Who is the worst Scoundrel?

On the 31^st October 1517 Martin Luther is said to have issued his “95 Theses” questioning the morality or immorality of the practice by the Roman Catholic Church of selling “Indulgences.”

Having committed a “venial sin” ( as opposed to a deadly one ) Christians, so the R.C.Church teaches to this day, will have to spend time in Purgatory, where flames, pain and suffering await them.

If, so the calculating Popes of this time announced, letters of Indulgence would be purchased by Christians, their time, or the time of their loved-ones in whose name the Indulgence was purchased, in Purgatory would be shortened, if not totally eliminated.

This practice, instituted by the Popes and executed by hundreds of “Indulgence Preachers” is surely no different from the Mafia, who assures the merchants of their town, that their stores would be protected from vandalism, fire bombs and total destruction, if they rendered regular “Protection Payments.”

Replace “Protection” with “Indulgence” and you have an undeniable simile.

History demonstrates over and over again that many of the Popes acted no differently than Sicilian Mafia Dons.

So far, so good: Luther recognized an evil and spoke against it, thereby founding the Reform movement, referred to as “Lutheran Church”, “Protestantism” and by several other names.

Who was Martin Luther really?

At first, Luther was eager to convert members of the Jewish faith to Christianity and he spoke in the kindliest but condescending of terms about them.

Once he became aware that conversion of members of the Jewish faith to Christianity was very difficult, if not impossible, he, in his frustration, became a virulent Antisemite, publishing a number of treaties and essays against Jews. The worst of them was entitled: “On the Jews and their Lies”

in which he listed 7 points regarding the manner in which Jews should be treated:

1. Burn down their schools and synagogues; this is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians.
2. Raze to the ground and destroy their houses and transfer them to “Community Settlements”
3. Confiscate all Jewish literature, which was blasphemous and in which idolatry, lies, and cursing is taught.
4. Prohibit Rabbis to teach on pain of loss of life and limb.
5. Deny Jews “Safe-Conduct” on the streets, for they have no business in the countryside.
6. Appropriate their wealth
7. Assign Jews to manual labor as a form of penance.

Luther, at his most hate filled writings spoke of the Jews as “a base and whoring people who are full of the devil's feces, in which they wallow like swine” and the synagogue is an “incorrigible whore and an evil slut.”

This, believe it or not, are the utterings of a self professed “Christian minister” and learned Theologian.

There are, of course, a number of apologists who will claim that Luther's virulent Antisemitism is not based on race, but rather on “theological differences.”

Is it really possible that there exists a person who believes that it makes any difference whatever, why the above 7 points are justified in one way more than in another?

400 years later, Hitler, Himmler and their gang of murdering hoodlums must have read this Essay and set into practice almost exactly all of the 7 points. Under H & H these places, referred to in point 2 above as “Community Settlements” were simply called “Concentration Camps” and to the millions who perished there it made little difference whether they were put to death for “racial”or “theological” reasons.

While I am not known as a defender of Roman Catholicism, ( in fact I consider Religion in all its manifestations as one of the worst evils against which mankind has to struggle), it seems to me that the practices of the Papacy and its henchmen, of selling indulgences, against which Luther protested so vociferously and which resulted eventually in the formation of Protestantism is, in the moral sense, like nothing when compared to the preaching of this fanatic as expressed in his writings.
It is, in fact, a simple "Con Job" compared to the urgings to deprive a people of its existence. 
The papal promise of a shortened stay in Purgatory was simply a blatant lie, in which probably not even the Pope himself believed. It was a primitive attack on the gullibility of the Catholic masses to cheat them out of part of their mostly hard earned savings. One may come to the conclusion that the idea of Purgatory was the first step in the black mail of simple minded believers.

It is fair to state that Antisemitism found such fruitful soil in largely Protestant Germany, when one considers that all the German population needed to do was to point to the writings of the admired founder of their religious splinter group.

This easily explains the “Kristalnacht,” the book-burning, the illegal expropriation of Jewish property, the willful, brutal attacks on Jews in the streets of many German cities and finally their extermination in the gas ovens of innumerable concentration camps.

Please, dear Lord, if you exist and if you care, save me from Catholics and Protestants alike.

A Pest on both their houses.

Bertstravels.