<<What really puzzles me is how Christianity, which was no big deal for hundreds of years, exploded into far more believers, that persist thousands of years later.>>
Del, I have read a couple of explanations of Christianity's spread as being likened to a virus, which may answer your question. Here is one web page which discusses this theory:
physserv1.physics.wisc.edu
While I was looking around on the web for that, I found an interesting site on the Christian Holocaust that you might enjoy reading:
blackplague.org
And some nice quotes!! (Are you still above water, incidentally? Hurricane Frances seems to be visiting your neighborhood.)
The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Religions impose their dogmas, bend conscience under their laws, deny freedom of discussion, and of judgment to their clients, and, in the name of God, proscribe all thought which they do not control, all liberty except the liberty to bow down and believe.
Louis Jacolliot
. . . it is my firm opinion that the whole batch of religions with their aims and claims are a barrier to world peace. Religion does not unite people. It divides them. Religion is not only a barrier to world peace but a thwarter and a stumbling block to world progress.
G. Vincent Runyon
I condemn false prophets, I condemn the effort to take away the power of rational decision, to drain people of their free will - and a hell of a lot of money in the bargain. Religions vary in their degree of idiocy, but I reject them all. For most people, religion is nothing more than a substitute for a malfunctioning brain.
Gene Roddenberry
In spite of centuries wasted in preaching God's omnipotence, his omnipotence is contradicted by every Christian judgment and every Christian prayer.
George Santayana
The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.
Henry L. Mencken
The OId Testament is a chronicle of horrors, describing an egocentric collection of supernatural beings who were always doing rotten things to gentle souls like Job.
John Keel
If a man would follow, today, the teachings of the Old Testament, he would be a criminal. If he would strictly follow the teachings of the New, he would be insane.
Robert Ingersoll
The truth is that Christian theology, like every other theology, is not only opposed to the scientific spirit, it is also opposed to all attempts at rational thinking.
Henry L. Mencken
To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.
Henry David Thoreau
Man is certainly stark mad; he cannot make a flea, and yet he will be making gods by the dozens.
Montaigne
There would be no need for the women's movement if the church and Bible hadn't abused them.
Father Leo Booth
Religion and its practices have consistently been one of women's fiercest enemies. . . . The fact that many women do not realize this shows how thorough the brainwashing and intimidation have been.
Arnold Toynbee
A new idea is the result of the dethroning of a reigning God.
Christopher Hyatt
Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it.
Charles Dickens
To religious despotism, imposing speculative delusions, and class-legislation, may be attributed the decay of nations.
Louis Jacolliot
There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages.
Ruth H. Green
Hell is - other people.
Nietzsche
Hell is useless to sages, but necessary to the blind and brutal populace.
Polybius
Every saint has a past and every sinner a future.
Oscar Wilde
All great truths begin as blasphemies.
George Bernard Shaw
If man had created man, he would be ashamed of his performance.
Mark Twain
Static religions are the death of thought.
Alfred North Whitehead
No progress of humanity is possible unless it shakes off the yoke of authority and tradition.
Andre Gide
A one-planet deity has for me little appeal.
Harlow Shipley
The density of matter in the Universe is only 20 drops of water in a billion cubic miles. That's all the creation the good Lord's come up with, and it's no big thing.
John Dobson, Astronomer
The Jehovah of the Jews is a suspicious tyrant, who breathes nothing but blood, murder, and carnage, and who demands that they should nourish him with the vapours of animals. The Jupiter of the Pagans is a lascivious monster. The Moloch of the Phoenicians is a cannibal.
The pure mind of the Christians resolved, in order to appease his fury, to crucify his own son. The savage god of the Mexicans cannot be satisfied without thousands of mortals which are immolated to his sanguinary appetite.
Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holback
The world is my country, to do good my religion.
Thomas Paine
No religion can rise to power quickly without vast promises, fierce threats, and the doctrine of imminent disaster.
Martin Larson
Honesty, like charity, must begin at home. Unless we can tell the truth in our churches we will never tell the truth in our shops. Unless our teachers, the ministers of God, are honest, our
insurance companies and corporations will have to be watched. Permit sham in your religious life, and the disease will spread to every member of the social body. If you may keep religion in the dark, and cry "hush," "hush," when people ask that it be brought out into the
light, why may not politics or business cultivate a similar partiality for darkness? If the king cries, "rebel," when a citizen asks for justice, it is because he has heard the priest cry, "infidel," when a member of his church asked for evidence. Religious hypocrisy is the mother of all hypocrisies. Cure a man of that, and the human world will recover its health.
M.M. Mangasarian
The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb in a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the
brain of Jupiter.
Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams
. . . Christianity is a monstrous fraud and delusion, that has desolated the earth and filled the spirit world with demons. . . . there is not a tenet, dogma, doctrine, ceremony, form or prayer,
fast or feast, title of deity, form of church government, official rank or religious observance of any kind, that is not identical with some prototype to be found in one or more of the more ancient religious systems. . . . no such person, man, or God, as Jesus Christ, had anything to do with establishing the religion that has been taught in his name. . . . To get rid of the damning fact that there is no historical basis for their theological fictions, the Christian
priesthood have been guilty of the heinous crime of destroying nearly all traces of the concurrent history of the first two centuries of the Christian era. What little of it they have permitted to come down to us, they have so altered and changed, as to destroy its historical
value.
JM Roberts, Esq.
False believing is ever the worst enemy of true doing; and every Sunday the teaching of these legalized kidnappers of children, for compulsory inoculation of their minds with the old theological virus, tends to nullify the good done by education during the other six days of the week.
Gerald Massey
And hereafter, when [Christians] laugh at the Jewish superstition of a scape-goat, let them bear in mind that more sensible and intelligent people may laugh in turn at their superstitious doctrine of a scape-God. . . .The blood of a God must atone for the sins of the whole human family . . . Somebody must pay the penalty in blood, somebody must be slaughtered for every little foible or peccadillo or moral blunder into which erring man may chance to stumble while upon the pilgrimage of life, while journeying through the wilderness of time, even if a God has to be dragged down from his throne in heaven, and murdered to accomplish it.
Nothing less will mitigate the divine wrath. . . . Whose soul - possessing the slightest moral sensibility - does not inwardly and instinctively revolt at such a doctrine?
Kersey Graves
Our legends and our folk-tales are the sacred lore which you croon to your infants. Our poems have filled your hymnals and your prayerbooks. Our national history has become an indispensable part of the learning of your pastors and priests and scholars. Our kings, our statesmen, our prophets, our warriors your heroes. Our ancient little country is your Holy Land. Our national literature is your Holy Bible. What our people thought and taught has become inextricably woven into your speech and tradition, until no one among you can be called educated who is not familiar with our racial heritage.
Jewish artisans and Jewish fishermen are your teachers and your saints, with countless statues carved in their image and innumerable cathedrals raised in their memories. A Jewish maiden is your ideal of motherhood and womanhood. A Jewish rebel-prophet is the central
figure in your religious worship. We have pulled down your idols, cast aside your racial inheritance, and substituted for them our God and our traditions. No conquest in history can even remotely compare with this clean sweep over you.
Mr. Ravage
The Christian religion and Masonry have one and the same common origin: Both are derived from the worship of the Sun. The difference between their origin is, that the Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun.
Thomas Paine
Judaism was a racial cult which had as its purpose its own aggrandizement.
Martin Larson
To read the Bible suffices to show that few people were more corrupt, few practiced more duplicity in their relations with neighbors, and that, lastly, few had less respect for the property of others. . . . "Submissive obedience to the Word of God, or death," says Moses to
the Hebrews; who, in their turn, say to the neighboring peoples, "Deliver up your wealth, your virgin daughters, and your houses, or you shall be destroyed with fire and sword." . . . There are people who see in these massacres, respecting neither child nor women, except the virgins, a manifestation of God's power. We prefer to see a manifestation of the spirit of evil, ruling with undivided sway over these barbarous and undisciplined hordes, who, from their quitting Egypt, could but mark their passage with rapine, pillage and slaughter.
Louis Jacolliot
. . . In religion, they become "holier than thou" types filled with terrible hatreds which in turn cause guilt complexes that drive them deeper into their religious frame of reference. The outlet for their scrambled emotions is to try to foist their beliefs - and their fears - onto the rest of us.
John Keel
Darwin was wrong. Man's still an ape. His creed's still a totem pole. When he first achieved the upright position, he took a look at the stars, and thought they were something to eat. When he couldn't reach them, he decided they were groceries belonging to a bigger creature. That's how Jehovah was born.
Gene Kelly, "Inherit the Wind"
In a child's power to master the multiplication table there is more sanctity than in all your shouted amens and holy holies and hoseannas. An idea is a greater monument than a cathedral. And the advance of man's knowledge is a greater miracle than all the sticks turned
to snakes or the parting of the waters.
Spencer Tracy, "Inherit the Wind"
The mass of people who are Bible-taught never get free from the erroneous impressions stamped on their minds in their infancy, so that their manhood or womanhood can have no intellectual fulfillment, and millions of them only attain mentally to a sort of second
childhood.
Gerald Massey
The audience remained stoic as the Catholic mother and I regaled them with horror stories of betrayal and sexual abuse of children by clergymen. But when one of the clergymen on the show "exposed" the fact that I am an atheist, a loud collective gasp was sounded from the
good Christians in the audience. It was a telling demonstration of that narrow bigotry, inculcated in so many Christians, that goodness has far more to do with one's professions of faith than with conduct and actions.
Annie Laurie Gaylor
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