As a confirmed atheist who thinks that all religion is trouble with a capital T and thrives where there is ignorance, I guess I’m bound to ask this question:
Why on earth do people embrace Christianity? Suppose one day you are walking down the street, and this young, long haired, bearded bloke comes out of the shadows at you. Now you are an intelligent, educated person, and so it is to your surprise therefore that he tells you that, without your ever asking him, he has taken the liberty of paying for the sins of your ancestors, and those of yourself, so that you now owe him. You must go down on your knees and worship him, otherwise you'll be in some kind of trouble with his Dad.
"A-hem...", you think to yourself, not without a little street-wisdom. "Erm...I see!"
Then, he makes out that the rules deciding whether you have done right or wrong in the first place, the rules dictating what's a sin and what's not, were made up by....yep, you guessed....his Dad, who is hanging about out of sight round the corner somewhere.
You'd call the Police wouldn't you?
And you'd be right (1). After all, we can all smell a Protection Racket when we see one, especially one which characteristically smacks of the Italian Peninsula, as this one does, and most of us can detect a system whose basic axioms are seriously flawed.
And that would also have been the precise reaction of any sophisticated Roman lady out doing her shopping 1,800 years ago. In fact, given the liberated enlightenment of her time in such matters, long before the rise of the Christianic regime, she would have seen straight through him much sooner than most of us. "Rabble" and "criminals" is how she would have referred to them, and how indeed ancient civilization did refer to them, and here I would like to submit to the reader the evidence of just how right she was, and of how they haven't really changed much since.
In prehistoric times, most religions seemed to follow a certain theme, of having respect for the earth, and the environment, and this theme has survived to this day from the Native Americans to the Asian Buddhists. Then, in the all-embracing Roman State, especially after they had absorbed the Greek culture, came the basic amenities of civilisation which today we take for granted...centrally heated libraries, a sense of world order under a common theme, and of course a religious freedom and toleration shared by all, even to the lengths of having Pantheons where the followers of different gods could all worship side by side under the very same roof, while still being able to find the civility, and the toleration, to embrace each other as citizens of the same World Order and fight shoulder to shoulder to ensure its preservation.
In this, they were somewhat ahead of where we are today. At last we have noticed, though, that 95% of all warfare on earth, and of all consequent death, has arisen directly out of super-tribal fighting between the rival nations of a divided Europe. And at least we are again trying to achieve what they built: a united Europe in which World Wars I and II, the Napoleonic Wars, the Hundred Years War, and all of the long and wearisome catalogue of medieval warfare would never have taken place, and the only objection to which united dream seems to be blind tribal patriotism for the individual nation and a narrowness of the very kind which precipitated all these wars in the first place.
After 1,600 years are finally coming close in Europe to again having the dream of what they had, plus the additional miracles of technology which have come along just in the past few centuries as science has waxed and religion has waned.
But the long, bleak, intervening gap between the two dreams, a gap of some 1,600 years, was occupied by little but narrowness, intolerance, bloodshed and persecution in a Europe where Christianity had the people in an iron grip, science in its search for the real reasons for things was suppressed, and everywhere people lived in intense and abject fear.
It is no coincidence that this dark period in our history was also the Christian period. By suppressing science and persecuting people like Galileo it perpetuated itself, keeping people in a darkness where their ignorance was the Church's power. And the Church itself invented the idea of confession, so that they could know what's going on in society, (and of course knowledge is power), applied the psychology of branding people with guilt, so that they could control them, and, bathed in hypocrisy, preached that it was better to give than to receive, only to then receive from the poor people far more than it ever gave, to the extent of becoming the richest organisation on earth, Then, as now, caught as it presently is, in the act of covering up rather than compensating for the sexual abuses of children by priests, --it thought only of itself.
If you were to take any group of human beings and wave a magic wand which has the specific effect of both narrowing their minds and conditioning them to be intolerant of the beliefs of others, you will presently see them begin to harm each other, and, eventually, as the mind narrows further, kill each other. They will begin to burn first books, and then people.
And by doing this to its people, by breeding them in such a mould, Christianity has achieved by far the worst, bloodiest history of any religion Ever. Look back into history. Have you noticed that in all religion, that there have been the murderers, and the murdered. The murdered could have been anybody....Jew, Buddhist, Hindu, Witch (Wiccan), Catholic murdered by Protestant, Protestant murdered by Catholic.......but the murderer?--- almost always the Christian. Have you noticed that? Almost always. They even became so narrow that they would murder their own, in the host horrible of ways, for the only "crime" of having very slightly differing views from each other (e.g. Catholics and Protestants, two different types of Christian.)
Anyone with a ounce of commonsense can cast his mind’s eye around any inner city at 2am and ask himself, “Any Buddhist thugs? Any Jewish muggers?” Nope. And, roving the mind’s eye a little further, how many Buddhists are in jail? How many Jews?
At the Glastonbury Festival when I was there some years ago, there were all the various different people practicing their various cultures and beliefs, as others, despite having views of their own, looked on in interested wonderment, in an atmosphere of harmony of which the Roman with his Pantheon would have been proud...and then suddenly the peace was disturbed, as these aggressive and intolerant yobbos, for want of a better word, came charging in with their "Jesus Battle Bus". And that name just about summed them up. And I just looked at them, and I cast my mind back to the horrors of all they have done during their reign, and I just thought that they were so very sad.
In Scotland a few years ago there was a museum display set up, of all the various religions of the world. One stand or display was set up for each of the religions, and of course they were all treated fairly and equally. Naturally, from the Principle of Equivalence, each religion was of course equally entitled to consider that it, and not the others, is the "chosen, true religion", and that the others are not.
So guess who the people were, then, that congregated outside, chucking bricks through the windows and protesting that they were being treated as "just another religion"? Yep...you guessed...the Christians. Nobody else did. Not because their religions are false, and not because they didn’t believe their religions as ardently, but because they could not bring themselves to become so wretched and behave in such a reprehensible manner. Naturally it is no accident or coincidence that Christians have the bloodiest record of any religion Ever.
Voltaire once said, "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to my Death your right to say it." The Evangelical Christian simply can't do that. He doesn't have it in him. He’d choke on the very words. When people irreconcilably disagree, there are always two courses of action open to them: either they can rise to the noble level of Voltaire, and agree to differ, so that they can live and get along together in the world -- or they can take the shallower, more wretched route and begin to fight and kill each other. The Christian has always had the notoriety of taking that second route. And consequently, his history has been written in the blood of innocent millions. The original conclusion of the Romans, a realistic and pragmatic people, that Christians were nothing but rabble and criminals, would go on to prove shockingly correct.
Voltaire
(Francois-Marie Arouet)
“I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to my death your right
to say it.”
An evangelical Christian would choke on those words. But if he would suffocate
on such great and
noble words, what does that make him?
With an appalling history like this, perhaps it is worth going back to basics and considering just what these people actually believe in and what, therefore, they have based their horrendous regime upon.
They believe that the cosmos, instead of having always existed as we now know, was created by a Jewish god, who is infinite in power and capability and who can see all things, past, present and future. This god is all loving, and all forgiving. And, of course, he is the very definition of Good.
Perhaps it has not occurred to these people that if a disaster occurs, in which a school is flattened by an aircraft for example, then an infinite being, truly infinite; without limits, must have foreseen this and therefore deliberately failed to prevent it. Deliberately. That is hardly Good. Alternatively, his only remaining excuse would be that he did not foresee it. But that is not infinite. And so he is either fallible, or evil. One or the other.
A popular excuse by the Church at this point is that of course he gave us freewill, and will not interfere in worldly matters, and so we are entirely responsible for our own actions. But unfortunately that doesn't get them far. For example little children who suffer horribly and then die of cancer, are not doing so because they wanted to, and their freewill has not come into it. Neither does your freewill come into it if you are attacked, raped or murdered, and yet the suffering you are subjected to is horrendous. This god also created a species of parasitic worm whose only, singular function in life is to burrow into the eyes of little children and make them blind.
Such events would therefore seem to lie outside of the parameters defining the reasons why we're supposed to have freewill and be here taking part in this scheme of things. What is still there, though, is the continued refusal of the god to intervene in such events and minimise the suffering. For example, imagine if you were sitting on a fence, overlooking a field, and in that field a helpless little child was being abused. What kind of person would you be, if instead of jumping down off that fence, you just said, "Oh they have freewill---both of them-- so I'm leaving them to it". But a better person would jump down off that fence and intervene. Therefore again, and completely outside of the Church's excuse, it is possible to do better than him. And so, once again, he is either fallible, seriously mistaken, or just downright evil. As an infinite being, he is infinitely capable of stopping the innocent child's abuse which, being infinite, he also cannot possibly have missed. Therefore he must have deliberately decided not to. In Europe, that is a Criminal Offence. If you are in a position to prevent suffering, and you deliberately choose not to, then you are correctly regarded as being equally guilty along with the perpetrator of the suffering, and equally liable to Prosecution. Its is very sad, that God's only valid defence here is that he doesn't exist. For then, he could hardly have intervened to stop the suffering, because he simply wasn't/isn't there. That is an admissible defence. However in the case of an infinite being, it is his only admissible defence. But of course, if his best defence is that he doesn't exist, then I'd hate to hear his worst one (2).
Also, of course, there is no reason, (beyond the base mentality of a spoilt kid playing around with his pet mice and hurting them for his amusement), why the god would want to create in the first place these conditions whereby we are subjected to the pains which befall us. The Church says that life is a test and he wants to know who are the better people and who are the sinners. But if he is infinite, through all space and time, then he already knew the answer to that before he even started. Perhaps the Church and its followers should have a better go at getting their minds around the concept of infinity.
This god was originally one of a couple. He was called Jehovah and she, the missus, was called Ashirah. But entirely due to male chauvinism, the seeking of the male to dominate the female, she was quietly elbowed at an early stage (apparently he told his followers to go and bust up all her statues and shrines, so at that point I guess we can call him single again), although she still has followers who turn up in Jerusalem from time to time to irritate the Christians and orthodox Jews there. Then, of course, the heavenly couple sent their son down among us. And whose word do we have for this? Why the son's himself, of course! Oh dear! Remember the street scene at the beginning of this study?
Following the return of more enlightened times, after so long a hibernation, a considerable amount of research has recently been carried out on the real Jesus. He certainly did exist, but in reality, far from being the son of God, he would have been next-but-one in line to the old Hasmonean (Maccabean) throne of Israel if the Romans hadn't moved in 60 years before and abolished their monarchy (3). His direct line of descent from King David is recorded in many versions of the Bible. By the time he was born, in about 11 BC, Judea was governed by a succession of puppet kings, installed by the Romans and with no original royal blood. These kings were very paranoid about the surviving fragments of the royal house (of king David), and when news went around that these fragments had spawned another male infant, out came the knives. But Jesus was carried to safety, as his senior cousin John ben Zacharias ("John the Baptist") had also been some years earlier.
Well Jesus grew up, and eventually made his bid to throw out the Romans. But recruiting support wasn't that simple. Theirs was a very small country and the Romans had ears everywhere. And so in his public speeches he had to be most careful. He spoke to the masses in what we call parables; stories which have a secret meaning, and which a presiding Roman guard would hopefully not have understood. It has long been noticed that there is not one of these parables which does not have an incitory or inflammatory meaning. And even the Bible still admits, that his private talks with his immediate followers ("disciples"), conducted behind closed doors, were rather more frank.
He married one Mary Magdalene(4). The Bible slips up there. That is, they haven’t done a very thorough job of concealing it. You see, at the wedding feast at Cana his mother Mary (5) was the hostess, and under Jewish law only the mother of the groom could assume that position. The identity of the bride has been established as Mary Magdalene by, among others, Donovan Joyce (see Donovan Joyce, The Jesus Scroll, 1972).
Far worse, he seems to have gone through life believing that he was the actual heir to the Hasmonean throne, but he then discovered that he had a senior cousin alive in John the Baptist. The two met, each backed with his army of followers, argued about which should have the power to "baptise" (i.e. recruit) the other, --in other words they argued about status--, and eventually it was agreed that John should prevail. Jesus told his disciples that he would accept this arrangement “for now”.
Jesus then at once withdrew into the desert, was greatly tempted, the flavour of this temptation being all about ruling Israel and nothing else-- and within a month John was delivered to the puppet king and decapitated. Make of that what you will.
Jesus
became the heir of the Hasmonean throne of Judea, except that the Romans
were occupying his country. And so, he set about throwing them out.
The original meaning of Messiah was a
liberator
specifically come to deliver the Jews from the Romans.
“And there was one named Barabbas, who lay bound with them that had
made insurrection with him” (Mark 15:7) Further, (for those
who might prefer
to believe that “him” meant Barabbas and not Jesus), “Jesus
was tried
by a Roman court on a charge of inciting the people to rebel
against
the Roman government” (Safed Scroll).
After that, Jesus, despite his hopes of inheriting John's mass of adherents, seems to have begun to run out of support. Reading again between the lines, one does begin to wonder just where all these people went, and what their feelings at that time were. But nevertheless he launched his insurrection in Jerusalem at the Passover of what we now know to have been 36AD. The modern Jews, having always known far too much about him to ever accept him, still correctly identify this rebellion as just another (and relatively minor) attempt to oust the Romans (see Hugh Schonfield, The Passover Plot (1965), which covers this insurrection and the plotting which went into it in some detail). Another document, the Safed Scroll, which the early church could not get its hands upon because it wasn't discovered until 1882, states categorically that Jesus "was tried by a Roman court on a charge of inciting the people to rebel against the Roman Government".
Of course it failed, as did the much bigger one 34 years later, the infamous Jewish Revolt of 70AD. Jesus rode on a donkey into the temple compound through the eastern gate, facing the wrong way (i.e. sitting backwards on the donkey) and looking back towards the rising sun as a symbol of Renewal, while his retainers laid a carpet of palm branches on the ground in front of the donkey. This was the precise way in which all the Kings of Israel, over the centuries from David and Solomon onwards, rode to their coronation, which in turn is something else that the church has kept quiet about. Pushing over some tables in the temple was the signal to start the rebellion, but Roman guards came from everywhere, and Jesus' son, one Jesus bar Abbas (6), quite the young militant, was captured early in the proceedings.
Jesus was desperate to secure his release, and had an arrangement made with the Roman governor, Pontius Pilatus, to exchange the son for the father. Lots were then drawn among the disciples to decide who would actually go to the governor and do this, and unfortunately Judas Iscariot, one of the fiercely loyal Sicarii, drew the short straw. (7)
I all fairness, I have to admit that Jesus was incredibly bold. Considering that he might not only snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by first obtaining his son's release by way of exchange, he then seems to have hatched a desperate plan to cheat the cross itself.
This involved manipulating the timing of his trial so that he would be crucified on a Friday. Now contrary to what the Christians would have you believe, the Jewish Sabbath is Saturday, not Sunday, and goes from sunset to sunset (not midnight to midnight) so that it actually began early Friday evening when the sun went down, at that time of year around 6pm. Now his trial was also held on a Friday, so all in all he couldn't possibly have been up there on the cross for more than a few hours before he had to be taken down again, as Jewish law required that all the crucified be taken down at the start of the Sabbath. But it could generally take days for crucified people to die.
Hence the bold bid to cheat the cross. Ten out of ten for bottle.
However,
it does appear that a Roman guard came round at the last minute with a spear,
and made sure they were all dead first. Almost on a whim, sometimes they did
this; sometimes they didn't. Ouch! Bad luck, that (8).
Now to this day, no one knows whether he survived that injury. We do know that
the spear entered his side opposite his liver, so he may have had a chance, but
again we just don’t know.
Of course, he was then ‘seen’ afterwards from time to time. But then, so were King Arthur and Elvis Presley, and I think from a commonsense viewpoint that in common with UFO reports such stories frankly tell us more about human psychology than anything else. But again he may have survived. However there is also evidence that he had a twin (9).
But the first seeds of Christianity seem to have arisen from the fact that these Kings of Israel were, traditionally, God's Son on earth. Not just Jesus -- they all were; all the Kings of Israel right back to David and Solomon. This was a constitutional tool which was invented as a device to make would-be pretenders think twice about the eternal consequences of overthrowing the king.
This, then, would you believe, is what for the best part of 1,500 years the Christians have based their regime upon, in the name of which the human race has been subjected to more misery, suffering, persecution and murder than from any other religion or regime in history. Unbelievable.
When faced with these accusations Christians frequently say, "Oh yes, but underlyingly, there is nothing wrong with Christianity, and there will always be evil people who will use and abuse Christianity to achieve their wicked desires, and these people give the rest of us a bad name".
Unfortunately however this excuse is not valid, for as we have already seen, these evil individuals are themselves every bit the product of the arrogant and intolerant religion which over many generations has bred them, to the exclusion of other religious influences, and that any religion which is so psychologically narrow, as Christianity undoubtedly is, and which cannot even teach its youngsters their faith without the background flavour, which I have witnessed myself, of hostility towards other religions, is bound to interact with human nature in such a way as to breed an increased number of people in its ranks who will burn first books and then people.
These individuals have not used Christianity. They have been produced by it (10). We could say that there are good drugs and bad ones, and that regrettably, in terms of its psychiatric effects, Christianity has proved a bad one.
Please look again at the picture at the top of this page. Who could do such a thing? And what kind of a psychological mould could possibly have produced them?
Of course, there will always be people who will say that I am being too extreme here, and that what I am saying has not been their experience of Christianity. Well it won't have been, because these days it is tempered by forces external to it such as science and the enlightenment which that has brought, and of course more liberal laws which have in turn come with that more generalised enlightenment and which keep Christian intolerance in check. But we cannot thank Christianity itself for these things, which have come about in spite of Christianity not because of it, and now occlude the underlying fact that Evangelicals, if given back the legal licenses they once enjoyed, would be back up to their abominations in no time at all. The portrait which I have painted above is every bit as accurate as it is alarming. It is a concise account of what Christianity, in itself, unchecked and given free reign, will inevitably become-- as every medieval person witnessed to his horror.
Asking
us to believe in souls is a bit like inviting us to believe that if the
electronics dies in the back of a tv set, the picture
detaches itself from the front and floats away, still animating -- and
thereby negating the need for the electronics in the first place.
But our human ‘electronics’ -- our brain neurons -- would not have
evolved through the natural selection process
in this case, because to do so there must be a crucial need for them, which
would certainly not be
the case if the consciousness they are supposed to create doesn’t actually
need them, for example if
there is already a soul in there doing the same job.
You know, religions thrive where there is darkness and ignorance of the real
reasons for things. Then, when science comes along and discovers those real
reasons, religion retreats from those areas. And yet, despite this, many
Christians still maintain that there is no conflict between science and
religion. In my opinion these people should take a trip back in time to the
medieval period and take a good look at just what an iron grip Christianic regimes
actually had on people in those days. Perhaps then they might see just how much,
in this world where human nature itself has not changed, Christianity has
retreated as science has advanced.
One
salient area in which conflict very definitely exists concerns the concept of
the immortal soul. The principles of evolution, first propounded in the 19th century
by Darwin and Huxley and since absolutely verified and proven, with examples of
it everywhere we look, stipulate that nothing can evolve unless it constitutes a
selective advantage. Eyes further apart for better distance evaluation, a
sharper claw, a longer leg for speed…. natural selection will take its pick of
what is available and only the best will survive. Very certainly, nothing will
evolve which has no advantage at all, as it will never survive the rigours of
the natural selection process.
Now the human brain has evolved 100 billion neurons. These work together in vast
orchestration, to produce your consciousness, your thinking, reasoning and
problem-solving processes, in a word, “you”. A small fraction of these
neurons also control your metabolism and physical movements.
However
we must remember that nothing can evolve unless there is a need for it, and how
on earth can there be a need for 100 billion neurons operating in vast
orchestration if there is already a soul in there doing
the same job?
But they did evolve, and therefore there must have been a need for them, and therefore there could not have been a soul in there already doing the same job.
And
so – right there – souls do not exist (11).
Ancient people, who did not know about neurons, always had some difficulty in
explaining why one lump of matter just stood there inert, such as a lifeless
boulder on a crag, while other lumps of matter ran around, were alive, and could
think and perform tasks. And so, they invented the notion of souls to explain
the difference. But this of course only passes the buck; after all how do these
souls derive their consciousness?
This of course is the point where most religious people start to cop out, that
is, their arguments begin to generalise and they jettison their logic and
reasoning, with such efforts as, “Well, God can do what he wants”….
Or….” Well God moves in mysterious ways doesn’t he?”.
But
no amount of reasoning, and certainly no amount of copping out, can change the
logic of the foregoing: neurons would not have evolved if there were anything
already in place doing the same job, and therefore, put very simply, souls do
not exist.
Ghosts
It follows from the foregoing that if souls can't exist then ghosts don't exist either. Therefore, the reported sightings of ghosts, if read correctly by analysts, should tell them more about human psychology than anything else.
Also, have you noticed that just about every ghost ever reported was wearing clothes? Now that’s a little strange if you think on it, because the clothes were never a part of the ghost’s original, mortal body. So how come these foreign objects became ghosts? It’s almost as though the same human imagination which created the ghost, also put some clothes on it for the sake of decency.
No doubt believers would counter this by claiming that the spirit can project whatever image it chooses – but this claim further violates the evolution/natural selection principle outlined above by necessitating a spiritual capability far superior to that of evolved neurons, which cannot create images in other people's minds with all the incredible advantages which that would entail, and so the neurons would not therefore have won the natural selection process. The fact that they did, unravels this claim and renders it invalid.
Now under Christianity, or any of the other hocus pocuses, you could, if you wanted, fill a metal container full of seats with people and then, using the rules, beliefs and axioms of that religion, pray that the container will take off and fly the people through the sky. Needless to say, it won't. You can pray until you go blue in the face, and it will just stay there on the ground. You could then repeat the same experiment with, perhaps, the idea of beaming magic pictures of faraway happenings into your living room. And again you could pray until you turn pink--- but it won't happen.
But then, as soon as you abandon your religion with its rules and axioms and adopt instead a new regime which believes in protons and electrons, and photons and quarks, -- then, and only then, it all works. Off goes the flying container (aeroplane) and up on your living room screen comes the picture (television).
Now...is it a coincidence that the only "hocus pocus" which works, is also the very one which accommodates the scenario which existed at the moment of creation, one of electrons and protons, and photons and quarks, and of the rules of science, the only laws which can possibly have been in God's mind because there was then nothing else?
The
Creation event featured nothing but subatomic particles and the bare laws of
science.
And, sure enough, the only ‘magic’ which works is orientated along these
very lines. Religions try to set science apart
and accuse it of cheating (“Oh, apart from that!”). And yet, all these
concepts, that is, all
the religions, and science, exist in the same world and are equally worthy of
consideration, and if religions
worked even half as well as science, believers would be singing about it from
the rooftops.
Course its not. Science is the only true religion, and if there is a God, then the laws of science are his underlying, fundamental Word – a fact completely missed by every religious believer.
--- Michael Alan Marshall
1)
In defence of this, Christians often say, "Well yes, but its different with
them. After all, they're God and Jesus. They can do that". Wrong. It
breaches fundamental moral principles to have one law for some and another for
others -- whoever they are. Gods could not implement such principles without
proving flawed and therefore false. Moreover, God's breaking of his own Laws
would make him a hypocrite.
(2)
Notice at this point that he doesn't qualify to be worshipped. He is either not
there, or he's wicked. There's no third alternative.
(3) There
is however some evidence that, as is so frequently the case with Royal families,
he was in fact a bastard. His mother, Mary, is reported in many ancient records
as having had an affair with a Roman soldier, Tiberius Julius Abdes Panthera,
and by him had twins, Jeshua ben Panthera (Jesus) and Judas Thomas ben Panthera.
Mary is on record as having claimed he raped her, but both Roman and Jewish
sources say that she claimed this in order to escape being stoned to death for
adultery.
Another ancient source, the Talmud, states that Yeshua (Jesus) ben Panthera's mother was Mariamne Stada (see (9) below) and that "this one has been turned away, being unfaithful to her husband"( Babylonian Shabbath, 104b). She was no more than 15 years old. The early Christian church went to extraordinary lengths to destroy this evidence, but failed to get its hands on all the documents. Tiberius Julius Abdes Panthera's tombstone was then discovered not many years ago in Germany, where he was later transferred. See Tony Bushby, The Bible Fraud, (2001).
(4) They had a daughter called Sarah. See Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (2003), which is actually based heavily on the Catholic Encyclopedia which owned up to most of this back in the early 20th century. Jesus bar Abbas was almost certainly from a previous union; he would be about 20 at the time of the Passover Plot. His father Jesus, born about 11 BC, was then about 46, not 33 as has been popularly (but mistakenly) stated. See John 8, 53-58 in which Jesus is described as "not yet fifty". Do you ever say that to somebody under 40? It was at the Council of Nicea in 324 AD that Jesus’ age was revised downwards, to make him young enough to appeal to the upcoming generations yet old enough to be mature and wise.
(5) Mary's real name was Miriamne Stada. Despite the efforts of the early church to win the hearts of the common people by portraying her as being of humble birth, the proof has survived that she was in fact illustriously connected. She was the younger sister of Herodias and the two were granddaughters of King Herod, no less, who "cared for them with great devotion" (Encyclopaedia Judaica Jerusalem, 1971, p. 443.). Her father had been Aristobulus, a son of King Herod. After his death her mother, Berenice, the daughter of Herod's sister Salome, remarried and took her to Rome where for a time they gained favour with Augustus Caesar. (Ibid, p. 601). However the trouble seems have arisen from the fact that away from Herod's line she and her sister were also, through their grandmother Mariamne I, descended from the old Hasmonean Kings of Israel. They were in the legitimate line and "carried the Hasmonean blood" (Catholic Encyclopaedia, vol. VI, 1910, pp. 291-292.). For this reason when Yeshua (Jesus) and his twin brother were born she apparently thought it wise to flee into Egypt, but she subsequently returned to Judea. After Yeshua's failed insurrection (the people demanded his death "because he was connected with the Government for Royalty" (Baraitha Bab. Sanhedrin 43a)) she is said to have fled to Ephesus in modern Turkey where she lived out the final years of her life and is buried. Her supposed tomb, which still exists, is a popular place of pilgrimage particularly for Greek Orthodox worshippers. By contrast the western Christian church, having suppressed all this, incredibly concocted a story whereby she simply rose into the sky and flew away.
(6) See Joyce again. Bar Abbas means "son of the Master". The Christians have tried to hide this by joining the two words together to make "Barabbas", a name which no one in the Jewish community has ever heard of, and in any event the fact that bar and Abbas have been simply joined together to hide the meaning is very obvious to any Jew who might read it.
(7) "One of you will betray me". But in real life, the sense of that statement was "I'm not putting this to you--- I'm ordering you. Now, who shall I choose to do this?" Judas Iscariot drew the long straw, and immediately left to carry out the order. (John, 20-30).
(8) An original source, outside the Bible, reports that Yeshua (Jesus) was actually stoned to death and his body hung from a tree or pole (Talmud, Sanhedrin 43a). Another ancient, untampered with source, the Gemara, states that Jesus, having been stoned (by the way the locals didn't stop stoning you until you were dead), "was hanged on the eve of the Passover". Baraitha Bab, Sanhedrin 43a, bears this out:
"On
the eve of Passover Jesus was hanged. For forty days before the execution took
place, a herald went forth and cried, "He is going forth to be stoned
because he has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy. Any one who can
say anything in his favour, let him come forward and plead on his behalf."
But since nothing was brought forward in his favour he was hanged on the eve of
the Passover. Ulla retorted, "Do you suppose that he was one for whom a
defence could be made? Was he not a Mesith [enticer]?".
Concerning him Scripture says, "Neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt
thou conceal him?". With Jesus however it was different, for
he was connected with the government for Royalty". (italics mine)
In
the Roman world ‘hanging’ meant being crucified but with the legs hanging
freely, rather than being effectively nailed to a vertical post by means of a
single nail through both feet.
(9)
A man identical in appearance to Jesus was intercepted by Roman troops on the
highway to Damascus in Syria shortly after, and fleeing from, the insurrection
in Jerusalem. He was identified as Judas Thomas, Jesus’ twin, and sent back to
Jerusalem originally to face trial and execution, but the Roman authorities
thought it wiser to keep the lid on the seething anti-Roman resentment which
still boiled, by giving him an administrative post in the city where they could
keep an eye on him. This twin is mentioned as such in several places in the
Bible, notably John: 11:16, 20:24 and 21:2, and in the Gospel of Thomas,
discovered in Egypt by Grenfell and Hunt in 1897 which begins, ”These are the
secret words that the living Jesus spoke, and the twin, Judas Thomas”. This is
the same man who called Paul, the founder of modern Christianity, a pathological
liar
(10) If a Government had been in power for 20 years, and the economy was in a mess, then you would be absolutely within your Rights to say to them, "You've held the reins for so long now, that you can't possibly blame anyone else but yourselves for the current situation. Don't even go there. Don't insult my intelligence. You're a lost cause".
Likewise, we are equally correct in pointing out that creatures who behave so wretchedly in the name of Christianity are themselves at the end of a long, long line, almost two thousand years of father-to-son, father-to-son upbringing under the Christian psyche, that they cannot possibly blame any other psychological influence for the way they have turned out.
Further, it cannot be claimed that the reason for their wretchedness is that Human Nature is still coming to the surface despite their Christian upbringing----- because other religions, notably Buddhism and Judaism, have succeeded in establishing father-to-son lines of psychological influence which have eliminated delinquency from their young, and have all but wiped out crime. When did you last see a Jewish or Buddhist thug in your neighbourhood?? How many have you heard of in jail?
It is the framework, the Christianity itself, which is evil --- not the creatures it produces. They did not ask to be born and they certainly did not ask to be turned out in the shape in which they were subsequently moulded by the application of the religion with the worst human rights record in history.
(11)
There is yet more evidence of this. For example, if the soul is immaterial, and
is independent of the physical body, then it wouldn't be possible to get drunk,
as alcohol is only a physical molecule and can only therefore interact with the
physical body. Further, personality changes -- not always for the worse-- are
caused by brain tumours, which are only physical phenomena and should not
therefore be able to change your personality (soul). By contrast, tumours do
however interfere with the neuronal circuitry of the brain.