Commentary on the Bible and Christianity As a literary monument the Bible is of much later

Commentary on the Bible and Christianity

As a literary monument the Bible is of much later origin than the Vedas; as
a work of literary value it is surpassed by everything written in the last
two thousand years by authors even of second rank, and to compare it
seriously with the productions of Homer, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare or
Goethe would require a fanatacized mind that had entirely lost its power of
judgement.  Its conception of the universe is childish, and its morality
revolting, as revealed in the malicious vengance attributed to God in the
Old Testament and in the New, the parable of the laborers of the eleventh
hour and the episodes of Mary Magdalen and the woman taken in adultry.
Historical investigations have revealed to us the origin and growth of the
Bible.  We know that by this name we designate a collection of writings as
radically unlike in origin, character and contents, as if the Nibelungen
Lied, Mirabeu's speeches, Heine's love poems and a manual of zoology had
been printed and mixed up promiscuously, and then bound into one volume. We
find collected in this book the superstitious beliefs of the ancient
inhabitants of Palestine, with indistinct echoes of Indian and Persian
fables, mistaken imitations of Egyptian theories and customs, historical
chronicles as dry as they are unreliable, and miscellaneous poems,
amatory, human and Jewish-national, which are rarely distinguished by
beauties of the highest order, but frequently by superfluity of expression,
bad taste, and genuine Oriental sensuality.

- Max Nordau, Conventional Lies of Our Civilization


Our study of pornography, our living of life, tells us that the myth of
feminine evil lived out so resolutely by the Christians of the Dark Ages,
is alive and well, here and now.  Our study of pornography, our living of
life, tells us that though the witches are dead, burned alive at the
stake, the belief in female evil is not, the hatred of female carnality is
not.  The Church has not changed its premises; the culture has not refuted
those premises.  It is left to us, the inheritors of that myth, to destroy
it and institutions based on it.

- Andrea Dworkin, Women Hating


Leaders in the field of marketing products of divinity, the Christian
churches have bowed to the pressures of the commodity system and put on a
display of contortionism which will not cease until their trade-mark, the
chameleon-like Jesus, has been discared entirely.  Son of God, son of a
whore, son of the virgin, worker of miracles and maker of loaves, militant
and steward, pederast and puritan, accuser and accused, convict and
astronaut... no role is outside the range of this amazing puppet figure.
He has been a hawker of suffering, waiter dispensing favors... he has been
a sansculotte and socialist, a fascist and anti-fascist, a stalinist and
barbudo, a Reichian and anarchist.  He has marched on every side under
every flag; he has been in every self-doubt and stood at both ends of the
lash, and present at most executions where he has held the hand both of the
executioner and of the executioner's victim.  He has his place in
police-station and prison and school, brothel and barrack, department store
and guerilla-held territory.  He has been used as a pendant and dipstick,
as a scarecrow standing guard over the resting dead and the kneeling
living; he has been used as torment and short rations: and once the hawkers
of the blessed foreskins have rehabilitated sin as a commercial
proposition he will serve as a dildo... Jesus Christ, superdrug and
superstar, all the images of the man who sold out to God, caught up in the
hard sell of the Godhead.

- Raul Vaughnaheim, The Subsistence Society


... Most of the world is ruled by Biblical religious beliefs -- even Africa
now.  I want to encourage anything that's a statement against Christianity,
because over the past 500 years Christian missionaries systematically
destroyed virtually all of world' s diverse cultures, making the world a
much less interesting place. No other religion -- Buddhism, Islam,
Confucianism, Paganism -- did anywhere near the damage Christianity did.
Bishop Landa burned almost all the one-of-a-kind Mayan codices -- an
incalculable historical loss.  There have been so many atrocities (like
the Inquisition and the Salem witch trials) in the name of Christianity that
-- it can't be too soon to be rid of that alien belief plague.  In fact,
aliens from Outer Space could hardly have devised a more crippling weapon
against the people of planet Earth than the Christian religion.

- V. Vale, Re/Search #12: Modern Primitives


With all of the contradictions in the Christian scriptures, many people
currently cannot rationally accept Christianity the way it has been
practiced in the past.  Great numbers of people are beginning to doubt the
existence of God, in the established Christian sense of the word.  So,
they have taken to calling themselves "Christian Athiests."  True, the
Christian Bible is a mass of contradictions; but what could be more
contradictory than the term "Christian Athiest?" If prominent leaders of
the Christian faith are rejecting the past interpretation of God, how then
can their followers be expected to adhere to previous religious traditions?
With all the debates about whether or not God is dead, if he isn't he had
better have MEDICARE!

- Anton LaVey, The Satanic Bible


The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean.  I
know this by my own experience, and to this day I cherish an unappeasable
bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only
permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I
was fifteen years old.  None can do that and ever draw a clean, sweet
breath again this side of the grave.

- Mark Twain.


I do not find in Christianity one redeeming feature.

- Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Salvation for Sale by Gerard Thomas Straub


The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion.  I could
never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.

- Abraham Lincoln, quoted in Salvation for Sale by Gerard Thomas Straub


Those who do not violently set themselves against religion, the bogus God,
the parasitic priests -- these professors of resignation are assimilable to
the pact with the countless vermin of Christianity, vermin which must be
exterminated.

- Andre Breton, What is Surrealism?


Christianity -- the religion dominant in our present society -- has had a
history that is simply FILLED with examples of disregard of individual
liberty, equality of men and women, and the dignity of all races of people.
The religion has exhibited over a period of almost two thousand years... a
self-righteous desire to impose itself on anyone and everyone through law,
and a total intense suppression of criticism and questioning of itself. How
can anyone with any shred of love for freedom call himself or herself part
of THAT tradition? Religion is a terrible and opportunistic thing.  The
fact is that something in it will always attempt to seize on anything in
the world that can lever it into an even more secure position of dominance.
If the spirit of the time is for slavery, then it is for slavery; if the
tendency evolves towards fascism, it is fascistic.  And true to form when
protest is the hallmark of an age, the churches turn into abodes of singing
nuns with guitars, or earnest young ministers decrying nuclear weapons.

- Fred Woodworth, Strike


There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the
life of Jesus.  The Jesus of Nazareth who came foward publicly as the
Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the
Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final
consecration, never had any existence... This image has not been destroyed
from without, it has fallen to pieces, cleft and disintegrated by the
concrete historical problems which came to the surface one after another...

- Albert Schweitzer, The Quest for the Historical Jesus.


I do indeed think that we can now know almost nothing concerning the life
and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no
interest in either, are moreover fragmentary and often legendary.

- Rudolf Bultmann


An old adage says, "Where a priest has trod, no grass will grow!"  That
means, in other words, if a person is once in the clutches of the priests,
his intellect becomes barren -- his intellectual functions cease to operate
in a normal way, and instead religious maggots and divine worms wriggle
through his brain.  He resembles a sheep that has the staggers. These
misguided, unhappy wretches have been defrauded of the real object of life;
but what is worse, they form the great crowd in the train of the opponents
to science and the march of reason, to revolution and to liberty.  Whenever
new chains are to be forged for mankind, they are willing to work at the
anvil as if possessed by demons... Away, then, with the Christian theology!
Away with a god invented by preachers of the bloody faith, who, without
their important nothing, by means of which they explain everything, could
no longer revel in superfluity; no longer glorify poverty and live in
luxury themselves; no longer preach submission and practice arrogance; but
who would, through the march of reason, be hurled into the deepest depths
of oblivion.