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“Christian observers would look on the tolerance of their non-Christian neighbours with astonishment. Augustine later marvelled at the fact that the pagans were able to worship many different gods without discord while the Christians, who worshipped just the one, splintered into countless warring factions. Indeed, many pagans like Celsus seemed to actively praise plurality. To the Christians, this was anathema. Christ was the way, the truth and the light and everything else was not merely wrong but plunged the believer into a demonic darkness. To allow someone to continue in an alternative form of worship or a heretical form of Christianity was not to allow religious freedom; it was to allow Satan to thrive. Augustine, despite being impressed by the harmony of his neighbours, was not willing to extend such tolerance himself. It was, he concluded, the duty of a good Christian to convert heretics – by force, if necessary. This was a theme to which he returned again and again. Far better a little compulsion in this life, than eternal damnation in the next. People could not always be trusted to know what was good for them. The good and caring Christian would therefore remove the means of sinning from the uncertain reach of the sinner. ‘For in most cases we serve others best by not giving, and would injure them by giving, what they desire,’ he explained. Do not put a sword in a child’s hand. ‘For the more we love any one, the more are we bound to avoid entrusting to him things which are the occasion of very dangerous faults.”

FreedomSinChristianityWorshipPaganismMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“Constantine was faced with an intransigent population who insisted on worshipping idols at the expense of the risen Lord. He realized that conversion would be more ‘easily accomplished if he could get them to despise their temples and the images contained therein’. And what better way to teach wayward pagans the vanity of their gods than by cracking open their statues and showing that they were, quite literally, empty? Moreover, a religious system in which sacrifice was central would struggle to survive if there was nothing to sacrifice to. There was good biblical precedent for his actions. In Deuteronomy, God had commanded that His chosen people should overthrow altars, burn sacred groves and hew down the graven images of the gods. If Constantine attacked the temples then he was not being a vandal. He was doing God’s good work.”

ChristianitySacrificeWorshipDestructionConversionMonotheism
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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“[W]hat befell the philosophers in AD 529 was not just one single law but a staccato burst of legal aggression issued by Justinian. ‘Your Clemency . . . the Glorious and Indulgent’ Justinian is how laws of this period referred to him. Justinian’s reverence, the legal code of the time announced, shone out ‘as a specially pure light, like that of a star’, while Justinian himself was referred to as ‘Your Holiness’; the ‘Glorious emperor’. There was little glorious or indulgent about what was coming. And there was certainly nothing that was clement. This was the end. The ‘impious and wicked pagans’ were to be allowed to continue in their ‘insane error’ no longer. Anyone who refused salvation in the next life would, from now on, be all but damned in this one. A series of legal hammer blows fell: anyone who offered sacrifice would be executed. Anyone who worshipped statues would be executed. Anyone who was baptized – but who then continued to sacrifice – they, too, would be executed. The laws went further. This was no longer mere prohibition of other religious practices. It was the active enforcement of Christianity on every single, sinful pagan in the empire. The roads to error were being closed, forcefully. Everyone now had to become Christian. Every single person in the empire who had not yet been baptized now had to come forward immediately, go to the holy churches and ‘entirely abandon the former error [and] receive saving baptism’. Those who refused would be stripped of all their property, movable and immovable, lose their civil rights, be left in penury and, ‘in addition’ – as if what had gone before was not punishment but mere preamble, they would be ‘subject to the proper punishment’. If any man did not immediately hurry to the ‘holy churches’ with his family and force them also to be baptized, then he would suffer all of the above – and then he would be exiled. The ‘insane error’ of paganism was to be wiped from the face of the earth.”

PhilosophyChristianityWorshipPunishmentLawsMonotheismClemency
Book:The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World
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