Continuing our series on the beginnings and early development of Christianity, we look in this essay for possible and plausible sources of the Idea that launched the new religion.

The first four essays are: A man named Jesus or something like that (September 23, 2011); The invention of Christianity (October 28, 2011); Tread on me: the making of Christian morality (December 22, 2011); St.Paul: portrait of a sick genius, (January 7, 2012).

Our contention is that the whole vast, towering, ornate, gorgeous, powerful, many-winged edifice of Christianity was started on the flimsiest of foundations: the fantasies of an obscure, wandering, sex-obsessed liar and genius whose real name nobody knows.

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The seed that grew into the Christian religion was the Idea that a certain crucified Judean rebel leader [1], whom a sect of Jews claimed was the prophesied Messiah (Christ in Greek), was a divine redeemer, Son of the One God worshipped by the Jews.

By “redeemer” was meant one who had died for the benefit of mankind, but rose again bodily and reigns forever with his Father in heaven, thus composing a deity consisting of two gods in One.

The earliest known documents that tell us where the Idea came from are the letters of St. Paul, so it may be assumed that he thought of it himself. Of course he might have picked it up from someone else, but it was he who posted about the Roman Empire trying to convince as many people as he could that the Idea was true. And he claimed it as his own, that it had come to him as a revelation from the resurrected divine redeemer himself [2].

But, granted it was his confection, from what sources might its elements really have derived? 

His birthplace, Tarsus [3], the capital of Cilicia, was a splendid pagan city where Persian emperors had built a magnificent palace [4]. It had a school of philosophy that “surpassed those of Athens and Alexandria”. [5]. It was also an important center of trade and religion. Unless Paul had left it when he was a mere infant, he would inevitably have witnessed pagan rites that were publicly and grandly celebrated there.

The city was named for Baal-Taraz, a god who annually died and rose again. Iconic representations of the Baal of Tarsus show that “there was a pair of deities, a divine Father and a divine Son“. [6]

Also in Tarsus, in the first century, the death and resurrection of the god Attis was ritually enacted every year. Attis – the son of a virgin mother – “died” in a ceremony of pain and blood. He was hung in effigy on a pine tree at Eastertide, the spring equinox, and priests sacrificed to him by castrating themselves. After three days his return to life was joyously celebrated. Both Baal-Taraz and Attis were fertility gods whose death and resurrection were believed to be for the good of humanity in that they ensured the rebirth of nature. In this sense they could be said to have suffered and died for mankind.

Nowhere in his known letters [7], or in the putatively biographical Book of Acts, is it recorded that Paul himself actively participated in these rites. (He claimed to have been born a Jew, but was more probably a convert to Judaism. [8]) But the religious belief that a god – Attis – came to earth in the form of a man, suffered execution by being hung on a tree for the good of humanity, and rose again, must have been familiar to him; and it is highly likely that it influenced his thinking about the crucified man he called “Jesus”, and whom a sect of Jews believed had risen bodily from the dead. [9] The Father and Son pair of deities worshipped in Tarsus may also have been in Paul’s thoughts when he called him “the Son of God”. (But when, later on, Christians endowed Jesus with a virgin mother, Paul had nothing to do with it. He never mentions Jesus’s birth. If the birth-myth of Attis influenced Christian thinking at all, it was almost certainly not through Paul.)

Ever since Alexander the Great conquered (between 334 and 323 BCE) most of the world known to the Greeks, goods of all sorts including ideas had moved freely about the lands of his empire. Greek culture continued to flourish after the Romans conquered Greece in the second century BCE. Religions and philosophies from Persia, North Africa, Asia Minor, Greece itself, even from as far away as India into which Alexander had briefly penetrated, were by that time gloriously intermingled in what one might call a salad of ideas. (The French word for a salad, macédoine, derives from the name of Alexander’s home state, Macedon, perhaps because his empire was a colorful mixture of cultures.)

Paul was literate and to an extent educated, and would have been aware of, if not well-informed about, many of those ideas. Philosophies and religions, both the popular and the esoteric, borrowed myths, rites, and beliefs from one another. So while the Attis cult may have been most vivid in his memory, and Judaism was the faith he was instructed in, other religions from near and far could have contributed to Paul’s invention. Some certainly did. They have left their traces in his writing.

There can be no doubt that Gnostic ideas were in his head. Most of the known Gnostic cults arose after Paul, and though deriving their elaborate cosmogonies in the first place from Greek philosophy, were also strongly affected by Christian theology; but one Gnostic cult at least was contemporaneous with him, the one that the Church Fathers believed to have been the first: that of Simon Magus, whom they called “the father of all heresies”. The Gnostic elements in St. Paul’s mysticism may have come from Simon, though it is possible there was a common source which both Paul and Simon knew but is entirely lost.

What are these Gnostic elements in St. Paul’s writings? Paul lamented that to live in this world was to be condemned to exist in spiritual darkness, and to be oppressed by “principalities and powers” (10]; and he spoke of a multiplicity of heavens [11], and “the god of this world” [12] –  all of which chimes with Gnostic doctrine.

Gnostics held that a lesser god, a “demiurge” who was just but not merciful, had created, and continued to rule over, the material universe and mankind. St. Paul does not assert this, nor does he echo the Gnostic belief that the great true God, the Primal Father who was all good, was too far off in his highest heaven to be known to mortals, except by a small minority gifted with intuitive knowledge (“the gnosis”). However, in Simon Magus’s system, a divine redeemer descended to earth from the highest heaven on a mission of salvation. Paul might well have heard Simon Magus preach that he, Simon himself, was the divine redeemer through whom alone mankind could hope for spiritual salvation.

Simon claimed that his own divine origin was the Godhead, the Source of all things. His lady consort too, he taught, derived from there. She was Ennoia, the First Thought of the Source, incarnate on earth as Helen of Troy. As Helen she had been suffering for long ages, but now that Simon had descended to redeem all mankind from this evil world, she would be restored to her place in the highest heaven. All this Simon spun from Greek philosophy, which had long before him conceived of a Godhead consisting of three beings, or “hypostases’, variously named; for instance, an unknowable source of all things called the Depth, Bythos in Greek; his First Thought, the Nous or Ennoia; and his Word, the Logos.

Was this the origin of “the Trinity”, the three-in-one god of Christianity? Probably – but not through St. Paul. It is found in the gospel of “Matthew”, probably as a late addition to the original text. [13] And the writer of the first verse of the gospel of “John” declares that “the Logos” – the Word – was the beginning of creation. [14] It is a direct borrowing from Greek philosophy, and inseparable from the philosophical idea of a triune Godhead. It was written some forty to sixty years after St. Paul’s letters, and cannot be traced back to him. Nothing in the letters, or in anecdotes in the Book of Acts, distinctly shows Paul to have conceived a Trinitarian God. As he did not explicitly formulate the idea of a Christian three-person Godhead, he cannot be either credited with or accused of the invention of “the Trinity”. [15]

Paul’s Idea was One God, Two Persons, and though it makes no rational sense, it was the idea that began Christianity. By the time the Christian God came to be described as a three-person deity, two-in-one had already been swallowed, and it could not have been much harder for the same people to accept three-in-one, however illogical and even downright insane it strikes non-believers. (But the idea of the “Holy Trinity”, did in fact remain a difficult one for believers to grapple with, giving rise to tortuous intellectual puzzles that have pestered Christian theologians right up to the present day.)

Numerous notions from pagan and heretical sources accumulated in the mythology and doctrines of the Christian Church after St. Paul’s time. [16] But a centrally important doctrine and ritual that began with him was the eucharist (meaning the “thanksgiving”), a rite in which “Christ’s flesh” is devoured and “his blood” is drunk. From where (other than by revelation from Christ as he claimed [17]) did Paul derive it? Did he invent it in the hope of winning over worshippers of Dionysus? If the savage Dionysian rite of intoxicated acolytes eating raw flesh and drinking blood in order to get the incarnated god inside them [18] was still being practiced in Paul’s time, it was surely not by such large numbers that he felt compelled to find a way to draw them into his faith. Yet to do so would have been consistent with his proselytizing method: to integrate ideas already sacred to his audiences and adapt them to his evolving doctrine.

What is certain is that Greek religion and philosophy were brought to bear, in the first instance through the mind of one man, on events of the Jewish rebellion, and on Jewish beliefs and Jewish prophecy, to bring a new, initially passive, ominously sentimental religion into the world. Christianity was fathered by a vulgarized Hellenism upon a demoralized Judaism.

Despite his awareness of how his Roman-Greek contemporaries thought and felt, Paul offered them a religion that fitted poorly with the virile values of the age, and its appeal was chiefly to women and slaves. It might have faded away quite soon had not a volcanically disruptive historical event helped to sustain it: the fall of the Temple in 70 CE, a climax of the war the Judeans had been fighting against the Romans. The probability is that no one remained in Jerusalem after that who could actually remember the executed rebel leader and what he taught; no one who could credibly contradict Paul’s and the gospel-writers’ fictions. Paul could allege anything he liked about Jesus’s chosen disciples “Peter” and “John” and “James”; that they encouraged him to be Jesus’s “apostle to the gentiles”; that “Peter” allowed the dietary laws to be considered outdated; that converts need not be circumcised. He was rid of the bothersome need to deceive and conciliate the old men who constituted the Jewish connection with the man he called “Jesus” (though Jewish sects – Nazarenes and/or Ebionites – that believed he was the Messiah and would return to complete his earthly mission, continued to exist in lands bordering the eastern Mediterranean for some centuries).

Within a hundred years after the destruction of the Temple, the greater part of the Jewish nation was scattered through the world. Bound together only by their religion, they held to an adjusted orthodoxy, it being impossible any longer to obey all the 613 laws of their Temple-centered faith. Jewish proselytizing ceased, while Christian proselytizing intensified. So the historic catastrophe of the Jews allowed Pauline Christianity to outlive its inventor; and as it rolled on it gathered myths and legends, doctrines and rituals, institutions of administration, and eventually power.

By the beginning of the 4th century, about 10% of the people under Roman rule had been drawn into the new religion. By then Christians were no longer thought of by the Roman rulers as a sub-sect of the Jews. When the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312 as a result of a superstitious bargain [19], strong-minded men began to look hard at the religion and find formidable intellectual difficulties in what it claimed for its truths. They felt a yearning for orthodoxy; a need to straighten it all out, clarify the muddles it was born with, lay down a correct dogma. But that was to prove an endless, arduous, emotionally charged, utterly impossible task. It was to extend combatively through centuries, darkening them with ignorance, fear, and intense suffering, while uncountable numbers of lives were destroyed in Christian wars, massacres, martyrdoms, and persecutions.

Jillian Becker   February 26, 2012

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NOTES

[1]  It is a curious fact that scholarship cannot discover the parent-given names of either the inventor of Christianity who became “St. Paul”, or his Jewish “Christ” whom he called by the Greek name “Jesus”.

[2] Acts 9:3-5

[3] St. Paul claimed to come from Tarsus, and there is no obvious way in which his lying about this would have served any purpose.

[4] The city and palace are described appreciatively in Xenophon’s Anabasis.

[5] & [6] J.G.Frazer, The Golden Bough: Adonis, Attis, Osiris Volume 1

[7] Most scholars now believe that only 7 of the 13 letters attributed in the New Testament to the authorship of St. Paul were written (at least for the most part) by him: Romans, 1&2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon.

[8] Apart from persuasive evidence deducible from his letters and the Book of Acts that he was not born a Jew, there is an apparent confession that he only pretended to be one in 1 Cor 9:20, “And unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews.”

[9] As on other subjects in Paul’s writings, there is an ambiguity to be found in what he says about bodily resurrection. He certainly believed that “Christ” had “risen”, and that the “redeemed” would “live” with God, but whether in the body or the spirit he was not clear. Attempting explanation, he confounds confusion (1 Cor 15).

[10] Rom 8:38

[11] 2 Cor 12:2

[12] 2 Cor 4:4

[13] Matth 28:19

[14] John 1:1

[15] St. Paul spoke of the Holy Spirit as something that a human being could be filled with or accompanied by: a spirit of holiness, eg. “Do you not know that that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God …?” (1 Cor 6:19); “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you” [ 2 Cor 3:14]. And when he says, “They that are in the flesh cannot please God, but ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you” (Rom 8:9 ), the “Spirit” has more in common with the inner spark of holiness which is cognate with “the gnosis” in the Gnostic systems, the spark by which a mortal might be saved from his entombment in the flesh, than with the Greek philosophical idea of a divine hypostasis.

[16] Among such alleged influences is the cult of Mithraism, centered in Rome and popular with the Roman army in Paul’s lifetime. Although it took the name of its god Mithras from the Persian god Mithra, it developed its own arcane rites. Little is known about its doctrines or practice. Some theologians, mythologists, and historians of religion assert that Mithra/Mithras had a virgin mother (though others say that icons prove he was born out of a rock); that three Magi (Zoroastrian grandees or priests) brought gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh for the new-born god; that Mithras celebrated a “last supper” with twelve disciples; that he was crucified, laid in a rock tomb, and rose again at the spring equinox. It is not known when these stories were attached to Mithraism, but it is most probable that they were taken over from Christian beliefs, rather than that the borrowing happened the other way about. It is possible that the choice of Sunday as the Christian Sabbath was taken from Mithraism. The only certain borrowing was the choice of December 25th as the birthday of Christ on earth. The date was deliberately chosen by the Catholic Church towards the end of the second century, because it was already being celebrated as the birthday of Mithras. In any case, of the alleged similarities in the two mythologies only a “last supper” (1 Cor 11:23-26), crucifixion and resurrection were included in Paul’s teaching; the rest came into Christianity years later.

[17] 1 Cor 11:23-25

[18] From Wikipedia: “Cultic rites associated with worship of the Greek god of wine, Dionysus (or Bacchus in Roman mythology), were allegedly characterized by maniacal dancing to the sound of loud music and crashing cymbals, in which the revellers screamed, became drunk and incited one another to greater and greater ecstasy [a state of being outside oneself]. The goal was to achieve a state of enthusiasm [the god being inside one] in which the celebrants’ souls were temporarily freed from their earthly bodies and were able to commune with Bacchus/Dionysus and gain a glimpse of and a preparation for what they would someday experience in eternity. The rite climaxed in a performance of frenzied feats of strength and madness, such as uprooting trees, tearing a bull (the symbol of Dionysus) apart with their bare hands, an act called sparagmos, and eating its flesh raw, an act called omophagia. This latter rite was a sacrament akin to communion in which the participants assumed the strength and character of the god by symbolically eating the raw flesh and drinking the blood of his symbolic incarnation. Having symbolically eaten his body and drunk his blood, the celebrants became possessed by Dionysus.”

[19] Just before a clash of arms known as the Battle of Milvian Bridge in a war with his co-emperor Maxentius, Constantine saw a light in the sky in the form of a cross. He swore that if he won the battle he would convert to Christianity. Tragically, he won.

Communism and Christianity are ideologically identical in a fundamental assumption: that ultimate virtue lies in the sacrifice of the individual to the supposed good of the community.

There are other salient resemblances between them, vivid in their histories; most notably a reach for totalitarian control and the punishing of dissent; but what they similarly do, for the Party or for the Church, is always in the name of their similar communitarian ethic.

The United States of America was founded on an opposite fundamental principle: that the individual is of paramount importance; that each should be free to act in his own best interests provided only that he does not impinge on the freedom of his fellow citizen. Those words are not used in the Constitution, but it is what the Constitution is all about, establishing a rule of law to protect individual liberty. That is what the rule of law is for. Where the individual citizen is free to strive lawfully for his own welfare, the nation as a whole flourishes and prospers. That was what was visualized by the founders, and they were proved right. (The paramountcy of individual freedom does not of course preclude necessary co-operation, to keep foreign enemies of the nation at bay with a strong military, or to provide conveniences that large numbers of citizens need in their particular localities such as street lighting, sewerage, transport. Nor does it exclude voluntary philanthropy.)

The United States of America came to embody the ideal of freedom. But the ideal seems to be fading. President Obama is a Communist by upbringing and choice, and has manifestly tried to turn America towards Communism by means of government-enforced wealth redistribution.

The apparent alternative to Obama at this point in the presidential election year is Rick Santorum. The picture at the top of this article suggests that this ardent Catholic stands more than anything else for Communism’s twin ideology, Christianity.

If that is the case, we need to ask: is there no one who will stand for freedom?

This is from an undated article. We quote it here in order to raise a question.

Authorities in four states are prosecuting Chris­tian Science parents on manslaughter, murder, or child abuse charges for refusing medical care to their dying chil­dren. The cases — six of them in all, including three in California — represent the largest assault in history against Christian Science reliance on prayer instead of medical treatment to cure dis­ease.

Are such prosecutions against the Constitutional principle of the separation of church and state?

If so, should the state not interfere in any way in such cases?

Should the state never interfere in any religious practice whatsoever, even if – for instance – it included human sacrifice?

Debate is invited.

This is from the Washington Post:

Nobel-laureate Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel and a top official from the Simon Wiesenthal Center said Tuesday that Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney should use his stature in the Mormon Church to block its members from posthumously baptizing Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Their comments followed reports that Mormons had baptized the deceased parents of Wiesenthal, the late Holocaust survivor and Nazi-hunter. Wiesel appeared in a church database used to identify potential subjects of baptisms. …

Posthumous baptisms of non-Mormons are a regular practice in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Members believe the ritual creates the possibility for the deceased to enter their conception of Heaven.

Individual members can submit names, usually of deceased relatives, for proxy baptisms. The church has tried to improve its technology to block the process from including Jewish Holocaust victims. … [as it ] has long been offensive to Jews.

How is all this absurd?

Let us list the ways. They are too numerous to count.

• The absurdity of worshipping “Jesus Christ”.
• The stacks of absurdities in Mormonism.
• The absurdity of baptism.
• The extra-hilarious absurdity of baptizing the dead.
• The extra-extra-absurdity of baptizing dead Jews.
• The absurdity of Jews complaining to the Mormon church about dead Jews being baptized. Do they fear it will turn dead Jews into Mormons?
• The absurdity of Mormons not getting their “technology” good enough to exclude Jews from their posthumous baptismal rites.
• The absurdity of expecting Mitt Romney to bring that mysterious technology up to scratch.

And there are probably more that we’ve missed.

Ah, well! Bring on the figurative corpses. It’s all good clean fun at the virtual baptismal font.

Perhaps the Jews could get their revenge by posthumously circumcising dead Mormons.

Obama’s 2010 health-care law was a levelling, socialist, collectivist, wealth-redistributing, government-enlarging measure. It was a power-grab, in the name of “compassion” as always –  the pretence by the left that the governing elite has nothing so much at heart as the welfare of the poor. The poor must have free stuff. Everyone must have free stuff so that no one is any different from anyone else – except of course the power-elite (what they called the “nomenclatura” in Soviet Russia).

But stuff does not come free. If some are getting something without paying for it, someone else is giving to them – involuntarily, in the collectivist state. “Free” means the state pays. The state gets its money from – well, from the people actually. The socialist, collectivist, redistributing state robs Peter to give free stuff to Pauline.

Among the free stuff Pauline must have is health-care. Obama’s health-care law requires contraception and sterilization to be included in all health insurance policies. There must be “free” contraceptives available to all women. They must be able to copulate without fear of conceiving. To have a baby is a “punishment” according to Obama. If conception accidentally happens, they must be able to have a “free” abortion. Copulating is good but conceiving is bad. Babies are bad for women’s health. And, besides, having a baby or an abortion is much more expensive than contraception.

Of course if every man and woman paid for their own health care just as they pay (or as most of them still do in America) for their food and shelter and clothing, the budgeting choices would concern nobody else. But freedom for the individual to make his and her own choices is precisely what the all-controlling, levelling, collectivist state is ideologically against. To prevent such freedom was the real reason why “Obamacare” was enacted.

To achieve their aim, Obama and cronies must ignore the Constitution. In any case it’s an outdated document, they say. As is stated in the official organ of the Dark Side, the New York Times:

The Constitution is out of step with the rest of the world in failing to protect … entitlement to food, education and health care.

By “the rest of the world” is meant places like Greece which recognize – to their financial embarrassment – that there’ s an entitlement to health care and everything. That’s the nub of the Obama collectivist ideology. All are entitled to have it, so some must pay for everyone to have it. Even if it brings the country to economic ruin.

However, those who pay must not be allowed to buy it for themselves. What selfishness! Private purchase is forbidden.

A Wall Street Journal editorial reports this and comments:

The HHS [Department of Health and Human Services] rule prohibits out-of-pocket costs for birth control, simply because Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s regulators believe no woman should have to pay anything for it. To take a larger example: The Obama Administration’s legal defense of the mandate to buy insurance or else pay a penalty is that the mere fact of being alive gives the government the right to regulate all Americans at every point in their lives

But there was a small difficulty, a minor nuisance. Some religions do not think of reproduction as a punishment and actually forbid contraception and abortion. They don’t see the question as one of health as the state pretends it is, but of morals. So the administration will allow an exception. Churches that object to birth control and abortion need not offer cover for them to their employees, and the employees may claim these “free” services directly from the insurers.

Of course they cannot and will not be free.

This is from PowerLine:

First, there is no possible constitutional basis on which the federal government can order insurance companies to provide specified services for free. Second, the idea that the cost of contraception and abortion services will be borne by insurance companies is absurd. Obviously, insurance companies will quote premiums based on the total cost of the coverage in the proposed policy. If the policy includes contraception and abortion, those costs will be included in the premium, regardless of whether those particular services are designated as “free” to the employee and/or the employer. It is the employee, of course, who ultimately bears the cost.

We’ll all ultimately bear the cost, which is our freedom.

Freedom itself, not health or religious doctrine, is the vital issue.

Religion has always been a principal cause – perhaps the principal cause – of Manmade Human Suffering.

Christians of all stripes practiced religious intolerance for hundreds of years. At present, however, Christians are the victims of it. They are being persecuted and killed in large numbers, mostly by Communists and Muslims.

In an article in this month’s issue of Commentary magazine, The Worldwide Attack on Christians, David Aikman writes:

A Pew Forum study in 2011 estimated that Christians are persecuted, either by government or hostile social forces, in an incredible 131 of the world’s 193 countries, and they constitute 70 percent of the world’s population. The World Evangelical Alliance believes that 200 million Christians are being singled out for persecution at any one time. At a 2011 Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) conference in Lithuania on the topic of Christian persecution, one delegate estimated that approximately 105,000 Christians lose their lives every year for their faith — a figure that translates into approximately one Christian killed every five minutes.

The informative article is let down by an absurd conclusion:

However much it helps those being persecuted is a matter of debate. But, still, we can pray.

What sort of a god have they invented who needs to be asked to protect his suffering faithful before he’ll take any notice of what’s happening to them and do something about it? And how many centuries of his failing to live up to his reputation for infinite goodness will it take to convince them that he isn’t going to do what they ask anyway?

But to return to the human persecution of Christians: suddenly it’s become a topic in the mass media, or at least in Newsweek.

Nina Shea reports in the National Review:

Best-selling author, film director, women’s-rights advocate, former Dutch parliamentarian, Islamist death-threat survivor, refugee from a Somalian forced marriage, and a fierce champion of individual freedoms — that of others as well as her own — Ayaan Hirsi Ali has demonstrated her courage once more. In the cover story she penned for the current issue of Newsweek, entitled The War on Christians, … Hirsi Ali gives a tour d’horizon of the most politically incorrect subject of all human-rights reporting: the ongoing religious persecution of Christians in the Muslim world. … She criticizes the media for giving short shrift to this development, favoring instead the [totally false – JB] narrative that Muslims are the victims of religious persecution by the West. …

She asserts: “The conspiracy of silence surrounding this violent expression of religious intolerance has to stop. Nothing less than the fate of Christianity — and ultimately of all religious minorities — in the Islamic world is at stake.”

Nothing less. And nothing more.

We deplore religious persecution. We deplore religion.

We don’t say religion has never been good for anyone, but we do say it has done incalculable harm.

We don’t imagine that wars and persecutions would never happen again if religion were to vanish from the earth. But we profoundly wish it would. By as much as human suffering would be reduced by its going, happiness would be increased.

The Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas score a victory, with only a US general being fired.

Here in part is the story as told and commented on by Diana West:

One day, William G. “Jerry” Boykin, a highly decorated retired Army general and ordained minister, and a founding member and leader of Delta Force, was scheduled to speak at a West Point prayer breakfast.

We find the thought of a prayer breakfast unpalatable, but that’s straying from the topic.

The next day, following a campaign to stop Boykin’s appearance by what the New York Times describes as “liberal veterans’ groups, civil liberties advocates and Muslim organizations,” Boykin was not scheduled to speak at West Point. “In fulfilling its commitment to the community,” West Point announced, “the U.S. Military Academy will feature another speaker for the event.” …

You can bet your last bullet the replacement speaker will not have identified, studied and himself experienced jihad – in military terms, the enemy threat doctrine – as Lt. Gen. Boykin has. This makes Boykin’s abrupt cancellation an information-war victory for the Muslim Brotherhood something few in Washington or West Point will even notice.

Muslim Brotherhood? Isn’t that in Egypt? How does the Muslim Brotherhood figure into a story about West Point?

Prominent in the stop-Boykin coalition is the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), known mainly for sound bite-ready spokesmen who present an Islamic point of view on TV. More important is CAIR’s place in the Muslim Brotherhood constellation of front groups as an entity founded by members of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian franchise, the jihad terror group Hamas.

This revelation emerged during the 2008 Holy Land Foundation terror-financing trial in a document authored by the Muslim Brotherhood itself. It attests to the presence in the United States of multiple Muslim Brotherhood front groups, including CAIR, which remains an unindicted co-conspirator in that case. The FBI cut off official contacts with CAIR in 2008.

Such information is documented in “Shariah: The Threat to America,” a book Boykin and I and 17 others, including former CIA director James Woolsey and former Reagan Pentagon official Frank Gaffney, co-authored in 2010. I wouldn’t be surprised if the book played some animating role in the Battle over Boykin at West Point, won by CAIR and celebrated in all the best bastions impregnable to fact. …

Some animus toward Boykin may form in reaction to the evangelical brand of Christianity he expresses on faith and war in churches across the country. Back in 2003, following the publication of snippets of these talks, the Pentagon investigated Boykin’s invocations of “Satan” as the enemy, and his attesting to his faith in the Christian “real God” over his enemy’s “idol.”

So in gagging on the prayer breakfast, we weren’t far off topic after all.

However, the outrage here is not Boykin’s Christianity, but a great US military academy’s capitulation to the impudent demands of a terrorist-founded, terrorist-funding, jihad-promoting Islamic organization.

Some of our readers (who may have spoken for many) have let us know that they disagree with Pat Condell – and so with us too – on what he says in the video we posted yesterday.

Contra Condell, they think a nativity scene on state property is a serious violation of the Constitution and should be protested against.

They insist that the Founding Fathers intended there to be “total separation of Church and State” although the phrase is not used in the Constitution.

One reader, Frank, sent us these quotations:

“I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.” ~ Thomas Paine

“All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.” ~ Thomas Paine

“I have found Christian dogma unintelligible. Early in life I absented myself from Christian assemblies.” ~ Benjamin Franklin

“The civil government … functions with complete success … by the total separation of the Church from the State.” ~ James Madison

“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize, every expanded prospect.” ~ James Madison

“The question before the human race is, whether the God of nature shall govern the world by his own laws, or whether priests and kings shall rule it by fictitious miracles?” ~ John Adams

By “the God of nature” we understand John Adams to have meant the laws of nature. (That was the only “god” that Spinoza and Einstein believed in.)

“As I understand the Christian religion, it was, and is, a revelation. But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed?” ~ John Adams

With this last one we have some disagreement. We don’t believe in revelation. And we think Islam has shown itself to be at least as bloody as Christianity.

But all the quotations are treasures worth remembering.

(Our thanks to Frank)

Out of season because only just found, here is a recent video by Pat Condell speaking against a pathetic anti-Christmas campaign conducted by atheists of the Left. 

As very often – without his knowing it, of course – he speaks for us.

This is from Front Page, by Raymond Ibrahim:

The New Year’s resolution for “Sunnis for Da’wa [Islamization] and Jihad” — also known as Boko Haram, that is, “Western education is forbidden” — is to create a Christian-free Nigeria, beginning, naturally, with the north, where Muslims outnumber Christians.

Right at the start of 2012, Boko Haram issued an ultimatum giving Christians living in northern Nigeria three days to evacuate or die — an ultimatum the group has been living up to, so much so that Nigeria’s President Jonathan recently declared a state of emergency. …

Boko Haram and other Muslims have been terrorizing Nigerian Christians for years, killing thousands of them, and destroying hundreds of their churches. Just last November, hundreds of armed Muslims, many from the group, invaded Christian villages, “like a swarm of bees,” killing, looting, and destroying. At the end of their four-hour rampage, at least 130 Christians were killed. Forty-five other Christians in another village were slaughtered by another set of “Allahu Akbar!” screaming Muslims. …

Beginning with Boko Haram’s church attacks of December 25, where over 40 people celebrating Christmas were killed, the group has definitely upped both the frequency and savagery of jihadi attacks on Christians and their churches. Most recently, armed Muslims stormed a church … killing six Christians, including the pastor’s wife, and wounding many.

Then, when friends and relatives gathered to mourn the deaths of some of those slain in this most recent church attack, Boko Haram Muslims appeared and opened fire again, killing another 20 Christians, all while screaming “Allahu Akbar!”—Islam’s ancient war cry, which at root simply means “my god is greater than your god!” …

Ayo Oritsejafor, head of the Christian Association of Nigeria has accurately characterized this spate of attacks on Christians as “religious cleansing,” citing that some 120 Christians have been killed since the Christmas day church attacks.

Worse, but not unexpectedly, President Jonathan recently declared that “some of them [Boko Haram] are in the executive arm of government, some of them are in the parliamentary/legislative arm of government, while some of them are even in the judiciary. Some are also in the armed forces, the police and other security agencies.”

Persons elected or appointed to maintain law and order are the disrupters of law and order – a state of affairs typical of many Third World “democracies”.

In any case, Muslims in power obey the commands of their religion rather than conform to Western notions of the rule of law, and the Koran commands the slaying of Christians.

For more on Muslims killing Christians in Nigeria, with more pictures of atrocities, see our posts –

Christians murdered by Muslims, March 9, 2010

Muhammad’s command, March 30, 2010

Suffering children, May 11, 2011

Victims of religion, October 16, 2011

Acts of religion in Nigeria revisited, October  16, 2011

Christians slaughtered by Muslims in Nigeria, October 17, 2011

Boko Haram, the Muslim terrorists of Nigeria, November 10, 2011