Though I was raised Catholic, I am, at age 63, no longer Catholic nor Christian. This happened in a pretty natural way, I would say. I attended Catholic elementary school for 6 years, then went to public schools after that. I was pretty much an atheist by the time I started junior high school. I didn't use that word though. I just knew I didn't believe the religion stuff anymore. I kept up appearances, but eventually it became clear to some of the people around me what was going on. And after that, by the end of high school, I was no longer going to church with the family.
I understand what it means to take the other's burden on oneself. Imagine if I was your boss and you got a parking ticket while working for me, and I paid the ticket for you. I understand how that would help you. You understand how that would benefit you. But if I killed myself instead, it would not pay your ticket. I don't see how it would help you at all, really. Somehow Jesus' suicide by cop is supposed to help us all, but I don't see it.
He supposedly took on all of our sins, but how much do those weigh? You couldn't trade all the sins in the world for a plug nickel.
Remember that despite dying for everyone's sins, Jesus sends the wicked into the lake of fire in the book of the apocalypse, so, what are we to make of that? Didn't Jesus already accept the divine punishment for all those sinners? Why the double harm? First Jesus dies over it, then souls get the lake of fire for it, and that makes two divine penalties for every sin worthy of damnation.
That is just one of thousands of intellectual problems in the bible. It isn't just the absurdity of believing in the magic creation of mankind by the saying of words, or the talking donkey story in the old testament, or the talking snake, or the flying wheel, or the resurrections and virgin births. No, the entire New Testament story is hokum. It is badly written pure myth. And the way it is thought about, that is, the way the churches have interpreted the NT, is even more hokey than the original book. All of the world's sins all at once for all time? What on earth are you smoking?
For me there is also a kind of moral absurdity that is everywhere in the bible, such as the fact that I am supposed to respect rather than revile Abraham, Jeptha and several genocidal kings in the old testament.
Another thing that bothers me is the fact that the churchlies and theologians and apologists and holy historians respect and revere, rather than hate, the Roman empire.
May I just say this: if you don't hate the Roman empire, isn't there something wrong with you? Slavery. Empire building (stealing other people's land). Ethnocide. Religicide. Endless war. Animal sacrifices. Human sacrifices. Gladiatorial murder for sport. Strict control over public speech. Strict class system. Forced religion.
The beginning of the end of ancient culture was Julius Caesar, who destroyed the republic and installed himself as autocrat. After less than a century of Emperors, the persecution of the stoics began under Nero. Philosophers were expelled from the city of Rome by Vespasian. Then they were expelled from Italy by Domitian, which forced Epictetus to move to Greece, which in turn forced a young Hadrian to go to Greece to study with him.
It is sad to see the republic turned into a kingdom by those pigs Julius, Augustus and Tiberius. I truly hate the arch criminal Julius Caesar, but that does not mean I love the republic against which Hannibal fought. No, I hate that too. I especially love to hate Emperor Justinian in particular. Justinian is a saint in the Eastern Orthodox Church. I also very much hate the wife and son killer, Emperor Constantine, another murderer made a saint by the Eastern church. His mother is a saint in the Roman Catholic church. They are quite a pair to despise, no? Mother and son saints in two different churches? Mother and the son who killed his wife and child, and who chose Christianity because the other priesthoods would not offer expiation for the sin? I figure his mom was just as evil as he was.
So again let me point out that I was raised Catholic. What do I think of the Catholic church? I would like to say something nice, but I just can't really. I think it is a crime of some kind, this church.
The allegedly universal church came into being through a crime against humanity known as the destruction of paganism. This was an over 300 year long murderous and violent suppression of indigenous cultures throughout the empire. It was religicide, it was ethnocide, and it was a project of the imperial office, that is, of the emperors. It did not come up to the emperor from his governors and senators and consuls. No, it went down to them from the imperial office. Christianity was forced on the empire by Constantine and all of the emperors, except Julian, who came after him. This massive crime against humanity began around 313 and ran on for centuries. The Christians were still forcing conversions on newly discovered pagans in the 800s.
After the western Roman empire disappeared, the Roman Catholic church (and, after 1064, an Eastern version of it) continued the project of threatening, torturing and murdering heretics.
The Crusades (1096-1291) were a crime against humanity.
The Inquisition (1231-1908) was a crime against humanity. The last execution of a heretic by the Roman inquisition was in 1761. It was six years earlier, in 1755 that the Roman office of the inquisition put Casanova on trial for spreading libertine ideas, owning forbidden books, and practicing magic. The last execution by the Spanish Inquisition was in 1826. The office of the Spanish Inquisition was officially shut down by the Spanish crown in 1834. Napoleon abolished the French office in 1808, though it had become ineffective in the revolution of 1789 when the church lost its judicial powers. However, as recently as 1858 the office of the Roman Inquisition kidnapped a Jewish child who had allegedly been secretly baptized. This, they pretend, made the child a Christian and Christians cannot be raised by non-Christians according to some stupid papal law. The pope refused to return the child, who grew up to become a priest. The Roman office of the inquisition was converted to an office called Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 1908. This is the office that still to this day harasses liberal theologians and tries to ban books. So, the ancient Roman impulse to resort to crime against opponents dies hard, it dies very hard. There is still an office for goading and depriving the opposition.
And it is easy to argue that those are not the only great crimes that the church has committed. The Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) was published in 1486 by an official church inquisitor. It became the handbook for witch hunts and witch trials all over Europe for three centuries. The last witch trial and execution was in the 1780s. The witch trials in England and the Holy Roman Empire are not to be confused with the inquisition, which was an office of the Catholic church licensed to kidnap, imprison, maim and kill heretics. Witch trials, such as those in America, were not exclusively a Catholic thing. Anglicans, Lutherans and other sects joined in, with most of them using the Malleus as their manual.
During the middle ages, the Catholic church depicted Jews as heretics in league with the devil. This fueled the pogroms which the church occasionally denounced. There was an order from the pope to protect Jews from attacks after the disaster of the fourth crusade, in which Jews were attacked indiscriminately. There was a pope who denounced the idea that Jews were Christ killers. But this was pretty weak tea from Rome. The rights of Jews to live free of Christian harassment is not something the Catholic church recognizes.
The Church was two faced and ineffective on the matter of the treatment of indigenous peoples in the Americas in the 1500s and after. Remember 1492, when Isabella of Spain gave Columbus ships to sail the ocean blue? She also expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492. It was a big year for the holy queen. The church never denounced the expulsion of the Jews, and of course it never denounced the robbery of the Incas by Spain's Catholics. It also did not object to the enslavement of natives in the Americas. Instead they opened offices of the Inquisition in Mexico City and Peru.
The Catholic Church owned slaves from the Roman era until the 1840s --as many as 1400 years.* The Catholic church did not condemn the slave trade until 1839. Jesus explicitly preaches slavery, as does the old testament, so, it was a long time coming. American Jesuits sold off their last slaves sometime after 1840 (they did not simply emancipate them). Two decades later, the Catholic church declared itself officially neutral during the American civil war (1860-65). Meanwhile, the pope wrote a letter to Jefferson Davis, president of the confederacy, recognizing his new nation. I find the content of this paragraph utterly unforgivable.
Imagine what a better world this would have been if one of the ten commandments had abolished slavery! If god actually contacted some iron age tribe, why didn't he abolish slavery, or teach hygiene?
In the 20th century, a pope signed the infamous Concordat with Hitler's Germany, giving the church a tithe, a tenth, of the taxes paid by German Catholics, who represented around a third of the nation. So it was on the order of a tenth of a third of taxes collected by the Nazis that went to the Roman Catholic church to buy its silence, support and complicity. Hitler's birthdays were celebrated in all Catholic and Lutheran pulpits throughout the Reich.
The holocaust was, of course, a crime against humanity perpetrated by Christians of assorted denominations, including plenty of Catholics.
Today the Catholic church in America is a backward, Trumpist outfit, working to take away women's rights and ban books. They want to fight gays and queers and trannies and abortion, but not corporate polluters, pedos, rapists or fascists. Them they want to put in the white house.
The church is still paying out millions to children who have been sexually abused by its priests, and it still does not fully cooperate with communities on the matter of outing abusers and getting them permanently away from children. In the US they have paid out over $3 billion now. There are cases all over the world though. In France, there are estimates of 300k victims. Because the cases are in several languages and nations, it is difficult to find a full accounting of all the damage so far.
Meanwhile, in Africa, the Catholic Church remains the biggest obstacle to the use of condoms to prevent the transmission of aids.
It is a crime, this church. Its history is a history of the most abject moral failure, the most total moral abandonment! The pope is no better than Atilla the Hun or Genghis Khan.
Here in the USA our jails are full of Christians. The hoodlums and bigots who attacked the American Capitol on Jan 6, 2021, were Christians. Christians did America's lynching too. The KKK is a Christian outfit. Christians did the Indian killing, the western slaving, the holocaust, the pogroms, the witch murders, the Inquisition, the Crusades and the slow, centuries-long torture-killing of paganism. Christian inhumanity, Christian bigotry, Christian violence, Christian crimes against humanity.
Xns come in every variety. No general rule about them can be set up. They are not particularly good or bad, talented or dull, etc. Christianity started out as a veil for evil and it remains a veil for evil to this day. I do not believe all Christians are evil. No, there are good and bad people in every avenue. There are good and bad people in sports, in the arts, in public service and in every industry. That is just human nature. There are plenty of nice people going to church. There are also rotten people going to church. To deny this is to confess total ignorance about society. The rotten people at church are there for the veil effect, the good people provide it. That is how it has always worked, and the whole scheme still works, it just has lots of competitors today.
I dare you to scrutinize Christian history looking for happiness. The church is not about happiness, they do not even study it. After the long rule of religious ignorance in the west, happiness itself had to be reconquered by enlightenment, along with science and scholarship. We are still reconquering happiness today. People are afraid to be happy. They think its a sin.
Religion is a costly enterprise that will squander anything and everything for no gain. It serves the interest of the priest/church and no other. Religion is a self-perpetuating game in which all doctrine, all practice, and all statements are intended to protect and strengthen victimizers at the expense of their victims. This goes for monotheism as well as polytheism and Buddhism -- the main parts of religion are the reward of priests/elites and the exploitation of believers/dupes.
Of all arts, the art of exploiting religious feeling is the most worked out and subtle art in the human arsenal. Procession, recession, presentation, adoration, oratory, music, dance, magic, color, light, darkness, architecture, image, text -- religion uses it all. By the time the Roman Empire was toying with Christianity, the priestly charade had been working for over 3 thousand years. Christianity represents the harvest of the ancient world in precisely that area, the harvest of at least three millennia of practice and repetition in the subtlest of elite arts.
From 313 onward, however, it was brute force that protected and promoted it. Every night, all over the empire, so-called monks formed gangs and broke into the homes of well to do pagans. They destroyed all of their pagan materials, statues, images, symbols, books, etc. Some of these people had extensive holdings, meaning they had dozens of statues if not hundreds. They had grottos and shrines on their properties. They had paintings and dinnerware with motifs that recall myths. They had writing too. All of it was destroyed. People all over the empire lived in fear of these mobs of "monks" for around three hundred years.
The mobs only destroyed sacred buildings. They did not destroy the Parthenon in Athens because it was not a temple. But the mobs were illiterate. When it came to written words, they could not be expected to discern what the writings were about. So, they simply destroyed all of a homeowner's written holdings. Whether it was a medical text, a ship-building plan, a love letter, or a poem to Dionysus did not matter. The mobs burned the written word indiscriminately. Because they systematically raided every pagan property, they, and the laws they operated under and the terror of the times, managed to burn the national literatures of three continents.
After 300 years of systemic crime against their enemies, Christian barbarians ruled the ashes of the ancient world. Literacy and craft were dead. Serfdom awaited the masses, ignorance and superstition were everywhere, but there was one church, one emperor, one god. Yeuch. The years of Justinian and the dark ages that soon followed were abysmal times to be alive.
The destruction of the ancient world, the destruction of everyone else's religion, the destruction of other people's possessions in the name of your filthy, barbaric superstitions? Your stupid religion gives you the right to break into your neighbor's house and smash their possessions because their gods are demons and yours is not? No, sorry, your god is the demon. Fuck Jesus with a broomstick!
If I had a religion, it would not authorize violence, slavery, genocide or religicide.
If your religion is Christianity, then your religion not only authorizes but practices those things.
If your church is the Catholic church and you live in America, your church probably needs to be de-nazified.
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* How long the church owned slaves depend on its time of origin.
When did the Catholic Church actually begin? The church likes to lie about this, so look into it critically and independently.
If by Catholic church you mean early Christianity, then it begins in the 1st century with the apostles, but this really does not resemble the Catholic church.
If by Catholic church you mean a heirarchical institution based in Rome with a pope and canon law, you are talking about something that forms gradually between 313 and the 800s, and becomes fully distinct by 1054.
If by Catholic church you mean the fully developed system of papal supremacy and doctrine, it takes this full shape between 1054 and 1500.
Almost every Catholic I have ever known answers the question as to when the Catholic church began by saying it starts with Peter in Rome, that he is the first pope, and so on. Don't believe any of that. There were no popes at that time, and no bishops of Rome either. It was the the bishop of Rome known as Victor I, in the 190's, who first tried to impose his decision on other churches. He tried to impose uniformity on the date of Easter. His effort failed because the other bishops ignored him and churches continued to celebrate Easter on various dates. So, if a central authority over many churches is required as a criterion for saying that the Catholic church existed, it did not exist in the time of Victor I, and so the Catholic church did not yet exist. Constantine legalized Christianity in 313 and convened the council of Nicea in 325, but this was an imperial enterprise, not a papal one. The bishop of Rome known as Damasus I, in the 360's, pushed an idea called Roman Supremacy, which upped the status of the bishop of Rome. The Catholic church still calls Victor I and Damasus I popes, but they were no such thing. With the fall of the western Roman empire in the 470's, the bishop of Rome became notably more important -- the only authority figure still standing in the west. In the 590's, a bishop of Rome known as Gregory I expanded his office to include political activity. He too is not really a pope yet, but the church pretends he is. The bishop of Rome gained temporal power in central Italy only in the 700's. And when the great east-west schism came in 1054, the bishop of Rome got free of the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople, and the independent pope was finally at hand. What we think of as a pope, namely a man at the head of a world wide church that is independent of all governments, only comes into existence then.
What is important to notice is that the church only gets its chance to lead when the western emperors disappear, and it gains its strength as more and more of the old pagan world is destroyed.
That the Catholic church was born out of the destruction of paganism is pretty undeniable. What we know as Christianity has its roots in Roman cruelty and tyranny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YFTgw8Bkec&t=345s
https://www.jesusneverexisted.com/dark-age/
https://www.rassias.gr/9011.html
Headline: Frankfurt Silver Inscription: Oldest Christian Inscription North of the Alps. This article from 12/12/24 describes a recently deciphered Roman amulet from around the year 270 which says the following:
(In the name?) of St. Titus.Holy, holy, holy!In the name of Jesus Christ, Son of God!The lord of the worldresists to the best of his [ability?]all seizures(?)/setbacks(?).The god(?) grants well-beingAdmission.This rescue device(?) protectsthe person whosurrenders to the willof the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God,since before Jesus Christbend all knees: the heavenly ones,the earthly andthe subterranean, and every tongueconfess (to Jesus Christ).
The ms is not fully legible, but notice the final lines: "before Jesus Christ bend all knees: the heavenly ones, the earthly and the subterranean, and every tongue confess (to Jesus Christ)". This is pure totalitarianism, and it comes from 40 years before the office of the emperor of Rome took the Jesus cult under its protection in 313, which began the process of trying to force every knee in the empire to bend to the one god.
