I’m not anti christian in the pure sense. I distinguish between the teachings of Jesus, the cult of Saul of tarsus, the bible, christian theology, catholic dogma, and the institutions of the churches. And the entire european corpus of myth, literature, philosophy, history, law, science, and mathematics that is otherwise vastly superior.
The only thing that helped Europe was the teaching of Jesus that gave those of low status and women a political voice – a house of government – in the church.
The rest: “Paulianity”, “Theology”, and “Churchianity” and “Dogma” are downright evil.
My bible consists of the Jeffersonian Bible, the Epic Cycle of Greece and Rome, the Works of the Stoics and Epicureans, The Works of Aristotle, and the works of the Physical, Natural and Evolutionary Laws.
But I acknowledge that the simplest of those messages, is that of Jesus, and that is enough for common folk. For those of us who have grater ability and agency, we require the works of those who demonstrated agency – not submission.
When Rome brought law, administration, roads, and commerce into the primitive peoples of the middle east, they felt they were being left behind by a new radical way of life, new knowledge, new technology that they could not compete with it or in it. While they endured tolerating the abuses of middle eastern people upon one another – eve their own – they at least understood how to survive under those conditions. But when faced with the ancient world’s equivalent of the european age of sail, the primitive people of the middle east, like all those aware of being left behind, turned to innovation by Luddism – regression. Doubling down on a backward past.
No there is nothing good in christianity that was not in roman culture before, other than that the new religion provided an organized underclass opposition in supernatural, theocratic political form to the empirical state, to undermine the state, undermining loyalty to roman civilization, and undermine the roman project, which was dependent upon the roman way of ‘baiting’ of people to evolve from slaves, to freemen, to citizens, to sovereigns – climbing the ladder of agency and status.
Had Christians simply integrated Jesus into the state religion as the romans suggested it wouldn’t have been a problem. The underclasses could have had a path to self respect and civic virtue. But no. They used christianity to undermine. They had to destroy that civilization and stop people from climbing the ladder of agency that was the strategy of european domestication of man, and instead, drag people back to the bottom with superstition and ignorance and false promise.
The purpose of christianity in the ancient world, like marxism-postmodernism-feminism in the modern, is to resist the continuous domestication and evolution of man from superstitious ignorant beast, into heroic agency.
It is to deny physical, natural, and evolutionary laws, woven by the hand of god into the fabric of the universe for all to see – and that any man who states otherwise has been not a prophet but a deceiver and a fraud.