The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> how Christianity "unites" people....

how Christianity "unites" people....

Posted by pancho (Guest) - Monday, December 4 2006, 21:10:34 (CET)
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From Durant's "The Story of Civilization", volume 3, titled. "Caesar And Christ"

"What good god, asked Marcion(a rich youth of Sinope in 140) would have condemned all mankind to misery for eating an apple, or desiring knowledge, or loving woman"...."While the Gnostic and Marcionite sects were spreading rapidly in both East and West. a new heresiarch appeared in Mysia. About 156 Montanus denounced the increasing worldliness of Christians and the growing autocracy of bishops in the Church...He announced that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand, and that the New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse would soon descend from heaven upon a neighboring plain. To the predestined spot he led so large a host that some towns were depopulated. As in early Christian days , marriage and parentage were neglected , goods were communistically shared, and an absorbed asceticism anxiously prepared the soul for Christ. When, about 190, the Roman proconsul Antonius persecuted Christians in Asia Minor, hundreds of Montanists, eager for paradise, crowded before his tribunal and asked for martyrdom. He could not accomodate them all; some he executed; but most he dismissed with the words, 'Miserable creatures! If you wish to die are there not ropes enough and precipices?' The Church banned Montanism as a heresy, and in the sixth century Justinian (a Christian) ordered the extinction of the sect. Some Montanists gathered in their churches, set fire to them, and let themselves be burned alive"

...there was no need for anyone to "wipe all Christians out"...they were busy wiping THEMSELVES out...that and splitting and splitting into smaller and smaller sects...all of them insisting THEY "got it right" and everyone ELSE was a heretic..and you know what they did to heretics....this is a way to GROW and PROSPER? Looking around at their small numbers today they try to blame Islam for killing them all and dividing them up when it was their own religion that turned them against their friends and neighbrs and even family members...and you can see that happening AGAIN..all over again today with Mar Bawi and the rest of this nonsense that has been dividing and splitting and turning people against each other..as it has been doing for 2000 years.

and again:

" Of minor heresies there was no end. The Encratites abstained from meat, wine and sex; the Abstinents practised self-mortification and condemned marriage as a sin; the Docetists taught that Christ's body was merely a phantom, not human flesh; the Theodosians considered him only a man; the Adoptionists and the followers of Paul of Samosota thought that he had been born a man, but had achieved divinity through moral perfection; the Modalists, Sabellians, and Monarchians recognized in the Father and the Son only one person, the Monophysites only one nature, the Monothelites only one will. The Church overcame them all by its superior organization, its doctrinal tenacity, and its better understanding of the ways and needs of men."

...that strikes me as nice way of saying the Church of Rome had the armies of the Empire at its back and came out victorius because it could back up its own doctrinal peculiarities with force..it certainly didn't convince any of these heretics by its force of reason. Too often the stake settled disputes about Jesus.

...and where in all of this do we find the seeds of UNITY? if anything this religion provided people with the means and excuse to separate and view each other as evil heretics...is it somehow a consolation to know that your own peculiar brand or sect survived because of the VIOLENCE it used against people just as sure of their religious convictions as anyone else?

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