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Am I having a crisis of Atheism?

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Comments

  • #52
    robindch
    Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 24,420 Mod ✭✭✭✭robindch


    ScumLord wrote: »
    The major religion in Europe before Christianity would have been the Roman religion that has sacrifices (although they seem par for the course in many pagan religions), forced virginity and all kinds of nonsense. Christianity could very easily be seen as an improvement on those practices.
    I'd imagine there are a fair number of historians who would disagree with that. The Roman religion did not really require much in the line of human sacrifices and in any case, human sacrifice was outlawed (mostly symbolically owing to its rarity) some time in first century or so.

    The Roman religion was significantly less harmful than christianity in its toleration of other religions and its general liberality. Unlike the later christians rulers, the earlier Romans were mostly happy with locals across their Empire carrying on their own religion, so long as they also carried out the appropriate Roman rituals too. That's why the Romans had trouble in Masada and similar places - the jews refused to carry out Roman rituals, believing them to be heretical, and started a bitter to-the-death war to assert that refusal. And the jews begat the christians who had similar views about religions different to theirs. And so it continues today.


  • #53
    ScumLord
    Registered Users, Registered Users 2 Posts: 28,789 ✭✭✭✭ScumLord


    robindch wrote: »
    I'd imagine there are a fair number of historians who would disagree with that. The Roman religion did not really require much in the line of human sacrifices and in any case, human sacrifice was outlawed (mostly symbolically owing to its rarity) some time in first century or so.
    Animal sacrifice was a daily occurrence. So was depending on which way birds decided to fly to make decisions. They had lots of crazy ideas, like slaves can't be trusted to tell the truth unless they're beaten.
    The Roman religion was significantly less harmful than christianity in its toleration of other religions and its general liberality.
    They did allow you to practice your other religion after you'd appease Romes gods but having multiple gods wasn't a big deal to them. They figured the more gods you have the better. So you could argue they were obliterating other religions by assimilating them into their own as a subset of gods. I don't know how people really felt about that. Maybe they didn't like the fact the Romans took their gods and relegated them to minor gods.

    Rome did some great things but I think if a modern person went back to ancient rome you'd be shocked and appalled by what happened on a daily basis there.


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