From time to time on this website I have reiterated the essence of the Christian religion: baptism, a sacrament involving immersion in running water where “water” symbolizes gnosis and “baptism” signifies conversion, enlightenment, and resurrection all in one. Baptism was the first Christian sacrament and for a long time the only one. It appeared among the Naṣarene Christians once the symbolic equivalence water = gnosis was firmly established, probably by the turn of the era. However, conversion, enlightenment, and resurrection are (and can only be) private. Originally, the sacrament of baptism was a ritual, a public acknowledgment, affirmation, and celebration of those all-important private transformations. Only later was baptism itself endowed with quasi-magical properties when it became a ceremony of membership into the Church.
In Western civilization, personal enlightenment has long been carefully hidden and replaced, among Christians, with fealty to Jesus of Nazareth. When that thoroughly invented figure was proclaimed in the four canonical gospels, the pre-existing gnostic religion immediately became a competitor—the new religion’s most dangerous competitor, for gnosticism could claim precedence as well as the higher ground of truth.
Christians in the last seventeen hundred years have been living in a world of reversals, not least of which is that gnosticism was a late bastardization of Catholicism. Of course, the reverse sequence is true. The “light bringer”—the gnostic hero—is commonly known as Lucifer (Lat. lux + fero), the devil’s archangel. Can the grand reversal between truth and falsehood be more complete?
For almost two millennia, the Christian world has been living in a religious funhouse, where piety is the artificial light, where comforting creeds are the aromatic smoke, and where apostolic ghosts strutting about a Galilean landscape are the bent mirrors inducing gullible millions to genuflect, to mumble pious verses, and to give their fealty to pope and pulpit. Is it not past time to remove the blinders from our eyes?
The sermons delivered throughout Christendom for centuries and centuries have been full of lies. Christian armies have converted at the point of the sword, and saints (particularly gnostic saints like the Cathars, Albigensians, and Bogomils) have been routinely burned at the stake. History teaches us that these atrocities are what “Christian” really means. The word certainly doesn’t mean “love your enemies”—an authentic saying of Yeshu that (fortunately) made its way into the New Testament.
It is not possible to recall the thousands, perhaps millions, of ordinary people who were tortured and murdered by the Church through the ages, particularly in the heyday of the Inquisition. Here I settle for the well-known case of Giordano Bruno who, at the behest of a group of cardinals, was burned at the stake in the year 1600 in the central market square of Rome, naked, upside down, and his mouth clamped shut “because of his wicked words.” The allegations for which Bruno so mercilessly gave his life were as follows:
The opulent interior of the residence of the archbishop of Salzburg, illustrative of the power of the Church through the centuries. The composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart often visited this hall in his employ under the archbishop. But after the famous composer ‘came out’ as a freemason and freethinker, the archbishop discharged him, the Church denied him final sacraments on his deathbed, and he was buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave.
The blood of many martyrs cries out for retribution, even after all these years. Of course, I do not speak of the early “Christian” martyrs, who were inventions of duplicitous Church Fathers and by-and-large a myth. I speak of anti-Christian martyrs, of all the saints, separatists, and Savonarolas murdered by Christians themselves!
That’s all blood under the bridge. But a lie is self-propagating and causes renewed destruction with every passing year. The only way to eradicate the original lie that is Jesus of Nazareth is to expose it. That is our task today, an important task that has been in preparation for centuries. Like religious scholars before us, we work against an opulent and corrupt religion that has never known compromise or compassion, one that has used brute force and the most un-Christian behavior against those who challenge its power. Today we work against priestly pedophiles in school and vestibule, against diploma’ed sycophants in higher education, and against a brainwashed public that is simply too busy to examine what they are told to believe.
My aim on this website is to peel away the layers of the onion and reveal the origins of the religion, origins that are radically different from those depicted in the gospels, taught in Sunday School, and lectured in the university seminar room. My purpose, in short, is to excavate the original gnostic message and, in so doing, to expose the lies that lie at the heart of the Christian religion.
If you care that genuflecting before a piece of wood is nonsense, or believing in a virgin-born son of god who walked on water and arose bodily from the grave (and who will return at the end of time to judge each of us) is insane, then you also will tell your family and friends these things, and thus help them stop mumbling bizarre creeds and counting rosary beads in a vain attempt to “get to heaven.” Amen.
—René Salm