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Street Smart Dictionary

Government: The PR branch of organized crime
Heaven: A "Get rich slow in your next life" scheme
Intelligence Service: Drugs and arms smuggling network
Jewelry: The monetary unit of oral sex
Lie detector: What exploded at the Pentagon's west wing
Mistress: Something between a mister and a mattress
News section: The advertising section for the government
Patriotism: Allegiance to our extortion gang
Peace: A period of government inactivity
Platform: The principles a party works hard to sell out
Prosperity: A period of government inactivity
Public Relations: False advertising
Respect: Lack of understanding
Terrorist: A bugaboo the regime pretends not to employ
War: The industrial form of organized crime

"How well we know what a profitable superstition this fable of Christ has been for us..." Pope Leo X (1513-1521) - (Tony Bushby - The Bible Fraud)

The Church stooped to fraud, as with pious legends, bogus relics and dubious miracles; for centuries it profited from a mythical "Donation of Constantine" that had allegedly bequeathed Western Europe to Sylvester I (r. 314-35) and from "False Decretals" (c. 842) that forged a series of documents to give a sacred antiquity to papal omnipotence.The Inquisition almost fatally disgraced the Church. Even while preaching peace the Church fomented religious wars in 16th century France and the Thirty Years War in 17th century Germany. (Will and Ariel Durant - The Lessons of History, pg 45)

Every Ten Commandments you see - from the 5,000 pound granite behemoth inside the Alabama State Judicial Building to the little wallet card sold at Christian bookstores - is bogus. For a proof, read the Bible, King James version. The familiar "rules" about having no other goods, not killing or coveting are given to Moses on tablets, which he smashes in Exodus 32:19. It is only when Moses goes back for new tablets that we see the phrase "ten commandments." (Exodus 34:28). But the Commandments on these tablets are significantly different than the rules given on the first tablets. (Russ Kick - 50 Things You're Not Supposed To Know, pg 10)

Had Jesus as a person existed, it is impossible to explain, why his contemporaries, the authors and historians of his time do not take notice of him. If Abraham Lincoln was important enough to attract the attention of his contemporaries, how much more was Jesus? It was not until 800 years after the supposed crucifixion that Jesus is seen in the form of a human being on the cross. The church historian Mosheim writes: The Christian Fathers deemed it a pious act to employ deception and fraud." Dr. Robertson Smith adds: "There was an enormous floating mass of spurious literature created to suit party views." The early Fathers did not hesitate to tamper even with the work of an awowed opponent of their religion. After issuing an edict to destroy his writings, a work called Philosophy of Oracles was produced in which the author is made to write almost as a Christian; and the name of Porphyry was signed to it.When to this manufacture of doubtful evidence we add the terrible vandalism of destroying nearly every great Pagan classic, we can form the idea of the desperate means to which the early Christian Church resorted to "prove" that Jesus was not a myth. Apostle Paul knows nothing about Jesus. He does not mention in all his 13 epistles a Jesus born of a virgin. Is it conceivable that a preacher of Jesus like Paul could go throughout the world to convert people to the teachings of Jesus without ever quoting a single one of his sayings? Today a preacher is expelled from his denomination if he suppresses the miraculous conception of Jesus; but Paul was guilty of that very heresy. How to explain it? It is quite simple: the virgin born Jesus was not yet invented when Paul was preaching Christianity. (M. M. Mangasarian - The Truth About Jesus, pgs 18, 50)

Such is the strange construction of the Christian system of faith that every evidence the heavens afford to man either directly contradicts it or renders it absurd. There have been men in the world who believe that a pious fraud might be productive of some good. But the fraud being once established, could not afterwards be explained, and it begets a calamitous necessity of going on. It is next to impossible to account for the continued persecution carried out by the Church for several hundred years against the sciences, if the Church had not some record that it was originally no other than a pious fraud, or did not foresee that it could not be maintained against the evidence the scientific discovery of the structure of the universe afforded. (The Thomas Paine Reader, pg 443)

Religion has been taught by a specially privileged class in every country, from the point of view favoured by that class. It was, and is still, in the interests of this class to propagate certain religious beliefs without any regard as to whether they are true or not. Political education is likewise bound up by similar restrictions. (Arthur Findley - The Curse of Ignorance Vol 1, pgs 36-37)

Fraud, forgery, intrigue, terror, persecution, inprisonment and wholesale murder combined to produce the Christian Church, which set itself up and the protector of Eucharist, a pagan ceremony to which it attached the name of Christ. Likewise, it adopted the Pagan form of infant baptism and abolished the Jesuian form of adult baptism. From the pagans it acquired the form of Church service, their marriage and other ceremonies, their ritual, their holy days and vestments, in fact the entire Apostolic outlook was changed to conform to pagan customs and beliefs. Even the name it gave to Jesus came from paganism, as the Egyptian god Osiris was known as Chrest, and to the Greeks as Chrestos. Like the dictators of our own times, the Church secured great power and wealth by every evil device, ad just as Hitler and Mussolini did for Germany and Italy, it brought Europe to the depths of degradation. (Arthur Findlay - The Curse of Ignorance Vol 1, pgs 569-570)

The summary of 700 years of Christian expansionism in northern Europe is that the work was mainly done by the sword, in the interests of kings and tyrants, who supported it, as against the resistance of their subjects, who saw in the Church an instrument for their subjection. Christianity, in short, was as truly a religion of the sword, as Islam. The heathen, broadly speaking, were never persuaded, never convinced, never won by the appeal of the new doctrine; they were either transferred by their kings to the Church like so many cattle, or beaten down into submission after generations of resistance and massacre. (Arthur Findlay - The Curse of Ignorance, pg 678)

Does history support a belief in God? If by God we mean a supreme being inteeligent and benevolent, the answer must be a reluctant negative. History at bottom remains a process of natural selection of the fittest in a struggle where goodness receives no favors, misfortunes abound, and the final test is the ability to survive. (Will and Ariel Durant - The Lessons of History, pg 46)

Religious organizations always came into being as the result of an action of a ruler or a noble. King Asoka of India established the Buddhist Church; Vistaspa, the wealthy Persian nobleman the Zoroastrian Church of Persia and Constantine established the Christian Church, shortly after he murdered Licinius, his brother-in-law. To Henry VIII falls the credit of founding the Episcopalian Church of England. (Arthur Findlay - The Curse of Ignorance, Vol 2, pgs 85, 110)

The history of theology and of the church teaches us that whenever Christendom appears as a concrete socioeconomic, political or similar program, it deteriorates into an instrument of man's rule over other men. (Demosthenes Savramis - The satanizing of woman, pg 38)

"The 'Law', the 'Will of God', the 'Sacred Book', 'Inspiration' are all merely words for the conditions under which the priest comes to power and by which he maintains his power. (Friedrich Nietzsche - The Anti-Christ, pg 80)

Religion is a weapon of political control, by which people are tricked into abandoning reason and autonomy (Daniel Pouzzner - Innovism)

The exact number of people killed in various witch-hunts, crusades, inquisitions, religious wars, etc., is not recorded anywhere, but the total must run into the tens of millions; Homer Smith arrives at a figure of 60,000,000 in his Man and His Gods, including all Moslems killed in the several Crusades, and hte non-Whites in Africa, the Americas and Oceania wiped out in the process of Christianizing the world. (Robert Anton Wilson - Ishtar Rising, pg 89)

None of the major world religions could have achieved their eminence, were it not for their capacity to sponsor and encourage military conquest and to aid and abet harsh forms of political repression and control. I wish I could say that the emergence of world religions to our kind's tendency to adopt more human principles of spiritual and ethical beliefs. But the historical achievements of the principal religions of love and mercy constitute a decisive refutation of any such view. Each of the nonkilling religions is implicated in devastating inversions of the principle of nonkilling and reverence for life. Indeed, were it not for their ability to sponsor and encourage militarism and harsh measures of state control, there would be no world religions in the world today. (Marvin Harris - Our Kind, pg 446)

God has always been a god of battles to the scoundrels who make their god in their own image. (Arthur Findlay - The Curse of Ignorance Vol 1, pg 362)

Are you the devil? I bet you thought you would never qualify. Wrong! Unchanged since 3000 years, the decisive criterion for being the Evil Umpire isn't horns, hoofs, or a fondness to toast people literally. It is a single question: do you support plunder and murder by your leaders? If you do not, you are the Devil, the Unamerican, the Enemy of the Proletariat - pick the devil figure of your favorite ideology. The fact that this would qualify even Jesus, Buddha, Karl Marx or George Washington for devils of their own beliefs yet it remains unchanged reveals the true priority of the genre. Ideology exists to justify crime. (George Cordell - Quiz: Are You the Devil?)

Crime may lurk behind the biggest personal fortunes, but where does ideology come into the picture? An ordained priest of two major religions, now a professor in Honolulu explains the connection: "The huge cathedrals and pagodas, the priests' often comfortable lifestyle rarely if ever came from the pennies of the believers. They came from huge contributions by a few very rich, who in exchange determined what is going to be preached." The church, a forerunner of today's war-cheering corporate media? "One could say that." (George Cordell - Quiz: Are You the Devil?)

The AP contacted dioceses across the country and found that 1,341 clergy members have been accused of molesting minors, with more than half the dioceses yet to report. (USA Today)

The idea of a Supreme Being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist, and then passes a law saying, "Thou shalt not kill," is so monstrously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how manking has entertained or given it house room all this long. (Peter De Vries) in (Colin Jarman - The Book of Poisonous Quotes, pg 224)

With priests and monks dying of plague just as quickly and thiefs and murderers, saints dying like sinners, many began to question the authority of the Church. The plague shattered people's faith in the Church which had been unable to stop the epidemic. And it shattered their faith in the aristocrats who mostly just ran away (History Bites)

In 1881 a new translation of the Bible was made which revealed 36,191 mistakes in the version of 1611, still looked upon by many Christians as infallible and the Word of God. (Arthur Findlay - The Curse of Ignorance Vol 2 pg 215))

Islam, according to historian Paul Johnson, is a Jewish heresy and so is Christianity. Who hates Jews more than Christians and Islamics? It's because we are brothers.The greatest battles of all are between brothers. (Paul Metzger - I Have Met God and He Lives in Brooklyn)

Islam was politically compromised within the lifetime of its founder by the action of no less a person than the founder himself. (Arnold J. Toynbee - A Study of History, Vol 1 pg 555)

The resumé of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church bears more than a few smudges. At 17, on trial for being an "imposter", he admitted in a New York court that he had told people he had visions from staring at a "seer stone" revealing to him where to dig for buried treasure. A decade plus later, he set up a bank in Ohio and issued Mormon money that his accountant later admitted was backed by strongboxes filled with sand and metal bolts, topped by a layer of silver coins. So, the prophet engaged in necromancy and financial chicanery. (Richard Zacks - An Underground Education, pgs 239-240)

Non-Aristotelian logic deals with probabilities. Aristotelian logic deals with certainities, and in the lack of certainities throughout most of life, Aristotelian logic subliminally programs us to invent fictitious certainties. This explains most of the ideologies and damned near all religions on the planet, I think. (Robert Anton Wilson - Quantum Psychology, pg 174)

Prostitution and Christian morality have in the past acted in collusion with business. In certain region the Church handled the matter himself. In the papal city of Avignon, the queen acted as protector of the public brothel, the Abbaye. The women working there were pledged to remain good Christians, and the customers had to be Christians as well; pagans and Jews were expressly banned. Pope Julius II established a similar house in Rome. Elsewhere, the Church refrained from direct involvement with such prostitution, but collected a part of the take anyway. To facilitate financing of the Basilica a special tax on courtesans was introduced; it led to the collection of four times more money than the sale of papal indulgences. (Demosthenes Savramis - The satanizing of woman, pgs 89-90)

Murders were common in the Lateran Palace, and much blood reddened the streets of Rome, especially during episcopal elections. Anathemas were scattered far and wide. 42 of the 85 popes who ruled from 600 to 1050 had each a reign of less than two years, quite a number suffering violent deaths because of their outrages. Thousands of victims languished in the papal dungeons, without trial or reason, and many ended their days there. Ecclesiastical offices were sold to the highest bidder, no matter who he was. There was no ethical standard in the Church, which was a money-making affair that could only prosper by keeping the people ignorant. (Arthur Findlay - The Curse of Ignorance pgs 799-800)

Pope John XII was one of the greatest scoundrels in history. There was no crime that he did not commit. The palaces of Nero or Caligula , two of the worst Roman emperors, never witnessed more wanton scenes than took place at the Lateran Palace, the Pope's residence in Rome. Amongst his many misdeeds were murder, perjury, adultery, incest with his two sisters, rape and sacrilege. He turned his palace into a brothel, cut out the eyes, or castrated those who criticised him, and raped girls and women who came to pray at St. Peter's. He gambled, cursed and drank to the devil. (Arthur Findlay - The Curse of Ignorance Vol 1, pgs 817-818)

The separation of church of state has been a mockery. The state of governmental body controlled the Church which became a government instrument to control and dictate to the people for the benefit of the government. The Church had become a government tool, a hireling of the State, working cooperatively to benefit itself in a self-serving manner. It promotes the government's tax lies, persuading its believers to pay, while itself being exempt (Dan Israel - Christianity Unmasked, pg. 144, 147)

The modern wealth of the Vatican is based on the generosity of Benito Mussolini. The Lateran Treaty, which his government concluded with the Vatican in 1929 gave the Holy See sovereignty, exemption from property, income and import taxes, diplomatic immunity, 750 million lire, and 5 percent of the state bonds of Fascist Italy. Catholic religious teaching was introduced in all public high schools. (David A. Yallop - In God's Name, pgs 92-93)

Items such as bombs, tanks, guns and contraceptives might be condemned in the Vatican pulpit,. but the shares Bernardino Nogara bought for the Vatican in companies that manufactured these items helped to fill the coffers in St. Peter's. When Mussolini needed armaments for his invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, a substantial proportion was supplied by a munitions plant Nogara had acquired on behalf of Vatican. (David A. Yallop - In God's Name, pgs 94-95)

“Fascism is the regime that corresponds most closely to the concepts of the Church of Rome” (Civilta Cattolica, 1939) in (Eric Jon Phelps - Vatican assassins, pg 488)

When Cardinal Pacelli became Pius XII in 1939, he welcomed to the Vatican from time to time, the infamous Ribbentropp to hear from him the plans Germany had made for the conquest of Europe. This fact has now been revealed in the impartial Annual Register. Another visitor was Matsuoke, the Japanese envoy, who told His Holiness what Japan proposed to do, to be rewarded with a high Papal decoration. Japan received the blessing of the Vicar of Christ on the foul work he was doing in China, and proposed to do until all Asia was in her power. While these interchanges of confidence took place, the Roman Catholic bishops met in 1940 at Fulda, in Prussia, to resolve that "after the completion of the final German victory, special ceremonies of gratitude to the German troops and loyalty to Hitler will be announced." There is no doubt about the attitude of the Roman Catholic Church in Germany towards the Nazi Party, and, when the attempt was made on Hitler's life in 1944, the Pope, Piux XII, was so relieved at his escape that he sent him a telegram of congratulation. (Arthur Findlay - The Curse of Ignorance Vol 2 pg 1069)

For the Vatican, one of the major advantages to emerge from the very lucrative concordat with Hitler was confirmation of the Kirchensteuer (church tax). This is a state tax that is still deducted at source from all wage-earners in Germany. The tax represents between 8 and 10 percent on income tax collected by the German government. Substantial amounts derived from the Kirchensteuer began to flow to the Vatican in the years immediately preceding the Second World War. The flow continued throughout the war ($100 million in 1943, for example) (David A Yallop - In God's Name, pgs 96)

If the Mafia wished to bring some of their cleaned money into Italy, they used Vatican Bank channels. The money was converted to bonds directly by Edilcentro of Washington (a subsidiary of Immobiliare that built the Watergate complex among other things) When John Paul 1 became pope, only 1047 of the 11000 accounts of the Vatican Bank belonged to religious orders and institutes, 312 to parishes and 290 to dioceses. The remaining 9351 were the property of diplomats, prelates and "privileged citizens", a lot of them foreign. Many of the account holders used the facility to export currency out of Italy illegally. Deposits were not subjected to any taxation. Michele Sindona, the Vatican's money expert was a financial adviser to the Mafia families Gambino and Inzerillo. (David A. Yallop - In God's Name, pgs 130, 154, 126)

Dogmas separate but ethics unite the human race. This means that religion (and any other belief) based on dogma is unethical. (Arthur Findlay - The Curse of Ignorance Vol 2 pg 22)

"There is no such things at this date of the world's history in America as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinion, and if you did, you know bewforehand it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly to keep my honest opinion out of the paper. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job... The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon (greed), and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it, and I know, and what folly is this, toasting an independent press? We are the tools of the vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the Jumping Jacks. They pull the strings, and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." (John Swinden, former head of New York Times) in (Lewis Lapham - Gag Rule, pg 99)

The mass media is little more than a public relations industry for the rich and powerful. Its primary purpose is to sell to the public rather than to inform it, and to protect its own interests. (David Cogswell - Chomsky for Beginners, pgs 69, 90)

Newsmen believe that news is a tacitly acknowledged fourth branch of the federal system. (P. J. O'Rourke - Parliament of Whores, pg 34)

Advertising is institutionalized lying. Network news are brought to us by sponsors that lie routinely; so how truthful can we expect the news to be? (Martin A. Lee, Norman Solomon - Unreliable Sources, pg 83)

Lies are fundamental to the political and economic system that sustains (and is sustained by) the mass media of the United States. A central function of the American press is to keep legitimizing the country's most powerful institutions. The media converts the elite opinion into popular opinion. (Martin A. Lee, Norman Solomon - Unreliable Sources, pg 334)

The media are perhaps best understood as institutions of governance that have broken new ground in "making people love their servitude" (Aldous Huxley) in (Martin A. Lee, Norman Solomon - Unreliable Sources, pg 334)

The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media. (William Colby, former CIA Director)

Hitler was TIME Magazine's Man Of The Year in 1938. Stalin was TIME Magazine's Man Of The Year for 1939 and 1942, and the Ayatollah Khomeini was TIME Magazine's Man Of The Year in 1979. George W. Bush was TIME Magazine's Man Of The Year in 2004. (Nicole Maestri)

The U.S. Government spends more than $400 million per year to employ more than 8000 workers to create propaganda favourable to the United States. The result: 90 films per year, twelve magazines in 22 languages, and 800 hours of Voice of America programming in 37 languages with an estimated audience of 75 million listeners — all describing the 'virtues' of the American way. (Pratkanis, Aronson - Age of Propaganda, pg 6)

The more ridiculous a belief system, the higher the probability of its success. (Wayne R. Bartz) in (C. C. Gaither - Statistically Speaking, pg 160)

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand. (Michel De Montaigne - Of Cripples, Book iii. Chap. xi)

To read about the criminality of war, visit this chapter

All quotes provided for purposes of verification, research, and criticism under the fair use doctrine. We provide authorship information as well as links to the source materials on the web. Page numbers given may differ between editions. Quotes may be shortened if this doesn't alter their meaning.

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