Man's Search For Spirituality by E Christopher Reyes (the best electronic book reader txt) 📖

men who had ever lived, reward the good and punish the living. It is from Persia that certain sects of the Jews, and Christ and the early Christians, borrowed this idea of  “The coming of the Kingdom of Heaven.’
In spite of the glosses of preachers and divines, educated Christians recite with some hesitation the words of the Apostles' Creed: “He, Christ, descended into Hell.” This intriguing clause, of what is called the simplest expression of the Christian faith, is based chiefly upon the alleged words of Peter in Acts 2:31 that, “His soul was not left in hell.” Hades in the Greek text corresponding to the Hebrew Sheol, and upon the statement in 1 Peter 3:18, that Christ after death preached to “The spirits in prison.” Here is the earliest inventions of the forever burning Christian Hell of fire and brimstone for eternal torture, “The wicked shall go down into the Sheol of darkness and fire and dwell there forever;” this being “One of the earliest mentions of Sheol as a Hell of torment.” ~Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. i, 602-3; Encyclopedia Britannica, vol. i, 223-5.
This descent into Hades is accepted literally, by the earliest Fathers of the Church, Irenaeus, Clement, Tertullian, etc., and later incorporated in the Creed. Later the same Latin word, infernum, is used to render both Hades and Gehenna, the latter being the Hebrew abode of the demons.
Saints Peter, and John, are described to be “Anthropoi Agrammatoi Kai Idiotai,” or “Unlearned and ignorant men.” ~Acts 4:13. All Twelve of the Apostles are of the same type, chosen from among the humblest and most superstitious of the Galilee peasants, fishermen and laborers, allegedly being “Called” personally, by the Son of God, the proclaimed soon to be King of the Jews. The ‘Chosen ones’ are to be his counselors and associates in the establishment of the earthly and heavenly Kingdoms of Jews. ~Note: Being Chosen to represent God is not in the Bible. The Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council's Ecumenical conduit breaking Nostra aetate [Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions] clearly renounces any basis in Scripture for regarding Jews as “Renounced or cursed by God,” but precedes that claim with the bold statement, “The [Catholic] Church is the new people of God.”
“The chronology of the birth of Christ and the subsequent Bibical events is most uncertain.” ~Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 7, 419.
Jesus is even regarded as insane and his relatives seek to restrain him by force, if necessary. ~Mark 3:21; cf. John 10:20. “If the Lord were from other than the Father, how could He rightly take bread, which is of the same creation as our own, and confess it to be His Body and affirm that the mixture in the cup is His Blood?   When, therefore, the mixed cup and the baked bread receives the Word of God and becomes the Eucharist, the Body of Christ, and from these the substance of our flesh is increased and supported, how can they say that the flesh is not capable of receiving the gift of God, which is nourished by the Body and Blood of the Lord, and is in fact a member of Him?” ~Saint Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 189 A.D.
It is Saint Irenaeus who notices the name ‘Teitan,’ or ‘Titans,’ who were often called the ‘Elder Gods,’ supreme rulers of the universe, being of enormous size, and incredibly strength, contained the Mystic number 666, and believed that ‘Teitan’ was “By far the most probably name” of the beast from the sea. ~Revelation 14:9, 19:20, 20:4.
Historically it will be found, that while ‘Saturn’ was the name of the visible head, ‘Teitan’ was the name of the invisible head of the beast. Teitan is the Chaldean form of ‘Sheitan,’ the name by which ‘Satan’ has been called from time immemorial by the Devil worshippers of Kurdistan; and from Armenia or Kurdistan, this Devil-worship embodied in the Chaldean Mysteries traveled westward to Asia Minor, and thence to Etruria and Rome. ‘Teitan’ was known by the classic nations of antiquity to be ‘Satan,’ or the ‘Spirit of Wickedness,’ and originator of moral evil. The history of ‘Teitan’ and his brethren, as given in Homer and Hesiod, two of the earliest earliest Greek writers, although later legends are co-mingled, show quite evidently the exact counterpart of the Scriptural account of Satan and his angels. Homer says, that all the “Gods of Tartarus,” or Hell, “Were called Teitans.” Hesiod also tells us how these Teitans, or “Gods of Hell,” came to have their dwelling there. The leader of the Teitans commits a particular act of wickedness against his father, the ‘Supreme God of Heaven,’ with the approval of the others of the “Sons of Heaven,” that father “Called them all by an opprobrious name, Teitans,” pronounces a curse upon them, and then, in consequence of that curse, they are “Cast down to hell,” and “Bound in chains of darkness” into the etrnal abyss.
Catholics accordingly accept the gloss of Thomas Aquinas, that Christ did not go into the infected company of the damned sinners, but into, “That part of Hell,” a sort of never-never land for exiles from heaven, where there is no fire or Devil, and where the company consists of innocent children and blameless souls who are excluded from heaven just because they inherited the guilt of Eve's terrible sin, and were never baptized [what of those who lived before the dogma of baptism was invented?]
Aquinas adds that Christ could not take them with him to heaven, so inescapable is the penalty of their inherited sin. This repulsive farrago of the Scholastic “Genius” is still taught in Catholic seminaries, Hurter's “Theologia Dogmatica,” II, 519-21; and Protestants, who are debarred from such consolation, regard the descent into hell as a mystery or reject it, though it has the same authority as the witnesses they quote for the Resurrection.
The supposed prophecy of Jesus, Matt. 12:40, that he would spend three days “In the heart of the earth,” and the few other references, show that the early Christians, in borrowing the story of the Resurrection [regeneration] from contemporary cults, Attis, Adonis, Isis, Horus, Cybele, etc., found it intimately connected with a descent into the underworld, and rather lamely took this over. Jesus, pronounced in Hebrew Yezua, was a very common name.
The Jesus of the New Testament is, to a large extent, a personification of the Sun God and Savior, Bacchus, the Phoenician Ies, identical with the Hindu Krishna or Christna, the Persian Mithra, the Egyptian Horus, and other Sun Gods. After the captivity the name was interchanged with Joshua or Yahoshua, the successor of Moses; and in the Greek it is Yesous or Jason.
In the Authorized Biblical Versions it is rendered Jesus. ~Acts 7: 45, Hebrews 4:8. But in the Revised Versions it is rendered Joshua, the “Same word rendered Jeshua.” ~Nehemiah 8:17. The concept connected with the word Jesus, and with the letters I H S and I E E S, is a Phallic vigor personifying regeneration and creation. ~See Webster’s Dictionary definition: [phal•li•cism "fa-l¤-'si-z¤m noun, (1884: the worship of the generative principle as symbolized by the phallus. © 1996 Zane Publishing, Inc. and Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. M.D. Aletheia, " The Rationalist's Manual," and Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201.
In Scripture, he is known as Tammuz and is commonly known among historical writers under the name of Bacchus, that is, “The Lamented one.” ~Ezekiel 8:14.
To the ordinary reader the name of Bacchus suggests nothing more than revelry and drunkenness, but it is now well known, that amid all the abominations that attended his orgies, their grand design was professedly “The purification of souls,” and that from the guild and defilement of sin.
This lamented one, exhibited and adored as a little child in his mother's arms, seems, in point of fact, to have been the husband of Semiramis, whose name, Ninus, by which he is commonly known in classical history, literally signified “The Son.” ~The Two Babylons by The Late Rev. Alexander Hislop
A three days' interval between the commemoration of the death and that of the resurrection of the god is familiar to the ancient religions. This was a necessary foreshortening in ritual of the third of the year during which the vegetation-god had to remain below the earth. The adoption of this descent into the underworld between death and resurrection lends legitimacy that the founders or compilers of the Legend of Jesus took the material from the popular cults of their time. It shows also that they were superstitious men of weak intellect, for the story as it was told about Attis, Osiris, Persephone, etc., was quite logical in its primitive way, it is altogether inconsistent when applied to Jesus. To the Christian, or the Jew who is passing into that phase, the underworld is a place of sin and torment; Attis and Persephone had been regarded by their worshippers as beings compacted of spirit and body, to say nothing of their divine and human natures.
The Christian “Hell” affords a useful insight into the confused making of the new religion, and we hardly wonder that it was a stumbling block to the educated Greeks and Romans. ~from the works of J. McCabe, Rationalists Encyclopedia. The Catholic Church, upon discovering the attributes and the striking similarities between the beliefs of the Zoroastrians and the early Christians, as well as other so called Pagan religions, stated that it is a trick of the devil to deceive them.
Religious leaders tell Christians that the devil put certain writings into the beliefs of other people to deceive them and the early Christians believed that ancient records were doctored or forged to mislead them and have them renounce their leaders. The writings on the pyramids had not yet been translated to prove the early Christian Fathers were lying. The Three Wise Men were Zoroastrians. ~Matthew 2:1.
Balthasarancient, Kasper, and Melchior of the East who were of a priestly caste, one of the six tribes of Medes that are described by Herodotus. “Herodotos, the first student of comparative religion, boldly identifies Dionysos with [the Egyptian] Osiris and asserts that the so-called Orphic and Bacchic rites were in reality Egyptian and Pythagorean [Pythagoreanism founded 6th century B.C.E., southern Italy].” ~Encyc. Philos.
“Whatever the precise value of such generalizations may be, we can at least infer that there were substantial points of agreement between the Dionysiac religion and its Egyptian counterpart.” ~From: Zeus A Study in Ancient Religion, by Arthur Bernard Cook, Volume I, Zeus God of the Bright Sky, Biblo and Tannen, 1964 [1940-1914 Cambridge].
The Halo that one sees in many religious paintings is an early Persian ornamentation [adopted by the Egyptians] that appears in later Christian, Chinese, and Indian and Buddhist art. The Halo decorates such alleged luminaries as Pope Saint Victor I, friend of the most brazen concubine in the harem of the debauched Emperor Commorlus, Collistus, ex-slave and, imprisoned for theft, and a corrupter of the Church.
Saint Damasus, who got elected by his followers, after murdering 150 of those of his rivals, is an acknowledged forger of lies and myths, and the only Pope, AD 366-384, who was indicted by the civil authorities for adultery. Rebuked by the whole Church for his arrogance and was on peculiarly good terms with the Emperor's passionate concubine. Little can be said of Catholic art, which was inspired by theft or pagan temples, and in the medieval era by such luminaries as Paolo Veronese, who was dragged before the Inquisition for the irreverence of his art, or Filippo Lippi, a loose friar who seduced a nun and co-habitated with her for years with her while he painted beautiful religious pictures. ~See La Decandence de I'art Sacre (1931), by A. Cingria [a Catholic]. It is enough to translate the title, The decadence of