Case Studies in Christian Malevolence
THE CITY OF COLOGNE WANTS TO FORGET
AND FORGIVE
|
Cologne's notorious 'Witches' pardoned 400 years after executions"Cologne City Council
has
pardoned 38 women nearly 400 years after
they
were sentenced to death for suspected
witchcraft, a newspaper reported
on Saturday.
Katharina Henot -
Germany's most
notorious "witch" - stood
accused of:
In 1627 she was sentenced to death by torture by the Cologne Court. Councillors voted
unanimously
to pardon the former Cologne inhabitants
in a vote on Thursday, rejecting "any
violation of human dignity and
human rights," wrote the paper.
The move was not a judicial act - authorities in modern day Germany do not have the power to overturn rulings made under the Holy Roman Empire. Instead, the move was intended to highlight how easily a person can be defamed to the point of no longer being seen as human, but a demon that deserves to die a horrible death. Hartmut Hegeler, a
retired pastor
from Unna who had
submitted a citizen
proposal to pardon the "witches" was said
to be "very relieved"
following the vote on Thursday.
He is now hoping a mass will be held in the Cologne Cathedral as a gesture of reconciliation by the diocese, according to the article. The decision makes
Cologne the 14th
local authority in Germany to
distance itself from historical witch
trials.
But not all
rehabilitation gestures have been agreed
without opposition, wrote the
paper.
When a citizen from Dusseldorf proposed that two women burned at the stake there in 1738 be rehabilitated, there was an objection from a citizen who claimed pardoning the women would amount to challenging his Catholic faith. His objection was overruled. Historians estimate the total of 25,000 women and men were sentenced to death in Germany in the past for having entered into a pact with the devil.... " Source:30 Jun 12 12:20 CET |
NOW READ THE TRUTH AND DECIDE FOR YOURSELF!
The vast majority of those victims were women and girls. It is now recognised that ALL the victims were innocent of any involvement in paganism or witchcraft.
The Earliest Nazi?
In Niesse in Silesia alone the
executioner ( in a chilling precursor of the Final
Solution) built a special oven to speed up the
burnings. In 1651 he roasted alive 42
women and young girls. Within 9 years he had
personally roasted to death over a thousand people
accused of witchcraft .
Torture of witches was mandatory in the legal system
of the Holy Roman
empire. One woman was tortured on 56 (fifty-six)
separate
occasions before 'confessing' to being a witch.
Torture was so effective that most victims 'confessed'
within two or three applications. Just the threat of
it was enough for many. The 56 tortures visited on one
woman mentioned in Russel Hope Robbins learned Encyclopaedia
of Witchcraft and Demonology is unusual and
tends to denote a young and voluptuous victim.
Witch-Torture was a form of priestly pornography.
In a time when the turn of an ankle set men's pulses racing where else could a celibate priest strip a woman, chain her to a rack, paw over her naked body and probe into every orifice looking for 'the Devil's mark'?
In the scale of the denegration and suffering imposed on these women by their torturers sexual impositions were a relative trifle - what woman would feel it worthwhile to complain about being raped yesterday when her feet were being smashed to a bloody pulp in The Boot today?
It is not easy, in the modern world, to effectively understand what the word 'torture' meant in Witchcraft trials but the following account gives something of the horror.
Clara Geissler Case
The torture in 1597 of Clara Geissler of Gelnhausen, a 69 year old widow, illustrates this.
"She resisted the thumbscrews, but when her feet were crushed and her body stretched on the rack, she screamed pitiously and said all was true that they had demanded of her: she drank the blood of children whom she stole in her night flights and she had murdered about sixty infants . She named twenty other women who had been with her at the sabbats, and said the wife of a late burgomaster presided over the flights and banquets. When released from the rack Clara retracted her accusations and pleaded that what she had said about the others were just rumours. The judges however arrested those she had named and tortured them. One of the women admitted crimes beyond that which Clara had mentioned so she (Clara) was again tortured to admit the 'truth'. Upon her release from torture Clara recanted a second time but was then tortured a third time 'with utmost severity' for several hours. She them admitted the lies the judges wanted to hear but during the agony she died under torture. On 23 August 1597 Clara Geissler's body was publicly burned as a witch. |
The accused was then jerked and dropped repeatedly under her own weight.
The Lutheran Carpzov, the law-giver of Saxony, claimed to have read the bible 53 times. He also claimed to have personally caused the burning to death of twenty thousand ( 20,000 ) people accused of witchcraft.
There are many, many more outrages by the pious church-people of Germany.
COLOGNE'S GUILT
The whole city of Cologne stood aside in 1577 when a
mob stoned to death a woman who had been cursorily
accused of witchcraft. No investigation was started
and nobody brought to book.
Few books have done as much harm as the Malleus...So great was its impact on humanity that Russel Robbins states that the book and its notorious authors 'set back the orderly development of civilisation by several hundred years'.
Real Cause Of The Genocide
The root cause of this witchcraft mania in Germany was the rise of protestant dissenters which challenged the power of the Catholi church. Ironically the mania caught on so well that plenty of Protestant churchmen belived the propaganda and started witch-hunting themselves using the Malleus Maleficarum! They were all responsible for many thousands of deaths.
The torture of innocent ordinary folk in Germany and Cologne had little if anything to do with Paganism. It was caused by power-struggles within Christian religious factions. If Germany's absolution from the hundreds of thousands of victims of Christian persecution is to be anything more than a PR stunt for the local tourist board Cologne will have to address the REAL issues.
No Cologne. Until you
admit the
truth instead of
perpetuating religious propaganda you will
not get our
forgiveness; otherwise the lives of people like
Clara
Geissler
will have been taken for nothing.
We Shall Remember Them.
John Freedom, Mortlake.
| Endnote;
In 1626 Katharina
Henot was accused of witchcraft - by the
Nuns of
St Clare's convent in Cologne. They said she
had 'bewitched'
them. |
ANOTHER NEW AGE SHOP FIREBOMBED
HAS SOMEONE TO DIE BEFORE YOU REALISE WHAT'S GOING ON?
The Bridge of Dreams New Age Shop in Lincoln was gutted by a petrol-bomb on Tuesday 28 January. The arsonists attacked at night; nothing was taken or stolen, the motive was malice.
This tragedy is the latest of a
rising tide of
attacks on New
Age
organisations and businesses in the U.K. and the
second firebombing to
occur. Yet the government turn a blind eye to the
plight of the victims
of this constant prejudice. The media and politicians
of this country
have repetitively failed to address the increasing
incidences of
Christian fanaticism in inverse proportion to their
obsession with
highlighting Islamic extremism. In the former all
Christians are
considered beyond reproach, yet in the latter all
Moslems are tarred
with the terrorist brush. Neither is true yet
politicians and the media
perpetrate the harmful stereotypes just the same.
Lincoln's Great and Good Stood By And Did
Nothing
And when short of a target for their
hypocrisy
it is a
time-tested
formula for rabid bigots to turn on religious
minorities who cannot
defend themselves. The petrol-bombing of the Lincoln
shop The
Bridge of Dreams was the last piece of
victimisation in a catalogue
of enmity from Lincoln's fundamentalists and
evangelicals. Like
witnesses at some gang-land killing, the people of
quaint Lincoln have
stood by and done nothing whilst a clutch of
obstreperous religious
fanatics mounted campaign after campaign to a level
which is
astonishing in its vindictiveness.
Not The First
The victimisation of The Bridge of Dreams is a classic example of how far Christian fundamentalists are willing to go but it is not THE classic example. The 'honour' of that title must go to The Sorcerer's Apprentice Bookshop in Leeds, West Yorkshire,the pre-emminent esoteric bookshop in the U.K. which was first targeted in 1988 in a despicable campaign of lies over four long-years using the dirtiest black propaganda imagineable with a gang of vicious fundamentalist agitators using Christian pillars of the Establishment to back their blatant persecution which was designed to destroy the S.A. and stop it from distributing genuine information on alternative beliefs from across the world. That campaign ended in a firebombing of the S.A. too, but unlike the Bridge of Dreams (which was short of necessary resources) The Sorcerers Apprentice was able to fight off the malice and still remains in business today, decades afterwards.
Lincoln; The Most Intolerant City in Britain
In 1255, the Jews were once again accused
of blood libel in Lincoln. A Christian
boy, Hugh of Lincoln, was chasing a ball
when he fell and drowned in a Jewish
cesspool. His body was found 26 days
later, when a large Jewish congregation
was gathered in Lincoln for a prominent
rabbis wedding. Some lincoln Christians
speculated that the boy was killed as part
of a ritual ceremony and 100 Jews were
executed.
|
By standing fast against religious
censorship
of an almost
insuperable kind the S.A. has earned its place
in history for
protecting freedom of belief and freedom of thought
for all people
everywhere. The full story of The victimisation of The
Sorcerers
Apprentice bookshop would take hundreds of pages
to relate (you can
see some of it here). We have detailed
on this page the much shorter but equally as
despicable persecution of The
Bridge of Dreams so that you, dear reader, can
understand how
sectarian persecution still exists today in Britain.
Excesses of Lincolnshire Media Largely to Blame
Just as the national newspapers
jumped on the
bandwagon and
gave
space to manic lies by religious fanatics who believed
in the now
defunct Satanic Child Abuse Myth, Lincoln's media rode
high with a
non-existent controversy framed for them by local
evangelists who
decided to rob the owners of Bridge of Dreams
of their rights.
Lincolnshire Councilors and Politicians Jumped on
Bandwagon
Not just Lincoln's media, but her Town Council and her politicians have for over a year shrugged their shoulders, resorted to expediency and turned a blind eye , allowing non-representative religious extremists to manipulate the political system for their own narrow sectarian ends, inciting hatred against the shop owners and anyone else whom they deemed had challenged the fundamentalists assumed absolute right to dictate how other people should live and what they should believe in.
How could they get away with it? Why
did no
one stop
them?
The full history of the victimisation of the Bridge of Dreams is astounding in the telling. As soon as the shop opened its doors it became the hub of intense hatred from the fundamentalists. They picketed the shop, distributing scare-mongering leaflets which stated that Lincoln's children were somehow at risk.
It was all nonsense but these were
mostly the
same
snipe-nosed
killjoy evangelicals who successfully campaigned to
have the Lincoln
Imp removed from the door of
Lincoln
cathedral. The bronze door-knocker had been a symbol
of the town for
hundreds of years and gave rise to the nickname of the
local football
team but despite businesses and locals lamenting the
short-sightedness
of it all (because the Imp's celebrity was a proven
tourist draw) the
snipe-nosed christian evangelists got their way - they
saw the Imp as a
representation of evil idolatry!
Despicable and Dishonourable Tactics
Some fundamentalist agitators went into The Bridge of Dreams pretending to be customers, and then surreptitiously inserted evangelical tracts in books on their shelves, condemning those who purchased.
Disturbing and abusive telephone
calls were
received by the
shop from
spiteful
people calling themselves Christians.
The fundamentalists arranged false controversies with the local media who couldn't resist printing every word against The Bridge of Dreams even though the allegations had no substance and there was no evidence to support the fundies' claims.
When the owners pleaded with the media not to print the abject lies for fear of the consequences and explained the ongoing fundamentalist countrywide campaign they were ignored. The media went ahead with the usual self-righteous kitsch.
Spurred on by their successes with the Lincolnshire Echo and other media clamour the fundamentalists obtained stock-lists from the shop and cut and pasted them up into false advertisement leaflets in an attempt to misrepresent Bridge of Dreams as a threat. Only legal action and police involvement stopped this fundamentalist plan from working.
Thwarted in their aims these wicked
people
then sent poisoned
pen
letters to the media repeating the lies about The
Bridge of Dreams
which they had themselves fabricated. The media
printed the letters before
checking the facts.
Later the newspaper printed a retraction but the
damage had been done,
just as
the fundamentalists desired it.
Troublemakers Let Off Again and Again
When proof of foul intent was given,
the
police discovered the
poisoned pen letter-writers and their link with
evangelical
Christianity. But they did not prosecute them.
When the
shop owners
pleaded with local councillors and officials for help,
they were told
that there was nothing that could be done.
Nothing? Could not
their Councilor or MP take up their case?
Unfortunately not, they
said! Not a word of caution or criticism left
anyone's lips. The
Great and the Good in Lincoln tacitly approved of the
actions of
these fundamentalist agitators. 
Like
something out of the 1955 cult movie Bad Day at
Black Rock,
Lincoln digniatries turned their heads and remained
silent. When
it
comes to spiritual terrorists disguised as do-gooder
Christians the
courage of local authorities soon fades. Good
Samaritans it would seem,
are in pretty short supply in Lincoln.
Spurred on at being able to get away
with all
this Lincoln
fundies may have believed they had a free hand and the
vicious
evangelicals
became
more irresponsible by the minute. They claimed that
the shop owners had
not obtained planning permission and demanded that the
Lincoln Planning
Department investigate. Like lap-dogs the local
authority did so. Much
trouble was
caused but the shop owners DID have planning
permission.
Fundamentalists Brought Orthodox Church Into Campaign
A special meeting of the Town Council was held and, in direct contravention of the rights of the shop proprietors, councillors and local politicians jumped on the bandwagon and made calls for the shop to be closed. The ensuing publicity in the local press further exacerbated the shop-owners position.
Had it not been for a reverse
campaign to
protect their rights
by
the S.A.F.F. which included a mass telephone protest
to block the
switchboards of Lincoln Town Hall, they might have
indeed ordered an
unconstitutional and
illegal action to close The Bridge of Dreams
which would have
probably ended up at the Court of Human Rights in
Strasbourg.
Shop Owners Compromise Seen as Weakness
Exhausted in the face of this hysterical and unreasonable Civic Terrorism the owners, being more responsible than those who attacked them, saw that the only way to avoid further harassment was to compromise and move to a less prominent site in Lincoln in the hope that the fundamentalists would leave them alone. The move took some weeks to organise.
The local newspaper came calling yet
again.
Realising that if
they told
the
truth the shop-owners would suffer further
victimisation from a
newspaper which had already printed lie upon lie about
them, they
employed a deception. They informed the reporter that
they were moving
to Hull. Within a day
the fundamentalists had caused front page headlines
in the Hull Daily
Mail, parading the very same lies and unfounded
allegations.
Bishop of Hull Dragged Into Imaginary Controversy
Local fundamentalist agitators who had networked with their Lincoln counterparts even conned the very stupid Bishop of Hull into getting in on the act and criticising the imaginary shop! Britain; Land of the Brave and home of the Free?
The main protagonist was a fanatical fundamentalist Christian group which gave out leaflets in the marketplace which inferred that the shop-owners were involved in Satanic Child Abuse, a most despicable slur without any foundation whatsoever. The Satanic Ritual Abuse Myth was invented by fundamentalists in the U.S.A. precisely to oppress and suppress freedom of religious choice and here is an illustration of how it was used.
The group making the criminal
allegations,
like thousands of
such fundamentalist groups in
the U.K.
today, is a registered religious charity with our
society bestows with
special tax advantages!
Fundies Demand Stall Is Closed Down
The evangelicals demanded that the market operators close down the stall. Please note that the demand was not to remove offending items from the stall (for their were none) but to close the entire stall down.
The market owners met with the proprietors of Bridge of Dreams over the issue. The man and wife team who run Bridge of Dreams are responsible and law abiding people and they sell entirely safe and legal goods. They have every right to co-exist and continue in business both morally and legally under the terms of EEC competitive trading rules.
Unbelievably during this entire
debacle The
Market
Operators
were the only authorities to have actually bothered to
talk directly
with the shop owners! Far from finding them 'agents
of the evil'
they
saw that they were good, kind people. Accordingly
they rejected the
complaints by the evangelicals and allowed the
owners to continue
trading.
Devil Doll Lie
Thwarted in their intolerance the fundamentalists then made up a totally untrue story about a child who was supposed to have purchased a 'devil doll' from the stall. The extent of the warped nature of these peoples' minds and their willingness to misrepresent the truth can be seen from the fact that the 'devil doll' turned out to be a set of hand-made Guatemalan Worry Dolls. The same ones that the United Nations sell and feature in their ethnic goods mail order catalogue to raise money for Third World Relief projects!
Yet on the basis of this lie a local MP jumped on the bandwagon to condemn the stall in the press.
The fundamentalists milked this controversy well, starting another petition with which they assailed customers in the marketplace.
In the face of growing antagonism, in order not to jeopardise the safety of others in the marketplace, the shop-owners decided to call it a day, leave the market and rush through the refurbishment of their new premises in Lincoln.
The nasty fundamentalist
trouble-makers
then celebrated
again,
claiming to have succeeded in putting them out of
business for a
'second' time.
The new Bridge of Dreams shop is tucked away down an arcade situated in a secondary location. Yet within days of its opening fundamentalists had located the shop and , unbelievably, began their terror-tactics again, using the local newspapers as their 'Witches Hammer' and repeating outrageous and untrue allegations.
Typically the Lincoln media,
inconsiderate to
the
consequences, gave these pernicious people front page
headlines yet
again.
A spate of 'anonymous complaints'
brought a
long queue
of
local authority officers to the shop. Complaints of
Noise, fire-risks,
public health and so on; all designed, so the shop
owners maintain, as
a form of terrorism by religious terrorists who
immorally work the
system to
suit themselves.
Bookshop Petrol-bombed
The new Bridge of Dreams shop was open for just a few weeks before it was finally petrol-bombed.
The perpetrators have yet to be found but there is no doubt in the minds of the shop-owners and many thousands of people in the New Age movement that here is yet another example of the inevitable violence which people of alternative beliefs have to suffer if they refuse to capitulate to the Cultural Supremacists of Christian fanaticism.
For the past four years the S.A.F.F. has been warning the media and the government of this country about the growing political influence and hidden social agenda of the fundamentalist lobby, but nobody has bothered to take our views seriously or come and look at our evidence. The biggest mistake our so-called leaders have made is to underestimate the impact of fundamentalism nationally and to consider all fundamentalists to be hare-brained seven day wonders.
This is not the first time
politicians have
made such a
mistake. Many of you may remember that during the
Sixties, the British
Press applied a similarly shortsighted approach by
publishing
lampooning articles which ridiculed the newly reformed
I.R.A. They
showed pictures of I.R.A. 'troops' undergoing secret
training with
broomsticks instead of guns and passed the whole thing
off as a seven
day wonder. A mistake which is having negative
repercussions decades
later.
Fundamentalists Are Not Misguided
Fundamentalist 'generals' are certainly not peripheral crackpots. Their stated intentions are clever and clear and, like Hitler (who outlined his intentions against the Jews in his Mine Kampf decades before he came to power) their writings show that they know exactly where they are going and how to get there.
These fundamentalist leaders number amongst the most well-informed and influential in the land and many are esconsed within National Institutions, well-placed to advise and direct the future course of Britain towards their sectarian ends. Why else would they have 'Breakfast Prayer Meetings on a regular basis in the Houses of Parliament? Such people will rarely be found in market-places handing out leaflets, they leave that kind of thing to the disposable dimwits whom their doctrines are designed to incite.
Observers should discard their intellectual smuggery and face the facts. Anyone who is capable of manipulating the entire British population into a hysterical panic over Satanic Abuse for five years whilst commandeering the Department of Health and almost every local and national police force in the process can hardly be described as incapable when that is precisely what they set out to do in the first place!
Add to this the manipulation of
central/local
governnment,
the judiciary and hundreds of MPs into squandering
millions of pounds
of
taxpayers money on financing a wild goose chase, (
from which many of
their own charitable organisations benefit in the way
of project
grants, propaganda and public support), and you begin
to wonder whether
it is the fundamentalists who are loony, or people who
refuse to see what they are doing and let them get
away with it.
Decades of Warnings Go Unheeded
This can be clearly seen by the public when it applies to Islam. There is no question that Islamic fundamentalists aim to impose a theocracy upon their nations and the world, yet when it comes to the same thing happening more subtly under the average citizens' noses the media are not only silent about the risks to society, but actively participate in the tacit conspiracy to restrict and censor freedom of religious belief by ramping-up the ancient untrue stereotypes about human sacrifice and evil deeds whenever the fundies tell them to!
Which is more despicable, the fundamentalist wolves disguised as ordinary Christians; or the sheep who allow them to achieve their ends by doing nothing to help innocent people like the owners of The Bridge of Dreams?
Continuous examples of extensive prejudice, discrimination and victimisation reach our offices daily. The terrible and unnecessary tragedy experienced by the owners of Bridge of Dreams is just one part of a continuous breach of human rights which the British authorities are turning a blind eye to.
Spiritually minded, honest and well meaning people are suffering repetitive bouts of institutionalised prejudice, arson, vandalism, wrongful incarceration, break-up of loving families and terrible victimisations. Such conflicts would be condemned out of hand if they were based on race or sexual discrimination.
Our politicians pompously condemn
such
victimisation
when it
occurs in other countries, yet even the most radical
parliamentarians
and liberal minded politicians make excuses when it
happens on their
own doorstep.
New Laws Protect a Little
Of course since the persecution of the
Bridge
of Dreams new
Religious and Racial Hatred laws have
been put in place in Britain which mean that
what happened to the
owners of the Bridge of Dreams would today be
classed as a
crime of Religious Hatred but don't let this
fool you into
thinking that it couldn't happen again in a more
subtle
way. Plenty of instances of religious
hatred fall through
the gaps because the police and
govt. decide not to
follow through with a prosecution for politicial
reasons. The
very same turning of a blind eye which
caused the
Bridge of Dreams so much trouble.
Hypocrisy of the Establishment
Instead of pursuing the perpetrators of real and terrible crimes against innocent New Age people we have Scotland Yard's 'pythonesque' Satan Squad which spends all its time attempting to discover whether Satanic Abuse Exists! Our politicians keep quiet about these things because they are given to short-term solutions and cannot see the long-term dangers of attempting to brush such injustice under the carpet.
There is a tacit understanding that it really does not matter in the long-run and that some of those 'awful' Pagan people perhaps might actually deserve all they get. Our politicians do not understand that there is an insidious wave of intolerance coming towards us ALL, regardless of religious belief, which if not checked, will destroy co-existence between competing facets of our society at ALL levels and including ALL minority groupings.
This has happened before; there is no
excuse
for
ignorance.
The unnecessary religious conflict between protestants
and catholics
created England's only Civil War. The
'Reformation' created rifts
which
still cause killing and murder in Northern Ireland
today.
State within a State
A State within a State is forming right now. The Absolutists owe allegiance to Divine authority before Nation or Democracy. They attempt control without accountability. They can be seen but they will not stand up and be counted until they have already won the war of domination over all other religious beliefs, not just paganism.
One only has to look at the effect of
fundamentalism in
the
Middle East and meditate upon the conflict between the
Koran and the
Bible to discover the real reason for the Gulf
War.
One only has to
ponder on the demise of the Russian nuclear threat and
the
inevitability of the 'Islamic Bomb' to see the shift
of the world power
structure into an arena where values will be based on
Holy Writ and
where political compromise takes second place.
One only has to compare the recent route to power of fundamentalism in the Middle East with the rise of White Supremacist Neo-Fascists in France and Germany to see the same appeal to mindless xenophobia which self-seeks the destruction of everyone else. How many more innocent people will have to suffer before people listen and act upon this information?
Solutions which when their need becomes obvious, will be by then well past their sell-by date. If the problem is not addressed by choice, the crisis will have to be tackled later. The politicians dare not grasp this nettle. The majority of them owe their position to Christian voters. That means individuals like YOU have to get the debate going and become aware and informed. The S.A.F.F. can provide extensive background information and documentary evidence about the situation for all seriously interested observers.
(c) world copyright holdler: The Sub-culture Alternatives Freedom Foundation (S.A.F.F.) Leeds, Yorkshire, U.K.
Think this constant hidden persecution of non-Christians by Christians who are aided and abetted by the Institutions of State is a rare occurrence? Then learn of The Seekers Temple scandal below:
|
The
Township
of Beebe in Arkansas should forever
hang it's head in shame
for the way they have victimised and
persecuted the Seekers Temple, run
by a man and wife Pagan
couple. Bert and
Felicia, the
owners of The Seekers Temple made
three crucial mistakes when
relocating their business to Beebe.
The first was that like many pagans
they thought their beliefs, being
essentially inoccuous and tolerant,
would be recognised as such by
others in a liberal world. The
second
was opening across the street from a
Christian church which was always
going to see their 'temple' as
'Satan's challenge to
Christianity', and the third was
their ignorance in their choice of
name for their shop and temple. 'The
Seekers' was originally a
prophetic Chicago based Cult in the
1950s who had apocalyptic beliefs
and links to Hubbard; but the
name The Seekers was also
re-applied to an imaginary group in
a list of threats by satan-hunters
in the 1990 Satanic Ritual Abuse
myth. Anyone seeking negative
prejudicial information on 'The
Seekers Temple' would have easily
found
propaganda to confirm their
bigotry. We shall
let the
pair tell their story in their own
words:
How The Christian Mafia Gave the Old One-Two to a pair of niave Pagans with the criminal help of local authorities and police. "
I have been a Pagan Priest since 1985.
I am also a disabled vet from the
U.S. Army and a stay-at-home father.
My wife is also a Pagan Priest.
We opened Seekers
Temple in 2008 Dec 13. We were in
operation in El Paso, AR. until 2013 Jan,
when we moved to Beebe, AR. The
Pagans of Beebe, AR. had ask us to move
here, as it is a more public location,
making it more convenient for a great deal
of Arkansas Pagans to find.
We spent nine months in negotiations for our house (2013 June - 2014 Mar). It has a building which is of the size and location we needed to move our temple and store into. During this time, we talked to Mayor Mike Robertson about our intent to move our church in that building. The mayor was very nice to us and welcomed us and even gave us useful information, such as the local utilities we would need to contact. He even sold us three couches from his furniture store to put in the new home. About the last week of Jan, we noticed the town had a nice park where we could hold our annual event, Arkansas Pagan Pride (now in its 12th year). We ask the town parks manager about renting it. He was very helpful, like everyone else, and told us they rent the whole park for the weekend to the Boy Scouts for $600. Since we only needed a small part of it for one day, he said that price could come way down for us. We told him that our event involved the vending of items and we needed to know the rules on knives and herbs. Since he didn’t seem to understand why a church would have knives and herbs, we pointed out our web page (www.SeekersTemple.com) and ask him to let us know if there was anything that would not be allowed in the park.Until that time, we had talked about our church but it had not come up that we were a Pagan church. Once they saw the site, the city told us they could not rent the ball park to us unless we would pay them $600 for one pavilion for one day (the rate they charge for the whole park for the whole weekend to others) and we would have to agree not to vend anything (knowing this was part of the event). So we declined the park. Before we could even got unpacked, get a permit and put a sign out, the city delivered a Cease and Desist notice and told us we must shut down all aspects of Seekers Temple. We ask how they could shut us down when we had not opened and what we had done to cause this and the officer said “Well, you were going to open, and now you’re not”. We were also given a Denial for a Permit to open, even though we had not yet applied for it. We ask for and was granted a meeting with the mayor. As he had encouraged us with our church before, we felt there must be some misunderstanding. During this meeting, the mayor told us we would not be opening a Pagan anything in his town. When we told him we wanted to talk to the town counsel about this, he told us that if we showed our face at the town meeting, we would not be on the docket and we would not be heard. We told the mayor that this seemed like Religious Persecution and he responded with “I don’t care, it’s not going to happen”. (We later found that he is on record at ’Having God’s back’ and being against anything not Christian. This leads us to ask if he can truly represent a town fairly). Mayor Robertson said that we were not zoned for a church or business, so we pointed out two churches across the street. He said that our side of the street is not zoned for it, so we pointed out commercial property for sale next to us and a business out of a barn next to that and a business out of a house next to that (run by our alderman). He said that the business zone ends at our property and was not allowed from there on down, so we pointed out a business next to us on the other side, run out of a home. He said that in Beebe, they zone individual property and ours was not zoned for it, so we ask what we had to do to get it re-zoned. He said we do not have enough parking, so we pointed out that we have more parking than some of the restaurants in town and much more than the other businesses run out of homes. He said there was no way we were having our church there, so we ask about just opening the store and keeping our group as a small in-house meeting of friends. He admitted that he can not stop us from having friends over, but that he would be watching and he would break it up if we had too many people over (true to his word, police sit and watch our house often). He said we would have to speak with the city attorney about opening a store and what we could have in it and he would have that person call us (this never happened) and that was the end of our meeting. We have ask many times since then, but he has not granted us another meeting. On 2014 Mar 14 we
decided to go to City Hall and
officially ask for the permit.
After that, we
started getting visits from the
Lighthouse Pentecostal Church from
across the street. They gave us
pamphlets and invited us to come worship
at their church.
www.SeekersTemple.com We pointed it out to them and explained that we were Pagan and would not be interested in their church. The next time they came, we insisted that they not come over again with this already declined invitation. The last time they came, the person who we would later find to be Bishop John Scheel began to warn us of the ’evil trickery of the Pagan Devil’ and how it would be best if we came to the church. At this, I got insistent that we have no interest in his church and began to talk about the fact that we don’t have a ’devil’ nor do we believe in ’evil’. Mr. Scheel began, in a military style to say “Yes Sir!” very loudly. Being disabled from the Army, this insulted me, so I closed the door in his face. The Lighthouse
Pentecostal Church then built a working
lighthouse on their front lawn and began
beaming a spotlight across our house
every FIVE seconds (that is the time it
takes to spin around and hit us again.
This was not only annoying to my
wife, and causing me nightmares, as I
suffer from PTSD, but also began
disturbing the sleep of our children
(four year
old Isis and one year old Bertram IV).
Isis would come into our room and
tell us that someone is shining a light
in her window. I went to the church and was given the number, which I called about the light. They would raise the beam for a day or two, but still hit our trees and light up our house, and then they would lower it again. I would call and they would raise it for a few days and then lower it again. This went on for weeks and then they began to just ignore our complaints. So, I went to the church and ask for a meeting with the elders. They ignored us. The next week, to the day, 2014 May 28, two officers came and arrested me for Disorderly Conduct and Harassing Communications. This had been filled by Jason E. Scheel and John Scheel. The City must have informed Mr. Scheel that they were coming to arrest me as is evident by his sitting in a car across the street watching me be arrested. We had to pay $320 to get me out of jail with a plea date of July 9. We called the FBI again and were told now that they have had me arrested, a file could be started. I am told by the Prosecutor that I could face up to $2,000 in fines and a year in jail for calling the church (though I had been given the number) and going onto church property and asking them to stop harassing us with the light (though I had been invited). The Prosecutor also tells me that he will not file against the church leaders for coming to our temple and for calling us. Somehow, when they do it, there is no crime. The Lighthouse Pentecostal Church continues to make my home and temple look like a prison camp with the spotlight coming over our heads every five seconds, but the police tell us they don’t have a disturbing the peace law in the town of Beebe, AR. and we can not stop them from shining the spotlight. Both our temple and our family are being harassed in this manner in a clear effort to remove us from the town of Beebe and we are asking for any help we can get. We simply want to complete the move of Seekers Temple to the town of Beebe, AR. and to be allowed to worship in peace. We are asking that people write a letter of support in opening our temple in Beebe, AR. and send it to the
Thank you for your time and for any
help you can be to Seekers Temple,
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