THE bastardisation of other peoples’ religions is the hallmark of Christianity.
We have already seen how the Crusades attempted to annihilate Islam.
In Africa the result has been even more devastating.
Just like Islam, Christianity has been forced down the throats of Africans.
Since the early days, the ‘soldiers’ of Christ were created by the earliest church, the Roman Catholic Church, to destroy anyone who resisted this religion.
Their raids on innocent others were sanctified as ‘crusades’.
Among the best-known events of the Middle-Ages, the crusades were a series of armed expeditions by European Christians (the Knight Templars) to conquer Muslim-controlled territory in the Holy Land.
Historians disagree over the exact number of crusades, although most agree there were either seven or eight in total.
The crusades were military campaigns waged between two very different cultures that had developed separately, but along paths that eventually brought them into violent contact.
The Muslims of the Middle-East were believers in an energetic religion of conquest and considered themselves the successors to the covenants God had established first with Jews and later, with Christians.
In the 21st Century, Muslim-Christian relations in the Middle Ages were complicated.
Messages in the Qur’an, the sacred book of Islam, about Christians are mixed.
While there is hostility toward Christians on account of some of their beliefs, there is also a sense that Jesus’ followers are to be respected because they, like Jews, are ‘people of the Book’.
Most European Christians, however, failed to realise Muslims considered themselves successors to a covenant that they (Christians) had once enjoyed.
Instead, most Christians considered Muslims to be pagans and were unaware of Islam’s monotheism and its perceived connection between Islam, Judaism and Christianity.
Later, Christians admit of this carnage as evidenced in a famous confession below:
“Nine hundred years ago, our forefathers carried the name of Jesus Christ in battle across the Middle-East.
Fueled by fear, greed and hatred, they betrayed the name of Christ by conducting themselves in a manner contrary to His wishes and character.
The crusaders lifted the banner of the cross above your people.
By this act they corrupted its true meaning of reconciliation, forgiveness and selfless love.
On the anniversary of the first crusade we also carry the name of Christ.
We wish to retrace the footsteps of the crusaders in apology for their deeds and in demonstration of the true meaning of the cross.
We deeply regret the atrocities committed in the name of Christ by our predecessors.
We renounce greed, hatred, fear and condemn all violence done in the name of Jesus Christ.
Where they were motivated by hatred and prejudice, we offer love and brotherhood. Jesus the Messiah came to give life.
Forgive us for allowing His name to be associated with death.
Please accept again the true meaning of the Messiah’s words: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
Yet in spite of this apparently resurrected moral realisation and remorse, the same Church is still accused of carrying out the same heinous atrocities against mankind under a new name of Jesuits.
It is now common knowledge that there was a big difference between the original Jerusalem Church and the later organisation which stole their clothes after they had been wiped out in the war with the Romans.
Looking at the writings of the people whom the Roman Church calls ‘early Church fathers’ and later Church leaders, we were staggered at the confusion, misunderstanding and muddled thought that has existed through the ages.
Pop Leo X is on record as saying: “Jesus Christ: Man, God, Myth or Freemason?
“It has served us well, this myth of Christ.”
From the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70, the faith called Christianity had started to part company with its Jewish origins and soon all sight of the hero called Yehoshua was lost in foreign myths and legends.
Old pagan stories were piled into a story of the man who tried to be the saviour king of his people.
In Rome, the legend of Romulus and Remus was retold with two new lesser gods, the great saints Peter and Paul.
The sun god ‘Sol’ had his birthday on December 25 and this date was thought to be suitable for Jesus’ birthday too, so that the great gods could be celebrated on the same feast day.
The Sabbath was moved from Saturday (Saturn day) to the Sun god’s day, Sunday, and the symbol of the sun found its way behind the heads of the divine and the saintly in the form of the halo.
The citizens of the Roman Empire found the new religion both familiar and reassuring.
They might not be doing so well in this life, but they would get a better deal in the next.
Like most people throughout history, they had little use for logic, preferring to take enjoyment from the emotion of it all, asking their (now one) God for help in times of need and praising him when things went well.
Christianity became a cult of ritual rather than ideas, and theology took a backseat to political control.
The Roman Empire had been a hugely successful political force, but despite its ruthless approach to holding power, its might could not last forever.
It began to crumble as a cultural force but it found that the control of the minds of people far more effective than controlling their bodies.
Christianity gave Rome the mechanism to establish unparalleled political might based on unsophisticated masses who would be offered a better life after death. Thomas Hobbes (quoted in Hiram Key), the 17th Century philosopher and political thinker, expressed the situation clearly when he said: “The Papacy is not other than the ghost of/the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.”