THE SACRIFICE DELUSION : The Opinion that Changed the World: The Opinion that Changed the World

By Ramon G. Mendoza

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Oct 9, 2009
• ISBN: 9798369408070

Ramon G. Mendoza

Ramon G. Mendoza, a former priest and a member of the Jesuit Order for twenty years, graduated summa cum laude at the Free University of Berlin and was Lektor and professor of Latin American Language and Literature at that university for seven years, after which he returned to the United States and was Professor of German and Latin American Languages and Literature and director of the Modern Languages Department at Florida International University. Professor Mendoza has written several books both in German and in Spanish, among which are: Stimmung und Transzendenz. Die Antizipation der existenzialanalytischen Stimmungsproblematik bei Ignatius von Loyola. (Moods and Transcendence. The anticipation of Heidegger’s Existential Analysis of Moods in the Work of Ignatius of Loyola). Berlin, Germany: (Dunker & Humblot) 1970; Outside Humanity: A study of Kafka’s Fiction. Lanham, New York, London: (University Press of America), 1986; and The Acentric Labyrinth: Giordano Bruno’s prelude to contemporary cosmology. Shafetesbury, Dorset: (Element), 1995

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THE SACRIFICE DELUSION

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The Opinion that Changed the World

RAMON G. MENDOZA

Copyright © 2009 by Ramon G. Mendoza.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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The 8th Century

Holed High Cross

at Moone, County Kildare,

Ireland

Rev. date: 09/20/2023

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Contents

Introduction

Dialogue in Heaven

1. At the antiquarian’s shop

2. Mephistopheles’s Self-portrait

3. La femme fatale

4. O felix culpa!

St. Paul’s Kerygma

Chapter One: The chosen one

Chapter Two: St. Paul’s Interpretation

of Jesus’s Crucifixion

Chapter Three: Blood Brothers

Chapter Four: The Apotheosis of the cross

How the Trinity Was Born

Chapter Five: God’s flesh and blood

Chapter Six: God’s need to proceed

Homo Immortalis

Chapter Seven: The ghost in the machine

Chapter Eight: Gods at last!

Chapter Nine: Lucy, baby Selam, and the Turkana boy

Chapter Ten: The cardinal’s common ancestry

Chapter Eleven: Cell souls

The Aftermath of St. Paul’s Christianity

Chapter Twelve: Giordano Bruno’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s indictment of St. Paul’s Christianity

Chapter Thirteen: The fate of St. Paul’s Christianity

To Faber A. Carmona

One must have become indifferent; one must never ask if the truth is useful or if it may prove our undoing; the predilection of strength for questions for which no one today has the courage for the forbidden; the predestination to the labyrinth.

Nietzsche, Antichrist

Acknowledgements

M y first and most important acknowledgement and gratitude I owe to the Society of Jesus, the religious order I was a member of for twenty years. The Jesuits gave me an excellent education in the Classics, philosophy, and Catholic theology, and sent me to major centers of education, particularly to colleges and universities in Spain, Canada, Austria, and Germany, the most prestigious of which were the University of Innsbruck and the Free University of Berlin, where I received my PhD.

I am particularly grateful to my Jesuit superiors who made this education possible, as well as to the excellent Jesuit professors who taught me. They contributed incalculably to the writing of this book because without the extensive and profound knowledge they enabled me to acquire about the history and theology of Christianity and the Catholic church in particular, I would never have been able to arrive at the conclusions I have arrived at by writing this book.

I also wish to acknowledge the inspiration I received from my dear departed friend Edith Hilliker during the first four years of my stay in Germany, with whom I held long discussions about evolution, the subject that contributed decisively to my loss of faith in the Catholic religion and to leave the Jesuit order while I was still studying at the Free University of Berlin. Additionally, and no less important for my conversion, were the courses I took and the books I read at the university about modern and contemporary philosophy.

Above all, I acknowledge the encouragement I received from numerous scholars and institutions in Italy and Germany to conduct the extensive research that led me to write and publish my book on the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, who was a heretical excommunicated priest and was condemned to be burnt at the stake, mainly for his belief in an uncreated, eternal, infinite, homogeneous, and centerless universe. Bruno stirred in me an ardent desire to understand the causes of his execution and to denounce the injustice of the Catholic church for its role in bringing it about. This book is, in a sense, a sequel to my book on Bruno, for he was, along with Friedrich Nietzsche, the rebel who dedicated his life and writings to subvert the values that St. Paul had established.

Finally, I wish to express my gratitude and admiration to my dear friend Faber Carmona who has edited this book with extraordinary patience, dedication, accuracy, and insight, and suggested important changes and corrections to be made in the manuscript. Above all, he has inspired and encouraged me to finish and seek publication of my manuscript which, without his valuable help, could not have been written.

Ramon G. Mendoza, PhD

Ft. Lauderdale, Florida

March 24, 2009

Preface

T

his book is about the religion whose author, a Catholic priest who, after twenty years of being a member of the Society of Jesus, left the Order and the priesthood and became a lay atheist. He wrote it mainly because he needed to understand why it took him so long to find out what had made him the person he was before and no longer is now. It is not a justification of the author’s apostasy nor a testament similar to the one written by the French abbé Jean Mercier who, at the end of his life, acknowledged his mistake in believing in the dogmas of the Catholic church and apologized to his parishioners for having deluded them for so many years; nor is it similar to Bertrand Russell’s well-known book Why I am not a Christian, for this book is neither an autobiography nor a denunciation; instead, its main purpose is to draw the attention of its readers to facts concerning primarily the Christian religion, which the author believes are extremely important for Christians all over the world to become aware of.

Very few people in this country would like to hear what the author has written in this book and, consequently, very few publishing houses would risk not making much profit if they publish it. However, there are some encouraging events, particularly the heated discussions that are taking place about the relationship between science and religion and the interest the media is taking in keeping the public informed about certain scientific discoveries which are generally perceived by the faithful as threatening to their faith, such as evolution and stem-cell research and experimentation.

The author contends that contemporary Christianity is not the apostles’ Christianity, but a religion attributed to St. Paul asserting that Jesus’s crucifixion was a sacrifice, whereas Jesus’s apostle Mathew and the other three Evangelists, namely, Mark, Luke, and John, interpreted Jesus’s death as the execution of the long-awaited Messiah by the Roman oppressors, instigated by the Jews and approved by Yahweh, as the necessary precondition of his resurrection, which alone would redeem them from the yoke of the infidels, punish their desecration of the temple, and grant them personal immortality.

As a result, Paul’s alleged interpretation of Jesus’s execution as a sacrifice became the bedrock of Christianity, thanks to having been made the official religion of the Roman empire by emperor Constantine, who ordered the immediate annulment of all the numerous other interpretations of Jesus’s execution already widespread all over the empire, and the abolition of all the other Christian communities, which very soon led to the universal worship and apotheosis of the Cross.

To my knowledge, there is no book presently accessible to the public that addresses these momentous and highly consequential facts directly and with the indispensable depth and thoroughness they deserve.

Introduction

C

hristianity is the only world religion entirely based on the idea of sacrifice. Because animal sacrifices were essential to the doctrine and cult of pre-Diaspora Judaism, the religion that St. Paul allegedly created remained ultimately and essentially Jewish. Actually, the replacement of an animal victim by a human one could never have occurred to a Jew other than Paul who was also a Roman citizen who grew up in the midst of the pagan Greek environment in Tarsus and knew that bloodthirsty Roman pagans would believe such a preposterous contention. And yet, Pliny the Elder (b. 23 CE d. 79 CE) wrote, It is beyond calculation how great is the debt owed to the Romans, who swept away the monstrous rites, in which to kill a man was the highest religious duty and for him to be eaten a passport to health. How then, was it possible that Paul got away with such a contention? The answer is incontrovertible; only and exclusively by assuring that the crucified had resurrected.

Jesus’s resurrection was the conclusive proof that Jesus was the sacrificial victim whose crucifixion God sanctioned and demanded; moreover, that God needed the cruelest and most humiliating sacrifice of his Son as the indispensable condition for forgiving not only the sins of his chosen people but those of the Gentiles as well, otherwise he certainly would have chosen a less cruel and humiliating way to achieve this.

Jesus, the Son of God, died for our sins and rose from the dead. This is Paul’s kerygma, his message of salvation to the Gentiles. It has three parts which Paul compressed into one brief and easily understandable proposition: first, that Jesus was the son of God; second, that he died for our sins, i.e., that his crucifixion was a propitiatory sacrifice; and third, that the victim resurrected. The kerygma is the result of Paul’s deft manipulation of two doctrines of pre-Diaspora Judaism, namely, the need for propitiatory animal sacrifices to placate Yahweh’s wrath and the resurrection of bodies, which the Pharisees, Paul’s party, believed in.

This book focuses on the circumstances that led St. Paul to interpret Jesus’s crucifixion as a propitiatory sacrifice to placate Yahweh’s wrath over the sins of humanity. It answers the question, How was it possible that the religion that he crafted and established in a handful of cities in the Eastern Mediterranean became the official religion of the Roman Empire in less than four hundred years, as well as the basis and core of almost all the religious, political, economic, social, and cultural institutions of the