Let the dark walls of Christendom collapse like the Berlin walls

In 1987 Reagan stood in front of the Berlin Wall and challenged his Soviet counterpart, saying General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union….come to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. The rest, as we now, is history. 29 months later the forces of Perestroika and Glasnost (restructuring and transparency) brought the Berlin wall down.

Won’t there be a statesman or an ecclesiastical dignitary to call the Pope and tell him: dear Pope, take off the veil of darkness you and your predecessors have put before innocent people like  Communism had done to the Soviets. Let there be transparency in their beliefs. Let each one understand that god-Jesus is a created myth and that he did not start Christianity. He never claimed to be the Messiah-a powerful king supposed to redeem Jews of their slavery. Let the billions  understand that the redemptory process had not been even thought about by God (there is no mention of it in the Old Testament): it was something hatched up in the brain of St. Paul. If God wanted his creation to be happy in this and in the after-life He could have had avoided the simple test he had willed for the first parents. Instead, He sent the serpent to tempt Eve to eat the fruit of the forbidden tree and she succumbed to His wily manipulations. God started roasting human souls in eternal fire from that moment and Christians are told He is love! How can he award eternal punishment for a temporary sin? 

If God gives heaven  to those who earn it only by merit using their freewill, what does he do with half of all mankind– the children who died before the age of ten- who could not use their freewill at all? And  the psychotic, the feeble-minded and the retarded who cannot even manage to survive by themselves, let alone choose freely what they do? Further, as per the latest theories, man hardly enjoys any freedom of choice and hence the whole edifice of Christendom falls down.  Let the billions of people chained by Christianity break open their fetters, become free and enter the land of inmtellectual freedom, light and truth.  

Let all become atheists!

I just read a statement that if you believe anything strong enough, the universe makes it happen by emitting and receiving similar energies form the universe. I believe strongly that atheism is the only truth in this world. I don’t believe it for any selfish motive; it is absolutely required to make man ‘homo sapiens,’ and make him live with an independent intelligence or reasoning capability. Religions make man unrealistic, commit cruelties in the name of his god and live like drunkards striving for things like heaven that is not there at all. Further, armed with a better perspective of life, atheists are found to be more helpful to his fellow beings and they try to ease the pain of the poor and the orphaned.

All will all agree-statistics do- that atheistic societies are better in humane indices and are more law-abiding and more helpful to his neighbors than the religious ones. Gods give them freedom to kill, lie or cheat and later repent. What is the meaning of repentance when you have taken away the right of an individual to live? Even the gods have shown examples by killing millions for their selected tribe. Is there any meaning for the commandment not to kill? Is there any meaning for any commandment? They were simply plagiarized form the laws of the then advanced societies.

Pope Francis says Islam’s God is the same as that of Jews and Christians. But the three religions have been fighting each other for centuries. God fights himself! What more fucking proof we need to prove there is no god?

Is Bible-God loving or a monstrous killer?

The Catholic Church teaches and all Christians believe that the Bible God is love.

How does God’s love operate in the Bible? Throughout the books of Moses we find that God (Yahweh) is to be feared and to be appeased. In the Exodus we read how He punishes pharaoh to let the Israelite go with Moses. God turned all canals and rivers of Egypt into blood. What did the poor creatures that lived there do to die an ignominious death? He then plagued the whole land with frogs, gnats, swarms of flies and locusts. Horrible boils and blisters destroyed everything. His angels beheaded thousands of innocent first born children (there is no accurate count). Pharaoh was afraid and was willing to let the Israelite go with Moses. But in or order to punish him more, God hardened his heart at night. He sent further punishments to the land of Egypt and its  people. At last God let Pharaoh release the Israelite with Moses. He parted the red-sea waters for his people to pass. Seeing the pursuit of the Egyptian Army just behind, God closed the waters on them drowning all the men and the beasts. (See chapters 7-14 of Exodus). 

Even to the Israelite God was a terror.   His punishment was severe to those who disobeyed his commandments. (Deuteronomy-30) “You do anything and you will be utterly destroyed.” “The Lord will smite you with fever, inflammation, drought, boils, fiery heat, madness and blasting until you perish. Your dead bodies will be food to all the birds and beasts.” (Deuteronomy 28:16-25) He frequently sent famines, plagues, hailstorms, and fire to his own people and others (Genesis 26:1, 41; 54:43; Exodus 32:35). When the Israelite made a molten calf He makes His messenger rave: “Now let me alone so that my wrath may not burn against them and consume them in a moment.” (Exodus 32:10)  

When Aron and Miriam turned against Moses, God made them leprous: (Numbers 12:9) Whenever the Israelite grumbled-often for genuine reasons-He threatened to punish them. (Numbers 24:23) When Korah organized a rebellion, God raves: Separate you from them that I may consume them (Numbers 16:20). When the Israelite began to prostitute with the daughters of Moab, God commands: take their chiefs and hang them before the Lord (Numbers 24:4).
Is this the picture of a loving and merciful God?

"I will ... trample them in my fury; and their blood ... will stain all my raiment. God's clothes will get stained with the blood of humans.” (Isaiah 63:2-6). When God gets mad -- watch out! He'll starve you to death, burn you with fire, and send vicious beasts to devour you. He'll destroy both the young man and the virgin, the suckling with the man of gray hairs. Not even the helpless and innocent children are spared. (Deuteronomy. 32:21-26)

God would send false prophets capable of doing miracles to test the Israelite. People would naturally start respecting them. And God would become wrath-incarnated. “If a prophet gives a sign of wonder …you shall not listen to his words. … For your Lord is testing you. You shall be after your God and fear Him.” (Deuteronomy 13:1-5). How could the people know those who performed miracles were false prophets? 

 God demanded animal and human sacrifices from the Israelite. To appease him, to get sins forgiven, to gain favors lambs, goats or bulls had to be sacrificed for Him and their blood sprinkled on the altar of the Lord and the flesh with all fat burned as the smell was most pleasing to this God. Leviticus gives details as to how animals are to be killed, their blood sprinkled and flesh burnt. Human sacrifices are not detailed in the OT but it was not repugnant to Yahweh, God asks Abraham to sacrifice His son for Him. (Genesis: 22:10) Just before Abraham was to slit the throat of Isaac, it was stopped, and a lamb was shown to take his place.                                     

The story of Job is an evidence for the atrocities of God and His complete disregard for human life. The Bible God and Satan placed a bet on whether Job would stop worshiping Him if things started turning wrong for Job. So God killed Job's children, destroyed his house and took everything away from him. As Job did not turn away, He gave him 10 other, more beautiful children. Think of God killing children and then creating more beautiful kids in a game with Satan! (Read the details of it in the book of Job.)

God is an ethnic Maniac

To settle His people He did the most vicious campaign ever known in history. One by one He annihilated the hostile kingdoms of Israel.  “Take all the fighting men to Ai as you did to Jericho … lay an ambush behind the city when you have taken the city fire it as the Lord has bidden.” (Joshua 8:1, 2 &8:8) “Israel snorted until there was none. As the Lord had commanded they hanged the king.” (Joshua 8:26)

“When all the kingdoms came to attack Joshua, Lord threw heavy stones from heaven upon them and they all died.” (Joshua 10:11). God ordered the sons of Levi-Moses and Aaron-and the other members of their tribe that were "on the Lord's side" to kill "every man and his neighbor.And there fell of the people that day about 3000 men." (Exodus 32:27-28) But God wasn't satisfied with the slaughter of the 3000, so he killed some more people with a plague. (Exodus 32:35)

“Makeddah, Jericho and Libna were already annihilated. The same was later done to Lachish, Horan, Eglon, Hebron, Debir, Nageb”(Joshua 10:31-40) “When a host of enemy kings came to confront the divine army, the Lord God said: do not be afraid of them, tomorrow at this time I will slain all of them for Israel.” (Joshua 11:6)
The details of such ethnic cleansing are in the books of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Zephaniah, Exodus and Deuteronomy.

“Only in the cities of these people that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you shall not leave alive anything that breathes. But you shall utterly destroy them: the Hittite and the Amorite, the Canaanite and the Perizzite, the Hivite and the Jebusite as the Lord your God has commanded you, so that they may not teach you to do according to all their detestable things which they have done for their gods, so that you would sin against the Lord your God.”(Deuteronomy 20:16–18) 

Only an ethnic maniac can think and act like the Bible God. See His command: “Thus says the Lord of hosts, ‘…go and strike Amalek and utterly destroy all that he has, and do not spare him; but put to death man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” (I Samuel 15:2-3) God killed/destroyed many of the  kingdoms of Canaan to settle to His bosom people. 

God destroys everything 

When the sons of god saw that the daughters of men were fair, they took to wife such of them as they fancied and the Lord was angry and he punished man and fixed his life-span as 120, Later,
God destroyed the entire human race in a huge flood.. God killed everyone in a single stroke. In genesis we also read how God annihilated Sodom and Gomorrah  with fire and brimstone from heaven with all the toddlers, infants and the newborns, the crippled, the aged, and the sick.

The Bible God is simply a killer-god.

How I became an atheist?

Indoctrinated into Catholicism by my parents from day 1, parish priests and sisters of my school later, I became an ardent believer. The indoctrination continued by way of everyday mediation on the Catholic doctrines, frequent retreats, daily Bible readings and reflections on their ‘truths’  in the catholic seminary where I was forced to join as an aspirant for priesthood due to poverty at home.

 

My lame brother who walked barefoot through the pebbles of our village’s non-asphalted road with excruciating pain every day to go and come back from college and worked hard-doing manual jobs- to meet the college expenses, died in a bus accident while he was a second year degree student. As he tried to alight, the bus accelerated and the back wheel crushed his skull killing him instantly. He had never taken a good meal or worn good clothes a single day in his whole life. This moved me so much that I started picturing God as a Cruel Monstrous Being finding happiness in the sufferings of his creation. I started abusing Him after taking Holy Communion (l believed the Almighty was inside me!)

Later, in one of our philosophy classes,  Fr. Fermin, a Spanish Carmelite, mentioned that there is no potency in God as He is Pure Act. He knows everything past and future; it is not simply that He knows them, but things happen because He knows them. I asked the learned priest: “since God determines everything, do we have to try hard to avoid sin and obey the commandments using our Free Will? It’s already known to Him from all times whether we will go to heaven or hell-whether we will commit good or bad. ” The priest was obviously not pleased. He said annoyingly quoting St. Augustine: “For those who want to know more, God has prepared a place in hell."   As most of the aspirants for priesthood were from very poor families and as they could not afford to go out of the seminary, they all sat quiet. And I said, “I will, in that case, go to hell and suffer as God wants me to.”

It was afterwards that I started reading prohibited books of the seminary library-mostly by Jewish and atheistic philosophers who wrote against Catholicism and the Christian God. I read extensively on human evolution and the origins of religions too. They gave answers to every doubt that was slowly creeping up inside me. I came to know for the first time in my life (I was just 19 then) that Bible was a fabricated story on a shadowy figure who was known as the Nazarene. They were not written by direct disciples or by historians of his time but by preachers in Greek in faraway lands after a century of his death, who wanted to project Jesus as the promised Messiah. Gospel writers appropriated Immaculate Conception, miracles, and the resurrection of the pagan gods and weaved a biography like thing of Jesus taking care to make him divine or God himself from the orally transmitted stories, and tales of the unconfirmed events to suite the vague OT prophesies.  Naturally many unclear prophesies regarding the Messiah have been shown as fulfilled in Matthew’s book. Miracles were profusely added in his life to picture him as god. Like the pagan deities he had a virgin birth and he died and rose up on the third day and ascended to heaven to sit on the right side of His Father. Preachers like St. Paul adopted all the pagan festivals like Christmas and Easter and many rituals. St. Paul gave a new meaning to his death and suffering: he suffered for our sins. The doctrine of redemption was a quick jump from there. The gospel writers, who came after Paul, wrote the gospels incorporating the Pauline theology. 

  

The existence of God  had been a serious issue in my mind. I knew man has been suffering since his appearance here and that nature and gods have been indifferent to him. They don’t bother whether man lives or dies; suffers or enjoys.  Natural calamities and contagious diseases have obliterated their entire societies. At least 45-50% of all children born in this world have died before reaching the age of ten. What is God’s purpose in creating them as they do not use freewill at all? Why does He create the psychotic, the mentally retarded and the imbeciles who cannot deliberate or use their freewill to merit heaven? Is He a Monster who enjoys the burlesque here? The Catholic standpoint that the fall of the first parents and that of the angels had brought in all the sufferings seems to have no meaning as the tests and the results were God's express wish. 

I had also noted that no religion defined God, his place of abode or how did he originate. Buddhism lacks any sort of a concept of god. Christianity has a trinity. Judaism and Islam have one supreme god. Hinduism is pantheistic; A few others are animistic.  Even the ultimate purpose of life is different from religion to  religion. Buddhism speaks of Nirvana-the cessation from attachment. For Christianity it is spiritual life with god in heaven. Islam’s heaven is a material one full of worldly pleasures. Hinduism promises Moksha- escape from life and rebirth cycles. Even morality is altogether different. What is good in one religion can be bad or not good in another. What is strictly enforced in a faith has no meaning in another. In short gods are different, purpose of life is different and morality is different. Sects of major religions like Christianity and Islam are fighting with each other too. Religions have waged thousands of wars and their different sects have fought and killed each other for their gods. 

I also thought about the apparitions of Mary in Fatima and Lourdes. If she appeared to the children, as believed by the Catholics, then I had to believe in her too. And I read a few books on the topic. Only those simple village girls who had been programmed to seek the help of Mother Mary in a distressing situation had seen her in a trance-like state. When there was a storm in a forest, far away from their homes, they knelt and started reciting the rosary in total fear. They looked up, and as conditioned by their minds, had a hallucinating experience of seeing Mary in the shape, dress and features they had seen her in the statues of their Church. Mother Mary had not appeared; their minds had projected their deep-rooted expectations. 

Once the apparitions were ruled out too, the step to atheism became easy and natural. I wrote then a  book entitled: “Challenge to Christianity”(I have not published it yet-but I use many of its chapters in my blogs.). I left the seminary after informing the authorities that I don't believe in any god. My archbishop, Cardinal-Joseph Parecattil, called me for a discussion  to know why I was leaving the seminary and he abruptly stopped it after one day fearing perhaps  he would lose his own faith. I have witnessed many learned Catholic priests run to the Church to pray (after discussing with me for an hour or so on what I believe) to keep their faith. I wonder how ordinary people believe all the stuff Christianity and other religions proclaim. Without childhood indoctrination no one will.  

How do Christians believe this crap!

Jesus lived and died a Jewish Pharisee. He exhorted the Jews to return to the ways of the Jewish scriptures.  He was a righteous man who lived poor and loved the poor. But he called the hypo-critic Jewish elite 'white washed tombs' and 'sons of serpents.' At the instigation of the Jews the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate crucified Jesus as a public nuisance in Jerusalem. Many felt that the poor guy wouldn't have to suffer so ignominiously and some of them started thinking Jesus was suffering for their sins. St Paul, moved by the vision of a 'cross-carrying bleeding Christ,' asserted he had suffered for the sins of others. Slowly the doctrine of redemption was on a solid foundation. So was the foundation of a new religion based on that doctrine. Christianity had its beginning in Paul's brain. Poor Jesus had not ever thought of any such development in his life. He was content being a Torah-abiding Jewish preacher-critic.

In the whole of the Old testament we do not find anywhere any plan of Yahweh to redeem man from his original sin. We come to know about god's plan of redemption  only after St. Paul constructs his above theory. The Roman crucifixion of an ordinary Jew gets a new meaning. How can a punishment meted out by the rulers of the time become  atonement for the sins of mankind?

If God really wanted to help man he could have avoided sending the foolish test after creating the first parents. Instead, He sent the wily serpent to tempt Eve and as desired by Him they failed. For that momentary disobedience  God started roasting their souls in eternal fire. He is not moved by their painful screams and cries for help. Is it just to burn man in towering flames for all times for a small disobedience in his temporary life? How can that God be love? Even if he wanted to wash away the original sin, a nod of His head or little finger was more than enough. Will anyone send His only son to get tortured, scourged, beaten and crucified as atonement?      

Yahweh the god of the Jews, who had freed the Israelite from the Egyptian slavery and settled them in Canaan after  massacring thousands of soldiers of the kingdoms of Canaan  and traveled with them in the desert in an arc, and protected them like a fiend later  turned against them. He instigated the newly formed Christians to persecute His own people! God's selected tribe, the people of Abraham, with whom Yahweh had entered into a covenant got rejected and discarded as enemies.

God forgot his covenant with Abraham and his insistence on circumcision: his new followers could keep their foreskin and they simply had to get washed in water in His name. The whole thing makes ample sense.             

What can we know of Jesus?

Most of what we know about Jesus comes from Christian writings. The Christian authors being not historians carry no authenticity. Scholars have been  investigating historical Jesus since the late 1700s. At the turn of the 19th century some of them  took the extreme position that Jesus did not live.  It is now usually discredited and although  the historicity of Jesus is not well-established the probability is that such a person lived around 2000 years back.

Renowned scholars of recent times feel it is impossible to construct the historical Jesus as the preachers who wrote about him  distorted and blurred  even the sharp outlines. Robert Henry Lightfoot (1883 –1953), an Anglican priest and theologian says: “For all the inestimable value of the gospels, they yield us little more than the whisper of his ways.” According to Rudolf Karl Bultmann, (1884-1976) the German Lutheran theologian, we can, strictly speaking, know nothing of the personality of Jesus from the gospels. The effect of the capture of Jerusalem by the Romans in AD 70 and the contact with the mystery cults, all deposited layer after layer in what was orally transferred regarding Christ. Many stories and miracles were added to his life. The gospel writers tried to set events to suite  some of the prophecies regarding the coming of the Messiah too. 

The Jewish and pagan historians of the first century are almost silent regarding Jesus. Flavius  Josephus who died abut 100AD published "The Jewish war" in 77/78  and "The antiquities of the Jews" in 94/95. In the earlier Greek versions there is no mention of Jesus as such. But in some other editions there are references to Jesus (which must have had been added later.) All leading scholars agree that the phrase “if it is lawful to call him a man’ found twice in later editions is simply a later addition. Cornelius Tacitus in about 116 AD mentioned in his manual: “ Nero was fiercely persecuting Christians on account of their crimes. Almost scornfully he adds: the founder of this sect named Christ was executed by the procurator, Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. Although the pernicious superstition was momentarily subdued, it again broke out not only in Judea but also in the city of Rome.” Tranquilus Suetonius who lived in the 2nd century alludes to Christians who adhere to a new and pernicious superstition in two passages in “The Live of the Caesars.”

Around 112 CE, Pliny the Younger wrote to Emperor Trojan, detailing how he was conducting the trials of those accused of being Christians.  A few years later, another historian, Suetonius, wrote that Emperor Claudius had expelled Jews from Rome because of the disturbances instigated by Chrestus (probably Christ).

If Jesus were the guy described in the Bible--calming the seas, walking over water, curing lepers, making the blind see, the deaf hear, raising the dead, he would have been quite famous and the historians of the period  would have written extensively on him. But there is hardly any reference about him. Was the infinite Lord, the Son of the Almighty, known only to handful of ignorant fishermen and a few ignorant followers? 

No early Christian knew when Christ was born. The Encyclopedia Britannica says: "Christians count one hundred and thirty-three contrary opinions of different authorities concerning the year the Messiah appeared on earth." Nobody knew when the Almighty god was born here! As Antonmaria Lupi, a learned Jesuit, has mentioned, the nativity of Christ has been assigned to every month in the year, at one time or another.

Matthew says he was born in Bethlehem (to fulfill a prophecy in the Book of Micah). But Micah had prophesied the coming of a military leader, not a divine teacher. Luke too says his birth occurred at Bethlehem, where his mother had gone with her husband, to make the enrollment called for by Augustus Caesar. Of the general census mentioned by Luke, nothing is known in Roman history. In any census, the Roman custom wanted every man to report at his place of residence. The head of the family alone made a report. Wife or any dependent was not required to do so. Still Luke says that Joseph left his home in Nazareth and crossed two provinces and went to Bethlehem with his pregnant wife, Mary on the very eve of her becoming a mother. Can this be true? The Messiah had to be born in Bethlehem, the city of David. And hence, as Ernest Renan, famous for Bible critic, says his birth was made to take place there.

The stories of the shepherds and wise men that recognized the child as the son of god are preserved in Mathew and Luke. Remember David himself was a shepherd in the fields of Bethlehem. The said narration could have been inserted to show the coming of the Messianic Shepherd from  David’s line. Mathew describes the attempt of Herod to destroy the child and hence Joseph and Mary took flight to Egypt and returned back to Nazareth where they settled down. If Jesus was recognized as the promised King by the shepherds and if Herod accepted this fact and took measures to kill the babe, why did he emerge as a stranger from Nazareth to begin his ministry? Why were the gospel writers totally silent on the thirty years of his life? Why didn’t any one recognize him during his public life? An attempt is made in the 4th gospel (A much later production) where Jesus is accepted by John the Baptist and the first disciples. The other three gospel writers make him Christ only by making Peter confess at Caesarea Philippi.

The story of the Immaculate Conception and connected legends and the miracles were invented to picture him as a god. Remember many of the mythological (Greek/Egyptian) and pagan gods of those times had Immaculate Conception and did many miracles. Present day scholars find the genealogy given in the gospels totally wrong , obviously added to show that Jesus is the heir of the promise made to Abraham. But if he was born of a virgin and what is the use of giving the genealogy extending to Joseph?    

Mary and Joseph were poor people. The family grew up to be a large one (4 brothers and some sisters are mentioned in Mark 6:3) Joseph was a carpenter and Jesus evidently got apprenticed tot his trade. He grew up as a Jewish boy among the Jews. He studied the Jewish scriptures first at home and then in the school attached to the synagogue. This enabled him to quote extensively form the religious books in his public life.

Gospels try to show that Nazareth of Galilee was his home town. Was there a city of Nazareth in the first century? The Encyclopedia Biblica, a work written by theologians, the greatest biblical reference work in the English language, says: "We cannot perhaps venture to assert positively that there was a city of Nazareth in Jesus' time." If there was no city of Nazareth in the first century, whatever the gospels writers say must be fictitious and imaginary. 

After his birth, nothing is known of the life of the Almighty God until he reached the age of thirty years. Yes, Luke mentions Jesus discussing with the doctors in the Temple in Jerusalem when he was twelve. The description of this incident is mythical; there were stories of other gods who had scholarly discussions with the learned at a very young age.  The other Gospels do not even mention it. Otherwise, the four gospels are simply silent with regard to the thirty years of his life.  If the writers of the Gospels knew about the life of Christ, why are they silent? Even his birth was witnessed by the appearance of a divine star and learned men came to visit him. A ruler had tried to kill the child. But then there is darkness for thirty years and the whole gospels are about his ministry which lasted just one year according to the synoptic gospels and more than two according to John.

His Public Life

According to the gospels Jesus came forth Nazareth, received baptism from John in the river Jordan Then he withdrew into the wilderness where he was tempted of Satan and was with wild beasts and angels brought him food-much as the Old Testament had related of Elijah the prophet. Luke and Mathew even say he fasted for 40 days and 40 nights as Moses did on  Mount Sinai(Mathew 4:1-12, Mark 1:12 , Luke 4:1-14). As the gospels were written during different periods of time, we find different narrations in the different gospels.  The events associated with the lives of the great Jewish prophets got incorporated into the life of Jesus too.

Upon the imprisonment of John he set out to preach.  Much of his teachings were based on the rabbinical writings both ancient and contemporary. He introduced a new form of homely metaphor and parable to his teachings. He always tried to explain and clarify the Biblical teachings. Some scholars feel his words:  ‘you are the salt of the earth, but if the salt has lost its savor wherewith shall one salt? You are the light of the world, your light shall shine forth before men,’ are certainly addressed to the Jews and not to the disciples as is later interpreted.
The gospels of Mathew and Luke contain a great condemnation of the Pharisees and the scribes and they are generally perceived to be against Judaism. It is addressed to the pagans who are already converted and who wish to get converted.  The destruction of the temple of Jerusalem (AD 70) gave a valid argument for the rejection of the Jews. The temple was the dwelling place of Yahweh. If it was destroyed, God had passed judgment over the Jewish people who refused to believe. This rejection must have come from Jesus, the new messiah. He spoke against the Jews; he turned his back on them. How can Yahweh turn against his own people for whom He massacred millions and even beheaded the first born of Egyptians? 

 Dr. Paul W. Schmiedel, Professor of New Testament Exegesis at Zurich, Switzerland, one of the foremost theologians of Europe, tells us in the Encyclopedia Biblica, that there are only nine passages in the Gospels that we can depend upon as being the sayings of Jesus but there are other scholars like Professor Arthur Drews, Germany's greatest exponent of the doctrine that Christ is a myth who believe that even these passages are as unhistorical as the rest.

The story of Jesus was certainly fashioned after the mythological gods like Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, and Mithras, Asclepius, Apollonius of Tyana and others like Buddha and Krishna. Some of the narratives of some of these gods existed hundreds of years before Jesus’ story emerged and some others were almost contemporaries of Jesus. The preachers who wrote about Jesus were familiar with them and they drew from them extensively or rather they created a Jesus in their model. The stories of the virgin birth, the shepherds and wise men, the miracle of turning water into wine in the marriage party, walking on waters, making the blind see, deaf hear, curing the paraplegics, raising Lazarus, having twelve disciples and last supper, the Eucharistic ceremony, raising the dead, getting crucified and resurrecting on the third day have all been adopted from earlier gods and projected into the life of Jesus. Further, Matthew puts a special effort to see that the messianic prophecies are fulfilled in Jesus. He studied the Jewish scriptures and models his account of Jesus to suite the so-called prophesies. He was more a preacher who wanted to establish Jesus was the Messiah, although the Jews, the chosen tribe of Yahweh, rejected him and is still waiting for the coming of the Messiah.

Jesus was a healer, preacher and reformer of the Jewish religion. As he was well versed in the scriptures he had debates and discourses with the Jewish scholars. He was annoyed at the strict observance of the Jewish laws. The Pharisees and the scribes were publicly criticized by him. He called the former ‘white washed tombs’ and the latter ‘sons of serpents.’ The offended Jewish elite plotted to kill him and forced Pontius Pilate to crucify the fiery man as a public nuisance. 

Jesus was probably a preacher and a faith healer with a winning personality. His eloquence and noble character attracted a few to him, and he was hailed as a prophet after his death. The picture of a good man carrying a heavy cross to a hill to be crucified perhaps made Paul think that he died for the sins of others.  Paul felt the innocent guy suffered not for himself but for others. This was the foundation for the doctrine of redemption, the basis of Christianity.  

Why one has to be only an atheist?

    

Different religions have very different ideas of what god is like; they even disagree about basic issues such as how many gods there are, whether they're male or female, whether they have children or not.

Every religion is different. It's worth mentioning that religions such as Buddhism and Taoism are atheistic. Bible God is simply a Killer God. Judaism and Islam have one supreme, jealous God. Hinduism has many gods. Some societies are animistic.  In short, there is no consensus among religions as to what god actually is.

If there is a god he is demonic who kills children like insects for eons and makes people suffer. One in two of all people born into this world has not attained puberty. Those who reached adulthood are haunted by earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, volcanoes, diseases, plagues and deadly viruses. The only reality is suffering.  In the quakes of the 20th century more than 1,250,000 people died. People have died likewise in all the 4000 centuries man has been here on this earth. Death by floods alone is around a million a century. Those who die in volcanoes, tempests and hurricanes will be more. Due to various epidemics since the birth of Jesus, more than 200 billion have died. In the 1918 flue pandemic, 75 Million died worldwide. Certain plagues have obliterated human societies and others like cholera and small pox decimated them. Is this the outcome of a loving God’s Providence? The only thing available in abundance for the poor are the religious texts like Bible. Quakes, tsunamis, cyclones, floods, plaques, famine, diseases, poverty and horrendous viruses.

Even the ultimate purpose of life is different in each religion. Buddhism speaks of Nirvana-the cessation from attachment. For Christianity it is spiritual life with god in heaven. Islam’s heaven is a material one full of worldly pleasures. Hinduism promises Moksha- escape from life and rebirth cycles. There is no consensus here too. Even morality is altogether different. What is good in one religion can be bad in another. In short their gods are different, their purpose of life is different and their morality is different.

I do not think there can be a more foolish thing than religious beliefs. Christians believe God created the first parents out of His immense love. But He puts them to a test and man failed. The loving God immediately opened the gates of hell and started roasting the souls of men, women and children for all eternity. God is not moved by their agony or screams, but He pushes them down deeper into the nether depths of fire to suffer, suffer and suffer. Eternal roasting in hell for a momentary sin in this life-sounds like demonic. Still Christians consider God is love although He didn't desist from sending the test to avoid all suffering; instead He sent a wily serpent to tempt the fragile first parents!

Jesus was born a Jew and lived a Torah-abiding one and died a Jew. He exhorted people to mend their ways and return to the Jewish God. As Jesus called the Jewish elite: ‘sons of serpents’ and ‘white washed tombs,’ they pressurized the Romans to kill him. Later Paul found a divine meaning for his passion and death and a new religion got birth with the rituals and sacraments of mystery religions like Mithraism. In Paul’s epistles there is not even one word about his virgin birth or the miracles he did. They were all added into the gospels that were written much after Paul had left the scene, incorporating his theology that Jesus died for our sins!.   

The original Jewish God is the Christian God too. But as Jesus Christ was crucified by the Romans at the instigation of the Jews, Christianity encouraged hatred towards Jews and when it became powerful-after the Roman Empire made it their official religion-it started persecuting Jews and this has been going on for the last 2000 years! Thus Yahweh-the common God of the two groups- inspired Christians to kill God's people whom He had selected so judiciously and freed from Egyptian slavery.  He had helped them settle in the land of Canaan by massacring surrounding kingdoms and guarded them like a possessed one. He always traveled with them in the desert in an arc. It is contradictory to the nature of any god to let his chosen sect get persecuted and killed by a new sect owing allegiance to him. 

Paul adopted many festivals like Christmas and Easter  as such from the mystery cults.  The birth of Jesus was pictured with shepherds, wise men, divine star; a dictator trying to kill the child and so on as seen in the stories of the births of many mythical gods that were celebrated on December 25th.  In the Zoroastrian cult there were elaborate celebrations on December 25th: bells were rung, hymns sung, candles lit, sacraments of blood and water administered to the initiate. The ‘Roman Saturnalia’ a festival held on December 25th in the mystery cults of Italy, was one of the brightest of all festivals held in the early times. Christians simply adopted these; “Santa Claus" and “Christmas tree" were all later additions. The story of the Immaculate Conception and connected legends and the miracles were invented to picture him as a god. Remember many of the mythological and pagan gods of those times had Immaculate Conception and they had done many miracles. 

Present day scholars find the genealogy given in the gospels- added to show that Jesus is the heir of the promise made to Abraham- totally wrong. If he was born of a virgin what is the use of giving the genealogy extending to Joseph. No early Christian knew when Christ was born. The Encyclopedia Britannica says: "Christians count one hundred and thirty-three contrary opinions of different authorities concerning the year in which the Messiah appeared on earth." Nobody knew when the Almighty god was born on this earth! The date and month of his birth were unknown. As Antonmaria Lupi, a learned Jesuit, has mentioned, the nativity of Christ has been assigned to every month in the year, at one time or another. His miracles were not known to the early Christians too as there is no mention of them in the Paul's epistles. The Greek Gospel writers, more or less a century after his death, wanted to picture him as one of the mythical gods who also did many such miracles.   

Bible’s classic pagan deity, Baal-worshiped by Canaanites-was a fertility god and was sometimes called the Lord of Rain and Dew. He was a second tier deity in the pantheon of the Canaanite gods who were presided over by EI whose cohort was Asherah. Yahweh, a warrior god and the lord of a number of nature phenomena-like storm, fire and earthquake in the Mid-East region somehow got into the EI group of gods and later on when each god was assigned a kingdom he became Israel’s deity. Later, he slowly turned into a universal god with the uttering of some mad-prophet-followers.  

Religions have done more harm than good to man even in today's world. A considerable percentage of man’s resources and time have been wasted for religions. Moral principles would have evolved anyway as they are essential for the peaceful co-existence of man. If there was no religion, there would have been no Anglo French war, no suicide bomber, no 9/11, no Crusade, no witch-hunt, no Hindu Muslim rivalry/war, no Arab Israeli war, no Serb/Croat/Muslim massacre, no persecution of Jews, no gas chamber, no honor killing, no Jihadi, no terrorist, no Taliban, no Osma Bin Laden, no oppression of women, no beheading of blasphemers and no persecution in the name of religions.  Millions have perished in each century due to religious conflicts alone. The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to become mad and commit in human acts considering them holy.

In the catholic Church today there 119 cardinals, 2946 bishops, an equal number of auxiliaries,  19,583 parish  priests and 2,79,561 religious priests. 7,05,529 sisters, and 55,314 brothers all of whom  lead a care-free life at the expense of the faithful. There must be perhaps an equal number of clergy in the other denominations too, doing no work, but living as parasites feeding on the earnings of the faithful.  If they could work, earn and live like others this world would have been a better place. 

It’s good to recollect that almost all people are atheists except that they believe in their own religion. 

A comprehensive survey revealed that only about 14 percent of English speaking professional philosophers are theists. Surveys of the members of the National Academy of Sciences, composed of the most prestigious scientists in the world, show that religious belief among them is practically nonexistent, about 7 percent only. In the European Middle Ages belief in a God was ubiquitous, while today it is rare among the intelligentsia. There has been a dramatic change in the last few centuries in the proportion of believers among the highly educated  Western world. I genuinely find the gods of religions like Christianity to be less plausible than, say, Father Christmas. I'm astonished that people still believe such stupid stuff.  

Religions come and go. There will be a time when Jesus and Christianity will become historical references. If we take man's history, many religions have come and gone already. Now God, Yahweh is already a part of history and everything is Jesus. Great Mithra, Osiris, Apollo, Horus are all gone. The present gods will disappear too. Faith has actually convinced believers that there's an invisible power - living in the skies - watching everything they do. He has given his directions though his prophet/son for the ordinary mortals to obey and follow. If people don’t live accordingly, the power has prepared a special place for them full of fire, burning and torture. He will send them there to suffer, burn, get roasted alive and scream forever. Still religious believers say this power is love! Is a believer like a drunken man and a non-believer more like a sober one? 

only a minuscule minority of scientists- who read thousands of books- are religious. But people who read only one spiritual book like the Bible or Quran in their whole life are deeply religious. How strange! Bible needs to be banned-what is written in it is not even readable. The OT god was an incarnation of revenge, ethnic cleansing, murder. anger,rape, incest, oppression of women, loving animal and human sacrifices and lover of the nudity of his prophets. In the deluge, Bible God Yahweh destroyed entire human race and all living things other than Noah and those left with him in the ark.He sent burning sulfur from heaven and killed all who lived in Sodom and Gomorrah.He sent his angels to behead firstborns of every Egyptian. When the first born of humans were finished God beheaded the firstborn cattle too. Why did He not even spare the children, toddlers, infants, the newborns, the crippled, the old and the sick? Is He a monstrous demon?  

If there is no freewill the whole edifice of Christendom will simply crumble into myriad pieces and disappear incognito.  If God is  just, he certainly wants to reward those who respond to His commandments and punish those who do not, He must have then endowed each one with equal freedom. Unless every man is equally free to do good or bad, there will be no meaning for God’s final judgment. Even Catholics admit that many factors determine human will.  Mind is a function of the corporal organism which is determined by the internal and external forces. Children, the psychotic, patients of hysteria, the mentally retarded and so on cannot deliberate or use freewill as normal men can. Thus only a few have been made capable of using Free-Will. Even among them  our actions are very much influenced by how we have been brought up and how we have been programmed. Simply put, we are not all that free in our deliberations or life choices. We lead a life and act according to the biology and structure of our brain, body constitution, early childhood experiences and prevailing culture we are brought up in. There is no meaning for freewill and hence there is no meaning for Christendom.
  
Universe is self originating and there is no need for a creator at all. God, soul, afterlife-all these have been the creation of the primitive mind of man. Like many others, even Jesus is mythical. Judaism, Christianity and Islam together have inflicted a sizable percentage of all the afflictions that have befallen man in the last 3 millennia. Religions are bound to be out in a century or two. Atheists have become the fastest growing group in USA, Canada, UK, Europe, Japan, Australia. The greatest mind living today-Stephen Hawking- has said this universe does not need a god.the greatest brain ever lived-Einstein-has mentioned feeble souls harbor thoughts of soul out of fear. There is no need for a god at all for living this life which is a cosmic blink of consciousness

My life in the Catholic Seminary-1

We were 7 children and we all worked hard with our parents to survive. After completing SSLC in a nearby school, I joined the Ernakulam petite seminary as my people did not have the means to send me to college. There I lived believing in God-as a true follower of Jesus and the Bible. The priests in the seminary detested me as I was dark and from a very poor family. 

I was happy to be in the minor seminary for three reasons: I could learn new languages and religions. There was enough food and we could play a number of games during the intervals (something altogether new in my life). But the rector was a stumbling block in eating enough and in playing to my heart's content. In the refectory, we were seated in a row and more food was served at the first seats (that of the prefect, procurator, and their deputies who managed the servants) and the quantity dwindled in proportion to the distance from the head of the table. As I was seated towards the end of the row, our plates would be half empty. Our rector, Father Joseph Panappilly would be around for breakfast, lunch and dinner inspecting how much we ate. He had some chronic stomach ailment (he was frail and thin) and he could not eat much. He did not want us to eat either. If I asked for another serving he would stare at me and in a few days I learnt to end up (breakfast, lunch and dinner) half-way and rose up half empty to avoid his stare and displeasure.

There were other problems too. The seniors teased and mocked us whenever they could. I joined a little late as I had an accident at home in which my leg was hurt. As I was a late comer the ire of the whole lot of the senior seminarians got focused on me. My belongings were substandard and cheap.  Many of the seniors used to look at them and smile sarcastically. During the recreation after dinner, they would swarm around me, ridicule and make fun of me so severely that I was on the verge of crying many a day. Thomas Narikulam was a tall, fair and handsome seminarian liked by the rector and the Archbishop-cardinal Dr. Joseph Parecattil. He made my life an ordeal. My head has a small backward elongation and he would hold the portion with his long fingers teasingly whenever he happened to be near me. This was very irritating and humiliating (what could I do to change the shape of my head?) and it happened more in the chapel when we assembled for prayers. His place was just behind mine and he would hold there (he was supposed to be praying) and giggle. He knew I would be sad and irritated, but he enjoyed it with some sadistic pleasure. With all his mischievous acts he knew how to be in the good books of the rector and the Archbishop. He had the looks of course. He would come earliest into the chapel after waking up. After each lecture or study hour he would run to pray; he knew our rector would be watching. He was below average in studies but they all liked him so much that he was sent to Rome for higher studies after just three years! I heard later, that he has a chance to become a bishop! 

There was another senior, George a guy who made my life a hell too. He knew how to rag me to tears. He was later allegedly involved in molesting a few of his cousin nuns (who had to leave the convents when they became pregnant) and a number of other women. He was the head priest of an important parish that had a hospital and a school. Now I do not know where he is-he could have retired. This guy was also fair and in the good books of the rector. I had noticed that the rector liked fair and good-looking aspirants from better families. The dark, not-so-good-looking ones from poor homes happened to be in his bad books. That is how God dispensed his justice and love through his 'Alter Christus'. From the petite seminary I learnt one important lesson: to be in the good books of the superiors or to gain favors from them be in their good books all the time doing whatever mischief you want in the sly. 

While we were in the minor seminary we had heard that our Cardinal had gone to meet the high court judge to help father Benedict the accused (sentenced to death by the district and sessions court ) in the Mariakutty murder case. Later we heard the news that the father was set free by the High court. I then understood the the catholic Church was rich and powerful. 

Well, the most interesting aspect of Catholic life is that anyone can commit any number of sins-grave and mortal sins included. Confess, pretend to repent and the god would forgive you. This could be one of the reasons why deeply religious societies are more criminal. They wouldn't dare to do such heinous acts if there was no god  prompting them under the guise of his promises. 

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Jesus was probably married to Mary

It’s known to all that nothing can be known about Jesus-who his parents were, when he was born or what he did or said in his life. The gospels which speak about him were written in Greek (which neither Jesus nor any of his disciples knew) much after he died in faraway lands like Rome, Antioch and others by unknown people taking a lot form the mystery religions and to suite the Pauline theology. It is also known to all that the Church canonized the 4 of them which suited their official line and burned or destroyed all the others which spoke quite differently about Jesus.       

Over the years ‘new’ gospels have been discovered and allegations about a romantic relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene have persisted for centuries. They have been explored by various writers and scholars. In the Fifties, the book, The Last Temptation of Christ suggested that the pair married.

                                                                                                                                                                 Did Jesus have children with Mary Magdalene? The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown’s 2003 best-selling thriller, was hinged on this premise. It said Jesus and Mary were married. The authors of another book, “The Lost Gospel”, claim to have unearthed evidence of a manuscript which tells the story of Jesus, his two sons and his marriage to Mary, one of his closest followers, who was at his crucifixion, burial and at his empty tomb. The last Gospel is based on a manuscript written (570AD) on Vellum–treated animal skin-in Syriac, a language closely linked to Aramaic (spoken by Jesus) found in the British Library.  Professor Barrie Wilson -a professor of religious studies in Toronto- and writer Simcha Jacobovici  an Israeli-Canadian film-maker-translated the text. They studied the document for six years and are convinced they have uncovered a missing fifth gospel. Jacobovici claims the manuscript, which is 29 chapters long, is a 6th century copy of another 1st-century gospel and casts parts of the Bible in a very different light. The document is in code and according to Jacobovici and Wilson, it tells of Jesus’s marriage through the story of the Old Testament character Joseph and his wife Aseneth. The document is also preceded by a covering letter, written in the 6th century by the man who translated the document from its original Greek into Syriac. They believe that this gospel and the ‘encrypted’ story of Jesus’s marriage disappeared from public view around 325 AD when the four gospels were accepted as canonical by the Trend Council. 

‘Many such gospels were there and they all got destroyed as they did not conform to the teachings of the Church. People have found bits and pieces of those destroyed gospels,’ says Jacobovici. ‘They usually come up through the antiquities’ market and they’re attacked as forgeries. But the British Library manuscript, he says, ‘is a full-blown gospel. While some academics agree it is possible that other gospels -recounting Jesus’s marriage-may have existed but got subsequently destroyed. In 1213, for example, a chronicle recorded that the inhabitants of Béziers, in southern France, had been burned alive four years earlier for ‘their scandalous assertion that Mary Magdalene and Christ were lovers.

Just two years ago, Harvard professor Karen L. King declared that she’d found a papyrus fragment — thought to be from Egypt — called The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife. In it, there were four words, written in Coptic (an Egyptian language), saying: ‘Jesus said to them, “My wife ..”  Jacobovici believes that his ‘lost gospel’ supports Professor King’s studies. He is also convinced the story of Jesus’s marriage is already incorporated into the four gospels of the New Testament. ‘Jesus is called a “rabbi” in some places in the gospels. And a rabbi, to this day, in order to have a congregation and a ministry, has to be married. If he’s going to lead a congregation, he’s got to be a model for that congregation. In the first century, you reach manhood when you get married. And therefore, he insists, there can be ‘no question’ that, even in the established gospels, Jesus must have had a wife.

 

To emphasize his belief that Mary of Magdalene was Jesus’s wife, he describes her decision to visit his body on the Sunday after the Crucifixion. ‘The gospels tell us why she went there — to wash and anoint his body. She’s just a follower and yet she’s going to unwrap his naked body? Women do not wash rabbis or male bodies. Only males do it — unless you are the man’s wife.’ Equally intriguing is what Jacobovici and Wilson claim about a plot to kill Jesus by a love rival 13 years before the Crucifixion.