Why don't you believe?

Debate Room
450

Oh LOL…

Really do some reading. There is some doubt whether Constantine really did “convert” to christianity. He made no attempt to prevent the Mithraic cult prevalent amongst his legions from flourishing. It was later subsumed by the christ war god. After the Councils of Nicea it was christians massacring christians until the current Latin Rite came out on top. Only after the 5th Century did the Christainised Romans start to apply the same force to the rest of their much diminished Empire. By which time they had lost much of what is now Germany, the British Isles and were in the process of retreat until the sack of Rome by the Germanic Goths and VisiGoths.

In short you ARE WRONG in your sweeping statement. From the elevation of Ceasar (Julius) the status of God Romans famously were indifferent to your religion provided it did not involve being contrary to their laws including the annual sacrifice to the God Emperor as I explained.

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451

Thought you might jump on that.

@Socialdarwin :

As far as I’m aware it was the emperor Theodosius 1 who made the sect we call christianity the state religion. It was also Theodosius 1 who first called those followers of ‘The Way’ of Jesus ‘*** Christians’ (4th century)

Theodosius approved of and encouraged the practice of the sect murdering any and all opposition and destroying their books. They continued that practice with gay abandon for the next 1500 years

*** There were literally dozens of sects claiming to follow the teachings of Yesua Ha Notzri .Most had their own sacared books, there were many often very different views. EG on the trinity and even on divinity of Jesus… The sect so revered today arrived where it is by being utterly brutal and ruthless as it amassed quite extraordinary wealth and power. The only reason the Catholic and Protestant churches stopped burning people alive is because temporal powers eventually stopped them.

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Of course, we often parallel and support each other in the actual history of the period. Because it IS the historical facts of the age, not wishful thinking (from theists) or errors from atheists who don’t actually do the hard yards when spouting off about events in the ancient world.

As we know, Constantines conversion was a political move designed to unite the forever internally combative “christian” churches into a homogeneous whole. Constantine seemed (like his legions) to have stayed with his Mithraic roots, and even, it certainly seems, to have introduced some of the liturgical elements into the christian sphere as well as some Apollonian symbolism.
That Constantines wife was an earlier wholehearted convert is indisputable. It was she who found the spear that pierced christ on the cross, nails from the true cross and many other supposed relics…oh and founded the Church of the Holy Sepulcher amongst other fake shrines and churches.

It was the Bishop of Rome in 492CE who first introduced the “Index” of banned books. This included just about every gnostic, adoptionist, Marcionic, or rival text in existence at that time. The list is very long and was added to in subsequent years. The texts and books were declared anathema and anyone holding, storing reading or disseminating them were to be killed and the works destroyed…ON SIGHT! No mention of Pagans, Mithrans, Apollonarians, no mention of Buddhists (who were a huge power at that time and well known in Rome) Hindus, Jains. This was a list squarely aimed at squashing in the most bloody manner any internal dissension in the Church and only in the Church.

Only when those bloody handed bastards consolidated their grip on the tenets of their “faith” did they turn their heads and proceed to enforce their “loving” god on the rest of the known world.

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Yeah , gullible old girl wasn’t she.

I’m aware that there’s no credible evidence that Constantine ever became christian. Some Christians like to claim he made a deathbed conversion, but I’m not aware of any evidence .

Also interesting to note that it was Constantine who called the First Council of Nicaea in 325. Things become much clearer when the council is understood to be about politics and power, not religion. (although that was the pretence)

It’s my understanding that the aim was to make Rome again the centre of
Christianity rather than Constantinople. Worked too.

Taking the list of books made by Athanasius of Alexander as the official Canon also ended up legitimising the Church of Rome. (and its persecution of dissidents)

As far as I can tell, Christianity was never more than a convenient tool for Constantine

()))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))9))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

@Old_man_shouts_at_cl

I’d like your opinion if you don’t mind.

By the Renaissance Christendom was arse deep in holy relics. EG enough pieces of the trues cross to build a small house ,and enough nails from the cross to hold it together. Not to mention straw from the manger, mother’ milk from Mary and several holy foreskins from the infant Yeshua. Constantine’s mother wen to Jerusalem and bought back a bunch of stuff . The only ‘real’ thing seems to have been oil from the putative holy sepulchre.

My question:

Context? At during the so-called dark ages, and for centuries after, the average human being never travelled more than 20 miles from his place (much like me in my retirement.) It seems to me that people had a very different idea of time. They may not have been able to grasp the concept of 1000 years, if indeed the bible was ever explained to the [illiterate] faithful in those terms.

Although the average man may have understood the earth is a sphere, I suspect he had only a vague idea of distances. EG even a relatively learned man such as Christopher Columbus apparently badly miscalculated the circumference of the earth.

In context, those people who bought holy relics 1700 years ago and later****, were not really all that gullible. Compare them with the literate gullible of today who fall for IT based scams and political charlatans such as Donald Trump ???

***Millions of believers today believe in miracles simply because the church claims there are such things

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454

Absolutely. Many people want their world to be as they wish it be, not as it is.

Exactly what it was. He was rumoured to have converted because of his vision before a battle that he won. Constantine was an astute politician at a time when the authority of the Emperor was being undermined by the growing diverse christian communities in Roman society. He lent them his office and cloaked them in his grace, but retained his divinity and power. Very clever husband and wife team.

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Ah, yes…deathbed conversions. A common “argument” from god-believers, employed when their usual inane arguments in favor or creationism(*), science denial, bible inerrancy, superior religious morality, etc. fall flat. For some reason, they seem to think that the made-up deathbed conversion of Charles Darwin is an argument against the theory of evolution and in favor of creationism. And related to that is the assertion that most people would pray to a god and convert when faced with deathly danger (“there are no atheists in the trenches”). Which basically is pure projection from people unable to grasp the concept of non-belief.

(*) I never get bored from making typos here when inappropriate → cretinism. Yes, I’m childish.

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456

Damn, I fell into my own trap. Helena was Constantine’s MOTHER, not his wife who he drowned in the bath.

In my defence I read that last some 20 years ago. Decided to look her up again and…good old Wikipedia. ( Refreshes those parts you forgot you had)

Constantine appointed his mother Helena as Augusta Imperatrix, and gave her unlimited access to the imperial treasury in order to locate the relics of the Christian tradition. In 326–28 AD Helena undertook a trip to Palestine.[21] According to Eusebius of Caesarea (260/265 AD – 339/340 AD), who records the details of her pilgrimage to Palestine and other eastern provinces, she was responsible for the construction or beautification of two churches, the Church of the Nativity, Bethlehem, and the Church of Eleona on the Mount of Olives, sites of Christ’s birth and ascension, respectively. Local founding legend attributes to Helena’s orders the construction of a church in Egypt to identify the Burning Bush of Sinai. The chapel at Saint Catherine’s Monastery—often referred to as the Chapel of Saint Helen—is dated to the year 330 AD.

The True Cross and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre
Jerusalem was still being rebuilt following the destruction caused by Titus in 70 AD. Emperor Hadrian had built during the 130s AD a temple to Venus over the supposed site of Jesus’s tomb near Calvary, and renamed the city Aelia Capitolina. Accounts differ concerning whether the temple was dedicated to Venus or Jupiter.[22] According to Eusebius, “[t]here was a temple of Venus on the spot. This the queen (Helena) had destroyed.”[23] According to tradition, Helena ordered the temple torn down and, according to the legend that arose at the end of the 4th century, chose a site to begin excavating, which led to the recovery of three different crosses. The legend is recounted in Ambrose, On the Death of Theodosius (died 395 AD) and at length in Rufinus’ chapters appended to his translation into Latin of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, the main body of which does not mention the event.[b] Then, Rufinus relates, the empress refused to be swayed by anything short of solid proof and performed a test. Possibly through Bishop Macarius of Jerusalem, she had a woman who was near death brought from the city. When the woman touched the first and second crosses, her condition did not change, but when she touched the third and final cross she suddenly recovered,[c] and Helena declared the cross with which the woman had been touched to be the True Cross.

On the site of discovery, Constantine ordered the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Churches were also built on other sites detected by Helena.

So yes I was WRONG !!! As I was typing earlier I had that niggling…“maaate, your typing shite, you KNOW better” feeling…but… ignored it. I will leave my transgression for the amusement of theists and those I have instructed to “look it up before typing”. Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa.

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Even today, many do not seem to be able to grasp time longer than, say, their own life times. A hundred years seems a looong time ago, but WW1 ended more than 100 years ago. And the first christians 2k years ago were closer in time to us than the bulding of the Great Pyramid of Giza (26th century BCE). And the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza is closer to us in time than the invention of agriculture/farming in the neolithic Levant. And then we haven’t even started on amounts of time required for evolution of a species (modern humans as a species is on the order of 100-200k years old). And THEN we have geologic time scales. Even for scientifically trained minds these are difficult to understand or visualize mentally; they’re mostly just numbers.

As for distances, a common measure would be to translate it to time; day’s marches or days of rowing or sailing.

Which it was not. The word of the Bible was far too holy and important to be translated to other languages than greek or latin. So people had to endure hours long services and masses in languages they didn’t understand. However, this changed. Public schools were introduced here in this country so that people could read and learn their chatecismus, psalms, and to read in the Bible. The two most important subjects at school were christendom and reading. Writing and arithmetics were elective subjects.

Not just apparently. It was a combination of mistaken units of length (arab vs roman miles), erroneous estimates, and being too optimistic. Source 1, source 2.

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459

So what? Have you a reply to your errors in Roman history? Or are you intent on introducing straw men?

460

@Socialdarwin

I assume your post in 445 is in response to source for your claim.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=GUHJsooAAAAJ&hl=en

  • Thisstudyalsounveilsastruggleoverreligiousidentitiesinthemovement. Inthis contest, “positive Christians” waged a struggle against the party’s “paganists.” The paganists were determined to create a new religion that would move its spiritual center f?om Jenisalem or Rome to Germany, and would introduce new objects of worship to the Volk. However, even as these paganists professed a rejection of Christianity and its dogmas, they esteemed Jesus as someone whose personal “struggle” against the Jews sewed as inspiration for their own struggle. Paganists cast Luther as both a great national hero and religious reformer, whose struggle against Romeinspiredtheirreligiousbattles. Convincedthattheyhadsuccessfullyoutlinedanew religious belief system, paganists fkequently salvaged key aspects of Christian belief for their new, un-Christian faith.

…
111
Lastly, this dissertation examines key social and political…*

The book isn’t readily available…but for those history buffs, I found his large dissertation at the university of Toronto.

461

Excellent digging! I did a search for “nordic” in the text, and found this quote:

In short, Rosenberg’s ideology was not a rejection of Christianity per se, but a radical revision of it. As one historian has noted, Rosenberg “was not a pagan in the traditional sense in which one might apply the term to Ludendorff.” While Rosenberg made reference to Nordic gods in Mythus, this was not a typicaliy paganist appropriation: “Wotan was and is dead.”

Now, I have of course not read it all, but the above quote indicates that the whole idea was to create a new religion. And from what I could read both here and elsewhere, their actual effective aim was to construct a new religion based on Nazi ideology, to scrape together desired pieces here and there, like Christian faith sans all references to jews, jewish names, places, culture and practices, and mix it with the nazi “worshipping” of aryan and nordic “blood”, and thereby throw in some references to norse mythology. The ultimate goal would then be to turn nazism into a religion. This is quite different from “taking Germany back to Norse gods”.

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462

That was my understanding. A revamping of religion to support political means - it comforts people to know they have “the truth and god is on their side”…

463

Not only religion. Hitler and Co. had grand plans in renaming and rebuilding Berlin into “Germania”. So they had massive plans in changing almost every perception in their new world.

464

The obvious (speculative) question now is: Was it this kind of process that happened in the formative decades/centuries of christianity?

465

@Get_off_my_lawn And what were the conditions before christianity took off.

My opinion is that the Roman leaders embraced christianity because it told slaves and other disadvantaged people to keep they heads down and obey their masters, that there was an afterlife where they would enjoy much better conditions.

For the political masters, it was a tool to stifle discontent, possibly rebellion.

466

Just so.

There’s a saying ; “Brits think 100 miles is a long way. Australians think 100 years is a long time.” (anon)

Last time I was in the UK,I spent a few weeks backpacking around S Ireland and Scotland. Finished at Loch Ness. Rang my host in Cambridge to advise I’d be home that night. When learning I was in Loch Ness, she was skeptical. I arrived at her place in Cambridge at 6.30 PM. I took the wrong train from London. It stopped at every stop, rather than the express to Cambridge. It had taken me 10 hours, taking a bus and two trains.

467

Simplier Language

Open

468

I think the first step here would be to formulate the question. The central part is the last sentence.
Some alternatives:

  • Why do atheists have a problem with God?
  • Why are atheists angry with God?
  • Why do atheists hate God?

There are other ways of formulating the question. But do we want to transform and shorten the question to the central message, or do we want to answer the actual question, as it was formulated by a religious person?

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