‘Through the Eye of A Needle’ by Peter Brown

Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the making of Christianity, 350-550 A.D.

Saturday, January 22, 2022 by Ferdinand III
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Western Europe developed civilisation within the cultural ethos of Christianity.  Why? How did a small, persecuted sect of former Jews and some gentiles take over the Roman empire?  How did Christianity wipe out the hundreds of instantiations of pagan cultic practices?  Peter Brown researches an essential element of history.  We take for granted that Western Europe was Christian.  We rarely ask why and how?

Christianity was not promoted through Jihad, war, violence and rapine, as with the cult of Muhammad.  It was not promulgated and made popular through official diktat and imperial decrees (quite the opposite for 300 years), though Constantine’s conversion around 312 A.D. certainly helped.  As Peter Brown relates in this excellent book, Christianity spread because of its morality, its functionality and exclusiveness, its miracles, its evangelising especially with Paul, its mouth-to-mouth marketing and person to person conversion; and its civilising mission which was an organised, rational approach to the immaterial and God.  Christianity was by the 3^rd century simply viewed as superior and pagans converted to the Christian church in such numbers that eventually the Roman empire, with or without Constantine’s conversion, would have been Christianised.  This is the central argument Peter Brown puts forward.

It is a long book, in small print, over 500 pages in length and with 200 pages of sources, footnotes and an index.  It is worth every minute to read and ponder.  Peter Brown is an excellent writer, organiser of facts and themes, and he connects disparate personalities including Paulinus of Nola and St. Augustine of Hippo, along with many other characters and real-world socio-economic events, along with ideas of ‘wealth’ and its relationship to power to map out his main ideas, which include inter-alia:

1-The political, social, and economic changes which took place from 500-650 A.D. were absolutely decisive for the dominance by Christianity, of Western European culture and society.

2-Gradually over about 500 years (from the time of Christ to 500 A.D.), notions about wealth, its generation, its usage to expiate sin and help the poor, and the utility of money to guarantee the salvation of the soul, transformed much of the West and its moral outlook.

3-The process of European Christianisation was gradual and quite at risk, there never was until the 4^th century, a certainty that the followers of Christ would survive as a group, let alone dominate an empire.

4-By 312 and the conversion of Constantine, the Church had grown to encompass perhaps 10% of the 60-100 million population within the Roman empire, but it had not become ‘wealthy’.  It was the new entry of wealth and talent into the Church after 370 A.D. that made such a profound impact on society, including church building, monasteries, the merging of political power with Bishopric responsibility, literacy and even the provision of hospital care. 

5-Many sects of Roman pagans had long believed in one ‘Great God’ as well many lesser Gods or demiurges.  The Christian ideal of monotheism was not new for many.  The use of angels and archangels within the Christian ecclesiastical doctrine would also have seemed familiar.  It was thus not a great leap for a pagan to become a Christian. 

6-A significant benefit of becoming Christian was the complete eradication of cultic practices to various gods which took up time and money and which included sacrifices, divination and public displays of pagan piety.  Christianity and its organised, exclusive approach, simplified the worship of God and ended all sacrifices, including human as well as (eventually) human enslavement. 

7-The demise of Rome during the 5^th century, led to some fairly radical reappraisals of wealth and its usage, along with the power and political structures used to generate and manage such wealth, outside and inside the Church.  There was in effect a reordering of society as Roman central governance, collapsed.  The Church picked up the pieces and married Roman secular law and customs with that of Christianity. 

8-As the aristocracy in the 5^th century collapsed, the transfer of wealth, power and embedded literacy shifted to the Church, presaging a shift in social and economic structuring.  During the 6^th century this new pattern of social organisation and use of wealth, from both the elite and the laity to fund Church projects, poor relief, monasteries and cultural demands and morality, became solidified and provided the basis for the rise of the medieval Church.

The rise of Christianity in Western Europe and its complete subjugation of pagan rivals was never a foreordained conclusion and seemed rather improbable around 100 A.D. when maybe 2-3% of the Roman population was Christian.  Christianity was moral and stringently ethical, miraculous, powerful, elegant, rational, open, and able to subsume many pagan practices within Church dogma, to facilitate an exclusive but remarkably dynamic socio-cultural traditions, within a unified and organised institution.  The pagans had nothing to rival this determined and pragmatic approach to religion. 

The myth of the Arabian Golden Age in Spain.

Historical rewriting to serve the interests of Muslims. Not very smart.

Friday, January 14, 2022 by Ferdinand III
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Another hoary and persistent myth issued by Muslims, academics, 'experts' and chattering media talking-heads, is that Islam and the Greater Arabian empire had 'golden' epochs of multi-cult, inter-faith harmony. All was light and wonderment apparently, during this Arab golden age. 9^th century Abbasid Spain is usually cited as the epitome of multi-cultural grandeur with pious, peaceful, tolerant Muslims, Berbers and Arabs enjoined in improving civilization, side by side with Jews, Christians and assorted infidels. This lie is perniciously amusing – and entirely untrue. 

 The Muslim-Arab conquest of Spain during the 8^h century was not one of genial courtesy, imparted with civilized countenance. It was a jihad with all the blood, destruction, and enslavement that a Muslim jihad demands.

 It is an absurd fantasy that a large-scale Muslim-Arab invasion of a rich Christian state, during the 8^th century AD, would not have ended up as a conquest, replete with massacres, deportations, coerced conversions and extraordinary bloodletting. It is equally insane to suppose that a society built around the intolerant fascism of the Koran would suddenly and quite magically become a multi-cult potpourri of goodwill, hope, faith and brotherly love. Al Andalus was never recognised until recently as the medieval name for Spain.  It was always Hispania, but academics, 'experts' and 'those who know' are keen to destroy the Christian legacy which created European civilisation and the modern world.  They therefore Arabicise the Romano-Christian civilisation of the Visigoths and Hispania. 

Spain represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women. Society was sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, with the Arab tribes at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the Berbers who were never recognized as equals, despite their Islamization; lower in the scale came the mullawadun converts and, at the very bottom, the dhimmi Christians and Jews.

Occupied Spain was hardly a peaceful, academically-inclined society. War and violence were endemic. Slave trading prominent. The rape of women common. Jews and Christians along with other slaves were tolerated only for their usefulness. The Muslims regarded them as little better than trained monkeys who might improve either the profits or the efficacy of the Arab controlled state. They certainly were not considered the equals of Arabs and would therefore have had little real contact in any area of importance. As in all Islamic societies, the dhimmis would have been shunned by their masters.  Glorious cooperation between the 'faiths' in Al-Andalus is a bold faced lie. 

Two writers amongst many who know that real historical legacy of the Arab subjugation and eradication of Christian Spain are Bat Ye’or and Andrew Bostom. Both are respected experts on Islamic history, including the destruction which ensues once a state such as Christian Spain becomes Islamicized:

 “We believe that reiterating these ahistorical, roseate claims about Muslim Spain abets the contemporary Islamist agenda, and retards the evolution of a liberal, reformed ‘Euro-Islam’ fully compatible with post-Enlightenment Western values. Iberia [Spain] was conquered in 710-716 AD by Arab tribes originating from northern, central and southern Arabia. Massive Berber and Arab immigration, and the colonization of the Iberian peninsula, followed the conquest. Most churches were converted into mosques. Although the conquest had been planned and conducted jointly with a strong faction of royal Iberian Christian dissidents, including a bishop, it proceeded as a classical jihad with massive pillages, enslavement, deportations and killings.” 

“In the regions under stable Islamic control, Jews and Christians were tolerated as dhimmis – like elsewhere in other Islamic lands – and could not build new churches or synagogues nor restore the old ones. Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory clothing. Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed a servile class attached to the Arab domains; many abandoned their land and fled to the towns. Harsh reprisals with mutilations and crucifixions would sanction the Mozarab (Christian dhimmis) calls for help from the Christian kings....  The humiliating status imposed on the dhimmis and the confiscation of their land provoked many revolts, punished by massacres, as in Toledo (761, 784-86, 797), Saragossa from 781 to 881, Cordova (805), Merida (805-813, 828), and yet again in Toledo (811-819). The insurgents were crucified, as prescribed in the Koran 5:33.”

 Arab controlled Spain was thus not an example of shining, benign multiculturalism. Jews and Christians were hunted, killed, forced into Islam, or perhaps deported. Jews and Christians who accepted Muslim overlordship and their dhimmitude were allowed to work, pay taxes, invent, conduct trade and generally engage in activities which benefited their Muslim masters. This is true of any slave society. Saying that Jews were at times 'tolerated' in Muslim Spain and than extrapolating their tolerated slave status to create a mythical world of heroic inter-faith cooperation is to put it mildly, insane. It would be as if the slave society of the Roman empire, where Gallic, Greek, Berber, Jewish and other assorted slave nationalities worked for the profit and the power of their Roman masters, was for some reason declared the great exemplar of multiculturalism.

Absurd.

When Muslims take over a state they eviscerate any non-Islamic culture and heritage. This is a historical rule. Muslims need the conquered population to be subservient to the Meccan moon deity ali-ilah. Those who don't accord themselves to the Islamic cult are either killed, deported or reduced to 'dhimmi' or slave status. As Bat Yeor writes:

 “The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State. If any infidel is suffered to exist in the community, it is as a necessary evil, and for a transitional period only. Political and social disabilities must be imposed on him, and bribes offered to him from the public funds, to hasten the day of his spiritual enlightenment and the addition of his name to the roll of true believers. A non-Muslim therefore cannot be a citizen of the State; he is a member of a depressed class; his status is a modified form of slavery. He lives under a contract (zimma, or ‘dhimma’) with the State: for the life and property grudgingly spared to him by the commander of the faithful he must undergo political and social disabilities, and pay a commutation money. In short, his continued existence in the State after the conquest of his country by the Muslims is conditional upon his person and property made subservient to the cause of Islam.”

 Islam demands the creation of the communal and the castration of the individual. All resources are directed and commanded by the Islamic state. The Muslim state has the power and the means to appropriate any and everything for the glory of Allah. The individual matters not. The communal world of Allah and Islamic doctrine is the ideal condition for a Muslim state.

But in the la-la land of today's political correctness fantasy replaces reality. Islamic barbarism in Spain which over 700 years murdered tens if not hundreds of thousands of Christians and Jews; and which extinguished what was once an advanced and precocious state; is now recreated as a multi-cult version of a John Lennon song. All matter of nonsense about inventions, art and public architecture are put forward to support the rather insidious notion that Islamic jihad can suddenly become a reincarnation of Augustinian Rome. Arab jihad and Muslim conquest always leads to the eradication of culture, civilization, rights, life and hope. That is the barren reality of the Islamic program and ideology - a set of facts supported by 1400 years of blood-letting. Ignoring it, or worse, celebrating such a travesty of violence, hate and racism, is a sure method to kill your own civilization. 

Scorching Winds and Christophobia

Sura 52 is yet another anti-Christian hate text

Saturday, January 8, 2022 by Ferdinand III
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 “But Allah has been gracious to us and has delivered us from the Penalty of the Scorching Wind.” [52:27]”

Sura 52 is another little-read chapter in Muhammad’s handbook.  There are 17 verses of supremacist cant against non-Moslems, specifically Christians, out of a total of 49, or 33%. A rather immoderate total.  There is not one verse that is moderate, accommodating or kind to Christians.  None. 

As verse 52:27 states, in order to escape the wrath of the Al Lah or Lord of Mecca, who was Baal the moon idol, and the scorching Arabian winds, one must follow Muhammad’s book, Recital, or Koran.  This book must followed in-toto.  Not in part, but completely and without question.  To doubt anything in Recital is blasphemous, and any who do not believe in its entirely such as a Jew, Christian, or non-Muslim, will be severely punished. 

Unlike Christianity, the Muhammadan doctrines are not a buffet of pick and choose.  Outside of the 10 Commandments and the last adjuration from Christ to ‘love’ (itself open to wide interpretation), there is little that is demanded within Christian Biblical tradition and doctrine that cannot be edited, amended or subject to some level of interpretation and implemented differently depending on time, space and culture.  This is not true in the Koran.  It is all or nothing.

The totality of Muhammad’s cult is ignored by most.  If a professing Muslim dares to investigate or disbelieve any aspect of Koranic-Sharia ‘Law’, they are blasphemers.  If they do not subscribe to all the rituals and dogma, they are officially apostates.  If they leave the cult, they are to be killed as demanded by Sharia ‘Law’.  All of this is quite pagan, antagonistic to freedom and the individual, premised on what a bronze age cult would establish to organise strength and conformity. 

Sura 52 and much of the Koran is anti-Christian.  It is not just anti-Semitic.  The ‘Peoples of the Book’ are targeted for extermination.  They refuse to follow the comprehensive totality of Muhammad’s handbook, or if you don’t believe that Muhammad really existed (an apocryphal belief), the guidebook of the Meccan cult named Submission. 

Muhammad was and still is, Baal's only spokesman.  To follow Muhammad is to follow ‘divine guidance’ and receive Baal’s grace. Sura 52 or The Mount', is simply a warning to anyone who does not follow Muhammad or the Koran:

Those who don’t believe in Baal and Muhammad (52:11) will inevitably (52:08) suffer torment (52:07) and Hell (52:14, 16).  The punishment will be horrible (52:13) and is not magic but real (52:15), and justified (52:16).  Only the Muslim pious will recline in heaven (52:17). 

This general warning becomes a specific injunction against Christians.  The Koran goes to great lengths to criticise the Christian Trinity or ‘partners of Allah’.  Al Lah as nothing to do with the Christian god head.  In fact Al-Lah is the opposite of the Christian conception of God, based on Baal associated as Baal always was, with Satanic practices.  Christians who defy the Baal cult are in good Koranic Orwellian doublethink, the real polytheists because they believe in a Trinity and are doomed to death and hellfire:

If you disbelieve in the Al-Lah you by definition are always plotting against the Muslims (52:42) and this will guarantee you a place in hell (52:46).  Christians are specifically identified as those who are the enemies of Muslims, since they associate ‘partners’, namely Christ and the Holy Spirit, with the Al Lah (52:43) and given their general disbelief are always plotting against the Muslims (52:46).  Christians are rather stupid and ignorant of the Al-Lah’s grace, given that if a piece of heaven fell to the earth, they would identify it as simply a fallen cloud (52:44), meaning that only Muslims understand the greatness of Al Lah and his promises of heaven.  Christians are deluded in their aversion to Muslim truth, and innately opposed to the cult of Muhammad but this matters not.  Their plotting and disbelief only assure that Christians are destined for hell (52:45), and torture (52:47).

This is just one Sura amongst many which has similar themes.  There is an obvious dichotomy with Muhammandan theology, an ‘us versus them’, imperative.  Christians are identified as intractable, stubborn, rather stupid, and evil, indefatigable in their plotting and opposition to the Al Lah cult.  It is impossible to align these statements with the official pronouncements by the Vatican, ‘experts’, ‘academics’ and those reptilians called politicians, that Muhammad’s cult is tolerant and immanent.   

Political Islam is Islam. There are no 'moderate pieces' within Islamic theology.

Wrong policy choices from the really smart people.

Saturday, January 1, 2022 by Ferdinand III
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Muhammadanism or ‘Islam’ meaning Submission to ‘Al-Lah’ or ‘The Lord’ of Mecca, was premised on worshipping Baal the moon deity who was the chief deity or Al-Lah of Mecca for millennia, and whose shrine was maintained by Muhammad’s family (hence the close relationship between the moon deity and his profiteer).  Al Lah the Moon ‘father’ had a consort the Sun and 2 daughters (Venus and Mars), each of whom had cult followers and demanded separate rituals and sacrifices. 

The Meccan cults echoed similar practices and beliefs which were commonplace in the Near East, most of which were spread by Sumerian-Babylonian imperialism and demands, stretching back to at least 2500-1800 BC, the late Bronze age, or the time preceding the rise of Moses and the Hebrew exodus.  The Canaanites, Jebusites, Amorites, Hittites and other tribal states of the Levant, all worshipped Baal or the moon deity. 

The Baal cult is rightly portrayed as demonic in the Old Testament, evil, suffused with human sacrifice, sexual perversity (Sodom and Gomorrah), slavery and immorality.  The wars in the Old Testament are in essence the eradication of this barbarism by a new religion, centred on human freedom, free will, an immanent high God, with a set of laws to end the pagan barbarism of Baal worship. 

Islam emanates from, and directly uses, even today, the artefacts from the Baal cult, a Bronze Age relic, a totalitarian system where the entire existence of the person is managed and monitored.  All of the rituals in Muhammadanism can be found in the Bronze age Baal cults (throwing rocks at little devils, kissing stones, the circumambulation around the Kabaa, sex slavery, polygamy, astral worship etc).  As the Old Testament outlines in its apposite history of the Bronze Age, within the Baal cults there is thus no separation between 'moderate' elements and the rest of the cult theology.  To presage Mussolini, everything lies within the cult.  This was Muhammad’s main theme when he conquered Mecca and demolished 364 idols keeping only the Baal idol and its red stone statue.  Even Baal’s consort and daughters were to be eschewed (the Satanic verses by Rushdie) and only the male moon deity venerated, suffused with the existing millennia old practices of pagan Baal barbarism, now elevated to divine status, tinctured with an admixture of garbled Judaism and a purloined twisted Christian ethos to support Muhammad’s totalitarian ideals.

The obvious historical roots and development of this Baal-Muhammad cult indicates there is not an 'Islamism' which can be divorced from a supposed 'moderate' Islam.  The book Recital (Koran) and Muhammad’s life and the 1400 Muslim Jihad make this clear.  The cult of Muhammad manages every single aspect of life.  This totality cannot be rejected in any form, nor can a component or part, be ignored or even criticised.  To do so is a blasphemy punished by death.  Leaving the cult is likewise a mortal sin punished by murder.  It is these ‘total’ theological demands and the ideological intolerance of the cult which matters, much as it did with Nazism and Communism, and not the protestation of a ‘secular Muslim’ who may display an individual belief system that could be labelled tolerant or reasonable and rational.  

Within Muhammad’s Baal cult the church is the state; the Imam or spiritual leader is the interpreter who must be followed; the cult is the social organization; and the construct of life is dedicated to furthering the aims and ambitions of the cult; in which all men are to be 'returned to Allah' to quote the Koran, because all humans are and must be, Muslim.  Islam can no more be broken into 'parts' of 'moderation' or 'dissent', any more than one can take the Sun and partition it into hot and cold pieces.  Islam is a complete and unified theology, welded together and impossible to parse into sections.

Supposed ‘thinkers’ within Islamic ‘jurisprudence’ also concur that the totality of the cult is uber alles.  The end objective is global conquest.  Muhammad demanded the conquest first of ‘Rum’ or Rome, meaning Constantinople, the Eastern Roman and Orthodox Christian empire.  But it also means Rome in Italy and be extension, Muhammad’s invocation demands the destruction of Western civilisation, and indeed all non-Muslim societies across the globe, replacing them with Muhammad’s totalitarianism, centred around the worship of Al-Lah and of course the reverence of Muhammad himself, imitating as with Christology, the deification of the moon deity’s spokesman. 

Within the totalitarian state of Muhammad, we also have the hierarchy of paternal governance, not often commented on by ‘experts’ and Muhammadophiles.  Pious Arabs from Muhammad’s tribe are at the top of the Muslim-patriarchal pyramid.  The ‘bloodline’ of the military founder runs supreme.  Next would be Arab Muslims, then mixed blood (Arab based) ‘slaves of Al Lah’.  Muslims of any blood or race would be ranked ahead of Christians, with non-Muslim Blacks, Jews and slaves at the bottom.  Dhimmitude or the existence of non-Muslims in a Muslim state is a real and vicious history of oppression, slavery, hate and intolerance, absent in most ‘histories’ of the Muslim world.  Women as well, do not feature within the socio-political organisation of power within Muhammadanism.  There are no female voices in Muslim history.  Women don’t exist outside of the purview and authority of a man.  Women are simply tools of procreation, destined to produce ghazi or warriors for Muhammad.

The most important ‘juridical thinkers’ of the Muhammad cult in the modern age are Qutb, Maududi, and Al Ghazali.  None of the 3 are Wahhabi's, the radical 18th century Saudi sect that still demands the complete fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, and which the Western ‘mainstream’ (ignorant) media and education blame for ‘radical Islamism’.  All 3 of these philosophers are interpreters of the Koran.  The writings and speeches of these men have had more influence in Islam than anyone else save that of the profiteer and war leader Mohammad. They have interpreted and laid out an uncompromising interpretation of Islam, based on the Koran, which has informed all of Islam today. Mohammed would certainly approve of their boundless enthusiasm for war, expansion, and the enslaving of others.  Jihad and the extermination of others was central to all of their works.  Along with Wahhabism, the writings of these apocalyptic horsemen provide a main-spring and a justification for Islamic terror, violence, apartheid and hate. Yet almost no-one in the mainstream media or in the educational systems in the West, will discuss these men. No one in the politically correct multi-cult universe wants to destroy the notion that Islam is a peaceful religion.

As millions of Muslims continue to pour into the West as ‘refugees’ or through an immigration system that desires the eradication of Western civilisation, the 'cognitive dissonance' will only continue to grow in academia, the media and within the political elite. These people can't or won't see Islam for what it is, namely a political movement designed to subsume the world under the control of Muslims.  

Why Christianity and the destruction of the Catholic Church

A long note on the inevitable unless the current Pope and policies are replaced

Friday, December 24, 2021 by Ferdinand III
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