Some two thousand years ago there is said to have appeared in the notoriously rebellious province of Galilee, the headquarters of Hebrew radicalism, a wandering teacher called Jesus, who passed from village to village expounding certain ethical and socialistic ideas, which were condemned by the Roman government and which resulted in this man’s arrest and subsequent execution. After his death, his various pupils continued to preach his theories, and, separating, spread these ideas over various pa

So those Christians whose reasoning powers will not allow them to believe in the absurdity of an unnatural conception, and whose superstitious adoration will not permit of their believing Mary guilty of an intentional faux pas , try in this manner to reconcile the two, and declare Joseph the guilty man. According to the Gospels, Joseph, the husband, knowing Mary to be with child, married her ( Matt. i, 18 ); but that is no reason for believing that he regarded the Holy Ghost’s responsibility for

Therefore, it is not surprising to find a royal pedigree for the god Christ, especially when the religious position occupied by the king in rude societies is considered. The Kaffres acknowledge no other gods than their monarch, and to him they address those prayers which other nations are wont to prefer to the supreme deity. Every schoolboy knows of the apotheosis of the Roman emperors, and the monarchs of Mexico and Peru were regarded as divinities. Every king of Egypt was added to the list of

Relic worship and belief in the miraculous powers residing in the bones of departed saints, which continues, despite the more general education of the laity, is by no means of Christian origin. In ancient Greece the bones of heroes were superstitiously regarded and those of Hector of Troy were sacredly preserved at Thebes; the tools used in the construction of the Trojan horse were kept at Metapontum; the sceptre of Pelops was held at Chæroneia; the spear of Achilles at Phaselis; and the sword o

While suffering his execution, Jesus, according to the Gospel writers, lost both his moral and physical courage, and cried aloud in agony, “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” In view of this fact, it seems impossible for reasonable creatures to accept the Christian dogmas of the atonement and the trinity, for, if Jesus were one of the godhead and had left his heavenly abode to descend to earth for the especial purpose of saving mankind by shedding his blood for them, he must necessarily have been awar

Regarding the resurrection, it is interesting to note that, whereas most crucified men lived a number of hours and even a day in this torture, the wounds in the hands not being mortal and the position only affecting the circulation, causing death by exhaustion or starvation, Jesus lived only three hours. Therefore, it may have been that he was not actually dead, but merely in a state of coma, or perhaps a cataleptic condition. The custom he had of using his subjective mind in telepathic cures, a

As noted in various parts of this work, unless Christians believe in the possibility of miracles, the power of a personal devil, and the physical resurrection of the body, there is no foundation for their faith, and it is a mockery. Not satisfied with having executed their god according to the most approved methods of antiquity, Christians felt the necessity of the presence of some remarkable natural phenomena at the time of his death, for among all ancient peoples it was customary to attribute

That Jesus believed in this demoniacal possession is undoubted, and he effected his cures by ordering or calling out the devil from the body of the possessed. For example, there is a story of Jesus driving devils into an innocent herd of swine ( Matt. viii, 28–33 ; Mark v, 2–14 ; Luke viii, 26–34 ). We also find him casting out and rebuking devils in various instances ( Matt. ix, 32–34 ; xii, 22–24 ; xvii, 14–18 ; Mark i, 23–24 , 34 ; iii, 11 ; Luke iv, 33–36 , 41 ; ix, 37–42 ). In all probabili

RAISING THE DEAD. In the Egyptian religion, Horus, son of Osiris, raises the dead by communicating the life-giving principle. Note that he employs the crux ansata . The doctrine that God was angry with humanity because of its ancestors’ transgressions, and would forgive its sins only on its acceptance of belief in the godhead of Jesus, is so entirely at variance with the Jewish teachings, which held that God freely forgave penitents on the confession of their sins ( Ex. xxxiv, 6–7 ; Neh. ix, 17

The whole of trinitarianism is epitomized in the phrase of Peter Lombard, who, having made the impossible arithmetical assertion that no one person of the trinity is less than the other two, says: “He that can receive this, let him receive it; but he that cannot, let him, however, believe it; and let him pray that what he believes he may understand.” Jesus having been ordained one of the godhead, the only begotten son of the most high god, the worship of his mother naturally followed; for who co

ENLIGHTENMENT AND IGNORANCE. Much akin to the saints, though differing from them in form and in never having been mortal, are the angels. These beings combine the wings of the Roman victories with the sweet voices of the Teutonic elves and the classical sirens, and are in many ways similar to the famous northern valkyries who wore shirts of swan plumage and hovered over Scandinavian battlefields to receive the souls of falling heroes. The Hindu apsaras and Moslem houris belong to the same family

The best known rites of the Christian church are probably those of baptism, confession and communion, with which are associated the ideas of purification, prayer and transubstantiation. The rite of baptism, like all ideas which refer to the purification of sin by water, is a most ancient one. Rivers, as sources of purification, were at an early date invested with a sacred character, and every great river was supposed to be permeated with a divine essence and its waters were believed to cleanse f

As a logical deduction from a given hypothesis, any Roman priest is greater than the virgin. She conceived God but once, while the priest may through his mass create the body of the Christ whenever he so desires. Every time a priest performs this function he is the father of God. However, in spite of the absurdity of the practice, to deprive the communion of the real presence is to make it a senseless and useless ceremony. While the communicants believe in the efficacy of the wafer as the actual

Thinking probably of the political strife which his messiahship would cause, Jesus said, “I came not to bring peace, but a sword” ( Matt. x, 34 ), in which remark he was a truer prophet than the heavenly host that sang at his birth “on earth peace, good will toward men” ( Luke ii, 14 ). “The Church of Rome has shed more innocent blood than any other institution that ever existed among mankind,” says Lecky in his “Rationalism in Europe” (vol. ii, p. 40). The Holy Office in Spain burned over 31,00

Castan, L’Abee Em. — Les Origines du Christianisme d’apres la tradition catholique . Paris. 1869. 2 vols. Les Origines du Christianisme d’apres la critique rationaliste contemporaine . Paris. 1868. Chantepepie de la Saussaye , P. D.— The Religion of the Teutons . Boston. 1902. Cheetham , S.—The Mysteries— Pagan and Christian . London. 1897. Christlieb, Theodore. — Modern Doubt and Christian Belief . New York. 1874. Colenso, John William .— Lectures on the Pentateuch and Moabite Stone . London. 1

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