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Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 16

Below, translated excerpts from the first volume of Karlheinz
Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums
(“Criminal History of Christianity”)

 
The ‘God of peace’ and the ‘children of Satan’ in the fourth century (Pachomius, Epiphanius, Basil, Eusebius, John Chrysostom, Ephraim, Hilary)
During the fourth century as divisions and sects grew, the schisms and the heresies developed with increasing boldness. The anti-heretic shouting also became more strident, more aggressive. At the same time, the struggle against non-Catholics sought judicial support. It was time of agitation and almost pathological actions: a true ‘spiritual disease’ (Kaphan).
 
St Pachomius
Saint Pachomius, the first founder of Christian monasteries (from 320 onwards) and author of the first monastic rule (of Coptic rite), hated the ‘heretics’ like the plague. This ‘abbot-general’ who wrote in code part of his epistles, considers himself capable of discovering heretics by smell and affirms that ‘those who read Origen will go to the lowest circle of hell’. The complete works of this great pre-Constantinian theologian (who was defended and appreciated even by great fanatics like Athanasius) was thrown by Pachomius to the Nile.
 
Epiphanius
In the fourth century Epiphanius of Salamis, a Jewish apostate and antisemitic fanatic and viper, writes his Apothecary’s Drawer (Panarion), where he warns his contemporaries against no less than eighty ‘heresies’, among which he even considers twenty pre-Christian sects! This does not prevent a coreligionist such as St. Jerome from praising him as patrem paene omnium episcoporum et antiquae reliquias sanctitatis, nor that the second Council of Nicaea (787) honoured Epiphanius with the title of ‘patriarch of orthodoxy’.
In his Apothecary’s Drawer, as confusing as long-winded, the fanatical bishop exhausts the reader’s patience with the pretence of supplying massive doses of ‘antidote’ to those who have been bitten by these snakes of different species, who are precisely ‘heretics’ for which the ‘patriarch of orthodoxy’ not only ‘asserts as certain the most extravagant and unbelievable hoaxes, even pledging his word as a personal witness’ (Kraft), but also invents the names of ‘heretics’ and pulls out of thin air new and nonexistent ‘heresies’.
Christian historiography!
 
St Basil
In the fourth century, Basil the Great, doctor of the Church, considers that the so-called heretics are full of ‘malice’, ‘slander’ and of ‘naked and brazen defamation’. ‘Heretics’ like to ‘take all things on the evil side’, provoke ‘diabolical wars’, have ‘heavy heads for wine’. They are ‘clouded by drunkenness’, ‘frenetic’, ‘abysses of hypocrisy’ and ‘of impiety’. The saint is convinced that ‘a person educated in the life of error cannot abandon the vices of heresy, just as a Negro cannot change the colour of his skin or a panther its spots’, so heresy must be ‘branded by fire’ and ‘eradicated’.
 
Eusebius
Eusebius of Caesarea, ‘father of ecclesiastical history’, born between 260 and 264 and the future favourite of the Emperor Constantine, offers us a complete list of horrible ‘heresies’. The celebrated bishop, now little esteemed by the theologians who judge him ‘scarce in ideas’ (Ricken S.J.), ‘of diminished theological capacity’ (Larrimore), beats a large number of false and deceitful men: Simon the Magician, Satorrinus of Alexandria, Basilides of Alexandria and Carpocrates as schools of ‘heretics who are enemies of God’ who operate with ‘deceit’ and incur in ‘the most abhorrent abominations’.
 
St John Chrysostom
Nor does John Chrysostom, the great enemy of the Jews, see in heretics anything other than ‘children of the devil’ and ‘dogs that bark’. Incidentally, the comparisons with animals are a very used argument in the controversies against the heretics.
In his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, Chrysostom stands beside Paul, ‘that spiritual trumpet’ to fight against all non-Catholic Christians, and quotes him with satisfaction when he says: ‘The God of peace [!] shall crush Satan under his feet’. Note that he does not say to ‘subdue’ them but ‘crush’ them; more concretely, ‘under your feet’. In a sermon to the Christians, Chrysostom invites the public blasphemers (who in those days already included Jews, idolaters, and heretics often called ‘antichrists’) to be questioned in the streets and, if necessary, receive the proper beating.
 
St Ephrem
For Ephrem, a doctor of the Church and a person who professed a deep hatred for the Jews, his Christian enemies were ‘abominable renegades’, ‘bloodthirsty wolves’ and ‘unclean pigs’. Of Marcion, the first founder of Christian churches (and also the creator of the first New Testament, and more radical than anyone in the condemnation of the Old Testament) says that he is devoid of reason and that his only weapon is ‘slander’. He is a ‘blind’, ‘a frenetic’, ‘a shameless harlot of conduct’; his ‘apostles’ are nothing but ‘wolves’…
It is evident that whoever wants to learn to hate, to insult, to slander without deceit, must seek as an example the holy fathers of the Church, the great founders of Christianity. Thus they proceeded against all those who did not think like them, Christians, Jews, or pagans: ‘Have no contemplations with idolatrous filthiness’ (Ephrem). For them, paganism was nothing more than ‘foolishness and deceit in all respects’ and the pagans ‘people who have lied’, ‘devour corpses’ and are ‘like pigs’.
 
St Hilary
[For] Hilary, a doctor of the Church who, apart from his special displeasure of the Jews… he also had as main enemies the ‘heretics’. Born in Gaul at the beginning of the fourth century, he attacked the Arians and fought, as the Catholic Hümmeler testifies despite that 1,500 years have passed, ‘the last breath of that plague.’
Admired by Jerome to the extent that he took pains to copy a work of Hilary; praised by Augustine as a formidable defender, and proclaimed by Pius IX, in 1851, Doctor of the Church, after long debates on baptism, the Trinity and the eternal combat of Satan against Jesus Christ, Saint Hilary charges against ‘perfidy and folly’, ‘the viscous and twisted path of the serpent’, ‘the poison of falsehood’, ‘ the ‘venom hidden’, ‘the insanity of the doctors of error’, their ‘feverish deliriums’; the ‘epidemic’, ‘illness’, ‘deadly inventions’, ‘traps for the unwary’, ‘tricks’, ‘endless madness’, the ‘pile of lies of their words’, etcetera, etcetera.
With these litanies, Hilary fills twelve books of his De Trinitate, ‘the best treatise against the Arians’ (Anwander). The monotonous flow of hatred is interrupted only to elucidate, or perhaps better to say to obscure, the question of the Trinity.

Categories
Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 15

Below, translated excerpts from the first volume of Karlheinz
Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums
(“Criminal History of Christianity”)

 
The ‘beasts with human body’ in the third century (Tertullian, Hippolytus, Cyprian)
Tertullian
Toward the beginning of the third century, Tertullian, the son of a non-commissioned officer and lawyer who occasionally exercised in Rome (where he drained the cup of pleasure, as he himself confessed) writes his ‘requisitions against heretics’, although not much later, and during the final two decades of his life, he himself would become a ‘heretic’, a Montanist and eloquent leader of a party of his own, that of the Tertullianists.
In his Praescriptio, however, that clever and mocking Tunisian, who dominated all the facets of rhetoric, ‘proves’ that Catholic doctrine is the original and therefore the true doctrine, in the face of the innovations of heresy, and that the ‘heretic’, therefore, is not a Christian and his beliefs are errors that cannot aspire to any dignity, any authority, any ethical validity.
(Later on, that born polemicist would whip up Catholics with his wit and sharp tongue, despite having been the creator of the institutionalized notion of the Church, as well as of the whole doctrinal apparatus of sin and forgiveness; baptism and penitence, Christology, and the dogma of the Trinity: that is, the very notion of the Trinity was his work.)
When Tertullian still belonged to the Church—to the point he would be later called the founder of Catholicism—he was in favour of avoiding the controversy with ‘heretics’ saying that ‘nothing is taken from it but stomach or head upset’. He even denies them the writing, since he says that they ‘throw holy things to dogs and pearls, even if they are false, to pigs’. He calls them ‘wrong spirits’, ‘falsifiers of truth’, ‘insatiable wolves’. For Tertullian ‘only the fight is worth; it is necessary to crush the enemy’ (Kötting).
St Hippolytus
Around the same time Hippolytus, the first anti-bishop of Rome, related in his Refutatio up to 32 heresies, 20 of them Gnostic. It is, among all the heresiologists of the pre-Constantine period, the one who left most news about the Gnostics, and he knew nothing of them! Moreover, these ‘heretics’ served only as a screen for the attack on his true enemy, Callixtus, the bishop of Rome, and the ‘heresy’ of the ‘Callixtusians’.
According to Hippolytus who, speaking of himself, claims he wants to avoid even the appearances of ‘slander’, many of the heretics are nothing more than ‘liars full of chimeras’, ‘daring ignorant’, ‘specialists in spells and incantations, formulas of seduction’. Noecians are ‘the focus of all misfortunes’, the Encratites ‘some incorrigible conceited’, the Montanists ‘let themselves be deceived by women’, and their ‘many foolish books’ are ‘indigestible and worthless’.
The Docetists propose a ‘confused and ignorant heresy’, and even Marcion, so selfless and personally unblemished, is nothing more than ‘a plagiarist’, a ‘debater’, ‘madder’ than the others and ‘more shameless’; as far as his school, it is ‘full of incongruities and dog life’, a ‘heretical impiety’. ‘Marcion or one of his dogs’, wrote the holy anti-bishop (and patron saint of the cavalry) Hippolytus, finally stating that he had broken ‘the labyrinth of heresy, and not with violence’ but ‘with the force of truth’.
St Cyprian
By the middle of the third century, among those who fought relentlessly against the defenders of other beliefs, there also flourished the holy bishop Cyprian, the author of the saying: ‘The father of the Jews is the devil’, which would have so much fortune among the Nazis. He was an arrogant, typical representative of his guild, who pretended that ‘before the bishop one must stand as, before, the figures of the pagan gods’.
Like the Jews and the pagans, Christian opponents of Cyprian are for him creatures of the devil, who ‘testify every day with an angry voice their mad frenzy’. And just as any Catholic writer ‘breathes holy innocence’, in the manifestations of ‘traitors to the faith and adversaries of the Catholic Church’, of ‘the shameless supporters of heretical degeneration’, there is nothing but ‘bark of slander and false testimony’.
Cyprian insists and repeats himself, for example in his 69th epistle, in which every ‘heretic’ is ‘enemy of the peace of our Lord’, that ‘heretics and renegades do not enjoy the presence of the Holy Spirit’, who are ‘prisoners of the punishments to which they are credited for joining in the insurrection against their superiors and bishops’; that ‘all without remission shall be punished’, that ‘there is no hope for them’, that ‘all will be thrown into perdition’ and that ‘all those demons will perish’. To the ‘heretics’, the saint argues with abundant evidence taken from the Old Testament, ‘neither food nor drink is owed to the earth’, nor, what to say, ‘the salvific water of baptism and divine grace’. From the New Testament he deduces that ‘one must depart from the heretic as the contumacious sinner, who condemns himself’.
Bishop Cyprian does not tolerate contact of any kind with the separated Christians. ‘Separation encompasses all spheres of life’ (Girardet). For Cyprian, who occasionally dedicates himself to establishing ‘true lists of heretics’ (Kirchner), the Catholic Church is everything and the rest, in the end, is nothing… For him they are only enemies: alieni, profani, schismatici, adversarii, blasphemantes, inimici, hostes, rebelles, all of which is summed up in one word: antichristi.
That tone ends up being the one usually used in interfaith relations. While the Church itself is praised as ‘heavenly paradise’, the doctrines of adversaries are always ‘absurd, confusion’, ‘infamous lie’, ‘magic’, ‘disease’, ‘madness’, ‘mud’ ‘plague’, ‘bleating’, ‘bestial howls’ and ‘barking’; ‘delusions and scams of old women’, ‘the greatest impiety’. As for separated Christians, they are always ‘conceited’, ‘blind, persuaded to be worth more than others’, ‘atheists’, ‘crazy’, ‘false prophets’, ‘Satan’s firstborn’, ‘demon spokesmen’, ‘beasts with human form’, ‘poisonous dragons’ against which we must proceed, sometimes even with exorcisms.
Against the heretics the charge of corruption of customs is also repeated; they are… like the males chasing many goats, or like stallions whinnying when they sniff the mare, or like grunting pigs. According to the Catholic Irenaeus, the Gnostic Marcus seduced his parishioners with ‘filters and magic potions’ to ‘tarnish their bodies’. Tertullian, after becoming a Montanist, proves that Catholics indulged in drunkenness and sexual orgies during the celebration of the holy supper; Cyril says Montanists climbers were child-eating ogres.
From Christians to Christians!
And yet Augustine had said: ‘Do not think that heresies are the work of four fainthearted; only strong spirits originate heterodox schools’. St. Augustine devoted his whole life to persecute them, and then with the help of the secular arm.

Categories
Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 14

Below, translated excerpts from the first volume of Karlheinz
Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums
(“Criminal History of Christianity”)

For centuries the crying against the heretics spread; not an objective polemic, but the demagogic of denigration. ‘In these circles to vilify was considered more important than a refutation’ (Walter Bauer). We can verify it in paleo-Christian literature.
 
The ‘beasts with a human figure’ of the second century (Ignatius, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria)
In the first Clementine Epistle, written about the year 96 C.E. (and attributed to the supposed third successor of Peter), the oldest document in patristics, he attacks the leaders of the Corinthian opposition who wanted to turn to the East, abandoning the West, and calls them ‘heated and reckless individuals’, ‘leaders of contention and disagreement’, who ‘tear apart the members of Christ as they eat and drink, and become fat, shameless, vain and braggart, hypocrites and fools’, ‘a great dishonour’…
 
St Ignatius
Ignatius of Antioch says that ‘heretics’ live ‘in the manner of the Jews’, who propagate ‘false doctrines’, ‘old fables that serve no purpose’. ‘He who has been tainted by it, is guilty of eternal fire’, ‘he shall die without delay’. And also those who teach error ‘will perish, victims of their disputes’. ‘I warn you against these beasts with a human figure’. The holy bishop, who calls himself ‘wheat of God’ with ‘seductive benevolence’ (Hümmeler) and his ‘language full of the ancient dignity ‘(Cardinal Willebrands), was the first to use the word ‘Catholic’ to designate what today is the confession of seven hundred million Christians.
 
St Irenaeus
Towards the year 180, Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyon, intervened in the chorus of those who thundered ‘against the heresies’. He was the first ‘father of the Church’ because he was the first to take for granted the notion of a Catholic Church and knew how to comment theologically; but he was also the first to identify the masters of errors [‘heretic’ Christians—note of the Ed.] with the figure of the devil, who ‘declared the beliefs of others as deliberately malicious’ (Kühner).
Irenaeus also advanced, like the great polemicists of the Church, the attacks against Gnosticism: one of the rival religions of Christianity and perhaps the most dangerous for the latter. Of undoubtedly of older origin, although little is known of its origins and many points remain controversial today, it represented an even more extreme and pessimistic dualism; its diffusion occurred with incredible speed, but in an infinity of variants that confuses the scholars. As it also borrowed many Christian traditions, the Church believed that the gnosis was a Christian heresy and as such fought against it, though of course without achieving the ‘conversion’ of any head of school or sect of the Gnostics.
The fact is that many of these, because of their personal qualities as has been granted by the Catholic Erhard, ‘fascinated many faithful of the communities’. From the year 400 more or less, Catholicism was dedicated to systematically destroy written documents of this religion, which had a rich collection of them. Even in the middle of the 20th century, when in a place in Upper Egypt a complete Gnostic library was found in Nag Hamadi, there were ecclesiastics to resume defamation of the gnosis ‘a poison of infiltration… to eradicate’ (Baus).
Irenaeus harasses the ‘mental lucubration’ of the Gnostics, ‘the malice of their deceptions and the perversity of their mistakes’. He calls them names, ‘vain histrionics and sophists’ who ‘give vent to their madness’. This saint, whose importance for theology and for the Church ‘can hardly be overestimated’ (Camelot), in his main work exclaims: ‘Oh, and oh pain’ as to the epidemic of ‘heresies’, to correct himself immediately: ‘It is much more serious, it is something beyond the woes and exclamations of pain’. The father of the Church particularly censures the hedonism of his adversaries.
According to the account, the Marcosians, who reached as far as the Rhône valley (where Irenaeus learned of their existence), were prone to seducing rich ladies, although Catholics also always preferred the poor. [Note of the Ed.: Deschner seems to write with irony here] It is true that some Gnostics were in favour of debauchery, but there were also rigorous ascetics. Irenaeus puts a lot of emphasis on incontinence. ‘The most perfect among them’, he affirms, ‘do all that is forbidden without any embarrassment; they surrender themselves without measure to the pleasures of the flesh, secretly dishonour the women whom they seek to indoctrinate’.
The Gnostic Marcus, who taught in Asia, where they claimed to having become acquainted with the wife of a deacon, had ‘as an assistant a little devil’, a ‘forerunner of the Antichrist’ who ‘had seduced many men and not a few women’. ‘His itinerant preachers also seduced many simple women’.
The priests of Simon and Menander were also servants of ‘sensual pleasure’, ‘they use magical spells and formulas, and practice making love filters’. And so were the supporters of Carpocrates; even Marcion, despite his acknowledged asceticism. He is branded as ‘shameless and blasphemous’ by Irenaeus. ‘Not only must the beast be raised; it must be wounded on all sides’.
 
Clement of Alexandria
At the threshold of the third century, Clement of Alexandria considers that ‘heretics’ are ‘deceitful’ individuals, ‘bad people’, unable to distinguish between ‘true and false’, who had no knowledge of the ‘true God’ and of course, were tremendously lustful. They ‘twist’, ‘force’, ‘violate’ the interpretation of the Scriptures.
Thus, Clement, praised even today for his ‘breadth of sight and his spiritual benignity’, defines Christians of other tendencies as those who ‘do not know the designs of God’ or the ‘Christian traditions’; who ‘are not afraid of the Lord but only in appearance, as they commit sin by resembling the pigs’. ‘As human beings converted into animals, they are the ones who despise and trample on the traditions of the Church’.

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Celsus Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) New Testament St Paul

Kriminalgeschichte, 13

Below, abridged translation from the first
volume of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte
des Christentums (Criminal History of Christianity)

 

______ 卐 ______

 

Chapter 3:

First malicious acts of Christians against Christians

‘No heretic is a Christian. But if he is not a Christian, every heretic is a devil.’ ‘Cattle for the slaughter of hell.’

—St Jerome, Doctor of the Church

 
In the origins of Christianity there was no ‘true faith’
The Church teaches that the original situation of Christianity was of ‘orthodoxy’, that is, of ‘true faith’; later, the ‘heresy’ would appear (de aíresis = the chosen opinion)… In classical literature it was called ‘heresy’ any opinion, whether scientific, political or from a religious party. Little by little, however, the term took on the connotation of the sectarian and discredited.
Now, the scheme ‘original orthodoxy against overcoming heresy’, essential to maintain the ecclesiastical fiction of an allegedly uninterrupted and faithfully preserved apostolic tradition, is nothing more than an a posteriori invention and as false as that same doctrine of the apostolic tradition. The historical model according to which Christian doctrine, in its beginnings, was pure and true, then contaminated by heretics and schismatics of all epochs, ‘the theory of deviationism’, as the Catholic theologian Stockmeier has written, ‘does not conform to any historical reality’.
Such a model could not be true in any way, because Christianity in its beginnings was far from being homogeneous; there existed only a set of beliefs and principles not very well established. It still ‘had no definite symbol of faith (a recognised Christian belief) nor canonical Scriptures’ (E.R. Dodds). We cannot even refer to what Jesus himself said, because the oldest Christian texts are not the Gospels, but the Epistles of Paul, which certainly contradict the Gospels in many essential points, not to mention many other problems of quite transcendence that arise here.
The early Christians incorporated not one, but many and very different traditions and forms. In the primitive community there was at least one division, as far as we know, between the ‘Hellenizing’ and the ‘Hebrew’. There were also violent discussions between Paul and the first original apostles… Ever since, every tendency, church or sect, tends to be considered as the ‘true’, the ‘unique’, authentic Christianity. That is, in the origins of the new faith there was neither a ‘pure doctrine’ in the current Protestant sense, nor a Catholic Church. It was a Jewish sect separated from its mother religion…
At the end of the second century, when the Catholic Church was constituted, that is, when the Christians had become a multitude, as the pagan philosopher Celsus joked, divisions and parties began to emerge, each of which called for their own legitimacy, ‘which was what they intended from the outset.’

And as a result of having become a multitude, they are distant from each other and condemn each other, to the point that we do not see that they have anything in common except the name, since otherwise each party believes in its own and has nothing in the beliefs of others.

At the beginning of the third century, Bishop Hippolytus of Rome cites 32 competing Christian sects which, by the end of the fourth century, according to Bishop Philastrius of Brescia, numbered 128 (plus 28 ‘pre-Christian heresies’). Lacking political power, however, the pre-Constantinian Church could only verbally vent against the ‘heretics’, as well as against the Jews. To the ever-deeper enmity with the synagogue, were thus added the increasingly odious clashes between the Christians themselves, owing to their doctrinal differences.
Moreover, for the doctors of the Church, such deviations constituted the most serious sin, because divisions, after all, involved the loss of members, the loss of power. In these polemics the objective was not to understand the point of view of the opponent, nor to explain the own, which perhaps would have been inconvenient or dangerous. It would be more accurate to say that they obeyed the purpose ‘to crush the contrary by all means’ (Gigon). ‘Ancient society had never known this kind of quarrel, because it had a different and non-dogmatic concept of religious questions’ (Brox).
First ‘heretics’ in the New Testament
Paul the fanatic, the classic of intolerance, provided the example of the treatment that would be given by Rome to those who did not think like her, or rather, ‘his figure is fundamental to understand the origin of this kind of controversy’ (Paulsen).
This was demonstrated in his relations with the first apostles, without excepting Peter. Before the godly legend made the ideal pair of the apostles Peter and Paul (still in 1647, Pope Innocent X condemned the equation of both as heretical, while today Rome celebrates its festivities the same day, June 29), the followers of the one and the other, and themselves, were angry with fury; even the book of the Acts of the Apostles admits that there was ‘great commotion.’
Paul, despite having received from Christ ‘the ministry of preaching forgiveness’, contradicts Peter ‘face to face’, accuses him of ‘hypocrisy’ and asserts that with him, ‘the circumcised’ were equally hypocrites. He makes a mockery of the leaders of the Jerusalem community, calling them ‘proto-apostles’, whose prestige he says nothing matters to them, since they are only ‘mutilated’, ‘dogs’, ‘apostles of deceit.’ He regrets the penetration of ‘false brethren’, the divisions, the parties, even if they were declared in his favour, to Peter or to others.
Conversely, the primitive community reproached him those same defects, and even more, including greed, accusing him of fraud and calling him a coward, an abnormal and crazy, while at the same time seeking the defection of the followers. Agitators sent by Jerusalem break into his dominions, even Peter, called ‘hypocrite’, faces in Corinth the ‘erroneous doctrines of Paul’. The dispute did not stop to fester until the death of both and continued with the followers.
Paul, very different to the Jesus of the Synoptics, only loves his own. Overbeck, the theologian friend of Nietzsche who came to confess that ‘Christianity cost my life… because I have needed my whole life to get rid of it’, knew very well what was said when he wrote: ‘All beautiful things of Christianity are linked to Jesus, and the most unpleasant to Paul. He was the least likely person to understand Jesus’.
To the condemned, this fanatic wants to see them surrendered ‘to the power of Satan’, that is to say, prisoners of death. And the penalty imposed on the incestuous Corinth, which was pronounced, by the way, according to a typically pagan formula, was to bring about its physical annihilation, similar to the lethal effects of the curse of Peter against Ananias and Sapphira.
Peter and Paul and Christian love! Whoever preaches another doctrine, even if he were ‘an angel from heaven’, is forever cursed. And he repeats, tirelessly, ‘Cursed be…!’, ‘God would want to annihilate those who scandalize you!’, ‘Cursed be everyone who does not love the Lord’, anatema sit that became a model of future Catholic bulls of excommunication. But the apostle was to give another example of his ardour, to which the Church would also set an example.
In Ephesus, where ‘tongues’ were spoken, and where even the garments used by the apostles heal diseases and cast out devils, many Christians, perhaps disillusioned with the old magic in view of the new wonders, ‘collected their books and burned them up in the presence of everyone. When the value of the books was added up, it was found to total fifty thousand silver coins. In this way the word of the Lord spread widely and grew in power.’
The New Testament already identifies heresy with ‘blasphemy against God’, the Christian of another hue with the ‘enemy of God’; and Christians begin to call other Christians ‘slaves of perdition’, ‘adulterous and corrupted souls’, ‘children of the curse’, ‘children of the devil’, ‘animals without reason and by nature created only to be hunted and exterminated’, in which the saying that ‘the dog always returns to his own vomit’ and ‘the pig wallows in his own filth’ is confirmed.

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Christendom Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Kriminalgeschichte, 12

A month ago I wrote that the oldest Christian texts are a treat if we compare them with the version of Christianity that conquered the United States: the worst Christianity of all times. I also said that it’s the worst precisely because it transmuted the anti-Semitism of the early theologians into the philo-Semitism brought to this continent by the spiritual sons of Cromwell.
Judge it by yourselves. In the first book of his ten-volume Criminal History of Christianity Karlheinz Deschner explains the anti-Judaism in the Church from the 2nd to the 4th centuries:

The increasing hostility against the Jews in times of primitive Christianity is observed in the writings of the iospatres aevi apostolici, that is, of the apostolic fathers, a designation created by the patristics of the 17th century to refer to the authors who lived shortly after the apostles: ‘When the earth was still warm from the blood of Christ’, according to the expression of St. Jerome…
St. Justin, an important philosopher of the second century, was much pleased (as was Tertullian, Athanasius, and others) about the terrible destruction of Palestine by the Romans, the ruin of their cities, and the burning of their inhabitants. All this is judged by the saint as a punishment from heaven, ‘what has happened to you is well deserved… criminal breed, children of harlot.’
And the invectives of the ‘very fine Justin’ (Harnack), whose celebration is attached to the 14th of April by disposition of Leo XIII (who died in 1903), do not end there. The saint devotes many other epithets to the Jews: he calls them sick souls, degenerates, blind, lame, idolaters, sons of bitches and sacks of evil. He states that there is not enough water in the seas to clean them.
This man, who according to the exegete Eusebius lived ‘at the service of the truth’ and died ‘for proclaiming the truth’, affirms that the Jews are guilty of all ‘injustices committed by all other men’, a slander in which did not fall even Streicher, Hitler’s propagandist.
At the beginning of the third century, the Roman bishop Hippolytus, disciple of St Irenaeus and father of the ‘early Catholic Church’, wrote a poisonous pamphlet, Against the Jews. He called them ‘slaves of the nations’ and demanded that the servitude of this people does not last seventy years as the captivity of Babylon, or four hundred and thirty years as in Egypt, but ‘for all eternity.’
St. Cyprian, who was a very wealthy man, rector and bishop of Carthage in the year 248 after divorcing his wife, devoted himself to collecting anti-Jewish aphorisms and thus supplied ammunition to all Christian anti-Semites of the Middle Ages. According to the teachings of this celebrated martyr, characterized by his ‘indulgence and cordial manliness for the good’ (Erhard), the Jews ‘have as father the devil’; exactly what the Stürmer said, the newspaper of agitation for the Hitler SS. The great author Tertullian says that the synagogues are ‘the sources of the persecution’ (fontes persecutionum)…

The Stürmer was the periodical that inspired Andrew Anglin to name his Daily Stormer.

Even the noble Origen thinks that the doctrines of the Jews of his time are only fables and vacuous words; to their ancestors he once again reproaches for ‘the most abominable crime’ against ‘the Saviour of the human race; that is why it was necessary that the city where Jesus suffered was destroyed, and that the Jewish people should be expelled from their homeland’…
With the increase of clergy power in the 4th century, the virulence of anti-Judaism also grew, as the theologian Harnack observed. It was becoming more frequent for the ‘fathers’ to write pamphlets against the Jews. Some of the oldest ones have been lost; our references begin with those of Tertullian, Hippolytus of Rome, and a number of Church doctors, from St. Augustine to St. Isidore of Seville in the 7th century. Anti-Jewish pamphlets became a literary genre within the Church (Oepke).
Gregory of Nazianzus, even today celebrated as a great theologian, condemned the Jews in a single litany, where he calls them murderers of God and of the prophets; enemies of God, people who hate God, despise the Law, devil’s advocates, race of blasphemers, slanderers, scoundrel of Pharisees, sinners, lapidary men, enemies of honesty, assembly of Satan, etcetera. ‘Not even Hitler made more accusations against the Jews in less words than the saint and bishop of sixteen hundred years ago.’

Deschner devotes a few pages to the anti-Semitic pronouncements of St. Ephrem (306-373), John Chrysostom, St. Jerome and Hilary of Poitiers. Then he tells us:

In 1940, in the middle of the Hitler era, Carl Schneider confesses that ‘rarely in history is anti-Semitism as determined and as uncompromising… as that of those early Christians’.

Compare this primitive Christianity with the standing applause with which all the congressmen, both Democrats and Republicans, received Benjamin Netanyahu—and tell me with a straight face that I am wrong that the worst type of Christianity conquered the most powerful nation in modern history!

Categories
Bible Christendom Judaism Julius Caesar Karlheinz Deschner Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Mainstream media New Testament Old Testament Theology

Kriminalgeschichte, 10

Today at dawn I discovered that David Irving has said that Rupert Murdoch is Jewish. If true, that would explain a lot of things I did not understand about Fox News, as it means that in the US there is not a single powerful TV network under the command of an Aryan.

In white nationalism the Jewish parasite is considered the primary cause that is exterminating whites. But who are worse: the parasites or those who behave like cattle because of their set of values? How on earth could the Aryans started to hand over their media to a subversive tribe right after Napoleon’s emancipation of them?

Hollywood released the movie The Time Machine when I was just two years old. The world of beautiful Eloi frolicking under the sun impressed George, the main protagonist of the film, soon after reaching the year 802,701 CE. But the Utopia was soon over when, carried off by the current of a river, blonde Weena screams for help but none of her male, blond companions show any concern. George rescues her and she tells George that her people are called the Eloi. Later George learns that the Eloi are the cattle of the Morlock cannibals.

Hating the Morlocks is easy, even to the point of wanting to exterminate them. But what about the extraordinary passivity of the Eloi? Two different species are required for the parasite-cattle dynamics, and in the case of the 1960 film, two wills. White nationalists are dedicated to investigate the Morlocks. I prefer to analyze the Eloi.

For example, it bothers me when Hunter Wallace praises Julius Caesar to the degree of embedding, in several entries of Occidental Dissent, clips of the famous series of HBO on Rome. That is not the historical Rome but “Holly-Rome”—I have complained a lot about white nationalists not reading Who We Are.

In Imperial Rome, in addition to the genocide of the Aryan Celts which the Romans, comparatively swarthier, perpetrated, I wonder if white nationalists know that Caesar also supported the Jews in many ways, and that Augustus generously endowed the Temple of Jerusalem, as Karlheinz Deschner writes in the first volume of Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums. In the section under the heading ‘Interpretatio Christiana’ Deschner tells us about the origins of Christianity:

Not the Jews, but the Christians now became the ‘people of Israel’, from which the Jews had apostatised. In this way, they snatched from the Jews the Old Testament and used it as a weapon against them, an extraordinary process of forgery that is called Interpretatio Christiana: a unique phenomenon that has no history in the history of religions, and which is practically the only original feature of Christianity.

‘Your Scriptures, or rather, not yours, but ours!’ wrote Justin in the second century. Justin is sure that ‘although they read them, they don’t understand them.’ To the literal sense of the Scriptures they opposed, in an exegetical operation that rises the hair, a supposed symbolic or spiritual sense, to be able to affirm that ‘the Jews did not understand’ their own sacred texts.

But not only the texts were stolen but the body remains of the Maccabees who had fought against our hero Antiochus! Deschner writes about the ‘relics’ of the Maccabees:

…preserved from the second century BC. in the great synagogue of Antioch, were declared Christian. Moreover, at the end of the fourth century, these relics were moved, so that the Jews were unable to worship them. And they turned the Jewish commemoration into a festival of the Christian calendar, which survives to this day.

The Christians snatched from the Jews whatever might be useful for the anti-Jewish polemic. As Gabriel Laub jokes, Christianity would not have been possible ‘if there had existed in the Old Testament times something like the international convention of copyright’. In the first century, Christians were already speaking of ‘our father Abraham’ and asserted that ‘Moses, in whom you have your hopes, is in fact your accuser.’

All of this hair-rising interpretations were systematized in Christian theology. For theologians and Christians, if there is an Old Testament it is only to announce things that are going to have their fulfilment in the New; and the passages of the Old that just do not square are eliminated. And since the Jews were the least squares, they were suppressed for ‘apostasy’.

As I have said: Interpretatio Christiana. One religion expropriates another and then insults, fights and persecutes the expropriated religion. This was necessary, because in Christianity what does not go back to paganism belongs, without exception, to the Jewish faith: its God, its monotheism, the days of fasting, the festivities like Easter, Pentecost… Even the word Christ (from the Greek christos) is nothing more than a translation of the Hebrew maschiah or ‘messiah’.

Manu Rodriguez has told us in this blog how Christianity infected the Aryan mind. But only a thorough reading of the history of Christianity may reveal how it turned whites into the cattle for a parasitic subspecies of humans. Just listen to the recent pronouncements about Charlottesville by Paul Ryan, Terence McAuliffe, Lindsey Graham, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney and even Jeff Sessions and countless others—the Eloi!

Categories
Catholic religious orders Christendom Eschatology Free speech / association Kali Yuga Liberalism Oliver Cromwell Protestantism St Francis

Crackdown!

After the events in Charlottesville, white nationalists have become the target group of the System forces. Not only The Daily Stormer (which for the moment can be seen: here) but Radio Red Ice, VDARE, NPI, American Renaissance, Mike Enoch, Counter Currents Publishing, Pax Dickinson, The Right Stuff, PolNewsForever, Altright.com, Vanguard America, RootBocks, Weev’s Linkeldn account, IdentityEuropa, Instagram, and Xurious have either been shut down or affected by the cancellation of their PayPal service.

Also, two of Richard Spencer’s upcoming conferences have been cancelled; in the case of Christopher Cantwell, both his Facebook page and his PayPal account have disappeared. In addition, Hatreon which provided donations for dissidents is offline; the Swedes Daniel Friberg and Christopher Dulny were banned from entering the US for their presence in the white nationalism movement, and the Paranormies account has been ousted from Soundcloud (Soundcloud is the same service that houses The West’s Darkest Hour Radio Show).

At least Trump has been brave in not joining the demonization of the Alt-Right like most American elites have. I believe, like James Mason, that the whole matter can be understood much better if we concede that the Enemy has won (since 1945), and that only a civil war can save the white race from extinction.

White nationalists horribly err when blaming the few swastikas (only three apparently) that some flaunted in Charlottesville. The myopia of these anti-swastika pundits borders psychosis. The original sin lies in the religion of our parents; in the liberal culture following the French Revolution, and in the American culture in particular that emerged from a version of Christianity friendly to the Jews.

White nationalists do not realise that practically all contemporary westerners are the product of a Christian and a liberal culture that has carried the principle of the human soul in a Christian sense—as opposed to the biological notion of the human psyche as Himmler explains—to its logical conclusion.

If there was a Pope of all Western culture today, whether religious or secular, he would be similar to the High Sparrow character of Game of Thrones: If you cannot equate those below with those above, humiliate and destroy the Aryan nobility of Westeros so that, this way, everyone will be equal. Studying the history of Christianity is fundamental to understand the atheistic world of today. I would go as far as claim that, if there is a key for the contemporary world, it is precisely the mendicant orders, such as the Dulcinians, which became fashionable after St. Francis tried to follow Jesus’ words in all of their purity.

White nationalists do not realise that the eschatological times we are living in are nothing but the last death rattles of Christianity, just as a dying star expands and burns all the planets near its orbit. It is Christianity what is dying, and before it becomes the white dwarf that will become the next century, it is giving us a hell of a fight by burning the whole West, including the precious blood of westerners through miscegenation. The madness of importing foreign people is not suffered in China or the countries under Islam: it is a folie en masse that only affects whites, upon whom sixteen hundred years ago a Levantine faith was imposed.

I am tempted tomorrow to continue the series on Deschner’s history of Christianity, but perhaps not with translations of whole chapters. I might limit myself to quote the anti-Semitic texts of the first fathers of the Church. Those millennial texts are a treat if we compare them with the version of Christianity that conquered the United States: the worst Christianity of all times! It’s the worst precisely because it transmuted the anti-Semitism of these early theologians into the philo-Semitism brought to this continent by the spiritual sons of Cromwell.

Write down my email address! If the System continues the crackdown, my WordPress, Twitter and Facebook accounts could be nuked. But if you save my email, I’ll to let you know the new address of this site.

cesartort [at] yahoo.com

Categories
Christendom Karlheinz Deschner

Clarification

Note of 16 July 2018:

This post has been merged within the book preface of my translation of Deschner’s book (here).

Categories
Christendom

Greg Johnson

“Greg, you do good sermons. Perhaps you missed your calling.”

—Johnson’s fan

Swedenborgian Church (San Francisco, California)

It’s true what I said earlier today: that in a dispute between White Nationalists I don’t take sides—because I am not a WN. But I’d like to rephrase what I already wrote on December 2012 about Johnson:

Take note of what he said in a 2010 lecture at the Swedenborgian Church of San Francisco. The lecture was “outed” in the WN community, much to his embarrassment. At the Swedenborgian meeting Johnson said:

“What most inspired me was his [Emanuel Swedenborg’s] discussion of the life of Christ and the meaning and the mystery of that… Swedenborg gave us the means to understand that mystery.”

After quoting Scripture Johnson asked, “What does it mean to say that ‘God is with us’?” and went into a theological peroration where he added:

“…a child was born. A child that somehow was the God of eternity. This unique incarnation is the great mystery. It is the conundrum of theologians and metaphysicians. Why was Jesus born? Why did God become man? Swedenborg claims that this was not part of Plan A… Jesus was Plan B… because of certain contingencies that [should not have] happened.”

Johnson then used autobiographical vignettes mentioning his childhood and his father to illustrate “Plan B,” presumably what God felt obliged to do when mankind fell into the original sin. He even mentioned the word “salvation.” At some point Johnson seemed to endorse the infinitely monstrous belief that it’s within God’s freedom to send us to Hell. (As an aside, see my piece on eternal damnation: here.) After speculating on the Second Coming, Johnson finished his lecture with an “Amen” and the Swedenborgians started to pray.

Listen this audio to hear, in Johnson’s own voice, his traditional homily. It sounds like the Catholic doctrine I was taught as a kid before my First Communion.

Johnson has been both a critic of Christianity on his webzine, and a pious Christian at his church in San Francisco. He literally had it both ways before his activities with the Swedenborgians were outed. As to his other persona, take note of what Johnson commented on The Occidental Observer:

[Christianity] did undermine racial exclusivity for nearly 2,000 years. Racial and subracial differences were no bar to marriage, as long as both parties were Christian.

And on another WN forum:

Christianity will not be dead until its secular offspring, liberal universalism, is dead as well. But you know that, don’t you? Christian fanatics are precisely the ones who believe that blood differences don’t matter.

See my brief collection of anti-Christian comments authored by Johnson: here. Even today, five years after I wrote the above, Johnson still can’t see that misleading both his WN readership and his church was wrong.

Categories
Autobiography Christendom George Lincoln Rockwell

This Time, 7

rockwell

A passage from This Time the World
by George Lincoln Rockwell

I read and reread the Bible, as I had not done before, from beginning to end. I was appalled at the demand by God for human sacrifice, for the eating of human body waste by the Lord, for the horrible cruelties and atrocities demanded by the Lord, according to the Old Testament…

Most of all, I wondered at the idea that if there were a few simple ideas and facts to be understood to enjoy eternal life and happiness, here and later on, and God were all-powerful, He had made it impossible for me to believe those ideas and facts because of the very mind which he gave me! And then I am to be threatened with eternal damnation for not believing that which I cannot believe! My first reaction was atheism.

I did something I deeply regret and shall never do again. I had begun to discover my own power of persuasion and, in the eternal bull sessions of a boys’ school, religion is not exempt as a topic. I was genuinely sorry I had lost my belief in Christianity, for it has truly marvelous power to sustain and help one in times of tribulation. I began to discuss the matter with a devout Catholic boy who tried with all his heart and might to make me see my error. We skied five miles over to his church to see a priest he said could straighten me out and I was truly anxious to be shown my error, if error it was.

But the matter turned out differently. Coldly and scientifically I argued with the priest, refusing to let him lead me into the inevitable non sequiturs, redundancies, etc. and brutally holding to logic. He was reduced, eventually, to exclaiming, “You just must believe. You have to believe!” I told him I could not believe and asked him if he were not able to help me do what he said I must. He shook his head sadly, no doubt convinced that I was determined not to understand.

The effect on my friend was something I had not counted on. All the way back to the school we skied in silence. When we got back, he said not a word and for days avoided me. I felt a secret shame for which I could see no reason. Eventually, he told me that he had been forced to agree with me and had lost his faith. That he was no happier about it than I, with my own loss of faith, was obvious. In fact, he was even more stricken. The result was to set me thinking on what I had done and whether it was right.

I saw then what I believe all great religious teachers knew, but could not and did not say. The ordinary man is too weak and too helpless in the whirling vortex of life to sustain himself on his naked human will and his cold human reason. Only with some kind of deep belief in an all-powerful magical being of some kind can the masses of humanity maintain social and reasonably worthwhile lives. Without such a belief, they can see no reason for not immediately indulging themselves in their most animal and immediate desires and they despair in the face of death unless they can imagine something further.

As long as men are thus ignorant and weak-minded, they must have some such spiritual crutches. So religion, far from being an “opiate”, is truly the sustainer of the masses of people. He who destroys religion before humanity has progressed far beyond its present primitive intellectual state is helping to destroy civilization.

I am an agnostic, which means that to all proposals and explanations of the mysteries of life and eternity, I say, “I do not know and I don’t believe you or any other human does either.”

At the same time, I stand firmly for positive, ethical religions, whatever they may be and believe they must be protected and given the greatest freedom to do what they can to lessen the awesome burden of human misery on this tiny planet. I know there will be many intellectuals who will reply that religion has caused untold torture and suffering to stamp out “heresy”, but in view of man’s need for emotional catharsis in today’s immensely frustrating world, and in view of Pavlov’s experiments, I believe that religion is the poor man’s “psychiatry”, his only “escape” from intolerable pressures of society.

Since that ski-trip to the priest up in Maine, I have never tried to argue anybody out of his religion and have given strict orders in the American Nazi Party that religion is simply not permitted as a subject of discussion for anybody. We have Protestants, Catholics, atheists and agnostics among our membership and all of them are equally welcome and valuable.