Christ Conspiracy_ The Greatest Story Ever Sold - Acharya S [7]
Christianity was thus fervently resisted wherever it invaded, as nation after nation died under the sword fighting it off, because its doctrines and proponents were repugnant and blasphemous. As Walker also relates:
Radbod, king of the Frisians, refused to abandon this faith when a Christian missionary informed him that Valhala was the same as the Christians' hell. Where were his own ancestors, Radbod wanted to know, if there was no Valhala? He was told they were burning in hell because they were heathens. "Dastardly priest!" Radbod cried. "How dare you say my ancestors have gone to hell? I would rather-yes, by their god, the great Woden, I swear-I would ten thousand times rather join those heroes in their hell, than be with you in your heaven of priests!"20
Some of the "barbarians" who resisted Christianity were actually far more advanced than those who followed what the Pagans considered a vulgar ideology. For example, "The Irish Fenians, whose rule was never to insult women, were said to have gone to hell for denying Christian anti-feminist doctrines."21
When the "great idea," threats of hell and other sweet talk failed to impress the Pagans, the Christian conspirators began turning the screws by establishing laws banning Pagan priests, holidays and "superstitions." Pagans were barred from being palace guards or holding civil and military office. Their properties and temples were destroyed or confiscated, and people who practiced "idolatry" or sacrifices were put to death. As Charles Waite says in History of the Christian Religion to the Year Two Hundred:
Under Constantine and his sons, commissions had been issued against heretics, especially against the Donatists, who were visited with the most rigorous punishment. .. . The decrees for the extirpation of heathenism were even more severe. Jerome and Leo the Great were in favor of the death penalty.22
Under the "great Christian" Constantine, the "followers of Mithra were hounded with such pertinacity that no one even dared to look at the sun, and farmers and sailors dared not observe the stars for fear of being accused of the heresy." 23 And where hellfire, repressive laws and bribery did not work, force was used. Leaders who were tolerant of religions other than Christianity, such as Emperor Julian, were murdered. In Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions, Doane relates how this "great faith" was in reality propagated by the most atrocious methods:
In Asia Minor the people were persecuted by orders of [Christian emperor] Constantius . . . "The rites of baptism were conferred on women and children, who, for that purpose, had been torn from the arms of their friends and parents; the mouths of the communicants were held open by a wooden engine, while the consecrated bread was forced down their throats; the breasts of tender virgins were either burned with red-hot egg-shells, or inhumanly compressed between sharp and heavy boards." . . . Persecutions in the name of Jesus Christ were inflicted on the heathen in most every part of the then known world. Even among the Norwegians, the Christian sword was unsheathed. They clung tenaciously to the worship of their forefathers, and numbers of them died real martyrs for their faith, after suffering the most cruel torments from their persecutors. It was by sheer compulsion that the Norwegians embraced Christianity. The reign of Olaf Tryggvason, a Christian king of Norway, was in fact entirely devoted to the propagation of the new faith, by means the most revolting to humanity.... the recusants were tortured to death with fiend-like ferocity, and their estates confiscated. These are some of the reasons "why Christianity prospered."24
The standard excuse for this vile behavior has been that Christian proponents had the right to purge the earth of "evil" and to convert the "heathen" to the "true faith." Over a period of more than a millennium, the Church would bring