Submit to God or die
After the civil war to decide which brand of Christianity was the ‘correct’ version, Christendom went through another war 200 years ago that was fought between theology and secularism. And secularism won. That is why religionists from all three Abrahamic faiths consider secularism and liberalism as the enemies of religion.
NO HOLDS BARRED
Raja Petra Kamarudin
It boggles the mind to see the killings between one Muslim sect and another. We must not confuse this with the current conflict going on in Gaza and Israel. That fight is not about religion but about territory. They are not fighting for God but for land. What I am talking about is the ongoing civil war to set up an Islamic state in the Middle East and North Africa.
The Jews have had their civil war to ‘define’ Judaism. But this was 2,000 years ago. The Christians, too, had their civil war to ‘define’ Christianity. And that war was a most brutal war indeed (you can read what happened in the write-up below). Now it is the turn of the Muslims to slug it out to decide which brand of Islam is going to emerge supreme.
After the civil war to decide which brand of Christianity was the ‘correct’ version, Christendom went through another war 200 years ago that was fought between theology and secularism. And secularism won. That is why religionists from all three Abrahamic faiths consider secularism and liberalism as the enemies of religion.
Today, the Muslim religionists are rising against secularism and liberalism to establish what they call an Islamic state or a global Muslim ummah (community). And this is why shrines and mosques are being demolished to end what they say is heresy.
To understand why they are always fighting you need to understand the history of the Abrahamic faiths. The religions of Abraham are about domination. You must submit yourself to God and if you do not you must be punished. And the punishment is normally death.
Democracy, human rights, civil liberties, secularism, and so on, do not exist. Only God’s will exists. And those who resist the will of God do not deserve to live.
Ah, yes, but this is only for Islam, you may say. You argue that Judaism and Christianity are not like that. That is not true. It is just that the secularists have managed to defeat the church while in Islam that has not happened yet. Hence Judaism and Christianity are given a more tolerant image compared to Islam.
The truth is all three of the Semitic religions are the same. The only thing is Judaism and Christianity have been castrated and have been turned into Eunuchs while Islam is still virile. That is the only difference.
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MisGod’ed: A Roadmap of Guidance and Misguidance in the Abrahamic Religions, by Dr. Laurence B. Brown
That the Catholic Church was so effective in eliminating their opposition is of no surprise to those who study their methodology. Their degree of savagery did not even spare their own people, at times sacrificing members of the orthodoxy to insure complete elimination of the Unitarians.
For example, the mixed population of Catholics and Unitarians of the people of Beziers, in the South of France, were attacked mercilessly. In his History of The Inquisition of The Middle Ages, Henry Charles Lea brings the full horror of the invaders’ overzealousness into sharp focus:
From infancy in arms to tottering age, not one was spared—seven thousand, it is said, were slaughtered in the Church of Mary Magdalen to which they had fled for asylum—and the total number of slain is set down by the legates at nearly twenty thousand….
A fervent Cistercian contemporary informs us that when Arnaud was asked whether the Catholics should be spared, he feared the heretics would escape by feigning orthodoxy, and fiercely replied, “Kill them all, for God knows his own!”
In the mad carnage and pillage the town was set on fire, and the sun of that awful July day closed on a mass of smouldering ruins and blackened corpses—a holocaust to a deity of mercy and love whom the Cathari might well be pardoned for regarding as the Principle of Evil.
The inquisitors’ use of torture was equally horrific, for it did not end at confession. Once they procured a confession, they began torture anew to extract names of associates until the last drop of information was squeezed from the mangled husk of what had once been a human being.
Once accused, the pitiful defendant was guaranteed to suffer. Torture yielded the required confession—if not out of truth, then out of the victim’s desperation to bring an end to the pain. Horrifically, protestations of innocence and even the oath of orthodoxy did not bring relief, for suspects professing orthodox belief were committed to a test of faith, and here the church demonstrated the full measure of its creativity.
Trials by water and fire were popularized and sanctioned by the Catholic Church for the testing of faith by way of Judicium Dei—Judgment of God, a concept based upon superstition. It was believed that the purity of water would not accept a guilty body into its midst, and so floaters were judged guilty and executed, sinkers were considered innocent, and if rescued before drowning, spared. It was believed that earthly fire, like the flames of Hell, would not harm those who were (in their view) the faithful Christians bearing the promise of paradise.
The “hot iron test” was the most commonly employed, as it was simple and readily available. In this test, the accused was required to carry a redhot piece of iron for a certain number of steps, usually nine. Judgment was offered either at the time of the test (those burned were judged guilty) or several days later (those whose wounds were healing were declared innocent, whereas those whose wounds became infected were deemed guilty).
Other variations existed, such as determining whether or not a person suffered a burn when an arm was immersed up to the elbow in boiling water or boiling oil.
Lest a person presume such insane methods were rarely employed, the Council of Rheims in 1157 ordered “trials by ordeal” to satisfy all cases of suspected heresy.
Now, why all this discussion about what are now littleknown and dead sects? Well, the intent is neither to glorify them beyond the merits of their ideology, nor to evoke sympathy for their cause, but rather to draw attention to the alternate Christian ideologies that have become obscure in the shadow of prevailing Trinitarianism.
The Corinthians, the Basilidians, the Paulicians, the Cathari and the Carpocratians may be littleknown today, but they were dynamic Christian ideologies that shared a significant place in history. But history, as the saying goes, is written by the victors. “Moreover,” writes Ehrman, “the victors in the struggles to establish Christian orthodoxy not only won their theological battles, they also rewrote the history of the conflict …”
The Catholic Church attempted to systematically erase the memory of all other sects and scriptures contrary to their own, and at this, they were largely successful. Given their vicious methodology, we should not be surprised.
Additionally, historical attempts to vilify all other religions or Christian sects prejudiced the minds of the populace. So successful were these efforts that the records and holy books of those who appear to have been closest to the teachings of the apostolic fathers have been largely lost.
Similarly, those closest to embodying the practices and creed of the prophet Jesus have come to be regarded as heretics, simply because they did not embrace the “evolved” doctrines of the Trinitarian victors. In other words, they were condemned for nonconformity with views which, though lacking scriptural authority, were selected by men of position and propagated for reasons of political expediency.
One of the curious elements of Trinitarian history lies in the fact that in all its travels throughout the Christian world, it had to be forced upon a previously Unitarian people. The Visigoths, Ostrogoths and Vandals, the Arians, Donatists and Paulicians—all had to be muscled aside prior to the imposition of Trinitarian rule.
Even in England and Ireland there is suspicion that, contrary to official historical accounts, a good percentage of the population were staunch Unitarian Christian prior to receiving Trinitarian “encouragement.” Whereas Unitarians attempted to spread faith through example and invitation, the Catholic Church spread Trinitarian faith by shearing the populace with the sharp blades of compulsion and elimination.
Reviewing unprejudiced historical accounts, a large population of the religious throughout the known world voiced their opposition to Trinitarian Christianity, and those who denied Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and death were not necessarily a minority.
Many would argue that from a gut level it makes more sense for God to have punished Judas for his treachery than to have tortured Jesus for his innocence. The argument would be more convincing if the doctrines of atonement and original sin could be shown to be invalid, for these two doctrines hinge off the doorframe of the alleged death of Jesus.
The first hurdle for many people in considering such revolutionary notions is the ageold assertion that Jesus Christ was the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29), for in the mind of the Trinitarian, this verse can have no relevance other than to that of the doctrine of atonement. Unitarians, however, conceive Jesus to have lived a life of sacrifice in order to bear a purifying teaching which, if adopted, would put humankind on the path of God’s design.
REFERENCES:
Conybeare, Fred. C., M.A. 1898. The Key of Truth. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lea, Henry Charles. Vol. I, p. 154.
Ehrman, Bart D. 2003. Lost Scriptures: Books that Did Not Make It into the New Testament. Oxford University Press.
