RE: Book Recommendations
July 22, 2020 at 2:45 pm
(This post was last modified: July 22, 2020 at 2:47 pm by Fake Messiah.)
(July 22, 2020 at 12:43 pm)Porcupine Wrote:(July 22, 2020 at 9:05 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: You call Scientology a scam?! So how then would you call Catholicism which has amounts of money Scientology leaders can only dream of?
The key difference is that the founder of Scientology was himself a phony scammer. I'm not sure that's the case with Christianity or Catholicism. It's founded upon scamming rather than merely containing a lot of scamming.
It's a hard thing to argue. Maybe Hubbard was insane just like Jesus or genuinely believed what he preached.
Besides, there is also evidence that Jesus cult was a scam for money since the beginning. Take Asclepius the healer and many healing stories attributed to him. The shrines attracted many customers and coveted many more. Healing stories functioned as effective propaganda, as they did for the new Jesus cult. For there were many who traveled about offering healing in his name, both Christians (1 Cor. 12:9) and non-Christians using Jesus' name as a magical charm (Acts 19:13-14, Mark 9:38).
Even Origen tells us that in his day the gospel episodes of healing and exorcism were recited verbatim as part of the healing or exorcism ritual.
And quoting Paul isn't a coincidence since you can see some of that scam in Paul like when he says he invented Jesus in a same way like Hubbard invented Xenu, and that is from voices "up above", like when Paul said Galatians 1:11-12 I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.
And like Hubbard, Paul wants money 1 Corinthians 9:14 "In the same way, the Lord ordered that those who preach the Good News should be supported by those who benefit from it."
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
