The following are quotes from various Christian luminaries throughout the last 2000 years, all expressing the belief that it's okay to lie and deceive in the name of the Lord, or to accomplish the Church's goals.
"It is an act of virtue to deceive and lie, when by such means the interests of the church might be promoted."
-- Bishop Eusebius (260 - 339), early Christian Scribe and historian.
"How well we know what a profitable superstition this fable of Christ has been for us."
-- Pope Leo X (1513 - 1521)
"[Those who assert that] the earth moves and turns ... [are motivated by] a spirit of bitterness, contradiction, and faultfinding; [possessed by the devil, they aimed] to pervert the order of nature."
-- John Calvin, sermon no. 8 on 1st Corinthians, cited in William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait (1988),
"Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?"
-- John Calvin, pointing to Psalm 93:1 in his Commentary on Genesis
"Woman is a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill."
Saint John Chrysostom (354?-407)
"Every woman ought to be filled with shame at the thought that she is a woman."
Clement of Alexandria (150?-220?) Greek Christian theologian
"Use against heretics the spiritual sword of excommunication, and if this does not prove effective, use the material sword."
-- Pope Innocent III, (C.E. 1161-1216) reiterating the death sentence which the Christian Church had meted out to all heretics and unbelievers for many centuries and which would continue to be endorsed by Christian denominations for centuries to come, even in the twentieth century by Pope Leo XIII (source unknown)
"If it shall be necessary, through sentences of excommunication against their persons and of interdict against their lands, all backsliding being put an end to, they compel them to fulfil their vows."
-- Pope Innocent III, (C.E. 1161-1216) explaining where much of the land that formerly belonged to our philosophical forebears went to: land was confiscated from any person suspected of heresy, "Bullariulii Romanum, editio Taurinensis," the Bull summoning the Crusades (December 14, 1215)
"We believe that the Greeks have been punished through [the Crusades] by the just judgement of God: these Greeks who have striven to rend the Seamless Robe of Jesus Christ ... Those who would not join Noah in his ark perished justly in the deluge; and these have justly suffered famine and hunger who would not receive as their shepherd the blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles."
-- Pope Innocent III, (C.E. 1161-1216) to the Greek (Byzantine) Emperor, after sending a group of crusaders to Constantinople in 1204 in humble obedience to the edict of Christ in Luke 19:27: "But those mine enemies, which would not that I should reign over them, bring hither, and slay them before me" (the chronicler Geoffrey Villehardouin said that never since the creation of the world had so much booty been taken from a city), in G. G. Coulton, Inquisition and Liberty (1969), p. 164-5
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