A blunt, shit-stained instrument wielded indiscriminately to bludgeon pseudoscience, superstition, blind faith and common or garden irrational bollocks.
I laughed at the Pope and the words of the brain, I laughed at the drawings which make it quite plain That Catholic dogma's a real force for ill, And shows why we need the Equality Bill.
So thanks for the pictures and thanks for the words, And thanks for exposing what's clearly absurd. Keep up the good work in the fight against Woo, And skeptics worldwide will unite behind you.
The Pope is the only religious leader who is also a head of state. His visit is allegedly a state visit, which means the UK tax payer foots the bill whereas he's really coming to canonize Cardinal Newman (who was gay - shh!) and to conduct some masses.
The National Secular Society is handing its petition in to Number 10 tomorrow protesting against the public funding of this essentially pastoral visit. Well over 28,000 signed the peition - and that's not counting all those who signed as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Hitler, God, Jesus and Satan.
The man who founded it - you will not believe it - was the Emperor Constantine. The church knows it, but does not allow the public to know it.
Emperor Constantine of Rome, who headed the Council of Nicea, died as a Christian, but he was baptized only on his deathbed. His whole life he was the high priest of the Sun God religion, which was why he changed the sabbath from Saturday, which was Jesus' sabbath day, to Sunday. Jews still have their sabbath on Saturday, and Jesus also had lived his whole life believing in the sabbath on Saturday. How did it become Sunday?
It was Constantine, who was a worshipper of the Sun God. Sunday represents the sun; the followers of the sun have always believed that Sunday is a holy day.
It was Constantine who was actually the founder of Christianity. He was the decisive factor in the Council of Nicea. It was under his pressure - because he was the emperor of Rome - that the priests voted for the divine personality of Jesus. He made Jesus a divine person. It was his creation, his invention.
He also changed Jesus' birthday from January sixth to December twenty-fifth, the day of the solar rebirth. The twenty-fifth of December, which is celebrated all over the world, is not Jesus' birthday. The whole idea of Christmas is bogus.
Jesus was born on January sixth, but under Constantine's influence and power, it was changed to December twenty-fifth, the day of the solar rebirth. It is thought by the sun worshippers that the sun was born on the twenty-fifth of December. The whole of Christianity is living in utter darkness. Their Christmas is bogus - and the church knows it perfectly well but won't allow people to know about it.
Constantine imposed himself as the real last prophet for whom the Jews had been waiting. Of course, the Jews could not crucify the emperor of Rome. And the Christians wanted some royal support; otherwise they were being crucified everywhere. They found a shelter in Constantine, but it was a bargain, purely business. They accepted that Jesus was a failed messiah, and that Constantine was the real messiah.
But this is not told to the public! Christians are not aware of it. All these scriptures are hidden under the Vatican.
Constantine, killed ten thousand people in a single day. He just called an assembly of all those who were not Catholics in a great auditorium in Rome, and ordered the army to kill everybody: "We don't want anybody other than Christians in Rome." He forced the whole of Italy to become Christian... just at the point of a sword.
The whole history of Christianity is of wars and nothing else - killing and violence.
Christianity has nothing worthwhile that can be supported by intelligence.
If your eyes open, it becomes impossible for you to remain confined to superstitions, lies of all kinds, and to go on believing in fictions when your intelligence raises doubts.
Christianity is dying so fast that every effort is being made to somehow keep it alive.
No effort is going to succeed, for the simple reason that the whole Christian attitude, the religion and its philosophy, are so out of date that it is impossible to convince intelligent people to have faith in them any more.
Christianity is no longer relevant, something new, something basically discontinuous with the past is needed...
Osho's comment about the role of Constantine ignores the rich history of pre-Nicaean Christianity. The Emperor did not invent the religion. And the council dealt with the date of EASTER, not Christmas. The earliest references to the date of Christmas date from sume quarter of a century later, and as far as is known, January 6 was celebrated a the date of Christ's BAPTISM, not his birth, although when infant baptisms became common the two were often confused.
Other than the date of Easter, the primary business of the council was the establishment of a statement of faith (the Nicene Creed, still used today in a slightly modified form) which settled pressing questions like the question of consubstantionality (whether Jesus was "of the same substance" as the Father, of was merely a "son of God" in the sense that other Biblical leaders had been).
The truth is, Constantine needed the Christian Church as much as they needed him. He needed a religious bulwark that relied on a central authority in Rome, and thus echoed the primacy of the Emperor. He found it in Christianity, so the relationship was symbiotic.
I admire your defense of your religious beliefs, although I think you missed the point on some of the "persecutions" that your blog talked about. They were mostly based on other more general rules, e.g., a BA regulation against wearing ANY non-standard jewelry or decoration other than that defined by the company. This has a legitimate business purpose, and applies across the board, not just the Christians.
I do NOT admire the tendency of some Christians to be intolerant of any beliefs OTHER than their own.
Who will be the pope when there is no God? What will be his position?
God is the central focus of the whole fiction.
Remove that central idea and the whole palace made of playing cards simply falls on the ground.
They are standing on fictitious ground.
They are keeping people in every way retarded just so that they can exploit them.
And twenty centuries of these popes prove that whatever they have been doing is against Christ
Religions teach faith because they cannot help you to find the truth.
They themselves don't know where truth is.
They have been talking about truth, but they have been hiding immensely important things.
They have changed all the gospels, they have edited everything that was going to be difficult for them to argue for, to defend.
The whole of Christianity lives in a paranoia that if anybody finds some truth, then what is going to happen to their lies that they go on propagating?
The Vatican has an underground library of thousands of scriptures which they have burned, saving only one copy.
Nobody is allowed to enter, except the pope and the cardinals, to see all the evidence, all the proofs which go against Christianity.
The public is not allowed to know what the truth is.
It should open the underground library in the Vatican to all the scholars who want to study there, and Christianity will evaporate without leaving a single trace on the human consciousness.
It has almost half of humanity converted to Christianity.
It is ninety-nine percent myth, invented, propagated, but it has a great propaganda machine, and it has a militant church.
It is said, "Fight the good fight! Onward Christian soldiers!" Is it a religion or an army?
But it has been killing millions of people - and Christians call them religious wars, holy wars, crusades.
Does God require that millions of people should be killed?
Does this statement come from God or from Jesus Christ, who talks continuously of love?
Can you think that if you had been left alone by your parents and the society, without any imposition to be a Catholic, you would have been a Catholic?
Don't expect gods to disappear any time soon. They've been around as long as we have, and probably always will be. Some (most?) people seem to need them.
One correction. The Vatican Library is open to qualified religious scholars for defined purposes, not just to cardinals. At a party a number of years ago I personally met an ordinary Dominican (order) priest who was an Assistant Professor at Loyola University in Chicago, and he had just returned from his third extended research trip to the Vatican Library. (Oh, the people hosting the party were an ethnically Jewish but pretty much non-religious couple ... it was NOT a religious event.)
Unfortunately, use of much of their collection requires special training in the very specialized ecclesiastical usages of both Latin and Greek not offered by even most university graduate departments in those fields. There are very few scholars QUALIFIED to approach that collection in a meaningful way ... they just don't understand the nuances of the language.
Some contemporary Christian thinkers (Bishop Spong comes prominently to mind) are attempting to reconcile Christianity and its past with contemporary reason and common sense. They're doing a reasonably good job at an admittedly difficult task.
The Catholic religion is such a poor religion; it has no arguments.
All the basic foundations of the religion are so poor, indefensible.
The virgin birth of Jesus Christ... there is no way to prove it; it is so unscientific. The concept of God as a trinity: God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost... and this "holy ghost" made the poor girl Mary, Jesus' mother, pregnant - without any license - and still he is holy? Then what is unholy? And in this trinity there is no place for any woman?
The pope pretends to be infallible. He has to pretend it, because the logic is that he represents Jesus Christ: if he is fallible then Jesus Christ is fallible. Jesus Christ represents God: if he is fallible then God is fallible. To make God infallible you have to make Popes infallible, for the sheer sake of logic - it has no existential truth in it.
Christianity is a fiction.
Jesus had never even heard the name Christianity. It has been imposed on him, he was not the founder of Christianity.
You can find Buddhism in the teachings of Gautam Buddha; he was the founder. You can find in the teachings of Mahavira that he was the founder of Jainism. You can find in the teachings of Lao Tzu that he was the founder of Taoism. But it is a very strange thing about Christianity: the founder had no idea at all, was not interested in creating a new religion, he was simply telling the Jews, "I am your last prophet."
Christianity is one of the most fake religions of all.
Jesus has nothing to do with it.
His life was written eighty years after his death, by people who had not directly known him.
Now even Christian scholars have come to the conclusion that the Christian gospels were not written by the apostles but were written by somebody else, because the mountains described are not in the same place where they are described in the gospels. The rivers described are not in the same place where they are described in the gospels.
Everything was written by people who had not known Jesus Christ, and neither had they lived with Jesus Christ.
I say unto you that Christianity is one of the most untruthful religions in the world.
It is a disease, a sickness, a pathology, a poison.
It has not been helpful to humanity in finding the truth in any sense.
It has been trying to propagate lies so continuously that they have almost become truth.
They have been exploiting for centuries.
Christianity has nothing worthwhile that can be supported by intelligence.
Deep down it is more interested in gathering numbers.
Numbers have their own politics.
The greater the number of followers you have, the greater the power to dominate.
Christianity's death, is very significant.
It will be a tremendous freedom.
I don't see any possibility that Christianity can offer anything.
It is doomed to die.
The sooner it dies, the better - because it will free millions of people to think on their own, to search on their own.
It will create a great revolution, the death of Christianity, because it is the biggest religion in the world, and it will not only be the death of Christianity, it will be the beginning of the death of other religions too.
When the big brother dies, the others are going to follow...
We are now facing a time that no scripture has had any idea of.
For the first time, humanity can be one, no divisions.
What divides all the religions? Just small details, meaningless details, about their idea of God.
But if there is no God, all those differences disappear.
Races have been claiming they are the chosen people of God.
Every religion is claiming that their book is written by God himself.
All these things, layer upon layer, make your mind; and unless you are able to put the whole mind aside and see the world directly, immediately, with your consciousness, you will never be able to see the truth.
There are many religions on this planet that have NO "divinely inspired" scriptures, and do not consider themselves to be the source of all truth ... in fact, that consider that (as well as the practice of seeking "converts" to a religion) as simply ill-mannered.
These people still have a firm belief (based on their interpretation of reality, NOT YOURS!!!!!) in divinity, but do not claim to have exclusive access to such a being.
Frankly, your strident ramblings against theism have no more basis in PROVABLE fact than do the two thousand year old tradition (backed by a billion followers) of His Holiness the Twat. Or of any Houngan in the service of Papa Legba.
Faith is always outside you, and TRUTH is within you.
The true religion has no name, it cannot have any name.
Buddha lived it, Jesus lived it – but remember, Jesus was not a Christian and Buddha was not a Buddhist, he had never heard of the word.
You were thinking that RELIGIOUSNESS is something extraordinary, very special, is attained by very special people.
It was not your thinking; this has been told to you for centuries.
This is the way the whole of humanity has been deceived for thousands of years: Religiousness is something so extraordinary, it happens only to special people, prophets,messiahs, saviors, incarnations of God.
It is not for the ordinary and the common people.
And you have accepted that conditioning.
You have been befooled for centuries.
Naturally, humanity has remained in darkness.
The only true religion there is, is the art of changing the unconscious mind into CONSCIOUSNESS, so that you don't have the duality of unconscious and conscious but you have only one, your very being.
At last, I think we agree on something. But I don't think it is all that EASY a thing to do ... achieve this transformation of unconscious into conscious. If it were, the Twat and his predecessors going back for 10,000 years or more would not have been able to achieve the success they have.
It is far easier to be GIVEN "the answers" and accept them on "FAITH" than it is to arrive at the TRUTH on your own.
It cannot be confined in words; the language is wordless.
You can see it only when you have seen it within yourself; otherwise you don't know the language.
Consciousness is always of the present.
It is your innermost core. It opens up only in deep meditation…
You have your guide within you…
In the real journey of life, your own intuition is your only teacher.
Have you looked at the word ‘intuition’? It is the same as ‘tuition’.
Tuition is given by teachers, from outside; intuition is given by your own nature, from inside.
Intuition cannot be translated into intellect.
A bridge between the intellect and intuition will give you a tremendous clarity, understanding, a new kind of intelligence of which you are absolutely unaware, and the more intuition takes possession of you, the more intellect has to function as a servant.
This is real richness. This is real power.
The creative people, whether painters, musicians, poets or dancers, reach to a place once in a while that can be called “a glimpse of enlightenment” but it is only a glimpse.
It is not a realization.
They have not prepared themselves for it.
It has come accidentally.
The painter was absorbed in painting.
He was so absorbed in painting that he forgot himself, forgot the ego, forgot his thoughts, and without knowing it he was in a state of meditation, and accidentally a door opened and he saw the beauty of the beyond.
Soon he will be back, when the painting is complete, he will be back in the desert of daily life.
Now a great problem has arisen for him, that there is something far more beautiful than any painting, far more musical than any music, far more poetic than any poetry.
There is a dance beyond dance, but how to reach there?
He does not even know the ABC of meditation; he may never have heard the word.
He was doing something else.
It was just because he got lost in his work, in dance, in music, in singing, he fulfilled the condition for a glimpse.
Meditation is the name of the deepest relaxation.
With meditation you will be opening up higher doors of your consciousness, your superconscious.
Meditation leads you to your own reality.
No spiritual thinker, philosopher, has tried to think of a parallel for spiritual growth.
Physics has given the words `quantum leap’.
So when a few people around the earth get the quantum leap, then thousands more will become part of a world-wide fire.
Suddenly people who have not even tried meditation, who are not even seekers, who have never thought about anything spiritual, catch the infection, it is contagious.
We are coming close to a tremendous transformation, and we are going to see it in our own lives, something so rare and unique which has never happened before, and will never happen again...
I found this on Friday from the link on the NSS newsletter. Just want to say thank you so much Crispian for making my weekend. I was crying with laughter. I absolutel love it.
The idea that there isn't a God is actually a less pleasant alternative to me. Do I have your permission to continue believing in Christianity, or have I fallen asleep and has Atheism become a requirement for being intelligent? If so, I wonder what you think of Nicholas Copernicus, Sir Francis Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, Mendel, etc. Also, remember to tell Einstein he's a retard for believing in an infinite Universe.
This debate is as stupid as arguing over which is better: the beach or the countryside. Being religious does not imply being an idiot. Being a politician on the other hand, it depends. Being an atheist does not imply one has reason, either. I am willing to bet most teens who abandon faith do it just to rebel at first.
My point is: do what you want, but insulting each other is always a sign of immaturity and nothing else.
"The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am unable to take seriously.
I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.
The most beautiful and most profound religious emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. And this mysticality is the power of all true science..."
Albert Einstein
Modern physics, in the hands of Albert Einstein, has turned almost into mysticism.
Nobody has noted the fact, because mystics don't understand modern physics and the physicists do not care about the mystics.
The mystics have always experienced that they are one, but nobody has listened to them.
Perhaps man was not mature enough to understand the depth of their declaration.
Christians go on believing in Jesus Christ because he walked on water, he fed thousands of people out of two loaves of bread, he healed thousands of people just by touch, he raised a dead man back to life.
Just think, if anybody does all these things, will his contemporaries not be impressed by him? Will his contemporaries completely ignore him? Not a Jewish scripture even mentions his name!
There is no contemporary literature relating about Jesus and his miracles - and these miracles are not ordinary miracles. And somebody who has done all these things, do you think he deserves to be crucified? He would have been raised up as the greatest god!
And those were the days in Judea when scholarship was at the highest peak. It had great rabbis. None of them even bothers to meet him, even bothers to listen to him. And he is doing all these miracles which none of their prophets have ever done before.
Only one thing is possible, that all these miracles are invented, they have not happened. These are just Christian inventions about which Jews were not aware at all; otherwise, contemporary sources would have related them somewhere or other, in some way or other.
And the man who did such unnatural things would have dominated the whole scene.
The Christians may have a formal belief in Christ, in the bible, but it is a Sunday religion, a kind of sociality.
There exists no evidence for any God, and no theologian in the whole of history has been able to give a single proof for the existence of God.
The truth is that God himself is a creation of man's imagination.
There are millions who say, "We believe in the existence of God." But your belief cannot create a God - if he does not exist your belief makes no difference.
God as a fiction is good for kindergarten school children. They need it – parables, fables, stories.
But very few human beings have gone beyond the kindergarten school.
God is the greatest lie you can ever find, because on that lie thousands of other lies depend. Churches, religious organizations go on multiplying lies upon lies, just to protect one lie.
God is simply the poverty of human consciousness.
God exists because you are not aware of yourself.
The moment you know yourself, there is no God and there is no need of any God.
God is a consolation for sick minds,sick psychologies.
If God created the world, and if he is behind nuclear weapons and the people who are creating them, then no effort on man's part can prevent the destruction of the whole planet.
To give the creation of the world into the hands of a fictitious God is very dangerous.
It makes us absolutely impotent. We cannot do anything.
For an attempt to meld the concepts of the most recent of physics advances with one religious belief system (pagan magic), read Bill Keith's "The Science of the Craft". Although lacking scientific rigor, Keith shows how certain concepts from quantum physics (e.g., quantum entanglement) show a remarkable similarity to the laws of magic (as set for by, say, Isaac Bonewitz ... in this case, the law of contagion). There are numerous other examples in Keith's very readable book.
Michelle B, I rather suspect that Viral Architect may not have been sounding off so much at the cartoon, but more about the tenor of the comments? Regardless of faith or non-faith stance, sometimes basic decent manners keep a conversation from descending into incoherent drivel. 'You're stupid, cos you're a Christian!' 'You're stupider cos you're not!' hardly rivets the intellect, eh? God, I now sound like my great aunty Nellie...
I have a mature and sensible 11-year old son who'll read that and laugh along and UNDERSTAND it, with me tomorrow. Thanks in advance for this...
I stumbled across your fine blog quite by accident, got lost for an enjoyable hour in here, and will be reading and recommending it to several critical-thinking pals forthwith.
I was simply impressed that you "found" and posted this cartoon...until I realized that you authored it! Again, Bravo.
In short: enjoying the reads, rants and reason. Keep it up. Cheers~ s
/today, my kid asks for (and will get) a FSM-fish badge for his locker. How friggin' cool is that?!
Well that was certainly offensive to Catholics. Heck, I'm not even Christian and I find it offensive that you're so intolerant of other views. Couldn't you at least let people believe what they want to without making fun of them for it? I mean seriously, have a heart man.
Excellent work, you've excelled yourself. Now get to work on "How Tim Minch stole Christmas".
ReplyDeleteYou are so going to hell. But it's brilliant. Can we make this into an insert for all those Gideon Bibles?
ReplyDeleteI laughed so much my halo fell off!
ReplyDeleteAwesomeness sir.
ReplyDeleteBrilliant.
Utterly delightful as always. Bravo sir!
ReplyDeleteOK, I'm forgiving you, but I'm not forgetting.
ReplyDeleteYou're not the only one who writes books and mine is, well, it's just better, right?
P.S. I know where you live.
ReplyDeleteYou sir are a genius.Please get this published and distributed to every school in the land.
ReplyDeleteUtterly utterly brilliant. Well done!
ReplyDeleteI hope you are going to balance this out by insulting other faiths, their followers and leaders.
ReplyDelete@Benjamin Glass
ReplyDeleteNo other religious "world leaders" that preach as much hate and as many lies as him are coming to the UK for a state visit, so there's no need.
lol at Benjamin Glass
ReplyDeleteMaybe we should get some other oversensitive idiots on here, to balance out the idiocy emanating from your comment.
this is beyond superb! i'm buzzing and facebooking it right now, kudos!
ReplyDeleteI laughed at the Pope and the words of the brain,
ReplyDeleteI laughed at the drawings which make it quite plain
That Catholic dogma's a real force for ill,
And shows why we need the Equality Bill.
So thanks for the pictures and thanks for the words,
And thanks for exposing what's clearly absurd.
Keep up the good work in the fight against Woo,
And skeptics worldwide will unite behind you.
ftp!
ReplyDeleteSimply brilliant.
ReplyDeleteExtremely witty, and well versed! Are you a python in disguise?
ReplyDeleteThe Pope is the only religious leader who is also a head of state. His visit is allegedly a state visit, which means the UK tax payer foots the bill whereas he's really coming to canonize Cardinal Newman (who was gay - shh!) and to conduct some masses.
ReplyDeleteThe National Secular Society is handing its petition in to Number 10 tomorrow protesting against the public funding of this essentially pastoral visit. Well over 28,000 signed the peition - and that's not counting all those who signed as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Hitler, God, Jesus and Satan.
I don't sign petitions.
ReplyDeleteGenius!
ReplyDeleteYou are my hero!
Thank you.
ReplyDeleteCan I join you in hell. It will be lovely.
Facile and amateurish, but don't let that stop you trying. Or you could heed your wife's sound advice.
ReplyDeleteThe analogy between "His Holiness" and "The Cat" isn't complete though is it?
ReplyDeleteAt least the cat came back and tidied up all the mess he'd got the kids into!
Brilliant!
ReplyDeleteI am going to have this printed on card-stock and bound.
I'll let you know how it turns out.
Quite fantastic. Well done!
ReplyDeleteHA HA brilliant!
ReplyDeleteEnjoyed your work ;-)
ReplyDeleteWho founded Christianity?
The man who founded it - you will not believe it - was the Emperor
Constantine. The church knows it, but does not allow the public to
know it.
Emperor Constantine of Rome, who headed the Council of Nicea, died as a Christian, but he was baptized only on his deathbed. His whole life he was the high priest of the Sun God religion, which was why he changed the sabbath from Saturday, which was Jesus' sabbath day, to Sunday. Jews still have their sabbath on Saturday, and Jesus also had lived his whole life believing in the sabbath on Saturday. How did it
become Sunday?
It was Constantine, who was a worshipper of the Sun God. Sunday
represents the sun; the followers of the sun have always believed that Sunday is a holy day.
It was Constantine who was actually the founder of Christianity. He was the decisive factor in the Council of Nicea. It was under his pressure - because he was the emperor of Rome - that the priests voted for the divine personality of Jesus. He made Jesus a divine person. It
was his creation, his invention.
He also changed Jesus' birthday from January sixth to December
twenty-fifth, the day of the solar rebirth. The twenty-fifth of
December, which is celebrated all over the world, is not Jesus'
birthday. The whole idea of Christmas is bogus.
Jesus was born on January sixth, but under Constantine's influence and power, it was changed to December twenty-fifth, the day of the solar rebirth. It is thought by the sun worshippers that the sun was born on the twenty-fifth of December. The whole of Christianity is living in utter darkness. Their Christmas is bogus - and the church knows it perfectly well but won't allow people to know about it.
Constantine imposed himself as the real last prophet for whom the Jews
had been waiting. Of course, the Jews could not crucify the emperor of Rome. And the Christians wanted some royal support; otherwise they
were being crucified everywhere. They found a shelter in Constantine, but it was a bargain, purely business. They accepted that Jesus was a failed messiah, and that Constantine was the real messiah.
But this is not told to the public! Christians are not aware of it.
All these scriptures are hidden under the Vatican.
Constantine, killed ten thousand people in a single day. He just
called an assembly of all those who were not Catholics in a great
auditorium in Rome, and ordered the army to kill everybody: "We don't want anybody other than Christians in Rome." He forced the whole of Italy to become Christian... just at the point of a sword.
The whole history of Christianity is of wars and nothing else -
killing and violence.
Christianity has nothing worthwhile that can be supported by intelligence.
If your eyes open, it becomes impossible for you to remain confined to superstitions, lies of all kinds, and to go on believing in fictions when your intelligence raises doubts.
Christianity is dying so fast that every effort is being made to
somehow keep it alive.
No effort is going to succeed, for the simple reason that the whole
Christian attitude, the religion and its philosophy, are so out of
date that it is impossible to convince intelligent people to have
faith in them any more.
Christianity is no longer relevant, something new, something basically discontinuous with the past is needed...
Osho
Osho's comment about the role of Constantine ignores the rich history of pre-Nicaean Christianity. The Emperor did not invent the religion. And the council dealt with the date of EASTER, not Christmas. The earliest references to the date of Christmas date from sume quarter of a century later, and as far as is known, January 6 was celebrated a the date of Christ's BAPTISM, not his birth, although when infant baptisms became common the two were often confused.
ReplyDeleteOther than the date of Easter, the primary business of the council was the establishment of a statement of faith (the Nicene Creed, still used today in a slightly modified form) which settled pressing questions like the question of consubstantionality (whether Jesus was "of the same substance" as the Father, of was merely a "son of God" in the sense that other Biblical leaders had been).
The truth is, Constantine needed the Christian Church as much as they needed him. He needed a religious bulwark that relied on a central authority in Rome, and thus echoed the primacy of the Emperor. He found it in Christianity, so the relationship was symbiotic.
Not so big a change after all.
read my blog:
ReplyDeletewww.bobhutton1.blogspot.com
Bob,
ReplyDeleteDo you have a hat, too, or are the hats optional?
I admire your defense of your religious beliefs, although I think you missed the point on some of the "persecutions" that your blog talked about. They were mostly based on other more general rules, e.g., a BA regulation against wearing ANY non-standard jewelry or decoration other than that defined by the company. This has a legitimate business purpose, and applies across the board, not just the Christians.
I do NOT admire the tendency of some Christians to be intolerant of any beliefs OTHER than their own.
Bravo. However, could you revise it for typos? I caught one on slide 35.
ReplyDeleteWho will be the pope when there is no God? What will be his position?
ReplyDeleteGod is the central focus of the whole fiction.
Remove that central idea and the whole palace made of playing cards
simply falls on the ground.
They are standing on fictitious ground.
They are keeping people in every way retarded just so that they can
exploit them.
And twenty centuries of these popes prove that whatever they have been doing is against Christ
Religions teach faith because they cannot help you to find the truth.
They themselves don't know where truth is.
They have been talking about truth, but they have been hiding
immensely important things.
They have changed all the gospels, they have edited everything that
was going to be difficult for them to argue for, to defend.
The whole of Christianity lives in a paranoia that if anybody finds
some truth, then what is going to happen to their lies that they go on propagating?
The Vatican has an underground library of thousands of scriptures
which they have burned, saving only one copy.
Nobody is allowed to enter, except the pope and the cardinals, to see
all the evidence, all the proofs which go against Christianity.
The public is not allowed to know what the truth is.
It should open the underground library in the Vatican to all the
scholars who want to study there, and Christianity will evaporate
without leaving a single trace on the human consciousness.
It has almost half of humanity converted to Christianity.
It is ninety-nine percent myth, invented, propagated, but it has a
great propaganda machine, and it has a militant church.
It is said, "Fight the good fight! Onward Christian soldiers!" Is it a
religion or an army?
But it has been killing millions of people - and Christians call them
religious wars, holy wars, crusades.
Does God require that millions of people should be killed?
Does this statement come from God or from Jesus Christ, who talks
continuously of love?
Can you think that if you had been left alone by your parents and the
society, without any imposition to be a Catholic, you would have been
a Catholic?
Osho - Christianity the deadliest poison
Osho,
ReplyDeleteDon't expect gods to disappear any time soon. They've been around as long as we have, and probably always will be. Some (most?) people seem to need them.
One correction. The Vatican Library is open to qualified religious scholars for defined purposes, not just to cardinals. At a party a number of years ago I personally met an ordinary Dominican (order) priest who was an Assistant Professor at Loyola University in Chicago, and he had just returned from his third extended research trip to the Vatican Library. (Oh, the people hosting the party were an ethnically Jewish but pretty much non-religious couple ... it was NOT a religious event.)
Unfortunately, use of much of their collection requires special training in the very specialized ecclesiastical usages of both Latin and Greek not offered by even most university graduate departments in those fields. There are very few scholars QUALIFIED to approach that collection in a meaningful way ... they just don't understand the nuances of the language.
Some contemporary Christian thinkers (Bishop Spong comes prominently to mind) are attempting to reconcile Christianity and its past with contemporary reason and common sense. They're doing a reasonably good job at an admittedly difficult task.
The Catholic religion is such a poor religion; it has no arguments.
ReplyDeleteAll the basic foundations of the religion are so poor, indefensible.
The virgin birth of Jesus Christ... there is no way to prove it; it is so unscientific. The concept of God as a trinity: God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost... and this "holy ghost" made the poor girl Mary, Jesus' mother, pregnant - without any license - and still he is holy? Then what is unholy? And in this trinity there is no place for any woman?
The pope pretends to be infallible. He has to pretend it, because the logic is that he represents Jesus Christ: if he is fallible then Jesus Christ is fallible. Jesus Christ represents God: if he is fallible then God is fallible. To make God infallible you have to make Popes infallible, for the sheer sake of logic - it has no existential truth in it.
Christianity is a fiction.
Jesus had never even heard the name Christianity. It has been imposed on him, he was not the founder of Christianity.
You can find Buddhism in the teachings of Gautam Buddha; he was the founder. You can find in the teachings of Mahavira that he was the founder of Jainism. You can find in the teachings of Lao Tzu that he was the founder of Taoism. But it is a very strange thing about Christianity: the founder had no idea at all, was not interested in creating a new religion, he was simply telling the Jews, "I am your last prophet."
Christianity is one of the most fake religions of all.
Jesus has nothing to do with it.
His life was written eighty years after his death, by people who had not directly known him.
Now even Christian scholars have come to the conclusion that the Christian gospels were not written by the apostles but were written by somebody else, because the mountains described are not in the same place where they are described in the gospels. The rivers described are not in the same place where they are described in the gospels.
Everything was written by people who had not known Jesus Christ, and neither had they lived with Jesus Christ.
I say unto you that Christianity is one of the most untruthful religions in the world.
It is a disease, a sickness, a pathology, a poison.
It has not been helpful to humanity in finding the truth in any sense.
It has been trying to propagate lies so continuously that they have almost become truth.
They have been exploiting for centuries.
Christianity has nothing worthwhile that can be supported by intelligence.
Deep down it is more interested in gathering numbers.
Numbers have their own politics.
The greater the number of followers you have, the greater the power to dominate.
Christianity's death, is very significant.
It will be a tremendous freedom.
I don't see any possibility that Christianity can offer anything.
It is doomed to die.
The sooner it dies, the better - because it will free millions of
people to think on their own, to search on their own.
It will create a great revolution, the death of Christianity, because
it is the biggest religion in the world, and it will not only be the
death of Christianity, it will be the beginning of the death of other
religions too.
When the big brother dies, the others are going to follow...
We are now facing a time that no scripture has had any idea of.
ReplyDeleteFor the first time, humanity can be one, no divisions.
What divides all the religions? Just small details, meaningless
details, about their idea of God.
But if there is no God, all those differences disappear.
Races have been claiming they are the chosen people of God.
Every religion is claiming that their book is written by God himself.
All these things, layer upon layer, make your mind; and unless you are able to put the whole mind aside and see the world directly, immediately, with your consciousness, you will never be able to see the truth.
God is a fiction - existence is a reality.
There is no god other than life itself...
Osho - The transmission of the lamp
Osho:
ReplyDeleteThere are many religions on this planet that have NO "divinely inspired" scriptures, and do not consider themselves to be the source of all truth ... in fact, that consider that (as well as the practice of seeking "converts" to a religion) as simply ill-mannered.
These people still have a firm belief (based on their interpretation of reality, NOT YOURS!!!!!) in divinity, but do not claim to have exclusive access to such a being.
Frankly, your strident ramblings against theism have no more basis in PROVABLE fact than do the two thousand year old tradition (backed by a billion followers) of His Holiness the Twat. Or of any Houngan in the service of Papa Legba.
What is faith? It is always blind.
ReplyDeleteA man who KNOWS does not need faith.
Faith is needed for exploitation.
It is faith which has kept humanity ignorant.
Faith is always outside you, and TRUTH is within you.
The true religion has no name, it cannot have any name.
Buddha lived it, Jesus lived it – but remember, Jesus was not a Christian and Buddha was not a Buddhist, he had never heard of the word.
You were thinking that RELIGIOUSNESS is something extraordinary, very special, is attained by very special people.
It was not your thinking; this has been told to you for centuries.
This is the way the whole of humanity has been deceived for thousands of years: Religiousness is something so extraordinary, it happens only to special people, prophets,messiahs, saviors, incarnations of God.
It is not for the ordinary and the common people.
And you have accepted that conditioning.
You have been befooled for centuries.
Naturally, humanity has remained in darkness.
The only true religion there is, is the art of changing the unconscious mind into CONSCIOUSNESS, so that you don't have the duality of unconscious and conscious but you have only one, your very being.
It is INTUITIVE
It is your core INTELLIGENCE.
All Authentic Religiousness Is
Intuitive..
Osho - From Darkness to Light
Osho,
ReplyDeleteAt last, I think we agree on something. But I don't think it is all that EASY a thing to do ... achieve this transformation of unconscious into conscious. If it were, the Twat and his predecessors going back for 10,000 years or more would not have been able to achieve the success they have.
It is far easier to be GIVEN "the answers" and accept them on "FAITH" than it is to arrive at the TRUTH on your own.
Truth is always alive, eternally alive.
ReplyDeleteIt cannot be confined in words; the language is wordless.
You can see it only when you have seen it within yourself; otherwise you don't know the language.
Consciousness is always of the present.
It is your innermost core. It opens up only in deep meditation…
You have your guide within you…
In the real journey of life, your own intuition is your only teacher.
Have you looked at the word ‘intuition’? It is the same as ‘tuition’.
Tuition is given by teachers, from outside; intuition is given by your own nature, from inside.
Intuition cannot be translated into intellect.
A bridge between the intellect and intuition will give you a tremendous clarity, understanding, a new kind of intelligence of which you are absolutely unaware, and the more intuition takes possession of you, the more intellect has to function as a servant.
This is real richness. This is real power.
The creative people, whether painters, musicians, poets or dancers, reach to a place once in a while that can be called “a glimpse of enlightenment” but it is only a glimpse.
It is not a realization.
They have not prepared themselves for it.
It has come accidentally.
The painter was absorbed in painting.
He was so absorbed in painting that he forgot himself, forgot the ego, forgot his thoughts, and without knowing it he was in a state of meditation, and accidentally a door opened and he saw the beauty of the beyond.
Soon he will be back, when the painting is complete, he will be back in the desert of daily life.
Now a great problem has arisen for him, that there is something far more beautiful than any painting, far more musical than any music, far more poetic than any poetry.
There is a dance beyond dance, but how to reach there?
He does not even know the ABC of meditation; he may never have heard the word.
He was doing something else.
It was just because he got lost in his work, in dance, in music, in singing, he fulfilled the condition for a glimpse.
Meditation is the name of the deepest relaxation.
With meditation you will be opening up higher doors of your consciousness, your superconscious.
Meditation leads you to your own reality.
No spiritual thinker, philosopher, has tried to think of a parallel for spiritual growth.
Physics has given the words `quantum leap’.
So when a few people around the earth get the quantum leap, then thousands more will become part of a world-wide fire.
Suddenly people who have not even tried meditation, who are not even seekers, who have never thought about anything spiritual, catch the infection, it is contagious.
We are coming close to a tremendous transformation, and we are going to see it in our own lives, something so rare and unique which has never happened before, and will never happen again...
Osho – The Rebel
I found this on Friday from the link on the NSS newsletter.
ReplyDeleteJust want to say thank you so much Crispian for making my weekend. I was crying with laughter. I absolutel love it.
You are a star!!!!
The idea that there isn't a God is actually a less pleasant alternative to me. Do I have your permission to continue believing in Christianity, or have I fallen asleep and has Atheism become a requirement for being intelligent? If so, I wonder what you think of Nicholas Copernicus, Sir Francis Bacon, Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Newton, Mendel, etc. Also, remember to tell Einstein he's a retard for believing in an infinite Universe.
ReplyDeleteThis debate is as stupid as arguing over which is better: the beach or the countryside. Being religious does not imply being an idiot. Being a politician on the other hand, it depends. Being an atheist does not imply one has reason, either. I am willing to bet most teens who abandon faith do it just to rebel at first.
My point is: do what you want, but insulting each other is always a sign of immaturity and nothing else.
"The idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I am unable to take seriously.
ReplyDeleteI believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.
The most beautiful and most profound religious emotion that we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. And this mysticality is the power of all true science..."
Albert Einstein
Modern physics, in the hands of Albert Einstein, has turned almost into mysticism.
Nobody has noted the fact, because mystics don't understand modern physics and the physicists do not care about the mystics.
The mystics have always experienced that they are one, but nobody has listened to them.
Perhaps man was not mature enough to understand the depth of their declaration.
Christians go on believing in Jesus Christ because he walked on water, he fed thousands of people out of two loaves of bread, he healed thousands of people just by touch, he raised a dead man back to life.
Just think, if anybody does all these things, will his contemporaries not be impressed by him? Will his contemporaries completely ignore him? Not a Jewish scripture even mentions his name!
There is no contemporary literature relating about Jesus and his miracles - and these miracles are not ordinary miracles. And somebody who has done all these things, do you think he deserves to be crucified? He would have been raised up as the greatest god!
And those were the days in Judea when scholarship was at the highest peak. It had great rabbis. None of them even bothers to meet him, even bothers to listen to him. And he is doing all these miracles which none of their prophets have ever done before.
Only one thing is possible, that all these miracles are invented, they have not happened. These are just Christian inventions about which Jews were not aware at all; otherwise, contemporary sources would have related them somewhere or other, in some way or other.
And the man who did such unnatural things would have dominated the whole scene.
The Christians may have a formal belief in Christ, in the bible, but it is a Sunday religion, a kind of sociality.
There exists no evidence for any God, and no theologian in the whole
of history has been able to give a single proof for the existence of God.
The truth is that God himself is a creation of man's imagination.
There are millions who say, "We believe in the existence of God." But your belief cannot create a God - if he does not exist your belief makes no difference.
God as a fiction is good for kindergarten school children. They need it – parables, fables, stories.
But very few human beings have gone beyond the kindergarten school.
God is the greatest lie you can ever find, because on that lie
thousands of other lies depend. Churches, religious organizations go on multiplying lies upon lies, just to protect one lie.
God is simply the poverty of human consciousness.
God exists because you are not aware of yourself.
The moment you know yourself, there is no God and there is no need of any God.
God is a consolation for sick minds,sick psychologies.
If God created the world, and if he is behind nuclear weapons and the people who are creating them, then no effort on man's part can prevent the destruction of the whole planet.
To give the creation of the world into the hands of a fictitious God is very dangerous.
It makes us absolutely impotent. We cannot do anything.
Truth is uncovering yourself from all lies...
Osho - Socrates Poisoned Again After 25 Centuries
For an attempt to meld the concepts of the most recent of physics advances with one religious belief system (pagan magic), read Bill Keith's "The Science of the Craft". Although lacking scientific rigor, Keith shows how certain concepts from quantum physics (e.g., quantum entanglement) show a remarkable similarity to the laws of magic (as set for by, say, Isaac Bonewitz ... in this case, the law of contagion). There are numerous other examples in Keith's very readable book.
ReplyDeleteUndoubtably the best 7 minutes I will spend today.
ReplyDeleteBravissimo!!
Truly brilliant! (and extra points for getting transubstantiation to fit in)
ReplyDeletePM.
I am so happy,
ReplyDeleteNow I have read that.
Thank you! Oh! Thank you!
For The TWAT in the Hat!
PeterSW
Viral Architect: "My point is: do what you want, but insulting each other is always a sign of immaturity and nothing else."
ReplyDelete____
Satire is an art, you ignorant doofus. A sign of immaturity is the inability to take an insult, not to give it when it is due.
The Overton window is gaping wide open, but still not wide enough for the likes of you to crawl over the sill, my dear.
Excellent satire, with the deafening ring of truth. Bravo!
Michelle B, I rather suspect that Viral Architect may not have been sounding off so much at the cartoon, but more about the tenor of the comments?
ReplyDeleteRegardless of faith or non-faith stance, sometimes basic decent manners keep a conversation from descending into incoherent drivel.
'You're stupid, cos you're a Christian!'
'You're stupider cos you're not!' hardly rivets the intellect, eh?
God, I now sound like my great aunty Nellie...
Love it. Well done.
ReplyDeleteBravo, good sir!
ReplyDeleteI have a mature and sensible 11-year old son who'll read that and laugh along and UNDERSTAND it, with me tomorrow. Thanks in advance for this...
I stumbled across your fine blog quite by accident, got lost for an enjoyable hour in here, and will be reading and recommending it to several critical-thinking pals forthwith.
I was simply impressed that you "found" and posted this cartoon...until I realized that you authored it! Again, Bravo.
In short: enjoying the reads, rants and reason. Keep it up. Cheers~
s
/today, my kid asks for (and will get) a FSM-fish badge for his locker. How friggin' cool is that?!
I too have a hat and in the words of Chris Rea, when its raining all the crap its good at keeping your head dry.
ReplyDeleteIts a very nice hat that I bought in Australia.
Like your site, like your thinking, please keep it up, to quote-
Face piles of trials with smiles, for it riles them to believe that you percieve the web they weave, and keep on thinking :-)
Live and let live... oh well
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing this information. I liked it lot.
ReplyDeleteSuch a wonderful blog. Nice post.
ReplyDeleteMLB2k11
Such a wonderful blog. Interesting resources.
ReplyDeleteInteresting one.
ReplyDeleteWell that was certainly offensive to Catholics. Heck, I'm not even Christian and I find it offensive that you're so intolerant of other views. Couldn't you at least let people believe what they want to without making fun of them for it? I mean seriously, have a heart man.
ReplyDeleteJust pointing out a spelling mistake on page 35; it's 'weird' and not 'wierd'. Other than that, I loved this to bits.
ReplyDelete