Question by Lion of Judah Regular: what made the pagans in rome leave their dual god/goddess religion for Christianity?
As in, in paganism, you have a god and goddess and you have automatic guarantee into heaven, and you had women preistess and things like that.
So what made those pagans want to convert? And at such a rate that by the time Constantine came about, Rome was almost split because of Christianity?
huh? it was the Christians that were getting fed to lions, but pagans, knowing this, still converted. 🙂
why? you can come out, the inquistions and stuff are over. 🙂
huh? I said by the time that it GOT to Constantine, there wasn’t ANY brute force before Constantine.
At least I don’t think, because Christianity wasn’t the state religion at the time.
hmm, so that’s what started the dark ages.
well then other pagans need to get with the times and convert! 🙂
Best answer:
Answer by The Apostle
The spirit of God came upon them.
Know better? Leave your own answer in the comments!
The threat of an appearance at the Coliseum?
fire and lions make for good convincing tools.
The Spirit of the Lord penetrated them………..like He did for us one glorious day
the threat of eternal hellfire was probably a deal clincher
you should read my blog and maybe find an answer
for more on this see http://rodney-therealtruth.blogspot.com
I think partly it was fear of Constantine, and partly they just had a more convincing story. Christianity is harder to dispute than Roman Mythology.
For the most part it wasn’t their choice. The Romans said be Christian or die. A lot of pagans went into hiding as well. Some of us still are. 🙂
Individually, they chose a religion that corresponded with their beliefs.
Or they were coerced. Who knows?
Brute force, mainly.
It was the Christians who were fed to the lions not the pagans as some have answered. People convert to Christianity because God by His Spirit has revealed truth.
They did not leave their old gods. The just adapted many of their practices and changed the names and called it Roman Catholicism.
http://philologos.org/__eb-ttb/default.htm
Constantine I was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity.
As Emperor, his word was law, and he put into motion the move to convert everyone else to his beliefs.
The Pagans didn’t necessarily want to convert. They simply had no other choice, besides death. It helped that the spin doctors of the day found ways to convince the Pagans that their practices could be construed as being part of Christianity.
Early Christianity had a better guarantee of an afterlife, or at least people were told that, and once Constantine came around Christians began to recieve tax breaks (as in no taxes), so that encouraged people to convert on the spot, in the same way that some Byzantine populations converted to Islam since non-Muslims have to pay an extra tax.
Also, I suppose that some people liked the idea of one infallible God as opposed to the pantheon of Gods who were as flawed as the people who worshiped them. I guess it;s less discouraging to have one God ignore your prayers than to have all of the Gods ignore them.
Threats of death and don’t mean being fed to the lions either.
It started with the slaves and soldiers, who were promised a better life in next world. Most of the poor, the enslaved, the soldiers, etc. didn’t know much about their beliefs. The missionaries of Christianity came along proclaiming a god that seemed very much like the gods they were used to, but kinder, more forgiving, etc. Then the upper class started converting and soon it became a social thing, and that was pretty much were it was when Constantine came along. He realized that Christianity was gaining power, so he wanted to be on the ‘winning side’ and declared Christianity the official religion of the Empire and started the wholesale forced conversion of those who still followed the old ways. The temples began to be closed and converted into churches, the old priests and priestesses where either killed outright or turned out of their temples and left to wander, homeless, etc.
Christianity cleverly imported different myths and traditions from pagan religions into their religion. Traditions like goint to church on sunday, All saints day (halloween) and even christmas. Christians in the fourth century took december the 25th as Christs birthday because it was already being used as a pagan celebration.
The Story of Jesus Christ and the miracles he performed are shockingly similar to that of Horus the egyptian god. Horus was born of a virgin, he had 12 diciples, he could walk on water and when he died he was reincarnated after visiting the land of the dead.
The ones who didn’t convert were hunted down and killed by the Christians. I guess payback is a b!+$h.
Christianity and the bible was the invention of the last Roman emperor. He was a nasty character who went insane after surviving the plague in Constantinople. He was losing control of the people who were left so he invented Christianity to keep them in order.
He ordered the burning of the libraries of Alexandria, setting mankind back millenia. Then went of a death campaign on the back of the plague murdering anyone who disagreed with him.
When his evil campaign met the northern celts they would not convert, so he ordered all the sacred circles to be destroyed, and planted ugly buildings on the sites to stop them being used. Christianity then plagiarized all of their festivals, including the dates. All they did was substitute Jesus instead of the Sun as the messiah, ie as per the Celtic Cross. When that did not work they tortured, stole, raped and burnt hundreds of thousand of people alive.
After a few generations of this death campaign the only ones left alive where ignorant Christians who could not read or write…. hence the start of the dark ages.
The Christians won’t like it but their religion is nothing but the evil machinations of a mad despot. Their history is not a pretty sight.
Practicing Shaman… quantum physics rocks.
Constantine:
…”Wishing that his pagan subjects would give up their religious rites, Constantine kept the pagans fearful and cowed as he confiscated from their priests much of the wealth the pagan religions had accumulated, including their sacred icons. This brought to Constantine much wealth in the form of precious metal, which he gave to the Christian Church.”
If you’d like to know more, I included a link.
First of all the “dual god/goddess religion” stuff is all Neo-Paganism. Roman polytheism was a belief in the Roman Gods of antiquity (Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, Mars, sound familiar?).
From around 200 BCE to around 300 CE many of soldiers followed a different religion from the ruling aristocracy: Mithraism, a modern Roman variant of Zoroastrianism (the predecessor to Judaism). At the time there were many Turkish soldiers and slaves serving in the Roman army and it was likely that their religion started to spread to other Romans.
Mithraism was the worship of the man Mithras, who was god incarnate, born of a virgin on Dec 25th, crucified, came back to life three days later, and preached peace throughout the land.
Before Jesus was even born or died, Roman soldiers had basically already been worshiping him under a different name for 200 years already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythras
They did not!!!
The Venerable Bede, an early Christian writer pointed out that the Christian church absorbed Pagan practices when it found the population unwilling to give up the festivals. Thus a lot of what Christians now see as Christians practices are in fact pagan!!!
Scratch the Christian and you find the pagan – spoiled. – Israel Zangwill
Christian are the new Pagans!!
It was the era of Pisces. (The Fish) Do you think it coincidence that early Christians chose the fish as a symbol of their Era? But, we have left the age of Pisces and entered the age of Aquarius. The Age before Pisces was indeed the age of the Ram (Aries), and was defined heavily by the Ram, and it’s sacrifice. The paganism you see today is different than the paganism of the Ram.
The true God (or Gods) speak to people in different ways in different Ages.
The Romans practiced a particularly cruel form of paganism. Their emperor was considered to be a god. Many died simply at his whim. Many were subject to cruel existence. There were slaves, and soldiers and gladiators were no better off. They may have been celebrated, but they were treated no better than our society treats the dogs in dog racing.
Now take those people, who are being killed for the glory of the emperor (or possibly for his entertainment), who were told that this was their role in the world,that the gods deemed they didn’t deserve any better. Now introduce them to a religion that said everyone who believes has worth, has a chance at salvation. Not just the titled classes. Of course they jumped at that. I doubt it had anything to do with true belief in the beginning. Just an offer of hope to escape their wretched lives.
This was completely different from what other pagans practiced at the time. In fact, in most of Europe, you would find different practices in different villages (some good, some bad).
Why did Constantine convert? No one knows for sure, it could have been because he saw the tide of the populous and was afraid of this new power. Maybe it was because he knew he wasn’t really a god. Who knows for sure?
Today, even the neo-pagans who follow the Roman pantheon realize that the Roman Empire was corrupt in its beliefs. If you want to see how paganism honestly worked, you need to go back to the Roman Republic (which probably would not have been converted so easily, because the people had not been abuse by so called gods).