[tpaine]

"Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."

Lattin is about to be crucified himself, -- for writing a religious editorial disguised as a book review..

[Just mythoughts]

These people comparing mere mortal humans to Only Begotton Son of God, who NEVER sinned, keep missing the boat.

[ClearCase_guy]

My duties as a religion writer forced me to watch Mel Gibson's Jesus movie

He sure sounds unbiased against Christianity!

[Ken522]

Paganism, with its worship of a variety of gods and goddesses, tends by its very nature to be more tolerant of other faiths than monotheistic religion.

So the Romans, being pagans, were more tolerant of other faiths? Anyone who has seen "The Passion of The Christ" which shows the scourging of Jesus Christ can see that the Romans were anything but tolerant of other faiths.

[AntiGuv]

Hmm.. This sounds almost identical to a Greek book titled Demolish Them.

[AntiGuv]

Well, except that Demolish Them (as the timeline makes clear) takes an apparently much more hostile perspective to the advent of Christianity.

[DallasMike]

I have to agree with the writer. Medieval Christianity has little to be proud of. There are exceptions, of course, but the whole Holy Roman Empire thing was a very bad idea. Further, the early Protestants, like Calvin, weren't much better.

[farmfriend]

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[x]

IIRC, there's been some disagreement about who killed Hypatia and why. It may not have been a straightforward "hate crime" because of her not being a Christian, but a personal vendetta.

The thing about living in what is in many ways a libertarian age (at least in terms of ideas) is that libertarian rebelliousness against state authority comes to be applied to cultural and religious ideas as well. The One God, the ultimate authority, also comes under fire.

Some people are convinced that they can ride the libertarian spirit back to an earlier vision of the Bible and Constitution and then keep it locked up in the garage. But it doesn't work that way. Ideas and movements can be more like subways or trams that keep going long past your stop. Fall asleep and who knows where you'll end up.

I'm not saying libertarianism is wrong, or that liberty isn't a worthwhile goal (or even that paganism doesn't have its good points), but a lot of people who pride themselves on their radicalism and principled unwilling to compromise, don't see where such qualities can lead, or how much their own assumptions have been shaped by the principles they attack. Shake the foundations enough, and it's surprising what will fall down. Dostoevsky is particularly good on how political radicalism leads to the denial of God.

[LiteKeeper]

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