A Christians Call for the Removal and Destruction of the Cross of Christ

China's Christians angry as removal of church crosses continues

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His mother was Jewish. He was circumcised as a Jew. He pretty much followed the Jewish law, departing from it only in the name of what he saw as its deeper meaning. Sure, he debated furiously with the Pharisees and Sadducees, especially about the significance of the temple. And, in time, this argument came to be restyled by Jesus' gentile followers as an attack upon Jews per se.

But originally it was an internal debate within Judaism , not an attack upon Jews from the outside. In was an internal debate in the same way that the prophets of the Hebrew scriptures, such as Jeremiah, often attacked the priests of the temple for missing the point. It is a horrible irony, then, that Christianity bears primary responsibility for historic antisemitism. Few ideas can have been as poisonous as, and inspired more murderousness than, the idea that Jews were the Christ-killers.

Of course, only the Romans had the legal authority to crucify someone: But this fact became historically inconvenient for a religion that was eventually to place its global headquarters within Rome itself. So what, then, about this unpleasant video recently released by the evangelical organisation Jews for Jesus, and widely dubbed as one of the most offensive religious videos ever made? Already watched by more than a million people, it shows Jesus, carrying a cross, being selected by Nazi guards for the gas chambers. Given the history of Christian antisemitism, using the murder of 6 million Jews as a pretext for converting Jews to Christianity is mind-bogglingly offensive.

As Jews commemorate Yom HaShoah on Sunday, the only proper Christian response to the Holocaust ought to be one of contrition and an acknowledgment of the ways in which Christian antisemitism prepared its ideological ground. There is more than a suspicion that Julian's untimely death was attributable to disloyal Christians. Certainly, many Christians did not trouble to disguise their glee at his demise, and attributed it to Christian agency. After Julian, the Empire returned to Christian government.

Christian rulers resumed the destruction of temples and cancelled the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple. By Christianity was the only recognised religion in the Empire. As part of its campaign books were burned, works of art destroyed, families dispossessed, and temples desecrated. Christians delighted in their victory, and seized opportunities for destruction of everything others held holy. The Christian Emperor Theodosius I closed pagan temples in Rome at the end of the fourth century, in line with the views of St Ambrose.

Under his influence, the Emperor adopted an official policy of Christian uniformity. Christian mobs were free to attack and destroy synagogues and temples with impunity. Spies were appointed to expose those who were not sufficiently sympathetic to the Christian cause. It was Ambrose who dissuaded the Emperor from paying compensation for the destruction of a synagogue in For a while Christians stuck to their home churches, often the private basilicas audience chambers of rich converts.

As Christianity adopted ever more pagan practices and trappings, old pagan temples were recognized as ideal locations for their meetings and ceremonies. Pagan temples were then appropriated for use as churches. This happened to countless thousands of temples throughout the Roman Empire. In Rome itself numerous pagan temples were converted into churches, as confirmed by archeological investigations. Peter's Basilica, the church of the Vatican, was built on top of a large pagan necropolis on the Vatican Hill.

Pagan gods and their temples are sometimes remembered in the names of Roman churches, for example the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva literally Saint Mary above Minerva. The Basilica of St. Officially sanctioned Christian Vandalism became ever more commonplace. At Alexandria in , Bishop Theophilus of Alexandria personally directed the destruction of the temple to the god Serapis, reputedly the largest place of worship in the known world. The statue of the god was chopped up and burned, its head being carried through the town for public ridicule. The temple precinct, or Serapeum, also housed a scientific research institute a "Museum" named after the nine Muses and the famous Library of Alexandria - two of the greatest academic buildings in human history.

Both buildings were loathed by Christians, who hated scientific research and secular knowledge as much as they hated other people's places of worship. Both Museum and Library were destroyed around this time, probably in the same violent incident in which the bishop destroyed the temple. The destruction of the Serapeum by Patriarch Theophilus was a critical event in the history of persecution of ancient paganism. A later bishop of the same city, Saint Cyril was responsible for the murder of the pholosopher Hypatia. Christian cross carved into Egyptian hieroglyphics at Temple of Isis at Philae, in southern Egypt We have no idea how many other images were completely destroyed by Christians.

Certainly he, like many other bishops, was a keen destroyer of other people's holy places in the area. Throughout Egypt bands of monks commissioned by bishops were given military protection so that they could despoil the shrines of other faiths in safety. Notre-Dame de la Daurade is a basilica in Toulouse, France. It was established in when Emperor Honorius allowed the conversion of Pagan temples to Christianity. The original building here was a temple dedicated to Apollo.

In the fifth century, the cult of Alexander, which had survived in the desert oasis at Siwa, was suppressed. By the sixth century the Christian Emperor Justinian closed the last temples in Egypt dedicated to the cults of Isis and Ammon. Centuries later Christians were still seizing wooden icons from devotees of other religions in Egypt. They were sent to Constantinople to be burned in the hippodrome. The famous shrine of the goddess Ma in Comana in Cappadocia was converted into a church.

The Temple of Athene at Syracuse was rebuilt as a church. Often the temples that had been dedicated to goddesses became churches dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The temple was converted into a Christian basilica in the 6th century by the bishop of Agrigento which is the only reason it survived the general Christian destruction of other people's places of worship.

Nevertheless the temple was comprehensively vandalised. Spaces between the columns were filled with walls, altering the Classical Greek form. The division between the cella and the opisthodomos was destroyed, and the remaining walls of the cella were cut into a series of arches along the nave. Numerous hilltop temples dedicated to Hermes Mercury were replaced by churches dedicated to St Michael.

A temple to Apollo at Monte Cassino was destroyed by followers of St Benedict in the sixth century, and a monastery was built in its place. Many future saints assisted in such destruction. Saints Justa and Rufina won their martyrdom by vandalising an image of the goddess Venus in Seville. In Western Christendom, such practices were encouraged by Pope Gregory I, who reigned between and It had been dedicated to all the Olympian gods; now it was dedicated to St Mary and all the Christian martyrs. Another Roman temple, probably dedicated to Hercules, was preserved because it was converted into a Christian church.

It is now known, mistakenly, as the Temple of Vesta. Another one, probably dedicated to Portunus, survived for the same reason and is known, again mistakenly, as the Temple of Fortuna Virilis. The main targets for concerted vandalism were religious. Other buildings were vandalised by neglect. The Flavian Amphitheatre, now called the colosseum, had no particular interest for Christians, since the fictions about Christian martydoms there were not invented until a millennium latter.

In contrast, there was an interest in stopping people being free to enjoy themselves, and by the late 6th century a small church had been built into the structure. Stones from the amphitheatre were pillaged for centuries during the Christian period, especially after earthquakes loosened the structure. Stones were taken for cardinals' palaces and churches throughout the city of Rome. A Christian Order moved into the north of the colosseum in the midth century where it remained until the early 19th century. Bronze clamps holding the stonework together were hacked out of the walls.

Pope Sixtus V planned to turn the building into a wool factory, with the intention of providing employment for Rome's numerous prostitutes, his plan falling through with his death in In Cardinal Altieri authorized the amphitheatre's use for bullfights. This at least stopped a thousand years of Christian vandalism, since he forbade the use of the colosseum as a quarry.

No-one prior to the 16th century had suggested the colosseum had been the site of Christian martydoms. The Catholic Encyclopedia concedes that there is no evidence, yet many Christians continue to imagine gory martydoms there. Each Good Friday the Pope leads a torch-lit "Way of the Cross" procession that starts at the colosseum.

The effect of a millennium of Christian vandalism on the Colosseum. Other classical structures all around the Mediterranean, many older, but located away from Christian cities, are much better preserved than this.

China cracks down on religion, crosses burned at Christian churches, Xi Jinping photos installed

In Gaul, Martin of Tours, a destroyer of countless temples and sacred sites, immediately built churches or monasteries on the sites of temples that he destroyed Sulpicius Severus, Vita of Sain Martin, ch xiii. The monastery at Monte Cassino was constructed by Saint Benedict on a pagan site, in an area that was still largely pagan. A temple of Apollo crowned the hill there. Benedict's first act was to smash the statue of Apollo and destroy the temple altar.

He then appropriated the temple, dedicating it to Saint Martin, and built another chapel on the site dedicated to Saint John the Baptist. Montmartre in Paris takes its name from Mons Martyris , "Mountain of the martyr", but this is an adaption of the original name, for it was previously Mons Martis , the "Mount of Mars". Nearby a church called Saint Pierre de Montmartre replaced mercurii monte , which had been a sacred place dedicated to Lugus, a Celtic deity equated with Mercury by the Romans. In his most famous miracle, Phillip cast the Devil, in the form of a hideous dragon, out of a statue of Mars.

Philip told the crowd that if they broke the statue and adored the Lord's Cross, the sick would be cured and the dead would be brought back to life. The Dannie and Hettie Heineman Collection; deposited in , given in The Abbey of Luxueil was built on the ruins of Luxovium, near to thermal baths in Burgundy, where pagan stone images crowded the nearby woods.

The abbey church was built in triumph within the pagan site, with a grant from a Christian officer of Childebert's court. In Carnac, beside the Gulf of Morbihan on the south coast of Brittany, a Catholic church was constructed on top of a Neolithic Tumulus in order to Christianise it. The story was much the same in what is now the South of France. A town built around a pagan temple to Minerva is still called Minerve, and the town built around a temple to Jupiter, fanum Jovis , is today called Fanjeaux.

In Britain, the Christian chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth reported that King Lucius had converted all of the old temples to churches. The idea certainly had the backing of the Church. Instead of destroying temples, they were to be sequestered for Church use. So when almighty God has led you to the most reverend man our brother Bishop Augustine, tell him what I have long gone over in my mind concerning the matter of the English: Let blessed water be made and sprinkled in these shrines, let altars be constructed and relics placed there: As elsewhere in the Celtic northwest of Europe, divinities associated with springs were transformed into local saints.

Today hundreds of local gods, relabelled as "saints" but recognized only at the location of their own particular "holy well".

They are often commemorated by annual well-dressing. In the Peak District, the well blessing ceremony is often the signal for the start of a week of celebrations or 'wakes' between the end of May and early September, with a range of events often culminating in a carnival at the end of the week. The ancient Romans had a practice of adopting the gods of other peoples. In a formal ceremony exoratio they induced their enemies" gods to change sides before a battle with promises of bigger sacrifices and better temples. As they conquered new lands and acquired new gods, they sent effigies of them back to the Temple of Capitoline Jupiter.

This collection, which should have been modern Europe's inheritance from the ancient world, disappeared in Christian times. Countless other works of art from all over the known world were also lost under Christian rule. Some classical art survived in the Eastern Empire, especially in Constantinople. But when the Western Christians besieged and took the city in , they immediately set about pillaging these ancient treasures, and destroying those that they could not carry away. Nicetus, a contemporary Greek writer, listed some of the treasures: Some of these statues were huge: The statue of Hercules by Lysimachus was so large that in girth, the statue's thumbs were equal to a man's waist.

Bronze work was broken up and melted down so that it could be transported more easily; marble work was simply vandalised. The Triumphal Quadriga, is a set of bronze statues of four horses, originally part of a monument in Constantinople, depicting a quadriga a four-horse carriage used for chariot racing The horses were placed on the facade, on the loggia above the porch, of St Mark's Basilica in Venice, northern Italy having been looted during the sack of Constantinople in The sculptures have been removed from the facade and placed in the interior of St. Mark's for conservation purposes, with replicas in their position on the loggia.

Much of what survived the vandalism throughout Western Christendom did so either because of pagan care or Christian ignorance. It was found, walled up, in the seventeenth century. Another Aphrodite, dug up on the Greek island of Milos in , is now celebrated as the Aphrodite of Milos, or more commonly the Venus de Milo. Even missing her arms which were broken after the statue was found she is one of the most famous statues in the world. She is now in the Louvre, and is shown on the right.

The arms and original plinth were lost following her discovery. The statue, in marble, was created sometime between and BC. From an inscription on its plinth, noted before it disappeared, she is thought to be the work of Alexandros of Antioch. According to modern experts she is not in the same class as Praxiteles" original Aphrodite, which is, of course, "lost".

So was the Farnese Hercules by Glycon, rediscovered in Some statues were vandalised but not destroyed. For example a statue of Isis in Rome now leads a second life as the liberally bosomed "Madama Lucrezia". Not only religious statues fell victim to the Christians. Early Christians destroyed secular statues and inscriptions. The great Church historian Eusebius gloated that Caesar Maximian was "the first whose complimentary inscriptions and statues, and everything else that is customarily set up, were thrown down as being reminders of a foul monster" 3.

Vandalised statues of him were left as objects for jests and horseplay for anyone who might want to insult and abuse them. Similar fates befell others who were not sufficiently sympathetic to the Christian cause. Unsympathetic people were executed, and all memorials to their existence destroyed. The West's patrimony from classical times is tiny compared to what it might have been if the early Christian authorities had allowed artistic taste to encroach on their religious prejudices 4.

The little that remains has survived despite the efforts of the more zealous Christians. Statues were buried, or walled up, or cast into the sea to avoid the Christian picks and hammers. Had the Christians been more competent detectives, and less ignorant about the subject matter, then the whole patrimony would have been "lost". An equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius in the Campidoglio in Rome survived because Christians mistook it for a statue of their hero Constantine.

We can often tell that Christians were responsible for vandalising statues first because they made a point of disfiguring the face as Moslems vandals still do , and secondly because they would often carve crosses on the face, most commonly a cross in the middle of the forehead, to somehow Christianise the statue. Making crosses on foreheads is a common Christian practice. It is still done with water in the course of baptisms, with ash on Ash Wednesday, and with paint on the skulls of dead monks. It was previously done with a red hot branding iron on the foreheads of supposed heretics.

Below are a few examples of statues vandalised by Christians. This statue of the goddess Aphrodite found at the Agora at Athens bears the hallmarks of Christian vandals, including crosses carved on the forehead and chin. This statue of Livia Drusilla, wife of the Emperor Augustus also bears the hallmarks of Christian vandals. Statue of Augustus from Ephesus. Now in the Ephesus Museum, Selcuk, Turkey. Religiously inspired philistinism extended to all corners of life.

Christians were responsible for putting a stop to the original Olympic Games, of which they disapproved. The famous statue of Zeus at Olympia, wrought in gold and ivory, one of the seven wonders of the world, was carted off to Constantinople where it was later destroyed. It is thought to have looked like the image shown on the right.

The workshops of Phidias, the sculptor of the statue of Zeus, were converted into a Christian church. Other wonders of the world suffered similarly. According to Christian sources, the Temple of Diana Artemis near Ephesus was destroyed along with the goddess's statue, first damaged by Saint John the Apostle, and then flattened by Saint John Chrysostom in , following a Christian emperor's Edict of Thessalonica 4a. The stones were used for a "tomb" for St John and a bath-house. A cross was raised on the spot where Diana's statue had stood.

Another wonder of the world, the Mausoleum at Helicarnassus, was cannibalised to build a crusader castle, which still stands near the harbour of modern Bodrum in Turkey.

One of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Mausoleum left , before it was dismantled by Christian crusaders to build a crusader castle right. It was described by Antipater of Sidon, who compiled a list of the Seven Wonders:. I have set eyes on the wall of lofty Babylon on which is a road for chariots, and the statue of Zeus by the Alpheus, and the hanging gardens, and the colossus of the Sun, and the huge labour of the high pyramids, and the vast tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the house of Artemis that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy, and I said, "Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on aught anything so grand".

Antipater, Greek Anthology [IX. It was destroyed by Christians, and is now an empty field. Some stones used to build a nearby church, other carted off to Contantinople. Some of the columns in Hagia Sophia came from the temple of Artemis, and statues and other decorative elements ended up in the Christian capital.. An inscription at Ephesus confirms the role of Christians in the vandalism, in particular a Christian called Demeas:. Destroying the delusive image of the demon Artemis, Demeas has erected this symbol of Truth, the God that drives away idols, and the Cross of priests, deathless and victorious sign of Christ.

A reconstruction of what the Temple of Artemis would have looked like, and a photograph of the site today the pillar is reconstructed from stones on the site. Quality stones were carted off to Contantinople, others used in churches and eventually building like those in the background. For years bands of Christian monks had been sweeping down from their desert monasteries to destroy shrines and temples.

They ransacked houses, destroying all non-Christian religious objects. Some estimates put the number of volumes destroyed at , although enough volumes remained for later Muslims to enjoy more fires when they arrived in The end of progress in ancient mathematics is conventionally dated as , the year Hypatia was murdered by Christians in the same city, during the reign of the next bishop.

The great tradition of learning at Alexandria came to an end in when its world famous School of Philosophy was closed down. Elsewhere, rival Christian schools had to be eliminated too. In the Emperor Zeno had closed the schools of Edessa. The end of ancient philosophy can be equated with the closing of the Academy and other philosophical Schools in Athens by the Christian Emperor Justinian in Any possibility of intellectual opposition was now eliminated.

Philosophy was considered dangerous to Christianity. Philosophers were persecuted and their books burned. Such was the persecution that men of learning were driven to destroy their own libraries rather than risk a volume being seen by a Christian informer. The few intellectual Christians that there were had to be careful of offending the sensibilities of the less intellectual majority. The philosopher Boethius for example was killed by the pious Christian Ostrogoth Theodoric in the sixth century. He is reputed to have met his end by having a bowstring tightened around his temples until his eyes protruded from his head.

His death marked the end of the classical tradition of learning. Any pagan work that referred to Jesus, and any works by Christians who could not accept the theology agreed atthe latest Church Council, were suppressed. The only acceptable literature was literature that conformed to the official Christian line of the moment.

Gospels that did not fit requirements were discarded, and their existence denied. Other writings were creatively edited. Works by educated pagan authors were destroyed along with those of Christians whose views were not currently regarded as orthodox. Histories were either "lost" or doctored to make them acceptable. Numerous works by pagan authors were known during the early centuries of the Church, and many of them were subsequently destroyed or otherwise "lost".

We know for example that several biographies of Pythagoras were written. All have been "lost". He was a highly regarded thinker who had a poor opinion of the Christians, and unsurprisingly his work has disappeared. Parts of his medical writings were rediscovered in the Middle Ages, and from these it is possible to gauge the scale of our loss. Often we know that works were still current in the early years of Christianity: Some pagan tracts were given Christian prefaces and conclusions, and presented as original documents.

Thus the letter of Eugnostos the Blessed was converted into an account of the wisdom revealed by Jesus to the disciples after his death. Anything that could not be cannibalised in this way was discarded. Thus, no Greek secular works were preserved in the original. Secular learning and secular art, along with secular education, almost disappeared.

Some works were recovered during the Renaissance. Petrarch, for example, recovered other works by Cicero. Poems by Catullus were reputedly found serving as a bung in a Mantuan wine barrel. Parchment was expensive so Medieval Churchmen would sometimes take a used one, scrape off the existing text, and reuse it - as a so-called palimpsest.

Regarding the works of pagans of the ancient world as worthless, they destroyed, or at least thought that they had destroyed, the works of the some of the greatest minds in human history, to make prayer books. Modern science has been able to recover a few important works from these Christian prayer books. For example, in AD parchment copies of seven treatises of Archimedes were erased and overwritten by prayers, then bound in a Byzantine prayerbook a euchologion by a priest called Johannes Myronas.

Myronas understood Greek, so must have known what he was doing. Of the seven treatises by Archimedes, two are otherwise unknown The The Method of Mechanical Theorems and the Stomachion and one On Floating Bodies is unknown in the original Greek, the language in which Archimedes wrote. Working in Jerusalem, the priest had vandalised not only treatises by Archimedes to make his prayerbook, but also other works, including 10 folios of the Attic orator Hyperides dating from the fourth century BC, one of which contained an extremely important speech that has not otherwise been preserved.

This copy of Archimedes Method was found in There is no way of telling how many other such palimpsests there were on which Christians did a more thorough job, and so will never be discovered. The loss through Christian vandalism - both deliberate and casual - is incalculable, but the scale of it can be estimated from the shreds that survive. Tacitus's surviving Histories and Annals are both incomplete. Livy's lost works include his volume History of Rome of which only a small part has survived.

Pliny the Elder wrote numerous works of which only his Historia Naturalis survives. It was not only classical works that were destroyed. When they had the opportunity to do so Christians burned Jewish and Muslim books as well. After the Muslim city of Tripoli surrendered to the crusaders in , the great library of Banu Ammar , the finest in the Muslim world, was burnt to the ground with all of its contents.

Some works were preserved because they were taken out of the reach of orthodoxy. When persecuted Nestorians fled eastward, they took ancient works with them. They enjoyed much greater freedom under Zoroastrian and Muslim rulers, and established prominent communities in what are now Iraq and Iran. Along with other refugees they translated the writings of Greek philosophers. For 1, years these writings were lost to the West.

When they were eventually retranslated from Arabic into Latin they fired the revival of learning that we know as the Renaissance. It was through this route that the works of Aristotle were preserved. Other works survived in other ways. In the ancient rubbish dumps of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt yielded, amongst other things, a forgotten song by Sappho and fragments of "lost" plays by Aeschylus and Sophocles. A common claim made by Christians is that Christianity single-handedly kept alight the guttering flame of learning during the Dark Ages, in the face of marauding wild barbarians.

The truth is almost the exact opposite. The Church was largely responsible for plunging western Europe into ignorance and darkness. Towards the end of the fourth century for example Goths destroyed much of the Western Empire, including great cities like Delphi and Athens. But these Goths were not the pagan barbarians of traditional history books, they were Christians.

These barbarians marched with bibles at the head of their armies. When they besieged Rome it was not, as is often supposed, pagans besieging civilised Christians but for the most part Christians besieging civilised pagans. To be sure there were some Christians in the city, but there is no reason to suppose that their faith was stronger than that of their bishop.

Their bishop now regarded as a Pope consented to pagan sacrifices on the altar of St Peter's in order to save the city from the Christian hordes at its gates. Popular stories about pagan barbarians sacking Rome are pure fantasy. Rome was still in good shape until the middle of the sixth century when the Christian Emperor Justinian tried to reconnect Italy to the Empire. The city was repeatedly besieged and plundered by Christian forces. Rain and weather did further damage, but there was still enough left for later Christians to exceed the efforts of all their predecessors.

Guidebook to Rome 6.

The true torchbearers during the Dark Ages were Arabs, Jews, heretics and pagans who kept alive pre-Christian teachings. In western Europe Christianity enforced a monopoly of thought, and the consequence of this was that Western Christendom spent the Middle Ages in abject ignorance, regarded by Byzantines and Muslims alike as hopeless philistines.

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Pope Paul II, a nepotist and murderer, epitomised Western Christianity at the end of the medieval period. When in the historian Bartolomeo Platina commented on his ignorance, His Holiness had him imprisoned and tortured. The same pope suppressed the Roman Academy, which he thought encouraged paganism, and also banned the reading of ancient poets by Roman children. How great was Europe's cultural loss can be assessed by comparing the state of civilisation under the ancient Greeks with that of Christendom at the close of the Middle Ages, almost 2, years later.

Stone buildings that had been built extensively for private and public purposes were now limited to military and ecclesiastical structures. Existing public buildings forums, libraries, odeons, theatres, museums, stadia, hippodromes, circuses, schools, gymnasia, temples, baths, Roman amphitheatres etc. Many building techniques were forgotten. Where even the poor had been taught to read and write in pagan times, and the rich had been expected to build public schools, education became a Church monopoly, and was denied to all except prospective priests and sons of the rich.

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The syllabus was restricted to Christian indoctrination. Unsympathetic or objective histories were "lost". Law was converted from an instrument of justice to a system featuring trials by ordeal, frequently serving the interests of the Church and denying the principles of natural justice. Inequality was a fundamental principle of ecclesiastical law. All literature, including the Bible, was banned to the population at large.

The few who were allowed to learn to read were restricted to prayer books and Christian Legends presented as fact. Other books were generally destroyed or hidden away in monasteries. This was limited within the Church to the arithmetic necessary to calculate the date of Easter. Otherwise it was treated with suspicion or hostility. All medical progress was halted. Illness was considered to be a punishment for sin. Hygiene and public health were abandoned as unchristian. Music and singing were periodically restricted to Church music.

Byzantine Iconoclasm

Otherwise they were regarded as satanic. The study of nature, popular in the ancient world, stagnated until the Enlightenment. Research was suppressed until then because the Church insisted on a literal interpretation of the Bible and its infallibility as a handbook of all world knowledge.

All representation was first banned, then restricted to religious themes from the fifth century. Existing non-Christian art was destroyed. The rules of perspective, known in Antiquity, were "lost" for a thousand years ie during the hegemony of the Church. In , the Council of Trent confirmed Art as a conformist naturalistic propaganda tool. A Church monopoly was established. The subject was then reduced to scholasticism.

Existing philosophical works were destroyed. Genuine philosophers were censored, persecuted and sometimes killed. The charitable endowment of public buildings schools, libraries, theatres, sports stadia, baths, horse racing cources, etc. Almost every village in Europe has a medieval church, generally built in better materials than any other local building. A vanishingly small number have comparable church built schools, hospitals or other useful public buildings. Non-religious sculpture ceased to be produced.

The best examples from antiquity were "lost". Inferior material was produced for the Church, generally for propaganda purposes. Nothing comparable in quality to classical work was produced until the Renaissancet. Sports were suppressed, along with international sporting events. They were replaced by various kinds of animal torture and pastimes too local to be controlled by the Church.

Acting was banned, except for propaganda purposes: Streets and viaducts were used but not maintained. They survived into secular times only because they had been so well built. It is notable that all of these areas flourished again as the hand of the Church was progressively relaxed, prized off by Renaissance Humanists, Enlightenment thinkers, scientists and secular philosophers. Typical Classical sculpture before the Christian era.

Typical Christian sculpture, after a millennium of Christian hegemony. Church vandalism continued for centuries after the Middle Ages. The canopy under the dome of the present St Peter's is made from tons of bronze stripped from the Pantheon in the sixteenth century the rest reputedly went to make papal canon. Construction of St Peter's had been started by Bramante. He destroyed much that could have been preserved from the old basilica, and pillaged various old buildings for marble and other materials. Raphael, who took over after his death, called him Ruinante.

Roman Christians were not content with destroying their own city. Rome, the Eternal Parasite , is still furnished with treasures pillaged from elsewhere. There are for example more large obelisks in Rome than remain in Egypt. Medieval Christians claimed that Holy Books could be easily identified because they would not burn.

It was the same technique supposedly used by early Christians to determine the cannon of the New Testament - Heretical books burned: Holy books did not. As Voltaire noted, it is a great pity that this simple method of distinguishing the two no longer works - Holy Testaments have burned just as well as heretical ones since the end of the Middle Ages. In any case, this supposed method enabled Churchmen like Saint Dominic to destroy any book they wanted, and acclaim their vandalism as proof of heretical content. When wagonloads of Jewish books were burned in the incident provoked an official inquiry.

The committee approved of the destruction of the books. As a result more mass burnings were held. Talmudic studies were banned, and centres of Jewish scholarship were destroyed.

In a papal bull forbade Jews to possess or read the Talmud. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish books, including rare manuscripts, were burned in Italy by the Roman Inquisition. In an Italian cardinal could boast of having collected 10, Jewish books for destruction 9. Classical books, if discovered, were burned or hidden, Arabic books were burned, heretical books were burned, books exposing forgery and corruption were burned, books containing original thought were burned.

Not only were factual information and opinions in need of suppression. Some churchman could generally be found to condemn any item of innocent fun, amusement, interest or beauty. In the Christian citizens of Florence were inspired by the Friar Savonarola and armed guards to burn material possessions. Countless works of art went onto a "bonfire of the vanities".

One bonfire, lit on Shrove Tuesday , was feet wide and sixty feet high. The crowd sang Te Deum laudamus as it burned. This is Chetham's Library in Manchester. It i is the oldest free public reference library in the United Kingdom. It operates as an independent charity, open to readers and visitors free of charge. The Churches could have created such libraries throughout Europe, but never saw the need to do so. The idea of enouraging the masses to read was traditionally seen as undesirable. Soon the Church would be suppressing nudity too. Paul IV pope , defaced many statues and paintings by covering up or painting over disconcerting genitals.

Michelangelo's Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel was sanitised in this way, the artist who carried out the task, Daniel of Volterra, earning the nickname il braghettone "the trouserer". Innocent X pope installed metal fig leaves on the nude statues in the Vatican. Numerous keen Christians have occupied their time in chipping the genitals off male statues throughout Christendom. This is one of the areas where Protestants and nonconformists have excelled Roman Catholics. In the nineteenth century notable figures like Comstock campaigned in the USA to protect the public from much of the greatest art ever produced.

Others established pressure groups to clothe animals and to suppress other manifestations of vice. Such distinctively religeous attitudes persisted throughout the twentieth century and beyond. In devout American Christians mounted a campaign to have two statues used at the Olympic Games covered up. They were offended that representations of human figures should be furnished with genitalia. Not so long before that the Australian authorities had impounded a copy of Michelangelo's David on the grounds that it was indecent.

In , officials in Bartholomew County, Indiana, required copies of classical art to be moved out of public view because they would be considered obscene under Indiana law. The statutes included copies of Michelangelo's David and the Venus de Milo. Ancient monuments throughout Europe also suffered at the hands of Christians. Following the methods advocated by Pope Gregory I, wherever the Church spread it destroyed or took over the sites held holy by the local inhabitants. In Britain the traditional holy sites included yew groves, which helps to explain why yew trees are so common in English churchyards to this day.

Neolithic stones were revered too. Churches were often built next to them in the hope that they would inherit the stones" sanctity. In this way the Church could represent itself as belonging to an existing sacred tradition. Christian churches were sometimes built within ancient circles. It was built here because of the Tor's significance in Celtic and even older religions. In later centuries, when the population had been converted and the earlier beliefs forgotten the Church could denounce the ancient stones as satanic, and set about destroying them.

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• A Modern Cinderella Or, The Little Old Shoe and Other Stories
• The Shadow Lantern (The Blackhope Trilogy)
• Dites-nous, Patrick Lemoine, à quoi sert vraiment un psy ? (Hors collection) (French Edition)
• A Bible Book of Laws (What IFS Bible picture books 3)
• THE BOY FROM THE HULKS
• The complete Stories of the North