Praedamus Let Us Prey Selling Heaven: It's All An Illusion

I actually met the author Don Spears on a flight back home to New Orleans. We were able to discuss this book and I was so fascinated by this charismatic man and his views, which were very similar to mine, that I had to order it. The book grabbed my attention from the beginning! This book is thought provoking and fascinating!! A must read!

its ok, and it is good if you don't want anything serious.

Excellent book. EZ read; very practical, analytical, informative, historically educational."A paradigm life changer!"

Great

“Religion plays an important part in most people’s lives… Many of us have absolute and often blind faith in the churches we attend. But is such dedication and unconditional loyalty well-founded, or even smart? Is it good for people to live their fragile lives based on stories told to them by someone who is not an informed, trusted family member, or a loyal and devoted friend?Why have Christian churches kept their members in the dark for over 2,000 years? What did the church hierarchy actually know that wasn’t being shared? And why does the church continue to keep secrets, and will that always be the case?Let Us Prey takes a brief look at organized religion and its attendant, ominous consequences. It is an attempt to help you understand and appreciate how and why your secular world and spiritual world work, or do not work.” —Excerpted from the Preface (pages 11-12)Televangelist Creflo Dollar recently asked members of his congregation to tithe the $60 million he needs to buy himself a luxurious Gulfstream jet so he could travel in style while spreading the word of the Lord around the world. Is the popular prosperity preacher sincere or just another hustler in a collar?Before you answer, you might want to read Praedamus: Let Us Prey, a jaw dropping expose’ written by Don Spears, a brother who is not one to mince words while making a full frontal assault on organized religion. This very timely tome represents the culmination of 9 years of research in religious history stretching back centuries from the present.The erudite author tackles an impressive range of topics, including racism, homosexuality, Jesus, slavery, Shakespeare, lynching, Sir Francis Bacon and the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans by European colonists, to name a few. Despite the diverse subject-matter, the book adds up to make a cohesive point, since every discussion relates directly to religion.For example, he talks about how the evil institution of slavery was made respectable by Christianity. This enabled slave masters to pass themselves off as moral pillars of the community while committing serial rapes on black females whose private parts they literally owned. Spears goes so far as to speculate that the reason the Confederates were willing to secede from the Union and die in the hundreds of thousands rather than abolish slavery was because of the sex on demand they had become so addicted to.Elsewhere in the text, the author questions the wisdom of adopting the faith of one’s enslavers, before offering Black Liberation Theology as a viable alternative. That progressive philosophy indicts “un-Christian” white racists for pushing a different brand of their religion on blacks than the one they practiced. Consequently, to this day, most African-Americans “stake their whole existence on heaven,” as opposed to the way whites focus on faring well, materially, in this life.Other chapters explore whether Jesus was gay, if Shakespeare ghostwrote the King James Version of the Bible, and how lynching functioned “as a way of reminding blacks of their inferiority and powerlessness.” Spears’ ultimate aim, here, is ostensibly to undo the ongoing brainwashing of the black masses by the time they finish reading his incendiary arguments.A whole new look at the Good Book arguably bordering on blasphemy.by Kam Williams

Review of the 4th edition:Don Spears’s Let Us Prey makes its intentions clear at the outset. Its mission, he writes, is “Connecting the dots between class, gender, religion and racism; Taking ignorance, outdated superstition and mythology, disguised as faith, out of theology.” That’s a tall order, but Spears handles it with aplomb and searing wit.He calls himself an “original thinker,” but he backs up his assault on faith-based beliefs, rites, practices, superstructures, and hierarchies with a wide array of supporting views from earlier philosophers, writers, artists, political leaders, theologians, and others. Covering more than six millennia of organized religion, with a particular focus on the pernicious effects Christianity has had on the Black American experience of the past 500 years, Spears takes no prisoners as he slices through the underpinnings of the greatest swindle in human history – absolutist religion, which has caused so much bloodshed, suffering, unwarranted wealth transfers, and the stunted intellectual development of entire civilizations for ages and ages, with no significant sign of letting up. Black people have paid – and are paying – a heavy price for this religious enshroudment.“I’m tired of seeing the world ‘going to hell in a hand basket,’ the world in which I have no choice but to live,” Spears writes. “I’m frustrated at seeing Black people either being denigrated, degraded, acting like fools, or living in denial. It seems we’re either the lower class glorifying ignorance, the middle class asleep at the wheel, or an upper class failing to accept its ‘blackness’ outside of the white man’s world.”Spears describes himself as a proponent of “Rational Literacy,” which, he says, is more aligned with critical thinking and the Golden Rule than it is with “Christianity’s outdated mysticism and propaganda,” which he sees as primarily tools for population control. Let Us Prey backs up Spears’s conclusions by taking deep dives into the official texts of the Bible as well as texts like the Gnostic Bible and the Book of Mary Magdalene that have been excluded from the authorized teachings of the Christian Church. His research takes him from Babylonian times to the modern era. At every step along the way, there are hilarious contradictions and ludicrous theosophical tenets that so many people have accepted for centuries without giving them a second thought.For believers and non-believers alike, Let Us Prey: Selling Heaven is an eye-opening exploration of a major force shaping our lives – organized religion. This fourth edition of the work is roughly twenty pages longer than the first printing in 2015 but it is an equally gripping read. Cheers to Mr. Spears for once more telling it like it is.Review of the 1st edition:“Black Americans are screwed up because their ancestors were lied to and bulls***ted about God and their place in the world.”That’s the central point of Don Spears’ new book Let Us Prey: Selling Heaven, a broadly researched, wryly observed and thoroughly enjoyable rant on the state of organized religion and how it got to be this way, particularly the institutions of Western Christianity. The book is part memoir, reportage, cultural critique and barbershop lecture.“I’m frustrated at seeing black people either being denigrated, degraded, acting like fools, or living in denial,” Spears says in explaining why he spent five years researching and writing Let Us Prey and publishing it at his own expense. “It seems we’re either the lower class glorifying ignorance, the middle class asleep at the wheel, or an upper class failing to accept its blackness “outside” of the white man’s world.”As fate, or the gods, would have it, while reading Let Us Prey I received news that Dr. Yosef ben-Jochannan, the noted scholar of black antiquity, had died at age 95. I had bought a copy of ben-Jochannan’s African Origins of the Major “Western Religions” a few months earlier but hadn’t gotten around to it yet. So I started reading it along with the Spears book and quickly realized that Spears could have saved himself a lot of time by starting there, too.In African Origins of the Major “Western Religions,” originally published in 1970, ben-Jochannan points out that “The whole concept of a “God” or “Gods” came out of the Nile valley African civilizations thousands upon thousands of years before Sumner (The Kingdom of Hamurabi) was established along the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. That was more than thousands of years before Abraham – the first Hebrew (Jew) – was born in the city of Ur, Chaldea. This concept, which had gone through very extensive changes and revisions for thousands of years before the arrival of the Asian Jews, all seventy-seven (77) of them, in Africa, was in its zenith when Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph entered the land at the end of the Nile River – Sais, which they later called “Egypt.”“The indigenous Africans of Egypt,” ben-Jochannan explains, “had already become proficient in the sciences that allowed them to: (a) embalm their dead; (b) name the bodies in the celestial universe; (c) name their God and minor Gods; (d) develop agriculture; (e) establish a Solar Calendar in 4,100 B.C.E.; (f) develop a fertility control tampon recipe; (g) build temples to the Gods – including the world wonder, the Sphinx of Gezeh (Giza); (h) develop engineering; (i) develop medicine – including internal surgery; (j) develop pharmacology and many other disciplines too numerous to try and outline or define at this time. They even wrote poetry and short stories during said period along with their historical achievements in the sciences. All of this the small group of half-starving Asian Jews met, and were exposed to, from the very first day they entered Africa out of the Asian desert, where they were nomads. At no time in their history is there any record of them being exposed to such knowledge before their encounter with the indigenous Africans of the Nile Valley, who had settled Sais, Egypt, for thousands of years before the Jews came. This, then appears to be the beginning of what is today called “Judaism, Judaeo-Christianity, Christianity,” and “Islam.” It is also the juncture that all of the concepts, be they material or spiritual, which are in any manner connected to either of these generally labelled “WESTERN RELIGIONS” originated.”Dr. ben-Jochannan goes on to present translations of “The Teachings of Amen-em-ope,” a Pharaoh who lived from 1405 -1370 B.C.E., with the Old Testament book of “Proverbs” attributed to King Solomon of Israel, 976-936 B.C.E. The biblical text is blatantly plagiarized from the Egyptian predecessor. So, too, are the Ten Commandments Moses claims to have been given by God. They are found almost verbatim among the 47 “negative confessions” in the “Hymn of Adoration to the God Osiris,” composed 1300 years before the Ten Commandments.Spears references other scholars who delve into the origins of the Bible and its factually-specious creation stories but they give the African roots of much of this material only a glancing look. It’s of no great import because Spears has a much more fundamental point to make in skewering what Karl Marx once deemed the opiate of the masses.” For this charge, he turns to Lloyd Graham, author of Deceptions and Myths of the Bible. “There is nothing ‘holy’ about the Bible nor is it the word of God,” Graham declares. To which Spears adds, “It was not written by God-inspired saints, but by power-seeking kings and priests, re-editing and re-translating to suit their own purposes.”Spears weaves through the history of Christianity in the West from its days as an underground sect to its adoption by the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century to its spread throughout Europe and later the rest of the globe as a tool of conquest. It’s not relevant to this narrative that the land known now as Ethiopia was the first place to make Christianity a state religion in the first century A.D. Nor is it particularly germane to Spears’ purposes to affirm that Mary Magdalene was Ethiopian, from a center of learning called Magdala. Located in central Ethiopia, it is now also known as Amba Mariam (Mary’s Stronghold).What is more important to Spears’ line of inquiry is the unbroken thread of violence, hypocrisy, corruption and theft that have fueled the empowerment of organized religion and the way the Black Church in America has taken on some of the worst of these characteristics.There was a brief moment in this country when that wasn’t the case. Commenting on “Reconstruction and its Benefits” in 1909, W.E.B. DuBois wrote: “After the (Civil War) the white churches of the South got rid of their Negro members and the Negro church organizations of the North invaded the South. The 20,000 members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1856 leaped to 75,000 in 1866 and 200,000 in 1876 while their property increased sevenfold. The Negro Baptists with 150,000 members in 1850 had fully a half million in 1870. There were, before the end of Reconstruction, perhaps 10,000 local bodies touching the majority of the freed population, centering almost the whole of their social life, and teaching them organization and autonomy. They were primitive, ill-governed, at times fantastic groups of human beings, and yet it is difficult to exaggerate the influence of this new responsibility – the first social institution fully controlled by black men in America, with traditions that rooted back in Africa and with possibilities which make the 35,000 Negro America churches to-day, with their three and one-half million members, the most powerful Negro institutions in the world.”One hundred years after DuBois’ observations, Spears makes a convincing argument that the potentially uplifting power of the black Christian church has largely been squandered. Its weaknesses and excesses have grown, not diminished. Perhaps it’s not too late to change things. Perhaps the truth will set us free. Let Us Prey: Selling Heaven opens a pathway toward correction and redemption. Let’s hope its message is heeded.

Don Spears, acclaimed author of "In Search of Goodpussy" has done it again, telling it like it is about the Christian Industrial Complex in his new book entitled "Let Us Prey." Not only does it reveal secrets about Christianity that your pastor or minister doesn't tell you, it sheds light on some issues which your minister may not even but aware of. It delves into sex, who's having it in the Bible, and who's not. Spears shines a light on the issue of being black in America and how Christianity has shaped us. Kudos, Don Spears! I'm giving your new book five stars.