Didn't Nero launch Christianity?

[The Grand Nudger]

Of course. Outside the Abrahamic traditions religious tolerance was pretty common. That's why I've always held that religious tolerance isn't a modern idea, but rather a departure from the influence of Christian/Abrahamic norms. 

Still. At one point in time, Christians were a cultural minority, and "minority status" isn't something peculiar to Abrahamic traditions or paganism. Thus, incorrect as their beliefs might have been, I sympathize with the early Christians as much as any minority in any epoch. If records from Nero's era are to be trusted, the Christians were once scapegoated by the Roman leadership. My original point was that (if doing such a thing is wrong in principle-- which it is) then, those who preach "Do unto others" ought to be ashamed of the way history panned out.

There's only one source for that, Tacitus, and he absolutely hated Nero.  Nero was, essentially, Tacitus' Bill Clinton, lol. Tacitus was writing in 115 ad-ish.  The great fire occurred in 64ad.  Romans wouldn't even have known what a christian was.  They still didn't in 115, lol.  We know this because Pliny and Trajans correspondence was contemporaneous.  Pliny is completely unaware not only of the claim that there was a persecution under Nero, but also of the equally unevidenced claim of persecution under Domitian in the 80's and 90's.  He was a career government official from the point of time in which rome was still being repaired all the way up to the time of his writing the letter...who didn't know what a christian was or if it was illegal to be so.  The response he gets from Trajan is completely at odds with the persecution narrative.   Pliny and Tacitus and Suetonius are friends, mind you, lol.

Suetonius says nothing of this.   Dio says nothing of this.  Lactantius, who formed Constantine's religious policies, disregarded the episode as fiction.  It was a christian author in 400AD, Severus, that turned the story into an industry. The truth of the matter behind the mythos, is that christianity only began to become a thing after 115AD. It was then that small groups of the roman intelligentsia first became aware of the thing, which wasn't yet what it is today. Before that, no one would have known how to pick them out of a crowd to scapegoat them for anything. There wasn't even a word for them. The Roman empire would shortly suffer through the Antonine Plagues, then the civil war that created the barracks emperors...and out of that morass would come the christian emperors of the Constantinian Dynasty, ultimately culminating in Julian Apostate, who gives us a picture of what christianity had become in the interim and whose death lead to another ten years of infighting and out of which came oppressive christian emperors. The actual history of christianity's relationship with state persecution and scapegoating, is that of wielding it, not being it's victim.

You're sympathizing on the basis of fiction explicitly created to whitewash a bloody history, lol. It's like feeling bad for the romans from when rome was a backwater in nowheresville on account of how they swore that the rape of the sabine women was all the fault of those greedy sabine townspeople keeping the pussy to themselves.