(May 24, 2016 at 10:56 pm)Jehanne Wrote:(May 24, 2016 at 8:51 pm)Godschild Wrote: The nonsense belongs to you and you have admitted this in this very post. You start off saying and I quote "NO evidence", then you go on to confirm that Christians were killed by Nero, and if you do not think that the Christians of the day didn't consider them martyrs then why did Christianity spread so rapidly. Use your reasoning, think about it. Do you have proof that the apostles weren't killed for their beliefs, because they did not go around breaking Roman law.
GC
Roman was a political empire, not a religious one; that bullshit did not come into being under after the reign of Constantine. The Romans respected burial places, which allowed the early Christians to meet at the catacombs in peace. Outside of a few isolated areas, persecution of Christians was a rarity. Usually, individuals were put to death out of obstinacy to the State and not for professing what many Roman intellectuals felt was just another dumb religion on the scene whose proponents, at least in the beginning, all believed in a flat Earth. (See Saint Irenaeus' justification for the "Four Gospels" in the late second century.) As for the so-called 12 disciples of Jesus, scholars know little about their fate, including, that of Paul, although, with Paul, there is some evidence that he was martyred in Rome; however, he was such a loon to begin with that the Roman authorities, after Nero's insanity, may have judged him a threat to the Empire and simply have decided to get rid of him.
You dodged my questions to you, why? Yep, Romans respected burial sites by tossing their victims into pits to rot, now that sounds respectful to me. Tell me how is it you can take a stand for a brutal Roman Empire and yet dismiss the peaceful Christians who were causing no problems. They believed in the things Jesus taught them and one was to obey the laws of the land and be good citizens, kind to all others and no one can rightly fault you. Even though they could not be rightly faulted they were killed, why, for their belief, seems as smart as you are you could figure this out.
GC
God loves those who believe and those who do not and the same goes for me, you have no choice in this matter. That puts the matter of total free will to rest.