"The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World." Christianity got its start with violence.
Christianity has a historical record of violence and destruction.
They destroyed the temples in the ancient world and then as Christianity expanded into Europe they destroyed the religions there.
The people of South Asia and East Asia should realize that their temples will eventually face destruction if the Christians take over there.
"The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World." Christianity got its start with violence.
Christianity spread through violence and terror throughout the Roman Empire. They weren't meek and mild. This history is a warning to the present world.
https://www.amazon.com/Darkening-Age-Christian-Destruction-Classical/dp/1328589285
It is available in both hardcover and softcover.
Christianity rose by a campaign of terror and violence against Pagans.
From the dustjacket.
In Harran, the locals refused to convert. They were dismembered, their limbs hung along yhe town’s main street. In Alexandria, zealots pulled the elderly philosopher-mathematician Hypatia from her chariot and flayed her to death with shareds of broken pottery. Not long before, their fellow Christians had invaded he city’s greatest temple and razed it—smashing its world-famous statues and destroying all that was left of Alexandria’s Great Library.
…….
As Catherine Nixey reveals, evidence of early Christian’s campaigns of terror has been hiding in plain site: in the palimpsests and shattered statues proudly displayed in churches and museums the world over. In The Darkening Age, Nixey ressurects this lost history, offering a wrench account of the rise of Christianity and its terrible cost.
I am going to be reading this book and reporting on what I have learned.
This interview is conducted by Lewis Lapham, a prominent writer end editor. He is the editor of Harper’s magazine from 1976 to 1981, and from 1983 to 2006, Lapham’s Quarterly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_H._Lapham
There have been multiple book reviews. A lot of people are not happy over this book.
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/catherine-nixey/the-darkening-age/
There is a paywall for this review.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/08/books/review/catherine-nixey-darkening-age.html
Financial Times.
https://www.ft.com/content/035fa46a-c62a-11e7-b30e-a7c1c7c13aab
About Catherine Nixey
https://www.catherinenixey.co.uk/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Nixey
The loss of our ancient culture.
The reason today that Paganism is only followed by a tiny minority in the West, is its violent destruction by Christianity. Without this exterminating violence, Paganism might have developed like Taoism in China, Shintoism in Japan or been syncreticized with Buddhism like it is in Myanmar and Thailand. It might have evovled into a system like Hinduism. But it was subject to exterminating violence instead.
Violent Christianity isn’t locked in the past.
Some people like to think that this violent Christianity is contained in the past, before the modern era with our Western progress. I suggest an alternative view, which is a development of an idea of Univ. of Houston Gerald Horne. Horne points out that Americans were hardly progressive, but had adopted this one idea, religious tolerance, which is really an anomally from the general thinking of the American Founders. Professor Horne points out that if you live in a county where slaves outnumber whites, maybe by 2 or 3 or 4 to 1, you can’t afford to have religious division. Slavery was a major part of the American colonies. When facing possible attacks by Indigenous who are resisting their dispossession of the land, you can’t have religious division among the whites.
Monthly Review, April 2020, “Delusions of the American Revolution: Science & Society looks at “The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism.”
I am not saying you have to agree with everything Horne states, but religious conflict would had made slave societies in the South extremely difficult to sustain. The religious faction being suppressed would at the final moment of desperation would have turned to the slaves. The British had recruited slaves during the American Revolution and it was adverse to the revolutionary military effort of the colonists to the point that Gen. George Washington, with great reluctance, decided to recruit slaves.
Horne shows that the eclipse of religion as an axis of differentiation in the settlement colonies served the purpose of uniting Europeans of all religions against enslaved Africans and indigenes. Those who applaud the century’s religious tolerance “confused a measure designed to gain an adequate racial supply with intentional avant-garde thinking” (112). The celebration of the American Revolution as a “novel display of patriotism” and “a great leap forward for humanity” is seen as a delusion; instead Horne characterizes the “revolution” as a “naked grab for land, slaves, and profit” (67).
If you think of the Europeans involved in colonial conquests, they can’t afford religious division either when their small armies have to occupy large territories with large populations. If the British had internal religious conflicts and also were planning an anti-Muslim and anti-Hindu campaign, their armies would have never been able to occupy and subdue India. A religious civil war in Britain would surely result in the return of British military forces to Britain, or the losing religous faction would surely make alliances with subjugated colonial populations.
The European empires of the have long since vanished except for the Russian occupation of Siberia. The United States no longer has slaves or a frontier with military conflict with Indigenous peoples. The historical and political forces driving the wide spread support of religious tolerance no longer exists.
We can see what Christianity will likely become in South Korea where it exists outside Western society. South Korea has a problem of Christians carrying out arson attacks on Buddhist temples.
The Open Buddhist University, “Broken Buddhas and Burning Temples: A Re-examination of Anti-Buddhist Violence and Harrassment in South Korea.” 2018.
From 1982 through 2016, Korean media outlets have reported over 120 instances of vandalism, arson and harassment targeting Buddhist temples and facilities in South Korea. An extension of on-going tensions between South Korea’s Buddhist and Evangelical Protestant communities, this one-sided wave of violence and harassment has caused the destruction of numerous temple buildings and priceless historical artifacts, millions of USD in damages, and one death.
And:
[This article] examines the responses from South Korea’s Buddhist and Evangelical communities and various government agencies, as well as the effects of these responses, before investigating the relationship between these incidents and the mainstream Evangelical doctrines of religious exclusivism, dominionism and spiritual warfare.
That “prayer warrior” talk of Christians can have consequences.
https://www.buddhistchannel.tv/index.php?id=89,11172,0,0,1,0
In the 19th and 20th century Protestant Koreans campaign against the indigenous religion of Korea.
Wikipedia, “Anti-shamanism movement in Korea.”
What happened was a repeat of the Christian destruction of the ancient Western Pagan world.
Waves of the anti-shamanism movement started in the 1890s with the rise of influence of Protestant preachers in Korea,[1] culminating during the New Community Movement of the 20th century, in South Korea. These movements destroyed most of the indigenous cults and shrines of folk religion, which were largely replaced by Christianity.[3]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-shamanism_movement_in_Korea
Wikipedia, “Korean shamanism.”
Again, the destruction of Paganism happens in the supposedly enlighten 20th century. It is what Christianity does when not held back.
In South Korea, Christianity spread rapidly from the 1960s, becoming the country's dominant religion by the 21st century.[431] South Korean leader Syngman Rhee launched the Sin Saenghwal Undong ("New Life Movement") which destroyed many village shrines.[432] This policy continued as the Saemaul Undong ("New Community Movement") of his successor, Park Chung Hee, which led to a surge in the police suppression of mudang during the 1970s.[433] In response, mudang formed the Tae Han Sŭngkong yŏngsin yŏnhap-hoe (Korean Victory Over Communism Federation of Shamans) to promote their interests, its name reflecting the pervasive anti-communist atmosphere of South Korean society.[434] Such outright persecution ended after Park's assassination in 1979.[432]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_shamanism
In this sermon, Pastor Kent Christmas, said that their Christian god was behind the cancellation of comedian Stephen Colbert.
0:03-0:40 When I knew God changed my message because the Lord spoke this to me. He said, "I am destroying, not going to, but I am in the middle of destroying strongholds, even ancient strongholds that are in this nation that have seemed untouchable." And God said, "Things that have been done in secret, I am revealing, and things that have been hid, I am uncovering." And then God brought me to this.
It is edited out of this video of Pastor Christmas, but it is in an X report of the sermon. About 23 seconds into the excerpt in the video reported by Christian Nightmares you can see and hear Pastor Christmas saying.
"I declare by the word of the Lord that God over this nation … God can do anything he wants to. Stephen Colbert, bye-bye," he said.
https://x.com/ChristnNitemare/status/1947746406758027579
https://www.christianpost.com/news/pastor-on-stephen-colbert-cancellation-god-can-do-anything.html
As Jesus is stated to have said in Matthew 10:34 in the Bible.
34 Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.
A violent Christianity, the same type of Christianity that had the Inquisition, burned witches, burned and destroyed temples, burned each other, is likely the Christianity of many Christians in the future.
In the Western world the various Pagan, Wiccan, and other non-Christian movements in American need to realize the coming danger. They need to organize and mobilize to defend themselves.
Outside the Western world, other religions have already have suffered the depredations of Christianity and are aware of the danger.
Comments
Post a Comment