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Pastimes : Ask God -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: IN_GOD_I_TRUST who wrote (20754)	9/15/1998 7:50:00 AM
From: Sam Ferguson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 39621

Yes it is marvelous. Can a loving God be vindictive God? Can God be jealous? Is Jesus God? Nearly every one of the dogmas and ceremonies in the Christian cult were borrowed from other and older religions. The resurrection myth, the ascension, the eucharist, baptism, worship by kneeling or prostration, the folding of the hands on the breast, the ringing of bells and the burning of incense, the vestments and vessels used in church, the candles, "holy" water, -- even the word Mass, were all adopted and adapted by the Christians from the religions of the ancients. The Trinity is as much Pagan, as much Indian or Buddhist, as it is Christian. The idea of a Son of God is as old as 'the oldest cult. The sun is the son of heaven in all primitive faiths. The physical sun becomes in the course of evolution, the Son of Righteousness, or the Son of God, and heaven is personified as the Father on High. The halo around the head of Jesus, the horns of the older deities, the rays of light radiating from the heads of Hindu and Pagan gods are incontrovertible evidence that all gods were at one time -- the sun in heaven. There was war before Christianity; has Jesus abolished war? There was poverty and misery in the world before Christianity; has Jesus removed these evils? There was ignorance in the world before Christianity; has Jesus destroyed ignorance? There were disease, crime, persecution, oppression, slavery, massacres, and bloodshed in the world before Christianity; alas, are they not still with us? When Jesus shall succeed in pacifying his own disciples; in healing the sectarian world of its endless and bitter quarrels, then it will be time to ask what else Jesus has done for humanity. If the world is improving at all, and we believe it is, the progress is due to the fact that man pays now more attention to this life than formerly. He is thinking less of the other world and more of this. Which of the religions has persecuted as long and as relentlessly as Christianity? Which of the many faiths of the world has opposed Science as stubbornly and as bitterly as Christianity? In the name of what other prophets have more people been burned at the stake than in the names of Jesus and Moses? What other revelation has given rise to so many sects, hostile and irreconcilable, as the Christian? Which religion has furnished as many effective texts for political oppression, polygamy, slavery, and the subjection of woman as the religion of Jesus and Paul? Is there, -- has there ever been another creed which makes salvation dependent on belief, -- thereby encouraging hypocrisy, and making honest inquiry a crime? To send a thief to heaven from the gallows because he believes, and an honest man to hell because he doubts, is that the virtue which is going to save the world? Witches were put to death in the name of the devil. Yet all this "evidence" has not saved the devil from passing out of existence. What has happened to the devil will happen to the gods. Man is the only real savior. If he is not a savior, there is no other saved!