From the Gospel of Atrocities (Part II)

[Rubaiyyat]

Revered in three different religions as not only the most important figure in early Judaism, but most likely the author, or at the very least editor of Judaism’s most sacred book, the Torah—whose five sections are known collectively to Christians as the ‘Pentateuch’’, or opening books of the Bible—Moses is revealed to objective readers of the second one, Exodus (Chap. 24, v, twelve, thru 32:28), as in truth an ancient genocidal, but powerful meshugganah who actually directed the mass murder of some three thousand people at the foot of Mt. Sinai after returning from the mountaintop with these mysteriously inscribed tablets and finding people engaged in worshipping a god other than—well, stripped of all its deceptive masks, simply him!

But he wasn’t the first, nor would he be the last to massacre his fellow humans in the name of religious purity. And yes, the victims include many early Christians.

Back when Christianity was but sixty-four years old--still an infant on the religious scene, as that phenomenon goes—the Roman emperor Nero wanted to raze and rebuild the city center, but was refused permission by the Roman Senate to do so. So a week or so later, a huge fire broke out in that part of the city and burned for six straight days—as Nero infamously fiddled, or whatever—before it could be contained, effectively destroying the entire area.

Afterward, of course, the fire was widely rumored to have set by Nero’s henchmen; and in an attempt to deflect attention from that accusation, Nero declared that it had actually been set by the city’s Christians—a loosely organized, but steadily growing religious group despite the fact that it was generally despised as pacifistic in nature—and that they should consequently be rounded up and killed. The lucky ones were quickly put to the sword, while others were torn apart by dogs as unsympathetic citizens watched and gambled on how much longer they might remain alive, and still others were set afire themselves, to die as human torches.

And later, in response to complaints by the priests and priestesses of the traditional Roman gods that Christianity was seriously encroaching on their respective domains, costing them a considerable amount of monetary support, succeeding emperors issued a series of edicts banning Christian practices altogether; ordering the immediate imprisonment of all Christian clergy; and finally, commanding that Christians either sacrifice to the Roman gods—that is, bring their priests suitable offerings—or face certain capture and execution.

Then in 315, the Emperor Constantine I converted to Christianity and accordingly decriminalized it throughout the empire—and suddenly, emboldened Christian mobs abandoned their pacifistic ways and began killing the old pagan priests and destroying their temples—according to historians, eventually murdering several thousand!

In 356, Constantine II bent to the will of the newly empowered Christians by announcing that the conducting of pagan services would henceforth be punishable by death; while shortly before he died, upon demand of Christian authorities who’d come to consider the distinguished Greek philosopher Sopatros of Apamea an enemy of religion, he ordered hm executed, supposedly for practicing magic.

Later that same century, Emperor Theodosius—a devout Christian described by Catholic chroniclers as having “meticulously followed all Christian teachings…”, and since sainted for having made Christianity the official ‘state religion’ of the Roman Empire in 380—reportedly had children executed just for playing with doll-like remains of pagan statues.

In 372, Christianity—or more precisely, its most powerful faction, based in Rome; which would come to be called catholic inasmuch as its view of itself and its mission was that it should organize people everywhere into a single, all-embracing, universal Church centered on the ‘official’ Christian story—began a bloody campaign aimed at stamping out Manichaeism, at the time its main rival for replacing the old, traditional paganism. 

In 381, at the request of the Catholic leader or ‘Pope’, Theodosius formally stripped the Manichaeans of all civil rights; and the following year, in response to more papal urging, he issued a decree of death for all their teaching monks. Altogether, millions of Manichaeans are estimated to have been killed before the severely weakened religion finally gave up the ghost more than a thousand years later, in distant Asia.

In 385, Bishop Pricillian of Ávila, Spain and five of his followers were accused by some rival Roman  churchmen of sorcery—a capital offense—and after being forced to confess that they’d studied obscene doctrines, held nocturnal meetings with shameful women, and prayed while naked, were convicted and ultimately beheaded.

In 388, a Jewish synagogue along the upper Euphrates in Asia Minor was ordered destroyed by the Bishop of Kallinikon. As the first recorded attack on Judaism by Christianity, it might have gone more or less unnoticed by historians had it not been followed closely by the fiery ruination of another synagogue in northern Italy at the command of Bishop Innocentius of Dertona.

In 393, Theodosius issued a law that specifically prohibited the public observance of any non-Catholic custom.

In 415, world famous female philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer Hypatia of Alexandria, a self-described pagan but good friend of Christianity, was cut to pieces with shards of broken glass right in  her church by an hysterical mob egged on by its official ‘Reader of Scripture for the Benefit of the Illiterate’.

During the sixth century, the Church boldly declared pagans everywhere devoid of any civil rights.

In 694, the Seventeenth Council of Toledo in the Roman province that would eventually become Spain issued eight ‘canons’, or official Church rulings, the last of which decreed that all Jews living under the rule of the local king—who’d called for the council, and now presided over it—must immediately turn all their property over to their Christianized slaves; thereafter become forever enslaved themselves to Catholic masters chosen by the king and contractually prevented from allowing the Jews to ever again practice their own religion; and agree to give up their children at age seven, to be raised as Catholics and subsequently married off to Catholics.

Late in the eighth century, the new Frankish king Charles I, perhaps better known today as Charles the Great, Charles the Magnificent, or as the French put that, Charlemagne—a staunch Roman Catholic whose forebears had a long history of supporting the papacy—quickly served notice that he intended to follow in their footsteps by removing the troublesome Lombard family from power in northern Italy; leading a Catholic incursion into Muslim Spain; converting his own eastern neighbors the Saxons to Catholicism under penalty of death, and in the process, unceremoniously beheading some 4,500 who refused conversion.

And lo on Christmas Day of the Christian year 800, this proponent of conversion by the sword and to hell with the rest was in Rome, having ostensibly received an invitation from Pope Leo III to attend his midnight Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica; while there, however, after kneeling briefly before the Pope, he left next morning bearing a new crown--that of the first Holy Roman Emperor, charged with enforcing doctrine, rooting out heresy, upholding ecclesiastical unity, and ultimately supporting papal primacy throughout what had by then become, depressingly enough, simply Christianity’s own, new, yet obviously no less tyrannical than the original, ‘Holy’ Roman Empire.

And so we needn’t be shocked to learn that a few centuries later, it came to pass that Pope Urban II and some three hundred of his cardinals, archbishops, bishops, ordinary parish priests, abbots, deacons, and an assortment of wealthy, influential Catholic noblemen convened at the church of Notre-Dame-du-Port, in Clermont, Auvergne—now France—supposedly to discuss and debate routine church business.

Historians would later come to call this gathering simply the ‘Second Council of Clermont’—sounds innocuous enough, doesn’t it? The council went on for ten days, and in the end issued thirty-three canons—the first thirty-two of which just dealt with run-of-the-mill stuff such as reaffirming the Church’s centuries-old prohibition of clerical marriage, excommunicating the Bishop of Cambrai for selling church privileges, extending the excommunication of the King of France for having committed adultery by daring to divorce and remarry, and so forth. But the thirty-third, or last to be announced to the throng waiting outside the church to find out exactly what decisions were being made inside, effectively launched one of the longest, bloodiest holy wars in all recorded history.

For that’s precisely how Urban dared refer to it as he addressed the crowd: not only a bellum justum, or ‘just war’, he declared—which the Church had always held to be moral—but a bellum sacrum, ‘holy war’.

As for Urban himself, he’d been in office for about seven years by then, had acquired something of a reputation as an exponent of the old Charlemagnian idea that Christianity should continue the expansion of its territory by whatever means necessary. And then as luck would have it, he’d received a letter from the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople appealing to him for help in repelling the Muslim army that had defeated his own several years before and was now seriously threatening to overrun the whole of eastern Christendom. Moreover, the letter had expressed outrage about the growing Muslim persecution of Christians making pilgrimages to Jerusalem—the city where Christ had been crucified—and suggested that after beating back the Muslims, their combined Christian armies might pursue them all the way back to Jerusalem, which had been in Muslim hands for the last four hundred years, and ultimately seize the city for Christianity.

Although the two main, eastern and western divisions of the Christian world had more or less survived independently of each other since agreeing to go their separate ways more than forty years before—among other things, the eastern church had refused to accept the spiritual authority of the Pope, thus bringing about what historians would come to call the Great Schism—the current leader of the western Church was disposed to send his ecclesiastic rival military assistance and join up with his army in a glorious, united fight for Jerusalem, if only because doing so promised to increase the prestige of his papacy as his own forces led the fight; while it also offered him a perfect opportunity to fulfill a long held personal dream: to reunite the two halves of the Christian world and go on to become its undisputed leader, or rank above the now-weakened Patriarch of Constantinople.

Hence the Pope informed the crowd that every able-bodied nobleman, knight, artisan, monk, beggar, and even thief and murderer among them was now needed for a great Crusade to drive the Muslims from Christianity’s birthplace.

That the capture of Jerusalem—and the extermination of every Muslim and Jew who refused to leave it—would be their primary objective; with the defense of Byzantium being of secondary importance.

That those who joined him in this endeavor, which Christ himself had ordered—“Christus autem imperat,” he told them, ‘Christ commands it’—would soon be embarking on a religious pilgrimage during which all their sins would be washed away.

That those who answered the call would be compensated in this life with material rewards, and in the next with spiritual ones.

That whether they died on the way to the Holy Land or in battle, they were still guaranteed a place in Heaven.

That the families and property of those who answered the call would be guarded by those who were left behind, and would ultimately be protected by God himself.

That while due to the local climate (it was now November) and the time that it would take to recruit and train a sufficiently large army and build it some siege weapons, the long, twenty-five hundred mile march probably wouldn’t begin until the following summer.

That everyone except the very young and very old, along with women and the priests who’d be needed to look after the spiritual needs of those remaining behind, should immediately step forward, take the Crusader’s oath, and start spreading the word.

Concluding his speech with the words “Deus vult!”, ‘God wills it,’—which was reported to have subsequently been adopted as the Crusaders’ battle cry—Urban announced that his attacking force would be organized in five sections assembled at various points throughout the Catholic lands, and then appointed Adhémar de Monteil, the Bishop of Le Puy, as his personal representative for the expedition and effectively its supreme commander; who was subsequently approached by an emotional, zealous monk from Amiens called Peter the Hermit, begging to be named one of the subordinate commanders and presenting as his credentials a letter of recommendation that he swore had been written by God himself and hand-delivered to him by Jesus.

As it happened, after making rousing speeches about the coming war all over Western Europe exhorting people to follow him to Jerusalem, Peter was so eager to get underway that he decided not to wait for the rest of the Crusaders to finish their own recruiting and training, but to set out alone from Cologne, Germany in early spring with an undisciplined peasant horde numbering in the thousands—under the protection of the Holy Ghost, he assured them—which some historians have since come to call the ‘People’s Crusade’.

Unfortunately, his ragtag group didn’t make it past Constantinople—but along the way, they did manage to impress Peter by storming the homes of thousands of Rhineland Jews, stealing whatever of value that they could carry and destroying the rest, desecrating and burning all their Torahs, torturing and raping the women, and killing off their men until according to eyewitnesses, in town after town the bodies of the dead simply couldn’t be piled any higher.

And so perhaps it was only to be expected that early in August, following their brazen takeover of a Byzantine castle just outside Constantinople, these particular Soldiers of Christ would be ambushed and all but annihilated by several thousand Soldiers of Muhammad sent to stop them before they could make much any more progress.

Thus ended the Crusade’s so-called first wave—but midway through that same month, a more powerful, better organized and properly disciplined second wave that included some four thousand mounted knights, twenty-five thousand infantry troops, and almost half that many non-combatants, moved east from France on its own divinely ordered mission to rid Jerusalem of all its non-Christians.

Crossing into the Byzantine lands early the following year, by late-May they’d definitely established themselves as a force to be reckoned with—first capturing the Muslim-held Turkish city of Nicaea, then defeating a massive Turkish army sent to take it back, and subsequently marching on to Antioch; which immediately closed its gates and sent its soldiers to the parapets.

This began a difficult, six-month long siege during which the Christian army successfully repulsed a number of attacks by would-be relief forces. ‘Repulsed’—such an antiseptic way to put it. Actually, the Crusaders brought hundreds of the severed heads of their Muslim opponents back from the battlefield, and shouting, “God wills it!”, took to catapulting most them over the walls into the besieged city while impaling the rest on stakes stuck in the ground in plain view of the enemy soldiers manning the ramparts.

When the Muslims sometimes crept out of the city at night in an effort to bury their dead, the suspicious 
Christians watching in the dim light from their campfires would remain clear of them; but then in the morning, they’d hurry forth to dig up the corpses and rob them of their gold and silver jewelry and any other items of possible value.

The siege of Antioch ended only when one of the more persuasive Christian leaders managed to convince one of the tower guards, an Armenian that history appears to have recorded only as ‘the traitor Firouz’, to accept a sum of money and a title in exchange for hanging a rope ladder from his tower just before daylight next morning and looking the other way while sixty of the crusaders’ best men ascended it and rushed to open one of the nearby city gates, allowing the rest to pour in. In the orgy of killing that followed, the Christian Warriors are known to have massacred thousands of Muslim soldiers and ordinary citizens—men, women and children—until the only inhabitants left alive were some who’d managed to take refuge in the city’s heavily fortified citadel.

According to the Christian chronicler Fulcher of Chartres—a witness to this mayhem—the invaders didn’t rape the women that they inevitably came across in the enemy tents, “but just ran their lances through their bellies.”

Later that month, when a huge Turkish army attempted to re-take the city, again only to be defeated, the citadel too surrendered, and all Antioch finally belonged to the Europeans.

After resting, attending to their wounded, and carefully reorganizing themselves over the next several months, the Crusaders—by now reduced to less than half their original number—marched on toward Jerusalem.

Early that winter, the Crusaders took the Syrian city of Ma’arat al-Nu’man, where they killed thousands more; after which, according to the Christian chronicler Albert Aquensis, “the already stinking corpses of the enemies were eaten by the Christians,” due to a famine in that area.

Finally arriving before the Jerusalem walls the following June—and finding it more heavily fortified than expected—they immediately set to building some enormous siege towers. Six days later, the towers were complete and the Christians began fighting their way across the city walls; and by the next day, they’d penetrated the Muslim defenses to the extent that a few of them were able to open one of the gates from the inside—and the slaughter was on.

Not thousands, but tens of thousands now fell before the Christian swords—Jews and Muslims alike; men, women and children—with the killing continuing all night and into the next day and then the next. Some Jews who’d taken refuge in a synagogue were burned alive when the Christians set it ablaze. And according to an Arab historian, when some seventy thousand Muslims, including many renowned scholars, managed to squeeze into the vast al-Aqsa mosque under the protection of a Christian banner and lock themselves in, the Crusaders simply forced an entry next morning and massacred them all.

As the city’s defenses collapsed, some Moslem soldiers who’d sought refuge in the citadel managed to fight on for three days, but in the end were forced to surrender to the invaders in return for safe passage to Ascalon. They were the only Moslems known to have escaped Jerusalem alive.

To sum up the remembrances of one participant: “Now that our men had taken control of the city, wonderful sights were to be seen. The city was filled with corpses and blood. Some of our men chopped the heads off their enemies; others shot them with arrows until they fell from the towers; others tortured them for as long as possible by casting them into one of the many fires. Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen everywhere. It was necessary to pick one’s way over the bodies of men and horses. But these were small matters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon. If I were to tell the full story of that, it would exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say that at the Temple and on the porch of Solomon, our men rode with enemy blood dripping from their bodies and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that the place was absolutely filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered for so long from their blasphemies.”

On the other hand, another participant, the Archbishop of Tyre, simply wrote: “It was impossible to look upon the vast numbers of the slain without horror; everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, and the very ground was covered with the blood of the slain. It was not alone the spectacle of headless bodies and mutilated limbs strewn in all directions that roused the horror of all who looked upon them. Still more dreadful was it to gaze upon the victors themselves, dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight that brought terror to all who met them.”

So the crusaders indeed achieved their goal; and when a numerically superior Egyptian Muslim army marched on the city shortly afterward to challenge the Christians’ claim on it, it too was routed—thereby ending Muslim resistance to the Christans for the time being; while in the end, five small, Christian states were set up in the region, one each under the rule of one of the Crusade’s remaining leaders.

(to be continued)
_________________________

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[Dānu]

[Rubaiyyat]

I don't understand the "404" in your pic, Dānu. Should I?

[TheGentlemanBastard]

Did the first thread really need a sequel?!?

[Paleophyte]

Moses is revealed to objective readers of the second one, Exodus (Chap. 24, v, twelve, thru 32:28), as in truth an ancient genocidal, but powerful meshugganah who actually directed the mass murder of some three thousand people at the foot of Mt. Sinai

The events in Exodus never happened. You're complaining about a fictional character murdering fictional victims. It's an ugly bit of mythology that says a lot about the priests of the time and the god that they worshipped but little else.

Nero declared that it had actually been set by the city’s Christians—a loosely organized, but steadily growing religious group despite the fact that it was generally despised as pacifistic in nature—and that they should consequently be rounded up and killed. The lucky ones were quickly put to the sword, while others were torn apart by dogs as unsympathetic citizens watched and gambled on how much longer they might remain alive, and still others were set afire themselves, to die as human torches.

Christian martyrdom is grossly exaggerated by the church that later wrote the histories. Most of what you're talking about here is yet more fictional victims.

Then in 315, the Emperor Constantine I converted to Christianity and accordingly decriminalized it throughout the empire—and suddenly, emboldened Christian mobs abandoned their pacifistic ways and began killing the old pagan priests and destroying their temples—according to historians, eventually murdering several thousand!

And they huffed and they puffed and they blew the temples down? It's a nice fairytale that belies a superficial understanding of the early Christian church and its relationship to Rome. Various emperors alternated between grudging tolerance and lacklustre persecution of the rising Christian church. Emperor Gallienus issued the first official edict of tolerance in 259, before Constantine was even born.

What follows is an impressively bad TL;DR WoT that could have been summarized as "They were people, some of them pretty horrible people, but by and large no better or worse than their contemporaries."

You need to learn the art of brevity. An atheist preacher loses its amusement value after the first couple of custard pies.

[Paleophyte]

[Rubaiyyat]

Moses is revealed to objective readers of the second one, Exodus (Chap. 24, v, twelve, thru 32:28), as in truth an ancient genocidal, but powerful meshugganah who actually directed the mass murder of some three thousand people at the foot of Mt. Sinai

The events in Exodus never happened. You're complaining about a fictional character murdering fictional victims. It's an ugly bit of mythology that says a lot about the priests of the time and the god that they worshipped but little else.

Nero declared that it had actually been set by the city’s Christians—a loosely organized, but steadily growing religious group despite the fact that it was generally despised as pacifistic in nature—and that they should consequently be rounded up and killed. The lucky ones were quickly put to the sword, while others were torn apart by dogs as unsympathetic citizens watched and gambled on how much longer they might remain alive, and still others were set afire themselves, to die as human torches.

Christian martyrdom is grossly exaggerated by the church that later wrote the histories. Most of what you're talking about here is yet more fictional victims.

Then in 315, the Emperor Constantine I converted to Christianity and accordingly decriminalized it throughout the empire—and suddenly, emboldened Christian mobs abandoned their pacifistic ways and began killing the old pagan priests and destroying their temples—according to historians, eventually murdering several thousand!

And they huffed and they puffed and they blew the temples down? It's a nice fairytale that belies a superficial understanding of the early Christian church and its relationship to Rome. Various emperors alternated between grudging tolerance and lacklustre persecution of the rising Christian church. Emperor Gallienus issued the first official edict of tolerance in 259, before Constantine was even born.

What follows is an impressively bad TL;DR WoT that could have been summarized as "They were people, some of them pretty horrible people, but by and large no better or worse than their contemporaries."

You need to learn the art of brevity. An atheist preacher loses its amusement value after the first couple of custard pies.

[Rubaiyyat]

If brevity is what you want, I suggest you stick to one-line jokes and restroom graffiti. History--especially religious history--is a serious subject that's rarely humorous, much less seen as entertaining except by those refugees from religion who might remain so bitter about their personal experience with it that they delight in learning of its every human foible; but such histories are always of interest to young, atheistic minded renegades from the world's various religions who might like to learn how all that shit actually went down, while the rest of your commentary--particularly your comment on the Levite massacre of 3000 people at the foot of Mt. Sinai as ordered by Moses--just reveals how little you really know about these matters: there was nothing fictional about it.

That said, I welcome any further arguments that you may have regarding my posts. But to be fair, I should probably inform you up front that I'm a published author on religious history, with several years of research behind me and files just bursting with evidence of everything that I've posted on this site to date; and six chapters in one of my books are titled "The Gospel of Atrocities', or Parts 1 thru 6.

Or just read the credits at the end of the article. See you around.

[skyking]

Ah yes, the argument from authority. Why are you here?
You're a published author. We could pick up one of your books if any of us so desired.

[Bucky Ball]

The historicity of virtually the entire Old Testament has been debunked, including very recent updates concerning that.
Moses was a mythical figure from the Northern tribes' cultural lore. He did not exist. The myths about his being found in a basket in or near a river came straight from Babylonian/other ancient Mesopotamian lore. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/746...-of-akkad/ ... which was discovered when the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal was unearthed in the late 1800's. Then also it was discovered that Yahweh had a wife, (Ashera) and the origins of Yahweh were also discovered. He was one of many sons of the Most High God (of Babylon).

There was no exodus. That many people wandering around in the desert would have left *some* traces. There are none.
As Finkelstein and his associates (also William Dever) ... eminent archaeologists, have proven.
There is no evidence at all of a large Semitic presence in Egypt, ever. Egypt controlled the ENTIRE ancient Near East. What sense would it make
to go from one place Egypt controlled to another ? There are archaeological records they have of reports and orders and conversations between the Egyptian rulers, and the garrisons/outposts up in Canaan. The OT is all myth, including the notion that a "Moses" wrote anything ... it has him writing about his own death and burial. Woops.

There are a lot of things in the Bible that are totally hilarious.
It says Yahweh is a loving god. Then it says he told Israel to wipe out the babies in the neighboring villages.
It says a higher god (Yahweh's father) gave Yahweh his portion of the nations, Israel.
I also like the one where the Witch of Endor conjures up the shade of Samuel for Saul, ... LOL

https://ksuweb.kennesaw.edu/~tkeene/ogtIsraelHerzog.pdf



If Min stops by, can you repost the link to the new (later) dates for the OT being written. Thanks. It's here somewhere, .. I don't see it.

The Documentary Hypothesis dates the Pentateuch (as does the Bible itself in the book of Nehemiah, which describes the introduction of the Pentateuch by Ezra, returning from the Exile, in a fall festival, for Israel). to the 5th Century BC. There are many reasons to now doubt that. Moses certainly wrote none of it. There was no "office" or function (as there was in Greece and Islam, the "Hafiz") to memorize texts, (as the finest scholars on Israeli texts say), (one being Dr William Schneidewind, "How the Bible Became a Book", UCLA), and Dr. Richard Elliott Friedmann, both of whom I was lucky enough to have for class.

I don't post "bibliographies". I post SPECIFIC references to specific experts, and support specific claims.

[Bucky Ball]

Revered in three different religions as not only the most important figure in early Judaism, but most likely the author, or at the very least editor of Judaism’s most sacred book, the Torah—whose five sections are known collectively to Christians as the ‘Pentateuch’’, or opening books of the Bible—Moses is revealed to objective readers of the second one, Exodus (Chap. 24, v, twelve, thru 32:28), as in truth an ancient genocidal, but powerful meshugganah who actually directed the mass murder of some three thousand people at the foot of Mt. Sinai after returning from the mountaintop with these mysteriously inscribed tablets and finding people engaged in worshipping a god other than—well, stripped of all its deceptive masks, simply him!

But he wasn’t the first, nor would he be the last to massacre his fellow humans in the name of religious purity. And yes, the victims include many early Christians.

Back when Christianity was but sixty-four years old--still an infant on the religious scene, as that phenomenon goes—the Roman emperor Nero wanted to raze and rebuild the city center, but was refused permission by the Roman Senate to do so. So a week or so later, a huge fire broke out in that part of the city and burned for six straight days—as Nero infamously fiddled, or whatever—before it could be contained, effectively destroying the entire area.

Afterward, of course, the fire was widely rumored to have set by Nero’s henchmen; and in an attempt to deflect attention from that accusation, Nero declared that it had actually been set by the city’s Christians—a loosely organized, but steadily growing religious group despite the fact that it was generally despised as pacifistic in nature—and that they should consequently be rounded up and killed. The lucky ones were quickly put to the sword, while others were torn apart by dogs as unsympathetic citizens watched and gambled on how much longer they might remain alive, and still others were set afire themselves, to die as human torches.

And later, in response to complaints by the priests and priestesses of the traditional Roman gods that Christianity was seriously encroaching on their respective domains, costing them a considerable amount of monetary support, succeeding emperors issued a series of edicts banning Christian practices altogether; ordering the immediate imprisonment of all Christian clergy; and finally, commanding that Christians either sacrifice to the Roman gods—that is, bring their priests suitable offerings—or face certain capture and execution.

Then in 315, the Emperor Constantine I converted to Christianity and accordingly decriminalized it throughout the empire—and suddenly, emboldened Christian mobs abandoned their pacifistic ways and began killing the old pagan priests and destroying their temples—according to historians, eventually murdering several thousand!

In 356, Constantine II bent to the will of the newly empowered Christians by announcing that the conducting of pagan services would henceforth be punishable by death; while shortly before he died, upon demand of Christian authorities who’d come to consider the distinguished Greek philosopher Sopatros of Apamea an enemy of religion, he ordered hm executed, supposedly for practicing magic.

Later that same century, Emperor Theodosius—a devout Christian described by Catholic chroniclers as having “meticulously followed all Christian teachings…”, and since sainted for having made Christianity the official ‘state religion’ of the Roman Empire in 380—reportedly had children executed just for playing with doll-like remains of pagan statues.

In 372, Christianity—or more precisely, its most powerful faction, based in Rome; which would come to be called catholic inasmuch as its view of itself and its mission was that it should organize people everywhere into a single, all-embracing, universal Church centered on the ‘official’ Christian story—began a bloody campaign aimed at stamping out Manichaeism, at the time its main rival for replacing the old, traditional paganism. 

In 381, at the request of the Catholic leader or ‘Pope’, Theodosius formally stripped the Manichaeans of all civil rights; and the following year, in response to more papal urging, he issued a decree of death for all their teaching monks. Altogether, millions of Manichaeans are estimated to have been killed before the severely weakened religion finally gave up the ghost more than a thousand years later, in distant Asia.

In 385, Bishop Pricillian of Ávila, Spain and five of his followers were accused by some rival Roman  churchmen of sorcery—a capital offense—and after being forced to confess that they’d studied obscene doctrines, held nocturnal meetings with shameful women, and prayed while naked, were convicted and ultimately beheaded.

In 388, a Jewish synagogue along the upper Euphrates in Asia Minor was ordered destroyed by the Bishop of Kallinikon. As the first recorded attack on Judaism by Christianity, it might have gone more or less unnoticed by historians had it not been followed closely by the fiery ruination of another synagogue in northern Italy at the command of Bishop Innocentius of Dertona.

In 393, Theodosius issued a law that specifically prohibited the public observance of any non-Catholic custom.

In 415, world famous female philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer Hypatia of Alexandria, a self-described pagan but good friend of Christianity, was cut to pieces with shards of broken glass right in  her church by an hysterical mob egged on by its official ‘Reader of Scripture for the Benefit of the Illiterate’.

During the sixth century, the Church boldly declared pagans everywhere devoid of any civil rights.

In 694, the Seventeenth Council of Toledo in the Roman province that would eventually become Spain issued eight ‘canons’, or official Church rulings, the last of which decreed that all Jews living under the rule of the local king—who’d called for the council, and now presided over it—must immediately turn all their property over to their Christianized slaves; thereafter become forever enslaved themselves to Catholic masters chosen by the king and contractually prevented from allowing the Jews to ever again practice their own religion; and agree to give up their children at age seven, to be raised as Catholics and subsequently married off to Catholics.

Late in the eighth century, the new Frankish king Charles I, perhaps better known today as Charles the Great, Charles the Magnificent, or as the French put that, Charlemagne—a staunch Roman Catholic whose forebears had a long history of supporting the papacy—quickly served notice that he intended to follow in their footsteps by removing the troublesome Lombard family from power in northern Italy; leading a Catholic incursion into Muslim Spain; converting his own eastern neighbors the Saxons to Catholicism under penalty of death, and in the process, unceremoniously beheading some 4,500 who refused conversion.

And lo on Christmas Day of the Christian year 800, this proponent of conversion by the sword and to hell with the rest was in Rome, having ostensibly received an invitation from Pope Leo III to attend his midnight Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica; while there, however, after kneeling briefly before the Pope, he left next morning bearing a new crown--that of the first Holy Roman Emperor, charged with enforcing doctrine, rooting out heresy, upholding ecclesiastical unity, and ultimately supporting papal primacy throughout what had by then become, depressingly enough, simply Christianity’s own, new, yet obviously no less tyrannical than the original, ‘Holy’ Roman Empire.

And so we needn’t be shocked to learn that a few centuries later, it came to pass that Pope Urban II and some three hundred of his cardinals, archbishops, bishops, ordinary parish priests, abbots, deacons, and an assortment of wealthy, influential Catholic noblemen convened at the church of Notre-Dame-du-Port, in Clermont, Auvergne—now France—supposedly to discuss and debate routine church business.

Historians would later come to call this gathering simply the ‘Second Council of Clermont’—sounds innocuous enough, doesn’t it? The council went on for ten days, and in the end issued thirty-three canons—the first thirty-two of which just dealt with run-of-the-mill stuff such as reaffirming the Church’s centuries-old prohibition of clerical marriage, excommunicating the Bishop of Cambrai for selling church privileges, extending the excommunication of the King of France for having committed adultery by daring to divorce and remarry, and so forth. But the thirty-third, or last to be announced to the throng waiting outside the church to find out exactly what decisions were being made inside, effectively launched one of the longest, bloodiest holy wars in all recorded history.

For that’s precisely how Urban dared refer to it as he addressed the crowd: not only a bellum justum, or ‘just war’, he declared—which the Church had always held to be moral—but a bellum sacrum, ‘holy war’.

As for Urban himself, he’d been in office for about seven years by then, had acquired something of a reputation as an exponent of the old Charlemagnian idea that Christianity should continue the expansion of its territory by whatever means necessary. And then as luck would have it, he’d received a letter from the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople appealing to him for help in repelling the Muslim army that had defeated his own several years before and was now seriously threatening to overrun the whole of eastern Christendom. Moreover, the letter had expressed outrage about the growing Muslim persecution of Christians making pilgrimages to Jerusalem—the city where Christ had been crucified—and suggested that after beating back the Muslims, their combined Christian armies might pursue them all the way back to Jerusalem, which had been in Muslim hands for the last four hundred years, and ultimately seize the city for Christianity.

Although the two main, eastern and western divisions of the Christian world had more or less survived independently of each other since agreeing to go their separate ways more than forty years before—among other things, the eastern church had refused to accept the spiritual authority of the Pope, thus bringing about what historians would come to call the Great Schism—the current leader of the western Church was disposed to send his ecclesiastic rival military assistance and join up with his army in a glorious, united fight for Jerusalem, if only because doing so promised to increase the prestige of his papacy as his own forces led the fight; while it also offered him a perfect opportunity to fulfill a long held personal dream: to reunite the two halves of the Christian world and go on to become its undisputed leader, or rank above the now-weakened Patriarch of Constantinople.

Hence the Pope informed the crowd that every able-bodied nobleman, knight, artisan, monk, beggar, and even thief and murderer among them was now needed for a great Crusade to drive the Muslims from Christianity’s birthplace.

That the capture of Jerusalem—and the extermination of every Muslim and Jew who refused to leave it—would be their primary objective; with the defense of Byzantium being of secondary importance.

That those who joined him in this endeavor, which Christ himself had ordered—“Christus autem imperat,” he told them, ‘Christ commands it’—would soon be embarking on a religious pilgrimage during which all their sins would be washed away.

That those who answered the call would be compensated in this life with material rewards, and in the next with spiritual ones.

That whether they died on the way to the Holy Land or in battle, they were still guaranteed a place in Heaven.

That the families and property of those who answered the call would be guarded by those who were left behind, and would ultimately be protected by God himself.

That while due to the local climate (it was now November) and the time that it would take to recruit and train a sufficiently large army and build it some siege weapons, the long, twenty-five hundred mile march probably wouldn’t begin until the following summer.

That everyone except the very young and very old, along with women and the priests who’d be needed to look after the spiritual needs of those remaining behind, should immediately step forward, take the Crusader’s oath, and start spreading the word.

Concluding his speech with the words “Deus vult!”, ‘God wills it,’—which was reported to have subsequently been adopted as the Crusaders’ battle cry—Urban announced that his attacking force would be organized in five sections assembled at various points throughout the Catholic lands, and then appointed Adhémar de Monteil, the Bishop of Le Puy, as his personal representative for the expedition and effectively its supreme commander; who was subsequently approached by an emotional, zealous monk from Amiens called Peter the Hermit, begging to be named one of the subordinate commanders and presenting as his credentials a letter of recommendation that he swore had been written by God himself and hand-delivered to him by Jesus.

As it happened, after making rousing speeches about the coming war all over Western Europe exhorting people to follow him to Jerusalem, Peter was so eager to get underway that he decided not to wait for the rest of the Crusaders to finish their own recruiting and training, but to set out alone from Cologne, Germany in early spring with an undisciplined peasant horde numbering in the thousands—under the protection of the Holy Ghost, he assured them—which some historians have since come to call the ‘People’s Crusade’.

Unfortunately, his ragtag group didn’t make it past Constantinople—but along the way, they did manage to impress Peter by storming the homes of thousands of Rhineland Jews, stealing whatever of value that they could carry and destroying the rest, desecrating and burning all their Torahs, torturing and raping the women, and killing off their men until according to eyewitnesses, in town after town the bodies of the dead simply couldn’t be piled any higher.

And so perhaps it was only to be expected that early in August, following their brazen takeover of a Byzantine castle just outside Constantinople, these particular Soldiers of Christ would be ambushed and all but annihilated by several thousand Soldiers of Muhammad sent to stop them before they could make much any more progress.

Thus ended the Crusade’s so-called first wave—but midway through that same month, a more powerful, better organized and properly disciplined second wave that included some four thousand mounted knights, twenty-five thousand infantry troops, and almost half that many non-combatants, moved east from France on its own divinely ordered mission to rid Jerusalem of all its non-Christians.

Crossing into the Byzantine lands early the following year, by late-May they’d definitely established themselves as a force to be reckoned with—first capturing the Muslim-held Turkish city of Nicaea, then defeating a massive Turkish army sent to take it back, and subsequently marching on to Antioch; which immediately closed its gates and sent its soldiers to the parapets.

This began a difficult, six-month long siege during which the Christian army successfully repulsed a number of attacks by would-be relief forces. ‘Repulsed’—such an antiseptic way to put it. Actually, the Crusaders brought hundreds of the severed heads of their Muslim opponents back from the battlefield, and shouting, “God wills it!”, took to catapulting most them over the walls into the besieged city while impaling the rest on stakes stuck in the ground in plain view of the enemy soldiers manning the ramparts.

When the Muslims sometimes crept out of the city at night in an effort to bury their dead, the suspicious 
Christians watching in the dim light from their campfires would remain clear of them; but then in the morning, they’d hurry forth to dig up the corpses and rob them of their gold and silver jewelry and any other items of possible value.

The siege of Antioch ended only when one of the more persuasive Christian leaders managed to convince one of the tower guards, an Armenian that history appears to have recorded only as ‘the traitor Firouz’, to accept a sum of money and a title in exchange for hanging a rope ladder from his tower just before daylight next morning and looking the other way while sixty of the crusaders’ best men ascended it and rushed to open one of the nearby city gates, allowing the rest to pour in. In the orgy of killing that followed, the Christian Warriors are known to have massacred thousands of Muslim soldiers and ordinary citizens—men, women and children—until the only inhabitants left alive were some who’d managed to take refuge in the city’s heavily fortified citadel.

According to the Christian chronicler Fulcher of Chartres—a witness to this mayhem—the invaders didn’t rape the women that they inevitably came across in the enemy tents, “but just ran their lances through their bellies.”

Later that month, when a huge Turkish army attempted to re-take the city, again only to be defeated, the citadel too surrendered, and all Antioch finally belonged to the Europeans.

After resting, attending to their wounded, and carefully reorganizing themselves over the next several months, the Crusaders—by now reduced to less than half their original number—marched on toward Jerusalem.

Early that winter, the Crusaders took the Syrian city of Ma’arat al-Nu’man, where they killed thousands more; after which, according to the Christian chronicler Albert Aquensis, “the already stinking corpses of the enemies were eaten by the Christians,” due to a famine in that area.

Finally arriving before the Jerusalem walls the following June—and finding it more heavily fortified than expected—they immediately set to building some enormous siege towers. Six days later, the towers were complete and the Christians began fighting their way across the city walls; and by the next day, they’d penetrated the Muslim defenses to the extent that a few of them were able to open one of the gates from the inside—and the slaughter was on.

Not thousands, but tens of thousands now fell before the Christian swords—Jews and Muslims alike; men, women and children—with the killing continuing all night and into the next day and then the next. Some Jews who’d taken refuge in a synagogue were burned alive when the Christians set it ablaze. And according to an Arab historian, when some seventy thousand Muslims, including many renowned scholars, managed to squeeze into the vast al-Aqsa mosque under the protection of a Christian banner and lock themselves in, the Crusaders simply forced an entry next morning and massacred them all.

As the city’s defenses collapsed, some Moslem soldiers who’d sought refuge in the citadel managed to fight on for three days, but in the end were forced to surrender to the invaders in return for safe passage to Ascalon. They were the only Moslems known to have escaped Jerusalem alive.

To sum up the remembrances of one participant: “Now that our men had taken control of the city, wonderful sights were to be seen. The city was filled with corpses and blood. Some of our men chopped the heads off their enemies; others shot them with arrows until they fell from the towers; others tortured them for as long as possible by casting them into one of the many fires. Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen everywhere. It was necessary to pick one’s way over the bodies of men and horses. But these were small matters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon. If I were to tell the full story of that, it would exceed your powers of belief. So let it suffice to say that at the Temple and on the porch of Solomon, our men rode with enemy blood dripping from their bodies and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that the place was absolutely filled with the blood of the unbelievers, since it had suffered for so long from their blasphemies.”

On the other hand, another participant, the Archbishop of Tyre, simply wrote: “It was impossible to look upon the vast numbers of the slain without horror; everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, and the very ground was covered with the blood of the slain. It was not alone the spectacle of headless bodies and mutilated limbs strewn in all directions that roused the horror of all who looked upon them. Still more dreadful was it to gaze upon the victors themselves, dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight that brought terror to all who met them.”

So the crusaders indeed achieved their goal; and when a numerically superior Egyptian Muslim army marched on the city shortly afterward to challenge the Christians’ claim on it, it too was routed—thereby ending Muslim resistance to the Christans for the time being; while in the end, five small, Christian states were set up in the region, one each under the rule of one of the Crusade’s remaining leaders.

(to be continued)
_________________________

Sources

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Got anything recent ? LOL
The word "gospel" means "good news".
Are you saying these atrocities are good news ?

[Rubaiyyat]

The historicity of virtually the entire Old Testament has been debunked, including very recent updates concerning that.
Moses was a mythical figure from the Northern tribes' cultural lore. He did not exist. The myths about his being found in a basket in or near a river came straight from Babylonian/other ancient Mesopotamian lore. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/746...-of-akkad/ ... which was discovered when the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal was unearthed in the late 1800's. Then also it was discovered that Yahweh had a wife, (Ashera) and the origins of Yahweh were also discovered. He was one of many sons of the Most High God (of Babylon).  

There was no exodus. That many people wandering around in the desert would have left *some* traces. There are none.
As Finkelstein and his associates (also William Dever) ... eminent archaeologists, have proven.
There is no evidence at all of a large Semitic presence in Egypt, ever. Egypt controlled the ENTIRE ancient Near East. What sense would it make
to go from one place Egypt controlled to another ? There are archaeological records they have of reports and orders and conversations between the Egyptian rulers, and the garrisons/outposts up in Canaan. The OT is all myth, including the notion that a "Moses" wrote anything ... it has him writing about his own death and burial. Woops.

There are a lot of things in the Bible that are totally hilarious.
It says Yahweh is a loving god. Then it says he told Israel to wipe out the babies in the neighboring villages.
It says a higher god (Yahweh's father) gave Yahweh his portion of the nations, Israel.
I also like the one where the Witch of Endor conjures up the shade of Samuel for Saul, ... LOL

https://ksuweb.kennesaw.edu/~tkeene/ogtIsraelHerzog.pdf



If Min stops by, can you repost the link to the new (later) dates for the OT being written. Thanks. It's here somewhere, .. I don't see it.

The Documentary Hypothesis dates the Pentateuch (as does the Bible itself in the book of Nehemiah, which describes the introduction of the Pentateuch by Ezra, returning from the Exile, in a fall festival, for Israel). to the 5th Century BC. There are many reasons to now doubt that. Moses certainly wrote none of it. There was no "office" or function (as there was in Greece and Islam, the "Hafiz") to memorize texts, (as the finest scholars on Israeli texts say), (one being Dr William Schneidewind, "How the Bible Became a Book", UCLA), and Dr. Richard Elliott  Friedmann, both of whom I was lucky enough to have for class.

I don't post "bibliographies". I post SPECIFIC references to specific experts, and support specific claims.

[Rubaiyyat]

The historicity of virtually the entire Old Testament has been debunked, including very recent updates concerning that.
Moses was a mythical figure from the Northern tribes' cultural lore. He did not exist. The myths about his being found in a basket in or near a river came straight from Babylonian/other ancient Mesopotamian lore. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/746...-of-akkad/ ... which was discovered when the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal was unearthed in the late 1800's. Then also it was discovered that Yahweh had a wife, (Ashera) and the origins of Yahweh were also discovered. He was one of many sons of the Most High God (of Babylon).  

There was no exodus. That many people wandering around in the desert would have left *some* traces. There are none.
As Finkelstein and his associates (also William Dever) ... eminent archaeologists, have proven.
There is no evidence at all of a large Semitic presence in Egypt, ever. Egypt controlled the ENTIRE ancient Near East. What sense would it make
to go from one place Egypt controlled to another ? There are archaeological records they have of reports and orders and conversations between the Egyptian rulers, and the garrisons/outposts up in Canaan. The OT is all myth, including the notion that a "Moses" wrote anything ... it has him writing about his own death and burial. Woops.

There are a lot of things in the Bible that are totally hilarious.
It says Yahweh is a loving god. Then it says he told Israel to wipe out the babies in the neighboring villages.
It says a higher god (Yahweh's father) gave Yahweh his portion of the nations, Israel.
I also like the one where the Witch of Endor conjures up the shade of Samuel for Saul, ... LOL

https://ksuweb.kennesaw.edu/~tkeene/ogtIsraelHerzog.pdf



If Min stops by, can you repost the link to the new (later) dates for the OT being written. Thanks. It's here somewhere, .. I don't see it.

The Documentary Hypothesis dates the Pentateuch (as does the Bible itself in the book of Nehemiah, which describes the introduction of the Pentateuch by Ezra, returning from the Exile, in a fall festival, for Israel). to the 5th Century BC. There are many reasons to now doubt that. Moses certainly wrote none of it. There was no "office" or function (as there was in Greece and Islam, the "Hafiz") to memorize texts, (as the finest scholars on Israeli texts say), (one being Dr William Schneidewind, "How the Bible Became a Book", UCLA), and Dr. Richard Elliott  Friedmann, both of whom I was lucky enough to have for class.

I don't post "bibliographies". I post SPECIFIC references to specific experts, and support specific claims.

[Rubaiyyat]

Bibliography?! I've providing the sources from which I drew obtained the information in the article. Go check them out, if you dare in view of your righteous spew. And I'm an atheist, but not so much that I have to see bullshit in every last word of religious texts--just in your response, maybe.

[Rubaiyyat]

The historicity of virtually the entire Old Testament has been debunked, including very recent updates concerning that.
Moses was a mythical figure from the Northern tribes' cultural lore. He did not exist. The myths about his being found in a basket in or near a river came straight from Babylonian/other ancient Mesopotamian lore. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/746...-of-akkad/ ... which was discovered when the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal was unearthed in the late 1800's. Then also it was discovered that Yahweh had a wife, (Ashera) and the origins of Yahweh were also discovered. He was one of many sons of the Most High God (of Babylon).  

There was no exodus. That many people wandering around in the desert would have left *some* traces. There are none.
As Finkelstein and his associates (also William Dever) ... eminent archaeologists, have proven.
There is no evidence at all of a large Semitic presence in Egypt, ever. Egypt controlled the ENTIRE ancient Near East. What sense would it make
to go from one place Egypt controlled to another ? There are archaeological records they have of reports and orders and conversations between the Egyptian rulers, and the garrisons/outposts up in Canaan. The OT is all myth, including the notion that a "Moses" wrote anything ... it has him writing about his own death and burial. Woops.

There are a lot of things in the Bible that are totally hilarious.
It says Yahweh is a loving god. Then it says he told Israel to wipe out the babies in the neighboring villages.
It says a higher god (Yahweh's father) gave Yahweh his portion of the nations, Israel.
I also like the one where the Witch of Endor conjures up the shade of Samuel for Saul, ... LOL

https://ksuweb.kennesaw.edu/~tkeene/ogtIsraelHerzog.pdf



If Min stops by, can you repost the link to the new (later) dates for the OT being written. Thanks. It's here somewhere, .. I don't see it.

The Documentary Hypothesis dates the Pentateuch (as does the Bible itself in the book of Nehemiah, which describes the introduction of the Pentateuch by Ezra, returning from the Exile, in a fall festival, for Israel). to the 5th Century BC. There are many reasons to now doubt that. Moses certainly wrote none of it. There was no "office" or function (as there was in Greece and Islam, the "Hafiz") to memorize texts, (as the finest scholars on Israeli texts say), (one being Dr William Schneidewind, "How the Bible Became a Book", UCLA), and Dr. Richard Elliott  Friedmann, both of whom I was lucky enough to have for class.

I don't post "bibliographies". I post SPECIFIC references to specific experts, and support specific claims.

[Rubaiyyat]

I assume you read my lead-in . . ."Revered in three different religions as not only the most important figure in early Judaism, but most likely..." I didn't say that it was a fact, or that In believed it to be true. Some of you guys/gals are too quick to either pick a fight with some 'straw man' observation that you think you've made or at least seize the opportunity to show off your ignorance under the guise of some wild revisionist history that I gather you got from Peter Pan. I'm an atheist--but a fair, no longer hateful or bitter atheist, willing to admit that not EVERYTHING in the traditional religious texts is bullshit. See you around.

[Rubaiyyat]

Ah yes, the argument from authority. Why are you here?
You're a published author. We could pick up one of your books if any of us so desired.

[Rubaiyyat]

Actually, you couldn't, since you don't know my name--much less the pseudonym that I write under. But fair enough; why don't you start with my latest, which is due to be released as an ebook sometime within the next 48 hours on Amazon: "Thoughts on the Natural Evolution of 'Mary'"; it's a history that picks up the idea of the Great Mother some 40,000 years ago in the Stone Age and traces it all the way to the mythical figure of Mary in modern Christianity, through art--with more than a thousand supporting photographs. Cheers, friend. See you around.

[Inkubus]

...not EVERYTHING in the traditional religious texts is bullshit. See you around.

For example?

.........................................................

Rubaiyyat, press the reply button any type:

[Here]

[Dānu]

[Bucky Ball]

I don't care what he claims to be.

He implied that Moses actually wrote something, and he said, unequivocally, that something happened at Mt Saini.
Both are total bullshit, as any scholar would know who studied the Bible in the last 20 years knows.

Now I see he is totally unable to defend his assertions, he can't even try.
He is dismissed as yet another ignorant pretending there is some 'expertise" there.

Why is he being allowed to advertise his book here ?
Nothing but worthless uneducated drivel.

[Rubaiyyat]

I assume that in your hurry to pick a fight and show off the revisionist history that you learned on your recent visit to Uranus, you missed my lead-in . . ."Revered in three different religions as not only the most important figure in early Judaism, but MOST LIKELY . . ." So where did I say that it was true, much less that I personally believed it?? And unable to defend MY assertions? You mean the information that I gathered from the wide variety of sources that I listed at the end of my post? Go argue with them if you're that desperate for attention, otherwise, I have no interest in responding to your egomaniacal diatribe. And then, my book--that you haven't even laid eyes on yet--is "uneducated drivel"? What's the matter, big guy, you jealous? Insufferable know-it-all; at least you got that right! Read my book when it comes out tomorrow or Tuesday at the latest, and then if you want to have a civil discussion about all this, whatever your views--which needn't mesh with mine in order to be treated with respect by me, of course, and I would expect the same from you--I'll meet you back here and we'll get deeper into it. By the way, in reference to your remark about scholarly progress over the last 20 years or so, I will admit that I wrote that "Gospel of Atrocities" series back in the '60s, and that at 85 now, I haven't kept up with the latest biblical analyses in about a full generation. Cheers, fellow atheist and possible future friend.

[Rubaiyyat]

I assume you read my lead-in . . ."Revered in three different religions as not only the most important figure in early Judaism, but MOST LIKELY..." I didn't say that it was a fact, or that In believed it to be true. Some of you guys/gals are too quick to either pick a fight with some 'straw man' observation that you think you've made or at least seize the opportunity to show off your ignorance under the guise of some wild revisionist history that I gather you got from Peter Pan. I'm an atheist--but a fair, no longer hateful or bitter atheist, willing to admit that not EVERYTHING in the traditional religious texts is bullshit. See you around.

[Rubaiyyat]

...not EVERYTHING in the traditional religious texts is bullshit. See you around.

For example?

.........................................................

Rubaiyyat, press the reply button any type:

[Here]

[Rubaiyyat]

"Okay, for example"--to use your words. May I share with you a brief (for me, anyway) article that I recently posted on another site:


TWO BEGINNINGS

"Understandably, theists’ stories of the ‘Creation’ tend to begin with three seemingly simple words: In the Beginning . . .

"But as one moves deeper into the various narratives that follow them, sometimes one discovers that the words didn’t mean what one might have thought they meant at first glance; because while sometimes they go on to speculate on the creation of the natural world, others may turn out to focus, rather, on merely the creation of a people and their culture within that world—while at most, barely touching on the other issue in passing.

"As a case in point, have you ever wondered why there are two noticeably different Creation stories in the Judeo-Christianity account? They appear back-to-back in its sacred Old Testament book, Genesis. In both versions, one reads—in English, anyway—“In the beginning, God . . .” But someone reading those same words in the OT’s original Hebrew finds that that word ‘God’ doesn’t refer to the same entity in both stories!

"In the first, apparently older story, the Hebrew word that’s translated into English as ‘God’ is Elohim; while in the second, it’s Yahweh. And the difference? Well for one thing, the -im at the end of a Hebrew word indicates a plural—same as the -en functions in certain German words, or our simple -s does in English. Thus ‘Elohim’ is actually a plural word—or to be more exact, the plural form of ‘eloah’: an innocuous, im-personal generic term that just means something like ‘force’ or ‘power.’ In short, as but the plural form of an impersonal Hebrew noun, Elohim isn’t a personal name at all—and doesn’t even refer to a singular entity, or being, but at least two!

"In the second story, the word that’s translated into English as ‘God’ is *Yahweh—*a singular, personal noun, as in someone’s name. No problem with that translation. But that story isn’t really about the creation of the world—granted that it briefly touches on the matter at the outset. It’s specifically about the creation of the Jewish people as a people or nation. Which is why Yahweh is never referred to in the second story as just ‘God’, but always—and always fully in upper case—as the 'Lord God’.

"And then as for the verb immediately following ‘God’ in the English version, "created"—well, we need to take a second look at that past tense. Because back when Genesis was written, Hebrew verbs didn’t have tenses as such; rather, as with some modern languages, their verbs simply distinguished, via a special prefix, between action that was ongoing—with reference to the past, present, or future to be determined by the context—and then, via a special suffix, action that had been completed, or was now over and done with.

"While the Hebrew verb that comes across in English as ‘created’ in the first story appears to be of the over-and-done-with variety, it’s immediately followed by so many of the other throughout the rest of the story that biblical scholars find it entirely within the realm of possibility that somewhere along the way, some scribe, while making a copy of it, either accidentally or deliberately changed the meaning of that one word, possibly to bring the first story more into line with the spirit of the second.

"So now let’s paraphrase a little: In the Beginning, interacting (natural] forces created the world, which is still being created or ‘evolving’ today and will continue to evolve . . . or something like that. Suddenly, one isn’t reading just another Creation myth satisfying only to theists, but a perfectly reasonable, timeless truth. Damn, I can certainly live with that better translation!

It's the rest of the OT, which after the first Creation story becomes simply a text describing and preserving for the Hebrew people the story of their supposedly heroic creation, subsequent history, and uniquely inspired literature that turns me away from the remainder of the narrative--since I'm not Hebrew, the Hebrew book and the culture that it talks about mean nothing to me, and in fact are none of my business.

But that one, opening line, paraphrased here as, "In the beginning, interacting [natural] forces began to create the world, which continues [to create itself, or evolve] even today, and will continue to do so in the future . . . " is for me a beautiful bit of poetry that captures my imagination and ultimately satisfies me like few other attempts at explaining the world that I've ever encountered; matches up neatly with everything that I know about science and my favorite source of deep thinking, eastern philosophy; and I don't mind admitting that atheist or not, I actually found the idea hidden in a poor translation of someone's sacred religious literature!

"Of course, both Jewish and Christian apologists hoping to sound authoritative to the laity typically twist things around to try to make people believe that ‘Elohim’ and ‘Yahweh’ really mean the same thing. To which one may now safely say, “Bullshit!” and turn scornfully away from them as complicit in helping to maintain the traditional religious establishment’s or theists' Big Lie.