Quote:Maybe the church fathers made some of it up and then it became a fad once martyrs who died for their faith were regarded as having special status.
The xtian cult of death in full bloom? I can see that.
Of course, we weren't the first to see it.
http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/persecutions.html
Quote:Pay Back Time: The Christian Torture Garden
'Wherever we look, bishops were encouraging the landed elites... to take firm and coercive action to make the peasantry Christian ...
Like it or not, this is what our sources tell us over and over again. Demonstrations of the power of the Christian God meant conversion. Miracles, wonders, exorcisms, temple-torching and shrine-smashing were in themselves acts of evangelisation."
– Richard Fletcher (The Conversion of Europe, p45)
With the triumph of Constantine the inmates came into possession of the asylum. Their insanities were to become the only acceptable world view. Demonic nonsense, dreamed up in the psychotic mind of the pious theologian, populated the natural world with monstrous phantoms and set Satan's familiars at every cherished spring and venerable grove. Ever more lurid descriptions of Hell instilled dread and terror. Every town and hamlet was polluted by limitless malevolence – from which the only deliverance was complete submission to Holy Mother Church and her rapacious agents.
Constantine placed himself at the head of the collective of Christian fraternities, rewarded their bishops and obtained their fawning adoration. Fanaticism was now pressed into service as the propaganda of a divine monarch; zealotry was directed, not merely at the pagan and the skeptic, but also at the brethren who had failed to understand the true nature of the political revolution, had failed to adapt to servitude in the kingdom of the world and still cast their eyes, wistfully, on an anticipated kingdom of heaven.
Christian monarchs would far surpass in resolution and cruelty the mild attempts of the pagan caesars to eliminate such unacceptable thoughts:
"In the century opened by the Peace of the Church, more Christians died for their faith at the hands of fellow Christians than had died before in all the persecutions."
– Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, p14.
