Lest we forget, by slaughtering the infidel unwilling to convert to their version of Islam, the Muslim Jihadis of today appear to have taken a page from the late great King Charlemagne – or Charles the Great – the king of the Franks, who became the first emperor in Western Europe since the collapse of the Western Roman Empire and is sometimes referred to as the founder of modern Europe.

During his campaign to establish an empire in full support of the Church, he felt compelled to Christianize newly conquered people upon penalty of death, which lead to such events as the massacre of 4,500 captive rebel Saxons in October of 782 in what is now known as Verden in Lower Saxony, Germany. The unfortunate Saxons had rebelled against King Charles’ invasion and his subsequent attempts to Christianize them from their native Germanic paganism.

And that massacre pales in comparison with the events almost 500 years later, in 1209, in the town of Béziers in the Languedoc region.  When the Roman Catholic Church established the Inquisition, it was set up initially to wipe out the Cathar movement in southern France where it had taken hold in opposition to the hitherto dominant Roman Catholic religion. Apparently, there were a lot of Cathars living in the town of Béziers, to the point that it was seen to be a Cathar stronghold, and on July 22^nd, 1209, under leadership of the Abbot of Citeaux the town was attacked, ransacked, and completely burned to the ground, the majority of its population of 20,000 people killed, including many women and children. That this would have included many thousands of Roman Catholic adherents who were also living in Béziers didn’t seem to matter. When questioned about this, the Cistercian abbot-commander of the Catholic crusaders, is on record of having said that: “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eis. (Kill them all, the Lord will recognize His own).

Now all this happened a long time ago, and while today the Christian faith is far more benign,  the justification for this kind of slaughter remains an intrinsic part of the foundation of the Christian faith: the bible, for in Deuteronomy XIII.12-16, the faithful are instructed as follows:

If thou shalt hear say in one of these cities …, Let us go and serve other Gods …; then shalt thou surely smite the inhabitants of that city with the edge of the sword, destroying it utterly and all that is therein. … And thou shalt burn with fire the city and all the spoil thereof every whit for the Lord thy God. … And it shall be a heap forever; and it shall not be built again.

And so we are here today, 800 years after the slaughter in Béziers – and yes, it was rebuilt again! –  and in the 21st century, and as can be evidenced from recent events in the Middle East, innocent people continue to be slaughtered in the name of some god or prophet or another. One might claim that this kind of action has nothing to do with the religious beliefs themselves – and that they are misused when wielded as weapons of murder and destruction. No – it is precisely the unsubstantiated and irrational nature of these beliefs that allows them to be used in this manner. When you think you have the creator and eternity on your side – all your actions are justified; you cannot be wrong!  Until we shake off the influence of these dangerous nonsensical beliefs, our species will continue to be murdered for them.

This leads me to say that to believe in the existence of a god or other kinds of super-natural beings has historically shown itself to be a seemingly endless source of human tragedy. Because – while in principle these are nonsensical and hence harmless beliefs– it is at the same time the sickly smell of centuries of savagery and senseless slaughter of thousands  of people in the name of such beliefs – and primarily in the competition between such beliefs.

I presume I am one of those who would like nothing better than the voice of religion to be silenced, if only long enough for people to come to their senses so they will see through the pitiful sham it represents, be done with all that nauseating pomp and circumstance, and to start believing in themselves as the source of their own spiritually and redemption. This as opposed to being led like sheep down the garden path while having their pockets picked so Joe and all the other fat old farts can live like royalty in their palatial Roman digs.

I guess it is the misappropriation of being the local guardians of all morality that really sticks in my craw with these charlatans, particularly after being exposed for what they have being hiding amongst themselves in terms of the rampant incidents of child molestation committed by them over the last few years. More likely: over the last five hundred years!

Hypocrisy is too mild a term to describe their despicable behaviour – and no greater pretenders were ever thus …

The above-mentioned works abound in such ambiguities and indeed even serious errors, as to offend Catholic doctrine… For this reason, the most eminent and most revered Fathers of the Holy Office exhort all Ordinaries as well as the superiors of Religious institutes, rectors of seminaries and presidents of universities, effectively to protect the minds, particularly of the youth, against the dangers presented by the works of Fr. Teilhard de Chardin and of his followers.

You see – like Copernicus before him – de Chardin had drawn conclusions about the world that were contrary to religious doctrine. As a trained scientist, as well as a gifted and original thinker, he could simply not accept the ancient folklore around the world’s creation in Genesis – and hence the concept of Original Sin. His evolutionary account of the origin of man as laid out in his most famous book Le Phénomène Humain (The Phenomenon of Man) written before 1940 had to be published posthumously in 1955 because the RC Church did not allow this during his lifetime.

In The Phenomenon of Man, de Chardin attempts to reconcile his faith with the unfolding of the material universe, from the earliest development of life to the presence of human beings, the parallel ascent of consciousness, and to his concept of the Omega Point in the future, the ultimate development of conscious life and convergence with God.

For him, evolution is an intrinsic, teleological or goal-driven process, proceeding from the most elementary particle in the cosmos to the most complex arrangements of matter, capable of ever higher levels of consciousness.

Clearly, Roman Catholic fundamentalism could not accommodate any of this.  It is –and always will remain – in the Dark Ages; its archaic, naïve doctrines seemingly frozen in time, not subject to reinterpretation or revision.  Not then, and especially not now, with with an ultra-conservative patriarchal throwback like Josef Ratzinger at the top of the hierarchy that controls the RC church today: Original thinking is an Original Sin!

Just so you know:  leave your brain at home when you go to church!

… the essence of Christianity, the typical Christian condition, ‘faith’, has to be a form of sickness, every straightforward, honest, scientific road to knowledge has to be repudiated by the Church as a forbidden road. Even to doubt is a sin … (Nietzsche)