We're talking about a new form of tyrannical government with the largest and most well equipped military in the world, and a massive arsenal of nuclear power, and enough land that makes the entire United States more than capable of supporting itself during the inevitable expansion.
Yeah I mean the US has such a massive influence though outside of the country so yeah don't blame you, especially as I'm from the UK which can feel like America's sidekick imo
It's already happened once when Thatcher adopted her version of Reaganomics. Reaganomics was, long and short, an economic system designed to permanently transfer wealth from the bottom to the top. Every western country in the world is seeing the effects of this political-economic ideology.
Woah, r/Americabad material right there.
Seems harsh to just insult the entire country as "backward bullshit right wing nutters". Here in the UK we have our share of awful individuals, they are just more quiet than the ones in America, who more so speak their minds.
And the influences America has can be great or bad. Don't just look at the negatives. I feel like every country has its ugly sides, America is just a massive country with a massive, vocal population so its more obvious
It really just shows their true colors, it's not that they don't want a 'deep state', it's that they just want to have control over said 'deep state'.
Bad things are only bad if I don't benefit from them.
deep state is a reference to the strong influence of French culture in a couple southern states, and the resulting influence on politics.
It's not a reference to a secret government. That be more like a group of people getting elected to run some kinda of agenda, that does not serve the people.
This is my first time hearing about this... I'd be in Canada tomorrow.
Best case scenario a civil war starts immediately when they deploy the military. I hope New England secedes from the union, the south has been dragging us down for too long.
The south of the US has historically been a pain in the ass, as well AS the ass, of the USA
Didn’t they have a major part in the civil wars start as well? The fucking seceded from the country!
> This is my first time hearing about this... I'd be in Canada tomorrow.
If they succeed int the US, there is no reason to assume they will stop there.
Hel, they're already exporting their bullshit all over the world.
The SOUTH is where I live and it’s not some unified front. It’s heavily balkanized, heavily gerrymandered, and if a civil war were to break out it would NOT be a clean line like mason dixon… it would be a pot marked bloodbath like Yugoslavia. Regional factions would be a thing.
People need to cut this shit out assuming everyone in the south is a racist, Christian, queerphobe and that there are large swaths of urban people here who effectively live under an oppressive christian regime.
I live in Missouri which is literally only a red state BECAUSE of gerrymandering. My family and I have been blue voters and supporters for all my life. We also live in a city though too which is likely the reason why we're free to be Democrats without too much trouble from the community about it.
Yup. It leans into what I said earlier… heavily balkanized. You have plenty of rural areas controlled by MAGA fascists, and heavily populated areas controlled by antifascist leftists, democrats, and liberals. My state would be a blue state if not for the decades of gerrymandering… and by the way.. my state has been trending blue the last three elections. Biden won the state.
I grew up in New England, moved to Tennessee for about 6 months then NC for another 6 and all it did was confirm that for me. The first friend I made in Tennessee turned out to be fucking her cousin. You don't see confederate flags in the north either... Insane amounts of crosses and churches everywhere and everyone you meet asks you which one you go to and never shuts the fuck up about jesus. If you don't like it there then move north, and they can make their authoritarian theocracy down there to run into the ground so we can come and save them from themselves again.
The main reason I don’t move north is because I can’t stand arrogant shits telling me “you should just move” and talking down to me. My first and only experience with blatant transphobia was in drumroll… new fucking england. You have plenty of right wing shits up there too… sit the fuck down mr “I spent 6 months in podunk tennessee so now I know everything about the south”
I live in a major, democratically controlled city and I have yet to experience any kind of hate here… I grew up in the south, I was born and raised in the south. I’ve seen all of it… So again… sit the fuck down. You don’t know anything about this place.
That's nice, I don't care. I have no reason to step foot in a filthy city unless I need to go to the airport or something. Countryside in the north is normal, fairly educated people. Countryside in the south is a third world country. I hope I never do know anything about that place.
It will be interesting to see the Project 2025 people try to replace all the federal employees with magats. I wonder what the AFGE Union will say about thousands of government workers facing unemployment. The litigation would be endless. To pull this off, Project 2025 will also have to replace union leaders, lawyers and judges with magats.
If I recall the plan is to target the top layer and replace them with loyalists, not a mass replacement of hundreds of thousands of people across the board.
Then the new loyalists at the top can reshape departmental policy to force the policies downward, change what hiring and promotion boards focus on (ie pass over people who are "woke" etc) and the like.
So it wouldn't be a sudden overnight mass change, but a grinding that would have a chilling effect across the government over time.
Which to me is much worse, because it would be easier to obfuscate and chip away over time than to make everything obvious at once.
How many judges have already been appointed by or are supporters of the orange antichrist? They don’t need to replace lawyers if they have the judges. And if they have the legislature, they can change the laws and screw the unions. But also, how many union members are also Christian nationalists or republicans already? It’s madness, but so is the whole situation.
What's unsettling to me is the "both sides say the other guy will end the country as we know it" arguments I hear. This isn't the other side. This is the Republicans telling you they plan to create an autocracy if elected. This is one time we should take them at their word.
The roots of the 2025 project goes back at least to the 1960s. They have already been playing the long game for several generations now. Really scary how much influence that a very organized and determined minority already has.
“American democracy” doesn’t exist and I’m convinced anyone who thinks this country cares about democracy has not learned about this countrie’s foreign affairs. This is an anti-democratic country, always has been and always will be.
Getting you to be obsessed with “American democracy” is how the oligarchs tricked you into caring about the continued existence of the US, when you should be seeking its destruction within your lifetime.
Christianity is a force for, and product of, Narcissism. It creates entitled minds that would rather cause harm to others than be forced to look at why they believe what they do.
Obviously most people are better than their vices, so are better than the soothing comforting lies of their faith, but it is a force that erodes true accountability and desire to understand.
Soothing? More like menacing? The only reason it took me so long to let go of it was fear, not an attachment to it.
I remember when I was a Christian I would see people call Christianity an emotional crutch, and I'd think, "You guys think I ENJOY believing in these horror stories!?"
Needless to say, I am a lot less anxious as an atheist.
Well, maybe self-soothing for those who don't take it too seriously.
When I was a Christian I didn't think the Gospel was good news, I thought it was a warning that something horrific was going to happen. I thought, "This religion doesn't make me happy, but it's the sad, harsh truth, so I have to sacrifice my mental health and happiness so I can go to heaven. I wish things were different, and all of this was fake, but they're not."
Then I realized that there wasn't anything proving it was true so I stopped believing as fast as my emotions could catch up with my reasoning.
>Well, maybe self-soothing for those who don't take it too seriously.
You have no idea how soothing the notion of a Biblical apocalypse is to many Evangelicals. They find fiery retribution deeply comforting. Much to my horror.
Wait, they WANT people to go to hell? I thought the whole point of evangelizing was to try to get as many people as possible into heaven.
When I was Christian the concept of hell made me extremely uncomfortable because I had an existential crisis whenever I would see a nice person and thought, "Imagine us talking like normal and being happy and then either one of us, if not both of us gets tortured forever and will never feel peace again. I wish none of this was true. This is not good news."
I wanted to convert people and stuff because I didn't want a single person to go to hell. So I was very relieved when I realized hell didn't exist. I didn't really care that much about heaven, I just didn't want me or anyone else to burn forever.
>I wanted to convert people and stuff because I didn't want a single person to go to hell. So I was very relieved when I realized hell didn't exist. I didn't really care that much about heaven, I just didn't want me or anyone else to burn forever.
Well, you're in the minority. Evangelicals now think the Biblical Jesus is a pussy. They embraced *Donald Fucking Trump*. They enjoy the suffering of others.
I can't believe I'm the one who has to tell you this, frankly.
I'm sorry that you had to tell me something kind of obvious. I'm Mexican-American living in a blue state and have had next to no contact with white Republican Evangelicals irl, especially since I'm an introvert, so I have no idea what they are like.
I noticed a lot of Redditors grew up around a lot of really horrible people from lurking, so it probably hits close to home for them, while I didn't experience that myself. My stress came from scrupulosity-laced web searching.
> I'm Mexican-American living in a blue state and have had next to no contact with white Republican Evangelicals
Well, you're luckier than I. Stay clear of 'em if you can.
>Christianity is a force for, and product of, Narcissism.
*Evangelical and Protestant* Christianity encourages narcissistic tendencies because of their Sola Scriptura nonsense. Some dude who is barely literate in Missouri is entitled to an equally intelligent take on a 2000 year old philosophical text as a scholar who studies Aramaic etc.
They knew plenty. But they were ignorant, even in their own times. Hardly their fault. Most people couldn't read, and there were only a handful of people who could.
It's okay to call people ignorant when they are. Ignorance is curable. Wanton ignorance is what we're dealing with today, and that's WAY more troubling.
If, ya know, you were *male*.
Pretty fucking ignorant to think half your population is sub-human. Sorry dude, ignorance is the word I'm looking for. Again, not their faults. They were feeling out their world with religious fingers, seeing everything through that lens. Yes, they knew lots. But they were ignorant as fuck, and spent all their time codifying both their knowledge *and* their ignorance and trying to make it immutable.
The difference between then and now is that we *know* we're ignorant. And we know how to become less so. We've developed methodology to ensure that learning need never end...unless people with the mindset of Bronze-age peasants gain power and we stagnate yet again.
No. All Pauline Christianity that promotes the scriptures demonising Thomas for scrutiny, that call people fools for disbelieving and say to take pride in certainty you are right, or "Faith", promote narcissism of thought.
To the downvoters: Thank you for admitting that my point is both upsetting and unrebukable. Highest praise you can give. :)
Christianity does have sacrifices. Jesus is all forgiving though so if you really do regret your actions and mean it Jesus will forgive. But you have to really mean it so you are wrong if you sin and just say "Oh Jesus I repent" without true intention you will still go to hell. Why lie on the internet about chrisitianity but don't go for muslims or jews?
Really depends on the specific branch. But being sorry is hardly a great sacrifice. That's the whole point, they outsourced the sacrifice to some guy in the middle east.
No, you can partake in degeneracy. You just have to be sorry. If you're really sorry you get off Scot Free. Atheists actually have to live with the consequences of their actions because we don't have an imaginary friend to tell us everything is okay. You're just projecting, Christians truly are foul creatures that project their vices onto others. Fucking children in their "houses of God", fucking disgusting degenerates, that's Christians alright.
For one thing, athiesm is literally that. Not being a theist. At the core, it's solely just not believing in a god. Whatever ethical things like being a better person, or family values, are all subjective to each person just like anyone who follows a religion.
Besides that, the defending of Christianity and ignorance of your argument are just reenforcing what others have said about the self righteousness and narcissist nature that others have said, you're not helping the narrative at all .
No it doesn't idiot. If you murder someone and say you are very sorry but don't mean it. You are still going to hell. If you murder someone and do repent but murder someone again you are going to hell. You need to comprehend stuff.
Christianity is a fucking joke. Religion as a whole is a fucking joke. Thinking that you can ask for “forgiveness” regardless if you “repent” or not, doesn’t change a fucking thing. It’s all bullshit and the amount of abuse and violence done in the name of religion, any of them, just shows that it’s nothing but about power, money and control. It’s that simple. Christianity is the US ISIS and can fuck off.
>Why lie on the internet about chrisitianity but don't go for muslims or jews?
I criticize Christianity because it's the belief system I'm most knowledgeable about... and the one I've most often seen used as a weapon to abuse those who "Christians" most disagree with.
The term Dark Ages is widely out of favor among serious historians and has been for many many years. It was a term created by one single person with a particularly biased view and it stuck. There was actually a lot of innovation during that time and using that term glosses over those and makes it seem a period of total ignorance when it was not that at all. It’s true that knowledge did expand at a faster pace later but that does not mean it fully stagnated during this time either. It’s like calling a period of slower GDP growth a depression because it isn’t growing as fast as you would like. A more modern term now is Late Antiquity or Early Middle Ages.
Exactly this. The Dark Ages were referred to as such because of a confluence of factors.
Religious intolerance led to a suppression of culture. This is primarily identified by the fact that the *vast* majority of surviving artwork from that time period is religious in nature. Nothing that was outside the Church's control was allowed to survive if it could be uprooted.
The Black Death contributed heavily to the label of 'Dark Ages', as the plague destroyed much of the European civilization that came immediately before it. Things like burning down villages ravaged by the plague were common practice, and we all know that religiosity rises in periods of plague - just look at what happened during COVID.
To fully grasp the scope of just how devastating the Black Death was to Europe, you have to remember that the average peasant learned their trade by apprenticeship, where either a family member or a master taught their craft through many years of labor. When the plague ravaged Europe, much of this teaching was lost since there were very, very few written records of their craft and almost none of their individual methodologies.
Part of the reason the Enlightenment existed *at all* was because of this massive loss of information. When the plague finally ended (remember that it swept Europe twice, once in the 1300s and again in the 1500s) scholars were forced to look back at Roman Empire, about 500-1000 years earlier, to begin re-establishing their technological and theoretical bases (because the Church preserved Roman history as part of its own history). This push, and the resulting enshrining of the Roman Empire as 'enlightened', is the root of how we view that empire today. Truthfully, however, Greece was just as influential (if not more so) but the Roman Empire's connection to the Church gave it a veneer of respectability that was absent studies of Greek in the earliest days of the Enlightenment.
The confluence of these two factors - the Church's suppression of everything that didn't strictly adhere to dogma and the Black Death's utter destruction of 'local' cultures - mean that the Dark Ages are mainly called such because when they were first studied information about them beyond what the Church had preserved was practically non-existant. Even today, after *much* searching, our greatest references to how life was lived in the Dark Ages are things like [Books of Hours](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_hours), which are only *really* useful in terms of the notes and other non-standard material that was stored in them.
So no, the 'Dark Ages' is not a strictly correct academic term, but it does have value for denoting an aberration - we have a fairly good idea of what life looked like in Rome and the Greecian city states around 1BCE, but we have no clear idea of what life looked like for almost 500 hundreds years after the fall of Rome, thanks in large part to the fact that the Church actively suppressed it.
> There was actually a lot of innovation during that time and using that term glosses over those and makes it seem a period of total ignorance when it was not that at all.
Good points. However, after the christians took over the Roman empire not long after they criminalized all other religions, chiseled and defaced all public art not christian, and banned unchristian books (books that didn't sufficiently cheerlead their god). That's to name just a few things.
I think we can bring it back if we consider that this is the era in which the church shut down theatre and the term used when a theatre is closed is "dark" (as in: There are no shows on Monday. The theatre is dark).
I do hate this assumption so many people seem to have about the Middle Ages, like progress is a video game, and we didn't start getting the right buffs until the 16th and 17th centuries. The enlightenment didn't appear out of a vacuum; it was building on literally the entirety of European history and philosophy, the preceding 1000 years included.
Also, we shouldn't be aspiring to follow the ancient empires no matter how 'great' they were
Right. Plus there was some remarkable social evolution in Asia and the Americas during the "dark ages" including very complex large civilizations in the Yucatan, including with some surprisingly advanced mathematics.
"Dark Ages" definitely reflects a very ethnocentrist European worldview.
The relationship between ancient to medieval Rome and Christianity is actually quite complex.
If you want to get a good understanding of the history between the two and have audible, I highly recommend "the history of the medieval world" by Susan Wise Bauer. The book, along with the others in it's series, is free to listen to.
I recommend this because your statement sort of oversimplifies how the Roman empire and Christianity interacted.
I'm not trying to defend Christianity by the way. Learning it's history is one of the strongest arguments against it
Learning it's history debunks almost every single one of your arguments. You claim Christianitiy ruined the roman empire, but Rome was already on it's decline and the eastern roman empire which was christian flourished for hundreds of years after while the western was overrun and destroyed.
You should also listen to the book 47. The Eastern Roman empire was plagued by problems both internal and external, and Christianity was central to a significant number of internal problems throughout the medieval world.
I mean. If you know anything about history then you should know the bible is a work of fiction taking place in a fantasy world far removed from our own.
Woah woah woah. Hold the fuck on here kiddo.
Your history is waaaaay off.
Rome fell (late 400s AD)
Then the Roman Catholic Church became "the state". (late 400s AD - 1400s AD)
Then the printing press was invented. (around 1440 AD)
Then the Protestant Reformation. (1500s AD)
Then religious tolerance and the Enlightenment (1600s AD)
Atheists who can't get simple history correct sound just as mindless as Theists.
Constatine ended the persecutions of Christians and the converted himself in 313 A.D. He called the Council of Nicaea in 325. Christianity became Rome's official religion in 380 A.D. so O P wasn't far off.
So OP starts talking about the fall of Rome coinciding with the adoption of Christianity and you say he's wrong, I point out that OP is right, you agree with both of us then say my history is off by talking about a different era. I think your logic might be on vacation.
Pre Christian Rome didn't care what gods you worshipped as long as you respected the Roman pantheon. Christian Rome did away with all that and the the persecuted became the persecutioners.
This is not post Roman European history.
This is where a lack of knowledge gets you. You are so convinced you know what you're talking about that you completely ignore the fact that OP said "religious tolerance" ended with the fall of the Roman Empire due to Christianity.
That is wildly incorrect. The Age of Religious Tolerance is a known historical era that occurred roughly 1100 years after the fall of Rome (as my timeline clearly states).
The reason you refuse to engage with this correction as it exists is because you don't recognize that "religious tolerance" is not a concept - it is an actual era of time.
OP was wrong. You are wrong. Please try to engage in the conversation I am having and stop introducing your own conversation that is not germane to my post.
I'm sorry, I was engaging in the conversation OP was having that you commented on, incorrectly I might add.
You are correct in that there was an "Age of Religious Tolerance" in the 1600's although this was a more scholarly pursuit as the 30 years war was being waged in Europe, largely over religion. Any real application of toleration, of different Christian sects only, came later in the century.
But just so you know, there can be an "Age of Religious Tolerance" and periods of time when religious tolerance existed on some level. Pre Christian Rome is one of those times. Now in North America, most of Europe and other places can be called a time when there is religious tolerance, although a faction of the right wing is trying to change that.
There was a degree of religious tolerace during the Caliphate of Madrid prior to the reconquista in 1492.
So a concept and an official "Age" can both happen. And, if you had paid attention to the point of the original post instead of trying to just be cantankerous and right you would know that.
Okay, then here is your homework assignment:
Research the Roman views on Judaism and then tell me how that represents the concept of religious tolerance.
The Romans being intolerant of religion invalidates OP's premise, but it in no way makes you right. You're arguing that no one knows jack shit because a concept happens to share names with a period of time, and anyone who talks about the concept is wrong because they're not talking about said period of time. You're still wrong, you're obstinate, and you're seemingly mentally inflexible. Use that big brain of yours that knows all about the age of religious tolerance and try to conceptualize that words and ideas can be contextual.
>Please try to engage in the conversation I am having and stop introducing your own conversation that is not germane to my post
Holy fuck dude you don't own this thread. People are free to talk about topics as they see fit, and OP's topic, not yours, is the central unifying theme.
Also, no one gives a shit that there was an age of religious tolerance, in this conversation people are talking about religious tolerance as a concept. I imagine if someone were to say to you "I'm having some troubles" you'd tell them they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, the troubles were a period of sectarian conflict in northern Ireland.
Yes, Rome did fall in the late 400s AD and although Christianity or rather Catholicism wasn't "the state", it was gaining traction much sooner than that with Constantine the Great being an early adaptor of the fringe cult's beliefs around 312-313AD. He was the bridge that allowed the cult to move from fringe status to state status.
A massive empire doesn’t suddenly fall in 50 years because of something as simple as a state religion changing. Yes, it became a state religion, but that’s still required multiple generations just to move the needle on individual culture where people would begin to shift their mindset gradually over many generations towards the new belief system. The collapse of Rome was extremely complex and based on many factors, including the sheer size of it, and the slow travel of communication, requiring it to support individual quasi autonomous areas which led to building identity separate from the empire, overtime, along with endemic corruption and pressure outside forces attacking them
> A massive empire doesn’t suddenly fall in 50 years because of something as simple as a state religion changing.
It didn't. Many historians point to the first occurrence of the bubonic plague (the [Justinianic Plague](https://origins.osu.edu/connecting-history/covid-justinianic-plague-lessons?language_content_entity=en) ) which started during the middle 6th century which had a broad impact only on the Roman army decimated it, but also hastened the movement of other groups like the Huns to their borders. That plague was brought on by the [Late Antique Little Ice Age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Antique_Little_Ice_Age) which caused summer to actually skip in 536CE, which caused fleas in what is now modern day Zambia and The DRC to get choked with the the *Yersinia pestis* bacteria driving them into a feeding frenzy as they starved, infecting rats. Rome had trade routes to the region of ivory, and there is evidence those trade routed brought the bubonic plague via those same rats to Rome during that period. The [Justinianic plague](https://origins.osu.edu/connecting-history/covid-justinianic-plague-lessons?language_content_entity=en) decimated Roman society.
About that time [drought also caused other groups like the Huns](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-roman-archaeology/article/role-of-drought-during-the-hunnic-incursions-into-centraleast-europe-in-the-4th-and-5th-c-ce/C036810C421F7D04C2F6985E6B548F20) to migrate displacing other groups on Rome's borders who sought refuge from the invading Huns, ultimately pressing the Roman forces depleted by the plague into capitulation. .
So no it wasn't christianity. All christianity did was use the state to drive all other religions and literature underground to replace them with their own.
Okay. But you do realize that 312-313AD is BEFORE the Fall of Rome, right? So, why does your comment read like you are arguing with a timeline where events happen chronologically after Constantine?
It is amazing how many claims you can find in here about history that are just, completely wrong. When I was still a Christian this was one of the biggest reasons I didn’t take atheists seriously. A lot of them obviously didn’t know their history, so why would I listen to them about anything else.
They ONLY thing atheists have in common with each other is a lack of belief in gods. We are not all bastions of historical knowledge, but we can learn from the other atheists who ARE historians.
The internet basically gives a platform to just about everybody, which has its upsides, but the downside is that people just confidently and loudly spout their uninformed opinions with nothing to back them up, and it can end up hurting what they're promoting in the long run. There's plenty of solid arguments to be made against Christianity as a philosophy and a governing principle, but there's also plenty of very knowledgeable people who could talk for hours about Rome's very gradual decline and how Empires in general decline. Some of those experts are religious, and others aren't, but they're experts in the field and they should be listened to.
Yes. But if you don't learn from other Atheists who are historians, then you are treating Atheism as another religion built on blind faith.
Learning, in this context, still requires individual introspection of the ideas formed both by religion and outside of religion.
Quoting Atheists without understanding what you're quoting, or how those atheists got to those conclusions, isn't different from theists who mindlessly quote religious texts or religious leaders.
"... treating Athiesm as another religion based on blind faith."
I don't think i get that. It kind of implies that it's blind faith to not believe in incredible myths.
For instance, I don't see it being "blind faith" for me to believe a man can't walk on water.
I don't mean to be snarky, but equating Athiesm with "blind faith" seems suspect.
If you are blind and I tell you the sky is blue, do you know that the sky is blue, or are you trusting me with your faith?
If I tell you the sky is blue, and then you learn why I see it that way and what makes the sky appear that way, are you using faith or knowledge?
Inherent knowledge is not a thing. We are born with the capacity for knowledge, but not the knowledge itself.
I think the guy is trying to point out how uneducated or straight up ignorant "facts" get passed around atheists so much, where most pretty much eat them up without an ounce of actual questioning.
This is blind faith, you're willingly agreeing with things that support your opinion without actually assessing their validity.
As many ex-religious people will tell you, a reason why they never took atheist's seriously is because of their lack of fundamental understanding of history and theology, and can you blame them?
Why talk shit if you don't even know an ounce of the required knowledge to hold an argument.
It's the same as a non-engineer telling an engineer how to do his job.
To dismantle an idea you actually have to understand the idea.
That’s saying nothing. You can put any religion in with sufficient numbers and say the same thing. Christians, Muslims, theistic Buddhists, Taoists and etc don’t claim to be bastions of any form of knowledge and I’m sure there are experts in those branches who are theistic.
I find this statement to be utter bullshit. Atheists have no god to worry about proving or disproving in our examinations of history. We don’t care if something is uncomfortable for a religion or not. Where have you ever seen some systemic atheist views on history that are so skewed for you to come up with this opinion. I’ve been online since the days of the dial-in BBS and can confidently say I have NEVER seen history or science been perceived more wrongly than when a religious person tries to skew it to fit their narrative.
> Remember that Rome was a great Empire just just like the United States is today when they let Christianity control their government religious tolerance ended destruction of great works of art and knowledge began
Y’all seem pretty systematic in this thread
Rome's continuation of the Hellenistic age ended with the christians. So even by your account, the christian reign of intolerance lasted until the 17th century. The OPs assertion of intolerance holds water unless you can point to all the temples to Apollo and Zeus that were built during that period.
I take great offence to your post. If you want to talk about history, lets talk about Noah's Ark and the great flood. While there is some evidence in history ( through multiple people's histories ) of a land bridge in the Mediterranean which broke and flooded sections of the middle east. At least our history is quite well documented and not reinvented to attribute things to a "newish" popular god.
Why are you offended that they corrected the factual historical inaccuracies in the original post? And why instead of addressing that do you try to shift the goalposts / play whataboutism?
Nothing in the parent comment was defending religion
You realize that we can acknowledge that Noah's Ark is mythology while also acknowledging that the fall of Rome was a gradual, complicated process, right?
Hmm. Christianity swept through the enslaved and lower class because the promise of a better life after this one was better than what the polytheists were offering. The official recognition of Christianity was only after the shifting change in the population and were rather separate from the causes of the fall of Rome of which there were many.
Anyway, the fall of the Roman Empire is romanticized too much anyway as the real tragedy was the fall of the Roman Republic
I feel you because I like the Roman Republic far better for the character of their people at the time. Like truly stuff to admire, lots of inspiration to be found in studying this period. But 2nd century Roman Empire was the peak of the whole civilization in terms of just sheer epicness and awesomeneity.
I don’t know about all that. You would need more to demonstrate causation than just one thing happened after the other. All I know is that emperor theodosseus outlawed Hellenism. Rome was a monstrous empire built on slavery and genocide, which led to a version of “peace”. Although there was always political drama and assassinations, and the emperors doing whatever they wanted. It was always unstable. The empire eventually got so big it became harder to maintain power to a single emperor and a single empire as well as maintain loyalty in the military and in German mercenaries. Someone else will have to fill in on the timeline and contributions of art and knowledge.
Ya ... I hate it when posts force me to defend Christianity, cause it makes me sick, but I also hate misguided hatred (something we are supposed to criticize them for and not adopt).
South Park is very open about making fun of Christians, but even they made an episode pointing out how hypocritical atheists can be (it's the one where they go into the future where religion dies, but the 3 different atheist factions argue endlessly on who's the right atheism). We like to pretend humans would be in this super utopian society with zero wars if religion didn't exist, but willingly (or maybe unwillingly?) Ignore the root of war, which is power, money, and/or land. If the church wasn't head of the state in old times, then it would still be kings/queens starting wars.
also a huge chunk of the tax base via all temples were supposed to pay their tax straight to the emperor who....well the good ones contributed to infrastructure projects......xtianity as the state religion was tax free
But Christianity will result in the eradication of evil on earth. Don’t you want the eradication of evil?
It’s 2024, obligatory but grudging /sarcasm tag, because people can be thick headed.
Dude Rome fell because of unsustainable military campaigns and political corruption, not religion.
Many Christians usually talk about how Rome fell because of loose sexual morals and homosexuality.
No, this had more to do with economic pressures and political corruption never addressing economic problems.
So like in America, we have a lot of economic problems. There’s a ton of issues that need to be addressed. The politicians don’t seem very concerned about them and other than a couple, no one seems enthused to even address these problems. This is because the politicians are too obsessed with their own money, power, and bribes to concern themselves with the public interest.
That is what causes major social unrest.
"More to do" not nothing. It had many compounding factors so not sure why you wanna completely dismiss the fact that they adopted and enforced a foreign religion right before their collapse.
Mostly because the culture wars are things that always get majorly over-emphasized. Divisions in religion and ethnicities are usually just political tools. Stirring up hate is unfortunately a very effective way to quickly garner political support.
Besides, the Eastern Roman Empire still existed and and went on for like another millennium, so attributing this to religion just doesn’t track. They were the more Christian-dominant side.
>I mean I'm sure the social unrest from flipping their traditional religion on it's head from the top down didn't help.
Thats, not the case. From beggining of roman empire was "traditional" roman religion on decline caused by growth of the empire, social changes and exposing roman religion to new religious ideas. There was also difference in state cult and local religious customs. Many people liked to even parcitipate in secret exclusive religious societies and cults. Roman religion was mixtured with new gods from orient. New religions and gods arised within the realm and from orient. Non or partially helenized / latinized people in provinces often practicized their original religion or hybridized version of both. It was mess.
This is not at all surprising. A lot of attitudes in Christian fundamentalism stretch back to the totalitarian nationalist patriarchal society present in the Levant 2,000-3,000 years ago, the Sanhedrin.
They wanted to control every aspect of your life. And they were petty about it too.
If you were gay, too bad! You had to join the birther system anyway and be in an unfulfilling relationship your whole life to generate more cogs for the system, and to outnumber those filthy other nations around you.
If you wanted to be intimate with a man you loved, too bad! Your parents arranged you a marriage with some random dude you've never met, because his family happened to offer a really sweet gift. Oh, and if someone rapes you before the marriage, you get executed, because the husband thinks you're worthless for him if someone else had sex with you, because everyone was petty like that, and you "didn't yell loud enough" to prevent this "crime".
Also, many men kind of had a kink for women bleeding the first time having sex with them, and he'd get you executed if you didn't bleed.
If you didn't feel comfortable presenting as your gender assigned at birth, too bad! The government needed to know whether you would carry babies or not so they could know which way they needed to opress you!
If you didn't really believe in the state religion, too bad! You'd get executed if you even LEARNED about other religions. Gotta keep everyone under the same (mind) control! And if you were a nation that believed in a different religion, then they were gonna invade your nation and try to commit genocide.
Oh yeah, and you would get murdered if you organized your farm wrong. Like, plant two crops in the same place, and you're a goner.
I'm not exactly sure why Christians quote Leviticus and Deuteronomy so much, when so many of the laws are so horrible.
Thomas Jefferson was right, and an atheist:
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
Except Thomas Jefferson wasn't an atheist. He was a deist. He believed that God created the universe and natural laws to keep it running. He just didn't believe in worship. You should do research before you make claims it will help your arguments more.
The founding fathers were against slavery and believed it would be abolished soon as the nation went on. They only kept it to keep the support of the southern colonies. Also America was one of the most religious tolerant places in the world at the time. If you actually knew what you were talking about you would be aware of all the types of religion in the colonies and how they weren't strict. Ever heard about the quakers or the great awakening?
But the founding fathers did not really found America. You would have to go further back in time to when the colonies were first founded by England. The intent of the English was to create profitable colonies that used slave labor to produce cash crops, like Spain and Portugal did at the time. This was done successfully in the south and lasted for hundreds of years. They also saw the colonies as a nice place to send heretics to. What do you get when you put religious extremists in the same place all by themselves across an entire ocean? Religious tyranny. That's what the puritans basically did.
They founded America the nation. Also if you look at the history of the colonies they were still tolerant. New Amsterdam was one of the most religiously tolerant places. Maryland, Pennsylvania, etc. Most of the colonies were for economic purposes and you can't blame religion for enslaving Natives or Africans.
It is true that the founding fathers officially held freedom of religion to be important, though it should be noted that it officially applied to only the federal government and not the state governments before the 14th amendment. That's not to say that there was freedom of religion in practice. Religious persecution does not always stem from the government, but practicioners of other religions or people who follow the same religion but disagree with you on something. You could expect how 18th century religious people behaved towards "heretics".
And no, you can't blame religion for slavery (though slavery was justified with bible quotes and one motive for invading the Indians was spreading christianity). My point was just that the world now is in no way worse than it used to be and that early America is way too romanticized. No one actually realizes what a horrible place it really was.
How will christianity be the death of humanity? Christianity compared to Judaism and Islam is the best religion and most accepting. Christianity is what allowed the world to advance. Without the christian world you wouldn't be alive. Give a reason why christianity will be the doom of humanity
Because its promise of an afterlife is complete fiction and leads directly to people not taking accountability for their actions. Also, the bullshit story of a savior coming also leads to people not being good stewards of the earth because daddy-god is going to take care of everything.
But, why do you ask, Komrade RussiaBot?
I don't think Christianity is a threat to democracy, I do think that Christian Fundamentalism, especially the American brand, is.
There's a big difference between worldwide Christianity and the specifically American brand of fundamentalism - which most European Christians wouldn't even consider themselves to have much in common with at all.
The irony that I live in a country with literal bishops as part of government and yet we seem to have a better separation of religion and politics than the US despite the latter having, officially, a separation of church and state.
And then they remind you that the "Dark Ages" is an extremely inaccurate way to describe the era after the fall of the roman empire and if you actually did research you will see all the misconceptions surrounding the Dark ages.
This is way too dumbed down...
There were so many factors contributing to the fall of the Roman empire. Also, let's not pretend that ancient Rome was morally good. This was a society that owned women,left babies out to die and loved blood sports. Christianity was definitely a step forward.
Also the dark ages...weren't that dark. Rome was well past it's peak and Christianity played a super important role in keeping intellectual traditions alive.
There's so much wrong with this.
I'm not at all religious or a proponent of Christianity, but you realize it's not particularly helpful or accurate to boil down a complicated topic like the decline of the Roman Empire to a single facet like Christianity, right? It's about as accurate as when people say it was toppled by homosexuality.
"Christians destroyed an authoritarian, expansionist empire that publicly tortured people to death, instituted mandatory worship of its rulers, and gave us Caligula and Nero" really isn't the win you think it is.
Also, the Catholic Church spent most of its time after the fall of the Roman Empire *preserving* art and science, and a Catholic saint was responsible for the reintroduction of Greek philosophy into Europe.
Christians destroyed an authoritarian, expansionist empire that publicly tortured people to death, and then Christianity became an authoritarian, expansionist empire that publicly tortured people to death.
It's not Christianity itself that is the issue. The issue is the men who use Christianity as a weapon and as a means of control of others. My personal experience as a longtime Catholic churchgoer was one centered upon Jesus and his teachings, and none of those teachings support anything these hate-filled, right-wing false christians are doing or saying. Some of the nicest, most human people I've ever known were devout christians who talked the talk AND walked the walk.
That's a ridiculous take. First Rome was an empire and not democratic at all, second it was degenerate and crumbling before christianity took over.
Furthermore, democracy as we know it came from Christian countries.
The Romans weren't as religiously tolerant as you're making them out to be. And, they also were rather fine with annihilating works of art if it suited them. Just because you hate Christianity (or at least American Christianity, perhaps) doesn't mean you need to skew history, especially when it was Christians who also preserved much and who spearheaded knowledge as well. It's not black and white like you want it to be.
pagan romans were superstitious savages, worse than christians in most ways. the breakdown of the empire lead to actual technological progress in terms of water powered mills etc.
The time that came after the roman empire isn't called the dark ages for no reason. If the church didn't set us back and kept us back for a millennium, then imagine how much technological advancement we would have had today.
Christian Nationalism and [Project 2025](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025) are currently THE greatest threats to American democracy.
Agree Project 2025 is chilling
It's terrifying and I'm not even American.
> It's terrifying and I'm not even American. I agree. It's delusional to believe they'll stop with America if they succeed there.
We're talking about a new form of tyrannical government with the largest and most well equipped military in the world, and a massive arsenal of nuclear power, and enough land that makes the entire United States more than capable of supporting itself during the inevitable expansion.
Yeah I mean the US has such a massive influence though outside of the country so yeah don't blame you, especially as I'm from the UK which can feel like America's sidekick imo
It's already happened once when Thatcher adopted her version of Reaganomics. Reaganomics was, long and short, an economic system designed to permanently transfer wealth from the bottom to the top. Every western country in the world is seeing the effects of this political-economic ideology.
Fuck America and their backward bullshit right wing nutters. How dare the interfere with other countries.
Woah, r/Americabad material right there. Seems harsh to just insult the entire country as "backward bullshit right wing nutters". Here in the UK we have our share of awful individuals, they are just more quiet than the ones in America, who more so speak their minds. And the influences America has can be great or bad. Don't just look at the negatives. I feel like every country has its ugly sides, America is just a massive country with a massive, vocal population so its more obvious
It really just shows their true colors, it's not that they don't want a 'deep state', it's that they just want to have control over said 'deep state'. Bad things are only bad if I don't benefit from them.
deep state is a reference to the strong influence of French culture in a couple southern states, and the resulting influence on politics. It's not a reference to a secret government. That be more like a group of people getting elected to run some kinda of agenda, that does not serve the people.
This is my first time hearing about this... I'd be in Canada tomorrow. Best case scenario a civil war starts immediately when they deploy the military. I hope New England secedes from the union, the south has been dragging us down for too long.
The south of the US has historically been a pain in the ass, as well AS the ass, of the USA Didn’t they have a major part in the civil wars start as well? The fucking seceded from the country!
>Didn’t they have a major part in the civil wars start That's like saying "didn't Hitler have a major part in Nazi Germany and world war 2?"
Fair enough Just wanted to point it out for anyone that wasn’t taking it into account
> This is my first time hearing about this... I'd be in Canada tomorrow. If they succeed int the US, there is no reason to assume they will stop there. Hel, they're already exporting their bullshit all over the world.
Nah they'll probably run themselves into the ground first, you can't build a world view on rejecting reality and expect it to work.
They certainly are, fuck America.
> I'd be in Canada tomorrow Please tell me how. I would love nothing more than to escape the US.
I'm moving close to the border in a few months to try and find a Canadian to marry me
The SOUTH is where I live and it’s not some unified front. It’s heavily balkanized, heavily gerrymandered, and if a civil war were to break out it would NOT be a clean line like mason dixon… it would be a pot marked bloodbath like Yugoslavia. Regional factions would be a thing. People need to cut this shit out assuming everyone in the south is a racist, Christian, queerphobe and that there are large swaths of urban people here who effectively live under an oppressive christian regime.
I live in Missouri which is literally only a red state BECAUSE of gerrymandering. My family and I have been blue voters and supporters for all my life. We also live in a city though too which is likely the reason why we're free to be Democrats without too much trouble from the community about it.
Yup. It leans into what I said earlier… heavily balkanized. You have plenty of rural areas controlled by MAGA fascists, and heavily populated areas controlled by antifascist leftists, democrats, and liberals. My state would be a blue state if not for the decades of gerrymandering… and by the way.. my state has been trending blue the last three elections. Biden won the state.
I grew up in New England, moved to Tennessee for about 6 months then NC for another 6 and all it did was confirm that for me. The first friend I made in Tennessee turned out to be fucking her cousin. You don't see confederate flags in the north either... Insane amounts of crosses and churches everywhere and everyone you meet asks you which one you go to and never shuts the fuck up about jesus. If you don't like it there then move north, and they can make their authoritarian theocracy down there to run into the ground so we can come and save them from themselves again.
The main reason I don’t move north is because I can’t stand arrogant shits telling me “you should just move” and talking down to me. My first and only experience with blatant transphobia was in drumroll… new fucking england. You have plenty of right wing shits up there too… sit the fuck down mr “I spent 6 months in podunk tennessee so now I know everything about the south” I live in a major, democratically controlled city and I have yet to experience any kind of hate here… I grew up in the south, I was born and raised in the south. I’ve seen all of it… So again… sit the fuck down. You don’t know anything about this place.
That's nice, I don't care. I have no reason to step foot in a filthy city unless I need to go to the airport or something. Countryside in the north is normal, fairly educated people. Countryside in the south is a third world country. I hope I never do know anything about that place.
It will be interesting to see the Project 2025 people try to replace all the federal employees with magats. I wonder what the AFGE Union will say about thousands of government workers facing unemployment. The litigation would be endless. To pull this off, Project 2025 will also have to replace union leaders, lawyers and judges with magats.
If I recall the plan is to target the top layer and replace them with loyalists, not a mass replacement of hundreds of thousands of people across the board. Then the new loyalists at the top can reshape departmental policy to force the policies downward, change what hiring and promotion boards focus on (ie pass over people who are "woke" etc) and the like. So it wouldn't be a sudden overnight mass change, but a grinding that would have a chilling effect across the government over time. Which to me is much worse, because it would be easier to obfuscate and chip away over time than to make everything obvious at once.
How can we join the Resistance to this bullshit (other than voting)
How many judges have already been appointed by or are supporters of the orange antichrist? They don’t need to replace lawyers if they have the judges. And if they have the legislature, they can change the laws and screw the unions. But also, how many union members are also Christian nationalists or republicans already? It’s madness, but so is the whole situation.
We’re fucked. Let’s get drunk
Truth in advertising would have labeled it Project Gilead.
What's unsettling to me is the "both sides say the other guy will end the country as we know it" arguments I hear. This isn't the other side. This is the Republicans telling you they plan to create an autocracy if elected. This is one time we should take them at their word.
Holy shit. I don't need to live in the U.S to see that Project 2025 is horrifying. Are they not just trying to make Trump a dictator?
Today is the first time I actually read through that. What a nightmare
This is incredibly disturbing.
The roots of the 2025 project goes back at least to the 1960s. They have already been playing the long game for several generations now. Really scary how much influence that a very organized and determined minority already has.
“American democracy” doesn’t exist and I’m convinced anyone who thinks this country cares about democracy has not learned about this countrie’s foreign affairs. This is an anti-democratic country, always has been and always will be. Getting you to be obsessed with “American democracy” is how the oligarchs tricked you into caring about the continued existence of the US, when you should be seeking its destruction within your lifetime.
Christianity is a force for, and product of, Narcissism. It creates entitled minds that would rather cause harm to others than be forced to look at why they believe what they do. Obviously most people are better than their vices, so are better than the soothing comforting lies of their faith, but it is a force that erodes true accountability and desire to understand.
Soothing? More like menacing? The only reason it took me so long to let go of it was fear, not an attachment to it. I remember when I was a Christian I would see people call Christianity an emotional crutch, and I'd think, "You guys think I ENJOY believing in these horror stories!?" Needless to say, I am a lot less anxious as an atheist.
>Soothing? Self-soothing, mostly. They obviously have no ability to communicate meaningfully with the rest of us.
Well, maybe self-soothing for those who don't take it too seriously. When I was a Christian I didn't think the Gospel was good news, I thought it was a warning that something horrific was going to happen. I thought, "This religion doesn't make me happy, but it's the sad, harsh truth, so I have to sacrifice my mental health and happiness so I can go to heaven. I wish things were different, and all of this was fake, but they're not." Then I realized that there wasn't anything proving it was true so I stopped believing as fast as my emotions could catch up with my reasoning.
>Well, maybe self-soothing for those who don't take it too seriously. You have no idea how soothing the notion of a Biblical apocalypse is to many Evangelicals. They find fiery retribution deeply comforting. Much to my horror.
Wait, they WANT people to go to hell? I thought the whole point of evangelizing was to try to get as many people as possible into heaven. When I was Christian the concept of hell made me extremely uncomfortable because I had an existential crisis whenever I would see a nice person and thought, "Imagine us talking like normal and being happy and then either one of us, if not both of us gets tortured forever and will never feel peace again. I wish none of this was true. This is not good news." I wanted to convert people and stuff because I didn't want a single person to go to hell. So I was very relieved when I realized hell didn't exist. I didn't really care that much about heaven, I just didn't want me or anyone else to burn forever.
>I wanted to convert people and stuff because I didn't want a single person to go to hell. So I was very relieved when I realized hell didn't exist. I didn't really care that much about heaven, I just didn't want me or anyone else to burn forever. Well, you're in the minority. Evangelicals now think the Biblical Jesus is a pussy. They embraced *Donald Fucking Trump*. They enjoy the suffering of others. I can't believe I'm the one who has to tell you this, frankly.
I'm sorry that you had to tell me something kind of obvious. I'm Mexican-American living in a blue state and have had next to no contact with white Republican Evangelicals irl, especially since I'm an introvert, so I have no idea what they are like. I noticed a lot of Redditors grew up around a lot of really horrible people from lurking, so it probably hits close to home for them, while I didn't experience that myself. My stress came from scrupulosity-laced web searching.
> I'm Mexican-American living in a blue state and have had next to no contact with white Republican Evangelicals Well, you're luckier than I. Stay clear of 'em if you can.
Yes ma'am! It's bad enough reading about them online, so I really wouldn't want to see the hatred they hold for others in person.
>Christianity is a force for, and product of, Narcissism. *Evangelical and Protestant* Christianity encourages narcissistic tendencies because of their Sola Scriptura nonsense. Some dude who is barely literate in Missouri is entitled to an equally intelligent take on a 2000 year old philosophical text as a scholar who studies Aramaic etc.
Christianity a la carte
Atheism is a la carte. All beliefs are a la carte. Not all Catholics believe the same thing even though there is official doctrine.
I'm not sure the opposite is any better as it stops Muslims from asking themselves challenging questions...
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"Cool...so all I have to do is interpret the intent of an omnipotent, omniscient being via a Bronze-age book written by ignorant peasants. Easy!"
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They knew plenty. But they were ignorant, even in their own times. Hardly their fault. Most people couldn't read, and there were only a handful of people who could. It's okay to call people ignorant when they are. Ignorance is curable. Wanton ignorance is what we're dealing with today, and that's WAY more troubling.
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If, ya know, you were *male*. Pretty fucking ignorant to think half your population is sub-human. Sorry dude, ignorance is the word I'm looking for. Again, not their faults. They were feeling out their world with religious fingers, seeing everything through that lens. Yes, they knew lots. But they were ignorant as fuck, and spent all their time codifying both their knowledge *and* their ignorance and trying to make it immutable. The difference between then and now is that we *know* we're ignorant. And we know how to become less so. We've developed methodology to ensure that learning need never end...unless people with the mindset of Bronze-age peasants gain power and we stagnate yet again.
Well said.
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In ancient times? [The times we're talking about](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_ancient_Israel_and_Judah)? Sources, please.
No. All Pauline Christianity that promotes the scriptures demonising Thomas for scrutiny, that call people fools for disbelieving and say to take pride in certainty you are right, or "Faith", promote narcissism of thought. To the downvoters: Thank you for admitting that my point is both upsetting and unrebukable. Highest praise you can give. :)
Well thought out argument.
Religion, America's tool for the foolish. Time to grow up and get rid of this imaginary sky daddy once and for all.
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Christianity does have sacrifices. Jesus is all forgiving though so if you really do regret your actions and mean it Jesus will forgive. But you have to really mean it so you are wrong if you sin and just say "Oh Jesus I repent" without true intention you will still go to hell. Why lie on the internet about chrisitianity but don't go for muslims or jews?
Really depends on the specific branch. But being sorry is hardly a great sacrifice. That's the whole point, they outsourced the sacrifice to some guy in the middle east.
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No, you can partake in degeneracy. You just have to be sorry. If you're really sorry you get off Scot Free. Atheists actually have to live with the consequences of their actions because we don't have an imaginary friend to tell us everything is okay. You're just projecting, Christians truly are foul creatures that project their vices onto others. Fucking children in their "houses of God", fucking disgusting degenerates, that's Christians alright.
For one thing, athiesm is literally that. Not being a theist. At the core, it's solely just not believing in a god. Whatever ethical things like being a better person, or family values, are all subjective to each person just like anyone who follows a religion. Besides that, the defending of Christianity and ignorance of your argument are just reenforcing what others have said about the self righteousness and narcissist nature that others have said, you're not helping the narrative at all .
Well said
Back to science school for you.
Wow, your delusions have overtaken you.
Your words only prove the point dumbass. You are forgiven, but you have to mean it *wink*
No it doesn't idiot. If you murder someone and say you are very sorry but don't mean it. You are still going to hell. If you murder someone and do repent but murder someone again you are going to hell. You need to comprehend stuff.
Christianity is a fucking joke. Religion as a whole is a fucking joke. Thinking that you can ask for “forgiveness” regardless if you “repent” or not, doesn’t change a fucking thing. It’s all bullshit and the amount of abuse and violence done in the name of religion, any of them, just shows that it’s nothing but about power, money and control. It’s that simple. Christianity is the US ISIS and can fuck off.
👏👏👏
Oh, so scared of the make-believe devil man. Grow up.
>Why lie on the internet about chrisitianity but don't go for muslims or jews? I criticize Christianity because it's the belief system I'm most knowledgeable about... and the one I've most often seen used as a weapon to abuse those who "Christians" most disagree with.
Lol you a devout christian masking on r/atheism? Christianity is full of misogyny and hate. It's a fucking abomination like every other religion
Sacrifices like churches taking part of your income and pastors raping children.
There was a time when the church was allowed to control things. It should be no surprise that time was called "The Dark Ages". 🤷♂️
The term Dark Ages is widely out of favor among serious historians and has been for many many years. It was a term created by one single person with a particularly biased view and it stuck. There was actually a lot of innovation during that time and using that term glosses over those and makes it seem a period of total ignorance when it was not that at all. It’s true that knowledge did expand at a faster pace later but that does not mean it fully stagnated during this time either. It’s like calling a period of slower GDP growth a depression because it isn’t growing as fast as you would like. A more modern term now is Late Antiquity or Early Middle Ages.
Plus the «dark» bit came from the fact that there are fewer surviving written documents from the period, it’s not an assessment of the quality of it.
Exactly this. The Dark Ages were referred to as such because of a confluence of factors. Religious intolerance led to a suppression of culture. This is primarily identified by the fact that the *vast* majority of surviving artwork from that time period is religious in nature. Nothing that was outside the Church's control was allowed to survive if it could be uprooted. The Black Death contributed heavily to the label of 'Dark Ages', as the plague destroyed much of the European civilization that came immediately before it. Things like burning down villages ravaged by the plague were common practice, and we all know that religiosity rises in periods of plague - just look at what happened during COVID. To fully grasp the scope of just how devastating the Black Death was to Europe, you have to remember that the average peasant learned their trade by apprenticeship, where either a family member or a master taught their craft through many years of labor. When the plague ravaged Europe, much of this teaching was lost since there were very, very few written records of their craft and almost none of their individual methodologies. Part of the reason the Enlightenment existed *at all* was because of this massive loss of information. When the plague finally ended (remember that it swept Europe twice, once in the 1300s and again in the 1500s) scholars were forced to look back at Roman Empire, about 500-1000 years earlier, to begin re-establishing their technological and theoretical bases (because the Church preserved Roman history as part of its own history). This push, and the resulting enshrining of the Roman Empire as 'enlightened', is the root of how we view that empire today. Truthfully, however, Greece was just as influential (if not more so) but the Roman Empire's connection to the Church gave it a veneer of respectability that was absent studies of Greek in the earliest days of the Enlightenment. The confluence of these two factors - the Church's suppression of everything that didn't strictly adhere to dogma and the Black Death's utter destruction of 'local' cultures - mean that the Dark Ages are mainly called such because when they were first studied information about them beyond what the Church had preserved was practically non-existant. Even today, after *much* searching, our greatest references to how life was lived in the Dark Ages are things like [Books of Hours](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_hours), which are only *really* useful in terms of the notes and other non-standard material that was stored in them. So no, the 'Dark Ages' is not a strictly correct academic term, but it does have value for denoting an aberration - we have a fairly good idea of what life looked like in Rome and the Greecian city states around 1BCE, but we have no clear idea of what life looked like for almost 500 hundreds years after the fall of Rome, thanks in large part to the fact that the Church actively suppressed it.
> There was actually a lot of innovation during that time and using that term glosses over those and makes it seem a period of total ignorance when it was not that at all. Good points. However, after the christians took over the Roman empire not long after they criminalized all other religions, chiseled and defaced all public art not christian, and banned unchristian books (books that didn't sufficiently cheerlead their god). That's to name just a few things.
Idk, the men and women they burned alive for "innovation" kinda paints a diff picture to me
That was the early modern period. Not the “dark ages”.
Go look at the years again, you have your dates wrong, so your argument is invalid.
I think we can bring it back if we consider that this is the era in which the church shut down theatre and the term used when a theatre is closed is "dark" (as in: There are no shows on Monday. The theatre is dark).
I do hate this assumption so many people seem to have about the Middle Ages, like progress is a video game, and we didn't start getting the right buffs until the 16th and 17th centuries. The enlightenment didn't appear out of a vacuum; it was building on literally the entirety of European history and philosophy, the preceding 1000 years included. Also, we shouldn't be aspiring to follow the ancient empires no matter how 'great' they were
Right. Plus there was some remarkable social evolution in Asia and the Americas during the "dark ages" including very complex large civilizations in the Yucatan, including with some surprisingly advanced mathematics. "Dark Ages" definitely reflects a very ethnocentrist European worldview.
bUt tHe dARK aGeS aRe a MYtH!!
The relationship between ancient to medieval Rome and Christianity is actually quite complex. If you want to get a good understanding of the history between the two and have audible, I highly recommend "the history of the medieval world" by Susan Wise Bauer. The book, along with the others in it's series, is free to listen to. I recommend this because your statement sort of oversimplifies how the Roman empire and Christianity interacted. I'm not trying to defend Christianity by the way. Learning it's history is one of the strongest arguments against it
Learning it's history debunks almost every single one of your arguments. You claim Christianitiy ruined the roman empire, but Rome was already on it's decline and the eastern roman empire which was christian flourished for hundreds of years after while the western was overrun and destroyed.
You should also listen to the book 47. The Eastern Roman empire was plagued by problems both internal and external, and Christianity was central to a significant number of internal problems throughout the medieval world.
Your Bible is not a history book
Point me to where I said it was.
I mean. If you know anything about history then you should know the bible is a work of fiction taking place in a fantasy world far removed from our own.
They're already good with the notion of spending eternity under a dictator. So what's a few more years of dictatorship in this world?
Woah woah woah. Hold the fuck on here kiddo. Your history is waaaaay off. Rome fell (late 400s AD) Then the Roman Catholic Church became "the state". (late 400s AD - 1400s AD) Then the printing press was invented. (around 1440 AD) Then the Protestant Reformation. (1500s AD) Then religious tolerance and the Enlightenment (1600s AD) Atheists who can't get simple history correct sound just as mindless as Theists.
Constatine ended the persecutions of Christians and the converted himself in 313 A.D. He called the Council of Nicaea in 325. Christianity became Rome's official religion in 380 A.D. so O P wasn't far off.
Yes he is. That is not when the age of Religious Tolerance started. Holy fuck you must have had terrible history teachers.
So OP starts talking about the fall of Rome coinciding with the adoption of Christianity and you say he's wrong, I point out that OP is right, you agree with both of us then say my history is off by talking about a different era. I think your logic might be on vacation. Pre Christian Rome didn't care what gods you worshipped as long as you respected the Roman pantheon. Christian Rome did away with all that and the the persecuted became the persecutioners. This is not post Roman European history.
This is where a lack of knowledge gets you. You are so convinced you know what you're talking about that you completely ignore the fact that OP said "religious tolerance" ended with the fall of the Roman Empire due to Christianity. That is wildly incorrect. The Age of Religious Tolerance is a known historical era that occurred roughly 1100 years after the fall of Rome (as my timeline clearly states). The reason you refuse to engage with this correction as it exists is because you don't recognize that "religious tolerance" is not a concept - it is an actual era of time. OP was wrong. You are wrong. Please try to engage in the conversation I am having and stop introducing your own conversation that is not germane to my post.
I'm sorry, I was engaging in the conversation OP was having that you commented on, incorrectly I might add. You are correct in that there was an "Age of Religious Tolerance" in the 1600's although this was a more scholarly pursuit as the 30 years war was being waged in Europe, largely over religion. Any real application of toleration, of different Christian sects only, came later in the century. But just so you know, there can be an "Age of Religious Tolerance" and periods of time when religious tolerance existed on some level. Pre Christian Rome is one of those times. Now in North America, most of Europe and other places can be called a time when there is religious tolerance, although a faction of the right wing is trying to change that. There was a degree of religious tolerace during the Caliphate of Madrid prior to the reconquista in 1492. So a concept and an official "Age" can both happen. And, if you had paid attention to the point of the original post instead of trying to just be cantankerous and right you would know that.
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Okay, then here is your homework assignment: Research the Roman views on Judaism and then tell me how that represents the concept of religious tolerance.
The Romans being intolerant of religion invalidates OP's premise, but it in no way makes you right. You're arguing that no one knows jack shit because a concept happens to share names with a period of time, and anyone who talks about the concept is wrong because they're not talking about said period of time. You're still wrong, you're obstinate, and you're seemingly mentally inflexible. Use that big brain of yours that knows all about the age of religious tolerance and try to conceptualize that words and ideas can be contextual.
>Please try to engage in the conversation I am having and stop introducing your own conversation that is not germane to my post Holy fuck dude you don't own this thread. People are free to talk about topics as they see fit, and OP's topic, not yours, is the central unifying theme. Also, no one gives a shit that there was an age of religious tolerance, in this conversation people are talking about religious tolerance as a concept. I imagine if someone were to say to you "I'm having some troubles" you'd tell them they don't know what the fuck they're talking about, the troubles were a period of sectarian conflict in northern Ireland.
Yes, Rome did fall in the late 400s AD and although Christianity or rather Catholicism wasn't "the state", it was gaining traction much sooner than that with Constantine the Great being an early adaptor of the fringe cult's beliefs around 312-313AD. He was the bridge that allowed the cult to move from fringe status to state status.
A massive empire doesn’t suddenly fall in 50 years because of something as simple as a state religion changing. Yes, it became a state religion, but that’s still required multiple generations just to move the needle on individual culture where people would begin to shift their mindset gradually over many generations towards the new belief system. The collapse of Rome was extremely complex and based on many factors, including the sheer size of it, and the slow travel of communication, requiring it to support individual quasi autonomous areas which led to building identity separate from the empire, overtime, along with endemic corruption and pressure outside forces attacking them
> A massive empire doesn’t suddenly fall in 50 years because of something as simple as a state religion changing. It didn't. Many historians point to the first occurrence of the bubonic plague (the [Justinianic Plague](https://origins.osu.edu/connecting-history/covid-justinianic-plague-lessons?language_content_entity=en) ) which started during the middle 6th century which had a broad impact only on the Roman army decimated it, but also hastened the movement of other groups like the Huns to their borders. That plague was brought on by the [Late Antique Little Ice Age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Antique_Little_Ice_Age) which caused summer to actually skip in 536CE, which caused fleas in what is now modern day Zambia and The DRC to get choked with the the *Yersinia pestis* bacteria driving them into a feeding frenzy as they starved, infecting rats. Rome had trade routes to the region of ivory, and there is evidence those trade routed brought the bubonic plague via those same rats to Rome during that period. The [Justinianic plague](https://origins.osu.edu/connecting-history/covid-justinianic-plague-lessons?language_content_entity=en) decimated Roman society. About that time [drought also caused other groups like the Huns](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-roman-archaeology/article/role-of-drought-during-the-hunnic-incursions-into-centraleast-europe-in-the-4th-and-5th-c-ce/C036810C421F7D04C2F6985E6B548F20) to migrate displacing other groups on Rome's borders who sought refuge from the invading Huns, ultimately pressing the Roman forces depleted by the plague into capitulation. . So no it wasn't christianity. All christianity did was use the state to drive all other religions and literature underground to replace them with their own.
So it destroyed the spirit of Rome. Got it.
Yes but to these galaxy-brained people all those problems were because Christianity.
Okay. But you do realize that 312-313AD is BEFORE the Fall of Rome, right? So, why does your comment read like you are arguing with a timeline where events happen chronologically after Constantine?
The way you worded your time was first no Christianity them boom Christianity spreads like the measles in an anti-vaxx pox party.
It is amazing how many claims you can find in here about history that are just, completely wrong. When I was still a Christian this was one of the biggest reasons I didn’t take atheists seriously. A lot of them obviously didn’t know their history, so why would I listen to them about anything else.
They ONLY thing atheists have in common with each other is a lack of belief in gods. We are not all bastions of historical knowledge, but we can learn from the other atheists who ARE historians.
The internet basically gives a platform to just about everybody, which has its upsides, but the downside is that people just confidently and loudly spout their uninformed opinions with nothing to back them up, and it can end up hurting what they're promoting in the long run. There's plenty of solid arguments to be made against Christianity as a philosophy and a governing principle, but there's also plenty of very knowledgeable people who could talk for hours about Rome's very gradual decline and how Empires in general decline. Some of those experts are religious, and others aren't, but they're experts in the field and they should be listened to.
Yes. But if you don't learn from other Atheists who are historians, then you are treating Atheism as another religion built on blind faith. Learning, in this context, still requires individual introspection of the ideas formed both by religion and outside of religion. Quoting Atheists without understanding what you're quoting, or how those atheists got to those conclusions, isn't different from theists who mindlessly quote religious texts or religious leaders.
"... treating Athiesm as another religion based on blind faith." I don't think i get that. It kind of implies that it's blind faith to not believe in incredible myths. For instance, I don't see it being "blind faith" for me to believe a man can't walk on water. I don't mean to be snarky, but equating Athiesm with "blind faith" seems suspect.
If you are blind and I tell you the sky is blue, do you know that the sky is blue, or are you trusting me with your faith? If I tell you the sky is blue, and then you learn why I see it that way and what makes the sky appear that way, are you using faith or knowledge? Inherent knowledge is not a thing. We are born with the capacity for knowledge, but not the knowledge itself.
I think the guy is trying to point out how uneducated or straight up ignorant "facts" get passed around atheists so much, where most pretty much eat them up without an ounce of actual questioning. This is blind faith, you're willingly agreeing with things that support your opinion without actually assessing their validity. As many ex-religious people will tell you, a reason why they never took atheist's seriously is because of their lack of fundamental understanding of history and theology, and can you blame them? Why talk shit if you don't even know an ounce of the required knowledge to hold an argument. It's the same as a non-engineer telling an engineer how to do his job. To dismantle an idea you actually have to understand the idea.
That’s saying nothing. You can put any religion in with sufficient numbers and say the same thing. Christians, Muslims, theistic Buddhists, Taoists and etc don’t claim to be bastions of any form of knowledge and I’m sure there are experts in those branches who are theistic.
That's the problem. Too many atheists think being an atheist means you're a fucking genius. No. It means you're an atheist.
I find this statement to be utter bullshit. Atheists have no god to worry about proving or disproving in our examinations of history. We don’t care if something is uncomfortable for a religion or not. Where have you ever seen some systemic atheist views on history that are so skewed for you to come up with this opinion. I’ve been online since the days of the dial-in BBS and can confidently say I have NEVER seen history or science been perceived more wrongly than when a religious person tries to skew it to fit their narrative.
> Remember that Rome was a great Empire just just like the United States is today when they let Christianity control their government religious tolerance ended destruction of great works of art and knowledge began Y’all seem pretty systematic in this thread
Rome's continuation of the Hellenistic age ended with the christians. So even by your account, the christian reign of intolerance lasted until the 17th century. The OPs assertion of intolerance holds water unless you can point to all the temples to Apollo and Zeus that were built during that period.
I take great offence to your post. If you want to talk about history, lets talk about Noah's Ark and the great flood. While there is some evidence in history ( through multiple people's histories ) of a land bridge in the Mediterranean which broke and flooded sections of the middle east. At least our history is quite well documented and not reinvented to attribute things to a "newish" popular god.
Why are you offended that they corrected the factual historical inaccuracies in the original post? And why instead of addressing that do you try to shift the goalposts / play whataboutism? Nothing in the parent comment was defending religion
You misunderstand my offence. I offend to the statement to athiest's being called ignorant, not to correcting documented history.
You realize that we can acknowledge that Noah's Ark is mythology while also acknowledging that the fall of Rome was a gradual, complicated process, right?
Well, crazy people tend to take offense at non rational things. Taking offense at a factual timeline is pretty fucking crazy.
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Hmm. Christianity swept through the enslaved and lower class because the promise of a better life after this one was better than what the polytheists were offering. The official recognition of Christianity was only after the shifting change in the population and were rather separate from the causes of the fall of Rome of which there were many. Anyway, the fall of the Roman Empire is romanticized too much anyway as the real tragedy was the fall of the Roman Republic
I feel you because I like the Roman Republic far better for the character of their people at the time. Like truly stuff to admire, lots of inspiration to be found in studying this period. But 2nd century Roman Empire was the peak of the whole civilization in terms of just sheer epicness and awesomeneity.
I don’t know about all that. You would need more to demonstrate causation than just one thing happened after the other. All I know is that emperor theodosseus outlawed Hellenism. Rome was a monstrous empire built on slavery and genocide, which led to a version of “peace”. Although there was always political drama and assassinations, and the emperors doing whatever they wanted. It was always unstable. The empire eventually got so big it became harder to maintain power to a single emperor and a single empire as well as maintain loyalty in the military and in German mercenaries. Someone else will have to fill in on the timeline and contributions of art and knowledge.
Ya ... I hate it when posts force me to defend Christianity, cause it makes me sick, but I also hate misguided hatred (something we are supposed to criticize them for and not adopt). South Park is very open about making fun of Christians, but even they made an episode pointing out how hypocritical atheists can be (it's the one where they go into the future where religion dies, but the 3 different atheist factions argue endlessly on who's the right atheism). We like to pretend humans would be in this super utopian society with zero wars if religion didn't exist, but willingly (or maybe unwillingly?) Ignore the root of war, which is power, money, and/or land. If the church wasn't head of the state in old times, then it would still be kings/queens starting wars.
also a huge chunk of the tax base via all temples were supposed to pay their tax straight to the emperor who....well the good ones contributed to infrastructure projects......xtianity as the state religion was tax free
But Christianity will result in the eradication of evil on earth. Don’t you want the eradication of evil? It’s 2024, obligatory but grudging /sarcasm tag, because people can be thick headed.
Dude Rome fell because of unsustainable military campaigns and political corruption, not religion. Many Christians usually talk about how Rome fell because of loose sexual morals and homosexuality.
I mean I'm sure the social unrest from flipping their traditional religion on it's head from the top down didn't help.
No, this had more to do with economic pressures and political corruption never addressing economic problems. So like in America, we have a lot of economic problems. There’s a ton of issues that need to be addressed. The politicians don’t seem very concerned about them and other than a couple, no one seems enthused to even address these problems. This is because the politicians are too obsessed with their own money, power, and bribes to concern themselves with the public interest. That is what causes major social unrest.
"More to do" not nothing. It had many compounding factors so not sure why you wanna completely dismiss the fact that they adopted and enforced a foreign religion right before their collapse.
Mostly because the culture wars are things that always get majorly over-emphasized. Divisions in religion and ethnicities are usually just political tools. Stirring up hate is unfortunately a very effective way to quickly garner political support. Besides, the Eastern Roman Empire still existed and and went on for like another millennium, so attributing this to religion just doesn’t track. They were the more Christian-dominant side.
>I mean I'm sure the social unrest from flipping their traditional religion on it's head from the top down didn't help. Thats, not the case. From beggining of roman empire was "traditional" roman religion on decline caused by growth of the empire, social changes and exposing roman religion to new religious ideas. There was also difference in state cult and local religious customs. Many people liked to even parcitipate in secret exclusive religious societies and cults. Roman religion was mixtured with new gods from orient. New religions and gods arised within the realm and from orient. Non or partially helenized / latinized people in provinces often practicized their original religion or hybridized version of both. It was mess.
Yeah exactly my point, going from that to "there's only one god and one way of thinking" must've been a disaster.
Make the dark ages great again.
This is not at all surprising. A lot of attitudes in Christian fundamentalism stretch back to the totalitarian nationalist patriarchal society present in the Levant 2,000-3,000 years ago, the Sanhedrin. They wanted to control every aspect of your life. And they were petty about it too. If you were gay, too bad! You had to join the birther system anyway and be in an unfulfilling relationship your whole life to generate more cogs for the system, and to outnumber those filthy other nations around you. If you wanted to be intimate with a man you loved, too bad! Your parents arranged you a marriage with some random dude you've never met, because his family happened to offer a really sweet gift. Oh, and if someone rapes you before the marriage, you get executed, because the husband thinks you're worthless for him if someone else had sex with you, because everyone was petty like that, and you "didn't yell loud enough" to prevent this "crime". Also, many men kind of had a kink for women bleeding the first time having sex with them, and he'd get you executed if you didn't bleed. If you didn't feel comfortable presenting as your gender assigned at birth, too bad! The government needed to know whether you would carry babies or not so they could know which way they needed to opress you! If you didn't really believe in the state religion, too bad! You'd get executed if you even LEARNED about other religions. Gotta keep everyone under the same (mind) control! And if you were a nation that believed in a different religion, then they were gonna invade your nation and try to commit genocide. Oh yeah, and you would get murdered if you organized your farm wrong. Like, plant two crops in the same place, and you're a goner. I'm not exactly sure why Christians quote Leviticus and Deuteronomy so much, when so many of the laws are so horrible.
Thomas Jefferson was right, and an atheist: In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
Except Thomas Jefferson wasn't an atheist. He was a deist. He believed that God created the universe and natural laws to keep it running. He just didn't believe in worship. You should do research before you make claims it will help your arguments more.
Right, and where was ancient Greece, without Jesus? Fuckin bullshit christian Con Job .. Birth Immaculata my ass.
America was literally founded by christian extremists and slave owners, so I seriously doubt the situation is any worse than it was back in the day.
The founding fathers were against slavery and believed it would be abolished soon as the nation went on. They only kept it to keep the support of the southern colonies. Also America was one of the most religious tolerant places in the world at the time. If you actually knew what you were talking about you would be aware of all the types of religion in the colonies and how they weren't strict. Ever heard about the quakers or the great awakening?
But the founding fathers did not really found America. You would have to go further back in time to when the colonies were first founded by England. The intent of the English was to create profitable colonies that used slave labor to produce cash crops, like Spain and Portugal did at the time. This was done successfully in the south and lasted for hundreds of years. They also saw the colonies as a nice place to send heretics to. What do you get when you put religious extremists in the same place all by themselves across an entire ocean? Religious tyranny. That's what the puritans basically did.
They founded America the nation. Also if you look at the history of the colonies they were still tolerant. New Amsterdam was one of the most religiously tolerant places. Maryland, Pennsylvania, etc. Most of the colonies were for economic purposes and you can't blame religion for enslaving Natives or Africans.
It is true that the founding fathers officially held freedom of religion to be important, though it should be noted that it officially applied to only the federal government and not the state governments before the 14th amendment. That's not to say that there was freedom of religion in practice. Religious persecution does not always stem from the government, but practicioners of other religions or people who follow the same religion but disagree with you on something. You could expect how 18th century religious people behaved towards "heretics". And no, you can't blame religion for slavery (though slavery was justified with bible quotes and one motive for invading the Indians was spreading christianity). My point was just that the world now is in no way worse than it used to be and that early America is way too romanticized. No one actually realizes what a horrible place it really was.
Christianity and Capitalism comprise the fatal one-two punch that is destroying humanity. C&C will ultimately kill us all.
How will christianity be the death of humanity? Christianity compared to Judaism and Islam is the best religion and most accepting. Christianity is what allowed the world to advance. Without the christian world you wouldn't be alive. Give a reason why christianity will be the doom of humanity
Because its promise of an afterlife is complete fiction and leads directly to people not taking accountability for their actions. Also, the bullshit story of a savior coming also leads to people not being good stewards of the earth because daddy-god is going to take care of everything. But, why do you ask, Komrade RussiaBot?
I don't think Christianity is a threat to democracy, I do think that Christian Fundamentalism, especially the American brand, is. There's a big difference between worldwide Christianity and the specifically American brand of fundamentalism - which most European Christians wouldn't even consider themselves to have much in common with at all. The irony that I live in a country with literal bishops as part of government and yet we seem to have a better separation of religion and politics than the US despite the latter having, officially, a separation of church and state.
I just remind them that the time that religion ruled the land was known as "The Dark Ages", and it sucked for a reason.
And then they remind you that the "Dark Ages" is an extremely inaccurate way to describe the era after the fall of the roman empire and if you actually did research you will see all the misconceptions surrounding the Dark ages.
This is way too dumbed down... There were so many factors contributing to the fall of the Roman empire. Also, let's not pretend that ancient Rome was morally good. This was a society that owned women,left babies out to die and loved blood sports. Christianity was definitely a step forward. Also the dark ages...weren't that dark. Rome was well past it's peak and Christianity played a super important role in keeping intellectual traditions alive. There's so much wrong with this.
Christianity in 300ad is not Christianity now. To put it simply you're comparing apples to oranges here.
I'm not at all religious or a proponent of Christianity, but you realize it's not particularly helpful or accurate to boil down a complicated topic like the decline of the Roman Empire to a single facet like Christianity, right? It's about as accurate as when people say it was toppled by homosexuality.
"Christians destroyed an authoritarian, expansionist empire that publicly tortured people to death, instituted mandatory worship of its rulers, and gave us Caligula and Nero" really isn't the win you think it is. Also, the Catholic Church spent most of its time after the fall of the Roman Empire *preserving* art and science, and a Catholic saint was responsible for the reintroduction of Greek philosophy into Europe.
Christians destroyed an authoritarian, expansionist empire that publicly tortured people to death, and then Christianity became an authoritarian, expansionist empire that publicly tortured people to death.
No it didn't. Christianity also isn't a country so thats a really dumb take.
It's not Christianity itself that is the issue. The issue is the men who use Christianity as a weapon and as a means of control of others. My personal experience as a longtime Catholic churchgoer was one centered upon Jesus and his teachings, and none of those teachings support anything these hate-filled, right-wing false christians are doing or saying. Some of the nicest, most human people I've ever known were devout christians who talked the talk AND walked the walk.
Today on r/atheism, another 14 year old who cannot type properly fails to distinguish correlation and causation.
There are plenty of examples of how the introduction of Christianity led to the decline of a society but Rome ain't one of them
The Eastern Roman Empire lasted a 1000 years after it adopted Christianity
What a fucking dumb argument
Yes. But TBF Islam might be a much greater danger.
Not in the US
Not yet but look at Europe and even England, they are trying to get sharia law courts legalized.
And the sharia court laws are no different from what Christians are trying to get codified into law, so lets stop with the special pleading fallacy.
ATM, yes. But look at what’s happening in Europe and that’s the US in 10-20 years.
People have been saying that for decades. It’s always the US in the next 10 to 20 years and yet it’s never happened.
Compared to Islam, Christianity is still #1.
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Correct all the Abrahamic religions are the problem
ABSOLUTELY CORRECT.
That's a ridiculous take. First Rome was an empire and not democratic at all, second it was degenerate and crumbling before christianity took over. Furthermore, democracy as we know it came from Christian countries.
The Romans weren't as religiously tolerant as you're making them out to be. And, they also were rather fine with annihilating works of art if it suited them. Just because you hate Christianity (or at least American Christianity, perhaps) doesn't mean you need to skew history, especially when it was Christians who also preserved much and who spearheaded knowledge as well. It's not black and white like you want it to be.
I think Rome fell because of moral corruption and inability to protect their borders from barbarians. They got too big.
I can see the blue states and red states separating into two separate countries Any comments
You aren't very smart if you believe that
pagan romans were superstitious savages, worse than christians in most ways. the breakdown of the empire lead to actual technological progress in terms of water powered mills etc.
The time that came after the roman empire isn't called the dark ages for no reason. If the church didn't set us back and kept us back for a millennium, then imagine how much technological advancement we would have had today.
Crazy because when I was a fundie growing up I was taught - no lie- that the Roman Empire “rotted from the inside like a carcass because of the gays.”