The Myth of Tolerant Paganism

By Michael F. Bird

Patheos

My former post December 25th Means the Triumph of Christianity over Paganism caused a bit of an uproar in pagan circles. Just read the comments. My wife reads my blog so I won’t repeat the content of some of those comments. Across the street at the Patheos Portal, Star Foster responds in a post When Interfaith Gets Ugly, with me obviously being the “ugly”. Now I’m not exactly a chip off a chippendale, my teeth are more crooked than the Governor if Illinois, and women tend to treat me with a mixture of contempt and disdain (and that’s just my mother).  But I did find Star’s own response to me a bit ugly when she wrote this:

Let me get this right. Christians were anarchic and were deliberately looking to get themselves martyred? Okay, I’ll admit that there were a few (esp. in North Africa) who set out to become martyrs, but they were a very small number, and their quest for martyrdom was criticized by church leaders. But it was hardly typical of the majority of men, women, and children who were butchered for their Christian faith. Now if that is not bad enough, in the comments she claims that (1)  the early Christians pretty much got what they deserved for failing to do their “civic duty,” (2) The early Christians were “disturbers of the peace” and drew “hostility” on themselves; (3) “Rome’s thriving Jewish population had no problem with performing their civic duty or living with their non-Jewish neighbors”; and (4) “The ancient world was a religiously tolerant place”. Now the professional historians and grad students among you know that is just patently false. This young lady does not know what the smurf she’s talking about. Though I am also left wondering if Miss Foster would regard Amnesty International’s reports of brutality towards Christian minorities in Africa and Asia as a desperate effort to paint this “martyr-hungry” group as “victims” when they clearly not? A contemporary application of her thesis to the present time would be morally disturbing.

Read the rest here