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“The funds for all this had to be found from somewhere. Now, Constantine turned to ‘those accursed and foul people’ who had chosen to stubbornly ‘hold themselves back’ from Christianity and continue visiting their ‘sanctuaries of falsehood’ – in other words, those people who would soon be called ‘pagans’. The means by which Constantine chose to take some of this wealth was simple – and humiliating: he demanded that the statues be taken from the temples. Christian officials, so it was said, travelled the empire, ordering the priests of the old religion to bring their statues out of the temples. From the 330s onwards some of the most sacred objects in the empire started to be removed. It is hard, today, to understand the enormity of Constantine’s order. If Michelangelo’s Pietà were taken from the Vatican and sold, it would be considered a terrible act of cultural vandalism – but it wouldn’t be sacrilege as the statue is not in itself sacred. Statues in Roman temples were. To remove them was a gross violation, and Constantine knew it.”

WealthChristianityDestructionMonotheismVandalismSacrilege
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.”

TruthFilmScienceReligionFaithLiteraturePoliticsUnited StatesProgressAtheismSelf LoveEnlightenmentArgumentLiesHumanismConvictionRussiaSocialismJournalismCommunismIronyGermanyLos AngelesIndividualismSouth AfricaCold WarSoviet UnionTotalitarianismCritical ThinkingOrthodoxyBerlinSelf PityApartheidPostmodernismLiterary CriticismSectarianismTribalismPopulismEuphemismHedonismMonotheismGeorge OrwellMunichGroupthinkSolipsismPolytheismThomas MannPotusRonald ReaganRadical PoliticsMargaret ThatcherRight Wing PoliticsLeft Wing PoliticsApoliticismGeorge Hw BushBought PriesthoodXhosa PeopleZulu PeopleCape ColouredsEurocentricismGerman PeoplePersonality Politics
Book:For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports
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“Polytheistic Greek mythology includes some stories that tell of intervention by Zeus in human affairs but others that tell of Zeus’s life among his fellow gods. In the Bible, God, being the only god, does not have that second kind of action through which to present himself. But the peculiarity of God’s character does not end there. God could conceivably engage in some kind of demonstrative action that would serve his own self-presentation apart from any interaction with man: miraculous displays, cosmic disruptions, the creation of other worlds. But in fact he refrains from all such activity. Not only does he lack any social life among other gods but he also lacks what we might call a private life. His only way of pursuing an interest in himself is through mankind.”

GodReligionChristianityMankindBibleGreek MythologyMonotheismPolytheism
Book:God: A Biography
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“[T]here is another side to this Christian story, one that is worlds away from the bookish monks and careful copyists of legend. It is a far less glorious tale of how some philosophers were beaten, tortured, interrogated and exiled and their beliefs forbidden; it is a story of how intellectuals set light to their own libraries in fear. And it is above all a story that is told by absences: of how literature lost its liberty; how certain topics dropped from philosophical debate – and then started to vanish from the pages of history. It is a story of silence.”

PhilosophyFearFreedomSilenceChristianityDestructionCensorshipMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“Some humans are made to trust in their supernatural Creator(s) to watch over them, make their lives better, protect them from each other, maybe even save them from themselves and their own actions… Listen, and listen well to that huge silenced inner voice of yours; It should be heard along with all the others. Here is what I heard from mine: “Until proof of the existence of a loving Monotheism-presented God or any supernatural Creator, it is man who will watch over man; We have nobody else Just us Just each other.”

InspirationalReligionHumanismSelf RelianceMonotheism
Book:The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity
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“Making decent human beings accept the principle of a private, divine covenant be it first, second, third, old, new or whatever, will destroy all humanity and decency in our species. All these diverging and contradicting one man “revelations” will always destroy our HUMAN grace, to serve one of the many “versions” of a hypothetical DIVINE grace… Something like… rape for a divine virginity…”

ReligionGraceHumanismThoughtCovenantRevelationDivine GraceMonotheismHuman Grace
Book:The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity
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“DIVINE NECESSITY creates “others” even among family members who become good to be killed by family members… HUMAN NECESSITY commands man to resurrect the supposed reason for which God supposedly shattered humanity in Babylon: The “Covenant” among men.”

ReligionHumanismThoughtSelf RelianceCovenantMonotheismHuman NecessityDivine Necessity
Book:The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity
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“Only man’s misdirected abstract mind can delude its own desire to know by creating contradicting belief systems using self-contradicting myths, and then make itself believe that these “revealed” belief systems are in fact the only “truths”, Then kill and die FOR them, Instead of saving each other FROM them.”

MindReligionCreationHumanismCreatorThoughtDelusionMonotheism
Book:The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity
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“In a now-familiar paradox of punishment it was explained again and again that all these physical attacks were a kindness. The Church persecutes, Augustine said, in the spirit of love. Jerome, the biblical scholar and saint, concurred: it was not cruel to defend God’s honour – in the Bible sinners suffer punishments up to and including death. Chrysostom agreed: if he were to punish your earthly body, he reassured his listeners, it was only to protect your eternal one so that ‘you may be saved, and we may rejoice, and God may be glorified now and always, for ever and ever without end. Amen.’ Those receiving such salvation might, not unreasonably, have felt otherwise. One monk in Shenoute’s care was saved with beatings so savage that he died of his injuries. And what if people, disinclined to rejoice, became frightened by the fact that their neighbours were spying on them, reporting on them, hounding them in their homes? Well, fear too had its benefits. Better to be scared than to sin. ‘Where there is terror,’ said Augustine, ‘there is salvation . . . Oh, merciful savagery!’ The intellectual foundations for a thousand years of theocratic oppression were being laid.”

LoveFearSinChristianityKindnessPunishmentCrueltyAfterlifeMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“[I]n the years that followed the persecutions, Christianity came to see itself, with great pride, as a persecuted Church. Its greatest heroes were not those who did good deeds but those who died in the most painful way. If you were willing to die an excruciating end in the arena then, whatever your previous holiness or lack thereof, you went straight to heaven: martyrdom wiped out all sins on the point of death. As well as getting there faster, martyrs enjoyed preferential terms in paradise, getting to wear the much-desired martyr’s crown. Tempting celestial terms were offered: it was said that the scripture promised ‘multiplication, even to a hundred times, of brothers, children, parents, land and homes’. Precisely how this celestial sum had been calculated is not clear but the general principle was: those who died early, publicly and painfully would be best rewarded. In many of the martyr tales the driving force is less that the Romans want to kill – and more that the Christians want to die. Why wouldn’t they? Paradoxically, martyrdom held considerable benefits for those willing to take it on. One was its egalitarian entry qualifications. As George Bernard Shaw acidly observed over a millennium later, martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability. More than that, in a socially and sexually unequal era it was a way in which women and even slaves might shine. Unlike most positions of power in the highly socially stratified late Roman Empire, this was a glory that was open to all, regardless of rank, education, wealth or sex. The sociologist Rodney Stark has pointed out that – provided you believe in its promised rewards – martyrdom is a perfectly rational choice. A martyr could begin the day of their death as one of the lowliest people in the empire and end it as one of the most exalted in heaven. So tempting were these rewards that pious Christians born outside times of persecution were wont to express disappointment at being denied the opportunity of an agonizing death. When the later Emperor Julian pointedly avoided executing Christians in his reign, one Christian writer far from being grateful, sourly recorded that Julian had ‘begrudged the honour of martyrdom to our combatants’.”

ChristianitySacrificeMadnessEqualityAfterlifeMartyrdomMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“Christian observers would look on the tolerance of their non-Christian neighbours with astonishment. Augustine later marvelled at the fact that the pagans were able to worship many different gods without discord while the Christians, who worshipped just the one, splintered into countless warring factions. Indeed, many pagans like Celsus seemed to actively praise plurality. To the Christians, this was anathema. Christ was the way, the truth and the light and everything else was not merely wrong but plunged the believer into a demonic darkness. To allow someone to continue in an alternative form of worship or a heretical form of Christianity was not to allow religious freedom; it was to allow Satan to thrive. Augustine, despite being impressed by the harmony of his neighbours, was not willing to extend such tolerance himself. It was, he concluded, the duty of a good Christian to convert heretics – by force, if necessary. This was a theme to which he returned again and again. Far better a little compulsion in this life, than eternal damnation in the next. People could not always be trusted to know what was good for them. The good and caring Christian would therefore remove the means of sinning from the uncertain reach of the sinner. ‘For in most cases we serve others best by not giving, and would injure them by giving, what they desire,’ he explained. Do not put a sword in a child’s hand. ‘For the more we love any one, the more are we bound to avoid entrusting to him things which are the occasion of very dangerous faults.”

FreedomSinChristianityWorshipPaganismMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“Many treated his sudden conversion to Christianity with profound suspicion and more than a little distaste. This man of ‘evil disposition’ and ‘vicious inclinations’ had converted, wrote one non-Christian historian, not because of any burning heavenly crosses but because, having recently murdered his wife (he had – allegedly – boiled her in a bath because of a suspected affair with his son), he had been overcome by guilt. Yet the priests of the old gods were intransigent: Constantine was far too polluted, they said, to be purified of these crimes. No rites could cleanse him. At this moment of personal crisis Constantine happened to fall into conversation with a man who assured him that ‘the Christian doctrine would teach him how to cleanse himself from all his offences, and that they who received it were immediately absolved from all their sins’. Constantine, it was said, instantly believed.”

SinChristianityGuiltConversionCleansingMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“Today, in a world in which the very word ‘classical’ hints at something revered to the point of dullness, it is hard to understand quite how alarming many of these works were to the Christians. But to Christian eyes the classical canon had the power to horrify. It was replete with sins of every kind. Open Homer’s Iliad and you might find your eyes falling on a passage about how the god Ares seduced golden Aphrodite – and how they were both then caught in flagrante delicto. Open Oedipus the King and you might find a declaration that ‘the power of the gods is perishing’. Even works by the most stuffily august of authors were not without danger: open a work by the tediously virtuous Virgil, and you might find Dido and Aeneas up to no good in a cave in a rainstorm. Idolatry, blasphemy, lust, murder, vanity – every sin was there. That was what made them so enjoyable and, to the Christians, so damnable.”

SinChristianityRepressionMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“Carpe diem, Horace had said. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you will be dead for eternity. The monks offered an alternative to this view: die today and you might live for eternity. This was a life lived in terror of its end. ‘Always keep your death in mind,’ was a common piece of advice: do not forget the eternal judgement. When one brother started to laugh during a meal, he was immediately reproached by a fellow monk: ‘What does this brother have in his heart, that he should laugh, when he ought to weep?’ How should one live well in this new and austere world? By constantly accusing yourself, said another monk, by ‘constantly reproaching myself to myself.’ Sit in your cell all day, advised another, weeping for your sins.”

SinChristianityEternityMonotheismEternal Judgement
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“Once a monk had given himself to his new monastic master he had to obey him – or face the consequences. Numerous rules begin with the formulation ‘Cursed be . . .’. Cursed were those who didn’t give all their wealth to the monastery; cursed were those who shaved without having been ordered to; cursed were those who looked at another monk with desire. If a monk ate, say, the forbidden fruit of cucumber at the wrong time then, the law informed him, ‘he sins’. At least sixty of the rules were devoted to sexual transgressions. Looking desirously at the nakedness of your neighbour while he washed was wrong; as was staring ‘with desirous feeling’ at your own nakedness; those who sat ‘close to one’s neighbour with a filthy desire in their heart’ were also ‘cursed’. Note that last one: ‘with a filthy desire in their heart’. No sin had been committed. The mere intention of sin was now a sin in itself. In Shenoute’s monastery even thoughts were policed. ‘Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him?’ the Lord had asked. The answer from the White Monastery at least was a resounding no. As this new generation of hard-line Christian preachers constantly reminded their congregations in fierce, hectoring speeches, there was nowhere to hide from the all-seeing eyes of the Lord.”

SinChristianityPunishmentCurseMonotheismThought Crimes
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“The philosophy they had lived for starts to die itself. Some strands of ancient philosophy live on, preserved by the hands of some Christian philosophers – but it is not the same. Works that have to agree with the pre-ordained doctrines of a church are theology, not philosophy. Free philosophy has gone. The great destruction of classical texts gathers pace. The writings of the Greeks ‘have all perished and are obliterated’: that was what John Chrysostom had said. He hadn’t been quite right, then: but time would bring greater truth to his boast. Undefended by pagan philosophers or institutions, and disliked by many of the monks who were copying them out, these texts start to disappear. Monasteries start to erase the works of Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca and Archimedes. ‘Heretical’ – and brilliant – ideas crumble into dust. Pliny is scraped from the page. Cicero and Seneca are overwritten. Archimedes is covered over. Every single work of Democritus and his heretical ‘atomism’ vanishes. Ninety per cent of all classical literature fades away. Centuries later, an Arab traveller would visit a town on the edge of Europe and reflect on what had happened in the Roman Empire. ‘During the early days of the empire of the Rum,’ he wrote – meaning the Roman and Byzantine Empire – ‘the sciences were honoured and enjoyed universal respect. From an already solid and grandiose foundation, they were raised to greater heights every day, until the Christian religion made its appearance among the Rum; this was a fatal blow to the edifice of learning; its traces disappeared and its pathways were effaced.”

PhilosophyChristianityKnowledgeLearningIgnoranceDestructionTheologyMonotheismAtomism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“. . . In all parts of our globe, fanatics have cut each other's throats, publicly burnt each other, committed without a scruple and even as a duty, the greatest crimes, and shed torrents of blood . . . Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under divers names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty. We find, in all the religions, 'a God of armies,' a 'jealous God,' an 'avenging God,' a 'destroying God,' a 'God,' who is pleased with carnage, and whom his worshippers consider it a duty to serve. Lambs, bulls, children, men, and women, are sacrificed to him. Zealous servants of this barbarous God think themselves obliged even to offer up themselves as a sacrifice to him. Madmen may everywhere be seen, who, after meditating upon their terrible God, imagine that to please him they must inflict on themselves, the most exquisite torments. The gloomy ideas formed of the deity, far from consoling them, have every where disquieted their minds, and prejudiced follies destructive to happiness.”

WarGodHappinessDeathReligionSacrificeBloodAtheismCrimeDivineMurderKillingSelfishJealousGodsFanaticsMeditatingCruelConsolingMonotheismCarnageMassacreSavageDeityPolytheism
Author:Baron d'Holbach
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“Constantine was faced with an intransigent population who insisted on worshipping idols at the expense of the risen Lord. He realized that conversion would be more ‘easily accomplished if he could get them to despise their temples and the images contained therein’. And what better way to teach wayward pagans the vanity of their gods than by cracking open their statues and showing that they were, quite literally, empty? Moreover, a religious system in which sacrifice was central would struggle to survive if there was nothing to sacrifice to. There was good biblical precedent for his actions. In Deuteronomy, God had commanded that His chosen people should overthrow altars, burn sacred groves and hew down the graven images of the gods. If Constantine attacked the temples then he was not being a vandal. He was doing God’s good work.”

ChristianitySacrificeWorshipDestructionConversionMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“The core issue in monotheism is righteousness/wickedness. Righteous/wicked qualifies a person acting or being Good/bad. In an environment of scarcity, man’s vital strategy for collective survival hinges on being good to his clan and bad to rival clans to acquire or defend resources. So the creation/elaboration/nurture of both good and bad can only be the consequence of a primary cause: scarcity. Monotheism “Revealing” such a mental disadvantage in a Creator as to confuse consequences for causes is … revelatory.”

PhilosophyReligionCreatorThoughtUnreasonableRevelationScarcityIllogicalMonotheismGood EvilIncomprehensibleGood Bad
Author:Haroutioun Bochnakian
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“Monotheism and an absolute God define one another. The absolute is a mental construct, an abstract mental model. The absolute, whether it is a purest abstract essence or an extreme abstract measure, only exists in our minds as an abstraction. Furthermore, the absolute will only lead to the abandon of all measure and blind us to the relative interdependence of all things. The measure of knowledge of life is the knowledge of the measure of this relative interdependence.”

PhilosophyGodReligionThoughtConfusionAbsoluteAbstractionInterdependenceMonotheism
Book:The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity
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“For St Paul and other Christian preachers, the body and its urges were not to be celebrated but smothered. In tortuous and embarrassed circumlocutions, Paul raged at ‘this body of death’. The rewards of a virgin in heaven were said to be sixty times greater. Christian writers in this period recorded the stirrings of their sexuality with great distaste – perhaps none more influentially than Augustine. Sex was, he felt, permissible if children resulted from the union but even then the action itself was lustful, evil and ‘bestial’, while erections were ‘unseemly’. The West would reap a bitter harvest of sexual shame from the disgusted writings of these two men. In the earliest days of the religion, some Christians went further, arguing that there was no need for sex any more at all. A new form of creation, in the form of a great conflagration and rebirth of the godly, was imminent. What need for awkward, messy, inexact human reproduction? Eternal life rendered reproduction redundant.”

SexChristianityIgnoranceShameAfterlifeRepressionMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“Could it not be that Moses and/or the Levites just came to it on their own?! Scholars have a tendency to take any parallel between ancient Israel's culture and assume that Israel took it from the others. Why? I see no good reason at all. Did Moses get this religion from the Midianites? All right then, where did the Midianites get it? Did Moses get if from Akhenaten? All right then, where did Akhenaten get it? If Ahkenaten thought of it on his own, why could an Israelite not have done it on his (or her) own as well? Is it a far-out thought that sometimes more than one person thinks of an idea--without influencing each other, without knowing each other? And we have another crucial consideration. The difference between Israel's monotheism and whatever preceded it is more than arithmetic. It is not just one god versus many. Biblical religion involves a different conception of what this one God is. In pagan religion, the gods and goddesses were identified with forces in nature: the sun, the sky, the sea, death, fertility, the storm wind. Even in Akhenaten's religion, whether it was fully monotheistic or not, Aten was identified closely with the sun. In Israelite religion, no force in nature can tell you more about God than any other.”

MosesMonotheismAkhenaten
Book:The Exodus
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“Aten, a minor solar god – a red disc from which long rays emanated and reached down to earth – was converted into the supreme God, in fact the one and only god, by Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh. Aten evolved into Jehovah, and Akhenaten’s religion evolved into Jewish monotheism. Akhenaten, or someone very close to him, is the true Moses of the Bible, standing up for the One God against Egyptian polytheism, and leading a mass Exodus of his monotheistic followers away from pagan Egypt to a new Promised Land. Jehovah, therefore, is just a modification of a minor Egyptian sun god.”

GodJehovahEgyptianMonotheismAkhenatenAtenPaganism Moses
Book:Fixed and Mobile Souls: Resurrection Versus Reincarnation
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“To Judaism Christians ascribe the glory of having been the first religion to teach a pure monotheism. But monotheism existed long before the Jews attained to it. Zoroaster and his earliest followers were monotheists, dualism being a later development of the Persian theology. The adoption of monotheism by the Jews, which occurred only at a very late period in their history, was not, however, the result of a divine revelation, or even of an intellectual superiority, for the Jews were immeasurably inferior intellectually to the Greeks and Romans, to the Hindus and Egyptians, and to the Assyrians and Babylonians, who are supposed to have retained a belief in polytheism. This monotheism of the Jews has chiefly the result of a religious intolerance never before equaled and never since surpassed, except in the history of Christianity and Mohammedanism, the daughters of Judaism. Jehovistic priests and kings tolerated no rivals of their god and made death the penalty for disloyalty to him. The Jewish nation became monotheistic for the same reason that Spain, in the clutches of the Inquisition, became entirely Christian.”

IslamIntoleranceGodsJudaismSpainRevelationJehovahInquisitionJewsDualismReligious IntoleranceMonotheismEgyptiansRomansPolytheismGreeksHindusZoroastrianismAssyriansPersian TheologyZoroasterBabyloniansMohammedanism
Book:Christ
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“It comes from history. It comes from the record of the Inquisition, persecuting heretics and torturing Jews and all that sort of stuff; and it comes from the other side, too, from the Protestants burning the Catholics. It comes from the insensate pursuit of innocent and crazy old women, and from the Puritans in America burning and hanging the witches — and it comes not only from the Christian church but also from the Taliban. Every single religion that has a monotheistic god ends up by persecuting other people and killing them because they don't accept him. Wherever you look in history, you find that. It’s still going on.”

HistoryTorturePersecutionWitchesProtestantsTalibanInquisitionJewsMonotheismReligious PersecutionCatholicsHereticsPuritans
Author:Philip Pullman
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“Do not all attempts, in our own cultural sphere at least, at escaping from the Judeo-Christian compound by means of a unilateral call to return to what it has repressed (rhythm, drive, the feminine, etc.), converge on the same Celinian anti-Semitic fantasy? And this is so because, as I have tried to explain earlier the writings of the chosen people have selected a place, in the most determined manner, on that untenable crest of manness seen as symbolic fact—which constitutes abjection.”

SexismAnti SemitismMonotheismAbjection
Book:Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
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“Religious intolerance is an idea that found its earliest expression in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew tribe depicts itself waging a campaign of genocide on the Palestinian peoples to steal their land. They justified this heinous behavior on the grounds that people not chosen by their god were wicked and therefore did not deserve to live or keep their land. In effect, the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian peoples, eradicating their race with the Jew's own Final Solution, was the direct result of a policy of religious superiority and divine right. Joshua 6-11 tells the sad tale, and one needs only read it and consider the point of view of the Palestinians who were simply defending their wives and children and the homes they had built and the fields they had labored for. The actions of the Hebrews can easily be compared with the American genocide of its native peoples - or even, ironically, the Nazi Holocaust. With the radical advent of Christianity, this self-righteous intolerance was borrowed from the Jews, and a new twist was added. The conversion of infidels by any means possible became the newfound calling card of religious fervor, and this new experiment in human culture spread like wildfire. By its very nature, how could it not have? Islam followed suit, conquering half the world in brutal warfare and, much like its Christian counterpart, it developed a new and convenient survival characteristic: the destruction of all images and practices attributed to other religions. Muslims destroyed millions of statues and paintings in India and Africa, and forced conversion under pain of death (or by more subtle tricks: like taxing only non-Muslims), while the Catholic Church busily burned books along with pagans, shattering statues and defacing or destroying pagan art - or converting it to Christian use. Laws against pagan practices and heretics were in full force throughrout Europe by the sixth century, and as long as those laws were in place it was impossible for anyone to refuse the tenets of Christianity and expect to keep their property or their life. Similar persecution and harassment continues in Islamic countries even to this day, officially and unofficially.”

WarReligionChristianityViolenceIslamGenocideIntoleranceJudaismConquestPalestineMonotheismConquestsGenocide In The Bible
Book:Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism
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“[W]hat befell the philosophers in AD 529 was not just one single law but a staccato burst of legal aggression issued by Justinian. ‘Your Clemency . . . the Glorious and Indulgent’ Justinian is how laws of this period referred to him. Justinian’s reverence, the legal code of the time announced, shone out ‘as a specially pure light, like that of a star’, while Justinian himself was referred to as ‘Your Holiness’; the ‘Glorious emperor’. There was little glorious or indulgent about what was coming. And there was certainly nothing that was clement. This was the end. The ‘impious and wicked pagans’ were to be allowed to continue in their ‘insane error’ no longer. Anyone who refused salvation in the next life would, from now on, be all but damned in this one. A series of legal hammer blows fell: anyone who offered sacrifice would be executed. Anyone who worshipped statues would be executed. Anyone who was baptized – but who then continued to sacrifice – they, too, would be executed. The laws went further. This was no longer mere prohibition of other religious practices. It was the active enforcement of Christianity on every single, sinful pagan in the empire. The roads to error were being closed, forcefully. Everyone now had to become Christian. Every single person in the empire who had not yet been baptized now had to come forward immediately, go to the holy churches and ‘entirely abandon the former error [and] receive saving baptism’. Those who refused would be stripped of all their property, movable and immovable, lose their civil rights, be left in penury and, ‘in addition’ – as if what had gone before was not punishment but mere preamble, they would be ‘subject to the proper punishment’. If any man did not immediately hurry to the ‘holy churches’ with his family and force them also to be baptized, then he would suffer all of the above – and then he would be exiled. The ‘insane error’ of paganism was to be wiped from the face of the earth.”

PhilosophyChristianityWorshipPunishmentLawsMonotheismClemency
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“It was Hypatia’s fault, said the Christians, that the governor was being so stubborn. It was she, they murmured, who was standing between Orestes and Cyril, preventing them from reconciling. Fanned by the parabalani, the rumours started to catch, and flame. Hypatia was not merely a difficult woman, they said. Hadn’t everyone seen her use symbols in her work, and astrolabes? The illiterate parabalani (‘bestial men – truly abominable’ as one philosopher would later call them) knew what these instruments were. They were not the tools of mathematics and philosophy, no: they were the work of the Devil. Hypatia was not a philosopher: she was a creature of Hell. It was she who was turning the entire city against God with her trickery and her spells. She was ‘atheizing’ Alexandria. Naturally, she seemed appealing enough – but that was how the Evil One worked. Hypatia, they said, had ‘beguiled many people through satanic wiles’. Worst of all, she had even beguiled Orestes. Hadn’t he stopped going to church? It was clear: she had ‘beguiled him through her magic’. This could not be allowed to continue. One day in March AD 415, Hypatia set out from her home to go for her daily ride through the city. Suddenly, she found her way blocked by a ‘multitude of believers in God’. They ordered her to get down from her chariot. Knowing what had recently happened to her friend Orestes, she must have realized as she climbed down that her situation was a serious one. She cannot possibly have realized quite how serious. As soon as she stood on the street, the parabalani, under the guidance of a Church magistrate called Peter – ‘a perfect believer in all respects in Jesus Christ’ – surged round and seized ‘the pagan woman’. They then dragged Alexandria’s greatest living mathematician through the streets to a church. Once inside, they ripped the clothes from her body then, using broken pieces of pottery as blades, flayed her skin from her flesh. Some say that, while she still gasped for breath, they gouged out her eyes. Once she was dead, they tore her body into pieces and threw what was left of the ‘luminous child of reason’ onto a pyre and burned her.”

PhilosophyChristianityMurderDisgraceBarbarismMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“If any locals had seen the dark-robed group as they moved through the darkness they might well have felt the stirrings of fear. Monks – anonymous, rootless, untraceable – were able to commit atrocities with near impunity. ‘Our angels’ some Christians called them. Rubbish, said non-Christians. They were not angels but ignorant, boorish thugs, men in appearance only who ‘led the lives of swine, and openly did and allowed countless unspeakable crimes’. As the author Eunapius wrote with sardonic distaste: ‘in those days every man who wore a black robe and consented to behave in unseemly fashion in public, possessed the power of a tyrant, to such a pitch of virtue had the human race advanced!’ Even a wholeheartedly Christian emperor mutedly observed that ‘the monks commit many crimes’. And on that night, these monks were about to commit another. Shenoute’s target was not, this time, one of his monks but one of the wicked, godless pagans. In sermon after furious sermon Shenoute had turned his famously fiery prose on these people. Their hearts were ‘the nests of the spirits of wickedness’. If disturbed then these evil people would spit out poison. The Bible, Shenoute told his congregants, said that those who set up pagan images should be killed. As he put it in one particularly vigorous sermon, God wished His people to ‘remove the abominations from His presence’. The emperors, Shenoute thundered, had declared that the entire earth must be cleansed of perversions. No stone was to be left on top of any other stone of any pagan temple. Not one. In the entire earth.”

ChristianityDestructionTyrannyWickednessAtrocitiesBarbarismMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“Out of all the froth and fury that was being issued from the government at the time, one law would become infamous for the next 1,500 years. Read this law and, in comparison to some of Justinian’s other edicts, it sounds almost underwhelming. Filed under the usual dull bureaucratic subheading, it is now known as ‘Law 1.11.10.2’. ‘Moreover,’ it reads, ‘we forbid the teaching of any doctrine by those who labour under the insanity of paganism’ so that they might not ‘corrupt the souls of their disciples.’ The law goes on, adding a finicky detail or two about pay, but largely that is it. Its consequences were formidable. This was this law that forced Damascius and his followers to leave Athens. It was this law that caused the Academy to close. It was this law that led the English scholar Edward Gibbon to declare that the entirety of the barbarian invasions had been less damaging to Athenian philosophy than Christianity was. This law’s consequences were described more simply by later historians. It was from this moment, they said, that a Dark Age began to descend upon Europe.”

PhilosophyChristianityHistoryPunishmentRepressionDark AgesBarbarismLawsMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“As the modern scholar Alan Cameron has put it: ‘In 529 the philosophers of Athens were threatened with the destruction of their entire way of life.’ The Christians were behind this – yet you will search almost in vain for the word ‘Christian’ in most of the writings of the philosophers. That is not to say that evidence of them is not there. It is. The miasmatic presence of the religion is keenly felt on countless pages: it is Christians who are driving persecutions, torturing their colleagues, pushing philosophers into exile. Damascius and his fellow scholars loathed the religion and its uncompromising leaders. Even Damascius’s famously mild and gentle teacher, Isidore, ‘found them absolutely repulsive’; he considered them ‘irreparably polluted, and nothing whatever could constrain him to accept their company’. But the actual word Christian is missing. As if the very syllables were too distasteful for them to pronounce, the philosophers resorted to elaborate circumlocutions. At times, the names they gave them were muted. With a masterful understatement, the present system of Christian rule, with its torture, murder and persecution, was referred to as ‘the present situation’ or ‘the prevailing circumstances’. At another time the Christians became – perhaps a reference to those stolen and desecrated statues – ‘the people who move the immovable’. At other times the names were blunter: the Christians were ‘the vultures’ or, more simply still, ‘the tyrant’. Other phrases carried a contemptuous intellectual sneer. Greek literature is awash with hideously rebarbative creatures, and the philosophers turned to these to convey the horror of their situation: the Christians started to be referred to as ‘the Giants’ and the ‘Cyclops’. These particular names seem, at first sight, an odd choice. These are not the most repellent monsters in the Greek canon; Homer alone could have offered the man-eating monster Scylla as a more obvious insult. That would have missed the point. The Giants and the Cyclops of Greek myth aren’t terrible because they are not like men – they are terrible because they are. They belong to the uncanny valley of Greek monsters: they look, at first glance, like civilized humans yet they lack all the attributes of civilization. They are boorish, base, ill-educated, thuggish. They are almost men, but not quite – and all the more hideous for that. It was, for these philosophers, the perfect analogy. When that philosopher had been beaten till the blood ran down his back, the precise insult that he hurled at the judge had been: ‘There, Cyclops. Drink the wine, now that you have devoured the human flesh.”

ChristianityIgnoranceCivilizationDestructionPunishmentTyrannyRepressionBarbarismMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“The old laissez-faire Roman ways, in which the worship of one god might simply be added to the worship of all the others, were, preachers told their congregations, no longer acceptable. Worship a different god, they explained, and you were not merely being different. You were demonic. Demons, said the clerics, dwelt in the minds of those who practised the old religions. Those who criticized Christianity, warned the Christian apologist Tertullian, were not speaking with a free mind. Instead, they were attacking the Christians because they were under the control of Satan and his footsoldiers. The ‘battleground’ of these fearsome troops was nothing other than ‘your minds, which have been attuned to him by his secret insinuations’. Demons were able to ‘take possession of men’s souls and block up their hearts’ and so stop them believing in Christ.”

ReligionChristianityCriticismDemonicMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“[A]ll over the empire, Romans are frustratingly unwilling to play their role as bloodthirsty martyr-makers. Many even refuse to execute Christians when they arrive in front of them. Arrius Antoninus was a Roman governor of Asia who in the late second century had executed a number of Christians in his province. He was perhaps unprepared for what came next. Instead of fleeing, local Christians suddenly turned up and, in one large mob, presented themselves before him. Antoninus did indeed dutifully kill a few (presumably there is only so much temptation a Roman can stand) but rather than dispatching the rest with pleasure, he turned to them with what, even with the passage of almost two millennia, sounds unmistakably like exasperation. ‘Oh you ghastly people,’ he said. ‘If you want to die you have cliffs you can jump off and nooses to hang yourself with.”

ChristianityMartyrdomMonotheismExasperation
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“That the writers of the Bible recognized a plurality of gods -- were polytheists -- is proved by the following 'And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us' (Gen. iii, 22). 'Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods?' (Ex. xv, 11.) 'Among the gods, there is none like unto thee, O Lord' (Ps. Ixxxvi, 8). 'The Lord is a great God, and a great king above all gods' (Ps. xcv, 3). 'Thou shalt not revile the gods' (Ex. xxii, 28). Monotheism, the doctrine of one god, is not merely the worship of one god, but the belief in the existence of one god only. Many were monotheistic in worship -- worshiped one god, their national deity -- while at the same time they were polytheistic in belief -- believed in the existence of many gods. The Jews who worshiped Jehovah have been called monotheists. And yet, for a thousand years, they believed in the existence of Kemosh, Baal, Moloch, Tammuz, and other deities. They believed that Jehovah was their national god and that they owed allegiance to him; just as the subjects of an earthly king profess their loyalty to him without denying the existence of other kings.”

GodsDeitiesJehovahJewsMonotheismBaalOne GodMolochBible PolytheismKemoshMonotheisticNational DeityPolytheism In BiblePolytheism In The BiblePolytheistsTammuz
Book:Christ
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“Part of [the benefit of God’s making one fall into sin] is also that the servant attains the ranks of humility, meekness and lowliness as well as neediness before Him, for the ego has a tendency to rival lordship; if it had the power it would claim what the Pharaoh claimed, but He has predestined and dominated and all other than Him is incapable and dominated.”

WisdomReligionSpiritualityIslamIslamicMuslimMonotheismIbn QayyimTawheed
Book:Ranks of the Divine Seekers A Parallel English-Arabic Text. Volume 1 (Islamic Translation)
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“As a convinced atheist, I ought to agree with Voltaire that Judaism is not just one more religion, but in its way the root of religious evil. Without the stern, joyless rabbis and their 613 dour prohibitions, we might have avoided the whole nightmare of the Old Testament, and the brutal, crude wrenching of that into prophecy-derived Christianity, and the later plagiarism and mutation of Judaism and Christianity into the various rival forms of Islam. Much of the time, I do concur with Voltaire, but not without acknowledging that Judaism is dialectical. There is, after all, a specifically Jewish version of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with a specifically Jewish name—the Haskalah—for itself. The term derives from the word for 'mind' or 'intellect,' and it is naturally associated with ethics rather than rituals, life rather than prohibitions, and assimilation over 'exile' or 'return.' It's everlastingly linked to the name of the great German teacher Moses Mendelssohn, one of those conspicuous Jewish hunchbacks who so upset and embarrassed Isaiah Berlin. (The other way to upset or embarrass Berlin, I found, was to mention that he himself was a cousin of Menachem Schneerson, the 'messianic' Lubavitcher rebbe.) However, even pre-enlightenment Judaism forces its adherents to study and think, it reluctantly teaches them what others think, and it may even teach them how to think also.”

LifeReligionEvilEducationChristianityStudyAtheismReturnEnlightenmentEthicsIslamIntellectThoughtProphecyJudaismExileOld TestamentAssimilationPlagiarism18th CenturyDialecticsMonotheismFree ThoughtAntisemitismRitualsVoltaireGermansRabbisMessianismIsaiah BerlinProhibitionsChabad MessianismHaskalahMenachem Mendel SchneersonMoses MendelssohnRebbes
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“Suppose that we agree that the two atrocities can or may be mentioned in the same breath. Why should we do so? I wrote at the time (The Nation, October 5, 1998) that Osama bin Laden 'hopes to bring a "judgmental" monotheism of his own to bear on these United States.' Chomsky's recent version of this is 'considering the grievances expressed by people of the Middle East region.' In my version, then as now, one confronts an enemy who wishes ill to our society, and also to his own (if impermeable religious despotism is considered an 'ill'). In Chomsky's reading, one must learn to sift through the inevitable propaganda and emotion resulting from the September 11 attacks, and lend an ear to the suppressed and distorted cry for help that comes, not from the victims, but from the perpetrators. I have already said how distasteful I find this attitude. I wonder if even Chomsky would now like to have some of his own words back? Why else should he take such care to quote himself deploring the atrocity? Nobody accused him of not doing so. It's often a bad sign when people defend themselves against charges which haven't been made.”

WarReligionEmotionUnited StatesIslamTerrorismPropagandaMiddle EastDespotismOsama Bin LadenWar CrimesMonotheismTheocracyIslamic TerrorismSeptember 11 AttacksNoam Chomsky1998The NationAl Shifa Pharmaceutical Factory
Book:Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
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“There are only a handful of monotheistic divine religions in the world. Muslims believe that there was a single monotheistic religion. It was the same religion which was preached by Adam (pbuh), Noah (pbuh), Ibrahim (pbuh), Moses (pbuh), Jesus (pbuh) and Muhammad (pbuh) and all the other Prophets (pbut) in between Adam (pbuh) and Muhammad (pbuh). Christians defined their distinct faith as Christianity by believing in Jesus (pbuh) and denying Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) despite Bible giving clear signs of His arrival and characteristics. Jews defined their distinct faith by believing in Prophets before Jesus (pbuh), but denying Jesus (pbuh) and Muhammad (pbuh) despite Torah giving clear signs of the arrival of last Prophet (pbuh) and His (pbuh) characteristics101. The denial of the last Prophet (pbuh) is not supported by the religious scriptures which clearly foretold the last messenger by name, characteristics and traits. Muslims believe in all Prophets (pbut) including Jesus (pbuh) and Moses (pbuh). Muslims believe in all Holy Books. Since these Holy Books were not kept in their original form, Muslims pay more heed towards the last Holy Book, i.e. Qur’an which was revealed in the daylight of history and which encapsulates the true teachings and foundational beliefs of the original monotheistic religion. Quran’s every word has been transmitted from generations to generations through i) the verbal transmission of thousands of people in every age who had learnt it by heart and through ii) written transmission soon after Prophet Muhammad’s (pbuh) time. Qur’an is the God’s last words transmitted to humans on earth because it was ensured that these final verses will be preserved in the daylight of history.”

IslamMonotheismIslam And ScienceIslam And ChristianityIslam And JudaismIslamic Worldview
Book:Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World
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“So which is more probable: That today's atheist apocalyptans are unique and right? Or that they are like their many predecessors—at the very least, in their motivations? If anything, the vehemence with which the believers in emergent complexity debunk all religion may betray their own creeping awareness of the religious underpinnings and precedents for their declarations. In fact, the concept of Armageddon first emerged in response to the invention of monotheism by the ancient Persian priest Zoroaster, around the tenth or eleventh century BCE. Until that time, the dominant religions maintained a pantheon of gods reigning in a cyclical precession along with the heavens, so there was little need for absolutes. As religions began focusing on a single god, things got a bit trickier. For if there is only one god, and that god has absolute power, then why do bad things happen? Why does evil still exist? If one's god is fighting for control of the universe against the gods of other people, then there's no problem. Just as in polytheism, the great achievements of one god can be undermined by the destructive acts of another. But what if a religion, such as Judaism of the First and Second Temple era, calls for one god and one god alone? How do its priests and followers explain the persistence of evil and suffering? They do it the same way Zoroaster did: by introducing time into the equation. The imperfection of the universe is a product of its incompleteness. There's only one true god, but he's not done yet. In the monotheist version, the precession of the gods was no longer a continuous cycle of seasonal deities or metaphors. It was nor a linear story with a clear endpoint in the victory of the one true and literal god. Once this happens, time can end. Creation is the Alpha, and the Return is the Omega. It's all good. This worked well enough to assuage the anxieties of both the civilization of the calendar and that of the clock. But what about us? Without time, without a future, how to we contend with the lingering imperfections in our reality? As members of a monotheist culture—however reluctant—we can't help but seek to apply its foundational framework to our current dilemma. The less aware we are of this process—or the more we refuse to admit its legacy in our construction of new models—the more vulnerable we become to its excesses. Repression and extremism are two sides of the same coin. In spite of their determination to avoid such constructs, even the most scientifically minded futurists apply the Alpha-Omega framework of messianic time to their upgraded apocalypse narratives. Emergence takes the place of the hand of God, mysteriously transforming a chaotic system into a self-organized one, with coherence and cooperation. Nobody seems able to explain how this actually happens.”

ScienceTechnologyAtheismApocalypseMessiahEmergenceMonotheismPolytheismPresent Shock
Book:Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
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“Thabit ibn Qurra (AD 836-901, and also born in Harran), would have had little patience with loaded terms like "star idolatry" which seek to place the "paganism" of the Sabians on a lower level than the deadly, and often bigoted, narrow-minded and unscientific clerical monotheism of religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Thabit was well aware that, underlying the ancient Sabian practices misunderstood by these young religions as "star idolatry," were indeed exact sciences of great benefit to mankind, and thus he wrote: 'Who else have civilized the world, and built the cities, if not the nobles and kings of Paganism? Who else have set in order the harbors and rivers? And who else have taught the hidden wisdom? To whom else has the Deity revealed itself, given oracles, and told about the future, if not the famous men among the Pagans? The Pagans have made known all this. They have discovered the art of healing the soul; they have also made known the art of healing the body. They have filled the earth with settled forms of government, and with wisdom, which is the highest good. Without Paganism the world would be empty and miserable.”

WisdomSciencePaganismMonotheismAbrahamic ReligionsSabians
Book:Magicians of the Gods: The Forgotten Wisdom of Earth's Lost Civilization
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“The call for justice was a protest as fierce as those of the biblical prophets and of Jesus, and the similarity of the call was no coincidence. As with early Judaism and early Christianity, early Islam would be rooted in opposition to a corrupt status quo. Its protest of inequity would be an integral part of the demand for inclusiveness, for unity and equality under the umbrella of the one god regardless of lineage, wealth, age, or gender. This is what would make it so appealing to the disenfranchised, those who didn't matter in the grand Meccan scheme of things, like slaves and freedmen, widows and orphans, all those cut out of the elite by birth or circumstance. And it spoke equally to the young and idealistic, those who had not yet learned to knuckle under to the way things were and who responded to the deeply egalitarian strain of the verses. All were equal before God, the thirteen-year-old Ali as important as the most respected graybeard, the daughter as much as the son, the African slave as much as the highborn noble. It was a potent and potentially radical re-envisioning of society. This was a matter of politics as much as of faith. The scriptures of all three of the great monotheisms show that they began similarly as popular movements in protest against the privilege and arrogance of power, whether that of kings as in the Hebrew bible, or the Roman Empire as in the Gospels, or a tribal elite as in the Quran. All three, that is, were originally driven by ideals of justice and egalitarianism, rejecting the inequities of human power in favor of a higher and more just one. No matter how far they might have strayed from their origins as they became institutionalized over time, the historical record clearly indicates that what we now call the drive for social justice was the idealistic underpinning of monotheistic faith.”

ChristianitySocial JusticeIslamEqualityJudaismMonotheismPolitical Reform
Book:The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad
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