Why did Constantine make Christianity the state religion? My guess is the Sermon on the Mount and related ethics. Here's the message in a nutshell: Stand down and accept your miserable lot without objecting or rising up, because that's what God commands. Christianity is a religion of submission and obedience - the only path to salvation over perdition. Subjects must submit to kings, slaves to slaveholders, and women to men. Be longsuffering. Be meek. If the man slaps you, offer him your other cheek. Do you have enemies? Love them. Pray for them, even. Your reward will come after you die.
What tyrant wouldn't love a religion that teaches that? This guy understood:
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How can you have order in a state without religion? For, when one man is dying of hunger near another who is ill of surfeit, he cannot resign himself to this difference unless there is an authority which declares 'God wills it thus.' Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet." - Napoleon Bonaparte
People need to stop using the term Darwinism. The TOE today has has been upgraded from Darwin's time.
So have Daltonism and mesmerism, but both words still work fine. Do you prefer neo-Darwinism?
Survival of the fittest in a historical Petri dish. Look and learn grasshopppah.
. . . Snatch the Gideon's from my hand it it will be time for you to leave enlightened.
LOL. I notice you didn't attempt to rebut any of it. But it's your lucky day. Here it is again. Do you disagree that these things happened or that collectively, they constitute a successful marketing scheme? :
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Christianity has enjoyed the greatest marketing campaign in the history of man, nearly two millennia long and still going. Paul was the first to market Jesus in earnest, then Constantine at the point of a sword. The Catholic church arose and its chapels then basilicas and cathedrals began cropping up everywhere like a fast-food franchise to promulgate the religion. Waves of crusaders, missionaries, conquistadores and inquisitions spread and enforced the faith. The Gideons put a Bible in every hotel room. Schools taught religion and led students in prayer. With broadcast media, the televangelists began marketing Jesus. There was an ad for Jesus in the last Superbowl"
Many people give a strong impression that they expect atheists to just lie about their disbelief.
As you likely agree, there was once a good reason to do that, and perhaps in Brazil, there still is. A few centuries ago, they held inquisitions killed people as witches. A century ago, they persecuted Scopes for teaching evolution. When I was born, atheists were deemed unfit to teach, coach, adopt, or serve on juries, and they are still considered immoral and unfit for public office by many.
Also, there were few places to express such opinions and be heard by a large audience, and atheists were easily cowed and silenced. Today, we have the Internet and a wave of increasing secularism in the West. It's safe to express these kinds of opinions. And not surprisingly, the faithful are shocked and unprepared for it. They aren't used to being told that their gods are irrelevant and their religions uninteresting, and they just don't know what to do about atheism becoming normalized. Look at the things this post contains - the Sermon on the Mount as slave mentality, and the spread of Christianity not being due to the religion itself but rather the fact that many benefit from selling it. What do you think my fate for expressing those views would have been a century or two ago? But today, nobody needs to hide their atheism nor their antitheism.
"The problem with being privileged your whole life is that because you have had that privilege for so long, equality starts to look like oppression." - Mark Caddo
