(September 22, 2014 at 9:46 am)Chuck Wrote:(September 22, 2014 at 8:25 am)Lemonvariable72 Wrote: Actually quite different, Judaism never really spread and Christianity was spread with in the roman empire, mostly withput violence for the first 300 years
Judaism did spread between 3rd and 1st century BC, Judiasm didn't spread wider because the overweening ethnocentrism built into the core of the religion handicapped it. The Jews, thanks to their religion and the deeply stratifying and ossifing institutions arising from the religion couldn't fit in, couldn't adapt, and couldn't fight worth a damn. Neither ethnocentrism nor the ossifing effect of Judiasm in what was a rapidly changing world are really a credit to it.
How much violence there was in the first 3 centuries of Christianity is hard to say. According to Christians all early Christians were martyrs. But if early Christianity didn't possess the power to act as it wished, what Christianity wished was made amply clear during the next thousand years, when it did have the power. It flayed alive those who sought to preserve and advanced philosophies and mathematics of the classical world, bleached ancient works so it could be overwritten with the doggerel a of the bible, and tore down wonders of the world to build dank monasteries.
Yes, the spread of Islam did involve a period of spectacular violence and book burning. But after just 2 centuries, the Muslim world had become the center of culture, mathematics, and learning far surpassing anything those living under the Christian yoke for 5 centuries could even dream of.
So the entire existence of the respective religions, Christianity had been a heavier burden upon intellectual and cultural development of the people under its yoke for far longer than had Islam.
Actually rather ironically, it was exposure and trade with with Muslims that help spur the renansaince ( forgive spelling) because the crusades freed a lot of men from serfdom (A man was nmo longer a serf if he had been gone for a year and a day or something to that effect) and also the Arabs did a particularly good job furthering medicine and astronomy.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
