The secret of how Christianity spread across the world

by Terry 108 Replies latest watchtower bible

Terry

What I am going to say may sound nasty and mean-spirited. I assure you it is NOT intended in that tone.
Men are power seekers and control freaks. Without using women as drones to do the grunt work of religion
throughout history and spackle the cracks in the ridiculous and dysfunctional aspects of ritual and faith....
religion would have died out like small camp fires in the wilderness.
Women are used to indoctrinate us from the cradle and fill our heads with fairy-tales of invisible gods, demons, angels
and rewards and punishments which pave the road for later total acceptance of insane mythic scenarios that we men are
willing to kill and die for.
We absorb the emotional resonance of complete and total absolute FAITH from our wives and mothers. It convinces us!
It is viral. We transmit it. Generation to generation.
How many married JW men would gladly abandon the Kingdom hall for good were it not for the extreme resistance and emotional blackmail of their
wife?
The illogic and the irrational are made flesh and blood and vividly believable because our wife or mother convicts us with their devotions.
The central nervous system of a woman demands SECURITY. Only religios piety and hope for the future can satisfy that craving!
SPIRITUALITY is a disease the symptoms of which are calming fears and building solutions to everyday threats by dwelling in the imaginary
brainfever of totally delusional wishful thinking.
Go ahead.....read that again.
Early Christianity largely spread because of the viral nature of political expediency among pagan leaders, rulers and kings whose mothers, daughters and wives had accepted the Christian Faith. The wife has the ear. The wife has the influence. The wife has the emotional persuasion. Moral suasion, you might call it. And certainly the long-term influence over children as I mentioned above.
Women in the Roman empire were ready and willing to embrace the peaceful aspects of christianity after centuries of seeing their sons grow up and die in silly wars. Christinaity was "turn the other cheek." Christianity was pro-family. Christianity was anti-politics.
Slowly but inexorably it was women who made Christianity a powerful and mighty influence.
Men retained the power as long as they possibly could by creating marginal status for their christian wives and daughters, but, today we see that women have finally broken through the "glass ceiling" of prejudice and Pauline prohibitions.
Turn on your tv and visit your local christian bookstore. WOMEN ARE TAKING OVER RELIGION at long last.
BizzyBee

SPIRITUALITY is a disease the symptoms of which are calming fears and building solutions to everyday threats by dwelling in the imaginary
brainfever of totally delusional wishful thinking.
Terry, are you confusing spirituality with religion?
Terry

Spiritualty is a word designed to fool you into thinking your aren't being RELIGIOUS.
Think about what Bill Clinton said about smoking pot: "I didn't inhale."
Think about what Bill Clinton said: "I didn't have sex with that woman.."
What was he saying in DIFFERENTIATING the way he did?
It is a semantic dodge.
Being SPIRITUAL is "not inhaling".
Being SPIRITUAL is "not having sex with that woman.."
How splitting hairs solves the problem is an emotional threshold in each person. How close do you get before you ADMIT something to yourself?
That is what SPIRITUAL is: a semantic dodge.
Back on topic for a moment....
Women are better at finding the emotional fulcrum that gets the job done than men are.
Men bully into and out of problems by throwing force into the mix.
Women, being more intelligently emotional, finesse their way.
Successful men link themselves with emotionally intelligent women who teach them finesse.
Christianity survived by an admixture of emotional finesse on the part of the women and the
brute force of the religious leaders.
moshe

Good points Terry- life was very hard 2000 years ago and a mistake cost you your life. Common folk didn't even have a way to lock there doors/tent when they left their home- they could lock/barricade themselves in at night, that is all . People just didn't have any security at all- a bandit could steal everything in a minute, if they left their property unattended. Criminals could get away with murder at night- no street lights, no police, no CSI detectives. A religion that made people kinder, more generous was, well, a miracle back then.
designs

Whatever Kinder Gentler groups of christians may have existed 2000 years quickly got pushed aside by the Greek and Roman Bishops and their hordes who saw the possibilities of world domination.
Terry

Yes, not to put too fine a point on it....
Christianity succeeded where Judaism failed (in the context of Roman rule) because they finessed the issue
of resisting Rome without engaging in battle. Ghandi did the same thing with British rule.
Passive resistance always wins.
Martin Luther King demonstrated this as well.
Taking the moral high ground provides a sharp and vivid contrast NOTICED BY WOMEN in society.
Women have extraordinary influence largely by the SAME STRATEGEY.
Women cannot engage men literally in battle of brute force. They "persuade" instead, take the moral high ground
and win by art rather than violence.
Women are the incubators of future generations.
By attrition whatever women embrace becomes the next generations seedbed religiously, philosophically and politically.
It is an inexorable process. Little mentioned or understood, I'd dare say.
I would point to Sara Palin in the Republican party right now as an example of something Transformational.
Women in the Tea party and in Conserative circles embrace what she is as an effective speaker, mother, political strategist and potential power broker.
The Left immediately and violently seeks to destroy her effectiveness by attacking her personally and marginalizing her as "dumb" and a "bad mother".
The Conservative men want to eliminate her and subsitute their own candidates by getting her out of the way early.
But--watch how WOMEN will empower Palin and defend her and will succeed against the brute force method.
I don't mean to sidetrack this Topic with Political discussion. I just think this particular example is vivid.
wobble

For much the same reasons Islam took hold during and after the life of Muhammad, here was a man teaching the need for submitting our own will to God, and here was a man who treated women well.
I do not have proof that women helped the acceptance of Islam more than men, but I would not be surprised, the old desert tribal ways were hard on women until Muhammad drew the tribes together.
I think that women taking a more proactive role in religion will improve it a bit, but as in politics, there are too few, and too few in key positions.
When women teach Islam in the Madrassah schools we may see an important move forward there. If ever that happens.
DagothUr

I always said it. Some religious groups do not allow women to "teach" inside the church/congregation. But still each one of us, men, had a woman as his first mentor and in what period! The first 10 years of our lives, when our personality is defined and refined for the rest of our lives. I have to admit, their desire is good in itself: the need for peace and security. But people develop other needs apart from security. The need for wealth, for power, for domination. That is a need which resides deep into the male mind and is instinctual. It's not aquired through education (though it can be supressed through education). Throughout history, these 2 needs were welded into a very destructive force: religious fanatism. It's prize was double: the self-righteousness of the individual made him feel almost like God, it drugged him; and by eradicating the heathens, he could aquire lands and wealth or just the appreciation and protection of the powerful clergy-class in the worst case.
In fewer words, the women seek security and wellfare for their homes and men are motivated into being willing to pay that price. It's something that can be also observed into other animals' behavior, like lions, for example. The male's job is to protect and provide for the family even with the price of his own life (the fact that he guards the family-hunting ground is his way of "providing"). It's an unwritten law of life: males are expandable, women must carry the offspring. Religions simply acts as one of the motivational tools of Homo Sapiens. A more evolved intellect demands more evolved motivational tools. Religion is one of them.
The irony of this whole situation is: Religion resulted from the evolution of our brain and is in itself a sum of evolved instincts.
Terry

Whatever Kinder Gentler groups of christians may have existed 2000 years quickly got pushed aside by the Greek and Roman Bishops and their hordes who saw the possibilities of world domination.
Men in the Catholic Church heirarchy eventually corrupted their own moral elevation in the eyes of the population and laid the
foundations for Protestant reformation. Men cannot resist the brute method.
Catholic leaders tried their best to damp down the power of the woman in the church by creating prisons called Convents. (I know it sounds like I'm crazy saying this...but..it has merit.)
The effective method of marginalizing the pious was to make them monastic. Effete men and female intellectuals were kept quiet (literally) by giving them busy work in dark, drafty compounds out of the way of the political deal-making and money-making aspects of Church business.
Joan of Arc was largely able to rally armies on the strength of her---what? EMOTIONAL APPEAL that a seige could be lifted and a prediction that God would miraculously endow her with success when EVERY MAN'S PLAN tried before had utterly failed.
She persuaded. She rallied. She succeeded.
The fact that she was eventually marginalized, villified, kangaroo-courted and burned at the stake speaks volumes about
how effectively she frightened the men in power and the Church.
Curtains

Terry is your op from a what seems likely position

The secret of how Christianity spread across the world

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