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CHAPTER XVIII.
The Clergy

The Presbyterian clergy or sorcerers of Scotland, of old times, claimed that they could consign their deluded victims to Heaven or Hell by a word, and could by their magic power strike with death any enemy of God, that is, the clergy. They would not allow anyone to remain in town who failed to go and hear their sermons. Buckle says the clergy kept the people in a worse than Egyptian bondage, inasmuch as they enslaved mind as well as body.

“John Knox sanctioned the murder of the Roman Archbishop Beaton of Scotland in 1548, and shut himself up with the assassins in the palace of the Archbishop. When the Catholic power was destroyed in Scotland by the nobles in 1560 and the church property confiscated by them, the Protestant clergy claimed that it was impious to secularize ecclesiastical property, and that they should be endowed with the spoils of the war, that it was right for the Lords to plunder the Church of Rome, but the loot should be turned over to them. They said that what rightly belonged to them was devoured by idle bellies. The Presbyterian clergy said that King James was a traitor and had seven devils inside of him, and he ought to be seized. And their associate in crime, the Earl of Gourie, entrapped the King into his castle in order to murder him.” – Buckle’s Hist. Civ. 2-201.

The Presbyterian clergy said that cheerfulness was to be guarded against. Smiling, provided it stopped short of laughter, might occasionally be allowed, still being a carnal pastime, it was a sin to smile on Sunday. A Christian has no business with love or sympathy. He has his own soul to attend to, that is enough for him. On Sunday in particular he must never think of benefitting others and thus break the Sabbath. On no occasion must food or shelter be given to a starving man unless he is a Presbyterian.

“In priest-ridden Spain, Charles V, the tool of religion, in his will provided that all heretics should be put to death and that the Inquisition should be upheld. Under his orders, according to Grotius, 100,000 persons were beheaded, buried alive and burnt at the stake in the Netherlands. Phillip II, of Spain, said it was better not to reign at all than to reign over heretics. The Duke of Alva, in this reign, boasted that in five or six years he had put to death in cold blood more than 18,000 heretics, beside a still greater number of infidels he had slain on the battlefield.” – Idem 2-14.

When it was proposed to expel from Spain the remnant of Moors remaining, who had turned Christians and were baptized by force, Bleda, the Dominican, said that every Moor in Spain should have his throat cut, because it was impossible to tell which of them were Christians at heart, but God knew his own and he could sort them out. About one million of the most industrious inhabitants of Spain were hunted out like wild beasts. Many were slain as they approached the coast, others were beaten and plundered, and the majority in the most wretched plight sailed for Africa. During the passage the crew in many of the ships butchered the men, ravished the women and threw the children into the sea. From this time Spain began to degenerate. The tyranny of religion was supreme. While every other country was advancing, Spain, numbed into a death-like torpor, spell-bound and entranced by the accursed superstition, presented to Europe a solitary instance of constant decay.“ – Idem, 2-53.

“The French Revolution freed the world from ecclesiastical tyranny and opened an unobstructed path to Napoleon, who had given the death blow to the Inquisition, the great slaughter house, where they butchered in the name of the Lamb.” – Isis Unveiled, 2-22.

The Brahmins, the clergy of India, were quite as disreputable as the others. The Institutes of Manu provided that if a common person molested a Brahmin, he was to be put to death. If he sat on the same carpet with a Brahmin, he was to be maimed for life. If he listened to the reading of the sacred books, burning oil was to be poured into his ears, and if he committed them to memory, he was to be killed. If he spoke disrespectfully of a Brahmin, an iron stile ten fingers long was to be thrust red-hot into his mouth. To give to the Brahmins or will them your property was an act of the highest piety.

The laws of the clergy in certain provinces of France, ruled by them in old times, provided that every man that died without bequeathing part of his estate to the church, should be deprived of the Sacrament (and would consequently go to Hell). If he died without making a will, his relatives were obliged to prevail upon the Bishop to appoint arbitrators to determine what sum the deceased should have given to the church in case he had made a will. At one time in France, “married couples could not sleep together the first three nights without purchasing leave of the church.” – Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, 665.

“Pope John XII was assassinated in the arms of his mistress. Crecentious, the illegitimate son of John X, caused Benedict VI to be murdered. His faction elected Boniface VII, and a third faction elected John XV, who was put to death by Boniface. We find shortly after 1044 Benedict IX, a boy of twelve, and Rholeme and Sylvester III all reigning at the same time, and all leading the most profligate and scandalous lives.” – Doubts of Infidels, 95. Bishop Hopkins says that “the great body of the clergy before the seventh century were steeped in licentiousness, avarice, simony, cruelty, violence and blood. They consecrated every vice in the interest of so-called religion, they graduated sins by pecuniary amercement, they commissioned assassins, having pardoned them before the commission of the murder.”

The priests or Magi of Persia, as ecclesiastical bandits, were unexcelled. The people had to give up one tenth of their income to these magical fakirs. Every woman in Babylon was obliged to offer her person for sale one day in the year at the temple of Astarte, and the money went to the priests. The pirates of Babylon ransacked the world and bought or stole the most beautiful women on earth for the use of the priests, who made a pretence of offering them up as human sacrifices to Baal. The god held in his hand the appropriate symbol of the traffic, the circle and the pillar, that may still be seen in nearly all churches. The beautiful sacrifice was placed on the lap of the god in the presence of the audience, to be devoured by the lions that surrounded the god. But after the meeting the priests drove the lions out and stole the sacrifice, as priests always did steal the offerings from god.

The Egyptian priests were the rulers of the whole, and owned one third the land of Egypt. Besides the princely revenue from this immense landed estate, they received, in addition to their salaries, all the offerings and sacrifices that the fools gave up as an atonement for sin. A very large part of their income was derived from the Bethel or Brothel maintained around the temple of the goddess Hathor, the cow, the wife of the god Ammon, which is another name for the Ram god or the lamb of god. Every woman in Egypt was obliged to sell herself for one month at this temple. And then, besides, there were the regular sacred ladies who lived constantly in the temple. The priests chose the most beautiful, then the remainder were turned over to the mob of pious dupes and devotees. The young lady who earned the most money for the priests was, in the after life, assigned by Osiris, alias Yahvah, to a seat beside the Golden Throne. This rotten pagan church subsequently changed its name to Christian.

Calvin, the blood-drenched, the fiend incarnate, one of the founders of the Protestant Churches, compelled his lady parishioners to confess on the rack their indiscretions, and then threw them naked into the lake and drowned them. He hanged a child for cursing its parents, burned old women as witches, and burned alive Michael Servetus for contradicting Moses in asserting that Palestine was a desert that did not flow with milk and honey. Calvin died in convulsions of fear, raving and cursing because he thought he was going to Hell.

Oliver Cromwell, the pious Puritan, the murder demon, the regicide, the usurper, with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other, rode at the head of his army of religious fanatics singing psalms. This sanctified Christian, upon the capture of Drogheda, Ireland, himself reported to Parliament that he massacred two thousand of the garrison. He fired St. Peter’s Church, to which the people had fled, and put a thousand of them to the sword. All the friars were killed but two. And the likes of him settled Boston and robbed and murdered the Indians. One of these Puritan buccaneers, named Will Bartlett, in Boston, in 1637, was sentenced to be set in the stocks, with his tongue in a cleft stick, because he got drunk and cussed and swore and refused to go to church on Sunday.

In those blithesome days a citizen could not vote unless he belonged to the Congregational Church and kissed the big toe of Cotton Mather, the superstitious bigot, the Prosecutor of the New England Protestant Inquisition. Ridpath says that Mather was chiefly responsible for the horrors and crimes of the Salem Witchcraft, and that this massacre, torture and imprisonment of 263 innocent persons was started by a Salem minister for the purpose of revenging himself upon those of his flock who antagonized him. – Ridpath’s Hist. of U. S. 131. The Quakers were perhaps the only decent body of Christians up to that time, and for that reason the Puritan pirates and slave-dealers hung four of them, one woman and three men, on Boston Common.

“Infuse a few different kinds of religious poison into a community of human beings, and they hate each other like tigers. Religious creeds have a worse effect on a man than booze. You can work the booze out of your system and quit the stuff, but when a victim is loaded up on some rotten brand of orthodoxy, it is hard to do anything with him. A Protestant will damn the Catholics, and a Catholic will yell ‘To Hell with the Protestants,’ and both will hate the Jews.” – Roman Religion, 27.

The churches have soaked the earth with the blood of their countless victims. Frederick, the Emperor of Germany, sentenced heretics of all descriptions alive to the flames. Sixty thousand heretics were slaughtered in the city of Beziers. Seventy thousand Huguenots were put to death in France. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew began at midnight, Aug. 23, 1572, and the carnival of death lasted seven days. Medals commemorating the holy event were distributed among the loyal butchers. – Roman Religion, 35.

“When the Crusaders took Jerusalem from the Moslems in 969 A. D., they massacred all the Mussulmans and burned the Jews alive. Seventy thousand persons were put to death in a week to attest the superior morality of the Christians.” – Boston Sun. American.

Dr. Fernald says that Sultan Bejazet wrote to Pope Alexander VI that he would give him 300,000 ducats, several cities and the shirt of Jesus Christ if His Holiness would kill Zimzim, the brother of the Sultan, “and you Most Illustrious Lord will not commit a crime, since by your religion Christians are ordered to exterminate heretics and infidels.” The Ency. Brit. says that “the unfortunate prince was murdered by Alexander, who received 300,000 ducats as the reward of the crime.” Zimzim was held captive by certain bandits in Rhodes, a Commandery of the Knights of St. John, a Christian organization under the domination of Alexander. Alexander was a Borgia, whose children were all illegitimate.

CHAPTER XIX.
The Bible

As the Old Testament was originally written without vowels, the Lord only knows what it meant. The best the copyists could do was to make a good guess at the meaning, or supply whatever vowels suited their purposes. – See Ency. Brit. 3-64.

Moses was a magician, a thief and a murderer according to the Bible, a fakir who foisted upon the Hebrews a magnificent system of priestly plunder. In pursuance of Moses pretence that the world was created in six days, and that their god El or Bel or Baal rested on the seventh, he commanded the people to refrain from labor on that day and go to church, so that he would have frequent opportunities to pick their pockets. The story of Moses’ birth and secretion in an ark of bulrushes was taken from the Babylonians, where it was applied to King Sargon, according to tablets excavated at Babylon.

The great, learned and profound Irenaeus says that there must be four gospels because there are four winds of heaven. This is a fair sample of the logic of theologians. The fact is, there are four gospels because those four jumped from the floor onto the table at the council of Nice. There was at that time so much doubt as to what alleged sacred writings were inspired by God, that the delegates put them all together under the communion table one night at the close of the session, and agreed that those that got up on top of the table during the night should be considered as inspired, and those that were too weak to get up on the table should be stamped as the work of the Devil.

“Many of the bishops in these councils were ruffians and were followed by crowds of vicious supporters, who stood ready on the slightest excuse to maim and kill their opponents.” – Keeler’s Hist. of the Bible. Tichenor says that “they decided all holy questions by a vote or a knock-down fight. It is doubtful if any of them drew a sober breath during the entire proceedings.” Millman says that “they fought in the streets and much blood was shed.” – Millman’s Hist. Christianity. “What these drunken, fighting, ignorant, pagan priests declared to be received from God, that is what is taught as Divine to-day. To this day they cram their abominable lies of devils and damnation into the brains of little children. The miserable, crazy creeds of Christendom were concocted by these brawling pagan priests, and their poison still pollutes the souls of men. Fire all the gods of all the creeds into the melting pot, and out comes the brazen face of Mammon.” – Tichenor.

Another reason why there are four gospels, according to Irenaeus, was because the Cherubim had four faces. But he thus calls attention to the fact that Christianity was spawned in the sties of paganism, as the Jews took the four beasts of the Cherubim, the bull, the lion, the eagle and the man, from the idolatrous Babylonians. And the four Evangelists adopted the four beasts as their totems and placed their beastly images on the four gospels. The Maya Indians and the Mexicans worshipped the same four idols of the four quarters of the heavens. – Ency. Brit. 12-823. The priests of the Ojibways wear the horns of the bull and sacrifice to the dragon or great serpent (Mary) that wears on its head the crescent moon. They also worship the eagle and the Tree of Life. The Ojibway picture writing shows that the Indian Adam and Eve had the same disgraceful scandal in the garden of Eden. See “Indians,” Ency. Americana.

It is claimed that Apollonius of Tyana (alleged to be the original of Paul and Christ) came through a medium and said: “Nine epistles were made a present to me by Pharaotes, a Satrap of Taxila, between Babylon and India. These epistles contained all that is embraced in the present epistles claimed to have been written by Paul. Further, I retired to the Isle of Patmos in 69 and 70 A. D. and wrote in a trance state an almost identical story with that attributed to St. John. The Christian Gospels were all preached by me at Jerusalem, Ephesus, Philippi, Rome, Antioch, Alexandria and Babylon, and in all those countries I healed the sick, cured the blind and raised the dead. The original of the four gospels I obtained at Singapore. They treated of the four stages of the life of Buddha.” – Antiquity Unveiled, 21.

Moses and God were mad at the Midianites because the Jews had entered into the tents of the Midianite ladies and worshipped Baal Poer, from which ensued a plague among the Congregation of the Lord. Num. 31-18. And they warred against the Midianites, as the Lord commanded, and slew all the males and took all the women and children captive. Moses was wroth because they had saved all the women and children, and ordered all the males among the children to be killed and all the females to be turned over to the soldiers for outrage. And he ordered all the women murdered except the virgins, of whom 16,000 went to the soldiers and 16,000 to the people, but the soldiers and the people were compelled to pay of these into the storehouse of the Lord 3200 in tithes. “And the priests laid with the virgins at the door of the Tabernacle.” Such a monstrosity of iniquity, such a fiend incarnate from the shades of Hell is the senior member of the firm of Moses and the Lamb.

The history of Moses is copied from the history of Bacchus, who was called Mises by the Egyptians. Like Moses, Bacchus was born in Egypt, he sojourned on Mt. Sinai, he passed through the Red Sea on dry land, he was a lawgiver and wrote the laws on two tables, he was found in a box that floated on the water, he smote a rock and wine gushed forth, and Bacchus was worshipped and these deeds of his sung in Egypt, Phenicia, Syria, Arabia and Greece before Abraham’s day. – Doubts of Infidels, 31.

The account of creation as given in the Bible has been found on tablets in the ruins of Nineveh, written in a language that was dead and buried before the Jews ever existed. In this Persian cosmogony the name of the first man was Adomah, and of the woman Hevah.

The Greeks said miracles for fools. Paul boasts of lying for the glory of God and catching converts with guile. Chrysostom said: “Great is the force of deceit.” St. Hermas, an Apostolic Father, said that he always lived in dissimulation and affirmed a lie for truth to all men. – Doubts of Infidels, 78.

You will see that the Bible is dedicated to King James, and that he is canonized in the dedication, probably because he kept fifty mistresses and was in the habit of becoming beastly intoxicated without provocation.

The only real revelations received by the priests and prophets of any religion were spirit messages, and the Lord only knows whether these were from God or the Devil, from good or bad spirits. In fact it is claimed by some spiritualists that all the good spirits are in Heaven with God and can’t get out. In other words, they are in limbo, while those that were not so good are at liberty to visit the loved spots and fond friends of earth and indulge on the astral in their favorite pastimes, whether it be a prayer meeting or a poker game. This is purgatory, the next story above Hell, which is the earth.

Gibbon said that Eusebius was a consummate liar. The Gospel of Matthew and the Epistle to the Hebrews were his work, taken from the lives of Christna and Apollonius and the records of the Essenes and some of the Jewish and Phenician legends.

A Coptic version of the life of Apollonius in the possession of the monks of Seville, Spain, about 1458, was placed in the hands of Juan Hermonez for translation. In the margin was a Latin translation, in which the name of Apollonius had been changed to John among many other falsifications. The Latin translation was almost identical with the Gospel of St. John. When Hermonez called the attention of the Superior to these changes, he was seized and thrown into a dungeon, in which he was allowed to starve and rot.

The Bible has been too much neglected, due, no doubt, to the general impression that, being religious, it must be dry. Far from it. For instance: Elohim, the gods, made the light and days and nights four days before they made the sun. They made a firmament, probably of metal, to divide the ocean above from the ocean below, and had windows in it, so that they could open them and drown the inhabitants of the earth whenever they got drunk and needed a little diversion. And they stuck the sun, moon and stars in the metal firmament, which revolved around the earth.

When the serpent was not working, he was coiled around the Tree of Life telling Eve in snake language what luscious fruit the tree bore. For this interference with the plans of the gods, they made the serpent crawl on his belly. He had been crawling on his back.

Moses and his first assistant fakir, Aaron, destroyed all the horses and cattle in Egypt by a murrain, and then, as Pharaoh still had a stiff neck, they destroyed them all again by hail. Then, as Pharaoh still had trouble with his neck, they killed all the first-born of Egypt, both men and cattle. Then the Israelites fled, and Pharaoh hitched up his horses, that had been killed three times, to his six hundred chariots and pursued the chosen of God, who had pinched all the jewelry of the Egyptians. The Bible is full of these delightful stories from beginning to end. If you have conscientious scruples against reading the Bible, you will find them attractively set forth in Le Brun’s Doubts of Infidels.