Christ Conspiracy_ The Greatest Story Ever Sold - Acharya S [11]
Within this debate regarding the nature and character of Jesus Christ, then, there have been three main schools of thought: the believers and the evemerists, both of which are historicizers, and the mythicists.
The Believers
The believers take the Judeo-Christian bible as the literal "Word of God," accepting "on faith" that everything contained within it is historical fact infallibly written by scribes "inspired by God." As we shall see, this position is absolutely untenable, and requires blind and unscientific devotion, since, even if we discount the countless mistakes committed over the centuries by scribes copying the texts, the so-called infallible "Word of God" is riddled with inconsistencies, contradictions, errors and yarns that stretch the credulity to the point of non-existence. In order to accept the alleged factuality of the Christian tale, i.e., that a male God came down from the heavens as his own son through the womb of a Jewish virgin, worked astonishing miracles, was killed, resurrected and ascended to heaven, we are not only to suspend critical thinking and integrity, but we must be prepared to tolerate a rather repulsive and generally false portrayal of the ancient world and peoples. In particular, we must be willing to believe fervently that the "gentle Jesus"-who was allegedly the all-powerful God-was mercilessly scourged, tortured and murdered by Romans and Jews, the latter of whom possess the ignominy and stigma of being considered for eternity as "vipers," "serpents," "spawn of Satan" and "Christkillers" guilty of deicide who gleefully shouted "Crucify him!" and "Let his blood be upon us and our children!"
In addition to this hideous notion, we are also expected to believe that the omnipotent and perfect God could only fix the world, which he created badly in the first place, by the act of blood-atonement, specifically with his own blood; yet, we know that such blood-atonement is rooted in the ancient custom of sacrificing humans and animals, serving basically as a barbaric, scapegoat ritual. Indeed, the sacrifice of God seems far worse than that of either animals or humans, yet this deicide is supposed to be one of the highest "religious" concepts. In fact, it is "God's plan!" As Kersey Graves says in The World's 16 Crucified Saviors:
And hereafter, when they laugh at the Jewish superstition of a scape-goat, let them bear in mind that the more sensible and intelligent people may laugh in turn at their superstitious doctrine of a scape-God.... The blood of God must atone for the sins of the whole human family, as rams, goats, bullocks and other animals had atoned for the sins of families and nations under older systems. . . . Somebody must pay the penalty in blood, somebody must be slaughtered for every little foible or peccadillo or moral blunder into which erring man may chance to stumble while upon the pilgrimage of life, while journeying through the wilderness of time, even if a God has to be dragged from his throne in heaven, and murdered to accomplish it. . . . Whose soul-possessing the slightest moral sensibility-does not inwardly and instinctively revolt at such a doctrine? ... We hold the doctrine to be a high-handed insult to the All-Loving Father-who, were are told, is "long suffering in mercy," and "plentiful in forgiveness"-to charge Him with sanctioning such a doctrine, much less originating it.
In embracing Christianity as reality, we are also required to assume that, in order to get "his" important message across, "God" came to Earth in a remote area of the ancient world and spoke the increasingly obscure language of Aramaic, as opposed to the more universally spoken Greek or Latin. We must also be prepared to believe that there is now an invisible man of a particular ethnicity omnipresently floating about in