Table of Contents
How did religion affect ancient civilizations?
Early civilizations were often unified by religion—a system of beliefs and behaviors that deal with the meaning of existence. As more and more people shared the same set of beliefs and practices, people who did not know each other could find common ground and build mutual trust and respect.
How is paganism similar to Christianity?
Ancient pagan cultures shared a common set of ideas about gods. Christianity may have adopted those ideas, and applied them to Jesus. It seems entirely possible that Jesus Christ began as a celestial god, then became a character in allegorical stories, and finally was seen as a historical person who actually existed.
Is Christianity spreading its civilization by destroying another civilization?
Christianity never had its own civilization. So there is no question of spreading their civilization by destroying another. Christianity is not even about spreading its culture because the Christians themselves belongs to 100s or 1000s of culture and spread across the world.
Did the Byzantine Empire destroy the classical world?
Still, contrary to Nixey, there was not utter but rather partial destruction of the classical world. The vigorous debates in Byzantine cultures about whether, for example, magical texts were demonic suggest that these works continued to have influence in Christian Europe.
How old were the ancient civilizations that collapsed?
It must be taken into account that the ancient civilizations that collapsed, many of them more than 6,000 years ago, were full of brilliance, with great advances, even being thousands of years older, they would come to be more advanced than Europe in the Middle Ages (from 500 to 1500 A.D.)
Why were the actions of the early Christians so extreme?
Actions were extreme because paganism was considered not just a psychological but a physical miasma. Christianity appeared on a planet that had been, for at least 70,000 years, animist. (Asking the women and men of antiquity whether they believed in spirits, nymphs, djinns would have been as odd as asking them whether they believed in the sea.)