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Category: Tacitus

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Ancient Rome Tacitus

Caligula, 1

Marble portrait bust of the emperor Gaius, known as Caligula, A.D. 37–41.

Because the book Neo-Christianity is finally available (even if only in PDF for the moment), I have changed both the sticky post and the featured post. In both I used the symbol from George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novels about the Weirwood tree (a tree that, if a greenseer touches it, he can paranormally see into the past of Westeros). I would like to exemplify what I meant in the sticky and the featured posts with a new series on the figure of Emperor Caligula. As can be read on pages 16-17 of Neo-Christianity:

The Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, who governed Palestine from 26 to 36 AD, was known for his aggressive treatment of the Jews. But things grew even worse for them after his removal from power and the ascension of Emperor Caligula in Rome. Hayim Ben-Sasson writes, “The reign of Caligula (37-41 AD) witnessed the first open break between the Jews and the Empire… Relations deteriorated seriously during this time.”

Years later, Emperor Claudius issued his third edict, Letter to the Alexandrians, in which he accused those Jews of “fomenting a general plague which infests the whole world.” This is a striking passage; it suggests that Jews all over the Middle East had succeeded in stirring up dangerous agitation toward the empire. It also marks the first occurrence in history of a “biological” epithet used against them. By the year 49, Claudius had to undertake yet another expulsion of Jews from Rome.

All this set the stage for the first major Jewish revolt, in the year 66. Also called the First Jewish-Roman War (there were three), this event was a major turning point in history.

This reminds us of what Eduardo Velasco wrote in the essay on Judea vs. Rome, which we translated for The Fair Race, book #2 on the list of thirteen books in the new featured post:

In 41, Caligula, who already promised to be an anti-Jewish emperor, was assassinated in Rome, which unleashed the violence of his German bodyguards who had not been able to prevent his death and who, because of their peculiar sense of fidelity, tried to avenge him by killing many conspirators, senators and even innocent bystanders who had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Claudius, the uncle of Caligula, would become the master of the situation and, after being appointed emperor by the Praetorian Guard, ordered the execution of the assassins of his nephew, many of whom were political magistrates who wanted to reinstate the Republic.

This is the probable cause of the unprecedented historical defamation of this emperor: the texts of Roman history would eventually fall into the hands of the Christians, who were mostly of Jewish origin and viscerally detested the emperors. Since, according to Orwell, ‘he who controls the past controls the present’ the Christians adulterated Roman historiography, turning the emperors who had opposed them and their Jewish ancestors into disturbed monsters.

Thus, we do not have a single Roman emperor who has participated in harsh Jewish reprisals who has not been defamed by accusations of homosexuality, cruelty or perversion. The Spanish historian José Manuel Roldán has dismantled many of the false accusations against the historical figure of Caligula.

Well, two months ago I received the book in Spanish by José Manuel Roldán Hervás, PhD in classical philology. Already in the prologue of Calígula, el Autócrata Inmaduro (Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2012), Roldán quotes a sentence from Tacitus’ Annals: ‘The deeds of Tiberius and Gaius [Caligula], as well as those of Claudius and Nero, were falsified, out of fear, while they lived; and written, after their deaths, with hatred still fresh’.

In the next entry I will translate the whole prologue to Roldán’s book. For the moment I would just like, as I said, to illustrate what I alluded to in the sticky and featured posts: that the System demoralises the white man through historical lies.

For example, I recently interrupted the Netflix series on Caligula when I saw that they cast him, even before he was emperor, as the poisoner of Tiberius, the previous Roman emperor. One cannot contrast more that tale ‘with hatred still fresh’ with what we read in Roldán’s biography.

If we recall what Catherine Nixey wrote about the burning of entire libraries of the classical world by Christians, it cannot be more unfortunate that of Tacitus’ Annals, originally sixteen books on the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, the entire reign of Caligula has been lost. Unlike the writers who wrote with hatred, Tacitus is known to have been more objective.

Now back to our metaphor. Unlike Martin’s fiction about the oldest religion of Westeros, its Weirwood trees and the gifted greenseers who saw the past when they touched them, in the real world we have no such window to know, with absolute precision, what happened in the time of those emperors of the first century c.e. But if I still use the metaphor it’s because books like Roldán’s are the closest we have to a truer history of what might have happened.

Categories
Judaism Old Testament Tacitus Theology

The Holy Hook, 4

by Laurent Guyénot

How Christianity reinforced Jewish alienation

Also to consider is the effect that the Christian sanctification of the Jewish Tanakh has had on Jews themselves. It has discouraged Jews from questioning their scriptures and freeing themselves from their psychopathic god. Any Jew who questioned the divine inspiration of the Torah was not only banned from his community, but found no shelter among Christians: this happened to Baruch Spinoza and many others. For two thousand years, Christians have prayed that the Jews would open their heart to Christ, but they have done nothing to free them from Yahweh.

Critics of Jews in pagan Antiquity had a simple logic: although Jews were considered an ethnos, it was commonly admitted that their misanthropy was due to their religion. It was the fault of Moses, who had taught them to scorn the gods and the traditions of others. Hecataeus of Abdera gives in his Aegyptiaca (around 300 BCE) an alternative version of the Exodus: to appease their gods during a plague, the Egyptians expelled from their lands the many tribes of migrants (those known in Acadian as habirus), and some of them settled in Judea under the conduct of their leader Moses who, ‘because of their expulsion, introduced a kind of misanthropic and inhospitable way of life’.[14]

The Roman historian Tacitus tells a similar story and also attributes to Moses the introduction of ‘new religious practices, quite opposed to those of all other religions. The Jews regard as profane all that we hold sacred; on the other hand, they permit all that we abhor’ (Tacitus, Histories V,3-5).

Plutarch reports in his treatise on Isis and Osiris that some Egyptians believed the god of the Jews to be Seth, the murderer of Osiris, exiled by the council of the gods in the desert from where he periodically returns to bring famine and discord. This opinion was so widespread in the Greco-Roman world that many people believed that the Jews worshiped in their Temple the golden head of a donkey, symbol of Seth in the divine bestiary of Egypt. The Roman general Pompey is reported to have been surprised not to find this famous donkey head when he entered the Holy of Holies in 63 BCE.

Everything was simple, then: the Jews were not racially, but religiously degenerate. But the Christian Fathers, who held that only the Jews had worshiped the true God before the coming of Jesus Christ, had to elaborate a sophisticated explanation for the Jews’ asocial behavior, one which is so self-contradicting that its message to the Jews amounts to a ‘double bind’: on the one hand, the Jews are told that their Yahweh is the true God and that their Bible is holy, but on the other hand, they are criticized for behaviors they have learned precisely from Yahweh in their Bible.

They are accused of plotting to rule the world, although it is the very promise that Yahweh made to them: ‘Yahweh your God will raise you higher than every other nation in the world’ (Deuteronomy 28:1). They are blamed for their materialism and their greed, but that also they learned from Yahweh, who dreams only of plunder: ‘I shall shake all the nations, and the treasures of all the nations will flow in’ (Haggai 2:7).

Above all, they are rebuked for their separatism, although this is the very essence of Yahweh’s message to them: ‘I shall set you apart from all these peoples, for you to be mine’ (Leviticus 20:26). Jews who want to break away from Jewish separatism deserve death, according to the lesson of the Bible. The Church Fathers have repeated Yahweh’s endless complaint against his people’s irrepressible tendency to compromise themselves with the gods of the nations by oaths, shared meals or—abomination of the abomination—marriages. But are not these ‘stiff-necked Jews’ who rebelled against the tyrannical yoke of the Levites, precisely those who sought to extricate themselves from the Jewish alienation by assimilating into the surrounding civilization? Were they not doing exactly what we would like them to do today? The contradiction is in many Christian writings. John Chrysostom, for example, writes in his First Homily Against the Jews (II,3):

Nothing is more miserable than those people who never failed to attack their own salvation. When there was need to observe the Law, they trampled it under foot. Now that the Law has ceased to bind, they obstinately strive to observe it. What could be more pitiable that those who provoke God not only by transgressing the Law but also by keeping it?

This amounts to telling the Jews: ‘Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.’ Christians accuse them of having rebelled against Yahweh yesterday, and they accuse them of obeying Yahweh today, under the pretext that Yahweh’s orders no longer stand. How unconvincing to the Jews!

Anti-Yahwism is the only effective criticism of Israel because it is the only fair criticism. It cuts short the accusation of anti-Semitism, since it aims at liberating the Jews from the sociopathic god who has taken control of their destiny—and who is, of course, only the puppet of the Levites. A manifesto of anti-yahwism might begin with this statement by Samuel Roth from his book Jews Must Live:

Beginning with the Lord God of Israel Himself, it was the successive leaders of Israel who one by one foregathered and guided the tragic career of the Jews—tragic to the Jews and no less tragic to the neighboring nations who have suffered them. Despite our faults, we would never have done so much damage to the world if it had not been for our genius for evil leadership.[15]

Zionist pioneer Leo Pinsker wrote in his booklet Auto-Emancipation (1882), that the Jews are ‘the people chosen for universal hatred.’ They are indeed, but not because Gentiles are universally affected by a ‘psychic aberration,’ a ‘variety of demonopathy’ known as Judeophobia, as Pinsker believes, but rather because their covenant with Yahweh has programmed them to be hated wherever they go.[16]

It’s time to tell the Jews what Christians have been unable to tell them: You were never chosen by God. You have just been misled by your Levites to take your vindictive tribal god for the universal Father in Heaven. This cognitive short-circuit has caused in your collective psyche a grave narcissistic personality disorder. For our own misfortune, we Gentiles have been fooled by your self-delusion and have fallen, too, under the psychopathic bond of your leaders. But we are now waking up, and as soon as we recover our senses and our dignity, we’ll help you out of it too.

_____________

[14] Peter Schäfer, Judéophobie: Attitudes à l’égard des Juifs dans le monde antique, Cerf, 2003, pp. 13-15.

[15] Samuel Roth, Jews Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on All the Frontiers of Civilization, 1934, (archive.org).

[16] Leon Pinsker, Auto-Emancipation: An Appeal to His People by a Russian Jew (1882).

Categories
Josephus New Testament Richard Carrier Tacitus

The Jesus Hoax, 3

CHAPTER 3: WHY THE JESUS STORY IS FALSE

The point bears repeating. During Jesus’ entire lifetime, from, say 3 BC to 30 AD, not one person—not a Christian, not a Jew, not a Roman, not a Greek—wrote anything about the miracles, what Jesus said, or what his followers did. No one wrote anything. It’s as if nothing extraordinary happened at all…

The Romans were excellent record-keepers; surely any such astonishing letters would have survived. And yet we have not one.

At the same time there lived a famous Jewish philosopher, Philo. He was born around 20 BC, and thus was an adult at the time of the Bethlehem star. He lived well past the crucifixion, dying about the year 50 AD. He would have been the ideal man to record everything about a Jewish miracleworker and savior. He wrote about 40 individual essays, which now fill seven volumes. Yet he says not one word about Jesus or the Christian movement.

It gets worse. For the next 20 years after the crucifixion, we still have no evidence. From the years 30 to 50 AD, not one thing has survived that documents Jesus or his miracles: not a letter, not a book, not an engraving, nothing. Nothing by Jews, nothing by Christians, nothing by Romans—nothing.

And yet, it’s worse still. We know that, from the year 50, we have a few letters by Paul. These letters are finished when Paul dies around the year 70. Now, of course, his letters cannot count as evidence, because it is exactly his accounts of Jesus that we are trying to validate. Apart from Paul’s letters, from the years 50 to 70, we still have no evidence. Nothing by other Christians, nothing by Jews, nothing by Romans—nothing.

And still it gets worse. The Gospels appeared between 70 and the mid-90s. But they, too, cannot count as evidence because it is precisely these documents that need confirmation. Apart from the four Gospels, from 70 to the mid-90s, we still have no evidence.

In sum: for the entire period of the early Christian era—that is, from say 3 BC to the mid-90s AD—we have no corroborating evidence from anyone who was not party to the new religion. Not a shred of anything exists: documents, letters, stone carvings—nothing at all. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this problem…

Men such as Petronius, Seneca, Martial, and Quintillian all lived in the immediate aftermath of the crucifixion and would have been ideally situated to write about Jesus’ extraordinary life. So too with Philo, the Jewish philosopher, as I noted above. And yet not one of these men wrote a single word about him…

The Roman perspective

Josephus is important because he is the first non-Christian to confirm that a Christian movement existed, at least by the late first century AD. But what about the Romans?

 

______ 卐 ______

 
Editor’s note: Remember that the NT scholar who has most influenced me is Richard Carrier, who believes that Josephus’ couple of brief mentions of ‘Christ’ were later interpolations by Christians. For apologetic reasons, they put words into Josephus’ mouth. Skrbina continues:
 

______ 卐 ______

 
Tacitus was born in the year 58 to an aristocratic family. Between 98 and 105 AD he wrote four books, including the highly important work Histories. As it happens, not one of them so much as mentions Jesus or the Christians.

But his final work, Annals, which dates circa 115 AD, does include two sentences on them. In section 44 of Book 15 we read the following:

…a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace… a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.

The passage is likely authentic but yet odd in that we have no other reference to Christians in Rome at the time of Nero. But this is not relevant here. What matters is the stunning fact that it took until the year 115—80 years after the crucifixion, nearly 120 years after the miracle birth—for the first Roman to document the Christians. And even then, he grants them all of two sentences.

A second Roman reference—and the third non-Christian [Ed. note: Remember that Skrbina is taking one of the brief paragraphs in Josephus’ book as legit]—comes from Pliny. Like Tacitus, Pliny was an educated and highly literate aristocrat. By the year 110, at around age 50, he had assumed the position of imperial governor of a province in the north of present-day Turkey. In a letter to Emperor Trajan, from about the same time as Tacitus’ Annals, he writes an extended critique of the Christian movement. Over the course of about five paragraphs, Pliny explains his need to repress the Christians, including executing the non-citizens and shipping citizens to Rome for punishment. Christianity is described as a “depraved, excessive superstition,” and Pliny is worried that the “contagion of this superstition” is spreading. But still, he thinks it “possible to check and cure it.”

Pliny’s suggestions aside, what we find here is a fascinating account of a growing but troublesome new religion. The Romans were generally tolerant of other religions, and thus we must conclude that there was something uniquely problematic about this group. It may perhaps have been their Jewish origins, or the fact that they embodied particularly repellent values. We lack the details here to determine the cause of the enmity. But in any case, it seems clear that the early Christians were not simple apostles of love. Something else was going on with this group that the Romans found truly galling and, indeed, a kind of threat to the social or moral order.

And yet, something happened. We know for certain that by the mid-90s or early 100s latest, Christians were becoming noticed and causing trouble for the empire. We are fairly sure that Paul lived and wrote between the mid- 30s and late-60s, and that the Gospels first appeared between 70 and 95.

Categories
Quotable quotes Tacitus

Tacitus quote

Deos fortioribus adesse.

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Destruction of Greco-Roman world Emperor Julian On the Historicity of Jesus (book) Ovid Richard Carrier Romulus Tacitus

Unhistorical Jesus, 6

This is an update on what I have been saying about how the Christians transvalued Greco-Roman values through stealing vital elements of the Romulus story. I have resumed reading Carrier’s book and on pages 302-303 I came across this:

Later in the third century the Neoplatonist Porphyry wrote his own fifteen-volume treatise Against the Christians, which again does not survive, except for diverse scattered quotations in later Christian authors. A century after that Emperor Julian (the last pagan emperor, himself taking the throne only after a long line of Christian emperors) wrote Against the Galileans, his own critique of the religion that had transformed the empire he inherited. Once again, this does not survive; all we have are portions of Cyril of Alexandria’s treatise Against Julian. Eunapius then wrote in the year 414 a History against the Christians (perhaps not literally named that, but it was regarded as such by later Christians), an extensive critique of Christian ‘versions’ of historical events from 270 to 404 CE. This, too, does not survive; his otherwise inoffensive Lives of the Sophists was preserved instead. The only reason we know of his anti-Christian work is that before it faded into oblivion, many later historians, including Christians, employed it as a source.

I didn’t know the following until today:

Again, these are just the ones we know about: Which would be a fraction of what there was. All of it was tossed out or destroyed. Instead, we get to read only what medieval Christians wanted us to read. Another example of this phenomenon is that of the ‘mysterious lacuna’. Several texts that were preserved have sections removed. Sections whose disappearance seems convenient for Christians. Now, a lot of ancient literature, indeed arguably most, has missing material. This is typically a result of carelessness and accident, multiplied by time. But in some cases the precision and location of what was lost is a bit more peculiar than chance accident would suggest.

Carrier illustrates this with Refutation of all Heresies by the Christian scholar Hippolytus in the 3rd century. Remember that the Christians were so thorough that sometimes they even destroyed the ‘refutations’ authored by Christians so that not even what the pagan said about Christianity remained, even as ‘refuted’ quotes! (Some passages of Celsus survived simply because they didn’t dare to destroy the work of Origen, one of the early fathers of the Church.) Carrier continues:

But the second and third volumes are missing. The text skips directly to volume 4, which begins his discourse on astrology. This does not look like an accident. Some Christian or Christians decided to destroy those two volumes—for some reason fearing their contents. The resulting loss in our knowledge of the mystery religions is beyond considerable.

The below paragraph is what moved me to post this entry:

Another strange loss concerns the annual festival of Romulus in which his death and resurrection were reenacted in public passion plays (see Chapter 4, §1). That festival was held on the 7th of July. At the beginning of the first century Ovid wrote an elaborate poem, the Fasti, describing all the festivals throughout the year at Rome and what went on in them and why. This only survives in its first half, covering January to June, the remaining months are lost. It seems strange that the text cuts off precisely before the month in which a passion play [of Romulus] is described that was the most similar to that of Jesus Christ.

The fact that we have other descriptions of this festival (albeit none as complete as Ovid’s would have been) does mean there was no organized conspiracy to doctor the record (except when it came to controlling faith literature, for which we have clear evidence of Christians actively eliminating disapproved Gospels, for example), but this along with all the other cases (above and below) indicates a common trend among individual Christians to act as gatekeepers of information, suppressing what they didn’t like.

Ovid! And this even happened to Plutarch and Tacitus!:

Another example along similar lines is a mysterious gap in the text of Plutarch’s Moralia, a huge multivolume library of treatises on diverse subjects. In one of these, the Tabletalk, Plutarch is discussing the equivalence of Yahweh and Dionysus, and linking Jewish theology to the mystery religions, when suddenly the text is cut off. We have no idea how much is missing, although the surviving table of contents shows there were several sections remaining on other subjects besides this one. If an accident, this seems like a very convenient one.

A similar mysterious gap is found in the Annals of Tacitus. The text of the Annals survives in only two manuscript traditions, one containing the first half, the other the second half, with a section in between missing—and thus its loss is explicable. But there is another gap in the text that is harder to explain: two whole years from the middle of 29 CE to the middle of 31. That the cut is so precise and covers precisely those two years is too improbable to posit as a chance coincidence. The year 30 was regarded by many early Christians as the year of Christ’s ministry and crucifixion (see Element 7).

Robert Drews analyzed all the gaps in the Annals and concluded that this one has no more plausible explanation than that Christians excised those two years out of embarrassment at its omission of any mention of Jesus or associated events (like the world darkness reported in the Synoptic Gospels). Tacitus digresses on Christianity in his coverage of the year 64, in such a way that guarantees he made no mention of it earlier (if the passage there is authentic: see §10)—although Tacitus surely must have discussed other events under Pontius Pilate. So we can be certain Christians weren’t trying to hide anything embarrassing said about Jesus. But the embarrassment of saying nothing was evidently enough to motivate their targeted destruction of the corresponding text.

To understand the censor who eliminated those chapters so that posterity would remain in the dark, let us remember that St. Augustine also struggled with an omission. Seneca de Younger wrote On Superstition between 40 and 62. Carrier again: ‘that lambasted every known cult of Rome, even the most trivial and obscure—including the Jews—but never mentioned Christians’.

It is increasingly clear: Not only Jesus of Nazareth did not exist. The authors of the gospels (Semites, I suppose) stole the myth of the Aryan god Romulus for incredibly subversive purposes (see red letters: here).

That is why they tried to erase any hint of the Romulus festivals when they destroyed almost all the books in Latin, from the fourth to the sixth century (see Catherine Nixey’s words in bold type: here).

Categories
Indo-European heritage Mein Kampf (book) Real men Schutzstaffel (SS) Tacitus Vikings

Holy wrath, 4

by Evropa Soberana

In Old Norse mythology, the einherjar means literally ‘army of one’ or ‘those who fight alone’; those who have died in battle and are brought to Valhalla by valkyries.

 
Another quality that was attributed to the berserkergang possessed was the ‘disable the arms of the adversary’, which probably implied that the berserkers were so fast, so invulnerable and inspired such terror in their enemies that they seemed to be paralysed with fear or that their blows were not effective.

Also, it is very likely that the aura of anger from a charging group of berserkers was ‘felt’ at a great distance by enemy soldiers as if it were an expansive wave, as the Roman historian Tacitus wrote while speaking of a Germanic männerbund whose members were called Harii, a word that, among Iranians and Indo-Iranians, meant ‘blondes’ and which is related to the einherjar of Valhala:

It will be enough to mention the most powerful, which are the Harii, the Helvecones, the Manimi, the Helisii and the Nahanarvali. Among these last is shown a grove of immemorial sanctity. A priest in female attire has the charge of it. But the deities are described in Roman language as Castor and Pollux. Such, indeed, are the attributes of the divinity, the name being Alcis. They have no images, or indeed, any vestige of foreign superstition, but it is as brothers and as youths that the deities are worshipped.

The Harii, besides being superior in strength to the tribes just enumerated, savage as they are, make the most of their natural ferocity by the help of art and opportunity. Their shields are black, their bodies dyed. They chose dark nights for battle, and, by the dread and gloomy aspect of their death-like host, strike terror into the foe, who can never confront their strange and almost infernal appearance. For in all battles it is the eye which is first vanquished [1].

We observe here the importance of the symbolism about the dark among these men. The night is essential in this symbolism because it symbolizes the dark age, this dark winter in which we were born for good or bad. The day, with the rays of the sun, the gold, is propitious for the will, for the courage, for the conscious struggle, to drive the spear into the enemy, to plunge the sword into the earth; in a word, to possess, to take over. The day represents the right hand; the order, the ritual and the ‘dry way’. The night, on the other hand, with its darkness, moon, stars, water and silver is more propitious to magic, to a certain chaos, to be allowed to be possessed, to raise arms to heaven instead of sinking them into the earth and therefore it is more related to the left hand and the ‘wet way’.

Since man is no longer a god, he must strive to become, at least, a blind instrument of the gods. For this, he must be emptied of all egocentric individuality in order to allow the divine outburst, that is, ‘to propitiate Odin to touch him with the tip of his spear’. And the first way to achieve this was through the establishment of severe discipline, asceticism and organisation.

Let us remember, with respect to the importance of the night, that Adolf Hitler himself spoke in Mein Kampf about the difference of the effect of his speeches among the crowds in the morning and at night. For him, the afternoons, and especially the evenings, were the ideal moment to give a speech and to assert his magnetism. Let us also note that, in the SS, the predominant colours in the uniforms and in their symbolism were black and silver. Symbolically, they were covered by night with darkness, with thunder and with lunar and star light.

Whoever had once been possessed by the berserkergang was already marked with a lifetime sign. From then on, the trance not only came to be invoked before the fight, but could also fall on him suddenly in moments of peace and tranquillity, transforming him in a matter of seconds into a ball of hate, adrenaline and subhuman cries striving for destruction.

Thus, Egil’s Saga describes how Egil’s father, a berserker, suddenly suffered possession of the berserkergang while peacefully playing a ball game with his son and another small one. The warrior, horribly agitated and roaring like an animal, grabbed his son’s friend, lifted him into the air and slammed him to the ground with such force that he died instantly with all the bones of his body broken. Then he went to his own son, but he was saved by a maid who, in turn, fell dead before the possessed.

In the sagas, the stories of berserkers are dotted with tragedies in which the uncontrolled berserkergang turns against those closest to the possessed. If we had to find a Greek equivalent, we would have it in the figure of Hercules, who during an attack of anger killed his own wife Megara and the two children he had with her, which motivated his twelve tasks as penance to expiate his sin.

In the field of mythology we have many examples of the fury of the berserkers. The Saga of King Hrólf Kraki speaks of the hero Berserker Bjarki, who fought for the king and who, in a battle, was transformed into a bear. This bear killed more enemies than the five select king champions. Arrows and weapons bounced off him, and he tore down men and horses from the forces of the enemy King Hjorvard, tore apart with his teeth and claws anything that stood in his way so that panic seized the enemy’s army, disintegrating their ranks chaotically.

This legend, which is still a legend, represents the fame that the berserkers in the North had acquired as small groups but, by their bravery, perfectly capable of deciding the outcome of a great battle.

Now, what is the explanation for these events, which far exceed the normal? How should we interpret the berserkergang? In our days, those who always look with resentful distrust at any manifestation of strength and health, have wanted to degrade it. For many of them, the berserkers were simply communities of epileptics, schizophrenics and other mentally ill people.

This ridiculous explanation is altogether unsatisfactory, as epilepsy and schizophrenia are pathologies whose effects cannot be ‘programmed’ for a battle like the berserkers did, and under epileptic or psychotic episodes it is impossible to perform valiant actions or show warlike heroism. An epileptic does more damage to himself by biting his tongue and falling to the ground than destroying the ranks of a large enemy army, and can also be reduced by a single person. Others have suggested that, as in the movies, the berserkers were alliances of individuals who had undergone genetic mutations, or the survivors of an old disappeared Germanic lineage, organised in the form of sectarian communities. Others even take into account the ‘shamanic’ explanation, according to which berserkers were possessed by the totem spirit of a bear or a wolf.

________________

[1] ‘Germania’ in Germania and Agricola by Tacitus, translated by Alfred J. Church, Ostara Publications (2016), page 17.

Categories
Ancient Rome Christendom Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books) Nero Tacitus

Christianity’s Criminal History, 94

Below, an abridged translation from the third volume of
Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums.

 
Most of the written statements about the martyrs are false, but all of them were considered as totally valid historical documents (1 of 7)

The Christians first falsified, from the 2nd century, the emperor’s edicts of tolerance: for example that of Antoninus Pius (about 180), or a Marcus Aurelius writing to the Senate a letter in which the emperor testifies about the salvation of the Roman troops from thirst thanks to the Christians.

They also falsified an epistle of the Tiberian proconsul to Trajan with the supposed imperial order to end the bloody persecution.

An edict of Nerva was falsified which revokes the harsh measures of Domitian against the apostle John. Indeed, Domitian himself, informs the historian of the Church Eusebius—relying on the Eastern Christian (((Hegesippus)))[1], the author of the five books of Hypomnemata (Memories)—, after having imprisoned ‘the relatives of the Lord’ as the successors of David, he released them and ordered to ‘cease the persecution of the Church’.

If the Christians began falsifying documents so that the emperor exonerated them, when the persecutions were a thing of the past, they began to persecute the adherents of classical culture. They ended up falsifying documents to accuse the Hellene sovereigns; they falsified, in series, a large number of anti-Christian edicts and letters of the sovereigns and consuls (especially by the end of the 3rd century): supposed records of non-historical martyrdoms, and also an infinity of martyrdoms. The Christians who appear as witnesses to these false biographies are countless.

Already the first of the presumed persecutions under Nero—which, for two millennia, made this emperor a monster without equal for Christians—was not a persecution against Christians but a process for arson. Even historians Tacitus and Suetonius, hostile to Nero, judged the process as just and reasonable. ‘Christianity was not discussed’, writes the evangelical theologian Carl Schneider. Also, the history of Christianity of the Catholic theologian Michel Clévenot establishes ‘that neither Nero, nor the police nor the Romans must have known that they were Christians; they were still moving too far in the dark and their number was still too small for their executions to have been a matter of public interest’.

But since the logic of Catholic theologians is rarely brilliant, Clévenot finishes his chapter on the fire of Rome in July of the year 64, not without having first recorded the ‘surprisingly’ good memory about Emperor Nero among the Romans. Among the Christians, he is still considered a bloodthirsty madman. And according to Clévenot this would be ‘perhaps (!) the best demonstration that Christians were really the victims of the horrible massacre of July 64’.

It is significant that religious motives did not play any role in the process, or at most a very accessory one. Significantly, Nero confined himself to the Christians of Rome. Although the acts were later falsified to locate martyrs elsewhere in Italy and in Gaul, according to the Catholic theologian Ehrhard: ‘All these acts of martyrdom have no historical value’.

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[1] Editor’s note: The triple parentheses are mine. Hegesippus, a chronicler of the early Church, was a Jewish convert. One wonders how many of the Christians that Deschner has been mentioning also had Jewish ancestry.

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Ancient Rome Catholic Church Classical sculpture Egalitarianism Enlightenment Individualism Jesus Liberalism Martin Luther New Testament Protestantism St Paul Tacitus

Heisman’s suicide note, 3

Rupture: How Christ hijacked
the moral compass of the West

The English word “virtue” is derived from the Roman word virtus, meaning manliness or strength. Virtus derived from vir, meaning “man”. Virilis, an ancestor of the English word “virile”, is also derived from the Roman word for man.
From this Roman conception of virtue, was Jesus less than a man or more than a man? Did the spectacle of Jesus dying on a Roman cross exemplify virtus; manliness; strength; masterliness; forcefulness? Consistent with his valuation of turning the cheek, it would seem that Jesus exemplified utterly shamelessness and a total lack of the manly honor of the Romans.
Yet the fame of his humiliation on the cross did, in a sense, exemplify a perverse variety of virtus, for Jesus’s feminine, compassionate ethics have mastered and conquered the old pagan virtues of the gentiles. Jesus’s spiritual penis has penetrated, disseminated, and impregnated the West with his “virtuous” seed. And it is from that seed that “modernity” has sprouted.
Jesus combined the highest Roman virtue of dying honorably in battle with highest Jewish virtue of martyrdom and strength in persecution. This combination formed a psychic bridge between pagan and Jew, i.e. between ideal cruelty in war and ideal compassion in peace. This is one way in which Christianity became the evolutionary missing link between the more masculine ethos of the ancient pagan West and the more feminine ethos of the modern West.
The original Enlightenment notion of revolution reflects a quasi-creationist view of change that makes the sudden rupture between the moral assumptions of the ancient and modern world almost inexplicable. However, if we take a more gradualistic view of social change wherein modern egalitarianism evolved from what preceded it, then the origins of modern political assumptions become more explicable. The final moral-political rupture from the ancients became possible, in part, because Christianity acted as an incubator of modern values.
Christian notions of “virtue” were not an outright challenge to pagan Roman virtue by accident; these values were incompatible by design. To even use the Roman term “virtue” to describe Christian morality is an assertion of its victory over Rome. The success of the Christian perversion of the manliness of Roman “virtue” is exemplified by its redefinition as the chastity of a woman.
A general difference between ancient Greco-Roman virtue and modern virtue can be glimpsed through the ancient sculpture, the Dying Gaul. The sculpture portrays a wounded “barbarian”. Whereas moderns would tend to imitate Christ in feeling compassion for the defeated man, its original pagan cultural context suggests a different interpretation: the cruel defeat and conquest of the barbarian as the true, the good, and the beautiful.

The circumstances of the sculpture’s origins confirm the correctness of this interpretation. The Dying Gaul was commissioned by Attalus I of Pergamon in the third century AD to celebrate his triumph over the Celtic Galatians of Anatolia. Attalus was a Greek ally of Rome and the sculpture was only one part of a triumphal monument built at Pergamon. These aristocratic trophies were a glorification of the famous Greco-Roman ability to make their enemies die on the battlefield.
A Christian is supposed to view Christ on the cross as an individual being, rather than as a powerless peasant of the despised Jewish people. If one has faith in Jesus, then one “knows” that to interpret Jesus as the member of a racial-religious group is wrong and we “know” that this interpretation is wrong. How do we “know” this? Because we have inherited the Christianity victory over Rome in that ancient war for interpretation.
Liberalism continues the Christian paradigm by interpreting Homo sapiens as individuals, rather than members of groups such as racial groups. If it is wrong to assume Jesus can be understood on the basis of group membership, then the evolutionary connection between Christianity and modern liberalism becomes clearer. Jesus was a paradigmatic individual exception to group rules, and his example, universalized, profoundly influenced modern liberal emphasis on individual worth in contradistinction to assumptions of group membership.
Love killed honor. The values of honor and shame are appropriate for group moralities where the group is valued over “the individual”. Crucially, such a morality is inconceivable without a sense of group identity. Jesus’s morality became liberated from a specifically Jewish group identity. Once it dominated gentile morality, it also eroded kin and ethnic identity. The Christian war against honor moralities became so successful and traditional [that] its premodern origins were nearly forgotten along with the native pagan moralities it conquered.
Jesus’s values implicated the end of the hereditary world by living the logical consequences of denying the importance of his hereditary origins. This is a central premise underlying the entire modern rupture with the ancient world: breaking the import of hereditary origins in favor of individual valuations of humans. In escaping the consequences of a birth that, in his world, was the most ignoble possible, Jesus initiated the gentile West’s rupture with the ancient world.
The rupture between the ancient and the modern is the rupture between the rule of genes and the rule of memes. The difference between ancient and modern is the difference between the moral worlds of Homer and the Bible. It is the difference between Ulysses and Leopold Bloom.
On Nero’s persecution of the Christians, Tacitus wrote, “even for criminals who deserved extreme and exemplary punishment, there arose a feeling of compassion; for it was not, as it seemed, for the public good, but to glut one man’s cruelty, that they were being destroyed.” The modern morality of compassion begins with Christianity’s moral attack on the unholy Roman Empire. Christianity demoralized the pagan virtues that upheld crucifixion as a reasonable policy for upholding the public good.
If, as Carl Schmitt concluded, the political can be defined with the distinction between friend and enemy, then Jesus’s innovation was to define the political as enemy by loving the enemy, and thus destroying the basis of the distinctly political. The anarchy of love that Christianity spread was designed to make the Roman Empire impossible. The empire of love that Paul spread was subversive by design. It was as subversive as preaching hatred of the patriarchal family that was a miniature model for worldly empire.
Crossan and Reed found that those letters of Paul that are judged historically inauthentic are also the ones that carry the most inegalitarian message. It appears that their purpose was to “insist that Christian families were not at all socially subversive.” These texts “represent a first step in collating Christian and Roman household ethics.” For these historians the issue is “whether that pseudo-Pauline history and theology is in valid continuity with Paul himself or is, as we will argue, an attempt to sanitize a social subversive, to domesticate a dissident apostle, and to make Christianity and Rome safe for one another.”
What could be more ridiculous that the idea that Jesus’s attack on Roman values would not need some “modification” before making themselves at home in Rome? Jesus and Paul were heretics of mainstream or Pharisaic Judaism and rebels against Rome. Since the purity and integrity of the internal logic of Christianity is hostile to purely kin selective values, there is no way whatsoever that Christianity could survive as a mass religion without corrupting Jesus’s pure attitude towards the family. Jesus’s values subvert the kin selective basis of family values.
That subversion was part of the mechanism that swept Christianity into power over the old paganism, but it was impossible that Christianity maintain its hold without a thorough corruption of Jesus’s scandalous attacks on the family. If not this way, then another, but the long-term practical survival of Christianity required some serious spin doctoring against the notion that Jesus’s teachings are a menace to society.
These, then, are the two options: the pure ethics of Jesus must be perverted or obscured as models for the majority of people or Christianity will be considered a menace to society. The very fact that Christianity did succeed in achieving official “legitimacy” means its original subversive message was necessarily subverted. State-sanctioned Christianity is really a joke played upon on a dead man who never resurrected to speak on his own behalf.
Official Christianity was making Jesus safe for aristocracy; falsifying Jesus; subverting Jesus. Rome subverted his subversion. Jesus attempted to subvert them—and they subverted him. (Bastards!) Yet without this partial subversion of subversion, Christianity would never have taken the deep, mass hold that is its foundational strength.
This insight, that pure Christianity must be perverted in all societies that wish to preserve their kin selective family values, is a key to understanding the process of secularization. Secularization is, in part, the unsubverting of the evidence for Jesus’s original social program from its compromised reconciliation with Rome. The first truly major step towards unsubverting Rome’s subversion of Jesus’s message was the Protestant Reformation.
The Roman Catholic hierarchy contains elements of a last stand of the old Roman pagan virtue, a reminder that it had and has not been subdued completely. The Reformation begun by Martin Luther was directed, in part, against this last stand. While Luther partially continued the containment of Jesus by checking the advance of the idea that heaven should be sought on earth, this German also continued the work of the Jewish radical he worshiped in attacking the hierarchy of Rome.
Secularization is the unsubverting of Jesus’s message subverted by Christian practice. Modern liberal moral superiority over actual Christians is produced by unsubverting the subversion of Jesus’s message subverted by institutional Christianity. There is an interior logic to Jesus’s vision based on consistency or lack of hypocrisy. Liberal arguments only draw this out from its compromises with the actual social world. In this role, Protestantism was especially influential in emphasizing individual conscience over kinship-biological imperatives based on the model of the family.
The average secular liberal rejects Biblical stories as mythology without rejecting the compassion-oriented moral inheritance of the Bible as mythology. That people, still, after Nietzsche, tout these old, juvenile enlightenment critiques of Christianity would seem to be another refutation of the belief that a free and liberal society will inevitably lead to a progress in knowledge. The primitive enlightenment critique of Christianity as a superstition used as a form of social control usually fails to account that its “social control” originated as a weapon that helped to bring down the Goliath of Rome.
Still, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, this old enlightenment era castigation of Christianity for not being Christian endures without realization that this is actually the main technical mechanism of the secularization of Christian values. When one asks, what is secularization?, the attempt to criticize Christianity for its role in “oppression”, war, or other “immoral” behaviors stands at the forefront. Liberal moral superiority over actual Christians commonly stems from contrasting Christian ideals and Christian practice. This is what gives leftism in general and liberalism in particular its moral outrage.
Secularization arises as people make sense of Christian ideals in the face of its practice and even speculate as to how it might work in the real world. Enlightenment arguments for the rationalization of ethics occurred in the context of a Christian society in which the dormant premises of the Christian creed were subjected to rational scrutiny. To secularize Christianity is to follow Jesus in accusing God’s faithful believers of a nasty hypocrisy:

Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness. (Matt. 23:27-28)

To charge Christians with hypocrisy is to relish in the irony of Jesus’s biting charges of hypocrisy against the Pharisees. Jesus’s attempt to transcend the hypocrisies inherent in Mosaic law’s emphasis on outer behavior was one germinating mechanism that produced Christianity out of Judaism. The same general pattern generated modern liberalism out of Christianity. Just as Jesus criticized the Pharisees for worshipping the formal law rather than the spirit of the law, modern liberals criticize Christians for following religious formalities rather than the spirit of compassionate, liberal egalitarianism. It was precisely Christianity’s emphasis on the spirit that helps explain how the spirit of liberal compassion evolved out of the spirit of Christianity even if the letters of the laws are different.
To recognize hypocrisy is to recognize a contradiction between theory and action. The modern ideology of rights evolved, in part, through a critique of the contradictions of Christian theology and political action. Modern ideology evolved from Christian theology. Christian faith invented Christian hypocrites, and modern political secularism seized upon these contradictions that the Christian hypocrisy industry created. Resolving these moral contradictions through argument with Christians and political authorities is what led to the idea of a single, consistent standard for all human beings: political equality. The rational basis of the secularization process is this movement towards consistency of principle against self-contradiction (hypocrisy).
Modern ideas of political rights emerged out of a dialogue; a discourse; a dialectic in which Christianity framed the arguments of secularists, defining the domain upon which one could claim the moral high ground. The “arguments” of Christian theology circumscribed the moral parameters of acceptable public discourse, and hence, the nature of the counterarguments of “secular” ideology. Secular morality evolved by arguing rationally against the frame of reference provided by the old Christian Trojan Horse and this inevitably shaped the nature of the counter-arguments that followed. Christianity helped define the basic issues of secular humanism by accepting a belief in the moral worth of the meek of the world.
The Roman who conquered Jesus’s Jewish homeland could feel, in perfect conscience, that their conquest should confirm their greatness, not their guilt. Roman religion itself glorified Mars, the god of war. Pagan Roman religion did not automatically contradict the martial spirit—it helped confirm the martial spirit.
Chivalry, the code of honor that tempered and softened the warrior ethos of Christian Europe, is the evolutionary link between pagan virtue and modern virtue. Yet the imperial vigor of the Christian West was made, not by Christian religiosity, but by Christian hypocrisy. Christianity planted in its carriers a pregnant contradiction between Christian slave morality and Christian reality that was just waiting for the exposé of the “age of reason”. Christianity made the old European aristocracies “unjust” by dissolving the prehistoric and pagan assumptions of its existence.
Jesus himself contrasted his teachings with the ways of pagans:

You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many. (Matt 24:25-28)

To reverse the high political development of kin selection represented by Rome leads towards sociobiological primitivity; to an immature stage where human ontology is closest to a more primitive phylogeny; when humans are closest to our common evolutionary ancestors; when humans are biologically most equal to one another since genes and environment have not yet exacerbated differences.
Christianity reached a state of fruition called “modernity” when a kind of justice was reaped for the ancestral betrayal of a Christian’s pagan forefathers. The pagan values that genuinely supported an ancestral chain of sacrifice for their kin kind and the patriarchal kingdoms of this world were betrayed.
A war of generations broke Christianity from Judaism, and left wing humanism from Christianity. These are only peak points that matured from the gradual kneading of cultural dough; from change guided by visions of the moral high grounds in heaven or on earth. Out of a conflict between generations that Christianity helped leaven, the modern social idea of progress rose.

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Ancient Rome Axiology Celsus Christendom Deranged altruism Jesus Judaism Miscegenation New Testament Psychology St Paul Tacitus

Heisman’s suicide note, 2


How Rome was raped by Jesus’s penis of the spirit, contracting a deadly virus
The Roman historian Tacitus wrote that the founder of the sect of Christians, Christus,

had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate, and the pernicious superstition was checked for a moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue.

In the view of Tacitus, Christianity did not merely spread like a disease—it was a disease. As with Marxism, it originally appealed to the lower social classes. Writing sometime between 177-180 C.E., the Roman philosopher Celsus wrote of:

a form of belief harmful to the well-being of mankind. Taking its root in the lower classes, the religion continues to spread among the vulgar: nay, one can say it spreads because of its vulgarity and the illiteracy of its adherents. And while there are a few moderate, reasonable and intelligent people who are inclined to interpret its beliefs allegorically, yet it thrives in its purer form among the ignorant.

Christianity conquered from the bottom up. The new religion conquered by attacking the Roman principle that might made right. Impotent against Christianity contagion within the Empire, Seneca raged:

The customs of that most accursed nation [more exactly: most criminal nation, sceleratissimae gentis] have gained such strength that they have been now received in all lands; the conquered have given laws to the conquerors.

Seneca correctly described the victory of a memetic virus that injected its codes of law into hosts that reproduced it and spread it further. Attack by a disease or plague of God’s holy, blessed goodness has a parallel and precedent in the Biblical story of the ten plagues visited upon Egypt. Christianity was to the Romans what the ten plagues were to the Egyptians: a reflex of divine retribution in the name of God.
Jesus could be considered a “new Moses” only because there was a “new Egypt” to be delivered from. Rome was that new Egypt, and its victims would become the new Hebrews. The Jesus movement unified the motley slaves of all nations into a novel form of Judaism. Yet Christianity cannot be understood as only a spiritual revolution against the Roman Empire.
The tax collectors Jesus associated with were Jews who collected taxes from other fellow Jews. They often made their profit by charging extra (and thus breaking Jewish law). They were also popularly considered traitors for collaborating with Romans against their own people. Since tax collectors were considered impure for associating with gentiles in this way, Jesus may have associated with Jewish tax collectors out of a kind of identification with them. Does this mean that Jesus identified with Rome on some level? Instead of the justice of retaliatory revenge or even simple self-defense, Jesus proscribed what most Jews would consider unjust:

You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist an evil person…

The alternative to retaliation is turning the other cheek. Total forgiveness meant both forgiving his persecutors and forgiving the Roman oppression that provoked this dynamic. Salvation was for everyone; everyone including ultimate sinners such as Caesar himself—and Jesus himself. How could Jesus hold that his mother Mary should have resisted his evil Roman rapist father when it made the goodness of himself possible?
Long before Jesus was born, the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus and his successors were called “the son of a god”. Far from being an inexplicable coincidence, Crossan and Reed explained:

Christians must have understood, then, that to proclaim Jesus as Son of God was deliberately denying Caesar his highest title and that to announce Jesus as Lord and Savior was calculated treason.

Worshipping Jesus as the “son of God” was tantamount to ejaculating Jesus’s spiritual seed right in the face of Caesar and Augustus.
Pilate, with or without realizing it, ultimately sanctioned the destruction of Jesus’s part-Roman blood. But what would the hypothetical acceptance of Jesus by the Roman aristocracy represent for their empire? Roman acceptance of Jesus would represent, not only a repudiation of the warrior virtues that made Rome, but a precedent and model of miscegenation that would spell the end of Rome as a kin selective order. And this is a central reason why the triumph of Christianity parallels the genetically maladaptive or un-kin selective disintegration of the Roman Empire. For the ancient Romans to accept Jesus as one of their own would have collapsed the sociobiological foundations of the pagan Roman Empire—and it did.
Edward Gibbon, well known for his negative appraisal of the empire crumbling effects of Christianity in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, wrote that the early Christians:

refused to take any active part in the civil administration or the military defence of the empire… it was impossible that the Christians, without renouncing a more sacred duty, could assume the character of soldiers, of magistrates, or of princes. This indolent, or even criminal disregard to the public welfare, exposed them to the contempt and reproaches of the Pagans, who very frequently asked, what must be the fate of the empire, attacked on every side by the barbarians, if all mankind should adopt the pusillanimous sentiments of the new sect?

Good news! Jesus has come to free you from the boundaries between Roman and barbarian that were a foundation for the struggle for imperial existence. What the Christian world inherited from Jesus was an ancient postmodernism that deconstructed the Roman Empire from within. At every point, the Kingdom of God offered the victims of Rome a binary ethical opposite against the Kingdom of Caesar. In the Christian discovery of the universal individual soul of infinite, God-given value, a thread was found, that when pulled, was able to unravel the entire Caesar-centered world.
The great Roman hierarchy was built on a central contradiction: the glorified selfish altruism of duty to Rome. Christianity worked by exposing this contradiction to Jesus’s radicalization of the ideal of altruism: consistent self-sacrifice unto the self-destruction of the ego. This was the seditious genius of Jesus. Christianity deconstructed the Roman hierarchy by pulling the thread of altruism loose from its conventional association with familial love and thus unraveled the whole structure as if a yarn from a knitted sweater.
The Kingdom of God was simultaneously and indivisibly both political and religious. The Kingdom of God could break all the sociobiological rules only by destroying kin selective altruism and the entire order of social rank emergent from a world ruled by selfish genes:

To destroy the house of the powerful
you must defeat the arms that protect it (i.e. Matt. 12:29).

The conquest of the Jewish homeland by the Roman war machine was a desecration of its religious-kin selective boundaries. The rape of Mary by a Roman soldier(s) was a desecration of Judaism’s religious-kin selective boundaries. If Jesus’s existence was God’s will, then this implied that God willed the overcoming of all sociobiological boundaries.
Jesus was only returning the favor with non-violent warfare that deeming the preservation of all sociobiological boundaries immoral. Positing itself as the ultimate good, early Christianity was the Trojan horse that opened the sociobiological boundaries of the Roman Empire from the inside out and from the bottom-up. This disarming and destruction of sociobiological barriers is of the essence of Christianity.
As Paul put it in his letter to the Galatians (3:28), “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus.” Paul’s evangelical mission focused, not on total Jews or total pagans, but those culturally between Jews and pagans. Both Jews and pagans were opposed to Paul, but gentiles attracted to Judaism became fertile missionary ground for early Christianity. Such persons reflected Jesus himself as the living border between Jew and gentile.
In the struggle for existence in a hostile world, it matters little whether one’s method of destruction is a machete or morality. Morality is a form of social control. It disarms seemingly stronger enemies of their own weapons from the inside. Jesus commanded the jihad of love against his enemies because love kills.
Just as the strength of Roman altruism made possible the vanquishing of the Jewish state, the strength of Christian altruism made possible the vanquishing of the declining Roman state. Just as Jesus was born through violation of the sociobiological boundaries of the Jewish state, Christianity was born through violation of the sociobiological boundaries of the Roman state. Just as Roman conquerors penetrated the territorial-sociobiological boundaries of the ancient Jewish state, the Jewish-based God memes of Christianity penetrated the ancient Roman world.
Jesus’s hatred for the family was also hatred of his Roman father for raping his mother and abandoning him to an orphan’s fate. The rape of Mary symbolized the larger Roman rape of the Jewish homeland. The spiritual penis of Jesus would rape Rome back and inseminate Rome with his love seeds just as his hated Roman father had raped his Jewish mother. After contracting the meme-virus equivalent of HIV, Rome would die of the cultural equivalent of AIDS as its sociobiological immune system was weakened beyond the capacity for resistance.
The imperial theology of Roman was a religion of rape. Rape of this kind stems from the logic of selfish genes. The “son of man” was greatest rapist of the sociobiological boundaries built by the selfish genes.
Jesus was the most insane spiritual rapist in history. He raped his own mind into faith that he was the son of God, and not the son of a Roman rape fiend. Yet he overcame the accusation that he a natural born rapist by sublimating his fate and becoming a truly God-like supernatural rapist. Jesus’s God-like spiritual penis raped the social boundaries of the ancient Roman world, inseminated that world with selfish memes that violated its sociobiological boundaries and, in doing so, gave birth to Christianity.

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Ancient Rome Eduardo Velasco Josephus Judea v. Rome Nero St Paul Tacitus

Apocalypse for whites • XXVIII

by Evropa Soberana

 
The case of Nero as an example of historical distortion
The perfect example of Christian victimhood is found in the figure of Nero. Nero has gone down in history as a cruel, tyrannical, perverted, capricious emperor given to excesses, and it is really incredible the amount of trash that Christians poured into his biography, to such an extent that the name of Nero is already synonymous with tyranny, caprice and depravity.
The problem of Nero, we are led to believe, is that he did not tolerate Judaism or Christianity; and that not a few Jews and Christians found their bones in the Colosseum, in the jaws of some lion, under the thunderous applause of the people of Rome by his express mandate.
The reality is that, in the year 64, there is a great fire in Rome that destroys many districts and leaves the city in a state of emergency. Nero welcomes the victims of the fire, opening the doors of his palaces so that the town’s people have a place to stay. In addition, he pays from his own private funds the reconstruction of the city.
What the emperor did do was take action against the Christians. In the words of the famous Roman historian Tacitus (55-120), ‘Nero blamed and inflicted the most cruel tortures on a class hated for its abominations, called Christians by the populace’. He orders to arrest them ‘not so much because of arsonists but because of their hatred of the human race’. Nero, then, does the following with the captured Christians: covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn to pieces by the dogs, or nailed to the crosses, or condemned to the flames.
Another issue is the wife of Nero, Poppaea Sabina. She is an interesting figure as a beautiful woman, ambitious, unscrupulous and immoral, conspiratorial, manipulative and typical of a society too civilized—a real harpy. Having already married twice, and because of her influences as a lover, Poppaea convinces Nero himself to dispatch of his own mother and divorce his own wife—after which she is exiled and forced to cut her veins, her corpse is beheaded and her head presented to Poppaea.
With such free way, Poppaea marries Nero and breaks into high Roman society with excesses in regard to coquetry, extravagances and high-handedness. Precisely at the instigation of her intrigues, the famous Spanish philosopher Seneca is pushed to suicide.
Poppaea openly sympathized with the Jew and the Christian cause, favouring them through palace conspiracies behind the emperor’s back. Nero, already tired of having the conspiracy near him, kills her supposedly with a kick on the stomach.
The year 65 runs. It follows an anti-Jewish repression from Nero, in which future Christian saints fall, such as the Jew Peter, and Paul himself: another Jew who had turned out to be so unruly. Paul is beheaded for being a Roman citizen. Peter, an unregulated immigrant with no Roman citizenship, is crucified. According to the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, crucifying in uncomfortable positions was a common practice among Roman soldiers to have fun in a macabre manner.
Nero, despite having shown himself to be magnanimous and generous to the people, passed into modern history as the Antichrist, a ruthless killer of Christians who murdered his own wife on a whim, and who for fear of conspiracy surrounded himself with a personal guard of praetorians of German origin—the only ones he considered sufficiently loyal.
Nero has also passed to the popular mind as the perpetrator of the arson in Rome while he played the lyre, singing a song before the flames; when in real history Nero was not even in Rome when the fire started.