Some years ago I wrote a book about the pagan foundations of virtually all Christian custom, which was very well received in my former church denomination. In fact, the book was something of a 'best seller,' and countless ministers praised and recommended my work from their pulpits. This praise abruptly ended upon the release of my second book, which proved that the very concept of a "virgin-born-son-of-god" dying for the sins of humanity was the cornerstone of ancient pagan theology. For that book I was excommunicated and relentlessly denounced as a "modern-day anti-Christ."
Certainly I understand why ministers have gone after my book—I've been told that it has taken thousands of people out of Christianity, which means it threatens to deprive these "men of god" of their livelihood. And I wasn't particularly shocked by their base dishonesty in the matter, since the history of Christianity demonstrates that the ministry is guilty of far worse than lies, slander and libel. What bothered me then, as now, is that the lies these men perpetuate continue a cycle of death and despair that will, if left unchecked, spell the downfall of Western society and ultimately the world.
Sometime back I was reading an article in a Seventh-day Adventist publication that trivialized Christianity's responsibility in two thousand years of wars and genocide by telling readers that communism and other political movements had killed far more people in the twentieth century than had Christianity in all the preceding centuries. What an absurd, lying argument!
Percentage wise, the Christian Church has killed more people than any political regime of the twentieth century, and that is a fact. Even worse, those political regimes and/or their agendas, to which the Seventh-day Adventist author referred, were biblically-based. For instance, the leaders of National Socialism had the support of the Christian clergy, signed a concordant with the Catholic Church, and most, including Adolf Hitler, considered themselves Christian. Since the declassification of World War Two documents, we know that the leaders of the Christian Allied Armies were accomplished liars and murderers of epic proportions. Franklin Roosevelt purposely provoked the Japanese to war, and knew in advance that the attack on Pearl Harbor was coming, and when it was coming. This "great" man sacrificed the lives of his own soldiers in order to have an excuse to drag America into the Second World War. Winston Churchill, the "great leader" of war-time Britain, is now exposed as one of history's greatest mass murderers. The lies and horrid dishonesties of this man are largely responsible for a war wherein countless millions of Christians butchered each other for stated reasons that are also proven lies.
Anyone familiar with the history of the Bolshevik Revolution will know that the majority of its leaders were products of religious philosophy. For instance Karl Marx (Karl Heinrich Mordecai) and Moses Hess, the founders of communism, were both men with distinguished rabbinical pedigrees; and as history amply proves, their religious backgrounds certainly spilled over into their politics. (The Jewish Chronicle of London, April 4, 1919, reports: "There is much in the fact of Bolshevism itself, that so many Jews are Bolsheviks. The ideals of Bolshevism are consonant with many of the highest ideals of Judaism..." Of the top four hundred leaders of the Russian Revolution, virtually all were Jews, including Vladimir Illyich Lenin himself. Jerusalem Post International Edition, Jan. 26, 1991, article, Who was a Jew? Why, Lenin of Course! and Dimitry Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography)
Now the above isn't quoted here as an attack on the Jewish people, the American people, the British people, the German people or the Russian people. Collectively they are only a small part of a two-thousand-year-old tragedy. What the above illustrates is that even when men have divested themselves of the bible, the cruel narrow-minded philosophy of "Judeo-Christianity" still holds this world like a steel vice. I didn't understand to what degree this was true until recently.
After the release of my second book, of necessity I was forced to critically examine many other cherished doctrines. This was necessary because many of the thousands of people, who left Christianity after reading my book, wanted answers and they turned to me. But I had no answers, nor indeed at that point could I clearly define what questions were relevant. That left me no alternative but to drop out of the public eye to pursue my studies.
And so Darrell Conder, the "modern-day anti-Christ", disappeared. However, my critics did not disappear. They continued in full force denouncing both me and my book. Not only did these "ministers-of-god" tell outrageous lies about my personal life, they purposely distorted and lied about my theological arguments against Christian doctrine and the bible. They misquoted my book and writings, and, in the case of a minister named William Dankenbring, even made fun of my name in a sermon. (He reminded his congregation that a "condor" is a giant vulture, and that I was fulfilling that role by feeding on the flesh of Christianity. I responded that vultures only eat dead things, so effectively he was comparing the Christian Church to a dead carcass!)
Dankenbring's personal attack really didn't bother me because I understood that it was the best "argument" this "man-of-god" had to defend his faith! What did bother me was hearing the laughter of his congregation on the sermon tape. The ignorance voiced in their self-righteous heehaws was disheartening, and a little too close to home, for I had once been in their blind state of mind. The fact is that Christian ministers have no answer for the multitude of contradictions and fables found in the "holy" scriptures, so they customarily go after the messenger with anything at hand to keep their "flock" from concentrating on the facts.
Notice how a Christian lady named Pam Dewey explains away the frauds of the New Testament on her Hebrew Roots web page:
"In 1996, a former long-time WCG minister named Darrell Conder rejected Christianity and began proselyting particularly to the circles of split-offs from the WCG. . . For the next several months I became deeply involved in exposing this man's attempts at proselyting, dialoguing with people who were being taken in by his teachings, and encouraging those in positions of influence in the exWCG community to realize that this man and his teachings did, indeed, pose a serious threat to the spiritual health of many naive Christians."In the process, I began to wonder just what it was that was driving Darrell Conder himself, as he was definitely not just casually selling his books, but obviously believed he was on a 'mission from the Almighty' to attack Christianity. So I wrote to him via email personally, and carried on a dialogue. I asked him what it was that first caused him to begin questioning the reality of Jesus. He fudged for a while, and rambled on and on in emails about the confusion in the writings of Paul and so on. But I pressed harder and insisted that there must be something more personal than just the intellectual arguments.
"And I finally got the answer. He confessed that he had been deeply disappointed by his experiences as a member of the WCG to find that there seemed to be no 'reality' to the claims of the Church for the power of a relationship with Christ to change lives, and the power of the spiritual gifts promised in the New Testament to operate within the Church. He had anointed many who were never healed, and he knew of many situations in which sincere people had not been helped in emotional, spiritual and other ways when struggling with sins in their life. He had never experienced any 'reality' of the indwelling of Christ in his own life either, and therefore, when he began studying what are usually referred to as the 'alleged discrepancies of the Bible' . . . particularly in the New Testament ... he latched on to these facts and concluded this was his answer—Christ wasn't real to him because the Jesus of the New Testament really was, he concluded, a myth.
"Thus all the 'intellectual' arguments I could have provided to him would really, in the long run, have done nothing to return him to a belief in Christ. Because his belief in Christ for thirty years in the Church had been just that ... an 'intellectual' belief, not an experience with the Risen Christ Himself."
In other words, Ms Dewey has no answers for the frauds of the New Testament, and wisely does not attempt to answer them on her web page. Instead she accuses me of not having an emotional relationship with the "Risen Christ Himself." I will say for the hundredth time: don't give me emotions, sentimentality, a Latin Mass or a "thus saith the Lord"; give me facts. If you want to appeal to the "Risen Christ", first prove to me that he was the son of God, that he rose from the dead and is now alive and ruling in heaven! You, Pam Dewey and Bill Dankenbring, and all your cohorts, cannot do that. Jesus is a two-thousand-year-old fraud living only in your appeals for faith and from the wallets of his deluded faithful! This is one of the reasons that I can no longer keep silent. I can no longer mutely watch as you and your legions emotionally defraud and plunder the poor and down-trodden of the world with deceit and empty promises.
In closing, I want to clear up another matter. Some will remember that I wrote a letter some years back to a minister named Fred Coulter in which I stated that I would cease actively teaching against the Christian Church and its doctrines. At the time I believed this was the best course. However, things have significantly changed in the world as a whole—so much so that I feel that the ever-growing madness of religion is surely going to bring to pass a global nightmare.
As I write this, the leader of our country has embroiled extraordinarily powerful forces of religious madness in a Middle Eastern war, which could easily ignite a third world war. We have a president who professes to be a devout Christian, allied with a nation that claims to be devoutly pursuing the faith of Abraham, facing a hornet's nest of religious fanatics who also claim Abraham as their father and rabidly follow the teachings of Mohamed.
With an impending world-wide religious war, I feel that I must renew my efforts to lead people to the realm of reality and hopefully, sanity. My plea is that you critically examine all things and prove them to be either truth or lies. Few have the courage to do this—I know, because for thirty years I was one of them—but if we, as a world, are to survive, then it must be in a world divested of man-made gods and madmen.
Darrell W. Conder
