HOW DARK THE CON OF MAN Continued
DVC: “Virtually all the elements of Catholic ritual—the miter, the altar, the doxology and communion, the act of ‘God-eating,’ were taken directly from earlier pagan mystery religions.”
TRUTH: Oh, dear. It’s such a long-established fact that the roots of Catholic ritual are in Jewish worship, which is not surprising, inasmuch as all the first Christians were Jews, not former pagans. The Temple in Jerusalem had altars; the doxology is rooted in Psalms 8, 66 and 150; communion had its roots in the Jewish Passover, celebrated by Jesus and twelve other Jews at the Last Supper.
DVC: “Originally Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine [4th century] shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the sun. To this day most churchgoers attend services on Sunday morning with no idea that they are there on account of the pagan sun god’s weekly tribute—Sunday.”
TRUTH: Jesus Christ rose from the dead on the first day of the week, a Sunday, so the weekly Eucharist was celebrated from the beginning on “the Lord’s Day,” a Sunday. Here is St. Justin Martyr, writing before 165 A.D.: “We hold our common assembly on the first day of the week, the day on which God put darkness and chaos to flight and created the world, and because on that same day our savior Jesus Christ rose from the dead.”
The names for the days of the week do come from the names of pagan gods such as Woden, Thor, Freia and Saturn. However, someone who goes to Thursday evening Bible study in 2006 is not therefore honoring the god Thor. Incidentally, the only thing Constantine did about this matter, in 321 A.D., was to declare Sunday a day of rest.
DVC: “The Church launched a smear campaign against the pagan gods and goddesses, recasting their divine symbols as evil.”
TRUTH: Well, that’s what monotheistic religions do—they oppose the worship of dozens or hundreds of greater and lesser gods. For example, Jews maligned Moloch, and discouraged the people from sacrificing newborn infants by tossing them into the fiery stove in the belly of the god. It’s hard to cast that divine symbol as anything but evil. Islam also replaced the worship of minor deities in the lands to which it spread.
DVC: “The Church burned at the stake over five million women [as witches].”
TRUTH: Genuine scholars agree that most people executed as witches (20% were men) were put to death between 1500 and 1800 A.D. These historians estimate the total at 40,000, with an upward limit of 50,000. Most of those were poor, ordinary and unpopular citizens, not strong, independent-minded women as described by Brown. Their accusers were usually their fellow citizens, not clergymen. More than half of those accused were acquitted. Some witches were executed by Catholics, some by Protestants, most by governments. Salem, Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, for example, could hardly be described as Catholic-dominated. Several popes condemned the practice of executing witches. Still, it doesn’t seems uncharacteristic of Brown to multiply the total number of victims by 100, and then blame them all on the Catholic Church.
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