Christianity
The Dark Ages: Christians Destroyed Pagan Culture Causing a Thousand Years of Ignorance
Abstract
The Roman Christians from the fourth century set about destroying the Pagan culture that had given us Classical and Hellenistic Antiquity. The Dark Ages resulted. Public libraries had their Pagan books replaced by Christian books. Christians closed Pagan temples and academies. In Alexandria, Pagans locked themselves inside the temple of the god Serapis. Christians sieged and captured the building, demolished it, burnt its famous library and profaned its images. Christians try to deny it. Since this vandalism started the Dark Ages, it is difficult to prove. Yet the holes in Christianity were filled with adaptations from Paganism. Pagan rites and ideas were received into the Church. Every important church festival coincides with an ancient solar or Pagan festival. Pagan gods were made saints. In a few hundred years, only the topmost levels of the clergy could read and write. The seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries have left a scanty literature. Europe sank into ignorance and superstition. Defenders of Christianity maintain Christians kept alive learning in the Dark Ages. Why then were they so dark for so long.
The Modern Era
© Dr M D Magee Contents Updated: Wednesday, 20 January 2010
- Book Burning 97 kb
Once the Empire was administered by Christians, public libraries had their Pagan books progressively replaced by Christian books. Christians closed Pagan temples and academies, destroying or scattering their libraries. Even as early as 235 AD Christians, like Sextus Julius Africanus, were in powerful and influential positions in Rome. By 391 AD, an edict of Theodosius prohibited visiting Pagan temples and even looking at their ruins. In Alexandria, Pagans revolted, led by the philosopher Olympius. They locked themselves inside the temple of the god Serapis—the Serapeion. Christians violently sieged and captured the building, demolished it, burnt its famous library and profaned its images. Christians try to deny that they ravaged the Pagan learning accumulated over the whole of previous history. Since this vandalism started the Dark Ages, it is difficult to prove…
- Justinian 97 kb
Theodora met Justinian who grew insatiably passionate about her and, at first taking her as a mistress, later married her just before his elevation to the rank of Patrician. Euphemia, the Empress, though a simple uncultured country woman of barbarian origins deplored Justinian marrying a prostitute and forbade it on the grounds of its unlawfulness. Justinian intimidated the Roman aristocracy into proclaiming him Emperor jointly with his uncle. Thus it was that the lowest class of woman became empress of Rome. Justinian could have picked any woman in the Empire, high class, cultured, modest, chaste, even virginal but it never seemed to occur to him that his choice of consort was shocking even in shocking times.
- Phallic Elements in Christianity 111 kb
The sexual act is not only the acme of physical bliss, it is necessary for the continuation of life. As humans came to think about their experiences, they wanted to celebrate sexuality—a demonstration of it showed to the gods what they needed—procreation became a religious act. The god or goddess was interested in its happening, not in its prohibition. By human intercourse, people prompted the fertility of mother earth, and the sexual act became necessary for the success of all reproduction. Sowers of seed had sex with their wives before they sowed to ensure the fertility of the grain. Then the act was ritualised in seasonal rites in the temples. First, upright stones stood for the phallus, then gods were fashioned with an exaggerated erect phallus. This god was a healing god, particularly of diseases and defects of the reproductive organs.
- Christendom in the Middle Ages 83 kb
Changing the world for the better could hardly arise in the medieval Christian milieu. The Catholic emphasis was on death, not the spiritual consequences foreseen, but on the physical manifestation of death, on the corpse corrupting and being eaten with worms. It showed how disgusting and sinful the world was. Equality meant that everyone ended up as putrefying corpses, whereas it had meant to the Essenes that everyone should aspire to heaven, even on earth. Catholic clergy held to the wickedness of the world because it explained how awful the world really was, and it drove the despairing people into church to receive the magic salvific rites of the mass, at a price. Life was terrible but it was God given, and, the clergy taught, was spoiled only by human sin. The imminent Last Judgement offered all the reforming needed. By emphasising material and visible corruption, the even greater horrors of hell kept the masses faithful.
- Pagans and Christians 153 kb
Christianity used Paganism as a source of spare parts. The holes in Christianity were filled with adaptations from Paganism. Pagan rites and ideas were “received” into the Church. It is a curious god this Christian one, that refuses to allow any other gods but cannot think of any new dates for his own festivals. He choses ones used for millennia by the gods he condemns and renames those old gods as Christian saints and lets them carry on with their old jobs! Every important church festival coincides with an ancient solar or Pagan festival. Pagan gods were made saints. Christianity had no burial customs, and so Pagan customs extended into the Christian era. Richly endowed graves have been found underneath Cologne Cathedral and the Abbey Church of S Denis—the sanctified God, Dionysus—in Paris.
- The Millennium 43 kb
The millennium passed with no End of the World, no Parousia or appearance of Christ, no kingdom of heaven to relieve their abject misery, and Christians realised they had been fooled. They turned to the more sincere religion of the heretics at the grass roots previously tolerated by the established Church as powerless and inconsequential. The enormity of Christianity has been hidden by writers, even Jewish ones, claiming it taught a humane way of life, tending the poor and the sick. Really, the Catholic mendicant orders were a response to the popularity of heresies and their apostolic poverty. The voluntary poverty of these monks was meant to match the voluntary poverty of the Parfaits and the Cathar and Waldensian missionaries who wandered around in pairs emulating the life of Christ and his apostles.
- The Dark Ages 68 kb
The Roman Christians from the fourth century set about destroying the Pagan culture that had given us Classical and Hellenistic Antiquity. The Dark Ages resulted. In only a few hundred years, only the topmost levels of the clergy could read and write. Many of the monks copying their bibles were simply copying the shapes of the letters, imagining them to be holy symbols from God. They prove it by making copying errors which could not have been made by a literate man, mistaking a gothic “f” for an “s”. No literate person could mistake the two. The seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries have left a scanty literature. Europe had sunk into the crassest ignorance and superstition. Defenders of Christianity are desperate to maintain that Christians kept alive learning in the Dark Ages. The skeptic wants to know why then they should have been so dark for so long.
- Satan or Christ? 2 kb
Modern Christians are sure they have been saved by having faith in a loving God. The God himself, when speaking on earth as an incarnated man, as Christians believe, never said it would be that easy. Maybe “the saved” ought not to be so certain!
- Satan in the Evolution of Christianity 126 kb
Rabbinic Judaism was a different religion from what Judaism had been originally, and even different from Pharisaism, except that it remained liberal in outlook. Rabbinism bases God’s role in a personal struggle with evil on the assistance that God has to offer. Yet, the Jewish Qabala, which emerged about 1150 in Provence, had retained the dualism of the Jewish religion before Jamna, where Rabbinic Judaism was devised. In the Sefiroth of the Qabala, ten good principles are set against ten wicked ones. The Rabbis had not succeeded in getting rid of Satan. The form of Judaism that was closer to the original was Essenism, and it became Christianity. The Persian traditions of dualism and apocalyptic, no longer prominent in Judaism, passed into Christianity, and still characterise the religion today. Christianity is more true to Zoroastrianism than Rabbinic Judaism, though both have the same roots. Christianity in relation to the evolution of the idea of Satan.
