How an obscure cult grew to become the dominant religion of the Western world
Reasonably written from a historical perspective, but it&#x27;s missing a few points:<p>1)<p>The &#x27;monotheistic&#x27; religions, particularly Christianity and Buddhism (though Buddhism is not exactly &#x27;monotheistic&#x27; it&#x27;s not &#x27;pantheist&#x27; in the classical sense) - represented a fundamental shift from pantheism.<p>It&#x27;s wrong to claim that &#x27;Pantheism = many gods&#x27; and &#x27;Monotheism = one god&#x27;. This the literal meaning, but it&#x27;s not remotely accurate.<p>Pantheistic gods were almost always a soap opera of &#x27;super human like&#x27; people who loved, fought and interacted with each other like a superior cast of beings.<p>&#x27;Pray to me and I&#x27;ll smote your enemy&#x27;<p>&#x27;Give me offerings or I&#x27;ll hurt you&#x27;.<p>Montheism wasn&#x27;t just about having &#x27;one god&#x27; - monotheistic religions were about <i>ideas</i> not so much <i>rites and rituals</i> (as mentioned in the article). Particularly - monotheistic religions required <i>moral and conscientious</i> behaviour.<p>Jesus had only two commands: &#x27;Love God and love one another&#x27;. In a more secular sense that could be &#x27;Recognize the divine and knowing that - do your best with what you have to make the world a better place&#x27;.<p>Buddhists are required to be &#x27;more enlightened&#x27; and more civilized people lest they be reincarnated as animals, if they want to &#x27;escape the cycle of reincarnation&#x27;.<p>Christian and Buddhist religions centre around moral philosophies at least in terms of how they apply to the real world.<p>The Christian God is not a &#x27;bearded buy in the sky&#x27; (even though he is often presented as such). He&#x27;s &#x27;unknowable&#x27; and completely transcends our understanding. &#x27;I am that I am&#x27;. This is not like the Greek gods who all have very tangible attributes and are mostly interested in human like things - i.e. power.<p>Similarly, though Buddhists are technically &#x27;atheists&#x27; in that they don&#x27;t have a &#x27;God&#x27; per say - they do have a kind of &#x27;monotheism&#x27; in that they present very specific ideals of &#x27;nothingness&#x27; etc.. They definitely present a metaphysical construct for us. And it&#x27;s not a bunch of angry super-dudes.<p>Monotheism is a huge leap forward in terms of our metaphysical evolution.<p>2)<p>It&#x27;s not fair to use the word &#x27;exclusive&#x27; so many times in this text.<p>The most powerful element of Christianity is that it was open to anyone. For the first time <i>slaves were equal to kings</i>. This was a very, very powerful idea, and obviously scared the bananas out of the elite.<p>Status and class were clearly delineated in terms of class in Greek mythology. Higher status = more &#x27;godliness&#x27;. That&#x27;s an artifact of human culture ... but it&#x27;s rejected in Christianity (and Buddhism).<p>Your &#x27;status&#x27; in Christianity is dependant on how <i>good</i> you are, not &#x27;how much money you have&#x27;. For the first time, you couldn&#x27;t just buy your way out of bad deeds (at least in theory, obviously not in practice, quite often).<p>Christians were the first international solidarity movement. They were the first &#x27;social movement of equal peoples&#x27;. The first to feed the poor as moral action, not just a political action. Moreover - they were organized. What the article failed to mention was that Constantine had a political motivation to be Christian because he could leverage the international network of organized and efficient non-state bureaucracy that the Christians had. Their &#x27;system&#x27; had efficiency on some level - and authenticity.<p>A strict historical articulation of the facts, I think fails to illustrate what it was that made Christianity so widespread.<p>I think the key to understanding is that &#x27;common era&#x27; religions such as Christianity and Buddhism are completely unlike their predecessors.