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Category: Christendom

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Benjamin (commenter) Christendom

Below,

pages 97-107 of the December 2024 edition of Benjamin’s The Less Than Jolly Heretic:
 

______ 卐 ______
 

I’ve become very anti-Christian over the recent years, seeing this slavish faith-based ideology as perhaps the primary cause of European civilisational collapse, having read quite closely into the likes of Catherine Nixey’s The Darkening Age, Revilo P. Oliver’s The Origins of Christianity, Tom Holland’s Dominion, and Charles Freeman’s The Closing of the Western Mind, and some abridged translations of Christianity’s Criminal History by Karlheinz Deschner, reinforced by the historical Roman writings of Celsus, Porphyry of Tyre, and the Emperor Julian, and, as with Edward Gibbon, have considered Christianity’s responsibility for the fall of Rome (and the theocratic brutality of Byzantium and the Dark Ages that effectively ended European science for well over a millennium, torturing and exterminating those Europeans who tried to hold out against the impositions of countless generations of bloodthirsty, ignorant, perverted Christian regimes, Europe split for seventeen centuries by terrible Christian sectarian warfare).

I have also considered its post-Enlightenment transition into liberalism and that all-encompassing secular ‘Neochristianity’, in the inspirational words of César Tort. This value system has conditioned a knee-jerk egalitarianism and relativistic weakness, a morality that Friedrich Nietzsche famously derided as fit only for slaves, a racially suicidal, life-hating framework of passivity, submission, and out-group preference, in complete contrast to the master morality values of Republican Rome and the cohesive Indo-European civilisations of the ancient world.

Drawing from a translated summary of Demolish Them by Vlassis Rassias, provided in original form on the West’s Darkest Hour blog, we can chart the principal Christian moves to destroy the Classical world. It’s worth noting that Christians referred to European advocates of Greco-Roman civilisation as ‘Gentiles,’ a Semitic term, before transitioning into even more erroneous and derogatory descriptors.

In 314, after the full legalisation of Christianity, the Christian church moved to attack the Gentiles. The Council of Ancyra denounced the worship of the Goddess Artemis. In 324, the Emperor Constantine declared Christianity as the only religion of the Roman Empire. At Dydima in Asia Minor, he sacked the Oracle of God Apollo and tortured its priests to death. He also evicted the Gentiles from Mt. Athos and destroyed all local Hellenic Temples. In 326, Constantine destroyed the Temple of God Asclepius in Aigeai in Celicia and many Temples of Goddess Aphrodite in Jerusalem, Aphaca, Mambre, Phoenice, and Baalbek. In 330, Constantine looted the treasures and statues of the Greco-Roman Temples of Greece to decorate his new capital of the empire, Nova Roma (the city of Constantinople), and in 335, went on to sack the Temples of Asia Minor and Palestine and ordered the execution by crucifixion of Gentile priests as “magicians and soothsayers” including the Neoplatonist philosopher Sopater of Apamea.

In 341, Emperor Constantius, the son of Constantine, persecuted “all the soothsayers and the Hellenists,” imprisoning and executing many Gentile Hellenes. In 346, there were large-scale persecutions against the Gentiles in Constantinople, during which the famous orator Libanius was banished as a “magician.” In 343, an edict of Constantius ordered the death penalty for all kinds of worship through “idols,” and a new edict in 354 ordered the closing of all Greco-Roman Temples, some of them to be turned into brothels or gambling rooms, and their priests were executed. In various cities of the empire, libraries began to be burnt, and lime factories were built next to the closed Temples. A large part of sacred Gentile architecture was turned to lime. A further edit in 356 ordered the Temples destroyed altogether and the execution of all “idolators,” and in 357, Constantius outlawed all methods of Divination.

In 359, massive death camps were built in Skythopolis in Syria for the torture and execution of arrested Gentiles from all around the empire. In 361, a new, non-Christian Emperor, Julian, pronounced religious tolerance and called for the restoration of the various pre-Christian cults but was assassinated in 363. In 364, the Emperor Flavius Jovianus ordered the burning of the library of Antioch, an Imperial edict ordered the death penalty for all Gentiles who worshipped their ancestral Gods, and three separate further edicts ordered the confiscation of all properties of Temples and the death penalty for participation in Greco-Roman rituals, even in private. In 365, an Imperial edict forbade Gentile army officers to command Christian soldiers.

In 370, Emperor Valens ordered a tremendous persecution of Gentiles throughout the Eastern Empire. In Antioch, the ex-governor Fidustius, the priests Hilarius and Patricius, and many other non-Christian believers were executed. All friends of Julian, such as his personal physician Orebasius, the Greek medical writer, the Roman historian Sallustius, and Pegasius, the custodian of the Temple of Minerva, were persecuted, and the philosopher Simonides was burnt alive whilst the philosopher Maximus was decapitated. In 372, Emperor Valens ordered the governor of Asia Minor to exterminate the Hellenes and all documents of their wisdom.

In 373, there was a new prohibition on Divination and the introduction by Christians of the slang term “Pagan” (from the Late Latin word pagani, meaning “peasants,” by extension as “rustic,” “unlearned,” “yokel,” or “bumpkin.”) The Greco-Roman polytheists did not refer to themselves as Pagans. The ‘Pagans,’ driven from their places of learning and religious practice and fearing for their lives, had become increasingly rural and provincial relative to the Christian population. Subsequently, Christians denigrated Paganism as “the religion of the peasantry.”

In 375, the Temple of God Asclepius in Epidaurus in Greece was closed. Again in 380, an edict of Emperor Flavius Theodosius decreed Christianity the exclusive religion of the Roman Empire, requiring that “all the various nations, which are subject to our clemency and moderation, should continue in the practice of that religion, which was delivered to the Romans by the divine Apostle Peter.” Non-Christians were referred to as “loathsome, heretics, stupid and blind,” and in another edict, he referred to all those who did not believe in the Christian god as “insane” and outlawed all disagreements with the Church dogmas. Ambrosius, the Bishop of Milan, began to destroy all the Temples in his area, and Christian priests led the mob against the Temple of Goddess Demeter in Eleusis and tried to lynch the hierophants Nestorius and Priskus. The 95-year-old Nestorius ended the Eleusinian Mysteries and announced a predominance of mental darkness over the race.

In 381, Emperor Theodosius removed all rights from any Christians who returned to the Greco-Roman religion. Throughout the Eastern Empire, more Temples and libraries were looted and burned down. Even simple visits to the Hellenic Temples were banned. In Constantinople, the Temple of Goddess Aphrodite was turned into a brothel, and the Temple of Sun and the Temple of Artemis were turned into stables.

Then, in 384, Theodosius ordered the devout Christian Praetorian Prefect, Maternus Cynegius, to cooperate with the local bishops of Northern Greece and Asia Minor to destroy more Hellenic Temples. From 385 to 388, “Saint” Marcellus and his armed gangs scoured the countryside, sacking and destroying hundreds of Hellenic Temples, shrines, and altars, including the Temple of Edessa, the Cabeireion of Imbros, the Temple of Zeus in Apamea, the Temple of Apollo in Dydima, and all the Temples of Palmyra. Many thousands more Gentiles were rounded up and sent to the Skythopolis death camps to be executed.

In 386, Theodosius outlawed the care of sacked Temples, and in 388 outlawed public talks on religious subjects. In 389 and 390, all non-Christian calendar systems were outlawed, and hordes of emboldened desert hermit fanatics flooded into the Middle Eastern and Egyptian cities, destroying statues, altars, libraries, and Temples and lynching the Gentile inhabitants. Theophilus, the Patriarch of Alexandria, began a heavy persecution of Gentiles and turned the Temple of Dionysos into a church, burnt down the city’s Mithraic Temple and then destroyed the Temple of Zeus, and mocked the priests as ludicrous before the laughter of the Christian crowd, before stoning them to death as the mob profaned their sacred images.

In 391, a new edict of Theodosius prohibited visits to Temples and the crime of merely looking at vandalised statues. In Alexandria, Gentiles led by the philosopher Olympius revolted, and street fights broke out before they locked themselves inside the fortified Temple of the God Serapis. Following a violent siege, the Christians occupied the building, demolished it, burnt its famous library, and profaned the Greco-Roman cult images.

In 392, Theodosius outlawed all non-Christian rituals as “Gentile superstitions.” The Mysteries of Samothrace were ended, and their priests slaughtered. In Cyprus, “Saint” Epiphanius and “Saint” Tychon destroyed almost all the Temples of the island and exterminated thousands more Gentiles. The local Mysteries of Goddess Aphrodite were ended. An edict by Theodosius declared, “The ones that won’t obey Pater Epiphanius have no right to keep living on the island.”

In 393, the Pythian Games at Delphi, the Aktia of Nikopolis, and the Olympic Games were outlawed as “idolatry,” and Christians sacked the Temples of Olympia. In 395, two new edicts led to the persecution of Gentiles. The Emperor Flavius Arcadius directed hordes of baptised Goths led by Alaric and the Christian monks to sack and burn the Hellenic cities, including, among others, Dion, Delphi, Megara, Corinth, Pheneos, Argos, Nemea, Lycosoura, Sparta, Messene, Phigaleia and Olympia, and then slaughtered and enslaved the inhabitants, burning all Temples. They burnt down the Eleusinian Sanctuary and had all its priests burnt alive, including the hierophant Mithras Hilarius. In 396, Flavius Arcadius declared Paganism to be treated as high treason, and the few remaining priests and hierophants were imprisoned. Then, in 397, Flavius Arcadius ordered all Temples still erect to be demolished.

In 398, the Fourth Church Council of Carthage prohibited the study of Gentile books by all citizens, their bishops included. Porphyrius, the bishop of Gaza, demolished almost all Temples in his city, leaving only nine to continue functioning. In 399, a new edict from Flavius Arcadius ordered the last of the Temples, almost exclusive now to the depths of the countryside, to be immediately demolished, and, in 400, bishop Nicetas destroyed the oracle of God Dionysus in Vesai and baptised all Gentiles living in the area. In 401, the Christian mob of Carthage lynched Gentiles and destroyed “idols.” In Gaza, the new “Saint” Porphyrius sent his followers to lynch Gentiles and destroyed the remaining nine Temples still active in the city. The Fifteenth Council of Chalcedon ordered all Christians who still retained good family relations with their Gentile relatives to be excommunicated (even after the death of these relatives).

In 405, John Chrysostom sent hordes of grey-clad monks armed with iron bars and clubs to destroy the “idols” in all the cities of Palestine and, in 406, collected funds from rich Christian women to financially support the demolishment of Hellenic Temples. The Temple of Goddess Artemis was destroyed in Ephesus, and in Salamis in Cyprus, “Saint” Epiphanius and “Saint” Eutychius continued the total destruction of Temples and sanctuaries and the persecution of Gentiles. A new edict in 407 once more outlawed all non-Christian acts of worship.

In 408, the Emperor Honorius of the Western Empire and the Emperor Flavius Arcadius of the Eastern Empire came together and ordered all Temple sculptures destroyed or confiscated. Private ownership of the statues was outlawed. The local bishops led new book-burning persecutions, and any judges showing pity for Gentiles were also persecuted. In Alexandria, a few days before the Judaeo-Christian festival of Pascha-Easter, bishop Cyrillis ordered the mob to attack and hack down the beautiful Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia. The Christians paraded pieces of her body through the city and burnt them together with her books at a place called Cynaron. A fresh persecution started, and all Hellenic priests in North Africa were crucified or burnt alive.

In 416, the inquisitor Hypatius, “The Sword of God,” exterminated the last Gentiles of Bithynia. In Constantinople, all non-Christian army officers, public employees, and judges were dismissed. In 423, Emperor Theodosius II declared that all Gentile religion was nothing more than “demon worship” and ordered those who persisted in practicing it to be imprisoned and then tortured. In 429, the Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens, holding the Temple of Goddess Athena, was sacked.

Then, in 435, a new edict of Emperor Theodosius II ordered the death penalty for all “heretics.” Judaism was considered the only legal and non-heretical non-Christian religion. In 438, Theodosius II’s new edict incriminated Gentile “idolatry” as the reason for a recent plague. Between 440 and 450, the Christians succeeded in demolishing all Temples, altars, and monuments in Athens and Olympia, and Theodosius II ordered all non-Christian books burned, and all the Temples of the city of Aphrodisias (the city dedicated to Goddess Aphrodite) were demolished. All libraries were burnt down, and the city was renamed Stauroupolis, “City of the Cross.”

Between 457 and 491, among others, the physician Jacobus and the philosopher Gessius of Petra were executed, whilst the Roman politician Severianus of Damascus, the Greek historian Zosimus, and the Greek mathematician and architect Isidorus of Miletus were tortured and imprisoned. The proselytiser Conon and his followers exterminated the last Gentiles on the island of Imbros in the North-East Aegean. The last worshippers of Lavranius Zeus were exterminated in Cyprus. The majority of the Gentiles of Asia Minor were exterminated, despite a desperate revolt against the Emperor and the Church between 482 and 488, and more Hellenic priests hiding ‘underground’ were arrested, publicly humiliated, and tortured, then executed.

By 515, baptisms had become obligatory, even among those who professed to already be Christian. The Emperor Anastasius of Constantinople ordered the massacre of Gentiles in the Arabian city of Zoara and the demolishing of the Temple of the local God Theandrites. In 528, Emperor Jutprada outlawed the alternative Olympian Games of Antioch and ordered the execution by fire, crucifixion, tearing to pieces by wild beasts, or cutting by iron nails of all who practiced “sorcery, divination, magic, or idolatry” and prohibited all teachings by “…the ones suffering from the blasphemous idolatry of the Hellenes”, then, in 529, he outlawed the Athenian Philosophical Academy and had all its property confiscated.

In 532, the fanatical inquisitor-monk Ioannis Asiacus led a crusade against the Gentiles of Asia Minor, put hundreds of Gentiles to death in Constantinople, and bloodily converted them to Christianity in Phrygia, Caria, and Lydia and in 556, inquisitor the Emperor Jutprada ordered Amantius to go to Antioch, to find, arrest, torture, and execute the last Gentiles and to burn all private libraries down. In 562, mass arrests, public humiliations, tortures, imprisonments, and executions were conducted in Athens, Antioch, Palmyra, and Constantinople. Within 35 years of Asiacus’ crusade, 99 churches and 12 monasteries had been built on the sites of demolished Temples.

Between 578 and 582, Christians tortured and crucified almost all the Gentiles around the Eastern Empire and exterminated the last Hellenes of Baalbek, now named Heliopolis. In Antioch, a secret Temple of Zeus was discovered and attacked, causing the priests to commit suicide. The captured Gentiles, including Vice Governor Anatolius, were tortured and sent to Constantinople to be fed to wild beasts and crucified when they were not devoured alive, their mutilated corpses dragged through the streets by Christians, and then thrown unburied in the city dump. Emperor Mauricius conducted further persecutions in 583, and in 590, Christian accusers ‘discovered Pagan conspiracies’ throughout the Eastern Empire, and a new wave of torture and executions erupted.

In 692, the Penthekte Council of Constantinople prohibited the last remains of Calends, Brumalia, Anthesteria, and other Hellenic Dionysian festivals. By 804, the last Gentiles living in Laconia in Greece had still resisted all attempts by Tarasius, the patriarch of Constantinople, to convert them, but they were, in the end, violently converted between 950 and 988 by the Armenian “Saint” Nikon.

This piece from a statue of Emperor Hadrian, which must have measured around 5 meters, was found in present-day south-central Turkey, where Christianity took root early.

There are many more examples of this barbarity, but this provides a basic overview of why I hold my perspectives. The most important factor, beyond the beautiful architectural physicality of their Temples and statues being defiled and destroyed, and the amassed wisdom of their many libraries lost forever, is that the Europeans referred to as “Gentiles”, those massacred throughout this violent centuries-long campaign of anti-European terror—conducted by their fellow European citizens and their leaders from within the same civilisation under the same race of people—methodically severed the European citizens from their Aryan Gods and instead subjected them to a forced conversion to this god of a foreign enemy, and the holy teachings and writings originally compiled by that enemy.

The gospels were originally written by Jews after all, much as the entire Old Testament is a Jewish mythology, that Judaic archetype of Jesus subversively inverting the European values to the values of their racial enemy, and the additional values they designed ‘for export only’, so the newly radicalized cult of Europeans could further impose these alien values among their own race by obscene brutality and blind torments and misery, these traitorous egalitarian submission and pacifism values held now near-unanimously by Europeans in the 21st Century, and held subconsciously, unaware that, though they have—in the general public understanding—dropped that god for atheism, their unthinking moral axiology and puritanism is still entirely Christian (and it certainly is unthinking beyond any rationalizations they can attribute in aftermath), an ethical framework of far more profound significance than the standard assumption by atheist progressives that by Christian ethics we mean merely an organised opposition to pornography, abortion and homosexuality as displayed by American conservative evangelicals, and irrespective of a liberal humanist’s scepticism over the existence of the supernatural and of the divine aspects of Christian monotheism.

The arbitrary value shift has been subsumed, and now, when one talks of being ‘good,’ or ‘moral’—or specifically obsesses over the moral value of an act at all, as Friedrich Nietzsche reminded us in his Twilight of the Idols—we can take it as read that they are in alignment with the morals presented to us in the Ten Commandments, and by the incoherent single-source literary subversions of a radical millenarian cult-leader archetype, the inverse of an Eliot Goldstein creation, this revolutionary fiction—as if morality had no other value-system, and as if nothing worthy had come before, or had been a mere barbarity of its own!—with us only able to view the pre-Christian Greco-Roman civilisation’s societal codes and cultural drives through a 2000-year post-revolutionary Christian moral lens, in unthinking retroprojection—our definitive modern paradigm—the Greco-Roman world now appearing alien to us, or somehow cruel.

As with the writings of Richard Carrier, David Fitzgerald, and David Skrbina, I am convinced that the character of Jesus is mythological, a subversive creation of Paul—and otherwise missing from the historical record (one cannot trust Flavius Josephus as a single external to the Bible source due to the likelihood of forgery)—invented for the purposes of irreversibly undermining an already weakened Roman Empire and to impede the maintenance of its grasp on Judea, manipulating the fundamental attitudes of his hated enemy to the point that their society would fall apart in revolution from the ground up, the universal egalitarianism of the Judaic doctrine of Christianity moulding the slave-classes into furious zealots, violently intolerant of the ‘paganism’ of the Greco-Roman tradition and the accepting pluralism of Roman religious belief, and their centuries of rational philosophy, mathematics, and analytical science, with their statues and sculptures vandalized and smashed, their ancient temples and monuments looted and destroyed, and their vast libraries holding centuries of accumulated wisdom and knowledge burnt to the ground, the precious works and advancements contained in them lost to history, and the people now weakened, tradition and social coherence obliterated, vulnerable to increasing miscegenation and the predations of hostile foreign outsiders, or to Christian-orchestrated purges and bloody mass executions. Ramsey Macmullen and J. N. Hilgarth elaborate on this violent, forced transition of Europeans to Christianity in the fourth to eighth centuries following Emperor Constantine’s proclamation that Christianity was now the one official religion of Rome.

Categories
Christendom Monarchy

Zero

Lebenskraft ! (5)

Budapest

27th and 28th April

Before arriving in Budapest the bus made a stop where I got off and touched the trunks of three beautiful trees with the palm of my hand. I felt like I was in paradise with that vegetation. I said to myself that I belonged in these latitudes: far away from the ‘Neanderthalesque’ tropical vegetation of the village where I now live.

The architectural beauty of Budapest impressed me much more than that of Prague, especially the views on both sides of the Danube on a cruise I took at night, from where I could see all the illuminated buildings and palaces, and where I had a glass of red wine. I had never seen so much architectural beauty except many years ago when I visited Venice. But as I explained in my previous post, we are not here to talk about the good things in Europe but the bad things, so I won’t add as many pictures of the beautiful capital of Hungary as I did of the Czech capital.

I stayed in a hotel on the Pest side of the Danube, and then toured its boulevards, Opera House, Parliament, Synagogue and St Stephen’s Basilica. In the afternoon I went to the Buda side of the city, and climbed Castle Hill with its magnificent views. But let’s take it one step at a time.

Arriving in Budapest I was surprised not to see any street posters of niggers on the streets, which I had seen in Germany and the Czech Republic (not to mention my previous trips to English-speaking countries!). Hungarians may be Christian, but it is atheistic hyper-Christianity that accelerates the Aryan self-hatred. As I arrived late in the evening, I went to the outskirts of the big city to a restaurant in the middle of the forest where they served traditional Hungarian food.

The next day, the first thing I visited was one of the most important places in the city, Heroes’ Square.

I was struck by the fourth king if we count the kings from the left. He was the father of St Elizabeth, a woman whose compassion for the dispossessed was a Christian preamble to the out-group neochristian altruism that the West suffers from today. St Elisabeth of Hungary is also venerated in German-speaking countries. The sculpture of the father of this woman revered by Hungarians, Austrians and Germans holds in his hands a document, the Golden Bull, which was the nation’s first written constitution (the one on the right was another king who also had another ‘saintly’ daughter).

The first sculpture depicts Stephen I of Hungary (997-1038), who brought Christian infection to this land, a religion whose Apostle didn’t distinguish between Aryan, Jew and sandnigger.

On this trip, which included the people of Budapest, I corroborated much of what I said about white trash from Himmler’s and my POV. The Nordic race is the paradigm of the Aryan. In other words, architectural art may be the frame of the West, but pure Nordic or English DNA is its canvas. A splendid frame with a bad canvas may have artistic value, but it doesn’t move us to sacrifice our lives for the cause.

Here we see the coronation of Franz Joseph. In a world where the Aryan, not the Jewish archetype reigned, no king would be seen kneeling before a Judeo-Christian bishop.

The Danube, which divides Budapest in twain, is one of the most important rivers in Europe. It flows through ten countries, including Germany, and empties into the Black Sea. Churchill urinated in the Danube in 1945. If the good guys had won the war, these days it wouldn’t be the Russians celebrating victory but the Germans. But the pungent smell of Churchill’s urine still permeates the masses of white trash I have seen on this trip. So trashy are today’s whites that they made a monument, beside the Danube, to the Jews shot not by the Nazis but by the JQ-conscious Hungarians.

It is said that there were twenty thousand, but when they ran out of bullets they started using ropes to kill the first Jew and throw him into the then freezing Danube to drag the others tied up. The monument is called the ‘shoe zone’.

I even heard one of the many tour guides use the word ‘holocaust’ when referring to the event.

This Christ appears outside St Stephen’s Basilica in Budapest. I repeat: to cure the white man of his false guilt, his Judeo-Christian monuments must be torn down. That will be Kalki’s revenge for what the Christians did to the Greco-Roman temples.

This monument I visited, ‘Liberators of Budapest’, which honours the Soviet soldiers in the 1945 battle, is in front of the American embassy and shows how, despite Hungarians commemorating the patriots of 1956, the anti-Nazi narrative is never questioned. No, Viktor Orbán is not one of us. Look at this other monument he had built, not far from the one the Soviets put up:

Orbán’s monument is dedicated to the ‘victims of the German invasion’, when in fact the government gladly collaborated with the Nazis. The eagle represents the Third Reich and, the archangel below, Hungary: a falsification of history because, as I have just said, it was the JQ-conscious Hungarians who perpetrated their little holocaust.

Here, below Orbán’s monument, we see the Jewish victims. When I took this picture I was no longer by the Danube but in the park near the American embassy.

Originally the Hungarians refused to be Christianised. Gerard of Csanád was the first bishop to preach in the city. Like the Jews who almost a millennium later were thrown into the Danube, those aware of the CQ put Gerard in a barrel and threw him into the Danube in 1046. This was a time when the aforementioned Stephen I wanted to convert his people to the worship of the Jewish god. Now the Hungarians worship St Gerard and a hill beside the Danube in Budapest is named after him.

As always, if the Aryan is to be saved, all these ‘holy place’ names will have to be changed. In fact, throwing the first bishop of Budapest into the Danube in a barrel would now have to be done with the new bishop of Rome, who belongs to the most progressive wing of the Vatican, if we want to preserve the DNA of pure Aryanism. See for example this aberration I saw inside the church at the corner of the hotel where I was staying: a mongrel recreation of the best-known painting of St Francis of Assisi.

It is the command to love the enemy, a la St Francis, that is screwing the minds of these Catholics. When Bela IV reigned there were only a handful of survivors left after the Khan’s invasion. But the city doesn’t preach hatred of the Mongols. They should hate them and also the Allies who bombed Budapest in WW2. It is worth mentioning that on that day I also passed by the elegant mansion where Orbán has his residence. Curiously, the word ‘Karmelita’ appears there after the order of the Discalced Carmelite nuns.

Categories
Christendom Revilo Oliver

Christianity

and the survival of the West, 1

by Revilo Oliver (1973)

Contents

The Religion of the West
The Orient
Christianity Today
The Predictable Future
The Consequences
Succedaneous Religion
Postscript

The mission of this generation is the most difficult that has ever faced a Western generation. It must break the terror by which it is held in silence, it must look ahead, it must believe when there is apparently no hope, it must obey even if it means death, it must fight to the end rather than submit… The men of this generation must fight for the continued existence of the West.

—Francis Parker Yockey (1948)

 

Chapter One: THE RELIGION OF THE WEST

YOU, WHO ARE NOW reading these lines, and I are strangers. I have no means of knowing whether you are a Christian or an atheist. That, however, will not matter, so long as we talk about facts and not wishes.

The observed and verifiable facts of the world about us are not affected by religious faith or the lack of faith. Christians and atheists must find themselves in perfect agreement when they affirm that lead is more malleable than steel, that the earth is an oblate spheroid rotating on its axis, that whales are mammals, that Germany was defeated and devastated by the many nations allied against her in 1945, and that the Chinese are Mongolians. About such matters there can be no dispute among Western men, who instinctively accept the reality of the world about us and cannot believe, as do many Orientals, that it is merely an illusion in the mind of a dreamer.

If we would salvage and restore our civilization—the Occidental culture that is peculiarly our own and that now seems to be disintegrating and rotting before our very eyes—we must do so as Western men, by observing reality objectively and by reasoning from it dispassionately. And when we try to compute what resources remain to us, we need first of all to determine the actual strength of the Christian tradition at the present time.

It is a fact, which Christians will regard with satisfaction and some atheists may deplore, that Western civilization, for about half of its recorded history, has been a Christian civilization in the sense that the great majority of the people belonging to it (though never, at any time, all of them) believed implicitly in the truth of the Christian revelation. That religious unanimity was for a long time so nearly complete that, after the fall of the Roman Empire and the evanescence of hopes for its restoration, we of the West regarded our religion as the bond that united us and distinguished us from the rest of the human species. During the Middle Ages, our ancestors occupied the greater part of Europe, and, until they discovered the American continents, they lived only in Europe, but despite that geographical unity, they did not generally refer to themselves as the Europeans. For all practical purposes, furthermore, our ancestors belonged to the same division of the white race: they, like the true Greeks and the true Romans before them, were all members of the great race that we now call Indo-European or Aryan, but they had in their languages no word to designate their blood relationship and biological unity. Thus, when they referred to the unity of which they were always conscious as something transcending the constantly shifting territorial and political divisions of Europe, they called themselves Christendom. And for many centuries that word was adequate and misled no one.

For many centuries the West was Christendom and its civilization was indubitably Christian: that, whether you like it or not, is an historical fact. There is a complementary historical fact that was less obvious at the time and that even thoughtful men overlooked or tried to ignore until the events of the past two decades made it indubitable: Christianity is a religion of the West, and, for all practical purposes, only of the West. It is not, as its polemical adversaries so often charge, a Semitic cult, for it has never commanded the adhesion of any considerable number of Semites, and it is not, as Christians once generally believed, a universal religion, for experience has proved that it cannot be successfully exported to populations that are not Indo-European.

Experience has also proved that it does not do the slightest good to deny ascertained facts. The men of Classical antiquity knew, of course, that the earth is spherical, and Eratosthenes in the third century B.C. calculated its circumference as 24,663 miles. But the early Fathers of the Church, living in the age of growing ignorance that shrouded the last century of the Roman Empire, decided, on the basis of some statements in the Old Testament, that the earth ought to be flat or, at least, no more curved than a shield. Lactantius was the most eloquent and probably, therefore, the most influential of the many who assiduously demanded that the earth be flat and so imposed on their contemporaries the conviction that it was. In the Middle Ages, to be sure, there were some learned men, such as Buridan, who knew that the globe is a globe, but they, like learned men today, who all know very well that talk about the equality of races is utter nonsense, usually refrained from publicly denouncing fashionable delusions. It was not until the Fifteenth Century that the truth became again inescapable, but when it did, the Christians, being men of the West, who do not deny the lessons of experience, surrendered the comfortable error in which they had once generally believed; and since that time, no rational Christian has doubted that the earth is spherical.

Today, as in the Fifteenth Century, Western men have had to discard a congenial assumption to bring their conception of the world into conformity with observed reality. So long as we of the West held unquestioned dominion over the whole earth, we permitted ourselves to assume that our civilization in general, and our religion in particular, could be exported and made universal. We did not sufficiently observed that talent for mimicry is common to all human beings and indeed to all anthropoids; that all human beings stand in awe of those who have power over them; and that a genius for dissimulation and hypocrisy is hereditary in the most intelligent Orientals. Even with these oversights, the evidence against our assumption was fairly clear, but in the pride of our power we felt that we could indulge an assumption that was so congenial to the romantic generosity that is a peculiarity of our race. But the events of half a century, and especially of the last two decades, have shown us, beyond peradventure of doubt, the shape of the world in which we live. We now know what our prolonged missionary effort, cultural as well as religious, accomplished—and how its visible effects were produced.

When Cortés and his small but valiant band of iron men conquered the teeming empire of the Aztecs, he was immediately followed by a train of earnest missionaries, chiefly Franciscans, who began to preach the Gospel to the natives and soon sent home, with naive enthusiasm, glowing accounts of the conversions they had effected. Their pious sincerity and innocent joy still lives in the pages of Father Sahagun, Father Torquemada, and many others. For their sake I am glad that the poor Franciscans never suspected how small a part they played in the religious conversions that gave them such happiness. Far, far more persuasive than their sermons and their book had been the Spanish cannon that breached and shattered the Aztec defenses, and the ruthless Spanish soldiers who slew the Aztec priests at their own altars and toppled the Aztec idols from the sacrificial pyramids. The Aztecs, Tepanecs, and other natives accepted Christianity, not because their hearts were touched by alien and incomprehensible doctrines of love and mercy, but because it was the religion of the white men whose bronze cannon and mail-clad warriors were invincible.

That was early in the Sixteenth Century and even then there were not wanting indications that should have given pause to a critical mind, but we of the West went on repeating that fond mistake for four centuries, as the missionaries whom we sent to all parts of the world wrote home glowing reports of the number of “hearts” they had “won for Christ.” It was only after our enemies’ campaign of “anti-colonialism” really got under way that most of us realized that what had won all those hearts was primarily the discipline of British regiments and the manifest power of the white man.

We now know what happened. On many a shore of Africa, for example, missionaries eager to “win souls for Christ” ventured to land alone, and the aborigines, after mutilating and torturing them for a good communal laugh, ate them, cooked or raw according to the custom of the local cuisine. Usually, a few weeks or a few months later, a British cruiser hove to off shore and lobbed half a dozen 4.5 shells into the native village, and, if not pressed for time, landed half a company of marines to beat the bushes and drag out a dozen or so savages to hang on convenient trees. Consequently the tribe, if not very obtuse, took the hint and respected the next bevy of missionaries as somehow representing the god of thunder and lightning. And if the men of God distributed enough free rice and medical care with their sermons, they were able to make “converts,” as the natives learned to utter the words that Christians like to hear.

That is, in essence, the whole history of “winning souls” among the savages. There were, of course, many local variations. If the first missionaries were preceded by troops or white settlers, the blacks had already been convinced of the virtues of Christian rifles and had learned that white men should not be regarded as esculent comestibles. It often happened, however, that the natives, even after many years of preaching and conversion, rejected the white man’s odd rites very emphatically, and a fresh supply of missionaries was needed. In 1905, for example, the Maji-Maji conspiracy in Tanganyika murdered all the missionaries and almost all the white men and women in the entire territory, and it required a German regiment and several companies of marines to restore the teachings of the Gospel. That was done by giving some forty or fifty thousand demonstrations that a Mauser bullet could penetrate even a black hide that had been most carefully anointed with the grease of a boiled baby.

The Christian missionaries did teach a ritual and often inculcated a superstition that had some superficial resemblance to their religion, but as for teaching the spiritual substance of Christianity, they might as well have followed the example of St. Francis and preached sermons to the birds. That is why the many, many thousands of devoted Christians who expended their whole lives to “save souls” built only an edifice of cardboard and tinsel that is now gone in the wind.

What the vanishing of that flimsy facade has made obvious was predictable from the first. The religion of the West has never been comprehensible to the rudimentary minds of Congoids, Capoids, and Australoids, races so primitive that they were congenitally incapable of inventing a wheel and even of using one without supervision—races that could not develop for themselves even the first and simplest preliminaries of a civilization. When the missionaries invented systems of writing the crude languages of the primitives, they had also to invent words to express such concepts as “God,” “soul,” “justice,” “morality,” and “religion”—invent them by either creating new words or by perverting to such meanings sounds that in the native jargons conveyed impressions that were faintly and remotely analogous. That fact alone should have made us think. It was clear, furthermore, that the “converts,” even those who had been most thoroughly imbued with an awe of the god of repeating rifles and locomotives, would conform to the white man’s morality only under coercion, and that whenever they escaped from the white man’s supervision they spontaneously reverted not only to their own mores but also to whatever form of voodoo they had practiced before. Even if earlier experience had not been conclusive, what happened in Haiti at the very beginning of the Nineteenth Century should have removed the last lingering doubt. But the missionaries did not learn, and the “Ladies’ Missionary Society” went on contributing their mites, plying their needles, and glowing with tender emotion for the sweet little savages depicted by their romantic imaginations.

Although it is true that in some places in the former colonial possessions missionaries are still tolerated, if they are obsequious to the natives and pay very well, we have at last learned that the Gospel follows the British regiments in the white man’s ignominious and insane retreat from the world that was his.

Categories
Christendom

Christianity

is a trillion-dollar corporation

by Gaedhal

Martin Luther and the Scriptures

I find that oft I must needs remind myself of this: Christianity is a trillion-dollar corporation, or, rather, Christianity is a cluster of corporations whose aggregate sums to about 1 trillion dollars. Some of these component corporations, like the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church are worth billions all by themselves. The Church of England were paid reparations when their slaves were set free. This debt contracted by the UK government to the Church of England was only paid off in the last few decades. It is ironic that slaveholders were paid reparations, but not the slaves themselves.

And so the Churches are vast storehouses of ill-gotten wealth. The Vatican was built on the backs of the purgatory scam. Christopher Hitchens mentions this as a reason why he never finds himself enjoying the splendid art and architecture of the Vatican: it was built on the backs of scamming peasants with Pugatory.

The corporate nature of Christianity must needs be remembered by us. Answers in Genesis, for instance, is not Ken Ham. When Ken Ham goes to be with the ground, AiG will be unaffected… because AiG is a corporation… and it is that corporation that demands that its employees adhere to a ridiculous Statement of Faith that includes inerrancy.

We could deconvert 99% of all Christians, and Christianity, as a corporation would hardly be affected by this at all. This is something that Cardinal Pell discovered. The Church in Australia was all but dead, which is why Pell schmoozed the politicians, and campaigned for the Roman Church to win government contracts. This, incidentally, is also why the Catholic Church is taking over the American Healthcare system. In Ireland, most schools and hospitals are still owned by the Catholic Church… but the government pay the salaries of the Catholic Church’s employees. I am amazed that outrages such as these are suffered to continue. One would think that in a Catholic theocracy like Ireland, that there would be a strong and vibrant secular movement. If there is, I haven’t run into it, yet.

I tell myself that long after I go to be with the ground, there will be psychotic lunatic apologists and clergy lying for Jesus.

We cannot decommission the good ship Christianity in our lifetime. No. The counterapologetic movement is more like a weak acid: like acid rain. Century after century we rain upon and wear away this edifice of fraud and cruelty.

We have achieved a lot, over the centuries. Europe is firmly post-christian. The United States of America will be majority atheist in the next century. However, it will take centuries. And this is where Stoic thinking comes in. I love my fate. I love that I have been fated to fight a battle that is ultimately unwinnable in my lifetime, but will, in about a thousand years, be firmly settled on the side of secularism.

Eventually, when we do get to a 99% deconversion rate, centuries into the future, then Christianity as a corporation would then need to be dealt with. Its ill-gotten assets ought to be seized and distributed amongst the people.

And we must also remember this when battling, in the field of ideas, with apologists such as Michael Jones: they are employees of a corporation. Their salary depends on their never ever ever conceding a single point!

What amazes me about this video is that Dr. Josh Bowen and Derek Lambert seem shocked—yes shocked!—(I’m not that shocked!) that apologists such as Jones and Manning act as they do! It is almost as though Christianity is a nasty totally intellectually bankrupt damnation cult; a nasty planetary-destruction cult; a nasty human-sacrifice cult; a nasty genital-mutilation-and-animal-abuse cult and that its cultists—its clergy and apologists—are, similarly, nasty people.

Now, again, there are plenty of salt-of-the-earth Christians with whom I have no problem. Their Christianity is a personal private thing, and with this, I have no issue.

However, evangelists and apologists are another thing entirely. They promote the lie that Christianity is veridical, and liars don’t tend to be nice people. As I said before: facility in lying is a symptom of sociopathy. This is why Pinecreek Doug is correct that neither money nor vulnerable people should be left alone with clergy or apologists.

This is why, these days, I simply ignore apologists. I have rooted them out of my YouTube algorithm. Go thou and do likewise!

Categories
Christendom

Alain

The translation of Alain de Benoist’s important essay on Christianity is now available in PDF (here), and I have just included it in the reading list for the featured article, ‘The Wall’.

Categories
Ancient Rome Bible Christendom

Christianity:

The communism of antiquity, 5

by Alain de Benoist

 
Christian doctrine was a social revolution. It did not affirm for the first time that the soul existed (which would not have made it original), but that everyone had one identical at birth. The men of ancient culture, who were born into a religion because they were born into a fatherland, tended instead to think that by adopting a behaviour characterised by rigour and self-control they might succeed in forging a soul, but that this was a fate reserved undoubtedly for the best. The idea that all men could be gratified with it indifferently and simply by the fact of existing was shocking to them. On the contrary, Christianity maintained that everyone was born with a soul, which was equivalent to saying that men were born equal before God.

On the other hand, in its rejection of the world, Christianity presented itself as the heir of an old biblical tradition of hatred of the powerful, of the systematic exaltation of the ‘humble and the poor’ (anavim ébionim), whose triumph and revenge over wicked and proud civilizations had been announced by prophets and psalmists. In the Book of Enoch, widely disseminated in the first century in Christian circles (cited in the epistles of Jude XV, 4, and of Barnabas: XV), we read: ‘The Son of Man will raise kings and the powerful from their beds and the strong from their seats; he will break their strength… He will overthrow kings from their thrones and their power. He will make the mighty turn their faces away, and cover them with shame…’ (Enoch XLVI, 4-6).

Jeremiah takes pleasure in imagining the future victims in the form of animals for the slaughter: ‘Separate them, O Yahweh, like sheep for the slaughter, and reserve them for the day of slaughter’ (Jeremiah XII, 3). To the women of the powerful, whom he calls ‘cows of Bashan’ (Amos IV, I), Amos predicts: ‘Yahweh has sworn by his holiness: The days will come upon you when you will be lifted with hooks, and your descendants with fishing spears’ (IV, 2). The psalms outline the beginning of the class struggle, and the same spirit will inspire ‘the first groups of Christians and later the monastic orders’ (A. Causse, op. cit.). ‘In the end, there is only one theme in the Psalms,’ says Isidore Loeb, ‘which is the struggle of the poor against the wicked, and his final triumph thanks to the protection of God, who loves the one and hates the other’ (Littérature des pauvres dans la Bible).

The poor are always the victims of injustice. They are called the Humble, the Holy, the Just and the Pious. They are unfortunate, prey to all evils; they are sick, invalid, alone, abandoned, relegated to a valley of tears, they water their bread with tears, etc. But they bear their pain; they even seek it out because they know that such trials are necessary for their salvation, that the more they are humiliated, the more they will triumph, the more they suffer, the more they will one day see others suffer. As for the wicked, they are rich, and their wealth is always culpable.

They are happy, build cities, perform pre-eminent social functions, and command armies, but they will one day be punished in proportion as they dominate. ‘Such is the social ideal of Jewish prophecy,’ says Gerard Walter, ‘a kind of general levelling which will make all class distinctions disappear and lead to the creation of a uniform society from which all privileges of any kind will be banished. This egalitarian sentiment, carried to its ultimate limits, is linked to an irreducible animosity against the rich and the powerful, who will not be admitted into the future kingdom. The ideal humanity of the announced times will include all the just without distinction of creed or nationality’ (Les origines du communisme, Payot, 1931).

The second book of the Sibylline Oracles paints a picture of humankind regenerating in a new Jerusalem under a strictly communist regime: ‘And the land will be common to all; there will be no more walls or frontiers. All will live in common and wealth will be useless. Then there will be no more poor or rich, no tyrants or slaves, no great or small, no kings or lords, but all will be equal’ (Or. Sib. II, 320-326).

Given this, it is easier to understand why Christianity initially seemed to the ancients to be a religion of slaves and heimatlos, a vehicle for a kind of ‘counterculture’ that only achieved success among the dissatisfied, the declassed, the envious and the revolutionaries avant la lettre: slaves, artisans, fullers, carders, shoemakers, single women, etc. Celsus describes the first Christian communities as ‘a mass of ignorant people and gullible women, recruited from the dregs of the people,’ and his adversaries hardly try to disabuse him on this point. Lactantius preaches equality in social conditions: ‘There is no equity where there is no equality’ (Inst. VII, 2). Under Heliogabalus, Calixtus, bishop of Rome, recommends that converts marry slaves.

For this reason, there is no idea more odious to the Christian than that of the fatherland: how can one serve both the land of one’s fathers and the Father who is in heaven? Salvation does not depend on birth, belonging to a city, or the seniority of one’s lineage but exclusively on respect for dogmas. From then on, it is enough to distinguish believers from unbelievers, and all other boundaries must disappear. Paul insists on this: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither male nor female…’ Hermas, who enjoyed great authority in Rome, condemns the converts to perpetual exile: ‘You servants of God live in a foreign land. Your city is very far from this one’ (Sim. I, I).

Such a disposition of spirit explains the Roman reaction. Celsus, a patriot concerned about the health of the State, who sensed the weakening of the Imperium and the decline of civic feeling that the triumph of Christian egalitarianism could provoke, begins his True Discourse with these words: ‘A new race of men born yesterday, without homeland or traditions, united against all religious and civil institutions, persecuted by justice, accused of infamy by all and who glory in this common execration: that is what Christians are. Factious men who pretend to make a separate ranch and separate themselves from common society.’ And Tacitus, who says that they were detested for their ‘abominations’ (flagitia), accuses them of the crime of ‘hatred of the human race.’ ‘As soon as it was suppressed,’ he says, ‘this execrable superstition was once again breaking out not only in Judea, the cradle of the plague, but in Rome itself, where all the horrors and infamies that exist flow from all sides and are believed…’

The imperial principle is at this time the instrument of a conception of the world carried out as a vast project. Thanks to it, the Pax Romana reigns in an ordered world. Filled with admiration, Horace exclaims: ‘The ox wanders safely through the fields fertile by Ceres and Abundance, while sailors everywhere plogh the peaceful seas.’ In Halicarnassus, a tripartite inscription in honour of Augustus proclaims: ‘Cities flourish amid order, concord and wealth.’ But for the early Christians the pagan State is the work of Satan. The Empire, the supreme symbol of a proud force, is nothing but arrogance worthy of ridicule. The harmonious Roman society is declared without exception guilty, for its resistance to monotheistic demands, traditions and way of life, are so many offences against the laws of heavenly socialism. And as guilty, it must be punished; that is, destroyed. Like a lengthy complaint, the Christian literature of the first two centuries breathes out its rosary of anathemas. With feverish impatience the apostles preach the ‘hour of vengeance,’ ‘so that all things which are written may be fulfilled’ (Luke XXI, 22). As the Fathers of the Church did after them, they announce the imminence of revenge, of the ‘great night’ when everything will be turned upside down. The Epistle of James contains a call to class struggle: ‘Come now, you rich people! Weep and howl for the misery that will come upon you. Your riches are corrupted and your clothes are moth-eaten’ (V,1-2).

James, who has read the Book of Enoch, predicts terrible tortures for the rich and the pagans. He imagines the final judgment as a ‘knock to the throat,’ ‘a kind of immense slaughterhouse to which thousands of the well-off, fat and splendid, and with all their wealth on them, will be dragged. He is joy at seeing them go one by one, returning their ill-gotten gains before feeding with their fat the formidable carnage he glimpses in his dreams’ (Gérard Walter, op. cit.). Above all, he accuses the rich of deicide: ‘You condemned and killed the Just One.’ (V, 6.) This thesis, which makes Jesus the victim, not of a people, but of a class, will soon become popular. Tertullian writes: ‘The time is ripe for Rome to end up in flames. She will receive the reward her works deserve’ (On Prayer, 5).

The Book of Daniel, written between 167 and 165 b.c.e., and the Book of Revelation are the two great sources from which this holy fury draws. St. Hippolytus (c. 170-235), in his Commentary on Daniel, places the end of Rome around the year 500 and attributes it to the rise of democracies: ‘The toes of the statue in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream represent the coming democracies, which will separate from each other like the ten toes of the statue, in which iron will be mixed with clay.’ Around 407, St. Jerome, in another Commentary on Daniel, defines the end of the world as ‘the time when the kingdom of the Romans will be destroyed.’ Other authors repeat these prophecies: Eusebius, Apollinaris and Methodius of Olympus. The revolutionary ardour against Rome, the ‘accursed city,’ ‘new Babylon,’ and ‘great harlot’ knows no bounds. The city is the last avatar of Leviathan and Behemoth.

In all these apocalypses, sibylline mysteries and double-meaning prophecies, in all this mental trepidation, hypersensitive to ‘symbols’ and ‘signs,’ in all this psalm-like literature, we find more imprecations than would have been necessary to warm the spirits, shake the imaginations and even arm still hesitant hands. This explains the accusations that followed the burning of Rome in the year 64.

Deuteronomy ordered the services of God to slaughter unbelieving populations and burn their cities in honour of Yahweh, and Jesus repeated the image: ‘He who does not abide in me will be thrown out like a branch that withers, and is gathered and thrown into the fire and is burned’ (John XV, 6). And indeed, from Rome to the bonfires of the Inquisition, much will burn. Sacred pyromania will be exercised without respite. ‘This idea (that the world of the impious will be destroyed by fire),’ says Bouché-Leclercq, ‘had been received by Christians from Jewish seers, from those prophets and sibilants who invoked lightning as quickly as a torch, iron as quickly as fire on the cities and peoples hostile to Israel. Never has the imagination burned so much as in the prophecies of Isaiah and Ezekiel, the richest collection of anathemas that religious literature has ever produced.’

‘In this opinion of a general fire,’ adds Gibbon, ‘the faith of Christians came to coincide with the Eastern tradition… The Christian, who based his belief not so much on the fallacious arguments of reason as on the authority of tradition and the interpretation of Scripture, awaited the event with terror and confidence, was sure of its ineluctable imminence. As this solemn idea permanently occupied his mind, he regarded all the disasters that befell the Empire as so many infallible symptoms of the agony of the world.

Categories
Christendom New Testament

Christianity:

The communism of antiquity, 4

by Alain de Benoist

 
The ancients believed in the unity of the world, in the dialectical intimacy of man with nature. Their natural philosophy was dominated by the ideas of becoming and alternation. The Greeks equated ethics with aesthetics, the kalôn with the agathôn, the good with beauty, and Renan rightly wrote: ‘A system in which the Venus de Milo is only an idol is a false system, or at least a partial one, because beauty is worth almost as much as goodness and truth. With such ideas, a decline in art is inevitable.’ (Les apótres, p. 372). The ‘new man’ of Christianity professed a very different vision of things. He carried within himself a conflict, not the everyday one that forms the fabric of life, but an eschatological, absolute conflict: the divorce from the world.

Early Christianity extends the messianic idea present in Judaism in an exacerbated form, due to a millennial expectation. In the words attributed to Jesus we find literal quotations from the visions of the Book of Enoch. For the first Christians, the world, a mere stage, a vale of tears, a place of unbearable difficulties and tensions, needed compensation, a radiant vision that would justify (morally speaking) the impotence of here below. That is why the earth appears as the field on which the forces of Evil and Good, the prince of this world and the heavenly Father, those possessed by the devil and the sons of God, confront each other: ‘And this is the victory that has overcome the world: our faith’ (I John V, 4). The idea that the world belongs to Evil, later characteristic of certain Gnostics (the Manicheans), appears frequently in the first writings of Christianity. Jesus himself affirmed: ‘I do not pray for the world…, as I am not of the world’ (John XVII, 9-14). St. John insists: ‘Do not love the world, nor the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father but is of the world.’ (I John II, 15-16.) ‘Do not be surprised if the world hates you.’ (Ibid. III,13). ‘We know that we are of God, and the whole world lies in the power of the evil one.’ (Ibid. V, 19.) Later, the Rule of St. Benedict will state as a precept that monks must ‘make themselves strangers to the things of the world’ (A saeculi actius se facere alienum). In the Imitation of Christ we read: ‘The truly wise man is he who, in order to gain Christ, considers all the things of the earth as rubbish and dung.’ (I, 3, 5).

In the midst of the great artistic and literary renaissance of the first two centuries, Christians, as outsiders who pleased to be so, remained indifferent or, more often, hostile. Biblical aesthetics rejected the representation of forms, the harmony of lines and volumes; consequently, they had only a disdainful look on the statues that adorned squares and monuments. For the rest, everything was an object of hatred. The colonnades of temples and covered walks, the gardens with their fountains and domestic altars where a sacred flame flickered, the rich mansions, the uniforms of the legions, the villas, the ships, the roads, the works, the conquests, the ideas: everywhere the Christian saw the mark of the Beast. The Fathers of the Church condemned not only luxury, but also any profane work of art, colourful clothing, musical instruments, white bread, foreign wines, feather pillows (had not Jacob rested his head on a stone?) and even the custom of cutting one’s beard, in which Tertullian sees ‘a lie against one´s own face’ and an impious attempt to improve the work of the Creator.

The rejection of the world became even more radical among the early Christians because they were convinced that the Parousia (the return of Jesus Christ at the end of time) was going to take place immediately. It was Jesus himself who had promised it to them: ‘Assuredly, I say to you, some who are standing here will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.’ (Matthew XVI, 28). ‘Assuredly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have happened.’ (Matthew XXIV, 34). In view of this, they repeated the good news more and more. But the end of all things is at hand (I Peter IV, 7). ‘It is the last time’ (I John II, 18). Paul returns again and again to this idea. To the Hebrews: ‘Therefore cast not away your confidence, which has great reward… For yet a little while, and He that shall come will come, and will not delay’ (Hebrews X, 35-37). ‘Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together… but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the day approaching’ (Ibid., X, 25). To the Thessalonians: ‘Stand firm, for the coming of the Lord is at hand.’ To the Corinthians: ‘Brothers, the time is short; therefore let those who have wives be as though they had none…’ (I Cor. VII, 29). To the Philippians: ‘The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything…’ (Phil. IV, 5 and 6).

In his dialogue with Trypho, Justin affirms that Christians will soon be gathered in Jerusalem, and that it will be for a thousand years (LXXX – LXXXII). In the second century, the Phrygian Montanus declares that he foresees the imminence of the end of the world. In Pontus, Christian peasants abandon their fields to await the day of judgment. Tertullian prays pro mora fines, ‘that the end may be delayed.’ But time passed and nothing happened. Generations disappeared, one after another, without having seen the glorious advent; and faced with the continual delay of its eschatological hopes, the Church, giving proof of prudence, ended by resigning itself to placing the Parousia in an undetermined ‘beyond.’ Today only Jehovah’s Witnesses repeat on a fixed date: ‘Next year in the Jerusalem of heaven.’

Categories
Catholic Church Christendom

Christianity:

The communism of antiquity, 3

by Alain de Benoist

 
Christianity, ‘an Eastern religion by its origins and fundamental characteristics’ (Guignebert), infiltrated ancient Europe almost surreptitiously. The Roman Empire, tolerant by nature, paid no attention to it for a long time. In Suetonius’ Life of the Twelve Caesars, we read of an act of Claudius: ‘He expelled from Rome the Jews, who were in continual ferment at the instigation of a certain Chrestos’. On the whole, the Greco-Latin world remained at first closed to preaching. The praise of weakness, poverty, and ‘madness’, seemed to them foolish. Consequently, the first centres of Christian propaganda were set up in Antioch, Ephesus, Thessalonica and Corinth. It was in these great cities, where slaves, artisans and immigrants mingled with merchants, where everything was bought and sold, and where preachers and enlightened men, in ever-increasing numbers, vied to seduce motley and restless crowds, that the first apostles found fertile ground.

Causse, who was a professor at the Protestant theology faculty of the University of Strasbourg, writes: ‘If the apostles preached the Gospel in the village squares, it was not only because of a wise missionary policy, but because the new religion was more favourably received in these new surroundings than by the old races attached to their past and their soil. The true Greeks were to remain alien and hostile to Christianity for a long time. The Athenians had greeted Paul with ironical indifference: “You will tell us another day!” it was to be many years before the old Romans would abandon their aristocratic contempt for that detestable superstition. The early Church of Rome was very little Latin, and Greek was scarcely spoken in it. But the Syrians, the Asiatics and the whole crowd of the Graeculi received the Christian message with enthusiasm’ (Essai sur le conflit du christianisme primitif et de la civilisation, Ernest Leroux, 1920).

J.B.S. Haldane, who considered fanaticism as one of the ‘four truly important inventions made between 3000 B.C. and 1400’ (The Inequality of Man, Famous Books, New York, 1938), attributed its paternity to Judeo-Christianity. Yahweh, the god of the Arabian deserts, is a lonely and jealous god, exclusive and cruel, who advocates intolerance and hatred. ‘Do I not hate those who hate you, O Yahweh, and do I not rage against your enemies? I hate them and regard them as my enemies’ (Psalm 139:21 and 22). Jeremiah implores: ‘You will give them their due, O LORD, and your curse will be upon them! You will pursue them in anger and exterminate them from under heaven’ (Lamentations, 111, 64-66). ‘Surely, O God, you will surely put to death the wicked’ (Psalm 139:19). ‘And in Your mercy You will dispel my enemies, and destroy all the adversaries of my soul…’ (Psalm 143:12). Wisdom, who personifies the infinitely good, threatens: ‘I too will laugh at your misfortune, I will mock when your fear comes upon you’ (Prov. I, 26). Deuteronomy speaks of the fate that must be reserved for ‘idolaters’: ‘If your brother, your mother´s son, your daughter, or the woman who lies in your bosom, or your friend, who is like yourself, should incite you in secret, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods”, whom you do not know…, you shall first kill him; your hand shall be laid upon him first to put him to death, and then the hand of all the people shall be laid upon him. When you hear that in one of the cities which Yahweh grants you to dwell, it is said that unworthy men have arisen who have seduced their fellow citizens, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods!” which you do not know, you shall inquire, and if you see that such an abomination is true, you shall smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword; you shall consecrate it to extermination, as well as all that is in it. You shall gather all its spoil amid its streets, and burn the city and all its prey in the fire to the honour of the LORD your God. Thus it shall become a perpetual heap of ruins, and shall not be rebuilt…’ (Deut. XIII).

In the Gospel, Jesus says, when they come to arrest him: ‘…for all who take the sword will perish by the sword’ (Matthew XXVI, 52). But before that he had said: ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man´s enemies will be those of his household’ (Matthew X, 34-36). He also pronounced the phrase that is the motto of all totalitarianism: ‘He who is not with me is against me’ (Matthew XII, 30).

The early Church will scrupulously apply such slogans. Unbelievers and pagans are subhumans in the eyes of the apostles. St. Peter compares them to ‘irrational animals, born to be taken and destroyed’ (2 Peter II, 12). Jerome advised the converted Christian to kick the body of his mother if she tried to prevent him from leaving her forever to follow the teachings of Christ. In 345, Fermicus Maternus made slaughter a duty: ‘The law forbids, most holy emperors, to spare either son or brother. It forces us to punish the woman we love tenderly and to plunge the iron into her breast. It puts weapons in our hands and orders us to turn them against our closest friends…’

From then on, the evangelical practice of charity will be strictly subordinated to the degree of adherence to mysteries and dogmas. Europe will be evangelized by iron and fire. Heretics, schismatics, freethinkers and pagans will be, renewing the gesture of Pontius Pilate, handed over to the secular arm to be subjected to torture and death. Denunciation will be rewarded with the attribution of the property of the victims and their families. Those who, ‘having understood the judgment of God,’ wrote St. Paul, ‘are worthy of death’ (Romans, I, 32). Thomas Aquinas specifies: ‘The heretic must be burned.’ One of the canons adopted at the Lateran Council declares: ‘They are not murderers who kill heretics’ (Homicidas non esse qui heretici trucidant). By the bull Ad extirpenda, the Church will authorize torture. And, in 1864, Pius IX proclaimed in the Syllabus: ‘Anathema be he who says that the Church has no right to use force, that it has no direct or indirect temporal power’ (XXIV).

Voltaire, who knew how to add up, had counted the victims of religious intolerance from the beginnings of Christianity to his time. Taking into account exaggerations and making a large allowance for the benefit of the doubt, he found a total of 9,718,000 people who had lost their lives ad majorem Dei gloriam. Compared to this figure, the number of Christians killed in Rome under the sign of the palm (a symbol of martyrdom and glorious resurrection in early Christianity) seems insignificant.

‘Gibbon believes he can affirm’ —writes Louis Rougier— ‘that the number of martyrs throughout the entire Roman Empire, over three centuries, did not reach that of Protestants executed in a single reign and exclusively in the provinces of the Netherlands, where, according to Grotius, more than one hundred thousand subjects of Charles V died at the hands of the executioner. However conjectural these calculations may be, it can be said that the number of Christian martyrs is small compared with the victims of the Church during the fifteen centuries: the destruction of paganism under the Christian emperors, the fight against the Arians, the Donatists, the Nestorians, the Monophysites, the Iconoclasts, the Manicheans, the Cathars and the Albigensians, the Spanish Inquisition, the wars of religion, the dragonads of Louis XIV, pogroms of the Jews… Faced with such excesses, we can ask ourselves, with Bouché-Leclercq, ‘whether the benefits of Christianity (however great) have not been more than compensated for by the religious intolerance which it borrowed from Judaism to spread throughout the world’… (Celse contre les chrétiens, Copernic, 1977).

Categories
Christendom

Apologetics

Excerpts from Gaedhal’s latest communication:

Apologetics is for Christians. It is a Christian product, and the target demographic is Christians—and, in particular, those Christians who have an IQ in excess of 90, who are beginning to doubt Christianity.

Apologetics is not for non-believers. To non-believers, Apologetics is a pseudo-discipline that merely serves to infuriate us and to confirm us in our disbelief. To a non-believer, Apologetics is every bit the pseudoscience that Astrology is. In the same way that Celestial bodies do not influence earthly events, dead Jewish carpenters usually stay dead—and certainly don’t float off into the sky. This is really the end of the matter for us non-believers. Apologetics is a product—it is intellectual property—and its consumer base is almost exclusively Christian…

Without the threat of Hell, then Christianity really does fall apart [emphasis added by Editor]…

If we heed William of Ockham and throw out God, Heaven, and inscrutable morally sufficient reasons [that try to solve the problem of evil—Ed.], then we are left with the vulgarity: “shit happens”. In a godless swirl of cause and effect, such as this planet seems to be, then we would expect to see the quantity of horrendous suffering that we do in fact see upon this planet.

Categories
Christendom Hans F. K. Günther

The dissolution

of Germanic racial care by medieval Christianity (3)

by Hans F. K. Günther

 

The most popular book of the Middle Ages. Note the devils behind the naked women and remember Nietzsche’s aphorism: ‘Christianity gave Eros poison to drink; he did not die of it, certainly, but degenerated to Vice’.

The church’s devaluation of all earthly life extends to all parts of the meaningful order. Sexual life was desecrated because it now belonged to the respected ‘flesh’. The woman, the mistress of the house as guardian of the racial heritage, became an object that could ignite carnal desires. This dissolved the order of procreation described above. Those who had become circumcised for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven were considered particularly pious (Matthew 19:127). Origen, the great teacher of the Church, had castrated himself. The degradation of the body, which was so contrary to the Indo-European veneration of the body, went so far that Athanastus (born around 297 in Alexandria) praised the Egyptian Antonius, a saint, because he no longer washed his feet, and Saint Agnes (in the 4th century) so disrespected her body for the sake of her soul striving for the afterlife that she no longer took a bath. The Indo-Europeans had always valued physical and mental health as a great asset. Wholeness, health and joy of life were wished for in the greeting: Heil (in English whole, entirely ‘vale’ or ‘chaire’). Saint Steronymus (340-420) taught: ‘One should conquer the flesh! A face radiant with health is the sign of a defiled soul. Health should be a danger to the soul, physical beauty, an expression of refined nature, a work of the devil to incite the flesh to fornication’.

Of course, such teachings never took hold of the entire Germanic people, as they were too deeply rooted in the aristocratic peasant nature and the everyday life of the peasant warrior. Only a few people completely fell for the church teachings, which always proclaimed a monastic life rather than a truly Christian life. But these teachings did dissolve the high-minded and ultimately ignoble beliefs of the Germanic people, so that some of the Germanic customs could only continue to exist as a tolerated secular tradition, while this customs before the conversion were actually an expression of Germanic piety. Nowadays, much of the tradition was considered ‘pagan and reprehensible’ and gradually dissolved in the course of the medieval centuries or became a class tradition of the nobility alone, which increasingly lost its original, biological meaning based on the laws of life.

The Midgard concept, which included the order of procreation that was so significant in terms of life law and race, and all the noble peasant values described by Neckel, was bound to be quickly disintegrated by the church teachings; the security of the world was bound to dissolve. This disintegration extended to the value of home, which was at the core of the Midgard idea. In his book Usketische Heimatlosigkeit (1930), Campenhaufen described the church value of xeniteia, the turning away from home and the holy emigration to foreign lands, which was opposed to the idea of home, the peregrinatio, as this turning away from home was called in the West. The value of homelessness as a means of healing the soul emerged above all in Irish-Anglo-Saxon Christianity. In the rest of the West this teaching later faded into the background, but peregrinatio was still practiced and practiced as a particularly sanctifying form of feudal conduct in the High Middle Ages. But the church’s devaluation of the homeland struck the heart of the Midgard concept. The monk Otfried von Weisenburg (in Elfass) wrote his Gbangelienbuch in 868, in which he explains (I, 18) that our homeland is paradise, that we humans live on this earth like outcasts in a foreign land because of our sins, and that only through repentance and turning away from the world can we regain our true homeland.

This was the exact opposite of Germanic belief – aversion to home and clan had become a sign of the greatest piety. For the Germanic people, maintaining clan ties was the safeguarding of peace that created prosperity. The word peace originally meant the prosperity of all growth in clan settlements through clan order. The most sinister thing for the Germanic people was clan division. Grönbech has convincingly demonstrated this. Therefore, even with the most appropriate interpretation, a word from Jesus such as that recorded in Matthew 10:35 must have seemed outrageous to the Germanic people, who still thought in terms of clanship: I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be his own household. For the church, such a word was confirmation of the spiritual value of turning away from the world. However, such a turning away from the world also meant a turning away from the idea of ancestry and clan care.

The idea of descent from noble peasant ancestors of one’s own tribe was further opposed as church teaching by the idea of a connection, at least of the souls, to the ancestors of the Jewish people. In Paul’s letter to the Galatians (3:27) it was taught: ‘But if you are Christ’s, you are Abraham’s seed. The Jews were now to be regarded as the chosen people from whom salvation comes’ (John 4:22), as the people chosen by God, because Old Testament terms such as Elohim or Jahn (ehoba), terms for the special god of the Hebrew tribes, were translated by the Holy Scripture, the Bulgata, as dominus or deus, as ‘lord’ or ‘god’, thus no longer with the designation as a special god, but as a one and only god and all-god who encompasses all peoples and obliges all to his commandments. It is precisely in this tacit equation of Hebrew names for gods with names for the all-god himself that the ‘great deception’ that was disastrous in the history of faith and to which Delitzsch has pointed out emphatically is touched upon.