Jesus was NOT the first man to "rise from the dead," as if rising from the dead were a more powerful or convincing show of divinity than simply freeing himself from a cross, or even doing to Pilate what Moses had done to the Pharaoh. One of the arguments offered by Celsus, one of the pagan philosophers against Christianity was that it was pretending to be something it wasn't - something new. Celsus was a Conservative intellectual among Roman pagan philosophers. Like so many Conservatives today, his arguments for NOT accepting the new Jesus religion as valid are EXACTLY what Conservative Christians would argue for NOT accepting a NEW Jesus religion today. As for rising from the dead.... "They say that Zalmoxis, the slave of Pythagoras, also did this among the Scythians, and Pythagoras himself in Italy, and Rhampsinitus in Egypt. The last named played dice with Demeter in Hades and returned bearing a gift from her, a golden napkin. Moreover, they say that Orpheus di
The Catholic Church has long defended and practiced pederasty. In addition to the great St. Thomas Aquinas supporting pederasty, in 1531, Martin Luther upbraided Pope Leo X [1] for having vetoed a measure that cardinals should restrict the number of boys they kept for their pleasure, "otherwise it would have been spread throughout the world how openly and shamelessly the Pope and the cardinals in Rome practice sodomy." [2] Nor was Leo the only one. Guided by Aquinas’s divine perspective on the legitimacy of pederasty, Pope Benedict IX was famous for debauching young boys in the Lateran Palace, leading Saint Peter Damian to describe him as “a demon from hell in the disguise of a priest.” Pope Julius II (1503-13), who commissioned Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling, caught syphilis from Rome’s male prostitutes. Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303), known as a pedophile who massacred the entire population of Palestrina, even famously declared that “pedophil