"God Save Us From Religion" Sample

Written by Ian Ross Vayro

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Chapter Two

‘Man’s ignorance ain’t ‘cause he ain’t ever learned nutten; it’s ‘cause he learned too many things that jes’ ain’t so.’

Henry Wheeler Shaw’s character; Uncle Josh Billings.

Out of Touch

In Australia, in December 2004, we had a situation where His Eminence, Cardinal George Pell of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney (who was a strong candidate in the last Papal election), answered a question put to him by an informed member of the press. A hypothetical situation was outlined where a faithful, Catholic, married woman in Africa (for example), had a husband who was unfaithful and as a result of extra-marital activity, he contracted AIDS. The essence of the question was whether it was acceptable for that woman to insist that her husband utilise a condom in further sex with her. The Cardinal answered that in line with Church doctrine she was obliged to have sex with her husband and could not under any circumstances use birth control methods. In other words, she must willingly accept a death sentence from AIDS, contracted from her cheating, worldly partner. This effectively meant she was not allowed to take precautions against the disease. This Catholic stance is not only out of step with the promoted ‘safe sex’ message of operations like the World Health Organization and various groups trying to contain the pandemic spread of AIDS in Africa; it is totally at variance with what is right, decent and acceptable within human rights. It is probably open to challenge, in a court of law, that it is illegal (as a form of unlawful killing) for her husband to knowingly pass AIDS on to her. Thus, the whole Church position is out of step with humanitarian concepts, with reality and with common sense. This goes to show that in offering support to its congregation, the Church has quite apparently lost its way. Also, in December 2004, four Israeli antique dealers were indicted on charges that they ran a massive forgery ring that produced fake Bible era artefacts, some of which had been acclaimed as important archaeological finds across the globe. The head of the Israel Antiquities Authority, Shuka Dorfman, made a forceful accusation that these forgers, although supporting the Bible, ‘were trying to change history.’ The forgery ring had been operating for more than 20 years and museums around the world were George Pell warned to re-check a myriad of items of suspicious origin. The Israel Museum admitted that the investigation of some artefacts were its own.

Pictured Right: Australia’s Cardinal

So what about the tour operators whose tour brochures advertise a menu of Jesus sites for the gullible tourist to visit? (I have a stack of them). What about the guides who point out the actual cave of Jesus’ birth and concoct the most unlikely stories connecting him to various sites around Jerusalem and the Holy Land? Should they be prosecuted, too? There have been many attempts to change history on a scale not even approached by this forgery ring. I believe that this century we are about to see a change of ‘paradigm shift’ proportions in the dating of monuments, like the sphinx and pyramids of Egypt and the temple of Stonehenge that will in turn lead to a revision of the tenure of life on this planet. This will also include a paradigm shift in the world religions that are based on the original Jewish texts. This, of course, encompasses the Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths and accounts for an enormous number of today’s believers. Professor Thomas Kuhn of the University of Chicago, explained that a ‘paradigm’ represents:

‘The entire constellation of beliefs, values and techniques shared by the members of a given community or discipline.’ (9)

The Professor goes on to state that once paradigms are set, recipients seem totally blocked to contrary suggestions. In other words, ‘There is nothing as permanent as proved error.’ Change will only come with education and in this age of information technology, the laity is becoming educated. In the same way, that which was held as unequivocal Christian dogma, is now becoming intellectually rejected as quaint mystic hangovers from the past. Kersey Graves stated:

‘Truth has made its ingress into the human mind in the ratio by which man has attained the capacity to receive it.’

If we look back over the past two thousand years, we find every decade shows us a lower level of intelligence in man and a mentality more conducive to ignorance and more accepting of superstition. Our interest here is that this human imperfection is reflected in the Biblical scriptures, conceived by the scribes in that Christian era. (10)

Over the past two millennia, many millions of people have been hood­winked by false ‘religion’. Why can we say this? Because in this author’s previous work, ‘They Lied to Us in Sunday School’, we saw conclusively that over and above the inherent erroneous documentation of the early scribes, a large part of the whole religious package was an orchestrated, deliberate fraud. When used as a tool of a corrupt and out of control Church system, religion has adversely affected every Christian, Moslem and Jew on the planet, spiritually, financially and emotionally. It has been somewhere behind each and every war and upheaval and has adversely effected its own congregation, betrayed in their individual efforts to bring about their own salvation. The Church insisted that the only way for man to communicate with his God was, in Latin, through the various hierarchy tiers of the Catholic Church. Despite this being both inane and un-scriptural, even the elect were fooled.

Matthew 6: 6 ‘But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.’

Any scripture that empowered the laity was either heavily edited or removed altogether from the Bible. Astronomy, astrology, karma and reincarnation were there in the early Bibles but were removed; whilst ‘big stick’ threats, like ‘purgatory’, ‘Hellfire’ and ‘the Devil’ were introduced to ensure obedience to the Bishops from a subservient congregation. (11)

Even today we can note the similarities between the removed doctrine of Reincarnation and the replacement Biblical ‘Born again’ ceremony; between the removed Karma and the Biblical ‘Reap what you sow’ and ‘those who live by the sword will die by the sword’. There is also a similarity between the removed Astrology and the Biblical Magi at the birth of Jesus who saw His star in the East. Also between the removed Astronomy and the prediction given to Abraham as shown in the stars:

Genesis 15: 5 ‘And he brought him forth abroad and said, “Look now toward heaven and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them”: and He said unto him, “So shall thy seed be.”

There are actually current Biblical texts that still seem to imply reincarnation. For example:

Matthew 11: 12 -14 ‘And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it by force. For all the prophets and the law prophesied until John. And if ye will receive it, this is Elias, which was for to come.’

Matthew 17: 12-13 ‘But I say unto you, That Elias is come already and they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed. Likewise shall also the Son of man suffer of them.’ Then the disciples understood that He spake unto them of John the Baptist.’

There seems no doubt that these passages identify John the Baptist as the reincarnation of the prophet Elijah (Elias).

In our studies of ancient scripture we see that in those times, doctrine was changed to include intercessory roles to empower the Cardinals, Bishops and Priests, who actually held the monopoly, not only on learning, but on communication with the Almighty. The treasured Christian message was not even allowed to be preached in the local vernacular; it had to be in Church Latin (a western Rome dialect) which was, of course, totally incomprehen­sible to the vast majority of Global citizens. Through altered scripture, altered doctrine, lies, false indoctrination; through wars, crusades and the denigra­tion of medicine and science, the Church has systematically retarded the advancement of the human race. It has spread division whilst claiming to do the opposite. In the Gnostic Apocalypse of Peter, we find this dialogue that Jesus imparts to Peter:

‘Those who name themselves Bishop and Deacon and act as if they had received their authority from God are in reality waterless canals. Although they do not understand mystery, they boast that the mystery of truth belongs to them alone. They have misinterpreted that apostle’s teaching and have set up an imitation Church in place of the true Christian Brotherhood.’ How many Jews, Gypsies, non-mainstream religions and handicapped people suffered in Nazi concentration camps while orthodox churches in Germany turned a blind eye? While we are on that subject, what happened to the young chemist who sold the cyanide gas, Zyklon B and Malathion, to the Nazi’s at Auschwitz, in Poland, with which to exterminate the Jews? Well, his name was Karol Wojtlya and he became so ashamed for his actions that at the end of the war he joined the priesthood and in quick time rose up through the ranks to become Poland’s youngest ever Bishop. In due course he was elected to the Vatican as Pope John Paul II. (12) They didn’t make that public, did they?

How many young women were burned at the stake as witches as part of the orchestrated subjugation of women throughout history by the Church? How many spiritual people were murdered in the Crusades of the Middle Ages, all in the name of God? How many pioneers of the sciences, how many Templars, Manicheans, Cathars & Bogomils lost their lives in the Inquisition, simply because their beliefs didn’t follow the manufactured ‘orthodoxy’ of the institutionalised Church? This Church reduced to system the removal of the competition and systematically eliminated an entire populous of spiritual people in the Albigensian Heresy; because their doctrine disagreed with the direction the contemporary Pope had planned for his own heretical Church. Our research shows that the Cathars were not heretical at all.

Today the process of education is slowly illuminating the discrepan­cies, dispelling the lies, removing the absurdities and dissolving the myths and in so doing, is stripping the Church of its credibility, even though the wealth, arrogance, pomp and ceremony still remain. Today’s easy access to an explosion of globalised knowledge, means that the Church no longer has a monopoly on learning and their supposed infallibility won’t stand up to much scrutiny at all. The Church is now regularly shown to be highly fallible and much of its past behaviour is found to be highly questionable. The clergy and the Church are in the news almost daily for their misdemeanours. An educated and worldly congregation will no longer accept or condone the Church’s pedigree of lies, fraud, crimes and excesses.

Another area where the Church is out of touch with modern thinking is in caring for Nature and our planet. In our Bibles we read:

Genesis 1: 28 ‘And God blessed them and God said unto them, “Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

Firstly, this passage does not command man to; ‘populate the Earth’, it says, ‘replenish’, which would indicate that this may not be the first time around for man. Next for those who view the Earth as a living entity that should be treated with respect, being absolutely harmonious with Nature and the Universe, it is hard to swallow God’s command to, ‘subdue it.’ Nevertheless, the Earth citizens of the past two millennia have certainly done just that.

There is, however, something of a related paradox within Judaism, contained in this passage. The ‘Sefed Zohar’ (Book of Splendour), is a Kabba­listic mystical work, whose introduction includes a richly metaphorical discourse given by Rabbi Chizkiyah explaining that the spiritual forces that protect and watch over us are called the ‘13 Attributes of Mercy’ and corre­spond to the first 13 words of the Torah. The Zohar explains that the attributes of mercy personify sharing and that this embodies the positive energy within our world. Followers of Judaism believe that meditatively brows­ing the Hebrew or Aramaic wording actually awakens our desire to share and that this arouses a spiritual light that effectively removes chaos from our lives. The Zohar introduces a mother goddess known as Shechinah (a feminine side of YHWH), a living animating force who oversees that all living things of planet Earth are harmonious and nurtured. Shechinah (radiance) also refers to the misty presence of God between the cherubim on the ‘Ark of the Covenant’.

On the other hand, the rabbinic and doctrinal teachings warn man not to be lured, in any way, by the beauty of the material world where short-lived achievements are based on egocentric drives and ambitions. They hold that attunement with Nature amounts to idolatry.

Miracles

We are told that the Biblical Jesus did supernatural ‘miracles’ presumably to demonstrate that he was a God and not a man; however, since Jesus was not deified until 325 A.D., these are, quite apparently, fraudulent additions in the Bible. The word ‘miracle’ only appeared in English from 1137 A.D., though it is derived from an ancient Latin root. Jesus was actually a doer of ‘paradoxa erga.’ Now ‘paradoxa’ means contrary to favourable opinion and ‘erga’ means works and this appears to have very little to do with the current English trans­lation as ‘miracles’. We must question why God supposedly set the universe in place, governed by strict rules of Nature and physics, then the Biblical miracles introduce a total repudiation of all law, all system and thus negate God’s order. In reality, Jesus did not do any miracles and in the Bible, He says so. The Church invented the miracles and fraudulently added them to the Bible.

Mark 8 : 11-12, ‘And the Pharisees came forth and began to question with Him, seeking of him a sign from heaven, tempting Him. And He sighed deeply in his spirit and saith, “Why doth this generation seek after a sign? Verily I say unto you, There shall no sign be given unto this generation.”

Jesus is quite adamant: “There shall no sign be given unto this generation.” Are we to believe that He then went out and commenced performing gratui­tous tricks and doing miracles that contradict His statement and repudiate the laws of Nature and Science? Well, just a few verses later in this ‘manufactured’ Bible, in total contradiction, the miracles start and continue through the book of Mark. It is far more believable that the miracles attrib­uted to Jesus are fraudulent additions by the clergy.

Prayers Answered

Statistics show that the majority of prayers in Christian countries are to ask that loved ones receive travelling mercies and that they remain safe, particu­larly in times of war and upheaval. Major insurance companies insure against calculated risks; that’s their job. Some years ago a very extensive study was undertaken to ascertain if, in fact, prayer had a bearing on risk; to ascertain if Christians were a better risk than non-Christians were. Imagine the effect it would have on their policies if it could be shown that Christians were actually a better risk and all this prayer was paying off.

The conclusions were, however, that there is absolutely no delineation in statistics of Christians and non-Christians killed in war or in travelling accidents. In aircraft accidents, train smashes and motor vehicle accidents, the statistics did not favour the Christians at all. This was a very prestigious organisation, undertaking a very extensive study and actually looking for a positive result that simply could not be substantiated. You may draw your own conclusions, but it is hard to overlook the simple truth that those millions of hours of prayer seem to be a total waste of time. Apart from some small benefit gained from ones own affirmation process and perhaps the polarising of one’s thoughts, or focusing one’s needs, this was just so much wasted effort. From all those thousands and thousands of prayers, prayed in earnest over the years, there is simply no evidence whatsoever that a single prayer was even heard and certainly no evidence that anything at all was achieved by it.

Matthew 7: 7 tells us, ‘Ask and it shall be given you.’

Isaiah 1: 14-15 states that, ‘God won’t hear your prayers.’

Lamentations 3: 8 says, ‘Also when I cry and shout, he shutteth out my prayer.’

Joshua 24: 19 shows us, ‘He will not forgive your transgressions or your sins.’

Psalm 10: 1 asks, ‘Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?’ This doesn’t instil much confidence for Christians who believe their prayers are heard and answered. Can you tell me why the above verses are in the Bible?

Today, the concept that an invisible, immortal God created the universe and continues to regulate all natural phenomena, does not stand up to even mild scientific scrutiny. Of course, the fact that God is supposed to be invis­ible gives him a lot more latitude; but really does not change a thing in our argument. In ancient times, the belief that prayer (like miracles) could influ­ence that regulation, one way or the other, was widespread, even if misguided and God was called upon to provide that which was perceived as necessary for survival. It can be seen that most civilisations, in their early history, worshipped pagan Gods in an attempt to guarantee supply of basic needs, like protection from the elements and food for their sustenance. In addition, immortality was admired and craved by the populous and this made them admire their Gods particularly for this reason. Early man praised Gods of the elements who he felt could affect the tribe’s harvest. Hence, the worship of Sun Gods and Gods who controlled the rain, allowed mild winters without frost and resultant good harvests. Obviously, procreation was deemed impor­tant, too; so fertility Gods and phallic Gods were common. Sacrifice began with token offerings to the Gods, for a successful birth, or a portion of a successful hunt or harvest and included gifts of appeasement. Later, birds, lambs, goats, oxen and even humans were sacrificed to ensure clemency, good seasons and fertility. A God who could be relied on to provide basic needs was attractive, indeed. We see all this as a little naive and quaint within the context of today’s modern world and yet we can still find a Bible record that appears to depict a pagan rain God who requires obedience and sacrifices to bestow good harvests:

Leviticus 26 : 1-7 ‘I am the Lord. If ye walk in My statutes and keep My commandments and do them; then I will give you rain in due season and the land shall yield her increase and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit. And your threshing shall reach unto the vintage and the vintage shall reach unto the sowing time: and ye shall eat your bread to the full and dwell in your land safely. And I will give peace in the land and ye shall lie down and none shall make you afraid: and I will rid evil beasts out of the land, neither shall the sword go through your land. And ye shall chase your enemies and they shall fall before you by the sword.’

The fact that this passage remains in our Bible is of considerable embarrass­ment to senior clergy. The whole concept is quite primitive. Robert Gillooly understood the point I am making. He states:

‘Certainly, Christianity did nothing to dispel a belief in spirits when it taught that the Almighty hung out the stars each night with his giant hand, set the sun on its course each day and kept in touch with an Earthbound audience by means of various signs and wonders-comets, for example, were flung across the night sky to register his displeasure (although some theolo gians believed they were piloted across the sky by lesser spirits). And angels, the minions of the Almighty and themselves spirits, performed such duties as opening the ‘windows of heaven’ to let the rain fall from heaven’s great cistern.

So, from the earliest of ages, humanity hazarded a guess that unseen spirits orchestrated the universe. The more powerful of the spirits became Gods and those of evil intent became demons. But all were merely creatures of the imagination, born of a need to understand the natural world and cope with the problems of life.’ (13)

Gillooly makes the point that early man attributed to the Gods that which was not easily attained for himself. Then, as science allowed man to perform the magic that had previously been the realm of the Gods only, the Gods’ power and attraction were naturally lessened. We are seeing exactly the same thing occurring in the Churches today, where education of the masses is rendering the Church somewhat redundant. Man has recently obtained medical and scientific abilities that would have appeared Godlike to ancient peoples. Now that man can utilise computers, irrigate the desert, clone life, detonate weapons of mass destruction, fly to the moon, communicate across the globe in seconds, then the power and attraction of Almighty God for today holds considerably less relevance. (14) As science and education reduce the relevance and potency of mythical guiding spirits in the Churches, the better-informed congregations begin to stay away in droves.

The Concorde, the Space Shuttle and the Stealth Fighter are no longer considered cutting-edge technology, but compared to Biblical angels flapping their feathered wings to commute from Heaven to Earth, man could now show God a better way. With this reduced dependence on our Gods, we see a huge reduction in man’s requirement for prayer. It is no longer practical for us to consider that today, God identifies and singles out the individual prayers of Mrs. Smith of Jonesville about her lost cat, or some other fairly trivial local issue and rushes to set things right. Multiply this situation by the few million or so souls across the world who are praying at any given time and the answer is patently obvious.

In reality, God does not control or interfere in worldly events and never has done. In World War II, we prayed for victory; the enemy prayed for victory. Can we seriously believe that we won because God could see how evil the enemy was? Yet this has been the belief throughout history; our God is stronger than their God. There is no evidence whatever that a single prayer has ever been answered. This has been scientifically tested and quite simply, if you are looking for positive results, prayer to an invisible God will not do it.

The word for today is:

‘If it’s to be … it’s up to me.’

God Failed Math

We find in the Biblical Book of Numbers, that the Lord commands Moses to sort through some captured plunder and allocate a share to the Lord. The Lord wants the spoils firstly divided equally between the soldiers and the priests, with each group then paying Him a disparate amount as His share. The Lord is quite adamant about the share He then requires from the first half and from the second half of this divided plunder. Now, this plunder just happens to include 32,000 virgin women. This is quite unpalatable to include in a Holy Book; the dividing up of women along with cattle and possessions. The Bible doesn’t exactly confirm that these virgins are to be killed as sacrifices; however, it certainly sounds like it. If not, just what is the Almighty planning to do with his share? If so, this Lord God and the Priests who pander to him are certifiable, sick, weirdos. Read the horrible thing:

Numbers 31 : 25-47 ‘The Lord said to Moses, “You and Eleazar the priest and the family heads of the community are to count all the people and animals that were captured. Divide the spoils between the soldiers who took part in the battle and the rest of the community. From the soldiers who fought in the battle, set apart as tribute for the Lord one out of every five hundred, whether persons, cattle, donkeys, sheep or goats. Take this tribute from their (First) half share and give it to Eleazar the priest, as the Lord’s part.

From the Israelites’ (Second) half, select one out of every fifty, whether persons, cattle, donkeys, sheep, goats or other animals. Give them to the Levites, who are responsible for the care of the Lord’s tabernacle.” So Moses and Eleazar the priest did as the Lord commanded Moses. The plunder remaining from the spoils that the soldiers took was 675,000 sheep, 72,000 cattle, 61,000 donkeys and 32,000 women who had never slept with a man.’

According to the Bible, the half share of those who fought in the battle was:

· 337,500 sheep, of which the tribute for the Lord was 675; · 36,000 cattle, of which the tribute for the Lord was 72; · 30,500 donkeys, of which the tribute for the Lord was 61; · 16,000 people, of which the tribute for the Lord was 32.

So the Lord has a requirement for all these virgins, most likely for sacrifice; now, is it me or is there something wrong with the mathematics here? Of the women, the first half amount to a monumental 16,000 and the Lord requires 1 in 500 = 32. Of the second half, the Lord requires 1 in 50 = 320, not the erroneous 32 shown in the Bible. Similarly, the Bible is wrong for sheep, cattle and donkeys as well. I have checked several translations and not one editor seems to have picked up this error. In those times, mathematics was not a strong point and many numbers were ‘rounded’ but one would think, not to this extent. The Bible’s figures are demonstrably wrong. They are plainly in error.

Bloodshed, Murder & Cruelty

They say a leopard cannot change its spots, yet we are asked to believe that the cruel, angry, unreasonable God of the Old Testament who even promotes human sacrifice, somehow, with the birth of Jesus, metamorphosed into the kind, loving, benevolent God of the New Testament.

Exodus 21 : 20-21 ‘And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money (or his property).’ Thus, with the Lord’s approval, a male or female slave may be beaten to death with no punitive retribution for the perpetrator as long as the slave doesn’t die too quickly.’

Numbers 16 : 30-33 ‘But if the Lord make a new thing and the earth open her mouth and swallow them up, with all that appertain unto them and they go down quick into the pit; then ye shall understand that these men have provoked the Lord. And it came to pass, as he had made an end of speaking all these words, that the ground clave asunder that was under them: and the earth opened her mouth and swallowed them up and their houses and all the men that appertained unto Korah and all their goods. They and all that appertained to them, went down alive into the pit and the earth closed upon them: and they perished from among the congregation.’

The Lord causes the earth to open and swallow up the men and their households (including wives and children) because the men had been rebellious.

Numbers 16 : 35 ‘And there came out a fire from the Lord and consumed the two hundred and fifty men that offered incense.’

Numbers 25 : 9 ‘And those that died in the plague were twenty and four thousand.’ This is bigotry in the extreme. The Lord kills 24,000 people with plague because a Hebrew man married a Midianite woman.

Joshua 7 : 24-26 ‘And Joshua and all Israel with him, took Achan, the son of Zerah and the silver and the garment and the wedge of gold and his sons and his daughters and his oxen and his asses and his sheep and his tent and all that he had: and they brought them unto the valley of Achor. And Joshua said, “Why hast thou troubled us? The Lord shall trouble thee this day.” And all Israel stoned him with stones and burned them with fire, after they had stoned them with stones. And they raised over him a great heap of stones unto this day. So the Lord turned from the fierceness of his anger.’ Achan, his children and his cattle are stoned to death because Achan had taken a taboo thing and the sight of this cruel punishment turned the Lord from his anger. He is sick!

Judges 16 : 29-30 ‘And Samson took hold of the two middle pillars upon which the house stood and on which it was borne up, of the one with his right hand and of the other with his left. And Samson said; “Let me die with the Philistines.” And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.’ Samson, with the help of the Lord, pulls down the pillars of the Philistine house and causes his own death (and in verse 27) that of 3,000 other men and women. (Note: at 30 dead, this Bible record could be believable, at 300 it would be highly improbable, but at 3,000 it is just ridiculous).

Judges 20 : 46-48 ‘So that all which fell that day of Benjamin were twenty and five thousand men that drew the sword; all these were men of valour. But six hundred men turned and fled to the wilderness unto the rock Rimmon and abode in the rock Rimmon four months. And the men of Israel turned again upon the children of Benjamin and smote them with the edge of the sword, as well the men of every city, as the beast and all that came to hand; also they set on fire all the cities that they came to.’ The Israelites smite 25,000 ‘men of valour’ from amongst the Benjamites, killing ‘men and beasts’ and set their towns on fire.’

2 Samuel 8 : 1-18 - David slew 22,000 Syrians and 18,000 Edomites in the valley of salt and made the rest slaves. He then slew more than 47,000 Syrians all in the name of the Lord.

2 Samuel; 18 : 6 - 720,000 men are slaughtered at the battle in the forest of Ephraim, all orchestrated by Almighty God.

2 Samuel 24 : 15 - The Lord sends a pestilence on Israel that kills 70,000 men.

1 Kings 13 : 15-24 - A man is killed by a lion for eating bread and drinking water in a place where the Lord had previously told him not to. This is in spite of the fact that the man had subsequently been lied to by a prophet, who told the man that an angel of the Lord said that it would be all right to eat and drink there.

1 Kings 20 : 29-30 The Israelites smite 100,000 Syrian soldiers in one day. A wall falls on 27,000 remaining Syrians. (That’s a big wall!) In fact, the Bible is in error, since the word eleph or aleph meant ‘thousand’, whilst the word originally used here was in fact aluph which meant ‘chieftain’. So, the scribe was trying to say 27 Syrian chieftains were killed by the wall but it was erroneously translated as 27 thousand Syrians.

2 Kings 19 : 35 - An angel of the Lord kills 185,000 men.

2 Chronicles 13 : 17 ‘And Abijah and his people slew them with a great slaughter: so there fell down slain of Israel five hundred thousand chosen men.’

Jeremiah 16 : 3-4 ‘For thus saith the Lord concerning the sons and concern­ing the daughters that are born in this place and concerning their mothers that bore them and concerning their fathers that begat them in this land; “They shall die of grievous deaths; they shall not be lamented; neither shall they be buried; but they shall be as dung upon the face of the earth; and they shall be consumed by the sword and by famine; and their carcasses shall be meat for the fowls of heaven and for the beasts of the earth.”

Matthew 10 : 21 ‘And the brother shall deliver up the brother to death and the father the child: and the children shall rise up against their parents and cause them to be put to death.’

Man has not done too badly, it seems, if he has had to counter this angry warlike nature he was given by the God who made him in His image; to finally evolve into the civilised being he is today. Perhaps we should feel sorry for the ruthless terrorists and other militant fundamentalists, who have not been able to overcome their nasty (Godlike) basic natures. This nasty nature is apparent when God looked at the devastation of the Flood He had caused to wipe out man for his inadequacies and stated that He had done it because the man He had created had a heart that was evil from his youth:

Genesis 8 : 21-22 ‘And Noah builded an altar unto the Lord; and took of every clean beast and of every clean fowl and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And the Lord smelled a sweet savour; and the Lord said in his heart, “I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for the imagina­tion of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I again smite any more every thing living, as I have done.”

The flood was supposedly to wipe out the ones with bad attitudes. It wasn’t very effective, now was it, because soon after, Almighty God is again inflicting man with plague and pestilence? Our attitudes have changed so very much from Biblical times, on things like anger, war, slavery, sacrificing children, sexism, racism and values in society. The attitudes to these things, depicted in our Bibles, look not only sadly old fashioned and out of whack with our thinking, but in many cases are actually legally wrong. The whole anti-social psyche of the ancients was macho, sexist, chauvinistic, racist and warlike. Let’s look more at that.

Animal & Human Sacrifice

The idea of blood sacrifice today conjures up images of superstitious, unedu­cated pagans trying to satisfy the blood lust of an idol God that can in no way help them in any case, ever. When it is human sacrifice that is being mentioned it gets even worse and then to hear of the sacrifice of one’s own children or firstborn, is just beyond comprehension. I was always bothered by the Old Testament’s blood sacrifice for the redemption of sin that was demanded by Almighty God. It was however something the Church had to abide by so that the New Testament sacrifice of Jesus, the innocent son of God, became atonement by the power of his blood, for the sin of the world. No sacrifice-no atonement!

Ezekiel 23 : 39 ‘For when they had slain their children to their idols, then they came the same day into my sanctuary to profane it; and lo, thus have they done in the midst of mine house.’

Numbers 8 : 17-18 ‘For all the firstborn of the children of Israel are Mine, both man and beast; on the day that I smote every firstborn in the land of Egypt, I sanctified them for Myself and I have taken the Levites for all the firstborn of the children of Israel”.

We should note the total lack of logic in this practice of utilising the life of an innocent to redeem the guilty. Whether it is man, woman, child, animal or bird, blood sacrifice is unpalatable, against Nature and plainly wrong! We simply cannot condone this left-over barbaric Christian doctrine, just because some long gone scribe included it in a document that ended up in our Bible. Recall that the Roman Emperor, Constantine, was responsible for the Church council that selected, by vote, which books were included in the Bible. Remember, too, that the formation of the Roman Church was a political manoeuvre and never a spiritual one. Accordingly the entire Christian doctrine is mostly fraudulent, with its pedigree hijacked from the Jewish Torah and this in turn from the Sumerian Enuma elish. Even its patriarchs were hijacked. The Church must, however, retain the abhorrent ‘blood sacri­fice’ in its doctrine or drop the whole concept of the sacrifice of Jesus, the ‘passover lamb’, for the redemption of sin.

The enlightened Egyptian Pharaoh, Akhenaten from the time of Moses found blood sacrifice abhorrent and left us with this thought:

‘I deny the existence of any divinity that requires to be worshipped with blood, with the death stroke and with sacrificial rites.’

Pictured Right: The Sumerian ‘EnumaElish’, Genesis tablet

Blood sacrifice is not a philosophy I could ever agree with or be a part of. How is it, that Chris­tians can feel total abhorrence when reading of sacrificial rites of pagan or satanic cults (happen­ing today in places, like the grounds of cemeteries), yet find comfort in the Christian sacrificial rites within their own Bible? They are happy to promote the power contained within the shed blood of Jesus and no one would ever guess they are discussing human sacrifice. Think about it: in this enlightened day and age, the taking of a human life, whether for blood sacrifice or not, is called murder; it is a criminal act, it is primitive, it is barbaric and it is sickening. Even the wine ceremony within the Eucharist is a parody of the ‘Kill the King’ ritualistic sacrifice and cannibalistic feast that followed. The following passages, however, are still in the King James Bible and a part of its (unholy) sacrifice doctrine:

Leviticus 27 : 28-29 ‘Notwithstanding no devoted thing, that a man shall devote unto the Lord of all that he hath, both of man and beast and of the field of his possession, shall be sold or redeemed: every devoted thing is most holy unto the Lord. None devoted, which shall be devoted of men, shall be redeemed; but shall surely be put to death.’

This is virtually saying that nothing must escape or be rehabilitated. All things earmarked for sacrifice must be killed off and even human sacrifice appears to be condoned.

In Judges 11 : 30-39 we read that Jephthah had to offer the Lord a human sacrifice for victory over the Ammonites. It was to be the first person who walked through his door on his return and just happened to be his beloved, only daughter. She was sacrificed to the Lord two months later. Some clergy claim that she was simply put to work in the Temple however, in verse 31 the original oath was ‘I will offer (that person) up for a burnt offering’ then in verse 39 it confirms that Jephthah, ‘did with her according to his vow.’

Ahaz, the King of Judah, sacrificed his son in the fire:

2 Kings 16 : 3-4 ‘Twenty years old was Ahaz when he began to reign and reigned sixteen years in Jerusalem … but he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, yea and made his son to pass through the fire, according to the abominations of the heathen, whom the Lord cast out from before the children of Israel.’

So too did Manasseh, a later king of Judah:

2 Kings 21 : 1 & 6 ‘Manasseh was twelve years old when he began to reign and reigned fifty and five years in Jerusalem … And he made his son pass through the fire and observed times and used enchantments and dealt with familiar spirits and wizards …’

In identical fashion, Abraham was prepared to sacrifice his son, Isaac, to the Lord, but, fortunately, the Lord accepted a ram instead:

Genesis 22 : 13 ‘And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked and behold behind him a ram caught in a thicket by his horns: and Abraham went and took the ram and offered him up for a burnt offering in the stead of his son.’

The word of the Lord spoken by Joshua prompted Hiel of Bethel to sacrifice his first born son in the foundations of the City of Jericho, which was a common practice in those times, to dedicate a City or new building or temple to the Lord. Hiel then sacrificed his youngest son by walling him up in the City gate posts:

1 Kings 16 : 34 ‘In his days did Hiel the Bethelite build Jericho: he laid the foundation thereof in Abiram his firstborn and set up the gates thereof in his youngest son, Segub, according to the word of the Lord, which he spake by Joshua the son of Nun.’

In the land of Canaan, the archaeologist Macalister, found the bodies of chil­dren, mostly fewer than eight days old, inserted upside down in huge pottery jars that had been sealed. This was discovered to be the result of mass human sacrifice of supposedly ‘first born’. This practice was a requirement of the Lord in line with the Bible’s sickly passages. Take note people; this is a particularly barbaric religion:

Exodus 22 : 29-31 ‘Thou shalt not delay to offer the first of thy ripe fruits and of thy liquors: the firstborn of thy sons shalt thou give unto me. Like wise shalt thou do with thine oxen and with thy sheep: seven days it shall be with his dam; on the eighth day thou shalt give it Me. And ye shall be holy men unto Me.’

Now if this Hebrew God actually required and demanded this human sacri­fice, he was indeed one sick puppy. If though he was a ‘creation’ of the Priests and scribes of the time and they added the human sacrifice requirement, this next passage speaks volumes about the prevailing psyche of these bloodthirsty people. It is seriously recorded that their megalomaniac God stated that he actually instructed the people to sacrifice their firstborn for no other reason than to ‘defile’ them, so that in the horror of what they had done, they may know that he was God:

Ezekiel 20 : 26 ‘I let them become defiled through their gifts - the sacrifice of every firstborn - that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am the Lord.’

Continuing with the blood sacrifices required by the Old Testament; these obviously had to be removed in the New Covenant to correspond to the more moderate, loving God. In a way, this couldn’t help but reduce the requirement for the sacrifice of Jesus. This is interesting, too, when Paul dismisses these rules out of hand as totally unnecessary:

Colossians 2 : 20-22 ‘Wherefore if ye be dead with Christ from the rudi­ments of the world, why, as though living in the world, are ye subject to ordinances, (Touch not; taste not; handle not; which all are to perish with the using;) after the commandments and doctrines of men?’

Both Jesus and Paul say that such rules don’t matter; they are only human injunctions.

Isaiah 42 : 25 The Lord speaks of what he did to Jacob and Israel as a sacrifice and concludes that a person is set on fire and burned to death, ‘yet he laid it not to heart’. It just amazes me that people would want to serve this God.

2 Kings 17 : 31-32 ‘The Sepharvites burnt their children in fire to Adram­melech and Anam-melech (Molech) yet they feared the Lord sufficiently to appoint priests to sacrifice to Him on their behalf.’

It seems apparent that Almighty God has no feelings or compassion whatever for the poor children being sacrificed, or for a person being set on fire; He is more concerned about His name being profaned and His competitor God, Molech.

Leviticus 18 : 20-22 Do not give any of your children to be sacrificed to Molech, for you must not profane the name of your God. I am the Lord.’

Now, in the Bible, Almighty God gives many, many specific lists of the sacri­fices He requires, but then in an instant denies having done any such thing. The lists are quite extensive and are considerably reduced here. Use your Bible to study the entire passages, if you desire:

Genesis 15 : 9 ‘So the Lord said to him, “Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon.”

Exodus 29 : 20-22 ‘Then shalt thou kill the ram and take of his blood and put it upon the tip of the right ear of Aaron and upon the tip of the right ear of his sons and upon the thumb of their right hand and upon the great toe of their right foot and sprinkle the blood upon the altar round about. And thou shalt take of the blood that is upon the altar and of the anointing oil and sprinkle it upon Aaron and upon his garments and upon his sons and upon the garments of his sons with him: and he shall be hallowed and his garments and his sons and his sons’ garments with him. Also thou shalt take of the ram the fat and the rump and the fat that covereth the inwards and the caul above the liver and the two kidneys and the fat that is upon them and the right shoulder; for it is a ram of consecration.’

Leviticus 1 : 1-7 ‘The Lord called to Moses and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting. He said, “Speak to the Israelites and say to them: When any of you brings an offering to the Lord, bring as your offering an animal from either the herd or the flock. If the offering is a burnt offering from the herd, he is to offer a male without defect. He must present it at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting so that it will be acceptable to the Lord. He is to lay his hand on the head of the burnt offering and it will be accepted on his behalf to make atonement for him. He is to slaughter the young bull before the Lord and then Aaron’s sons the priests, shall bring the blood and sprinkle it against the altar on all sides at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting. He is to skin the burnt offering and cut it into pieces. The sons of Aaron the priest are to put fire on the altar and arrange wood on the fire.”

Numbers 28 : 3-5 ‘And thou shalt say unto them, this is the offering made by fire which ye shall offer unto the Lord; two lambs of the first year without spot day by day, for a continual burnt offering. The one lamb shalt thou offer in the morning and the other lamb shalt thou offer in the even; and a tenth part of an ephah of flour for a meat offering, mingled with a forth part of an hin of beaten oil.’

Numbers 29 : 1-6 ‘And in the seventh month, on the first day of the month, ye shall have an holy convocation; ye shall do no servile work: it is a day of blowing the trumpets unto you. And ye shall offer a burnt offering for a sweet savour unto the Lord; one young bullock, one ram and seven lambs of the first year without blemish: and their meat offering shall be of flour mingled with oil, three tenth deals for a bullock and two tenth deals for a ram and one tenth deal for one lamb, throughout the seven lambs: And one kid of the goats for a sin offering, to make an atonement for you: Beside the burnt offering of the month and his meat offering and the daily burnt offer- ing and his meat offering and their drink offerings, according unto their manner, for a sweet savour, a sacrifice made by fire unto the Lord.’

Even if your sin is entirely unintentional, the Lord says a sacrifice is still re­quired:

Numbers 15 : 27-28 ‘But if just one person sins unintentionally, he must bring a year-old female goat for a sin offering. The priest is to make atone- ment before the Lord for the one who erred by sinning unintentionally and when atonement has been made for him, he will be forgiven.’

After all the instruction of the sacrifices He desired, (read demanded), above, these are then negated in the following passage as Almighty God now denies all knowledge, claiming He didn’t demand sacrifices at all:

Jeremiah 7 : 21-22 ‘Thus sayeth the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: “Put your burnt offerings unto your sacrifices and eat flesh (yourselves). For I spake not unto your fathers nor commanded them in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

Are you kidding? If the Bible has this correct, we have just caught out Almighty God telling porky pies. So tell us again; why all these innocent ani­mals and human victims were being slaughtered? So that the blood of the innocent could redeem the guilty! Well, the Bible has different news for you:

Hebrews 10 : 11 ‘Day after day every priest stands and performs his reli- gious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins.’ In case you missed that we have it a second time!

Joshua 24 : 19 ‘He will not forgive your transgressions or your sins.’ Do we all have that straight? We now find the purpose of all this bloodshed and sacrifice demanded by the Lord, was simply, ‘that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am the Lord.’ The sacrifices had no power whatsoever to atone for sins, intentional or unintentional. Read it again, if you don’t believe this. Our only conclusion: the people are being conned, this is a totally wacko God in a very weird religion

Cannibalism

It is really to the credit of the Christian clergy that they don’t mention the unacceptable practice of cannibalism, or teach the corresponding scriptures. It is, however, necessary to note the relevant passages from the Bible since it is part of Church doctrine and supposedly the ‘Word of God’ that endures forever and never changes. Of course, it was inherited from the Jewish religion when the Old Testament was hijacked and since so very much was edited out of the Bible, it is truly amazing to find this subject still included. What sort of a God would want passages on cannibalism included in his Holy Book? We will see that both Old and New Testaments prohibit the consuming of blood; then in contradiction, a myriad of passages show God promoting cannibalism, mostly as a punishment:

Leviticus 3 : 17 God himself prohibits forever the eating of blood and fat.

Acts 15 : 29 ‘That ye abstain from meats offered to idols and from blood and from things strangled and from fornication: from which if ye keep yourselves, ye shall do well.’

And yet there are many verses in which God causes His followers to engage in human sacrifice and cannibalism:

Ezekiel 39 : 18 ‘You will eat the flesh of mighty men and drink the blood of the princes of the earth as if they were rams and lambs, goats and bulls - all of them fattened animals from Bashan.’

Ezekiel 5 : 10 ‘Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee and the sons shall eat their fathers; and I will execute judgments in thee and the whole remnant of thee will I scatter into all the winds.’

Lamentations 4 : 9-10 ‘Those slain by the sword are better off than those who die of famine; racked with hunger, they waste away for lack of food ... Pitiful women have cooked their own children, who became their food ...’

Deuteronomy 28 : 53 ‘You will eat the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the Lord your God has given you.’

Isaiah 49 : 26 ‘The Lord will cause the oppressors of the Israelite’s to eat their own flesh and to become drunk on their own blood as with wine.’

Leviticus 26 : 28-30 ‘Then I will walk contrary unto you also in fury; and I, even I, will chastise you seven times for your sins. And ye shall eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters shall ye eat. And I will destroy your high places and cut down your images and cast your carcases upon the carcases of your idols and my soul shall abhor you.’

Jeremiah 19 : 9 ‘And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend in the siege and straightness, wherewith their enemies and they that seek their lives, shall straighten them.’

2 Kings 6 : 29 ‘So we cooked my son and ate him. The next day I said to her, ‘Give up your son so we may eat him,’ but she had hidden him.’

Micah 3 : 2 ‘ … who pluck off their skin from off them and their flesh from off their bones; who also eat the flesh of my people and flay their skin from off them; and they break their bones and chop them in pieces, as for the pot and as flesh within the caldron.’

The ‘evil side’ of Almighty God shown graphically in the above passages, was so specifically defined that it had a separate identity as Mastema, well before the introduction of Satan. We need to look at that.

Mastema

The above depictions of God as a cruel and ruthless warmonger, manifesting deceit, wrath and senseless killing, firmly cemented His position in the minds of the Hebrew scribes as the Jewish tribal war God. YHWH was a God of War with an impressive kill rate, including men, women, children, babies and animals. In time the scribes delighted in documenting his warlike nature and wrath in all its graphic, nasty detail because ‘our God is stronger than your God’. We heard from Moses; Exodus 15 : 3 ‘The Lord is a man of war; YHWH is His name.’

In early Bibles the passages; Exodus 4 : 24 & 25 tell us that YHWH God turned on his servant, Moses and tried to kill him. This same story is also included in the non-canonical Hebrew ‘Book of Jubilees’ that previously bore the title ‘The Apocalypse of Moses.’ The Hebrew people claimed this book was actually dictated to Moses by an Angel on Mount Sinai at the time he received the Ten Commandments and as a result, it was well accepted and enjoyed an enormously high readership amongst the Hebrew people. This book was excised from the Bible hopefuls and then suppressed after the Council of Nicea in 325 A.D.

The attack on Moses in the ‘Book of Jubilees’ (Apocalypse of Moses), however, is blamed not on Almighty God but on a ‘bad’ spirit of the Godhead called Mastema. This means that the bad side of God was sufficiently defined that it was actually given a separate name and identity. (15) Mastema actually meant ‘the dark, evil or warlike’ side of YHWH, so this must mean Almighty God has a sufficiently defined, dark, evil and warlike side to have a separate name attributed to it. Mastema is also found recorded, in a similar light, in the fragments of an early Zadokite work that likely originated from Qumran. According to Jubilees, it was the Mastema part of the Godhead who desired to test the piety of Abraham (as Satan did with Job) by demanding his son, Isaac, as a sacrifice:

Jubilees 17 : 16 ‘Then Prince Mastema came and said before God: “Abraham does indeed love his son Isaac and finds him more pleasing than anyone else. Tell him to offer him as a sacrifice on an altar. Then you will see whether he performs this order and will know whether he is faithful in everything through which you test him.”

It was originally recorded in our Bibles that the Mastema part of the Godhead asked King David to take a census and rather strangely, in 2 Samuel 24 : 10­17 we are told that David actually sinned by taking this census. The involve­ment of Mastema explains some of the contradiction we have in the Bible today:

In 2 Samuel 24 : 1, it is Almighty God who incites David to take this census.

In 1 Chronicles 21 : 1, current Bibles claim it is the later introduced Satan; however, in original scripture it was actually Mastema, the ‘evil’ part of Almighty God!

The evil Mastema personality of YHWH was also responsible for slaying the first-born in the land of Egypt. Compare Exodus 12 : 29 to the report in the Book of Jubilees:

Jubilees 49 : 2 ‘For on this night-the beginning of the festival and the begin­ning of the joy-ye were eating the passover in Egypt, when all the powers of Mastema had been let loose to slay all the first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh to the first-born of the captive maid-servant in the mill and to the cattle.’

In the Book of Jubilees, Mastema appears to be the prototype, filling the role that was later handed to the ‘manufactured’ Satan. The difference in the two situations, however, is that if man succumbs to the tempting of Mastema, he is then accused before the Throne of God. Apparently, it was considered that Man could not achieve righteousness without first resisting temptation and Mastema was a part of the Godhead, working in conjunction with Almighty God, to test man and achieve this. Satan was a later, separate, entity working against God as an adversary. The following depiction of Mastema in Jubilees, however, sounds very much like our later conception of Satan:

Jubilees 10: 8-9 ‘When Mastema, the leader of the spirits, came, he said: “Lord creator, leave some of them before me; let them listen to me and do everything that I tell them, because if none of them is left for me I shall not be able to exercise the authority of my will among mankind. For they are meant for (the purposes of) destroying and misleading before my punish­ment, because the evil of mankind is great.” Then he said that a tenth of them should be left before him, while he would make nine parts descend to the place of judgment.’

Let’s look at some ‘nasty’ things done by Almighty God in the Old Testament, which the early Hebrew people attributed to this character ‘Mastema’:

Exodus 32: 14 ‘And the Lord repented of the evil which He thought to do unto His people.’

Isaiah 30: 26 ‘ … when the Lord binds up the bruises of His people and heals the wounds He inflicted.’

1 Samuel 16: 23 ‘And it came to pass, when the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, that David took an harp and played with his hand: so Saul was refreshed and was well and the evil spirit departed from him.’

Numbers 31: 17-18, Deuteronomy 20 : 16-17, Joshua 10 40-42, Ezekiel

9: 4-8 The Spirit of God promotes slaughter.

Judges 14: 19 ‘And the Spirit of the Lord came upon him and he went down to Ashkelon and slew thirty men of them and took their spoil.

1 Samuel 18: 10 ‘And it came to pass on the morrow, that the evil spirit from God came upon Saul.’

On Moyers’ program, discussing the story of Noah and the flood, author and ex-nun Karen Armstrong asserted:

God is “not some nice, cozy daddy in the sky,” but rather a being who decid­edly behaves frequently, “in an evil way.” (16)

One passage in our Bibles that was not put down to Mastema certainly seems to have Yahweh Himself, accepting responsibility for this personality of good and evil:

Isaiah 45 : 6-7 ‘I am the Lord and there is none else, I form the light and create the darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord, do all these things.’

Satan

Most successful religions are dualistic, with a motif of good triumphing over evil. In the Christian religion, the role of Mastema became a little clumsy and inconsistent; where a supposedly loving creator God was then doing the tempt­ing and creating the evil, Himself. As a result it was thought at the Council of Nicea, that the redefined Roman Church of Constantine should separate this evil adversary into a specific character, in a dualist form. Accordingly, although the role remained pretty much unchanged, the actual character of Satan is a later fraudulent addition to the Christian Bible. The entity of Satan did not exist in early scripture. The word ‘Satan’ is Aramaic and simply means ‘ad­versary’. In the Bible we find in Mark 8 : 33, Jesus rebukes Peter ‘Get thee behind me Satan’. In his work, ‘Ancient Egypt: the Light of the World’, Gerald Massey explains - ‘One name for the mount (otherwise the horizon) in Egyp­tian is Sut or Set, the rock, hill or mount ...’ Accordingly, Peter the ‘rock’ is associated with Set which we will see is an Egyptian origin of Satan.

We must also acknowledge that the role of Jesus and his relationship with his ‘Father’ God is a direct allegoric steal from the Egyptian depiction of Horus and his father, Osiris. The twin brother of Osiris was Set; and Jesus is said to have had a twin brother, Judas Thomas the Twin, although this too is likely allegory. Now Set murdered his brother Osiris and became the ‘adversary’ of Horus. In Egyptian, the genitive is indicated by the letter ‘n’; hence, ‘Setn’ means ‘of Set’. Since Egyptian was recorded without vowels, this adversary or negative dualistic character was documented as ‘stn’ and here we possibly find the origin of the character Satan. To take this further, the Egyptian Book of the Dead mentions serpents called ‘Sebau’, ‘Sata’ and ‘Sa-en-ta’ and this could likely show how Satan became associated with a serpent.

Even early Egyptian religions had a dualistic format (the concept of good verses evil) and evil Gods, like the adversary of Osiris, are well documented. The later cult of ‘The Aten’, however, held no such dualism; the problem be­ing that when disaster struck there was no adversary of their God on whom to blame the evil. This point was appreciated by Graham Phillips who wrote:

‘The greatest problem for Atenism was that it was too naive - it made no allowance for evil. The idea of a single all-encompassing God is a fine phi- losophy, until you run into trouble. If there is only one divinity responsible for everything, then whom do you blame when things go wrong?’ (17)

This was precisely the situation with the early YHWH religion, prior to the introduction of Satan. The situation was exacerbated because the chosen Hebrew people were a particularly warlike race and felt they needed a fierce and angry God to lead them. This was also a valuable mechanism for justify­ing their atrocities. No matter how foul their actions, they could blame God’s Holy will. Most particularly, the genocide associated with stealing the ‘Prom­ised Land’ from its early inhabitants was reflected in early scripture, with a bent on justification.

Mastema, then the Serpent and to some extent the Gnostic Samael, were utilised to represent the ‘evil’ side of the Godhead and to fill the void, until eventually the Satan character was custom made specifically for the expanded role. Of course, this nasty side of God was not ideal for gaining recruits for the religion, so a ‘Satan’ was ultimately required. Almost all religions of any long standing are dualistic and promote this form of ‘good triumphs over evil’. The scribes really required an ugly, nasty, corrupt, dishonest and thor­oughly evil adversary to offset the beautiful, truthful, compassionate, consid­erate, loving, non-threatening (New Testament) God they worshipped; so they simply created one. This is absolute fact. Satan was custom made, along with accompanying Hellfire, for that role and resulted in one of the most success­ful marketing ploys ever devised. The Priests found a new role and a good livelihood in saving the souls of the laity from this particularly nasty, hellish fate. Look at the similarities of the traditional role of Satan in the New Testa­ment compared to that attributed to Mastema in the Old Testament. Except for the fact that Mastema was the evil side of Almighty God, we would be excused for believing that Mastema is just an apocalyptic name for Satan.

… they are no more than fictional fables, designed to undermine historical record and to intimidate readers into compliance with the dogmatic and sexist rule of the Christian bishops. Their portrayals of Satan are entirely fabricated and they are contrary to all original Sumerian, Canaanite and Hebrew archives.’ (18)

Within Christianity, to blame ‘the devil’ is the denier resort for all religious difficulties. It was made simple for us in the serial Westerns that we watched at the movie matinee as children; the ‘goodies’ wore white hats and the ‘bad­dies’ had the black ones. The wrestling has always had the ‘pretty boy’ and the ‘heel’ as a most successful marketing format; cops and robbers, goodies and baddies - people love it, people respond to it. It is amazing how thinking people will view Lucifer as a magnificent head angel, the most beautiful crea­tion of Almighty God, yet view Satan as the epitome of evil and ugliness, even when they are supposedly one and the same entity. They see angels as serene and majestic beings, but ‘fallen angels’ as putrid, demons from the pit of hell. Over the past two centuries, the uneducated were ruled by fear of ‘fire and brimstone’ and today only modern education is finally causing us to stop and finally evaluate this past superstition in a more natural light. We are now seeing it for the total nonsense it really is. Accordingly, people are voting with their feet and staying away in droves from the bombastic Church with its fraudulent doctrine. Meanwhile, this manufactured Satan is possibly the most corrupted figure in the entire Bible. Remember that Lucifer was supposedly God’s ‘most beautiful creation’ and the name meant nothing more sinister than, ‘Morning Star’. Since then, Lucifer has been called, Satan, Baal-zebub, The Serpent, The Prince of Liars, The Demon, Diablo and the Devil; and we certainly don’t think of him as being beautiful. In fact, the image gained from Sunday School, with the horns, hoofs and the arrowed tail are nothing to do with Lucifer at all; they are satyr images drawn from the sprite Pan with the goat legs. If the parishioner is still concerned about hell-fire, a correct transla­tion of the Biblical ‘fire that burns forever’ was shown by Dr. Barbara Thiering to be nothing more sinister than the Jerusalem rubbish tip.

We can also ask ourselves who is a group who likes to manipulate mankind and is wholly pre-occupied with ritual and symbolism? Note that the reverse of ‘live’ is e-v-i-l and that the name d-e-v-i-l is actually ‘lived’ in reverse. We can also see ‘evil’ is a large part of the name Devil. Think about it.

It is important to our research to note that once the Devil was intro­duced into the Bible, the death of Christ was originally documented and taught as a ransom paid to the Devil. This concept played a conspicuous part in the history of theology and the early church for over a millennium. (19) This entire scenario seems to stem from the ancient Sumerian traditions where a ransom was required to affect escape from the underworld. It was the Twelfth Century theologians Anselm and Abelard who, in a passionate display of logic, decided that this afforded too much power to Satan and turned all that around when they decided that the death of Christ was not a ransom to Satan at all, but instead, that God had a requirement for the death of His own Son, as a blood sacrifice, to appease Himself. (20)

1. Anselm of Canterbury was born in Italy about 1033 A.D. and in 1060 he entered the monastery of Bec, in Normandy, to study under Stephen Lanfranc, whom he succeeded in office, first as prior of Bec and later as Archbishop of Canterbury. In his work called the ‘Monologium’, he argues for the existence of God from the existence of degrees of perfec­tion (Aquinas’s Fourth Way is a variation of this argument) and his ‘Proslogium’, is an outline of his ‘ontological argument’ for the existence of God.
2. Peter Abelard (1079 -1142 A.D.) was born in Le Pallet, a small town in Brittany near Nantes and was a brilliant lecturer, debater, dialecti­cian, philosopher, theologian, poet and a musician. Abelard was, how­ever, an arrogant, larger than life character and his amazing debating skills, along with his sharp tongue and perfect memory, made him virtually unbeatable in debate, whether he was wrong or right. Abelard studied theology with the most eminent teacher of his day, Anselm of Laon (not to be confused with Anselm of Canterbury) and became his student, though it was a short term relationship, since no one seemed to tolerate the arrogant Abelard for long. He became scholar-in­residence at Notre Dame, a position he held until he entered the Benedictine monastery of Saint Denis. His work was extremly contro­versial and though brilliant in many respects and the theological teacher to three Popes, much of his writings were rejected and he died a shattered man. Whilst these two philosophers and theologians disagreed on much, they were responsible for causing the thousand year old salvation story to be re-written in the Twelfth Century, in line with their own teachings and even the elect still think today that the current Bible is the original source of this doctrine. At the very least, Christians are now asked to believe that the original ‘Word of God’ concept was faulty and these theologians corrected it in today’s Bible. In reality, these two men orchestrated the complete turn around in Biblical salvation that we are taught today as irrefutable dogma; the ineffable Word of God. Can you see how ‘hit and miss’ this whole church doctrine really is?

Interesting, too, is that the story of Satan also parallels that of the King of Tyre, on whom he was probably based. The rebellious King of Tyre was said to be ‘perfect in beauty’ and ‘faultless in his ways from the day of his creation until unrighteousness was found in him.’ Now where do you think I found this information recorded? Read it in your Bible, in Ezekiel 28 : 12-19.

Thinking people will see a somewhat ludicrous Christian prejudice in the Bible, where the newly created Satan is blamed for the actions of Judas Iscariot prior to the crucifixion:

Luke 22 : 3 ‘Then entered Satan into Judas, surnamed Iscariot.’

We are told that a Christian rejoices in the salvation achieved from the sacri­fice of Jesus, their Saviour. Paramount is the belief that Jesus died for them as a personal Saviour! Thus, logic tells us: Judas played a crucial and pivotal role in achieving that sacrifice. (No Judas, no betrayal, no sacrifice, no resurrec­tion, no salvation.) If the whole thing was prophesied and planned, for the salvation of mankind, then Judas was simply acting out a role, orchestrated for him by Jesus:

Luke 22 : 37 ‘For I say unto you, that this which is written, must yet be accomplished in me.’

This role was totally orchestrated. Recall that when the time drew near, Judas actually received a cue from Jesus:

John 13 : 27 ‘What thou doeth, do quickly.’

To blame Satan in line with Luke’s passage above, Christians would need to believe that in this situation the Devil actually worked to achieve their salvation, found in the crucifixion of Jesus. This entire Biblical story of Jesus being betrayed by a kiss from Judas is indeed fraught with problems; let’s move on to that:

Matthew 26 : 49-50 Jesus is betrayed by Judas with a kiss and then He is seized.

Mark 14 : 44-46 The same story from the same original Quelle source.

Luke 22 : 47-48 Jesus anticipates Judas’ kiss but no actual kiss is recorded. Then, in John 18 : 2-9, Jesus voluntarily steps forward to identify Himself, negating any need for Judas to identify Him. Again, no kiss is mentioned. The ‘cue’ we just looked at is from this same Book of John, involving Judas, who is then not required when Jesus steps forward.

These passages are pivotal and extremely important to the entire Chris­tian message. We are a people obsessed with ‘justification’ and the same can be particularly stated for the early, warlike, Hebrew people. The Jewish religion is a religion of ‘justification’ and by association, so is Christianity. The belief that possession by demons and spirits caused most human ailments, led to the fear and paranoia of witchcraft and sorcery that marked the period between the 13th to the 18th Centuries. To fully grasp this hysteri­cal fear within the church, we must appreciate that in this period alone, some­thing probably exceeding 500,000 young women were put to death as witches when, in reality, only a minute percentage were really guilty of anything at all. In the seventh century, 3 year old girls were burned to death or tortured in Europe, supposedly for copulating with demons, witches and sorcerers. Strong sexual passions were attributed to the youngest children and today we could view that this was likely justification by paedophiles who frequently find a way to excuse their actions by blaming their victims.

We have seen, too, that the reason most world religions need to be dual­istic, is because a scapegoat is needed on whom to heap the blame when things go wrong. In this case any bad decisions or evil behaviour from a God can be blamed on the Devil. Followers of YHWH have worked hard to overlook his wrathful, evil side, initially blaming it on their own unworthiness and inad­equacies. With their already low self-esteem, they readily accepted devils and demons and fallen angels, who could share the blame. We can see in the Old Testament, Balaam go from a position of ‘pleasing the Lord’ to being so despised as a soothsayer and fornicator that he was killed by the Hebrew people. In like fashion, the Canaanite deity Ba`al went from universal adora­tion and worship by the Hebrew people, to become Baal-zebub, another prototype of today’s Satan. Paul told the Ephesians in the New Testament to put on the whole armour of God daily to guard against the devil. And why not! Everything from bad luck or lost property, to sickness and outright possession, was down to Satan. People today blame Satan for late return of library books and for speeding tickets. But then, when did common sense ever count? It would seem that none of these believers had ever read in their Bibles of the bloodthirsty God-ordained atrocities that were a thousand times worse than anything a mythical Satan ever conjured up.

Inherent Evil Nature

It seems this evil behaviour was present in all the Gods from the most ancient times. The Sumerians left us clay tablet records that the Anunnaki Gods were continually fighting for power and control and how EN.LIL thought nothing of utilising the flood for the attempted genocide of man.

Now, we should wonder that if these Gods were so intelligent, were so advanced, were so powerful and possessed so much knowledge, then why did they display these evil traits? It poses an extremely interesting question on two fronts. Firstly as advanced beings with all this intelli­gence and knowledge, why could they not overcome their apparently evil natures? Secondly, how does this impact on mankind, made in their image?

Pictured Right: To please the ‘Sky-Gods’, Sumerians would make clay models of their family, held wide eyed in worship and permanently place them at the altars.

We were told in Genesis 1 : 26 ‘Let us make man in our image after our likeness.’ Man was apparently made with this inherent flawed nature of the Gods and was then set strict rules and commandments in an attempt to rise above it. The philosophical aspect of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’ is again the inherent motif, with a good God triumphing over an evil Satan. With God often displaying evil intent, far worse than the manufactured Satan, the very evil, itself, has no benchmark. God displays evil of the foulest nature, yet in the same breath, claims He is a God of love and curses man for his inadequacies. He then feeds him more rules and commandments on how he should behave. Could it be that once a race like the Anunnaki advances in knowledge, whilst depend­ing on exterior technology, they do so to the detriment of their own emotional stability?

A man will outwardly manifest what he is like inside and accordingly, is wise to strive for a healthy balance. Abraham Lincoln said; to quickly evaluate the measure of a man, one had but to give him a little power. We never really consider the various Gods as power hungry, but why not? What father would condemn his children to eternal damnation in Hellfire for disobedience? Most Gods seemed to command, ‘no other Gods before me,’ whilst many simply annihilated the competition. The technologically superior Gods appear to have manifested quite anti-social ‘evil’ natures and exhibited the vices of greed, lust and a general lack of compassion for each other and for their created beings. They did not display or exercise what we would see as normal loving natures and emotions. When they created beings lower than themselves, they seem to have embedded more balance in those beings, giving them the capa­bility of genuine love and compassion and the ability of becoming one with their universe. The Old Testament projects the same attributes for Almighty God. Recall the words of Jesus from the Gospel of John:

John 6 : 56 ‘Believest thou not that I am in the Father and the Father in Me? The words that I speak unto you I speak not of Myself: but the Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works.’

Jesus said that His Father God and He Himself would make an abode within us; however, we would hope that we would not then inherit the ‘evil’ traits of the Old Testament God. How could a person possibly exercise the uncondi­tional love Jesus preached about, or be expected to, with the Old Testament wrathful God dwelling within them? This is the same God who at times manifested the wholly evil Mastema. There could be some concerns with passages like the following:

John 8 : 44 ‘Ye are of your father the devil and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar and the father of it.’

This is, apparently, comparing believers to non-believers but it comes a little close to home when considering the ‘evil’ Godlike nature given to man. Is this what our daily Christian walk is really about? Must we struggle to overcome the inherent nasty (evil) nature we were endowed with in order to attain eternal life with the (good) Gods?

‘Man’s biggest problem is that he just doesn’t think.’

Albert Schweitzer.

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