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.

New year thoughts

Cheers to a new year and we get a chance to set things right. 2016 is at our doorsteps. Let us ring out the old and ring in the new-with fresh hope and faith for a better tomorrow. I wish Happy New Year to all my friends and acquaintances worldwide. 

2016 should never repeat itself.

It is no time for hatred or terror as it happened in 2015. We have just an average of 100 years or little less on this earth. No god or religion shall make us live with the illusion of an after life. If anyone of you get fooled by the promises of any god and put an end to your life, your allotted time is over once and for all.  Let us use each second of it till the last one: it is a wonderful cosmic experience, not to be thrown away for any material heaven promised by anyone or any god.    

We have seen heartbreaking terror in the bygone year.

On 7 January 2015 at about 11:30 local time, two brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, forced their way into the offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Armed with assault rifles and other weapons, they killed 11 people and injured 11 others in the building. After leaving, they killed a French National Police officer outside the building. The gunmen identified themselves as belonging to the Islamist terrorist group Al-Qaeda's branch in Yemen, who took responsibility for the attack.

On the evening of 13 November 2015, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks occurred in Paris and its northern suburb, Saint-Denis. Beginning at 21:20 CET, three suicide bombers struck near the Stade de France in Saint-Denis, followed by suicide bombings and mass shootings at cafés, restaurants, and a concert hall in Paris. The attackers killed 130 people, including 89 at the Bataclan theatre, where they took hostages before engaging in a stand-off with police. There were 368 people who were wounded, 80–99 seriously so.

There has been over 27535 terrorist activities by terrorists since September 11 attacks  when 4 passenger airliners—which all departed from airports on the U.S. East Coast bound for California—were hijacked by 19 al-Qaeda terrorists to be flown into buildings. Two of the planes, American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175, were crashed into the North and South towers, respectively, of the World Trade Center complex in New York City. Within an hour and 42 minutes, both 110-story towers collapsed, with debris and the resulting fires causing partial or complete collapse of all other buildings in the World Trade Center complex, including the 47-story 7 World Trade Center tower, as well as significant damage to ten other large surrounding structures. A third plane, American Airlines Flight 77, was crashed into the Pentagon (the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense) in Arlington County, Virginia, leading to a partial collapse in the Pentagon's western side. The fourth plane, United Airlines Flight 93, initially was steered toward Washington, D.C., but crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after its passengers tried to overcome the hijackers. In total, the attacks claimed the lives of 2,996 people (including the 19 hijackers) and caused at least $10 billion in property and infrastructure damage.

Despite 14 Years of the US War on Terror, Terror Attacks Have Skyrocketed Since 9/11.74 percent of all terror-related casualties occurred in Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Syria.

Even in today's world religions do more bad than good. 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. Religion has not contributed much even to this and each religion enforces different moral standards. Non-religious societies have been found to be more humane, loving and good to one’s fellow travelers.  

Millions of innocent people have been tortured and killed in the name of religions and holy fight in the bygone eras.  This is still going on and terrorism is still rampant. Major religions, although they deny accepting this fact, ill-treat Women.  There is, I think, no reason to believe in the superiority of the male although this is extolled by them for their own selfishness

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 Osama   Bin Laden, no oppression of women, no beheading of blasphemers and no persecution in the name of religion

World mourns the lives lost. Only emotional attachment to a god can make men do such evil as that in Paris now, earlier in the Twin Tower massacre or in the Mumbai blasts. The world should take concerted action to wipe out religions from the face of the earth so that terror disappears.

Let no life get lost in 2016 because of a religion or a god.  Let none keep ill-feeling to a fellow traveler-after all we are all of the same stock.  If religions disappear from this earth, man will live happily here forever more.   As Tennyson wrote "Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering it will be happier."

Jesus did not start Christianity

Who really founded Christianity? Was it Jesus, as most Christians believe? Did it directly evolve from the Essene with Jesus at the central point? Or was it Paul who established this new faith? Probably it was an amalgamation of all the three but the role of Jesus was insignificant. He perhaps wanted to reform the hypocritical Jews and make people live as per the tenets of the Torah. It was St. Paul who gave a divine meaning to the passion and death of Christ which had not been thought about by anyone else.  He invented the idea that Christ died for the sins of the world. It is obvious that most of the Christian sacraments and rituals were not introduced by Jesus. They are found in the writings of St. Paul who could have borrowed them from the mystery religions like Mithraism and monastic sects like Essene.

Pauline Christianity is the most prominent one that shaped the early Christian communities. Many of the best references to support the theology which Christians hold on to and support are gleaned from the epistles of St. Paul. Hyam Maccoby (British Jewish scholar and dramatist who specialized in the study of the Jewish and Christian religious traditions) believes St. Paul formed a new religion, taking ideas such as baptism, the Eucharist, Christology, the Holy Spirit, and eschatology and melded them with Jewish sacred history, Gnosticism, the teachings of Quran community and the pagan mystery religions like Mithraism. The teachings of Jesus had common elements with the Jewish Pharisaical teaching and that of the Essene. Jesus was born a Jew; he lived and died one. Jesus did not wish to abrogate Judaism, but was only in conflict with certain practices of the Jewish elite. He wouldn’t then accept his own divinity. The Synoptic gospels prove this point, but not John's  as it was done much later after the establishment of the theology propounded by Paul. Even the Synoptic gospels were written 30-40 years after Christ’s death and there was plenty of time for the Pauline theological ideas to creep into them and shape them.

Paul was a free man from the Greco-oriental world of Asia Minor whose Roman name was Paul. In Asia Minor there were many mystery religions, and they were centered upon young gods who died young and resurrected. Sacraments of bread and wine prevailed too.  And those were considered to be bonds between the gods and the faithful. Through them people thought gods bestowed on them divine life.  He had all these in mind when he went to the land of Israel.

Paul was originally a Pharisee who persecuted the Christians.  He was conscious of the inefficiency of his own religion and was probably looking for a better one. Paul would have compared the doctrine of the pagan mystery religions  which proclaimed about gods who had passed away in the bloom of life and risen into a new life with the one of whom the Christians talked about who died young on the cross. It was a part of the Jewish faith that the dead would be awakened again.  A prophet had spoken of the revival of the Jewish men on the third day. Like the pagan sacraments, nourishment with the bread and wine and the baptism of initiation could be found among the new Christian communities too. Baptism with water had been a sacrament of Judaism. The thought of the prophecy about the coming of a mighty ruler flashed across his mind. Then he could feel not only the hopes of the Jews, but also the yearnings of what had been promised in those mysterious realms. But before the Messiah would return, faith in him might grant everything that the mystery cults promised to offer to the initiated through the sacraments.

Paul has a vision

Soon he joined the congregation of the followers of Jesus. He read whatever he could get on the Nazarene. He was awe-inspired at the life of this ideal man who loved the poor and preached eternal life to them. He tried to find a new meaning for his crucifixion and passion. Why did he have to die like that? What did he do to deserve it? Was he not the best human ever? Still he was scourged, beaten up and made to carry a big cross on which he was crucified.  He had a new awakening. One day He saw Jesus coming to him with a big cross in an apparition. The sight of the Messiah carrying a heavy cross upon his bleeding shoulders was enough to deduct that Jesus was carrying the sins of the world. He could find out a meaning for the suffering Jesus underwent. He wanted to repent for all his sins and he started preaching his new awakening and the new revelation to whomever he could find.

Paul’s faith became the center of his life.  The vision he had consumed his whole being. What had happened in Paul was a revolution, a transformation rather than a mere conversion. He had to forget many things: his past life, its wrong deeds and its beliefs. The manifestation made him a new apostle, a new revolutionary. His old Jewish Theo-centered-faith got converted into a new Christ-centered one. The vision had disclosed to him the celestial meaning for life. Jesus became the promised Messiah and the Son of God whose death and resurrection were his main concerns.

The romantic certainty with which Paul spoke was derived from the psychic experience. It had the power of a revolution. He seemed to get the truth finished and completed. Jesus seemed to speak to him and he had only to listen. Any person who has such an experience, according to psychologists, gets the feeling that grace has descended on him.

Paul organizes a new religion

Paul was a man of letters and he could command a literary skill.  He was well-versed in the common religious tongue of the Greek. He also had artistic and poetic talents. All these are reflected in Paul’s writings.  Later the Church canonized his writings and they are included in the Bible. The letters of St. Paul propound the Christian faith.

These writing are different from the Gospel narrations. He speaks not about the doctrine of Jesus but about him.  The gospel teachings and the new faith they enshrine take a sidetrack; theological discourses of the sacraments and the rituals the believers have to perform take prominence. His incarnation, death and resurrection displace the good deeds and the teachings of Jesus. According to scholars on St. Paul’s writings, Jesus had remained a Jew always; but Paul the Jew became Paul the Christian. Jesus, the founder of the sect had been a prophet and dreamer and Paul organized and built up the foundations of a new religion. He introduced a new ethical code. And to spread a new religion from the faintest outlines, he borrowed a lot that was pagan.

As mentioned, it was St. Paul who gave a meaning to the death of Christ and to Christianity. Many think he was the real founder of Christianity. He was the one who developed the idea of Christ as both divine and human. The relationship and analogies of Paul’s religion with those of the mystery cults are so evident that sometimes historians think Paul is the founder of a new mystery cult.

He thought of Christ as a personal redeemer, savior or Lord through whom mankind will attain salvation. These terms were all known to the mystery cults like Zoroastrianism that they were easily assimilated by the new converts. Further, to attract the intellectuals of Greece, he borrows the idea of ‘logos’ from Philo’s philosophy. He had taught that God, the All father, had contact with the earth only through intermediary beings known as Logos, ‘the word’, ‘the son of god’, and ‘the Holy Spirit’. See how Christ became the Son of God and the prominence ‘word’ and Holy Spirit got accorded to in the gospels.

Paul adopts pagan rituals and holy days

Many of the sacramental rituals of the pagans were simply adopted as such. In many of the mystery religions there had been means for entering into communion with God. The raw blood of the bull was eaten to have divine life of the deity concerned. The priest’s administration ‘to cut up and minister the cake and distribute the liquid to the devotees’ recorded in the fragmentary inscriptions from Tomi on the Black sea scroll indicate the same sacramental element (like the present day bread and wine sharing) in the Samo-Theracian cult. St Paul established the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist form such mystery religions. The sacrament of baptism was also derived from the Pagan religious rituals. In the worship of the Pagan mother-Goddess, Cybele and her cohort Attis, initiation into a blessed immortality was secured by anointing the body of the novice with a mixture of mud and bran. 

To spread his new religion St Paul as mentioned, adopted many of the sacramental elements of the pagan religions. He adopted the Mithraic Sunday instead of Jewish Sabbath. The Mithraic holidays such as Christmas, Easter and epiphany were simply adopted as such. The sacramental ritual of the Mithraic religion was preferred to the Jewish temple sacrifice. Like the mythological gods, Christ, the Son of God came to be conceived of a virgin. Pictures of Jesus and Mary which had a remarkable resemblance of the older picture of Osiris and Horus were set up in the new Churches.  Almost all the Christian ceremonies are, in some way or other connected with the ceremonies of the mystery religions. Many authors have brought them to light. Gerald L. Berry, ‘Author of Religions of the World’, draws a parallel between the past mystery cults and Christianity and shows clearly how the latter evolved from the former.  

There are scholars who believe that the Gospels are opposed to the material found in the letters of Paul. They point out to many supposed contradictions between that which Jesus taught and what Paul wrote. These according to them prove that the message of Jesus, a true Jewish Pharisee, was not the same as that of Paul’s. Other scholars believe that that Jesus and Paul are not in full contradiction with one another, and that most of what Paul claims are already in the Gospels though in a different way. One of the reasons for this stand could be that most of the New Testament books were written after the theology of St. Paul was well established and known to all early Christians.  Because there are no known writings from Jesus or any direct apostle, or anyone that actually knew Him in the flesh. Most of what he taught is lost forever. 

Why Paul does not mention anything that Jesus is said to have done in the Bible?

In all the Epistles of Paul, there is not one word about Christ's virgin birth. Does it mean that the story of the virgin birth had not yet been invented when Paul wrote?  A large portion of the Gospels is devoted to accounts of the miracles Christ is said to have wrought. But Paul has not given the slightest hint that Christ ever performed any miracle. Is it conceivable that Paul was not acquainted with the miracles of Christ? Didn’t he know that Christ had cleansed the leprous, cast out devils, made the blind see, deaf hear, dumb speak, raised the dead and walked over the lake waters?  Why Paul didn’t write a single line on the wonders Jesus did? Could it not be possible that the accounts of the miracles wrought by Jesus had not yet been invented or recorded anywhere when Paul's Epistles were written? (Obviously, the gospels were a later product.)

Paul was not only silent on the virgin birth and the miracles of Jesus; he did not have the slightest knowledge of the teachings of Jesus like the Sermon on the Mount. Paul had not heard of Lord’s Prayer now recited by every Christian in the world. Christ taught in parables; Paul was not acquainted with them either. Paul, the man who perhaps established Christianity is almost ignorant of the teachings of Christ. Why does he not quote a single line of what Jesus Christ said in all of his thirteen Epistles? 

 Is it not a wonder that the teachings of Christ had not been known to Paul? If he did, he would have made use of them in his writings. Why did  a Christian missionary would go to foreign lands and work for  many years to convert people for  Christ, and never once mention what Christ had said to the masses,  the Lord's Prayer or at least  of one of the parables and be silent on the master’s precepts? The Churches have been teaching throughout the centuries these teachings of Christ-the virgin birth, the miracles, the parables, and the precepts of Jesus not mentioned by St. Paul.  The answer could be that the virgin-birth, miracles, preaching of Christ, parables, Sermon on the Mount, Lord’s Prayer and all were not known to the world in Paul's day- or they were not yet invented!

The Christ Paul knew was the Christ he saw in a vision while on his way to Damascus and not a living, human being, who preached and worked among men. The Christ Paul knew and the Jesus of the Gospels is two different beings. Paul does not speak of a Christ, followed by the multitude or one who performed miracles and taught substantial things. He was more concerned with why he had to die and what rituals the Christian followers Had to practice.