In the Middle Ages, when a man with money got tired of life, he committed suicide with the blessings of the Church.

We all know that not only was suicide a mortal sin in the eyes of the Medieval Church, but a person who committed suicide could not be given a Christian burial. In fact, one of the ways a person became a vampire was to commit suicide and rise from the dead.

But the Church approved of suicide if it was done right. When a Benedictine monk took his final vows, he was accorded burial rites. He became “dead to this world.”

If a wealthy man got tired of living, he was given church rites and buried alive. A priest accompanied him to his burial place. He was put in a hole and food and water were provided through a hole in the grave.

I said “a man with money” because he had to get the tomb dug, pay for the rites, and pay for the supply of food and water.

For the man buried alive death was not long in coming, but it was a Holy Death. He was assured of salvation.

Poor Origen! Origen lived in the fourth century and he was one of the greatest religious writers and teachers and theologians in history. But he was never allowed to become a priest and he has been damned by the Church.

The Church kept insisting that the highest virtue was sterility. St. Paul said, “It is better to marry than to burn,” but the best of all was chastity. Then poor Origen read these words from Jesus, which he quoted but I cannot find:

“Blessed are those who make eunuchs of themselves in my name.”

So Origen, following the teachings of Paul and what he took to be the teachings of Christ, got a knife and made a eunuch of himself. He spent the rest of his life being persecuted by the Church. He was denied ordination as a priest, he was excommunicated by his bishop.

But Origen kept founding new schools of theology and was too valuable to be ignored. Other bishops allowed him to serve, but none would ordain him.

Like suicide, being a eunuch was the holiest thing possible, but it had to be done right.

Jimmy Carter almost lost the presidency in 1976 because of a similar error. Jesus said that when a married man looked on another woman he had committed adultery in his heart. Carter quoted that to a Playboy reporter during the 1976 campaign and said he had committed adultery in his heart many times. His poll ratings collapsed.

CS Lewis, the great Christian writer, as an old man, said that God could let him live a lot longer, but he wished God would call him soon. That is committing suicide in your heart, but it is no sin.

I discussed the movie “The Believer,” where a young Jew was so outraged by the Judeo-Christian admiration of Job that he became a Nazi. In case you haven’t heard the story, God and Satan were talking about this guy Job who loved the Lord with all his heart.

Satan told God that Job only loved God because he was rich and healthy and had a nice family. So God killed Job’s family, took away all his possessions, and made Job sick and hated. And Job loved Jehovah anyway!

Jehovah showed old Satan what was what!

There is nothing wrong with killing a man’s family if Jehovah does it to win a bet.

And this, to my mind, is what is meant by Judeo-Christianity. It has no Jesus reducing all those commandments to two. It has LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of theology, but no RELIGION.

When the Spanish Conquistadores took over Mexico City, the Aztecs desperately sacrificed four
thousand prisoners to their god in a matter of a few hours to get them to drive the Spaniards out. They cut their victims’ hearts out and rolled their bodies down those great stairs this Great Civilization had built.

Only a few decades ago, the official line was the Aztecs did not practice human sacrifice at all. But this line was abandoned when thousands of skeletons appeared at the base of those Greatly Civilized steps, so historians declared that the Aztec priests could not have cut out THAT MANY hearts as fast as the Spaniards said they did.

So some doctors tested the theory.

Some doctors made realistic dolls and tried cutting out the hearts with the speed the Aztec priests would have had to have. They used the old stone knives of the Great Civilization of the Aztecs. At first they thought the historians were right for a change. It couldn’t be done that fast.

Then the doctors thought about it, used another technique and found out it was easy.

They were not the pros the Wise Men of the Great Civilization were, so they had to rediscover this ancient, sophisticated and lost technique.

The doctors may have been lost in the required Politically Correct admiration of the genius of this Lost Civilization. Everybody is always lost in admiration of the sophistication of all non-white civilizations.

The Spaniards, on the other hand, were appalled by this Aztec slaughter.

The Spaniards worshiped human sacrifice, too, but this was the wrong kind. There were tens of thousands of boys and girls who had been committed to monasteries and convents in Spain at birth and dedicated to a life of self-torture and sterility, but that was the right kind of human sacrifice. Those children were aging and dying and suffering and stinking in silence and behind walls.

The Aztecs were rolling their sacrifices down the stairs, on the Aztec equivalent of national television.

We have the same morality today. You can’t execute man, and you certainly can’t perform a public execution, but you can lock him quietly in a steel cage for the rest of his life.

Or you can let him out to go kill some more human sacrifices on the streets. As long as nobody is executed on television, and the bloody corpses of the killer’s victims are not shown on television, the whole thing is just fine.

Judeo-Christianity is alive and well!