[Zhavric]

Quote by: Zhavric Christianity is a messiah cult originating from the political unrest of Judea circa 70 ce (around the fall of the second temple).

Estimated date range of Mark, the first gospel written which the others were based off of: circa 70 ce.

It was invented / able to take hold as a cult due to the hero myths of Judaism and the desperate desire of the Jews to have a savior "show up".

Look at any point in ancient Jewish history and you'll see the same pattern. Jews minding their own business. Jews get conquered. Jews make up story about person who saves them. Moses is a perfect example, but if you need more, let me know.

There were many 'Jesus cults' in the first century,

The personal existence of Jesus as Jehoshua Ben-Pandira can be established beyond a doubt. ... 'He was born in the fourth year of the reign of the Jewish King Alexander Jannæus, notwithstanding the assertions of his followers that he was born in the reign of Herod.' That would be more than a century earlier than the date of birth assigned to the Jesus of the Gospels! But it can be further shown that Jehoshua Ben-Pandira may have been born considerably earlier even than the year 102 BC, although the point is not of much consequence here. Jehoshua, son of Perachia, was a president of the Sanhedrin — the fifth, reckoning from Ezra as the first: one of those who in the line of descent received and transmitted the oral law, as it was said, direct from Sinai. There could not be two of that name. This Ben-Perachia had begun to teach as a Rabbi in the year 154 BC. We may therefore reckon that he was not born later than 180-170 BC, and that it could hardly be later than 100 BC when he went down into Egypt with his pupil. For it is related that he fled there in consequence of a persecution of the Rabbis, feasibly conjectured to refer to the civil war in which the Pharisees revolted against King Alexander Jannæus, and consequently about 105 BC If we put the age of his pupil, Jehoshua Ben-Pandira, at fifteen years, that will give us an approximate date, extracted without pressure, which shows that Jehoshua Ben-Pandira may have been born about the year 120 BC.

Gerald Massey's Published Lectures. (1)


but orthodoxy (the gospel myth we know today) won out due to the violent nature of it's earlt adherents.

The distinction between orthodoxy and its opponents was never as clear cut as later 'official' Church historians were to maintain. Many so-called Gnostics had held positions of authority within the early Church, as did the Apologists later stigmatised as heterodox and heretical. Orthodoxy even appears to have had its own factions. The synoptic "12 Apostles and a ministry of 12 months" has a hint of gnosticism about it, connecting the superstar with the zodiac and astrology. A rival faction of the orthodox favoured a much longer ministry for their hero and a rebuttal of the more esoteric gnostic doctrines. Their ideas entered the canon in the Gospel of John.

Orthodoxy favoured a set of simplistic tales, little more than "comings and goings" of the godman, comprehensible to the uneducated, and readily re-enacted in pageant and ceremonial. These fables were held to be "true accounts from recent history".

In a series of councils and assemblies spanning two centuries, an officially approved and obligatory dogma was hammered out which was then stamped upon the credulous mind of humanity. Those with the temerity to question the creed and sacraments were criminalized, persecuted and eliminated.

The cult became institutionalized by emperor Constantine for political reasons

In Constantine's day, the eastern provinces were by far the richest and most populous of the Roman world. Some of its cities – Pergamon, Symrna, Antioch and so on – had existed for almost a millennium and had accumulated vast wealth from international trade and venerated cult centres. Through its numerous cities passed Roman gold going east in exchange for imports from Persia, India and Arabia. Flowing west with those exotic imports came exotic 'mystery religions' to titillate and enthrall Roman appetites.

In contrast, the western provinces now ruled by Constantine were more recently colonized and less developed. Its cities were small 'new towns', its hinterland still barbarian. During the crisis decades of the 3rd century many provincial Romans in the west had been carried off into slavery by Germanic raiders and their cities burned. The province of Britain and part of northern Gaul had actually seceded from the empire in the late third century – and had been ruled by its own 'emperors' (Carausius, Allectus) with the help of Frankish mercenaries (286-297).

Constantine had no power-base in the east from which to mount a bid for the throne – but he had been at Nicomedia in 303 when Diocletian had decided to purge the Roman state of the disloyal Christian element. He had also served under Galerius on the Danube and witnessed at first-hand how the favoured Galerius – designated heir and rival – in particular despised the cult of Christ.

The ambitious and ruthless prince, from his base in Trier, immediately proclaimed himself 'protector of the Christians.' But it was not the handful of Jesus worshippers in the west that Constantine had in mind – there had not, after all, been any persecution in the west – but the far more numerous congregation in the east. They constituted a tiny minority within the total population (perhaps as few as 2%) but the eastern Christians were an organised force of fanatics, in many cities holding important positions in state administration. Some held posts even within the imperial entourage.

By championing the cause of the Christians Constantine put himself at the head of a 'fifth column' in the east, of a state within a state.

and has been spread through guilt,

Judaism was under direct threat from Roman persecution of the priestly class (seen as a political threat resulting from the uprising against Roman rule) and a new version of Judaism had to be concocted that would be so appealing that people would want to belong to it, and so captivating that people would not want to abandon it, even in the face of persecution, and be politically inoffensive so as to hopefully escape the attentions of the Roman persecutors. It had to abandon the temple worship since there was no temple anymore, and it had to be able to survive the onslaught of foreign ideas which were widely available, from Roman, Hellene, pagan and oriental sources, not to mention the many attractive mystery religions of the Roman Empire. The result is that the new religion had the features of what in our day is called a meme - an idea that actually behaves like a virus - it infects, reproduces and spreads itself, and most importantly, has the ability to evolve to adapt to fluid circumstances. As a response to Roman persecutions following the failed uprising against Rome, Paul and the other founders of Christianity seem to have set out to create a religion that was flexible enough that it could evolve in this way, so as preserve at least some form of Judaism from the Roman persecutions and do so in the absence of a highly organized priesthood.

That meme they mention functions on guilt avoidance which is one of the most powerful motivating emotions there is.

coercion and outright violence for over 1600 years.

Do you really need me to start pulling up websites about the crusades and what missionaries actually did. Really? I will, but I figured this to be common knowledge.

Modern Christians remain Christian due largely to early childhood indoctrination.

Richard Dawkins proposes that religion is a by-product arising from other features of the human species that are adaptive.[4] One such feature is the tendency of children to "believe, without question, whatever your grown-ups tell you" (Dawkins, 2006, p.174). He compares children's gullibility with the tendency of moths to fly towards a flame, a similar rule of thumb. Using distant light from the night sky for navigation works most of the time, but can still fail catastrophically, as happens when they spiral into a nearby flame.

The psychologist Paul Bloom sees it as a by-product of children's instinctive tendency toward a dualistic view of the world, and a predisposition towards creationism.[4] Deborah Keleman has also written that children are naturally teleologists, assigning a purpose to everything they come across.

The God Delusion - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Most never actually question or research their religion objectively and thus remain Christian for life (and indoctrinate their children and so on).

Again, this is self-evident. Part of the indoctrination of Christianity is to adopt a different set of (bad) logical rules that apply only to Christian claims. Most Christians are highly intelligent and rational, but suffer from the handicap of only being able to employ bad logic when looking at their own religion. This is why Christians will scoff at the idea of a tabloid reporting that thousands of people saw Elvis after he died, but never doubt the idea that Jesus was seen after he allegedly lived & died. They (Christians) will even go so far as to see rational objections to the grossly ridiculous claims of Christianity as being silly or tabloid-ish. Christians, armed with absolutely zero evidence, will often poke fun at "christ-mythers" who do nothing more than apply logic uniformly.