Thursday 10 April 2008

crumpets and butter
it must be real butter though
not imaginary

Even Martin Luther wondered how there could be 26 apostles buried in Germany, when they were only twelve in the entire Bible. . . It is clear that most 'relics' are frauds.--Bart Brewer, Pilgrimage From Rome, (C) 1986 Bob Jones University Press , p. 126

Most of the known world, some of us realise, is in denial about basic truths that affect us all. We’ll avoid the subject of evolution for today, since that is something the truth of which seems blindingly obvious to me, but which a large percentage of people refuse to accept, since it challenges their basic conception of their universe.
Let’s look at something more specific. St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, a site of pilgrimage for many Catholics and allegedly the place where St Peter died. The new Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11744a.htm) for instance states ‘St. Peter's residence and death in Rome are established beyond contention as historical facts by a series of distinct testimonies extending from the end of the first to the end of the second centuries, and issuing from several lands.’
The Catholic Encyclopedia’s definition of the phrase ‘historical facts’ is not a definition which professional historians would recognise, but then we are dealing with an organisation which presumably treats the Bible itself as historical fact, so we have to be aware that we are dealing with ‘historical facts’ on that level.
Two separate Popes of the twentieth century (neither of them archaeologists or anthropologists) have endorsed the veracity of the discovery of St Peter’s bones, despite the fact that these were two separate sites and two separate skeletons. The most recent, allegedly discovered beneath the Basilica, is now displayed in an arrangement of plastic display cases, and contains – amongst other things - five tibias, one of which is a woman’s, and the bones of sheep, cows, pigs, goats, a chicken and a mouse.
For a more detailed account of what is essentially an act of massive fraud perpetrated by the Catholic Church, please check out http://sxws.com/charis/relics10.htm.