by Bill Etem
from the True Faith, because it is not the Church which Christ founded on a rock, then the Roman Catholics, who worship a god who says the Church of Rome leads people to heaven, worship a false god, a false evil beastly god who leads them to perdition, provided of course the True God says the Church of Rome leads people to perdition, in which case the Roman Catholics, in a figurative way, worship this seven-headed beast mentioned in Revelation 13. 1-8. Of course, if the True God says the Church of Rome leads people to heaven, then it is a foul blasphemy to say the Roman Catholics worship some beastly false god who will lead them to perdition. But if the True God says the Church of Rome leads people to perdition, then, obviously, the Roman Catholics worship a false god when they worship a god who says Rome leads people to heaven…If the True God says every church under the sign of the cross leads people to perdition, because not one of them is the True Church, because all of them have fallen away from the True Faith, then, when various Protestants under the sign of the cross worship god, they worship a god who says their Protestant sect under the sign of the cross leads people to heaven, therefore, these Protestants do indeed worship a false evil god, a false version of the Trinity who leads them to perdition, assuming again, of course, that the True God, the True Father, Son and Holy Spirit insist that every sect under the cross, including every Protestant sect under the cross, leads people to perdition. So you can see how these Protestants, though they claim to worship the True God, actually worship a false evil beastly god who will lead them to perdition, and therefore, in a figurative way, they worship this seven headed beast mentioned in Revelation 13. 1-8, though of course they are not literally kneeling down and worshipping some seven headed beast with ten horns…No one has a brain big enough to even begin to comprehend a fraction of all of the evil which was perpetrated over the centuries by people under the sign of the cross…You’re whacked out of your mind if you think the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob sees the sign of the cross, sees a representation of a pagan instrument of torture as something which is sacred. Christ’s sacrifice on the evil pagan instrument is sacred, but the cross is not sacred. The cross reflects century after century of evil. It’s a sacrilege, a sin which leads offenders straight to perdition, to say the cross or the sign of the cross is sacred.’
I let this info sink in with the audience, and then I was just starting to review Gibbon’s remarks about some evil people under the sign of the cross, here my intent was to substantiate my arguments about 2 Thess 2 and the falling away from the True Faith, about how the falling away happened many centuries ago, but I was thoroughly shouted down by the angry mob of Protestants in Rock Island, IL. I was just starting to quote Gibbon, you know that passage where Gibbon writes about the 4th century Catholic Emperor Valentinian and his judges,
‘They easily discovered, that the degree of their industry and discernment was estimated, by the Imperial court, according to the number of executions that were furnished from their respective tribunals. It was not without extreme reluctance that they pronounced a sentence of acquittal; but they eagerly admitted such evidence as was stained by perjury, or procured by torture, to prove the most improbable charges against the most respectable characters. The progress of the inquiry continually opened new subjects of criminal prosecution; the audacious informer, whose falsehood was detected, retired with impunity, but the wretched victim, who discovered his real or pretended accomplices, was seldom permitted to receive the price of his infamy. From the extremity of Italy and Asia, the young, and the aged, were dragged in chains to the tribunals of Rome and Antioch. Senators, matrons, and philosophers, expired in ignominious and cruel tortures...The expressions which issued the most readily from the mouth of the emperor of the West were, ‘Strike off his head;’ ‘Burn him alive;’ ‘Let him be beaten with clubs till he expires;’....He could behold with calm satisfaction the convulsive agonies of torture and death; he reserved his friendship for those faithful servants whose temper was the most congenial to his own. The merit of Maximin, who had slaughtered the noblest families of Rome, was rewarded with the royal approbation, and the praefecture of Gaul. Two fierce and enormous bears, distinguished by the appellations of Innocence and Mica Aurea, could alone deserve to share the favor of Maximin. The cages of those trusty guards were always placed near the bed-chamber of Valentinian, who frequently amused his eyes with the grateful spectacle of seeing them tear and devour the bleeding limbs of the malefactors who were abandoned to their rage.’
Yeah, that’s the passage. I was trying to say that that sort of evil shows a falling away from the True Faith. Obviously, the evil Christians who are torturing people to death have fallen away from the True Faith. But good Christians who fail to excommunicate evil Christians have also fallen away from the True Faith. A good Christian is not to celebrate communion with evil people. St. Paul told people to obey the emperor but he didn’t tell people to obey the emperor when he ordered you to do anti-Christian things, such as torture people to death, such as worship his image as the image of a god etc. St. Paul didn’t tell people to hold communion with evil emperors etc.
Anyway, a Protestant guy was now addressing me, saying - ‘Look you dumb bastard, you know perfectly well most of us here are Protestants. You bring up some Catholic from 16 centuries ago and you seem to think that has some bearing on Protestantism, and you seem to think it proves Protestantism is satanic. You got shit for brains! Everyone here knows you got shit for brains!’
This gets a big applause from the audience. Then I start in again, and I have to compete against a chorus of boos just to be heard.
Me - ‘There are so many ways that the people under the sign of the cross have fallen away from the True Faith. We’ll get to the subject of evil economic systems in this Symposium, sooner or later. A person would have to be brain dead if he thinks the economic systems which prevail today, and which prevailed in former centuries, among people under the sign of the cross, are founded upon the New Testament’s teachings. They are founded upon heresies which lead people to perdition, therefore they are, essentially, satanic economic systems…But we’ll get to these economic issues later. Let’s start with the sign of the cross and the sin of sacrilege. Either the cross reflects no evil, because it is sacred to God, or else it reflects some evil, and it is not sacred to God. If the cross reflects no evil then it is a sacrilege to say the cross reflects some evil, and sacrilege is a sin that leads straight to perdition. If the cross reflects some evil, then it is a sacrilege to say the cross is pure and holy, as it is a sacrilege to say that something which symbolizes some evil is sacred to God…There was so much evil under the sign of the cross it boggles the mind to try to comprehend just a fraction of all this evil, you know? Where does one begin to explain the horror of it all? Henry Charles Lea, the pre-eminent authority on the Inquisitions, wrote in his ‘A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages’ (Macmillan, 1922),
‘We have only to look upon the atrocities of the criminal law of the Middle Ages to see how pitiless men were in dealing with each other. The wheel, the caldron of boiling oil, burning alive, burying alive, flaying alive, tearing apart with wild horses, were the ordinary expedients by which the criminal jurist sought to deter crime by frightful examples...An Anglo-Saxon law punishes a female slave convicted of theft by making eighty other female slaves each bring three pieces of wood and burn her to death....In the Customs of Arques, granted by the Abbey of St. Bertin in 1231, there is a provision that, if a thief have a concubine who is his accomplice, she is to be buried alive...In France women were customarily burned or buried alive for simple felonies, and Jews were hung by the feet between two savage dogs, while men were boiled to death for coining. In Milan Italian ingenuity exhausted itself in devising deaths of lingering torture for criminals of all descriptions. The Carolina, or criminal code of Charles V., issued in 1530, is a hideous catalogue of blinding, mutilation, tearing with hot pincers, burning alive, and breaking on the wheel...As recently as 1706, in Hanover, a pastor n
amed Zacharie Georg Flagge was burned alive for coining...So careless were the legislators of human suffering in general that, in England, to cut out a man’s tongue, or to pluck out his eyes with malice prepence, was not made a felony until the fifteenth century, in a criminal law so severe that, even in the reign of Elizabeth, the robbing of a hawk’s nest was similarly a felony; and as recently as 1833 a child of nine was sentenced to be hanged for breaking a patched pane of glass and stealing twopence worth of paint [this sentence was commuted]...It has seemed to me however, that a sensible increase in the severity of punishment is traceable after the thirteenth century, and I am inclined to attribute this to the influence exercised by the Inquisition over the criminal jurisprudence.’
The Moderator jumps in now - ‘So what you are saying here is that a person would have to be a f$@king retard if he can’t understand that it is a sacrilege to say the sign of the cross is sacred to God, what you’re