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Category: Christendom

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Christendom Civil war Deranged altruism Judea v. Rome

Guilt

John Canavesio, The Suicide of Judas, ca. 1492: a fresco painting from the Chapel of Notre Dame des Fontaine, France. The painting shows the corpse of Judas, who, overwhelmed by the guilt for having betrayed what many pseudo-racists still call ‘Our Saviour’, had committed suicide. A devil extracts the soul from the body of Judas, presumably to take it to hell.
The reason why we must destroy Christianity and burn all the churches is that whites, now almost a corpse of what they were, are following the steps of Judas. Even some in the Alt-Right begin, barely, to glimpse it: as Ramzpaul says in his most recent video. There he speaks that a religious guilt, previously controlled by the redeeming figure of Christ, has metastasized into runaway guilt that can only be expiated through ethnic suicide.
There will not be general awakening. Because of Christianity, the devil that took our soul out of our bowels, the white race is doomed to perish. If at least three percent of whites were willing to fight, as Norman Spear says, we would not need to unite the right: only join that three percent. But not even that percentage of whites are willing to give their lives for the cause. A civil war only has chances to occur with the convergence of catastrophes, beginning with the fall of the American dollar.
Even the people of the Alt-Right do not seem to see the degree of nihilistic psychosis in which their race is found. I have not visited Toronto since 1982 but if I did and saw the masses of people of colour that Ramzpaul saw, as he tells us in his most recent video, I would feel a superlative hatred: something that no Alt-Right figure, including Ramzpaul, says publicly.
However, Ramzpaul hits the nail with his comments about guilt. I remember how it lacerated me what my father said to me: that Jesus had died for me. My brother, with such an education, went astray in liberation theology. Let’s visualize Leonardo Boff taking ‘baths of people of colour’ in Brazil, that is, giving us the virtuous signal that he is a holy man. No wonder those who leave the church are left with the worm of guilt and deranged altruism.
I refer to the stupid atheists: those who, stupidly, believe they have abandoned Christianity. They have not. The only thing they have done is going mad like Judas and try to exorcise their guilt in the only way that the secularized Christian ethic allows us: giving their lands and Aryan women to the Other…
Psychologically speaking, the triumph of Judea against Rome is complete. Whites are destined for extinction. Those who have not read Evropa Soberana’s essay will never understand what is happening. And if there are no catastrophes that I predict and the race continues in its guilt path, coloured historians will see that, except this blog, no racist of the 21st century wanted to see what was happening:
It is Xtianity, stupid!

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Christendom Destruction of Greco-Roman world Kevin MacDonald Miscegenation Philosophy of history

Why Europeans must reject Christianity, 21

by Ferdinand Bardamu

 
A Europe without Christianity?
The world of classical antiquity shone as a lamp in the dark, filled with a youthful vigor that ensured its institutions and ideas would endure long after Greece and Rome ceased to exist as viable political entities. Science and reason were then snuffed out by the darkness and imbecility that followed in the wake of Christianity. Libraries were destroyed; art treasures were smashed; building in non-perishable materials almost vanished from memory; personal hygiene disappeared; ignorance was considered a virtue; chaos ensued. This was the triumph of Christianity, a syphilis of the mind that nearly wiped out Western civilization. Although Christian power and influence were shattered long ago by the rediscovery of science and reason, a resurgent Christianity now dominates the West in the form of liberal egalitarianism and cultural Marxism. These philosophies serve as the ideological basis of endless mass Third World immigration and other multiculturalist policies. This neo-Christianity has been imposed on the West by totalitarian liberal-leftist governments.
Understanding Christianity through the prism of group evolutionary strategy can shed light on the significant threat the religion poses to Europeans. As a seminal concept originally formulated by Prof. Kevin MacDonald, it was used with devastating effect in his analysis of 20th century Jewish intellectual and political movements. In a world characterized by in-group ethno-racial preference, absence of a group evolutionary strategy allowing populations at the species and sub-species level to survive and replicate is highly maladaptive.
A group evolutionary strategy is defined as an “experiment in living.” This refers to the establishment of culturally mediated processes or ideological structures that allow humans to exercise control over natural selection at the group level. The basic characteristics of Jewish evolutionary group strategy are:
1.) the rejection of both genetic and cultural assimilation into neighboring populations. Jews in Europe and the Middle East segregated themselves from gentiles by fashioning a distinct identity for themselves. This was accomplished through enforcement of strict endogamy and residential segregation. The genetic relatedness between Jewish groups, such as the Sephardi and Ashkenazi, is higher than between Jews and European populations because of this age-old resistance to assimilation; 2.) successful economic and reproductive competition that has driven Europeans from certain sectors of their own societies (such as finance); 3.) high ethnocentrism; 4.) within-group altruism favoring Jews at the expense of outgroup members, and; 5.) the institutionalization of eugenic practices that selected for high intelligence and conscientiousness in Jewish populations.
In contrast, Christianity undermines group survival by suppressing natural ethnocentric tendencies and maximizing the spread of dysgenic traits. Christianity provides no effective barrier to the cultural and genetic assimilation of Europeans by surrounding non-white populations; for example, during the Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Roman Catholic Church aggressively promoted miscegenation among the conquistadores. Ecclesiastical officials encouraged the European colonists to marry and interbreed with their native Indian and African concubines. This resulted in large-scale demographic genocide, which replaced European genetic homogeneity with mestizaje.
That Christianity is a non-ethnocentric ideology based on moral universalism is another serious problem with the religion. Europeans will always champion the interests of hostile out-groups at the expense of fellow Europeans in the name of Christian love and brotherhood. Christianity also opposes the high aggressiveness directed towards outgroup members; instead, believers are expected to practice nonviolence and compassion in the face of demographic replacement. High aggressiveness is a defining feature of Jewish group evolutionary strategy. It has allowed Jews to outcompete Europeans in their own societies.
Lastly, Christianity is militantly anti-eugenic, which is why it allows weaklings to survive and reproduce. This has decreased average IQ and the prevalence of other beneficial traits in European societies. In contrast, Jewish group evolutionary strategy institutionalizes eugenic practices that positively select for these traits, especially high intelligence. These eugenic practices have allowed Jews to exercise a degree of influence over Western societies vastly disproportionate to their actual numbers. Unlike Judaism for Jews, Christianity does not function as a group evolutionary strategy for Europeans, but as a recipe for racial and cultural suicide on a massive scale.
All aggressively pro-active measures against Christianity are certainly ethically justifiable in the face of Western decline and European racial extinction. In this essay, a more scientific approach is recommended. The European intellectual, before he devises any plan of action, must first acknowledge that no other biological process is as important for humans as evolution through natural selection. If he is to have any belief-system, it must be the civil religion of eugenics. Incorporating eugenics into the fabric of civic life would obviate coercion, making racial hygiene a matter of voluntary acquiescence. He would also do well to embrace the trifunctional worldview of the ancient Indo-Europeans.
For many thousands of years, trifunctional ideology served as an effective deterrent to the pathology of moral universalism. By envisaging the tripartite caste system as the fundamental pillar of a new order, the iron law of inequality is exalted as the highest law, the one most conducive to the achievement of social harmony. In this vision, the highest caste, equivalent to the brahman of Aryan-occupied India or the guardians of Plato’s Republic, would be absorbed in scientific and technological pursuits for their own sake. They would be entrusted with the material advancement of civilization. Their moral system, informed by the principles of evolutionary biology and eugenics, would be derived from the following axiom:

What is morally right is eugenic, i.e. improves the race biologically;
what is morally wrong is dysgenic, i.e. degrades the race biologically.

The second class of individuals will be bred for war and the third will consist of industrial and agricultural producers. These correspond to the Aryan kshatriyas and vaishyas or the “silver” and “bronze” castes of Plato’s Republic. Since these individuals do not possess the cognitive ability to participate in the highly abstract civil religion of the brahmans, they will worship their distant ancestors as the racial gods of a new religion founded on eugenic principles.
Christianity is an irrational superstition, which means that its influence will not be mitigated through logical argument. The child-like simplicity of Christian dogma is “a feature, not a bug.” Without an ability to appeal to the lowest common denominator, Christianity would not have spread as rapidly as it did during the 4th century. An enlightened European humanity, educated in the principles of Darwinian evolution and eugenics, cannot co-exist side by side with this ancient Semitic plague. The negative correlation that exists between Christian religiosity and intelligence simply reinforces this conclusion. Christianity is a seemingly intractable problem for primarily eugenic and biological reasons. Although a eugenic approach is clearly needed, other things must be done. If Christianity is to be abolished, all state-sanctioned programs of multicultural indoctrination must be completely eliminated along with it.
Through a program of rigorous eugenic breeding and media control, Europeans will be weaned from the neo-Christian ethical system they have imbibed since childhood. They will come to see eugenics as a necessary form of spiritual transcendence instead. Through a process of evolutionary development that is both culturally and technologically mediated, the lowest castes will embrace the brahman civil religion and see themselves as gods; the more evolved brahmans will move on to a more intensive contemplation of increasingly sophisticated mathematical and scientific abstractions. This progressive development of European racial consciousness will ensure the adoption of a successful group evolutionary strategy among Europeans.
The gradual phasing out of individuals with IQs below 100 will be carried out as an act of religious devotion among the lower castes. Aryan kshatriyas, the “knights of faith” of the new Aryan race religion, will impose a eugenic regime over the entire globe, repopulating the Third World with highly evolved super-organisms that will turn these former hellholes into terrestrial paradises. Wasting precious material resources caring for less evolved members of the human species will be a thing of the past. Humanity, whose scientific and technological progress stagnated during the late 20th century, will once again resume its upward journey toward the stars.

Eugenic breeding will force Europeans to realize the truth of Nietzsche’s core insight: Christianity, a transvaluation of all values driven by ressentiment, is a slave morality. It is the revolt of the underman against the aristocratic Indo-European virtues of strength and magnanimity, pride and nobility. By repudiating the syphilitic poison of Christianity, Europeans will become a race of value-creators, once again in charge of their own destinies as they affirm the beauty of life in all its fullness.

– End of Bardamu’s essay –

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Alexander the Great Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Axiology Catholic Church Christendom Deranged altruism Egalitarianism Individualism Kevin MacDonald New Testament Universalism

Why Europeans must reject Christianity, 20

by Ferdinand Bardamu

 
The Christian apologetics of Prof. Kevin MacDonald
Sociobiological accounts of Western pathological altruism are based on inferences not supported by the available empirical evidence. For example, if the individualism of European societies is the result of evolutionary adaptation under ecologically adverse conditions, a similar tendency would be found among other ethno-racial groups that evolved in the same environment. However, Eastern Europeans and Northeast Asians evolved in the same North Eurasian and Circumpolar region but remain strongly ethnocentric and collectivist.
Those arguing in favor of a European genetic basis for pathological altruism face another serious problem: for thousands of years of recorded history, there isn’t a single instance of collectively suicidal behavior among Europeans until the Christianization of Rome in the 4th century. Why this is the case requires the following explanation.
Ancient ethical norms diverged considerably from modern ones. Pity was condemned as a vice; mercy was despised as a character flaw. Mercy was viewed as the antithesis of justice because no one deserved help that had not been earned. The rational man was typically expected to be callous towards the sufferings of the less fortunate. His philosophical training in the academies had shown him that mercy was an irrational and impulsive behavior whose proper antidote was self-restraint and stoic calm in the face of adversity. In the Roman world, clementia was reserved exclusively for the vanquished in battle or the guilty defendant at trial. Weaklings and the economically disadvantaged were beneath contempt.
Life in the ancient world was quite brutal by modern Western standards. The punishments meted out to criminals—blinding, burning with coals, branding with hot irons and mutilation—were exceedingly cruel and unusual. Public entertainment was noted for its brutality. Scratching, biting, eye gouging and mauling an opponent’s genitals were accepted as legitimate tactical maneuvers for boxers and wrestlers alike. In the naumachia, armies of convicts and POW’s were forced to fight each other to the death in naval vessels on man-made lakes. Gladiatorial combat remained immensely popular for centuries, until the monk Telemachus tried to separate two gladiators during a match in the Roman coliseum. He was promptly stoned to death by the mob for his efforts. Slavery was considered a non-issue in the ancient world. Aristotle rationalized the institution by dividing men into two classes: those by nature free, and therefore capable of assuming the responsibilities of citizenship, and those who were by nature slaves. A slave was defined as chattel property bereft of the capacity to reason. This meant that he could be sexually exploited, whipped, tortured and killed by his master without fear of legal reprisal.
Racism or, more accurately, “proto-racism” was more widespread and more accepted in the ancient world than in our politically correct modern Western “democracies.” As revealed by in-depth examination of classical literary sources, the Greeks were typically ethnocentric and xenophobic. They were given to frequent generalization, often negative, about rival ethnicities. The Greeks casually and openly discriminated against foreigners based on deeply ingrained proto-racial prejudices. Ethno-racial intermarriage, even among closely related Greek ethnic and tribal groups, was universally despised. It was even regarded as a root cause of physical and mental degeneration. The absence of terms like “racism,” “discrimination” and “prejudice” in the ancient world reveals that proto-racist attitudes were not generally condemned or seen as pathological.
Greek intellectual and biological superiority was determined by their intermediate geographical position between lazy, stupid northern Europeans and effeminate, pleasure-loving Asians. The Greeks were the best of men because they had been exposed to the right climate and occupied the right soil. The Greeks looked down upon foreigners, pejoratively referring to them as “barbarians.” This was an onomatopoeia derived from Hellenic mockery of unintelligible foreign speech. Barbarians were viewed as the natural inferiors of the civilized peoples of the Mediterranean basin. Prejudice was not only directed at foreigners. Significant interethnic rivalry also existed among fellow Greeks, as demonstrated by the history of the Peloponnesian Wars. Greek patriots despised their Roman conquerors, even referring to them contemptuously as barbarians. After the conquest of Macedonia, the Romans embraced the prejudices of their Greek subjects as their own.
How do contemporary sociobiological accounts of Western pathological altruism explain this?
It has been alleged that pathological altruism was always a deeply ingrained European character flaw. The Pythagorean communism of the 5th century BC is frequently mentioned as corroborating evidence, but these practices were reserved for the intellectual elite. Much the same could be said for Stoic cosmopolitanism, which bears no similarity to the deracinated cosmopolitanism of the modern West. In the Greek variant, the intellectual gains world citizenship by living in accord with the cosmic law of universal reason; in the Roman variant, the cosmopolis is identified with the Roman patria.
The Hellenistic empire of Alexander the Great is believed by some to have been established on a morally universalist foundation. These accusations have their basis in the rhetorical amplifications and literary embellishments of chroniclers who wrote long after the exploits of Alexander. The expansion of the Greek sphere of influence in Asia was romanticized by some as implying a new world order based on an imagined brotherhood of man. This is contradicted by the historical record. In actuality, Alexander and his generals promoted a policy of residential segregation along ethno-racial lines in the conquered territories, with Greek colonists on one side and natives on the other. In the Greek view, Hellenized Egyptians, Israelites, Syrians and Babylonians were racial foreigners who had successfully assimilated Greek culture; clearly then, cultural and linguistic Hellenization was not enough to make one “Greek.”
Ancestral lineage was an important component of ancient Greek identity. Herodotus observed that the Greeks saw themselves as a community “of one blood and of one tongue.” Caracalla’s extension of the franchise to Roman provincials in 212 AD was not an act of universalism per se, but occurred after centuries of Romanization. It was done for purposes of taxation and military recruitment. This imperial legislation, known as the Antonine Constitution, did not abolish ethnic distinction among Roman citizens.
The conventional sociobiological explanation of Prof. MacDonald and others is contradicted by the pervasive brutality and ethno-racial collectivism of ancient societies. Given Christianity’s role as an agent of Western decline, no explanation will be fully adequate until this is finally acknowledged and taken into consideration. Prof. MacDonald, in an essay for The Occidental Observer, “Christianity and the Ethnic Suicide of the West”, ignores this major obstacle to his own detriment, arguing that from a Western historical perspective, Christianity was a relatively benign influence. Despite MacDonald’s eminence as an authority on 20th century Jewish intellectual and political movements, his defense of Christianity reveals a superficial understanding of history, contemporary political theory and Christian theology.
Prof. MacDonald whitewashes Christianity throughout, denying that the religion has ever been “a root cause of Western decline.” He observes that Christianity was the religion of the West during the age of European exploration and colonization, but not once does he mention that Christianity was a spent force by the late Middle Ages, having undergone a serious and irreversible decline in power and influence. Prof. MacDonald does not mention that after 1400, Christendom was no longer unified because the legitimacy of medieval ecclesiastical authority had been shattered; first, by the rediscovery of classical science and philosophy, which shook the Christian worldview to its very foundations, and second, by the Protestant Reformation, which reduced the pope to the status of a mere figurehead.
This set the stage for the large-scale dissemination of atheism and agnosticism in the 20th century. Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, combined with the spread of mass literacy, virtually ensured that the Christian church would never again control European intellectual life. If the late medieval church had retained the same ecclesiastical and political authority it had under Pope Innocent III, European colonization and exploration of the globe would have been virtually inconceivable. For these reasons, it is more historically accurate to situate European territorial expansion within the context of resurgent pagan epistemic values, i.e. empirical rationality, intellectual curiosity and the pursuit of scientific progress for its own sake, during the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution.
It is argued that the decline of the West has co-occurred with the decline of Christianity as an established faith, but this is incorrect. The Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, as well as exploration and colonization that occurred along with it, were only possible because of the collapse of ecclesiastical authority in the late medieval period. This eroded the Christian stranglehold on the spread of knowledge, replacing blind faith with the pagan epistemic values of classical antiquity. The recent decline of the modern West beginning in the 1960s has co-occurred with the growing influence of a neo-Christian ethic in the public sphere, just as the decline of the ancient world co-occurred with the triumph of Christianity over the forces of paganism.
Prof. MacDonald observes that Christians have not always been consistent moral universalists in practice, but this is a non-sequitur. Marxists have not always been consistently anti-racist or multiculturalist, given Stalin’s rabid anti-Semitism, aggressive policy of national Russification, and deportation of entire ethnic populations to Siberia, but this does not change the fact that anti-racism and multiculturalism are characteristic features of Marxist orthodoxy. Since when have the inconsistent practices of a few individuals ever mitigated or excused the destructive nature of an ideology completely at odds with the biological reality of human nature? Likewise, MacDonald’s non-sequitur does not affect the central importance of spiritual equality in the Christian belief-system. Historically, Christians were divided on whether spiritual equality entailed certain real-world implications or was of purely eschatological significance.
This hopelessly muddled line of argument revolves around a nebulous definition of “traditional” Christianity, a term either alluded to or directly mentioned throughout. If traditional Christianity is supposedly good for Europeans, how can it be universalist and ethnocentric at the same time, as in the case of American abolitionists and slave-owners? Or is traditional Christianity whatever form of Christianity MacDonald finds acceptable? If this is the case, what is the point he is trying to make here? Prof. MacDonald mentions that the patristic writers frequently criticized Jewry for being obsessed with biological descent. This placed them at odds with the multicultural and multiethnic ideology of the Christian religion. But how can the patristic writers, who systematically formulated the official dogmatic orthodoxy of the church, not be representative of “traditional” Christianity? Paradoxically, MacDonald acknowledges the ancient origin of the church’s race-mixing proclivities. If he believes that the patristic writers were corrupted by egalitarian principles at a very early date, he should at least provide evidence of theological subversion.
According to Prof. MacDonald, the secular left, which initiated the cultural revolution of the 1960s, is not Christian in inspiration. This statement is egregiously wrong, revealing a profound ignorance of the philosophies of liberalism and Marxism, especially in terms of their historical development. These belief-systems originated in a Christian theological context. The core ideas of liberalism, human rights and equality, have their genesis in the careful biblical exegesis of 17th and 18th century Christian political theorists. Marxism is deeply rooted in the fertile soil of the Christian tradition, especially in the speculative Protestant rationalism of Hegel. It also draws additional inspiration from the Reformed theological principles of Luther and the communist socio-economic practices of the primitive Christian church.
The hostility between the secular left and “traditional” Christianity is emphasized to further demonstrate the non-Christian origins of Western pathological altruism. However, his observation is completely irrelevant, as both traditional and secular Christianity are essentially rival denominations within the same Christian religious tradition. The mutual hostility that exists between the two is to be expected. Furthermore, it is foolhardy to maintain that traditional or mainline Christianity has been corrupted by the secular left; given the origins of liberalism and Marxism in Christian theology and biblical exegesis, it is more accurate to say that traditional Christianity has allowed itself to be corrupted by its own moral paradigms after taking them to their logical conclusion. The Christian theological basis of social and biological egalitarianism is merely the rediscovery and application of the original ethical teachings of Jesus and the primitive church.
Prof. MacDonald says the “contemporary zeitgeist of the left is not fundamentally Christian.” He fails to realize that the liberal-leftist ideas behind Third World immigration and state-sanctioned multiculturalism have deep roots in the Christian tradition. There is a common misunderstanding, no doubt propagated by Christian apologists, that one must embrace the supernatural claims of Christian religious dogma to be considered a Christian. This contention is not supported by contemporary scholarship. For example, Unitarians reject traditional Christian orthodoxy but remain well within the Christian fold. Neo-Christianity, like Unitarianism, is a thoroughly demythologized religion, properly defined as the application of New Testament-derived ethical injunctions to the management of contemporary social and economic relations. By this definition, Liberals and Marxists are no less Christian than your typical bible-thumping “holy roller.”
If Christianity is ultimately responsible for the destruction of Western civilization, asks MacDonald, why aren’t Middle Eastern Christians destroying their own societies by aggressively pushing the same universalist and ethno-masochistic agenda? In this case, the comparison is historically flawed. The medieval Islamic conquest of Byzantine North Africa and the Near East virtually guaranteed that Middle Eastern Christianity would follow a socio-historical trajectory differing significantly from the one followed by Latin Christianity. Up until quite recently, Middle Eastern Christians inhabited a medieval world no different from the one Europeans had lived in for centuries before the dawn of the Renaissance. Middle Eastern Christians never experienced any Reformation that allowed them to shake off the tyranny of ecclesiastical authority and wrestle with the real-world implications of spiritual equality.
Furthermore, none of the conditions for a Reformation ever existed in what remained of Middle Eastern Christendom. There was no humanist movement, which meant no dramatic increase in literacy or availability of printed material. There was no rediscovery of the patristic writers or of the ancient biblical manuscripts in the original languages. Access to the original source material would have made it easier for religious dissidents to challenge ecclesiastical authority and refute long-established medieval Christian dogma. In fact, Middle Eastern Christians were dhimmis, a persecuted jizya-paying religious minority in a larger Moslem world hostile to their very survival. Given the precariousness of their legal situation in the Ottoman empire, they had no time for the finer points of biblical exegesis or theological analysis.
Prof. MacDonald states, erroneously, that in Judaism there is no “tradition of universalist ethics or for empathy with suffering non-Jews.” He is obviously not familiar with the teachings of the Old Testament: “The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God.” (Leviticus 19:34) Christianity is simply the radical universalization of Hebrew ethical concern for the plight of hapless foreigners living among them; as such, it is firmly embedded within the soil of 1st century Palestinian Judaism. Although Christianity has absorbed Greek philosophical ideas because of its wide dissemination in Europe, it is obviously not a European invention.
At this point, Prof. MacDonald asks: If the “moral universalism / idealism” that is destroying Sweden is due to Christianity, how does one explain “how people can lose every aspect of Christian ideology except the ethics”? To answer this question, let us inquire into the historical genesis of the Christian religion and the identity of its earliest followers.
Christianity originated in the yearning of Palestinian Jewry for social justice while having to patiently endure the tyranny of foreign rulers. Under these harsh conditions, Jewish beliefs in a messiah acquired an unprecedented sense of urgency, eventually assuming militant and apocalyptic overtones. This sense of urgency reached a crescendo in 1st century Palestine; self-proclaimed messiahs amassed armed bands of followers poised and ready to establish the son of David on the throne of Caesar, by force if necessary. This is the environment in which the Jesus myth originated, woven together from different strands of Jewish tradition in an atmosphere of deep-seated yearning for the coming advent of a messiah. This advent symbolized the end of Roman tyranny and the establishment of the kingdom of god on earth.
Christianity’s earliest followers were drawn from the refuse of the empire. Why? Because Christianity was the first mass movement in history to give concrete expression to the inner yearning of the people for freedom from oppression and hunger. What man has not sought to escape the oppression of his masters or the poverty of his surroundings? With the rise of Christianity, like the rise of Jewish Messianic belief, the inchoate yearnings of the mob for deliverance from oppression were replaced with a vision of a new social order that would inaugurate an age of universal justice and freedom. This new vision would lead to the establishment of a worldwide communist economic system that would forever solve world poverty and hunger. In the New Testament was found a blueprint for an ideal society that would inspire generations of social reformers and leftist revolutionaries.
For centuries, it was the only widely accessible document that demanded social justice for the poor and downtrodden and the only document to propose a practical solution to the problem of social inequality: the establishment of a socially egalitarian or communist society on earth. The religion of Christianity tapped into this deep-seated, age-old psychological yearning of the masses and, for the first time in history, gave it a coherent voice. This ensured the survival of ethical Christianity long after the decline of ecclesiastical orthodoxy in the late Middle Ages, allowing it to flourish, virtually unchallenged, in the ostensibly secular milieu of the modern 21st century Western “democracies.”
As a control mechanism, ethical Christianity was remarkably flexible. It could be used to justify any social arrangement, no matter how unjust or brutal. Its promise of “pie in the sky” had a remarkably pacifying effect on the illiterate serfs, who were expected to toil on the lord’s manor for their daily bread. Feudal landowners encouraged Christian religious instruction because it produced an easily controlled and manipulated peasantry. Vassals had it drummed into their heads from the moment of birth that servants must obey their masters. The church promised them life everlasting in paradise if they faithfully observed this requirement until death.
The great rarity of the peasant revolt against serfdom reveals the shrewd pragmatism of those who used religion as a means of safeguarding the public order. Punishment for original sin and the Pauline dualism between body and spirit, among other things, provided European rulers with additional convenient rationalization for the institution of serfdom. In the right hands, the ethical pronouncements of the New Testament could be used as an agent of revolutionary change, capable of stirring up mass revolt and potentially unleashing forces that could tear apart the “vast fabric of feudal subordination.” This was demonstrated by the Peasant Revolt of 1381, ignited by the fanatical communist-inspired sermons of the renegade priest John Ball.
The concept of human rights—Christian ethical injunctions in secularized form—illustrate in concrete fashion why the morality of the New Testament managed to survive long after the decline of Christian dogmatic orthodoxy. Rights dominate the field of political discourse because they are considered by egalitarian ideologues the most effective mechanism available for ensuring (a) the equal treatment of all persons and; (b) equal access to the basic goods deemed necessary for maximal human flourishing.
This practicality and effectiveness must be attributed to the ability of rights to fulfill the secret yearning of the common people, which is to ameliorate, as much as possible, the baneful effects of oppression and want. It achieves this by demolishing the traditional social and political distinctions once maintained between aristocracy and peasantry, placing all individuals on the same level playing field. The concept of rights has allowed the masses to closely realize their age-old utopian aspirations within a liberal egalitarian or socialist context. The concept’s great flexibility means that it can be interpreted to justify almost any entitlement. Even those who openly rejected the notion of rights, such as utilitarian philosopher Bentham, were unable to devise a more satisfactory mechanism that ensured equal treatment of all.
The Marxist tradition, emerging from under different historical circumstances, never fully decoupled Christian ethical teaching from traditional orthodoxy; instead, Marxist philosophical method necessitated an “inverted” Judeo-Christian eschatological and soteriological framework, largely because dialectical materialism is primarily an inversion of Hegel’s speculative Protestant rationalism.
In Hegelian Christianity, knowledge is substituted for faith. This eliminated the “mysteries” of Christian orthodoxy by making rational self-knowledge of god a possibility for all believers. The trinity as absolute mind, and therefore reason incarnate, means that Jesus of Nazareth was a teacher of rational morality, although his ethical system had been corrupted by patristic and medieval expositors. If “the rational is real and the real is rational,” as Hegel said, history is not only the progressive incarnation of god, but god is the historical process itself. The triadic structure of the natural world, including human self-consciousness, proves that the structure of objective reality is determined by the triune godhead of Christianity.
Hegel’s interpretation of Christianity gave Marx the raw material he needed to extract the “rational kernel” of scientific observation from “within the mystical shell” of Hegelian speculative rationalism. This liberated dialectical analysis from Hegel’s idealist mystification, allowing Marx to do what Hegel should have done, before succumbing to Christian theological reflection: construct a normative science, a Realwissenschaft, analyzing the socio-economic developments within capitalism that would unleash the forces of worldwide proletarian revolution.
The secularization of Christianity preserved the religion’s ethical component, while discarding all supernatural elements. This gave us modern liberalism. In contrast, Marx turned Hegel’s Protestant theological system upside down, a process of extraction resulting in the demystification of Hegelian Christianity. In Marxist philosophy, the inversion of dialectic removes the analytical tool—the “rational kernel”—from within its Christian idealist “shell.” This is then applied to the analysis of real-world phenomena within a thorough-going materialist framework, like the internal contradictions of capital accumulation in Marxist crisis theory.
Prof. MacDonald argues for a genetic basis for moral universalism in European populations, a difficult argument to make given the historical evidence indicating a total absence of pathological altruism in the ancient world before Christianization of the Roman empire. He mentions the systematic brainwashing of Europeans and the major role of Jewish political, academic and financial influence in the ethnocide of the West, but again forgets to mention that all these cultural forces rationalize European dispossession using political ideas like universal human rights and equality, the two fundamental pillars of secularized Christianity.
Prof. MacDonald’s attempt to exculpate Christianity of being “a root cause of Western decline” is easily refuted. In the final analysis, Christianity, at least in its organized form, is the single greatest enemy of Western civilization to have ever existed.

______ 卐 ______

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Axiology Catholic Church Christendom Demography Egalitarianism Kali Yuga Liberalism

Why Europeans must reject Christianity, 19

by Ferdinand Bardamu

 
Most destructive force in European history? World’s most dangerous religion?
Among the great religions, only Christianity contains within its shell an unlimited capacity for self-destruction. Nihilism lies at the core of the Christian gospel; in pure form, the religion demands the total renunciation of all worldly attachment for the greater glory of the kingdom of god. Christianity is the negation of life because it sets goals that, when attained, lead to the annihilation of the individual. As far as Western survival is concerned, this can only mean one thing: civilizational collapse and ethnic suicide. This is exactly what happened during the Dark Ages, when Christians were at the apogee of their power and influence in Europe. This decline was reversed by courageous intellectuals who had rediscovered the glories of the ancient civilizations, using this past achievement as the basis for new achievements and discoveries.
Christianity is a dangerous religion. It maximizes the survival and reproduction of the genetically unfit at the expense of society’s more productive members. It promotes the mass invasion of the West by foreigners of low genetic quality, especially from the Third World. By lowering collective IQ, Christianity has accelerated Western civilizational decline.
Neo-Christianity, in the form of liberalism and cultural Marxism, has inherited the orthodox Christian high regard for Lebensunwertes Leben. Christians and neo-Christians have even provided the necessary economic and political means, i.e. welfare statism and human rights, for ensuring that the genetically unfit breed large numbers of offspring with each passing generation. This has created an “idiocracy,” one that threatens the sustainability of all Western institutions. With each passing year, an enormous fiscal burden is imposed on the state for the support and daily maintenance of this growing class of dependents.
The Christian belief in the sacredness or intrinsic worth of all human life means that the religion is best regarded as an inherently anti-eugenic force. This Christian hatred of race improvement has manifested itself throughout European history. Christian monasticism and the priesthood, which removed Europe’s most gifted men from the gene pool, helped prolong the Dark Ages by hundreds of years.
Christian opposition to eugenics may also be driven by a recognition that actual religious belief is correlated with genetic inferiority. The negative correlation between intelligence and religiosity has been known since the mid-1920’s. Recent findings include a 2009 study revealing that atheists have average IQ’s 6 points higher than religious believers. This more than exceeds the threshold for statistical significance. The study further explored the relationship between national IQ and disbelief in god, finding a correlation of 0.60. This negative correlation, replicated across multiple studies, is the main reason why Christianity has experienced such explosive growth in the underdeveloped regions of Africa and Latin America.
In this context, Christian opposition to eugenics is a defensive maneuver. A more biologically evolved population would abandon Christianity for a rational belief-system. This would bankrupt the Christian religion by emptying church coffers and forcing its clergy to find an alternative source of employment.
Christianity is a threat to global peace and security. This makes it the world’s most dangerous religion. The Roman Catholic Church, the largest Christian denomination in the world at almost 1.3 billion members, is opposed to abortion and all other forms of contraception. Protestants are also against abortion, although many support voluntary contraception. Neo-Christians, which include modern liberals and cultural Marxists, although not opposed to the free availability of abortion and contraception in the West, are opposed to population stabilization and reduction in Third World countries.
Although modern research has demonstrated the existence of a significant positive correlation between foreign aid and fertility, Christian organizations continue to actively send aid to Third World countries. The continuous flow of money from the global north to the global south has led to explosive population growth in the developing regions of the world.
This problem is most acute in Africa, where the demographic situation has been significantly exacerbated by foreign aid from the liberal governments of developed countries and Christian charities. The population increases through a continuous stream of charitable donation, which places great strain on available resources as the local carrying capacity of the land is exceeded. Competition for scarce resources intensifies, bringing violent conflict in its wake; large-scale famines occur with increasing frequency and severity. The destabilization of entire regions leads to increasing numbers of Africans desperately trying to escape worsening conditions in their own countries, accelerating the destruction of Western civilization through the demographic timebomb of Third World migration.
After the West has been utterly destroyed by rampaging migrant hordes, the populations that once survived on Christian charity and foreign aid return to subsistence-level conditions after Malthusian catastrophe. This results in widespread depopulation of Africa south of the Sahara Desert.
Like the patristic Christianity that once menaced the world of classical antiquity, the “neo-Christianity” of social welfare liberalism and cultural Marxism threatens to bring about the complete destruction of modern Western civilization. Political doctrines like equality and human rights, forged within a Christian theological context, are now used as tools for the dispossession of Europeans in their own homelands. Not only is neo-Christianity represented by liberal-leftist ideology; it is also an intrinsic element of modern Christian teaching that has rediscovered its primitive Christian roots.
All Christian churches, both Protestant and Catholic, support racial egalitarianism; they actively promote the ethnocide of the West through massive and indiscriminate Third World immigration. This resurgent neo-Christianity gathers momentum with each passing decade. Time will only tell whether the neo-Christian recreation of god’s kingdom on earth is successful, but the current prognosis for Western civilization remains a bleak one.
The multiculturalist state religion was implemented during the cultural revolution of the 1960s. Reversal of course is not possible in this current atmosphere of state-sanctioned political correctness. If the liberal-leftist regimes of the West maintain their grip on power, the dystopian conditions they have socially engineered will continue without interruption into the foreseeable future. The totalitarian nature of multicultural ideology is further reinforced by the systematic brainwashing of Western populations and Jewish elite control of politics, the media, all major financial institutions and the academic world.
European civilization is in danger of being permanently eclipsed by the specter of neo-Christian influence, which hangs over the continent like the sword of Damocles. We will always have the Bible and the church, but Western scientific and technological advancement will not be with us forever. It is obvious that Christianity offers nothing but endless misery and suffering for Western man. Unless the remaining vestiges of Christianity in Europe are extinguished without a trace, European civilization will find itself submerged in a dark age more long-lasting and calamitous than the one that engulfed Europe after the Christianization of the Latin-speaking West in the 4th century.
For the first time in history, Western man must choose between Christianity or the survival of his own civilization. We can only hope that he chooses wisely as the “hour of decision” fast approaches.

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Christendom Judaism

Why a new subtitle?

Today I changed the subtitle of this site from ‘Just follow the white rabbit’ to ‘Christians are the ultimate conclusion of Judaism’. Older subtitles said: ‘Hitler was right’, ‘Gens alba conservanda est’ and ‘Western racial and cultural preservation’.
To understand the new subtitle, a Nietzsche quotation, keep in mind the context of the quote—see red letters in this post—and also the article ‘White nationalism is deluded, the rabbi is right’.

______ 卐 ______

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Catholic Church Christendom Egalitarianism Jesus Karl Marx Martin Luther Protestantism Reformation Thomas Aquinas

Why Europeans must reject Christianity, 17

by Ferdinand Bardamu

 
The Christian origins of modern liberalism and socialism
The “anticipatory” consequences of spiritual equality meant social and economic equality for the church, leading to the establishment of formal communism in the early Christian communities. This was not just philanthropy, but a highly organized social welfare system that maximized the redistribution of wealth. Early Christian communism was widespread and lasted for centuries, crossing both geographical and ethno-cultural boundaries. The communist practices of the ante-Nicene church were rooted in the Jesus tradition of the 1st century. The existence of early Christian communism is well-attested by the Ante-Nicene fathers and contemporary pagans.
After Christianity became the official state religion, the church became increasingly hierarchical as ecclesiastical functions were merged with those of imperial bureaucracy. The communist socio-economic practices of the early church were abandoned by medieval Christians. This was replaced by a view of inequality as static, the result of a “great chain of being” that ranked things from lowest to highest. The great chain was used by theologians to justify cosmologically the rigidly stratified social order that had emerged from the ashes of the old Roman world. It added a veneer of ideological legitimacy to the feudal system in Europe. In the great chain, Christ’s vicar, the pope, was stationed at the top, followed by European monarchs, clergy, nobility and, at the very bottom, landless peasantry. This entailed a view of spiritual equality as “antipathetic.” St. Thomas Aquinas provided further justification for inequality along narrowly teleological lines. In the Summa Contra Gentiles, diversity and variety in creation reflect the harmonious order established by god. If the universe only contained equal things, only one kind of good would exist and this would detract from the beauty and perfection of creation.
The antipathetic view of Christian equality was the dominant one until the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. Martin Luther’s iconic act—the nailing of the 95 Theses to the Wittenberg Castle door in 1517—began an ecclesiastical crisis of authority that was to have tremendous repercussions for the future of Western history. The pope was no longer the supreme representative of Christ on earth, but an irredeemably corrupt tyrant, who had wantonly cast the church into the wilderness of spiritual oblivion and error.
Access to previously unknown works of ancient science and philosophy introduced to an educated public the pagan epistemic values that would pave the way for the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century. The humanist cry of ad fontes! was eagerly embraced by Reformers. It allowed them to undermine scholastic hermeneutical principles (i.e. the Quadriga) and the major doctrines of medieval Christianity. The rediscovery of more reliable manuscripts of the Bible served as an important catalyst of the Reformation.
Reformed theologians, armed with humanist textual and philological methods, studied the New Testament and the Ante-Nicene fathers in the original languages. This led to a Christian “renaissance,” a rediscovery of the early Christian world. Compared to the lax morality and spiritual indifference of late medieval clergy, the first 4 or 5 centuries of the primitive church seemed like a golden age, one that maintained the doctrinal purity of Christian orthodoxy until Pope Gregory I, unencumbered by the gross distortions of scholastic theology and ecclesiastical tradition. Early Christian teachings and practices, forgotten during the Middle Ages, became popular once again among Protestants.
Reformers sought to recapture the spirit of primitive Christianity by incorporating egalitarian and majoritarian principles into an early modern ecclesiastical setting. Egalitarian thought was first enunciated in Luther’s teaching on the universal priesthood of all believers. In contrast to medieval Christian teaching, which viewed the clergy as members of a spiritual aristocracy, Luther proclaimed all Christians equally priests before god, with each one having the same capacity to preach and minister to fellow believers. On this basis, Luther demanded an end to the differential treatment of clergy and laity under canon law. He also defended the majoritarian principle by challenging the Roman ecclesiastical prerogative of appointing ministers for Christian congregations. Calvin, the other great Reformed leader, acknowledged the real-world consequences of spiritual equality, but approached it from the perspective of universal equality in total depravity.
Protestant radicals viewed the egalitarian policies of the mainstream Reformed churches as fundamentally inadequate; any concrete realization of Christian spiritual equality entailed a large-scale revival of the communistic socio-economic practices of the primitive church. Muntzer, an early disciple of Luther, is representative of this more radical egalitarian version of the gospel. In 1525, a group of religious fanatics, including Muntzer, seized control of Muhlhausen in Thuringia. During their brief rule over the city, they implemented the program of the Eleven Articles, a revolutionary document calling for social justice and the elimination of poverty. Idols were smashed, monks were driven out of their convents and monastic property was seized and redistributed to the poor. From the pulpit, Muntzer delivered fiery sermons ordering his congregation to do away with the “idol” of private property if they wished the “spirit of God” to dwell among them. A leader of the Peasant’s War in Germany, he was captured in May of 1525 after his army was defeated at Frankenhausen. He was tortured and then executed, but not before his captors were able to extract the confession: “Omnia sunt communia.” Whether the confession represents the exact words of Muntzer is controversial; nevertheless, it accurately reflects Muntzer’s anti-materialistic piety and view that the teachings of the gospel were to be implemented in full.
The Munster Rebellion of 1534-1535, led by Jan Matthys and Johann of Leiden, was far more extreme in its radicalism. After the Anabaptist seizure of the city, Matthys declared Munster the site of the New Jerusalem. Catholics and Lutherans were then driven from the town, their property confiscated and redistributed to the poor “according to their needs” by deacons who had been carefully selected by Matthys. They set about imposing the primitive communism of the early church upon the town’s inhabitants. Money was abolished; personal dwellings were made the public property of all Christian believers; people were forced to cook and eat their food in communal kitchens and dining-halls, in imitation of the early Christian “love feasts.” Ominously, Matthys and Johann even ordered the mass burning of all books, except the Bible. This was to symbolize a break with the sinful past and the beginning of a new communist era, like the Year One of the French Revolutionary National Convention. In the fall of 1534, Anabaptist-controlled Munster officially abolished all private property within city limits. But the Anabaptist commune was not to last for long. After a lengthy siege, the Anabaptist ringleaders, including Johann of Leiden, were captured, tortured and then executed by the Bishop of Munster.
The Diggers (or “True Levellers”) and the Levellers (or “Agitators”), active during the English Civil Wars (1642-1651) and the Protectorate (1653-1659), were strongly influenced by primitive Christian teaching. The Diggers, founded by Gerard Winstanley, were inspired by the communist socio-economic practices of the early Christians. They tried to establish agrarian communism in England, but were opposed in this endeavor, often violently, by wealthy farmers and local government officials who dismissed them as atheists and libertines. The more influential Levellers, a radical Puritan faction, tried to thoroughly democratize England by introducing policies of religious toleration and universal male suffrage. Their rejection of the arbitrary monarchical power of King Charles I in favor of egalitarian democracy was ultimately informed by Christian theological premises. Prominent Levellers like “Freeborn” John Lilburne argued for democratic egalitarian principles based on their exegetical interpretation of the Book of Genesis. All men were created equal, they said, with no one having more power, dignity and authority than anyone else in the Garden of Eden. Since no man had the right to exercise authority over others, only popular sovereignty could legitimately serve as the underlying basis of civil government. Many Leveller proposals, as written down in the Agreement of the People, were incorporated into the English Bill of Rights of 1689. This document later influenced the American Bill of Rights of 1791.
John Locke was the founder of modern liberalism, a political tradition soaked in Christian religious dogma. He drew many social and political implications from Christian spiritual equality. His belief in equality was rooted in the firm conviction that all men were created in the image of god, making them equal by nature. Church fathers and medieval theologians had long argued that all men, whether slave or free, were “by nature equal,” but that social inequality among men was god’s punishment for sin. John Locke agreed with the patristic and medieval authors on natural equality but repudiated their use of original sin to justify the passive acceptance of human social and economic inequality. Like the Protestant reformers before him, he believed that spiritual equality was not merely eschatological, but entailed certain real-world implications of far-reaching political significance.
Locke’s argument for universal equality was derived from a careful historical and exegetical interpretation of the biblical narrative. The creation of man in god’s image had enormous ramifications for his political theory, especially as it concerns his views on the nature of civil government and the scope of its authority. From his reading of Genesis, Locke argued that no man had the right to dominate and exploit other members of the human species. Man was created by god to exercise dominion over the animal kingdom. Unlike animals, who are by nature inferior, there can be no subjection among humans because their species-membership bears the imprint of an “omnipotent and infinitely wise maker.” This meant that all men are born naturally free and independent. Locke’s view of universal equality further entailed the “possession of the same faculties” by all men. Although men differed in terms of gross intellectual endowment, they all possessed a low-level intellectual ability that allowed them to manipulate abstract ideas and logically reason out the existence of a supreme being.
In Locke’s view, all government authority must be based on the consent of the electorate. This was an extension of his belief in mankind’s natural equality. Any abuse of power by elected representatives, when all judicial and political avenues of redress had been exhausted, was to be remedied by armed revolution. This would restore men to the original liberty they had in the Garden of Eden. Freedom from tyranny would allow them to elect a government that was more consonant with the will of the people.
Locke’s theory of natural rights was based on biblical notions of an idyllic prehistory in the Garden of Eden. Contrary to monarchical theorists like Filmer, man’s earliest social organization was not a hierarchical one, but egalitarian and democratic. If all men were created equal, no one had the right to deprive any man of life, liberty and private property. In Lockean political philosophy, rights are essentially moral obligations with Christian religious overtones. If men were obliged to surrender certain natural rights to the civil government, it was only because they were better administered collectively for the general welfare. Those rights that could not be surrendered were considered basic liberties, like the right to life and private property.
Early modern Christian writers envisioned in detail what an ideal communist society would look like and how it would function. The earliest communist literature emerged from within a Christian religious context. A famous example is Thomas More’s Utopia, written in 1516, which owes more to patristic ideals of communism and monastic egalitarian practice than Plato’s Republic. Another explicitly communist work is the Dominican friar Tommaso Campanella’s 1602 book City of the Sun. These works form an important bridge between pre-modern Christian communism and the “utopian” and “scientific” socialism of the 19th century. For the first time in history, these writings provided an in-depth critique of the socio-economic conditions of contemporary European society, indicating that only through implementation of a communist system would it be possible to fully realize the humanist ideals of the Renaissance. They went beyond communalization of property within isolated patriarchal communities to envisage the transformation of large-scale political units into unified economic organisms. These would be characterized by social ownership and democratic control. Implicit in these writings was the assumption that only the power of the state could bring about a just and humanitarian social order.
“Utopian” or pre-Marxian socialism was an important stage in the development of modern leftist ideology. Its major exponents, Blanc, Cabet, Fourier, Saint-Simon and Owen, were either devout Christians or men profoundly influenced by the socio-economic and ethical teachings of primitive Christianity. They often viewed Jesus of Nazareth as a great socialist leader. They typically believed that their version of communism was a faithful realization of Jesus’ evangelical message. In the pre-Marxian vision, the primitive communism of the early Christian church was an ideal to be embraced and imitated. Many of these writers even defended their communist beliefs through extensive quotation from the New Testament.
Louis Blanc saw Jesus Christ as the “sublime master of all socialists” and socialism as the “gospel in action.” Etienne Cabet, the founder of the Icarian movement, equated true Christianity with communism. If Icarianism was the earthly realization of Jesus’ vision of a coming kingdom of god, it was imperative that all communists “admire, love and invoke Jesus Christ and his doctrine.” Charles Fourier, an early founder of modern socialism, viewed Jesus Christ and Isaac Newton as the two most important figures in the formative development of his belief-system. He grounded his socialist ideology squarely within the Christian tradition. As the only true follower of Jesus Christ, Fourier was sent to earth as the “Comforter” of John 14:26, the “Messiah of Reason” who would rehabilitate all mankind along socialist industrial lines.
Henri de Saint-Simon, another important founder of modern socialism, believed the true gospel of Christ to be one of humility and equality. He advocated a “New Christianity” that would realize the practical and economic implications of the just world order preached by Jesus. Saint-Simon was also an early precursor of the Social Gospel movement, which sought to ameliorate social pathology through application of Christian ethical principles. The early Welsh founder of modern socialism, Robert Owen, although hostile to organized Christianity and other established religions, regarded his version of socialism as “true and genuine Christianity, freed from the errors that had been attached to it.” Only through the practice of socialism would the “invaluable precepts of the Gospel” be fully realized in contemporary industrial society.
The earliest pioneers of socialism, all of whom maintained socio-economic views grounded upon Christian religious principles, exercised a profound and lasting influence on Marx. His neo-Christian religious beliefs must be regarded as the only real historical successor of orthodox Christianity, largely because his ideology led to the implementation of Christian socio-economic teachings on a scale hitherto unimaginable. Muntzer, the radical Anabaptists and other Christian communists are considered important predecessors of the modern socialist movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. For example, in Friedrich Engels’ short monograph The Peasant War in Germany, Muntzer is immortalized as the man whose religious and political views were way ahead of his times. He even possessed a far more sophisticated “theoretical equipment” than the many communist movements of Engels’ own day.
The primitive communist transformation of the socio-economic order under Christianity is based on 1.) the elimination of all ethno-linguistic and socio-economic distinction between men—unity in Christ—and; 2.) the fundamental spiritual equality of all human beings before god; it is the mirror image of the modern communist transformation of the socio-economic order under classical Marxist ideology, which is based on 1.) elimination of all class distinction between men and; 2.) a fundamental “equality” of access to a common storehouse of agricultural produce and manufactured goods. The numerous similarities between Christian communism and Marxism are too striking to be mere coincidence. Without the dominant influence of Christianity, the rise of modern communism and socialism would have been impossible.
The Protestant Reformation of the 16th century links the socio-economic egalitarianism of the early Christian communities with the socio-economic egalitarianism of the modern West. As a religious mass movement beginning in late medieval times, it profoundly affected the course of Western civilization. The Reformation played an instrumental role in the initial formulation and spread of liberal and socialist forms of egalitarian thought that now serve as the dominant state religions of the modern Western “democracies.” Without Luther and the mass upheaval that followed in his wake, Christian spiritual equality would have remained an eschatological fact with no direct bearing on the modern secular world.
Spengler’s observation that “Christian theology is the grandmother of Bolshevism” is a truism. All forms of Western communism are grounded in the Christian tradition. The same applies to liberal egalitarian thought, which was also formulated within a Christian religious milieu.

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Christendom Communism Egalitarianism New Testament Old Testament St Paul Theology

Why Europeans must reject Christianity, 16

by Ferdinand Bardamu

 
Christianity: the grandmother of Bolshevism?
In 1933, the German historian Oswald Spengler wrote: “All Communist systems in the West are in fact derived from Christian theological thought… Christianity is the grandmother of Bolshevism.” This alone makes Christianity one of the most destructive forces in world history, a force so radioactive it destroys everything within its immediate vicinity. But how is this even possible?
Equality is such a fundamental aspect of the church’s kerygma that if it were removed the entire ideological structure of Christian orthodoxy would collapse like a house of cards. The “catholicity” of the church signifies that membership in the body of Christ is open to all men, regardless of ethno-linguistic or socio-economic differences. Salvation, because it is equally available to all, means that all men possess the same innate capacity to achieve it. There is also universal equality in sinful depravity, as well as in the possession of unmerited divine grace. Jesus’ commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself is merely the application of universalist and egalitarian principles to human social life. In the New Testament, believers are asked to serve one another, with the aim of achieving social equality within an ecclesiastical setting.
Assimilation of Platonic idealism by Ante-Nicene theologians added a metaphysical dimension to the egalitarian pronouncements of the New Testament. When God created man, he imparted the breath of life through his nostrils. This “breath,” psyche, or anima, translated “soul,” served as the life-principle of the animate body. The equality of souls before god obtains because all bear the same imago dei or image of god. In the Garden of Eden, man lived in circumstances of natural equality. St. Augustine writes that before the Fall, no one exercised dominion or lordship over anyone else, but that all ruled equally and indifferently over the inferior creation. The natural equality that once existed in this mythical prehistory was lost because of sin, which corrupted human nature. This brought slavery and other inequalities into the world. The church believed that the kingdom of god would restore Edenic conditions at the end of time.
To the Ante-Nicene church, belief in spiritual equality was not some ossified formula to be recited by rote like the Apostle’s Creed, but an ever-present reality with real-world, “anticipatory” consequences. Gospel narratives that incorporated elements of primitive communism were received favorably by the church and declared canonical. In Luke 3, John the Baptist, a member of the communist Essenes, exhorts his followers to share their clothing and food with those who are destitute. The communist pronouncements of John foreshadow the more explicit primitive communism of Jesus.
In Luke 4, Jesus begins his ministry by inaugurating an acceptable “year of the Lord’s favor.” This is a direct reference to the Hebrew Jubilee, which came every fifty years after the completion of seven sabbatical cycles. The proclamation of Jubilee signified manumission of slaves, absolution of debt, redistribution of property, and common ownership of the land’s natural produce.
According to Leviticus, no one owned the land, except YHWH; only its usufruct could be purchased. This was not a literal year of Jubilee inaugurated by Jesus. The passages being quoted in Luke are from Isaiah, not Leviticus which contains the actual Hebrew legislation. The imagery associated with the Jubilee is used to describe the realized eschatological features of the new age inaugurated by the coming Messiah. His return symbolizes the complete reversal of the old order. The new age will bring about communistic social relations through the ethical transformation of believers. From a biblical hermeneutic standpoint, the Torah Jubilee foreshadows the greater Jubilee now realized in Jesus’ ministry.
Jesus’ economic teachings go far beyond Levitical communal sharing. They necessitate large-scale re-organization of society along egalitarian and communist lines. In Luke 6, Jesus commands his audience to give to all those who beg from them, without distinction as to friend or enemy. His condemnation of violent retaliation is closely linked to this ethic of universal sharing; the communist social arrangement envisaged by Jesus cannot flourish in an atmosphere of violence and suspicion. The eschatological age inaugurated by the Messiah is one where lending without expectation of financial reward has become a new moral obligation, one that must be carried out if one wishes to obtain treasure in heaven.
That early Christian communist practice was morally obligatory is supported by numerous passages from the New Testament. According to 1 John 3:16-17, true believers will sacrifice their lives for the good of others, especially by giving to those in need; anyone who refuses to do this cannot claim to be a Christian in good moral standing.
In the Ante-Nicene church, fellowship was not only spiritual, but included mutual aid in the form of concrete material and economic assistance. The canonical epistle of James defines true religion as caring for “orphans and widows,” an ancient Hebrew idiom for the economically disadvantaged. Those who favor the rich over the poor, instead of treating both equally, are sinners in need of repentance. They have transgressed Jesus’ great commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself.” James says that “faith without works is dead.” What do these “works” consist of? We are informed that true faith is shown by those who feed and clothe the wretched of the earth. If one refuses to do this, one’s very identity as a Christian is placed in jeopardy.
In 2 Corinthians, Paul provides additional theological justification for early Christian communist practice using the kenosis of Christ as a reference point. Christians were expected to follow the example of Jesus, who was “rich” in his pre-existent state, but willingly “impoverished” himself so that believers could become “rich” through his “poverty.” This meant that wealthier Christian communities were morally obligated to share their abundance of riches with poorer ones. The purpose of re-distributing wealth from one Christian community to another, writes Paul, was the achievement of economic equality between believers.
The apostolic identification of “true faith” with material re-distribution led to the establishment of the world’s first welfare system and centrally planned domestic economy. While some form of primitive communism existed before the institutionalized Christian communistic practices of the first three centuries AD, these were reserved for small communities of Greek-speaking intellectuals or Jewish religious fanatics. What made Christian communism unique was its moral universalism and non-ethnocentric orientation. Given the egalitarian thrust of early Christian communist ideology, it should come as no surprise that the central organizing principle of classical Marxist economics, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” was lifted verbatim from the pages of the New Testament.
Marxism-Leninism, a murderous 20th century ideology that led to the deaths of over 100 million individuals worldwide, was directly inspired by the ethical pronouncements of the New Testament. This is a source of great embarrassment to the Christian religionist. In defense, apologists emphasize the voluntary nature of communist practice in early Christianity. Yet this apologetical evasion is clearly anachronistic.
Freedom defined as the ability to choose in the absence of external coercion is a uniquely modern idea inherited from post-Enlightenment philosophies of liberalism. This idea of freedom affirms the sovereign will as one obedient to itself, but also reducible to the basic laws of the free market. However, this understanding of freedom is diametrically opposed to the one encountered in the ancient Greek philosophical tradition. In this context, there is no sharp distinction between voluntary action and involuntary obligation; individuals are not conceptualized as autonomous agents with a multitude of options to choose from.
Instead, freedom is the ability to pursue the Good without impediment; only a properly functioning will, in which the subject has fully realized his true essence, can do this. To do evil goes against the proper functioning of the will; it is not an expression of one’s individual capacity for freedom. No one willingly or voluntarily refuses to pursue the Good; rather, they lack sufficient moral training or the appropriate self-restraint.
The Christian in the ancient world was free to not worship or consume meat sacrificed to idols; he was not free to do the opposite because he was no longer pursuing the Good. A Christian who violated the prohibition against idolatry was not legitimately exercising his capacity for free will, even though the prohibition had been violated in the absence of external coercion. Instead, such an action was the result of moral ignorance or error.
The same could be said of the early Christian practice of communism. This was only “voluntary” in the sense that Christians were freely pursuing a morally acceptable outcome. If freedom is pursuit of the Good without obstruction, Christians were morally obligated to participate in the communist socio-economic practices of the church, otherwise they would not be considered righteous before god.

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Architecture Catholic Church Christendom Destruction of Greco-Roman world Evil Indo-European heritage Islamization of Europe New Testament Theology

Why Europeans must reject Christianity, 15

by Ferdinand Bardamu

 
What has Christianity done for Europe?
Christianity is a violent, destructive, murderous cult. It is dangerous for the following reasons: 1.) the religion promotes the survival of the sick, the weak and the stupid at the expense of good racial hygiene. This drastically lowers population IQ and capacity for civilizational attainment, and; 2.) the cult relies on blind faith instead of rational persuasion, which has resulted in long periods of widespread chaos and bloodshed, especially during the Christianization of Europe. These dangers were even noticed by contemporary pagan writers, who immediately recognized the threat a triumphant Christianity would pose to the survival of Western culture.
Christianity never “civilized” or “domesticated” Europeans. On the contrary, Europeans were forced to endure a Neolithic existence when Christians were at the apogee of their power and influence. The church sent men of genius to monasteries or had them consecrated to the priesthood. This prevented them from passing on their genes, a significant dysgenic effect that lowered the collective European IQ. Only the pagan science and reason of classical antiquity could re-domesticate Europeans after 500 years of total intellectual darkness.
The church successfully defended Europe from invasion, argue some apologists, but nothing could be further from the truth. Charles Martel’s confiscation of church property to defend Europe from Moslem intruders was met with significant ecclesiastical opposition. If the church had succeeded in withholding the necessary funds, all Europe would have been reduced to a province of the Umayyad caliphate. Nevertheless, Martel was unable to pursue the Saracens across the Pyrenees and dislodge them from their Andalusian stronghold. The Moslems would continue their occupation of the Iberian Peninsula for 800 years, until their final expulsion by Ferdinand and Isabella in the late 15th century.
Southwestern France and Italy were periodically raided and sometimes controlled by Moslem invaders. The emirate of Sicily endured for over two centuries. Even after Norman conquest, a significant Moslem presence remained on the island. The Moslems of Sicily were finally expelled by the middle of the 13th century. The crusades to retake the Holy Land from the Saracens (1095-1291), a series of large-scale military operations under the joint leadership of papacy and feudal aristocracy, failed to achieve its primary objective. In 1204, Christian crusaders sacked Constantinople in an orgy of rape, pillage and murder. The crusaders caused so much damage that the Byzantines were unable to resist their Ottoman conquerors in 1453.
Christianity provided no adequate defense of Europe. The church only did enough to maintain herself as a viable institution. In the process, the church weakened Europe, making her ripe for conquest by the Umayyad and Ottoman caliphates.
Apologists tentatively acknowledge that although Christianity hindered scientific and technological progress, it still made “contributions” to fields as diverse as architecture and philosophy. On closer examination, these “contributions” are neither “Christian” nor worthy of being considered “contributions.” The great churches of the Middle Ages are frequently trotted out, but these have their origin in Roman building methods. The dome, the arch and the vault, the typical features of the medieval Romanesque style of architecture are all borrowed from the imperial Roman architecture of pre-Christian times. The basic architectural plan of most medieval churches is the Roman basilica, a public building reserved for official purposes. Even the Gothic style that supplanted Romanesque still employed architectural features of Roman origin. The ribbed vaulting that was typical of Gothic architecture was originally used in Vespasian’s Roman colosseum and by Hadrian in the construction of his Tibertine villa.
While acknowledging Romanesque as an “accomplishment,” the Christian religionist will conveniently ignore the almost total disappearance of Roman building methods from western Europe for almost 300 years. This was a direct result of the church’s active suppression of Western scientific and technical knowledge. From the completion of Theodoric’s mausoleum in Ravenna to the consecration of Aachen in 805, nothing of monumental significance was built in western Europe. During the intervening period, Europeans, like their Neolithic ancestors, had returned to the use of perishable materials for use in building.
Apologists for Christianity will mention Aquinas and scholasticism as the highpoints of not only medieval, but European intellectual development, even though Aquinas set European scientific and technological progress back by hundreds of years. Scholasticism was an object of ridicule and mockery during the Renaissance. Religionists mention the Christian “contribution” of the university, oblivious to the many institutions of higher learning that existed and even flourished in the ancient world. The first universities taught scholasticism, so they were the frontline in the Christian war against the pagan values of intellectual curiosity, love of progress for its own sake and empirical rationality.
In the Christian religious mind, science and technology are of Christian origin because the men doing the discovering and inventing during the Scientific Revolution were nominal Christians, like Galileo and Newton. This argument is just as absurd as arguing that the Greek invention of logic, rhetoric and mathematics were the result of Greek pagan theological beliefs because Aristotle and other ancient scientists and philosophers were pagans. No, these men were “Christians” because public avowals of atheism were dangerous in an age where even the most innocuous theological speculation could smear reputations and destroy careers. It is a glowing tribute to the courage and honesty of these men that they were able to abandon Christianity’s reliance on blind faith, often in the face of public censure, and consciously re-embrace the pagan epistemic values that produced the “Greek miracle” 2000 years before the Scientific Revolution.
Christian religionists claim that the New Testament, a collection of childish scribblings penned by semi-literate barbarians, is a great contribution to Western civilization. As has been pointed out for generations, even by other Christian religionists, the work is notorious for its use of bad grammar and unrefined literary style. Much of it was composed by Jews who were not even fluent in koine Greek. Overall, the New Testament is an inferior production compared to the meanest writers of Attic prose. Even St. Jerome, the translator of the Vulgate, expressed contempt for the crude, unsophisticated literary style of the Bible. He preferred the elegant Latin of Cicero instead.
What has Christianity contributed to Europe? The answer is nothing! No art, culture, architectural monuments, science or technology. Christianity was a massive waste of European intellectual and physical potential. Furthermore, Christianity almost destroyed Europe.
The church discarded over 99% of ancient literature, including works on science, mathematics, philosophy, engineering and architecture. This was the largest campaign of literary censorship and suppression in history, an act of cultural and physical genocide that nearly severed medieval Europe from the great achievements of classical antiquity.
This was cultural genocide because the church nearly wiped out an entire civilization and culture; this was physical genocide because the church’s deliberate eradication of secular knowledge placed millions of lives in danger, unnecessarily subjecting them to the ravages of disease, war, famine and poverty.
Far from being largely benign, the Christian church is a power-mad religious mafia. It bears sole responsibility for perpetrating the greatest crimes in history against Europeans. How long shall the Christian church escape punishment for this criminal wrongdoing? No other religion has caused as much suffering and as much damage to Europe as this spiritual syphilis known as Christianity.

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Why Europeans must reject Christianity, 14

by Ferdinand Bardamu

 
Christianity is a form of magical thinking. It cannot be disseminated on a large scale through rational persuasion. No one can explain how Christ rose from the dead, how god subsists as three persons in one or how a bible that teaches a geocentric, flat earth cosmology is an infallible guide to universal truth. These are “mysteries.” This is what makes Christianity such a dangerous and destructive cult. Conversion, unless done for gain or under threat of force, is an emotional affair. No one is “reasoned” into Christianity. Either that person must be gullible enough to accept the teachings of the Christian faith without question or he must be forcibly converted using the sword. It was through the latter that Christians were able to spread their gospel beyond imperial frontiers, nominally converting all Europe by the 14th century.
The spread of Christianity cannot be understood apart from the use of force. The barbarians who invaded the western empire had to convert to Christianity as soon as they set foot on Roman territory. Conversion to the religion was a condition of their migration and settlement on imperial soil. They would not have been allowed to participate in Roman society as pagans.
Christian missions located beyond the imperial frontiers would typically focus on converting barbarian rulers and their courts. Once the king was made to accept the new religion, he would then compel his followers to convert along with him. This pattern emerged early in the Christianization of Europe. These kings were the “new Constantines,” because they embraced Christianity, often after invoking Christ for victory in battle, like Constantine during the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312, and then imposed the religion on the aristocracy and the common people.
The earliest of these new Constantines included Caedwalla, the 7th century king of Wessex. He invaded the island of Wight and exterminated most of the Jutes who lived there. Caedwalla replaced these with Christian West Saxons and forced the survivors to convert to Christianity at sword-point. Another was Edwin, the 7th century king of Northumbria, who used a mixture of bribery and threats to convert aristocracy and common people to the new religion.
After the collapse of the West, Christianity remained confined between the river Elbe in the north and the Danube in the south on continental Europe, until 1000. Barbarians motivated by greed and lust for power were the driving force behind the renewed territorial expansion of medieval Christendom. They were impressed by the wealth, opulence and might of Constantinople and the Frankish dominions and wanted it for themselves. For the pagan warlord, Christianity was akin to the cargo cults of Melanesia. If only his barbarian court displayed all the trappings of the Christian religion, he would be as rich as the emperor in Constantinople!
In an illuminating anecdote, medieval chronicler Notker the Stammerer accurately captured the mentality of barbarian converts to Christianity. In the 9th century, Danes would flock to the Frankish court of Louis the Pious to undergo baptism. In exchange for conversion, Louis would give each man a set of brand new garments and weapons. Once, when Louis ran out of these articles to give prospective converts, he had a few rags stitched together into a coarse tunic and gave it to an old Dane who had been baptized some twenty times before. “If it was not because I was ashamed of my nakedness, I would give you back both the clothes and your Christ,” the Dane snapped back angrily. The “rice bowl” Christians of the 19th and 20th centuries make it difficult to dismiss this story as just another monkish fable.
The power-mad King Stephen of Hungary forced his subjects to convert to Christianity. He believed that Christianization of his kingdom would make it as powerful and as influential as Byzantium. Laws were enacted forbidding pagan ritual practice. Stephen ordered all Magyars to attend church on Sunday and observe Lent and fast days. Failure to obey this draconian legislation was dealt with harshly. Eating meat during Lent was punished by imprisonment; working on a Sunday was punished by confiscation of one’s tools and beasts of burden. The legal penalty for murmuring during a church service was having one’s head shorn, accompanied by a severe flogging. The “Black” Magyars who resisted Stephen’s forced conversion of Hungary were cruelly suppressed. Many were tortured and then blinded by Stephen’s Christian soldiers, who were angered by the intransigence of their pagan foes. These men preferred death to the shame and dishonor of being forcibly baptized into an alien Semitic religion and culture.
Christianization in Poland unleashed a similar wave of violence. Mieszko I forcibly Christianized Poland to strengthen his grip over the country and avoid forced conversion by the East Franks. Idolatry was suppressed by smashing pagan idols and sanctuaries, confiscating estates and beheading those who refused to convert. Although very little Christian legislation survives from Mieszko’s reign, his successor Boleslaw I, prescribed knocking a man’s teeth out upon refusal to observe Lenten fasting. Fornication was punished by nailing a man’s scrotum to a bridge and giving him the choice between death and castration.
The brutality of these methods led to a great pagan reaction to the Christianization of Poland. Pagans retaliated by killing Christian priests and destroying churches. By the middle of the 11th century, the land was plunged into chaos, the Christian church in Poland nearly wiped out, and Mieszko’s dynasty temporarily driven from power.
The Saxon Wars of Charlemagne, lasting from 772 to 804, was the first time in history that Christianity was used as an instrument of imperialist conquest. Charlemagne initiated formal hostilities by destroying pagan monuments in Saxony. In 782, Charlemagne promptly avenged a Frankish defeat at Saxon hands by massacring 4,500 Saxons in savage reprisal. The Saxon Capitulary of 785 ordered the death penalty for any Saxon caught resisting baptism or observing heathen practices.
Rulers forcibly converted pagans to Christianity for reasons of personal self-aggrandizement. Michael III, emperor at Constantinople, forced the Bulgarian Khan Boris to accept the eastern orthodox rite in 864, after he was defeated in battle. Forced Christianization allowed Michael to expand his sphere of influence in the Balkans. Bulgaria was then flooded with Byzantine clergy who, with the help of Boris’s army, began a nationwide campaign to demolish all pagan holy sites.
The boyars accused the Khan of accepting laws that threatened the stability and autonomy of the state. In 866, they revolted against the khan’s forced Christianization of the country but were suppressed with great cruelty. In the final decade of the ninth century, Boris’s eldest son Vladimir, who became ruler of Bulgaria, tried to eliminate Christianity and restore paganism. In this endeavor, he was supported by the boyars. Vladimir ordered the killing of Christian priests and the destruction of churches. Boris was compelled to leave his monastic retreat and suppress the revolt. Vladimir was deposed, blinded and imprisoned in a dungeon, never to be heard from again.
By the 12th and 13th centuries, crusades were launched to convert the indigenous peoples of Scandinavia and the Baltic region to Christianity. There were crusades against the Wends, Finns, Livonians (Latvians and Estonians), Lithuanians and Prussians. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, a monastic reformer, called for the cultural and physical extermination of northern Europeans who resisted forced conversion to the Christian religion.

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Why Europeans must reject Christianity, 13

by Ferdinand Bardamu

 
Christianity: bringer of violence and bloodshed
Word of mouth is notoriously ineffective as a means of spreading religious propaganda. This explains why Christianity’s growth remained largely unspectacular until the early 4th century. Of course, the primary reason for the Christianization of the empire was the conversion of Constantine to the new religion. The influence of Christianity in the empire was continuously reinforced and strengthened by the imperially coercive legislation of his successors. Christianization also sanctioned acts of religious violence against pagans, which contributed significantly to the religion’s spectacular growth in numbers and influence. Christianity unleashed a wave of violence that nearly drowned Europe in an ocean of blood. Without Constantine, and the religious violence of his successors, Christianity would have remained just another competing religion in the provincial backwaters of the empire, like Mithraism or the Eleusinian Mysteries.
The imperial policy of Christianization was further aided by the religion’s intrinsic advantages over rival philosophical and religious belief systems, making it more palatable to the ignorant masses. This facilitated its rapid spread across the empire until, by the reign of Theodosius in the late 4th century, most urban areas were predominantly Christian. These advantages included the egalitarian ethos of the Christian church. Unlike Mithraism, which was elitist, Christianity accepted all potential recruits, regardless of ethno-linguistic or socio-economic difference. The Christians of the first three centuries practiced a form of primitive communism. This attracted the chronically indigent, as well as freeloaders. Another advantage was the child-like simplicity of Christian doctrine.
The Crisis of the 3rd century, where rival claimants fought each other for the title of Caesar, was an internecine conflict lasting for decades. It produced widespread economic instability and civil unrest. This disruption of daily life encouraged men and women to seek refuge in the mystery religions, but also Christianity, which offered easy answers in an increasingly chaotic and ugly world. The Christian religion promised life everlasting to those who successfully endured tribulation on earth.
Passage of the edict of Milan in 313 meant that Christians would go from being a persecuted minority to a persecuting majority. Although persecution of religious dissidents had occurred before Constantine, such events were comparatively rare. Roman “persecution” of Christianity was mild and sporadic. It was not even religious in nature, but political; Christians refused to swear loyalty to the state by offering the pinch of incense to the emperor’s genius. Christians were not so much persecuted as they were subjected to Roman police action for disobeying the laws of the land. In contrast, Christian persecution of pagans and heretics was entirely motivated by religious hatred. It combined the authoritarian anti-pagan legislation of the emperors with the bigotry of the clergy and the violence of the Christian mob.
The first repressive laws against paganism were passed by Constantine. In 331, he issued an edict that legalized the seizure of temple property. This was used to enrich church coffers and adorn his city of Constantinople. He redirected municipal funds from the curiae to the imperial treasury. The curiae used these funds for the construction and renovation of temples, as well as for pagan banquets, processions and festivals. The redirection of municipal funds significantly diminished the influence of paganism in the public sphere. Constantine also showed preference for Christians when considering prospective candidates for government posts. For the first time in the empire’s history, conversion to Christianity was considered an attractive proposition.
Pagan temples and statuary were first vandalized and destroyed under Constantine. Christians believed that this first wave of iconoclasm was in fulfillment of scriptural command: “Ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves; . . . for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God” (Exod. 34.13f). The earliest Christian iconoclasm included the partial destruction of a Cilician temple of Asklepios and the destruction of temples to Aphrodite in Phoenicia (ca. 326 AD).
Constantine’s sons, Constans and Constantius II, followed in their father’s footsteps. In 341, Constans issued an edict banning animal sacrifice. In 346, Constans and Constantius II passed a law ordering the closure of all temples. These emperors were egged on by the Christian fanatic Firmicus Maternus who, in an exhortation addressed to both emperors in 346, called for the “annihilation of idolatry and the destruction of profane temples.” The fact that pagans continued to occupy important posts in the imperial administration made it difficult to legislate the active destruction of temples, statuary and inscriptions without alienating a large segment of the empire’s population. Nevertheless, Constantine’s sons turned a blind eye to private acts of Christian vandalism and desecration.
After the death of Constantius II, Julian was made emperor in 361. Having succumbed to the influence of pagan tutors in his youth, he developed a deep hatred for the “Galilean madness.” Accession to the throne allowed him to announce his conversion to Hellenism without fear of retribution. Julian set about reversing the anti-pagan legislation first enacted by his uncle. He re-opened the temples, restored their funding and returned confiscated goods; he renovated temples that had been damaged by Christian vandals; he repealed the laws against sacrifice and barred Christians from teaching the classics. Julian’s revival of pagan religious practice was cut short in 363, when he was killed in battle against the Persian Sassanids.
His successor Jovian revoked Julian’s edicts and re-established Christianity as most favored religion in the empire. The emperors who came after Jovian were too occupied with barbarian invasion to be concerned with internal religious squabbles; it was more expedient to simply uphold the toleration imposed on pagans and Christians alike by the Edict of Milan. Anti-pagan conflict again came to the forefront with Gratian. In 382 he angered pagans by removing the altar of Victory from the Senate. In the same year, Gratian issued a decree that ended all subsidies to the pagan cults, including priesthoods such as the Vestal Virgins. He further alienated pagans by repudiating the insignia of the pontifex maximus.
In 389, Theodosius began his all-out war on the old Roman state religion by abolishing the pagan holidays. According to the emperor’s decrees, paganism was a form of “natural insanity and stubborn insolence” difficult to root out, despite the terrors of the law and threats of exile. This was followed by more repressive legislation in 391, which re-instated the ban on sacrifice, banned visitation of pagan sanctuaries and temples, ended imperial subsidies to the pagan cults, disbanded the Vestal Virgins and criminalized apostasy. He refused to return the altar of Victory to the Senate house, in defiance of pagan demands. Anyone caught performing animal sacrifice or haruspicy was to be arrested and put to death. In the same year, the Serapeum, a massive temple complex housing the Great Library of Alexandria, was destroyed by a mob of Christian fanatics. This act of Christian vandalism was a great psychological blow to the pagan establishment.
Pagans, dissatisfied with the imperially-sponsored cultural revolution that threatened to annihilate Rome’s ancestral traditions, rallied around the usurper Eugenius. He was declared emperor by the Frankish warlord Arbogast in 392. A nominal Christian, Eugenius was sympathetic to the plight of pagans in the empire and harbored a certain nostalgia for pre-Christian Rome. He restored the imperial subsidies to the pagan cults and returned the altar of Victory to the Senate. This angered Theodosius, emperor in the east. In 394, Theodosius invaded the west and defeated Eugenius at the battle of Frigidus in Slovenia. This ended the last serious pagan challenge to the establishment of Christianity as official religion of the empire.
Apologists for Christianity argue that imperial anti-pagan legislation was more rhetoric than reality; their enforcement would have been difficult in the absence of a modern police state apparatus. This objection is contradicted by archaeological and epigraphic evidence. First, based on stratigraphic analysis of urban temples, cult activity had virtually ceased by the year 400, after passage of the Theodosian decrees. Second, temple construction and renovation declined significantly under the Christian emperors. In Africa and Cyrenaica, temple construction and renovation inscriptions are far more common under the first Tetrarchy than the Constantinian dynasty, when pagans still constituted a significant majority of the empire’s citizens. By the end of the 4th century, the authoritarian legislation of the Christian emperors had seriously undermined the strength and vitality of the old polytheistic cults.
The emperors did not stop with the closure of pagan religious sites. In 435 AD, a triumphant Theodosius II passed an edict ordering the destruction of all pagan shrines and temples across the empire. He even decreed the death penalty for Christian magistrates who failed to enforce the edict. The Code Justinian, issued between 529 to 534, prescribes the death penalty for public observance of Hellenic rites and rituals; known pagans were to seek instruction in the Christian faith or risk property confiscation; their children were to be seized by officials of the state and forcibly converted to the Christian religion.
Imperially mandated closure of all urban temples resulted in the privatization of polytheistic worship. This further exacerbated the decline of the pagan religious cults because of the object-dependent nature of ritual practice, which could not be fully realized in the absence of statuary, processions, festivals, lavish banquets and monumental building. In urban areas, imperial legislation was clearly effective. This was ruthlessly enforced by professional Christians and zealous magistrates, who used the additional muscle of the Roman army to get their own way, especially when preaching and public example failed.
Pagan rites and rituals were still observed at rural sanctuaries and temples for some time after the closure of urban centers of worship. These remained off the beaten track, so to speak, and were harder to shut down.
Churchmen like the fiery John Chrysostom, cognizant of this fact, exhorted the rich landowning class of the east to convert the heathen on their country estates. Those who allowed pagan worship on their rural properties were just as guilty of violating imperial anti-pagan legislation as the pagans themselves. Itinerant Christian evangelists, like Martin of Tours, fanned out across the countryside, winning souls for Christ through a campaign of intimidation, harassment and violence. In the end, aggressive evangelism, privatization of pagan religious practice and social marginalization ensured the death of paganism in rural areas.
Christianization of the empire was complete by 600 AD, although it is unclear to what extent Christ was considered just another deity to be worshipped alongside the old pagan gods.