Deadly Dogmas, part 1

Here the author compares aspects of the vaccine dogma to other dogmas that many people hold dear. Some may find these ideas upsetting or infuriating. Please read no further unless you consider yourself totally open-minded.

by John Massaro

WE HUMAN beings are part of the natural world. We are animals and much less unique in our behavior than we would like to believe. One characteristic that does distinguish us from the rest of the animal kingdom is our highly developed brain. This has allowed a few of us to accomplish magnificent feats that the highest ape could never come close to duplicating. However, the human brain is a two-edged sword that has given others free rein to do all kinds of horrible things far beyond the capacity of any other life form. The human brain is the source of endless destruction of our natural environment, and the needless deaths of so many living beings, including our own. It has also has made us vulnerable to falsehoods and delusions of every description, some of which fall under the heading of dogma.

Superstition is a mild form of dogma. It’s not as rigid, not as universal, and not empowered by bad government, as dogma often is. Astrology is a good example of superstition. It maintains that the positions of the moon, stars and planets at one’s birth predestines that person to a particular temperament and to certain twists and turns throughout life. Conceived four or five thousand years ago, it was based on an image of the physical universe that was totally wrong. Nevertheless, it survives and even flourishes to the present day, kept alive by millions of horoscope readers, and even by men and women in search of a compatible mate born under a certain zodiac sign. But at no time did astrology ever ascend to an official position of social or governmental influence; it remains what it always has been — harmless nonsense shunned by most rational people.

It’s when superstition escalates into dogma that trouble starts. Dogma runs deeper and stronger, is imposed by established authority, and enforced, at the very least, by the code of social approval, and as often as not throughout history, by the lawman or the executioner. Except for those rare individuals who are capable of thinking flexibly and independently, dogma also provides a frame of reference to understand the inner and outer world, which is a powerful human need. Through the ages and among all human societies, a wide varietyof dogmas have existed, in some cases at odds with other dogmas. Despite the fact that all dogmas are by definition falsehoods, most people need some fixed idea to give them their mental bearings. Put another way, most people believe what they believe not because they’re interested in the truth, but because it makes them feel good. This is often conditioned by fear of punishment for thinking forbidden thoughts. Attempting to deprive people of their most cherished beliefs is a cruel act that can shatter their equilibrium, provoking anger, scornful laughter or frozen silence, depending on the individual personality. Yet it has been those philosophers, scientists, inventors and other rebels who were able to think undogmatically — to think outside the convention of their times — who were responsible for raising man to the fragile plane we call civilization. It is they who have always posed a threat to the upholders and enforcers of dogma — a threat not only to their power and prestige but to their income as well. And since all dogmas are false, they always require some modification when the heat of critical inquiry is turned up high enough by those brave few willing to risk unpleasant consequences.

Western man’s greatest dogma, of course, has been Christianity, the core of which is the divinity of Jesus Christ. (For what it’s worth, I believe in evolution not creationism, and I do believe that a man of extraordinary character named Jesus walked the earth in ancient times, but was as mortal as the rest of us.) It may well be that organized religion, however fallacious its doctrines, exerts a positive, perhaps even an essential stabilizing influence on every society. It also has inspired some of mankind’s most beautiful creations, as exemplified by Europe’s soaring Gothic cathedrals, Bach’s cantatas, and Michelangelo’s paintings and sculptures. But here I set these issues aside. The issue before us is how an idea so illogical, even after mutating into countless schisms over the past two thousand years, and being stripped of all its legal might these past two centuries — after spawning so much neurosis, psychosis and bloodletting, which reached its peak in the Thirty Years’ War of 1618-1648 pitting Catholics against Protestants across nearly the entire continent of Europe, which wiped out half the population in some areas — still endures in various dogmatic forms. For example, some forty million Americans, mostly in the Baptist denominations, actually believe that the Jews literally are God’s Chosen People, and a fair number of these even believe that destroying the perceived enemies of the state of Israel with nuclear weapons would be fulfilling biblical prophecy. The notion of Israel’s sanctity has long infected the minds of several high-ranking people in government and the military; President Ronald Reagan, who really believed that we were living in the “end times” as foretold in the Book of Revelation, was a prime example.

Most Christians are not zealots or fanatics. For the majority, Jesus’s divinity serves as a kind of security blanket, something to wrap oneself in when life becomes hard to bear. What is instructive here, however, is mankind’s incredible inertia. Ever since that collection of fairy tales, massacres and half-baked history took shape as the Holy Bible, Christians have had the opportunity to read something that contradicts itself more than a hundred times, but how many have actually read it? Furthermore, those who believe that the Bible is the infallible word of God, and Jesus his earthly emissary, need to explain why, when he lost his temper with a fig tree just because it had no figs at the time, he cursed it and caused it to wither to its roots (Mark 11: 12-14, 20-21), and worse, why he said of those who rejected him as their ruler, “Bring them here and slay them before me” (Luke 19: 27). Is that any way for a Son of God to talk? And of course there are many more uplifting passages in the Old Testament, such as “Happy shall be he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock” (Psalms 137: 9). In fact, the Good Book is replete with accounts of mass murder on the scale of Hiroshima, carried out against the enemies of the ancient Hebrews.

The great astronomer Galileo, and Darwin two hundred fifty years after him, dealt Christian dogma a one-two blow which sent it reeling. It’s still reeling. Yet, even though the dogma has lost its punch, it survives. As recently as 1859, when Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published, his ideas were violently attacked by learned men throughout the Western world, not because they were wrong, but because they refuted the creationist myths in the Book of Genesis, which at the time all respectable citizens were expected to believe. And even though it is no longer taboo to believe in evolution, the firestorm of controversy that Darwin ignited smolders to this day. Most people who adhere to any of the world’s major religions don’t want to hear about it.

It’s equally remarkable that, at the dawn of the seventeenth century, a scientist of Galileo’s stature had to go underground to escape the clutches of the Roman Catholic Church. So did Copernicus, whose observations and brilliant mathematical calculations forced him to conclude that the earth was not the stationary center of the universe around which all celestial bodies revolved, as the Church taught. Copernicus kept a low profile, deferring the publication of his findings until after his death. Galileo built magnificently on the foundation that Copernicus laid, but his work unfortunately coincided with the Inquisition. He constantly lived in fear of Church authorities and often found himself in hot water. In later life he was charged with heresy and put on trial. Knowing he would face certain imprisonment, and possible torture or execution, he recited an apology in which he “abjured, cursed and detested” his earlier writings in which he had contradicted the official Catholic dogma of how the solar system worked. As a reduced punishment, he spent the last eight years of his life under house arrest.

Giordano Bruno, a contemporary of Galileo, paid the supreme price for defying that dogma. This fiery, restless spirit traveled widely around Europe and England, studying, writing, lecturing, meeting royalty, fascinating some and infuriating others with his revolutionary concept of the universe. Bruno went much further than Copernicus, completely rejecting the static, Aristotelian explanation of outer space, which the Church had incorporated five hundred years earlier, and even lambasted Aristotle as “the stupidest of all philosophers.” (Aristotle, for his part, fled Athens in 323 B.C. for upsetting the authorities there with his “lack of reverence for the gods,” mindful that not long before him the ever-questioning Socrates had been forced to drink poison hemlock, his death sentence for committing a similar crime.) God, asserted Bruno, was not the thundering tyrant of the Old Testament, but a primordial energy pervading a universe of infinite space and heavenly bodies, endowing everything with freely developing forces of change and growth. Jesus, he said, was just a magician. This kind of insolence alarmed the authorities, who considered it very bad for business. Fifty years earlier, Martin Luther, outraged by the rampant corruption of Church officials who were making personal fortunes selling “ticket to Heaven” indulgences to sinners, initiated the first Protestant sect of Christianity bearing his name, at the same time stemming the flow of illicit profits. But the Church’s thriving trade in baptisms, marriages, tithes and real estate continued unabated.

Bruno became a wanted man. Eventually he was betrayed to the Inquisition by a malevolent nobleman named Mocenigo, who envied his phenomenal memory and intellect. Bruno was thrown into a filthy Vatican dungeon where, clad in rags and malnourished, he languished for seven years. From time to time he was dragged out and given a chance to recant, but unlike Galileo, he refused. Finally tiring of this impossible man, nine resident cardinals put him on trial for heresy, found him guilty, and sentenced him to death. On February 17, 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake on the Campo Dei Fiori in Rome.

There is a world of difference between the power and influence of the Catholic Church during the Renaissance and that of the contemporary Christian churches, but some things, including the profit motive, have not changed. Bruno was a very real threat to the priestly monopoly as well as the authority of dogma in his time; that dogma has run out of steam over the past four hundred years, and much of what remains is more social gospel than religious gospel, with a pronounced leftward tilt. But churches still compete with each other for customers — there are about 800 listings in the Suffolk County yellow pages — and when not ensconced in their mansions, America’s top televangelists continue to preach about the Armageddon that never comes while flying around the country in their Lear jets.

It’s foolish to imagine that men have outgrown the backwardness and closemindedness exhibited in ages past, other than to grant that modern day heretics are no longer burned alive. Dogma and heresy are still very much with us, and even though Christian doctrine has become totally disconnected from political power, new dogmas have stepped in to fill the vacuum. To really get a feeling of dogmatic authority and the fear and intolerance it engenders, we need look no further than the socalled Holocaust, which has replaced Christianity as the number one dogma in the Western world. What we are seeing here is the birth of a new religion, which should be obvious from the universal capitalization of the letter H in this word, a word which began appearing only in the 1970s to signify the alleged attempt by Adolf Hitler to kill all the Jews of Europe.

As the late professor Revilo Oliver pointed out in his book The Origins of Christianity, Christianity was a copycat religion modeled in almost every detail on Zoroastrianism, an ancient Persian religion which was based on a real man named Zoroaster who, like Jesus, was transformed by his followers into a savior. Now we see Holocaustianity imitating Christianity the same way — the nation of Israel as the Jewish people’s resurrection, Hitler as Satan, Holocaust shrines and museums sprinkled like chapels across the Western landscape, the sense of collective guilt for allowing the Jews to be “crucified,” the social pressure to conform to the tall tale of the gassed six million, the persecution of heretics (euphemistically called “deniers”), and as with all major dogmas, the establishment of a lucrative racket, which has reaped billions in films, books, research grants and reparation schemes of all kinds, the prime beneficiary being the state of Israel itself.

All dogmas crumble under the weight of serious inquiry. And it is the simplest questions that cause the first cracks. Even as a child, upon being taught in weekly Catholic religion class that all the good people in the world who had been born before Jesus came to Earth were not “saved” and had to spend eternity not in Heaven but in a neutral place called Limbo, I remember thinking, “What kind of all-knowing, all-understanding God could be so unfair? Why should all those people be deprived of eternal happiness in Heaven because of something they had no control over?” (I imagine the Church has replaced this and a lot of other hooey I was taught with more persuasive hooey.)

So it is with the Holocaust. We might ask, for example, if the Germans, so renowned for their efficiency, really intended to exterminate all the Jews in Europe, why were so many of them in German-occupied areas still alive at the end of the war? Arthur Butz, author of the landmark study The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, asked this question many years ago. It has never been answered. British historian David Irving has asked many more troublesome questions. The multilingual Irving has written more than thirty books on World War Two, though none focus specifically on the Holocaust. He has spent much of his life studying the archives of that era in institutions through out Europe and America, and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the personal lives of famous figures associated with the Second World War, particularly from Germany. Why, he has asked, are there documents with Hitler’s signature authorizing the summary execution of commissars on the eastern front, and as a temporary measure, the euthanasia of Germany’s institutionalized mentally incurable at a time when hospital beds were urgently needed for wounded soldiers — yet not one that mentions the mass killings of Jews? Why, furthermore, in all the recorded comments about Jews made to his inner circle, such as those published in the book Table Talk, does he speak only of expulsion and never extermination? The late French revisionist scholar Robert Faurisson once challenged the dogmatists in the simplest way. He said, “Draw me a Nazi gas chamber.”

No one ever did. One rebuttal, by an establishment historian named Jean-Claude Pressac, was attempted, which in turn was demolished by Faurisson. For those interested, the minutiae can be found online.

No revisionist historian, incidentally, would dispute that many Jews, though certainly not all, were uprooted and transported to work camps, and that many died of starvation or disease, as did a far higher number of Germans, after Germany’s infrastructure was destroyed by sustained Allied carpet-bombing, and that Hitler was determined to expel most Jews from Europe and eventually transport them either to Russia or Madagascar — much as they had been expelled from European countries or territories nearly fifty times in the past thousand years. What these modern heretics dispute is the dogma that Jews were the victims of an attempted wholesale extermination, that mass execution gas chambers were employed by the National Socialists, and that anything close to six million perished.

To be continued

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Source: an excerpt from the book Will Vaccines Be the End of Us?