King Solomon's Goat

by George Willard Bartlett

“The French Revolution freed the world from ecclesiastical tyranny and opened an unobstructed path to Napoleon, who had given the death blow to the Inquisition, the great slaughter house, where they butchered in the name of the Lamb.”—Isis Unveiled, 2-22.

The Brahmins, the clergy of India, were quite as disreputable as the others. The Institutes of Manu provided that if a common person molested a Brahmin, he was to be put to death. If he sat on the same carpet with a Brahmin, he was to be maimed for life. If he listened to the reading of the sacred books, burning oil was to be poured into his ears, and if he committed them to memory, he was to be killed. If he spoke disrespectfully of a Brahmin, an iron stile ten fingers long was to be thrust red-hot into his mouth. To give to the Brahmins or will them your property was an act of the highest piety.

The laws of the clergy in certain provinces of France, ruled by them in old times, provided that every man that died without bequeathing part of his estate to the church, should be deprived of the Sacrament (and would consequently go to Hell). If he died without making a will, his relatives were obliged to prevail upon the Bishop to appoint arbitrators to determine what sum the deceased should have given to the church in case he had made a will. At one time in France, “married couples could not sleep together the first three nights without purchasing leave of the church.”—Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, 665.

“Pope John XII was assassinated in the arms of his mistress. Crecentious, the illegitimate son of John X, caused Benedict VI to be murdered. His faction elected Boniface VII, and a third faction elected John XV, who was put to death by Boniface. We find shortly after 1044 Benedict IX, a boy of twelve, and Rholeme and Sylvester III all reigning at the same time, and all leading the most profligate and scandalous lives.”—Doubts of Infidels, 95. Bishop Hopkins says that “the great body of the clergy before the seventh century were steeped in licentiousness, avarice, simony, cruelty, violence and blood. They consecrated every vice in the interest of so-called religion, they graduated sins by pecuniary amercement, they commissioned assassins, having pardoned them before the commission of the murder.”

The priests or Magi of Persia, as ecclesiastical bandits, were unexcelled. The people had to give up one tenth of their income to these magical fakirs. Every woman in Babylon was obliged to offer her person for sale one day in the year at the temple of Astarte, and the money went to the priests. The pirates of Babylon ransacked the world and bought or stole the most beautiful women on earth for the use of the priests, who made a pretence of offering them up as human sacrifices to Baal. The god held in his hand the appropriate symbol of the traffic, the circle and the pillar, that may still be seen in nearly all churches. The beautiful sacrifice was placed on the lap of the god in the presence of the audience, to be devoured by the lions that surrounded the god. But after the meeting the priests drove the lions out and stole the sacrifice, as priests always did steal the offerings from god.

The Egyptian priests were the rulers of the whole, and owned one third the land of Egypt. Besides the princely revenue from this immense landed estate, they received, in addition to their salaries, all the offerings and sacrifices that the fools gave up as an atonement for sin. A very large part of their income was derived from the Bethel or Brothel maintained around the temple of the goddess Hathor, the cow, the wife of the god Ammon, which is another name for the Ram god or the lamb of god. Every woman in Egypt was obliged to sell herself for one month at this temple. And then, besides, there were the regular sacred ladies who lived constantly in the temple. The priests chose the most beautiful, then the remainder were turned over to the mob of pious dupes and devotees. The young lady who earned the most money for the priests was, in the after life, assigned by Osiris, alias Yahvah, to a seat beside the Golden Throne. This rotten pagan church subsequently changed its name to Christian.

Calvin, the blood-drenched, the fiend incarnate, one of the founders of the Protestant Churches, compelled his lady parishioners to confess on the rack their indiscretions, and then threw them naked into the lake and drowned them. He hanged a child for cursing its parents, burned old women as witches, and burned alive Michael Servetus for contradicting Moses in asserting that Palestine was a desert that did not flow with milk and honey. Calvin died in convulsions of fear, raving and cursing because he thought he was going to Hell.

Oliver Cromwell, the pious Puritan, the murder demon, the regicide, the usurper, with the Bible in one hand and the sword in the other, rode at the head of his army of religious fanatics singing psalms. This sanctified Christian, upon the capture of Drogheda, Ireland, himself reported to Parliament that he massacred two thousand of the garrison. He fired St. Peter’s Church, to which the people had fled, and put a thousand of them to the sword. All the friars were killed but two. And the likes of him settled Boston and robbed and murdered the Indians. One of these Puritan buccaneers, named Will Bartlett, in Boston, in 1637, was sentenced to be set in the stocks, with his tongue in a cleft stick, because he got drunk and cussed and swore and refused to go to church on Sunday.

In those blithesome days a citizen could not vote unless he belonged to the Congregational Church and kissed the big toe of Cotton Mather, the superstitious bigot, the Prosecutor of the New England Protestant Inquisition. Ridpath says that Mather was chiefly responsible for the horrors and crimes of the Salem Witchcraft, and that this massacre, torture and imprisonment of 263 innocent persons was started by a Salem minister for the purpose of revenging himself upon those of his flock who antagonized him.—Ridpath’s Hist. of U. S. 131. The Quakers were perhaps the only decent body of Christians up to that time, and for that reason the Puritan pirates and slave-dealers hung four of them, one woman and three men, on Boston Common.

“Infuse a few different kinds of religious poison into a community of human beings, and they hate each other like tigers. Religious creeds have a worse effect on a man than booze. You can work the booze out of your system and quit the stuff, but when a victim is loaded up on some rotten brand of orthodoxy, it is hard to do anything with him. A Protestant will damn the Catholics, and a Catholic will yell ‘To Hell with the Protestants,’ and both will hate the Jews.”—Roman Religion, 27.