Lost Wages?

As discussed previously, Charlie and I are planning to sell our home here in Bear Creek (Murrieta, California) this coming Spring. Thirty years in one place is enough. It’s time for a new adventure!

Plan A, up until recently, was to find a single-story home where we could winter without freezing to death or getting doused with continuous rain. Also, we were thinking of renting.

However, the fact that we have three dogs limits us somewhat in the rental domain. Also, we don’t want to be too far from Murrieta, because we have family here. And, finally, we don’t want to live in another H.O.A. We’re tired of numbskulls telling us when and how high to jump.

After much discussion, we are now considering Plan B,  buying a home in Las Vegas.

Housing is cheaper there (maybe 40 percent lower than Murrieta), there’s no State income tax (which would save us at least $500 per month), the weather is OK there in the non-Summer months, and it’s only a five-hour drive from here. And, as opposed to some spots we were considering in Arizona, there’s plenty to do in Sin City besides gambling.

We’ve re-jiggered our 2018 Road Trip to begin with a jaunt up to Las Vegas for a week. We will check out neighborhoods, talk to realtors, look at some houses, and maybe hook up with a responsible home remodeling contractor. Our Murrieta home will have been on the market since April 15th, so we may have gotten some interest by then. If not, we will move on with the rest of our Road Trip, and play it by ear.

Our son Tim is a Realtor and he will handle things at this end for us. Hopefully, early on into our trip, we will get word of a sale, and we can return home to clean out the house. In the meanwhile, we can pull the trigger on a deal in Las Vegas. We may have to stow our stuff for awhile, but…no problem.

Hopefully, we will get done the housing deals done by the end of May, because we are really looking forward to our planned month-long stay at Oceanside Beachfront RV Resort in Charleston, Oregon in June. Our friends, the Quinn’s, are going to meet us there.

Of course, the whole plan could blow up, as well. If so, we’ll have to come up with Plan C on the fly.

 

 

 

 

Pound The Table and Yell Like Hell

It’s been an interesting year watching the Russia-gate spectacle unfold in Washington D.C.

That there was Russian interference in the 2016 Elections is no longer in doubt, by either Democrats or Republicans. The question is, and has always been, was the Trump for President campaign complicit in this foreign attack on American democracy?

There were enough bread crumbs lying around in May, 2017 that the Justice Department appointed former FBI Director Robert Mueller to be the Special Counsel overseeing the investigation. Mueller, a Republican who was appointed FBI Director by President George Bush (a Republican), served in that capacity for 12 years, and was seen at the time of his Special Counsel appointment to be above reproach by both parties.

 

Almost from the beginning, President Trump has acted suspiciously defensive about this matter. The appointment of the Special Counsel was against his wishes, and Trump publicly reproached his Attorney General Jeff Sessions for recusing himself from the matter.

Shortly thereafter, in June, the President wanted the investigation to be terminated, but his White House counsel said that he would quit if Mueller was fired.

So, the investigation continued, as the President fumed and lashed out on Twitter, to his friends on Fox News, and in public appearances. “It’s a witch hunt! It’s fake news!”, Trump has been screaming, louder and louder, for the past eight months.

(As we all know, the only true, pure-as-the-driven-snow political reporting is done by Fox News.)

The Special Counsel has apparently panned a few gold nuggets over the Summer and Fall. A couple of Trump campaign functionaries have been charged with crimes, much testimony has been received (under subpoena and in secret before a grand jury) and it appears (to the media covering the story) that some juicy details have been extracted by Mr. Mueller from participants in exchange for plea bargains.

No one knows for sure what Mueller knows, because the Special Counsel is playing his cards close to the vest.

It is apparent from the President’s behavior, and from the increasingly strident diversionary tactics being employed in his behalf, that…Mr. Trump has something to hide.

Carl Sandburg, the honorary Poet Laureate of the United States, once offered this legal observation: “If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell.”

Here’s Soviet Premier Khrushchev pounding the table with his shoe while denying that the Russians had put ICBM missiles in Cuba:

For the past couple of months, the American public has been subjected to a massive disinformation/smear campaign orchestrated by the President’s legal defense team. Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has been kept busy putting out fires.

The Trump game plan shamelessly copies Vince Lombardi’s mantra: “The best defense is a good offense.” Therefore, it is necessary to discredit anyone (the media, the FBI, Democrats, etc.) homing in on the truth of the Russia-gate matter, and to create enough distraction that the public will tire of the story or the Special Counsel will be kept off-target investigating false leads.

Trump’s team hopes that it will succeed in discrediting Mueller’s team to the extent that: (a) the President will have an excuse to fire the Special Prosecutor; or, (b) the public will not believe Mueller’s case for prosecution once it is revealed.

The President’s offensive weapons in this campaign include the usual  conservative radio talk show hosts (like Rush Limbaugh), Trump’s nightly apologists on Fox News…

…and various Congressmen who suck up to the President whenever he beckons, including Benghazi investigation attack dog Trey Gowdy (who is angling to replace Attorney General Sessions or Vice President Pence)…

…and permanent Trump stooge Rep. Devin Nunes, who chairs the House Select Committee on Intelligence, who was caught last Summer fabricating scandalous information to help the President. He also appears to be angling for a job in the Administration.

 

These are Trump’s “Dirty Tricks” squad, similar to the bunch of goons and losers ex-President Nixon employed in the Watergate era. Many of them ended up in jail.

President Trump has, from the beginning of Russia-gate, made disparaging comments about FBI leadership (including Director Comey, whom he fired), and about the motivation and fairness of the Special Counsel. Trump also claimed that the FBI’s reputation was “in tatters”, and that he removed Director Comey because he had lost the confidence of the rank-and-file FBI employees.

Uh, excuse me!: A group representing 14,000 active and former FBI agents then responded to his allegation by affirming that Director Comey was well-respected in the Bureau, and that firing him because his subordinates had “lost confidence in him” was…a red herring. 

It later turned out (Trump’s own admission) that Comey was fired because he was loyal to the Constitution and not to Donald Trump. That’s basically the same problem he has with Special Counsel Mueller.

The President and his cronies have attempted, many times during the past eight months, to divert attention from Russia-gate by fanning various conspiracy theories against former President Obama and ex-candidate Hillary Clinton. “They should be investigated and put in jail”.

In the past few months, Trump’s “truth squad” has made hay with the President’s political base about a couple of FBI minions who texted back and forth, during the Presidential  campaign, about Trump’s lack of qualifications, character, etc.  When this issue arose, the two agents were removed from the Special Counsel’s team forthwith, despite, as Americans, having the right of free speech and ability to vote any way they want, even if they work for the FBI.

Trump has jumped all over this matter, because, to him, it reveals that the Mueller investigation is biased. (This brings up the obvious point:  More Americans who voted for President in 2016 voted against Trump. This suggests that thousands of FBI employees, if not the majority of them, voted for the loser, Hillary Clinton. Under the President’s concept of “loyalty”, all of these voters who work for the FBI should be fired, because they’re probably biased against him. Similarly, he should clean out the “haters” over at the CIA, in the State Department, and in the military, too.)

Following up on that, the President’s hit men have now “discovered” a general conspiracy within the FBI to undermine the President.

The goofy thing about it is that…all  of these alleged conspirators are Republicans or Republican appointees.

The Gowdy/Nunes/Limbaugh/Fox News team almost simultaneously began pounding the table and yelling about a “secret society” operating within the FBI, a manifestation of the “deep state” cabal that ultra-conservative Republicans have insisted is operating the government with its own nefarious agenda.

Supposedly, Representative Nunes has a “memo” that he prepared that exposes the whole, terrible conspiracy. Of course, no one has seen it, except select Republican congressmen and their Fox News lapdogs.

One would think that, if Rep. Nunes had actually stumbled onto this political treasure, it would be used immediately to terminate the Mueller investigation and eliminate offending senior FBI personnel. The President would immediately gloat on Twitter: “See! I told you!” Congressman Nunes would be summarily appointed FBI Director, there would be parties in D.C., and President Trump would be free to rape, pillage, and plunder our government.

Obviously, beyond all the table pounding and yelling, this is yet the latest attempt to divert the Special Counsel from his real job; if he is busy defending the Bureau, he cannot devote his energies to Russia-gate.

 

I don’t think it is going to work. Mueller is going to methodically plod ahead, getting his facts together, building his case. He is a professional; he’s seen stunts like this before, albeit not by Congressmen, Rush Limbaugh, and Fox News. I don’t think he can be intimidated; he ran the FBI for a dozen years.

If Russia-gate is actually a “witch hunt”, then the President has nothing to fear. However, the fact that he and his flunkies are expending superhuman efforts to derail Mueller’s team speaks to the old saying, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”

Just sayin’:

Donald Trump entered the Republican primaries intending to broaden the Trump brand, and not become President of the United States. He is narcissistic and opportunistic, likes to hear himself talk and appear in the news, and he knew that he could dominate the news by shooting his mouth off. “Any publicity is good publicity”, and all of this publicity would be free. It was a win-win proposition, as far as Trump was concerned.

Lo and behold, he won the Republican nomination. Democrat Hillary Clinton, despite her warts, was strongly favored in the general election. Trump and his campaign team were not experienced, and didn’t have the full backing of the Republican Party. They were grasping for straws, trying to make a splash in the campaign, because Mr. Trump HATES to lose at anything.

The Trump Organization has many contacts in Russia, because of its business dealings over there pushing luxury hotel projects. The Russian government realized that they had an opportunity to use the Trump candidacy for their own purposes, and the inexperienced Trump team (including Trump’s relatives) took advantage of the proffered help. They were probably going to lose the election, anyway, so…why not? Free help…we’ll take it.

The amateur politician Trump made quite a few pro-Russian comments prior to the election, which puzzled many Democratic and Republican politicos in D.C., and alerted the media that something odd was going on.

Donald Trump was surprised to win the election, as was his campaign team. It was probably only then when they realized that the Russian assistance they’d sought/received might come back to haunt them, because they had acted in an amateurish way and the Russians had put on a digital full-court press…which became very evident, very quickly following the election. Denials began immediately.

That’s when the real scrambling began… the table pounding and yelling.

I don’t think the Trump folks conspired with the Russians to rig the election. They weren’t smart enough; all they wanted was some dirt on Mrs. Clinton. The Russian’s, though, had their own agenda, which was putting Mr. Trump in their debt, which they did. 

The President knows this, and, at the same time, resents that he was played so easily by Putin and his gang.

Trump, a proud man, is embarrassed and enraged that he finds himself in this situation. He’s desperate to have it go away. If it doesn’t, and the Democrats win the mid-term elections, the newly constituted House of Representatives (under Democratic control?) might impeach him.

So much for the Trump brand.

Supposedly, the President is going to let Mueller interview him “under oath”. I don’t know what that means exactly, as Mr. Trump has a difficult time telling the truth. Who’s going to believe anything he says?

If the “besmirch the FBI” campaign isn’t successful, and if the President can’t get Mr. Mueller off of his scent, the President will probably fire the Special Prosecutor before he can present his case. He will have nothing to lose at that point.

It might happen right after the President gives his “sworn” testimony.

THAT is when things will get dicey.

 

 

 

 

 

The Unlimited Mulligan Doctrine

As we discussed in my previous blog, “Unlimited Power”, the original Christians felt quite put upon by the Roman Empire, complaining loudly (many years later) about the cruel persecution, horrific acts, and just plain mean-spiritedness of their secular leaders.

“Why can’t we just be friends?” as Rodney King later plead to the LAPD.

When the Christian clergy gained strength at the court of Emperor Constantine and his successors, it used its influence to absolutely crush opposing versions of the new Christian religion and wipe out any vestiges of the pagan religions, which most of the populace still practiced. They used cruel persecution, horrific acts, and just plain mean-spiritedness…honest to God.

What short memories; what hypocrisy!

As things turned out, the Christian religion became dominant in the Roman Empire, and, eventually, the Catholic Church extended its tentacles into the secular arena. By the Middle Ages, all of the countries in Europe were Catholic, other religions were forbidden (or, in the case of the Jews, severely discriminated against), and any type of blasphemous act, real or imagined, could earn the transgressor a nice barbecue over slow-burning coals. Church and State were essentially the same.

This is probably not what Jesus had in mind when he was quoted as saying, “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s”. This saying is generally defined as separating worldy authority (government) from heavenly authority (religion). But, officials at the Vatican ignored that Heavenly advice, as they became hypocritical pastoral plutocrats…and even bragged about it.

In 779 A.D., Charlemagne (the “Holy Roman Emperor”) rewarded his ally Pope Hadrian I by issuing the Capitulary of Herstal, ordering all men within his realm (essentially all of Europe) to pay tithes to the Church.  In 1400, the Church followed up by decreeing it a mortal sin not to leave at least ten percent of one’s estate to the Church in a will.

Lots of other unseemly things went on, as well.

The scandals, greed, and overreach of the Catholic Church boiled over in 1517, when Martin Luther ignited the “Reformation”.  This was chiefly a theological dispute wherein European religious intellectuals chose to pursue other interpretations of Church teachings. The result of this revolt was the creation of various Protestant factions that weren’t beholden to the Pope. This is how Lutheran, Methodist, Calvinist (Baptist/Presbyterian), Quaker and other denominations originated.

All of these goings on (i.e. the quest for religious freedom) provided part of the impetus for the formation of our country. Remember the Pilgrims? They were of the Puritan religious sect, essentially fleeing the domination of the Church of England (Anglican), which was another of the Protestant spin-offs. The Puritans thought that the Anglicans (nominally headed by the British sovereign) were too much like the Catholics…in theology and mixing of state and church.)

As I have previously postulated, the clergy (of any religion) is constantly seeking more power, and, ultimately, that quest involves the secular political realm. In other words, not satisfied with mind-control over its own parishioners, the clergy is always attempting to exert control over other religions, non-believers and government actors…in an attempt to achieve hegemony. As in “calling the shots” for society as a whole: “This is my belief, therefore it should be your belief.”

The Hebrews did it (the whole Old Testament tells the tale), the original Judeo-Christians did it, the Catholic Church did it, the Muslims did it, and the Protestant denominations have done it. Essentially, the goal (of religion) is to force-feed a belief system onto everyone within their grasp. The more converts, voluntary and forced, the more power to entrench their belief system.

The fact that, in the Christian experience, this is totally hypocritical… seems to escape the conscious awareness of the true believers.

Evangelical Christians perceive their mission in life is to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ. In the United States, these “born again” Christians, commonly Baptists and Methodists, are extremely aggressive in pushing their beliefs into the secular arena. Not satisfied that they “know Jesus as their personal savior”, it appears to be their sworn duty (as pushed by their pastors) to force all citizens to believe as they do. This manifests itself by political efforts (by so-called “moral majority” and “family values” groups) to mandate prayer in public schools, prohibit abortion, permit public funding of church schools, allow tax breaks to religious institutions, etc. Darker aspects of the agenda include legalized discrimination against the LGBT community and non-Christian religions, opposition to immigration to the United States by non-Christians, and discrimination against non-white races.

Ironically, all of the major Judeo-Christian religions (including Islam), base their fundamental  philosophy on the Golden Rule; i.e. “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. Sunday school lessons are all about this. What do the The Ten Commandments say? Don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t kill, don’t commit adultery, etc. Supposedly, these are the cornerstones of Christian values and morality; i.e. “family values”.

Who among us wants discrimination done unto them? Certainly not the original Christians, who were allegedly tormented, crucified, and thrown to the lions by the Romans. They didn’t appreciate discrimination one bit. However…when the Catholic Church gained the power to discriminate…they used it, gleefully, for a thousand years.

The early American settlers came here to escape religious discrimination…they didn’t like it. The framers of our Constitution made it very clear that religious freedom (i.e. the ability to believe in God, or not, as one wishes) is one of America’s bedrock civil rights.

And, yet, we Americans endure a constant onslaught of political pressure by the evangelical Christian clergy to operate our government and regulate our society…in accordance with “fundamental Christian values”, which, apparently include discrimination.

The Protestants hated the Catholic Church for cramming its dogma down their throat; now, the evangelical Christians want to cram Protestant beliefs down America’s throat. Does anyone see the irony? And, the hypocrisy?

The current flag bearer of the evangelical Christian political movement is, astoundingly, Mr. Donald Trump, who would be hard to characterize as a moral Christian of any stripe.

This is a guy who is a known: (1) serial adulterer; (2) dishonest businessman; and, (3) pathological liar. His only appearance in a church over the past fifty years has been to get married (three times), which he followed up by dishonoring the vows with various women. As he has been quoted as saying, “When you’re famous, you can just grab ’em by the pussy.”

(The latest revelation about Reverend Trump is that he had an affair with porn actress Stormy Daniels 1n 2006 while his new wife was pregnant with (eventual) son Barron. Just guessing here, but…I think I know Jesus would have said about that!)

The fact that a low-life like this bum is strongly supported by the evangelical Christian community seems odd, to put it mildly. One might even say…hypocritical.

“The end justify the means”. That seems to be the thinking of the evangelical Christian/Moral Majority crowd nowadays. But, where exactly in the Bible can one find that principle, Reverend?

Nowhere…it is from Sergey Nechayev, a 19th Century Russian revolutionary, and it became the rationale for famous Marxist dictators Lenin and Stalin who murdered 20 million people. God-fearing evangelical Christians and conservative politicians have screaming at those atheistic Communists for the past 100 years. Now? They like their style.

Apparently, the moral teachings of Jesus pale in comparison to the secular political opportunity presented to the Christian clergy.  Apparently, as long as President Trump makes it easier for them to force-feed their theological and nationalistic agenda upon non-Christians, they will continue to bless his Administration.

As Tony Perkins, the president of the Family Research Council (a prominent evangelical activist group) said last week, “We’re giving him a Mulligan” on the Stormy Daniels affair.

 

It’s apparent the our Moral Majority friends have also given the President Mulligans on his “grab ’em by the pussy” comment, his previous affairs, his calling African nations “shithole countries”, the 5,000-plus public lies that he told last year, and his statement that Mexicans immigrants are “murderers and rapists”.

And, also for attempting, numerous times, to deny health care to millions of poor citizens…all the while he was engineering a massive tax cut to his already obscenely rich American buddies. So much for, “Blessed are the poor…”

The question I pose to the evangelical Christian clergy who are enabling this fool by making excuses for him:”For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark 8:36) Have you no shame?

The “Trump Is Savior” fiasco reminds me of the curious decision by Pope Urban II in 1095 to bless the first Crusade to “liberate” Palestine of the heathen Muslims. It was a bad enough idea to begin with; a shameless power grab. However, the Pope doubled-down on his avaricious mistake by giving the mercenary European soldiers “forgiveness, in advance” for any sins that they may commit while pursuing the greater good of securing the Holy Lands for the Church. Many crusaders, who were criminal thugs in everyday life, used this license to murder, rape and pillage innocent Europeans as the army made the long trek to the Middle East.

They, like Trump, were granted unlimited Mulligans.

This is what can happen when “the end justifies the means”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Feeding The Beast…Again

It’s  time to spruce up the RV for next year’s odyssey. We’ve got some things to repair, to improve, and to replace…as usual. It’s always a longer list than I would like, but we are slowly getting the troop transport into the condition that we want. As they say, “What’s money for, anyway?”

As I noted in a previous blog, The Skipper tried to fit our ten-foot wide RV into a 9-1/2 foot hole up in the Santa Cruz redwoods. The trees won, and the rig suffered a 15-feet long scrap along the kitchen/patio side. The bad news: about $10K in damage! The good news: Allstate will pay about $9,500 of that amount. Hooray for insurance!!!

That work will be done in February; we’re in the body shop queue at Temecula Valley RV.

Tomorrow, we will be taking the coach in for a variety of fixes and improvements. Included in that will be: a new concave mirror; fixing headlamps (fuse?); cosmetic repairs in the rig; audio-visual system enhancement; repair/replace bedroom A/C unit (it squeeks!); and, the big expense, re-upholster the small sofa and the two swivel seats in the driver compartment.

We are also having a private contractor replace all of the day/night window shades with easy-to-operate roll-up blinds.

So, yes, we are spending a bunch this year on making the rig our little paradise. A lot of what we’re fixing/replacing is now 13 years old; the stuff only lasts so long.

We want to get our second home just right, because, particularly this year, we may be spending a lot of time in it. Who knows?

RV’ing…it’s an expensive luxury, for sure. But, we enjoy it, and should be having more fun now, since Charlie is handing off more and more of her business to our son, Jonathan.

Perhaps my wife can actually enjoy the upcoming 2018 Road Trip?

Immorality

Below is Chapter 9 of my book on religion, “Disbelief”.

                                                          SHAME ON YOU

 Many good people, compassionate and care-giving by nature, have donned clerical robes.  If men are to believe in anything, they’ve got to trust their priest to be honest, selfless, and working on a divinely-inspired agenda.  And, one would think that God is very particular about who is speaking and acting in his name, and would mete out terrible punishment for those who misuse the clerical collar.

Apparently, this is not the case, at least in this world.

Creative Writing

A case against the validity and historicity of the New Testament has been made in previous chapters.  That important Christian leaders over the centuries developed myths and passed them off as factual events is obvious…when compared against actual facts, actual people, and actual events that have been recorded by historians at the same time in history.  It is telling that no one heard of Jesus and his apostles, their magnificent deeds, or wonderful speeches until hundreds of years afterward.  And, then, miraculously, non-eyewitness holy men were able to recount every word ever spoken by Jesus of Nazareth.  In a nutshell, the Gospels, Acts, etc. simply do not pass the smell test.

The dishonesty of high-ranking Christian clerics only became worse as they began to accumulate power as “Catholics”, the preferred (and, then, later official) religion of the Roman Empire.  At first, they set their sights on absolute dominion over all Christian sects.  Then, they came after non-Christians.  Later, they targeted competing Catholic claims.  And, finally, they attempted to stake a claim to all matters, religious and secular.  Forgery of official documents was a key instrument in their plan for world dominion.

Duping citizens and officials in the Dark Ages was a fairly easy matter.  Men were credulous and ignorant, thanks to an official religion of the State which required great belief and derided knowledge.  This had been a critical part of the Church’s master design: denigrate learning and emphasize absolute obedience to whatever drivel the Church was expounding.  If Church officials said that they’d found a lost document or “proof” critical to some issue, the faithful bought the story “hook, line, and sinker”.  This included, apparently, royalty and civic officials.  Of course, they had to, because they were Catholics, too.  It was the law of the land by that time.  And, as they had been taught, the Bishop spoke for God.

Following are listed a few monumental forgeries that evidence the Roman Catholic Church’s history of greed and lust for power:

The Apostolic Constitutions – These Constitutions, purported to be dictated by the Apostles, laid down all the intricacies of organization of several centuries later, including elaborate chapters “concerning bishops”, presbyters, deacons, all kinds of clergy, liturgies, and Church proceedings and services, undreamed of by “apostles” or in the “apostolic age”.

Included in the constitutions are quotes like “we, the twelve apostles of the Lord, who are now together…”, and, “I, Peter, say…”  The instructions were supposedly gathered from the apostles and handed down by Saint (later Pope) Clement of Rome.  The Constitutions were held generally in high regard and served as the basis for Church legislation…as late as 1563.

Modern historical criticism later determined them to be 4th century forgeries.  However, for more than one thousand years they formed the groundwork and foundation of some of the most extravagant pretensions of the Church.

The Apostolic Canons These are a collection of ancient ecclesiastical decrees concerning the government and discipline of the Church.  In a word, they are a handy summary of the statutory legislation of the primitive Church.  They claim to be the very work of the Apostles themselves, at least according to their disciple, Saint Clement.

In the 6th century, Justinian   recognized the Apostolic Canons as the work of the Twelve, and confirmed them as ecclesiastical law.  Some of the material was included in the Decretum Gratiani, an 11th century textbook on Church canon law, which was used in law schools during the Middle Ages.

The Apostolic Canons were later exposed as frauds, “from the same pious forging hand”, says the Catholic Encyclopedia.  Experts claim they were written at the end of the 4th century.  This was the same time that all manner of theological mischief was being accomplished by Emperor Theodosius I and his court of Catholic advisors.

The Liber Pontificalis – This official Church document, “The Book of the Popes”, is notorious for its accounts of the early and mythical “successors of Saint Peter”.  It purports to be a “history of the popes, beginning with St. Peter and continued down to the fifteenth century, in the form of biographies” of their respective Holinesses of Rome.

Modern research has shown that the first series of biographies, from St. Peter to Felix III (died in 530) were compiled as late as the 6th century.  The original compiler used information from a host of sources which have since been discredited by biblical scholars.  Included in the accomplishments of the early Popes are papal decrees which they never issued.  Or, in some cases, it is claimed that a pope issued a decree that has been lost or mislaid.  Later Catholic forgers developed pontifical letters suitable for the occasion, to fill in the gaps.

The Conversion of Constantine – According to Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, the “Father of Church History”, Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianity before his historic victory over rival Maxentius at the Milvian Bridge in 312.  In Eusebius’ laudatory, “Life of Constantine”, written after the Emperor’s death, the Bishop tells of a fiery cross that appeared in the heavens to herald God’s support of Constantine’s army.

Tellingly, this portentous event was omitted in Eusebius’ History of the Church, despite the fact that he devoted large parts of Books IX and X to Constantine.  No mention is made of the fiery cross in the sky.  Of course, the still-pagan Emperor was alive at the time of publication (in 326), and would have noticed the writer’s creative license.

Further fibbing in the” Life of Constantine” included purported chats between God and the Emperor, the Almighty’s newest bosom buddy.  Left out are the details of Constantine’s life, including the fact that he murdered his wife’s father, his sister Anastasia’s husband, his nephew, his wife, his former counselor, his sister Constantine’s husband, and the beheading of his own son Crispus.  The last one occurred in 326, after he was converted to Christianity (according to Eusebius).

Also omitted was the fact that Constantine cautiously denied himself the saving Christian rite of baptism until he was on his deathbed, in Nicomedia, in the year 337 A.D.  However, he was still a practicing pagan when he died.  Until death he remained Pontifex Maximus, or Sovereign Pontiff of the Pagan religion, a title which the Christian bishops could not arrogate until the Christian Emperors abandoned it many years later.  On his death, he was dually baptized with blood and by deathbed Christian rite.  He was, after a fashion, “covering his bets”, both Christian and pagan.

Constantine “The Great” died an Arian Christian, not a Catholic.  He did not ascribe to the Trinitarian concept (recall the Nicene compromise that he brokered), and carried the disbelief of the inspired dogma to his grave.  Arian theology was orthodox at the time of his death, but later was declared illegal under Theodosius I.  So, the Emperor who legitimized Christianity actually died an unrepentant heretic.

So, was he really a “converted” Catholic at all?

The Acts of Saint Sylvester – This is an account of the early piety of Emperor Constantine.  It alleges that Constantine had a vision of St. Peter and St. Paul, who directed the Emperor to go to Sylvester, then the Bishop of Rome, in order to be cured of leprosy.  He was cured, of course, and was immediately baptized by Sylvester.  In gratitude, Constantine had given a substantial amount of authority to the office of the bishop of Rome in addition to numerous allotments of land and property.

Like most other “actual events” invented by the Catholic Church, this pious falsehood was late arriving.  It began to be circulated in the 8th century, roughly five hundred years after the events were supposed to have happened.

Pope Adrian I induced Charlemagne to found the Papal States based on “The Acts of Saint Sylvester” and another shameless forgery, “The Donation of Constantine”.

The Donation of Constantine – This brazen dishonesty was, perhaps, the ultimate deathbed legacy.  In it, the dying Emperor Constantine conferred on the Pope and his successors:  (a) primacy over all other bishops and eastern patriarchs;  (b) senatorial privileges and regalia to the clergy; and, (c)  Roman Catholic Church possession of imperial palaces, Rome itself, and the entire western Roman Empire.

The legacy was used by a number of Popes to legitimize independence over the Byzantine emperors and claim superiority over all rivals, ecclesiastic and secular.  Pope Leo IX, in 1054, used the “Donatio” to prove to the Patriarch of Constantinople that the Holy See of Rome was the rightful head of all the Church.  The Patriarch of the Eastern world rejected the claims of papal primacy, and subsequently the Catholic Church was split in two in the Great East-West Schism of 1054.

The “Donation of Constantine” was denounced as a forgery by two separate Church researchers in the 15th century.

The Forged Letter of St. Peter – Pepin the Younger was the first King of the Franks from the Carolingian line that later produced Charlemagne.  Pepin obtained his throne with the help of Pope Zachary, who declared the Frank kingdom to be vacant.  Pope Stephen II later crowned Pepin King of the Franks in 751, using as authority an autographed letter from St. Peter himself.

Of course, St. Peter had died approximately seven hundred years previously, but such was the arrogance of the Church that it shamelessly invented the preposterous letter.  Pope Stephen’s forgery was described in the Historians’ History of the World as follows: “The pontiff dictated his letter in the name of the apostle Peter, closely imitating his epistles, and speaking in a language which implied that he was possessed of an authority to anoint or dethrone kings, and to perform the offices, not of a messenger, or a teacher sent from God, which is the highest characteristic of an apostle, but of a delegated minister of His power and justice”.

The letter also granted the Frankish king with the title of the former representative of the Byzantine Empire in Italy (i.e. Patricius), and was assigned the duty of protecting the privileges of the Holy See.  In other words, protecting the Vatican from the Lombards, who then controlled most of Italy, including Rome. 

The Symmachian Forgeries – These are a sheaf of documents forged by, or on behalf of, Pope St. Symmachus (498-514).  The purpose of the documents was to further papal pretensions of the independence of the Bishops of Rome from the just criticisms and judgment of ecclesiastical tribunals, and putting them above law, clerical and civil.

These forgeries were produced during a dispute between Pope St. Symmachus and the anti-pope Laurentius.  It was the position of Pope St. Symmachus that the Roman bishop could not be judged by any court composed of other bishops, and the forged letters provided (false) testimony supporting that position from alleged earlier Church decisions.

The False Decretals of Isadore – These are a famous collection of canon laws composed in the middle of the 9th century, making use of documents written long after the times of the popes to whom they are attributed.

Upon these false decrees the Church built a great fabric of papal supremacy over the different national churches.  They provided the Church with a legal system suited to any emergency, and which gave it unlimited authority through the Christian world in causes spiritual and over persons ecclesiastical.  The forgeries produced an immense extension of papal power, transformed the Church into an absolute monarchy, and made the pontiff the supreme judge of the whole Christian world.  It also prepared the way for the great attempt to convert the states of Europe into a theocratic priest-kingdom, with the pope at its head.

The forged documents, which included “papal edicts” as far back as “Pope” Clement, were actually manufactured by the Church in the 9th century.  The Eastern Catholic Church never accepted the Decretals, and this was part of the cause of the Great Schism, which divided the Christians into Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodoxt.

By the 10th century, the Church had set the table for its dominion.  According to papal historian Joseph McCabe, “There was no need for further forgeries.  Now securely established on its basis of forged donations of temporal power and territory, forged decretals stating its spiritual powers, and forged lives of saints and martyrs, the papacy was so strong and prosperous that the popes actually dreamed of forming sort of a United States of Europe with themselves as virtual presidents.  Nearly every country was in some ingenious way made out to be a fief of the Papacy and bound to recognize the Pope as its feudal monarch.”

A review of the Catholic Encyclopedia, an official organ of the Roman Catholic Church, reveals that the Church acknowledges the dishonesty of popes, bishops, and other Church officials who participated in these forgeries.  But, one is hard-pressed to find a sincere apology for such behavior.  Once again, the “edification of the Church” seems to be paramount, the “end justifies the means”, and so forth.

It is not surprising.  What are we to expect from the folks who invented the Trinity?

The “True Cross”

The mythology that is the New Testament is filled with stories of amazing people, miracles, persecution, and the like.   None of the individuals named in the stories have ever been connected to a real person who walked the earth and was observed by credible individuals.  All of these heroes died without a trace, leaving no writings, no corpse, no estate, and no relatives.  Jesus of Nazareth is but one example.  The Apostles Peter and Paul are others.

According to the biblical tale, Jesus of Nazareth was crucified, arose from the dead, and (according to the Apostle Paul, who wasn’t there) he was then observed by at least 500 witnesses in Jerusalem.  Despite the fact that no human being had ever experienced this before while claiming to be the Son of God, there is, surprisingly, no historical record of anyone venerating the site of the Jesus’ crucifixion, or the site of his resurrection until the 4th century.

It was left for ex-Empress Helena, the mother of Constantine, on a visit to the Holy Lands in 326, to find the site of the Holy Sepulchre.  This was an amazing discovery, particularly since the Romans had twice destroyed the city of Jerusalem.  In fact, after the Bar-Kochba rebellion, the Roman army razed the walled city so that “not one stone was left upon another” (a slight exaggeration, since the Western Wall still stands!), the site was allegedly plowed under as a mark of infamy, and the ground was said to have been sown with salt so that nothing might every grow there again.  Later, a pagan city was erected over the old Jerusalem, and a great Temple of Venus was erected on a suitable spot.

This was the very place that “Saint” Helena is supposed to have directed her Christian friends to dig.  Sure enough, under the Temple of Venus there was an ancient tomb…which, according to Church officials, turned out to be the actual sepulchre that Jesus arose from.  Of course, there was no one around to verify this, after three hundred years.

But, the good news was yet to follow.  In an adjacent underground room or cellar someone had stored the whole apparatus of the Crucifixion:  the three identical crosses whereon had hung Christ and the two thieves; the very nails wherewith they had been fastened; the precise spear which had pierced Jesus’ side; the cruel crown of thorns which tore his brow; the holy seamless coat which he had worn; and, the sacred shroud in which the dead God was buried.  Also in the room was “a separate piece of wood, on which were inscribed in white letters in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, the following words: Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews”.

It was an incredible find, easily surpassing the fabulous treasure trove of King Tut.  Its significance to the Christian world was inestimable, lending veracity to the Gospels, etc.  And, yet, the report on these wondrous discoveries by Bishop Macarius, who allegedly accompanied the ex-Empress, wasn’t mentioned until the mid-5th century (over 100 years later!) by Church historians Socrates and Sozomen.  Now, how can that happen?  And, why?  Well, maybe it’s because the discoveries were never made as described, and the Church waited many generations after the fact so that they could lie about them with no one to challenge the falsehoods.

As the myth goes, there was a test of the three crosses found in the vault to determine which one was the True Cross, the one Jesus had been nailed to.  According to Sozamen, writing a century later, a sick woman was cured upon touching the True Cross after touching the other two in vain.  With the help of the holy relic “a dead person was also restored to life”.

Bishop Eusebius, who was a big-shot in the Church at that time, in his history entitled the Life of Constantine, gives a very circumstantial account of the visit of ex-Empress Helena to Jerusalem…and is silent as the grave about the discovery of any Cross of Christ or any of the other holy marvels.  The Bishop was well-known to ad-lib ficticious events into his “histories”, as long as they glorified the Church in any way.  Had Saint Helena’s discoveries been real, one can be assured that Eusebius would have featured them in his laudatory volumes about the reign of Constantine.  He didn’t mention a one, and he would have been in a position to know about any Church miracles of that time.

Within the Roman Catholic Church, Saint Helena’s miraculous discovery is known as “The Invention of the Cross”, which is exactly what it was.

By the way, if one can believe anything that the Church says, “very soon after the discovery of the True Cross, its wood was cut up into small relics and scattered throughout Christendom”.  This preposterous assertion is made by the Catholic Encyclopedia with a straight face.  That a one-of-a-kind relic, the most symbolic and important of the Faith, would not be safeguarded in the most secure vault in Christendom, is absurd on its face.  And, the idea that the Church fathers would desecrate such a relic, one that had Jesus’ own blood on it, is an outlandish idea.  Can you imagine the credibility that the Church would have gained by leaving the True Cross intact, exhibiting it in churches throughout Christendom, and using it to cure illness and bring back people from the dead?  It would have been the ultimate sales “closer”.  That is wasn’t used in that fashion is proof that the Church didn’t possess such a relic.

It was later determined that Saint Helena’s True Cross was a fake, despite the fact or fiction that bits and pieces of it had “filled the world with its miracles”, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia.

The supposed actual True Cross, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia, was later reported to have been captured in 614 A.D. by Khosru II, King of Persia, when he took Jerusalem and massacred 90,000 good Christians.  Of course, the alleged possession of this treasure by blood-thirsty infidels was just another reason for future popes to sanction Crusades to regain Holy Land sacred sites and relics.

Nowadays there are so many supposed authentic pieces of the True Cross preserved in churches and private collections, and available for purchase on E-bay, that some wag recently commented, “If all of the relics of the True Cross were brought together, there would be enough wood to build Noah’s Ark.”

“A Sucker is Born Every Minute”

The amazing trove of Christian treasures allegedly found by Saint Helena kick-started an entire industry involved in the production, sale, and theft of supposed original Christian relics.  One has to wonder, though, if the “True Cross” allegedly found in Saint Helena’s hidden sepulchre vault was a fake, what did that make the other items allegedly found there?

Eventually, it became the norm for all Catholic churches to possess relics for adoration by the faithful.  In fact, the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 decreed that every altar in every Catholic church should contain a relic.  This leant a certain holiness to the church, where the dim-witted parishioners tip-toed around the shrines in awe…exactly as the Church intended.  And, it started a stampede in the “authentic” relic business.

Although the Church had “made its bones”, so to speak, on the disparagement of the pagans’ reverence of idols and symbolic religious regalia, once it gained power there was a Church-encouraged onslaught of idol-worshipping in the form of veneration of saints, their bones, and things that they’d touched.

Anything remotely associated with Jesus or his apostles was in high demand.  Supposedly, anything a saint had touched became “sacred” or “holy”, according to the esteemed Bishop Gregory of Tours, himself later named a “Saint”.  Accordingly, the faithful wanted to see and, if possible, own sacred relics, hoping that some of the “mystic potency” would brush off on them.

The Church actively encouraged such thoughts, even though the practice smacked of paganism and idol worship.  The Church, in fact, blamed the practice on the parishioner’s hard-to-break pagan habits.  As stated in the Catholic Encyclopedia, “Still, it would be presumptuous in such cases to blame the action of the ecclesiastical authority in permitting the continuance of a cult which extends back into remote antiquity.”  In other words, the Church was against paganism, but the cult-like veneration of Christian heroes was acceptable.

This fascination and obsession with presumed holy objects was reaffirmed by the Council of Trent in 1546, which forbade the consecration of any Church without a supply of relics.  Thus, the ancient superstition was sanctioned and its observance was made mandatory.

It is not surprising that many dubious relics, including duplicates of supposedly one-of-a-kind items, began to populate church altars and private collections throughout Christendom.  Among the more famous (and dubious) are the following:

The Crown of Thorns – Paulinus, Bishop of Nola, said in 409 A.D. that the “thorns with which our Saviour was crowned” resided in Jerusalem.  The crown was amazingly produced by Bishop Gregory of Tours (in what is now France) in the 6th century.  At that time, the Bishop reported that “the thorns in the Crown still looked green, a freshness which was miraculously renewed every day”, to which the Catholic Encyclopedia has skeptically remarked “does not much strengthen testimony for the authenticity of the relic”.  The relic was passed around Europe for hundreds of years, which is another indication that it was probably inauthentic.

The Crown of Thorns that is preserved in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris has been carbon dated to around 695 A.D., only about six hundred years “newer” than the one Jesus wore.

Individual thorns of the Crown are reputedly now owned by individuals and churches around the world…”at least 700 have been enumerated”, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia.

The Holy Lance – This is reputedly the lance with which one of the Roman centurions pierced Jesus’ side while he was on the cross.  It is also known as the Spear of Longinus, the supposed Roman Centurion.  This lance is supposedly the same one found in the tomb by Saint Helen.  It is alleged to have appeared in Jerusalem in the 6th century, after apparently being lost for several hundred years.  Later, it supposedly fell into the hands of pagans.

In 1241, the point of the lance was supposedly presented by King Baldwin of Jerusalem to St. Louis during the Crusades.  It was then enshrined in the Sainte Chapelle cathedral in Paris along with…the Crown of Thorns, if that can be believed.

Other Holy Lances or parts thereof are claimed to be preserved under the dome of St. Peter’s in Rome, at a cathedral in Nuremberg, and two others are said to be preserved, one in Vienna and the other in Cracow.

One of the curiosities about the “Holy Lance” is that it was an important piece of armament of the Roman centurion.  That a military man would have given up his weapon (which in most armies is a crime) to someone at the Crucifixion event is quite preposterous.  How it supposedly ended up in a tomb along with all of the other named items involved in the Holy Event is a bigger mystery.  Especially since it was then misplaced for several hundred years.

The Holy Stairs — This is allegedly the very stairway “consisting of twenty-eight white marble steps…the stairway leading once to the Praetorium of Pilate, hence sanctified by the footsteps of Our Lord during his Passion”, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia.  Supposedly this 300 year-old relic was brought from Jerusalem to Rome by Saint Helena in 326, although the alleged eyewitness Bishop Macarius failed to note this enormous item at the time.  The “stairway” now leads to the Sancta Sanctorum (Holy of Holies) of the Lateran Palace in Rome.

The alleged discovery of this large intact relic by amateur archaeologist Saint Helen is truly a miracle, considering that all of the main buildings of Jerusalem were razed (completely destroyed) twice by the Romans in 70 and 135 A.D.  Normally, real archaeologists dig for years before they uncover bits and shards of historic material.  Yet, the amateur relic hunter, Saint Helen, on a brief pilgrimage to Jerusalem, was able to uncover some of the most unique treasures of Christendom, buried under hundreds of years of debris and subsequent building.  In addition, neither Helena, Bishop Macarius, or anyone else accompanying the ex-Empress could have possibly known what the real stairway looked like, since it had last been standing 200 years previously.

Despite all of that, Saint Helena was able to confidently declare, “Yes, those are the Holy Stairs!”

The Holy Nails — These spikes are allegedly the ones that secured Jesus to his cross.  Saint Helena discovered four of them in the infamous vault adjacent to the supposed Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem in 326 A.D.  According to legend, she is said to have taken them to Constantinople.  Two were worked into her son’s helmet and bridle, and the others were (honest to God!)…cast into the Adriatic Sea to calm a storm.

Constantine’s helmet, the Iron Crown of Lombardy, is in the cathedral at Monza, Italy, while the bridle is in Carpentras, France or Milan, Italy, depending on who you believe.  Other Holy Nail repositories are located in Rome, Naples, and Venice.  And, the bottom of the ocean.

Two additional nails were found in 1990 in the supposed grave of Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest who supposedly organized the plot to kill Jesus.

The Catholic Encyclopedia says, “Little reliance can be placed upon the authenticity of the 30 or more holy nails which are still venerated.”  That is an understatement.

The Titulus Crucis – This is the title board (“This is the King of the Jews”) that Pilate allegedly ordered placed on the cross.  Saint Helena supposedly found this on her fateful trip to Jerusalem.  She supposedly divided it into three pieces, of which only one remains…at Rome’s Church of the Holy Cross.

Modern science has determined that the Titulus Crucis is a forgery.  Not only does it contain linguistic problems in the way it is written, but it has been radiocarbon-dated within the 980 to 1146 A.D. range.  This corresponds closely to the period in the 12th century when the artifact was first acquired by the Church of the Holy Cross.

The Holy Robe – This is the seamless garment that Jesus wore on his way to Calvary.  It was allegedly in Saint Helena’s treasure trove, but disappeared for many hundreds of years.  One story has it that the Byzantine Empress Irene made a gift of the Holy Robe to Charlemagne in 800 A.D.  The remains of that robe are supposedly preserved in a Benedictine church in France.

On the other hand, on May 1, 1196 A.D., Archbishop Johann I of Trier (near Luxembourg) consecrated the altar of his church, which allegedly contained the Holy Robe.

But, wait a minute!  The Eastern Orthodox Church also has several authentic Holy Robes.  One of them is preserved to this day in a crypt in the Patriarchal Svetitskhoveli Cathedral.  Other portions of the robe (evidently this official copy was divided up) are venerated in Saint Petersburg, Russia in two cathedrals, one at the Winter Palace and the other at St. Peter and St. Paul’s Cathedral.  Still more are allegedly housed at the Cathedral of the Dormition, in Moscow, at Kiev’s Sophia Cathedral, and at the Ipatiev monastery near Kostroma.  One supposes that they need a lot of robes in Russia because it gets so cold there.

The bible only verifies one official Jesus Robe, and that one was won by the centurion who prevailed when the Roman security contingent “cast lots” to determine who would own it.  Why he would later throw it in the sepulchre with all of the other Crucifixion goodies is a mystery to us all.  And, there is no mention in the Bible of the carpenter’s son owning a wardrobe of…robes.

The Holy Burial Shroud – Jesus’ body was supposedly wrapped in a linen shroud before he was placed in the sepulchre.  Saint Helena allegedly discovered the authentic shroud in 326.  However, like all of the other invaluable treasures she supposedly found, the shroud disappeared from sight for many centuries.

A large quantity of alleged Holy Burial Shrouds were trafficked within Europe during the Middle Ages.  It was the time of the “holy relic” craze, and between 26 and 40 “authentic” burial shrouds were preserved throughout the abbeys of Europe at that time.

In 1355, one of them was exhibited at the Church of St. Mary in Lirey, France.  Supposedly it had been given to the church by a French knight, Geoffroy de Charny.  This is the supposed authentic item that has become known as the “Shroud of Turin”.  It is a yellowed, 14-foot long linen that appears to contain the image of a crucified man.  The Shroud of Turin has gone on to become probably the most famous Christian relic of all time.

However, the earliest written record of this particular holy shroud is a Catholic bishop’s report to Pope Clement VII, dated 1389, stating that it originated as part of a faith-healing scheme.  The Bishop of Troyes, Henri of Poitiers, alleged “pretended miracles” being staged to defraud credulous pilgrims, and stated that his predecessor bishop had “discovered the fraud and how the said cloth had been cunningly painted, the truth being attested by the artist who had painted it”.  Yes, the forger had copped to the crime in 1389.

As a result of these revelations, in 1390, Pope Clement VII declared that it (the Shroud of Turin) was not the true shroud but could be used as a representation of the real thing, provided the faithful be told that it was not genuine.  This has since been done, but with a wink.

Because of that, millions of faithful have continued to venerate the phony relic in the seven hundred years since.

Radiocarbon dating of the Shroud in 1988 showed that the linen material was made between 1260 and 1390, which indicates that the shroud was a relatively recent forgery when the Pope correctly declared it one in 1390.

Yet, millions of Christian faithful continue to believe that the Shroud of Turin actually touched Jesus.

The previously-discussed items are those vouched-for relics that were supposedly uncovered by Saint Helena in 326.  However, many other items have surfaced over the years to populate church altars and monastic shrines throughout the world.

For example, twenty-one different churches in Europe at one time claimed to possess the Holy Foreskin of Jesus.  The first one (there can only be one, right?) surfaced in 800 A.D., when Charlemagne presented it as a gift to Pope Leo III.  That someone attending Jesus’ bris in Bethlehem had the foresight to pick up this useless piece of flesh demonstrates amazing foresight.

The Shroud of Ovieto is a bloodstained cloth said to have covered Jesus’ head after he died.  Supposedly, it was found in Jerusalem in the 6th century.  That’s right, almost six hundred years after the Crucifixion, in a city that was totally demolished twice, someone just happened to see the precious relic lying in the road!

The Holy Sponge is that which was dipped in vinegar and given to Christ to drink during the crucifixion.  Some other lucky treasure hunter found this item by chance in Jerusalem…about one hundred years after that other charlatan “discovered” the Shroud of Ovieto.  This fake sponge, presumably still reeking of vinegar, resides in the Santa Croce Church in Rome, with several fake fragments of the True Cross, one of the fake Holy Nails, and several of the fake thorns from Jesus’ crown.

The Cradle of Bethlehem is another dubious item that turned up hundreds of years after the holy birth.  It is reverently displayed under the altar in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome.  Planks from this alleged original manger of Jesus were examined and found to have been manufactured from an 8th century packing crate.

The Throne of St. Peter is also displayed in Rome, at the Vatican.  Supposedly, it was the chair that the first pope sat in.  However, there is no historical evidence (even in the Bible) that St. Peter ever made it to Rome, and, if he did, he was not a pope at the time and certainly didn’t sit on this pretentious chair.

Other well-known relics, of which there are many “duplicates”, include:

A Drop of the Breast Milk of the Virgin Mary

A Vial of Christ’s Blood

One of Jesus’ Baby Teeth

Swaddling Clothes of the Baby Jesus

The Umbilical Cord of Jesus

The Rod used by Moses to part the Red Sea

The Cloak of the Blessed Virgin

The Loin Cloth worn by Jesus on the Cross

The Remains of the Three Wise Men

Wing and Tail Feathers of the Holy Ghost (pulled out when in the disguise of a dove)

Manna that Fell from Heaven in 371 A.D.

The Sweat of St. Michael (from his tussle with Satan)

All of the above fake relics were purchased and proudly venerated by naïve Christians and Catholic churches during the Middle Ages.  The supposed sacred items were the crowd-pullers of the Medieval age.  Any church of monastery that could lay claim to a relic would be assured a steady stream of fee-paying pilgrims.  P.T. Barnum would have been proud.

What was the Catholic Church’s attitude about relics that were most likely fakes?  As the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, “Supposing the relic to be spurious, NO DISHONOR IS DONE TO GOD by the continuance of an error handed down in perfect good faith for many centuries”!  In other words, if a church enticed parishioners and pilgrims for centuries on the basis of particular “sacred” relic, the Church presumption is that no one could have possibly known that the relic was fake…even if it was a preposterous forgery on its face.  A good example would be the many churches in Europe that venerate supposed samples of the breast milk of the Virgin Mary.

The bottom line, as quoted by the Catholic Encyclopedia, is this: “…the Church is tolerant of ‘pious beliefs’ which have helped to further Christianity”.  No kidding!

 

“Saints Preserve Us!”

Much was made in the early years of Christianity about the preposterous veneration of a variety of gods by pagan believers.  That the pagans believed that some spiritual force or power emanated from their favorite gods or likenesses of them didn’t matter.  Anything other than the worship of the one true god, the Abrahamic one, was foolishness and a sacrilege, according to the Christian clergy.

It wasn’t long after Christians began to rule the roost that the veneration of idols (like the cross) and “sainted” individuals and their body parts became a staple of the new Catholic religion.  What’s more, the Catholics took this type of veneration to heights of absurdity unimagined by pagans.

Many people in the Middle Ages were encouraged by the Church to believe that relics were invested with heavenly powers and that to be close to a relic, or even better, to touch one, would provide a person with spiritual blessings, divine protection and even a cure from illness.  Many “holy” sites that held sacred relics charged an entrance fee, which pilgrims had to pay to gain access to view the holy item.  Such a practice meant that religious communities came to rely on relics as an important form of income.

Throughout the Middle Ages, there was intense competition between various European religious houses about who had the most impressive relics.  Some churches and monasteries were accused by others of holding fake relics.  For example, during the 14th century, both towns of Amiens and Constantinople claimed to own the head of St. John the Baptist.

That brings to mind a story about a small church in the Middle Ages that was desperately seeking a famous relic to help steer visitors (and income) to their parish.  Finally, the parish priest located a relic hunter with an important relic for sale.  “Father, this is your lucky day!”, said the salesman.  “It just so happens that I have recently acquired the head of St. John the Baptist and for a moderate sum, to cover my expenses, the head is yours.”  “But, my good man, isn’t the head of St. John the Baptist held at the church of San Silvestro here in Rome?”, inquired the priest.  “Ah, yes, Father”, replied the salesman, “but the head in San Silvestro is the head of St. John as an adult.  I happen to have the head of St. John as a child.”

As preposterous as this tale seems, various Catholic churches have seen fit to claim possession of some very unlikely relics.  St. Paul’s Outside the Walls in Rome boasts of several infant bodies, alleged victims of the biblical (and phony) Herod’s “Massacre of the Innocents”.  The Cathedral of Cologne has preserved the skulls of The Three Wise Men who followed the Star of Bethlehem.  Now, how exactly did they acquire those items?  The church in Tarascon (France) contains, if you can believe it, the bodies of the three Mary’s of the Gospels.  Not to be outdone, a monastery in Jerusalem claims to possess one of the fingers of the Holy Ghost!

As the Catholic Encyclopedia observes, “Naturally, it was impossible for popular enthusiasm to be roused to so high a pitch (by the Catholic Church) in a manner which easily lent itself to error, fraud, and greed for gain, without at least the occasional occurrence of many grave abuses…”  As if…the Church wasn’t encouraging, if not facilitating, such deception!

From an early time, the Church began an assembly-line process of manufacturing “saints” to be venerated.  Supposedly, the canonization of some individual required a life of sacrifice and service to the Lord, in addition to the performance of a miracle or two.  Alternatively, a “saintship” could be acquired by throwing some money in the direction of the Mother Church.  Other individuals became “saints” simply because the Vatican felt it the right thing to do.  An example would be St. Abel, the younger son and second heir of the mythical Adam (of Eden).  The Bible fails to recount any miracles accomplished by this individual, nor was he a card-carrying Christian.  (Actually, Cain slew his brother Abel, so perhaps Abel was the first Jewish martyr?)

At last count, there are over 25,000 officially authenticated Saints of the Roman Catholic Church.  This is a testimony to the feverish activity that was occurring in the Middle Ages when each Christian community desired their own patron saint.

Another admission by the Catholic Encyclopedia:  “At the beginning of the 9th century the exportation of the bodies of martyrs from Rome had assumed the proportions of a regular commerce…in an age not only utterly uncritical…”  This is so true.  The Church itself had systematically dumbed-down the Christian populace, had invented thousands of Saints, had required possession of relics by each and every church, and then was…surprised?…when “unscrupulous rogues” pawned-off goat carcasses as the bones of revered Christian saints.

Actually, the manufacture and exportation of supposed martyrs’ bones was a highly profitable industry by the Mother Church for many years.  Conveniently, the catacombs of the ancient city of Rome provided a vast treasure trove of decayed humanity – centuries of decayed pagans, Jews, and even a few Christians.  Retrospectively, they all became Holy Martyrs and the “ancient Christians of Rome”.  As late as the 7th century, Pope Boniface IV was extracting cartloads of bones from the catacombs for sale to visiting pilgrims and onward shipment to his distant agents.  The supposed holy relics were stored temporarily in the Pantheon, one of the few serviceable buildings left in Rome at the time.  The ex-pagan shrine had by then been appropriately renamed the “Church of St. Mary and the Martyrs”.

Rarely, if ever, did a whole skeleton go anywhere.  The various parts of a “martyr” might be distributed across the length and breadth of Christendom.

The parade and adulation of sacred bones brought joy to European cities.  The plethora of heavenly saints assiduously manufactured by the Church marked out the Christian calendar and signaled the procession of the seasons.  Scarcely a day passed without a martyr to thank, praise or implore for mercy.  For centuries the Cult of the Martyrs did most to fill the coffers of the Church and propagate the faith among an ignorant and superstitious population.

When the supply of corpses from the catacombs of Rome ran short (the subterranean necropolis was completely rifled by the 10th century), the Church continued to make money from the catacombs by charging pilgrims a fee to marvel at the former resting places of revered saints.

 

God’s Representative

According to the Church, the Pope is God’s right hand man here on earth, the successor to Saint Peter himself.   Although Roman Catholic dogma teaches that the Pope is “infallible” when it comes to his leadership and moral teachings, this does not apply to the personal behavior of His Holiness.  Many of the hundreds of popes have contended with moral weakness, at least as it is defined for Church parishioners.  Some of the pontiffs who have “talked the talk” but failed to “walk the walk” are the following:

Boniface VI – was defrocked twice by Pope John VIII for immorality

John X – had romantic affairs with a married woman and then her 14 year-old daughter

John XII – “liked to have a collection of women”; fornicated with a widow, his father’s concubine, another widow, and his niece; contemporary reports indicate that he “made the sacred palace into a brothel”

Leo VII – died of a paralytic stroke during intercourse with a married woman in 965

Pius II – had a dozen illegitimate children before becoming Pope

Paul II – alleged to have died of a heart attack while in a sexual act with a male page

Julius II – had at least one illegitimate daughter, and possibly two others; the Council of Pisa in 1511 called him a “sodomite covered with shameful ulcers”

Clement VII – had an illegitimate son

Pius IV – had three illegitimate children before being elected Pope

Gregory XIII – had an illegitimate son

Back in the old days (before the “New Covenant” with Christians), the God of Abraham used to deal with such transgressions by throwing lightning bolts, making the earth open up to swallow sinners, turning  those who disobeyed him into pillars of salt, afflicting evildoers with hemorrhoids, and so forth.

Under the new program called Catholicism, all that was required was for the Pope to confess (to himself) his sins, be contrite, and promise not to do it again.  And, then, made pure again, the Pope was free to continue his evil ways.

Peculiar Justice

Sometimes it became necessary for the Pope, acting on God’s behalf, to punish sinners…even popes.

In January, 897, in the Church of St. John Lateran, the Pope’s official church in his capacity of Bishop of Rome, a strange trial unfolded.  The defendant in the case was the former Pope Formosus who, after a reign of five years, had died nine months earlier in April, 896, and had been buried with honors in St. Peter’s Basilica.  The trial of the former prelate was ordered by the reigning Vicar of Christ, Pope Steven VII, who evidently had a near-hysterical hatred of Formosus.

Sitting on a throne, Pope Steven VII personally presided over the trial.  Also present as co-judges were a number of Roman clergy who were there under compulsion and out of fear.  The trial began when the disinterred corpse of Formosus was carried into the courtroom.  On the Holy Father’s orders, the putrescent cadaver, which had been lying in its tomb for seven months, had been dressed in full pontifical vestments.  The dead body was then propped up in a chair, behind which stood a teenage deacon who was there to “defend” Formosus by speaking in his behalf.  Steven VII read the three charges against Formosus: (1) perjury; (2) coveting the papacy; and, (3) violating church canons when he was Pope.

The trial was completely dominated by the Supreme Pontiff, who overawed the audience with his frenzied tirades.  While the frightened clergy silently watched in horror, Pope Steven VII screamed and raved, hurling insults at and mocking the rotting corpse.  Then the grotesque spectacle was finally over, Formosus was convicted on all counts by the kangaroo court.  The sentence imposed by Steven VII was that all of Formosus’ acts and ordinations as Pope be invalidated, that the three fingers of Formosus’ right hand used to give papal blessings be hacked off, and that the body be stripped of its papal vestments, clad in the cheap garments of a lay person, and buried in a common grave.  The sentence was rigorously executed.  The Pope then apparently changed his mind, had the corpse exhumed, and then had it thrown into the Tiber River.  Mercifully, a monk secretly retrieved the body from the river.

This so-called “Cadaver Synod”, with its appalling trial and savage mistreatment of Formosus’ corpse, provoked so much anger and outrage in Rome that, within a few months, Pope Steven VII was deposed, stripped of his vestments, imprisoned, and later strangled.  Three months later another Pope, Theodore II, annulled the Cadaver Synod, fully rehabilitated Formosus, and reverentially reburied his battered remains in St. Peter’s Basilica.  The following Pope, John IX, also nullified the Cadaver Synod, and any future trial of a dead person was forever prohibited.  Thank God!

Incredibly, however, this was not the end of the story.

Sergius III, who was Pope from 904-911, reversed the decisions of Theodore II and John IX, and placed an epitaph on the tomb of Steven VII which lauded that evident madman and heaped scorn on Formosus.  Historical accounts differ whether Sergius III literally dug Formosus out of his grave yet again (possibly beheading the corpse in the process), but he did void all of the Formosus appointments, in defiance of the previous papal edicts banning posthumous persecution.

Pope Sergius III went on to further distinguish himself by murdering his predecessor, Pope Leo V, whom he had imprisoned.  This esteemed Pontiff also fathered an illegitimate son who in 931 became Pope John XI.

Rule of the Harlots

Much to the chagrin of the Mother Church, there was a couple hundred-year period of time in the Middle Ages when the papacy was a tool and plaything of a few ruling political clans in Italy.  One of the most prolific of these clans was the lineage of Theophylact I, Count of Tusculum, which produced a staggering seven Pontiffs during the period 904 through 1085.

Theophylact served as Holy Roman Emperor Louis III’s main agent in Rome.  Together with his wife, Theodora, they controlled the city and the papacy in the early 10th century.  Theodora used her feminine wiles to gain and use power.  Years after the fact, Cardinal Baronius wrote: “A certain shameless strumpet called Theodora at one time was sole monarch of Rome and, shame though it is to write it, exercised power like a man.  She had two daughters, Marozia and Theodora, who were not only her equals but could surpass her in the exercises that Venus loves.”   Translation:  they liked to sleep around.

According to some accounts, Theodora and her daughter, Marozia (who was a ripe 14 years-old at the time) were both having an affair with Sergius III when he was appointed Pope in 904.  The new Pontiff set about consolidating his power with ruthless abandon.  Two of his predecessors – Pope Leo V and Pope Christopher, who had taken the papacy by military force and were only semi-legitimate – were in prison when Sergius became Pope.  Both were soon deceased, allegedly at the order of the Holy Father himself.  Sergius later fathered a child with the young Marozia, who later rose to political power like her mother.

After the demise of Sergius III, Theodora engineered the “elections” of the next two Popes, Anastasius III and Lando, and then promoted her current bedmate, the Archbishop of Ravenna, to the papal chair, as Pope John X.  After fourteen years in office, John X was imprisoned and eventually murdered at the direction of Marozia to secure the elevation of her then-lover, who became Pope Leo VI.  Following that pontiff’s short reign, Marozia hand-picked Pope Steven VII as a stop-gap measure, to control the Church until her own son John was ready to assume the throne of St. Peter.  In 931, Marozia installed her son (the illegitimate son of Pope Sergius III) as Pope John XI.  However, another of her sons, Alberic II, seized military and political control of Rome and reduced John XI to a figurehead.

Alberic II, the grandson of Theophylact I and Theodora (the couple who started the puppet show in 904) administered an oath to the Roman nobles in St. Peter’s that, on the next vacancy of the papal chair, his only son, Octavianus, should be elected Pope.  On December 16, 955, his son, only eighteen years of age, assumed the papacy as Pope John XII.  This new Vicar of Christ went on to set new performance lows for pontiffs, such that the writings that remain about him note that his home church, St. John Lateran, was spoken of as a brothel, and the moral corruption of his administration became the subject of general disgrace.  Some of the highlights included:  ordaining a deacon in a horse stable; being paid for ordaining bishops, including a ten year-old boy; adulterous affairs; fornication with his father’s concubine; as well as murdering two Vatican officials.  He was eventually deposed with the help of Otto I, King of the Germans.

Alberic II had another son, Gregory I, Count of Tusculum, who fathered a son, Theophylactus, who himself became Pope Benedict VIII in 1012.  That Pope’s brother, Romanus, took the reins in 1024, as His Emminence Pope John XIX.  When this pontiff died in 1032, his nephew, who may have been 12 years old at the time, took his place on the throne of St. Peter.

The new Pontiff, Pope Benedict IX, was entirely unsuited to be the head of the Church.  He reportedly led an extremely dissolute life, to put it mildly.  He was, in fact, the great grandson of Morazia, who helped kick-start the process in the 10th century, so it might be said that scandalous behavior was part of his DNA.  Among his excesses were:  orgies that he sponsored, including homosexual sodomy and bestiality; womanizing;  gluttony; and, murder.  According to St. Peter Damian, a cloistered monk of that period, Benedict “feasted on immorality” and was “a demon from hell in the disguise of a priest”.  Desiderius of Monte Cassino, who was a contemporary of Benedict IX and later reigned as Pope Victor III, wrote that Benedict committed “rapes, murders, and other unspeakable acts” and his reign was “so vile, so foul, so execrable that I shudder to think of it”.

After five years of these shenanigans, Benedict was ousted from the pontificate by an angry mob of Romans who were tired of sleazy popes.  Benedict’s political backing was strong enough, however, that he retook the papal throne without a fight within three weeks.  In 1045, the Holy Father was ousted by a more serious group of enemies, who replaced the hedonist with Pope Sylvester III.  Benedict invaded Rome with force this time and regained his title within a matter of months.  Sylvester III was retroactively declared an antipope, and Benedict resumed his playboy lifestyle.  It took His Holiness less than a year to determine that he was bored with being head of the Catholic Church.  He wanted out and, to do so, he needed lots of money to fund his extravagant lifestyle.  So, he sold the papacy to his godfather, Archpriest John Gratian, for an estimated 1,500 pounds of gold.  Unfortunately, the bribe paid by the new Pope Gregory VI so completely bankrupted the papal treasury that for months afterward the Church was unable to pay its bills.

Within a year, Benedict reneged on the sale (he kept the money, however) and, with his political support in Rome, once again became the Holy Father.  Finally, King Henry III of Germany was implored to step in and settle the matter.  He invaded Rome in 1046, deposed Benedict IX and all other claimants to the papacy, and installed a German bishop as Pope Clement II.  Within 11 months, the new Pope mysteriously died from poisoning, and Benedict was once again the reigning Vicar of Christ.  King Henry eventually found out what had happened, and sent a new Pope (Damasus II) along with an army to back him up.  Strangely enough, this pope died 23 days later, and King Henry had to send yet another replacement, Pope Leo IX, to put down one last power grab by our hero.

The now-deposed Benedict IX, who was by that time only 35 years old, allegedly then retired to a monastery where he is said to have miraculously repented his evil ways and died shortly thereafter.  Probably only God, King Henry, and St. Leo IX know if that’s what really happened.  At any rate, Benedict’s passing marked the end of the Saeculum Obscurum, the Church’s official nomenclature for “the dark age of the Papacy”.  Among historians and non-Catholics it is better known (with a snicker) as the “Pornocracy” or the “Rule of the Harlots” (after the mother/daughter tag team, Theodora and Morazia).

 

Agent Provocateur

The Roman Catholic Church by the mid-15th century was all-powerful and its leaders were arrogant and decadent.  It was in dire need of a “reality check” when a German Catholic priest named Martin Luther published his Ninety-Five Theses, openly calling-out the Church authority for the scoundrels they had become.  Luther was particularly incensed about the idea that freedom from God’s punishment of sin could be purchased with money (indulgences), and he thought that a lot of the Church doctrine at the time was without merit.

For his efforts, Father Luther was excommunicated by the Church, condemned as an outlaw by the Emperor, and spent many years under house arrest in a castle.  There he had the audacity to translate the Catholic (Latin) Bible into German, so that it could be read by the common man, something that the Church was dead-set against.  All of this set in motion the so-called Protestant Reformation, the second great schism of Christianity.  Everything considered, this was probably a good thing.

But, then, the Reverend Luther spoiled his legacy by becoming perhaps the greatest anti-Semite in history.

Ironically, Luther rarely encountered Jews during his life, as he lived in a German community that had expelled all its Jews some ninety years earlier.  He considered Jews blasphemers and liars because they had rejected the divinity of Jesus, whereas good Christians like himself believed Jesus to be the Messiah.  He argued that Jews were no longer God’s chosen people but “the devil’s people”, and referred to them with violent, vile language.  Luther advocated setting synagogues on fire, destroying Jewish prayer books, forbidding rabbis from preaching, seizing Jew’s property and money, and smashing up their homes so that “these poisonous envenomed worms” would be forced into labor or expelled “for all time”.  Luther went so far as to proclaim, “We are not at fault for slaying them”, and said that “whoever would help the Jews was doomed to perdition”.

The Reverend Martin Luther became the most widely-read author of his generation, and he acquired the status of prophet within Germany.  The prevailing view among historians is that his anti-Jewish rhetoric contributed significantly to the development of anti-Semitism in Germany, and in the 1930’s and 1940’s provided an ideal underpinning for the National Socialists’ (Nazi) attacks on Jews.

According to historian Robert Michael, just about every anti-Jewish book printed during the Third Reich contained references to and quotations from Martin Luther.  Bishop Martin Sasse, a leading Protestant churchman, published a compendium of Luther’s writings shortly after Kristallnacht (“The Night of Broken Glass”) in November, 1938.  This event was an anti-Jewish pogrom, carried out by the Hitler Youth, the Gestapo, and the SS, wherein ninety-one Jews were murdered, 25,000 to 30,000 Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps, 267 synagogues were destroyed, and thousands of Jewish homes and businesses were ransacked.   Bishop Sasse applauded the Kristallnacht mayhem, noted with pleasure that the attacks were timed precisely to coincide with Martin Luther’s birthday, and urged the German people to heed the words of “the greatest anti-Semite of his time, the warner of his people against the Jews.”

Sleazy Evangelists

Back in the 2nd century, Lucian of Samosata was quoted about shaking down the sheep: “So any adroit, unscrupulous fellow, who knows the world, has only to get among these simple souls and his fortune is easily made; he plays with them.”  Pope Leo X, although one of the most corrupt and depraved pontiffs, was equally straightforward and candid, saying of the Church, “the fable of Christ has been quite  profitable to us.”  Unfortunately, His Holiness wasn’t the only man of the cloth who felt that way.

Although the two thousand year-old Roman Catholic Church is probably without peer in fleecing its obedient flock, Protestant evangelists in the 20th century unleashed the power of technology to “bring in the sheaves” in prodigious amounts.  Beginning with tent revivals, then moving to radio services, then to televised sermons, then to blatant infomercials, these clerical-collared hucksters found a virtual gold mine of gullible believers just waiting to be asked to empty their wallets for Jesus.

Among the more productive pitches were: good old fashioned Faith Healing, where seeming miracles abound to the shouts of “Hallelujah!” and the sounds of coins kerplunking into the collection plate; Prosperity Theology, which means that the more money you give to the preacher, the more financial success that God will send your way; and, the simple but effective approach, Give Me Your Money and I’ll Pray for You.

These and other sleazy pitches are used to sell “the power of God” to the gullible, the elderly, and the desperate.  Ordained purveyors of false hope and empty dreams repackage Christianity as a “cargo cult”, in which they solicit “seed” donations and preach a “gospel of gain”.

Televangelist Paul Crouch of the Trinity Broadcasting Network espouses this theology of fleecing the sheep on behalf of a needy God: “So what did God do?  He GAVE the very thing He needed – His only begotten Son, the best gift heaven could give!  What did God receive?  Yes, we know – billions of sons and daughters!  God lives by His own law – you GIVE if you expect to RECEIVE!”  According to Reverend Crouch, God needs a lot of folding money.

In Southern Baptist minister Kenneth Hagin’s words: “Take out the largest bill or check you have.  That $100, $50, or $20 bill, hold it in your clean hands and say, ‘In Jesus name I dedicate this gift to God’s work and expect a miracle return of money”.

A towering ego, an insatiable appetite for adoration and applause, a rampant libido, and, above all, an eye on the big money…all of these are the marks of the “charismatic” personality well-suited to the business of televangelism.  Too many have trod the path, and the roll-call of dishonor speaks volumes.  Hiding behind their Bibles, crucifixes, and robes are crooks and hucksters, living in high fashion off the hard-earned dollars of gullible, desperate people.  Among the worst of this rabble of flim-flam men have been the following:

Oral Roberts — a 1940’s pioneer in the business of extracting Jesus loot.  According to Time magazine, Roberts originally started his ministry with a large mobile tent “that sat 3,000 on folding metal chairs” where “he shouted at petitioners who did not respond to his healing”.  He eventually mastered the technique, laying his hands on more than 2 million people and their money, although on several occasions people died at his healing prayer sessions.

Roberts also ran direct mail campaigns, reaching out to poor Americans with his novel scam, “Seed Faith” (i.e. the sucker gives Minister Roberts his cash and then waits for God to return it to him “100-fold”).  The good Reverend also opened a donation-based 24/7 prayer-by-proxy hotline for believers too busy to pray.

Roberts and his family made so much money so fast (an estimated $120 million per year by 1980) that he branched into television, built his own university to school other Jesus shysters, and bought $500 million worth of real estate near Tulsa.  He and his family lived the high life, with fancy second-homes in Palm Springs and Beverly Hills, country club memberships, and the like.  Roberts loved fine clothes and jewelry, and one obituary claimed that even when times became hard, “he continued to wear his Italian silk suits, diamond rings and gold bracelets – (which were) airbrushed out by his staff on publicity pictures”.

In 1987, during a televised fundraising drive, with an impassioned plea and tears in his eyes, Reverend Roberts announced that unless he raised $8 million by that March, God would “call him home”.  That Oscar-worthy performance raised $9.1 million from his terrified viewership.

Eventually, his ministry, like many others, was rocked by financial and credibility scandals.  Mercifully putting an end to the shameless huckster, God (or, was it Lucifer?) called Oral Roberts home in 2009.

Robert Tilton — a 1980’s hotshot fraudster who cut himself a fat slice of the Jesus pie with a “Success-N-Life” scam.  At one point, Pastor Tilton was purchasing 5,000 hours of air time per month, and his half-hour “infomercial” could be seen in all two hundred and fifty-three U.S. television markets.  Tilton’s Word of Faith Church was raking-in an estimated $80 million per year by 1991.

Once a gullible Christian found himself on the Tilton mailing list, he would be barraged with free gifts, i.e. mailings chock full of testimonials to his good works, accompanied by “magic pennies”, cheap metal crosses, anointed rubber bands, blessed lengths of yarn, holy swatches of carpet, etc.  Each was a part and parcel of an intimate religious ceremony that the gullible recipient could conduct in the privacy of his own home.

One of Tilton’s most famous scams was the Miracle Cloth that he sent to his mentally-challenged constituency.  “Right now, this cloth is plain fabric”, the accompanying literature read, “But after you send it back with a $1,000 vow, it will be a Miracle Cloth saturated with the presence of God.  Open the enclosed package of special oil and anoint the point of your need.  Let the Holy Spirit lead you in applying this Miracle Anointing Oil and Miracle Cloth in faith to pictures of your loved ones, to your billfold, to the doorposts of your home, and to your body…for special miracles.”

Diane Sawyer and ABC television ran an expose in 1992 on Pastor Tilton’s money machine, including an interview with a woman who spent two days opening mail for Tilton.  She told reporters that she and other workers were instructed to remove any cash, checks, or jewelry from the returned mailers, and throw the prayer requests written to Tilton into the trash can.  The lady said, “You cannot help but read them.  All these letters were like, ‘Pray for me”, because they were terminal or their son is terminal or there was no money for food.  Desperate situations.  There would be like $17, and the letter would say, ‘I realize I have to give $2 more than I usually give’.  You open enough envelopes to generate $1,000 an hour.  It was unbelievable, literally unbelievable.”

Tilton’s ministry suffered measurably from the fallout of videotaped evidence depicting thousands of torn-up prayer requests in Hefty-brand garbage sacks slogged away in dumpsters.  His televised ministry went off the air in 1993, he was sued successfully for $1.5 million (for fraud) in 1994, and his Word of Faith Church property was sold in 1999.

Reverend Tilton is still working the con, however.  He’s resumed his mailings and TV ministry (he’s now on BET).  His most recent book, sure to snare some more fools for his mailing list, is called, How to Pay Your Bills Supernaturally.   Still living the high life off the backs of the faithful, Pastor Tilton recently bought a 50-foot yacht and nabbed a piece of oceanfront property in Miami Beach valued at $1.3 million.  P.T. Barnum would have loved this guy.

Peter Popoff — a Pentacostal faith healer whose ministry is funded by donations.  In a message entitled 10,000 Miles of Miracles, Popoff claimed that he had been born “in the bomb shelters of Berlin at the end of World War II”.  Actually, he was born in Hamburg in 1946 after the war.

Popoff is famous for performing revival meetings on national television which include the laying on of hands and seemingly instantaneous miracle cures.  During his appearances at church conventions in the 1970’s, Minister Popoff routinely and accurately stated the home addresses and specific illnesses of his audience members, a feat he allowed them to believe was due to divine revelation and “God-given ability”.  Actually, he had a radio receiver in his ear and was repeating information transmitted from his wife backstage that had been gathered from earlier conversations with members of the audience.

More dishonesty in Popoff’s televised shows featured audience members who were brought on stage in wheelchairs, healed by the magic hands of Popoff, and then rose dramatically to walk without support.  These were some of Reverend Popoff’s most incredible “healings”, but what the believing audience members and the suckers watching television didn’t know was that wheelchairs were used by Popoff to seat people who were actually already able to walk.

After the huckster’s dishonesty was exposed on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Popoff’s popularity and viewing audience declined sharply.  His ministry, which had been earning over $4 million per month, declared bankruptcy later that year.  In 1998, Popoff made a comeback with dozens of other preachers like the disgraced Robert Tilton to become fixtures on BET.

Pastor Popoff continues to peddle faith healing and his specialty product, “Miracle Spring Water”.  He also touts free “Miracle Manna” that can allegedly provide health and financial miracles.  If viewers ask for the free manna, they are sent a letter asking for a donation.

In 2009, Popoff advertisements appeared in the UK press offering a free cross which contained “blessed water” and “holy sand”.  The blessed water was supposedly from a source near Chernobyl, and animals drinking from this source were reportedly free from any radiation sickness.  The cross also bore the inscription “Jerusalem”.  Once again, gullible believers asking for their free cross were asked for a donation.  Every little bit helps.  According to IRS records, the disgraced Peter Popoff Ministries raised over $16 million in revenue in 2004, and the Lord only knows how much in the UK and the rest of the Christian world.

Benny Hinn — a televangelist best known for his regular “Miracle Crusades”, revival meeting/faith-healing summits held in large stadiums and broadcast worldwide on his television program.  Minister Hinn claims that God uses him as a conduit for divine healing powers.  His teachings are evangelical and charismatic, accepting the validity of spiritual gifts, and Word of Faith in origin, with a focus on financial prosperity.  In other words, Hinn’s practiced grift works all the angles.

At his Miracle Crusades, Hinn claims to have healed attendees of blindness, deafness, cancer, and AIDS, although the proof of such claims has never been produced by Reverend Hinn.  In 2006, the CBC television show The Fifth Estate did a special entitled “Do You Believe in Miracles?” on the apparent transgressions committed by Benny Hinn’s ministry.  According to the show, the seriously disabled who attend his healings are interviewed and then weeded out from ever getting the chance to come on stage.  There is a wheelchair section situated at the back of the audience, away from the stage.  Instead, those who have minor injuries, or injuries not immediately visible are brought up in their place.  “Healed” audience members that the show was able to track down and talk to were not healed and had never heard from the Ministry again.  Pastor Benny promised on stage to set up a fund for the college education of a blind child, who Hinn said was now healed.  When contacted, the child was still blind and had not heard back from the Ministry after two years.

It appears that God’s divine conduit can’t really heal sick people, nor is he very good at prophecies, either.  In the 1990’s, Hinn made a number of unfulfilled prophecies, such as God destroying America’s homosexual community, the death of Fidel Castro, the election of the first female president of the United States, and the east coast of the U.S. being devastated by an earthquake…all to happen before year 2000.

Despite all of his obvious lies and the phony faith-healing theology that he purveys, Benny Hinn takes in about $200 million worth of donations yearly.  In December, 2006, Benny Hinn Ministries sent out a mailing to his gullible Christian audience asking for donations toward a plush, new Gulfstream G4SP jet valued at $36 million and costing $600,000 per year to maintain.

Dr. Gene Scott — during his heyday Scott was probably the most watched and most entertaining minister and religious instructor in the history of television.  He may be one of the richest television stars of all time.  His suite of programs was broadcast in eight languages, in 180 countries, over radio and television stations twenty-four hours a day throughout the world.

A typical Dr. Gene Scott televised pitch went something like this: “I want you to stop what you are doing and get on the telephone and hand over ten percent of your weekly income”.  The average sucker’s contribution was reportedly $350 per month.  “I want 300 people to give $1,500 by June 30 to humiliate Satan’s effort to destroy us “, Dr. Scott commanded in a Web site missive.  “I also want 700 to commit to $10,000 by Christmas”.

Dr. Scott’s version of “seed faith” had a high price tag, measured in what he called “first fruits”; i.e. returns on any form of income (an investment, a pay raise, a second job, a tax refund, Lotto winnings).  If you’re out of work, you give him the first week’s unemployment check.  Amazingly, people listened and obeyed, to the tune of uncounted millions of dollars per year.  Why not?  According to Scott, “A skinflint may get to Heaven, but what awaits him are a rusty old halo, a skinny old cloud, and a robe so worn it scratches.  First-class salvation requires money.”

In the role of minister and religious educator, Dr. Scott seemed to be a genuine and even vulnerable person, and was fun to watch, with his goofy outfits, bizarre sunglasses and hats, cigars, and colored marking pens scribbling doodles on a chalkboard.  But, when it came time to shear the sheep, Scott became Dr. Hyde, coaxing, cajoling, exhorting, pleading, and haranguing his viewers to send in money…even daring them not to!  When the evening’s take was less than hoped for, Scott might punish his faithful audience by refusing to say another word, sitting in silence for ten minutes while the TV cameras kept running and his phone volunteers sat on their hands.

He once told the faithful, “I’m not selling forty-pound Bibles, or water from Jordan, or plastic crosses made by the Japanese.  I don’t send out ‘healing cloths’ or tear up my shirt.  I say: what’s what I’ve done worth?  Whatever the meal I’ve fed you is worth, pay up”.  If they didn’t tithe ‘til it hurt, Dr. Scott told them they could look forward to “sliding down the slimy chute straight to Hell.”  Millions of dimwits got the message.

What did the good Reverend Scott do with those donations for Jesus?  No one knows because he refused to open his books to scrutiny.  Officially, his contract called for an annual salary of $1, “plus unlimited expenses”.  Some of the visible perks paid-for by the gullible TV congregation included chauffeured limousines, Lear jet travel, a mansion in Pasadena, California, a number of racing-horse ranches, and round-the-clock bodyguard protection.  Reverend Scott defeated repeated attempts by the Federal government to examine his church’s operations simply by directing contributors to sign pledge slips which specifically stated that Dr. Scott could spend the money however he liked.  And, he did, perhaps a hundred million of it, with gusto, before dying of a stroke in 2005.

In Luke 18:25, Jesus is quoted, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven”.  Apparently, Pastors Roberts, Tilton, Popoff, Hinn, and Scott, to name a few of the money-grubbing televangelists, never read that part of the Holy Book.  Like all true scam artists, they wanted their reward in cash without delay.

Windbags for Jesus

A popular Christian religious song for the little tykes starts off with, “Jesus loves the little children…red, brown, yellow, black, and white…”  It’s a song about tolerance and Jesus’ love and compassion for everyone.  Unfortunately, a number of famous Christian evangelists must have been napping in Sunday school and shooting spitballs with their friends in seminary when that lesson was taught.

Accordingly, there is a class of ordained bigots who use their pulpit, websites, schools, and television programs to tirelessly broadcast hate and political propaganda in the name of the Prince of Peace.  Not surprisingly, they have found a perfect constituency:  millions of dimwitted Anglo-Saxon Protestants who lap up the nonsense and fill-in the pledge slips.  This, in turn, has given these ministerial blowhards access to, and influence on, the regional and national political stage.  Some of the most notorious examples of this phenomenon are:

The Reverend Fred Phelps – he’s an ordained Southern Baptist minister famous for his obsession with homosexuals.  When in college, this busy-body initiated a campaign to stamp out necking and petting on campus.

In 1955, Phelps became Pastor of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas.  At about the same time, he became an attorney, but was not very good at it.  In 1969, Attorney Phelps was suspended from practicing law for two years.  In a fit of pique, on the first anniversary of his suspension, Phelps gave his wife a harsh crewcut.  He was eventually disbarred by the Kansas Supreme Court, which declared in part that attorney Phelps “has little regard for the ethics of his profession”.  After subsequent harassment of nine Federal judges, Phelps was required to surrender his license to practice law.

During all of this, Phelps retained his position as head of the Westboro Baptist Church, where he concentrated his ministry on some of the more controversial messages of the Old Testament.  In his sermons, in his church fliers, and on his infamous website, GodHatesFags.com, the good Reverend focused his energies on anti-tolerance.  Some of the more notable Phelpsisms on the website include the following:  “You can’t preach the Bible without preaching hatred”, and, “God doesn’t hate them because they’re fags; they’re fags because God hates them”.

In a 1996 Westboro Baptist Church flier, Phelps demonstrated the level of his historical scholarship when he claimed that “Jews stirred up the Romans to butcher 6 million Christians in the catacombs in the 1st century”.  (Actually, Reverend Phelps, there were only a handful of “Christians” in existence by the end of the 1st century, and only a few of them made the trip to Rome, location of the catacombs.)

The bigot Pastor was on a roll in 1996.  Another flier sounded the alarm about an upcoming speech by a black man in the public park:  “Anybody babbling about ‘multicultural affairs’ and ‘celebrating diversity’ is a propagandist for the militant sodomite agenda.  Westboro Baptists will picket this black obfuscator, in religious protest and warning.  Being black won’t get you into Heaven.  But, promoting fags will take you to Hell.”  In 1998, the Westboro church faithful were treated to this gem:  “Filthy sodomites crave legitimacy as dogs eating their own vomit and sows wallowing in their own feces crave unconditional love.”

By 2005, the Westboro Baptist Church had a total of 71 parishioners, mostly members of Reverend Phelps’ large family.  The church’s focus up to that time had been picketing the funerals of gay victims of murder, gay-bashing or people who have died from complications relating to AIDS.  Phelps and followers also began to loudly picket military funerals with the rationale that “the Lord is punishing this evil nation for abandoning all moral imperatives that are worth a dime”.  Banners including the gem, “Thank God for dead soldiers”, were prominently displayed.  The Westboro Baptist Church also protested a memorial for twelve victims of the 2006 Sago, West Virginia mine disaster, declaring that the accident was God’s revenge against America for its tolerance of homosexuality.

As the popular bumper sticker says, “Jesus is Love”.

Pastor Jerry Falwell – a fundamentalist Christian evangelical Baptist pastor, televangelist, and conservative political windbag who left the earth in 2007.  Son of a bootlegger, Falwell was the founding pastor of the Thomas Road Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia.

The good Reverend was also a product of the South, and as such was resistant to civil rights reform.  In 1958, he spoke about the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling: “If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made.   The (school) facilities should be separate.  When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line”.  (In other words, when God made some people black, he meant for them to have an inferior education.  That is an interesting theory… especially since the subject of education is not once mentioned in the Bible.)  On his evangelist program Old Time Gospel Hour in the mid-1960’s, Reverend Falwell regularly featured segregationist politicians Lester Maddox and George Wallace, both infamous for using brutal violence against civil rights protesters.

In 1977, Pastor Falwell supported orange juice spokesperson Anita Bryant’s campaign, “Save Our Children”, to overturn a Dade County, Florida ordinance prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.  Mrs. Bryant blamed homosexuals for a variety of society’s ills, as did Falwell.  He also wanted the public education system overhauled.  In his book, America Can Be Saved, he wrote:  “I hope to live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools.  The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them”.   (Yes, those were the good old days, back when “sinners” were put in the stocks for public ridicule, women wore scarlet letters, and Christian-led mobs burned witches in Salem.)   Minister Falwell later supported George W. Bush’s Faith-Based Initiative, which proposed public funding of such church schools, but he publicly worried about “other denominations”, not just his fundamentalist Christian Baptists, getting their filthy fingers into the Federal pork barrel.

As noted previously, the Reverend Falwell was not high on his black brothers, even Christian men of the cloth.  The racist Falwell waded into international politics in the 1980’s when he publicly called-out Nobel Peace Prize winner Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu as a “phony” for his support of civil rights in South Africa.

Falwell wasn’t just picking on Tutu; he hated political liberals of any color.  In 1989, between sermons at the Thomas Road Baptist Church, Falwell found time to create the so-called Moral Majority.  The mission?  “We must, from the highest office in the land right down to the shoeshine boy in the airport, have a return to Biblical basics.”  The Moral Majority was a powerful political lobby group of evangelical Christians that helped elect Republican candidates and conservatives who were “pro-family”, “pro-life”, pro-defense”, and “pro-Israel”.  The strategy was to create a solid voting bloc, whose members would vote the way Jerry told them.  “Christians, like slaves and soldiers, ask no questions,” he explained.  The first successful target of the Moral Majority was the Equal Rights Amendment.  The group was later credited with delivering two-thirds of the white, evangelical Christian vote to Ronald Reagan during the 1980 presidential election.

By 1994, Reverend Falwell was pretty much a full-blown political operative of the Republican Party, funding his own Dirty Tricks Division.  In that year, he paid $200,000 for, promoted, and distributed the video documentary The Clinton Chronicles, a political hatchet-job designed to undermine a sitting President of the United States.  The video, which sold 150,000 copies, purportedly connected President Clinton and Mrs. Clinton to a murder conspiracy and a cocaine-smuggling operation.  The theory was discredited, and when the news broke about the complete dishonesty of the video, in true form Minister Falwell tried to disclaim having any editorial control over the project.

When Falwell’s Liberty University was staggering under a tremendous debt load, he quietly accepted $3.5 million from the infamous Korean cult messiah, Reverend Sun Myung Moon.  In exchange, Falwell publicly urged a presidential  pardon of Moon’s conviction for tax evasion.

The good Reverend later went on to dishonor himself with his continuing campaign against homosexuals, following in the footsteps of fellow Baptist preacher, Reverend Fred Phelps.  Some of Falwell’s most notable quotes on the sodomite menace include:  “Gay folks would just as soon kill you as look at you”; “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for homosexuals, it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals”; calling Ellen DeGeneris, when she came out as a lesbian, “Ellen Degenerate”; and, regarding homosexuals, “We’ve said go somewhere else, we don’t need you here at our churches”.  Minister Falwell further soiled himself when he opined that one of the characters on the children’s television show Teletubbies is a “homosexual role model for homosexual recruitment”, and that LBGT (lesbian, bisexual, gay and transgender) organizations angered God, thereby in part causing God to let the September 11 attacks devastate New York City.

These bogeymen weren’t the only degenerates to blame, however.  Pastor Falwell also noted that:  “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this (i.e. the 9/11 disaster) because God will not be mocked!”  Capping off his career of “hate speech” in 1999, this agent of intolerance left his faithful with a prediction:  the Antichrist will arrive within a decade and, “Of course, he’ll be Jewish”.

Pat Robertson – a prominent self-appointed political spokesman for conservative Christians in American politics and a highly visible spokesman for Fundamentalist religion, this guy has shared his stupid opinions with Americans on just about every subject for the past four decades.

A son of a former conservative U.S. Senator, Robertson attended Washington and Lee University, where he later claimed (but it was proven to be a lie) to have been elected to Phi Beta Kappa.  He was later in the Marine Corps, where he claimed to have won three battle stars for action against the enemy.  This, too, was proven to be a lie.  One of his Marine acquaintances, Pete McCloskey, who later became a Republican Congressman, claimed that Pat was spared combat duty when his father, then a Senator, intervened in his son’s behalf.  According to McCloskey, Robertson spent his time in the military as the “liquor officer” responsible for keeping the officers’ clubs supplied with hootch.  There he was known to personally consume large quantities of said booze and frequent local prostitutes.

After his less-than-distinguished military career, the Korean War “veteran” went on to get a Bachelor of Laws degree from Yale in 1955.  However, he failed his bar exam, had a religious epiphany, and decided against pursuing a career in law.  Instead, he put his dishonesty to use by becoming an ordained minister.

In 1960, the new “man of God” purchased a struggling UHF station in Portsmouth, Virginia for $37,000 and gave it an evangelistic format.  It would be the beginnings of CBN, the Christian Broadcasting Network.  He launched a religious talk show in 1963 and called it the 700 Club.  It showcased a lot of weird religious stuff, including glossalalia –speaking in tongues.

In addition to being a media mogul, Robertson became a well-known faith healer.  In one of his televised sermons in 1981, Reverend Pat told his congregation, “Satan has gone!  God has just healed somebody!  A hernia has been healed!  Several people are being healed of hemorrhoids and varicose veins!  People with flat feet!  God is doing great things for you!”  Yes, somewhere out there in the world, as a result of Robertson’s miraculous faith-healing powers, someone finally shook-off the flu.  Praise the Lord!

Gerard Straub, a former 700 Club producer, published Salvation for Sale in 1986.  It was a nasty tell-all describing what it was like working with Pat at CBN.  It portrayed Robertson as something of an overbearing asshole with delusions of grandeur.  In 1979, the network started making detailed preparations to televise the Second Coming of Christ, which Robertson figured was due at any moment.  This was known internally as GSP, or God’s Secret Plan.  Much to Robertson’s chagrin, Jesus failed to materialize that year, or in any year thereafter.

At about this time, when Pat was preparing the ticker-tape parade for the Son of God, he decided to get into politics.  Ingratiating himself with the Republicans, the good Reverend joined in an effort (along with later-disgraced Colonel Oliver North and the drug cartels) to support the Contra rebels in Nicaragua behind the back of Congress, which had prohibited aid to the rebels.  That didn’t work out so well in the long-run, as it jeopardized CBN’s tax-exempt status.

But, the excitement of being involved in national and international politics was a narcotic that Robertson couldn’t resist.  In the year that Salvation for Sale was published, the egotist fundamental Christian televangelist decided that he should run for President of the United States.  When ex-700 Club producer Straub heard about Robertson’s political aspirations, he opined, “I’d be very concerned about a man sitting next to a button who believes Jesus is telling him to press that button”.  As a matter of fact, the candidate’s first newsworthy statement to the New York Times indicated that he (Robertson) had a divine endorsement.  This is because he had prayed that Hurricane Gloria would spare Virginia Beach, and it did.  (But, then, it ravaged Long island and Boston to the tune of $320 million in damage.)  Robertson told the Times that the event was “extremely important because I felt, interestingly enough, that if I couldn’t move a hurricane, I could hardly move a nation”.  Yes, that is interesting.  Thanks to Robertson’s influence with God, the storm passed-by a sparsely-populated area so that it could kick some real ass in two densely-populated ones!  According to Pat Robertson, this was exactly the kind of judgment that the nation needed in the White House.  During the campaign, Robertson also made it clear that he was an advocate of Christian Dominionism, the idea that Christians had a right to rule.

Not surprisingly, the American people didn’t buy the religio-political nonsense that huckster Robertson was peddling and didn’t appreciate his lies about valorous combat as a Marine in Korea.  Denied the Presidency, the egotist then created his own version of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, calling his lobbying group the “Christian Coalition”.  Millions of right-wing fundamentalist Christian idiots signed up, almost overnight.  In 1997, at one of its meetings, Robertson spoke admirably about the Tammany Hall political organization (that once controlled politics and patronage in New York City) and declared his desire to select the next President.  He had to wait awhile longer than he hoped.  The Christian Coalition endorsed George Bush, Sr., grudgingly, but campaigned enthusiastically for victorious George W. Bush.

Eventually, the Coalition got caught improperly using funds to promote specific candidates, and the FCC slapped it with fines.  The membership dwindled and Robertson abandoned the organization in 2001.

Having been defeated in his run for President, exposed as a liar, and defanged by the FCC, Robertson retreated to his couch on the 700 Club and proceeded to opine stupid ideas on virtually every subject for the next decade or so.  One of his favorite targets was/is the Supreme Court and the imbeciles sitting on it.  Interestingly, Robertson once publicly admitted that while gaining his Law Degree at Yale, he had never read the U.S. Constitution.  Yes, the very body of law that the Supreme Court is charged to uphold.  Maybe that’s why he failed his bar exam?

When the Supreme Court struck down the Texas anti-sodomy statute, Robertson publicly urged his Christian followers to pray for God to “remove” the three most liberal jurists.  Remove, as in extinguish their lives?  The prayers weren’t answered, at least quick enough for the good Reverend.

Of course, the flap about knocking-off those liberal Justices was only one of the many times that Robertson misspoke himself.  It came to light in 2002 that Robertson owned a race horse named “Mr. Pat”.  The Pastor told the New York Times that his interest in the horse was purely aesthetic.  “I don’t bet and I don’t gamble.  I just enjoy watching horses running and performing”, he said.  Harder to explain was why he spent $520,000 on the horse, training it to compete at the track.  The resulting furor over the clergyman’s involvement in a gambling racket caused Robertson to sell Mr. Pat a month after the story broke.

Some of Pat Robertson’s other business ventures were harder to explain.  For example, the diamond mining rights he purchased from Mobutu Sese Seko, the brutal tyrant of Zaire.  Diamond mining is an expensive proposition, but not if you’re a televangelist huckster.  In order to lower overhead and increase profits, Robertson ferried his mining cargo aboard planes owned by “Operation Blessing”.  The mission of this tax-exempt charity of Robertson’s was, ostensibly, to deliver medical supplies to the needy in Africa.  In fact, according to two pilots who worked for Robertson, nearly all the flights they made on Operation Blessing planes were delivery trips to and from the mining areas.  One said, “We were just supplying the miners and flying the dredges from Kinshasha out to Tshikapa.”

In 1999, Robertson struck up a relationship with another African dictator, Liberian strongman Charles Taylor.  For $8 million, Pastor Pat could pursue gold mining in Liberia.  Unfortunately, God’s tip to Robertson, that there was plenty of gold for the taking, turned out to be bogus.  Eventually, Taylor was chased out of the country for perpetrating crimes against humanity on a massive scale.

Another interesting case was the time that Robertson appeared on CNN defending China’s forced-abortion policy.  This was a head-scratcher for several reasons:  Robertson’s conservative Christian political constituency is hard-line anti-Communist and the Reverend had a three-decade long public record of opposing abortion of any kind.  The explanation of Robertson’s hypocritical position on CNN was because he had business interests in China, where its leaders don’t appreciate criticism of public policy.  Apparently, sticking to his theological and political guns was less important to the phony Pastor than toadying up to his Communist business partners.

None of this matters, of course, as The End is Near, at least according to Robertson, who personally talks with God.  In 1980, God told Pastor Pat that the Tribulation would begin in “the fall of 1982”.  It didn’t.  In his 1990 book, The New Millenium, Robertson prophesied that the Tribulation would begin on April 29, 2000.  Again, he misheard the Almighty.

In February, 2003, Pat announced that he was afflicted with potentially fatal prostate cancer.  This should not have been much of a problem for Robertson, as he claims to be one of the world’s most famous faith-healers.  He could just pray the tumor away like he did those flat feet, right?  Wrong.  Instead of laying hands upon himself, Robertson hired a surgical team to do God’s work for Him

Ordained Sex Addicts

All kinds of personalities find their way into clerical robes.  Many are undoubtedly decent, caring individuals, who want to give back to the community, rather than shake it down.  At least the faithful would like to believe that.

Some jokers, however, have found clerical vestments to be the perfect cover for their real passion:  carnal pleasures.  Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with sex.  It’s perfectly natural and humanity wouldn’t be here without it.  And, every male has probably done some stupid sexual thing that he’s not proud of.  However, once you’re on God’s payroll, you’ve got an obligation to toe the line, to live the Ten Commandments, and… to keep your pants zippered in front of the paying customers.  That’s true for Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant priests alike.

As was noted in the discussion of the confessional box, and the liberties taken by priests and popes in the early years, the clergy might or might have not been celibate, but they sure as Hell were not abstaining from carnal pleasures.

Regretably, in recent years (from the 20th century), there has been a veritable orgasmic explosion of high-profile sex scandals that have rocked the clergy.    Some of the more lurid tales to hit the newsstands include the following:

Joseph Smith – back in the 19th century this fellow created a new religion, Mormonism, so he could have sex with scores of women with God’s blessing.

At age 14, the teenager was supposedly approached in the woods by God who told the youth that every church on earth was offensive to Him.  God gave Smith some golden tablets with new rules to help establish the new, correct religion.  Like other famous prophets, the teenager never told anyone about this and, of course, the golden tablets disappeared like divine evidence always does.

Smith eventually completed the Book of Mormon, his new bible .  Luckily for Smith and the rest of his male followers, God’s new rules allowed Smith and his buddies to have sexual relations with as many women as they pleased.  Actually, this is not surprising , since a teenage boy was writing Scripture.

Prophet Smith ended up with twenty-eight concubines.  Unfortunately, before he could shack-up with any more, he ticked off a bunch of creditors, was jailed, tried to escape, and was killed by an angry mob.

David Koresh – born Vernon Wayne Howell, this guy was pretty much an average teenage loser.  He was a dyslexic high school dropout, born to an unwed mother, who went to Hollywood to make it as a rock guitarist but failed at that and moved back to Waco, Texas after two years.  There he became a member of, and later leader of, the Branch Davidian Seventh-Day Adventist religious cult.  It is not clear exactly what the tenets of the religious cult were, but the main attraction, especially for the leader, was that he could enjoy unlimited sex with the female members.

In 1990, Vernon legally changed his name to David Koresh.  He believed and taught to the cult that he was the reincarnation of King David and King Cyrus of Persia, and that he had been appointed by God to rebuilt the Temple and destroy Babylon.  In other words, Koresh claimed to be the Messiah.  He also claimed that he was owed at a minimum 140 wives and he was entitled to claim any females who were attracted into the cult compound.  Koresh fathered at least a dozen babies by his harem, which included girls as young as 12 and 13 when they got impregnated by the Messiah.

The Prophet’s orgy of love hit the skids in 1993 when Federal ATF agents, coordinated with the FBI, mounted a raid against the compound to search for illegal machine guns.  They definitely found them, as 131 Branch Davidians were waiting for the G-men with guns drawn.  A firefight ensued, as well as a conflagration of the complex, and when the smoke cleared four ATF agents and six cultists were dead, including playboy Pastor Koresh.

Tony Alamo – a low-life wannabe musician like the Prophet Koresh, this reprobate changed his name several times in the pursuit of filthy lucre and just ahead of the posse.

In 1969, he and his wife, Susan, hit upon the perfect scam, which they established as the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries.  The self-ordained Pentacostal evangelists had a syndicated TV show during the 1970’s.  They also sold a line of “Tony Alamo” sequined denim jackets, a business that eventually landed the Reverend Alamo in prison for tax evasion.

Like madman Koresh, Alamo’s congregation hunkered down in cult-like fashion at his compound in Texarkana, Arkansas.  His conscripts publicly distributed tracts of Minister Alamo’s writings, which featured a “Repent, the End is Near” theme.  The Alamo literature regularly condemned Catholicism, the Pope, and the American government as a joint Satanic conspiracy behind events such as 9/11, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the JFK assassination.

When he wasn’t preaching or practicing creative writing, Reverend Alamo was screwing around, quite literally.  He particularly liked young girls.  On September 20, 2008, Federal and state agents raided Alamo’s 15-acre compound as part of a child pornography investigation.  The case involved allegations of sexual abuse, polygamy, and underage marriage.  Alamo was arrested on charges that he transported minors (as early as 1994) over state lines for sexual activity in violation of the Mann Act.  During his trial, testimony was received that 74 year-old Minister Alamo had practiced polygamy and had taken a nine year-old as one of his wives.  He was eventually found guilty of ten Federal counts, sentenced to 175 years in prison, and had to pay each of his five victims of sexual abuse $500,000 each.

After his conviction, sex pervert Alamo made headlines by calling himself, “just another one of the prophets that went to jail for the Gospel

Warren Jeffs – a modern day Joseph Smith who used his ministerial position mainly to further the “missionary position”.  Warren is the son of Rulon Jeffs, once the head pervert of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  The senior Jeffs was survived by 19 wives and about 60 children.

When his father died, Warren assumed the titles of “President and Prophet, Seer and Revelator” of the FLDS Church.  He also inherited all of his father’s wives except his mother, because Mormons don’t tolerate incest…at least with mothers.  The young Jeffs eventually added fifty more sexy spouses to his personal harem.

One of the ways that the Prophet and his fellow FLDS horndogs were able to win over the affections of the FLDS girls was the practice of expelling teenage boys from the Church to decrease competition for wives.  The Church owned essentially all of the homes and real estate in the Colorado City area where the Prophet and his followers resided.  As the FLDS head honcho, Jeffs was the sole individual in the Church with the authority to perform its marriages.  He also was responsible for assigning wives to husbands, and also held the power to discipline wayward male believers by “reassigning” their wives, children, and homes to more obedient male followers.

In 2004, Minister Jeff’s power trip shorted-out.  He was accused by his nephew Brent Jeffs of sodomy when the victim was five or six years old.  Two of the Prophet’s other nephews stepped forward and made similar claims.  In June, 2005, Jeffs was charged with sexual assault on a minor for arranging a marriage between a non-consenting 14 year-old girl and her 19 year-old first cousin.  The young girl alleged that her new husband raped her repeatedly.

The Prophet fled the state to avoid prosecution and was placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List.  During his time on the lam from the Feds, website images showed photos of Jeffs with two of his own underage wives, one of whom was 12 years old, celebrating one-year anniversaries in 2005 and 2006.  Eventually, the cops apprehended the FLDS Seer and Revelator and his trial was held.  In 2007, Jeffs was found guilty of two counts of accomplice to rape and was sentenced to ten years to life in the Utah State Prison.  Charges in other states are pending.

Once convicted, Jeffs resigned the presidency of the Church, thereby allowing the FLDS orgy to continue unabated under the watchful eye of his horny brother.  In 2008, child welfare authorities conducted a raid of the FLDS Yearning for Zion property in Eldorado, Texas in which 530 women and children were temporarily removed from the cult compound.  Many of the children had broken bones and thirty-one girls aged 14 to 17 years-old were found to be pregnant or already mothers.

While in prison, the ex-Prophet has engaged in lengthy fasts, which his doctors report have been for spiritual purposes.

The HBO miniseries Big Love contains a scene where Roman Grant, the leader of a fictional fundamentalist and polygamist sect, observes Jeffs being arrested on TV.  Grant refers to him as a pervert and worries that Jeffs will “ruin things” for other polygamist sects.  Yes, it would be a shame if that happened.

Ted Haggard – one-time high-flying poster boy and do-gooder in the Christian evangelical movement who went over to the dark side.  Pastor Haggard was a handsome, charismatic guy, a confidante of President George W. Bush, and was one of the most influential Christian leaders in America during the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.

Founder of the New Life Church in Colorado Springs, which he grew into a 14,000 member strong congregation, Haggard was also President of the National Association of Evangelicals in 2006.  Like his fellow conservative Christian brethren, Haggard was an outspoken opponent of gay marriage, supported anti-gay legislation, and flat-out publicly despised “those sodomites”.  In the documentary Jesus Camp, a scene shows Minister Haggard saying, “We don’t have to debate about what we should think about homosexual activity.  It’s written in the Bible.”

Apparently the Bible that Haggard was teaching from said that men having sex with other men was okay.  In November, 2006, prostitute and male masseur Mike Jones alleged that Haggard had paid Jones to engage in sex with him for three years and to supply Haggard with crystal methamphetamine.  “It made me angry that here’s someone preaching against gay marriage and going behind the scenes having gay sex”, said Jones.  Jones made the allegations public in response to Haggard’s political support for Colorado Constitutional Amendment #43 on the November 7, 2006 ballot that would ban same-sex marriage in that state.  Jones further commented, “I had to expose the hypocrisy”.  Eventually other salacious testimony emerged from the gay community.  It was reported that Haggard “craved sex, he was a sexaholic”.  The Reverend tried to sidestep the charges but eventually confessed to “sexual immorality”.  He resigned his NAE presidency and his senior pastor position at New Life Church.  “I am a deceiver and a liar”, he wrote in his resignation letter.

As the shame unfolded on the national stage, Haggard’s famous evangelical buddies, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and James Dobson sought to distance themselves from the leprous fornicator and downplay his influence on religious conservatives.  His White House buddy, President George W. Bush, took shelter as well, acting as if he’d never met Haggard.  After the scandal was publicized, Pastor Ted entered three weeks of intensive counseling overseen by four ministers.  In February, 2007, one of those Men of God, Tim Ralph, announced that Haggard “is completely heterosexual”.  Well, Thank God for that!

In 2009, the Reverend Haggard and his wife appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and other “repentance broadcasts” to offer a public apology and confession for the sexual deviance that spurred his demise in 2006.  It appeared that Pastor Ted had been healed by the hand of God, and that he was solidly on his way toward redemption in the minds of his adoring Christian public.

But, gosh darn, in 2009, officials from Haggard’s former church announced that a young male church member had come forward.  There was “an overwhelming pool of evidence of an inappropriate consensual sexual relationship that went on for a long time with Haggard… it wasn’t a one-time act”.  The church eventually reached a six-figure settlement with the young man, who was in his 20’s at that time.  According to the man, the relationship was “not consensual”, and it later was reported that Haggard got his kicks by masturbating in front of the young man.

In the aftermath of the news that the New Life Church had paid “hush money” to hide his perversion, Haggard was asked by reporters if he had additional gay relationships that had not been reported.  Pastor Pat did not provide a direct answer.

On June 5, 2010, the now-rehabilitated (?) Pastor Ted Haggard welcomed a new crop of parishioners to the first meeting of his new St. James Church in his home in Colorado Springs.  As the famous quote goes, “Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.”

Jim Bakker – a televangelist and one-time prince of the Prosperity Gospel gang of thieves who let his libido ruin one of the richest scams of all time.  Bakker and his wife, Tammy Faye, helped Pat Robertson’s 700 Club become a money machine, and later teamed with youth pastors Paul and Jan Crouch to create the Praise The Lord show for the then-new Trinity Broadcasting Network.  Their later creation, The PTL Club, grew quickly until it was carried by close to a hundred stations and had twelve million regular viewers.

The Bakkers started earning Jesus cash at a prodigious rate, thanks to their decisions early on to accept all denominations in their ministry and to refuse no contributions regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation, or criminal record.  Any donation green and foldable was gratefully received on behalf of the Precious Savior.  By the 1980’s contributions were coming in at the rate of $1 million per week (Praise the Lord!) and the Bakkers pretty much exhausted holy purposes to fund.

Accordingly, the couple adopted a lifestyle of conspicuous consumption unknown even to most filthy-rich televangelist hucksters.  A New Yorker article noted, “They epitomized the excesses of the 1980’s:  the greed, the love of glitz, and the shamelessness, which in their case was so pure as to almost amount to a kind of innocence.”  The Bakkers built a theme park and a satellite system to distribute their TBN cash-cow program 24 hours a day across the country.  By 1987, the Bakker’s PTL ministry had a burn rate of $500,000 per day, the couple was living in extravagance, and they were the darlings of the televangelism industry.  Jim and Tammy Faye had a fleet of luxury cars and six mansions, a dog house equipped with air conditioning, and one of their palaces had $60,000 in gold-plated bathroom fixtures.  God had blessed them.

And, then, the proverbial poop hit the fan.  Pretty boy Pastor Jim was caught-up in a sex scandal.  Bakker had boinked his supposedly-virginal church secretary, Jessica Hahn, using the creative pick-up line, “When you help the shepherd, you’re helping the sheep.”  But… the adulterous Lothario got snagged funneling $265,000 in Jesus money to hush up Ms. Hahn about their desktop frolic.

Suddenly, Jim Bakker and poor Tammy Faye became pariahs.  All of their friends deserted them.  Even fellow Assemblies of God televangelist big-shot Jimmy Swaggart took some unnecessary potshots, just for fun and just to be cruel.  Swaggart went on CNN and told Larry King that Jim Bakker was “a cancer on the body of Christ”.

The Reverend Bakker regretfully resigned from the PTL, the ministry that he founded, claiming that he was set-up by manipulative, greedy people.  The feeding frenzy got real nasty when televangelist John Ankerberg accused Jim of having engaged in sex with prostitutes and homosexuals, encouraging wife-swapping among PTL employees, and embezzling millions from the business.  Fellow televangelist and bigot-bashing gasbag Jerry Falwell also lit into Bakker during a 90-minute press conference:  “I have sat across the table from men who have told me of your homosexual advances”.

Within the year, sullied church secretary/strumpet Jessica Hahn appeared in a Playboy pictorial, and an article, The Devil in Jim Bakker: His Homosexual Lover and Pimp Tells All, appeared in Penthouse magazine.

Delivering Jim an ill-timed kick in the testicles, The Charlotte Observer began to scrutinize PTL’s fundraising activities.  This eventually led to criminal charges being filed.  Following a 16-month investigation into the PTL, a Federal grand jury indicted Bakker in 1988 on eight counts of mail fraud, fifteen counts of wire fraud, and one count of conspiracy.  The ticked-off jury of good Christian folk found him guilty on all twenty-four counts, and he was sentenced to 45 years in Federal prison and a $500,000 fine.  An appeals court later reduced the sentence to eight years.

Bakker served his time and was released from prison in 1994, but still owed the IRS $6 million in income tax.  The fallen evangelist is paying off his IRS tab with money he is now earning from his new ministry operating out of a television studio near Branson, Missouri.  His daily Jim Bakker Show is carried on satellite networks and the CTN network.

Jimmy Swaggart – still another wildly-successful, hypocritical Christian preacher who was brought down by sex scandals.  One of the pioneers of televangelism, Jimmy was originally a gospel singer and a cousin of Jerry Lee Lewis.  Swaggart began his ministry from a flatbed trailer in 1955, developing a revival meeting following throughout the South.  He was ordained by the Assemblies of God in1961 and began his radio ministry in 1962, broadcasting to the faithful in the Bible Belt.  He also started a church in Baton Rouge which eventually grew to 1,000 parishioners.

By 1975 Swaggart’s television ministry had become his primary preaching venue, and in 1978 his weekly telecast was expanded to one-hour.  By 1983, he had become the most popular television preacher in the United States with more than 250 stations broadcasting his program, reaching an estimated 80 million Jesus freaks weekly, and generating $150 million annually to the Jimmy Swaggart Ministries.  He was immensely popular, immensely rich, and, evidently, immensely bored with it all.

He was an insufferably pious big shot in1986 when he gleefully helped to defrock fellow Assemblies of God minister and competitor Marvin Gorman, who had conducted an extramarital affair with one of his parishioners.  And then the next year, when the PTL Ministry collapsed around Jim Bakker, another rival for Jesus dollars, Swaggart was ecstatic.  It was almost too good to be true.

But, if watching other people in misery was the Reverend’s favorite thing, then his next favorite was probably looking at pornography and having sex with $35 per-hour prostitutes in cheap motels.  When the rumors started flying, Jimmy was doomed.  Ironically, it was Marvin Gorman who nailed him.  In 1987, one year after Swaggart had publicly pole-axed Minister Gorman, revengeful Marvin paid a private detective to take photos of Jimmy with his regular Louisiana hooker.  Once he had the photos, ex-Minister Gorman tried blackmailing Reverend Swaggart, but Jimmy didn’t follow through on the payments.  So, Marvin turned to the same church elders who had disgraced him two years earlier.  When confronted by the Assemblies of God leadership, cocksman Swaggart had no choice but to confess.

The good Reverend told his peers that he had suffered a lifelong addiction to pornography.  It was probably no surprise to them.  All the signs were there.  Swaggart had written an article in 1987 asserting that “pornography is now considered as addictive as drugs”.  And, over the years, he had campaigned hard for tougher anti-porn legislation.  It was similar to Ted Haggard pontificating about bestial gays and sexual perversion at the same time he was having sex with a male prostitute and masturbating in front of teenagers.

The Assemblies of God had no recourse but to reprimand their shining star, so they decided to defrock him for one year.  It was like a misdemeanor slap on the wrist.  The next week, humbled Jimmy wound up crying on television.  In front of cameras and congregation, Swaggart seemed contrite:  “I have sinned against you, my Lord, and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God’s forgetfulness, never to be remembered against me.”  It was an Emmy-worthy performance.

But, the sinner never made any mention of the nature of his transgressions, referring only to some vague “moral failure”, and never promised to give up his sinful habits, either.  His normally-gullible followers weren’t fooled this time; his empire foundered and never recovered.  Within three years, his viewership had declined by more than 80 percent.

Nevertheless, Jimmy Swaggart soldiered on for Jesus, preaching the Gospel, knowing that God had his back.  But, in 1990, Penthouse magazine published an article featuring a woman who claimed to have had an extramarital affair with Preacher Swaggart.  Between 1987 and 1988, according to the lady, they had met up on ten separate occasions.  She mentioned beating him with a riding crop, but only after Jimmy convinced her to do it.  A few months later, Penthouse ran an exclusive interview with the Minister’s favorite Baton Rouge prostitute, Debra Murphree.  She claimed that Swaggart once asked her if he could screw her nine year-old daughter.  Even a prostitute knows better than that; she said, “No!”

The horny Pastor then took his “Lookin’ for Love” road show to California.  During a preaching tour, Swaggart drove his white Jaguar into the desert town of Indio.  There he propositioned 31 year-old Rosemary Garcia, who promptly got in the car.  Later, the lovers were pulled over by cops for driving on the wrong side of the road.  Garcia told a Palm Springs TV news crew that Swaggart had picked her up, then inquired where they could find a motel with in-room porn video.  When the reporter asked why Swaggart had approached her, Garcia said, “He asked me for sex.  I mean that’s why he stopped me.  That’s what I do.  I’m a prostitute.”

Shaken but not stirred by these scandals, the Jimmy Swaggart Ministries today mainly comprises the Family Worship Center in Baton Rouge, The Jimmy Swaggart Telecast, other radio and television programs, and a website.  The reprobate Minister is still preaching, if not practicing, the Holy Word, and continues to vacuum out the wallets of his faithful dimwit followers.  On November 10, 2002, the confessed porn addict Swaggart publicly called-out Islam’s Prophet Muhammad as a “pervert” and a “sex deviant”.

“I’ve Got Your Back!”

The scope and depravity of what has become known as the “Catholic Church Sex Abuse Scandal” only began to achieve notoriety in the last two decades of the 20th century.  The scandal, which continues to unfold, concerns sex crimes against children committed by Catholic priests and members of religious orders under diocesan control.  One of the more troubling aspects of the scandal is that the heinous crimes against innocent children were known to officials in the Church hierarchy, possibly all the way to the top.  And, there was an organizational effort to hide the crimes, throttle complainants, and hide the sex pervert priests when they became exposed

The scale of the scandal is staggering.  In the United States alone, almost 4,400 Catholic priests and deacons have been accused of approximately 11,000 cases of sexual abuse, according to the John Jay Report, published by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.  That report stated that the abuse was primarily sexual in nature and involved mostly boys between the ages of 11 and 17.

By 2009, U.S. dioceses had paid out more than $2.6 billion in abuse-related costs.  Several dioceses found it necessary to close churches and in some cases declare bankruptcy.  In Ireland, 18 religious orders agreed to pay victims about $1.2 billion Euros ($1.7 billion USD).  Catholic congregations in many other countries have been hit hard, too.  Confidence in the Mother Church is at an all-time low.

One of the more notorious pervert priests uncovered to date was John Geoghan of the Boston Archdiocese.  Over a 30-year career in six parishes, Father Geoghan was accused of sexual abuse involving 130 children.  After initially agreeing to, and pulling out of, a $30 million settlement with 86 of Geoghan’s victims, the Boston archdiocese settled for $10 million and is still negotiating with other victims.  The most recent settlement proposed is $85 million for 542 victims of priests within the Boston archdiocese.

The settlements are being made because of evidence that the archdiocese had transferred Geoghan from parish to parish despite warnings of his behavior.  As a result of allegations against Geoghan, evidence arose that the archdiocese displayed a pattern of shipping other priests to new parishes when allegations of sexual abuse were made.  In other words, the Church simply found fresh meat for the known predator, rather than firing him or turning him over to civil authorities.

When Geoghan finally entered the criminal justice system, his reputation preceded him.  In 2003, while in protective custody at the Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center , Father Geoghan was strangled and stomped to death by his cellmate, a self-described white supremacist serving time for murdering a sexual deviant.

A number of high-level Catholic Church officials have been implicated in the scandals.  Probably the most infamous of these clergymen is Cardinal Bernard Law of the Boston Archdiocese. His actions and inactions relative to accusations of sexual impropriety by priests under his direction prompted public scrutiny of all members of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the steps they had taken in response to past and current allegations of sexual misconduct at the hands of priests.  Cardinal Law became the first individual shown to have actively participated in the cover-up of child molestation.  The evidence was overwhelming, but the Cardinal refused to step down as Archbishop of Boston.

A massive number of lawsuits were filed against the Archdiocese.  As a result, the Archdiocese lost millions of dollars in fines and settlements, it slipped into large financial deficits, and had to close sixty-five parishes in a cost-cutting move.

Eventually, fifty priests signed a letter declaring no-confidence in Cardinal Law and asking him to resign.  When he did finally submit his resignation to the Vatican and Pope Paul II, he was allowed to remain a Cardinal and was put in charge of the prestigious Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, with the title of Archpriest.

The office of the Vatican in charge of oversight of clerical discipline, the “Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith”, has been involved in questions regarding the final disposition of clergy accused of sexual abuse.  Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was Prefect of the CDF for twenty-four years from 1981-2005, when the sexual abuse scandal hit the fan.  Criminal investigators during this period were pretty much stonewalled by Ratzinger’s CDF with little admission of any type of problem.

In 2006, Cardinal Ratzinger was elected Pope (known as Benedict XVI) by his appreciative cronies.

What Would Jesus Say?

Below is Chapter 8 of my book on religion, “Disbelief”.

                                           THE DIVINE MONEY MACHINE

 As Lord Acton famously said, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”

This has been especially true throughout the history of the Catholic Church.  Many “holy men” have used their priestly camouflage to incite mob violence, lead holy wars, or torture critics in the name of God.  These zealots don’t seem to be truly religious in nature but, rather, absorbed by the narcotic of power.  Their goal is, apparently, to advance the organization (i.e. the Church) and its hegemony, at any cost.  These Worker Bees for Christ seem to ascribe to the Communist motto, “The end justifies the means”.

In the process of glorifying the Mother Church, however, there is the opportunity for charlatans to use the license and trust given to them to glorify their own ego, satisfy their lusts, and line their pockets.  Unfortunately, there have been too many of these dregs, who have busied themselves with fleecing the faithful.

The Catholic Church is probably the wealthiest business corporation on earth.  From the humble beginnings of a carpenter’s son, a religious money machine evolved through the efforts of some very clever and ruthless confidence men.  Hardly any stone was left unturned in the frenzied dash to acquire and enjoy the fruits of their parishioners’ labors.

It is an ironic fact that the original Levite priests (in the Old Testament) received no pay for their services to the faithful Hebrews, nor did the pagan priests that were shown the door by the new Christian religion in the 4th century.

Jumping on the Bandwagon

Emperor Constantine’s embrace of Christianity set in motion a stampede of self-serving uppergclass citizens to enlist in the new Church hierarchy.

There had been no professional priestly class in pagan Rome.  The priests (haruspices) that pagans had were elected or co-opted from prominent citizens, laymen not experts, and their chief function was to propitiate the relevant gods to ensure continued good fortune.  They did this through proper ceremony; belief did not really come into it.  Christianity introduced organizational structure into religion, and, with it, a way to wealth and career outside of the only real alternative – the army.

By the end of the 4th century, what remained of Rome’s old senatorial class looked with envy on the Imperial generosity that was being showered on the Christian clergy.  By that time, there was a cost, both financial and penal, for remaining a pagan.  So, “the best and brightest” moved wholesale into the higher ranks of the Church, where they could feed at the Imperial trough.

Ironically, it happened at the worst time for the Empire.  Thanks to Constantine’s “religious revolution” and the subsequent establishment of a state-endorsed Catholic Church, the manpower that might have defended the Empire was drawn increasingly into the higher ranks of the priesthood.  Bright, young men who would have normally become military officers found comfortable positions in the Church bureaucracy, at the very time that militaristic tribes from Northern Europe were looking covetously at Rome.

Within the Church, these high-born hierarchs often clashed with and drove out puritan and “heretical” individuals.  At the same time, they brought into the Church much of the familiar ritual and regalia of paganism.  Thus entrenched, the new Christian grandees became the recipients of Imperial largesse, took up residence in palaces and appeared resplendent in the finest costumes.  By and large, the 5th century bishops of western Europe were the old Roman aristocracy wearing a new hat.

“Privilegia Ecclesiastica”

As historian Edward Gibbon noted, the foolish Constantine was perhaps the first of a thousand monarchs who “too easily believed that he should purchase the favour of Heaven if he maintained the idle at the expense of the industrious”.  By the “idle”, he meant the clergy.

The revolution of Constantine transformed the Church beyond recognition.  Bishops and priests, no longer elected or acclaimed by the faithful but members of a self-perpetuating “order”, enjoyed exemption from taxation and all other public service.  As state officials they received generous stipends.  These Church custodians couldn’t “own” property, but they enjoyed a privileged and exclusive use of ever-grander riches and property that accrued to the Church.

Bishops and priests schemed to receive bequests from those who died or were just enamored with the Church.  The temptation for Church officials to take advantage of their new-found positions of trust was great, particularly with grieving families and widowed women.

The Senatorial class that once made laws in Rome wasted no time in seeking legal protection as members of the clergy.  In 321, Constantine began the process by which the clergy were exempted from the jurisdiction of civil law, and the decisions of bishops became binding on civil magistrates.  As Gibbon noted, “Even in a capital accusation, a synod of their brethren were the sole judges of their guilt or innocence…Constantine was satisfied that secret impunity would be less pernicious than public scandal, and the Nicene council was edified by his public declaration that, if he surprised a bishop in the act of adultery, he should cast his Imperial mantle over the Episcopal sinner”.  So, if a bishop or presbyter was caught cheating someone out of property or valuables, he didn’t have to worry about legal ramifications.

This came in handy in 366, when an ambitious presbyter named Damasus had his sights on the papal throne.  Unfortunately for Damasus, a rival presbyter named Ursinus beat him to the punch, getting his followers to elect him pontiff.  Not to be undone, Damasus had his partisans besiege the Ursinus gang, holed-up in the basilica of the Church of Mary Maggiore in Rome.  Unable to break in, they climbed onto the roof of the building, forced a hole and began raining masonry onto the heads of their rivals.  When the Ursinus clan capitulated after three days, one hundred and seventy-seven dead and dying were brought out of the wrecked church.  Damasus had won the battle, and was declared the true Pope.  But, the charge of murder hung over Damasus for years.  His name was further blackened in the eyes of many when he renounced his wife and family, became involved in running Rome’s city brothels, and was later accused of misappropriating inheritances of wealthy spinsters.

Luckily for Damasus, “privilegia ecclesiastica” reared its head in 378 when, Emperor Gratian, in a political move, saved the Pope’s bacon when he exempted the Bishop of Rome from secular law.

Pope Damasus I, the boss of a gang of murderers, was later proclaimed a “Saint” of the Catholic Church.

Imperial Favor

Money, property, and treasures began flooding the Catholic Church after the Christian religion was legalized under Emperor Constantine and made his “favored” religion.

In the beginning, Church big-shots had to be satisfied with minor positions at the Imperial court and the good life that came with them.  Later, as Constantine and his followers cracked down on heretic Christians, real estate from seized churches and the treasures within them were appropriated by the Church.

Once Catholicism became the official religion of the Empire, Christian fanatics and monks, acting as de-facto Imperial agents, sacked thousands of pagan temples and shrines.  An astounding amount of wealth poured into the coffers of the Church, much of it plundered from the treasuries of pagan sanctuaries.

Imperial entourages in Rome and Constantinople became bloated with Church parasites.  Being a Church heirarch was now a very lucrative and powerful profession.  This is the period when the Roman upper class jumped ship en masse to the Christian cause.

Ammianus Marcellinus, a noted 4th century Roman historian, commented on these religious carpetbaggers:  “I do not deny, when I consider the ostentation that reigns at Rome, that those who desire such rank and power may be justified in labouring with all possible exertion and vehemence to obtain their wishes; since after they have succeeded, they will be secure for the future, being enriched by offerings from matrons, riding in carriages, dressing splendidly, and feasting luxuriously, so that their entertainments surpass even royal banquets.” (Res gestae, 27.3)

Squeezing Grapes

The Catholic Church, having secured it place at the Imperial banquet table, next devised nefarious means to extract filthy lucre from their gullible parishioners.  They are called the “Sacraments” of the Church.

The term derives from the Latin word, sacramentum, which referred to the sacred oath of fidelity sworn by Roman soldiers.  The idea in some bishop’s mind was to achieve unflinching loyalty and obedience from the “soldiers of Christ”.  So, the “sacraments” of the Church were developed for a venal purpose:  to make the priesthood indispensible to the communities on which it fed.

Baptism:              In the early Church, converts had been adults or at least adolescents.  Baptism, or a spiritual rebirth, came after a probationary period during which the convert displayed his knowledge of the mysteries and ability to respond to pagan critics.  Since the convert was expected to live his life in pursuit of sinless purity, some held off baptism until late in life.  Emperor Constantine, for example, waited until he was on his deathbed, finally convinced that he would no longer commit “sin”.

                                The need for infant baptism came about after a couple of creative theologians (Cyprian and Origen) devised the Original Sin and “pollution of birth” doctrines.  In essence, the idea was that since all humans are descended from Adam, and he had sinned, then all humans are infected with that sin, and need to be baptized to remove that stain.  That neither the Original Sin nor infant baptism ideas were supported by the New Testament mattered little to Bishops Cyprian and Origen.

Saint Augustine further developed the fiction, with the cruel notion that un-baptized babies went straight to Hell, effectively terrorizing parents into seeking out the priest.  In 416, the Council of Mela, presided over by the fanatical Augustine, issued a curse on the opponents of infant baptism.

In Rome, bishops enthusiastically endorsed the idea, a doctrine that efficiently delivered newborns into the hands of the Church, where they could be indoctrinated from an early age.  As part of the baptismal ritual, “spiritual parents” were appointed for the infant convert, particularly where the child had been born to pagan parents.  Often these “god parents” were deacons from the local Catholic hierarchy.  Fees were paid for services rendered.

In 416, an Imperial edict made infant baptism compulsory throughout the Roman Empire.  Millions of customers were now assured to the Church, whether the parents liked it or not.  And, they had to pay the clergy for the service…a divine inoculation against sin.

The Church now controlled the youth of the Empire, filling their heads with nonsense and recruiting them for religious mischief.  As Saint Ignatius of Loyola later said, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will show you the man.”

This corporate indoctrination policy was copied a thousand years later when the Nazis formed the “Hitler Youth”.

Confirmation:   Infant baptism had its limitations.  How could the Church be sure that many, in adulthood, might not fall away from the true religion?   The answer was to confer “additional grace” when the communicant had achieved the use of reason. 

                                                The ritual of confirmation had little history before Pope Innocent I, in the 5th century, decided that here was a sacrament that could be profitably administered by fellow bishops.  In essence, true believer parents would be purchasing the bishop’s sincere and personal blessing of their children, who would now become official “Soldiers of Christ”.

Eucharist:            Ritual meals, in which the revered deity was said to be present, were commonplace in pre-Christian religions.  Early Christians (actually, Jewish-Christians) had such a love feast (agape), which was spontaneous and indulgent.  The celebration commemorated the imminent messianic kingdom, i.e. the world passing away.

                                                The Catholics gave new meaning to the agape celebration; it was now to be a somber event, exercising quiet humility, always attended by the bishop.  The morsel of bread and sip of wine represented the “body and blood” of the Savior, a gift to each communicant by the Holy Spirit. 

                                                The eucharist is central to the ceremonies of the Church, the regular gathering of the flock for an obligatory dose of self-discipline, pastoral chastisement, and encouragement in the faith.  Parishioners leave the church envigorated, more fit for heaven.  And, the Church achieves its purpose: marshaled ranks of dutiful and obedient servants.

                                                In order to acquire this weekly dose of grace, the faithful had to attend church, and once again pass the collection plate.

Penance:             The Christian ideas of “salvation” and “heaven” were new concepts, especially to pagans and Jews.  Heretofore, existence had been day-to-day, and the assistance of God was requested to help out with worldly matters.  The moral compass of “do unto others…” was known and practiced before Christianity.

The Church’s “Original Sin” doctrine basically declared all human beings criminals in the eyes of God…from birth.  The entire purpose of the doctrine was to make mankind beholden to the Church, the only place where guilt could be assuaged.  It was extortion, pure and simple.

                                                The “Heaven” and “Hell” constructs were the carrot and the stick to induce parishioners into the confessional booth.  If one confessed sins, Divine Grace would be given, and the believer would go to Heaven.  If not, the individual could expect a pitiless, eternal torment.  To terrified parishioners in the Dark Ages, the choice was obvious.

                                                The hapless Christian was goaded into admitting and confessing every possible “sin”, whether in thought or deed.  Churchmen became privy to human weaknesses, dark secrets, and valuable confidences.  Thus informed, the priest was empowered to offer, or withhold, “absolution” and set penalties.  Or the priest might order the contrite believer to make a payment, supposedly almsgiving to the poor or “service to the altar”.  There was an obvious conflict of interest inherent in the process.

                                                The venality, licentiousness and impurity of much of the priesthood at that time was apparent to the congregation.  Many of the priests taking confessions were bigger sinners than their parishioners, and the issue arose as to whether they were fit to represent Christ in such matters.  In a clever stratagem, the Church ruled that the sacrament was efficacious (with the capacity to have effect), even if the priest administering it was a known bad guy.  In this case, the Church opined, the sacrament acted ex opere operato (by the very act of being performed), and were independent of the morality of the minister.  This may have been the origin of the saying, “Do as I say, not as I do”. 

                                                In the early days, priests were known to take liberties with their flock during confession.  The scandal of priests too free with their hands (solicitatio ad turpia) would later force the adoption of the confessional box to afford the penitent some protection.

                                                The absurdity of the penance sacrament reached an all-time high during the Crusades.  Private armies, comprised of thugs and criminals, were granted penance in-advance for sins that they would commit in the Holy Lands on behalf of the Church.  These so-called “indulgences” excused the burning and looting of towns, raping of women, and massacres of whole communities.  As far as the Church was concerned, these activities were “just” and the mercenaries were “Soldiers of Christ”.  Thus, the heinous acts were no bar to salvation.

Annointing:        One of the great mysteries of life is death, and may be the ultimate reason why religion was developed.  There is great fear and apprehension as death approaches, and much grief to be dealt with when it occurs.  Since the beginning of time, priests have positioned themselves as “gatekeepers on the door to eternity”.

                                                The supposed ability of holy men to cure the sick and forgive the sins of the dying is a card that is well-played by the Church.  Annointing, also known as “extreme unction”, or last rites), is a sacrament devised to ensure the presence of the Church at the moment of truth.  With the right words uttered over the death bed, sins can be forgiven, and a comfortable life in the ever-after can be assured.

The dying are quite vulnerable at this time, as are family members of the soon-to-be-departed.  Will the dead be buried in hallowed ground? What will become of the widow?  What would become of his estate?  What better management of these matters than the trusted hands of the Church…as if God himself is taking care of things.

                                                It became obvious to the Church at an early time that the new Christians would pay handsomely for their ticket to Heaven.  Very early on in Christianity, the Church sought, and was granted by Emperor Constantine, the legal right to accept bequests to the Church.  This law had a particular angle: it stressed the validity of a man’s deathbed legacies to a church’s funds, a topic which was particularly sensitive because of the clergy’s special presence at the moment of death.

                                                Over the centuries, the Holy Mother Church grew immensely rich through the inheritance of land, property, and portable riches from deceased Catholics.  Estates and assets not commandeered by churchmen for their own uses were leased to those who could pay a levy, and the Church entered the business of landlordism.

Matrimony:        Marriage was not, of course, invented or even practiced by Jesus.  In pre-Christian times the marriage ceremony might be sanctified by a priest, but essentially mutual agreement in the presence of witnesses was the only prerequisite.  A high-status wedding would involve banquets, dowries and property transfer, while among the peasantry an acclamation at a grove or shrine might dignify the occasion.

                                The adoption of matrimony as a holy sacrament was politically and economically useful to the Church, extending its dominion over the faithful.  In order to receive the Church’s blessing to marry, the couple would have to promise to raise the children “in the faith”.  The children would then become loyal servants of the Church, and the vicious cycle of exploitation would continue.

                                Over time, the Church found ways to make a lot of money from this sacrament.  Marital discord meant penance, which meant offerings to the Church.  “Blood marriages” (i.e. marriage with blood relations) was declared a sin, but dispensations could be purchased by those who had extractable wealth.  Divorce was a sin, but a priest could grant an annulment if the proper fee was paid.

                                Procreation, and lots of it by Catholics, was then, and always has been, a major objective of the Church.  More babies mean more baptisms, more confirmations, more seats filled at mass, more weddings, and more last rites.  All of these occasions produced income for the Church.  And, as the population of Catholic citizens in a parish or state grew, so did the political power of the priest, bishop, cardinal, and Pope.  Along with political power came spoils, including property and position at court.

                                Accordingly, the Church has insisted on controlling procreation by the Catholic faithful.  The Church’s stand on contraception and abortion, while cruel and unfair to married couples, is totally self-serving.  No parishioner (even a raped women) has a say in the management of the Church’s lucrative customer base.  As the Mafia saying goes, “It’s not personal, it’s business.”   

                                It is commonly believed that Catholic priests cannot marry (i.e. they remain celibate) so that they can remain steadfast and true to their primary purpose of serving God.  The same goes for the chaste and celibate nuns, who are supposedly “married to Christ”.  But, actually, the Church doctrine requiring priestly celibacy was not instituted for those lofty purposes.  What actually happened was that the Church got very rich very quick.  Some of the high-styling bishops and priests, accustomed to living a life of luxury, began to think of their church’s possessions and benifices as their own.  This led to the thought that their children might “inherit” the goodies that their father had grown accustomed to.  Emperor Justinian I (who died in 565) basically forbade church officials from having children, and if they did, the children would be considered illegitimate on the same level as those “procreated in incest and in nefarious nuptials”.  That pretty much ended any thoughts of inheriting Church property or treasures.

                                Despite this and numerous other attempts by authorities to end priestly sexual shenanigans, many, if not most, rural priests were married well into the 12th century.  And, many continued to have children, as well, who fed from the Church trough.

The Second Lateran Council (1139 A.D.) is often cited as having for the first time introduced a general law of celibacy, requiring ordination only of unmarried men.  And, they couldn’t have a concubine on the side, either.

The policy said nothing, however, about a priest having sex with a woman, a man, or a child.  Not surprisingly, many priests, bishops, cardinals, and popes have used this loophole.

Holy Orders:      The ordination of bishops, priests, and deacons is a sacrament of the Church called Holy Orders.  The officiating officer is essentially vesting in the recipient the cloak of Christ’s stature.  As Ignatius said to the Ephesians, “Plainly therefore we ought to regard the bishop as the Lord Himself.”

Receipt of holy orders was an honor and carried with it serious obligations regarding the welfare of the parish and upholding the trust that the parishioners had in the Church.  Holy orders also placed the recipient in the reception line for the bounty of riches that flowed to the Church, much like a named partner in a law firm.

                                The credibility of the holiness of such orders was diminished somewhat with the flood of ex-Roman aristocrats into the Church beginning in the 4th century.  The conversion of these ex-Senatorial plutocrats into the Catholic fold was less theological than simply a changing of attire.  There was a political and economic imperative for them to do so, and the Church benefitted as well, by the stature that these individuals and families brought to the table.  It wasn’t long before these carpetbaggers began to secure ecclesiastical preferments for family members, with several members of the same family simultaneously holding holy office.  As the Who song, We Won’t Get Fooled Again, goes, “…meet the new Boss, same as the old boss”.

Rule by a group of elders or presbyters, which had characterized the early Church, faded from the scene.  The bishop who had previously received his office by acclamation of his parishioners now received his holy appointment courtesy of existing bishops in neighboring sees.  Nepotism ran rampant.

The new princes of the Church were used to high-living and enjoying the finer things in life.  Many flaunted the accoutrements of their lofty Church appointments.  Church historian Sulpicius Severus, in 403 A.D., penned these words of disgust: “For to the Levites, who had been set apart for the priesthood, no portion was given, in order that they might the more freely serve God.  I desire not, in silence, to pass over the example thus set, but I would earnestly bring it forward as well worthy of being read by the ministers of the Church.  For these seem to me not only unmindful of this precept, but even utterly ignorant of it – such a lusting for possessing has, in this age, seized, like an incurable disease, upon their minds.  They gape upon possessions; they cultivate estates; they repose upon gold; they buy and sell; they study gain by every possible means…they look for gifts; and, have corrupted the whole glory of life by their mercenary dispositions, while they present an appearance of sanctity, as if even that might be made a source of gain.”

The patrician-bishops lacked sophisticated religious sensibilities, but they were politically adroit and had skills at power-brokering.  Pastoral matters were devolved to the deacons, sub-deacons, and priests so that the bishop could concentrate on developing the power, wealth, and reach of the Catholic Church.  The diplomatic skill of the new Church hierarchs was skillfully used when, between the 4th and 8th centuries, western Europe was ruined by invasion and warfare.  Church officials had to nimbly deal with the spate of petty kings, dukes, barons, and counts who wrestled for lands and power.  While these “conquerors” might possess the land (temporarily, in many cases), the Church possessed spiritual control of the populace.  So, agreements were reached wherein the Church could go about its business so long as it supported the political leadership.  Eventually, the Church became part of the political establishment.

The cozy relationship between Church and state was critical because it perpetuated business dealings that brought a lot of income to the parishes.  Vast tracts of land were owned by the Church, accumulated through centuries of death-bed bequests and regal sweeteners, or simply stolen from “witches” and “heretics”.  Not merely peasant-farmers but whole towns and cities were subjected to fierce church rents and levies.  Newly-cleared land was tithed, as was cut wood and slaughtered livestock.  In medieval Europe, for example, it was not uncommon for churches to request a tithe (ten percent of income or produce) from local peasants.

In 779 A.D., Charlemagne (the “Holy Roman Emperor”) rewarded his ally Pope Hadrian I by issuing the Capitulary of Herstal, ordering all men within his realm (essentially all of Europe) to pay tithes to the Church.  In 1400, the Church decreed it a mortal sin not to leave at least ten percent of one’s estate to the Church in a will.

Commonly, the largest building in a village, after the church itself, was the barn that held the tithes.  Ceremonies throughout the year obligated generous gifts to the clergy.  The church hierarchy might dictate (in time of war, pestilence, coronation, etc.) special prayers, for which again payments were required.  In 1188, for example, an obligatory levy in England and much of France, was the Saladin tithe, raised to finance the warrior monks off on the Third Crusade.  Those who had no wealth to give gave instead their labor, toiling away in fields and vineyards or slaving as kitchen hands or personal servants to the local clergy.

Receiving “holy orders” was, indeed, a blessing from God.  It was, in essence, divine permission to shear the flock.  At the top of the food chain was the Pope, who was on the receiving end of a divine pyramid scheme.  Popes lived as well or better than kings and emperors.  Answerable to no one, they made their own rules.  They could ignore Church policy about celibacy and nepotism, for example.  A basic rule of the papacy, it seems, was to gather as much wealth for yourself and your family as possible.  Some of the best practitioners of this were the following Popes:

Sabinian – when Rome was threatened by invasion and plague, this Pope sold grain to the populace at exorbitant prices

                                Sergius II – famous for simony, i.e. selling of Church offices

Sergius III – his illegitimate son later became Pope John XI

Benedict IX – a famous hedonist and homosexual, this Pope sold the papacy to his godfather

Nicholas III – famous for repeated nepotism (granting Church offices to his relatives), he had himself named Senator for life

Boniface VIII – used the office in ruthless support of the interests of his family

Clement VI – moved the Papal offices to Avignon, France, where he lived in grandeur within a fancy palace

Sixtus IV – awarded gifts and benefices, including a cardinalship, to male court favorites for sexual favors

Innocent VIII – had three illegitimate children; lived in a grand style while the Vatican was practically insolvent; created Church offices solely in order to sell them to the highest bidder; pawned the papal tiara to a Roman merchant for extra cash

Alexander VI – had nine illegitimate children through many mistresses; poisoned several Cardinals; son, Rodrigo, the model for Machiavelli’s Prince, carved a personal empire out of Church real estate with his father’s help

Leo X – famous for saying, “God has given us the Papacy; let us enjoy it!”; lived in lavish splendor and left the Vatican bankrupt; sold “indulgences” to fund his extravagant parties

Paul III – strong supporter of nepotism… promoted two grandsons to Cardinal, one was 14 years-old and the other was 16; fathered four illegitimate children; made his illegitimate son Pier Luis Farnese the first Duke of Parma

Julius III – devoted himself to a life of luxury; famous for promoting a 16 year-old boy to be a cardinal because of the boy’s courage when bitten by the Pope’s pet monkey

Paul IV – used his office to enrich his family; made his nephew a cardinal and gave other relatives benefices and estates taken from those who supported Spain; was so despised that when he died, a mob tore down his statue

Urban VIII – known for “reckless nepotism”, made his brother and two nephews cardinals; most famous for condemning Galileo who claimed, correctly, that the earth revolves around the sun

Innocent X – allowed his sister to sell Church offices and benefices, and made her son a cardinal

Clement X — allowed his nephew to run the day-to-day affairs of the Papacy, while he concentrated his energies enriching his family and reducing the powers of other officials

Benedict XIII – surrounded himself with a cabal of Dominican monks who engaged in corrupt practices, selling church offices and taking bribes; spent most of his time in the Papacy enriching himself and his buddies

As someone famously said (maybe it was a Pope?), “the Lord helps those who help themselves”.

Inmates Running The Asylum

Below is Chapter 7 of my book on religion, “Disbelief”.

                                                    PEACE BE UNTO YOU

According to Church historians, early Christians were victims of religious persecution at every turn.  To hear them tell the story, all they wanted was to exercise their religious freedom.

Yet, from virtually the moment that the Christian church was legalized in the Roman Empire by the Edict of Milan in 313, church leaders embarked on an ever-expanding mission to stamp-out competing versions of their new religion as well as pagan beliefs.  Over the succeeding centuries, as the new Church gained more and more secular influence, and its dogma became more established, it then added established religions to its “enemies list”.

By the Middle Ages, Christianity (now the Roman Catholic Church) was the dominant religion in Europe and in a political position to have its followers and governmental agents ruthlessly stamp out all vestiges of competing theologies.  As philosopher Blaise Pascal later remarked, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.”

Christians as Victims   

“Persecution of the Christians” was a common theme of the early Catholic Church.   Supposedly, the Jesus Christ cult was picked on by orthodox Jews, and, later, Roman authorities hounded early Christians.  Whether the crucifixion of Jesus tale and the systematic persecution of early Christian leaders portrayed in the Acts of the Apostles actually occurred, or is simply metaphorical fiction putting a human face to some of Christianity’s early growth pains, no one knows for sure.

Roman historians documented many punishments meted out to enemies of the Empire.  In the 1st and 2nd centuries, civil punishments were directed at any agitators who threatened “Pax Romana”.  If the Bible is to be believed, the Jesus Christ cult (which was a branch of Judaism at that time) and orthodox Jewry were constantly at each other’s throats.  As far as Roman officials were concerned in the 1st and 2nd centuries, “Christian” Jews and the good, old fashioned Jews were, collectively, considered Jews, period.  At any rate, it is not surprising that Roman authorities would have taken measures against any Jews generally “disturbing the peace” (i.e. Pax Romana).

Although it is often claimed that Christians were persecuted for their refusal to worship the emperor, a general dislike for Christians likely arose among the populace from their refusal to worship the gods or take part in sacrifice, which was expected of those living in the Roman Empire.   Although the Jews also refused to partake in these actions, it seems that they were tolerated because they followed their own Jewish ceremonial law, and their religion was legitimized by its ancestral nature.   On the other hand, Romans believed that Christians, who were believed to take part in strange rituals and nocturnal rites, cultivated a dangerous and superstitious sect.

Evidence from suspect ancient documents suggests that the persecution of the Jewish-Christian sect by the Roman government did not occur until the reign of Nero, and it might not have started that early.  In 64 A.D., a great fire broke out in Rome, destroying portions of the city and economically devastating the Roman population.  In his book, Annals, historian Tacitus recorded that Nero was rumored to have ordered the fire himself, and in order to dispel the accusations, accused and savagely punished the already-detested Christians.  This is the story that Christians proudly tell when “persecution” is discussed.  However, as was mentioned in a previous chapter, many historians believe that these passages in Tacitus’ Annals were added much later by Christian redactors.  Another historian of the day, Suetonis, mentioned that Christians were killed under Nero’s reign, but does not mention anything about the fire.  Interestingly, the term “Christian” wasn’t in common usage during Nero’s reign, so one wonders if Suetonis’ writings were also amended after the fact, in order to bolster Christian allegations of persecution as early as the 1st century.

There is no known historical record of a law against Christians during Emperor Nero’s alleged persecution.  Church “tradition” informs believers that the Apostles Peter and Paul were martyred in Rome during this persecution.  However, the only evidence for this claim is derived from later martyrologies (i.e. stories concocted by the Church one to two hundred years after the fact).  Had Saints Peter and Paul actually been martyred during the reign of Nero, it is inconceivable that such incidents wouldn’t have been included in the Acts of the Apostles, which were clearly written after the reign of Nero.  Acts featured Peter and Paul, and focused on martyrdoms of key Christian leaders.

It was not until the reign of Emperor Decius, almost two hundred years after Nero, that a persecution of Christian laity across the Empire took place.   The persecution under Decius was the first universal and organized persecution of Christians.  In January 250, Decius issued an edict requiring all citizens to sacrifice to the emperor in the presence of a Roman official and obtain a certificate (libellus) proving they had done so.  This persecution lasted for one year.  Many Christians complied and earned the ever-lasting enmity of those who had not.  Wealthy Christians were able, with a suitable bribe to officials, to acquire the “Get out of jail free” card without making the required oath.

Under Valerian, who took the Imperial throne in 253, all Christian clergy were required to sacrifice to the gods.  In a 257 edict, non-compliance was punished with exile; in 258, the punishment became death.  Christian senators, knights and ladies were also required to sacrifice under pain of heavy fines, reduction of rank and, later, death. Finally, all Christians were forbidden to visit their cemeteries.

Many Christians were killed during this period, according to the Church.   At about this time, a letter by (later Pope) Dionysus stated that “men and women, young and old, maidens and matrons, soldiers and civilians, of every age and race, some by scourging and fire, others by the sword, have conquered in the strife and won their crowns.”  The seven-year period of official harassment and brutality under Valerian was easily the worst that Christians faced.

The prayers of Christians were answered in 260, when Emperor Valerian was captured in battle by the Persians.  Valerian was then persecuted by his captors, for a time being used as a human footstool by Persian strongman, Shapur I, when mounting his horse.  According to one version of events, after a long period of such treatment, Valerian offered Shapur a huge ransom for his release.  In reply, Shapur was said to have either forced Valerian to swallow molten gold or flayed him alive (accounts vary), and then had the unfortunate Valerian skinned, his skin stuffed with straw, and preserved as a trophy in the main Persian temple.

Over the next fifty years, there were several official anti-Christian persecutions authorized and, then, un-authorized within the Empire, depending on the mood and beliefs of the monarch in charge at the time.  Finally, in 313, by the Edict of Milan, the persecutions ended, and it became legal to be a Christian.

The persecutions of Christians by the Roman government failed to check the rise of the Church, and may have actually turned public opinion in its favor.  Although the several decades of official persecution resulted in the deaths of—according to one modern estimate—3,000 Christians, and the torture, imprisonment, or dislocation of many more, most Christians avoided punishment.

Documented history shows that religious persecution greatly increased within the Roman Empire beginning in the latter half of the 4th century.  Harassment, looting, destruction of property, and atrocities became a tool of the State.  What is surprising, however, is that Christians weren’t the target of this persecution; they were the eager instigators, cheerleaders, and participants

Enforced Monotheism

Christian fanatics had helped Constantine secure the Imperial throne in the early 4th century, or at least he may have believed that.  Accordingly, Christianity quickly became the “favored religion” of the Empire, and then Constantine moved to repay his Christian friends by beginning Imperial persecution of pagans.  This benefitted the Christian clergy by driving pagans into the fold, and also by providing the Church with important real estate assets (i.e. ex-pagan temples and their treasures).

Between 324 and 335, Constantine sacked pagan temples throughout the Empire, ordered the execution by crucifixion of all “magicians and soothsayers”, and looted the temples of treasures and statues to decorate Constantinople, the new capital of his Empire.

Constantius II, the son of Constantine, accelerated and deepened the campaign of pagan persecution by the Empire.  Between 341 and 357, he ordered the death penalty for all kind of worship through sacrifice and “idols”, ordered the closing of all pagan temples (providing many to the Catholic Church and turning others into brothels or gambling rooms), and ordered destruction of pagan temples and the execution of all “idolaters”.

In 364, Emperor Jovian issued several  Imperial edicts which: (1) ordered the death penalty for “all those that worship their ancestral gods or practice divination”;  (2) ordered the confiscation of all properties of the pagan temples; and, (3) ordered the death penalty for participation in pagan rituals, even private ones.  Emperor Valens followed up in 365 with an Imperial edict forbidding pagan officers of the army to command Christian soldiers.

In 380, Emperor Theodosius I, a newly-converted Christian, issued the Edict of Thessalonika, proclaiming Christianity the exclusive religion of the Roman Empire.  In this and follow-up edicts, the Emperor called non-Christians “loathsome, heretics, stupid and blind”, and labeled “insane” those who do not believe in the Christian God and outlawed all disagreement with the Church dogmas.

A chief Catholic theologian of the time, the esteemed “Saint” Augustine, rationalized the brutality of the pagan persecution by the Empire/Church: “There is a persecution of unrighteousness, which the impious inflict upon the church of Christ; and there is a righteous persecution, which the church of Christ inflicts on the impious…Moreover, she persecutes in the spirit of love, they in the spirit of wrath.”

The pious fanatic Augustine counseled the Emperor that forced conversion was the answer, quoting the Gospel of Luke, 14:23, “And the master said to the slave, ‘Go out into the roads and fenced-in places, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.”  So much for the doctrine of “free will”!

In 381, Theodosius declared that any Christians who returned to the pagan religion would be deprived of all their rights as a citizen of the Empire, and, in 388, outlawed public talks on religious subjects, except, of course, in Catholic churches.  And, in there, of course, the only one allowed to talk was the Catholic priest.

Between 390 and 500, the Empire stepped up its persecution and destruction of pagans, their property, and their memory.  Citizens were prohibited from not only visiting ex-pagan temples, but also from looking at the vandalized statues.  “Saint” John Chrysostom collected funds from rich Christian women to financially support hordes of grey-dressed monks armed with clubs and iron bars who traveled far and wide vandalizing pagan “idols”, sacking temples, and slaughtering priests.  The Olympic Games, a Greco-Roman tradition of some 600 years, were outlawed, and Christian fanatics sacked the temples of Olympia, Greece.  The 15th Council of Chalcedon, a self-important conclave of Catholic clergy, ordered that all Christians who still kept good relations with their non-Christian relatives be excommunicated (even after their death).

In 515, Saint Augustine’s fondest desire became reality:  Catholic baptism became obligatory for all citizens, even for those who were already Christians.  The Church now had government-sanctioned control of all matters spiritual throughout the Empire.

Thus, in little more than two centuries, the religious beliefs of 90 percent of the citizens of the Empire, and most of the evidence thereof, were obliterated by fanatical Emperors and their Catholic advisors.  During this time the Church became wealthy and powerful, serving as influential advisors to Emperors.

From 380 to 500, an untold number of pagan believers, priests, and Hellenic philosophers were slaughtered in the name of the “Prince of Peace”.  Historians believe that the numbers of Christians killed in Roman persecutions pale in comparison to the carnage wrought by the 4th and 5th century pagan “holocaust” directed by the Imperial Theocracy.

Christian Heretic Hunting

Christian clergy have been throwing charges of “heresy” at each other for two thousand years.  It’s a never-ending story; one man’s orthodoxy is another man’s heresy.

The bitter Arian-Trinitarian battle of the 4th century was finally won-out by Trinitarian forces, and those Christians became known as Catholic (another word for “orthodox” Christians).  They were orthodox simply because they were on the winning side.  Had they not prevailed, they could have been labeled “heretics”, because Arian Christianity was in the driver’s seat at the time.

Once the Catholic Church gained Imperial favor, they spent a lot of effort over the following couple of centuries squashing their heretical Christian brethren.  Un-cooperative clergy were deposed and sometimes murdered, heterodox writings were burned, and sectarian Christians lost possession of their churches and were even forbidden to assemble together.

By perhaps 600, Catholicism was endemic throughout European kingdoms (the former Western Roman Empire) and within the Byzantine Empire (the former Eastern Roman Empire).  The Church had moved on to more pressing issues (see Chapter 8, The Divine Money Machine), although there were always “unorthodox” Christian sects in various locations throughout Christendom.  And, the Church was always on the lookout for heretical individuals that it could bully.

In 782, in one of the more heinous examples of heretic hunting, Charlemagne (later crowned “Holy ‘Roman Emperor” by Pope Leo II) had 4,500 Saxons, unwilling to convert to Christianity, beheaded in what is known as the Massacre of Verden.

The Islamic Menace

As Aristotle once proclaimed, “Nature abhors a vacuum”.   Apparently, it is also necessary that a religious void must be filled, because that’s what occurred in the Middle East in the early 7th century.

Christians were on a roll, amassing religious as well as political power in most of the once mighty Roman Empire.  This could not have escaped notice in neighboring lands which had not embraced monotheism.  And, so, it is not surprising that, seemingly out of the blue, God decided to speak to an Arab man named Mohammed.  Or, so he claimed.

The nomadic, clannish, tribal Arab peoples of the Middle East had no experience with organized religion, no regional political strongmen, nor did they have any holy heroes, so to speak.  In Mohammedism (later to be termed Islam), they acquired provenance (claiming Biblical/Abrahamic roots), a local Arab hero/prophet to rally around (Mohammed), and a simple, unifying message tailored to Arab sensibilities.  The Islamic holy book, the Koran, is claimed to be a verbatim rendering of the conversations that Mohammed had with Allah (God).

Muslims (adherents of Islam) view Mohammed as a messenger from God, the last in a line of prophets including Abraham, Moses, and Jesus.  Muslims consider Hebrews and Christians “fellow children of The Book” (i.e. the Old Testament), recognizing that the Christian God, the Hebrew Yahweh, and the Islamic Allah are one and the same Almighty.

Thus, from an ecumenical point of view, it would seem that these religious brethren, sharing so much in common, would be able to live and let live, minding their own business, worshipping and honoring the One True God, whatever his name might be.

Of course, honoring God is not exactly what organized religion is about.  It is about the acquisition and use of power…in God’s name.  (By the way, the Islamic god, Allah, conveniently felt the same way about women as the Hebrew and Christian god, according to the author of the Koran.  Women were to be secondary citizens, chattel of the men folk, to be enjoyed or disrespected at the pleasure of the male horde. Not surprisingly, Allah communicated his support of polygamy to Mohammed, and the Prophet found his way clear to secure/own 13 wives.)

Mohammed and his followers, much like the Hebrews in the Old Testament fervently pursuing their Promised Land, and the Christians voraciously devouring the old Roman Empire, began an aggressive campaign to convert all people in the Arab world to Islam, whether they wanted it or not.  Beginning in about 630 A.D., Mohammed first, and then his followers after his death, quickly brought all of Arabia under Islamic control.  Over the next 400 years, large swaths of Europe, Asia, and Africa fell under Islamic control.

The Islamic juggernaut was not without it problems, however.  Jealousy and infighting among the “clergy” began almost immediately after Mohammed’s death in 632 A.D.  The esteemed Prophet had not left an heir or designated protege to lead the Islamic flock.  Two factions formed.  Shia Muslims believe that the caliph (or, successor) to Mohammed must be a holy man chosen by Allah from the “Family of the House”, i.e. Mohammed’s direct descendents.  In contrast, Sunni Muslims believe that the supreme religious and political leader should be elected by Muslims or their representatives (i.e. the priestly class).

A distinguishing characteristic of Islam is that, conceptually, it is a unified religious and political program.  There is really no “separation of Church and State” in a perfect Islamic world.  The religious leader IS the leader, and the law is religious-based (sharia).   This concept seems alien to today’s Western sensibilities; however, at the time that Islam was conceived and developed, the Roman Catholic Church was attempting, with great success at the time, to achieve the same thing in Europe and other areas.

Empire-Building

Beginning in 1095, the arrogance and ambition of the Roman Catholic prelates reached an all-time high when Pope Urban II commanded Christendom to embark on a holy war to “free” the Holy Lands from blasphemers who had occupied those territories for centuries.  The First Crusade was ostensibly a war between the Christians and the Muslims.  However, once the heavily-armed knights and their troops received Papal “indulgences” (i.e. in-advance forgiveness for sins they might commit in the holy war), they used the occasion to indiscriminately rape, plunder, pillage, and murder whenever they saw fit.  For example, the earliest crusaders found time to loot Hungarian cities and destroy Jewish enclaves in Germany, killing thousands of innocent citizens in the process, as they passed through Europe on the way to the Middle East.

The real slaughter began when the Christian armies reached the Holy Lands.  Antioch was conquered in June, 1098.  There, over 100,000 Turks, including men, women, and children were killed.  According to eyewitness Christian chronicler Fulcher of Chartres: the Christians “did not other harm to the women found in the enemy tents…save that they ran their lances through their bellies.”

Jerusalem itself was “liberated” in July, 1099 with the annihilation of 60,000 victims (Jewish and Muslim men, women, and children).  In the words of one eyewitness: “there in front of Solomon’s temple was such a carnage that our people were wading ankle-deep in the blood of our foes”, and after that “happily and crying for joy our people marched to our Savior’s tomb, to honour it and to pay off our debt of gratitude.”  It was reported that within the Temple enclosure alone about ten thousand infidels perished.

About one month later, at the Battle of Askalon, one observer reported that 200,000 heathens were slaughtered “in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ”, although other reports have the toll at no more than 60,000 Muslim fighters.

At any rate, the bloodshed of these battles was of biblical proportion, and they were repeated many times over in several other Crusades authorized by subsequent Popes.  Some historians estimate that, by the time the last Crusade had run its course in 1291, there had been as many as twenty million victims in the Holy Lands and Arab/Turkish areas alone.

In the end, Christendom was still denied possession of Jerusalem and the most holy sites that it had originally sought: incredibly, God’s own army had failed to achieve its objective.

Importantly, though, Christians had earned the everlasting emnity of the Arab/Islamic world.

Keeping the House in Order 

Crusades weren’t just about the Holy Lands.  Some popes used them to weed out heretics, settle old scores, court favor with European monarchs, and obtain the wealth and lands of their allegedly disloyal and misguided Christian brothers.

In 1209, Pope Innocent III authorized the Albigensian Crusade against French Christians (Cathars) who refused to accept Roman Catholic rule.  The first battle was in Bezirs, France, in 1209, where the city was destroyed and an estimated 20,000 to 70,000 inhabitants were slaughtered.  In the subsequent twenty years of war, nearly all of the Cathars (probably half of the population of southern France) were exterminated.  Actual warfare was followed by an Inquisition to search and destroy surviving/hiding heretics.  The last Cathars were burned at the stake in 1324.  It is estimated the victims of the so-called Cathar Heresy numbered upwards of one million souls, whose only sin was disobedience to the Holy Father in Rome.

The Cathars weren’t the only Christians who were taught a lesson by arrogant pontiffs.  In 1234, peasants of Steding, Germany rebelled at paying suffocating church taxes.  Pope Gregory IX authorized a crusade to show the faithful the error of their ways.  In the ensuing battle, the Dominican priest-led crusaders annihilated the community, killing between 5,000 and 11,000 men, women, and children.

Another example of Church house-cleaning was the demise of the Knights Templar.  During the crusades, this military Holy Order, officially endorsed by the Church in 1129, had some of the most skilled fighting units and also managed a large economic infrastructure within Christendom, including the first banking system within Europe.  When the Holy Lands were lost, papal support for the Order of Knights Templar waned.  Rumors began to circulate about the Order’s secret initiation ceremony, creating mistrust in Vatican halls.  At the same time, King Phillip IV of France was heavily in debt to the Order.  Taking advantage of the situation, and presumably acting to protect the Church, Phillip had many of the Order’s members arrested, tortured into giving false confessions, and burnt at the stake as heretics.   Under pressure from King Phillip, Pope Clement V disbanded the Order in 1312.  Instantly, Phillip’s debts were “forgiven”, but an important part of European infrastructure (i.e. banking) was devastated.

Acts of Faith

The “Inquisition” holds a particularly infamous position in the hierarchy of Church misdeeds.  The Catholic Encyclopedia devotes twenty full pages to rationalizing an excuse for the Inquisition and its approved procedures and methods.  By definition, an Inquisition is a special ecclesiastical institution for combating or suppressing heresy.  In other words, it is a tool of the Holy Father to stamp out any type of disagreement or discontent with Church dogma and policies.  It was also used to settle scores in the community and enrich the coffers of the Church.

The heyday of the Inquisition was the 13th through 16th centuries (four hundred years!) in Europe.  Supposedly, only Christians can be accused of heresy and be subject to a true Inquisition.  When an accusation was made, the defendant was reminded that heresy was subject to the penalty of death, so full confessions were rare.

Once a denial of the charges was made, the appointed Inquisitor had four methods of extracting confessions: (1) fear of death, i.e. by giving the accused to understand that burning at the stake awaited if he would not confess (as opposed to a quicker, more humanely administered death); (2) close confinement in a dungeon, possibly emphasized by curtailment of food; (3) visits of individuals who would attempt to induce free confession through friendly persuasion; and, (4) torture.

The defendant had no right to know the identity of his accusers, and testimony from infamous accusers (i.e. commonly-known perjurers) was accepted by the Church.  As the Catholic Encyclopedia naively notes, “Torture was not regarded as a mode of punishment, but purely as a means of eliciting the truth.”  The Church-approved limit on torture was that it was not to cause loss of life or limb or emperil life, and it was only to be applied once.  However, in actual practice, these guidelines were often ignored or circumvented.  For example, “with each new piece of evidence the rack could be utilized afresh, and secondly, by imposing new torments on the poor victim (often on different days), not by way of repetition, but as a continuation”.  Obviously a clever lawyer wrote that!

Once the accused was dutifully found guilty of heresy, the sinner was turned over to the cooperating civil authorities for punishment (typically burning at the stake).  Thus, the Church could, in effect, “wash its hands of the matter” and put the onus on the King or his cronies.  As the Catholic Encyclopedia states, “On the whole, the Inquisition was humanely conducted.”  This is blessed news, of course, to the thousands of individuals who were imprisoned, starved, tortured, stripped of all possessions, and roasted over burning coals in front of their neighbors.

Of particular note were the antics of the First Grand Inquisitor of Spain, one Tomas de Torquemada, who conducted a twenty-year reign of terror in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic monarchs of Spain at the time, wanted to rid the country of Marranos (ex-Jews) and Moriscos (ex-Muslims) suspected of being sham converts to Christianity.  Jews and Moslems had been given a choice: convert to Christianity or leave the country (where they had been resident for seven hundred years).  Many converted rather than leave their homes, businesses, and friends.

However, suspicions remained about these individuals who also happened to have wealth and property.  Pope Sixtus IV appointed Fray Torquemada (a Dominican priest) to administer the Inquisition, and this appointment was seconded by Sixtus’ successor, Pope Innocent VIII.  Thereupon, Senor Torquemada embarked on his own crusade, uncovering heretics and no-goodniks in every nook and cranny.  By the time Torquemada was done in 1498 (when he died), he had presided over the burning of 2,000 Jews and other assorted heretics.

The methods used by Torquemada’s Dominican goon squad to elicit confessions were inventive even by medieval standards.  Supposedly, humane tortures could “spill no blood”.  But, that didn’t rule out flogging, thumbscrews, the rack (stretching the victim’s extremities until joints dislocated), and red coals applied to the feet.  Also popular at the time was the “strappado”, in which the accused was suspended by his wrists and incrementally heavier weights were wrapped around his ankles or looped around his toes.  Other ingenious gadgets devised to elicit sincere confessions included:  the “Judas Chair”, where the victim was lowered anus first onto a sharply-pointed seat; the “Head Vise”, a cranial version of the thumbscrew; the “Pear”, an expandable, bulbous device that was inserted into the anus or vagina; and, the “Wheel”, where the victim was strapped onto a wheel and their bones are crushed.  Not surprisingly, these methods induced a high rate of confession.

The next diabolical step was the “auto da fe”, or act of faith, where the condemned would be publicly burned at the stake.  If the poor soul kissed the Holy Cross, he was garroted (strangled) before the fire was set.  If he merely apologized, he was barbequed with quick-burning logs.  In the case of a stubborn bastard, a slow-roast was conducted using fresh, slow-burning green wood.

To His Excellency Torquemada’s credit, a large percentage of his victims were very wealthy.  Researchers estimate that 91.6% of those judged in Valencia and 99.3% of those judged in Barcelona between 1484 and 1505 were of Jewish ancestry.  They were saddled with exhaustive fines, court costs, and their properties were seized.  All of the plundered wealth traveled up the hierarchy of cooperating church and governmental officials.  Presumably, just as Jesus would have wanted it.

The Inquisition in Spain outlasted Father Torquemada by another 300 years as its mandate was expanded to include general morality, book censorship, superstition, witches, bigamy, solicitation, and, surprisingly, negative comments about the Office of the Inquisition.  Over 50,000 such trials were eventually held in the name of the Prince of Peace.

The God-Killing Demons

Anti-semitism is as old as Christianity.  Anti-Judaic attitudes developed from the early years of Christianity, driven by numerous factors including theological differences, competition between churches and synagogues, the Christian drive for converts, misunderstanding of Jewish beliefs and practices, and alleged Jewish hostility toward Christians.

The latter might be understandable, as the Christians pretty much shanghaied the Jewish religion.  Back in the 4th century, Saint Augustine declared, “What we now call the Christian religion existed amongst the ancients, and was from the beginning of the human race, until Christ Himself came in the flesh; from which time the already existing true religion began to be styled Christian”.  That’s right…Judaism had actually been Christianity from the very beginning, all the way back to Abraham!  What’s peculiar, though, is why God did all the heavy lifting himself during the first several thousand years.  If his son Jesus was the Answer, why didn’t God send him earlier?

From a very early point in Christianity, a theme emerged that both the Jews present at Jesus’ death and the Jewish people collectively and for all time, have committed the crime of “deicide” (or God-killing).  This theory, originally attributed to 2nd century Bishop Melito of Sardis, gained traction during the Middle Ages when gullible, uneducated European peasants were brought into the Christian tent.

As early as the 4th century, anti-semitic attitudes were prevalent in the Church.  One of the so-called Church Fathers, Saint John Crysostom, in a homily called, Against the Jews, said, “The pitiful and miserable Jews…Certainly it is the time for me to show that demons dwell in the synagogue, not only in the place itself but also in the souls of the Jews…And this is what happened to the Jews: while they were making themselves unfit for work, they grew fit for slaughter.”

Attitudes of contempt for Jews persisted in Christian preaching over the centuries and in many Christian countries it led to civil and political discrimination.  For one thousand years in Europe, almost all of the monarchs were Catholic and there was a close cooperation between the Church and the State.  Jews were subject to a wide range of legal restrictions during the Middle Ages, some of which lasted until the end of the 19th century.  Jews were excluded from many trades, the occupations varying with place and time, and determined by the influence of various non-Jewish competing interests.  Local rulers and church officials closed many professions to the Jews, pushing them into marginal occupations considered socially inferior, such as tax and rent collection and money lending, tolerated then as a “necessary evil”.  Catholic doctrine of the time held that lending money for interest was a sin, and forbidden to Christians.  Not being subject to this restriction, Jews dominated this business.  This was then used to imply that Jews were insolent, greedy usurers, and subsequently lead to many stereotypes and propaganda.

Natural tensions between creditors (typically Jews) and debtors (typically Christians) were added to social, political, religious, and economic strains.  Peasants who were forced to pay their taxes to Jews (the tax collectors) could personify and demonize them as taking their earnings, while remaining loyal to their Christian lords (the one’s doing the taxing and on whose behalf the Jews worked!).  Jews were eventually accused of a variety of crimes against the good Christians of Europe including causing the Black Plague, kidnapping children and drinking their blood (fictions generally classified as “blood libels”), and desecrating Christian sacraments.

Anti-semitic discrimination took many forms:  in some communities, the number of Jews permitted to reside in different places was limited; they were concentrated in ghettos, and were not allowed to own land; they were subject to discriminatory taxes on entering cities or districts other than their own; they were forced to swear special Jewish oaths; and, suffered a variety of other measures, including restrictions on dress.  The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, under Pope Innocent III, proclaimed the requirement for Jews to wear something that distinguished them as Jews.  It could be a colored piece of cloth in the shape of a star or circle or square, a Jewish hat, or a robe.  Jews sought to evade the badges by what amounted to bribes in the form of temporary “exemptions”, which were revoked and re-paid whenever the ruling authority needed to raise funds.

When the Church successfully completed its Albigensian Crusade in southern France, the Counts of Toulouse were required to discriminate against Jews like other Christian rulers.  Explicit provisions on the subject were included in the Treaty of Meaux (1229).  Within a short time, the newly-chastened and now-zealous Christian rulers were arresting and imprisoning Jews for no crime, raiding their houses, seizing their cash, and removing their religious books.  The offending Jews were then released only if they paid a new “tax”.  The practice of expelling the Jews, accompanied by confiscation of their property, followed by temporary readmissions for ransom, was a popular device of European monarchs in the Middle Ages, including the French kings during the 12th to 14th centuries, Ferdinand II and Isabella of Spain in 1492, the kingdom of Portugal in 1496, and Frederick II of Prussia in 1744.

The displaced, persecuted, and heavily-taxed Jews of the Middle Ages were the lucky ones.  Beginning with the First Crusade, tens of thousands of Jews were slain in various pogroms throughout Europe.  Some of the highlights include:  1290, Bohemian (Poland), allegedly 10,000 Jews killed; 1337, beginning in Deggendorf, Germany, a Jew-killing craze reached 51 towns in Bavaria, Austria and Poland; 1348, all Jews of Basel, Switzerland and Strasbourg, France (2,000) burned; 1349, in 350 German towns, all Jews murdered, most of them burned alive; 1389, Prague (Czechoslovakia), approximately 3,000 Jews were slaughtered; and, 1391, in Seville (Spain), with Archbishop Martinez leading the way, 4,000 Jews were slain and 25,000 others were sold as slaves.

In 1964, the Catholic Church, under Pope John VI, issued a document Nostra Aetate, which finally laid to rest the bogus anti-semitic charge of deicide concocted by one of its bishops back in the 2nd century.

For Thirty Pieces of Silver

Unfortunately, Nostra Aetate was a bit late to save the 6 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

Adolf Hitler was a product of the anti-semitism begun by Church saints in the 3rd and 4th centuries.  Mr. Hitler was a Roman Catholic, baptized as an infant in Austria.  He became a communicant and an altar boy in his youth and was confirmed as a “Soldier of Christ” in that church.  Young Hitler did well in monastery school.  He sang in the choir, found High Mass and other ceremonies intoxicating, and idolized priests.  Impressed by their power, the young man at one time considered entering the priesthood.  It’s a shame that didn’t happen, but the Church’s worst doctrines never left him.  He was steeped in its liturgy, which contained the words “perfidious Jew” (perfidy means treacherous).

In his day, hatred of Jews was the norm.  In great measure it was supported by the two major religions of Germany, Catholicism and Lutherism.  Young Adolf had great admiration for Martin Luther who called Jews “ungodly wretches” and opined that “We ought to take revenge on the Jews and kill them!”  Luther’s 1543 tract On the Jews and Their Lies, is believed to be a principal inspiration for Hitler’s own political manifesto, Mein Kampf.

As he matured, Hitler melded his Christian beliefs with an emerging racial theory called Christian Aryanism.  According to that theory, Judaism was viewed as a racial curse, and Jesus was an Aryan soldier who brought the sword to cleanse the earth of Jews.  Germany’s ambitions had ended in humiliating defeat in the First World War, followed by a wrecked economy.  Putting all of this together (the anti-semitic religious culture, the Aryan theory, and the need for a scapegoat for Germany’s problems) when he sought power in 1925, Hitler wrote, “I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator.  By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.”  Years later, when in power, he quoted the same words in a Reichstag speech in 1938.  Three years later he informed General Gerhart Engel: “I am now as before a Catholic and will always remain so.”

Adolf Hitler never left the Church, and the Church never left him.  Great literature was banned by the Church, but Mein Kampf never appeared on the Index of Forbidden Books.  The Fuhrer was never excommunicated or even condemned by the Church.  This is because Mr. Hitler had a very special relationship with the Vatican, one that most people don’t know about.

Stripped of her last Papal States in 1925, the Mother Church lay bankrupt until Italian dictator Benito Mussolini came to the rescue.  In exchange for the Pope’s support for his fascist regime, Il Duce made an up-front payment of $100 million, instituted state salaries for the Italian clergy, and restored the Vatican City’s nationhood.

Not quite satisfied, then-Pope Pius XI coveted still richer booty, and God answered his prayers.  Adolf Hitler, wanting to solidify his political power in a nation with more Roman Catholics than Italy, eagerly sought similar ties with the Church.  The resulting 1933 Concordat, engineered by future Pope Pius XII, was one of history’s richest kickback schemes.  The Pope gave Hitler legitimacy, the support of his office, and the enforced loyalty of German prelates.  In return, one-tenth of the income tax paid by German Catholics would flow from Hitler’s treasury to the Church’s accounts.  This averaged the equivalent of $100 million per year or approximately $1 billion over the life of the Third Reich.  Because the grateful pontiffs held the same absolute control over the Church’s funds that the Fuhrer exercised over the German treasury, it can be fairly said that Pope Pius XI (reigned 1922-1939) and Pope Pius XII (reigned 1939-1958) were on Hitler’s payroll.  Protestant churches in Germany received blood money from the Nazis, as well.

Flush with wealth, Roman Catholic and Protestant churches invested heavily in fascist enterprises, many of which would manufacture weapons, employ slave labor, or both.  Ironically, as church leaders began to act as financiers and brokers, their prejudice against usury, the ancient keystone of anti-Semitism, melted away.

In the end, Christendom paid a heavy price for its deal with the devil.  Some 2.5 million European Protestant soldiers and civilians died.  The Catholic toll, which included people from other countries where Catholics were not in the minority as they were in Germany, was broadly similar.  Perhaps half of all Soviets were Orthodox Christians, and so their Christian dead amounted to fifteen million or more.  All told, more than twenty million Christians and six million Jews died courtesy of Adolf Hitler and his silent partners, the Christian clergy.

One wonders what Jesus and his Heavenly Father thought about this caper.  And, better, why it wasn’t stopped before it got started.

Absolute Power

Below is Chapter 6 of my book on religion, “Disbelief”.

                                        THE SLIDE INTO INSANITY

The Romans were greatly indebted to their predecessors, the Greeks, whose highly-developed culture dated to 700 B.C.  The origins of Western literature and learning can be traced back to these ancient Greeks, and included among the immortal contributors are luminaries like Homer, Aesop, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Hippocrates, Euclid, Archimedes, etc.  Their discoveries and insights benefitting civilization were passed along to the Romans, and the Romans took the baton and ran with it.

Over a period of about eight hundred years (from roughly 400 B.C. to 400 A.D.) a sophisticated culture developed around Rome and within its ultimate Empire that, even today, is difficult to comprehend.  Great urban areas were made possible by huge, grain-carrying merchant ships; concrete; and, efficient water supplies.  Roman engineers improved on the Greek pillar-and-beam design with the load-spreading arch.  Iron reinforcement and cement enabled the Romans to build with pre-stressed concrete…and underwater.   Aqueducts and drainage systems made public fountains, baths, street drainage, and flush toilets possible.  Romans introduced improved methods of brick-making, highway-building, and agriculture (though the use of the iron-bladed plough) to the far reaches of the Empire.  Some of the Roman structures built with these innovations still stand today, including amphitheaters, bridges, and structural masterpieces such as Rome’s Colosseum and magnificent Parthenon.

The Greco-Roman planning, design, engineering, and construction management knowledge that made these projects possible was seemingly lost to Western civilization after 500 A.D., not to reappear for almost a thousand years.  Historians call this time the “Dark Ages”, referring to a sustained period of intellectual darkness.

How and why did humanity’s great leap backward occur and who was responsible?

The Empire Goes to Seed

The founder of the Roman Empire was Augustus Caesar.  During his 41-year reign, between 27 B.C. and 14 A.D., Augustus dramatically expanded the Empire to include Spain, Germany, Britain, Egypt, and north Africa.  He initiated a two-hundred period which has come to be known as “Pax Romana”, or the Roman Peace.  During this period, up through the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the military was able to govern the far-flung Empire, thanks to a succession of “The Five Good Emperors”.  And the city of Rome grew into what was, perhaps, the greatest urban metropolis the world had ever seen.

Beginning with Marcus Aurelius’ son Commodus, the Empire began a long period when its top leaders were not up to the task of maintaining military, political, and economic order.  Diocletian, who reigned from 284 to 305, saw the vast Empire as ungovernable, and therefore split the Roman Empire in half and created two equal emperors to rule under the title of Augustus.  This was the situation when Constantine ascended the imperial throne as joint ruler of both halves of the Empire.  Unfortunately for the Western half, however, Constantine chose to relocate the seat of power to his own new capital city, Constantinople, in the East.  Members of the court and the imperial bureaucracy moved with him, and cities and pagan sanctuaries in the East were plundered to embellish the new metropolis with appropriate grandeur.

At the same time, Constantine began the process of metamorphosing the Empire into a state theocracy.  In the beginning, the Christian religion was merely a “favored” religion.  But, what this meant was that Christian influence began to be felt at the Imperial court.  Bishops had the ear of leaders, and the children of the Emperor had Christian tutors.  When these young royals later assumed power, they had a different agenda than their predecessors.

The sons of Constantine, and most of the 4th century emperors that followed them, had little in common with the military strongmen who had so often seized power a century earlier.   At a time when regeneration of the military legions was most urgent to keep the Empire intact, the juvenile leaders spent an ungodly amount of resources padding the imperial court with Christian clergy, eunuchs, and regents.  The Christian influence was immediately felt.   The bishops’ top priority was consolidating and utilizing religious power.  So, instead of focusing on the very real threat of barbarians at the gates of the Empire, the Church-influenced royal court preoccupied itself with issuing increasingly vindictive edicts against the perceived foes of Christianity.  Monies that could have defended the provinces from Goths and Vandals were instead spent on the new, top-priority agenda of ridding the Empire of pagans, Arians, and other heretics.

Under earlier rulers, heavy taxation on the wealthy to support the governmental apparatus and the military was burdensome to society, but at least the public was protected from exterior threats.  After Constantine, crippling taxation on all levels of society was instituted, but the military apparatus was not maintained.  The menagerie of palace favorites produced nothing, yet continually demanded more, leading to an intolerable tax burden on the productive classes.  Industry moved to the provinces, basically leaving Rome as an economic empty shell; still in receipt of taxes, grain and other goods produced in the provinces, but producing nothing itself.

In the fifty years after Emperor Diocletian, the Roman tax burden roughly doubled, making it impossible for small farmers to live on their production. This is what led to the final breakdown of the economy.  As Lactantius, a 4th century author, put it, “The number of (tax) recipients began to exceed the number of contributors by so much that, with farmers’ resources exhausted by the enormous size of the (tax) requisitions, fields became deserted and cultivated land was turned into forest.”  The grand old city of Rome was gradually reduced to the status of a provincial city and entered a period of neglect and decline.  Roads, aqueducts, bridges, and other infrastructure, now inadequately maintained, began to crumble.

With the Empire preoccupied with internal issues, it wasn’t long before the militaristic hordes of northern Europe came a calling.  Rome was sacked by Visigoths in 410 and by the Vandals in 455, and in 476 Romulus Augustus, the last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, was deposed by Odoacer, a Germanic chieftain.

In his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon held that Christianity contributed to the end result by making the populace less interested in the worldly here-and-now because it was willing to wait for the rewards of heaven.

At its height, the City of Rome had numbered just over a million inhabitants.   By the late 6th century, the population was perhaps 30,000, the city was in ruin, and Pope Gregory I was in de-facto control of what little was left.  The Church had finally “won” Rome, but little remained of the once glorious city.

Eliminating the Opposition

The late 4th century was a good time for the Catholic clergy.

In 379, Emperor Gratian chose Theodosius I as Augustus Caesar of the Eastern Roman Empire.  After falling dangerously ill in the late summer of 380, Theodosius regained his health after he was baptized by the local Catholic bishop in Thessalonica.  The grateful new Christian immediately set to the task of making Catholic dreams come true.  For starters, Theodosius issued the Edict of Thessalonica, compelling all Christians to adhere to the Catholic faith.  Thereafter, Theodosius was more concerned with religious correctness than with the safety of the Empire.

When he and his army entered Constantinople in 380, his first order of business was to wade through hostile crowds at the church of St. Sophia and depose the Arian patriarch Demophilus.  Shortly thereafter, in January, 381, Theodosius issued the first of fifteen edicts directed against heretics and pagans.  Over the course of the next fourteen years, Theodosius sanctioned:  the destruction of non-Christian temples and sanctuaries; the burning of heterodox writings; and the exile or execution of recalcitrant polytheists and all who refused to believe, or at least to profess, the truth.  Though never entirely eliminated, sectarian Christians lost possession of their churches and were forbidden even to assemble together.

In May 381, Theodosius summoned one hundred and fifty bishops to a Council of Constantinople (known as the Second Ecumenical Council), which issued a canon condemning all unorthodox belief as heresy.  The Emperor followed up this statement of policy with six laws over the next thirteen years which confiscated “heretic” churches, handed them over to Catholics, exiled their bishops and priests, and forbade assemblies of such “heretics”.

In 384, Theodosius took on the pagan religions, by criminalizing all of the many manifestations of pagan worship, including torch-bearing processions, the wearing of garlands, the burning of frankincense, the offering of libations of wine, etc.  Even harmless household gods were proscribed.   Eventually the sacred feast days of the polytheists were made workdays, further eroding the popular support for pagans.

Whereas earlier laws enacted against pagans had often been mitigated or ignored by local magistrates (who were themselves pagans), now a magistrate who failed to rigorously enforce the laws would himself become a criminal.  To the delight of the Christian priesthood, their pious Emperor thus set the entire machinery of the state against the pagan establishment.  And, by imperial permission, the Catholic clergy became vigilante goons, desecrating temples, destroying idols, and looting the accumulated wealth of a thousand shrines and temples.

Limiting the Human Mind

Once the Catholic Christians had emasculated their un-orthodox Christian brethren, eliminated the pagan opposition, and became an integral part of the Imperial entourage, they set about to consolidate their religious hegemony.

Big-shot Bishop Ambrose of Milan, a behind-the-scenes manipulator at the Imperial courts of several late 4th century Emperors, probably described the arrogance and hubris of the Catholic clergy best when he said, “Nothing can be found in this world more exalted than priests or more sublime than bishops.”  Yes, some of the elite bishops even felt that they were of a higher pecking order than the Emperors themselves.  Certainly they felt intellectually superior to others.  Or, if not, they felt they were smart enough to bring the masses down to their level.

Once Catholicism got into the driver’s seat in the late 4th century, a concerted Church effort began to dumb-down the populace.  Constantine’s goal of imposing a single “truth” or “faith” on the empire was meant in religious and political contexts.  He simply wanted the religious bickering to stop, and wanted everybody rowing in the same direction.   However, when the leech-like Catholic Church latched onto the Imperial host, it was determined to stay there.  One of the best ways to do that was to teach, insist on, and help enact Imperial laws that declared that Scripture and Church dogma were the only knowledge that anyone needed, period.  As someone once said, “If you control the head, the body follows.”

The Apostle Paul, in Colossians 2:8-1, made it pretty clear:  “Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ…But if any man be ignorant, let him be ignorant…For I determined not to know anything among you, except, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified…God has chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.”  In other words, there is only one “truth” that is important in this world, and it is the product that the Apostle is selling.

Public ignorance and lack of education was henceforth a goal of Church leaders, and something noble to be sought by parishioners.  Saint Anthony, an Egyptian monk, said, “In the person whose mind is sound there is no need for letters.”  In other words, a person of sound mind is one who will recite back verbatim everything thing that is told to him at church, and keep his ears closed to everything else.  Thus, being a “tool” for the Church punches your ticket to Heaven.

Lucius Lactantius, the first Latin theologian, propagandist for Emperor Constantine, and tutor of the Emperor’s son, stated, “What purpose does knowledge serve – for as to knowledge of natural causes, what blessing is there for me if I should know where the Nile rises, or whatever else under the heavens the ‘scientists’ rave about?”  Well, actually, if it weren’t for the discoveries of the Greco-Roman thinkers and scientists that preceded Emperor Constantine, most of the infrastructure of the Empire, the armaments that made the Roman legions victorious, and the industry that made the Empire rich would never have happened.   There would have been no Roman Empire, and, thus, no tax monies to support parasitic Catholic clergyman like Lactantius at the royal court.  He probably never thought of that.

In the midst of the insanity, there was a plea from one of the last pagan senators, Aurelius Symmacus, to the boy emperor Valentinian II in 383, asking for freedom of thought: “What does it matter by which wisdom each of us arrives at the truth?  It is not possible that only one road leads to so sublime a mystery.”  Bishop Ambrose, the then-Imperial tutor and spiritual advisor, responded on behalf of the Emperor: “What you are ignorant of, we know from the Word of God.  And what you try to infer, we have established as truth from the very Wisdom of God.”

Bishop Augustine, one of the Church intelligentsia of the 4th century, declared, “Scripture gives no false information.”  Uh, what about the sun revolving around the earth?

What exactly was the basis of this divine knowledge?  A mythology and theology constructed, word by word, by pious and ambitious clergymen like bishops Ambrose and Augustine in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd centuries.  It was not the Word of God, nor was it the Wisdom of God, but, rather, a self-serving literature designed to advance the priesthood and make mental slaves of the “true believers”.

Basil, the Bishop of Caesaria, was another who preferred parishioners accept that God was unknowable.  A difference of opinion from the Church – merely thinking for oneself – was the Sin of Pride.  “Let us Christians prefer the simplicity of our faith to the remonstrations of human reason”, Basil said, “For to spend much time on research about the essence of things would not serve the edification of the Church.”  So, now we’ve come to the crux of it:  the most important thing for humanity is the glorification of the Catholic Church!

Heresy was a dirty word back in the 4th century.  Roman emperors and popes alike spent inordinate time and resources to stamp it out.  But, what exactly was “heresy”?  According to Bishop (later “Saint”) Isadore of Seville, “Heresy is named in the Greek from its meaning of choice, since each at his own will chooses what he pleases to teach and believe.”  (This sounds reasonable, especially since the Catholic Church espouses the belief in “free will”.)  But, Saint Isadore went on to elaborate on the Church position: “But we are not permitted to believe anything of our own will, nor to choose what someone has believed of his.  We have God’s apostles as authorities…”  Yes, those guys that no one ever heard of.

And, if a Christian parishioner were to have the audacity to ask questions about Scripture, the Trinity concept, or about Church dogma, surely the clergy would be happy to educate the true believer, right?  Wrong.  As Saint Basil stated, “It should be enough for you (the parishioner) to know that there is a good shepherd who gave his soul for his sheep…How big God is, what His limits are, and of what essence…such questions are dangerous…they shall be taken care of with silence.”  So much for the Socratic method…

Two of Christendoms most dim-witted, pious, and hard-line clerics were Bishops John Chrystostom and Augustine of Hippo.   Chrystostom urged Christians to “empty your minds of secular knowledge”.  This was necessary, one supposes, so that the Church could fill it with stupid ideas.  Saint Augustine, on the other hand, was a bottom-line guy.  He flatly declared, “Since God has spoken to us it is no longer necessary for us to think.”

For this, and other brilliant ideas contributed by Bishop Augustine (like the doctrine of “Original Sin” and the theological argument for “just” wars) he was later proclaimed a Saint.

Erasing Human Knowledge

Once the Church got its believers (and Imperial supporters) into the right frame of mind, it set about the task of destroying the accumulated knowledge of humankind.  Because, in the Christian future, the only knowledge would be that produced and disseminated by the Catholic Church.

Book-burning was not a new tool of tyrants.  Back in the Old Testament, it had been used by the Hebrew patriarchs for supposed divine purposes.  “Therefore, behold, I will proceed to do a marvelous work among this people, even a marvelous work and a wonder:  for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid”, said the Prophet Isaiah (Isaiah 29:14). Thus, it appears that the God of Abraham supported book-burning when it would serve the purpose of his earthly minions, namely the Hebrew priesthood.

In 364, Emperor Jovian ordered the burning of the Library of Antioch.  Six years later Emperor Valens orders the burning alive of the philosopher Simonides and the decapitation of the philosopher Maximus.  Afterwards, tons of books were burnt in the squares of the cities of the Eastern Empire.  Two years later, the Emperor ordered the governor of Asia Minor to exterminate all the Hellenes and all documents of their wisdom.  In 398, the 4th Church Council of Carthage prohibited everybody, including Christian bishops, from studying pagan (i.e. non-Christian) books.

Hypatia was a world-renowned Greek philosopher who was the first historically noted female mathematician.  She was the head of the Platonist school at Alexandria, Egypt, where she taught philosophy and astronomy.  Because of her wisdom, Orestes, the Roman prefect (provincial governor) of Alexandria, would often ask her for advice.  Cyril, the Catholic Patriarch of Alexandria, had a running feud with Orestes which came to a boil in 415, when Cyril’s backers (actually, 500 Christian monks) physically attacked the Prefect.  When the actual perpetrator was apprehended, he was tortured and died.  In retaliation, a Christian mob kidnapped Hypatia and took her to the Caesareum (Basil’s church), stripped her, cut her to pieces with sea shells, and then burned her corpse.  When the news broke of Hypatia’s murder, it provoked not one outraged response from the Christian community.

Some historians view Hypatia’s murder as marking the end of Classical antiquity.

Unfortunately, Bishop Cyril’s buddy, the fanatical Emperor Theodosius I, was followed on the imperial throne by his son, Theodosius II, who was also in the back pocket of the Christian Church.  He quickly declared, “All the volumes that move God to wrath and that harm the soul we do not want to come to men’s hearing.”

In 448, Theodosius II ordered all non-Christian books in the Empire to be burned.  And, thus, he personally ushered in the Dark Ages.

Lust for Power

Below is Chapter 5 of my book about religion, “Disbelief”.

                                          THE 300-YEAR WAR OF WORDS

 The “canon” is the set of books Christian’s regard as divinely-inspired and constituting the Christian Bible.  The Hebrew priesthood completed the Old Testament portion by 400 B.C.   Christian biblical scholars say that the additional books of the New Testament were originally written as early as 60-120 A.D., although skeptics believe that they may have been written a century or more later.

The content of the Old and New Testaments in bibles today represents the surviving, officially-approved literature of a very nasty philosophical and theological war that raged in the emergent Christian church community for three centuries.

Spiritual Foundations

Many religious historians use the term “The Axial Age” to describe the period from 800 B.C. to 200 A.D., when the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently in China, India, Persia, Judea and Greece.  These foundations were laid by individual thinkers within a framework of a changing social environment.

No one knows exactly why many of the world’s major religions sprung up seemingly all at once and independently.  A common denominator could be the empire-building of the Greeks and Romans during that time.  Both the Greeks and Romans expanded the reach of their military might during that period, and simultaneously exported their culture and philosophy to new lands and peoples.  The reach of Greco-Roman influence during this time extended from Britain and Spain on the west, to North Africa and Egypt on the south, from Germany to the Black Sea on the north, to India on the east.  This was pretty much the “known world” at the time.  Into these culturally diverse areas, each with their own ancient beliefs, poured new philosophical concepts from the likes of Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Diogenes, and Marcus Aurelius, among others.  Their ideas:  the unity of opposites; logos, a master design; platonic realism, beyond senses to higher insights about reality; knowledge, justified true belief; morality, a return to the simplicity of nature; stoicism, a relationship between cosmic determinism and human freedom; the superiority of reason; etc.

At this time in world history, paganism was extant throughout the Greco-Roman empires.  In each culture, there was a family of gods that were revered, and that family and each of its members had its own mythology.  Generally speaking, there was a great degree of religious tolerance at the time.  The Greeks and Romans both had their pantheon of gods that they favored, yet they allowed the peoples of the countries that they conquered to keep and venerate their own.  It was truly a time of “different strokes for different folks”.

Into this mix were tossed the Hebrews, a monotheistic (belief in one god) people.  From 587 to 538 B.C., in three waves, many prominent officials, priests, and other Judeans were exiled by King Nebuchadnezzar from Palestine in what has come to be known by Jews as the “Babylonian Captivity”.  These people subsequently settled in many areas in Europe and Asia Minor.  And, when they arrived in foreign lands, their unique and ancient religion set them apart, and provoked interest among pagans and philosophers alike.  Jewish synagogues sprung up and, apparently, thrived in many cities.

Jews were invited back to Jerusalem by Persian King Cyrus the Great in 538 B.C., and their holy Temple was rebuilt within about twenty years.  After the Persians came the Macedonians, then the Seleucids, then the Hasmonean dynasty (Jews actually governed themselves for about 100 years!).  In 63 B.C. the Romans came to town, and for the next one hundred years kept the locals at bay.

In 70 A.D. the Romans ended an uprising by Jews in Palestine (the First Jewish-Roman War) by crushing their opponents, sacking Jerusalem, and destroying the Second Temple.  Again in 135 A.D., in what is known as the Bar Kokhba Revolt, the latest “Messiah”, whose efforts were blessed by the Jewish High Priest, led an insurrection against the Romans.  Emperor Hadrian was not amused by this latest civil war, and he directed his Imperial legions to savage the impertinent rebels.  Over 580,000 Jews were killed and 985 Palestinian villages were razed by the Romans.   Members of the Jerusalem Sanhedrin were tortured and executed.  The High Priest who had supported the rebel leader had the skin of his head pulled off slowly.  Jews who were lucky not to be slaughtered or sold into slavery by their Roman conquerors fled to other countries (now known as “Diaspora Jews”, as in dispersed), where they again mixed with pagans, philosophers, and members of metaphysical sects.

One important result of the Bar Kokhba Revolt was that it occasioned major changes in Jewish religious thought.  Messianism, the idea that an anointed one would deliver the Jews from their oppressors, was abstracted and spiritualized; by necessity, the thought began to gain traction that the Old Testament promise related more to spiritual deliverance than to rescue from worldly tyrants.

To put it in another way, the Jewish Ford dealerships in the late-1st and early-2nd century found themselves trying to sell Edsels to weary and wary consumers.

This was the state of the Jewish “world” when the Jesus Christ cult began to emerge from the physical and emotional rubble.

Customized Christianity

Emerging local churches espousing the “Jewish-Christian” theology of the 1st and 2nd centuries were somewhat unique, determined by the local head cleric.  There was no common “orthodoxy” at the time, no official dogma, doctrine, canon, or rites practiced by Jesus Christ cultists.  And, that’s what they were at that time…an unorthodox, unauthorized branch of Judaism.  The theology of a particular parish (most likely a synagogue) depended upon the information that had been collected and digested by the head priest, along with his particular “spin”.  In some cases, that priest published his own religious material.  Jewish-Christian theology was being developed on-the-fly.

As the Jesus Christ movement blossomed, a spate of Gospels (“good news”) began to be spread about the Christian world, each generating its own mythology about supposed Christian beginnings.  Archaelogists have uncovered evidence of at least fifty-five Gospels, some of which vary considerably in story and message from the familiar Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  Among the other fifty-one are:

Gospel of Thomas            fails to mention crucifixion, resurrection, final judgment, or messianic understanding of Jesus

Gospel of Nicodemus      written in the 4th century, contains testimony supposedly obtained by Pontius Pilate

Gospel of Barnabas         written in 17th century, conforms to the Islamic interpretation of Christian origins

Gospel of Gamaliel          supposedly attests to the conversion of the great rabbi (teacher of Paul?) and president of the Jerusalem Sanhedrin to Christianity, which Jews deny

Infancy Gospel of

Matthew                             recollections of the Virgin Mary’s birth and Jesus’ childhood, written approximately 600 years after the fact

Gospel of James                written in the 2nd century, it expands on the virginity legend of Jesus’ mother Mary

Gospel of Judas                 conversations between Judas Iscariot and Jesus Christ, written 100 years after the fact; suggests Judas was acting in accordance with Jesus’ instructions, and was the only disciple to be taught the True Gospel

Gospel of Philip                 suggests a close, loving relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene

What the other fifty-one Gospels have in common with the canonical Gospels is that they were: (a) focused on an alleged “Jesus Christ” ministry; (b) all written long after the supposed events they portrayed; and, (c) were not written by the purported authors.  In other words, no one knows who wrote them and, more importantly, why.

In today’s world, a story that cannot be backed by evidence, is presented in a “hearsay” manner, and is produced by an anonymous source is quickly dismissed as balderdash.  Back in the 1st and 2nd century, though, people were so anxious to hear something fantastic and wonderful that they didn’t do much fact-checking.  And, that is what the early Jewish-Christian priests-Gospel writers were counting on.

As noted in Acts and the Pauline Epistles, a lot of early discussion and debate ensued between the parish priests regarding Mosaic Law (including  circumcision and dietary rules), the Jesus Christ story, and the nature of God.  The most likely scenario with the numerous Gospels is that each was written to strengthen some particular doctrine of the sect that the author belonged. That’s because, in addition to the many Gospels, there were many off-shoots of the breakaway Jewish “Jesus Christ” movement in Christianity’s first 300 years.

Notable divisions among the Jewish/Christian sects included:

Ebionites – 1st century – believed that Jesus was the Hebrew Messiah; insisted on following Jewish law; considered St. Paul an apostate from the Law

Nazarenes – 1st century – early sect, considered themselves Jews; adhered to the Law of Moses; rejected the canonical Gospels, and accepted the Virgin Birth

Adoptionists – 1st century – believed that Jesus was adopted by God following his baptism; Jesus was chosen because of his sinless devotion to God; did not believe that Jesus was God’s son, any of the Virgin Mary story, etc.

Gnostics – 1st century – believed in a knowledge superior to and unknown by faith; God is within each of us, knowledge is supreme; anti-clerical…i.e. the individual is his/her own priest

Ophites – 1st century – a Christian sect that preferred to venerate the serpent (from the Garden of Eden story) instead of Christ; thought Jesus might have been a wise and virtuous man

Cerinthians – 1st century – early Christian Gnostic sect, followed Jewish law; used the Gospel According to the Hebrews; denied the divinity of Jesus

Encratites – 1st century – ascetic Gnostic sect; abstained from worldly pleasures, instead pursued religious and spiritual goals; rejected the Book of Acts and the Pauline Epistles; sometimes called the Severians

Borborites – 2nd century – a libertine Gnostic sect; denied that Christ had a real body or was the child of Mary; used both the Old and New Testaments, but did not acknowledge the God of the Old Testament as the supreme deity

Docetists – 2nd century – denied Jesus’ humanity…He only seemed human

Montanists – 2nd century – believers in prophecy, reliance on spontaneity of the Holy Spirit, and conservative personal ethics; believed in power of apostles, prophets, martyrs, and confessors to forgive sins (later extended to bishops and presbyters); believed preachers should be paid

Basilidians -2nd century – claimed that Jesus had not been crucified, but had swapped places with a mysterious bystander named Simon of Cyrene; Christ was the latest of a whole series of spiritual agents from the higher god; did not believe in the Resurrection; believed that “we are also from God and are also divine”

Marcionites – 2nd century – believed that Jesus was a savior sent by God and that Paul was his apostle; did not believe in the holy family, the nativity, or Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist; Christ descended fully grown from heaven, to bring the “Grace” of a loving god to replace “The Law” of the harsh Jewish god Yahweh; as a divine, Jesus’ only appeared to suffer on the cross

Carpocrations – 2nd century – a libertine, Gnostic sect; Jesus was not divine, but a good man

Arianites -3rd century – believed that God the Father and Jesus the Son are two separate entities (i.e. did not buy into idea of the Trinity)

Manichaeans – 3rd century – believed in elaborate cosmology, struggle between a good, spiritual world of light and an evil, material world of darkness; theology is mix of Gnostic Christianity, Zooastrianism, and Buddhism

Sabellianism – 3rd century – denied the Trinity; Jesus Christ was not human at any time, therefore He could not have suffered

Preterists/Pantelists – 3rd century – believed that events of Daniel and Revelation happened in the 1st century (i.e. that “second coming” predictions were fulfilled)

Pelagianists – 4th century – disputed idea of Original Sin; mortal will is capable of choosing between good and evil without divine guidance

What is clear from a review of early church beliefs is that “the Jesus story” and “the Christian message” had not yet been worked out by the 4th century, almost three hundred years after Jesus Christ’s supposed life.  Christianity at that time was a germinating seed, consisting of DNA from Judaism, Platonism, Paganism, Zooastrianism, and Gnostic mysticism, with some old-fashioned hucksterism thrown in.

What was needed, in the opinion of a few ambitious and fanatical clerics, was a coherent code of monotheistic belief…a “new and improved” Judaism, if you will…with an approved orthodoxy (i.e. a uniform, accepted creed).  And, so, in the second, third, and fourth centuries, a number of forceful men stepped forward, determined to commandeer the new religion and produce an irresistible theological product.

The Church Fathers

Catholic Church tradition would have the faithful believe that the Apostles Peter and Paul founded the Christian church in Rome.  The Bible says nothing of the sort.  In fact, according to the New Testament, St. Peter never visited the place, and St. Paul’s stay there was as a prisoner of the Roman government, where he briefly chatted with some Jewish leaders while he was in a rented house.  As a matter of fact, other than “tradition”, there is no reliable information indicating who founded the church in Rome or when it happened.

One (dubious) report from antiquity gives some indication that there were Jewish Christians in Rome by 64 A.D.  Roman historian and senator Tacitus is alleged to have written about the Jesus Christ cult in his passage about the Great Fire of Rome during the reign of Emperor Nero.  Tacitus refers to Christ, his earlier execution by Pontius Pilate, and the existence and persecution of Christians in Rome at the time, in his book, Annals.

However, Tacitus was supposedly writing in 116 A.D., fifty years after the Great Fire, and was born 25 years after the life of Jesus Christ.  He was not a witness to the Holy pageant in Palestine, and his comments many decades after the Great Fire benefit from later knowledge about the Christians, their beliefs, and their influence on Roman culture in the early 2nd century.  Also adding to the skepticism about Tacitus’ Annals is the fact that the earliest known example of the document was written in Latin at the Benedictine Abbey at Monte Cassino, Italy, in the 11th century.  It is at least possible that Tacitus’ original passage regarding the early Christians in Rome was re-worked by the Benedictine clergy during the 1,000 year lapse between the purported events and the publication of the Tacitus’ so-called Annals.  It is also possible that the “Christian” passage in Annals is a complete forgery, added by the Benedictine brothers to provide provenance to Christianity’s murky early Roman beginnings.

The Catholic Church recognizes three men as “apostolic” Fathers of the Church.  Supposedly these bishops (Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, and Polycarp of Smyrna) learned their craft at the feet of the twelve disciples of Jesus.  Not much is known about any of them; that which survives is Church “tradition”, including the fact that these three were active in the new church movement in the first century.  As usual, the three allegedly suffered martyrdoms at the hands of the Romans.  Supposedly, Clement was tied to an anchor and tossed into the Black Sea, while Ignatius was fed to the lions in the Colosseum.  Polycarp, on the other hand, proved a difficult man to kill.  The Romans tried burning him at the stake, but the flames did not hurt him.  So, he was stabbed to death, and there was so much blood from the wound that it quenched the fires surrounding his body.  That’s pretty hard to believe, but it does beat the tale of Paul’s bouncing decapitated head creating natural water springs.

What these three Apostolic Fathers left behind was minimal, in terms of written material, but they shared a common message: the imperative that the bishops run the parishes with an iron hand.  They believed that the authority had been passed down to them directly from the twelve disciples, hence from Jesus Christ himself.  Ignatius, in particular, asserted the supremacy of the bishop as a divine institution.  He went so far as to affirm that the bishop stands in the place of Christ himself:  “When ye are obedient to the bishop as to Jesus Christ it is evident to me that ye are living not after men, but after Jesus Christ…Be ye obedient also to the presbytery as to the Apostles of Jesus Christ.”  (ad Trallians, 2).  This was the beginning of the idea of “apostolic succession” which eventually justified the elevation of a high-ranked Christian cleric to the all-powerful position of Pope (from the Greek papa, meaning “father”).

It is not clear how true believers in the new creed were ordained as church deacons, presbyters, or bishops.  There was no central church in the first three centuries A.D. to sanction ordinations of priests and creation of bishropics.  Undoubtedly, some of them were self-appointed, similar to Paul of Tarsus, who appointed himself an Apostle after claiming to experience a vision of the Holy Spirit.  Others, it seems, were appointed by their buddy clerics.

In the 2nd and 3rd centuries, other Church Fathers (of the non-Apostolic breed) emerged to assert their thoughts on orthodoxy and the leadership of the young Christian church.  Irenaeus of Gaul was a lead-prosecutor, commonly called apologist, for Church orthodoxy in the late 2nd century.  His mission was to root-out Gnostic heretics (like the Marcionites) and reinforce the idea that the bishops provide the only safe guide to interpreting Scripture.  Irenaeus was one of the first to suggest the canonization of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and was the main promulgator of the cult of the “Virgin Mary”.  Tertullian was an early Christian theologian from Carthage (in North Africa) who was the first to express the idea of the Trinity in Latin.  He likewise spent a lot of effort identifying and debunking heretics.  Origen of Alexandria, a respected early theologian, is now considered a Church Father, although his followers were denounced as anathema and he was considered a heretic by some of his peers during his life.  Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, was adamant that everyone seeking enlightenment must do it through his church.  He is famous for saying, “He can no longer have God for his Father who has not the Church for his Mother”, and rejecting all religious ideas other than his own by adding, “…nor is there any other home for believers but the one Church.”  Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria was an ultra orthodox cleric who led the fight against Arian Christians (who held the position that Jesus was distinctly different than God the Father).  And, there were many others whose divergent views on the Jesus Christ idea caused constant skirmishing within the nascent religion.

The fight for position by Christian cleric against Christian cleric did not go unnoticed among the pagan bystanders.  Ammianus Marcellinus, a 4th century Roman historian, commented that, “The enmity of the Christians towards each other surpassed the fury of savage beasts against man.”

Other citizens of the Empire were amused by the new religion and the credulity of its converts.  Take for example a sanctimonious quote from 2nd century Bishop Melito of Sardis: “For there is no need, to persons of intelligence, to attempt to prove, from the deeds of Christ subsequent to his baptism, that his soul and his body, his human nature like ours, were real, and no phantom of the imagination.  For the deeds done by Christ after his baptism, and especially his miracles, gave indication and assurance to the world of the Deity hidden in his flesh.”  Of course, Bishop Melito had only read about those deeds and miracles in books written by unknown clerics who, admittedly, didn’t witness any of the purported acts.  And, of course, converts to the new religion were to follow whatever Bishop Melito told them.

Lucian of Samosata, a famous 2nd century Greek rhetorician, didn’t think too much of Christians’ common sense: “They accept such things on faith alone, without any evidence.  So, if a fraudulent and cunning person who knows how to take advantage comes among them, he can make himself rich in a short time.”  Yes, like a power-hungry, egomaniacal Bishop!

Improved Marketing through Orthodoxy

It is highly likely that the initial generations of “Christian” bishops had earlier in their lives been Jewish priests, like Paul of Tarsus.  Being “holy men” was the only job they’d ever had, and the rewards had been immense: power, prestige, and good living.  The Judaean state was the quintessential theocracy.  The priesthood controlled all aspects of Jewish life and the humble Jew was totally at the mercy of the priest.  Even under Roman rule, the priesthood fused with, and became part of, the ruling elite.  This is why, if the story of Jesus of Nazareth is to be believed, the Romans crucified Christ, the agitator against the Pharisees (the guys who ran the Jewish Temple).

Judaism succeeded over the many generations because it had a set of beliefs “set in stone” and a long-established mythology.  There were no orthodox and non-orthodox Jews in antiquity…they all believed in the same thing, and practiced their religion the same way…lest they invoke the ire of the High Priest and his enforcer thugs (like Paul of Tarsus).

The success of this religious model was not lost on the new “Christian” (i.e. ex-Jewish) clerics.  As the 3rd century of Christian thought came to a close, they realized that they needed to quickly settle amongst themselves on exactly what story they were peddling.  Orthodoxy favored a set of simplistic tales, little more than “comings and goings” of the godman, comprehensible to the uneducated, and readily re-enacted in pageant and ceremonial.  These fables would then be presented as “true accounts from recent history”.

Constantine’s “Fifth Column”

At the beginning of the 4th century, Constantine was an aspiring Roman Caesar.  He was the son of a Caesar, and a military man, doing his job in the remote province of Britain.  Constantine was ambitious, but needed to expand his political base, particularly eastward, because the eastern provinces of the Empire were the wealthiest and most populous.  Constantine was aware that Emperor Diocletian had recently purged Christians in Nicodemia (now Turkey), and his most fierce rival, Galerius, was known to despise the Christian cult.  Needing more support for his ambitions, in a political move, Constantine announced from the western provinces that he was now the “protector of Christians”.  This stratagem didn’t benefit him immediately because Christians only comprised two percent of the eastern provinces.  But, it did put him in nominal charge of a “fifth column” of Christian fanatics in the east, a state within a state.

Christian agitators within the Empire turned the misfortunes of the Roman world to their advantage.  They directed their energies towards frightened widows and abandoned children, towards the slave and criminal classes.  Every defeat in battle, every pestilence and natural calamity, was seized upon as evidence of divine censure and retribution.  With zeal and anticipation, the Christians predicted further ruin and desolation.  Among the peoples of the great cities, the fear of imminent judgment and the threat of eternal torment were spread like a contagion.  Only by submission to Christ could the individual hope for salvation.

This was the “burr” that Constantine put under his opponent’s saddle, throwing in his lot with the Christian underground.

When Galerius died in 311, Constantine went on the offensive, decisively seizing control of Africa and Italy.  One of his key victories took place at the Milvian Bridge, where later Catholic historians would claim that Constantine’s troops rode to victory with Christian crosses on their battle flags, thus insuring victory.  This is an incredible story, but not true:  the cross was not to become a Christian symbol for another two hundred years.

In 314, Constantine plunged the Empire into another civil war against his last rival, Licinius.  After some brutal battles, Licinius sued for peace, and Constantine had achieved his goal of becoming Augustus…Emperor of the Roman Empire.  Almost immediately, he began drawing up plans to move the capitol from Rome eight hundred miles to the east, to a new grand city on the Bosphorus which would be called Constantinople.  After 326, Constantine never again set foot in Rome.  He is quoted as saying that “he never liked the city”.   With the power and wealth of the Empire shifting to the east, Rome became a city in decline, easy prey for barbarians and emboldened Christian clergy.

The egotistical Constantine set a model for all future monarchs: he surrounded the imperial dignity with a halo of sacredness and ceremonial pomposity.  He was now, in his own mind (and, bolstered by his cheering section of Christian clerics), God’s Agent on Earth.  Politician that he was, Constantine realized that he could use the unifying force of religion to strengthen his control of the Empire.  As one historian observed, “Nothing is more welcome to a military empire than a religious doctrine that counsels obedience and acquiescence.”

The “Christianization” of Constantine is somewhat confusing.  Probably as payback for support in his military campaign to become Augustus Caesar, Constantine signed the Edict of Milan in 313, officially proclaiming freedom of religion within the Empire and putting to an end the persecution of Christians begun under Emperor Diocletian.  Later in his reign Constantine made the Christian church the most favored recipient of the near-limitless resources of imperial favor.  However, he was not a Christian himself at this time.  Prominent on the Arch of Constantine, finished in 315, was a depiction of the pagan god Apollo.  And, on Imperial coinage minted at least as late as 317, Constantine stood shoulder to shoulder with the Sun God – Sol Invictus.

The developing partnership between Christian clergy and the Emperor brought about a high level of pandering to his massive ego.  Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, a prominent Christian propagandist of the time and enthusiastic bootlicker of the Emperor, likened him to a “new Moses, a new Abraham”.  Constantine more modestly saw himself as a Thirteenth Apostle, a saint-in-waiting.  The church and the as yet un-converted Emperor were now linked arm-in-arm, with the common goal of amassing power and crushing opposition.  Constantine’s focus was on his new capitol city, while Christian leadership set its target on Rome, where there was now a power vacuum.

The Arian-Trinitarian Dogfight

Bishop Eusebius was a Christian in the Arian camp of belief.  Arians (followers of Arius, a 4th century Alexandrian presbyter) believed that “A creation is less than its creator.  The Son is less than the Father that ‘begot’ him.  In the beginning was the Creator God and the Son did not exist.”  It was a simple theology, one that had a certain rationality and also the merit that it could be easily understood.

However, in the early 4th century, the popular concept among many Christian bishops (and, interestingly, not one found in the Bible) was that God, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were one and the same – called the Trinity.  It was, and is, a difficult concept to get one’s arms around.  How could a “redeeming sacrifice” – if less than a god – “atone for all of humanity’s sins?” But, on the other hand, if the sacrificial lamb was really a god, could he then really have suffered and died on the cross?

Arian Christians felt strongly that the Trinity concept was anti-rational and anti-Scriptural.  In Mark 6:46, Jesus “…departed into a mountain to pray”.  If Christ were truly part of the Trinity, then he would be praying to himself, which doesn’t make sense whatsoever.   In John 14:28, Jesus says, “…the Father is greater than I”.  So, the Arians thought, if Christ and his father are one in the same, why would he say such a thing?  The problem was that they were being rational and not looking far enough toward the end goal, as were their opponents.

The great Arian versus Trinitarian slugfest of the early 4th century threatened to destroy Constantine’s hope that the Christian religion could be a unifying force in his Empire.  In an attempt to reconcile the many divergent beliefs of the Empire’s Christian clergy, Constantine convened a large meeting of the combatants in 325 in Nicaea (what is now northern Turkey).  Because Bishop Eusebius was a learned man and famous author, he was favored by Emperor Constantine and called upon to present the creed of his own (Arian) church to kick-off the debate amongst the three hundred attendees.  However, the predominant preference of the assembly was anti-Arian.  Constantine, vexed by the discord among the bishops, and not too concerned with the fine points of Christian theology, wanted more than anything a catholic or universal orthodox faith to get everyone on the same page.

This is precisely what he created off the assembly line that was the Council of Nicaea.  Supposedly, Constantine, the political pragmatist, himself broke the deadlock by proposing the compromise formula which expressed his idea of the precise relationship of Christ to God:  he opted for “of one substance” (in Greek homoousian).  Thus it was determined that Jesus of Nazareth had, in fact, been God incarnate, the infinite Creator of the universe.   Once the dogmatic logjam was forcibly broken, the bishops got down to business and agreed (most of them) to a common creed that they would propound in their Catholic Christian churches.

The Nicene Creed, or profession of faith, basically endorsed the mythology of Jesus Christ of Nazareth as laid out in the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.  It was supposed to end all debate over who Jesus was and the message that he delivered.   As is the case with much of Church history, conveniently no copies of the Nicene Council’s proceedings survived.  Eyewitnesses at the conclave stated that once the Creed was finished, eighteen bishops continued to oppose it.  Constantine at this point threatened to exile anyone who didn’t sign it.  In the end, two Libyan bishops and Arius, the father of Arianism, refused to sign and were officially exiled, although Constantine later allowed them to return to their homes.

Despite the Nicene concord, the Arian-Trinitarian debate continued on for another fifty years.  And, even though he had been exiled, Arius eventually prevailed with Constantine.  He submitted a creed to Constantine which the Emperor judged to be orthodox, and a contrite emperor ordered that Arius should receive holy communion in the cathedral at Constantinople.  Bishop Arius died (rumor has it he was poisoned by opponents) on the way to the church to receive that communion.

Interestingly, although Constantine the Great ended persecution of Christians, made them a favored religion within the Empire, and helped Christianity adopt a universal creed, he was not a practicing Christian during his lifetime.  Allegedly, in 337, on his deathbed, Constantine was baptized by Bishop Eusebius… one of the most prominent Arian Christians of the day.

Arian theology was favored during the reign of Constantine’s son, Constantius II.  Chief Trinitarian proponent, Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, fought a losing battle for a generation against Bishop Arius and the Empire.  Athanasius was exiled at least four times by Imperial order.   He even recruited Pope Julius I to his side.  The Pope called a council favorable to Athanasius at Sardica in 343, but the council was avoided by Eastern bishops and ignored by Emperor Constantius.  By 350, Arian bishops commanded important sees throughout the Empire, most importantly at the imperial cities of Milan and Constantinople.  Ten years later, the Arian homoean (“of like substance”) view became the official Catholic church position via the Council of Constantinople.

Yet, the war of words was not ended.  Trinitarian bishops were now heretics, and many were exiled.  Theologically opposed bishops literally fought each other in the streets.  While all of this mayhem was going on, Julian replaced Constantius as Emperor.  Although raised as a Christian, Julian was in fact a pagan, and he did everything he could to irritate the festering Arian-Trinitarian boil.  He even encouraged exiled Trinitarian fanatics to return home in the hope that they might destroy each other (and their common religion).  Some of this occurred.  When head Trinitarian Bishop Athanasius was briefly exiled from his Alexandria see, his replacement, Arian Bishop George of Cappadocia, was seized by enraged inhabitants and thrown into the sea.

Eventually the Trinitarians won out.  Between 364 and 381, a succession of Catholic-friendly Emperors were persuaded by Bishop Ambrose of Milan to cut the legs off of the Arian movement.  Between 379 and 380, a series of laws was enacted to prohibit Arianism in the West (i.e. west of the eastern provinces).  Ultimately, Theodosius I, the last Emperor to rule over both the western and eastern halves of the Roman Emperor, gave Arianism the coup d’grace.  In 381, Theodosius reconvened  the Council of Constantinople, where Catholic orthodoxy was redefined to include the mysterious Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, who, though equal to the Father, ‘proceeded’ from Him, whereas the Son was ‘begotten’ of Him.”  Following up on that decision, the new Emperor later outlawed Arianism entirely, dismissed many Arian Christian bishops from their posts, made Christianity the state religion of the Empire, and set Christian fanatics loose to loot and destroy pagan temples.

The Last Piece of the Puzzle

The obstinate princes of the church had finally achieved their objective: the Catholic Church had become the state religion of the greatest Empire the world had ever known.  And, in the process, they had instituted the confusing idea of the three-headed God.  But, why had this principle of the Trinity  been so important that Christian bishops fought over it for a good part of century?

At the time that Christianity became the favored religion of the Roman Empire, more than 90 percent of its citizenry were non-Christians.  In fact, they were mostly pagan worshippers.  There was no official pagan church or dogma for the Christians to target.  Pagans paid tribute to, and sought blessings from, a variety of favorite “gods” who supposedly controlled things like harvests, fertility, success, and such.  When something good happened to a pagan, he might attribute the “miracle” to his pandering to the appropriate god whose effort, behind the scenes, had made it possible.  That was (and, continues to be) the primary reason “believers” pray to, make sacrifices to, and venerate mysterious spirits that no one can see.

The emerging Christian theologians were quite blatant about commandeering aspects of other religions that could be worked into the Christian product to improve marketability.  Talking about miracles Jesus performed back in the day was interesting, but people in the 4th century wanted to know “what can He do for me now?”  The”Holy Spirit” that the Trinitarians had insisted on including in the Christian creed was meant to represent the mysterious essence of God that works his divine magic on earth, just like pagan gods helped those who venerated them.  Everyone knows who God is, and Christians believed they knew who Jesus was and what he stood for, but there needed to be some Christian agent here on earth, always at the ready, with the ability to affect miracles for good Christians.

The new Christian “Trinity” (sounds like the latest Ford Hybrid) had three outstanding features to attract tire-kickers:  A God to be feared, everlasting life in Heaven to those who believed, and an army of Angels to perform miracles on the customer’s behalf.  It was just about everything that a person would want in terms of divinity, so it is no wonder that many pagans throughout the Empire flocked to the dealership for a test drive.

The Miracle

President Trump and his followers have been crowing lately about the great turnaround of the economy under his leadership. The stock market is humming along, and unemployment is at almost record levels. It’s a miracle, they say.

What the fan club fails to point out is that the economy had been in a recovery mode for many years, following the economic collapse of 2008 (The Great Recession). That recovery, which has gone on now for about 9 years, was started under President Obama, whom Donald Trump regularly ridicules.

When Barack Obama became President, the Dow Jones Average (New York Stock Exchange) was just shy of 8,000; when he left office, it had reached 20,000. It is now at a record high of 26,000.

Similarly, when Obama took office, unemployment was at 7.6 percent. At the end of his term, it had been reduced to 4.8 percent. The current number is 4.1 percent.

What we can infer from this are two things: (1) Mr. Trump has not adversely affected the ongoing economic recovery; and, (2) the President’s policies may have stimulated more enthusiasm in the economy.

There are two problems with the Trump euphoria: (1) Newton’s Law applies to the stock market; and, (2) wages are still stagnant.

Many Trumpian issues have been, seemingly, set aside while the stock market rises, but there will be a DJA correction (there always is!). When that happens, how will people react? Will they then begin to take note of the many scandalous actions of the Administration? Mid-term elections are coming.

And, if wages don’t make gains, Trump will have a lot of irate constituents barking at him, because he promised significant improvement in that area. Remember? “Make America Great Again”…more jobs, higher wages. Again, mid-term elections are coming.

Miracle? I think the jury is still out. It will render its verdict in November, 2018.