Man's Search For Spirituality - E Christopher Reyes (jenna bush book club .TXT) 📗

most extravagant prodigies and wonders.” “It was by belief in these, that the religion of Buddha was established.” ~Burnouf. Buddhist garments and staffs were supposed to imbibe some mysterious power, and blessed were they who were allowed to touch them. A Buddhist saint, who attained the power called ‘Perfection,’ was able to rise and float along through the air, his body becoming imponderous. Buddhist annals give accounts of miraculous suspensions in the air.
We are also told that in B.C. 217 nineteen Buddhist missionary priests entered China to propagate their faith, and were imprisoned by the emperor; but that an angel came and opened the prison door and liberated them. The Hindu sage, Vasudeva, Krishna, was liberated from prison in like manner. We may, therefore, easily see where the legends of Peter and his release from prison and the Ascension, came from.~ Acts 5:21-24, Bank of Wisdom, Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201.
But alas, the Buddhists were not immune from corruption either as discovered a few miles from Tokyo was a large and rich monastery of what was understood to be the very strictest sect of Buddhist monks.
“They were so Holy that they closed their doors against the wicked world and wanted to be alone. But in their extensive grounds there was a home for feeble-minded women, tended by the good monks, and a rumor spread in Tokyo that numbers of these unfortunates were just unwanted wives whose husbands paid the monks to take them over. A Tokyo paper organized a raid in 1928, and though the police at once suppressed it, published an amazing story. The Buddhist monastery was a colony of sadists, just as the German Franciscan friars were found to be colonies of sodomists. When the raiders burst in they found the monk-keepers gambling and squabbling with blood-splotched paper money, while the women, half mad or half dead, lay about, mutilated, exhausted, fouled with the monks' excrements. Women were chained even in the temple, and rape, sexual mutilation, and ignominy were but a few of the foul performances that took place." And this is the second greatest "spiritual" religion of our time: the religion over which our idealists and scorners of materialism go into ecstasies!’” ~The Fruits Of Romanism, The Catholic Church Does Far More Harm Than Good by Joseph McCabe, Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius.
BC 853-King Ahab dies. “By integrating Biblical data with those derived from Assyrian chronological records, the yr 853 B.C. can be fixed as the year of Ahab's death, and the year 841 as the year Jehu began to reign. The years in which Ahab and Jehu had contacts with Shalmaneser III of Assyria can also be given definite dates [by means of astronomical calculations based on an Assyrian reference to a solar eclipse]. With these fixed points, it is possible to work both forward and backward in the lines of the kings of Israel and Judah to give dates for each king. By the same means it can be determined that the division of the kingdom occurred in 930, that Samaria fell to the Assyrians in 722-21 and that Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians in 586. The synchronistic data correlating the reigns of the kings of Israel and Judah present some knotty problems, which have long been considered nearly insolvable. In more recent times, most of these problems have been resolved in a satisfactory way through recognizing such possibilities as overlapping reigns, co-regencies of sons with fathers, differences in the time of the yr in which their reign of a king officially began, and differences in the way a king's first year was reckoned.” ~Introduction to 1 Kings, NIVSB, by J. Vannoy, See also, Gleason Archer, pg., 369, Vol., 1., The Expositor's Bible Commentary, Leon Wood, A Survey of Israel's History, Wycliffe Bible Encyclopedia, Vol., 1, pg. 347, Edwin R. Thiele, A Chronology of the Hebrew Kings; all by Zondervan Pub.
BC 850- The Odyssey includes many traces of werewolf beliefs.
BC 800-Carthage, a small city along the northern coast of Africa, home to many early Christian Bishops, Saint Cyprian [248 C.E.], Tertullian [155 C.E.], and Saint Augustine [354 C.E.].
The Romans will not outlaw Child Sacrifices until 146 B.C.E. Carthage is later razed to the ground and rebuilt by order of Caesar and then later captured by the Arabs in 698 C.E. The African congregation will have a marked impact on Christian throughout history, especially by the first black Saint, Augustine. Augustine’s miysogynist views and acceptance of Pagan gods [the Sun God], and Augustine’s Western Christianity, will give the Church its theological excuse for mass murder and genocide against heretics such as the Gnostics, Arians, Donatists, etc., and strangely enough, Augustine’s theology originates from the early Gnostics [Manichaeans].
“This work has shewn that Hercules, Mithra, and other gods, were but personifications of the ' Sun,'—while, at the same time, it has incontestably proved that the religion and worship of Christ is but a copy of the religion and worship of Mithra, the god Sun of the Persians. Certainly, as noticed in the second number, Augustine, Firmicus [Firmicus Maternus 4th century], Justin [Justin Martyr c. 100 - c. 165], Tertullian [c. 160 - 220], and others, having perceived the exact resemblance between the religion of Christ and the religion of Mithra, did, with an impertinence only to be equaled by its outrageous absurdity, insist that the Devil, jealous and malignant induced the Persians to establish a religion the exact image of Christianity that was to be, for these worthy saints and sinners of the church could not deny that the worship of Mithra preceded that of Christ, so that, to get out of the ditch, they summoned the devil to their aid, and wi th most astonishing assurance, thus accounted for the striking similarity between the Persian and the Christian religion, the worship of Mithra and the worship of Christ; a mode of getting rid of a difficulty at once so stupid and absurd, that it would be almost equally stupid and absurd seriously to refute it.”
“The worship of Christ, and the religion based upon it, is an exact copy, in all its essential features, of the worship of Mithra and the religion of the Magi; if so, is it not morally certain that the Persians did not copy the religion of the Christians, but that the Christians copied the religion of the Persians? The early fathers must have been very reluctant to admit the likeness was so complete; the admission was, however, wrung from them, by facts they were compelled to receive as such, and which could not be explained or argued away by any other than a devilish kind of sophistry.”
“It is, therefore, incontestably proved that Mithra was the original personification of the god Sun—of which Christ is the copy—as it is certain the original must exist before the copy can be made; and Mosheim informs us that ‘Manes’ [also: Mani, c. 216 - 276] or Manchaeus, as he is sometimes called by his disciples, by birth a Persian, educated among the Magi, and instructed in all those arts and sciences which the Persians and the other neighbouring nations held in the highest esteem, who had penetrated into the depths of astronomy, in the midst of rural life studied the art of healing, and applied himself to painting and philosophy, that this great genius [continues Mosheim] combined these two systems (that is, the Persian and the Christian system), and applied and accommodated to Jesus Christ the characters and actions which the Persians attributed to the god Mithra.”
“The comparison instituted by us in our second number, between Mithra and Christ, renders it unnecessary to write another line in order to show that those who worship Christ as a god, are idolators, bowers down to an idol formerly worshipped in Persia under the name of Mithra, and that Manes was right when he accommodated to Christ the character and actions, which the Persians attributed to the God ‘Mithra.’” ~From: The Existence of Christ Disproved, by Irresistible Evidence, in a Series of Letters, From a German Jew, Addressed to Christians of All Denominations, pgs. 202-203.

BC 800-700 (?)-The Phrygian [part of Asia Minor] deity is Cybele, known as the Great Mother of the Gods. She takes for her lover a young and handsome god named Attis. When he proves himself unfaithful to her, the angry goddess has him castrated, and he dies of his injuries, but he later returns to life.
The priests of Cybele are castrated, so as to play the role of Attis, and adherents of this religion work themselves into frenzies with drums and cymbals, slashing themselves with knives and rubbing the blood over their bodies.
In his book, “The Golden Bough,” Dr James Frazier notes the striking similarities between Jesus and ancient pagan god known as Attis or Atys, “The only begotten son and Savior” of the Phrygians. Like Jesus, Attis is depicted as a man nailed or tied to a tree, at the foot of which was occasionally depicted a lamb. Some accounts said Attis castrated himself beneath the tree, giving rise to a priesthood that practiced either self-castration or enforced celibacy [centuries later Pope Gregory VII, AD 1073-1085, will enforce celibacy on the Roman Catholic clergy]. It is claimed that after Attis was crucified [Or, some say castrated], Attis, like Jesus, descended into hell and arose after three days.
“The reason why the 'Christ,' Jesus, has been made to descend into hell, is because it is part of the Universal Mythos, including the ‘Three days' duration. The Saviors of mankind had all done so; he must, therefore, do likewise.” ~Doane, Bible Myths, p. 213.
Like Jesus and even Mithras, the festival of the “Resurrection of Attis” is celebrated at the time of the Christian Easter. “In point of fact it appears from the testimony of an anonymous Christian, who wrote in the 4th century of our era, that Christians and pagans alike were struck by the remarkable coincidence between the death and resurrection of their respective deities, and that the coincidence formed a theme of bitter controversy between the adherents of the rival religions, the pagans contending that the resurrection of Christ was a spurious imitation of the resurrection of Attis, and the Christians asserting with equal warmth that the resurrection of Attis was a diabolical counterfeit of Christ. In these unseemly bickerings the heathen took what to a superficial observer might seem strong ground by arguing that their god was the older and therefore presumably the original, not the counterfeit, since as a general rule an original is older than its copy.” ~Doane, Bible Myths.
Dr. James Frazier admits the Christians confessed that in this point of time, Christ was the junior deity, but they triumphantly demonstrate his real seniority by falling back on the subtlety of Satan, who on so important an occasion had surpassed himself by inverting the usual order of nature. “Taken altogether, the coincidences of the Christian with the heathen festivals are too close and too numerous to be accidental...”
Jesus was accused of being a “Necromancer, and a magician, and a deceiver of the people,” says the early Christian, Father Justin Martyr. He was said to have been initiated in the magical arts while in the heathen temples of Egypt, and both Jesus, and Horus the ‘Egyptian Savior,’ are represented on monuments with wands, in the received guise of necromancers, while raising the dead to life.
“There was just reason to suspect that there was some fraud” In the actions of these Yesuans, or primitive Christians, who traveled about from city to city to convert the Pagans; and that, “The strolling wonder-workers, by a dexterity of jugglery, which art, not heaven, had taught them, imposed on the credulity of the pious Fathers, whose strong prejudices and ardent zeal for the interests of Christianity would dispose them to embrace, without