There's a certain quality about Christians that makes them reach out to others and try to lure them into their faith. In all my life, and I'm sure this is true for millions of others, no other social group has approached me and invited me to attend their services more than the Christians have, which is pretty surprising given the rampant number of solicitations in our society. The denomination hardly matters either; Baptists, Jehovah's Witness, and Mormons have all tried to persuade me. They are like the mightiest of corporate entities, relentless in their pursuit of profiting from our attention, seductively influential in their appeal to our moral needs.
Since they aren't trying to sell us anything (though they are trying to get us to pay their churches!), where does this quality come from? Since the dawn of this religion, missionaries have arrogantly stepped beyond the bounds of respect for alternate faiths and imposed their beliefs on others. It's as though the very first of them- Paul of Tarsus, Peter, and the rest Jesus' disciples- set the example by creating a manifesto that condemned any alternate faiths and philosophies, ignoring anyone who challenged the word of their God with that of their own, or any of the voices of reason in scientific communities. To this day their zealotry has magnified through the centuries and their words have been spread to the farthest corners of the globe. They may be a dying race, but what quality in a dying race still makes them try as hard as they can to gather followers?
The answer is martyrdom. The feeling of sacrifice. The superstition that something is so much greater than their meaningless lives that they offer their minds, bodies, and souls to it without retaining a shred of individuality. The goal for them is to become one with the world, in peace and in love, like Jesus, although a great many of them never reach this state. The first-century Christians were so willing to give their lives for a cause that was intangible and beyond them, that every martyr who stood for them only added to the divine impression this faith gave to others. For if they wanted to be like Jesus, they had to give up their lives like he did, turning a blind eye to those in control and convincing themselves of a justified suicide. A suicide for the people. And this is why Christians are among the most susceptible to cult suicides; the sins of the world are too great for them. There is too much suffering, so they try to deter it by making examples of themselves. The problem with this line of reasoning is that martyrdom never solves anything, it only manages to get rid of good people who could have solved the problems of society in more practical ways.
Christian martyrdom helped begin an age of darkness where ignorance prevailed and fear was the emperor of the passions. The millennium of Christ that St. Augustine predicted really did happen, though not in the way he envisioned. The fear, wonder, and revelry that the story of Christ inflicted upon people was as much an agent of control as it was a moral code for people to live by. They were able to sustain such an influence because of the blood of their martyrs, who died during the turbulence of early Christianity. Without their sacrifices the faith wouldn't have expanded as far as it did, because nothing spreads fear and wonder the way a public execution does. This lazy succumbing of the spirit to the doctrines of faith made society incredibly weak and at the mercy of anarchists. Justice, art, and progress were locked in the shackles of medieval exile. The gothic invaders broke the structure of civilization, but they couldn't have done it so easily if it weren't for the weakness of a faith that clouded the senses. The loss of Rome itself was like a collective martyrdom, as people seemed to give up on the greatest empire that ever existed just as Christianity was reaching its widest audience. Byzantium, Rome's twin in the east after the empire was split up, didn't suffer the same fate because it wasn't attacked as viciously. Even then, the size of Byzantium seemed to shrink the more it was Christianized.
It's important to point out that the spread of Christianity wasn't the only cause of Rome's demise. You won't find any historian claiming such an absurd thing. Rather what I'm trying to say, as Edward Gibbons did in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was that it was only a contribution and not the sole reason. Also: this is not an attack on Christianity, it is a rejection of missionaries and martyrs, not just in the Christian faith but in others as well. If your faith really were the best one, people would flock to it naturally and you wouldn't need to send people out to convince them it's the best. The way they manipulated people into believing in Jesus, regardless of how great he was, was a major obstacle in the history of intellectualism. It saddens me that this faith was thrust upon so many people in so many different parts of the globe. Rather than keeping old gods by their side and entering the modern world with their faiths intact, the victims of Christianization were forced to replace them with the one God through the power of a very sad story.
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