Did Muhammad exist?

[vulcanlogician]

It's Mins brain you want to pick about that, not mine.  I only know these bits because of an interest in Julian, essentially, they're the prelude to the end of paganism..and it wasn't faith in the one true god or any of his prophets that conquered our preexisting beliefs, lol.

Okay, aside from hearing the name before, I don't know much about Julian. I took a few minutes to breeze over his wiki article. I see why you find him interesting. His thinking that Christianity was the cause of the Roman decline reminds me of Nietzsche's thinking about the general decline (decadence) of societies. Whether speaking of the Greeks who embraced moral philosophy, the people of India who embraced Buddhism, or the latter day Romans who embraced eternal life through Christ, all of these systems seek to hold decadence at bay by demonizing the instincts (decadence was Nietzsche's word for "cultural decline").

But Nietzsche didn't think that Christianity was the cause of decadence but merely a symptom of it. What happens with all cultures, in Nietzsche's view, was that they rose to their zenith by embracing their instincts. But once they crossed that zenith, the slow and inevitable decline began. To Nietzsche, figures like Christ and Socrates would appear in cultures and try to resuscitate the dying vigor of a culture by naming its virtues, but alas, this was a fruitless exercise. Once your instincts begin to fail you, fighting your instincts only further zombifies the already dead cultural spirit which you are trying to revive.

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It is a self-deception on the part of philosophers and moralists to believe that in waging war on decadence they are already emerging from it. It is beyond their power to emerge from it: whatever they choose as their means, their deliverance, is itself just another expression of decadence--they alter its expression, but they do not get rid of it. Socrates was a misunderstanding; the entire morality of improvement, Christianity's included, was a misunderstanding... The harshest daylight, rationality at all costs, life bright, cold, cautious, conscious, instinct-free, instinct-resistant: this itself was just an illness, a different illness--and definitely not a way back to "virtue," "health," happiness... To have to fight against one's own instincts--this is the formula for decadence: so long as life is ascendant, happiness equals instinct.
[Twilight of the Idols "The Problem of Socrates" #11]

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All this aside, do you think Julian was acting out of a sense of virtue? Or do you think he was motivated by power, ambition, etc?