The Reformation and the Rise of the Nation State
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The Hebrew of Genesis opens with “In the beginning the Gods made the Heavens and the Earth.”
Elohim is plural of El, the king of the gods.
Because we use the Anglo-Saxon Goden (Wodin) i.e. “God” in the Germanic languages, we lack the plurality of the Hebrew. Similarly, so do the Latin tongues, which use the Celtic name Teu (Deus, Dieu, Dios).
The Gods are also physical, material beings. As Kautsky says, this was true in Jewish Christianity too: Heaven is to be made on Earth, it is not a “spiritual” kingdom in the sky. The religious idea today of “spirit” is inherited from Plato and the Greek idealists; it was unknown to the Hebrews and the Jewish Christians. When Christians today tell us God is “not a white-bearded man” that is in fact precisely what he was to the Jews and Judaeo-Christians: a material being who looks like us.
A vestige of this original physicality of Heaven and its inhabitants remains in Eastern Orthodoxy, in which the dead are asleep in their graves waiting to physically rise and ascend, as bodies, upon Christ’s command.
The Bible is only a combination of mythologies, epic events, and stories taken from different places and different civilizations adapted to the Hebrews to give them certain hopes and written by priests.
They also worshipped Baal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BaalBaal was a major ancient Canaanite and Phoenician deity, revered as the god of storms, fertility, and rain, crucial for agriculture. Often depicted holding a lightning bolt, he was considered the “Lord of Heaven” or “Master”. In the Bible, Baal is portrayed as a false god and primary rival to the Hebrew God, with worship involving intense, sometimes sexualized, rituals that Canaanites believed ensured prosperity
At the beginning, the Bible was written by polytheist priests in Babylonia, the Syrians and the Caldeans, and Jehovah is the summation of several pagan gods. That historical passage was corroborated by the Rosacrucians
It has already been proven by different sources that everything is fake and did not take place, including the existence of Jesus and his zealots. The real name of that movement should be Jesuism.
In Rome, there were too many christs and christians sects, but the Egyptian mythology prevailed
https://oscarperdomoleon.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/carcenac-b-jesus-3000-anos-antes-de-cristo.pdf. Jesus 3000 years before Christ, it was an Egyptian god, written by an ex-catholic priest
Mankind has created more than 14 million gods, and India has a warehouse of gods and goddesses, and they have their own ‘sacred book’, like the Mayas,https://yucatantoday.com/en/blog/el-popol-vuh, the Aztecs, the Iliad and the Odyssey.
The Greek mythology was part of the Humanities curriculum of certain universities during the 60; it was a much better read than the Bible.
The ten commandments, the exodus, and all those biblical figures were made famous by Hollywood filmmakers to make money and alienate people based on false narratives.
Engels wrote the real history of the Roman Christians
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/early-christianity/
I think we know things now about the history that Engels didn’t have to hand. There are many interesting books written by modern materialists and experts on religious history. We don’t have to rely on just 19th century sources any more.
Even Kautsky’s is much more detailed and researched than Engels, and I think his Foundations of Christianity still holds true.
Marx and Engels would have been thrilled with discoveries made since, including in the realm of religious history.
Yes, we know that, but they laid down the materialist foundation to understand the real origin of religion, and based on that, more materialist investigators have expanded their research
It also shows that men and women during that epoch were more likely to read books than in our times. Libraries look like dessert, and bookstores are going bankrupt; some fanatics want to burn books that nobody is reading, they are just getting dusty. They buy an expensive laptop to play video games and to read comic books. They are experts on communism, and they have not read anything about it
Yes. The fact that everyone was rushing to buy the cheapest pocket Bibles and reading tracts produced by both sides in the English Civil War shows they could either read themselves or knew someone who could read.
Private reading is a recent phenomenon. Reading was a social activity in the medieval and Early Modern periods.The numbers of Englishmen who fled the colonies of New England to join the native Americans were huge! If recaptured by the New England authorities they faced burning, hanging and breaking on the wheel. Yet still more fled to live with the native people and get away from the repressive Biblemania of their fellows.
(Ref: Stannard; Hill).In 1644 the English parliament, purely for political reasons, promised to adopt Presbyterianism as the state religion, so the Scots would join them in fighting the King. The Presbyterians immediately demanded an end to all religious toleration and urged the suppression of Independency in religion, even though the Independents were also Calvinists.
Needless to say, they failed to persuade the English, although Thomas Fairfax, commander-in-chief of parliament’s army, resigned in protest at parliament’s suspicion of the Scots.
(Hill, The English Bible).Google: “… enclosure of common land and open fields continued during the Interregnum (1649–1660). While the period was marked by political instability, the underlying economic pressures and the trend towards consolidating land into private ownership persisted throughout the 17th century.Key details regarding enclosure during this time include:Continued Momentum: The decades surrounding 1640, including the 1650s, saw ongoing enclosure, with significant portions of counties like Leicestershire and Durham being enclosed, alongside 90% of Welsh lowlands.Shift in Power: Following 1640, government attempts to prevent enclosures or make money by fining enclosers—a practice previously used by the Stuart kings to control the gentry—ceased.Capitalist Development: Landlords and developers continued to drain fens and enclose common lands, often facing resistance from locals who relied on those lands for grazing and foraging.Regional Differences: In some areas, particularly in parts of central England, the conversion of arable land to pasture continued, driven by the profitability of sheep rearing.”
It was considered a duty in the Middle Ages and into the Early Modern era for farmers to leave a measure of the harvest for wild birds.
Some quakers are living with the natives in the Venezuelan jungles and they call themselves socialists and they have established communes with he natives
Before 1660 the Quakers were not pacifists. They urged a belligerent foreign policy and demanded to know why Cromwell had not attacked Rome. (Hill, The English Bible).
Most religions and so called sacred books are based on violence, and they can be used by the ruling class to spread nationalism, bigotry, racism and xenophobia. Christians nationalists they do not care if they are electing gangsters, criminals, thieves, racists, or xenophobic candidates. The soviets used the orthodox church in order to spread patriotism among the Russians peasants during World War Two, and Stalin became the apostle of Jesus to finish the diabolical nazism and the other sides also used religion to bless tanks, warplanes, battleships, bombs, and soldiers
Enclosures produced modern proletariat.
https://portside.org/2026-05-03/capitalism-was-built-ruins-commons
Stalin was the Henry VIII of Russia (he even set up his new, Soviet, Patriarchate), as was Mao of China. The peasants were expropriated so they would be forced to work for the capitalist state.
In England’s case, so they would have to become a propertyless work force for merchants, burghers, upstart gentry etc. Most would be vagrants, beggars, petty thieves, or bonded to planters and sold as slaves to the colonies.
Volunteering oneself as a slave in the colonies would become a legally accepted way of escaping the gallows.
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