You know how one picture Middle Easterners rioting for no apparent reason?
Well, that was pretty much Early Christianity, violent Christian mobs going around rioting and murdering people for bathing regularly.
For example Antioch, one of the commercial, cultural and religious centers of the Roman East was Christianized more or less through regular pitched street battles with pagans and Jews.
As if by divine prophecy (har har har).
Edit: Okay so apparently this is from yesterday. In my defense, it wasn’t trending on social media til today. Still counts.
1000 years ago, this story has a VERY different ending to it. Religion is NOT immune to society. No religion is.
No it isn’t. Try not to conflate the elements of a society with the entirety of it. You also seem to be focused on modern, sophisticated religion rather than considering primitive rock knockers that were overjoyed with simple things like sun, rain, rocks that make sparks and food. If it helps, try substituting modern judeo-christian religion with rudimentary belief in the elements- which goes back way before written and common languages. Religion, belief, worship of some type has been found to go back about as far as, and grown along with our “new brain” or frontal lobe.
I get it if you have some resentment toward modern religion. I’m not trying to assuage that for you, but there is a lot more history to this subject than the most current one you don’t like.
I pretty much agree with that. Virtually impossible not too. It was just a few hundred years ago we were burning witches on this continent.
Not a bad point. The desire to know where we came from and to grasp out to find answers ala caveman style doesn’t feel like conventional religion, but I guess in practice it serves the same purpose.
There was a time when if you picked the right mushroom and could make fire you were the magic shaman that held the keys to the universe in a gourd rattle!
But it still requires a degree of sophistication cognitively and most likely language. I should add that superstition, which is a product of evolution, does not count as religion.
Superstition doesn’t count as religion? You’ll have to unwrap that one for me. Religion IS superstition (I say that NOT to offend religious people, using a literal definition of the word).
It used to be so easy to identify them…
E tu Brute?
What, did you seriously think that religions used to spread through an ancient version of a “please look at our pamphlet”?
The Roman Empire employed a massive, top-down repressive program for conversion, including but not limited to exemplary executions, punitively high taxes and property seizures for suspected pagans (the vast majority of population). Of course, this relatively lenient practice was accompanied by more extreme policies on the ground - namely, veritable Christian lynch mobs (to use an anachronism) that rampaged through the streets and killed, among others, frequent bathers.
Incidentally, Islam took the exact same approach a few centuries later - top-down imposition of a religion, punitively high taxes, repression, exclusion from holding any office, even at the local level.
Many distinguished Arab families in Lebanon for example still remember the year centuries ago when their ancestors bowed to orchestrated, ever increasing governmental pressure and converted to Islam.
Ironically, Judaism, arguably the oldest of extant ancient religions, has seldom been a proselytizing religion in its history, if ever. Indeed, we typically restrict conversion.
That’s because it’s a REALLY tough sell to non jews. Imagine a man showing up at your door.
“Hello would you like to here about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob”
Some time later…
“How do I become a Jew?”
“Well first you have to cut off the foreskin of your penis, then you can’t eat bacon, sausage, pork chops, shrimp, muscles, scallops, clams or oysters ever again…”
“GTFO”
True!
That said, Judaism also considered all Noahadic faiths perfectly appropriate for non-Jewish peoples. Hence why the largest part of the Temple was the “Court of the Gentiles.”
This outreach of “Judaism Lite” really ceased until Chabad brought it back 20-30 years ago, mainly because Jews knew such efforts would result in expulsion from their homes during the Diaspora. Really, the advent of modern Israel is what made it possible.
Markedly less restrictive, and all the bacon lobster cheeseburgers you desire.
Religion may be influenced by superstition but there are all sorts of superstitious beliefs that have nothing to do with religion.
su·per·sti·tion
ˌso͞opərˈstiSH(ə)n/Submit
noun
excessively credulous belief in and reverence for supernatural beings.
Sure sounds like religion to me. If I’m superstitious about the weather, that’s different. If I’m superstitious a diety/controlling power, that’s kinda when it becomes “religion.”
And pizza. You forgot the pizza.
I know it wasn’t spread only via conquest. As a matter of fact it spread like wild fire under the rule of Nero who mecilessly persecuted the Christians. So, no it was not spread merely by force at the threat of death. There were darker moments, but it wasn’t the only way.
As a matter of fact, China is one of the fastest growing Christian populations, despite the fact that it is persecuted there. It’s not being spread by force, by any stretch there.
??? Even a cusory inquiry into too apologetics renders this statementry false.
It’s like me saying atheist belief is nihilism by default. Because in the end everything means nothing.
If you have an issue with the definition of a word, take it up with Websters. I’m unable to help you
Nihilism states that life is meaningless and rejects MORAL values as well as religious. While that applies to some atheists, certainly not all. Most of us believe that life is all that matters, as we don’t believe in the afterlife.
Swingandamiss.
