Constantine, the first Christian Emperor of Rome
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I've often said that the Muslims were just tools in the Hands of God to punish the Christians for their sins during the rise of Mohammed and Islam. Because by that time, the 6th and 7th centuries, Christianity had become as idolatrous and as wicked and as corrupt as any kind of paganism, and their temples were filled with idols, statues of Mary and Joseph and blah blah! They just cleaned out the old pagan idols and put in new ones, that's all. That's all the Romans did. They even used some of the same old heathen temples for their churches. That's what the first Christian church building was (estatablished by Constantine around 325 AD) , did you know that? It was not built, it was a former pagan Roman heathen temple! They just painted over the pictures and painted on new pictures.
They threw out all the old idols and made new ones! After all, they didn't want to put the poor idol-makers out of business! Making images and idols was big business in those days! They didn't want to put all those great Mediaeval artists out of business, they had to have work and it meant money. So they gave them new business to paint new pictures and make new idols.--And not only that, they didn't want to put all the temple builders out of business or the Temple's Union would have howled! So the government put them to work building new temples, only now they were Christian temples instead of pagan temples.
Look how much was economic in the corruption of the Church, just to keep businesses going and people busy and furnish employment! Besides, they were just commanded by Caesar to become Christians. An early Emperor proclaimed, "From now on Rome is Christian!" Whether they got saved or not, they had to worship the Christian idols and the Christian God and worship in Christian temples, whether they liked it or not! Is that conversion? Is that Salvation?--No!
So no wonder it became such a Hell of a religion full of a bunch of rats who in secret were still worshipping their old gods and idols and only came to the temple because they had to and were compelled to, and only confessed that they worshipped God or Jesus and Mary because they were forced to! Just like the former Roman Emperors used to force'm to worship the old pagan gods, they turned around and started forcing them to worship Jesus! What kind of a Salvation is that? What kind of Christianity is that? That's not any good Christianity! They were just forced to worship even when they didn't want to. That wasn't changing hearts. Their hearts were just as black and wicked and filthy and corrupt as they were before, so there were corrupt people in the congregation and corrupt priests in the pulpit, all there only because they were forced to.
They actually took some of the images, the actual idols, painted them over and called them Mary and Joseph, etc.! That's actual ancient history! It probably doesn't come out too much now because the Catholics wouldn't like it. But they had this beautiful statuary, gorgeous statues, and they didn't want to just throw'm all away. So any that they could possibly just paint over and change the pictures a little bit and call them Joseph, Mary or somebody else, they did! They didn't want to destroy all that beautiful classical art, so they just changed the expression or changed the rod to a cross or something like that. Well, the Catholics were guilty of a lot of that kind of corruption, so it's no wonder God sent the Muslims down on the Christians.
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