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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3358 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 12, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The Romans are known for their infrastructure, their cohesive military, their state capacity. One of their recurring political challenges was keeping the slaves and peasants satisfied, to the point of literally inventing panem et circenses. You don't think they had myths about diligence and service?

You could tell the opposite just-so story where the collapse of Rome represents the erosion of collective values in favor of eschatology. Wait... A thousand years of throwing lives away in monasteries and Crusades. Only the Enlightenment reminded people that the material world was worth improving!

That story is bunk, too, for the same reasons as yours. Christians didn't invent diligence or self-sacrifice, and they didn't ruin collectivism. You can mine any time period for examples for and against.

For example, Rap Snitch Knishes is an eloquent plea for cooperation in the face of state power.

It’s a blunder to say that because a religion possesses something that is called “sacrifice”, that what we think when we say “sacrifice” calls to mind all the same meaning, baggage, and effect. Rome had myths and stories that entail something Christians could call self-sacrifice. But what early Christians understood by sacrifice is a totally different thing, which just happens to share the same referent.

If you lived as a Roman you would be forced into internalizing their view of power and sacrifice: the Emperor had power and you sacrifice for the Emperor and if you’re lucky you get something in return; the gods you worshipped are under a tyrannical pantheon; the most glorious human to exist is certainly the Emperor or a great warrior who carved out land for Rome; you worship a powerful human-like god and you make a promise of sacrifice for the god to benefit you, and if if benefits you, you make the sacrifice. Because the thing you are worshipping is always high-and-mighty and glorious, what you internalize is that power and glory are the only things that really matter. This is problematic because mathematically only a few can have power and glory.

This is in sharp contrast to the Christian view. What a Christian looks at as the best is not a warrior with a lot of land and slaves. They look at a person whose mission was to help people with little care for material reward, who didn’t despise sinners, who served the Father of all mankind up to and including crucifixion, and who willingly died in our place as a servant to our shared Creator. This is an inversion of the entire Roman system, which by the time of Christianity was already collapsing from waste, ill morals, and corruption. Rome invented bread for the masses and Christianity invented heavenly bread for the Mass: they are not the same. In the Christian system, a simple laborer could understand that there is nothing in life he is missing and that he is up to the standards of God.

The monasteries provided us with the beginnings of formal logic, architectural improvements, philosophical improvements, and many of the classics from the Ancient World. But if you think the Pagans were so good, we are back to the first question: how did the lowly crucified triumph over Roman Might? In fact, how did the lowly crucified religion triumph over almost the whole world? And one point they had near-hegemony.

They didn’t. The Romans co-opted it to shore up a diverse empire, and forced others to convert.

Nope, outdated view

For over 200 years, Gibbon's model and its expanded explanatory versions—the conflict model and the legislative model—have provided the major narrative. The conflict model asserts that Christianity rose in conflict with paganism, defeating it only after emperors became Christian and were willing to use their power to require conversion through coercion. The legislative model is based on the Theodosian Code published in AD 438.

In the last decade of the twentieth century and into the twenty–first century, multiple new discoveries of texts and documents, along with new research (such as modern archaeology and numismatics), combined with new fields of study (such as sociology and anthropology) and modern mathematical modeling, have undermined much of this traditional view. According to modern theories, Christianity became established in the third century, before Constantine, paganism did not end in the fourth century, and imperial legislation had only limited effect before the era of the eastern emperor Justinian I (reign 527 to 565).[1][2][3][4] In the twenty-first century, the conflict model has become marginalized, while a grassroots theory has developed.[5][6]

According to Stark, the rate of Christianity's growth under its first Christian emperor in the 4th century did not alter (more than normal regional fluctuations) from its rate of growth in the first three centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historiography_of_Christianization_of_the_Roman_Empire

Also a poor argument from common sense. Rome was already very diverse, and already had many diverse gods which usually got together fine. State-sponsored Christianity would have caused considerable and significant division in the Empire, like it would in America today, whereas tolerance and a pantheon and appropriation would have kept the Pax Romana. So the argument doesn’t even require evidence to disprove

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