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The Reason Christianity Spread So Quickly
I recently read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. He was a Roman Emperor who ruled from roughly 160 AD to 180 AD. Rome didn’t become a Christian Empire by name until 380 AD. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is a great book. It’s an enlightened meditation on death. It’s brilliant.
You see in this period (160 AD to 180 AD), paganism was dying. And the most enlightened of men were finally able to see that things like human sacrifice do not matter to God or the gods.
The uneducated still clung to various forms of paganism, meaning human sacrifice to bribe peace from God.
But the educated were beginning to see that reality is chaos, and when reality is embraced as such, it becomes a short yet beautiful ride. Marcus Aurelius essentially said, “Decide today that you are already dead, and live your life accordingly”. That is enlightenment.
But because of a lack of education, most of humanity still clung to paganism during this period. Paganism is the idea of bribing God through human sacrifice. This was of course horrific, but made sense to the unenlightened who look at life as a win-lose game.
Then Christianity comes along. It’s neo-paganism. Christianity says that human sacrifice is necessary, and that is why God sacrificed his son Jesus, who was fully divine, and FULLY HUMAN. So…
