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The version of the Christian faith that has cast the greatest shadow of misery over humanity is that centred in Rome. The Roman Patriarchate, the Papacy, is the only version of Christianity which has modelled itself on the prescriptions of Islam.

In his book "Byzantium: The bridge from antiquity to the middle ages" author Michael Angold endeavours to explain what he alleges to be the "superiority" of Islamic culture. On p 69 of his book Angold writes:

: "...Islam had created in almost every respect [a] superior civilization." to the Byzantines and the Franks...
For this to be true, it would help to show how this "Islamic civilization" was either emulated or how its influence extended beyond its immediate geographic borders .... This poses some difficulty when regarding Byzantium, but none when considering the impact the Mohammedan faith had on Rome and the Catholic Papacy.
 
Angold attempts to show how the Byzantines "emulated" the Abbasids. In p 39 however he had written "... the Carolingian West and the Abbasid Caliphate sought to emulate and surpass Byzantium..." but then on p. 90 he writes that the Byzantine emperor (Theophilus) instead was emulating the Abbasid court.

However, the Abbasid Court was an attempt to recreate in Baghdad the splendour of the demolished Sassanian Court as it had existed in Ctesiphon before Arab conquest and subsequent demolition. The claimed Abbasid-cum-Arab achievement was instead (largely) Persian: the Abbasids were helped into power by Persians and this resulted in preferential treatment of Persians by their Arab over-lords (Mary Boyce in her "Zoroastrians: their religious beliefs and practices" pp 150-152; and Delacy O'Leary in his "How Greek Science passed to the Arabs" pp  147-148 & 155, both write on this Persian phase for instance).

THE TRANSMISSION OF MOHAMMEDAN PRINCIPLES TO THE LATIN CATHOLIC WEST:

The Latin Catholic version of Christianity came to adopt several features and beliefs that characterised Mohammedism: killing unbelievers leads directly to Paradise; an Inquisition to make certain that the faith is not corrupted; and that those outside the faith (non-Christians in a Christian society/ non-Mohammedans in a Mohammedan society) be dressed in a way to make them easily recognisable (Hitler was so impressed with this Mohammedan idea that he took it up himself).

1/Mohammedans (Muslims) made landfall in Spain in 711. In 788  Charlemagne was invited by the Mohammedan governor of Barcelona Suleiman ibn-al-Arabi to give military assistance against his enemy Abderrahman. On his return to France Charlemagne was ambushed by Basques. It is this ambush of 788 which is remembered in the Song of Roland from which to quote: "...if you die, you will be holy martyrs. You will have seats in Paradise the Great." (lines 95-100).

This idea that martyrdom could be achieved by dying whilst spilling blood then made its way to Rome and became part of Urban 2's call for a Crusade 3 centuries later:
"All who die by the way, whether by land or by sea, or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of
God with which I am invested." Urban 2 (1088-1099) Speech at Council of Clermont, 1095

This is a non-Christian idea which comes directly from the Koran:
Repentance 9:38: "Believers, why is it that when it is said to you: 'March in the cause of Allah,' you linger slothfully in the land? Are you content with this life in preference to the life to come? Few indeed are the blessings of this life compared to those of the life to come. If you do not fight He will punish you sternly and replace you by other men. Allah has power over all things." ... "Are you waiting for anything to befall us except victory or martyrdom?" Repentance 9.51

[Note: Although the ambush in the Song of Roland was by Basques, not Mohammedans, as claimed in the poem, that in itself is immaterial. The point is, that Charlemagne's force was fighting on behalf of a Muslim force. Essentially, this was a Christian leader fighting on behalf of Allah. As every Muslim knows, killing for god leads to either "victory or martyrdom". And martyrdom according to this faith can only be achieved by dying in the process of killing "unbelievers" (or those who might not be considered pious enough to quite be "believers"). To someone fighting on behalf of the "one true god", any Mohammedan's promise included the promise of "martyrdom" and immediate entry to paradise as reward for fighting on the side of Allah.]
 

*The idea of any remission of sins, or martyrdom gained by killing was never adopted or endorsed in the Greek Orthodox eastern version of Christianity. Emperor Nicephorus 2 (reigned 963-969) attempted gaining concessions from the Patriarch Polyeuctus at Constantinople that soldiers who died fighting Muslims be honoured as martyrs. However, the Patriarch declared that killing in battle was a sin requiring penance.

(The Greek eastern Orthodox version of Christianity included the Serbs, Russians, as well as the Greeks, Rumanians - and eventually, the Bulgars.)


Urban's call to arms against Mohammedans was not the first such call made by Roman Christians. Leo 4 (reigned 847-55) predates Urban 2 by two & a half centuries.

In 846 Rome was attacked by Mohammedans. The next year Leo was made Pope, and he commenced on building fortifications for the city. In 849 another Islamic armada sailed for Rome, but was destroyed. It is not a matter of coincidence that faced with a foe determined to die because they believed they would gain immediate entry to heaven, that Leo 4 made a speech which included those very same sentiments of his attackers. Part of Leo 4's speech to the Frankish army:

"Now we hope that none of you will be slain, but we wish you to know that the kingdom of heaven will be given as a reward to those who shall be killed in this war. For the Omnipotent knows that they lost their lives fighting for the truth of the faith, for the preservation of their country, aid the defence of Christians. And therefore God will give then, the reward which we have named."

Yet even Leo 4's call has a history which predates it and this call has to be put into the historical context in which it was made:
After the death of Mohammed, his followers set out to conquer the world. In 719  Mohammedans attacked Septimania in southern France and established a base of attack there.  In 721 another Mohammedan wave invaded France from the Pyrenees but was defeated by the Franks. It was not until 732  in the Battle of Tours that Charles Martel effectively halted the almost unchecked Mohammedan zealots, defeating a Muslim force of around 40,000 - 60,000 with his own force of around 1,500. This finally limited the Mohammedans to Spain. In 759 Pippin captured Narbonne, the last Mohammedan stronghold in France.

In 792  Hisham I, the emir of Cordova, called for a Jihad against the non-Mohammedans in Spain and France. 
"Tens of thousands from as far away as Syria heed his call and cross the Pyrenees to subjugate France. Cities like Narbonne are destroyed, but the invasion is ultimately halted at Carcassone." http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/christian/blchron_xian_crusades01.htm 

The entire basis of the later Crusades of the western Latin Christian Church were based on the experience of the  perpetual violence suffered from Mohammedans on "holy war", Jihad. 

2/The Abbasids were helped into power by Persians (in the 750s). Persians however were not given a charte blanche to conduct their civilization. They had to conduct themselves as Muslims, not Zoroastrians and in Arabic, not Persian. This was enforced by what was known as the "ulama" (or "culama") an Islamic Inquisition. This made certain that their views did not contradict Islam and their writing in Arabic meant that the Arabs could inspect Persian ideas for possible heresy. This idea was adopted by Innocent 3, 5 centuries later & it formed the basis of the Roman & then, Spanish inquisitions;

3/In 9th century Baghdad, Caliph Al Motevakel excluded from government employment and schooling all non-Mohammedans, who were forced to wear distinct clothing and coloured ribbons to indicate they were non-Mohammedans. In 1215 the Roman Catholic church held its Fourth Lateran Council in which cannons 78 & 79 ordered that Jews and Mohammedans wear clothing so they could be differentiated from Christians! This idea was adopted by Adolf Hitler over 700 years later.

If emulation is an demonstration of a superior culture being imitated, then in the instance of Roman based western Latin Christendom that faith adopted and emulated Mohammedan ideas.

For the past century (or so) western Latin and ex-Latin Christians ("Protestants") have peddled a fantasy in the place of history where they celebrate what they have come to insist is their collective guilt, a collective cross that the collective conscience of all Christians (they claim) has to bear, regardless that it was limited to the (then) western rump of Christendom. Contrary to this view however is the reality that the Crusades were the scar left on western Christianity in its first encounters with Islamic ideology which was then adopted and employed by Christians against those whose ideology it was originally. Contrary to the mythology peddled by today's propagandists-cum-historians Islam created the Crusaders and not vice-versa. It is not, as some would have it, that the violence seen in Islam historically, and to our own day, was a consequence of the reaction of a peaceful religion's encounter with militant Christendom!

A profound ignorance of the Koran and its message, coupled with an ignorance of history culminates in the absurd being posited in place of any genuine history.  In a television documentary on the Crusades by an obscure British comedian, Terry Jones, purporting an historical evaluation of the Crusades, presented a 'history' that went back only as far as Urban 2's speech without mentioning the Koran or the 400 years worth of Jihad that led up to the Crusades.
On the basis of the violence committed by Catholics in pursuit of Urban 2's edict, Terry Jones then proceeded to write in his book (which accompanied the television series) about the Mameluks: 

"Years of Christian crusading had finally produced this monstrosity: a Moslem state run by ex-slaves who had learnt to be the mirror image of the enemy they fought and whose pleasure in the destruction and slaughter was the exact image of the delight the Crusaders themselves had once taken in butchering Moslems." p. 195 Crusades by Terry Jones & Alan Ereira, published by  Penguin Books/BBC Books 

Thus we have propaganda in place of history, a classic argument by omission in which the opposite is instead posited to have occurred. This is about as awful a misrepresentation of history as one is likely to encounter.

         To email Terry Jones: terryjoneswebsite@yahoo.co.uk


The unfortunate association of Roman Christianity with the Mohammedan faith continues to this day.

In 1994 the UN convened a conference in Cairo on "Population and Development":

"For the Vatican... as well as for certain Islamic factions abortion and 'family planning' - that is artificial contraception, were both anathema. In the weeks preceding the conference, rumour proliferated of a clandestine alliance being forged between the muslim factions and Rome...[this was denied until] an Italian newspaper manage[d] to obtain a three-page document in Arabic, that testified to a meeting at the Vatican three months earlier, in June, between Church functionaries and Muslim representatives. An agreement had be signed to adopt a joint strategy designed to thwart the UN's proposed measures for controlling population growth... the Vatican and its Islamic allies refused to budge..." p.258 The Inquisition M. Baigent & R. Leigh [ Amazon-UK link ] [ Abbeys bookshop- Aus link ]. What is most alarming is that the Catholic position was presided over by the then Pope's "doctrinal watchdog", Cardinal Ratzinger, the man who became Pope in 2005.

Welcome to the new Inquisition!
 

Considering the historic association of Rome and Islam, it is not surprising to find that both have a common goal and cooperate in a symbiotic relationship with one-another. In the Australian State of Victoria the state government introduced "impiety laws", or what are euphemistically referred to as "religious tolerance laws". Under this new law a group of Muslims took a group of Christians to court claiming that they had been vilified by the Christians because the Christians claimed that Islam was a religion of violence. This action was backed by the Latin Roman Catholic Church, who lent assistance to the Muslims. The Anglicans, in contrast to the Romans, have insisted that it should not be the subject of law courts and have kept their distance. 

Catholicism sees in the legislation of the Australian state of Victoria a means by which it might control criticism of religion; a means of imposing religious law without the constraint of it being analysed and criticised. This is the same Roman Church which burnt Giordano Bruno in 1599... and it seems that if they could still get away with burning more people today, they'd be burning a lot more of us.


The Patriarch of Rome, the Pope, is Christianity's greatest fraud. His claim to Christian primacy was founded solely on the so-called "donation of Constantine", a document which it was claimed was given to Rome by Constantine and which gave Rome the right to rule on behalf of all Christians - even though Constantine himself had moved the capital of his empire to the city he founded in his own name, Constantinople. During the Renaissance this "document" was proven to be a forgery. However, the church of Rome claims Christian primacy. The new German Pope, Ratzinger (Benedict 16), has claimed that he considers all of humanity as his flock:

"I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must lead them, too, and they will need my voice. So there shall be one flock, one shepherd." (Age, 26/4/2005, after Guardian/Reuters)

According to the above article (by John Hooper) "The Pope, 78, reached out beyond the 1.1 billion members of his own flock to other Christian faiths, Jews and atheists."

The fraud of the Roman version of Christianity intends, on behalf of "all of us", to rule all of us. Even in this instance the Latin Catholic version of Christianity, by claiming to represent all of us with the correct version of all 'faiths' (of which it seems the Pope considers atheism to be one such 'faith'), has adopted the Mohammedan position. According to Mohammed Islam is the true version of Judaism and Christianity, both of which are considered corruptions of the true word of god which was why the angel Gabriel possessed Mohammed and through him uttered the 'true word of god' the Koran.

This leaves out the Orthodox East. 

Orthodox East as an independent entity in its own right effectively "ended" in 1453 when Constantinople fell to Mohammedan Ottoman Turks.

To contrast the eastern church with the one in Rome, Patriarch Photius serves as an example. Photius was part of the Byzantine phenomenon that preserved the Greek writings of pre-Christian antiquity. His associates were people like Leo the Mathematician and John the Grammarian. This period saw the refounding of the university of Byzantium. Virtually the entirety of the writings Greek antiquity that have come down to us, like those of Homer, Hesiod, Apollonius, Apollodorus, Aristotle, Plato, Archimedes, Euclid, Hero, Diophantus, Aeschylus, Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch,..., the list goes on, were all preserved during this time. It is from these texts, that the scientific texts (eg Archimedes, Euclid, Hero, Diophantus) found their way to Baghdad... and how the "Arabs" "found" the "lost" ancient literature. Rather than having disappeared in the "dark ages", Greek learning was alive and well in Byzantium: plays of antiquity were not only preserved, but performed and additionally the Byzantines wrote their own plays. Of the Greek literature that Byzantium preserved only 1 out of 4 (or 5) books survived the Catholic Crusade of 1204 to come down to us. Photius, though anti-Semitic, and a stickler for dogma (it was his condemnation of the Latin practice of using leavened bread when the Bible demanded "unleavened" bread that "caused" the schism between east & west in 1054). However, compared to the Roman west, Photius read the pagan literature and mythologies of his ancestors and wrote commentaries on that literature. He was well versed in philosophy and Aristotle when the Popes of the west, guided by authors such as Augustine (unknown in the Greek east), condemned such philosophy. 

Additionally, philosophers accompanied the Greek Patriarchs and served the church. Both Gemistos Plethon and John Argyropoulos attended the Council of Ferrara-Florence 1438-39. John Argyropoulos stayed on in Florence and eventually became the tutor of Lorenzo de' Medici. Leonardo da Vinci also attended his lectures on Greek science and philosophy in Florence.

After 1453 the Greek Orthodox version of Christianity was subsumed by the Islamic world with the conquest of Constantinople by Turkish Mohammedans. During this time it became increasingly Islamised. The "secularism" of the Renaissance was condemned by successive Patriarchs - even though its impetus had come about because of Greeks fleeing to Italy with their manuscripts. [ probably the best source of information on the Byzantines' profound influence on the Italian Renaissance is Deno John Geanakoplos' book Constantinople and the West [ Amazon link ]]

"...[after] 200 years of Ottoman rule, the influence of the West and the ideas emerging out of the Renaissance were perceived as threats to the Orthodox church...The Orthodox church was anti-Western and had rejected vigorously everything the Renaissance represented. According to L. S. Stasvrianos, a historian of the Balkans, the Orthodox church was repelled by the 'exaltation of reason in place of dogma, the turn to Greek antiquity... In short, Balkan Orthodoxy opposed the West not only because it was heretical but also because it was becoming modern.' ...the anti-intellectual and antiscience attitude of Muslim clerics had also permeated the mind-set of the Orthodox hierarchy in the Ottoman Empire." p. 20 Red Acropolis, Black Terror by Andre Gerolymatos [ Amazon link ].
 

The most profound influence on the Eastern Orthodox Church by Mohammedans was their attitude to idols. The iconoclast dispute that arose in Byzantium occurs at the time that Mohammedans condemned icons as "idols". This caused a wave of destruction and much that is irreplaceable was destroyed.


 

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