Saturday, December 7, 2013
Today's Atheist martyr.
Kazimierz Łyszczyński was a nobleman, landowner, philosopher, and soldier in the service of the Sapieha family. For eight years he studied philosophy as a Jesuit and then became a supply judge (podsędek) in legal cases against the Jesuits concerning estates.
Łyszczyński had read a book by Henry Aldsted entitled Theologia Naturalis, which attempted to prove the existence of divinity. But its arguments were so confused that Łyszczyński was able to infer many contradictions. Ridiculing Aldsted, Łyszczyński wrote in the book's margins the words "ergo non est Deus" ("therefore God does not exist").
This was discovered by one of Łyszczyński's debtors, Jan Kazimierz Brzoska, who was the nuncio of Brest in Poland or a Stolnik of Bracławice or Łowczy of Brześć. Brzoska, reluctant to return a great sum of money to him lent by Łyszczyński, accused the latter of being an atheist and gave the aforementioned work as evidence to Witwicki, bishop of Poznań. Brzoska also stole and delivered to the court a handwritten copy of De non existentia Dei, which was the first Polish philosophical treatise presenting reality from an atheistic perspective, and which Łyszczyński had been working on since 1674. Witwicki along with Załuski, bishop of Kiev, took up this case with zeal.
The King attempted to help Łyszczyński by ordering that he should be judged at Vilna, but this could not save Łyszczyński from the clergy. Łyszczyński's first privilege as a Polish noble, that he could not be imprisoned before his condemnation, was violated. The Łyszczyński case was brought before the diet of 1689 where he was accused of having denied the existence of God and having blasphemed against the Virgin Mary and the saints. He was condemned to death for atheism. The sentence was carried out before noon in the Old Town Market in Warsaw, where his tongue was pulled out followed by a beheading. After that, his corpse was transported beyond the city borders and cremated.
For untold centuries the religious have done everything in their power to destroy any who would dare question of reality of their God. They have burned us, tortured us, hanged us, imprisoned us, for doing nothing more than using the brain that THEIR faith stated that THEIR God had gifted to mankind.
Would any loving God give a bird wings and then lock him in a cage, or a fish gills and then strand him on the shore, why give a man intelligence and demand that he not think?
And if such a God existed, would he be worthy of worship?
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