http://members.aol.com/porchnus/memorial/turning.htm

  s a young man once, and now as a septuagenarian, I have spent countless hours in
  libraries, trying to better understand virulent anti-Semitism. I have been seeking
  answers to the question: What happened to biblical Christianity? When one reads
  the Sermon on the Mount and studies the admonishments and ideals of Jesus of
  Nazareth, and then compares same to Christian history, the result is an incredible puzzle. When and who transformed the yearning for agape, for universal love, into centuries of bloody torture and the burning alive of fellow humans? And why? How did love thy neighbor get twisted into loving thy neighbor unless thy neighbor is not a Christian, or not a Christian of the majority denomination -- and then you should not hesitate to slay thy neighbor?

      Eureka! I do believe I have found the source. The book is The Christians by Bamber Gascoigne, published by Wm. Morrow & Co. NY, in 1977. The author is a prominent British writer and historian. On page 40, he quotes Emperor Theodosius, a successor to Constantine, the gentleman who mandated Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire in our 4th century. Thereafter it became known, despite its very unholy behavior, as the Holy Roman Empire.

      As a source for the quotation, Mr. Gascoigne credits Eusebius, a renowned ancient historian of the early Church. In the year 380, some 55 years after the Nicene Council formulated the Holy Trinity concept, Emperor Theodosius issued the following proclamation:

      "It is our will that all the peoples we rule shall practice the religion which the divine Peter the Apostle transmitted to the Romans. We shall believe in the single deity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, under the concept of equal majesty and of the Holy Trinity.

      "We command that those persons who follow this rule shall embrace the name of Catholic Christians. The rest however, whom we judge demented and insane, shall sustain the infamy of heretical dogmas, their meeting places shall not receive the name of churches, and they shall be smitten first by divine vengeance and secondly by the retribution of our own initiative, which we shall assume in accordance with divine judgment."

      In my opinion, the foregoing indicates that with the Nicene Council, the Church deified the Messenger and soon after discarded the Message. The Crusades, Inquisitions, counter-Reformation wars and finally the incredible Holocaust, have their origins in those fateful words.

  oday, the world is witnessing a modern application in former Yugoslavia with
  Eastern Orthodox Christians (Serbs) and Roman Catholic Croats slaughtering their
  Moslem neighbors. Most of the media seem to be cooperating with this modern evil
  by never mentioning that Moslems have been residents of Serbia and Croatia for
  centuries and are therefore also Serbs and Croats. One side is identified by its religion and the other side by its national origin. The media seems very reluctant to use the "C" word (Christian) to identify those who massacred Moslems into mass graves. By the way, even tyrannical, bloodthirsty Josef Stalin, a former seminary student, applied the demented and insane criterion to get rid of his real and perceived enemies. He too was raised in the Eastern Orthodox tradition of Theodosius.

Aaron Hiller, aka Skeptic249@aol.com
4625 Shys Hill Road
Nashville TN 37215