John E. Remsburg

“ Amid all these forces, the mightiest is, without contradiction, the sun, the fire of heaven, father of earthly fire, unique and supreme cause of motion and life on our planet. There is no need or reason to understand that the very life, and as it were the blood of our celestial father flows in the veins of the Earth, our mother. In the time of love, when the luminous heaven embraces her, from her fertilized womb springs forth a world. ”

“ When India is supreme, Brahma sits upon the world’s throne. When the sceptre passes to Egypt, Isis and Osiris receive the homage of mankind. Greece, with her fierce valor, sweeps to empire, and Zeus puts on the purple of authority. The earth trembles with the tread of Rome’s intrepid sons, and Jove grasps with mailed hand the thunderbolts of Heaven. Rome falls, and Christians, from her territory, with the red sword of war, carve out the ruling nations of the world, and now Christ sits upon the old throne. ”

“ Mankind watched with rapture its rays gain strength daily in the Spring, until the golden glories of Midsummer had arrived, when the earth was bathed during the longest days in his beams, which ripened the fruits that his returning course had started into life. When the sun once more began its course downwards to the winter solstice, his votaries sorrowed, for he seemed to sicken and grow paler at the advent of December, when his rays scarcely reached the earth, and all nature, benumbed and cold, sunk into a death-like sleep. ”

“ Odin and his brothers slew Ymir and from his body created the earth, his flesh forming the land, his blood the sea. Out of two trees Odin made man and woman, and breathed into them the breath of life. For the abode of man a fruitful garden was planted in the center of the earth and called Midgard. Beneath the earth dwells Hel, the goddess of the dead.
Loki is the god of evil. ”

“ These indignities Jesus is said to have suffered, not at the hands of a Jewish mob, but at the hands of a Roman court, from which the Jews had absented themselves and whose proceedings they could not witness nor directly influence. Every lawyer knows that for more than two thousand years the Roman court has been the world’s model for dignity and fairness. That an innocent and defenseless prisoner was subjected to these insults and brutalities in a Roman court, presided over by a Roman governor, none but a slave of superstition can believe. ”

“ Zeus, Jove, or Jupiter, as he is variously called, was the greatest of the sons of gods and held the highest place in the pantheons of Greece and Rome. He was the son of the god Kronos and the goddess Rhea.
The gods of Greece, while mostly pure myths, were yet intensely human. In these gods human vices sank to the lowest depths and human virtues rose to the loftiest heights. Zeus was one of the most puerile, one of the most sublime, one of the most depraved and one of the most beneficent of deities. ”

“ We may, therefore, safely assert that if the friends of Jesus had thought as we do of the lot of those that die, they would never have so much as dreamed of their Master’s resurrection or ascension. For to the Christian belief of today it would be, so to speak, a matter of course that Jesus, like all good and noble souls—and indeed above all others—would go straight ‘to a better world,’ ‘to heaven,’ ‘to God,’ at the instant of his death; but in the conception of the Jews, including the Apostles, this was impossible. ”

“ Imagination declines to picture the long future that lies before us. We cannot understand that we shall never again listen to the tones of the familiar voice; never feel the touch of the gentle hand; never be encouraged by the warm embrace that tells us we are loved, or find a refuge from miserable thoughts and the vexations of the world in the affectionate and ever-open heart. All this is too hard for us. We long for a resurrection ”

“ Supposing that from the myth of Prometheus had sprung a popular religion, which, in its day, had, like the religions of Osiris, Bacchus, Krishna and Christ, overspread the earth. Then think of the devotees of this religion massacring the Hellenists because Zeus had crucified Prometheus! How long must our mythology, with all its attendant evils, rule and curse the world? How long must an innocent people suffer for an alleged crime that was never committed? ”

“ It is not, then, in the name of this or that philosophy, but in the name of universal experience, that we banish miracles from history” (Life of Jesus, p. 29) .
Christianity arose in what was preeminently a miracle-working age. Everything was attested by miracles, because nearly everybody believed in miracles and demanded them. Every religious teacher was a worker of miracles; and however trifling the miracle might be when wrought, in this atmosphere of unbounded credulity, the breath of exaggeration soon expanded it into marvelous proportions. ”

“ The earliest records of all nations and of all religions are more or less mythical. “Nothing great has been established,” says Renan, “which does not rest on a legend. The only culprit in such cases is the humanity which is willing to be deceived.”
A Philosophical myth is an idea clothed in the dress of historical narrative. When a mere idea is personified and presented in the form of a man or a god it is called a pure myth. Many of the gods and heroes of antiquity are pure myths. ”

“ It is not against the man Jesus that I write, but against the Christ Jesus of theology; a being in whose name an Atlantic of innocent blood has been shed; a being in whose name the whole black catalogue of crime has been exhausted ”

“ The exaltation and deification of Jesus is thus described by the Dutch theologian, Dr. Hooykaas: “When Jesus was gone, those who had known him personally insensibly surrounded him with a glory that shone at last with a more than human splendor. The spiritual blessings which flowed in ever rich measure from his person and his gospel compelled the Christians to exalt him ever more and more. The title of Son of God, which his followers had given him as the future Messiah, was elastic and ambiguous enough to lend itself very readily to this process. ”

“ The ancient adoration of Adonis survives in this modern adoration of Jesus. We see here the same strange commingling of superstition and fanaticism, of love and sorrow, of ecstasy and agony, of chastity and lust. The religion is the same; the worship is the same. The divine lovers only have been changed. The beautiful Pagan has been supplanted by the Ideal Man. ”

“ A stream of miraculous pretension, in fact, has flowed through all human history, deep and broad as it has passed through the darker ages, but dwindling down to a thread as it has entered days of enlightenment. The evidence was too hackneyed and commonplace to make any impression upon those before whom the Christian miracles are said to have been performed, and it altogether failed to convince the people to whom the revelation was primarily addressed. ”

“ In dreams the old life is repeated again and again. Sometimes the lost one is beside us as of old and we are quite untroubled by the thought of parting. Sometimes there is a strange and confusing consciousness that the great calamity has happened, or has been thought to happen, but that now we are again together, and that a new life has succeeded upon death.... ”

“ Miracles must be dismissed from the domain of fact and relegated to the realm of fiction. A miracle, I repeat, is impossible. Above all this chief of miracles, The Christ, is impossible, and does not, and never did, exist. ”

“ The supernatural Christ of the New Testament, the god of orthodox Christianity, is dead. But priestcraft lives and conjures up the ghost of this dead god to frighten and enslave the masses of mankind. The name of Christ has caused more persecutions, wars, and miseries than any other name has caused. The darkest wrongs are still inspired by it. The wails of anguish that went up from Kishenev, Odessa, and Bialystok still vibrate in our ears.
Two notable works controverting the divinity of Christ appeared in the last century, the Leben Jesu of Strauss, and the Vie de Jesus of Renan. ”

“ The fire still glows upon the hearth, but the great Titan who brought it down from Heaven lives only in a poet’s dream. The crimson nectar of the vine moves men to mirth and madness now as when the swan of Teos sang its praise, but Bacchus and the ancient mysteries are dead. ”

“ Greg says: “Ignorance and folly too often became the arbiters of wisdom—and the ravings of delirium were listened to as the words of inspiration, and of God. If Jesus could have returned to earth thirty years after his death, and sat in the midst of an assembly of his followers, who were listening in hushed and wondering prostration of mind to a speaker in the ‘unknown tongue,’ how would he have wept over the humiliating and disappointing [329] spectacle! ”

“ Moved by the same passions and the same emotions that thrilled the hearts of the female worshipers of Adonis, it is the women of Christendom, who, more than any other cause, keep alive the memory and the religion of Christ. Thus writes a Carmelite nun describing the passionate adoration of her Christian sisters:
“One day they have raised their eyes to an adorable face. A horrible diadem of interlaced branches binds the august forehead; rubies of blood roll slowly upon the livid pallor of the cheeks; the mouth has forgotten how to smile. It is a man of sorrows. ”

“ This is quite as intelligible as the Christian Confession of Faith, Article II of which reads as follows: “The Son, which is the Word of the Father, begotten from everlasting of the Father, the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father, took man’s nature in the womb of the blessed Virgin, of her substance: so that two whole and perfect Natures, that is to say, the Godhead and Manhood, were joined together in one Person, never to be divided, whereof is one Christ, very God, and very Man.” ”

“ Henceforth he triumphs, growing ever stronger and more brilliant. He ascends into the zenith, and there he glows, on the right hand of God, himself God, the very substance of the Father, the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person, upholding all things by his life-giving power. ”

“ Womanhood has been worshiped in all ages of the world, and maternity has been deified by all creeds: from the savage who bowed before the female symbol of motherhood, to the philosophic Comtist who adores woman ‘in the past, the present, and the future,’ as mother, wife, and daughter, the worship of the female element in nature has run side by side with that of the male ”

“ The Christ is a myth. The Holy Ghost Priestcraft overshadowed the harlot Superstition; this Christ was born; and the Joseph of humanity, beguiled by the Gabriel of credulity, was induced to support the family. But the soldiers of Reason have crucified the illegitimate impostor; he is dead; and the ignorant disciples and hysterical women who still linger about the cross should take his body down and bury it. ”

“ But the resurrection of a dead person from the grave, and his ascension through the air, is a thing very different as to the evidence it admits of, to the invisible conception of a child in the womb. The resurrection and ascension, supposing them to have taken place, admitted of public and ocular demonstration, like that of the ascension of a balloon, or the sun at noon-day, to all Jerusalem at least. A thing which everybody is required to believe, requires that the proof and evidence of it should be equal to all, and universal ”

“ What has been the fate of the Pagan gods will be the fate of the Christian deity. Christianity, which supplanted the ancient faiths, will, in turn, be supplanted by other religions. On two continents already the cross has gone down before the crescent. The belief in Christ as a divine being is passing away. The creeds, as of old, affirm his divinity, but in the minds of his more enlightened followers the divine elements are disappearing. What was formerly believed to be supernatural is now known to be natural. What were once living verities are now dead formalities. ”

“ History, for the most part, takes cognizance only of noted men and important events; and while this silence precludes the existence of the supernatural Christ of Christians, and even that of the human Jesus of Renan, it does not necessarily preclude the existence of an obscure religious teacher and an insignificant sect which subsequently, by a chain of fortuitous circumstances, became the mightiest among the religions of the world. ”

“ When the architects of Egypt began their work, there was another polar star in the northern sky, and the southern cross shone upon the Baltic shores. How glorious are the memories of those ancient men, whose names are forgotten, for they lived and labored in the distant and unwritten past. Too great to be known, they sit on the height of centuries and look down on fame. * * * The men are dead, and the gods are dead. ”

“ What proved the strength of Christianity in an age of ignorance is proving its weakness in an age of intelligence. Christian scholars themselves, recognizing the indefensibility and absurdity of miracles, endeavor to explain away the difficulties attending their acceptance by affirming that they are not real, but only apparent, violations of Nature’s laws; thus putting the miracles of Christ in the same class with those performed by the jugglers of India and Japan. They resolve the supernatural into the natural, that the incredible may appear credible. ”