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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 because the FULLY HUMAN Son of God was sacrificed, it makes all other human sacrifices less, and therefore unnecessary. But human sacrifice is still necessary for Christianity, it’s just God allowed the human sacrifice of his son, to make all other human sacrifices unnecessary.
Christianity spread because it appeased a psychological need that some humans have for human sacrifice. These are people who can’t conceive of a God who gives and takes at random. Everything has a cost for these folks, everything has it’s bribe. Every game is capable of being “won”.
I was raised Catholic, but Christianity never stuck with me. It never took hold no matter how hard I tried. And I know it was because, in my soul, I was the type of person who never saw the need for any type of human sacrifice. I saw that reality is chaos and saw the beauty in that. I saw all these things before I had the words to say them.
But for some people, Christianity does stick. These are people who believe in human sacrifice to get ahead. Christianity appeases that belief.
