The root of Christianity

[DrZoidberg]

Here's an episode on the Christian martyr stories. None of this was news to me, but still interesting to add to this thread (if anybody cares).

https://literatureandhistory.com/index.php/episode-091-the-passion-of-perpetua

1) The Bible itself is a martyr story.

2) It seems to have been important for church leaders to also be martyrs. It seems to have been a "popular" way to get posthumous high status in the church.

3) All of the Christian accounts of martyrdom have implausible details. The basic narrative is a perfect human being completely free from faults is arrested for nothing but being so incredibly perfect and Christian, they are then murdered in a gruesome way in great detail, there is a miracle of some kind, which leads to the onlooking crowd immediately mass converting. So obviously the people who wrote these weren't above enhancing facts to get a better story.

4) We have letters from emperors and works by non-Christian historians and none of them mention any persecution of Christians. So it cannot have been particularly widespread. Roman emperors do sometimes talk about them as a nuisance that has to be dealt with. Since they seem to have been causing problems for them. But none of them mention them needing to be suppressed.

5) Before the persecution of Decius in 250 Ad there was no systematic empire wide persecution of Christians. Emperor Decius had a 8 months short reight in 250 AD. And this persecution wasn't even specifically targeted against Christians. Rome was cosmopolitan, multi ethnic and multicultural. In order for the empire not to dissolve into sectarian violence it was important that the various sects showed each other respect. So Decius made an edict that everybody had to sacrifice to other people's gods in their location. There's a possibility he wasn't even aware that this would have been a problem for Christians. It wasn't a problem for long. Soon after issuing the edict he died (of something unrelated) and the whole thing was dropped. This did lead to some Christians getting executed. But nowhere near the scale the Catholic church later claimed.

in 64 AD Nero tried blaming the fire of Rome on the Christians. Something which nobody believed at the time and which backfired on him. There is no evidence any Christians actually got executed for this.

He didn't say this in the podcast, but my impression from reading about these martyr stories is that these church fathers could be awfully annoying and seems to have gone out of their way to provoke the authorities. As if they were trying really hard to go the way of their idol.

To sum it up, Christian persecutions was grossly exaggerated by the Christian church.

 

[Gnostic Christian Bishop]

Gnostic can be applied to any belief system.

I chose Gnostic Christianity. I could have chosen to be a Gnostic Muslim.

Sure, but isn't Gnosticism neo-platonism adapted for Christianity? Gnostic Islam is neo-platonism adapted to Christianity adapted to Islam. Why add the extra step and not call yourself neo-platonist? It's simpler.

My love for it created the greatest hate and a Gnostic has a duty to let that hate be known.

That is why we condemned Yahweh to hell. Not that any such supernatural creations are real.

We are the black sheep of all religions that we try to improve, in the moral sense.

I thought Gnostics condemned Yahweh because Yahweh isn't a particularly pleasant Biblical character? The Christian project of trying to pass the early Jewish God off as a loving God who only means well is a tall order. The Gnostics picked a different solution, there is more than one god and Yahweh is an evil god.

I suspect that what the other Christians didn't like about the Gnostics is that they turned Paul's message of an open and transparent church back into a standard pagan exclusive mystery cult. It was popular at the time because Romans were more familiar with pagan mystery cults than they were with Judaism. So for the regular pagan Roman it was less of an effort to convert to Gnosticism.

As I understand it the other Christians felt that the Gnostics were missing the point of simplifying Judaism (which fundamentally is all Christianity is) and making it complicated again by adding a bunch of complicated theology that, (as in all pagan mystery cults) will be dripped to the convert drop by drop as they ascend the hierarchy of step-by-step cultish initiation.

And I sort of understand them. If you're on a project to create a new religion and you get a bunch of converts, who the first thing they do, is to take your religion and convert it back to their old religion, then why did they bother to convert in the first place? Why not stay pagan? But it is a bit of a stone in a glass house because mainstream Christianity is also a paganizing of Judaism. At least Catholics and Orthodox Christianity is more Jewish than the Gnostics are.

In the early Christian church this was the major debate, "how Jewish should we be?". "How little Jewish is it ok to be?". "How many of the commandments do we need to follow?". The Gnostics were among the most radical of the Christians. They wanted to almost break completely from the Jewish faith and denigrated it as evil. They lost that debate.

Given the hate that Christianity and Islam have for Jews, it is as if they have forgotten that they are to bend the knee to a Jew.

As to my label, being born Christian, and owing them a debt, it is my duty and honor to try to correct their immoral thinking.

I do not like Christians, but I will not abandon them the way Yahweh has.

I will nurse them along as they slowly continue to die off due to modernization.

Regards
DL

 

[atrib]

I get no great pleure from these exchanges. I partipate becuse us Atheists have to rotect ourselves from all forms of relgion, even Gnostic Christianity.

I have waited a long time and tried to get the more stupid atheists to get the led out of their ass and form more Atheist Churches and Mystery Schools, --- for that same protection you speak of, --- but atheists are a slow lot in some areas, --- like understanding tribalism instincts.

Atheists might be brighter that theists, but still slow off the mark. It has cost you many good lives and slowed civilized social progress.

Regards
DL

Arrogant judgemental nonsense. Atheists have lives to live, and we recognize that we have finite time to live it. So while some atheists do make the effort to challenge the gross transgressions of the religious, many, or even most choose to focus on the stuff that is important to them. Which may not include beating our heads against the walls trying to debate the loonies peddling magic and woo on the net (and the loonies come in many flavors).

 

[DrZoidberg]

Sure, but isn't Gnosticism neo-platonism adapted for Christianity? Gnostic Islam is neo-platonism adapted to Christianity adapted to Islam. Why add the extra step and not call yourself neo-platonist? It's simpler.



I thought Gnostics condemned Yahweh because Yahweh isn't a particularly pleasant Biblical character? The Christian project of trying to pass the early Jewish God off as a loving God who only means well is a tall order. The Gnostics picked a different solution, there is more than one god and Yahweh is an evil god.

I suspect that what the other Christians didn't like about the Gnostics is that they turned Paul's message of an open and transparent church back into a standard pagan exclusive mystery cult. It was popular at the time because Romans were more familiar with pagan mystery cults than they were with Judaism. So for the regular pagan Roman it was less of an effort to convert to Gnosticism.

As I understand it the other Christians felt that the Gnostics were missing the point of simplifying Judaism (which fundamentally is all Christianity is) and making it complicated again by adding a bunch of complicated theology that, (as in all pagan mystery cults) will be dripped to the convert drop by drop as they ascend the hierarchy of step-by-step cultish initiation.

And I sort of understand them. If you're on a project to create a new religion and you get a bunch of converts, who the first thing they do, is to take your religion and convert it back to their old religion, then why did they bother to convert in the first place? Why not stay pagan? But it is a bit of a stone in a glass house because mainstream Christianity is also a paganizing of Judaism. At least Catholics and Orthodox Christianity is more Jewish than the Gnostics are.

In the early Christian church this was the major debate, "how Jewish should we be?". "How little Jewish is it ok to be?". "How many of the commandments do we need to follow?". The Gnostics were among the most radical of the Christians. They wanted to almost break completely from the Jewish faith and denigrated it as evil. They lost that debate.

Given the hate that Christianity and Islam have for Jews, it is as if they have forgotten that they are to bend the knee to a Jew.

As to my label, being born Christian, and owing them a debt, it is my duty and honor to try to correct their immoral thinking.

I do not like Christians, but I will not abandon them the way Yahweh has.

I will nurse them along as they slowly continue to die off due to modernization.

Regards
DL

Historically Christians started hating Jews very quickly. Almost immediately. In spite of early Christians referring themselves as Jews. Ie, they were the real Jews while the normal Jews were fake Jews. Both denouncing each other as heretics. Jewish sects did this to each other as well. But once the Christians outnumbered the Jews and then took control of the Roman government apparatus Jews hating Christians was less of a problem than Christians hating Jews. As you are well aware of Christian sects also hated each other. A particular form of hate that nearly wiped out Gnostic Christianity.

So no, it's not strange that Christians hate Jews. Abrahamic faiths have always been vitriolically intolerant towards unbelievers. Especially people who have slightly different beliefs than themselves.

 

[DrZoidberg]

I get no great pleure from these exchanges. I partipate becuse us Atheists have to rotect ourselves from all forms of relgion, even Gnostic Christianity.

I have waited a long time and tried to get the more stupid atheists to get the led out of their ass and form more Atheist Churches and Mystery Schools, --- for that same protection you speak of, --- but atheists are a slow lot in some areas, --- like understanding tribalism instincts.

Atheists might be brighter that theists, but still slow off the mark. It has cost you many good lives and slowed civilized social progress.

Regards
DL

Arrogant judgemental nonsense. Atheists have lives to live, and we recognize that we have finite time to live it. So while some atheists do make the effort to challenge the gross transgressions of the religious, many, or even most choose to focus on the stuff that is important to them. Which may not include beating our heads against the walls trying to debate the loonies peddling magic and woo on the net (and the loonies come in many flavors).

Gnosticism is based on the idea that the real world is an illusion and the spiritual world is the real world. And we access the spiritual world through visions, dreams and other altered states. You don't need to be a genius to see the inherent problem with that. How do you know that your visions are true? What if two people's visions contradict one another? It risks reducing fact to mere opinion and then anything goes and you're none the wiser.

Gnosticism also suffers from another problem. And it's a major problem. When the secret gospels of John and Mark popped up none of the apostolic fathers had heard of them. These are people who knew the apostles personally (or knew people who knew people who knew them personally) and were tasked with founding and running the early church. If these truly are genuine then why didn't the apostles inform the initial ruling body of the church of these secret gospels. They popped up quite late (2nd century). They're a pretty radical departure from the rest of the Bible. The traditional explanation is that it was a conspiracy. But that's silly when talking about the early Christian church. A church with zero power and no money. A pretty early and egalitarian church where the papacy hadn't been invented yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostolic_Fathers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irenaeus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Heresies_(Irenaeus)

 

[Gnostic Christian Bishop]

Here's an episode on the Christian martyr stories. .

You may have found a gem in your research.

Tell us please, have you ever compared the rather puny numbers of Christian martyrs as compared to all the martyrs of the other thinking systems that inquisitions murdered?

Regards
DL

 

[Gnostic Christian Bishop]

[
Arrogant judgemental nonsense. Atheists have lives to live, and we recognize that we have finite time to live it. So while some atheists do make the effort to challenge the gross transgressions of the religious, many, or even most choose to focus on the stuff that is important to them. Which may not include beating our heads against the walls trying to debate the loonies peddling magic and woo on the net (and the loonies come in many flavors).

For evil to grow all atheists have to do is not fight their oppressor.

When speaking the truth meand death by religion, I can see why atheists were cowed.

Today, they have no excuse for damning the vile immoral mainstream religions to hell.

Anything less and atheists are not doing the duty that they could not do in the past.

As a religionist and moralist, I do my duty of tying to fight evil and hope more atheists get with the program for the security of their own female or gay children.

Regards
DL

 

[DrZoidberg]

Here's an episode on the Christian martyr stories. .

You may have found a gem in your research.

Tell us please, have you ever compared the rather puny numbers of Christian martyrs as compared to all the martyrs of the other thinking systems that inquisitions murdered?

Regards
DL

Well... the puny number of Christian martyrs are only puny if we trust Christian sources. If we go to other sources the real number of Christian martyrs is significantly less. There haven't been that many Christian martyrs. It's mostly a mythic activity.

Those killed by the Inquisition is another matter. But those numbers are in the public imagination also way higher than they really were.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition#Death_tolls_and_sentenced

The true damage of the Inquisition wasn't the people they killed. But the terror the fear of being accused spread. I think that did way more damage in the long run.

 

[Gnostic Christian Bishop]

Arrogant judgemental nonsense. Atheists have lives to live, and we recognize that we have finite time to live it. So while some atheists do make the effort to challenge the gross transgressions of the religious, many, or even most choose to focus on the stuff that is important to them. Which may not include beating our heads against the walls trying to debate the loonies peddling magic and woo on the net (and the loonies come in many flavors).

Gnosticism is based on the idea that the real world is an illusion and the spiritual world is the real world. And we access the spiritual world through visions, dreams and other altered states. You don't need to be a genius to see the inherent problem with that. How do you know that your visions are true? What if two people's visions contradict one another? It risks reducing fact to mere opinion and then anything goes and you're none the wiser.

Gnosticism also suffers from another problem. And it's a major problem. When the secret gospels of John and Mark popped up none of the apostolic fathers had heard of them. These are people who knew the apostles personally (or knew people who knew people who knew them personally) and were tasked with founding and running the early church. If these truly are genuine then why didn't the apostles inform the initial ruling body of the church of these secret gospels. They popped up quite late (2nd century). They're a pretty radical departure from the rest of the Bible. The traditional explanation is that it was a conspiracy. But that's silly when talking about the early Christian church. A church with zero power and no money. A pretty early and egalitarian church where the papacy hadn't been invented yet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostolic_Fathers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irenaeus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Against_Heresies_(Irenaeus)

You know our myths, but forget that we are not stupid enough to take our myths literally.

We are and were the intelligentsia and moralists of the day, as shown by our condemning Yahweh to hell, where all genocidal gods are. Not that they are real.

We do not really see the world as an illusion. It is more of a collective hunch.

We base our view on the evolving perfection of reality.

Try to understand the following. I think you might get it.

Let me speak to the lie of Gnostic Christians hating matter.

I wrote this to refute the false notion that Gnostic Christians do not like matter and reality that the inquisitors propagated to justify their many murders of my religion’s originators. It shows that Christians should actually hate matter and not Gnostic Christians.

The Christian reality.
1 John 2:15Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. 16For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.

Gen 3; 17 Thou shalt not eat of it; cursed is the ground for thy sake; in toil shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.
-----------

The Gnostic Christian reality.
Gnostic Christian Jesus said, "Those who seek should not stop seeking until they find. When they find, they will be disturbed. When they are disturbed, they will marvel, and will reign over all.
[And after they have reigned they will rest.]"

"If those who attract you say, 'See, the Kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you.

If they say to you, 'It is under the earth,' then the fish of the sea will precede you.

Rather, the Kingdom of God is inside of you, and it is outside of you.

[Those who] become acquainted with [themselves] will find it; [and when you] become acquainted with yourselves, [you will understand that] it is you who are the sons of the living Father.

But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty."

As you can see from that quote, if we see God's kingdom all around us and inside of us, we cannot think that the world is anything but evolving perfection. Most just don't see it and live in poverty. Let me try to make you see the world the way I do.

Here is a mind exercise. Tell me what you see when you look around. The best that can possibly be, given our past history, or an ugly and imperfect world?

Candide.
"It is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise than as they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end.”

That means that we live in the best of all possible worlds, because it is the only possible world, given all the conditions at hand and the history that got us here. That is an irrefutable statement given entropy and the anthropic principle.

Regards
DL

 

[Gnostic Christian Bishop]

[

The true damage of the Inquisition wasn't the people they killed. But the terror the fear of being accused spread. I think that did way more damage in the long run.

Possibly as their evil continues to plague humanity and slow our sociological progress.

Regards
DL

 

[Bomb#20]

... these church fathers could be awfully annoying and seems to have gone out of their way to provoke the authorities. As if they were trying really hard to go the way of their idol.

To sum it up, Christian persecutions was grossly exaggerated by the Christian church.

Funny story about that. According to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the provincial Roman magistrates were no fans of the periodic persecution edicts from on high, and developed three resistance strategies:

1. As Gilbert and Sullivan might have put it, why should I require you to sacrifice to the Emperor when an affidavit that you've sacrificed to the Emperor will do just as well?

2. When a person was denounced to the authorities as a Christian, it was the duty of the magistrate to arrest him. But rather than sending legionaries to carry out the arrest, suspected Christians were arrested by mail. Those not set on martyring themselves were given every opportunity to skip town.

3. If all else failed, the final resort was to the Romans' infamous brutality. In a sort of inverted Inquisition, magistrates would have a confessed Christian tortured until he recanted his confession and admitted he wasn't really a Christian. Then they'd let him go.

 

[Politesse]

This is deliberately not telling the whole story. What do atheist apologists really think they have to gain by all this? We live in the internet age; anyone can pick up Pliny the Younger and read about vicious persecutions from the lips of the persecutor. Why put forth an argument that anyone who has ever studied the issue at all knows is misrepresenting the subjecty? Are you really hoping to convert only the stupidest and laziest of Christians to your cause? I ask this of all evangelists of any faith: why use stupid arguments? It seems to me that using stupid arguments could only, ever, win you only the most dim-witted of new recruits.

 

[DBT]

Atheism needs no apology. An absence of evidence supports a lack of conviction.

 

[Politesse]

Atheism needs no apology. An absence of evidence supports a lack of conviction.

Whether or not atheism needs apologists seems immaterial to whether there are any. Whenever I see people trying to skepticize religiousleaders/events etc., people straight out of history, usually armed with with as little evidence to back up their own claims as the people they are ostensibly criticizing, my general assumption is that they are proselytizing. Why else would you engage in such silliness? On the whole, very little is really known about the religious politics during the time of the early Christian (or Muslim, or Buddhist, or Jain, or...) histories, and what we do know defies simplistic analysis. In all cases it was a syncretic, fragmented, politically turbulent world in which regional realities routinely trumped affairs of Empire, and indeed knowing what we do know about the genesis of the major world faiths, it's more likely than not that at the bottom of any search for the roots of a faith tradition will lead you to a similar time of fragmentation, uncertainty, and casual violence. Because those are the very conditions that lend conviction and sometimes ammunition to nascent revitalization movements.

 

[steve_bank]

I watched a PDS show today Secrets Of The Dead that looked at the newest archeological evidence around the time of the alleged King Arthur.

There is no evidence of any large scale conflict or battles between Britans and Anglo Saxon immigrants. It was an agricultural society iwth interbreeding and mixing of ciltures.

The story goes Arthur battled an invading horde, did not happen. A n 11th century monk published a historynof England and creted the fiction, with supernatural elements.

A Jewish heretic sect eventually deveoped a sepaate identity as it spread to gentiles and coopted the Jewish scripture as their own.

The Jesus myth arose out of a Jewish biblical myth of a svior who woud retun them to power.

The Jesus Jewish myth morphed into the Jesus as sent from god tp save the world.

Christianity grew in the same manner as the Arthurian legend evolved. Generation by gubernation and human imagination.

 

[DBT]

Apologetics for atheism are unnecessary. If some like to take it up as a hobby or pastime, that is their business.

 

[DrZoidberg]

This is deliberately not telling the whole story. What do atheist apologists really think they have to gain by all this? We live in the internet age; anyone can pick up Pliny the Younger and read about vicious persecutions from the lips of the persecutor. Why put forth an argument that anyone who has ever studied the issue at all knows is misrepresenting the subjecty? Are you really hoping to convert only the stupidest and laziest of Christians to your cause? I ask this of all evangelists of any faith: why use stupid arguments? It seems to me that using stupid arguments could only, ever, win you only the most dim-witted of new recruits.

It's not a long read. It's pretty clear to me that Christians, were going out of their way to be persecuted. Why not just make sacrifices to the emperor? What's the big deal?

Rome didn't have mass media. The only way to know what people thought and felt was to see and hear them in person.

Since Rome was multicultural, multiethnic and multi religious special steps were taken to ensure peace and to avoid sectarian violence.

The Roman custom of Pax Romana was that all Romans had to show up for all religious festivals (even if they disliked them) and make offerings. This sounds like work, but wasn't. You just basically needed to show up and not behave like an idiot for an hour or so.

Christians refusing to take part in this, I think is, incredibly childish and silly. Christians were going out of their way to be disrespectful to non-Christians. Obviously the authorities had to do something about that, if only to maintain peace in the empire. The persecution of Christians was also performative rather than an attempt to stop them. Since Christians systematicaly insulted other cults the Roman authorities needed to show the non-Christian Romans that they took this very seriously. They executed as few as possible and hoped that soon Christians will come to their senses. But they never did.

This is the context. And what Pliny is writing about.
.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliny_the_Younger_on_Christians

When Christians refused to give offerings to the idols of other cults, I think, they knew what they were doing. I think they were steering the authorities towards persecuting them to allow themselves to be martyred. And then also the Christians took those martyr events and spun the crap out of them and also invented some.

 

[Politesse]

It's not a long read. It's pretty clear to me that Christians, were going out of their way to be persecuted. Why not just make sacrifices to the emperor? What's the big deal?

So your feeling is that religious persecution isn't really persecution, provided you can escape punishment by recanting your faith to align with the arbitrary and self-serving demands of an all-seeing State and its Gods?

This kind of thing is exactly why Christians, and everyone else, are wary of letting atheists take control of the government. Your unashamed embrace of fascist ideology is not the boon to your cause that you think it is.

 

[DrZoidberg]

It's not a long read. It's pretty clear to me that Christians, were going out of their way to be persecuted. Why not just make sacrifices to the emperor? What's the big deal?

So your feeling is that religious persecution isn't really persecution, provided you can escape punishment by recanting your faith to align with the arbitrary and self-serving demands of an all-seeing State and its Gods?

This kind of thing is exactly why Christians, and everyone else, are wary of letting atheists take control of the government. Your unashamed embrace of fascist ideology is not the boon to your cause that you think it is.

You're putting modern ethical standards and using modern communication technology paradigms straight onto the Roman government.

Rome was a huuuuuge empire. In a world with little communication technology. That places certain demands on how it must be run not to fall apart.

One thing that's really important is that the various ethnic groups and cults treat eachother with respect. What Christians were doing was in effect to insult other religions and the emperor. For no reason other than to cause trouble. It was a calculated act of defiance. Pax Romana is older than Christianity. Each and every Roman convert to Christianity knew what it meant to publicly refuse to give offerings to other cults.

Also, stop pretending we're talking about modern politics. We have mass communication. Rome's government had things to worry about that a modern government doesn't have to worry about.

In the Podcast he mentioned martyr stories under emperor Severus. But these martyr stories are late additions. The Christian historian Tertullian, contemporary with Severus and who lived in the same city called Severus a great emperor who protected Christians and allowed them to worship in peace.

 

[steve_bank]

The way I say it the Romans had two rules.

1. Promote that which promotes order and wealth.
2. Anything interfering with 1 is harshly suppressed.

Pragmatic Romans may have seem them as delusional threats to order. Thy coud not hve people covrting oters to belive in a god and Jesus above all inclosing Roman authority.

We see it today. People claim vaccination for COVID is a violation of beliefs. Romans would probably say comply or die.

Christianity does not appeaser to have ver been any kind of monolithic belie and group.

Look ath forum today. No insult intende but we an array fof Christians passing through, nd we have one who identfies as Pagan Christian and one as Gnostic Christian.

I expect early Christianity was no different. Paul refers to people claiming to be followers of Jesus but that the leaders were false. Christian diversity began early. There was violence among early Christians.