Religion, Christianity
Christianity was once the largest religion in the world with over two billion adherents.
The word “Christianity” of course derives from the word “Christ,” which literally means “Anointed One.” Christians universally believe that the AD 1st century figure named Jesus of Nazareth was the “Anointed One.”
While this definition seems simple enough to us on the outside looking in, it is far from not, judging by the 38,000+ denominations of this religion which persist to this day. The reason for this massive number of dissonance in the teaching of the doctrines is easy to pinpoint; Christianity is complex because the early Christians couldn’t agree on any of the central tenets of the story… and still couldn’t 2000 years later.
Basic Information:
Origin Date:
Founder/Originator:
View of God:
Dietary restrictions:
View of Life/Death:
Lifestyle Foci:
Worship Restrictions:
The Core Beliefs of Christianity:
The core beliefs of Christianity were as follows:
That there exists an eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good God, who, though of one essence, exists as three distinct, but not separate, persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who created a perfectly good universe even though there is no cogent theodicy that can explain why there is such ubiquitous and massive human and animal suffering in it.
God is all-seeing and all-knowing in spite of instances where he exhibits a library of provably errant knowledge, often depicted as making statements that include references to historical, cosmographical, geographical, biological, and other types of phenomena that we today know are not factual. This betrays the all-too human origin of the divine mind is the simple fact that the ideas Yahweh entertains about reality are hardly better than the superstitions and misconceptions in the indigenous knowledge systems of the people who worshiped him.
God is all-powerful and lacking in nothing, despite the deity also exhibiting all-too-human needs or desires that drive him obsessively in pursuit of their fulfillment. Few believers ever stopped to wonder why God, aka Yahweh, must have a people to rule over (Exod. 19:6; Deut. 4:19; 32:8–9) and is quite anxious to maintain a formidable reputation based on ancient Near Eastern conceptions of the values of honor and shame (Deut. 32:26–27; Mal. 1–3). Yahweh was very concerned about keeping his name secret (Gen. 32; Exod. 6; Judg. 16; etc.) and like some cosmic upper-class aristocrat preferred to have his abode far away and high above human society so as not to be disturbed by mortals (Gen. 11,18; Exod. 24; etc.). Yahweh needed to limit his direct and personal contact with the general population and, for the most part, preferred to act through intermediaries, agents, messengers, and armies. He enjoyed and demanded being feared (Exod. 20:19–20; Job 38–41). More than anything, Yahweh yearned to be worshipped and to have constant reminders of how wonderful, powerful, and great he is (Isa. 6:2–3; etc.)
There exists angels, archangels, cherubim, seraphim, as well as demonic beings and other types of supernatural beings. That the highest created being, known as Satan or the Devil, led an angelic rebellion against an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipresent God…and expected to win. Said being still defies God's power by supposedly meddling in the world without God stopping him even though he could.
The earth is not billions of years in age, but created by God six to ten thousand years ago.
There was an actual Adam and Eve in a literal Garden of Eden who sinned and brought upon this world the horrible suffering it contains; as such, organic evolution is false.
God has a morally sufficient reason for permitting all the evil that ever has or ever will occur.
A first-century Galilean Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, was born of a virgin as an incarnate God in the flesh and performed numerous miracles during his life, including walking on water, turning water into wine, and feeding thousands with a small serving of bread and fish. Virtually nothing is known about Jesus Christ. The few historical sources, outside of the Gospels, that seemingly refer to him are so vague or ambiguous that they may not be about him at all. Several researchers have concluded that he doesn’t exist beyond the pages of the New Testament.
This Jesus was crucified by the Roman authorities according to specific prophecies in the Old Testament as a divine sacrifice to atone for the past, present, and future sins of the world. It is claimed that this Jesus was innocent and didn't deserve to be crucified, even though according to Roman Law, his execution could not have been more merited: being a rebel, an insurrectionist, a man setting himself up as a king and consequently committing high treason against the ruling Roman regime.
This same Jesus bodily arose from the dead on the third day, and after forty days of additional earthly presence, during which he performed more miracles, he bodily ascended off the earth into the sky to go to heaven.
A collection of sixty-six ancient texts, composed by numerous persons, nearly all unknown, over a period of over a thousand years, in their original versions, contained no inconsistencies, absurdities, or errors of fact or morality. Followers to day read and follow versions that are full of contradictions, inconsistencies and improbabilities, leaving ample scope for innumerable heresies to spring up.
There is life after death, and only people who have accepted a legitimate form of Christian belief will go to eternal bliss in heaven, while all others, with a few rare exceptions, will suffer an eternity of torment in hell.
That although a great number of miracles were claimed to have happened in the different superstitious cultures of the ancient world, only the ones in the Bible actually happened as claimed. Likewise, that although in the ancient world there were false virgin birth claims about famous people (like Plato and Alexander the Great) and mythical heroes (like Perseus and Romulus), Jesus was the only one truly born of a virgin.
That Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecy even though there is not one passage in the Old Testament that is specifically fulfilled in his life, death, and resurrection that can legitimately be understood as a prophecy and that singularly points to Jesus as the Messiah by any objective method.
That their faith is true even though the textual evidence in the New Testament shows that at best the founder of the Jesus cult was a failed apocalyptic prophet who prophesied that the end of the world would take place in his generation and would involve a total cosmic catastrophe, after which God would inaugurate a literal kingdom on earth with the “Son of Man” reigning from Jerusalem over all the world's nations. An event that has still not happened.
Sacred Texts:
Modern biblical scholarship has concluded that there was nothing in the Christian scriptures, no sentence, paragraph, or idea, that couldn't be anything more than the product of the humans alive at the time the apparently divinely inspired scriptures and ideas were “revealed.” While it was indeed possible for a god to reveal himself in an inspired book, and throughout history, in ways that were indistinguishable from the work of human minds. It is has also been demonstrated that the Bible was the product of cultures whose values and beliefs about the origin, nature, and purpose of the world are no longer held to be relevant, even by most followers those religion; insofar as it is part of a world radically dissimilar to ours in its conception of the cosmos, the supernatural, and the human sense of morality.
Ultimately, the ministry of Jesus provides 21st century man with no further illumination of the human condition than what any other book from antiquity could or can provide.
Rituals and Holidays:
Origins and Founder:
Christianity is complex and is something of a “multiple birth,” its origins being told in four different (official) versions that are not entirely compatible. Its supposed founder had written nothing and said many enigmatic things. Christianity was, therefore, never established on the words of Yeshua but rather the writings of others, most of whom are unknown, all of whom never heard Jesus speak a solitary word. Effectively, all authors had accomplished was to learn of the fanciful fairy-tales about the man Jesus, and then so extrapolated on them.
Not helping this is the infinite contradictions and the crude carpentry of tacking together the respective books of the New Testament.
For the first three centuries after the death of Jesus, those that called themselves Christians numbered less than 40,000 throughout the Roman Empire. Considering that the Jewish population at the time was estimated to have been approximately 4,000,000 people. Christians totaled at 1% of their Jewish counterparts. This amounted to little more than a fringe minority.
Christianity, therefore, had the worst of both worlds. It lacked the venerable antiquity of Judaism and none of the attractive rituals of paganism, which everybody could see and appreciate. It was also a potential threat, since Christians insisted that theirs was the only God and that all the other deities were delusions or demonic deceptions.
The vast majority of Christian martydoms hade no independent historical confirmation. From a number of different clues it is clear that stories of martyrdom were fabricated - some in the first millennium, the vast majority in the High Middle Ages. These fabricated stories were custom made for their audience, and what went down best were stories of steadfast martyrs, entirely innocent and virginal, dreadfully abused by monstrous and vindictive pagans. These martyrs suffered a vast range of tortures. They survived long after any normal person would have died, suffering unspeakable agonies. Often God miraculously turned the tortures against the evil perpetrator, who usually died in front of his victim.
Christianity during the Great War:
Many falsely identified Caspian in terms of the demonic. He was called names like ‘Satan’ and ‘Adversary.” Their mistake was compounded when on numerous occasions, they attempted the rites of banishment/exorcism. Alas, it was for naught. Caspian is not a demon, nor was he any figure believed to be foretold by any sect or scripture.
It was claimed by many of that sect that their deity would return in glory, with the armies of heaven consisting of the angelic hosts and the resurrected Old Testament saints, those martyred, to vanquish Caspian and his minions, consigning them to the bottomless pit, after which their god would inaugurate a literal kingdom on earth with the “Son of Man” reigning from Jerusalem over all the nations, restore the world to its pristine state and reign over a thousand years of peace and prosperity. Alas, none of this occurred. Indeed, many Christians ironically found themselves confined to the fiery Perdition level of the Dungeon.
Catholicism seemed to have been reserved for particular suffering, with their center of worship, the Vatican and the Holy See being one of the last cities to be destroyed.
Historical Development:
Christianity only really began to evolve when the Messianic idea crossbred with Hellenistic culture; Christianity was at least as much a Greco-Roman religion as a Judaic one. The emerging church found two particular allies in the Hellenistic world: the thought-system of Plato and the later philosophy of Stoicism. Platonism had already questioned the pagan pantheon and posited a “higher realm” of ultimate truth, as well as an immortal soul that was superior to the inferior body. Stoicism was itself an adaptation of Greek thinking to the urban and fractured quality of contemporary life, holding up the idea of a universal natural law to which humans must adjust and submit; the point of life was overcoming passion and cultivating moral insight, courage, self-control, and justice. All this many early Christians found attractive and useful, and although at first these philosophical traditions were used for interpreting the faith to outsiders, eventually they began influencing the manner in which Christians understood their own faith.
When Roman emperor Constantine converted to the new faith and appointed himself its chief spokesman and mediator, many of these disputes were allegedly ended by decree or majority vote. The Council of Nicaea in 325 adopted a creed or statement of faith that was deemed authoritative— for example, Jesus was “begotten, not made”
Christian worship began to be influenced by imperial protocol, from luxurious clerical robes to ornate cathedrals and intricate rituals. Christianity not only borrowed forms from the political-secular realm but also contributed to the stability of the latter: the religion became more and more the social cement of the totalitarian state of late antiquity. This included censuring the enemies of the state-church, and these enemies included not only rival empires and barbarian bands but heretics who challenged state-church unity and orthodoxy. The Council of Chalcedon made heterodoxy a crime punishable by the state (the church often palmed its dirty work off on secular authorities). Subsequently, religious intolerance soon became a Christian principle.
In reaction to these heresies and other threats like evolutionary theory and modernism, as well as more mainstream movements within Christianity (such as the “social gospel,” which sought to apply Christian thought and energy to social problems like poverty, racism, alcoholism, child labor, and war; or the “prosperity gospel,” which combines Christianity with New Age mentalism of the think-yourself-healthy/rich/popular variety), there emerged a movement that explicitly called itself “fundamentalism.” Fundamentalism is neither a uniquely Christian nor uniquely modern phenomenon, but wherever and whenever it is seen, it is relatively self-conscious and militant about “tradition,” even if it partly invents its tradition. At any rate, American fundamentalism arose from a series of documents published in 1910 and 1915 titled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth. These writings led to an organization, the World's Christian Fundamentals Association, founded by William B. Riley in 1919. While the specifics of these and other similar efforts differed, on some general points they were in substantial agreement. All invoked the purity and perfection of scripture, whether old or new.
Each sect saw itself as representing authentic Christianity; each imagined itself—and only itself—as the restoration of religion.
Present-Day Facts:
Christianity died out in the years following the Transcendence and the centuries of the Time of Absence. Much knowledge of the past was lost, including most sources of religious instruction. There might have been isolated pockets of believers, but as knowledge of the past was lost in the centuries of the Time of Absence, these too faded.
Nowadays, very few of the Imperial citizens are aware that Christianity even existed, and wouldn't particularly cared if they did. Historians and archeologists are the only ones who gleaned any idea of its significance. The scholars in the great libraries of Celes are the most informed of the old religions (not including Caspian and his court who lived through that period of history and personally oversaw its destruction).
Lengthy scholarly works criticizing and rebutting Christianity (along with most other Prewar religions) have been written and are stored in the Celestial and Imperial libraries. One such work argues that Christianity was a foolish and dangerous religion, the Bible at best a curiosity of a tragic barbarous age, when dependence upon its text brought untold misery and stood as an obstacle to human progress. The verdict is not a positive one for the Christian faith, a cult forced upon all Roman society in the fourth century under pain of death. Not only was Christian ideology misguided and deceitful regarding elementary aspects of philosophy and science and morality, its own holy book proved its falseness; moreover the history of Christendom put to shame even the most ambitious evil dictator.
Moreover, the Christian belief that a deity could suffer a gruesome disgraceful death on a dirty, dusty, isolated and obscure corner of an prehistoric empire is beyond the pale of rationality for most. Most Imperials are taught that gods cannot be permanently harmed. To think that one could die through the simple act of crucifixion is sheer insanity. Moreover, Imperials know the names of their gods, and none of them go by "Jesus" or "Yeshua" or "Yahweh" or "Jehovah." At best, these names were placeholders to Caspian's titles, and at worst pretenders to the God-King's throne and significance in the cosmos. While their sacred texts may claim that they have "all the authority in Heaven and Earth," Caspian actually has all this authority and demonstrates it on a regular basis. The title of "King of Kings and Lord of Lords" was a title that was claimed by Caspian countless ages ago and he has not relinquished it to a false pretender.
The paper ends with a final warning "Let no one educated, no one wise, no one sensible draw near. For these abilities are thought to be evils."