Historical Truths

The danger to America is not from without, but from Evangelists from within who would return us, and the world, to The Middle Age when Religion reigned supreme.

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(PASO ROBLES, Calif.) - Protestants believe that because Catholicism is more Institutional it is a less Godly instrument of Truth than is Protestantism that relies more on the Bible as the Word of God, and less upon ceremony.

Mother was raised Protestant and when we attended a funeral Service in a Catholic Church and I knelt in unison with Catholics, mother ordered that I not do so. I rejected her scolding because I saw nothing wrong in doing in Rome what Romans do. My personal beliefs were not affected, and eventually mother came around to my point of view.

I was with mother moments before she died when suddenly she opened her blind eyes and gazed beyond me in amazement and raised her arms to embrace whoever she recognized.

I may never know, but I will always wonder who she saw. I casually told my doctor what happened and was surprised when he said he was at his mother’s bedside who, before she succumbed, opened her eyes and pointed to a picture of his father beside her bed. He is Jewish, and I agnostic.

If what we witnessed suggests a truth beyond comprehension, I would caution that conclusions not be based on religious teachings with their implied truths, but be considered in more Universal terms. What my doctor and I experienced implies nothing beyond the probability of a spiritual afterlife.

All religions are constructs by persons who pretend to know more than is possible who use symbols to convey their opinions to others.

Miracles exist by suggestion that, with the aid of time, become implied truths that are imprinted in recipients as “givens,” passed to each generation as absolute truths that can evoke reactions of certainty that logic can not easily dislodge, as described by Giordano Bruno in the mid 18th century:

Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition

By Frances Yates

p.253

“I see clearly that we are all born ignorant and willing to acknowledge our ignorance; then as we grow, we are brought up in the disciplines and habits of our house, and we hear disapproval of the laws, rites, faith and manners of our adversaries and of those who are different from ourselves, while they hear the same about us and our affairs. Thus, just as [givens] are planted in us by the natural forces of breeding the roots of zeal for our own ways, so in others an enthusiasm for their own different customs are instilled. Thence it easily becomes axiomatic that we should esteem the oppression and slaughter of the enemies of our faith as a pleasing sacrifice to the gods; as they do also, when they have done the like by us. And they render thanks to God for having vouchsafed to them the light which leads to eternal life with no less fervor and conviction than we feel in rejoicing that our hearts are not blind and dark as theirs are.”

Judaism was the first of the Three Religions of the Book, Christianity the second, and Islam the third.

Christianity was a cult within Judaism whose New-Testament concept elevated the One God of the Jewish Nation to the of One God for All Nations, but until 314 A.D. was just one of several religions vying for prominence when Emperor Constantine chose Christianity to be the religious arm of his Holy Roman Empire.

The Empire included North Africa, and most of Europe, including England in the West, to the Black Sea in the East.

Teutonic [Germanic] tribes known as Goths existed beyond the frontier, but in the 4th Century the Visigoths invaded the Empire and overran Rome causing Constantine to relocate his Capitol to Istanbul, re-named “Constantinople” in his honor, where he lived till he died. The Visigoths meanwhile embraced Roman Christianity for its own purposes, as had Constantine, and Christian Soldiers both East and West continued to enforce conformity and obedience to the Empire.

Arabs objected, and rather than submit, borrowed from Christianity‘s New Testament scheme by inventing Mohammed as the last of God’s Prophets, and made Islam his Church.

So it was that The Jewish Torah, Christianity’s New-Testament and Islam’s Koran became the Three Religions of the Book all of which worship One and the same God, leaving only the problem of symbolic primacy to be resolved.

Pope Benedict VI claims the only way to God is through Jesus and the Catholic Church, but Protestant Evangelists have other thoughts. Islam claims primacy based on the word of God as revealed to Muhammad during the 7th century, and Judaism retains it’s Jehovah.

Islam rebelled against Christianity in the 7th Century, captured Constantinople - Christendom’s Eastern Capital - and in the 8th Century overran much of Eastern Europe where its influence continues to be felt, but co-exits with Orthodoxy. Spain was occupied for seven-hundred years until 1492 when the Moors were completely expelled. Spain alone of the invaded territories remained solidly in the Roman Catholic camp, and its Conquistadors spread the Roman faith to the New World and beyond.

With Constantinople occupied, Orthodoxy defeated but still breathing, and the Roman Church embraced by Visogoths, Rome decided to go for Primacy. It created the Iconoclastic Controversy in an 8th century movement that tried to end the use of icons in the Greek Orthodox Church in favor of Rome’s use of statuary, then capped off its effort by forging The Donation of Constantine that purported to give to Rome the Primacy it sought.

The veracity of the “Donation” was proven to be a fraud by Lorenzo Valla in the 15th century, seven centuries after it was manufactured in the papal court early in the 750’s. [The Medieval World 300-1300, 2nd Edition, Ed. by Norman F. Cantor, Brandeis University; The Macmillan Company; © 1989 New York, New York 10120. Pp 131-38].

The conduct of the Roman Church produced a schism when Orthodox Christianity chose not to bend its knee to Roman domination.

The discovery of the New World in 1492 benefited Rome as did The Donation of Constantine proven to be a fraud in the same century. Time and circumstance gave to Rome the benefit of the doubt, and a new world to conquer, but also created misgivings that contributed to the second Christian schism, the successful Protestant separation from Catholicism in the 19th Century after three hundred years of failed insistence by Rome of its infallibility.

Between 1500-1800, it is estimated the two factions combined to kill ten-million innocents, witches, defined as both heretic and apostate, many burned on pyres of an artificial hell.

The Puritans landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1621 to escape the tyranny of religion in Europe, but carried with them the habits and practices then in vogue. They killed the last so-called witch of their community in Salem early in the 18th Century, the same century in which America declared its Independence, and became a Secular State separate from the excesses of religion; need we ask why?

The danger to America is not from without, but from Evangelists from within who would return us, and the world, to The Middle Age when Religion reigned supreme.