christian defences of the faith are.
Christianity claims that
the faith comes before the state or anything else. If its correct, then the accounts of the
resurrection of Jesus in the four gospels must fit legal requirements. They must satisfy a court of law that the
resurrection happened. The resurrection
accounts can’t do this for none of them claim to be other than hearsay. For example, there is no mention of signed statements
or affidavits from the witnesses. As for
The Christian apologist
distorts the facts to give his religion plausibility. The apologists are bigots. They ignore the rule that hearsay is no good
in court to verify the resurrection accounts and then they laugh at accounts of
miracles from other religions such as Islam and Mormonism. They dismiss those as hearsay!
For example, the
apologists say the gospellers must have been cross-examined for a
cross-examination is necessary to discern if they are telling the truth. This is pure hypothesis and even the Bible
doesn’t support the hypothesis that there was a cross-examination either.
We know from law that:
"A failure to assert a fact, when it would have
been natural to assert it, amounts in effect to an assertion of the
non-existence of the fact. This is conceded
as a general principle of evidence...[it is] 'prima facie' an inconsistency."
Wigmore
on Evidence – this is an encyclopedia and a legal text book.
The
Bible God agrees for he said that when a public charge is made, the whole truth
must be told and to keep any of it back is to be held responsible for
subverting justice (Leviticus 5:1).
Public charges were made against Jesus for crimes against the
Matthew and Mark state that the women saw Jesus risen from the dead first. But Paul writes that the first appearance was to Peter. The Christians, knowing there can’t be other excuse, say that Paul doesn’t give the complete list. They contend that since men were thought to be the only legal witnesses and women were not he simply does not bother to mention the women. They lie that he is not denying that women seen Jesus first. But in that case he had no reason to say Jesus appeared first to Peter. Why say the word first at all? Paul wasn’t treating his list as a legal list or a list to satisfy people legally. No New Testament testimony claimed any legal authority. Therefore there was no reason for saying nothing about the women - unless the story of the women is lies.
To give a list and mention 500 seeing Jesus and not say where or who they were and when is not a legal list. It was addressed to ordinary people and why get legal with people who don’t think legal? To say that Paul was legally saying Peter saw the Lord first negates the gospels which could equally be said to be legally saying it was the women. We have no reason to think Paul is being legal so nobody has the right to use the legal escape route to gloss over this contradiction between a resurrection witness and the gospels which are not testimonies written by eyewitnesses. Paul is more believable than the gospels for he wrote nearer the alleged apparition events. And at least we know he wrote his letters while the gospels are anonymous.
Christian defences of the faith offend against the rule of plausibility. Using their standards, any contradiction at all can be fixed up and we will never be able to learn anything if we start doing that!
Christianity is notorious for ignoring the refutation of its arguments. Ideas that have been refuted centuries ago are still used today. Apologetics does little to make converts. It is just a trick to reassure believers that their absurd faith makes sense. It leads to believers becoming so cocksure that they set out to take away the civil rights of those who disagree with them. Remember how the Catholics of Ireland fought to stop the right to divorce and contraception and persecuted those who complained against clerical sex abuse?
Christianity argues that Jesus rose from the dead for many of his friends believed he did. That does not follow. Also, it is really putting faith in the testimony of people rather than in God. It would in fact be evidence then that God was not behind whatever happened. God wants to be honoured for being God. There is something sectarian about taking a group's interpretation of God and what he has done in preference to that of other groups.
Jesus left no writings
behind so it was left to the twelve apostles he chose to preserve his
message. The Church believes the
apostles were appointed by Jesus because the apostles said so. Why should we believe them then and not the
many modern apostles who have as much claim to authority from Jesus? Christianity is not about Jesus at all but
about the apostles’ interpretation of him.
It is following men not God. The
apostles were undoubtedly just out for the pleasure of telling people what to
think for they had no reasonable claim to authority. Many in the early Church denied their
authority. Christians have no right to
say it was just sour grapes for nobody knows if their reasons were weighty or
not.
The doctrine that our lives are mapped out by the heavenly bodies, eg, moon, sun and stars etc. Accordingly, it is thought that it is possible to tell our future using charts and working things out from the position of the heavenly bodies. To protect themselves, astrologers say that their prognostications show what tends to happen in the future not what will happen. There are actually thirteen signs scientifically speaking but astrology always assumed twelve which shows that it is an irrational superstition. Astrology with its stress on what zodiac sign you are born under is akin to racism. It would advocate discrimination against a person just because of what bad traits their birth chart should have. It argues that each sign has a good match romantically with some of the other signs but not always all. Teachings like that can cause trouble and indeed do. It is totally unfair to judge people according to their birth charts. It is no better than judging people according to their skin colour. And why birth charts? The time of conception or when the embryos became those persons would make more sense. After all, your birth does not create you. It is only you emerging from your mother.
The denial that gods
exist or that there is a God.
Agnosticism is not a viable or possible option and neither is Pantheism
therefore Atheism is true. People
believe in God out of habit and they tend
to copy other people and believe what they believe.
They believe because they want comfort. They think people who don’t
believe have bad morals. Habit is not a reason. You can get comfort without belief in God –
belief in nature spirits would do. And
belief in God has nothing to do with a good life because atheists can do much
good therefore belief in God is not needed.
Since God is supposed to be the supreme good it follows that to
believe in him we have to pretend that taking comfort from the idea of nature
spirits is bad if not sinful. We have to say that atheists are only
pretending to be good people. That shows you that belief in God is intrinsically dishonest and bigoted.
Jesus paying for our sins to God by dying on the cross so that we would be forgiven and not have to pay the penalty for our sins. This arrangement is totally unfair for you can only pay for your own crimes. The fact that the law lets people pay your fines does not mean that is fair. Christians know this but they still use the example of the law to pretend that what happened to Jesus was fair. Only the person who committed the crime can atone. Jesus consenting to pay makes the doctrine sillier and more unjust and is no improvement though Christians say it is! It makes Jesus a man who imagined that his suffering and death could pay for the sins of others, a man who demeaned himself.
The purpose of justice is to make real laws of laws. A law against something that does not punish you by paying you back fair and square for the evil you have done is not a law at all. With this insight, we clearly perceive that when God made Jesus pay for breaking the law when he was innocent so that we could get off that this was not justice but vengeance. The atonement is attractive to people who wish to believe that they are friends with a vindictive God.
To punish the car thief by throwing dung on his jeans is not to punish him at all because real punishment always fits the crime. If you hate, you deserve hate in return. God said in the Bible that the law is to be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. To deny this is to deny that hate should be punished properly by hate. And if it should not be punished then why forbid it at all? To forbid what should not be punished is evil and shows there is hate involved.
A God of justice must necessarily be a God of hate. A person who commits an act of hate is usually punished not with hate but with community service or something. But there is still an undercurrent of hate there. If he doesn't deserve hate, then it is not wrong for him to hate. Then to punish him at all is an act of hate for he has done nothing wrong.
Some liberal Christians lie that when the Bible speaks of the wrath of God and God punishing that this is a metaphor. Suppose you drink a bottle of vodka a day you will destroy your liver. This is the punishment. It is the way your body reacts to your treatment of it. It is not a punishment in the sense that God wills it to happen to you or is angry with you. They then use the word punishment to describe the bad effects of your actions on you. That is stretching the meaning of the word. They don't believe in what they are saying. They say that it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you are sincere and mean well. But dangerous or wrong belief brings bad on the believers and those they live among. And they don't describe that as punishment! They are just pandering to and sucking up to those who are so arrogant that they think they should get away with their sins and misdeeds and even crimes. No wonder Christianity is popular in prison.
An offshoot of Islam that
seeks to unite all world religions. It
was founded by manifestations of God notably Baha’u’llah.
Baha'u'llah proved that he was not a manifestation when he insanely thought he could promote unity
among the world religions by founding a new one that takes bits out of every
religion and which turns Krishna, Jesus and Buddha into manifestations of God
though they all contradicted one another.
And its a strange way of uniting religion to make another religion!
Christianity cannot water down its view that Jesus was the only
manifestation of God and who proved it by coming back from the dead and yet
this cult claims to be compatible with Christianity.
A
sacrament rite which infuses the gift of faith and which removes original sin
in which person is dipped into water or sprinkled while a magic spell, “I baptise
you in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit” is recited. It is performed on infants as an excuse to
get indoctrinating Christianity into them later on in childhood when they are
so fragile and easily conditioned. The goal is to prevent them having the right to make
up their own minds without undue and one-sided influence when they are old
enough. Children do not need religion
for they are innocent and things like death do not seem real to them. We may teach things to children say about
other countries that they have to take on faith but that doesn’t justify
teaching religion to them and conditioning them for you can prove what you say
about other countries but you can’t prove your religion. Every religion claims that it has the best
evidence and you would need a million brains to test every religion.
Baptism allegedly changes your sinful nature to one that is eager to please God. Experience shows that this is not true for there is nothing remarkable about the virtue that most sacrament takers have, so sacraments are wilful quackery. The rite facilitates racism for it implies that the unbaptised who are often of another race are in some way inferior to the baptised. Since they still have original sin they must be more dangerous than a person who has been baptised.
Communities necessarily put some pressure on members to conform. This is a form of force. Many Catholics are victims of forced conversion. Do not abuse your child by letting it be baptised! Children are made to undergo the rite of confirmation (ie confirming membership of the Church) even if they don't believe. The Church grows by forced conversion though it pretends to oppose it.
Catholics say they get their children baptised to give them a relationship with Jesus and it is not about making them servants of the pope. But if you look after a medium and give her money and persuade your children to believe in her simply because she claims to be in touch with your dead husband you can't say it is about your husband and not her.
A
violent and spiritually pornographic collection of books regarded by Christians
as the word of God. It claims to have
God’s actual words. Christians
habitually twist it to make it tell them what they want to hear. For example, Nebuchadnezzar and his men were
predicted to do things to the city of
The gospels say that Jesus told Peter how many times Peter would betray him and this prophecy came true. Nobody denies the prophecy and its fulfilment was written after the event. This is absolute proof that the gospels are not as truthful as Christians would like us to believe. If a man wrote a book of prophecies after the event you would say he was a fraud. No God would inspire books like that. If we agree with the Christians that the gospels are right to expect us to believe they are truthful despite the problem with those prophecies, then we lose any right to complain that fortune-tellers are fakes if they write that they made prophecies that came true without recording the prophecies before the event. Jesus making such unimportant prophecies makes it all look like magic and superstition.
Liberals say that the Bible is God's word only because he influenced the writers. He did not tell them what words to write or put ideas in their heads but influenced them without using direct supernatural power on them. This view denies that the Bible is unique for it can't then be the only book that God influenced. Also it denies that God is the author of the Bible. If DH Lawrence was influenced by a lady he knew when he was writing Lady Chatterley's Lover that does not make her the author. Roman Catholic teaching says that God authored the Bible. So we must hold that God put the ideas in the minds of the writers if we are to be Christians.
Some Christians like Keith Ward argue that the vindictive and evil laws of the Bible are overridden by later laws which are kinder. They say this shows that God was influencing his people to progress in understanding. They thought incorrectly that God wanted them to liquidate other nations and then later understood that God wanted them to live in peace with those nations. But that is the take of those Christians. Its just their interpretation. By saying what they say, they are making their own guesses the word of God.
To a Catholic it means the start of God deciding to have a loving relationship with you at baptism. To the Protestant it is the same thing but they often think it happens when you accept Jesus consciously as your substitute who earned salvation for you by paying for your sins for you. The term is terribly insulting to good people who are not believers for it implies that they are spiritually lacking and defective. It is really no better than racism especially when it teaches that people who have never heard the gospel will not be saved and will have to pay for their own sins in Hell. Even to suggest that God might find some other way to save them implies that they might not be saved and they might be ripe for Hell. That is nasty too.
The new birth allegedly removes original sin which causes our bias towards sin so it results in a holy life. Whether we are talking about born –again Protestants or Catholics most of them do not act in any remarkably virtuous way so the new birth is a conscious dose of quackery and deception. No concern is showing for proving that the baptism ritual actually helps. It is not about helping babies but about imposing the foolishness of religion on them.
Founder
of Buddhism. A fanatic who advocated a
difficult and boring life in order to make sure you are not reincarnated. He never stopped to consider that if there is
no life after death this is a waste of time and one might as well live it up
within reason. He accused all desire of
being something that we must get rid of.
But manipulated the right way, desire can make your life fun and more
interesting.
The
word canon means rule. The canon of the
Bible is the list of the books that belong in the Bible.
The Catholic Bible is longer than the Protestant one for it contains
extra books such as Tobit and Sirach.
The Council of Trent infallibly decreed that these books belonged in the
Bible. And this despite the fact that
Tobit has an Angel of God lying unnecessarily and Sirach commands the abuse of
women under the pretext of making them behave.
According
to Sirach 42, a man has the right to lock up his wife to keep her from
committing adultery.
Daughters
are not to be allowed to be friends with married women or to be trusted with
men. The author thinks that women think
of nothing only sex.
Sirach
commands that servants be beaten up for disobedience. Then, by implication, wife beating is
allowed.
Such books by no means can really be the word of God.
It is important that sceptics of the Bible get their facts right.
They like to say that the New Testament list of books, and that idea that there was only four gospels, was sorted out late in the history of the Church and that those who chose them were biased and innovators determined to impose their own version of Christianity on the Church. They want to hold that the Church arbitrarily rejected gospels it didn't like.
Irenaeus in 180 AD when he spoke of there being four gospels was not making an innovation but just reiterating a tradition that was well established by then (page 37, Who Chose the Gospels?). It is a lie that Irenaeus ordered the destruction of other gospels - he merely advised that believers should not read them (page 59). Clement of Alexandria is said to have quoted gospels besides the four as authoritative whereas in fact he cited the four gospels at a ratio of 120 to 1 concerning the other gospels (page 72). He did not quote the other gospels as authorities but as useful to make his points just as a preacher might quote a fairy story. Seraphion permitted the Church at Rhossus to read the gospel of Peter as there was dissension in the Church there over it. He admitted he hadn't read it and regretted this permission (page 91). He spoke of the gospel as being put forward by them as if it had only just appeared. It was new for he had read the four gospels and didn't read this one. He speaks of it as being put forward by "them". So it appeared among one of the groups in the Rhossus Church. So nobody can say this was a gospel accepted by the general Church.
The Apocryphon of James which was written in the early second century says that there is a curse on the men who saw Jesus meaning the apostles. This work is proof that there were mystical Christians who denied the authority of the apostles. By implication, they were rejecting the authority of the gospels for the gospels purport to preserve the apostles teaching and take us as near to seeing Jesus as a man as possible.
The
word Catholic means universal. It refers
to the fact that the one true Church must invite all nations to become part of
it. Christ implied the Church
must be Catholic when he told it to make disciples of all nations. To be universal the Church must be primarily one in faith
for what is divided by confusion and heresy can’t be for everybody. The Church would need a clear and fixed
message to be really universal. To be universal
the Church has to have one government - that is to say, it has to be one Church. So to be
Catholic, the Church has to be one, united.
It has to be holy, that is dedicated to God and what God has
revealed. It needs some kind of
authority then to preserve this revelation intact. If the apostles received the completeness of
God’s word, and the Church says they did, then the Church has to be
apostolic. So there are four marks of
the one true Church as expressed in the Nicene Creed, “I believe in one, holy,
Catholic and apostolic Church.” This
creed is a manifestation of the infallibility or protection against error that
the Church supposedly enjoys.
The Roman Catholic Church claims to meet this one, holy, Catholic and apostolic model. This Church is not one for it is divided on matters of faith. It is really like a collection of faiths under the Roman Catholic umbrella.
The mark of oneness has more to do with unity
in mind and heart than with organisational unity. Plus Protestants are thought to belong to the
Catholic Church by virtue of their baptism.
That’s not unity. The unity of
the Church is artificial so the Church is not Catholic. Plus there is the idea of automatic
excommunication in which you commit a sin that secretly puts you out of the Church, such
as, abortion, schism, heresy and apostasy and others. That means you will have many Catholics who
are visibly Catholics but who are not Catholics at all because the
excommunication has put them outside the Church. The Church also says that
those who die in invincible ignorance desiring to be with God even if they are
not Christians have become members of the Church. That denies the doctrine of the one visible
Church. The true Church is not confined
to the visible Church so the visible Church then is not necessarily the true
Church. The Church is not one. It is missing the main mark.
The true Church should be united. It does not really matter if a false
religion is divided. If you can have one con around why not another? Catholics
ignore the fact that it is not the Church being one that is important but that
it should be one. For example, the
modern day Catholic Church claims to be the one true unerring faith but this
isn’t true for it has altered many doctrines.
Traditionalist Catholics can tell you about many of these changes which
is why they have declared the current Catholic system led by
The
Protestant view that despite our disagreements and divisions we are one
spiritual family as long as we carry God’s love in our hearts and that this
family is the one true Church is more plausible than the Catholic view.
The
Catholic Church isn’t holy for its teaching is often ridiculous and dangerous
and it has corrupted the legacy of Jesus and the apostles by adding doctrines they never
knew to the faith so it is not apostolic.
The Catholic Church isn’t Catholic for babies who won’t be brought up as Catholics are not welcome for baptism and women can’t become priests. Only the right Church would have the right to be called Catholic and the Roman Catholic doctrine is full of lies and errors.
There has to be something unique about the term Catholic. If any sect at all even atheistic ones can call themselves Catholic, then there is nothing special about being a universal faith so it is not a mark of any kind at all. A religion that errs is excluding people who know it is wrong so it is not Catholic and it is not open to all people. Being universal or open to all is not as important as being right. The reasoning of Rome that as the Church is Catholic that is one of the signs that it is true makes no sense. It is really saying that whatever is true is Catholic and since the Church is Catholic the Church is true. That is incorrect logic.
Catholicism is just another man-made faith.
Charity holds that love
is doing good to others because it pleases God and not yourself or them. It is allegedly a supernatural gift from
God. Actually it is a vice for it puts a concept, God, before people and the one person you are more sure exists
than any other, yourself. Religion says
we must abandon our own opinions and feelings and agree with whatever God
says. But it is human opinion that God
has spoken and nobody agrees on what he said, and the experts differ. What is loved is not God but an idol made out
of human opinion and pride and arrogance.
It’s all selfish.
There is no point in
believing in God unless you are going to put him first so the God concept is
intrinsically sinister. Misanthropism
must have something to do with it which explains why believers of God have been
so eager to shed the blood of heretics or have been at least delighted when
their rivals in religion were slaughtered.
The word means called
out. Some believe that only God knows
who really belongs to his Church for there are many phoneys. The Roman Catholic Church strangely admits that
there are many fake Catholics in its midst but still, inconsistently, says that
the true Church is visible and you can see who is part of it. The Church believes that Catholics who are
automatically excommunicated, that is Catholics who put themselves outside the
Church by having beliefs that contradict the Church (heretics) and those who
procure an abortion and Catholics who only pretend to be Catholics are not
really Catholics. We can see most
Catholics have excommunicated themselves so what sense does it make to talk
about a visible Church? The Catholic
Church claims to be this one true visible Church which, as with the Mormon
Church, is clear evidence that it is not.
The bigotry alone of claiming to be the true Church is enough evidence
that it is not the true Church.
Bread and wine which are
blessed and believed to link you to the body and blood of Christ which they
represent. The Catholic Church holds
that the bread and wine cease to be bread and wine but become the body and
blood of Jesus. It is a sectarian rite
in Catholicism for people who are better than most Catholics are barred from it indicating
that your beliefs and religious affiliation are regarded as more important than your kindness and decency.
Catholics have to confess their sins to a priest and tell him how often they committed them so that the priest can forgive their sins in the name of God. The Church says it needs to be told the sins before it can decide to pardon them which is an untruth because what matters is the person being sorry for all the sins. Confessing is no good without repentance.
The Church says that when you confess to a priest you are really confessing to God not the priest and the priest only serves as a witness. If it is really God who forgives then how can the Church argue that it needs to be told the sins? It is up to God to see if the confessing person is sincere and admitting all his sins to him.
The person confessing sins does not mean he repents them. No examination takes place as to why the person repents and what steps they have taken to avoid the sin. The Church then is lying pure and simple that it needs to hear the sins. How could it need to when there is little concern for testing the person's profession of repentance?
Confession
is an invasion of the conscience and a bad thing to put children
through. The Catholic doctrine that the
priest is needed to remove sins is cruel for it must terrify those who find
themselves dying alone after a car crash.
The sacrament of confession forces priests to be accessories to crime for the priest is forbidden to go to the police even if he hears in confession that a mass-murder is about to be committed by a person who confessed to him. Confession implies that we have a duty to obey the Church even if it seems evil.
Confession is a tribunal – the priest has to find you guilty of your
sins and find your repentance sincere and then he absolves you. The seal of the confession prevents the
priest from telling what went on. There
are no witnesses and nothing to stop a priest from lying that you permitted him
to discuss what you told him and that you were the one that told him with all
and sundry.
If you had a sexual
feeling you would have to explain to the priest how you could have avoided it
and what caused it and what you did with it and how many times. Confession is a grave invasion of the
conscience and of privacy and it is an enforced invasion because if you don’t
confess and tell all your serious sins you will go to Hell to burn forever.
Using pills and devices
to prevent conception. The Roman
Catholic cult regards it as sinful and has done its best to stop the use of
condoms in
The Church says that sex
must be open to life at all times and yet it allows you to marry somebody you
know is barren. The hypocrisy is astounding.
The Church says you must
let God plan your family. This makes
sense if there is a God. But the doctrine is dangerous if there isn't.
If there is a God, you are not to blame if pregnancy results and great misery happens because
of it for it was God’s decision to send the baby.
Almost beyond belief, the
Church permits natural birth control!
This is confining sex to the period of the month in which the woman is
most unlikely to conceive.
If it is up to God then it doesn’t matter if you use the safe period in which conception is less likely or not. The Church says fertility is a blessing and a divine gift and is natural and not a disease so contraception is wrong. Then inconsistently it allows you to wear coloured contact lenses to change your eye colour. So is your natural eye colour not a gift and not a blessing? It even lets you have a nose job though there is nothing wrong with irregular features! It is possible to approach contraception as follows: "We will use these condoms for we feel using them is co-operating with God's plan. If he doesn't want us to have any more children, then they will work. No contraception method is 100% foolproof". To claim that using contraception necessarily implies that you don't appreciate the gift of fertility is slander and judgemental. The pope does not love people who use contraception when he invents sins and accusations for them. If you are not totally sure that what a person did is sinful and you say you hate the sin, be honest and admit that it is them you hate.
Pius XI made an infallible statement in part 54,56 condemning birth control in his encyclical Casti Connubi: “No reason, however grave, may be put forward by which anything intrinsically against nature may be conformable to nature and morally good. Since, therefore, the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose sin against nature and commit a deed which is shameful and intrinsically vicious. Since, therefore, openly departing from the uninterrupted Christian tradition, some recently have judged it possible solemnly to declare another doctrine regarding this question, the Catholic Church, to whom God has entrusted the integrity and purity of morals, standing erect in the midst of the moral ruin which surrounds her, in order that she may preserve the chastity of the nuptial union from being defiled by this foul stain, raises her voice in token of her divine ambassadorship and through Our mouth proclaims anew, any use whatsoever of matrimony used in such a way that the act is deliberately frustrated in its natural power to generate life is an offence against the law of God and of nature, and those who indulge in such are branded with the guilt of grave sin”.
Catholic teaching is that
uninterrupted tradition is infallible and any change is heresy. The pope says that he is speaking with the
Church and nobody can contradict him so he is speaking infallibly. He says God has guided him and the Church to
this decision.
It is one of the heresies of the modern Church that natural family planning is fine for any reason but the actual teaching of the Church is that it is only allowed in grave and extreme cases! The permitting of the natural method of the Catholic Church was introduced by Pius XII. Tradition was wholly against him. This modification of the teaching was heresy too.
The natural method was only permitted because the encyclical of the previous pope, Pius XI, Casti Connubi was misunderstood. That pope permitted sex if the couple was sterile or too old to reproduce. This permission was misinterpreted without warrant to refer to the natural method in its Rhythm Method form or the use of the safe period. The pope is thought to have written the following about those married couples who had sex during the infertile time of the month. His encyclical says: “Nor are these considered as acting against nature who in the married state use their right in the proper manner, although on account of natural reasons either of time or certain defects, new life cannot be brought forth” Pope Pius XI. Time had to mean old age. Certain defects refers to sterility. It is stretching the meaning to think he meant the safe period with the intent to avoid children. It contradicts what he said that nothing whatsoever must be done to prevent conception. He did not mean the safe period because it is not fully safe. He speaks of a condition in which new life cannot be brought forth so he is not thinking of it at all.
He says nothing of having sex
while knowing a baby cannot come. Back
then there was no real way to be very sure.
All he is saying is that if a couple have sex when it may be the
infertile time, they do not sin. The
reason they do not sin is because they don’t know the chances of
conception and don't intend to avoid conception.
They are not
sinning as long as they don't mean to prevent conception. The pope gave no impunity from
sin to those who had sex while believing a baby couldn’t result. If you have sex with your wife and don’t know
her chances of conceiving when it may be her infertile time there is no sin. That is all he is saying.
Pius XI had no problem with Catholics having sex during the safe period. He just had a problem with them using this period as a form of birth control. He never mentions in the encyclical that that is allowed. The natural method was well known in his day. For him, the birth control he meant included natural and artificial methods.
In 1951, Pope Pius XII,
29th October, said that natural family planning was allowed only
when a doctor had decided the wife should have no more babies for it would
destroy her health or when the family is afflicted by severe poverty. So the circumstances are very abnormal.
Natural family planning
can lead to the same contraceptive mentality that the Church condemns
contraception for: the feeling that a baby is a burden and not a gift from God
and its conception is to be avoided.
With the new Catholic doctrine, at least, you can hold that you really want a baby
but can’t have one perhaps because another pregnancy could kill the mother. You are to use the natural method with
regret. You approach it as a necessary evil not
as a good thing.
Creation is the act by which God made all things out of nothing. Nothing means that which cannot become something. It cannot become something as it is not something. It is nothing.
The Church says that nothing can come from nothing unless there is a God to make something come out of nothing. Its a trick as it contradicts the definition of nothing. If nothing is that which cannot become something then even a God cannot make any difference.
The notion of things popping out of nothing by themselves is impossible. God causing things to exist is far more impossible. Why? Because if God can do the impossible that makes God irrational and he should be able to create a being who though it has no free will is still able to use free will to become good. It would make God fundamentally evil and bad. The doctrine has the hidden meaning that God is evil and should be worshipped for that evil.
Buddha said we would never understand how the unvierse and ourselves ame to be and so not to waste time on the issue.
Jesus was allegedly nailed to the cross to die for our sins and rise again to show that we could have eternal life. If Jesus showed up again after his death that would mean the man who died was a pretender or that it was all a magic trick. No evidence is given in the gospels that it was really Jesus who was crucified just hearsay. If we are going to accept hearsay we cannot consider Christianity worth believing. Jesus had fanatical followers who risked their lives going after him so any one of them who looked like him could have taken his place and the gospels do state that people had problems recognising "Jesus" and nobody who knew him well saw him close up on the cross. The crucified man could have had a badly swollen and bloody face meaning it was easy to pass off somebody as Jesus. The gospels say that Pilate was desperate to prevent Jesus from going to the cross so a trick might have been employed. The gospels can be read either as speaking of the risen Jesus as a flesh and blood man or an apparition. For example, the vanishing of Jesus at Emmaus doesn’t actually say that he just dissolved into thin air. He could have gone when they were not looking. That would be natural and would still be vanishing. The apostles didn’t speak of these appearances for forty days after which they never saw Jesus again so Jesus could have gotten away with a hoax. Some of them are down to mistaken identity.
The
ten commandments of the Jewish Law. Two
of the commandments are, “Remember that you keep the Sabbath day holy” and “You
shall not commit adultery”. Christians
and Muslims accept these commandments as true.
They were reportedly dictated to Moses by God on
Command
means to force a person to do whether they want to or not and if they refuse
they are punished. So either way
commanding is anti-freedom. It forces
you to obey and imposes penalties on you if you still firmly resist. To command is to claim the right to
force. Jesus said his command to us was
to love one another. God commanding you
to care for others is ridiculous. If you have free will, only you can decide
to care and there is no point in anybody commanding it.
The master by command compels the slave to scrub the floor but he can’t
make the slave do it of her own free will.
People only want God because they want to bind society to certain rules
and commands from God but at the root of all this is suspicion, fear, anger and hatred. Only people who like violence like violent
bullying beliefs. That these beliefs are
sugar-coated as in Christianity only makes them sly as well. Belief in God is evil. We resent anybody commanding us what to
feel. It makes us bristle and so those
who believe in God who want others to believe will do so because they want
others to feel this horrible resentment too.
The
Devil is the head of all the evil spirits.
Since God does not make evil beings, the Devil was once good but became
bad of his own fault. Or so the Church
would have us believe.
We
always do what we feel we like to do even when we feel we hate our action. Choosing means prefer. It means you like doing the hated action more
than you hate the action. So if God had
given Satan better likes he wouldn’t have sinned. It’s all God’s fault that Satan sinned. The Church will answer that Satan didn’t have
to go along with the sinful attractions.
But still God tempted him to sin by giving him those feelings and then
punished him for doing what he inspired him to do. Yet for God to be really good he has to
incapable of asking anybody to sin (James 1:13) so temptation is the chief
proof that God can’t exist. It is so
obviously right that all believers are blinding themselves to the truth. God gives Satan the psychic power to tempt us
and this is unnecessary for we don’t have such telepathic powers. A God who won’t tempt but gets a lesser being
to do it for him is worse than one that does it himself. Better one evil being than two. He is like a man that won’t shoot his wife
but hands the gun to his friend to do it.
The Church says that God permitted Satan to be tempted because those who resist temptation are more good than those who don’t because they choose to be good after being attracted by evil. What else can they say? This not solving the problem of how an all-good God could allow temptation to happen. If temptation makes those who resist it more good then why can’t God tempt? If he can’t then temptation is always bad no matter how much good it results in. Their teaching suggests that the person who gets rid of all temptations is not as good as the good person who still has them. Yet they look forward to a Heaven where temptation is no more! They worship a God who cannot be attracted by evil and they contend that God is perfect good!
Good
actions are caused by good desires. We
are supposed to be most free when we are free from sin for sin is irrational
and what is irrational means you have lost your reason and your freedom is
diminished. So God takes away our
freedom by giving us bad desires! Is it
not better to be so free that you never feel interested in sin than to have an
interest in it, an interest which puts others at risk of being hurt? The Church’s answer implies that the most
important good is having freedom to take away the freedom of others by hurting
them. Their implication suggests that
immorality is good! And it suggests that
Satan was more good when God put the suggestion of sin in him! When actions are caused by desires it follows
that the more good desires you have the better.
But God’s treatment of Satan implies otherwise, meaning if Satan agreed
with God’s ways then he deserved to be thrown out of Heaven.
The doctrine that God looks after all that he has made and that he uses evil for a good purpose.
God can only need evil for a purpose if there is no other way to make us good. This idea cannot be true.
God supposedly made the first human beings, Adam and Eve, as perfect. They sinned and the Church says their sin affects us too and we have inherited spiritual damage from them. All he had to do then was to prevent them having children and make another couple to populate the world in their stead so that they would not spread their weaknesses towards sin. Human evil then is useless compared to the good that has been brought out of it. The evil in us could have been easily prevented.
The very fact that evil is that which should not exist, alone proves that God need have no purpose for it.
God had to make us with more good or more evil in us. You are either unholy or holy. Even if you have only one sin, that sin defiles your goodness because you won’t give it up. When you do good as you hold on to sin you are saying you will do good on your terms and when it suits you. You hold on to the evil in your heart as you do the good. Thus you turn the good into a counterfeit of good.
Christians claim that God can’t put goodness in us and we have to do it ourselves. The alternative then is to put less goodness in us or none. If God makes us good we can have the choice of keeping it or losing it. Christianity says that God would be evil if he put perfect good in us. Then they say he is good because he made us less than good. That is clearly saying that God made us evil and is right to even though it is wrong. If he can put evil in us at all he can put good in us and indeed would be better off putting only good in our hearts. The hypocrites worship a God of evil.
In marriage the husband
and wife are closer than mother and son.
It follows then that since you can’t divorce your mother or make her
cease to be your mother you have even less hope of really making your wife
cease to be your wife. Marriage then implies
that divorce is immoral and invalid and wrong.
Marriage is anti-women for women suffer more from marriage than men
do.
Christian marriage claims
that the husband is the master and head of his wife (1 Corinthians 11:3) and
this is the punishment God meted out to Eve and all her female descendants who
would marry (Genesis 3:16). This implies
that if divorce is allowed only the husband should seek divorce.
The New Testament says
that divorce is absolutely wrong. Even
when Paul says that a Christian convert can leave the spouse married in a pagan
ceremony, he doesn’t let the convert marry again. He says in Romans 7 that the law of God is
binding on you as long as you are alive like a woman cannot have another man in
marriage until after her husband dies.
To allow divorce would contradict his point.
Jesus in Matthew seems to say that divorce is only permitted when adultery has occurred. But all he says is that pornea is a separate case – he doesn’t say it is an exception but something he won’t discuss now. Pornea can mean adultery or fornication. He may be referring to invalid marriages as fornication and saying they are a separate case but that divorce is always always wrong. If Matthew really allowed divorce it would have to be eliminated as true scripture for the earliest sources say divorce is absolutely wrong.
If divorce is intolerable despite all the suffering caused by being married to an unsuitable partner, isn't it obvious that separation must be intolerable too? Separation is treating the marriage as if it never happened. If you must keep acting married to your partner by refusing to take a new husband or wife is it not as bad to live away from that partner? Marrying a new partner is less of a breach of the marriage contract than is living away from that partner.
The Catholic Church boasts that it forbids divorce. Not true. The Church declares that the marriage between two validly baptised people cannot be dissolved by any power. But if one of them turns out to be unbaptised then the divorce is permitted. The Church boasts that it protects marriage when it is really its doctrine it cares about - not marriage!
Marriage is not a union of lovers for the feeling of love can disappear and the partners start to love each other in another way.
Jesus' teaching has a lot of vicious implications. No wonder his apostles didn't like his teaching and said it was better not to marry at all.
Ecumenism means unity and is different religions coming together to learn from one another, to pray together, to bring out statements of common belief, to be at peace with one another, to help one another and to work together on solving social problems.
Ecumenism will have one of two motives. One motive is just to soften other religions up to convert them into one religion. This isn’t real ecumenism for it sees unity as being one faith and getting rid of the others. Destroying other faiths is the main goal. This ecumenism isn’t about unity now, it is about a future unity of getting everybody in the one faith so it isn’t ecumenism. The other motive is to bring religions together without intending to convert them. This one implies that one religion is as good as another as long as there is sincerity – a view called indifferentism. Or that there is one really good religion and the rest aren’t so bad but not as good but acceptable. The latter form is the form officially adopted when the Roman Catholic Church departed from the Catholic faith at Vatican II in the 1960’s.
The Church claims that it has not altered its claim to be the one true Church
and yet it inconsistently says if you are a sincere member of another faith you
can be saved. But then if you can be saved in a false religion, then
that religion is good enough for as long as it gets you into Heaven who
cares? One false religion then will
often be as good as another. So being
the right religion doesn’t matter. If
being the right religion doesn’t matter then one religion is as good as
another. That is why the Catholic
traditionalists who accuse the Vatican II Church of looking Catholic but really
being indifferentist are correct.
Ecumenism is a sin and a heresy for Christ commanded us to believe that
he was the way the truth and the life and to make disciples of all
nations. True Christianity is a divisive
troublemaker.
The Church claims to be Catholic. It claims to exist for all people. It says that it is easy to work out that it is the true Church for many people are simple people. If the Church then is really Catholic, then it follows that educated Protestants and their ministers and clergy are wilfully refusing to see that the Church is the true Church. To say any different is to deny that the Church is genuinely Catholic. If Protestants are doing good works and engaging in missions in poor countries and are still hypocrites then surely we must agree that religious faith is probably nearly always self-deception. The Catholics are certainly deluding themselves by claiming they can be Catholic and involved in ecumenism.
Protestants
ceased to be classified as heretics at Vatican II. They are now separated brethren. This is rubbish for the word heretic means
choice, choosing to go your own way and not Christ’s and Protestantism teaches
private interpretation of the Bible allowing each one to think and interpret
scripture as he pleases. The short
Second Epistle of John (supposedly the apostle John) to the elect lady and her
children says that if anybody comes to the Christian without agreeing with all
the doctrine taught by Christ, he isn’t to be allowed into their house or
greeted and he who greets him shares his wicked work. It doesn’t say that such persons are
deliberate deceivers or anything. It
would be clear on that if it did refer to such.
But it says that such people are dangerous because they can
mislead. This was written to a lady who
learned from the apostles themselves so how much more dangerous is it to risk
your faith today by praying with people of a different
faith and listening to them preach? It is certain then that ecumenism
is declared sinful by the God of the Bible.
If
it doesn’t matter what religion you believe in then the only thing that matters
is sincerity. How can ecumenists place so
much value on sincerity? If it is okay
to believe what you want and encourage error then insincerity can’t be that bad
for it only harms yourself!
The Catholic Church only went into ecumenism because the world was sick of religion causing war and fomenting hatred so the Church wanted a sweetness and light reputation to keep its following in the modern age. It’s pure manipulation. As we stated, this happened at Vatican II in the 1960’s when for the first time the Church entered the ecumenical movement. That the Church from the beginning was anti-ecumenism shows that Vatican II was altering Catholic teaching and this is heresy for the constant traditions of the Church from its beginning are infallible for the Church cannot be taught error by the Holy Spirit. To teach that one religion is as good as another is the most serious heresy possible and makes you an apostate, one who has abandoned Christian faith entirely. Christian acts and beliefs are replaced with preferences and feelings so that the apostate looks like a Christian. This is the heresy of Modernism condemned by Pope St Pius X who warned that Modernists sound like Catholics and call themselves Catholics but indeed are not.
Leo XIII taught that Anglican orders were
invalid for they didn’t intend to ordain priests that could offer the sacrifice
of the
Desire is the wish to gain. People say it is the wish to gain or the wish for another to gain. But the latter tries to cover up the fact that your gain is to see the other gain. It is about you thought it looks like it is not. The motive is self-interest.
Even when we hate doing something, we like it enough to do it.
Egoism is the realisation that whatever you do is for your gain - to fulfil your desire.
Those who say we should help others without any intention of gaining from it are hypocrites. They are dangerous for they give us an impossible morality that will only lead to frustration and anger and disillusionment.
Everybody admits the existence of self-interest. But the existence of other-interest can never be proven. For example, you are considered selfish if you hoard your money up and don't share it. Doing this does you no favours and you will know it. But it is still selfish. And if you give everything away for the poor its considered unselfish even though this may do you no favours either! It is more reasonable to assume that human nature only cares about itself.
The tomb of Jesus was found empty on the third day after his crucifixion according to the four gospels.
Christians try to refute the possibility that somebody stole the body of Jesus for they want people to think he rose bodily from the dead. Their proofs that nobody stole the body are just speculation.
The
Matthew gospel says that there were guards at the tomb. It says they were
scared by an angel that appeared and it made them faint. They could have been scared by a
trickster who pretended to be the angel. Perhaps the body was stolen in the confusion or
after they ran off. The Matthew Gospel says the
Jews bribed them to say that the body was
stolen by Jesus' disciples as they slept on duty. Maybe they really did really did sleep on duty and it was not a faint. Perhaps they were drugged by those who were
endeavouring to fake a miracle.
The Gospel of Matthew admits that the soldiers were
amenable to bribes. Jesus could have got plenty of donations through the years that he said
nothing about. Those funds could have been used to bribe the soldiers to let his henchmen who need
not necessarily have been among the apostles steal the body.
All
the sources say that the women were there alone and when the tomb was
open. Maybe they stole the body and lied
about visions of Jesus and angels? We
have no reason to think they couldn’t have managed to move the stone which might
have been a small slab. The gospels say
they wondered who was going to open the tomb for them indicating that the
guards story is lies. Had there been guards
there they would have expected them to open the tomb for them. If the
women couldn’t
open the tomb themselves then why didn’t they take men with them?
The
burial might have been a trick. There is
no reason stopping you from believing that the buriers of Jesus only pretended
to bury Jesus and fooled the witnesses who were in a distracted distressed
state. Maybe the body was never buried
in the first place.
The
Christians expect us to believe that all the possible explanations for the
empty tomb and appearances of Jesus to the apostles take too much faith and it
is easier to believe simply that Jesus rose by a miracle.
That is appalling logic. Natural
explanations, however bizarre, must always be preferred to supernatural ones
and the supernatural explanation with the least miracles in it must be
preferred if a natural one will not do.
A supernatural explanation is never ever necessary. After all, aliens could be doing the miracles
with their super-science. Then in that case they
merely look like miracles but are not miracles at all. If a man came
to the world as it is today from the Middle Ages he would think that
televisions are supernatural. That would
in fact be irrational of him. He should
instead think that it is something to do with nature that he doesn’t understand. The idea that demons made people forget the
real location of the body is a better one than that it rose from the dead.
Error is being wrong. Error is always bad for in so far as you are wrong. You will be willing to undergo inconvenience for that error so error attacks your human dignity. Unless you nip it in the bud, its problems will be passed on to other people and harm them. That is why we should make no apology for converting people to putting people and not creeds and Gods and clergy first. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that error has no rights because it is wrong (page 277, Pope Fiction, Patrick Madrid, Basilica Press, San Diego, 1999). It doesn’t have the right to be respected. When we seem to respect error it is because it is we respect the people who err and not the error. If this teaching is correct then everybody has the duty to try to convert others to her or his belief even if they are political beliefs. Nobody has the right to order you to be silent about your beliefs.
Many Catholics say that the trouble with
respecting people of different beliefs is that we can’t please everybody so
the Catholic Church being the single largest organisation in the world must
alone have the right to propagate its beliefs.
Casting out demons that
have taken over people so that the people will be free. Jesus performed many exorcisms in the Bible
which is odd for you hardly ever hear of possessions these days. When demons take over they treat the victim
very cruelly to the horror of the spectators.
It would be better to take over and use the person to do evil things but
in secret while hiding the malevolence.
The demons would only be putting people off them and off evil if they
did anything else which is why no story of demonic possession makes sense. They look more like displays to get followers
for the exorcist who is really on their side so they pretend he could and indeed
has cast them
out. The Jews suggested that to Jesus.
He then tried to scare them into thinking that they were insulting the Spirit
of God when in fact he could give no proof but speculation that they were
wrong. He said that they would never be forgiven
for their sin. Obviously what they said had got to him. He wanted to
scare them into silence. He was the one insulting the
Spirit.
Christian teaching:
“Faith is trust in God and in his promises and in what he has revealed. It is the belief that God is honest and
reliable and leads to you believing all he allegedly revealed. It is a supernatural gift from God for
humanity is believed to prefer to be independent from God. Humanity will only trust God and become
dependant on God if God helps them to do it, if God puts thoughts and
realisations in their minds and changes their emotions to make faith
attractive. So it is not natural.” Faith is a miracle.
Christianity wants and
expects like its God for all believers to believe in the same stuff despite the
problems of making this happen which shows that in principle faith has to be
caused by the direct influence of God to make it possible.
Christian Faith involves
believing all the dogma that the source God speaks through states as true be it
Church, prophet or Bible or any number of these. That means that if you really have
supernatural faith in some Catholic doctrines and regard the Church as the
source you will believe everything that source says. That is why Catholics who might scoff at the
virgin birth of Jesus are not Catholics even if they believe everything
else. They do not have the gift of faith
but imagine they have it. A person with
real faith who refuses to believe doctrines from the source of revelation and
belief must be refusing to believe God on purpose and is trying to stamp out
the light of God so not only does she know she is fighting God she is also
giving up her trust in God. To deny or
question one principle taught by the source is say that the whole source is
unreliable. That is why the Church
regards heresy or disagreeing with her teaching as the worst and most dangerous
sin.
Christian Faith cannot
mean that God makes you see the evidence that verifies the authenticity of the
source of his doctrines for no two people agree on the evidences and reasons.
Furthermore, they differ on the
interpretation of the evidence and/or how helpful it is. For example, some accept some arguments for
God's existence and others accept none of them.
So God helps you towards the conclusion without any regard for the
evidence. This really means that what
you feel God is saying to you is what matters not the evidence for the evidence
is not allowed to stand on its own for the whole process of getting to faith
requires prayer and openness to God’s guidance.
So faith then is anti-evidence though it pays lip-service to it.
It is a superstition. It takes
quite a lot of arrogance to hold that what you want to be true is a
communication from God and therefore true and that those who disagree with you
are wrong. With that belief the more
holier you seem to be the more black inside you would be because fanaticism
(the desire to hurt others over faith) and egotism would be behind your
holiness and it is not about God at all but only looks like it is.
The rock Christianity is built is on the doctrine of faith and it underlines how that faith is all lies and wishful thinking so that is what the miracles it boasts about are defending! It is feelings about doctrines that mean everything to Christians not the doctrines and they disguise this self-indulgence as selfless love for all.
It is common for Christians to mistake belief for faith. In fact, correct Christian doctrine sees faith as a form of knowledge. Sensible people know that the more outrageous a claim is the stronger the evidence is you need for it. You need absolute proof to accuse people of original sin, to accuse them of needing a saviour, to accuse them of being able to commit serious sin, to say Jesus rose from the dead, to say priests forgive sins. Every religious doctrine needs absolute proof for the claims made are so huge and strange. And this proof must be understood by the person entering a religion before the person can be validly accepted. Christians can only say, "The more miraculous the doctrine the more miraculously perfect evidence you need that it is true. We agree. We have this evidence. We know in our hearts that we are right." That attitude is arrogant and vicious and irresponsible. Fundamentalist religion will only go out to murder and maim if it thinks it knows that it should.
Fanaticism is usually a
religious trait. Fanaticism in religion
takes two forms. The first oppresses the
mind and tries to make you feel guilty for disagreeing with the religious
status quo. Christianity does this when
it forbids doubt (Question 177, A Catechism of Christian Doctrine, CTS,
Political fanaticism is terrible but can be excused a little for it will have some evidence for the stances it takes but there is no excuse at all for religious fanaticism which has no evidence. And it never has any. A political regime knows fine well that it has no right to kill citizens at whim even if it kills. But with religion it could be argued that God authorises and needs those killings. Religion is a licence for fanaticism. Politics is not.
Tolerance is a big virtue these days. It is insulting for it implies putting up with something undesirable. Religious tolerance means one religion merely stomaching the others that disagree with it. There should be no religion as there is enough around to test our tolerance without it adding to the problems. People get some comfort from religion but have they considered how in the bigger picture that this comfort is not worth it? Tolerance when practiced by a believer in religion is itself a form of fanaticism.
The Virgin Mary allegedly
appeared six times in 1917 in
Forgiveness is at the heart of the Christian faith. Forgiving is supposed to be good while condoning, rewarding the ill-done by acting as if it does not matter, is bad. Forgiveness says the sin matters and requires hating the sin and loving the sinner.
Christian forgiveness is two-faced because you can no more love the sinner and hate the sin any more than you can trust the sinner and not trust the sin they commit. Trust is an ingredient of love and a major one at that. Hate thrives on mistrust and mistrust involves fear. Fear always blinds you at least a bit. Therefore to fear is to tempt yourself to hate or will evil on another and to attempt to become unfair.
Christianity seeks to turn away from valuing people to valuing people for the sake of God - so in reality people are thought of as commodities to be used to please God. Mother Teresa once admitted she didn't give a toss about the people she helped for it was all about God to her. A faith like that can only appeal to people who are at least secret misanthropes and how could such people genuinely love sinners?
The idea of a forgiving God is not consoling at all. If God forgives he will not forgive you unless you forgive everybody else too first which is only decency and commonsense and it is scriptural too (Mark 11:25,26; Matthew 6:12). But can you forgive Hitler? You can only pretend you can. You would need to experience the full horror of the evil that Hitler did. Otherwise you are not forgiving properly. Subconsciously, if you experienced his evil and your family did, you wouldn’t forgive. Nobody can genuinely forgive everybody. They only imagine that they do.
If to refuse to forgive means that God refuses you pardon, then to sin after or to not forgive means you are ungrateful for this pardon you have received from him and are trying to reverse it all which is a very serious sin indeed. Then nobody can be saved. To deny this would be to become a self-deluding hypocrite.
Forgiveness means that if the person could be punished, you would not approve this punishment. Forgiveness is not about feelings.
Christians talk about how good forgiveness is for you and that it rids you of hate and stress and fear. Recovering from these pests is not forgiveness. Its emotional recovery.
To accuse people who are trapped in their anger and resentment of being unforgiving is the worst form of bullying imaginable.
The
will is a feeling itself. It is the
feeling that I am programmed to think is for the best that wins all the
time. It therefore makes me “choose”. So my strongest feeling is to do what is best
for me. I do not determine what the
strongest feeling makes me do for I am not free to want what I like to want
with a snap of my fingers.
God could program us to do good all the time for our feelings that cause us to do good or harm are programmed anyway. People worry that if free will is denied that we deny human responsibility for good and evil. If we are not free we should be treated well so there is no need to believe we need free will to be rewarded for our goodness. Even if we are free we are considered responsible for the harm we do even if we didn’t mean it so free will has nothing to do with this either. We are more sure that people suffer than that they are free therefore it is wrong to make them suffer for the sake of what they have allegedly earned. If they have to be hurt this should not be the reason.
Free will is an assumption. It is impossible to prove it. We think we are free when we are drunk though the drink is removing our freedom. So what makes us think we are free when we are sober?
We can carry on much the same way as we live without believing in free will. The doctrine is just a nasty rumour spread by religion since the dawn of time and it is inexcusable for it is not needed at all.
It is a trendy dogma to assert that blaming a person for some bad thing is different from declaring them responsible for it. It goes, "You can't blame a person without declaring them responsible. But you can declare a person responsible without blaming. We say we should never blame but we should remind people of their personal responsibility for the bad things they allow to happen to them." Blame says bad. Bad means should not exist and we should feel a desire to make it suffer. Thus to say anything is bad is vindictive. It wishes evil on evil. To wish evil on a thing is wishing evil and becoming evil just like it would be evil to wish evil on a person. You can't say that the person who would murder Ann's hat if he could is better inside than the person who would murder her. The purpose of telling people they are responsible for something is to tell them they can do something about the bad and they can stop being bad enough to let the bad happen. The only true difference between blame and responsibility is the different words.
You cannot blame unless you believe in free will. Free will is a vindictive doctrine.
An attempt to salvage God from the charge of cruelty when he allows innocent suffering by blaming us for it. The logic goes that God made us to love him and gave us free will to do right or do wrong because love cannot be forced. When we chose evil, he made evil things like killer viruses so that sacrifice could be made in love and we are told that this is our fault, not his. But when I am most sure of my existence (that I exist now is the one thing I cannot doubt), I have to put myself first and so I should not suffer but be happy all the time and a God should make that possible. I am not advocating having no concern for others. We need to suffer to be happy because of the way things are. I am saying this should not be the way things are in the first place if there is a God. God is evil when I suffer and when he demands sacrifice. To invent a God and then accuse people of causing all the evil in the world means that belief is being put before people, what you can touch and see is put second to a concept and perception that might be wrong. That is barbaric and the free will defence is an insult to us humanists and to those whom we cherish.
Religion says that love is voluntary. Only a being with free will to do extreme evil can give it. So they say God gave us all this freedom but we abused it of our own volition and so he is not to blame for evil. This reasoning is called the free will defence or the freedom defence. It is meant to clear God of the blame for evil. But it is obvious that God could limit our free will. It is limited anyway by our feelings and what we can remember and what we can think of. In short, it is limited by our mental powers. Hitler disproves God.
Religion says that to be free we have to be free all the way. We have to be free to do tremendous harm like Hitler was.
Christianity says that too. But it does not really believe it. Christianity says that we are all sinners meaning that we do not have the free will to live a sinless life. So we only have choice in relation to what sins we want to commit. We have no choice about being sinners or not. This implies that God doesn't give us enough free will. A God who refuses to give you the power to live a sinless life but you gives you rein to commit whatever evil you wish after making sure you will sin is a God of evil. The freedom to live a sinless life is not as important to him as making people inclined to commit any sin even extreme ones.
If God wanted us to have a lot of free will he would have given us the power to live without sin.
He lets us have a bias towards sin that we will give in to and then lets us become Hitlers if we can. So he gives us too much free will of the wrong kind. The free will argument that evil is compatible with God's love is wrong. To worship God is to close our eyes and hearts to his evil.
The free will defence is rejected by astute scholars such as Brian Davies OP. He says that it denies that God is the maker of all. It says we make our sins in spite of God. But if God is almighty we make our sins because of him. He argues that God is right to do this so it does not mean God sins with us. We have here an idea of God which means he lays out everything that happens to us. It is a form of fatalism and predetermination that is as vile as that taught by Islam. Islam often reasons that if you want to kill for God, go and do it for he is predetermining your actions so it is up to him to worry about it not you.
All religions accept the
fruits doctrine. Basically what it says
is that if the religion has good fruits then it is the true religion. Jesus said in Matthew 7 that you can tell bad
prophets by their bad fruits.
Christianity believes that Jesus was the Son of God for Christianity has
good fruits. Roman Catholicism decides
that a miracle or apparition - say
The Catholic Church teaches that good fruits come from prayer, faith in God's Church and the sacraments. We hear today of the conversions at Catholic apparition sites. The most cited reason for taking these apparitions seriously as supernatural events is the fruits. The Church correctly observes that the fruits do not come from the apparitions - which may even be hoaxes - but from the Catholic spirituality applied to the pilgrims. To say fruits come from an apparition directly is to contradict the doctrine of the Church that we do not have to believe in them.
Apparition site where the
Virgin Mary supposedly appeared a great deal during the 1960’s. The apparitions were not from God for he
could easily have picked visionaries who would never deny that they saw the
Virgin like the Garabandal visionaries did.
Visionary Marie Loli died denying seeing the Virgin. The apparitions have been condemned by all the bishops
of the area who denied, in their official capacity, that the visions were
supernatural or from God. They have been condemned not once but several times. Garabandal however was accompanied with
many testimonies that miracles really happened and still the Church rejects the
idea that any miracle took place. There
are times when no matter how good the testimony is there is better evidence
that the testimony is wrong. The mess at
Garabandal warns about how little faith we should put in miracle testimonies.
To
be God, God has to be perfect for what is imperfect can hardly be the Supreme
Being for there are forces that it can’t conquer that make it faulty. God cannot exist because evil exists. The God concept goes with the activity of
worship for only what ought to be worshipped can be called God and only what is
worthy can be worshipped. As God is
perfect and the maker of all and we owe him everything he alone matters. We
should prefer even self-destruction to displeasing him so he alone matters.
If God never wanted evil to exist and it is our fault then it follows that he puts up with it for a purpose. This is to deny that he is almighty or even competent because he could arrange things so that we are less likely to choose evil. Yet we have this bias towards evil. Some are born with less bias than others. It is proven that God must want evil to exist.
If suffering has a purpose then it follows that it must be intended so
that we will be able to make sacrifices for love. This implies that the more God lets us suffer
the better for the more we sacrifice the more we love. This shows the doctrine of God to be morbid
and degrading and enamoured of fanaticism for the allegation that God wants
suffering is the only plausible assumption to take if you want to believe in
God.
Should we feed the beggar because he needs food and we care? That is the same as doing it is because it is good. Or should we do it because God commands it in which case if he forbade it we would let the beggar starve? If God comes first then we should do it because God commands it for in so far as we do it for the beggar we are not honouring God who is more important. The solution that God commands us to care for the beggar doesn’t work for the question is asking what matters: obedience to commands or concern for others. God may be called love but all he is good for is destroying it for since we have to put obedience before caring for an unfortunate human being. If God commanding is what is important and not good then religion is about power and control even when it seems to do good. The person who believes that caring is more important than obeying is an atheist in practice. The only message the concept of God gives out is that God and therefore religion must be served and put first and that human beings and yourself are dirt and good for nothing at all and all must be manipulated for him and those who resist him must be punished.
Priests who condone the
ways of God when he lets the children suffer are doing so in honour of a belief
that thrives on a hidden kind of evil and that is totally
repulsive.
It means a gift from God. God forgiving sins is a grace for you do not deserve it. A deserved gift is not a gift. Strangely God helping you to live a good life is also a grace. Grace is an evil concept that denies the truth that however bad you are, the one thing you always deserve is to be helped to live a good life. You earn grace by your sins so grace is nonsense. Grace is the essence of what the Christian gospel is about which marks Christianity as evil especially when it teaches that God is right to deprive the souls in Hell of grace so that they abide there forever. Grace cannot make you holier for a person who does a lot of bad things but who tries really hard to fight his weakness will be holier in his heart than a person to whom virtue comes easy. So it follows then that the holier you are the worse you are! Grace is a miracle. We know from the entry on free will that God can change our feelings and make us very holy but that God needs to do a miracle when he could have set everything out right in the first place shows that grace is nonsense.
The Bible teaches that forgiveness for sin is a gift from God. Christianity says you get forgiven as long as you resolve to make amends to the people you hurt. So you get pardoned before you do anything. This is an insult to anybody that you hurt. You should not get forgiveness until you do the bare minimum to prove your worthiness of it for actions speak and words do not. It is doing that shows the authenticity of your intentions. Otherwise you can't know.
To separate the sin from the sinner is to deny that the sinner is the cause of the sin and to pretend that sin is a thing when it is not - it is a what kind of person a person is. Sins are not just what sinners do. Sins are what reveal the kind of person the sinner is. No separation is possible. You can’t hate the sin like it was the sinner and not the person committing the sin. Its not a person. It’s ridiculous hating a thing. It’s only a thing. To hate the sin is hating the sinner as well. Christ said if you have two masters you will like one and hate the other (Matthew 6:24). This shows that it is his doctrine that hating a person is too easy for us all. When somebody hates your sin you can be sure that it is you they really hate. We all know that to hate sin is personal for it feels personal. You feel something against the person as a person. Christianity calls on you to lie to be a Christian. It calls on you to tell people with a straight face that you tolerate them as people but you don't tolerate their sins! Hate is a form of intolerance. Intolerance is at the root of hate.
The Christians say that hating sin turns so easily into hating the sinner. Obviously the more sin you hate the more likely this will be. But the gospel is clear that we must hate sin and find it repulsive. The stress of all that hatred and trying to keep it from turning into hatred for the sinner (I'm not pretending that they are not the same thing!) would soon result in a complete mental and nervous breakdown. Christian forgiveness is motivated by pleasing God and not genuine concern for yourself or others. The Church is quite clear that if we have a choice between loving people and God and can't do both we must love God. Vile! Vile! Vile!
Love the sinner and hate the sin is as silly as love the nurse and hate the woman who is the nurse. The teaching that we must love the sinner and hate the sin because we are sinners ourselves suggests that hating the sinner is good but only if you are not a sinner! It involves wishing you were in a position to be able to hate the sinner!
Cancer isn’t bad. It is just something that is living and
growing in the wrong place. It’s the
place that is wrong not the cancer for life and growth are good. Therefore you cannot hate cancer. You hate its consequences but not the
cancer. You don’t have anything personal
against the cancer or its wrongness. If
you really loved the sinner you wouldn’t be able to have a personal hatred of
the sin.
Loving the sinner and hating the sin is the same thing as condoning in that you pretend the sinner hasn’t had anything to do with the sin. The main reason condoning is bad is because of the results and there is no point in condemning it and praising forgiveness when both have the same results: namely the criminal getting off scot-free. It is best to put evildoing down to the insanity we all have rather than down to us knowingly and freely doing evil to avoid the hateful implications of faith in forgiveness. In other words, see evil as an aberration and not a sin. This way you can praise the woman who neglected her father for her kindness towards you without implying you approve of her behaviour towards her father. The better you get on after doing something terrible the more good you feel about having done the evil, so to be kind to her would be condoning and rewarding her sin.
The Church makes people who imagine that it forbids hate feel good and safe. They are mistaken for the Church says that hate is an act of will not emotion. You can have the feelings of hate and not will them and you can refuse to give in to them. The hate is not sin. So hate is acting to destroy the wellbeing of another. Also, if you feel that sinners are leading your loved ones into Hell forever you will naturally feel hatred for them. This is not a sin as long as you can't help it. It is simply not true that the Church is a sweetness and light organisation that is too nice to advocate hatred. It does.
Acts of sin don't seem that bad in the sense for example that we feel that even Hitler should not be punished with everlasting punishment. But the religious treat people as having sin natures. They have influenced and persuaded the law of the land to jail people for life for something that took them one second to do: the act of murder. They agree that a person who steals a bar of chocolate should have their good name taken away by the law and the papers and punished seemingly out of proportion to the crime. They agree to this because they see the murderers and thieves as having an evil nature or character which is why they must suffer. It is more about dealing with the dark characters than the actions. Nobody can pretend that any of that is about loving the sinners and hating their sins!
It is not the evil that people do to us that troubles us. It is the hate or bad feeling toward us expressed by their actions. We are made to want people to like and love us with their feelings. We are emotional creatures. If Catholics understood their faith properly they would not be in it.
The state of being with God and enjoying him forever. It is a state of perfect happiness because God is the source of all happiness. Christianity insists that God only lets the morally perfect into Heaven. But why bother when the virtues are no good there for there is no suffering there? (Revelation 21:4). What God would prudence and fortitude be in Heaven? The doctrine shows how the doctrine of God incites discrimination against doubters and atheists for they are influencing people to stay away from the one source of true happiness: God.
Christians want the happiness not God. But they can't admit that. If they wanted God, they would be willing to be tormented forever to the extreme to help others as long as it meant he was pleased. Christians use the people they charm and help in order to get the pie in the sky.
The everlasting punishing for those who die outside of a friendly relationship with God. It is a terrible slur to say that people would throw themselves into such a state forever. None of us could be that bad. You would need absolute proof to make such a terrible accusation. In the absence of such proof it is undeniable that hell is vindictive wishful thinking. It is nasty despite its having being taught by Christ and the Bible, Muhammad and the Koran as revelation from God. People come before faith and not faith before people. Hell suggests different. And Hell is the evil that Jesus (allegedly) rose to promote. The Church says that his Gospel cannot be understood or be that important without the need to be saved from such a dreadfully unspeakable fate. And those who say that instead of Hell we will have everlasting death if we do not do what God wants are only a bit better than their rivals. What is the point in banning hate if you are going to encourage people to intend or wish on some level that if an adulterer or homosexual dies unreconciled to God that they will go to Hell?
The teaching that we make our own Hell and spend all eternity refusing to repent denies that Hell is God punishing us. Jesus spoke of it as eternal punishment (Matthew ). Jesus warned people about Hell. It would make no sense to warn people if there was nothing keeping them there but themselves! The people in Heaven just look at the inhabitants in Hell and go, "They deserve it and we will not waste compassion on them". Its an insult to your departed loved ones to say they go to Heaven!
The Church says that Hell is your own choice. So the people in Hell supposedly would stay there rather than turn to God. They hate him so much that they cut off their noses to spite their faces forever. Catholics say that atheists are repelled by God because they think he maliciously lets us suffer if he exists. They will go to Hell because they have the attitude that keeps the very Devil himself in Hell. They have the main ingredient of hellfire. The doctrine violates the humanitarian principle that we must avoid having beliefs that attack others.
A tradition more than a
religion. It allows you to be an Atheist
as long as you follow the traditions.
That is fine but all Hindus then should become Atheists and enjoy life
without the burden of supernatural beliefs.
The caste system of Hinduism is a great evil for it treats many people
as dirt just because they were born into the “lowest” class. They are accused of having committed great
sins in a past life thus deserving this treatment.
In Christianity theology
the Holy Spirit is the Third Person who is God.
He is the one most associated with interior spiritual guidance and Jesus
says he leads his true disciples into all truth. Jesus said that the Jews who said he did
miracles by the Devil’s power were blaspheming the Holy Spirit and would never
be forgiven. Catholics, Protestants and
Mormons are three cults that each claim that the Spirit has told them in their
hearts and by improving their virtues that their religion is true but the three
contradict each other. The real Holy
Spirit is just their prejudice and arrogance.
They are the biggest blasphemers of the lot!
The Holy Spirit is
chiefly called Holy because he is the sanctifier, he makes Christians holy and
live holy lives. But our perception and
practice of right and wrong is impaired.
Accidents often happen and we screw things up. To pretend that this is holiness and inspired
by the Holy Spirit is the height of arrogance.
It is expedience not holiness.
Most people who think they are inspired by some sanctifier are wrong
- which proves the point.
This is condemned in the Bible despite attempts to cover this up with interpretations that are not straightforward. For example, some say that the apostle Paul in Romans 1 condemns people who are homosexual against their nature. But it can be read as saying people choose to be gay and that is the simplest interpretation. And if it was not a sin to engage in sexual activity with a member of the same sex, surely it would not be a big deal if a straight man had gay sex. Paul wrote to Corinth which like today was sexually lax. He ordered that a man must be handed over to Satan and cursed and expelled from the Church because he was living in a sexual relationship with his step-mother. That was not incest or disgusting. It was heterosexual. Yet it provoked such an extreme anger from Paul that he had to persecute this man in a public letter. Anyone who imagines Paul would have been kinder towards homosexuals is deceiving himself. No his condemnation would be even more virulent.
The Bible God says that a man that lies with a man as with a woman they must be put to death in Leviticus 20:13. It is taken to be a condemnation of sodomy. It is more than that. A man can lie with a woman sexually without having intercourse with her. Intercourse doesn’t have to necessarily happen with a man and wife all the time. They might engage in other forms of sexual activity. So any sexual activity between two men - eg kissing and masturbation for example - is to be punished as a horrendous abomination. The Bible God also says that their barbaric execution is their own fault “their blood will be upon them”. So it is what they justly deserve. The Christian must believe that homosexuality even when monogamous and no harm but only happiness ensues is extremely evil. That is bigotry and going too far and no amount of pretending to love homosexuals can mask that. God says then that all his commands about killing homosexuals and stuff must be obeyed so that the people will not be vomited out of Israel and they must be holy as he is holy. God was willing to put the nation out of the land he gave them if they tolerated homosexuals showing how abhorrent the sin is. So the killing of homosexuals is holy, it is God’s nature, it is not something God is forced to allow against his nature (Leviticus 20:22-27). To promote the Bible as the word of God is incitement to hatred and not just against homosexuals.
Protestantism teaches that the Bible is the only authority in faith and morals and that the Christian has to interpret it for himself with the help of the Holy Spirit. Clearly this implies that if one reads about the holy murder commanded in the Bible by God and feels they must stone gay people to death or settle for beating them up then they must be given the right to do it.
The Catholic Church says that sex outside marriage, whether homosexual or not, is always a sin - its absolutely (ie always) wrong. It says we must always let the person know we do not like it or approve. For example, you don't let them have sex in your house. You speak up for marriage and keeping sex confined to it. You don't congratulate them. The Church says that if you really love a person you will not respect their sinful choices. Thus true Christians will fight to stop sex outside marriage ever being legally tolerated.
In my opinion the true
understanding of humanism is the recognition that atheism and living without
God is love.
Anybody in the world who
accepts the following three principles is automatically a Humanist.
I see no reason why God
or any religion should tell me what is right and wrong. I will decide that for myself. There is no need for them because I cannot
follow them unless I decide to anyway so I may as well decide without letting
them making any decisions for me.
I see no reason to
believe in free will for we could be programmed to feel free. There is no need for punishment – just stop
the crime and deter people from crime without judging them as evil beings.
Everything I do I want to
do at least under the circumstances so when I only please myself I can only
love myself. I love myself in helping
others.
The virtue of not getting
above yourself. It is the converse of
pride which the Church considers the root of all evil. Religion is actually opposed to this virtue
though it pretends it is not. Is it
humble to say you have got a revelation from God? Not even if you really have had some kind of
revelation or vision for that gives you power over others. The very reason that humility is advocated by
religion is that it makes you serve others rather than be above them. It will be replied that to give a message
from God is serving others. It is if the
message gives advice and does not start saying stuff like that Jesus rose from
the dead or gives orders. Doing right
matters and not dogma and not commands.
A trance state that
enables you to be controlled by another person.
One thing is for sure, human beings are in this state all the time.
We know this for
there are things people who know us can get us to do without us even realising
that we are being manipulated. We can make ourselves ill if we mistakenly believe that we are ill. The human mind is so fragile and steered by
emotions and forces we are unaware of that it is certain that things like
religion are dangerous and irresponsible and exploitive. That is why Humanism forbids anything that is
against free-thinking and self-determination.
It has been
scientifically proven that hysteria can be easily spread in a crowd for we are
conditioned by society to believe that we should do what everybody else does
which is why good and bad example are so influential. Also, if people see a crime happen and are
questioned separately after their accounts will be different in many ways for
their memory and perception is tampered with by suggestion, a power in the
subconscious that takes over.
Giving a created thing
the honour that is due to God. For
example, worshipping the moon like many pagans do. To be real worship, the worship has to be
well-meant and sincere. Otherwise it is
not idolatry. The condemnations of
idolatry as a sin in the Bible clearly imply that God will condemn you for
worshipping anything that is not him even if you did not mean to.
Furthermore, God will probably condemn you for disobeying him by mistake as
well. The condemnation of idolatry
implies you will go to Hell forever for not believing the right
things. Christians say that you will be
punished not for your unbelief as long as your unbelief is caused by invincible
ignorance that you cannot help but for your sins. This is nonsense for unbelief
could only justify God leaving you to suffer for your sins if it was a sin
itself. Despite all the watering down
these days, Christianity is a very bigoted religion.
When God the Son
allegedly became man, later named as Jesus, in the womb of the Virgin
Mary. Jesus once lied that he and the
Father witnessing to his being the Son of God fulfilled the divine law in the
books of Moses that two witnesses were necessary before a claim could be
believed. God would not need to lie so
the incarnation doctrine is untrue. Jesus and God were guilty of the
hypocrisy of recognising the Law of Moses as the infallible word of God when
there was no eyewitness testimony that it was written exactly as God had laid
it out. There is no eyewitness testimony
that says the four gospels were not selective in what they said about
Jesus. Being selective is the best way
to give a misleading impression. It is good if
you wish to create a better image of some idol than he or she really was. Had God
really written them as the Church says, we would have the testimony. The Church will answer that many will still
not believe. Maybe, but that is no
excuse for God making a poor effort to back up the scriptures.
The
view that our choices are uncaused and therefore we have free will. But if we don’t cause our choices then they
are not ours so it fails. Free will
cannot be reconciled with determinism the idea that our choices are caused for
cause means forcing something to happen.
Free will cannot exist for determinism necessarily holds that our
choices are caused by our emotions and our perception and our circumstances so the same emotions and
choices and circumstances always results in the same choice.
So whether caused or uncaused we can’t have free will. This problem refutes the view that God has
given us free will and that we are to blame for the evil and suffering in the
world for we have abused our freedom.
The claim that there is no error in the Bible and that its contradictions can be solved. Muslims say the same thing about the Koran and Mormons about their scriptures. It is easier to believe in contradictions than in the many improbable and bizarre solutions they offer for the contradictions and the errors. All the so-called solutions are human assumptions. God could arrange things so that it could be CLEARLY proved there was a remarkable agreement that could only be explained by divine inspiration. God he failed to: meaning the books are not inspired at all. To believe in inerrancy is to believe more in scholars and theologians who pretend to explain away the errors than in the purported word of God. The doctrine of Jesus - taught in the Bible - that people who will not repent and believe in the word of God when they have the word of Moses and the Prophets will not be convinced if anybody goes back to them from the dead in a miracle implies that these books are more convincing than any miracle. This is total madness. The books are not that convincing. (Obviously Jesus takes it for granted that anybody with commonsense will agree with putting homosexuals and adulterers to death as the Bible commands.) The books are not a miracle themselves so a miracle would be more convincing. If Jesus is right then the miracles the books testify to do not verify the books. It is absurd to consider the books to be the word of God then.
The Bible in 2 Peter 1:16-21 says that the
Old Testament is more sure even than seeing Jesus transfigure and glow before
your very eyes – that means total infallibility for the Old Testament was taught
by Jesus and the early Church. Paul
wrote that all of scripture is breathed out from the mouth of God (2 Timothy
3:16-17) and able to be complete for all who want to do the will of God. The true Christian then will be a
Fundamentalist. The view that the ideas
not the words of the Bible rubbish. The ideas are inseparable
from the words. The view that the
main truths is inspired is dishonest for that
leaves you free to pick and choose what you like. While it is true that for Christians only
Jesus Christ is the word of God and infallible, he is supposed to be the supernatural
author of the Bible so it is his voice.
Jesus alone being the word doesn’t mean the Bible can be treated as
containing error.
The power of the Roman
Catholic Church and the pope to work out doctrines and declare them revealed by
God while being guarded by God against error. Most Roman doctrines have come out of this
belief in the power to divine true doctrine. If the Church is wrong then the
doctrines are not
binding for belief and the whole Catholic faith falls apart. The Roman Catholic Church claims that it is
infallible when its bishops meet in an ecumenical council and when the pope
makes an ex cathedra statement. They
must intend their teaching to be infallible and binding on the Church. Jesus is said to have given the Church this
power when he said the gates of Hell would never prevail over his Church and
when he promised the Holy Spirit to the apostles to guide them into all truth. But at most Jesus promised his Church would
be indefectible, never depart far enough from the faith to block the salvation
of its members. And no Church has all
the truth.
The Catholic Church says that infallibility
is not inspiration but protection from error.
This is a lie for you must need some inspiration to avoid error. The Church says that inspiration doesn’t
happen since the time God wrote the Bible and the traditions of the Church for there is
no public revelation since the apostles.
This proves that infallibility cannot happen. The Church is totally incoherent in its claims
about this charism. This being so even if it has the power to be infallible it cannot
use it. The Church says that the
conclusion is infallible but the reasons for the conclusion are not. So the Holy Spirit protects from making the
wrong conclusion when the research is undertaken but he doesn’t guarantee that
the research will be well done. In that
case, the research can’t be very important and so we are talking about
inspiration here. If the research is
important, then the reasons for the conclusion are also infallible.
What infallibility supposedly does is show
that a doctrine was taught by the apostles at least implicitly or by
implication for nothing can add to their teaching. That is why giving an infallible statement is
called defining or making known. First
of all it is made known to the pope for example but it is foolish to think it’s
not infallible until he reveals it. Can
you believe that the decision of Pope Pius IX that the Virgin Mary was
conceived without sin wasn’t infallible until he announced it? No way.
Don’t say that the pope was infallible during his research for he
intended to define the doctrine and if he didn’t intend that he wouldn’t have
any infallibility. He intends an
infallible revelation as a
possibility.
If Pius IX had been led to
the conclusion that the Immaculate Conception was false then he would not have
made the announcement. We would have a
dogma saying that the Immaculate Conception wasn’t true. Anything a pope says could possibly be turned
into a dogma so everything a pope teaches is open to being made
infallible. The intention idea solves
nothing.
Infallibility in itself would only make sense
if the pope was infallible all the time.
Even the most extreme Catholics don’t think that he is.
Vatican I was the ecumenical council
that made it a dogma or binding belief that the pope was infallible. Vatican I
put limits on papal
infallibility. It said the pope was only infallible when he spoke clearly that he
was making this dogma part of the faith. Despite all that, it is obvious that the doctrine makes
the pope more infallible than it looks.
The Church only pretends that it accepts papal infallibility under strict conditions
because it knows fine well that popes are capable of serious error and to go
too far with papal infallibility will only make a laughing stock of the
Church. But nevertheless its cover-up
doesn’t work and the pope is still left more infallible than even he would want
to be! Pius IX proclaimed the Immaculate
Conception as dogma BEFORE any definition came from the Church that he was
infallible. This proves that the pope
must be regarded as infallible all the time for he is to be obeyed even without
a definition and he can define without being defined infallible. The pope then is the only thing that is
needed if you want infallible teaching and ecumenical councils aren’t. This gives absolute power, at least
potentially, to the pope! It contradicts
the biblical view that the apostles shared authority with Peter. There was no greatest among them in terms of
rank.
A regime used by the Roman Catholic Church for many centuries to stop anybody expressing opinions contrary to the doctrine of the Church. Millions were put to death through it and extreme torture was deployed. Today, the Church claims to believe that it was an abuse of religion. But as long as the Church holds that it is better for one human life to be lost than for the Church not to exist we refuse to buy this. Human nature is peculiar and we are all strange to a great extent which shows why weird organisations like the Church are just asking for to be "abused". Only if you can prove your teachings can you dare to say that abuses are not your responsibility. Even being wrong or implausible is enough to prove that the abuses are your responsibility. Additionally, the Church teaches doctrines that suggest that hurting people for religious reasons is perfectly acceptable.
The doctrine that though
men wrote the Bible the way they wanted it is as much God’s word as theirs and
so it is both fully human in authorship and fully divine. This is obviously contradictory
nonsense. The Church says it is not and
that it is a mystery. Then why could I
not be God the Father? Maybe that is a
mystery too! Only a book that was
mechanically dictated by God could be his word.
Not even fundamentalists believe that the Bible was dictated with the
human writers being little more than typewriters. The Bible does show marks of humanity
such as bad sentence structure in places and bad descriptions and vague
teachings. When the Bible is not the
word that means the Koran isn’t his word either for it sees the Bible as its
predecessor. So though the Koran claims
to have been dictated by an angel speaking for God it is not God’s word.
The word Islam means submission to God. The religion was founded by the Prophet Muhammad. He gave the world the Koran which was written down after his death. This book, though it claims to be the perfect word of God, gives no evidence of supernatural origin. It never predicts the future though such predictions are the only sure mark that a book is from God who alone knows the future. You could write a clearer and more uplifting book than the Koran in the name of God so it would be fairer for this new book to be taken for the real word of God. The Koran is alleged to be a perfect work of written art. But if you read it you see many mistakes, such as lack of clarity, and you will sometimes meet a piece of it in one place and a similar version of it in another - bad editing. It accuses Christians of making a Holy Trinity of God, Jesus and Mary which is false. The trinity is the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Mary wasn't even as important in the Church at that time as she is now. So its hard to make an excuse for this gross error.
An American Christian
Fundamentalist sect that follows the New World Translation of the Bible. This Bible is a travesty of the standard text
of the Bible and has been adulterated to back up the sect’s peculiar
beliefs. They deny that Jesus was God
and reject his bodily resurrection. The
cult has fallen prey to fanaticism in its absolute opposition to blood
transfusion. The fact that this teaching
does not murder as many today thanks to alternatives to blood transfusion makes
no difference for they would still kill by their teaching if these alternatives
were unavailable.
A
false prophet who allegedly lived in the first century. His prophecies are susceptible of too many
interpretations. God would not let the
evidence that he spoke through a true prophet, especially Jesus who professed to
be the
supreme prophet, disappear. A prophet as
ambiguous and suspect as Jesus could not be a real prophet of God and God said
that when he speaks through a prophet there are no games like that or errors
(Deuteronomy 18). Jesus gave no
remarkable moral example or advice. We
are told little about him meaning it could only be the good things we are told
and his advice was dished out by many religious teachers before him. And so he could not have been the Son of God
for why not believe that somebody decent who you know better is the Son of God?
Jesus’
prediction of his own resurrection could have been written down after the event
or been a later invention. Jesus said he
would rise on the third day but a true prophet will leave proof of that. He didn’t.
The point of making prophecies is that they will be seen and proven to
have come true. Prophecies have to be declared
before the events they forecast. He appeared on the
third day which proves nothing for we have no proof that he appeared in the
body that died. Also the body could have
vanished from the tomb before the third day.
It was only found empty then.
This error proves that Jesus was not a prophet, and if he was not a
prophet he was not God or the Son of God.
The
crowning point of Jesus’ mission was his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew
5-7). This was uttered to ordinary
people so we should take it at its word rather than pretending it was more
poetic than literal like even fundamentalist Christians do. When it suits, Christians soon forget the
rule that a text should be interpreted the way the listeners would have done
and the listeners were not theologians but simple people. That means then that Jesus condemned all
sexual feelings, saying that a man who looked at a woman with desire was an
adulterer. It means that you should let anybody who steals from you steal even more he
must be taken literally. He also said
that he hadn’t come to soften the harsh Law of Moses but to perfect it – that
is add in more tough teachings. Jesus
advised extreme hatred of sin by saying you should pluck out your eye if it
makes you sin meaning you should do all you can to avoid sin for you should
detest it so much. People find hating
sin too painful and stressful these days and don’t want to do it and the clergy
is as bad. Jesus made it clear that his
words were literal in this Sermon when he said that whoever listens to it and
obeys it will be like the man who built his house on the rock (Matthew
7:25). And the gospeller commented that
this Sermon was taught not like a sermon by the scribes but with authority
(Matthew 7:29). It was serious and there
was no time for confusing people with non-literalism. There is no doubt that going by the Sermon on
the Mount that Christians have turned an evil or insane person into their God.
If
you love your neighbour as yourself that means a lot of stress for sin is all
around you. You won't live too long if you
seriously try it. Hating the sin is as
dangerous in practice as hating the sinner for even if you make a difference in
your mind between sinner and sin you won’t be able to in practice.
The
only gospel of the four we have got that says that Jesus claimed to be the only
way to God. Strangely the others did not
think this claim important when they forgot about it or deliberately omitted
it. Its unreliability is proven by the
absurd reasoning its mad Jesus uses. For
instance, he says to the Jews that the Law of Moses correctly needs two
witnesses to establish claims as true.
Jesus then says he is his own witness and God is the other! (John 8:17, 18). Any crank could make claims like that. The law meant two witnesses apart from
yourself.
The first century Jewish historian Josephus allegedly
wrote: “An end was put to this
uprising. Now about the same time, a
wise man called Jesus, if it be right to call him a man for he was a worker of
wonderful works and a teacher of men who like to receive the truth. He won over to him many of the Jews and also
many of the Gentiles. He was the Messiah
or Christ. Pilate at the request of the
chief men among us condemned him to crucifixion. When that happened those who loved at from
the first did not abandon him because he appeared to them alive on the third
day as the prophets of God had forecasted and not only that but ten thousand
other things about him. The tribe of
Christians called after him are not extinct even today. About this time another sad calamity put the
Jews into great crisis and terrible disgusting things happened concerning the
The testimony does not fit in as the words “An end was put
to this uprising” and, “About this time
another sad calamity”, prove. The Jesus
bit gets a happy ending so it is not the calamity and indeed if the Jews didn’t
like Jesus as it says his death was no calamity for them. No matter what you think of this argument,
the fact remains firm that nobody can be sure that the testament about Jesus is
authentic.
Even if Josephus wrote the testimony we have testimonies from the New
Testament itself that contradict him regarding when Jesus lived. The New Testament provides the best evidence
that Jesus didn’t live at all. Much of
the New Testament is older than his writings so it is what should be heeded if
a conflict arises.
The testimony says that that there was a man called Jesus. Later it says that he appeared alive on the third day "as the prophets of God had forecasted and not only that but ten thousand other things about him". It does not say that there is credible testimony that Jesus was seen alive after his death. It only mentions that he appeared. The witnesses could have denied the resurrection afterwards for all we are told. So the evidence given for the resurrection is the prophecies. He means YOU MUST CHECK OUT THE OLD TESTAMENT PROPHECIES TO SEE IF WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT JESUS RISING FROM THE DEAD IS TRUE!! This is more evidence that the text was tampered with. Josephus was writing to a Roman audience who did not have any interest in Jewish scriptures. Even if Josephus did write the Testament it still does not help in the case for a risen Jesus because it depends on human interpretative ideas about Bible prophecies. It is not history that is here but faith. Josephus did not write this part of the testimony, at least, for we know he was not a believer.
The account depends on interpretations of prophecies when it says Jesus was seen alive on the third day. It is speaking of faith not evidence.
He questions if Jesus can be called a man. If he means Jesus was a spirit being then clearly the crucifixion was uncertain. You cannot really crucify a ghost. He again was resorting to faith. Some scholars say that he only meant that Jesus was too great of a man to be called a man - it was only an honorific way of speaking. He says he is uncomfortable calling Jesus a man as he was "worker of wonderful works and a teacher of men who like to receive the truth". Clearly he thinks that doing miracles and being infallible are signs of not being really human. The Romans thought that these powers were what made their gods gods. We must see this as the Roman audience for which it was intended saw it. It is correct to say the whole testimony is faith not evidence. Therefore it is no use if you want to show Jesus lived.
To question if Jesus can be called a man
means that his later reference to James being the brother of Jesus the
so-called Christ is put into a new context.
It is not saying Jesus was a real man because he indicated before that that
this was a matter of faith. Jesus the so-called
Christ could have had the meaning so-called man who was claimed to be the
Christ. Josephus only spoke of a Jesus of faith,
assuming he really mentioned our Jesus.
The evidence
is overwhelming. Josephus and
Because Josephus was a Jew not a Christian and a supporter
of the Roman Empire which didn’t tolerate Messiahs and considered allegiance to
them to be treason against the divine Emperor in Rome, this passage has been
inserted or reworked by a Christian. The
Romans sponsored his writing. If a
Christian went to this trouble it would indicate that there was a need to
fabricate evidence for the existence of Jesus.
There can be no doubt that the passage is principally intended to back
up its main statement that there was a man called Jesus. The other details are just meant to back this
up. How could Josephus under Roman
sponsorship speak well of Jesus when the Christians got the blame for burning
Origen in his famous Against Celsus, recorded that Josephus did not receive Jesus as his Saviour, Lord and Messiah and was amazed when Josephus praised James who was unjustly executed and who Josephus regarded as the brother of Jesus. It would be more natural, as well, for Origen to be amazingly amazed at what Josephus supposedly wrote about Jesus in the famous Testament of Flavius. It was not in the text in those days. When Origen was so gobsmacked then his Josephus did not mention Jesus in nice terms at all or perhaps he didn't mention Jesus but somehow indicated that he wouldn't believe if he did.
Origen did not quote the stuff about Josephus
saying Jesus was the Messiah and rose from the dead to Celsus though he wrote a
lot against Celsus to defend the faith against Celsus’ scepticism about
Christianity’s’ claims meaning it did not exist in the works of Josephus in his
time. Celsus rejected Jesus’ morals and
Origen couldn’t even use Josephus to argue that Jesus had been stated by a
non-Christian to have been a good man.
Josephus never mentioned the man at all.
By the way, the nice stuff about James was definitely an insertion for
we don’t have it in any decent copy of Josephus.
Justin Martyr, Tertullian and Cyprian did not know that
Josephus had any faith in Christ therefore their silence proves that he
didn't. It must have been a Christian
copyist who inserted the Testament. This
Christian forger of the Testament did not know much about Jesus and had
leanings towards the Christian tendency to deny that Jesus was a proper man but
just God or an angel in a human body without a human mind. The interpolation was put in by somebody who
did not believe that Jesus was God for that s too foundational a detail to
leave out.
It is surmised that the Testament was not mentioned in the
first few centuries because the existence of Jesus was not questioned by any
important people or groups. The
existence was questioned but lets pretend the objection is right. The resurrection and the miracles were
questioned as were the Messiahship and the divinity of Christ. The Christians had four very serious reasons
then to use and cherish the text and they did not because it did not
exist. They would not have known that it
was a fake so that could not have put them off.
The text would not be still extant if it had been recognised for the
fraud it was.
“Ananus...called together the Sanhedrin and brought the
brother of Jesus the so-called Messiah/Christ, James by name, together with
some others. He accused them of breaking
the Law and condemned them to death by stoning.
But the experts of the Law who were more liberal were angry at this and
secretly requested the king stop this from happening” (Jewish Antiquities, Book
20).
Calling James the brother of the Christ or the Lord was a
title given to James by the early Church.
In Galatians 1:19, Paul says that he met James the Lord's brother. This seems to say that Jesus lived in the
first century when his brother was still alive.
But the most important thing to realise is that Paul told Philemon that
Onesimus the slave was to be his blood-brother and not just a brother in the
Lord so blood-brother among the early Christians didn’t always mean that you
shared a parent. According to the letter
of Paul to Philemon Christians believed you could make somebody you loved your
brother or sister by blood even if they were not a blood relation. Paul told Philemon that Onesimus was not just
a brother in the Lord but a blood brother from now on. A brother in the Lord means a non-literal
brother but Paul’s saying Onesimus who was not related to Philemon was more
than that and a blood brother indicates plainly that you can become a literal
blood brother by adoption. This practice
could have confused people about James and made them think he really was born a
brother of Jesus’. Josephus who also
called James Jesus’ brother could have made a mistake due to this confusing
practice. The practice probably had a
lot to do with the universal accusations of incest against Christians that supposedly
were rife among the pagans.
In James 5:10, James offers the prophets as role models and
singles out Job for mention. The real
brother of Jesus would have stressed Jesus as role model. Why would Jesus' brother mention the
suffering of prophets inferior to Jesus and not Jesus'? He never calls Jesus the Son of God or hints
that Jesus lived a perfect life before his glorification. It seems that James did not even think that
Jesus was the best exemplar. He had very
little interest in Jesus in his epistle.
This suggests that James was not his brother at all and knew very little
about him.
Maybe Josephus was saying James brother of the so-called
Christ as in a sneer. That would mean
the line can’t prove if Jesus was thought to have existed or not. Also what if Josephus was calling James under
a Jewish nickname “Brother of the So-called Christ”, called to him in mockery
for following a false or non-existent Christ?
Josephus would not call Jesus the so-called Christ when it
was not the Jews or the Romans were calling him Christ but a tiny persecuted
and obscure sect.
We must face the possibility that somebody altered
Josephus's text to make it deceitfully call James the brother of the so-called
Christ, Jesus. This was somebody who
didn’t like the fact that Jesus was ignored by Josephus but who knew that
Josephus couldn’t be positive about
Jesus and would speak of him as a so-called Christ.
There
is no evidence that the first century Jewish historian, Josephus, mentioned
Jesus. His silence is a strong
indication that Jesus never lived and Christians were obscure for he wrote
prolifically concerning the period Jesus supposedly
lived.
To regard a person as a wrongdoer deserving of disapproval and condemnation and retribution.
Some Christians lie that Jesus condemned judging. He did not. He only said that before you judge make sure you are not worse than the person you judge. He said you may see the speck in the eye of another and ignore the plank in your own. He said get rid of the plank and then judge.
Christians say he forbade hypocritical judgement in saying all that. He actually forbade unfair judgement. It is not fair to judge somebody who is not as bad as you.
Other Christians say we must judge the sin and not the sinner. This makes absolutely no sense at all. It only makes a hypocrite of the person who claims to believe it.
Those who when their actions are condemned say, "You have no right to tell me what I am doing is wrong - judge not that you be not judged." They are hypocrites who judge those who judge them. They are being judgemental though they condemn being judgemental! They insinuate that God will judge those who judge them! So they admit that judging is not necessarily sinful! They want people to believe that judging need not be sinful and is only sinful when they are being judged!
The Catholics say you must tell those who have sex outside marriage for example that they are doing a great wrong and that sex outside marriage is a sin that merits everlasting torment in Hell from the moment of death. They deny that saying this means they are judging the persons as going to Hell. There could be weakness or ignorance that prevents them from deliberately committing a great evil. Their responsibility might be mitigated. The Church says it can judge that somebody is doing wrong but they cannot judge the person's exact intentions. For example, murder is a mortal sin but if the murderer was given drugs against his will it would mean he was not being fully himself and so did not intend to commit a mortal sin.
Matthew 18 records that Jesus said that those who continue in sin after being told they are sinners must be shunned.
Should the true Christian be constantly disapproving?
Fairness. In Christian theology, justice condemns the wrongdoer but love forgives. In Humanism, justice is what is meant by love. The system is always fair. Love in any other sense is an evil.
Jesus accused adulterous people and those who hated people of serious sin. He was very harsh. The Church condemns sin as seriously. Sin is not serious if you believe the sinner should get away. When a person is not made to suffer what she or he inflicted on others, the person does not see how grave the sin is. Also, evil needs to be repaid by evil otherwise you are treating the person as if the evil is not important. The purpose of punishment is to deal with the imbalance in justice so that the relationship between the evil person and the people he hurts can be restored. You do evil and there is a debt to be paid before restoration can begin.
We plainly see how evil the love that Jesus preached is for it refuses to give people the evils in the form of punishment they have consented to by their sins. Thus it is merely artificial love for Christianity claims that the value it has for the person necessarily indicates the necessity for respect for human free agency. Christianity believes that to treat a person as a person you have to give them what they deserve. So its mercy contradicts this. Some say that mercy is important for it softens justice with kindness. This view says that kindness like justice is an important virtue too. It is nonsensical for if punishment is dignified then it is kindness to give it unpleasant and all as it is.
Some say you have to forgive for you cannot
punish everybody. And to have mercy just because you cannot
punish everybody all the time is not mercy. Real mercy is freely given while
this is given because it has to be and it is grudging. Yet this is the reason Christians “forgive”.
The doctrine that the
evil that you send out of you comes back on you. This is totally insulting. It implies that a murdered baby deserved its
fate. Some say that karma just means that
whatever you do will be done to you - and it isn't about deserving. They
say it is just a reaction. But nevertheless the murdered baby is being
accused of being a baby murderer in a past life. You need the baby to be in a court
trial to be able to say such a horrible thing and then only if its guilt is
established beyond all doubt. Karma is only acceptable to people who are not
as nice as they pretend to be. Buddha and co could not possibly be saints
when they propounded such a concept. They did the evil they said that
prevents salvation.
An Irish apparition of
Mary and Joseph and
It was seen by several witnesses who provided depositions which were changed and exaggerated afterwards by a dishonest Church and a dishonest publisher. Top witness Mary Beirne in the original handwritten deposition said, "I saw the statue of the BVM". This is omitted in the published version.
Judith Campbell in her real deposition - not the altered published one - declared that, "There was a beautiful light shining around the statues". Her declaration that there had been statues of Joseph and John in the chapel in the resembling the statues she saw was excised from the published account.
She stated that the ground and the gable were quite dry. The quite is interesting. It was not as dry then as some of the other witnesses claimed. One as good as said the dryness was a miracle for the rain fell in the direction of the gable.
Bridget Trench's line in her altered testimony, "The wind was blowing from the south" meaning against the gable contradicts the assertion of Mary Beirne to The Weekly News of 1880 that there was no wind. There seems nothing unusual about the dryness but it is the chief reason why many think the vision was a miracle and not a trick.
Trench famously tried to feel Mary's feet and her hands clasped nothing but thin air. However, this tale is a fabrication. It is not in her original testimony. Here is the original:
LIVES IN THIS PLACE. ON THE EVE OF 21 AUGUST A PERSON SICK SENT FOR HER THAT SHE MIGHT SEE HER. SHE CAME THAT EVENING TO THE CHURCH [SOMETHING ERASED]. SHE WAS IN THE HOUSE OF THE SICK WOMAN. SHE CAME BY THE ROAD AND SAW GREAT LIGHT. SHE ENTERED AT HER RIGHT HAND. SHE LEFT HER HAND ON THEM. SHE SAW ST JOSEPH AND THE BVM AND ST JOHN AND THE ALTAR AND THE LAMB. THEY WERE NOT STANDING ON THE GROUND BUT PROBABLY TWO FEET ABOVE THE GROUND.
It even says she did touch them!
The apparition was not of Mary and Joseph and John but of their statues.
Mary McLoughlin the priest, Archdeacon Cavanagh's, housekeeper asked him to go and see the vision. He said he didn't believe her and didn't go. The next day he started credulously promoting the vision as genuine and believed all the rubbish he was told from religious nuts who claimed to be cured. The conversion was so fast that it looks like he didn't go because he was playing the innocent and was involved in the hoax. Also, he had a view of the gable from his house and had the light been as bright as some witnesses said he would have noticed.
Some of the stories of the witnesses improved with the telling which shows that God was not involved for he could organise things better than that (The Apparition at Knock, A Survey of Facts and Evidence, Fr Michael Walsh, St Jarlath’s College, Tuam, Co Galway, 1959). Also, the Archdeacon who was the parish priest and his priest friends were was anxious to promote the apparition as a real miracle wrote the witness reports and could have influenced their memories and manipulated the alleged witnesses to tell much the same story. The Archdeacon reported many eccentric visions of his own in the house. The witnesses talked about the vision for a long time after it happened among themselves which means that in the excitement and wonder they would have corrupted each other’s memories so that the story unconsciously got better and more convincing and consistent and more preternatural in the telling.
The witnesses could have been duped by a projector as was rumoured at the time and they would have pushed the evidence they noticed for this outside of their minds in order that they could believe they really had a miracle vision. It has been found that a light source such as a projector - a magic lantern - could have been used. It may have been on the window sill and the image was then directed at a mirror which shone it down the gable. This would have avoided the problem of spectators getting in the way of the light source. But sceptics observe that they strangely stood at an awkward viewing angle from a schoolhouse at a distance as if they were trying to avoid disturbing the vision. It is said that there is no evidence the witnesses got in the way of the light source. But there is no evidence against it either. The witnesses were not asked anything about it. It is claimed that at least some of the witnesses would have examined the scene for a hoax and would have been smart enough to spot a hoax. But when one considers how people can flock to venerate a tree stump that seems to have the virgin's face on it, it is possible that they felt no inclination to check it out. Also the witnesses were never asked if they saw anything suggestive of a hoax. If they were it was never written down. Judith Campbell's testimony is typical of most of the visionaries. She only states what was to be seen and says nothing about a hoax never mind a miracle! If the images were not that amazing that would explain why the visionaries were too embarrassed to get all the neighbours out to see it. The apparition was seen only by a few and most of them were related.
Perhaps the images were cut-out paintings stuck to the wall. The images were not seen coming and they were not seen going. Patrick Beirne testified in 1932 as follows, "I saw three figures on the gable surrounded by a wonderful light. They appeared to be something like shadows or reflections cast on a wall on a moon-light night" (page 53, The Apparition at Knock). That is evidence that a magic lantern was used. This testimony is to be taken seriously because it if the figures were that unclear they would have looked better at a distance. Was that why the witnesses stood at a strange spot for viewing the vision? The other witnesses exaggerated how good the visions were. The fact that the Beirne woman said that the Virgin’s crown was kind of yellow indicates that it was not supernatural for a vision from God or Satan would manage to get the colour of the crown right, get it gold. Knock The Virgin's Apparition in Nineteenth Century Ireland, Eugene Hynes, Cork University Press, Cork, 2008 shows that the apparition was reported in a culture prone to bizarre visions and offers psychological explanations.
The Church seizes upon the tiny things that seem to indicate supernaturality. Patrick Hill's testimony seems to indicate it. But Father Lennon, a scientist, went as far as to say his testimony was of no value. Biased supporters of the apparition, though they have no evidence, simply take comfort in the notion that that Lennon may have been prejudiced against Hill as Hill was in his early teens. Statistically, if a group of people see something unusual there will be at least one person who will add a lot of window dressing to his or her testimony. Hill's account is too good to be true. Judith Campbell like him went close to the vision but she simply stated they were statues. Had the vision been as glitzy and magical as Hill said surely she would not have been so calm and matter-of-fact about it?
No cure at Knock matched the calibre of the cures at Lourdes.
There is no evidence against the hoax theory.
St Bernadette allegedly
saw the Blessed Virgin Mary at
Some who were there during Bernadette's visions were shocked at her pale dead appearance. During the first vision Jean Abadie, her friend thought she was dead though she was kneeling.
Bernadette talked about seeing something white in the shape of a girl. Called it aquero meaning that thing.
In 1860, Bernadette was still calling the apparition that thing aquero.
Of extreme significance is what she said to the Jesuit Pere Langlade in 1863. He asked her if she had seen the Blessed Virgin . Her reply was that she did not say she seen the Blessed Virgin but she seen the apparition.
Whatever the apparitions were, they were not from God.
The miracle spring had always been there though not at all times. The apparition told Bernadette about the spring. The obstructions were cleared and it has run constantly since. The spring is cited as a miracle even though it is not.
Subjectively, lying is saying what you believe or know is not the truth. Objectively, lying is saying what is not true whether you realise that or not.
If God exists then he is the perfect good. Therefore the truth that he exists is the most sacred truth there is. It is more important to know that than to know or do anything else. To lie then would be to attack truth and the principle of telling the truth. To lie then would be to insult the most sacred truth. If you ever allow lying, you lose the right to ever forbid it. If you oppose truth you cannot complain if somebody opposes truths you wouldn't oppose. So, all lying, passive (when you let people get the wrong idea) and active is ungodly. This shows the complete undesirability of even saying there might be a God for then you would be expected to act as if there were one, just in case.
Religion says there is no trace of deceit in God for he is perfect good. And because of his power, he never needs to lie. To be like him we must be truthful in all things. He never can approve of our lies for he never lies himself.
Believers in God have to claim to have the right to persecute those who differ from them because they don't respect truth. They might not realise they are working against the truth or ignoring it but they are. The amount of blood shed for God is unbelievable and sickening. No wonder.
The Bible teaches that even clever lies to
people - who will never find out - to make converts of them to Jesus Christ and
save them are sinful. Romans 3:7,8 condemns
people who lie to glorify God though it means making sure they will be saved by
lying to them when one can get away with it.
It says that we can’t do evil so that good may come. If we obey this lying ban we will have no
friends and cause the Third World War.
The
Magdalene is St Mary of Magdala who supposedly announced the resurrection of
Jesus after he appeared to her to the apostles.
Mary Magdalene and some
other women went to Jesus’ tomb on Sunday morning to anoint his body. This was an excuse for decomposition was
believed to have set in by then so what were they really going to the tomb
for? They were up to no good. Plus what took them to the tomb so early in
the morning? Why was it important to
them that there would be nobody about?
The gospel says they
wondered who was going to open the tomb of Jesus for them which had a big stone
rolled across it. Why didn’t they bring
somebody to help them? That they carried
heavy expensive goods with them to anoint the body means they were lying when
they said they had nobody to open the tomb.
They must have had strong males with them to protect them in case
the robbers were out and fancied stealing the goods from them. If they didn't want help, then the reason was
because they were plotting something devious.
They didn’t want to bring
men with them to help for they were scheming.
If the women had expensive goods with them to anoint Jesus how do we know then that they didn’t bribe somebody to steal the body for them? They had the motive and money to do it with.
There is nothing in the
gospels or New Testament or anything to indicate that the stone could not have been moved by the women.
When the women came to the tomb
the guards were unconscious according to the Matthew gospel only. Matthew
says the tomb was open by then and there had been an earthquake so did it move
the stone allowing the women to steal the body?
In fact there were no
guards. The Matthew Gospel says the Jews feared the apostles stealing the body to put out a
resurrection report. If that was a real concern, the Jews would
have put the body in a secret place. It wasn't. Why make extra trouble by
posting guards when it was easier simply to move the body to the dump where it
would never be found?
The women might have
stolen the body. The act of stealing the
body might have triggered hallucinations, or imaginations caused by the sheer
passion of religious faith, of the risen Christ in the apostles if they thought
the missing body was a miracle. Once
they had the hallucination they wanted to believe it was real and convinced
themselves they all experienced the same thing and had happened several
times. Memory is very easily polluted. With faith, people generally persuade
themselves that they believe what they want to believe. People do make sense of the silliest
hallucinations in time as their memories and imagination and wishful thinking
tell them a different story from what actually happened. That is how
collective hallucinations, which are relatively common, become more credible.
The claim that the
apostles were totally disillusioned with Jesus at the time of his death cannot
be proved from the gospels. It’s a
Christian lie to thwart attempts to suggest the visions of Jesus were
hallucinations or just mystical experiences rooted in psychological need. Mark only says the
apostles didn’t believe the women about the resurrection vision which could
mean they just didn’t believe the women but did accept that Jesus could be
alive. In John the apostles going back
to their former trades, only means they went back to their jobs. Even if they believed Jesus rose, it was all
different now and they couldn’t walk around with him as before.
The women were very loyal
to Jesus and determined that he would not be perceived as a failure so they
perhaps concocted a pious fraud. The
claim that the women must have been telling the truth when they seen Jesus for
nobody regarded female testimony as true proves nothing. Christians did regard female testimony as
valid. So the gospels using such
testimony proves nothing about the believability of the claims. Besides, if the gospels were using women for
evidence when women were considered to be bad testators that does not speak
well of their objectivity and fairness.
Marriage or matrimony is
a sacrament of the Roman Catholic Church.
The Church believes in marriage that isn’t sacramental but valid and
marriage that is a sacrament or Holy Matrimony.
Only two baptised persons can contract matrimony. Jesus then refuses to help a baptised person
married to an unbaptised person with the grace of the sacrament.
The marriage rite makes a man and woman belong to each other for life. This contract is validated by them having sex at least once. A system that stresses that instead of how happy they can make each other is definitely unloving and degrading. Marriage is a sacrament in the Roman Catholic tradition which forbids us then to say such things about marriage!
If marriage is about love, then its odd how it is finalised by an act of sex even if the partners turn to hate each other. And another couple who love each other infinitely who can't have sex never have a valid marriage.
The marriage is validated by sex meaning the man and woman virtually cohabit until they have sex. There is no real marriage until the sex.
Church teaching says the
letters of the apostle Paul were written by God at the same time. Paul, who the Church says wrote
the letters carrying his name in the New Testament, said that because the unmarried can spend more time
serving God that marriage wasn’t recommended and was only for those who had
strong sexual needs that could lead them to sin unless they got married (1
Corinthians 7). Doesn’t sound much of a
sacrament to me! Paul may say this is
his opinion but he says it is trustworthy in the Lord meaning God inspired this
opinion! He wrote that the single woman
or man is worried about the affairs of the Lord and how to be holy in body and
spirit but the married woman or worries about worldly things and pleasing the
spouse. He said he wished that all were
like him and were unmarried celibates (1 Corinthians 7:7) and that it was best
to refrain from marriage (v38). If
marriage were a sacrament, it would bring people closer to God no matter about
the world for the husband and wife find God in pleasing and helping each other.
Martyrdom is testifying that your faith is true by dying for it.
Christianity thrived – and still does - on the lie that the twelve apostles of Jesus were killed for their testimony that Jesus did miracles and managed to rise from the dead.
Clement
of
The early Church father
Hippolytus was one of the best earliest sources that denied the martyrdom that
Christians alleged visited most of the apostles. The account may contain some legend but there
is no doubt that the sources that say that most of the apostles died natural
deaths must be right for Christians wouldn’t have wanted that to be true. And it is easier to remember martyrdoms than
the more boring natural deaths.
Martyrdoms make more impact and draw more interest in the martyr’s
cause. So let us not hope Hippolytus was
mistaken. There were no martyrdoms –
Hippolytus was telling the truth.
The alleged predictions of martyrdom from Jesus are ambiguous. They can be
understood as predicting something other than death by martyrdom . But the texts
may still have been enough to cause
the legend through people misunderstanding - the gospel of John speaks of a case
where Jesus was misunderstood.
Evangelicals though claiming to support the Bible only, still believe the
martyrdom stories though they come from legendary material that is full of
wildly over the top stories which is dishonest.
Their faith in the apostles’ testimony does not come from the
Bible but from outside it though the Bible claims to provide evidence. They say they believe what the apostles said
about the resurrection because they died for their faith.
The apostle James was said to have been slain by Herod in Acts 12 but no indication is given that James willed this death to avoid denying Christ. It may have been an assassination so he can’t be a martyr. For a person to be a true martyr he has to choose death rather than denying his faith. He must have no other reason to choose death than to testify to it with his blood. He has to have this choice right up to when the sword is about to fall on his neck. He must not be blackmailed by the fear of divine retribution. The killers must not have made threats to him to hurt his family. It would be easy for somebody who was happier dead to be “martyred”. He must be sane and not senile. We have no evidence that the apostles fulfilled these conditions – and the accounts of their deaths are legendary and full of stupendous and foolish miracles. No evidence is given by anybody in the early Church that claims any of the apostles was a true martyr in support of their contention. Accordingly, the apostles being martyrs is only hearsay not evidence and to deploy it to get converts for Christ is dishonest.
The apostles might have given their lives for political reasons for that was basically the reason they were slain if they were slain. If they died for religious freedom, to be able to declare the sectarian faith of their Jesus as true, that hardly makes them proper martyrs! It does not amount to being the same as testifying with their blood that Jesus rose.
To argue the apostles
were telling the truth because they were martyred is to try and trick people.
It is obvious that they might have been fooled themselves and we have
no real evidence that they died for belief in a Jesus who physically not
spiritually rose from the dead. If they died for belief that Jesus rose
spiritually then they are no good to the Christians. Even if they died for Christianity, we don’t
have any hard evidence for what kind of Christianity this was. The gospels only say the body was missing and
that Jesus was raised but they never actually state that the body was
resurrected for they don’t know. There
was a connection between the risen and the crucified body but it is not stated
what it is. The crucified body might
just have provided the seed of the new body.
Apostles dying for visions would mean nothing for visions are easy to explain and are commonplace. Jesus himself said that the resurrection would be the only proof (Matthew 12:38-40) for even fakes could do real miracles (Mark 13:22) for presumably only God could have power over life and death. But he also stated that the Old Testament scriptures come first for they are more convincing than men coming back from the dead (Luke 16:31) so it is forbidden to believe in his resurrection unless the scriptures testify to it. He said that the resurrection must be believed in mostly because it was predicted in the Old Testament (Luke 24:25-27; Luke 24:44-47). He indicated that we must not believe in his resurrection unless we see that it is prophesied there. If the apostles died for Jesus then they did not die for Jesus or for visions or empty tombs or miracles but for what they said the Old Testament said. They died for an interpretation of the Old Testament that nobody honest or sane accepts as correct. It is certain that the gospels say that Jesus after he rose lied to the apostles that his rising on the third day was predicted (Luke 24:46) so why listen to anybody who dies for a lying messiah?
Jesus' would have believed that as God is all-powerful, he alone has power to raise the dead as only he has power over life and death. So Christians argue that Jesus was from God for he rose. But they don't want to remember that Satan could make it look like his man rose from the dead. The evidence for a resurrection means nothing if Jesus' teaching was unimpressive or not unique or if it advocated evil. The resurrection is supposed to be important for it inspires us to love. If Jesus and his teaching isn't special then all the evidence for the resurrection in the world means nothing. You can have a lot of evidence for something but then you could have a big piece of evidence that this something is not true. If Jesus ever sinned or taught wrong morals then this is big evidence against the resurrection.
The evangelical habit of writing books to show that the resurrection is believable history is a tactic to scare and bully sceptics to believe. They want them to think, "There is something to this Jesus lark. I'm done for if he is the Son of God and my saviour so I had better turn to him." Jesus' own boast that the resurrection would prove his claims - if the gospels are to be believed - smacks of that vicious attitude. It is also intended to make their believers cockier. Weak believers are no help to priests and popes and evangelists who seek to use religion to enjoy power over lives.
The argument that the
apostles told the truth about Jesus for people don’t die for what they know is lies is
untrue. People do die for what they know
is wrong – people who seem happy even commit suicide though they could get help
like many do by opening up to their doctor.
The mother of Jesus
Christ. There is no proof that she was
always a virgin and the Bible positively denies it but the Roman Church holds
that she was. Though the Church says
Marian apparitions cannot add to the evidence of the apostles, they always
portray a Mary
who claimed to be virgin and to always have been.
There is no evidence at
all that the doctrine that she was conceived without sin was ever taught in the
early Church so when Pope Pius IX proclaimed this doctrine to be revealed by
God he was adding to the apostles’ teaching – a practice that Roman theology
says is always wrong.
It is Catholic dogma that
Mary never sinned. But even if she were
conceived immaculate that doesn’t necessarily mean she remained faithful. So why should we think that Mary never
sinned. She could have sinned on her
deathbed – the sinlessness of Mary is just an assumption. Its something there cannot be any evidence
for and yet the Church was able to make a dogma of it – proving that its
teaching that no dogma can be made without getting evidence for it first to be
false.
The Church teaches that Mary
was taken up into Heaven body and soul.
There is no proof that this more than just a human fantasy. We have
no reason to believe that it is actually
a divine revelation. Catholicism reasons
that since she was so special, God would not let her decay so she was assumed
body and soul into Heaven meaning she is resurrected. And this is the religion that tells us about
God’s ways that look so strange! God might have
a reason for doing the unexpected and leaving Mary in the grave. The
evidence that the assumption was a late Christian fantasy proves that the
papacy added a doctrine to the Christian faith and declared it revealed by
God. This is against the Roman Catholic
law that doctrines are to be rejected as being binding on believers that way
unless the evidence or reason proves they were taught by the apostles for the
Church has no authority to create new doctrine and revelation stopped with
them.
A town in the former
The apparition
pretends to support the Catholic Church while causing and inviting dissent from the
authority of the local
bishop. This contradicts the foundational Roman dogma that you have to be with
the legitimately appointed bishop to be part of the Church and protect the
purity of its doctrine. To oppose the
successor of the apostles is to oppose Christ who gave him the authority to
represent him in the one true Church.
Even if a bishop is stubborn and stupid he must be obeyed. If we didn’t have to obey people who we
thought were wrong there would be no such thing as authority and no need for
it.
The Church teaches that that the headship of the Pope means he has authority to teach faith and morals to the bishops, lay down canon law for the whole Church, and give them a large level of independence from him. The bishop does not have to seek the pope's approval for every priestly diocesan appointment for example. The Medjugorian claim that the Vatican has to investigate the apparitions as the bishop is incompetent is just an excuse for getting around the fact that he has the right to condemn the visions. Another lie is that the bishop has not officially disapproved of the visions. He has. He has banned pilgrimages there.
If miraculous, then the Medjugorje visions support
opposition to the Catholic Church and the Virgin Mary who we cannot know
without the Church. The excellent book
by Michael Davies, Medjugorje After 15 Years, explains that the
Vicka the visionary was proven on a widely
seen film clip to be faking the miraculous ecstasy that comes over her during a
vision (page 10) for she leapt back when she thought she was going to get
prodded in the eyes despite the visionaries claiming that pricks and attacks
like that and sound being blasted into their ears does not bother them during
ecstasy. She tried to cover this up with
an absurd story that she thought the Virgin was going to drop the baby Jesus
and she was leaping to catch him but she jumped AWAY from the vision. This supersedes the testimony of the likes of
Professor Henri Joyeaux that there is something supernatural about the ecstasy
for the camera does not lie.
The Lourdes Medical Bureau rejected all the alleged miracles of healing at Medjugorje as false (page 60). The real Mary would not give cause for division and doubt. She would not appear if her appearing would bring them about. To reply that God has strange ways means we are left with little hope of telling true revelations from Heaven apart from fake ones and is unacceptable. Mary would appear in a diocese where the bishop wasn’t likely to oppose the visions too much so that he might relent and accept them so that excludes the diocese Medjugorje belongs to.
The
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
November 1996
Regarding
the circulation of texts of alleged private revelations, the Congregation
states:
Any apparition that breaks this rule, and the Medjugorje Virgin commands that her messages be distributed as they are received, is not a Catholic apparition or concerned about Catholic orthodoxy. The bishops are the official Catholic teachers not apparitions. The vast majority of modern visions break the rule and so are themselves disobedient apparitions.
The apparition never mentioned the fact that miracles are not for propaganda but for showing how loving God is. A God who makes the sun spin is showing off and out to make propaganda. The apparition never condemns the huge percentage of pilgrims who are there primarily to experience a miracle. The Church says that seeking miracles makes God look bad.
Events
in the life of Christ were allegedly foretold in the Old Testament scriptures
written before he was born and Jesus himself stated several times that his
death by crucifixion was predicted in them.
The
main events were the virgin birth, the crucifixion and the resurrection.
The
verse that Christians say speaks of the virgin birth has been taken out of context for it has
Isaiah (7:14) telling Ahaz that the young woman, virgin is a mistranslation,
will give birth and bear a son who will mature as his enemies lose their
kingdoms and this will be a sign for Ahaz.
Even if it did say virgin, a girl that was a virgin at that time could
have a baby later when she is not virgin anymore.
So it only means that a girl who is a virgin now will have a baby later meaning
she will not be one then. The text does not say the birth will be a sign but the birth and its aftermath
are all part of the sign. So you can’t
say that he must have meant a virgin birth for a normal birth is not much of a
sign. Besides, even a virgin birth isn’t
much of a sign. Women were known to have
got pregnant without intercourse.
Isaiah
53 supposedly predicts the death of Jesus on the cross for sinners. But all it says is that somebody who is
innocent will be violently treated and wounded and will die for sins and will
be given a grave among the wicked. It
does not even say that the wounding will be the cause of death or that the man
will be killed.
Psalm
22 supposedly describes the crucifixion of Jesus before it happened. If it were about Jesus then it would have
been more logical for the psalmist not to write as if he were writing about
himself. There is a clue that it is not about
Jesus in verse 9. It says the tormentors were saying of the victim that he
relied on God therefore let God save him. This is thought to predict the
Jews mocking Jesus on the cross. The Jews who nailed Jesus would not have been saying
that for that would have been
blasphemous. Also to say Jesus relied on God contradicted the Jewish
consensus that he was a heretic and a blasphemer. It would have been promoting Jesus. The psalm says the enemies are bullocks who
encircle him and attack him with their open mouths (verse 14) and that they
have wounded his hands and his feet (verse 17). It speaks as if he tried to stop their
biting him by hitting them and kicking them which left him with their bite marks
on his hands and his
feet. So the psalm is using a metaphor
for the enemies did not literally bite him.
A miracle is an event that is not naturally possible. A miracle is a supernatural event. It's like God doing magic. A miracle is when God does magical things like raising Jesus from the dead.
Miracles are likely or unlikely. To say they are likely means its no big deal if one refuses to take one's cancer treatment.
To say they are unlikely means that we need very good evidence for holding that they happen.
All reasonable people agree that if a miracle is reported that it is more likely that the witness is mistaken or lying than that they are right. That is why there needs to be evidence apart from a mere testimony. It would be devastating if a hospital for example stopped giving chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatments just because some psychic said that if this is done the people who need the treatments will be instantly cured by the Holy Ghost. We will end up believing anything!
Miracle beliefs are encouraged by immoral religions. A God who won’t cure a leper until the leper goes to a Catholic shrine is obviously more interested in showing off and promoting the shrine than in helping the leper. Some people might say that we have free will and mess up God's creation against his will. They argue that sometimes we wreck it so much that God has to do miracles to fix the damage. So they deny that a miracle is more about showing off than helping. They say the miracle is about showing love to the leper. They deny there is any showing off at all.
They overlook the fact that if God is all-powerful then we sin because of him and can't go against him. He gives us all the things we use to sin. He gives us the will. Thus the idea of creation being out of his control is false and really kind of atheistic. The notion of free will being the power to step outside of God's will is rejected nowadays because we are free because of God and not because we are free from him. Such a God has no need to work miracles - he could simply ensure we can believe without them. Whatever miracles point to – if anything – it is not God. If God is able to influence us to believe and see the truth then miracles are not needed. They are vulgar and capricious.
Both sceptics and believers say that really good evidence is necessary to believe in a miracle.
David Hume was a philosopher who showed that belief in miracles is superstitious. He said that it is very probable to our minds that the sun will rise tomorrow. He would say that it is very improbable to our minds that it will not. He did not say that miracles are violations of natural law and conclude that "natural law doesn't change so miracles are impossible". He was saying miracles could be possible but they are very unlikely. By natural law, he only meant not that it was strict law or real law but that it was probable that x will happen and not y.
Hume was merely saying that miracles are so improbable we are entitled to hold that even if there is excellent evidence for them that it is not enough. For example, excellent evidence that Jesus rose from the dead is nothing in comparison to the evidence that dead people stay dead. This is the only rational approach. He is not being dogmatic and refusing to consider the evidence. Yet Christians ALWAYS misrepresent his argument and say he is. They say he is rejecting miracles as nonsense without considering the evidence for them. A faith with an attitude like that is hardly dependable when it comes up with evidence for miracles! It is unfair and uncharitable and peppered with religious bigotry.
Christians say that Hume is doing the wrong thing in having actual evidence outweighed by theoretical probability. They say actual evidence does outweigh theoretical probability. For example, they say its true that it is very improbable for dead people to rise but the evidence says there was one exception: Jesus. They say that is very improbable to get a perfect hand while playing bridge but it can happen. This is their proof. But though the perfect hand is theoretically very improbable it is possible without the supernatural. In relation to the resurrection, we are not talking about something that is naturally very unlikely but about something that is supernatural and not natural at all. The proof is irrelevant as regards the resurrection.
They deliberately neglect to tell us that even if actual evidence outweighs theoretical probability it doesn't always. For example, if you had the codes to start a nuclear war and sound witnesses told you that they had a vision of Jesus that you should use them for God has a plan you should not listen.
They do not believe that actual evidence outweighs theoretical probability. They are lying when they say they believe that. They would not believe a dream which seemed to come true in which they were told that Jesus was a fraud. And dreams that seem to be prophetic or clairvoyant are quite common. That lies have to be told in order to defend belief in miracles is enough to put us off them and those who say they happen.
They forget that belief in evidence itself is based on theoretical probability. You theorise for example that the evidence is real and not planted by aliens or some unknown conspirator for those scenarios are improbable. Maybe they are not improbable but you have to assume that they are. From this it is clear that theoretical probability should always be put before actual evidence because it is only down to theoretical probability that you believe in evidence at all.
Miracles are either against the law of nature or in accordance with nature. Neither understanding is helpful and both are dangerous and pro-stupidity so miracles are a dangerous and bad belief.
What about the view that miracles are ABOVE the law of nature? That is not a new view. It could mean you are saying that miracles do not break the laws of nature. You would say rather that they are caused by laws of nature we know little or nothing about.
Coincidences look like these kind of miracles. People tend to imagine that coincidences are signs from above. But every religion experiences these coincidences. They do nothing to help us find the true religion if there is one. All they do is lead to separate and sometimes bitter religions. We can do without all that discord and disunity.
If miracles are against nature, then God has to change nature. He sets up the law for instance that anybody dead for three days cannot rise. But if he allows an exception then the law isn’t true any more. Its not a law. Then natural law is nonsense. Christians will reply, "But exceptions prove the rule." Not in this case. An all-powerful God should be able to create a universe in which he does not need to suspend his laws. If he doesn't then he is a bit of a show off and unfit for worship. God would be in charge of everything. If we abuse free will, we do it because of him and not in spite of him so he is ultimately responsible for all that happens. A God with that amount of control has no need to change the way nature works. If he does miracles, he has no need to make them known. Surely if Jesus had to rise from the dead to save us this resurrection could have taken place in secret and still do its job? We should be doing good works instead of investigating miracles. God by doing miracles infers that the miracles matter most. Evil.
It is more likely when an alteration of
natural law is reported that the report is false for people lie and make
mistakes even if you can’t explain the reports.
You may be mystified at the strange puddle on your floor but you know it
didn’t just appear there even if two reliable people testify that it did.
Suppose miracles are signs from Heaven indicating the truth of God. By revealing through miracles, God is undermining unbelievers. Unbelievers are either liars or mistaken or both. But the fact remains that if we are going to believe in religion, we must limit ourselves to harmless beliefs - beliefs that bring no bother to anybody should they prove to be wrong. Unbelievers would have the right to be alarmed and feel threatened by reported miracles and their followers.
If
miracles are not against nature then one day science might find some kind of
intelligent gas that has been doing these miracles and we have no reason to
think God has anything to do with it.
Antony Flew argued that miracles are uncommon and unrepeatable events. Christians agree with that. Flew said that even if miracles are possible they are not believable because you can't for example prove that Jesus rose from the dead by making him repeat it. He is saying that the evidence for the general and the repeatable will always be necessarily better than the evidence for the particular and unrepeatable. Christians deny this. The Christians are saying in effect that something you can scientifically test in the lab and repeat is not as convincing as human testimony to miracles or the sight of a very sick person who was miraculously healed and is now the picture of health. We have only human testimony to the resurrection of Jesus and it is extreme fundamentalism to argue that such testimony is better than any experiments we can do.
The
Church lies about miracles being signs from God that Christianity is the true
faith. The Church says we cannot dismiss
miracle reports as mistakes or lies or the meanderings of deranged minds for
that would be like saying human testimony is worthless. And then the Church turns a blind eye to the
fact that most miracle reports, for example, alien abductions and ghosts – many
of which are accepted by expert investigators. The sheer spectrum of
different miracles indicate that if they happen they are just
freak events. They often happen without a
propagandist purpose. The Church refuses
to admit that miracles mean nothing for that denies its dogma that miracles are signs from God
pointing to the religion that has the truth or to verify that Jesus really is
the only saviour. The Church will not
accept or even bother investigating the vast majority of reported miracles,
like visions of Mary, that happen in her midst!
Reliance on miracles as signs is a sign for only three things: arrogance
and deceitfulness and seeing only what they want to see. It is pretending you have debunked all
miracle reports except those of your Church which is impossible and you know
it. With these nice attributes the
Church cannot be trusted in verifying miracles or God in speaking to us through
them. It is blasphemy to say God does
the miracles. God set up nature and does
not need to change it unless he wants to give signs. Miracles are not signs therefore God is
incompetent, having to fix the mistakes he made when he set up natural
law. The miracles that happen in the
Catholic Church then support a doctrine that the Church rejects and it is this:
that miracles are not signs. Miracles
refute the existence of God for a God that needs to repair his mistakes is not
a God.
To
say magical events against nature happen is to say there is a small chance that
if you cut a person’s throat they will recover instantly and without any
evidence of injury. That undermines how
evil it is to do this thing so belief in miracles is evil and puts faith before
people. Jesus, to his credit, did say
that faith should not come before people when he stated that the Sabbath was
made for man and not man for the Sabbath (Mark 2:27). It is a mystery why a miracle of healing
happens to one person instead of somebody more worthy who also seeks a
miracle. The terrorists of 9/11
sincerely believed it was a mystery why Allah wanted them to attack
Christians say the miracles of Jesus are believable because:
First of all, he did may of them not only in front of his disciples but in front of the public.
Second, he did the miracles often in front of hostile witnesses. These witnesses never denied the reality of the miracles.
Third, he did different kinds of miracles at different times.
Fourth, unlike the pagan miracle stories, Jesus did miracles to show the power of God to people who did not already believe in the miracles so they were not biased.
But none of this is valid when it was believers or at least people who wanted others to believe who wrote all this down. A Jesus who gives evidence and is unable to look after that evidence and unable to provide independent verification is not much of a miracle-worker! The Catholic Church constantly hears of miracle reports similar to those about Jesus but they crumble under investigation. Jesus was never checked out. That didn't stop him from ordering people to believe in his miracles. His example implies that checking out is a sin!
Jesus
prophesied that signs and wonders would be done by impostor Christs that would
be so great that even the elect, the holiest of the believers, could be deceived
despite their spiritual discernment and theological insight and training. This means that we should look for the bad
side not the good side for we can’t be too careful and that any miracle that
attracts the devotion of ordinary laypeople is showing a bad fruit, causing
imprudence, and must be false. But Jesus
didn’t realise that if the fakes should not be accepted as emissaries of God
then he should be even less accepted for all the evidence we have for his miracles
is some anonymous paperwork! Modern
miracles are more believable for we can test them with science and yet Jesus
wanted us to believe in his! How bigoted
and unreasonable!
The
Roman Catholic Church says we are not under obligation to believe in any
apparition or miracle even when they are approved by the Church that has taken
place since Bible times. We are obliged
to believe in the miracles reported in the Bible for it is the word of God and
doesn’t err. This is a dishonest
double-standard. You can’t believe
without evidence, if you try all you do is assume or guess which is not
believing. If we believe that the Bible
is true we must find evidence that its miracle stories are true. But if we may reject the non-biblical
miracles then that is saying the evidence doesn’t matter. If evidence for miracles doesn’t matter then
the evidence for the Bible doesn’t matter either. This is so simple and obvious that if we
accuse the Church of stupidity or deliberate distortion one thing is for sure,
it cannot be trusted and it is the body that takes the authority to declare
miracles false or true. Would a God of
truth really do miracles for a religion like that?
The
idea of God healing cancers here and there as signs is madness because why
doesn’t he make an amputee grow new legs in front of doctors instead? A simple sign like that would avoid the hard
work that is needed in verifying the miracle and leave people freer to do good
works. Why act as if there isn’t enough
power to do it? Small wonder there are
no wooden legs deposited at
Miracles seem to do some good such as making people feel consoled. Actually, people make themselves feel good on the occasion of an alleged miracle. The miracle has nothing to do with it. Miracles seem to heal people. But despite the good, miracles are a bad thing - overall. Belief in miracles has led to more harm than good. For everybody who is helped, there is ten who has been led into superstition and robbed of a lot of money by miracle mongers looking for donations. These miracle mongers range from fortune-tellers to the likes of US Televangelists. Even Jesus warned that fake Christs would come with great miracles and be able to lead even the elect astray. If God were all powerful, he would have things arranged so that belief in miracles would be good. Whatever the cause of so-called miracles is, it is not God. Those who promote miracles have more concern for what they want to believe than in promoting beliefs that are generally wholesome and therapeutic.
If miracles are not believable or if they do not happen, then clearly those who claim to perform them are taking advantage of other people and particularly vulnerable people.
If I experience a miracle, I have no right to ask or tell anybody else to believe. I have no right to even mention it - I would not be mentioning it unless I was encouraging the other person to believe! If I see a man commit a murder, its not others I should be telling but the appropriate authorities for only they are qualified to check me out. Miracles encourage disrespect.
True helping of others does not involve suggesting what they can do or should do. It certainly does not involve commanding them like religion does. It involves questioning and challenging them to help them find their own answers. Miracles do nothing in that respect at all. They are said to be verbal or non-verbal commands to believe in the truth and to obey and believe in Church authority.
To affirm the supernatural and the magical is to claim the right to hurt others with your belief. For example, take the bitter divisions over the apparitions of Medjugorje. If the apparition claim was never made none of that trouble would have happened. It is to tell others that you have the right to disregard the laws of nature. If you have the right, you must have adequate evidence. But you cannot have evidence that a miracle is going to happen. You can only gather evidence after it happens.
The quest for miracles is the quest for religious propaganda: "Hey Jesus is the Son of God because he raised the dead and turned a few loaves of bread into a ton of it to feed thousands of people!" If Jesus is indeed God's son, we can honour him implicitly. If you are a truly good person who feeds the hungry and clothes the naked etc and avoids the vices of pride, laziness etc you don't need to believe in Jesus or to know he is the Son of God. Good religion would be about doing good works and not about dogma. And therefore not about miracles. Jesus raising the dead is not about Jesus doing good works. It is about getting attention for Jesus.
Religionists who are on the quest to experience miracles or if not miracles then belief in miracles open themselves wide to deception. St John of the Cross had plenty to say about that. Also, they evidently think their religion is so ridiculous that they need to see miracle or a sign from God before they can manage to believe. Those who go to miracle shrines may not expect a direct miracle that will astound science but they will expect to experience the miracle of sensing the divine presence and experiencing God's power to heal the heart.
Conclusion - miracle reports are based on superstition. Religion ignores the proofs and dishonestly fools those who don't know any better into imagining that miracles really do happen.
It is self-evident that certain things are good and other things are not so good.
Morality is not about doing good. In fact, it is about doing certain kinds of good under the pain of retribution.
That is why it is not considered immoral to buy yourself a nice coffee instead of giving the money to the beggar outside the cafe door. It is not good but it is not immoral either.
Morality is about rules and laws. A law is not a law unless a punishment is prescribed for those who break it. The moral person will punish the immoral person by judging and disliking and condemning her or him. If the person has the authority to, he or she can lay down further punishment. For example, the parish priest may fire the housekeeper for being a lesbian.
The law of the land enforces moral rules that affect the people as a whole and claims the right to make any immoral act illegal that it wishes to.
The Christians promote God because they think we need morality. Thus they have to
The religion founded by
Joseph Smith Jun in 1830. He claimed
that he translated a new scripture The Book of Mormon from golden plates that
he dug up in a hill. Eleven witnesses
had a vision of the plates. Their
evidence was totally pointless because there is evidence in the book itself
that it is not the word of God. For
example, it makes prophecies and not one of them has been convincingly
fulfilled – those that did come true came true through luck - though Smith’s
translation of the Bible (Deuteronomy 18) agreed that the highest standards
while giving revelation from God will be followed by a true prophet. Basically, if a prophet gets all his
predictions right but one he is still to be regarded as a fraud despite the
miraculous knowledge of the future. This warns us against the idea of
accepting miracles as signs from God though the false prophet Jesus (who
claimed allegiance to Moses or to have sent him) claimed they were. Logically the same would apply to prophets
who make some predictions that could be explained by chance when they are
fulfilled. The Bible indicates that evil
spirits can do seemingly holy miracles to deceive people but since only God
knows the future then prophecy is the only way to be sure, it is the only
miracle that proves God is speaking or has spoken.
Smith prophesied that a
man called David Patten would accompany him on a mission in spring but Patten
died before this happened. The Mormon
answer that Patten would do the mission as a spirit being is just an obvious
cop out. This prophecy can be read in
the Mormon Scripture Doctrine and Covenants Section 114 which asks Patten to
sell what he has and get ready so that he can go on the mission with twelve
others. Another excuse is that the
section contains not a prophecy but a command from God for David. Would God tell you to do something knowing
you will die before you get the chance especially when he doesn’t speak
much? Excuses like this are unconvincing
and when God speaks there can be no doubt that God knows the future. God says in the prophecy that it is wisdom
for Patten to get ready for the mission.
Why would God who rarely speaks waste time on Patten and what he was
doing if he was going to take Patten from the world? Smith accepted the Bible statement that if a
prophet predicts wrongly he is a fraud.
Smith was a fake prophet.
Smith’s new addition to
the Bible The Book of Mormon is a fraud.
The Bible commands that a prophet who is always right but who is wrong
once or who teaches heresy is to be ignored.
That is why if Smith was not a true
prophet we cannot believe in the Book of Mormon.
Mormon 7:9 says that
whoever believes the Bible will believe the Book of Mormon. But the Book of Mormon says the Bible has
been changed and corrupted and the Bible gives no reason to believe in the Book
of Mormon! 2 Nephi 2:23 states that if
Adam and Eve had not sinned they would have had no children and would not have
known any joy for they knew no misery and being unable to do good for they did
not know what sin was. This is utter
rubbish. Sinlessness was no bar to
making babies. Thought God was
all-powerful? And you can have joy when
you forget about misery and do good when you forget about sin so you can have
joy without knowing what sin is.
Smith was copied by a man
who was undoubtedly a fraud James Jesse Strang who produced far more convincing
witnesses to his miraculous, yet undoubtedly non-existent, plates which
warns us not to be quick to believe Smith.
In Catholic doctrine, mortal sin is a serious sin that rejects God and cuts off friendship with him and which will take you to everlasting damnation in Hell. Venial sin is sin that is not as bad as that and only breaks with God a bit.
The Church says that God gave us all we have so we owe him devotion with our entire being. We are like married to God and to sin seriously is adultery for adultery does serious damage to a relationship. The commandment of God that we are to prefer nothing and nobody and not even ourselves to him but are to love him with all our heart and soul and mind and being is behind this rationale.
God would hate sin
infinitely because he is all good – his goodness is infinite. He can only be good to the degree that he
hates sin which is unlimitedly.
Therefore venial sin cannot exist.
Catholic morality then is hypocrisy.
The Church says that even if you commit one discreet act of adultery or miss mass on a Sunday you commit mortal sin. A system that says that and then that many venials which do more harm do not add up to mortal sin knows nothing of justice or making sense. It is a religion that is about law not goodness.
Paul wrote that nobody can be saved by works of the law of God and by obeying it and believing it as it commands for all it does is reveal what sin is in Romans 3. Its not for getting you into Heaven. Even the Sadducee Jews who believed that most sins were venial couldn't be saved or right with God. The Catholic teaching of venial sin contradicts the Bible and means the Church is telling people. they won't go to Hell when they will. And the reason is that all sin is mortal.
The reputed author of the first five books of the Bible which comprise the Law which was allegedly instituted by God.
Moses was an evil man who demanded in the name of God that adulterers and homosexuals be stoned to death. To say the Old Testament is the word of God is to side with God despite the murders he said he commanded through Moses. Though Moses demanded the highest standards in working out who was really a prophet of God: agreement with the word already given and predicting the future without error, he never left any fulfilled predictions behind that would prove that he could keep up to the standard. To reject Moses is to deny the divine origin of Judaism and the pretended fulfilment of Judaism, Christianity. It is to deny the divine sonship of Jesus Christ for Jesus said Moses really was a prophet of God and that Moses' writings were his credentials.
Judaism is the default faith. Christianity started among Jews who changed the Jewish religion. If they had no right to then we should become Jews. For this reason alone, the Christians must allow the Jews to commit the executions as God commanded. Having faith that Christianity is true is not a licence for refusing to play it safe.
The unlawful killing of a
human being. The doctrine that an
all-good God has the right to kill makes us see death as less bad than we could
which is a help to the person contemplating committing a murder. There is no need to believe in God therefore
belief in God is encouraging murder.
A “truth” of faith or
morals that we cannot understand however hard we try. Christianity is full of mystery. This marks it as a bigoted super-sect because
they reject other systems of belief that are full of mystery and accuse them of
contradicting themselves or of being otherwise implausible. Mysteries can be used as an excuse to get
people to believe anything that is very silly and no theology that has too much
mystery or unnecessary mystery can be considered believable.
An interpretation of Christian history that denies that Jesus existed. I suspect that when we read the life story of James the alleged brother of Jesus that the Jesus story may have been based on his story. I suspect that the teachings of James were put into the mouth of Jesus by the gospellers. Hegesippus stated that James was regarded by everyone as the holiest on earth and holy from his birth and never drank or ate meat. James was thrown off the Temple and survived. Reminds us of Satan tempting Jesus to survive such a fall. He died near where Jesus supposedly died and at Passover and was even buried near where Jesus was supposedly buried.
Simon of Peraea is sometimes called
Simon son of Joseph. He was a former slave of Herod the Great. He
fomented a rebellion and the Romans beheaded him in 4BC. He put a crown on
his head according to Josephus and proclaimed himself King or Messiah. "He
thought himself more worthy of that dignity than any one else."
The Gabriel's Revelation or The Jeselsohn Stone mentions Simon. It
commands Simon "to rise from the dead within three days".
Simon could have been another inspiration for the Jesus tale.
The Jews were performing healings in the first century invoking the name of Jesus son of Pantera. This could have been another Jesus. The Jesus of the gospel could be a fictitious figure based on many messiahs and prophets.
The main evidence for mythicism is as
follows:
The silence of historians and writers from the time. Even if he had been mentioned, they would need to give some indication of having evidence that he existed. A bald, "There was a Jesus," is nothing more than hearsay.
There is no evidence that the first
century Jewish historian, Josephus, mentioned Jesus for we know that a
Christian interpolator edited his work and inserted references to Jesus and
could have written all Josephus’ alleged references to Christ.
The gospel stories could have been invented. They could have been influenced by true stories where they ring true.
They
contain huge errors like saying Jesus was publicly active while claiming to be
the Messiah an act which would not have been tolerated by the Jewish leaders or Rome for even a
day in those politically turbulent times.
To claim to be Messiah or king was to declare war on the ruthless Roman
occupiers of Palestine.
The gospels cannot be trusted as evidence that Jesus lived. Maybe they are being truthful but what are we
to do? The gospels are the only
evidences for a historical Jesus. Even
if the gospels seem fairly plausible to some, the fact remains that the earliest
evidence counteracts them and denies them.
The earliest evidence is what counts.
The idea that people would not say embarrassing things about Jesus in the gospels which they did so the stories must have been true and undeniable is of no hope to Christians. The stories are that he insulted pagan women with possessed daughters and was nailed to the cross as a political criminal. Now all invented gods have unflattering tales told about them. And the crucifixion was turned into an advantage for it led to the heart-warming idea that Jesus died for sinners in atonement and rose from the dead and showed himself stronger than his killers.
The first Christian
writer, top Church leader and apostle, Paul of Tarsus, never placed Jesus in a
historical setting or said when he lived and gives no reason for us to deny
that all he said about Jesus came from his visions.
He indicated that there was no evidence when he required faith in the
crucifixion. You don’t need faith for what
is historical fact in recent times. He
told the Corinthians that he decided to know and hear nothing among them but
Christ crucified and this was to happen not by the wisdom of men but by the
inspiration of the Spirit (1 Cor 2:1-5).
When he put this faith on something so dangerous as the feeling that you
are inspired that shows that it was all he could do. He had nothing but visions and communications
from the Holy Spirit to tell him that Jesus was crucified meaning it was NOT
something a historian could accept. He
couldn’t refute the Corinthian believers who denied the resurrection except to
mention the visions of the risen Jesus that they scoffed at and say that Jesus
must have risen because the dead would be lost if he didn’t. The desperation proves that there was no real
evidence – he couldn’t say Jesus did miracles when alive and could have managed
to return from the dead. If Jesus lived
recently some of the sceptical Christians would have been saying that the
resurrection was a misunderstanding for the wrong man was nailed or Jesus
survived by trickery but he makes no effort to prove that Jesus was dead which
he would have to do to show the resurrection happened. He can do nothing.
Paul stated that Christ
did not send him to baptise but to preach the gospel and not with eloquence and
wisdom so that the cross would not be emptied of its power (1 Cor 1:17). This means that wisdom and intelligence would
be no good to get people to believe in the cross and in its power but the cross
has power to draw people to believe in it.
That would only be right if there was no evidence for the cross but
visions of a man who claimed to have been crucified and raised from the
dead.
In Galatians 5:11, Paul declares that if he preaches circumcision the stumbling block of the cross is removed. This is plainly saying that to accept circumcision is denying the cross happened.
Notice that he doesn’t say denying the atonement or the propitiation but the cross, the historical event.
Hardcore Protestants argue that he was saying that the likes of Catholics are making the cross ineffectual. So it is necessary to deny that you can do anything to please God. Salvation is passive. Believing in Jesus doing all the work so that there literally nothing left for you to do is a sign of being saved and justified and forgiven.
Paul did not mean anything like that. If he had meant it he would have said that the circumcision is a stumbling block to the propitiation not the cross. That view would be pure nonsense. And Paul would have known it was for there were a lot of different views in early Christianity. Millions have believed in the cross as a vehicle of salvation and atonement without believing that it abolished good works and religious rites as specified in the Law of Moses. Catholics follow a replacement for the Law of Moses and still believe that Jesus died in their place for their sins. You could have circumcision without denying the atonement of the cross.
Why did
believers of his day go as far as to say that to accept circumcision was doing
away with the cross? There is only one possible answer. Jesus revealed
that he was nailed to a cross in visions to the apostles.
In those visions, Jesus stated that the cross had to happen to free Christians from the Law of Moses
and circumcision by taking the punishment due to sin. We know this had to
have happened for the gospels never portray a Jesus who was that emphatic
about doing this. To reject the revelation is to reject the cross for the
revelation is the only evidence that the cross even happened.
If you accept circumcision you contradict Jesus who told the Church about
the cross eliminating the need for it and if you contradict Jesus you also deny that he was reliable in
relation to the cross having happened.
To deny one then is to deny the other.
There is nothing else that could make the cross and the abolition of the law so inseparable.
Paul talked as if the risen
Christ was a mystical supernatural being who somehow was one person with the
Church which was his body so in a sense he and his cult were Jesus Christ
(Galatians 2:20; 1 Corinthians 6:15-17; 1 Corinthians 12) which may explain the
reference to Jesus testifying to Pontius Pilate in one of his letters which
most scholars however think is not really his work. Perhaps Jesus was thought to have had
appeared to Pilate after his resurrection.
There were many Christian legends from early times to that effect.
The Christianity of the
apostles and Paul had nothing to do with a Jesus who provably lived but a
visionary one – an entity that appeared to some people claiming to have been a
man that was never known before who was crucified and raised from the dead. This was the testimony of the first Christian
writer so it supersedes any evidence that allegedly shows that Christ lived
especially when the other apostles of Jesus, Peter, James and John, accepted
him as sufficiently Christian. So they
must have agreed on that much.
1 Peter 3 says that Roman
governors and officials must be obeyed for God uses them to punish and reward
people (1 Peter 2:13, 14). Most of these
punishments were unduly harsh and pagan and punishment is really vengeance if
you administer it in a spirit of hatred and spite like they did so it is
ridiculous to say that Peter means we should just approve of their punishments
when they do right. He is saying we must
approve of what they do just because it is God that lets them rule. This is a denial that Jesus suffered death
under Pontius Pilate, a Roman governor.
2 Peter 1 says that the
apostles believe that seeing Jesus glorified and transfigured (this seems to be
referring to a resurrection vision) and God telling them that he was his beloved
son is not as sure a word from God as the word of God in the Old
Testament. So you should not look for
evidence that Jesus lived or what he did except by looking at the Old Testament
prophecies about Jesus. This admits that
there is no evidence but the Old Testament.
It therefore dismisses traditions about Jesus and gospels as fables.
The secular references to
Jesus, which are very flimsy, could have come from hearsay that was understandably
taken as fact just like some people believe that Joseph Smith of the Mormons
really had golden plates even though that is part of the Mormon myth though
without accepting any of the other Mormon legends. They take the plates as history and the rest
as nonsense.
It is a mistake for those
who oppose mythicism to disparage it.
Even if it simply shows that the evidence for Jesus is not great or very
weak or that nobody can know if Jesus existed or not or that it is one of the matters
on which competent scholars can choose to disagree it still manages to destroy
Christianity. If Christians would accept
weak evidence, then they have no right to object if somebody invents a new
creed on slender evidence and yet they intolerantly claim to follow Jesus who
called himself “the Truth”.
Ordination or Holy Orders is one of the seven sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church.
Holy Orders can only be validly conferred by bishops. The idea is that Christ gave the power to ordain and celebrate the sacraments only to the twelve apostles who passed these powers on by laying hands on other men, called bishops, to continue these powers. Thus the power was spread like a virus.
The power can only be validly transmitted from bishop to bishop by the laying on of hands.
The bishop is thought to have the
full priesthood and a priest only shares in some of the priesthood. A deacon receives some of the sacrament of order,
some of the priesthood as well, though inconsistently
The Bible never says that these offices can only be conferred by a bishop who derives his powers from a line of bishops going back to the apostles. It never says that ordination is a sacrament.
If
you read Acts 13:3 you see no indication that the laying on of hands here was
an ordination. The Holy Spirit asked for
Paul and Barnabas to be set apart for his mission and this was done by the
laying on of hands. They went then
directed by the Holy Spirit on a missionary journey. At most this was just a blessing for the
journey. The text doesn’t tell us if the
hands were essential or if they conferred sacramental powers or were more than
just an indication of approval and a blessing in preparation for sending these
men on a mission. 2 Timothy 1:6 has
Timothy asked by Paul to rekindle the grace within that he got through Paul
laying hands on him. This text or
context doesn’t indicate that Timothy was a bishop or ordained. Nor does Paul say that the grace happened
because it was a sacrament. Grace can be
transmitted by prayer and laying hands is a prayer. And Timothy needs to rekindle the grace even
though Paul praised him as exemplary just a few verses earlier. A sacrament’s grace will stay with you as
long as you are holy.
Just as the Church has found that many marriages are invalid – and these are the few it was able to know about – obviously there must be invalid ordinations as well. The Council of Trent made it official Catholic teaching that a sacrament can only be conferred by intending to at least do as the Church does. “If anyone shall say that intention, the intention at least to do what the Church does, is not required in ministers while performing and giving the sacraments then let him be accursed” (Session VII, Canon 11). So an unbelieving bishop can validly make new bishops as long as his intention is this: “I don’t believe this stuff but if there is anything in it then I intend to make this man a true bishop and give him grace.” Obviously, then ordinations done by a bishop like this should be repeated to be on the safe side. What if because of his unbelief he can’t intend to consecrate? What if he thinks, “What a superstition this rite is! I am so sure there is no power in it and I can’t give any and I don't even intend to.”
The Roman Catholic Church decreed with Pope Leo XIII that since Anglican bishops though intending to ordain priests didn’t believe in ordaining priests to celebrate Mass the ordinations were invalid. For Roman Catholics, Anglican bishops and priests are really not ordained at all. The Catholic Church re-ordains them unconditionally as if there is no doubt that the orders they got before were fake.
The decree would imply that unbelievers cannot give real sacraments. The Church says they cannot give real ordination. Inconsistently, though it may recognise their baptisms.
There is nothing the Church can do to guarantee that you are getting a real sacrament. The Church says that it trusts in God to protect her from such disasters as ministers giving invalid ordinations. When God lets the Church be bothered with invalid marriages and lets it be fooled by false popes why be so sure? The Church has admitted to excommunicating people and groups unfairly causing grave division in the Church by its invalid excommunications. This does even worse damage than the consecration of fake priests and fake bishops.
Suppose somebody is invalidly baptised. If that person becomes a priest or bishop that person will not be a true priest or bishop. Church law is that the sacraments can only be validly received by a baptised person. If a priest is invalidly ordained he cannot become a valid bishop for it is necessary to be a priest first. The doctrines surrounding the sacrament of ordination are so ridiculous that one must question the sanity or normality of any man that becomes a priest.
Protestant baptisms cannot be valid in the eyes of honest Catholics. A valid baptism must be done with the intention to let God put grace into the child. Even an atheist or Jew can do this. Not believing in God does not mean you can't think, "I am totally sure I am right that there is no God. But if there were I would want this rite to let him help the child with his grace." Protestantism consecrates the child to the doctrine of total depravity which means the child is not being consecrated for God. Thus the many priests and bishops of the Catholic Church who had been baptised as Protestants are not really ordained at all.
The doctrine that when Adam the first man ate the forbidden fruit according to the first book of the Bible that this was a terrible sin that cut him off God and made us born in the same rebellious state. This was supposed to be why we needed the atonement of Christ to make up for this so that we could be put right with God. No good God would let us be born in such a state for he would want us to be with him in every moment of precious time. The Church says that the human weakness in us is evidence for this original sin. But it is just evidence for weakness and that is all. God is universally insulted to justify the claim that nobody is saved without Jesus for all have descended from Adam and inherited his antagonism towards God like a virus.
People took stories like Adam and so on literally in ages past. Theologians today who say it is symbolic cannot give us a Bible verse that says it was. They are making assumptions and treating them as the word of God. To find absurdities and contradictions in the Adam story and claim that they indicate that the story is symbolically true but not literally true is extremely dishonest. If we use that approach all the time we will have to start saying that every rubbish story say in paganism is true. Adam did not exist so original sin is a lie.
The story says that Adam was asked not to touch the tree of knowledge of good and evil. God made this law. Touching the tree was not wrong in itself. God made it wrong. The story implies that sin is not exactly doing harm - it is the disobedience to divine authority that is the problem. Original sin if it exists then causes the wish to unify law and morality in the name of God.
Theologians say that the tree was called the tree of knowledge of good and evil because anybody who touched the tree would know experientially what it is to stop being good and become evil. They deny that Adam was going to get a purely intellectual knowledge of these things without experiencing them.
A stigmatic
miracle-working monk who died in 1968 and who canonised by Pope John Paul II.
Pio claimed that Jesus gave him a copy of the
five wounds of the crucifixion. In 1923,
In the pro-Pio book, Padre Pio Under Investigation, Francesco Castelli states that a Monsignor Rossi (in 1921) examined Pio's stigmata and found no wounds in the palms even though there was a scab of blood in each palm. He found two white button like marks on the feet but no blood or wounds there. Rossi described the marks not as wounds but as the effusion of blood - like blood getting out through skin. This book admits that Pio was ordering carbolic acid but says without proof that he needed it to sterilise needles.
The book says that Rossi found no lesions but yet Pio told him that his hands were very sore. Why would they be sore when there were no wounds but only scabs?
This book says that in order the doctors who examined the alleged wounds were
Doctor Romanelli in 1919. Asserted there was a side wound "lacerated" and "linear". Stated that he thought the wounds in the hands went right through.
Professor Bignami in 1919. Asserted there was no side wound. Denied there were any deep fissures.
Doctor Festa in 1919. He contradicted Romanelli who said the wounds in the hands went right through. Asserted there was no side wound. Denied there were nay deep fissures.
Doctor Festa conducted a second examination in 1920.
Doctor Festa conducted a third examination in 1925.
Festa regarded the marks as supernatural. He reached this opinion merely from the fact that they were perfumed. He obviously just took Pio's word for it that no cologne had been applied!
Its uncertain that Pio ever really had wounds.
Nobody ever said he could press on each
side of the hand "wound" and get his fingers to touch one another through the
alleged wound. Doctor Romanelli said he had the
impression that the hand wounds were through the hands but he admitted it was
only an impression. He tried but assumed that
his fingers would meet if he tried harder. But he was afraid to for it
gave Pio great
pain (page 14, The Stigmata and Modern Science). The priest was crying and struggling and
wincing with the alleged pain enough as it was so would the examination have been done right? Romanelli is the weak leg that the pro-Pio devotees have to stand on.
How convenient that Pio was not put under
anaesthesia for examination of the wounds.
That shows that neither Pio or those who organised the tests were very
particular though they did a bit to look particular. Pio was not
seriously interested in having the wounds cured for as far as he was concerned
he knew how to handle them. Pio wanted
the appearance of being verified as a true stigmatist. And Pio was able to undergo two operations
without anaesthetic which is a phenomenon known as auto-anaesthesia (page 89,
The Bleeding Mind)– many people with trained minds are - which makes his
behaviour very suspicious. It looks as
if he wanted to use the pain as an excuse for getting the tests rushed and to
prevent anything suspicious being found.
It paid off.
Pio’s Provincial said he would testify on
oath that he could see through Pio’s hand wounds (page 68, The Bleeding Mind). But no doctor ever could so that is
worthless. A piece of a mirror in the
middle of the encrusted blood could be used to give the impression that the
hand could be seen through just like a magician could do it.
Reason bids us believe the doctors who said
the wounds were superficial for that would explain why they were not septic –
as can carbolic acid which some thought Pio was using on the wounds.
Superficial wounds would explain why
there was not a mark on Pio when he died.
When there is conflict of testimony the testimony that is closest to a
rational or simplest interpretation has to be preferred. And in this case we have disposed of
Romanelli’s reliability – remember when we refute his testimony that is all we
need to do for he was the only one that was nearly any good - so we can be
confident that Pio’s wounds were superficial and that naturally he exaggerated
the pain from them to avoid detection and so he was consciously deceiving.
It is absurd to think that the wounds would
change so much as from superficial to complete perforations if they were
miraculous. They might change if they
were natural.
Pio was certainly dodgy and has recently
been exposed for surreptitiously sending for chemicals amid great secrecy
as if he needed them to make his wounds.
If Pio's stigmata was dubious, how can we be confident in the other miracles ascribed to him?
Pio was famous for the miracle of perfume
which surrounded him. One thing is for sure when a person has a nice smell that
is supposedly a miracle you can be sure that it is not. No sensible God would do such a mundane and
easily duplicated miracle.
Pio drew attention for his alleged (and
unsubstantiated for he was alone when they happened) nocturnal battles with
demons who used to hit him. Demons would
not have drawn attention to him unless they had some secret pact with him for
if God was with him they could not hope to win.
The belief that God is
not a spirit outside the universe but that the universe is this spirit behaving
as if it were matter so all things are God.
This is absurd for it would mean the child killed by the car is the same
being and thing and person as the car. A
God like this is insane when he morphs into a world such as ours. He is therefore not a God for he is not in control of
himself so he cannot expect sincere worship.
Many Atheists claim to be Pantheists for they believe that God is a
material thing, the universe. They see
God as non-supernatural and just another word for the universe.
The man who was behind the spread of Christianity throughout the Empire. He claimed that Jesus made him an apostle by appearing to him. He told the Corinthian Christians who had fallen away from belief in the resurrection of Christ that Jesus rose for all the dead would be lost if he did not. He was trying to emotionally blackmail them to believe. That was a very very cynical and callous lie for he was trying to make those who doubted the resurrection feel so scared and depressed that they would believe. He was plainly lying for if Jesus was a fraud there could be another saviour who is not. He cannot be trusted for Jesus being a fraud could not mean that the dead would have to necessarily be lost. He clearly was hard up for evidence for the resurrection. He knew that the stranger a claim is the more evidence it needs. He was trying to make people dishonest with themselves and believe such a serious claim with such flimsy evidence.
That
the apostles tolerated this man and even gave him the hand of fellowship shows
that they were just as bad.
The sin of swearing on the Bible to tell the truth and then lying. Most people these days lie under oath and they get away with it because it is very hard to prove they were deliberately lying. In the past it was believed that if you lied under oath you would be consigned by God to eternal damnation because you were calling the God of truth to bear witness to a lie. That was the rationale for swearing on the Bible. It was very useful for those who secretly sneered at the Church - and every Church contains a large number of people who do that – to give their lies more weight.
One thing is for sure, the person who swears
outside of a court of law is definitely lying for they are asking for more
faith to be put in their statements than normally would be. Their oaths mean nothing because the
solemnity and the penalty of the law does not hang over them so why are they
wasting their breath swearing if they are telling the truth? Yet we have Jesus and Paul swearing in the
Bible outside of the courts. Jesus said
that God bears witness to him which is the same in all respects as an
oath. If God is truth then to tell any
lie is calling on God to witness to a lie at least implicitly. You lie to destroy truth and you are hoping
that God will not expose you and thereby imply that he agrees with what you are
doing.
This apostle supposedly
wrote 2 Peter in the Bible. This crazy
letter says extraordinary things about the Bible. It stated that even though Peter actually heard
the voice of God when Jesus was transfigured that this voice was not as certain
as what God said and predicted in the Old Testament. This indicates that the evidence for Jesus
Christ should be gleaned from the Old Testament and that even the apostles should not
be believed when they testify that Jesus rose unless it can be determined that
the Old Testament God forecasted it.
Jesus himself according to Luke 16:31 reasoned that if the Old Testament
says something it is right and even a resurrection miracle has less credibility.
He stated that if people don’t believe in the Old Testament they will not
be persuaded even if they see a man rising from the dead to warn them.
When the Old Testament is more sure than even the direct voice of God that means that the Old Testament words must be literally the words of God as fundamentalists believe – the Old Testament is verbally inspired.
The pope claims to succeed Peter. A real successor of Peter would uphold his legacy of fundamentalism.
The head of the Roman Catholic Church. Roman Catholic doctrine says that the apostle Peter was the first pope. Peter was the first bishop of Rome and so the man who becomes bishop of Rome becomes pope and head of the Church as he succeeds Peter. The fact that an ossuary has been found on the Mount of Olives bearing Peter's name Simon Bar Jonah does not faze the Catholic Church. Peter indeed was probably never bishop of Rome and died and was buried in Jerusalem.
The pope claims to be the successor of St Peter the apostle on whom Christ built the one true Church, the Roman Catholic Church and that all Christians have a duty to obey him. He goes as far as to claim to be infallible. There is no evidence that if Jesus made Peter the rock that he meant he was to be the head of the Church. Peter might have been only the chief organiser of the Church meaning that if the pope is his successor the pope like any organiser may be rebelled against and broken away from if he does not do his job.
Jesus would have meant that if Peter was the rock he would only be that as long as he stayed firm so it is a conditional role he got. The pope claims that his office is unconditional for the Church needs him. So the papacy was not instituted by Jesus.
The pope sees no evidence for his infallibility and his kingship over the Church so he has stolen his position. He has stolen the place of Christ and is antichrist.
Pope John Paul II claimed that the papacy never misleads the Church and
yet he came out against the Bible teaching on the rightness of capital
punishment! To say as he did that
capital punishment is evil for the person might be innocent however unlikely
this seems, accuses Jesus of backing up an evil God who commanded executions by
stoning for apostasy, heresy and sexual sins. This is the man who insists that condoms must
not be used even by a married man trying to avoid giving AIDS to his wife!
The Church says Peter was the rock that is to say the foundation of the Church. If Peter was the rock the Church was built on, it follows then that Peter and the pope, if he is really his successor, have to hold the Church together. This would require one to believe that the Roman Pontiff is infallible or acting without error when he excommunicates. The Church dares not teach this for history shows persons and groups being thrown out of the Church by one pope and this action being apologised for by another pope. If the pope were really the rock he wouldn’t be able to excommunicate unfairly.
The SSPX says it is in communion with the Catholic Church and is not a separate Church even though it is excommunicated for schism. They say the excommunication is unfair and therefore null and void. The concept of invalid excommunication doesn’t solve any problems for the pope and the Church are separating themselves from some person or group and vice versa. There is still a split, casting-out, separation and division even if the decree is invalid. The decree might be invalid but it is still effective. If you give John a vodka but not knowing it is a synthetic copy of vodka you have given John an invalid vodka but it still makes him drunk and has consequences. It’s real in its effects.
If Jesus promised us popes to be the rock the Church was built on, then he broke his promise for many of them have been wimps and disasters. They cannot be described as rocks. At times, two or more men claimed to be pope and nobody knew for sure who was the real pope. How then could the papacy be rock?
There is no good evidence that Peter was the rock in the Catholic sense. For example, he doesn't leave any affidavits saying he was head of the Church. Nor does he mention that bishops of Rome will be his successors. Peter might have been one of many bishops in Rome - if he died there at all. For all one knows, maybe the Peter that allegedly died a martyr's death there could have been a mistaken identity. Peter would need to designate a successor to be the new rock after his death. None of this happened. The evidence is not convincing enough then that Peter can be considered to be the rock the Church is built on in the sense of father, infallible teacher and monarch over the Church. A rock that leaves inadequate evidence that it is the rock is not a rock at all. Worse, even if Peter was the rock in the Catholic sense there is still no reason to believe that the popes, even if they are his successors, are his equals or were meant to be.
If Jesus made a false prophecy or Matthew mistakenly imputed one to him, then we cannot take Matthew 16 as support for the papacy. Its unreliable.
Prayer according to the Church is raising the heart and mind to God. It means sincerely and consciously communicating with God. It is always asking God for something, it could be to love God more or it could be for something as materialistic as a pay-rise.
The Church says that salvation is impossible without prayer. That’s discrimination against those who don’t pray but do some mighty good work. So prayer is unloving and it cannot do any real good for it deepens darkness in the heart. The virtue it produces is just self-serving vice in disguise.
If you are happy and confident, you don't need prayer. It is strong self-esteem we need not prayer. Prayer is therefore incompatible with self-esteem for it denies this truth. It only bestows self-esteem in some cases in spite of itself.
You would only need to pray if God won’t help you unless you open your heart to him. A really good God would help you anyway. He could save you through your sincere effort to live as a good person even without you knowing it is he or that he exists. God will do what is best and he is the almighty boss so prayer is not trying to help anybody. It is an evil God that will abandon people until somebody prays for them. Magic would be more moral for it at least is really trying to help. Prayer is not for you can’t change God. Its not really trying.
Praying Christians know that Christianity is not a humanitarian religion - it is about God and serving him through helping others - the others are not to be helped for their sake but his. Prayer is for them, just an attempt to feel good about doing nothing. Then rancid selfishness is concealed by piety.
Even the believer has to admit that prayer is really doing nothing for another person. God knows what is best. We might pray for healing. And it may come. Did God answer the prayer then? That depends on his motive. Did he do it to answer the prayer or did he do it just because it was the right thing to do? If he did it because he was asked, then it was not because it was right. Maybe he did it both because he was asked and because it was right? That means he refused to do it entirely because it was right. In so far as God does not do it because it is right he is acting amorally if not immorally. As he claims to be good, he would be showing he is not perfectly good. Then prayer is saying, "I don't care if you are evil or not do what I ask!" How is that supposed to help us become more virtuous? No wonder there is nothing remarkable about the virtue of most believers. Any virtue they have is there in spite of their faith and their prayers.
It is said that if we pray we become more like God in virtue and this alone is an answer to prayer. He helps us.
A tiny minority of believers say that if we want something from God, we must make sure that it is spiritually good for us to get it. We have to make the circumstances right for God to give us the blessing we want. If you want a bicycle and pray for it then you have to acquire virtue so that you will appreciate getting it and having it and try to grow closer to God through using it. For example, you might use it to go to Mass more if you are a Catholic.
This seems to avoid the idea that prayer is an arrogant and prideful attempt to manipulate God and to impose your will on him. But does it? It does not work. Most Christians do not emphasise it or even know of it. This means that their prayers are undoubtedly superstitious. The true devotee will try to be holy for the sake of holiness and not for the sake of a bike. Such holiness would be mercenary and thus it would be fake. And if it will help you spiritually to get the bike you will get it even if you are not paving the way by becoming holier.
As for being good and holy and spiritual so that God will be able to answer your prayers what about the many evil people who think their evil prayers to him are answered? Jack the Ripper would have prayed to get through the streets after his crimes without being apprehended by the police. He would have imagined his prayer was answered. Believers would see that as proof that his escape was just down to luck not God for God wouldn't hear his unholy prayers. Yet they refuse to admit the truth, "There is no way of telling if an answer to prayer is coincidence or a real answer." They carry on the same way as fortune tellers with their superstition.
To love God with all your heart means to hate sin with all your heart as well. Prayer is opening up to that and trying to do that. That is what really matters. Prayer indicates that God is good and so deserves all our love and it urges people to sacrifice themselves on the altar of religion by being eaten up by hatred. Then when they go out of control they can make out its a crime of passion and not fully sinful as they were not completely free.
The prayers of most believers are not motivated by the intention to develop a rabid hatred of sin so they are not prayers to God but to the image they have made of God. The ego lurks behind their piety.
Prayer implies that it is God's will that matters and nothing else - it conditions people to help themselves and others only for God. It implies that God is what matters and people don't. It implies that if God needed you to torture everybody else to death you would. Christians say that is a stupid thing to claim for God would never ask that. But that is not the point and they know it. The point is that it is hypothetical. You have to be willing to do it at least in theory.
Why is it that one prayer is never enough? A good God wouldn’t care about the quantity
but the quality. Prayer then is a kind
of a spell, trying to control God and it insults his goodness. It puts people into a relaxed hypnotic state
of mind that is useful for religion to hypnotise people to believe its lies and
obey it.
Catholics pray to saints. They say God uses the saints to help those who pray to them get close to him. If they really want to get close to God then they don't need the saints. They can go straight. The saints who pray for you are hypocritical for the essence of prayer is hypocrisy. If you ask their prayers that is what you are asking them to be - hypocrites. If we thought they were merely praying, "You know best O God and your will be done!", we wouldn't bother invoking them. We wouldn't need to and it would be ridiculous to ask. Those who pray to saints are trying to get them to manipulate and fool God for them. Only demons will be interested in responding to such prayers! The prayers are really attempts to bend God's ear and a sign of mistrust.
Miracles supposedly aim to inspire prayer which if true, shows they are signs not of grace but of folly and evil.
Does prayer matter in itself? Or does it matter only because it gets us blessings from God? If it matters even partly because of what we can gain then in so far as we do that we are for self and not God. Prayer must matter in itself if there is a God. It follows then that to teach us that we must be meant to suffer by crying out to God for help and getting nothing from him. God then has the right to do this and even the obligation to.
Prayer when dissected is alarming and offensive and pays homage to fanaticism.
A person who functions as a kind of channel for God for God to speak through, which often involves telling what God has shown them about the future.
The Law of God in Deuteronomy 18 decrees that if a prophet who accurately predicts the future at all times and makes one prediction that fails, he is to be stoned to death. It says he is a false prophet for God does not err. So it says God does not speak through prophets who err in reporting what he said or who lie about receiving revelations.
The standard is high and so it should be. We should expect awesome amazing evidence that somebody is really inspired by God and is his prophet. Deuteronomy says that a prophet can be miraculously right nearly all the time and still not be a prophet of God. This warns us that even if somebody does miracles and shows they really do know the future and can forecast the lottery numbers they are getting the power from some source other than God. The person is not a prophet of God. Deuteronomy 18 denies the religious lie that miracles are signs from God saying where the true faith is and which church teaches it. This makes a question mark appear over Jesus’ big sign, the resurrection.
The standard eliminates Moses and Jesus and John the Baptist and several others as true prophets as they showed no power to tell the future. They made no predictions except for Jesus who is terribly unimpressive. Jesus' fulfilled prophecies were recorded after the event. The ones still to be fulfilled are vague and show he didn't know the future at all and was only guessing. It should be that prophecies cannot be rationally explained when they are fulfilled. It is worse to make no prophecies that fall into that category than to make many prophecies that come true and get one wrong.
Prophets are evil men
because they predict wars which influences politics and evil men. For example, the Bible prophecies about
The Protestants belong to
The Protestant God is
obviously condoning the sins of believers. Jesus may pay but as far as we experience it,
which is what counts, our sins are being condoned. The Catholic God does the same when you can
go straight to Heaven after committing venial sins if somebody has got
indulgences for you to cancel the punishment due to them. A God that rewards
sin is not a God but a hypocrite. The
fruits of Christianity prove that Jesus was not the Son of God for he was the
one that said the work of God always brings good fruit.
To teach that faith alone
saves is to deny that human beings matter.
It teaches that dogma matters more than people for you cannot be saved
by saving a life but you can be saved by trusting in dogmas. It is a lie that it is not dogmas but God a
person that is trusted for if there is no God then it follows that it is
dogmas. We don’t know for sure if
there is a God and less sure if God really saves this way so it is dogma.
Paul wrote in his divinely inspired scripture that obeying the law of God cannot save or justify, put you right with God, because the law gives knowledge of what sin is (Romans 3:20). In other words, the law saves nobody for they cannot keep it. Then he writes that God has had to save us without the law by faith. He means faith alone for he already said why obedience to God can’t save.
The Bible is a Protestant book. The Bible is an evil book for it is attractive to those who want to be saved but not from their sins. Protestantism is perfect for people like that with its doctrine that Jesus died on the cross so that you could sin with impunity.
Giving a criminal the bad things they earn for doing wrong. This is really the only thing that free will is believed in for. People say you cannot deserve punishment if you did not do the wrong you did of your own free will. You can give rewards as incentives towards goodness – because free or unfree, we will not do good unless we get interested in doing it and so you can still tell a person what they should do without accepting free will. The punishment doctrine is just an excuse for hidden revenge. We can put criminals in jail so that the law is seen to be seriously opposing evil activity and we don’t need to bring in the notion that they really deserve it. All we need to know is that they are not deranged persons in the psychiatric sense. Evil people are all deranged but not medically deranged.
The best way to encourage evil is to condone it. Condoning says that an act is bad. Then when you do it there is no punishment. So it is not real disapproval. It is really a form of encouraging evil. Forbidden fruits are the most attractive. So the fake disapproval is necessary to make it more attractive. The Church never punished child molesting priests. It is no different from paedophile rings which admit the abuse is wrong but who facilitate it. In a sense the person who thinks what is evil is good and refuses to do anything about it is less bad than the person who does that believing that evil is bad. Religions like Christianity that tell people they can sin and face no penalties are frankly evil.
Rationalising means
- you make far-fetched excuses for holding a view that is wrong or improbable. For example, Padre Pio was able to undergo surgery without anaesthetic yet he claimed it was painful if somebody tried to touch his allegedly miraculous stigmata marks. Another example. The medium Florence Cook used props and was caught fraudulently pretending that she could call up the dead. She used props and tricks to help her use her powers to call up the dead. The powers can sometimes fail. The medium needed to resort to fraud when her powers would fail her. This was so that she felt more relaxed and attuned to her powers. She knew that she would one way or another not end up discrediting her mediumship and herself. Or maybe when she was caught acting fraudulently she was actually set up by evil spirits.
- you use speculation to ignore the problems. For example, the Bible's Book of Daniel contains predictions that could have been made after the events. There is no evidence at all that the book was really written centuries before the events. The Christians say that Jesus who claimed to be God's prophet said it was authentic and that settles it! But if Jesus was wrong he would have been a false prophet! Why should we agree with the Christians? The Book of Mormon says the wheel was used over a wide part of ancient America. No evidence has surfaced to back this up. The Mormon excuse is that God laid waste the nation destroying the evidence and its people became barbarians and lost the knowledge they once had.
- rationalisers say their religion is true and they try to explain away the evidence against the religion being true all the while having little evidence that the religion is true. Mormons say Joseph Smith their prophet knew the future from God. They explain away his false prophecies. That approach would only be fair if they could give us authentic examples of prophecies that did come true. This then would allow us to reason, "Prophecy 1 came true and this must have been miraculous. Prophecy 2 seems to have failed. Let us see if it really was a prophecy or if it really failed. Maybe there is something wrong with our interpretation? Is the text correct?" If a person does not start with the pro-evidence that person is a rationaliser and a fraud and a self-deceiving fool.
Rationalisation gives silly things a veneer of plausibility. It leads to rubbish "ringing true".
Rationalising and deceiving yourself are one and the same thing. The rationaliser tries too hard meaning he or she knows fine well that his or her claim about the supernatural or paranormal is suspect or downright wrong.
Reason is thinking without contradicting yourself for A cannot be B at the same time and in the same way that A is A. Reason is about knowing when something is a fact and holding beliefs that do not contradict it. A person who follows reason in preference to religious dogma and emotional feelings is called a rationalist. We can’t get away from reason. Even those who say that faith and not reason should be listened to are reasoning that faith is better. Their reasoning is bad for why their preferred faith and not another? But it is still reasoning. Accordingly, it is only natural that we should check anything we are told with commonsense and logic.
It is right to have a faith that exalts human beings as the supreme dignity and which questions all things to get the right answers and is open-minded and eager to hear all sides if you must have a faith. Keep away from religion. Religion is bias and prejudice.
Reason will not answer all questions but encourages us to be fair and sensible and consistent and we can fill the gaps with harmless hypotheses that we are happy to change if need be and when they are disproved. It is a way of dealing with what we are told and experience. Rationalism should not advocate reason alone. That won’t work for we do need faith but we need godless faith that is tested by reason which sees no contradictions or impossibilities in it. Feelings are fine as long as they don’t control our thinking. We should experience joy in our reasoning.
It is unreasonable
to believe in reason alone because we need faith to help ourselves. But it can be said we believe in reason alone
because we only have the faith that reason permits us to have and because
reason tells us to use faith and have it.
Positive thinking is a virtue for even when it is proved wrong it is
still the best approach for it has less suffering in it. Positive thinking is faith.
The view that this life
will not be the only one for me and when I die I will come back in another
body. This doctrine is very dangerous
when coupled with the doctrine of karma.
Then it could infer that a baby that is murdered must have murdered somebody in
a past life. One would need perfect evidence to justify making an
accusation like that.
Religion comes from a word meaning to bind. The best definition of religion is that it is dogma that people are bound to adhere to no matter what. The pope for example does not permit himself to doubt that Jesus is God.
Atheism is not a religion as long
as it is all about rejecting hypotheses there is no evidence for and using
reason and experimentation to work out the truth. Atheism counts God among such hypotheses. If religion really cared about truth,
Catholics for example would be encouraged to check out the Church and given the
resources to decide for themselves and leave the Church if their conclusions
were unorthodox. You may say it is the
person’s own responsibility, but the Church claims to be the shepherd of souls
meaning it takes responsibility.
Christianity and Islam believe that the body will rise again. Christians hold that Jesus rose from the dead and left an empty tomb and subsequently appeared to his disciples. The earliest Christian writer, Paul the apostle, spoke for the Church when he said that if Jesus has not risen then our faith is in vain and useless and our dead will not rise and believers are to be pitied above all people. "But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But if he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men" (1 Corinthians 15:12-19). This argues that just because the resurrection is preached it should be believed. That is unfair. The apostles were manipulating and subtly bullying their believers. Paul then later says that it should be believed because it is testified to. That is only slightly better and slightly more charitable than what he said before. But still testimony is only human and so we can reject it if we don't see why we should accept it. Paul certainly was not very confident about the testimony. If your testimony is questioned you repeat it and answer problems people have with it. You don't say, "Accept my testimony because you are calling me a liar or wrong if you don't." To do that would set alarm bells ringing. All the religious frauds in the world try that tactic. Paul states that the faith even if it makes people happy is useless and futile if it is not true. He seems to mean here that God will damn believers if their faith is wrong. Happiness would only be useless if it was the means of landing you in Hell forever after death. Paul's argument shows that he is only concerned about being called a fraud like the other apostles. He was not as saintly as he pretended to be.
If you want to refute Christianity, all you need to do is focus on the resurrection of Jesus and see whether it is credible and possible or not. Every other miracle reported by Christianity is not as important. Paul set the standard and as an apostle we are meant to take his word as the word of Jesus himself. To repudiate the standard is to become your own religion and cease to be Christian. People think a huge miracle happened at Fatima in 1917 when people had visions of the sun spinning and changing colour in the sky. The Christian teaching on the resurrection of Jesus implies that this miracle was not necessary. It implies that it could not be as convincing as the resurrection. It implies that it is dishonourable to spend time examining that miracle instead of the resurrection. In reality, the Fatima miracle would be one of those miracles that refute the resurrection for it is better attested. Thus it purports to be the miracle that deserves the most faith.
The gospel writers offer not evidence for the resurrection of Christ but an interpretation they put on what they think happened. Why should we accept theirs for millions of interpretations are possible? They are the ones that say there is only one explanation so it is up to them to refute all the alternatives even if it takes to the end of the millennium so they have no right to our faith. Worse, there is no proof that the accounts are eyewitness accounts. Christians say they are. They seem to think that eyewitness accounts that have been worked over will do. They will not. We don't want something that was edited. We want the original unaltered written accounts and we want assurance that the witnesses checked over them before they were made public. They can't give us any of that.
Bodies have vanished inexplicably from their tombs. Even if nobody knows how or why they were taken, nobody reasons that this indicates resurrection. Christians agree and they say the empty tomb on its own is not enough and that is where the apparitions of Jesus come in. Apparitions alone would not be enough either - consider the visions that Mormons and Catholics see all contradicting one another. So Christians say that the empty tomb alone proves nothing and the apparitions alone prove nothing but the two together indicate that Jesus rose. But nothing can prove a connection between the two. Jesus could have been stolen from the tomb perhaps by people who thought he had enough healing ability to recover. And he could have risen in their care and vanished. But that is no use to those who seek evidence. We have no record of Jesus's body being observed as it vanished from the tomb or as it rose. And we need that.
A ghost could have
masqueraded as Jesus to create the resurrection appearances. It’s easier to
believe that than that a man came back bodily from the dead so it is more
reasonable. Ghost stories are the most common
accounts of miracle. That counts for a lot. The Church admits that if it
was just a ghost story that started the whole thing off there is no point in
believing in Jesus any more for his resurrection was meant to be a miracle that
could not be duplicated by Satan or anybody else.
The risen Jesus said that
his crucifixion and resurrection were foretold in the Jewish scriptures. That was a lie and the apostles knew it
because there are literally thousands of different interpretations for the
passages he was on about that Christians say predict the crucifixion and
nothing at all predicts the resurrection.
Psalm 16 allegedly does (Acts 2) but all it mentions is the recovery of
King David from serious illness.
The Christians all say that it is easier to believe that Jesus rose than the natural explanations. Hello! So a miracle then is a viable alternative to an outlandish natural explanation? A bizarre but possible natural explanation is always to be chosen over a miracle one. We know weird outlandish natural things can happen for heaven’s sake and what is natural comes first. Yet the denial of this is what faith in the resurrection depends on. It is a denial of a principle we need to keep for our own protection. We cannot live if we give people free rein to claim that say the missing money from the piggy bank could not have been taken by saintly Alex or sickly Paul and since there was nobody else in the house a demon must have taken it. Jesus wants us to be irrational if he wants us to believe in this resurrection. Irrational is the same as evil for evil is irrational. The irrational thought is what starts evil off. To condone the irrational is to repudiate the right to try and invite people to live better lives.
The Christians won’t admit
that there could be mistakes in the gospels so they use the gospels to prove
the resurrection. So what they are
really saying is that no other explanation works for the gospels are right. Evidently they are begging the question or
arguing in circles: “The gospels are all true therefore there is no other
explanation but resurrection and the resurrection proves the gospels are true.”
The Torah emphasised that nobody should be punished by death under God's law unless there were two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 17:6). Then later it said that nobody must be accused of a crime unless there are two or three witnesses (Deuteronomy 19.15). God gave this law. Jesus said two witnesses were needed that he was the Son of God and quoted this law in the Gospel of John (John 8:17-18). . He said God was one witness and he was the other. Any madman or religious fraud could say the same. Jesus was not genuine when he said this. But that aside, he was implying that witnesses to the resurrection were not needed. Indeed looking for them would be sidestepping his testimony and that of his Father God.
So the law is reaffirmed by Jesus and the apostles taught it as God's will ( 2 Corinthians 13:1 and 1 Timothy 5:19). This means that if three people tell you they had a revelation from Heaven that Jesus was a fake or did not rise from the dead then you must believe them. After all it makes sense to believe people you know than people who lived thousands of years ago like the gospel writers. This proves that those who focus so much on the resurrection of Jesus are being arrogant and arbitrary bigots. They centre on this and ignore better miracle claims just because those claims do not fit what they want to believe. There is no such thing as believing what you want to believe. If you think you have done this then you merely feel that it is true. That is not belief. Roman Catholicism then thanks to Jesus' low standard, has been refuted by the three witnesses of the Book of Mormon, a volume that denies that the Catholic Church is guided by God and is his true Church.
The major lie about the resurrection is that it is the miracle that proves to us that Jesus saved us from sin and death – a doctrine that was put into Jesus’ mouth by the gospellers and the other creators of the New Testament. For it to do that, you would have to prove that aliens or demons didn’t do some kind of trick like making everybody go to the wrong tomb and have hallucinations of Jesus induced and controlled by their super-science. In other words, nothing ever can prove that the resurrection was supernatural or the work of God. The resurrection of Jesus and the outlandish emphasis put on it destroys the credibility of Christianity.
When God or a spirit gives a supernatural message.
For Christians, revelation is the miracle of God giving us knowledge we wouldn't get otherwise. It is necessarily anti-reason and anti-evidence - and therefore anti-science. We will see this in a moment.
The Church disagrees - it says revelation is not irrational, not even slightly. It says reason is good for seeing if a claim is coherent or true or false. It sees it as a tool. But it says reason alone cannot tell us everything.
Reason says we need to take things on trust in order to function in life. It is reasonable to do that for reason is not enough. But it is not reasonable to claim that religious trust, trust in God and religion, is needed. The minimum faith we need is faith in each other. That is the default. Humanism, us deciding what is best for ourselves while assuming there is no more to life than the natural universe, is the default. Any faith that goes beyond the essentials then is against reason.
Revelation is invariably a scam with which to gain power over people’s thinking. It denigrates our human ability to look after ourselves for the messages would not be coming if they were not thought to be needed. God should help us to reason better so that way he doesn't need to appear in visions or write holy books through his channels. Revelation should take place the mundane ways.
We may not do well at looking after ourselves but that does not mean we need revelation for we are just abusing our resources and could waken up. God could give revelation simply by giving us inspiring thoughts that we don’t know are from him instead of setting up a monolith of dogma, a miraculous source of revelation such as a Church or Bible, which serves only to stir up trouble and division and confusion. For any man to claim to be the mouthpiece of God, to claim to be the Son of God which is to claim to be the supreme mouthpiece, demands extreme arrogance for he wants you to be dependant on what he wants you to believe about God. Maybe God is talking through him but how do you know? Remember that many people with stronger faith than you could have another prophet. It is really the man who is trusted and not God and it is the man’s vision of God not God that is worshipped. If revelation is immoral, then so are miracles for they are supposedly intended to reinforce the authenticity of revelation. The men in one sect claim to have verified miracles that show their gospel is from God while there are other sects claiming the same verifications for their gospel that contradicts it. It is not God and religion we oppose when you think about it but the men trying to fool us.
To embrace faith in revelation or miracles is really to abdicate responsibility. It is letting another tell you what to think and believe. In principle you became like the Nazis, "Oh I was only following orders." The outlook is evil in its intent. Like the Nazis you virtually tell yourself, "I choose to think this because X thinks it. So I will live it out and if it harms others I care not." Not all believers will necessarily do much evil but the mindset is the same as the ones that do. They have a vicious mindset underneath the sweetness.
A blasphemous rite that is alleged to be a channel through which God gives grace. It pictures the grace it is supposed to give. For example, the priest saying he absolves your sin pictures God forgiving you and causes God to absolve you as well. Sacraments are occult activities condemned by the Law of Moses. The Catholic Church rejects this teaching for it says that sacraments are not magic for God has decreed that his power will only be channelled through rites performed a certain way. But then what is stopping you from saying that God will give you riches and a love mate if you carry out certain rites? Magicians often do make such claims. Their claims show that the sacraments are indeed occult rituals.
A sacrament is an occult spell. Believers say it is not because instead of working like magic, the sacrament only works on a person who wants to receive the grace and who has faith. But that is like saying that a love spell is not a spell at all if the one you want to love you has to consent to letting the spell work!
Magic goes by the law of correspondence, which simply means that like produces like. The sacraments are said to give the grace they symbolise: in other words we have like produces like.
Many Christians believe that you should not do the Ouija Board or meditate for you don't know what kind of spirits or supernatural influence you are opening yourself up to. And they have the nerve to inflict sacraments on their babies and eat communion wafers!
God would be more interested in people being holy than in them gaining holiness through rites which is too restricting and makes availability a problem. The Catholic Church has seven sacraments.
You could have tremendously holy dispositions one day and be ready for the sacraments. Then you miss the bus and the next day your dispositions are far from the calibre they were yesterday. That a God would decline to give you grace until you undergo a rite though you might have been more open to his grace before is disgraceful and superstitious. The sacraments were useful for getting people to trust in the Church for salvation so that the Church would trust them more. They exist for the purpose of ecclesiastical manipulation.
Jesus
said if you cannot trust a man in big or small things you cannot trust him full
stop. The Bible sees human authority as
regrettable but necessary for humanity is so dangerous and godless and
deceitful. In this context no sane God would
give humanity the power to channel his grace, especially in relation to forgiving
sins through baptism and absolution.
Such doctrines can only spring from human pride. Sacramentalism is deformed spirituality.
The
Roman Church says that we always have some residue of sin in us no matter how
holy we are.
“Lord,
the end of another messed-up day. I let
you down at every turn. I’ve lived for
myself all through” (page 4, Friday Penance, John C Edwards SJ, Catholic Truth
Society, London, 1985).
Even
the greatest saint has sins (1 John 1:8-10).
But to do good while sinning is making it clear to God that you will do
good when you feel like it and not because it is right or because it is God’s
will. That is totally evil as God is so
wonderful so the good
is not good but defiance disguised as good.
To understand this is to understand the reason the Bible says that one sin
defiles all the good you do (James 2:10; 3:10-12) and makes you a good
actor.
The Catholic Church prays to saints. If you really trust God and find comfort in him you will not be asking saints to pray to him for you. You will pray to God. The Church says that praying to the saints is really praying to God through them, it is giving them the prayers to give to him. If praying to the saints is really praying to God as the Church says then why don't Catholics simply pray to God? The reason must be that praying to saints is really satisfying our natural liking for having many human gods. Humankind did it for countless centuries so we haven't changed.
If praying to dead saints is fine, then why don't Catholics pray to the living? The reason is that the saints are thinly disguised gods. It is no reply to say that the saints have God's power to help and not their own power. In paganism, many gods had no power of their own but they were still gods.
The Bible teaches that Jesus intercedes for us before God (Hebrews 7:25). That blasphemously infers that God would ignore us and refuse to help us unless Jesus asked him. A perfect God will give help if we ask him and will not need intercessors. If God would do it if Jesus never asked then clearly Jesus is not an intercessor for intercessor means a person who tries to influence a higher authority for you on your behalf and this authority has to make the decision if your request will be granted or not. To teach that Jesus or Mary or any saint can influence God is to deny that God is perfect. It is declaring them more powerful than he is. It is declaring them to be the real Gods.
Praying to saints is really turning to demons for it shows contempt for God and resorting to beings that are against him. They must be against him if they listen to your prayers and want them.
You can honour and respect the saints without praying to them.
Science teaches that there no truth claim or doctrine or belief that should be made immune to testing and questioning. Science is about always checking things out and rechecking.
Science ignores the supernatural because the supernatural cannot be tested. A scientist can only say that an alleged miracle is unexplainable. Occam's Razor says that if something takes place that needs explanation, we must look for the most likely and simplest explanation. It does not say the explanation is necessarily right but its the one we will choose if we are sensible.
The believer in the Bible who thinks that all knowledge - whether revealed by him or not - comes from God will find he has to reconcile science and everything else with the Bible. In other words, everything must be made to fit the Bible. Anything that contradicts it may evoke an attitude of, "We still hold the Bible is right and let us wait for more light. Maybe this thing that contradicts it will be proven false." This attitude can only lead to fundamentalism and distortion. The best obscurantist always pretends to be distorting nothing.
It only takes one or two false notions or beliefs or assumptions to make you go far wide of the truth. Hitler developed a bad view of all the Jews based on a few unpleasant stories about some Jews. Science is based on the fact that whatever assumptions and beliefs you have control how you view and interpret evidence and it seeks to reduce this tendency as far as possible. It wants to see things as they really are. This totally opposes the view that any alleged revealed religion should be considered when interpreting and trying to understand the evidence.
Secularism means that the state should be run without influence from specifically religious principles. Secularists make their policies as if there is no life but this life and as if all that matters is making people well in this life.
For example, the
state should not consider banning, say, contraception except on rational and
non-religious grounds and shouldn’t be doing it just because a pope or Bible
says so. The taxpayer should not have to
fund religious schools. It is not fair to have Mormons and unbelievers in
religion financing, for example, Catholic schools with their taxes. If religion wants
to control and condition children it should pay out of its own pocket. Running the state is
the state’s business. Recently Islamic
girls were banned from wearing head coverings in public schools in
Religious faith is not really about pleasing a God who comes first - even before the state - though religion would have you believe otherwise. What it is really about is people pretending that what they want to be true is probably true. Those people are out not for religion but for gratifying their desires and prejudices. It is not an issue of religion but of manipulative people. That is why crucifixes should not be displayed in state schools either.
A mother is hit by her son who she adores. She convinces herself that she dreamt it. She knows deep down that she didn't. But she turns off that voice that tells her that. Now she seems to believe that he didn't do it. She is engaging in self-deception.
Because she knows the truth and won't face it she is deceiving herself. She is deceiving anybody who she tells that her son would never hit her. Even when she simply says he is good, one of her implicit meanings is that he wouldn't hit his mother. So the deception goes deeper than her simply denying her son has or would hit her.
We are so good at self-deception that psychologists and psychiatrists deny that we can ever be completely unbiased and fair and objective. Christian psychiatrist Andrew Sims admits this. Page 146 of his tome, Is Faith Delusion?, says that all attempts to be objective or totally unbiased fall short in the sense that there will always be a bias or subjective aspect. In short, the unprejudiced observation does not exist.
Even the most devoted servant of God is practicing a degree of deceit in his or her religious affairs and practices.
The atheist must be engaging in self-deceit too in order to be an atheist.
The best we can hope for is that everybody's statements and beliefs are or are intended to be sufficiently accurate. Their accuracy and the intent to be accurate will have been degraded by the self-deceit.
Self-deception influences al we believe and testify to. Suppose somebody reports a miracle. Is it more probable that the claim arises because somebody is deceiving themselves than that a real magical event happened? We have stronger proof that people deceive themselves than we do of miracles. For example, everybody practices self-deception but hardly anybody sees miracles. And when they do they don't experience as many miracles as they do episodes of self-deception. Also, people suffer and die for their self-deception but you don't see anybody dying for belief in miracles.
Another problem is that a miracle can be caused by a magical violation of nature or it can be caused by a natural law that we don't know of yet. The latter is the most likely possibility of the two. Thus even miracles then cannot prove that the supernatural exists. Maybe the secret natural law rather than causing blood to come form a statue is actually causing people to think it came from the state though their mechanism of self-deception?
Christianity says the testimony of twelve apostles is enough to make belief in the resurrection of Jesus reasonable. The word apostle in the special sense is used to mean those who have seen the resurrection of Jesus and have been accepted as its official witnesses and missionaries. The Book of Acts say that the apostles chose Matthias as a new apostle in the place of the traitor Judas as he knew Jesus like they did. We say that the testimony of twelve psychiatric patients that self-deception is very powerful makes it more reasonable to deny that the testimony of the twelve apostles is enough.
Christians have twelve witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the apostles. Did these witnesses deceive themselves? Christians say their testimony is accurate.
We know of wives who died because they would not stop believing that their evil monster husbands who murdered them were good people. The evidence that people die for self-deception is better than the evidence that
The evidence for the reliability of human testimony to miracles is always counteracted by evidence that people deceive themselves.
Jesus during the appearances kept them very brief as if he had something to hide. He was also very curt and complaining.
Feeling good about yourself and liking yourself. If you don’t like yourself you can’t like other people either. You will be afraid they will not like you either or notice what it is that you don't like about yourself . Self-esteem is a sin in the Bible, God’s word, for it commands that you should look up to everybody else as better than yourself (Philippians 2:3). So you shouldn’t think you are as good as anybody else or let anybody else think they are good. In the Sermon on the Mount, Christ taught that if you love those who love you then you deserve no praise for that for even evil people love those who care about and for them (Matthew 5:46-48). If this love deserves no reward as Christ says then how much less of a reward one must deserve for loving oneself? Jesus says evil people get no reward for loving their families and friends. He really hates evil people when he says that you should get no reward even if you are good person and care for your family and friends simply because they care for theirs too. It is like saying that people should be condemned for reading the Koran just because it is the "bad Muslim's" book!
Jesus' message is that if we look after our health it is to be solely so that we can help others and not burden them. Self-love then is no good. This tells us that if we do good for ourselves we must do it only for others and it must have nothing to do with looking for anything from them. You must serve them even if they hate you and plot against you.
The Bible also says that it is a sin to think you know anything without loving God (1 Corinthians 8:1-3). Only true Christians love God according to the Bible for they are born again so nothing anybody says who is not a Christian is to be valued. You need God to know things, for you are good for nothing.
Self-esteem makes a person rejoice in making others happy for he or she wants to share and find his or her happiness through others. To do this properly it is necessary to avoid anti-social acts like stealing and slandering and lying.
Christianity says we must do good for others just because it benefits God. It says that as we are not 100% sure God exists, we must have the attitude, "Hypothetically if God does not exist we must do it just because it benefits others". If the faith really believes all that then it is a sin to say you were glad you did the good because you enjoyed it.
How could Jesus and God tell us to love God totally or to love only God and then contradict this by saying we must love neighbour as ourselves too? Jesus himself had defined love as doing. For him serving our neighbour while thinking only of God and not him is love. He said we must love God with all our hearts meaning we must direct our feelings toward God and not others. There is then no contradiction.
The Turin Shroud is hailed by Christian fanatics as the burial cloth of Jesus Christ showing what he was like when he was lying dead in his tomb. Whether you believe or not that it is inexplicable comes down to what "experts" you wish to listen to. But, when you consider the rule that you must accept a supernatural explanation only when all the natural ones are impossible, it is evident you have to side with the sceptics until absolute proof comes. Something is innocent of being a miracle until proven guilty! Inexplicable does not amount to miraculous! In reality, it is impossible to be ever reasonably certain that an event is a miracle. Unknown natural laws may do strange things.
Main Points: Nobody might know for sure exactly how the shroud image was made. It is not the only thing that is surrounded in mystery.
The image was made so long ago that chemical alteration and ageing and fading have added to the mystery.
The image contains errors - the face in particular should show distortion but it doesn't. A cloth pressed into a paint stained or bloodstained face will have a distorted image. There is too much blood for a supposedly dead man.
Believers claim that the image cannot be rationally explained at this time - they fail to remind us that even if that is true, the image is inauthentic because of the major errors.
All old blood shows the same blood type, AB, yet Christians pretend that the Shroud and another cloth the Sudarium might have come from the same person for the blood type, AB, matches.
Scientific access to the Shroud is limited - chiefly to a few who are prepared to deny that its a fraud or declare that fraudulence is inconclusive.
Now let us proceed and ask if there is evidence that the Shroud is not a miracle.
Many deny that the image is miraculous and say they can explain it.
It is certainly not a miracle for there are errors in the image. There are such errors as the man’s hair hanging down as if he was standing up and the face image should be distorted if the cloth was draped over the face. We don't need to be able to explain the Shroud to know that it isn't a miracle! It isn't the only strange thing in the world.
The man bled around the head from a crown of thorns. But the "blood" looks as if it was put on artificially. The blood is very clearly defined like drops. Real blood would not be sitting on top of the hair but would have matted.
The blood has a painted appearance - I am only saying it looks that way and it shouldn't and especially so if there are indeed no brush marks on the image. You see no evidence that the blood was disturbed when the cloth was removed from the body. No smears or distortion are evident.
Middle eastern pollen was reportedly found on the cloth. But interestingly, pollen from the huge preponderance of olive trees in Palestine was absent (The Jesus Relics, page 177).
The Should is hailed as a miraculous photographic negative. But the positive image shows a man with white hair and a white beard (page 182, The Jesus Relics). This is not what you would expect of Jesus Christ who would have been dark and who was allegedly only in his early thirties when he was put to death. The Shroud does not have the properties of an actual photograph (page 188, The Jesus Relics).
Also, if a body had lain in the cloth on its back, the back image should be pressed deeper into the cloth and a lot of smudging should have taken place. But what we see is that the front and back images are light - they show no difference in density (page 184).
Carbon dating has
pointed to a medieval origin for the cloth but believers, including “scientists”
sneered at the dating from the very start though there is no evidence that the
Shroud existed in the first thousand years after Christ.
The Shroud man has a lot of blood all over him. The Bible says that Jesus would have been washed for he was buried according to the Jewish custom – others say the custom was for criminals to be buried with their blood. Obviously the Bible is referring to the general custom so he had been scrubbed. The burial of criminals would not be the general custom. Jesus was not thought by the Jews to be a real criminal. Also, when the Bible says the women went to the tomb on the third day to anoint the body, the body was not treated as a criminal corpse. And they are said to have been sure that if there were soldiers at the tomb then they would be allowed in. Another hint. However, that visit was an eccentric departure from tradition for the body was considered to be decomposing by then and it shows (if the account can be trusted) how much Jesus was thought not to be a criminal when they were prepared to do such an over the top thing.
The Bible would tell us what it meant by the general custom had it meant
Jesus being buried with his blood like a criminal for it tries to emphasise how
demeaning for Jesus his death was. Plus
the general custom has to refer to the washing for you don’t speak of a custom
for some criminals as the general custom.
If Jesus’ corpse was washed then why is there so much bleeding after?
If he bled like that then clearly he wasn’t
dead when he was put in the tomb. Even
tiny cuts emitted blood indicating life.
Dead men don’t bleed, big wounds may give out some blood but with this
is not like bleeding and there won’t be much blood. Was the Shroud created to indicate that Jesus
was not dead at all to support the rumour that Jesus survived the crucifixion
and that was how he “rose”?
Jesus and his followers
did make a point of debunking Jewish traditions that were not scriptural but he
would have had no problem with the washing – that was only decency.
The Shroud man does not
have blurred and smudged bloodstains but it has clear bloodstains which show a
clear intention to make the image suitable for display. Also, the hands
which should have fallen back to his side when they were not tied conveniently
cover the private parts. All this shows forgery. Jesus would have had
unclear blood marks for spices were used
at the burial according to the custom and rubbed into his body. We should have a body that was all red with
the blood rubbed all over in the spices and ointments but the Shroud shows the
opposite. The Shroud should have been
rubbing over the body and distorting the stains as the body was put in the
tomb.
The perfect muscular
physique of the Shroud man does not fit Jesus who lived rough and who should
have been malnourished. Do you really
imagine that Jesus would have been working out?
Would a man who despised luxury and became a travelling preacher and who
expected to die on a cross be imagined as being that into fitness?
With all the reasons the
Turin Shroud can’t be that of Jesus Christ, it is clear why the image was made so subtle
to keep the Church wondering what it was to give it a chance of becoming
popular enough so that the Church would have to come to terms with the
existence of the cloth. Otherwise the
Church would have come down too hard too soon and the Shroud would have ended
up on a pyre. And if for no other reason
than that it depicts a man who was not dead for he was bleeding too much.
The Bible, as you will
see from my entry on MARTYRDOM, states that we must check first that the Old
Testament God predicted the resurrection of Jesus before we have the right to
believe the apostles’ testimony that he rose.
No such predictions exist so we can be sure that nothing supernatural
happened meaning that if the Shroud is a miracle then it has nothing to do with
Jesus Christ.
The prestigious French magazine, Science and Life, reported in 2005 that it proved the shroud a forgery by making the same shroud from materials available in the middle ages.
According to The Jesus Relics, STURP, the body that exists to research the Shroud manipulates the investigations and tests in order to keep true to its notion that the shroud is genuine. They have used dodgy people like Frei to give the impression that pollen tests show that the shroud came from Palestine where Jesus died. They have used the mad Whangers to declare that images of Palestine's flowers can be seen on the cloth. They have not let sceptics study the cloth itself. Whanger used image analysis techniques to show that the Shroud and the Sudarion of Oviedo covered the same body but Whanger is not even a scientist. His work has been laughed at by forensic anthropologists (page 204, The Jesus Relics). Plus Whanger is not the respected scientist that he is called in Catholic literature but an eccentric ageing ex-psychiatrist. STURP used John Heller and Alan Adler to refute the discovery of Walter McCrone that the Shroud was made using a painting technique even though they did not have the experience and prestige of McCrone. They used improper techniques to give the impression that the blood on the cloth was not paint but real blood (page 219, The Jesus Relics).
Independent and open minded and non-religious researchers are kept away from the Shroud (page 224, The Jesus Relics).
The Sudarion did not cover the head of the shroud man for the shroud man has a bloodstain on the forehead like a mirror image 3. This is not on the Sudarion (page 205, The Jesus Relics). The forehead part of the Sudarion is largely free from blood marks while this is not the case for the Shroud.
Carbon-dating for the Sudarion has been performed - accurately we hope! But it points to a date from about 695 AD (page 209, The Jesus Relics).
If religion exists such desperation in the search for evidence for the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ and to find his image, is that not a warning that it is bad for the mind? The supporters of the shroud carry on like addicts.
Pope
Sixtus V personally made a botched translation of the Bible though he had no
competence as a translator. He wrote a
papal bull excommunicating anybody that didn’t believe his Bible was accurate
and without error and declared this by the fullness of apostolic
authority. “By the fullness of
Apostolical power, we decree and declare that this edition …approved by the
authority given to us by the Lord, is to be received, and held as true, lawful,
authentic, and unquestioned in all public and private discussion, reading,
preaching, and explanation”. There is no
doubt this was intended to be an infallible statement. The Church burned his Bible after he died for
it was full of errors and that was putting it mildly.
Sixtus
V had given his Bible and the Bull to his cardinals and died just before both
were released to the public.
The
Catholic Church says as he didn’t make his decree public, it was not binding on
the Church and doesn’t disprove papal infallibility. But the Church says that infallibility only
means that the pope is protected from error while researching something that he
plans to speak to the whole Church infallibly about. Infallibility is not inspiration but
protection from error while working out a solution to a theological question. So infallibility is at work before the
promulgation of the teaching. After all,
before the pope can make a promulgation of a new infallible teaching he has to
infallibly realise that the teaching is infallible and correct. He has to infallibly proclaim the doctrine to himself
first. Or to put it more accurately, the Holy Spirit has to declare the doctrine
infallible to the pope first. So
doctrines are necessarily infallible before they are voiced by the pope as
infallible.
The Church says that the Sixtus case proves that God protects the papacy from declaring error infallible for Sixtus miraculously died before he managed to promulgate his travesty of a Bible translation.
The Sixtus shenanigans still disprove infallibility for the pope had already used his alleged infallibility. A decree takes effect legally from the time it is made and this decree is in the present tense. It says, “We decree.” The “We decree” indicates that Sixtus and others had already decided that infallibility was at work. Plus the Sixtus Bible was promulgated among the top teachers of the Church with the decree of infallibility and declared binding on them and that is enough. What else did Sixtus V give them a copy of the papal bull for if it wasn’t to make them bound to accept his Bible so that they might promulgate it for him when he said so? He was making an infallible declaration. The public promulgation to everybody was just a formality. The pope as far as he was concerned had used infallibility charism already and was planning a public promulgation despite that. It was to proclaim that he had already used his infallibility. The promulgation and publishing of the Bible to the general public was just to complete the promulgation not the infallibility. Its totally ridiculous to think that when Pius IX used his infallibility to work out the immaculate conception of Mary that it wasn’t infallible until he announced it in St Peter’s.
The botched
Bible of Sixtus V disproves papal infallibility for the prime purpose of
infallibility is to work out and protect what the apostles taught through
scripture and tradition. Infallibility
would cover declaring a Bible to be the accurate Bible or defining what books
belonged in the Bible.
Sixtus V and his faulty Bible refute papal infallibility. It was the Church that declared the pope infallible in 1870 so it isn’t infallible either.
Accusing
a person of an evil that they have never done.
All world religions do this without exception mainly through their
teaching of free will. They say we have free
will and are guilty of what we do wrong. But we could be programmed to feel
free and not be aware that we are programmed all the time. So in that case we are not to be blamed or condemned.
It is no answer to say we feel free so we are free. Animals look as if they have free will and
they feel free. They prove they feel free by the way they hate their freedom restricted.
And nobody
believes they have free will. It is
wrong to accuse people of free will over faith because religion should be made
for people not religion for people.
A mental illness that is
based on dealing with your imagined needs for the divine. It is a sickness for it conditions people to
have needs they would not otherwise have and the fewer needs you have the
better for then the less you have to fear and be unhappy about.
Many say you can have spirituality
without religion. But whatever. You cannot have religion without spirituality which is why
there no justification for religion.
Spiritual people should experiment without dogmatism to see what ideas
and techniques help them instead of tying themselves to ideas and tenets that
they are not encouraged or allowed to dissent from. To need anyone even God is to refuse to be
happy if they do not do what you want.
That is not love. What you do is
you detach yourself from all things and realise that you are in charge of your
feelings which will program you to change.
Religion tries to make you need God and that causes fear and
suffering. God implies that cruelty is
good. To be in any way religious is to
have a mental disorder.
A believer in psychic abilities that allow gifted people to communicate and get messages from the departed. When it needs psychic powers to work, it is possible that the powers are inventing the entities which could be products from one’s own subconscious mind. The powers could be divining facts about the dead while the medium thinks the revelations are coming from the dead who may really be non-existent. Spiritualism is black magic for it is a waste of time and the powers should be used on nurturing the only thing that matters, self-esteem.
Christians say that
spiritualists are foolish for they open themselves up to powers they do not
understand and which could be dangerous. Surely Christians are worse for
they don't know if Jesus really was all-good. Maybe he is an evil spirit
now. Maybe he has no power at all and evil spirits do meaning they are
what Christians are opening up to. And the Christians expect us to
open up more to Jesus than any spiritualist ever asked anybody to open up to the
spirit world.
The phenomenon which makes some people seemingly unaccountably carry wounds similar to the crucifixion wounds of Jesus Christ. Given that in recent times brilliant magicians and conjurers have fooled scientists into believing in their miracles and then revealed that they were hoaxing that explains a lot of the allegations of past experts that they had seen inexplicable stigmata. The Church has never officially accepted the vast majority of the stigmatics as real victims of a particularly barbaric miracle. Like all Catholic miracles, the stigmata imply that God uses evil to do good which is a heinous insult for he does not need to.
The case of the fasting girl Molly Fancher, the Boston Enigma shows that some people have unexplained abilities. These abilities have not been explained but we know they are natural. That is all we need to know. Molly Fancher never made any supernatural claims. We must take her word for it.
An attempt to prove that a good God can stand by and let us suffer, cause scandal and lead others to sin.
If people would believe in an amoral impersonal intelligence who makes all things rather than a God there would be no need for theodicies.
To say that people suffer and a good force is creating the suffering and using it for a purpose is plainly inexcusable and malevolent. Believers can’t deny that their doctrine: “God doesn’t create or love human and animal suffering but merely permits it to happen”, is a lie.
Suffering is bad energy and God created it and the power to suffer. Bizarrely, religion says that evil is not a power or a thing - its a good thing in the wrong place. It's a lack. They say that if God created evil he would prove himself to be not all-good. So their answer is that he didn't create it. What blindness would urge them to exonerate a god who makes viruses just to torment us? Their desperation shows through. They cannot face the evil in the world so they water it down by saying its part of God's plan.
Also, if God can be excused for the fact that things fall short of their good potential why can't we?
Evil by definition is that which is intolerable and useless. To say an all-good and all-powerful God lets evil happen contradicts this. Even if God can bring good out of evil the evil still should not have been allowed to happen. And the notion of God bringing good out of evil is ridiculous and subtly denies that evil is evil. God can only do good in spite of evil and not because of it.
It is better to say that suffering is totally useless and abhorrent for that is denying that it should happen, or be allowed to happen, to any extent. It's kinder. We might use suffering for good but that does not make it excusable. Believing that it is useless increases our resolve to destroy it. It is better to disapprove than to approve of suffering to be on the safe side. That can only be done if the existence of God is denied.
Theodicy is really saying that justifying God
matters more than people. God comes first for being perfect infinite
love he has to naturally be the only really important entity. So the concept demands to be put first even
at the expense of human welfare and happiness.
Indeed, if you are horrified by human suffering, you don’t even try to
justify it. To try speaks of false compassion and a hardness in the heart.
God cannot ask us to sin. He cannot tempt us or create forces that cause temptation for that would mean he was tempting us. We then must cause our own temptation though we think we do not. This puts an impossible burden on us for all of us feel tempted to do wrong. Deny God and that removes the burden.
If you have time on your hands, spend it on helping people and not on trying to save God's reputation. That the doctrine of God asks for such salvation shows it is despicable. Evil is not justifiable and they try to justify God letting it happen and his making of the experience of depression.
Some people encourage suffering people to believe in God so that they will feel that God is with them all the way helping them and giving them inner strength. But is it not better to encourage them by saying, "There is no all-powerful God. All who die become perfect and they use their powers to help the living. They are not all-powerful and they absolutely hate to see you suffer. They cannot take your suffering away but they will give you inner strength." A God that lets you suffer cannot be said to absolutely hate to see you suffer when he won't snap his fingers and take it away. Looking for inner strength from supernatural beings however is a sign that our friends and family are not sustaining us as well as we need them to. Or it could show that we are not letting them do so to the extent that we need it. The notion of supernatural help gets in the way of surviving on the sheer love of those whom we love.
The vast vast majority of Christians do not heroically fight evil. Their doctrine of God suggests they do not hate evil as much as they say.
Theofascism - preferring God to people - is worse than sexism which looks down on women. It looks down on everybody for the sake of God or gods. To say such beings exist is to automatically say that you are not going to consider human beings the most important beings you know of in the universe. This is very seriously evil for you cannot prove that God exists to a sufficient extent to justify that. Why should we worship say God then? Because he is good in himself and to us? Or because he is powerful? He does not need us to be grateful to him so he has no right to it. And to adore him because he is powerful is to make a tyrant of him. It’s indecent. A human being trying her or his best deserves as much worship for they are trying to do the best they can and so are as good as God. To say we should love God and have a relationship with him is opposing reason and what is best for humanity.
Those who say that they know God exists as much as they know they have a body are obviously suffering from delusion. They afflict themselves. One has to afflict this delusion on oneself to condone the evil ways of God.
God is the key to absolute power which is why Judaism and Christianity were theocracies in the past and would be today if they were able to pull it off. It works like this, “This is what God has commanded, kill heretics, don’t use contraception to keep your wife if pregnancy could kill her, persecute homosexuals, pay us money, obey all we say, so you have to do what we the men of God and his representatives on earth want and if you don’t you are evil – maybe not deliberately but you are evil and therefore should be worked against.” Therefore it is about violence. Harbouring violence inside you encourages you to become violent and stand by when others are violent towards those you despise.
If Tony hits Amy, that is bad for he hurt another person. It is not bad because he broke a law. It is bad because he hurt someone. To worry about the law would in effect be to care about rules and power and not persons. Christians have to accuse him of more than hurting another person but of offending God. Belief in God then means if you do wrong then you intended to insult and demean God as well. It makes the wrong you do worse. The belief is therefore evil. It is heartless to be more worried about offending God than hurting a human being.
Theofascism stands for absolute standards of morality. An absolute standard is one that must never be broken or diminished. To say you must love God completely with all you are is really to say that it is never right to risk that love by getting attached to a human person. It follows then that there may be other absolute standards that seem harmful. It would be no surprise then that it could be absolutely wrong to let a witch live as the Bible says.
If you can't learn to respect yourself you cannot learn to respect anybody else. Genuine goodness starts with yourself not God.
It's not very flattering to know that you and your ideas are only tolerated by others. Tolerating means putting up with something bad. Why would you be tolerated? Because hating you and doing violence against you would be worse evils than putting up with you and your ideas. Tolerance is not the view that one belief or religion or opinion is as good as another. That is indifferentism and relativism. They do far more harm than intolerance ever did. They are self-deception and hypocrisy at their worst.
So you are only put up with for the tolerant can do nothing about you. In other words, they think its a pity they can't bully you or silence you or hurt you for being you or for what you believe. You can't say they love you. Love cannot be forced. To say those who want to hurt you but can't can love us contradicts that.
Without religion there would be less to tolerate.
Tolerance is indirect incitement to intolerance. It is intolerant towards the intolerant. But to force a person to be tolerant is as impossible as forcing them to be loving. It cannot be done. You may manage to make them seem to be tolerant but that is all. The tolerant only behave themselves until they get the chance to show their real colours.
Relativism is the view that you have a right to your moral opinion and that nobody should tell you your morality is immoral or wrong. It rejects the idea that anything is absolutely wrong. But it contradicts this by saying its always wrong to say relativism is wrong!
Relativism is itself intolerance. It condemns the view that morality is objective and real. It is not a proper response to the problem of tolerance. The pope speaks of the dictatorship of relativism which regards the person who rejects relativism as intolerant and evil.
The modern adage, "You have a right to your opinion/belief" is used by those who think they should think or believe whatever they WANT rather than think or believe whatever seems TRUE. Its a revolting misuse based on the wish to become immune to rational argument or persuasion. The only reason you have a right to your belief or opinion is that you use belief and opinion to find the truth or to improve your knowledge and accuracy. To say you have the right to believe or think what you want is ridiculous. It is not about what you want and you have no right to deceive people that it is. Grow up!
The person who tries to believe what he wants without regard to what is true is being intolerant of the fact that belief is based on evidence. He is not being fair or honest in this. He is not being supportive or tolerant towards those who want to base belief on good reasons. He will fear and tend to be bigoted towards those who endanger the facade he has created.
People say they have a right to their beliefs and opinions. That is actually a half truth. The correct thing is to say you have a right to your beliefs and opinions as long as you see them as helps on the journey to truth. If you say you have a right to your beliefs and opinions without any concern for truth then you are not being fair. Fairness is based on what is true. The person who sees the truth and calls it a lie is being unfair.
The doctrine that there is nothing of value to God in anything human (as taught by 1 Corinthians 3:19-23). The reason nothing pleases him about us is because we are by nature sinners. That is to say that the Bible says we are not sinners because we sin but we sin because we are sinners. This merely recognises the fact that Christian teaching says that sin shows the kind of person you are. And it is the kind of person that you are that is the real problem. There is no room in this doctrine for silly notions about loving the sinner and hating the sin for there can be no distinction made between the two. No wonder Protestant Christianity as taught by the Reformers and even by Catholicism in the days of the Pre-Protestant St Augustine has led to so much hatred and sectarianism and bloodshed.
The total depravity doctrine
stands for the idea not that man is as dangerous as can be but that man does
nothing good or bad with real sincere and good intentions and so man can do
nothing that pleases God. It accuses the
good deeds of Florence Nightingale of being as bad in intention but not in
consequence as the crimes of Nero for both were spitting the same hate and
defiance towards God. One way,
Total depravity was taught
by Jesus Christ (Mark 10:18) and the apostles (Romans 3, 7). The apostate early
Church abandoned it to suck up to the Roman Empire until it was revived at the
Protestant Reformation by Martin Luther.
The doctrine implies that you should take your lessons in faith and
morals from the God inspired scriptures and not from tradition for man
preserves tradition and man is anti-God so it completely refutes nearly every
major doctrine of the Roman Catholic cult.
Also, how could we be sure the scriptures are God-inspired when man
hates God so much and when it was man that wrote these books? We end up enslaved to guesses. We know by experience that when we do good we
do it for what is in it for ourselves.
Humanists do not see this as evil but the Bible does – hence the
doctrine of total depravity. Obviously if
us humankind are as bad as Christians would like us to think then we should live by
the rule: guilty until proven innocent!
The doctrine that human beings are universally bad and hate good though
they use it for their egotistical ends incites mistrust and hatred especially
against people who are not Christians.
It also encourages people to be evil and devious for they believe that
when they are born evil they should act evil and think evil if they can’t act
evil.
The conversion of the bread and wine at Mass into the body and blood of Christ. This is a major and basic doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church. The Church worships the consecrated bread and wine as Jesus Christ who it teaches is God. The bread and wine are given the worship due to God without qualification.
It is against the Bible for it says that anything that cannot protect itself from desecration is not divine but is an idol, a false God. God himself ridicules idols for their helplessness and inability to hear those who pray to them. The doctrine is evil for we need to hold that a man is a man and a rock is a rock. What if you start saying that a man is really a woman or a dog? And what if Satan can convert things like God does? We can convert dough into bread. Suppose transubstantiation is possible. Then surely Satan having occult powers can change dough into bread without the dough physically changing? The logical consequences of the doctrine are sufficient reason to reject it strongly. It doesn't deserve respect.
If God can do the transubstantiation miracle he can feed us with Jesus without the bread and wine becoming him.
Protestants do not believe the bread and wine are turned into Jesus. Some Protestants say that the Mass is not idolatry because it is just an error about where Jesus is - and not an error about Jesus - so to worship the host is to worship Jesus for he is the one that is meant to be adored. The Bible is not so understanding and forbids even images of God (Exodus 20:4-6) worshipped in the view that God indwells them for nobody worships a statue for being a statue. Idolaters say their idols are their gods meaning the statues are not worshipped simply because they are images. The person worships the God who is in the statue or represented by it. The Mass goes further than any image of God so it is graver and deeper idolatry.
What Catholics call a change from bread and wine into Jesus is not a change at all for there is no physical difference and they confess that. It is the same as calling your chips gold. They adore bread and wine and pretend they are Jesus. That's it. Even the pagans didn't pretend that statues were their gods. Catholics then are worse idolaters!
We can do transubstantiation by turning something physically into something else!
It is so simple to believe that Jesus comes close to us when we eat the bread and drink the wine in his memory instead of believing they really are Jesus. It is the relationship that matters not whether your communion wafer is Jesus or not. The Mass is quite uncharitable for those who don't believe in or who doubt the change are barred from communion while the change doctrine isn't that important.
We are asked to believe that a priest has the power to turn bread and wine into Jesus. This is unlikely to be correct for Jesus complained a lot about the esteem religious leaders were in and wanted to bring them down to the level of the ordinary person. He would not have given a power that leads to the ordinary people developing a devotion for priests that borders on idolatry. In strong and properly indoctrinated Catholic areas, the priest is treated as an infallible God and honoured more than Jesus. The doctrine glorifies the priest which is the real reason the Church teaches it. Its a good power tool. We are asked to believe that when you eat Jesus' body it starts turning back into digested bread so you only have his body and blood in you for a few minutes. Is the miracle of transubstantiation worth all the hassle? God turns something into Jesus and then he has to turn it back into material things in the digestive system! The main thing about the Mass is the grace. Jesus only lives in you a while but he leaves grace behind. So again, this shows how unnecessary the miracle is. Why not give us the grace in the first place instead of all this bread and wine turning into Jesus rigmarole?
The Church says the miracle is spoken of in the Bible at John 6 when Jesus told the Jews to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Jesus did not say they must eat his flesh. He said they must gnaw his flesh animal style. He used the blatant language of animals eating human flesh. That was to express that what he was saying was symbolic. The Catholics say he used such extreme language to show that he literally meant we have to eat his body and blood and used such shocking words to emphasise that they could become literal food and drink for us. Would Jesus who could say, "God who made all things has the power to turn bread into my body without it seeming to change" resort to such a device? Why not say, "I mean real eating"? And the Jews found it sickening and ridiculous and offensive. They had a taboo about cannibalism and that was what Jesus seemed to be endorsing. Both those who deny that John 6 teaches the changing of bread and wine into Jesus and those who say it does teach that then agree that the gnawing is symbolic. Catholics say it means eating communion. Others say it is a metaphor for reaping the fruits of the sacrifice of Jesus' body. It is more reasonable to assume the latter. Where there is symbolism, assume the least exotic interpretation.
Suppose Jesus did say we eat his body and drink his blood. There is no need to read transubstantiation into that for he could feed us this way without turning bread and wine into himself. The eat my body drink my blood really just mean have a relationship with him that nourishes you through him sacrificing his body and blood to God to pay for your sins and reconcile you to God and feed you with grace. Jesus said that he was the bread of life and that to come to him was to cease to hunger so eat stands for coming to Christ. He said that he who believes in him will never thirst so to drink is to believe in him (John 6:35). To eat his body stands for coming to Jesus sacrificing his body for your sins and to drink his blood stands for believing in his bloody sacrifice on Calvary. The passage tells us that eat and drink may not be literal.
Jesus compares the food he will give to the manna that Israel had to survive on in the wilderness. He implies that the food he gives is absolutely essential. Catholic teaching says communion is not essential for babies and indeed many go to Heaven without ever having got communion. Whatever he meant he did not mean communion.
Jesus says the bread he will give is his body for the life of the world and the Jews ask among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat it?” And he says his body and blood have to be eaten and drunk for everlasting life. When Jesus reacted like that instead of setting them straight it seems he did mean to turn bread and drink into his body and blood. But if the bread is literal so is the flesh but it can’t be both bread and flesh. Jesus had no reason to correct the Jews for he left clues he didn’t mean it literally. He told them that they had to eat his body and drink his blood or they would have no life, no saving relationship to make them live in God, in them. But the entire New Testament teaches that communion is not necessary for salvation but availing of the sacrifice of the body and blood of Jesus is. It was the latter he meant. He said a minute later that they would believe easier if they seen him ascend physically to heaven but added that the flesh is useless but only the spirit gives life. So his body cannot give life only the divinity in him can.
Catholics say if the Jews had been wrong to suggest that Jesus meant eat his flesh literally he would have corrected them but he didn’t. So they conclude that he meant it literally. The Jews asked, “How will he do it?" In other words, "This is an ordinary dude and how could he do what he says?" Jesus does not answer this. He does not respond. A response would be, "I am the Son of God and I have the Father's power to do miracles." He says about eating his body and drinking his blood. He is saying not responding.
What would he correct them for when he was in the habit of ignoring what was said to him? In John 4, Jesus tells a woman by a well that he wants a drink. He tells her that whoever drinks from the well will thirst again but whoever drinks the water he gives will never thirst. She says that she wants this water so that she may not have to come to the well again or thirst. He does not correct her for taking him literally therefore the Catholic argument based on what the Jews asked Jesus doesn’t prove a thing. She thought he meant magic water and he didn’t tell her what he really meant. Yet this non-correction thing in John 6 is what the entire Catholic Mass stands on and led to the Church “infallibly” stating that communion is literally Jesus. The Church deliberately distorts the Bible to teach this doctrine for it knows fine well from say John 4 that its argument is false.
Even Roman Catholics do
not literally eat the body of Christ and yet they pretend that the expression
eating the body in John 6 backs up their Mass. What they eat is the appearances of bread but
Jesus is in Heaven. The Church while
teaching that the bread converts does not teach a local presence. Jesus is not in the bread but in Heaven but
the bread is him. And even the soul
can’t eat Jesus’ body! So eat my body
does not prove the Mass at all!
Some theologians say that
God can feed you with the body and blood of Christ without putting them into
the form of bread and wine. They say
that eating the body and drinking the blood refers to acts of the soul not the
body – the soul being nourished by Christ so the eating and drinking should not
be taken as referring to physically eating bread and drinking wine turned into
Jesus. These theologians agree that God
can do this all the time so the idea of communion being a sacrament is
nonsense.
The Catholic Church takes Jesus literally at the last supper when he said, “This is my body given for you,” and this cup is my blood”. Luke 22:20 and 1 Corinthians 11:25 both say that the cup is the new covenant in Jesus’ blood. The cup wasn’t literally the new covenant. The New Testament says elsewhere, “This is my blood.” Obviously either wording was sufficient. But this point proves that the cup was just symbolism at most or a memorial. The view that the bread and cup are not symbols of the body and blood of Jesus but meant to be reminders of the body and blood of Jesus is absolutely fatal to attaching any sacramental interpretation to the Eucharist. The reminder theory should be considered true for there is no need for the symbol idea and a sacrament is supposed to be a symbolic ritual that actually gives the grace it pictures. There is no room in scripture for the idea that the Eucharist is even a sacrament. Jesus asked us to remember him when we take bread and wine. He didn’t say we have to say the words he said but he did ask us to remember him. He didn’t say we had to take bread and wine perhaps whenever we see bread or wine we have to remember his sacrifice.
So to summarise, the apostle Paul said that Christ called the cup the new covenant in his blood. Evidently, the cup was not the blood of Christ or even a symbol of it but just a reminder of the covenant and the blood. He wouldn't create a symbol of the covenant so the wine is simply a tool which recalls the covenant.
Another problem is that only the Luke Gospel and 1 Corinthians 11 mention that we are meant to do this memorial and the authenticity of both of these texts is disputed. In the RSV Catholic Edition it is admitted that many ancient authorities left out the reference to doing it in Jesus’ memory. This is a strong indication of inauthenticity when the Church left out something it wanted to believe in, the command of Jesus for the Church to celebrate the Eucharist.
In 1
Corinthians 11, Paul says he will not commend those who get drunk and won’t
share when they meet together for their holy meals. He puts in an account of
the last supper. He then apparently says it is because the meal is a
memorial of the body and blood of Jesus that he can’t commend their behaviour. But that doesn’t really fit for he never
explains why the meal being a memorial should mean that people don’t abuse the
meal. The passage makes more sense and
flows better if you leave out the entire stuff about the last supper and the
body and blood of Jesus. This would mean that the bit where Paul describes the
last supper is an interpolation. The verse
before that account says something like, “Will I commend your behaviour when you
meet to eat? No I will not. And the bit after runs, “So when you gather
together to eat, wait for one another.”
If the account is an insertion by a fraudulent disciple of Paul’s, that
means that there is no authority whatsoever for celebrating the Lord’s Supper
with the body and blood of Jesus stuff.
It could well be an uninspired writing of Paul that he discarded and
somebody took it and stuck it in his letter to forge evidence that the rite was
celebrated from the start of the Church.
Even Paul doesn’t say the bread and wine are symbols of Jesus or that we
have to say, “This is my body/blood” over bread and wine. A sacrament is a symbolic rite that does what
it represents. There is no biblical
authority for holding that the bread and wine are symbols and so the Eucharist
is not a sacrament.
Jesus said that bread was his body and wine was his blood at the last supper but there is no reason to hold that this was anything other than a memorial rite. It could symbolise the invisible feeding of our souls with Christ but there is no need for the symbol interpretation. Catholics say he turned the bread into his resurrected body before the resurrection happened ignoring the words, “This is my body which IS being sacrificed for you,” or the words, “This is my blood which is being shed for you”. These words deny that the body and blood is the resurrected body and blood.
Logic says that if we need anything from God it is his help to live a good life and you don’t need to physically eat the body and blood of Jesus for that so transubstantiation would be an absurd miracle and to believe in it would be to insult God’s intelligence.
The change of bread and wine into Jesus during Mass is magic. Magic is condemned in the Old Testament. To turn bread into a man without the bread seeming to change is far more magic than turning an ugly hag into a beautiful young maiden. The Church says that magic is using supernatural power that is not from God.
The Church rejects the doctrine of annihilation which teaches that the substance of the bread and wine cease to exist and Jesus' substance, his body and blood, take their place. The Church teaches not replacement but transformation. When one studies this, clearly the Church is making a new Jesus. Transforming means making Jesus out of bread and wine. But if Jesus already exists then the Church is making a new one. This other Jesus reminds us of Paul who condemned those heretical Christians who offered the real Christians another Jesus. See his letter to the Galatians.
Jesus didn't need to reveal his presence in the communion. Its results that matter not doctrines. His revealing his presence shows he disagrees and is very unreasonable and caring about doctrine that much is a mark of bigotry not love.
There is no evidence for the Catholic Mass being of divine origin in the Bible. It is dangerous to build fancy theologies about transforming bread and wine on the Bible which gives no stable foundation for the rite. The Mass is idolatry. It degrades us all for if there is a choice between worshipping your daddy or mummy and a wafer you should worship daddy or mummy. The Mass is an insult and we should stay away from it. If no insult is intended it is still an insult.
The doctrine of transubstantiation is evil. It implies that if you are willing to give your life to save the Eucharist from desecration you must do so. And the Church advocates this madness.
In 1378, cardinals in
Urban VI wasn’t mad all the time. He knew he shouldn’t stay on as pope and should have resigned in favour of Clement VII. That way even if Clement were not validly elected he would still become pope.
Surely a pope who causes division and heresy
like Urban and who is unsuitable must be considered an ex-Catholic who deposes
himself from the papacy? It is
ridiculous to say that a person who breaks from the Church becomes an
ex-Catholic by excommunication and that a Catholic who causes others to break
away or who keeps that kind of trouble up is still a true Catholic.
All of the cardinals agreed that the election of Urban VI was invalid. They asserted that they didn’t have any freedom during the conclave due to threats from a mob demanding a Roman or an Italian so the election was a fiddle. The mob had even invaded the building they were in. The Catholics say that Urban was accepted by the Church as pope and this made him pope even if the cardinals invalidly elected him. But how could their acceptance be genuine when it was based on the election that was a trick? In those times, the idea of deposing a pope was very acceptable. However, the cardinals didn’t try that route. They just argued that you can't depose a non-pope. They didn’t want a schism - they wanted the Church to accept Clement and ignore Urban. All this indicates their sincerity, the election really was fiddled. They didn’t have to admit it and they did.
Anyway, the two rival
popes caused the Great Western Schism and resulted in one Roman Catholic Church
being led by Urban in
History says that before they let Urban know he was pope, they presented a Roman in pontifical robes to the mob as their pope. This was strange for they knew the mob would go berserk if they thought they were being fooled. It is possible that this was the man they really elected and not Urban? It certainly must have been the case. They changed their minds and lied about Urban being elected probably because they thought he would be a better political choice. They were wrong.
The Church today says that if an
election is faked the pope chosen is still a valid pope for God doesn’t want
schism and God doesn’t necessarily like the new pope. The Church doesn't believe this at all for if a
female to male transsexual or somebody that had no intention of being a valid
pope and who didn’t believe in it or if a plastic surgery copy of some papable
person was made pope they would consider this an invalid election resulting in
a fake pope. All the Church acceptance
in the world cannot help. The Church says that a
woman does not validly accept a man she doesn't know well enough to be her
husband. Her accepting is not real accepting and they fail to validly
marry. So why should
it be different if a papal election is invalid and accepted by the Church?
If acceptance by the Church is valid then why don’t they acknowledge
Alexander V (who was appointed when the Council of Pisa deposed both the Roman
and
Today the Church regards Urban VI and his
successors as the real popes. They were not so
the Church today is in communion with fake popes and so is schismatic and
heretical. To follow the wrong pope is
heresy for it means you believe in the wrong rock and regard the wrong man as
shepherd and father and teacher of all Christians. Antipopes are not infallible so they are
dangerous and since the supreme authority in Catholicism is tradition it
follows that the wrong pope means separation from tradition and the means of
its protection and the forfeiture of its infallibility.
Though witchcraft today
claims to be a benign nature religion the fact is that all magic is evil magic.
All magic is evil magic for it is
trying to avoid what really matters.
What matters most is not spells, believing in God, a man who rises from
the dead, miracles but believing in your natural power to change and make yourself
happy. Don’t try to change the world but
change yourself and nice changes will happen automatically around you. It is not what you have in life that matters
or who loves you. What matters is how
you feel about your life. What good is it to
be loved if you don't appreciate that love? What
people need is self-esteem training not magic.
Magic then arises from laziness and therefore lack of concern for
self-esteem. Magic workers say that
magic cannot work without self-esteem for you produce magic from your own mind
and emotions. But if you really have self-esteem you wont feel the need
for magic! If you don’t have good self-esteem you cannot really trust in
the spell so it can’t work. So magic
contradicts itself by requiring something that it forbids!
Magic is trying to manipulate reality. Believers claim that love spells are wrong for they are too manipulative for they are trying to make another person love you. They say that instead you should do a spell to make yourself more lovable to another. But there is no difference in forcing a person to love you and in forcing them to see that you are lovable and therefore attract them. Nobody can love anybody unless they see them as attractive. If love spells are wrong, then who will want to do magic?
We all love people with faults. The Witch who is trying to use magic to catch a man
who likes gossip is making him see her as a gossip or using magic to turn
herself into a gossip! This is
self-manipulation, self-deception. Also
to magically make yourself more lovable in the eyes of the other is to
manipulate his life so that he will see this.
To do a spell to make yourself more lovable
to another is manipulative for it asks that they only see or let themselves see
what they find attractive about you. Moreover, you are degrading yourself by turning
yourself into somebody else’s idea of desirability. The spell might have the side-effect of putting his mother
in an accident so that you can help her and he can see how wonderful you
are. If you were lovable, you wouldn’t
need magic to make him see it.
The self-righteous say
that spells that use force are wrong.
But that can be said of any spell.
For example, a healing spell will try to force a person to have a better
attitude for a good attitude is one of the main helps in recovery. A person wants to change their own
attitude. They don’t want forces doing it
for them.
All magic is harmful and
the notion of white magic is nonsense and sooner or later the white magician
will see that and the temptation to use malicious magic and start calling up
demons will get too much. Magic should
lead to black magic and Satanism. Magic
workers who claim to harm none are just deceivers.
We know that some people
will die in accidents. Nothing can stop
that. Then why not use magic so that
evil people or your enemies will be the ones struck down instead of the innocents
that these things usually happen to? You would
be shuffling the pack so that the deserving people have the accidents. It is probably because magic leads to
attempted murder and evil that the Bible God says that we should not suffer a
sorceress to live (Exodus 22:18). The
context doesn’t allow us to get liberal.
God is blunt. He says the life of
a sorceress should not be tolerated. He
could have demanded some other treatment for her but he demanded execution.
The command is thought to be compatible with love your neighbour as yourself for
the sorceress is dangerous no matter how altruistic she seems to be or
acts so she must be destroyed to save others. God evidently believes that there
is something in this magic – why else be so harsh against it - but we know
better! The view that God opposed it for
he wanted to keep his people free from pagan influence doesn’t explain the harshness.
Magic workers do loads of protection and health spells and still get cancer and have accidents and die young so magic is wasting time. Magic is always evil because it implies that it is better to do nothing active for other people but spend all your time casting spells to help them. This - like becoming a contemplative nun dedicating yourself to a life of prayer for others - is really putting faith before people. Religion is schizophrenic, it pretends to want to help people and then chooses, in its smugness, a futile way of doing so. Magic-workers will respond that magic doesn’t happen. They say that you can't just sit back and wait for the spell to work. You have to help it to work by doing something. But though you may help it to work it is only a small part. If you help your sick father by looking after him it is mostly how circumstances you can’t control work out that do any good. The doctor will help, the nurse will help, his medicine has to agree with him, the heating has to work, your own health has to be okay there is so much. Magic then needs to be very powerful to look after all those things so why shouldn’t it work if you do nothing?
Magicians insist on you trying to make your spells come true the mundane ordinary way because they know fine well that magic doesn't work. They want you to think that if you go to more interviews and get a job that a spell helped. You could have got the job anyway. And religionists who advocate the power of prayer are no better. They are just as manipulative. They too rob you of the recognition that you got the job and the supernatural did not help.
What I could never understand was how people who could allegedly bend spoons by mind power can’t change their DNA so that they remain youthful until death or manage to change their DNA so that they never die or get cancer. The magicians say magic cannot give you a new set of teeth if your adult teeth all fall out. But why not? Some people do grow teeth a third time. When magic changes what is going to happen it should be able to change nature for changing this is still changing nature. Saying magic cannot change nature is only an excuse. It is used to explain why magic cannot make an amputee grow a new limb. The excuse doesn't work for magic doesn't work!
To
give honour and praise to a deity.
Everything I do I do it to please myself so all worship is a lie and a
superstition. To need to do it
when all you need is yourself for you should love others because you love
yourself is indicatory of a serious neurosis.
14/05/2012
A
CATECHISM OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE, Catholic Truth Society, London
BERNADETTE OF LOURDES, Her Life, Death and Visions, Therese Taylor, Continuum, London, 2008
MEDJUGORJE
AFTER 15 YEARS, Michael Davies, Remnant Press, Minnesota, 1998.
PADRE
PIO, Patrick O Donovan, Catholic Truth Society,
PADRE PIO, MIRACLES AND POLITICS IN A SECULAR AGE, Sergio Luzzatto, Metropolitan Books, New York, 2010
POPE
FICTION, Patrick Madrid, Basilica Press,
REASONS
FOR HOPE, Editor Jeffrey A Mirus,
THE
BLEEDING MIND Ian Wilson, Paladin,
THE JESUS RELICS, Joe Nickell, The History Press Limited, Gloucestershire, 2008
THE
STIGMATA AND MODERN SCIENCE, Rev Charles Carty, TAN,
WHO CHOSE THE GOSPELS? C E Hill, Oxford University Press, New York, 2010
WHO
IS PADRE PIO? Fathers Rumble and Carty, TAN,