The Clergy.
The Presbyterian clergy or sorcerers of Scotland, of old times, claimed
that they could consign their deluded victims to Heaven or Hell by a
word, and could by their magic power strike with death any enemy of God,
that is, the clergy. They would not allow anyone to remain in town who
failed to go and hear their sermons. Buckle says the clergy kept the
people in a worse than Egyptian bondage, inasmuch as they enslaved mind
as well as body.
“John Knox sanctioned the murder of the Roman Archbishop Beaton of
Scotland in 1548, and shut himself up with the assassins in the palace
of the Archbishop. When the Catholic power was destroyed in Scotland by
the nobles in 1560 and the church property confiscated by them, the
Protestant clergy claimed that it was impious to secularize
ecclesiastical property, and that they should be endowed with the spoils
of the war, that it was right for the Lords to plunder the Church of
Rome, but the loot should be turned over to them. They said that what
rightly belonged to them was devoured by idle bellies. The Presbyterian
clergy said that King James was a traitor and had seven devils inside of
him, and he ought to be seized. And their associate in crime, the Earl
of Gourie, entrapped the King into his castle in order to murder
him.”—Buckle’s Hist. Civ. 2-201.
The Presbyterian clergy said that cheerfulness was to be guarded
against. Smiling, provided it stopped short of laughter, might
occasionally be allowed, still being a carnal pastime, it was a sin to
smile on Sunday. A Christian has no business with love or sympathy. He
has his own soul to attend to, that is enough for him. On Sunday in
particular he must never think of benefitting others and thus break the
Sabbath. On no occasion must food or shelter be given to a starving man
unless he is a Presbyterian.
“In priest-ridden Spain, Charles V, the tool of religion, in his will
provided that all heretics should be put to death and that the
Inquisition should be upheld. Under his orders, according to Grotius,
100,000 persons were beheaded, buried alive and burnt at the stake in
the Netherlands. Phillip II, of Spain, said it was better not to reign
at all than to reign over heretics. The Duke of Alva, in this reign,
boasted that in five or six years he had put to death in cold blood more
than 18,000 heretics, beside a still greater number of infidels he had
slain on the battlefield.”—Idem 2-14.
When it was proposed to expel from Spain the remnant of Moors remaining,
who had turned Christians and were baptized by force, Bleda, the
Dominican, said that every Moor in Spain should have his throat cut,
because it was impossible to tell which of them were Christians at
heart, but God knew his own and he could sort them out. About one
million of the most industrious inhabitants of Spain were hunted out
like wild beasts. Many were slain as they approached the coast, others
were beaten and plundered, and the majority in the most wretched plight
sailed for Africa. During the passage the crew in many of the ships
butchered the men, ravished the women and threw the children into the
sea. From this time Spain began to degenerate. The tyranny of religion
was supreme. While every other country was advancing, Spain, numbed into
a death-like torpor, spell-bound and entranced by the accursed
superstition, presented to Europe a solitary instance of constant
decay.“—Idem, 2-53.
“The French Revolution freed the world from ecclesiastical tyranny and
opened an unobstructed path to Napoleon, who had given the death blow to
the Inquisition, the great slaughter house, where they butchered in the
name of the Lamb.”—Isis Unveiled, 2-22.
The Brahmins, the clergy of India, were quite as disreputable as the
others. The Institutes of Manu provided that if a common person molested
a Brahmin, he was to be put to death. If he sat on the same carpet with
a Brahmin, he was to be maimed for life. If he listened to the reading
of the sacred books, burning oil was to be poured into his ears, and if
he committed them to memory, he was to be killed. If he spoke
disrespectfully of a Brahmin, an iron stile ten fingers long was to be
thrust red-hot into his mouth. To give to the Brahmins or will them your
property was an act of the highest piety.
The laws of the clergy in certain provinces of France, ruled by them in
old times, provided that every man that died without bequeathing part of
his estate to the church, should be deprived of the Sacrament (and would
consequently go to Hell). If he died without making a will, his
relatives were obliged to prevail upon the Bishop to appoint arbitrators
to determine what sum the deceased should have given to the church in
case he had made a will. At one time in France, “married couples could
not sleep together the first three nights without purchasing leave of
the church.”—Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, 665.
“Pope John XII was assassinated in the arms of his mistress.
Crecentious, the illegitimate son of John X, caused Benedict VI to be
murdered. His faction elected Boniface VII, and a third faction elected
John XV, who was put to death by Boniface. We find shortly after 1044
Benedict IX, a boy of twelve, and Rholeme and Sylvester III all reigning
at the same time, and all leading the most profligate and scandalous
lives.”—Doubts of Infidels, 95. Bishop Hopkins says that “the great body
of the clergy before the seventh century were steeped in licentiousness,
avarice, simony, cruelty, violence and blood. They consecrated every
vice in the interest of so-called religion, they graduated sins by
pecuniary amercement, they commissioned assassins, having pardoned them
before the commission of the murder.”
The priests or Magi of Persia, as ecclesiastical bandits, were
unexcelled. The people had to give up one tenth of their income to these
magical fakirs. Every woman in Babylon was obliged to offer her person
for sale one day in the year at the temple of Astarte, and the money
went to the priests. The pirates of Babylon ransacked the world and
bought or stole the most beautiful women on earth for the use of the
priests, who made a pretence of offering them up as human sacrifices to
Baal. The god held in his hand the appropriate symbol of the traffic,
the circle and the pillar, that may still be seen in nearly all
churches. The beautiful sacrifice was placed on the lap of the god in
the presence of the audience, to be devoured by the lions that
surrounded the god. But after the meeting the priests drove the lions
out and stole the sacrifice, as priests always did steal the offerings
from god.
The Egyptian priests were the rulers of the whole, and owned one third
the land of Egypt. Besides the princely revenue from this immense landed
estate, they received, in addition to their salaries, all the offerings
and sacrifices that the fools gave up as an atonement for sin. A very
large part of their income was derived from the Bethel or Brothel
maintained around the temple of the goddess Hathor, the cow, the wife of
the god Ammon, which is another name for the Ram god or the lamb of god.
Every woman in Egypt was obliged to sell herself for one month at this
temple. And then, besides, there were the regular sacred ladies who
lived constantly in the temple. The priests chose the most beautiful,
then the remainder were turned over to the mob of pious dupes and
devotees. The young lady who earned the most money for the priests was,
in the after life, assigned by Osiris, alias Yahvah, to a seat beside
the Golden Throne. This rotten pagan church subsequently changed its
name to Christian.
Calvin, the blood-drenched, the fiend incarnate, one of the founders of
the Protestant Churches, compelled his lady parishioners to confess on
the rack their indiscretions, and then threw them naked into the lake
and drowned them. He hanged a child for cursing its parents, burned old
women as witches, and burned alive Michael Servetus for contradicting
Moses in asserting that Palestine was a desert that did not flow with
milk and honey. Calvin died in convulsions of fear, raving and cursing
because he thought he was going to Hell.
Oliver Cromwell, the pious Puritan, the murder demon, the regicide, the
usurper, with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other, rode at
the head of his army of religious fanatics singing psalms. This
sanctified Christian, upon the capture of Drogheda, Ireland, himself
reported to Parliament that he massacred two thousand of the garrison.
He fired St. Peter’s Church, to which the people had fled, and put a
thousand of them to the sword. All the friars were killed but two. And
the likes of him settled Boston and robbed and murdered the Indians. One
of these Puritan buccaneers, named Will Bartlett, in Boston, in 1637,
was sentenced to be set in the stocks, with his tongue in a cleft stick,
because he got drunk and cussed and swore and refused to go to church on
Sunday.
In those blithesome days a citizen could not vote unless he belonged to
the Congregational Church and kissed the big toe of Cotton Mather, the
superstitious bigot, the Prosecutor of the New England Protestant
Inquisition. Ridpath says that Mather was chiefly responsible for the
horrors and crimes of the Salem Witchcraft, and that this massacre,
torture and imprisonment of 263 innocent persons was started by a Salem
minister for the purpose of revenging himself upon those of his flock
who antagonized him.—Ridpath’s Hist. of U. S. 131. The Quakers were
perhaps the only decent body of Christians up to that time, and for that
reason the Puritan pirates and slave-dealers hung four of them, one
woman and three men, on Boston Common.
“Infuse a few different kinds of religious poison into a community of
human beings, and they hate each other like tigers. Religious creeds
have a worse effect on a man than booze. You can work the booze out of
your system and quit the stuff, but when a victim is loaded up on some
rotten brand of orthodoxy, it is hard to do anything with him. A
Protestant will damn the Catholics, and a Catholic will yell ‘To Hell
with the Protestants,’ and both will hate the Jews.”—Roman Religion, 27.
The churches have soaked the earth with the blood of their countless
victims. Frederick, the Emperor of Germany, sentenced heretics of all
descriptions alive to the flames. Sixty thousand heretics were
slaughtered in the city of Beziers. Seventy thousand Huguenots were put
to death in France. The Massacre of St. Bartholomew began at midnight,
Aug. 23, 1572, and the carnival of death lasted seven days. Medals
commemorating the holy event were distributed among the loyal
butchers.—Roman Religion, 35.
“When the Crusaders took Jerusalem from the Moslems in 969 A. D., they
massacred all the Mussulmans and burned the Jews alive. Seventy thousand
persons were put to death in a week to attest the superior morality of
the Christians.”—Boston Sun. American.
Dr. Fernald says that Sultan Bejazet wrote to Pope Alexander VI that he
would give him 300,000 ducats, several cities and the shirt of Jesus
Christ if His Holiness would kill Zimzim, the brother of the Sultan,
“and you Most Illustrious Lord will not commit a crime, since by your
religion Christians are ordered to exterminate heretics and infidels.”
The Ency. Brit. says that “the unfortunate prince was murdered by
Alexander, who received 300,000 ducats as the reward of the crime.”
Zimzim was held captive by certain bandits in Rhodes, a Commandery of
the Knights of St. John, a Christian organization under the domination
of Alexander. Alexander was a Borgia, whose children were all
illegitimate.