The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Constantine the What?

Constantine the What?
Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Wednesday, September 7 2011, 16:51:09 (UTC)
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...it never ceases to intrigue me the stories put out about how Christianity "spread" in the Western world.

In the East it's pretty clear that Jews were the first Christian converts, since they didn;t have far to travel...and that it was Jews outside Jerusalem and Palestine who converted. People being what they are individuals converted, always on the lookout for a new set of beliefs...but the idea that whole nations and tribes converted willingly is impossible to believe....mostly because we have more recent evidence of what kind of lying and killing and raping it took to convert Africans, Asians, Aboriginals, Island Peoples and western natives....if nations converted willingly 2000 years ago, how come they fought to the death, literally, to avoid such conversions in recent times when, co-incidentally, we had more and better observers on the ground whose eyewitness accounts tell a far different and bloodier story? Was the Church sweet back then and only recently became violent and bloody in its forced conversions and wholesale slaughter of those who refused Jesus? Nah...I think they were always bloody and violent but we just couldn't prove it.

But back to the West. Reading about Constantine I find most historians scoff at the idea that the man was less than sincere in his conversion to Christianity....there is no "evidence" that he was anything but
"devout", they claim. I guess murdering your wife and sons and nephews can still qualify one as a true believer in this church...maybe not, but we know such a person can beg forgiveness and still get to heaven...and that may be the greatest attraction of all to this religion.

I mean you know damn well if there had been no "hope" forgiveness and a washing away of sins, sinners such as Roman emperors would never have been interested. It says "thou shalt not kill"...but no one means it....because you can kill your own children and have it all wiped away. It would seem then that this religion with its penchant for forgiving anybody anything is ideally suited to criminals and murderers.

As an argument for Constantine's sincerity, or at least against the charge that he was foxy, people point out that it was normal back then to put off confessions till the grim end....I should think that proves the point that none of them meant anything by being Christians except that they'd one found a novel way of forgiving themselves for their crimes.

At the time he saw his sign from God Constantine was fighting a desperate war to keep the empire intact....not only did he have to keep 100 nations under his imperial yoke, but he was facing civil war against competing emperors. He needed something grand, something with the stamp of heaven on it to bind all these disparate forces together...but not just any old religion would do.

In the first place it would have to be a religion that claimed a "universal" appeal, not merely another local tribe or petty nation. This new god had to embrace everybody because the emperor HAD to embrace everybody. It would also have to be a religion that made a fine distinction between what you owed god and what you owed the emperor. Under sharia law they are one and the same....that would never do for a Roman emperor, or any emperor or tyrant, or president. The words were put into the mouth of Jesus to ease the conflicts which arose when the emperor demanded that you kill virgins where god told you not to. And, always lurking behind every crime was the priest anyway, ready to to tell you that god didn't really mind after all...so long as you were sincere in your repentance...and who isn't sincere when facing hell?

No matter what Jesus actually said or did, or whether he existed at all, you have admire how well Rome constructed Christianity. It was the ideal religion for a bloody empire...and it has served others empires just as faithfully.



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