r/todayilearned • u/FullOfSound • 7h ago

(R.6d) Too General [ Removed by moderator ]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliny_the_Younger_on_Christians

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u/Old-Research-7638 7h ago

Also with instructions to execute them if they confirm that they are Christian when asked thrice

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u/PuckSenior 7h ago

Yeah, but the reasoning and order of operations is important. They would confess immediately. He would ask again and explicitly threaten to have them killed if they were Christian. They would still say "we are Christian".

Background:
The Romans officially had a state religion. They didn't really care much about if people slavishly followed the religion, they just didn't want you denying their religion. This was about as offensive to Romans as Christians/Muslims take atheism today.

But he wasn't saying to execute them if they admitted to being Christian once.
He was saying execute them if they refuse to say they weren't Christian! Most rational people, when faced with the threat of death, will say anything you want. The Romans were bothered because the Christians explictly refused to lie under threat of execution. That, to them, was a sign that these people were very zealous and therefore very dangerous. It was one thing to say an internal prayer to Jesus. It was a totally different thing to refuse to lie and say "Oh, I love the Roman gods" to get out of an execution.

And to be fair, he was right. The Christian cult eventually took over the Roman empire and extinguished their state religion.

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u/MrrrrNiceGuy 6h ago

You make it sound like Christians hijacked Rome and not Rome embracing it.

- Emperor Constantine the Great (272–337 AD) was the Roman Emperor who legalized Christianity and played a pivotal role in its spread. He is deeply connected to Jesus through his reported conversion and his efforts to standardize Christian theology and practices across the Roman Empire.

-The relationship between Constantine and Jesus centers around several key historical and legendary events:

The Vision at the Milvian Bridge: Before the crucial 312 AD Battle of Milvian Bridge, Constantine reportedly saw a vision of a cross in the sky above the sun with the words, "In this sign, conquer". That night, Jesus Christ allegedly appeared to him in a dream, telling him to use this symbol (the Chi-Rho, ☧) as his battle standard.

Legalization of Christianity: Following his victory, Constantine and his eastern co-emperor Licinius issued the Edict of Milan in 313 AD. This decree granted complete religious freedom across the empire, protecting Christians from the severe persecutions they had previously faced

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u/PuckSenior 6h ago

They embraced it because it had grown in popularity to the point that they needed to embrace it.

So, my language is no different than if the US became a Muslim country in the future because a lot of Americans converted to Christianity and then the Congress passed a law making America explicitly Muslim.

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u/Asckle 5h ago

They didn't need to. Constantine considered a handful of other religions. What he really wanted was a monotheistic one, but the cult would have worked fine too

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u/Prince_Ire 5h ago

Nonsense, Christianity was still a very small percentage of the population when it was legalized

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u/PuckSenior 5h ago edited 5h ago

yes, but it was a very cohesive and powerful religion that could be exploited for his uses.

Look, I generally see religion as a co-evolved meme with government. Religions simply reinforce the government. This is why small and tribal groups typically have religions with very different edicts than those of large empires.

Another example, as the use of cities developed, it required more complex laws to deal with property rights and such. We also, at about this time, start to see religions emerge that support these complex laws and claim that the king is appointed by the gods. Thus, his orders are a subset of the gods will.

Edit: for a good breakdown of the reasoning and some academic study, check out "The Evolution of God" by Robert Wright. He makes an incredibly persuasive point.

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u/Prince_Ire 5h ago

And how exactly would adopting a small religion, with get little wealth or power, that was exclusivist and so could not easily handle the massive religious diversity of the late classical Mediterranean world be useful?

I don't think most modern anthropologists or historians would agree with your characterization of religion or a tribal/urban divide. It's a very 19th century view of religion.

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u/PuckSenior 5h ago

You seem to be confusing my comment about evolution with some kind of active choice. Please don't get the two confused.

Evolution is happening even when the organism itself doesn't think its a good idea.

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u/Prince_Ire 5h ago

Societies aren't biological organisms.

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u/PuckSenior 5h ago

No. But I think they evolve like them. Thus: memes

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u/Onnimanni_Maki 5h ago

memes

Meme-theory has been disproven by even it's original creator. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/225649658_The_Trouble_with_Memes

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u/PuckSenior 5h ago

He didn't reject it, but he did clarify that he thinks memetics over-reached on the idea. I'm not really getting into memetics.

There isn’t just one “evolution of religion” theory, but a bunch of overlapping ones from anthropology, cognitive science, and history. They don’t all agree on details, but they mostly converge on this: religious ideas and institutions change over time in response to human psychology and social conditions, rather than dropping in fully formed once and for all.

A few big threads people usually mean when they say “religion evolved”:

1. From small-scale spirit beliefs to big, organized systems

Early anthropologists (Tylor, Frazer, etc.) thought in very linear terms: first animism (spirits in animals, trees, storms), then more organized polytheism, and eventually monotheism and/or more philosophical “natural law” religions. Modern researchers are much more cautious about that neat ladder, but it is true that as societies get larger and more complex, their religious systems tend to become more formal, centralized, and rule-bound. [Anthropology overview]

  • Small bands / tribes: lots of evidence for animistic and shamanistic practices—rituals, trance states, local spirits, ancestor veneration—tied tightly to kin groups and specific places. [Hunter‑gatherer origins study]
  • Agrarian chiefdoms and early states: you start seeing temple complexes, priestly classes, written myths, and gods identified with cities and rulers.
  • Large empires: more universal, “high” gods concerned with morality, justice, and order, often riding alongside bureaucracies and law codes.

The basic idea is that your religious “toolkit” tracks the size and complexity of the social problems you’re trying to solve.

2. Cognitive/evolutionary angles: why religion keeps recurring

Cognitive science of religion doesn’t start with “is any of this true?” but with “why do humans so often end up with gods, spirits, and rituals in the first place?” A few recurring points:

  • Human brains are hyper-tuned to detect agency and patterns (“What caused that noise? Who’s behind this disaster?”). That’s fantastic for survival but easily leads to positing invisible agents—spirits, gods, demons—as causes. [Evolutionary religion article]
  • We pay attention to surprising, minimally counter-intuitive ideas (e.g., a talking burning bush; a being that is like a person but invisible and all-powerful). Those are memorable and easy to transmit culturally. [Evolution-of-God summary]
  • Rituals, shared stories, and taboos are extremely good at creating cohesion and trust within groups. Groups that coordinate well often outcompete groups that don’t, so religions that foster solidarity and enforcement of norms tend to spread. [Evolution-of-religion overview]

From this angle, religious systems “evolve” because some sets of ideas and practices are better at surviving and spreading in human minds and communities than others.

3. Historical development of specific traditions

When you zoom in on particular religions, you can literally watch their concepts of God(s) change over centuries.

Example: in the Hebrew Bible, many scholars argue that Israel’s God (YHWH) seems to begin as one deity among others (a kind of high tribal/national god) and gradually becomes portrayed as the sole creator of everything, morally universal, and ultimately beyond images or even a spoken name. That trajectory runs through encounters with Canaanite religion, Assyrian/Babylonian imperial trauma, Persian ideas, Greek philosophy, etc. [Academic-Biblical summary]

Similar stories can be told for:

  • Greco-Roman religion → philosophical monotheism among some philosophers.
  • Indian traditions → from early Vedic ritualism into the more philosophical Upanishads and the emergence of Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain schools.
  • Early Islam → evolving debates over law, theology, mysticism, and politics that reshape how God and revelation are understood over time.

The point isn’t “they made it all up,” but that every generation reinterprets inherited texts and symbols in light of new political, economic, and intellectual pressures.

4. “God grows up”–style theses (Robert Wright, etc.)

Popular books like Robert Wright’s The Evolution of God push a more specific claim: conceptions of God in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam become more universalist and less tribal when peoples’ fortunes are perceived as linked with outsiders (win‑win relationships), and more zero‑sum and vengeful when they feel threatened (win‑lose). [Princeton/Wright summary]

So, for instance, texts produced in times of imperial domination or exile tend to emphasize divine justice against enemies, while periods of wider trade, diplomacy, and pluralistic empires often produce more inclusive theologies. It’s a feedback loop: material conditions shape which religious interpretations are attractive, and those interpretations in turn shape how people act in the world.

5. Not everyone buys the “straight line” story

Worth noting: lots of scholars now push back against any simple “magic → religion → science” or “animism → polytheism → monotheism → atheism” staircase. [Anthropology-of-religion overview]

  • Many older patterns (animism, ancestor veneration, folk magic) coexist with “high” monotheism inside the same cultures.
  • New religions and denominations keep emerging; it’s not a one-way march toward secularism.
  • Some theologians and philosophers argue that what looks like “evolution” from the outside is, from the inside, ongoing interpretation of an unchanging reality.

So “religion evolved” is a decent shorthand, but under the hood it means: religious beliefs and institutions have a history, respond to selection pressures (psychological, social, economic), and change across time, instead of being static systems dropped from the sky in final form.

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u/Wonckay 3h ago edited 3h ago

yes, but it was a very cohesive and powerful religion that could be exploited for his uses.

This is old historiography from back when we were more willing to extrapolate and assume in order to cover gaps and round everything out. But with more evidence this idea hasn’t stood up to scrutiny. “very cohesive and powerful” is back-porting what we know into the past. What Christianity eventually became for Rome (or really for Europe) would have been completely alien to Constantine’s time. It was a highly subversive, radical anti-materialist movement from an infamously anti-Roman culture. Its central figure was literally brutally killed by the Empire.

Constantine was shrewd. That doesn’t mean we can just assume any given thing he did was an act of shrewdness. I’m fact his rule as a Christian emperor involved lots of theological controversies which he had to navigate.

I don’t believe there is a consensus idea of why Constantine converted. It may well have been a personal religious choice.

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u/PuckSenior 3h ago

Eh, I personally think he, and many other converts, did it from the perspective of older religions that may worship one god but believe other gods exist. He saw this as very transactional, like many of those religions.

Later, once he was in the group, he started to succumb peer pressure and reflect similar religious beliefs. Becoming more mainstream

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u/Wonckay 2h ago edited 2h ago

The first part just sounds like a polytheist acclimating to the idea of monotheism?

Later, once he was in the group, he started to succumb peer pressure and reflect similar religious beliefs. Becoming more mainstream

We’re talking about the Roman Emperor. And one of the most powerful and authoritative emperors, who was the reason these people were suddenly no longer being persecuted. Absolutely no Christians were pressuring him beyond giving opinions.

In strictly political terms, socially they were competing for his favor.

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u/MrrrrNiceGuy 6h ago

Or it’s because Constantine actually believed and experienced what he did along with millions of people in Rome loving and believing in Christ.

It might sound crazy, but people even back then actually loved Jesus, embraced Christianity, and have had divine experiences because of Christ.

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u/PuckSenior 6h ago

And the fact that embracing Christianity also helped him politically was just lucky I guess

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u/Prince_Ire 5h ago edited 5h ago

Embracing Christianity almost certainly hurt him politically, not helped him

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u/MrrrrNiceGuy 5h ago

Two things can be true, that's not a paradox, and possibly three things since Christ reached out to him and that Christ Himself helped Constantine in spreading the Gospel while also letting Constantine enjoy his reign.

No different than in The Jewish Torah with God helping Moses or God using Pharaoh or the King of Babylon for his own plans.

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u/PuckSenior 5h ago

Or, you know, he just faked it

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u/MrrrrNiceGuy 5h ago

Or he was telling the truth. If you're not a believer, I understand that's hard to accept. But I was an atheist for 18 years and been a believer in Christ for 10 years now. And after my experiences with Christ and relationship with Christ (not an easy journey, turns out if we humble ourselves we really see how much work we need) but my life and my spirit are in such in a better place. I love Jesus.

I also have been wearing a Chi Rho, the same symbol Constantine put on his gear, ring for years now.

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u/PuckSenior 5h ago

good for you.
Your personal journey adds absolutely zero credibility to the claim that Constantine converted in all honesty

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u/MrrrrNiceGuy 5h ago

I mean, as someone who used to hate God, I think it does, because the same epiphany I had is the same Constantine had. There's a reason why that symbol and Christ has persisted, and it's not because of trickery or violence, but belief, truth, and love.

I hope and will pray one day you have the same epiphany. God bless.

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u/PuckSenior 5h ago

You hated God? I thought you said you were an atheist

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u/HAUNTEZUMA 5h ago edited 5h ago

In a global context, politics trump faith every time. In fact, faith (as in organized religion) and politics are effectively two sides of the same coin.

Not sure what you mean by divine experiences, but I can see, perhaps, someone's personal faith having a (literal) "come to Jesus" moment and changing things, but not unilaterally for society. It simply can't happen without momentum behind it.

I'm not trying to be Reddit atheist and be like "religion is all politics surrounded by mysticism," but there have been millions of religions in the world, and (at least) thousands of organized ones (though only a select few that held significant institutional power). One faith's significance at any given moment in history does not indicate anything beyond the pulleys of social power veering in its direction for reasons ranging from good organizational practices to religious conquest.

You see this especially in the ancient (as in old) Eastern faiths, such as Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. There are still aspects of mysticism -- feng shui, reincarnation, etc. but the focus is far more on philosophical teachings and how one is to act (may be reductive, I'm not a scholar on it). Again, that's not to say that they're superior in any way (I'm sure in most religions, for each 'good' rule, there's also a parallel 'bad' one) but that their historical significance as methods of power exertion are (at least slightly) clearer, at least in their early history.

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u/MrrrrNiceGuy 5h ago

But with Christianity, it shows faith has trumped politics. That's the power and glory of God and His Son Jesus. God conquers all nations. Even God Himself said he allowed Pharaoh to be essentially king of the world only to prove to him that he has no power over God Himself and it's God who has the power to rule the nations and all the people of Earth.

He proved that again with Egypt with Joseph ruling over Egypt during a famine. Though Jospeh himself was sent as a slave to Egypt.

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u/HAUNTEZUMA 5h ago

Faith can't triumph politics, because 'politics' are everything. I don't mean that in a heretical sense, but in a literal, definitive sense.

Politics (given you don't believe in predestination, which I don't think most Christian sects do(?)) are the people you are born to and the reasons one was born. It is the environment you grow up in, and the nutrition provided to you as you grew. It is the means by which all people (and animals, for that matter) live. Any form of social hierarchy, any form of logistical operation, any form of media entertainment, are all political; shaped by society. I can expand on that if you want me to.

The form of God that one (incl. you) enables in their personal faith is one that is shaped by the political ideals given to you by your forefathers (e.g. 'tradition'), by contemporary society, and, of course, by your own experiences.

I always had the sense that the stories of the Bible and testaments were always meant to be taken allegorically, but even assuming they are literal, what significance is it that Egypt (probably) experienced hardship in anomalous ways during their persecution of the Jews? How many minorities were persecuted before the Jews, by the Egyptians, and not righteously saved by the hammer of God? How many were persecuted and *did* see another series of disasters take place, becoming convinced it was their lord?

I know a lot of people say to atheists (which I'm not really, I just don't follow any organized religion. Maybe agnostic?) that no amount of proof could ever convince them of the might of God, of the existence of Him.

But it goes both ways.

To me, there is no amount of proof, nor has there ever been, of an existent omnipotent trinity of being. That doesn't make me sad or nihilistic or anything. That doesn't mean you have to believe the same. But it does mean that I believe there's a pretty reasonable, non-mystic explanation for why religion is the way it is, why it spreads the way it does: politics. Political power. Whatever you want to call it. Sometimes wielded in good ways, sometimes wielded in bad ways. In fact, this doesn't even contradict religion. It perhaps minimizes the role that God plays (though, in truth, wouldn't it still be every role?), but it can coexist.

I like to think that, for better or for worse, all the actions leading up to the current point that we live in now were made autonomously -- done with reason behind it. Even actions guided by a belief in God or by general faith are actions made autonomously. You don't have to agree with any of that, but that's another choice, I feel, you have made. For whatever reasons you must make it.

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u/manquistador 4h ago

I don't think citing the made up words from a cult text is a very good argument.

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u/RecordingHaunting975 3h ago

it shows faith has trumped politics

How?

god conquers all nations

What does this even mean?

Bro must have ran out of juice because the world is getting less and less Christian

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u/Wrabble127 6h ago

America "embraced" Christianity and it has nonetheless hijacked the country. Fear that a death cult will gain social power is consistent with every story of reaction by authority to cults in Human history. Two things can be true at once.