PIOUS FRAUD 2

Instead of just doing a film review of Constantine's Sword (***), it seemed more apt to relate it to this thread. Author James Carroll is both brave and well-intentioned in this historical documentary (told as personal biography) regarding the origins (and brazen Christian culpability) for the relentless persecution of Jews throughout the last couple of millennia as being the killers of Christ as portrayed in the New Testament Gospels. On his journeys, many poignant and fascinating stories emerge and for many, I suspect, they will come as quite a shock to dearly held beliefs.

The real truth (as I see it) is simpler, starker and more shocking than even he, as a former priest, could understandably bring himself to contemplate. That Emperor Constantine (and many of his predecessors and successors), at a time of waning military influence, cynically and ruthlessly used Christianity as a means of oppression is clear, but the film doesn't reveal its special underlying strategy (and the one that gave it its unique leverage), that of forced acceptance of the historicity of the gospels, of fundamentalism. And therein lies a poetic tragedy because all the bloodshed and persecution and perversion and corruption and slaughter at the hands of the bearers of the holy cross was (and continues to be) committed on account of a distorted account of something that never even happened about someone who almost certainly never even existed. A fucking work of fiction.

And furthermore, neither was there a real decline of the Roman Empire, it just morphed from a military into a vast religious empire whose pagan origins and hierarchy are pretty much intact to this very day. The movie's footage of US Christian evangelists, and of the charlatans, pederasts, murderers, warmongers, child-molestors, perverts, and shameless self-serving crooks creepily dressed up as popes and bishops, will send a very real shiver right down your very real spine. And especially that nightmarish last shot of Ratzinger.