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.
Ah, yesâŚdeathbed conversions. A common âargumentâ 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 (âthere are no atheists in the trenchesâ). 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 â cretinism. Yes, Iâm childish.
Damn, I fell into my own trap. Helena was Constantineâs 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 andâŚgood 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 326â28 AD Helena undertook a trip to Palestine.[21] According to Eusebius of Caesarea (260/265 AD â 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 Christâs birth and ascension, respectively. Local founding legend attributes to Helenaâs orders the construction of a church in Egypt to identify the Burning Bush of Sinai. The chapel at Saint Catherineâs Monasteryâoften referred to as the Chapel of Saint Helenâis 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 Jesusâs 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, â[t]here was a temple of Venus on the spot. This the queen (Helena) had destroyed.â[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 Rufinusâ chapters appended to his translation into Latin of Eusebiusâ 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 nigglingâŚâmaaate, your typing shite, you KNOW betterâ feelingâŚbut⌠ignored it. I will leave my transgression for the amusement of theists and those I have instructed to âlook it up before typingâ. Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa.
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 havenât 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; theyâre mostly just numbers.
As for distances, a common measure would be to translate it to time; dayâs 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 didnât 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.
So what? Have you a reply to your errors in Roman history? Or are you intent on introducing straw men?
I assume your post in 445 is in response to source for your claim.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=GUHJsooAAAAJ&hl=en
âŚ
111
Lastly, this dissertation examines key social and politicalâŚ*
The book isnât readily availableâŚbut for those history buffs, I found his large dissertation at the university of Toronto.
Excellent digging! I did a search for ânordicâ in the text, and found this quote:
In short, Rosenbergâs ideology was not a rejection of Christianity per se, but a radical revision of it. As one historian has noted, Rosenberg âwas not a pagan in the traditional sense in which one might apply the term to Ludendorff.â While Rosenberg made reference to Nordic gods in Mythus, this was not a typicaliy paganist appropriation: âWotan was and is dead.â
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 âworshippingâ of aryan and nordic âbloodâ, 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 âtaking Germany back to Norse godsâ.
That was my understanding. A revamping of religion to support political means - it comforts people to know they have âthe truth and god is on their sideââŚ
Not only religion. Hitler and Co. had grand plans in renaming and rebuilding Berlin into âGermaniaâ. So they had massive plans in changing almost every perception in their new world.
The obvious (speculative) question now is: Was it this kind of process that happened in the formative decades/centuries of christianity?
@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.
Just so.
Thereâs a saying ; âBrits think 100 miles is a long way. Australians think 100 years is a long time.â (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 Iâd 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.
I think the first step here would be to formulate the question. The central part is the last sentence.
Some alternatives:
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?
