CHRISTIANITY - A CANABALISTIC, HUMAN BLOOD-SACRIFICIAL CULT

Shocking as it may seem, Christianity is actually a human blood-sacrificial cult. This is also true of the various versions of Judaism that spawned it. Christians even eat the body and drink the blood of their sacrificial victim via the ritual of "communion." Christians claim that the brutal sacrifice of a man placates their God and somehow saves them from their so-called "sins," opening up the gates of heaven to all those who "believe." Ironically this thought process is pure Paganism, a religion Christianity then cruelly stamped out with similarly brutal methods of torture and murder in order to assert their dominance over the mind of the common man and accumulate massive amounts of wealth. These are very incongruous actions for a religion that alleges it preaches peace, poverty and love.

Jesus is only one of many, many thousands of people who were crucified by the Romans. There was nothing special about Jesus' death or the manner of his execution, to claim otherwise belittles the horrific suffering of all the thousands of other unfortunate people who were tortured in this same, extremely brutal way. Jesus was tried and executed for sedition because he claimed to be the long-awaited Messiah, the King of the Jews. In an empire where only the Roman Senate had the power and authority to proclaim someone a king, this was an extremely dangerous claim to make. Jesus attacked the Jewish Priestly class and played a high-stakes game of politics with the Roman Empire. He lost. Unfortunate as they are, these are the harsh historical facts, and I have every sympathy for the man, all the rest is geo-politics, religious fantasy, state authorised social control and psychological delusion.

JESUS OF NAZARETH - FAITH HEALER, SOCIAL REFORMER, SEDITIONIST

Here is my take on the actual, historical Jesus, using New Testament quotes to back up each of my deductions about the sort of man he was and how he came to be the centre of such attention. In many ways Jesus reminds me of Hitler (yes, you heard that right) a "nobody" for most of his life until one day he realised he had a voice and that people were listening to him. It went to his head and ended in tragedy.

According to the Gospel of Luke 1:5, Jesus was born during the reign of Herod The Great, who died in 4 BCE. Scholars calculate the birth of Jesus at 6 BCE and his place of birth not as Bethlehem, but as Nazareth, a small northern village in Galilee near the Syrian border. Jesus most likely spent his whole life there working as a "tekton" which means an artisan, joiner, builder or workman. This would have been hard physical labour with very little reward - much like today.

Jesus' life changed dramatically at the age of 34 when, in 28 CE, he decided to leave his work and his family and travel south to the Jordan River to hear the preaching of John the Baptist. John had an enormous influence on Jesus who describes him in glowing terms: Luke 7:28, "I tell you, among those who are born of women there is none greater than John." Jesus was initiated into John's order through baptism and became his disciple staying with him for well over a year. When John was arrested and beheaded by Herod Antipas, Jesus took over John's ministry and thus became an itinerant preacher.

Curiously, for most of his life Jesus seems to have been an unassuming person who went about his work unnoticed by all. Scholar deduce this from the Gospel passage Mark 6:4 in which Jesus returns to his own villagers and tries to preach there. They mock him and chase him away, saying we've known you and your family all your life, you are a nobody, how dare you pretend you are a prophet of God and preach to us. Jesus was unable to perform any miracles there because they had no faith in him. This tells us that Jesus was a Faith Healer and that his ability to heal depended solely on the patient's belief. Today physicians still do not understand this rare and powerful phenomenon and call it "spontaneous remission" or "the placebo effect." Jesus had now changed so much, and his preaching and healing were so strange to his family that they thought he had gone mad: Mark3:21.

John preached a message now known as "Apocalyptic Messianic Eschatology." He claimed that the Biblical End Times were imminent and that God and his Messianic prophet were about to descend from Heaven and intervene in human affairs, wiping out the evil doers, particularly the brutal Romans and restore Israel to glory as the ruler of the world. Repent now, John said, or be destroyed with the evil ones.

After John's death Jesus preached the same message but, unlike John, who based himself at the River Jordan allowing people to come to him, Jesus went out to preach directly to the people and he took his newly acquired ability to Heal by Faith with him. From an unassuming nobody in Galilee, Jesus had become a charismatic preacher and healer attracting many disciples and huge crowds wherever he went.

With all this sudden success it's not surprising that his followers claimed he was the long awaited Messiah, and that the "End Times" were indeed about to be fulfilled. Jesus must have believed this too because he was now emboldened enough to enter Jerusalem riding a donkey, a revolutionary Messianic act, and to enter the Temple complex with a whip, overthrow the tables of the money changers and decry the Temple authorities as "a den of thieves." Mark 11:15. To Roman eyes, this was an act of sedition which could not be tolerated. Jesus was immediately arrested, tortured, humiliated and executed by crucifixion for claiming to be the King of The Jews.

Jesus' final words on the cross are telling: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Matt 27:46. God had not intervened. The ruling order had not been destroyed. Ordinary people continued to live in poverty, oppressed by an over-arching autocracy bent on the pursuit of wealth and power by any means. Two thousand years later, and still no sign of the long-awaited "return," the situation remains the same the world over