Religion, faith, and belief are very personal things that can invoke powerful emotional and intellectual responses. Responses are shaped by social conditioning during childhood that can last a lifetime, engendering spiritual comfort or deep disturbance in adulthood. I began to question my Catholic indoctrination as I started to delve into historical accounts of early Christianity and the evils inflicted on the world under the banner of doing God’s work, politics waged by the Vatican to maintain secular power, distilling it all into something I finally felt comfortable with.
Fascinated by the Roman Catholic Church and its internal organization, many years ago, I naively assumed the Vatican was the world’s center of piety and righteousness and the guardian of the world’s morality. This book helped me shed a stark light on reality.
I never knew that from the 16th century, the Church maintained a secret service, the Holy Alliance, that meddled in every aspect of European politics. In 1930, they were renamed ‘The Entity,’ with its counterespionage arm, the Sodalitium Pianum, and the Vatican had its CIA. Once I started, I couldn’t put this book down, shaking my head. Laundering money for the Mafia, helping Nazi officers escape to South America, funding revolutions, assassinating those who stood in their way…This work blew me away and left me stunned and much wiser.
For five centuries, the Vatican - the oldest organization in the world, maker of kings and shaper of history - has used a secret spy service, called the Holy Alliance, or later the Entity, to carry out its will. Forty popes have relied on it to carry out their policies. It has played a hitherto invisible role confronting de-Christianisations and schisms, revolutions and dictators, colonisations and expulsions, persecutions and attacks, civil wars and world wars, assassinations and kidnappings.For the first time in English (already a bestseller in Spain and France), Eric Frattini tells the comprehensive tale of this sacred secret…
I really wanted to know who the Israelites were, whether the Exodus happened, the conquest of Canaan, and other historical facts behind what is today Israel and its claim to the Holy Land…and this book gave me more than I bargained for.
Raised a Catholic, I found it a natural step to question how all this Christian stuff happened. Before I could do that, I first had to know how Israel came about and the rise of the Old Testament. A fascinating read, this book captivated me from the initial introduction and let up. I found some of it heavy going and resorted to fact-checking many things, but I could not ignore the verified body of archaeological evidence that cast a new light on many things I was taught.
This book naturally led me to probe deeper, raising more disturbing questions.
In the past three decades, archaeologists have made great strides in recovering the lost world of the Old Testament. Dozens of digs in Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Lebanon have changed experts' understanding of ancient Israel and its neighbours- as well as their vision of the Bible's greatest tales. Yet until now, the public has remained almost entirely unaware of these discoveries which help separate legend from historical truth. Here, at last, two of archaeology's leading scholars shed new light on how the Bible came into existence. They assert, for example, that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob never existed, that David and…
I always took it for granted that questioning the New Testament and the gospels was somehow sinful. However, as I grew into adulthood, I accepted that faith and a set of beliefs can be independent and a viable position from Catholic Church dogma.
This invariably led me to research Christianity and its roots. Once started, the discrepancies between what I was taught and reality brought home the realization that the Church fathers were only men after all, subject to the same failings, striving for power, corruption, and greed as all other men. Like opening Pandora’s Box, this book opened my eyes to many things. Was Jesus invented by the Flavian dynasty? I have my own views on that.
The Invention of Jesus is a pivotal, ground-breaking work, arguably one of the most important ever written in the field of New Testament textual analysis, and one that should direct scholastic endeavour for years to come. The author has developed some new techniques and taken an indepth look at the earliest surviving manuscripts of the gospels describing the life and death of Jesus as well as letters, attributed to Paul and others, to the outposts of the early Church. There are papyrus fragments, some from as early as the second century, and then later manuscripts written on parchment, with fewer…
Like many others, my Catholic upbringing told me the Gospels were written by the apostles. I believed that for a long time … until I started to delve more deeply into the basis of my beliefs. I quickly realized that the simple fishermen Jesus supposedly had around him could not have written the gospels created in the late first to mid-second century. Nobody really knows for certain.
I asked myself, ‘How could the gospel authors provide direct quotes supposedly said by Jesus?’ Were the texts pure inventions? An elaborate collaboration between Rome and Israeli factions to promote Roman rule? The more I delved into this book, the more its pages generated further questions…and provided answers that plainly contradicted accepted Christian dogma. I had a lot of material to digest, and the process wasn’t complete.
Commencing in mid February 2004, SBS TV (Australia) will run a two–part documentary based on this title.
In this groundbreaking and controversial book, Burton Mack brilliantly exposes how the Gospels are fictional mythologies created by different communities for various purposes and are only distantly related to the actual historical Jesus.
Mack‘s innovative scholarship which boldly challenges traditional Christian understanding‘ will change the way you approach the New Testament and think about how Christianity arose.
The clarity of Mack‘s prose and the intelligent pursuit of his subject make compelling reading. Mack‘s investigation of the various…
I sort of always knew that the tortuous line of Catholic popes was a road of corruption, war, treachery, conquest, and gathering of secular and sectarian power.
When I started reading this book, my preconceptions were severely beaten. The history of papal rule turned out to be far more bloody. What disturbed me greatly, something I should not have found surprising is that this process is happening even today. I could have dismissed this work as simply another anti-Christian smear campaign were it not for the solid research and undeniable supporting facts. I had to accept the veracity of what I read, understanding why the Church never adopted the concept of separation of powers. To do so would mean its destruction. What to do? More research, of course.
"The truth, we are told, will make us free. It is time to free Catholics, lay as well as clerical, from the structures of deceit that are our subtle modern form of papal sin. Paler, subtler, less dramatic than the sins castigated by Orcagna or Dante, these are the quiet sins of intellectual betrayal." --from the Introduction
From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Garry Wills comes an assured, acutely insightful--and occasionally stinging--critique of the Catholic Church and its hierarchy from the nineteenth century to the present.
Papal Sin in the past was blatant, as Catholics themselves realized when they painted popes roasting…
Father Paulini Garbaldi, a researcher in the Vatican Secret Archives, finds a first-century papyrus that claims Jesus was John the Baptist’s disciple and the second Messiah. He brings the papyrus to his friend in Boston for authentication. Afraid that Garibaldi will publish the devastating revelation, the Vatican’s secret service, The Entity, sends an assassin to Boston to recover the tractate.
Garibaldi meets FBI agent Tom Meecham and explains the importance of the tractate after realizing that the Vatican was prepared to murder to keep it secret. The assassin kills Garibaldi, but he still needs to recover the tractate. Meanwhile, Meecham has a fake papyrus made as bait for the assassin. Will he survive to confront the assassin and expose the Vatican plot?
My core value is realistic education—learning from each other’s errors and successes, but with full awareness of the difference between the determined past and the uncertain future. We can benefit from uncertainty, which I’ve been doing for a living as an engineer, academic researcher, and inventor. I make use of knowledge and science as much as possible, but I also know that strategic decisions for the uncertain future require skepticism and thinking to deal with the differences in a new circumstance. With my core value, I am passionate about sharing insights and knowledge that our formal education does not provide.
Everything in nature evolves by trial, error, and success—from fundamental physics, through evolution in biology, to how people learn, think, and decide.
This book presents a way of thinking and realistic knowledge that our formal education shuns. Stepping beyond this ignorance, the book shows how to deal with and even benefit from uncertainty by skeptical thinking, strategic decisions, and teamwork based on enlightened self-interests.
This bottom-up thinking is thought-provoking for leaders who wish to build teams rather than herds. The insights in the book will help you to be better prepared for the unexpected, less likely to conform when you…
Trial, Error, and Success: 10 Insights into Realistic Knowledge, Thinking, and Emotional Intelligence
Everything in nature evolves by trial, error, and success. They didn't teach you this in school, even though you should know why the rigid laws of physics don't rule nature and don't inhibit your free-will decisions to try, fail, and succeed. As a guide to success, this book shows how skepticism, prudent use of science, and thinking lead to strategic decisions for the uncertain future.
Presenting real-life examples, the thinking in the book combines sharp analyses with broad analogies to show:
How to identify realistic knowledge and avoid harm due to overgeneralized concepts.
How to create new knowledge and solve…
