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Response to Mr. Gott's Pathetic Anti-Christian Sociology
by P.T.
4 December 2003
Greetings, VNN readers. I’d like to make few comments on Mr. Gott’s rather stereotypical and thin-on-concrete-examples accusations against Christianity. Now is obviously that time of the year.
Dear White Nationalists, Bible Believers intend to be among the mankind to spread their message, and are not going to ask permission for it either from ZOG OR the possible White Nationalist governments. Can’t we all just get along and exalt things that we both know are according to truth and decency?
First of, I’d just like to make the pragmatic observation that this article contains at least two themes that will greatly lead most laymen readers (including unbelievers) to think that White Nationalism is truly the business of uneducated (or half-educated) morons: A) seriously comparing the origin of the Christianity to Holocaust exaggerations, and B) seriously doubting the existence of Lord Jesus.
I could really shoot these pathetic claims full of holes, but now I‘ll just quote Sir James Frazer, the author of the questionable pagan magnum opus “The Golden Bough”, and quite an un-Christian character himself:
“Sir John Frazer, who will certainly not be accused of bigoted orthodoxy, observes in this connexion :
The doubts which have been cast on the historical reality of Jesus are, in my judgement, unworthy of serious attention. . . . To dissolve the founder of Christianity into a myth, as some would do is hardly less absurd than it would be to do the same for Mohammed, Luther, and Calvin.(60) ”
http://www.geocities.com/yarmulka.geo/webster/secret01.htm
Regarding the martyrs, who says that there should have been myriads (or at all) for the religion to be genuine? There certainly were quite a few, and pagans those days told colourful stories about their heroes too. Flaming strawman argument.
Besides, Mr. Gott, shouldn’t a big bad pagan like you be able to appreciate the concept of dying with honour for your principles? Martyrs did indeed help the Church to grow, but not in sense that they were pitied, but because pagans saw their courage in the face of death and were impressed! (Think about “Braveheart!”) Church Father Tertullian was converted thusly, and even pagan Stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote that since Christians (“Galileans”) had shown how bravely even commoners could die, everyone should be basically be able to the same thing.
Second, I see quite a lot recycling of tired anti-Christian clichés originating from F. Nietzsche and Edward Gibbon. Hint, Mr. Gott: relying on former doesn’t make you a superb expert on the ancient world but rather an amateurish hack, and the latter is, sorry to say, very OUTDATED source among Classical scholars, who aren’t generally pro-Christian bunch.
“[T]he Roman Empire allowed all to worship freely”? Tell that to Gallian and Britannian Druids, who systematically eliminated as a part of imperialistic Roman onslaught (possible instigators of rebellion!). Julius Caesar bragged in his memoirs how those Gauls whom he had not yet killed (one million) would soon die in starvation after he had burned down their fields and crops.
Sure enough, you were allowed to maintain your silly little cults, (equivalent of PC Judeo-Christian churches of today) as long as you didn’t question the official imperialistic party line, the practical manifestation of which was the emperor worship. When you crossed the line, you soon found out that imperial Roman “tolerance” was just as phony as the “land of freedom” ideology is in today’s America. Why do you think that the Imperial Rome is such an “idol” for neocons today?
Incidentally, it was the great persecutor of Christians, Diocletian, that fully turned Rome into a totalitarian empire ruled by the semi-divine “Pharaoh” Emperor. It was HE who truly began the institution of serfdom, which Middle Ages inherited from him, by tying peasants to their farms.
We have some colourful descriptions on the working of the Roman IRS:
“Numerous ancient documents confirm that Diocletian's system gave birth
to a monstrous bureaucracy, with more tax collectors on the government
payroll than actual taxpayers. From Lactantius, a Christian apologist of
the 4th century, we read: "The number of those receiving pay was so much
larger than the number of those paying taxes and that because of the
enormous size of the assessments. The resources of the tenant farmers
were exhausted, fields were abandoned, and cultivated areas transformed
into a wilderness."
Diocletian's new tax system could not work unless all citizens,
particularly farmers, stayed on their land. Farmers eventually were
taxed on the number of workers on their land, and they began to flee
their farms in droves. Then came the imperial crackdown: All farmers,
their children, and their children's children were bound to the land
forever. Thus, the fundamental right of all Roman citizens to move about
the empire was destroyed. After 800 years, Roman citizens were finally
to lose their liberties -- not to an alien power, but to the very
government that was supposed to protect them. As in contemporary
America, civil liberties in Rome were adjusted to a tax system; the tax
system was not adjusted to civil liberties.”
http://www.xent.com/FoRK-archive/apr98/0030.html
Great White Nationalist analyst Yggdrasil clearly agrees on this baneful assessment of the Roman Empire:
“Similarly, one might be tempted to conclude that a millennial cycle ended in the 20 years following 455 AD, as the Roman Army disintegrated. However, the disintegration of the Roman Army represented the largest and most important tax cut in the history of the planet. I would argue that this marked the middle of a grand supercycle advance following a down wave of Millennial degree. That final disintegration of the Western Roman Empire precipitated a "dark age" only in the sense that nobody was being taxed to support a class of scribblers, architects and sculptors extolling the greatness of the tax collecting elites.
“Joseph Tainter sets forth an excellent discussion of the economics of the collapse of the Roman Empire in his classic "The Collapse of Complex Societies." He describes how expansion of the army and the empire was profitable and self financing during the Republic as new kingdoms were conquered and their treasuries were seized. This process ended with Octavian's (later, Emperor Augustus) conquest of Egypt. However, under the Principate (27 BC through 284 AD - Augustus through Diocletian) expansion stopped, and imperial resources were devoted to holding the empire together.”
“During the collapse of the Roman Empire, the population decline was caused by disease and economic hardship imposed by imperial tax collectors.”
http://home.ddc.net/ygg/cwar/crest.htm
And you can shove your tired accusation that the Christians destroyed the Classical literature instead of preserving whatever they were able from the collapse of the Empire HERE:
http://www.christian-thinktank.com/qburnbx.html
Finally I’ve got to lay down to rest the widespread Nietzchean idea that early Christians were somehow all from the lowest stratum of the society (although many of them were), “losers”. In fact, the latest study on this field has revealed that the early Christianity was in fact the movement of the UPWARD LOWER MIDDLE CLASS (the same sociological group that German National Socialists recruited their core people), attracted people of high calibre and made their lives better!
“Live Longer, Healthier, & Better"
The untold benefits of becoming a Christian in the ancient world. by Rodney Stark
Constantine, the first Christian to rule Rome, governed for 31 years and died in bed of natural causes at a time when the average imperial reign was short and emperors' lives usually came to violent ends.
That he lived to old age illustrates a more general, if not widely known, early Christian achievement: Christians in the ancient world had longer life expectancies than did their pagan neighbors.
Modern demographers regard life expectancy as the best indicator of quality of life, so in all likelihood, Christians simply lived better lives than just about everyone else.
In fact, many pagans were attracted to the Christian faith because the church produced tangible (not only "spiritual") blessings for its adherents.
Why Christians lived longer
Chief among these tangibles was that, in a world entirely lacking social services, Christians were their brothers' keepers. At the end of the second century, Tertullian wrote that while pagan temples spent their donations "on feasts and drinking bouts," Christians spent theirs "to support and bury poor people, to supply the wants of boys and girls destitute of means and parents, and of old persons confined to the house."
Similarly, in a letter to the bishop of Antioch in 251, the bishop of Rome mentioned that "more than 1,500 widows and distressed persons" were in the care of his congregation. These claims concerning Christian charity were confirmed by pagan observers.
"The impious Galileans support not only their poor," complained pagan emperor Julian, "but ours as well."”
http://www.ctlibrary.com/ch/1998/57/57h028.html
None other than Kevin MacDonald himself supports Stark’s conclusions and says that Christians simply outbred their pagan opponents due to their higher ethics:
“Particularly interesting is the discussion of early Christianity based on the work of Rodney Stark (1996). Early Christianity emerges as a non-ethnic form of Judaism that functioned as a way of producing cohesive, effective groups able to deal with the uncertainties of the ancient world. The ancient world was a very unpredictable place indeed, characterized by natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, rioting, epidemics, brutal military campaigns against civilians, famines, and widespread poverty. Navigating this world was greatly facilitated by co-religionists ready to lend a helping hand and to establish economic alliances. Wilson has no hesitation in supposing that Christian charity in extending aid to fellow Christians suffering from the plague involved altruism, as indeed it did. But the result was that more Christians survived these disasters than did Pagans: Christianity was adaptive at the group level. The adaptiveness of Christianity also stemmed from its emphasis on several attitudes that were notably lacking in the Roman Empire: encouragement of large families, conjugal fidelity, high-investment parenting, and outlawing of abortion, infanticide, and non-reproductive sexual behavior. The bottom line is that Christian women did indeed out-reproduce Pagan women.”
http://www.csulb.edu/~kmacd/dswrev.htm
Sure enough, there were some “great sinners” among the early redeemed, but generally Christianity attracted decent people and made them better. The uppest class naturally had their reservations on this new movement, but not without exceptions: many of the Church Fathers came from this group, including Augustine!
In this spirit, I’d like to quote Kahlil Gibran, Lebanese poet and mystic, who was admittedly quite an eccentric, but on the other hand knew a lot about the mentality of Mediterranean aristocrats and how keen they were – and are – to maintain their status against the mob. Here he comments on the absurdity of the anachronistic Nietzschean idea that these proud nobles would have let some rabble-rousers influence themselves – Americans could perhaps get the faint idea of this by thinking that pre-Civil War Southern aristocrats would have let Al Sharpton make an impression on themselves.
“Think you that these men were slaves or outcasts? And think you that the proud princes of Lebanon and Armenia have forgotten their station in accepting Jesus as a prophet of God? Or think you the high-born men and women of Antioch and Byzantium and Athens and Rome could be held by the voice of a leader of slaves?”
http://kahlilgibran.diaryland.com/021012_54.html
P.T.
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