Criticism Of Christianity

"[Per writings earlier than Mark] the object of Christian faith [Jesus] is never spoken of as a human man who had recently lived, taught, performed miracles, suffered and died at the hands of human authorities, or rose from a tomb outside Jerusalem. There is no sign in the epistles of Mary or Joseph, Judas or John the Baptist, no birth story, teaching or appointment of apostles by Jesus, no mention of holy places or sites of Jesus’ career, not even the hill of Calvary or the empty tomb. This silence is so pervasive and so perplexing that attempted explanations for it have proven inadequate."

"[The Epistle to the Hebrews chapter 8, verse 4] contains a grammatically ambiguous statement in the Greek: it says either that “If Jesus were on earth [meaning now], he would not be a priest” or “If Jesus had been on earth, he would not have been a priest.” [...] What my analysis does is show that, within the context of the passage and through deductive reasoning, the present sense, allotting the statement to the present time, cannot be supported; in fact, it can be shown that the author can only be applying it to the past."

"[In the Gospels] many elements of the Jesus story [depend] on passages and motifs from the Jewish scriptures. [...] John Shelby Spong (in his Liberating the Gospels) regards the Synoptic Gospels as midrashic fiction in virtually every detail, though he believes it was based on an historical man."

"[The Mythical Jesus viewpoint is] the theory that no historical Jesus worthy of the name existed, that Christianity began with a belief in a spiritual, mythical figure, that the Gospels are essentially allegory and fiction..."

"The entire machinery of academic promotion and academic endorsement and of academic advancement has been taken over, and therefore heretics like me have to be routed out. It's very similar to what happened to German universities under Hitler. The group that is most vulnerable, I'm afraid, are intellectuals. Right over the country, you have these kinds of implantations of Metropolitan wokeness. The universities are acting rather like Covid spreaders, these are the super spreaders. These people wear a cloak of impenetrable virtue. We've been here before. This is Robespierre."

"If you think about it, Alex Salmond is a democratic Caledonian Hitler, although some would say Hitler was more democratically elected."

"In fact, they go so far as to differentiate their status between inner scholarii – who have been inducted into the mysteries as Elton's own students – and discipuli, an outer and less privileged band who have only sat at his feet, without the benefit of formal instruction. Long ago, in my own very happy days in Elton's seminar, we used to divide the group into Eltonians and Eltonettes. These were roughly to be equated with 'us' and 'them', English and Americans. Eltonians, we thought, grasped the essence of what Elton was trying to do without needing to imitate the style; Eltonettes reproduced the form to the last perfection of pedantry, but caught nothing of the substance. There is too much in this volume that confirms our arrogance."

"What are the points of comparison? Well, we have a political movement that has a single historic explanation for why your country is facing such terrible oppression; it’s either Versailles or the Treaty of the Union. You have a particular group of people who are responsible for this; it is either the English or the Jews."

"[Responding to a suggestion Prime minister Rishi Sunak appeared to be "detached, or at least semi-detached, from this coronation" from journalist Andrew Pierce] Invisible. I think one of the reasons that I think a lot has gone wrong, for example, why parliament has not been properly represented at the coronation of a parliamentary monarchy, is because the government isn't interested in the constitution. The prime minister, the man of immense talent, of extraordinary skill, but really, not fully grounded in our culture [...] I know that's a difficult and controversial thing to say, but I think it's true. And, again, this coronation is going to highlight far too much our differences rather than what unites us."

"In the name of acceptance, of broadening, of anti-discrimination, we're at the risk of undoing what is our only claim to survive in the future. The only thing that's made these little islands what they are is this astonishing burst of creativity of the last 500 years. It is our individualism, it's our bloody mindedness, our awkwardness, our refusal to fit into categories that has made us, dare I use the word, great. And if we lose that we are lost, we have absolutely nothing else. The world that my enemies are trying to create is one that we will just go down the tubes, we are finished. I believe in going down fighting."

"The determination is to replace the Holocaust with slavery. In other words, this is why Jews are under such attack from the left, there’s jealousy, fundamentally. There is jealousy of the moral primacy of the Holocaust and a determination to replace it with slavery."

"Freedom of speech wasn’t won by being nice, it has been won by struggle with religion."

"You have as a symbol the twisted cross: the saltire or the swastika. You have a passionate belief in economic self-sufficiency: known by the Nazis as autarky and the Scots as oil. And also you have the propensity of your elderly and middle-aged male supporters to expose their knees."

"English national identity is too important to be left to the loons of the BNP and the EDL [English Defence League]."

"[Shakespeare's date of birth (23 April) as a potential English national day] If we decide to go down this route of an English national day, it will mean we have become a feeble little country, just like the Scots and the Welsh and the Irish [...] We do not make a great fact about Shakespeare, like the Scots do about that deeply boring, provincial poet Burns, and we do not have national music like the awful bagpipe. The Scots and the Welsh are typical small nations with a romantic 19th-century-style nationalism."

"[On Enoch Powell's 'rivers of blood' speech] His prophesy was absolutely right in one sense. The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent, they wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham. But it wasn't inter-community violence. This is where he was absolutely wrong. [Referring to another participant in the discussion, Owen Jones, author of Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Classes] What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs that you wrote about have become black."

"Movements like critical race theory and Black Lives Matter are not what they pretend to be. They are attempts at destroying the entire legitimacy of the Western political and cultural tradition. The idea that they are there to defend black lives is a preposterous notion. They do not care about black lives, they only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture. We have to be absolutely clear about this. The narrative of Black Lives Matter is that Western culture and Anglo-American culture in particular are fundamentally morally defective, they are characterised by the mark of Cain and their strategy is to do exactly what was done to German culture because of Nazism and the Holocaust."

"We're at great risk of dying of niceness [...] I hate niceness."

"[The governments "British values" should include] queuing, drunkenness, nostalgia, loving pets, self-loathing, wit and eccentricity."

"[Advocating for 'leave' in the then forthcoming EU membership referendum] We have a very large trade deficit with Europe, we have a decent trade balance with the rest of the world. Is Europe going to cut off its nose to spite its face? It seems to me so infinitely unlikely. There's no risk. There would be a risk if we were running a German-style trade surplus with Europe. But we're not. The problem of our leaving Europe is a problem for the Germans and not us."

"Slavery was not genocide otherwise there wouldn't be so many damn blacks in Africa or Britain would there? An awful lot of them survived."

"I've always had a naughty streak. I've always challenged authority. I'm on the right but it's kind of ironic on the right. I've studied kings, so I’m very aware of the feet of clay of authority."

""By their fruits you shall know them." I always thought Jesus was a rotten theologian, but he is jolly good at politics."

"The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion and black and white boys and girls operate in this language together. This language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England and that is why so many of us have this sense of literally of a foreign country."

"[The English, particularly some on the left, are] incapable of recognising that this is national socialism. And the nationalism is much more important than the socialism, as it was in Germany. The socialism is a very fragile, superficial thing. The nationalism is very real."

"There’s no point in arguing against globalisation or Western civilisation – they are all products of it. We are all products of it [...] The honest teaching of the British empire is to say it was the first key stage of world globalisation. It was probably the most important moment in human history and it is still with us. As for the idea that slavery is this terrible disease that dare not speak its name. It only dare not speak its name because we settled it 200 years ago. Do you know what, we had Catholic emancipation at pretty much the exact same time we got rid of slavery – in the 1830s - we don’t go on about that."

"It still makes me angry. The church still controls education in Ireland. And it’s an obscenity to tell innocent children they’re going to go to hell for taking sixpence out of their mother’s purse…[in America] It’s regarded as important not to put money into it, because if you put money into it, you start people thinking, and then they start to question the system and that’s dangerous…I want to go on that journey with my child trying to expand their vision of the world. I’m not going to leave it to them to take over her brain."

"We now prefer the fantasy…We find comfort in the lies. I was the victim of that for so long. I imbibed everything. It led to a place where I became extremely unhappy. And now I question everything. I believe it’s a responsibility to do it."

"There’s a kind of an unspoken acceptance of the idea that sex against girls is kind of the real assault. The violation of women is what you should pay attention to. There’s a shame about men speaking out. A sense that if you were abused, it was your own fault. Men are not supposed to talk about their feelings. Men have to be strong and men don’t cry."

"Nothing much will change under Biden because his thing is: let’s return America to what it was. Well, what America was caused Trump. The Democrats rolled out the red carpet."

"The priest’s breath was sour and hot as he moved towards me…Then there was blackness...I remembered every single moment up to a point…Then it’s concreted over. What’s buried there? Is it something worth exhuming?..Yes. Maybe if I say it, it will lose its power over me."

"When I found out that the Pentagon has a film department, a lot of things made sense to me. America reveals itself to the world through film. We absorb the American dream because they own the means of production... Reagan and Bush essentially appealed to American cinema mythology; the good guys out on their farms in cowboy hats. America is Gary Cooper. The terrorists are the Indians on horseback. Trump appeals as much to our cinematic language as to our politics: he works through the old reliables of fear and lies."

"The same euphemism comes, in the term some Christians allow themselves to be deceived in this way and to act against the gospel, well, anti-Semitism was preached as an official doctrine of the Church until 1964. Do you think that might have something to do with public opinion in Austria, and Bavaria, and Poland, and Lithuania? There’ll come a time, when the church will issue apologies, and explanations, and half-baked appeals for forgiveness for things it’s still doing. I think that there will be an apology for what happened in Rwanda, the most Catholic country in Africa, where priests and nuns and bishops are on trial, for inciting from their pulpits and on the Church’s radio stations and newspapers, the massacre of their brothers and sisters."

"In the jubilee millennium year of 2000 the Vatican spokesman Bishop Piero Marini said, explaining a whole sermon of apology given by His Holiness the Pope, given the number of sins we’ve committed in the course of twenty centuries, reference to them must necessarily be rather summary. Well I think Bishop Marini had that just about right, I’ll have to be summary, too. His Holiness on that occasion—it was March the 12th, 2000, if you wish to look it up—begged forgiveness for, among some other things, the crusades, the Inquisition, the persecution of the Jewish people, injustice towards women, that’s half the human race right there, and the forced conversion of indigenous peoples, especially in South America, the African slave trade, the admission that Galileo was right, and for silence during Hitler’s Final Solution or Shoah. And it doesn’t end there, there are smaller but significant—equally significant—avowals of a very bad conscience. These have included regret for the rape and torture of orphans and other children in church-run schools in almost every country on Earth, from Ireland to Australia. These are very serious matters, and they’re not to be laughed off by the references to the occasional work of Catholic charities. But I draw you attention not just to the apologies, ladies and gentlemen, but to the evasive and euphemistic form that they take."

"Some persons think us too severe and censorious when we call the Roman pontiff Antichrist. But those who are of this opinion do not consider that they bring the same charge of presumption against Paul himself, after whom we speak and whose language we adopt... I shall briefly show that (Paul's words in II Thess. 2) are not capable of any other interpretation than that which applies them to the Papacy.""

"No one [in the Vatican] thinks the sexual abuse of kids is unique to the States, but they do think that the reporting on it is uniquely American, fueled by anti-Catholicism and shyster lawyers hustling to tap the deep pockets of the church. And that thinking is tied to the larger perception about American culture, which is that there is a hysteria when it comes to anything sexual, and an incomprehension of the Catholic Church. What that means is that Vatican officials are slower to make the kinds of public statements that most American Catholics want, and when they do make them they are tentative and halfhearted. It's not that they don't feel bad for the victims, but they think the clamor for them to apologize is fed by other factors that they don't want to capitulate to."

"We must know and be out of all doubt, that the Pope hath but a devilish Synagogue, and that all his Clergy is but filth & stench, all these varlets that have cast aside the Church of God, are but vermin. Although the Pope, who is Antichrist, be set in God’s sanctuary, (as we have seen before [2 Thes. 2.4]) yet notwithstanding, he is not worthy to be taken and accounted for a minister of the Church, nor all his mates."

"The more exciting life is, the more absurd is the idea of losing it. This is perhaps the secret of that proud aridity felt in Nietzsche's work. In this connection, Nietzsche appears to be the only artist to have derived the extreme consequences of an aesthetic of the Absurd, inasmuch as his final message lies in a sterile and conquering lucidity and an obstinate negation of any supernatural consolation."

"It is Nietzsche's merit to have critically placed the problem of the relationship between life and truth and to have denounced the confusion between truth and what sustains, justifies, and legitimizes. However, the Nietzschean chant to life, the cry for the intensification of life to the detriment of “truth” etc., are simply Nietzsche's choice, not a part of his scientific (specifically, psychological) results. ... The way of truth, if it is really undertaken — and not only “proclaimed” in the apologetic discourse of the philosopher as a “seeker of truth” — must necessarily — so is the goal of my argument — lead to the non-being. ... If Nietzsche frightens you, then take your moral ideas to their last consequences, which will lead one to embrace a negative ethic, that is, an ethic in which truth will have absolute primacy over life."

"Nietzsche's philosophy, undoubtedly, revolves around the problem of rebellion. More precisely, it begins by being a rebellion. But we sense the change of position that Nietzsche makes. With him, rebellion begins with “God is dead,” which is assumed as an established fact; then it turns against everything that aims at falsely replacing the vanished deity and reflects dishonor on a world which doubtless has no direction but which remains nevertheless the only proving-ground of the gods. Contrary to the opinion of certain of his Christian critics, Nietzsche did not form a project to kill God. He found Him dead in the soul of his contemporaries. He was the first to understand the immense importance of the event and to decide that this rebellion on the part of men could not lead to a renaissance unless it was controlled and directed. Any other attitude toward it, whether regret or complacency, must lead to the apocalypse. Thus Nietzsche did not formulate a philosophy of rebellion, but constructed a philosophy on rebellion."

"Who knew that if you merely represent the thought of Nietzsche or Schopenhauer in a fun way it would find such an audience? Some things, it seems, are always green."

"I've come to understand that the quality of memorability and inevitability which I assumed came from intense pleasure may actually have come from a kind of pain. That is to say that one learns from Nietzsche that there is something painful about meaning. Sometimes it is the pain of difficulty, sometimes the pain of being set a standard that one cannot attain."

"Kierkegaard's criticism of actual Christianity is an inner one; he does not confront Christianity, as, for example, Nietzsche does, with an alleged higher value, and test it by that and reject it."

"Our conjecture that metaphysics is a substitute, albeit an inadequate one, for art, seems to be further confirmed by the fact that the metaphysician who perhaps had artistic talent to the highest degree, viz Nietzsche, almost entirely avoided the error of that of confusion. A large part of his work has predominantly empirical content. We find there, for instance, historical analyses of specific artistic phenomena, or an historical psychological analysis of morals, In the work, however, in which he expresses most strongly that which others express through metaphysics or ethics, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, he does not choose the misleading theoretical form, but openly form of art, of poetry."

"Nietzsche seems to have been unaware of the origin as well as of the modernity of the term “value” when he accepted it as a key notion in his assault on tradition. But when he began to devaluate the current values of society, the implications of the whole enterprise quickly became manifest. Ideas in the sense of absolute units had become identified with social values to such an extent that they simply ceased to exist once their value-character, their social status, was challenged. Nobody knew his way better than Nietzsche through the meandering paths of the modern spiritual labyrinth, where recollections and ideas of the past are hoarded up as though they had always been values which society depreciated whenever it needed better and newer commodities. Also, he was well aware of the profound nonsense of the new “value-free” science which was soon to degenerate into scientism and general scientific superstition and which never, despite all protests to the contrary, had anything in common with the Roman historians' attitude of sine ira et studio."

"Nietzsche's inverted Platonism, his insistence on life and the sensuously and materially given as against the suprasensuous and transcendent ideas which, since Plato, had been supposed to measure, judge, and give meaning to the given, ended in what is commonly called nihilism. Yet Nietzsche was no nihilist but, on the contrary, was the first to try to overcome the nihilism inherent not in the notions of the thinkers but in the reality of modern life. What he discovered in his attempt at “trans-valuation” was that within this categorical framework the sensuous loses its very raison d'être when it is deprived of its background of the suprasensuous and transcendent. “We abolished the true world: which world has remained? perhaps the world of appearances? . . . But no! together with the true world we abolished the world of appearances.” This insight in its elementary simplicity is relevant for all the turning-about operations in which the tradition found its end."

"It is another matter, and one that objectively considered is to the praise of Nietzsche, that he thus hurled himself against the strongest and not the weakest point in the opposing front. With his discovery of the Crucified and His host he discovered the Gospel itself in a form which was missed even by the majority of its champions, let alone its opponents, in the 19th century. And by having to attack it in this form, he has done us the good office of bringing before us the fact that we have to keep to this form as unconditionally as he rejected it, in self-evident antithesis not only to him, but to the whole tradition on behalf of which he made this final hopeless sally."

"They muddy the waters to make them look deep."

"Absolute nothingness is an ultimate ground of a purely apophatic mysticism, and it is even more primal in Mahayana Buddhism, just as it has been resurrected in the deepest expressions of a uniquely modern imagination. Nietzsche is the only Western thinker who has fully thought an absolute nothingness, although that nothingness is a deep even if elusive ground of Hegelian thinking, and of all of the fullest expressions of modern dialectical thinking and vision."

"If you crush a cockroach, you're a hero. If you crush a beautiful butterfly, you're a villain. Morals have aesthetic criteria."