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THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ATHEISM
FIVE SHORT PRINCIPLES THAT REFUTE
RELIGION
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.
With communication advanced to an incredible degree the information we
need on any subject is present at the press of a computer button. It is still important to stress simple
refutations of religion, the prevalent form of exploitation and mental illness
and means of legalised theft, 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!
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. The Roman Catholic Church
forbids it even when it is needed to save the mother’s life even though
bizarrely it 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 bizarre 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 of Catholicism.
Many apparitions that seem convincing 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 and when the foetus is older it
should only be permitted to save the mother’s life. A baby 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 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.
Suppose the Catholics are
right. There is no evidence that the
apostles passed this power 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 and it is very
serious doctrine and you need two independent eyewitnesses according to God’s
law. The apostles would have been barred
from the
Jesus was claimed to have
given his apostles unique guidance from the Holy Spirit so that they were
covered by infallibility and could write infallible scriptures if they wanted
to. 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 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. 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.
Also 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.
The denial that one can
know if God exists or not. It 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. 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.
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 for if he is not
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.
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 that’s true 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. 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 and since men were thought to be the only legal witnesses he
doesn’t mention the women so 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 first word 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.
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.
APOSTLES
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.
Astrology with its stress on what zodiac sign you are born under – there
are actually thirteen signs scientifically speaking but astrology always
assumed twelve which shows that it is an irrational superstition – 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.
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, because they want comfort and because they think
people who don’t believe have bad morals and they tend to copy what other
people. 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.
But since God is supposed to be the supreme good it follows that to
believe in him we have to pretend that the last two reasons are correct so the
belief 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. 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.
An offshoot of Islam that
seeks to unite all world religions. It
was founded by manifestations of God notably Baha’u’llah who proved that they
were not manifestations when they insanely thought they 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.
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 and 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.
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
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.
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
or might not be and will have to pay for their own sins in Hell. 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.
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 what books 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.
CATHOLIC
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 one in faith
for what is divided by schism and heresy can’t be for everybody. The Church would need a clear and fixed
message to be really universal. 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 is the Church is closest to this one, holy, Catholic and
apostolic model. But it doesn’t quite
make it. 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 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.
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.
The
Catholic Church isn’t holy for its teaching is often ridiculous and dangerous
and it has corrupted the legacy of 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. To say that the mark of Catholicism is a mark
of the true religion depends on the religion being true. So we are deceived concerning the mark. It makes no sense to say that the Catholic
Church is true therefore it is Catholic and because it is Catholic it is
true. A Catholic religion that err is
excluding people for being so is not for all.
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 still
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
for people who are better than most Christians are barred from it indicating
that your beliefs are 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.
It 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.
The 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 which shows how dangerous the concept of God is but it
means 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 is natural and not a disease so contraception is wrong and yet it
allows you to wear contact lenses instead of getting laser surgery on your eyes
even though the laser would be less unnatural.
It even lets you have a nose job though there is nothing wrong with
irregular features!
It is one of the heresies
of the modern Church that natural family planning is fine but the actual
teaching of the Church given by Pope Pius IX in Casti Connubi is that it is
only allowed in extreme cases! This pope
made in infallible statement in part 54,56 condemning artificial birth control:
“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.
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 Pius’s 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.
The act by which God made
all things out of nothing. God is a
being without parts and passions, that is, he is spirit so God is his power,
his intelligence. What he has is what he
is. He is his own power. The Church denies that God made all things
out of part of himself for that is transmutation not creation and God is
separate from the creation. If God made
all things out of his energy that would mean he turned himself into the
universe. To create or make something
out of nothing you need infinite power for the difference between something and
nothing is infinite. So that means God
made all things out of his own power for there can be no other power but his
for infinite means all or without limit.
So either God didn’t create or he turned himself into the universe. Both of these alternatives are rejected by
the Church as heresy. So if the earth
and the universe came from nothing then God did not make anything but it just
popped into existence from nowhere and he had nothing to do with it. Whatever comes from nothing doesn’t need a
creator. It is as absurd to believe that
God made all things from nothing as it is believe that all things just popped
into existence. Want proof? Nothing is not a material that you can make
things out of. So we do not need the God
explanation. Indeed God wouldn’t be God
then for there is power that is not his.
If transmutation is true then we are God and should act it without
taking orders from religion.
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.
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 forces 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 for only you can decide
to care and there is no point in commanding it.
The master by command forces 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 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.
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 but this is not true for he supposedly made the
first human beings as perfect so all he had to do 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.
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 because if you have one sin that defiles
your goodness because you won’t give up.
Funny that isn’t a problem for Christians despite their claim that he
can’t put goodness in us and we have to do it ourselves. What do they want him to do put less goodness
in us or none? 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.
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.
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. It is inconsistent. 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.
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 and preaching with people of a different
faith? 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 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. Leo XIII taught that Anglican orders were
invalid for they didn’t intend to ordain priests that could offer the sacrifice
of the
The
doctrine that all you do should be for yourself and that it is good for others
to have you like this for it means you make them happy because you are
happy. Egotism is the term for an
exaggeration of it which demands that you trample over others to get what you
want. Altruism opposes both saying that
we should be other-centred. But even the
altruist does good to satisfy some desire he or she has so altruism is just a
con.
All
the egoist is saying is that the altruist is right to help other people but
wrong to pretend that she is not doing this because she wants to, that is, gets
pleasure from simply doing it. This is
simply what the saying “virtue is its own reward”, is trying to tell us. What happens then is you help others even if
you hate doing it for you still want to do it under the circumstances and you
are doing it for yourself and not them.
Wanting to bandage John’s wounds means you want to fulfil the desire to
help John so it is the desire that is important to you not John or his wounds. Egoism is a major pillar of Humanist thought.
Egoism
is godless for it implies each person can only serve himself or herself and not
God or others though others benefit far more from the assistance of people who
have great self-esteem. The more you
love yourself properly the more you benefit others.
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 are just speculation.
The guards who were supposedly at the tomb could have been scared by a
trickster who pretended to be the angel and the body stolen in the confusion or
after they ran off. Matthew says the
guards did go unconscious so maybe they really did sleep on duty like the Jews
bribed them to say or were drugged. The
plan could have been to fake a miracle.
Jesus could have got plenty of donations through the years that he said
nothing about and these funds could have been used to bribe the soldiers who
the gospel of Matthew says were amenable to bribes 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. If they 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
gospellers 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.
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. 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 nobody
has the right to not bother trying 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. The trouble is 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 never 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 cast them
out. The Jews suggested that to Jesus
who 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 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 evidence for the
source of his doctrines for no two people agree on the reasons and the
interpretation of the evidence or how helpful it is. For example, some accept some arguments for
his 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.
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.
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,
The Virgin Mary allegedly
appeared six times in 1917 in
Forgiveness is at the
heart of the Christian faith. It is
supposed to be good while condoning, rewarding the ill-done by acting as if it
does not matter, is bad. Yet forgiveness
says the sin does matter and involves hating it 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.
To separate the sin from the sinner is to deny or pretend that the
sinner is the cause of the sin. 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.
Christianity calls on you to lie to be a Christian.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 (it’s the one thing I cannot
doubt that I exist now), 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.
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
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 denies seeing the Virgin to this day. They have been condemned by all the bishops
of the area who denied, in their official capacity, that the visions were
supernatural or from God and 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 and we
should prefer even self-destruction to displeasing him so he comes first.
If
God never wanted evil to exist and it is our fault then it follows that to say
that he allows evil for a purpose is to deny that he is almighty or even
competent because he could arrange things so that we are less likely to choose
evil and yet we have this bias towards evil.
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 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.
Godism is worse than
sexism which looks down on women for Godism 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.
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.
It means a gift from
God. God forgiving sins is a grace for
you do not deserve it. Strangely God
helping you to live a good life is also a grace. The evil concept denies that however bad you
are the one thing you always deserve is to be helped to live a good life. Others deserve to be helped for their
sake. You earn grace by your sins so
grace is nonsense. It 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 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). 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.
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 a vindictive wishful thinking despite
being taught by Christ and the Bible, Muhammad and the Koran as revelation from
God. People come before faith and not
faith before people and this is the evil that Jesus (allegedly) rose to
promote. 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?
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 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.
The Bible says that a man that lies with a man as with a woman meaning
sexually for intercourse doesn’t have to necessarily happen with a man and wife
all the time they must be put to death (Leviticus 20:13) which says that it 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
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 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 for
there are things people who know us can get us to do without us even realising
and 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 implies that God will condemn you for
disobeying him even if you did not mean to.
It 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 and 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. 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 so the same emotions and
choices 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 it.
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 errors. But all
the so-called solutions are is 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 but 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.) And if they could be more
convincing than a miracle then how could they be the word of God for the
miracles that they testify to do not verify them either? 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 or the main truths is inspired is rubbish 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 which guards them against error in doing so. Most Roman doctrines have come out of this
belief in the power to divine true doctrine, if it is wrong then they 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 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 with this
charism and 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 it 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.
Despite Vatican I, the council that made it a
dogma or binding belief that the pope was infallible putting limits on papal
infallibility and saying he was only infallible when he spoke clearly that he
was making this dogma part of the faith, it is obvious that the doctrine makes
the pope more infallible than it looks.
The Church only pretends that it accepts it 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.
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. But 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 be dictated 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.
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 was 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. It has to be declared
before the event. 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 and 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.
Since
you love your neighbour as yourself that means a lot of stress for sin is all
around you. 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 this 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 Jesus won disciples and was
crucified under Pilate and rose BECAUSE the prophets spoke of these and
countless others things about him. THE
TESTAMENT DOES NOT CLAIM TO BE A TESTIMONY.
WHAT IT CLAIMS IS THAT YOU MUST CHECK OUT THE OLD TESTAMENT PROPHECIES
TO SEE IF WHAT IT SAYS ABOUT JESUS IS TRUE!!
This is critically important. It
means that even if Josephus did write the Testament it still does not help in
the case for a historical Jesus because it depends on human interpretative
ideas about Bible prophecies. It is not
history that is here but faith. This
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 existed because he indicated before that that
this was a matter of faith. 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. 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 is 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 that supposedly was rife
among the early Christians.
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.
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. We plainly
see how evil the love that Jesus preached is, because it refuses to give people
the evils in the form of punishment they have consented to by their sins which
itself makes it 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. The view that mercy is important too for it
softens justice with kindness which is an important virtue too fails for if
punishment is dignified then it is kindness to give it. And to have mercy just because you cannot
punish everybody all the time is not mercy for 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. 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.
An Irish apparition of
Mary and Joseph and
St Bernadette allegedly
saw the Blessed Virgin Mary at
Lying is saying what is
not true when you could tell the truth.
If God exists then he is the perfect good meaning that the truth that he
exists is the most sacred truth there is and that it is more important to know
that than to do anything else. To lie
then would be to attack truth and the principle of telling the truth meaning
you insult this most sacred truth 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. It also shows that believers in
God have to claim to have the right to persecute those who differ from them –
the amount of blood shed for God is unbelievable and sickening. 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.
Why didn’t they want males with them to protect them in case somebody
fancied stealing the goods? The reason was
because they were plotting something devious.
You don’t go to all the trouble they went to unless you can open the
tomb yourself. They didn’t want to bring
men with them to help for they were scheming.
There is nothing in the
gospel to indicate that the stone could not have been moved by the women.
When they came to the tomb
the guards were unconscious. 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?
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.
In fact there were no
guards for had the Jews feared the apostles stealing the body to put out a
resurrection report they would have put the body in a secret place. Why make extra trouble?
The women 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.
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. 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 interest in objectivity.
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! The apostle Paul, who the Church says wrote
the letters carrying his name in the New Testament, which are also written by
God at the same time, 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 alleged predictions
of martyrdom from Jesus don’t necessarily have to mean it but may have caused
the legend through people misunderstanding.
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.
It means their faith in the apostles’ testimony does not come from the
Bible but from outside it though the Bible claims to provide evidence.
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 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 or perhaps people who can hurt his family to say
what his faith wants, he must have no other reason to choose death – it would
be easier 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 which is why the apostles being martyrs is only hearsay not evidence
and to deploy it to get converts for Christ is dishonest. They might have given their lives for
political reasons for that was basically the reason they were slain if they
were slain.
To argue the apostles
were telling the truth because they were martyred is to try and trick people
because 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 so even if they died for Christianity we don’t
have any hard evidence for what 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?
The argument that the
apostles told the truth about Jesus for people don’t die for their 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
apparitions cannot add to the evidence of the apostles they always have 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 and 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! 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
If miraculous, then the 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 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.
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 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 and not be a virgin anymore.
It 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 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. A clue that it is not about
Jesus is in verse 9 for the Jews who nailed Jesus would not have been saying
that Jesus relied on God therefore let God save him for that would have been
blasphemous and 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) as if he tried to stop their
biting him by hitting them and kicking them but then they bit his hands and his
feet. So the psalm is using a metaphor
for the enemies did not literally bite him.
A
miracle is when God does magical things like raising Jesus from the dead. 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 than in helping the leper. Whatever miracles point to – if anything – it
is not God. Miracles are either against
the law of nature or in accordance with nature.
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. 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.
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.
Neither
understanding is helpful and both are dangerous and pro-stupidity so miracles
are a dangerous and bad belief.
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 - indicate that miracles are just
freak events. They happen without a
propagandist purpose. The Church refuses
to admit that 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
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
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 plates, yet undoubtedly non-existent plates, which
warns us not 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. Venial sin is sin that is not as bad as that
and only breaks with God a bit.
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.
A system that teaches
that through one discreet act of adultery you commit mortal sin and that many
venials which do more harm do not add up to mortal sin knows nothing of justice
or making sense. Protestants reject the
doctrine that venial sin is not a complete break with God.
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.
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. The main evidence for mythicism is as
follows:
The gospel stories could
have been invented or influenced by true stories where they ring true for 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
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 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 nonsense and he would
have known it for millions have believed in the cross as a vehicle of salvation
without believing that it abolished good works and religious rites as specified
in the Law of Moses. But why did
believers of his day go as far as to say that to accept circumcision was doing
away with the cross? It could only be
because when Jesus revealed in visions to the apostles that he was nailed to a
cross Jesus stated it had to happen to free Christians from the Law of Moses
and circumcision for the gospels never portray a Jesus who was that emphatic
about doing this. 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. 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
Just as the Church has
found that many marriages are invalid – and these are the ones 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 he 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.”
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.” 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 so Anglican bishops and priests are really
not ordained at all. This decree would
imply that unbelievers cannot give real sacraments. 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. 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.
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.
A stigmatic
miracle-working monk who died in 1968 and who canonised by Pope John Paul II.
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.
He claimed that Jesus gave him a copy of the
five wounds of the crucifixion. In 1923,
The doctors do not agree on whether or not
fingers could meet through the hand wounds.
Nobody ever said he could press on each
side of the hand wound and get his fingers to touch one another through the
wound. Romanelli tried but assumed that
his fingers would meet if he tried harder but was afraid to for Pio was in great
pain (page 14, The Stigmata and Modern Science). But with the priest crying and struggling and
wincing with the alleged pain would it have been done right? There is no doubt that the testimony of
Romanelli is the only one that is worth examining for it is detailed and though
not great it is the best of a bad lot.
He is the 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 their best to look particular and that 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 - and 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 told a couple of young girls to listen
to their father who warned them that kissing his hand would lead to infection
(Who is Padre Pio? page 37). This is a
denial of the supernatural nature of the marks and that they never turned
septic though this immunity to disease is boasted by the followers of Pio to
prove that he had miracle stigmata. Pio
was indicating then that there were times the wounds turned septic that only he
knew about. When Pio lied to the girls
and when he knew fine well that loads of people do dirty things with no harmful
effects and that the risk was nothing it shows he did not like anybody seeing
his wounds too closely at least at that particular time. The wounds would naturally look more
convincing at some times rather than others.
Pio was certainly dodgy and has recently
being exposed for surreptitiously sending for chemicals in great secrecy.
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 and 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. But when 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 plainly lying
and was hard up for evidence for the resurrection which amounts to dishonesty
too for the stranger a claim is the more evidence it needs. He cannot be trusted for Jesus being a fraud
could not mean that the dead would have to necessarily be lost. 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. 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 Bible 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.
(When the Old Testament is more sure even that 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.) Jesus himself according to Luke 16:31 said
the same thing 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.
The head of the Roman
Catholic Church. He claims to be the
successor of St Peter the apostle on whom Christ built the one true Church, the
Roman Catholic Church. 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. 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 gets. The
pope claims that his office is unconditional for the Church needs him. So the papacy was not instituted by
Jesus. Moreover, 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. 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 these
executions 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 the foundation of the Church and the Church was built on so it follows
then that Peter and the pope his successor have to hold the Church
together. The Roman Church has never
said that the Roman Pontiff is infallible or acting without error when he
excommunicates for history shows persons and groups being thrown out of the
Church by one pope and this action being apologised for by another. If the pope were really the rock he wouldn’t
be able to excommunicate unfairly. The
concept of invalid excommunication doesn’t solve any problems for the pope and
the Church are separating themselves from some person or group. 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.
Prayer according to the
Church is raising the heart and mind to God.
It means sincerely and consciously communicating with God. 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.
Prayer is incompatible with self-esteem and only bestows it 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. Miracles aim to inspire prayer which shows
they are signs not of grace but of folly and evil. God will do what is best and he is the
almighty boss so prayer is not trying to help anybody and 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 for you can’t change God.
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.
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 says that a
prophet who accurately predicts the future at all times and one prediction
fails is to be stoned to death for God does not err and God cannot be speaking
through him. The trouble with this is
that it eliminates Moses and Jesus and John the Baptist and several others as
true prophets. They made no prophecies
except for Jesus who is terribly unimpressive and his poor attempts at prophecy
were recorded after the event. It is
worse to make no prophecies that cannot be rationally explained when they are
fulfilled than to make many prophecies and get one wrong. Deuteronomy 18 denies the religious lie that
miracles are signs from God saying where the true faith is unless the prophet
makes no error at all which makes a question mark appear over Jesus’ big sign,
the resurrection.
Prophets are evil men
because they predict wars which influences politics and evil men. For example, the Bible prophecies about
The Protestants belong to
It cannot be denied
however that the Protestant God is indeed 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. 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. But 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 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.
Giving a criminal the bad
things they earn for doing wrong. This
is really the only thing that free will is believed in for. 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 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 the notion that they really deserve it
in. 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.
Reason is thinking
without contradicting yourself for A cannot be B at the same time and in the
same way that A is A. A person who
follows reason in preference to religious dogma and emotional feelings is
called a rationalist. We can’t get away
from reason because even those who say that faith and not reason should be
listened to are reasoning that faith is better so it is only natural that we
should check anything we are told with commonsense and logic! Their reasoning is bad for why that faith and
not another and why not 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? 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, 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. It is not reasonable
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.
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. 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. 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 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.
A ghost could have
masqueraded as Jesus. It’s easier to
believe that than that a man came back bodily from the dead so it is more
reasonable. 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? 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. Jesus wants us to be irrational which is the
same as evil for evil is irrational if he wants us to believe in this
resurrection. 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, 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 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. 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 causing miracle hallucinations of Jesus. The resurrection destroys the credibility of
Christianity.
When God or a spirit
gives a supernatural message. 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. 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 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 and many people with stronger faith than you would 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.
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 for magic can be based on the claim that God has
decreed that his power will only be channelled through rites performed a
certain way. Magic goes by the law of
correspondence, which simply means that like produces like. God would be more interested in people being
holy than in them gaining holiness through rites which is too restricting. The Catholic Church has seven
sacraments. 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.
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 so the good
is not good but defiance disguised as good.
That logic and experience was the reason the Bible said 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. You can honour and respect the
saints without praying to them. 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. 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.
Secularism
means that the state should be run without influence from specifically
religious principles. 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. Religion wants
to control and condition children it should pay out of its own pocket. Promoting the good running of the state is
the state’s business. Recently Islamic
girls were banned from wearing head coverings in public schools in
Feeling
good about yourself and liking yourself.
If you don’t like yourself you can’t like other people either. 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 reward one deserves for loving
oneself. 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 so 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.
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
scientists you choose 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 clear you have to side with the
sceptics until absolute proof comes.
Something is innocent of being a miracle until proven guilty! Many deny that the image is miraculous and
say they can explain it. But it is
certainly not a miracle as such errors as the man’s hair hanging down as if he
was standing up show. 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 of washing because when it says the women went to the
tomb on the third day to anoint the body the body was not treated as a criminal
corpse. That visit was an eccentric
departure from tradition for the body was considered to be decomposing by then
and it shows 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 and bled like that then clearly Jesus 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 distorted bloodstains and Jesus would have had them 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 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.
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 so full of errors.
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. 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.
Despite
what the Church says about God taking the pope’s life before he had a chance to
lead the Church astray with fake infallibility, the Sixtus shenanigans still
disprove infallibility for the pope did already use 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 but just for the sake of ceremony he wasn’t ready to make the whole
world know about it yet. The
infallibility charism was intended to be used then and 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 for they say we have free
will and are guilty of what we do wrong though we could be programmed to feel
free and not be aware that we are programmed all the time. Animals look as if they have free will and
they feel free too because 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.
You can have spirituality
without religion but 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.
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 most 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.
An
attempt to prove that a good God can stand by and let us suffer and 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 scandalous. 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. It is better to say that suffering is totally
useless and abhorrent for that is denying that it should happen to any extent
for that increases our resolve to destroy it and it is better to disapprove
than to approve of suffering to be on the safe side. 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.
The
doctrine that there is nothing of value in anything human (as taught by 1
Corinthians 3:19-23). This 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,
The conversion of the
bread and wine at Mass into the body and blood of Christ. 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. If God can do this
miracle he can feed us with Jesus without the bread and wine becoming him. Some Protestants say that the Mass is not
idolatry because it is just an error about where Jesus is not 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.
The Mass goes further than that so it is grave idolatry.
The Church says the
miracle is spoken of in John 6 when Jesus told the Jews to eat his flesh and
drink his blood. But there is no need to
read transubstantiation into that for he could feed us this way without turning
bread and wine into himself and 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. 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
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.
The Jews asked “How will he do it? So what would he correct them for
when he was in the habit of ignoring what was said to him? Yet this non-correction thing is what the
entire Catholic Mass stands on and led to the Church “infallibly” stating that
communion is literally Jesus.
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.
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
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 symbolism was sufficient. But
this point proves that the cup was just symbolism. The view however 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. Another problem is that only the Luke Gospel
and 1 Corinthians 11 mention that we are meant to do this memorial and both of
these are disputed. In the RSV Catholic
Edition it is admitted that many ancient authorities left out the reference to
doing it in Jesus’ memory – 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 then says it is because the meal is a
memorial of the body and blood of Jesus that he can’t commend them. 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. The verse
before that stuff 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 portion 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 symbolic or memorial rite. It could symbolise the invisible feeding of
our souls with Christ. 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” which say the
opposite. 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 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.
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.
In 1378, cardinals in
All of the cardinals
agreed that the election of Urban VI was invalid for they didn’t have any
freedom during the conclave due to threats from a mob demanding a Roman or an
Italian. The mob had even invaded the
building they were in. The two rival
popes caused the Great Western Schism and resulted in one Roman Catholic Church
being led by Urban in
Though witchcraft today
claims to be a benign nature religion the fact is that all magic is evil magic,
trying to avoid what really matters.
What matters most is not spells, believing in God, a man who rises from
the dead, in miracles but believing in your 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
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 and 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? To do a spell to make yourself more lovable
to another is also manipulative for you are degrading yourself by turning
yourself into somebody else’s idea of desirability. We all love people with faults. The Witch 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 him so that he will see this.
For example, 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 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 them but he demanded execution
indicating that this was compatible with love your neighbour as yourself for
the sorceress is dangerous no matter how altruistic she seems to be or
acts. 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 still get
cancer and have accidents and die 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 just if you sit back 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?
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.
They 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.
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.
25
November 2007
A
CATECHISM OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE, Catholic Truth Society,
MEDJUGORJE
AFTER 15 YEARS, Michael Davies, Remnant Press,
PADRE
PIO, Patrick O Donovan, Catholic Truth Society,
POPE
FICTION, Patrick Madrid, Basilica Press,
REASONS
FOR HOPE, Editor Jeffrey A Mirus,
THE
BLEEDING MIND Ian Wilson, Paladin,
THE
STIGMATA AND MODERN SCIENCE, Rev Charles Carty, TAN,
WHO
IS PADRE PIO? Fathers Rumble and Carty, TAN,
MAIL
TO: EMAIL
ME