(September 29, 2022 at 4:02 pm)The Grand Nudger Wrote:(September 19, 2022 at 2:13 pm)Fake Messiah Wrote: I mean, didn't Constantine have that council where he ordered some guys to figure out who Jesus was?
-ish. He didn't give a fuck who jesus was or what theology that entailed, he just wanted them to stop bickering - because division eradicated the whole point of the roman administrative state assuming christianity.
Pick a god, one god, any god, and end it. That was his ask.
The historic version of christianity is a dispute between two wings of a pagan roman family angling for power...both sides long dead...availed them nothing. They just stuck us with it.
You said it yourself "pick a god".
After the council, certain beliefs got uniform and formulated as dogma (nature of Jesus), and Christians who did not accept this dogma were persecuted as heretics so that only one version of Jesus prevails. They also forbade and destroyed all other gospels (at least 50) because they held heretical descriptions of Jesus - meaning, different descriptions than those that the council prescribed.
There was the "Edict of Thessalonica" of Theodosius I. Which was a state-sponsored support for legal mechanism to counter what it perceived as 'heresy'. By this edict, in some senses, the line between the Catholic Church's spiritual authority and the Roman State's jurisdiction was blurred. One of the outcomes of this blurring of Church and State was a sharing of State powers of legal enforcement between Church and State authorities, with the state enforcing what it determined to be orthodox teaching.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
