= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
gwern comments on How would you take over Rome? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (200)
Hm. 1 AD and Christianity is on the rise. That's one of the prime reasons I didn't want to start a new religion. Sounds like a good way to get yourself killed. See also: Jesus. Jesus threatened the power structure of Rome and didn't get much for it...
Imperial Rome was in general extremely tolerant of new religions, of which there were many new mystery cults - as long as they accepted a few ground rules vis-a-vis politics, and even those ground rules were negotiable. For example, the Jews were allowed to break all sorts of rules like not sacrificing to the emperors or ejecting legion standards from the Temple. As far as we can tell given the sources available (which likely skew pro-Roman), the Jewish revolts were not really the Romans' fault.
This also means that there was intense competition among religions which would reduce the chance that any one religion could gain adherents.
On the other hand, a printing press is an enormous advantage for spreading memes.
That's right, and that's also probably why Christianity grew extremely slowly early on. (I wouldn't go the religion route myself unless I had technological miracles to employ.)
I wonder why Christianity won so big in the end then, given that it wasn't displaying early memetic virulence.
People have speculated about that for a long time. Relevant factors seem to be the decay of the Roman military discrediting Christianity's major rival, Mithraism, lack of vitality in the pagan faiths such as diminished oracular activity discrediting them ('the silence of the oracles'), and good political luck.
My point is more that you're instantly going to alienate a great number of people and make things much, much harder for you.
Who are you going to alienate by starting a new religion? No one unless you choose to. (Even the intolerant Hebrew scriptures were respected among the pagans by virtue of their antiquity, and this was a big selling point for the many fellow-traveler non-Jew Jews, if you will, and for the later Christians.)
But did the Hebrew's respect the pagans? Religion is mindkilling, and anyone who ascribes to another one is going to be less fond of you. At least that's what I was thinking.
Did they all? Who knows. Xenophobia is universal. We do know there were instances and veins of respect for some pagans who did not go so far as to convert & be circumcised. If they were 'righteous', which entailed following the basic moral code, they might even avoid Gehenna.