Aidonian's blog

Today I had an interesting “discussion”with a Christian who claimed that Christianity defeated the pagan religions of the ancient world. While Twitter isn’t the best forum to hold such discussions, he went to accuse me of worshipping demons. 

To state that polytheists worship demons is an old one and not uncommon. For Christians their God is the only one, one God who is omnipotent, omniscient and all powerful. While this in itself creates philosophical and theological problems, the accusation of worshiping demons makes no sense. Its based on the use of daimon or daimones in Hellenic religion but the usage is different from the rest of the ancient world. While there were malevolent spirits, daimones meant spirit, but it could also mean divine presence. Its nothing more than a linguistic twist to demonstrate the supremacy of the Christian religion vs the polytheistic religions of the Roman empire. 

In my opinion, if a religion wants to prove its supremacy by demoting all other religions to demon worship, it kinds of misses the point.Polytheism isn’t perfect, but it does have one thing going for them: acceptance. Acceptance of other religions and deities. Like all things, it depends on the culture and the people. The Romans had an open view on it and offered sacrifices for foreign Gods. They even adopted foreign Gods in their pantheon like Cybele and Attis, Mithras, Sol Invictus, Isis, Serapis, etc…

In the first few centuries before acceptance by the Roman empire as the official religion, Christianity underwent changes. At first, there were several bibles, so the council of Nicea was to rectify that by putting one official bible out there. Second, it adopted a philosophy so it would attract more people than just commoners, so platonism and neoplatonism was a good fit for it. 

Now the idea that Christians were mass persecuted isn’t entirely true. There were local persecutions but mostly the result of some fanatical Christians attacking pagans in their temples causing persecutions to happen in the region. 

However, by the time of adoption as the official religion of the empire, there were at least 150 different Christian sects and Christians made up around 10% of the population. The first thing that happened was that in the army, only Christians could be officers and not pagans. This made sure that anyone who wanted to rise up in the ranks had to convert and most did. After they flushed out pagans from military and political leadership, they started persecuting them in the next couple of centuries. Destroying temples, shrines, looting them, forcing people to convert or die. When pagans were stamped out in Europe, they turned to the Jews, later Muslims and witches. So if you have a religion of the book like monotheists do, why the need to convert others? If your God is so powerful, why would he need you to convert others to this religion? 

While Christians like to remind us that they were once persecuted, they seem to forget that they themselves did a lot of persecuting as well, mostly under the guise of evangelism, they seek out to spread the teachings of their God to the whole world, if the world wants to hear it or not. This creates problems. This creates tensions, conflicts within society. Needless to say, that Christian user on twitter blocked me. 

Using the slander, false idols, devil worship, demon worship does nothing than to make people dislike you. It shows you have no respect for other people’s beliefs and customs. I don’t mind if someone is a atheist, Christian, Satanist, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, etc… I don’t mind. Religion is a private matter. I work with Christians, atheists, muslims and i’m friends with a Jew. I respect people’s belief. I have read the Torah, Bible, Quran and I can say that i didn’t find any spiritual truth in them. It was interesting to read them, but its not for me.