Want to Subscribe?
Sign In or Sign Up now!

------------------------------ --------------------------

Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience. There is one more charge to be added to the bill of indictment. With a necessary part of its collective mind, religion looks forward to the destruction of the world. By this I do not mean it "looks forward" in the purely eschatological sense of anticipating the end. I mean, rather, that it openly or covertly wishes that end occur. perhaps half aware that's its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of temporal power and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim the Apocalypse and the day of judgment. This has been a constant troupe, ever since the first witch doctors and shamans learned to predict eclipses and to use their half-baked celestial knowledge to terrify the ignorant. It stretches from the epistles of Saint Paul, who clearly thought and hoped that time was running out for humanity, through the deranged fantasies of the book of Revelation, which were at least memorably written by the alleged Saint John the Divine on the Greek island of Patmos, to the best-selling pulp-fiction Left Behind series, which, ostensibly "authored" by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, was apparently generated by the expedient of letting two orangutans loose on a word processor:

The blood continued to rise. Millions of birds flocked into the area and feasted on the remains...and the winepress was trampled outside the city, and blood came out of the winepress, up to the horse's bridles, for one thousand six hundred furlongs.

This is sheer manic relish, larded with half-quotations. More reflectively, but hardly less regrettably, it can be found in Julia Ward Howe's "Battle Hymn of the Republic," which dwells on the same winepress, and in Robert Oppenheimer's murmur as he watched the first nuclear detonation at Alamagordo, New Mexico, and heard him self quoting the Hindu epic Bhagavad Gita: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." One of the very many connections between religious belief and the sinister, spoiled, selfish childhood of our species is the repressed desire to see everything smashed up and ruined and brought to naught.

- Christopher Hitchens "GOD IS NOT GREAT"

------------------------------ --------------------------

But the truly sinister complicity of the church came in its willingness to open its genealogical records to the Nazis and thereby enable them to trace the extent of a persons Jewish ancestry. A historian of the Catholic Church, Guenther Lewy, has written:

The very question of whether the [Catholic] Church should lend its help to the Nazi state in sorting out people of Jewish decent was never debated. On the contrary. "We have always unselfishly worked for the people without regard to gratitude or ingratitude," a priest wrote in Klerusblatt in September 1934. "We shall also do our best to help in this service to the people." And the co-operation of the Church in this matter continued right through the war years, when the price of being Jewish was no longer dismissal from a government job and loss of livelihood, but deportation and outright physical destruction.

All of this, despite the fact that the Catholic Church was in very real opposition to much of the Nazi platform, which was bent on curtailing its power. Goldhagen also reminds us that not a single German Catholic was excommunicated before, during, or after the war, "after committing crimes as great as any in human history."
This is really an extraordinary fact. Throughout this period, the church continued to excommunicate theologians and scholars in droves for holding unorthodox views and to proscribe books by the hundreds, and yet not a single perpetrator of genocide - of whom there were countless examples - succeeded in furrowing Pope Pius XII's censorious brow.

Not a single leader of the Third Reich - not even Hitler himself - was ever excommunicated, Galileo was not absolved of heresy until 1992.

- Sam Harris "The end of Faith"

------------------------------ --------------------------
"You got a genius attitude towards the Bible..... You need a child-like attitude..Its not that hard to understand."
-youtube/nflstar37

"sicens is bullshit"
- youtube/superEMOman1324

"Here's a painful in your face analogy. Who made the right right? And made the liberal the left? Media made these terms, but God speaks! Right=Righteous Left=left behind...think about it!"
- youtube/Truthsayer57

"Evolution is every bit as much of a religion as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or any other. A claim of fact without any evidence."
- youtube/matt61387