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Did the early Christians invent religious fanaticism?.....................................................................................2

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i
Being Human
Did the early Christians invent religious
fanaticism?
I do think that the greatest single innovation of the early Christians was the very grand idea that forwarding a
purely abstract idea could be more important even than preserving and protecting a human life. I do think that
they also discovered the methods for inducing religious fanaticism in people easily and most of all effectively

Of course people had died in masses before them for many kinds of ideas, but these ideas had
always been invented to support something that had real physical properties also.
People had died to further the interests of their family, profession, village, town or fatherland or to protect
their kinsmen and their family and property.
I cannot think of any cases before the rise of Christianity that somebody would have really died in defense of
a pure idea only.
I do think that even Socrates died because of his perceived non-belief in the central traditions of the city state
and not in defense of some pure idea of his own.

So, I do think that the early Christians fathers of the church can truly be credited with the creation of the
religious fanaticism, which is used purely to defend and forward that idea itself, and is not used as a tool for
forwarding the interest of ones own real world family, tribe or nation.

Of course Christianity had it roots in the old Jewish tradition, but this Jewish tradition was still tied to
furthering the interest of a single nation against the interests of other nations. Jewish fanaticism was still
basically just nationalism dressed up in fancy cloths.
This fact is made more difficult to see because Jewish faith did later break loose from the Jewish state and
nation, when the Jews were dispersed by Romans after the Jewish uprisings in the first and second century
and there was no Jewish nation no more.

What really was the big thing that made the first Christians think that they want more to be eaten by lions than
simply to accept even in the name only the existence of many kinds of deities, as had been the norm in their
society for a long time?
The fact remains that just accepting the primary position of the Roman gods even in the name only would
have gotten them off the hook, as Rome was a extremely tolerant society in religious matters, but it would not
tolerate anything that threatened the power and unity of the Empire.

Christians were not persecuted because of some kind of perverse religious intolerance, but because the spread
of their beliefs was perceived as a threat to the Empire when they denied the ultimate supremacy of the old
Roman religious traditions.
Only later in the fourth century was Christianity completely reformed and changed to suit the needs of the
Empire and most of all the deeply unjust feudal society, but this grand transformation of Christianity is
another story that has been told many times in this blog before.

The important thing just now is the willingness of early Christians to give their lives to protect a pure idea.
Basically it was an incredible show of a new kind of ability in mind control that the early Christian movement
had perfected.
Their success can be measured by the simple fact that they got these poor people really into thinking that
suffering and dying for a newfangled and rather strange religious belief was far more important for them as
human beings than living for another day.
This is a immense achievement, as self-preservation is one of the most very basic human instincts.

The Christian martyrs were simply the suicide bombers of their day. They were brainwashed by their fellow
believers into believing that they should die for their faith, as well as are the suicide bombers of the modern
day are brainwashed into believing that they must die for their faith.
Of course there is clear difference in killing just oneself and killing arbitrary innocent people too; in that sense
the Islamic fanaticism goes one clear step further than even the early Christian fanaticism, even if inducing
other people into assisted suicides cannot be seen directly as a moral virtue either.

Islam is a syncretic religion that is based mainly on Judaism and Christianity, but also on the old animistic
belief systems of Arabia. However, the lessons of how to create unwavering religious fanaticism they
definitely took from the Christians and they took these lessons to their hearts.

The Christians were able to do all this, as they had perfected their religious ideas but also the methods by
which a new individual could be tied into to fold of the believers until he or she saw that new belief as the
most important thing in his or her life.

The theory of the evolution helps to explain how this all came to be. The basic fact is that the early Christian
church was not a church at all, but a conglomerate of different competing cults, that had ideas and stories
loosely based on the shared belief in the importance of the life-story and some central teachings of a Jewish
preacher.

These ideas were at first freely propagated in the religiously tolerant Roman society. This tolerance also gave
rise to an incredible competition between different religions to attract followers. So also the Christian factions
faced fierce competition from other quite similar religions as the cult of Mithra or the Egyptian mystic
religions.

Among these competing factions in this overall extremely competitive setting the ones who could induce the
most loyalty and religious fervor survived.
In time these groups created better and better stories telling about the life of their preacher figure, more and
more wonderful promises of eternal afterlife and more and more fearful stories of eternal anguish waiting
those who did harbor wrong kinds of beliefs.

The net result was a birth of a religion world had not witnessed before; it was a religion that did really
transcend the borders of class, gender and nationality.

Now we need the bring in the theory of memes. This new religion was soon a meme that could completely fill
the mind of the receiver and block successfully all other similar memes.
This new religion soon become so successful as a meme that many people receiving it simply could not think
of anything else than forwarding this meme. In fact by that time it was the most evolved and virulent meme
the world had ever witnessed.

by jaskaw @ 02.10.2010 - 13:21:54

http://beinghuman.blogs.fi/2010/10/02/did-the-early-christians-invent-religious-fanaticism-9504527/
Feedback for Post "Did the early Christians invent religious
fanaticism?"

atheistbruce [Member]
02.10.2010 @ 17:36

I am sure Mohammed & his mates understood this process very well, which is why Islam achieves an even
greater degree of submission from its followers.

Is there an atheist meme developing?

mikespeir [Visitor]

02.10.2010 @ 19:22
I think Judaism beat Christianity to the punch on this one. Witness the fanaticism surrounding the Maccabean
rebellion. I will say that Christianity, as the offspring of Judaism, came by its fanaticism honestly.

| Show subcomments
jaskaw pro
http://www.beinghuman.blogs.fi
02.10.2010 @ 19:56
Mikespeir, I do think that the Maccabeans were also nationalists, even if their fervor was greatly intensified
by their religious beliefs. I would still say that the early Christians were the first fanatics with purely and only
religious motives.
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About the author
jaskaw (Jaakko Wallenius), male, 52 years old, Lohja, , speaks Finnish (FI)

(English version at bottom) Uusi ja yllättävä tieto on minulle ylivoimaisesti parasta viihdettä. Rakkaus
historiaan syttyi jo kansankouluaikana, mutta viime vuosina melkoisesti aikaa on vienyt myös
tietotekniikkaan syventyminen. Opiskelin aikoinaan historiaa, sosiologiaa ja valtio-oppia, mutta lyhyeksi
jäänyt poliittinen ura vei miehen pian mukanaan. Jo 17 vuotta sitten alkoi nykyinen taloustoimittajan ura.
Asun pienessä omakotitalossa pienessä kaupungissa vaimon, kahden koiran, kahden lapsen ja viime laskun
mukaan 14 kalan kanssa. Korjailen toimittajan päätyöni ohella sivutoimisena yrittäjänä hyvien
kaupunkilaisten tietokoneita. Olen myös kotitoimitukseni pääluottamusmies. New information has always
been the best form of entertainment for me. My everlasting love for history started at the elementary school at
tender age of nine, when I did read the 600 pages of The Pocket World History, admittedly skipping the dull
parts about culture... I have studied history, political history, political science and journalism in universities of
Turku and Tampere, but have never graduated from neither. A brief but tempestuous political career blew the
man prematurely to to wide world from the comforting womb of university. A more steady career in
journalism followed and I have been a professional writer and journalist for the past 20 years. At present I live
in a small town in a small house with a wife, two not so small teenagers, two middle-sized dogs and 14 fish of
various sizes. By day I work as a journalist writing about local economy in our local newspaper. Its a job i
have held for the past 20 years. In the evenings and week-ends I repair the computers of the good citizens of
our little town as a private entrepreneur.

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