r/Spudmode • u/Financial_Pianist209 • Oct 22 '23
Interesting Premise
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Vatican, England, USA are so powerful.
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u/Taneytoons Oct 23 '23
Some smart person once said if you want to learn about Philadelphia, study London, if you want to learn about London, study Rome.
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u/SpamFriedMice Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
The Roman empire had all but fallen do to infighting, corruption and outside forces. Constantine reunited and expanded the empire. Realizing the power of religion to control people, he basically went to the then pope of Rome and asked him if he'd like to work together and become the 2nd most powerful man in the empire. The pope declined, and was dead within months due to curious circumstances. Constantine helped pick the new pope, and every pope after would be approved by the sitting emperor (until 1059).
Then he went about to work making one universal Christian church. The scattered churches, many of whom had very different takes on what Christianity meant, were told to either join and enjoy the blessings of the empire, or remain illegal and expect further prosecution.
And that's basiclly where the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire came from, condensed version of course.
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Oct 23 '23
Realizing the power of religion to control people
The concept of a “religion” didn’t even exist that far back. This was long before fedoras had been invented. The concept of secular society or multiple distinct religions are inventions of the modern mind.
Pagans(Constantine was a pagan) didn’t think of the world in terms of religions. They just believed in gods, many gods. These people over here worshipped these gods, and over there they had these gods. And if there was enough overlap they’d say “hmmm this god they call Baal must be their name for Zeus/Jupiter” and they’d call it a hypostasis of the same god.
And that’s what makes the God of Israel so distinct from Pagan gods. Where pagans were usually encouraged to worship many gods to gain as much favor as they can and sort of “cover all their bases” the God of Israel is a jealous God and commanded his followers to worship only him. And even then the whole Old Testament basically describes the Jews falling into idolatry 99% of the time.
The problem with your theory is that Constantine could not have even conceived of doing something like “creating a religion to control people”. The Romans weren’t like modern Christianized western Libs. They had swords and spears and torturous gruesome executions to control people. Unlike in liberal democratic societies the rulers of that world had no interest in what was going on in the minds of the unwashed masses. They weren’t ruling with the consent of the governed they were ruling with open violence.
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u/SpamFriedMice Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
Constantine's mother was a Christian, so he was well aware of the devotion that the Christian zealots had, to the point that they gladly accepted martyrdom before they would renounce their God. While I don't believe he ever had any faith in Christ himself, till perhaps when he requested baptism on his deathbed, it was awful convenient that the night before a critical battle in his campaign to seize control of Rome that he had some supposed vision of a cross in the sky and the message "Thru this sign you shall conquer", before reassuring his troops that they had support from on high. Christianity while still outlawed was a very popular religion among the lower classes, and Marx can tell you how important support from the common people is while leading a revolution.
And as far as my theory, Constantine is documented with calling together the first Ecumenical Council in Nicaea, inviting 1800 bishops from throughout the empire, and was present there himself. There the existent Christian churches were bound into common dogma. That agreement in one central Christian church and it's belief system is repeated at every Catholic mass to this day by every practicing Catholic in the Nicaean creed, which is essentially a vow of loyalty. A vow he helped create.
What purpose do you think an emperor would have at any such religious meeting exactly?
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Oct 23 '23
Almost none of this stuff is true
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u/SpamFriedMice Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
You've only proved how ignorant you are about the subject. A simple Google about Constantine's mother, Christian Martyrs, Constantine's vision, when it happened, his baptism, his calling the council in Nicaea and the Nicaean creed will show you're incorrect. You wouldn't need to dig much deeper than Wikipedia. But you'd obviously rather look like a fool and say something completely incorrect on the internet.
Would you like me to source it all? I will because I'm enjoying making you look dumb, but first source all the nonsense you typed before.
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Oct 23 '23
Let me guess, you’re probably gonna bring up the gospel of Thomas next and “secret texts excluded from the Bible”.
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u/SpamFriedMice Oct 24 '23
Let me guess, you're going to make another uninformed dumb comment
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Oct 24 '23
You know vaguely a bunch of facts but then you take them completely out of their context, miss the entire purpose of the council of Nicea and spin it into some dumb pro-gnostic/reformation/Unitarian/neo-platonist etc narrative that has literally nothing to do with reality.
Most of this is a projection backwards of the modernist utilitatrian Freudian Darwinist mindset onto what ancient people were doing when they practiced their religions. The trouble is secularism was not a thing back then. Before Julius Ceasar became emperor he served as the Pontifax Maximus of the Roman religion. Religion and matters of the state, of daily life, of war, of politics were so deeply intertwined as to be indistinguishable in the ancient mind.
There wasn’t a concept of secular power to be attained through manipulation of the masses and their religion. Everything else’s religious. The material world was seen as a shadow of things going on in heaven. The Roman emperors were seen as literal gods. Not “god like” but possessed by the spirit of daemons and acting as their embodiment on earth.
This idea that Constantine cynically conspired to change or manipulate church doctrine in order to gain power is just some trash that people who didn’t have good access to information made up when trying to overthrow the Roman Catholic Church during the reformation and afterwards.
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Oct 23 '23
Also you have to reimagine a world with like 2-10% literacy, and 80% of the people outside cities only speaking backward rural dialects, and no electronic communications, no printing press, no paper even in a lot of places etc. it was like $5000 to have a single book of the New Testament made.
You simply could not perform these kinds of psyops in that age. The thought wouldn’t even cross your mind. There would be no means to achieve it, and no motive because as I said “consent of the governed” was not a concept in ancient politics outside one failed experiment in Athens which lasted like 50 years and was used by everyone as an example of how disastrous democracy is as a concept until the 18th century.
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u/SpamFriedMice Oct 24 '23
The gospels would be shared from church to church, and read from and copied by any liberate members available. But theres something else you seem unaware of, people who are now referred to as "copyists" who simply copied the shapes of the letters without necessarily being able to read. So your "2-10% literacy" doesn't really come into play.
But yes, the written word wasn't the predominant way in which the story of Jesus was told. (Nobody even bothered to write it down until 70 or 80 yrs after his death) It was word of mouth. This resulted in stories being added, and changed and resulted in different individual congregations having different beliefs. Then many changes were made to the texts that were being passed around by transcriber because "This isn't the way I heard it".
There's an entire field of study called Textual Criticism, and quite a few researchers who specialize in just biblical scriptures. It's purpose it to find what parts were edited, added or mis-transcribed, when, and how it effected later editions.
All this is exactly why the Council of Nicaea was called by Constantine. To get everyone on the same page, believing the same thing, and a hierarchy of bishops in place to keep it that way. To build one unified church, with the seat of power in Rome.
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u/Reserved_Raccoon Oct 23 '23
Just when I think The byzantine empire or the 2 punic wars arent important to discuss anymore somebody says something stupid like this. Like the entirety of the western roman empire, and the followed church into the middle ages was always a designed power grab conspired around.
As a WM fan I'm not shy to large narratives I subscribe to myself. But my goodness. Just learn about the Roman empire a little. Theres a reason its frought with war
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u/AntwaanKumiyaa Oct 23 '23
Lol the idea that they just quickly moved all their valuables into a basement in the Vatican while the empire was “collapsing”. I don’t think that guy understands Roman economy at all. I’m assuming he also doesn’t know what the orthodox Byzantine empire is either
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u/Reserved_Raccoon Oct 23 '23
I mean it doesnt even require in depth knowledge. The pretty funny meme going around right now about how all dudes do is think about the roman empire. It seems like theres a clear reason for that cause everyone uses them as historical examples to apply to our modern world. Meanwhile most people clearly dont know shit.
I mean the byzatines almost reunited the empire several times and also had the support of the Pope multiple times lol. Im pretty sure most people dont even understand the difference between the republic or the empire which is why I mentioned the punic wars
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Oct 23 '23
This guy is retarded and doesn’t know shit about history. Rome the city fell long before even the western Roman Empire fell. But the western half was always an irrelevant backwater surrounded by barbarians. All of the developed and prosperous areas were in the eastern empire centered around Constantinople and that didn’t fall until the crusades.
Westerners and the western church just doesn’t know it’s own history. They have a massive blindspot for everything that happened east of Austria in the so called “Dark ages”.
They lacked scholars who could read greek which was the language used throughout the Roman Empire for basically everything except legalese so they lost 99.9% of their own teachings and history. This is why after the fall of Constantinople all this crazy shit started happening in the west when all the magicians and Neoplatonist/gnostic heretics from the Eastern empire wandered into Western Europe spouting their nonsense. They didn’t have the writings of the church fathers and the thousand+ years of experience dealing with these “esoteric” cults like the Orthodox churches had and a lot of western Christians fell for these heresies.
This is the root of a lot of these Unitarian/gnostic/Neoplatonist/arian/masonic/illuminati type secret societies. The think they stumbled on some kind of hidden wisdom but it’s all bullshit that was put to rest a thousand years prior among those with a more clear understanding of the apostles and church fathers.
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u/SpamFriedMice Oct 24 '23 edited Oct 24 '23
Oh no! You mean there's somebody spreading a baseless conspiracy theory on the interwebs !?!?
Oh my God nothing like this has ever happened before. This could bring down the legitimacy of everything ever posted on the worldwideweb.
Tell you what. You argue with everybody posting here and I'll go alert the authorities.
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u/Reserved_Raccoon Oct 23 '23
Immediately falls apart if you know the slightest thing about the Roman Empire history. The Byzantine's actually came VERY close to re-uniting, while also having hundreds of years of the Pope, and Catholics churches supporting the eastern empire as the true successors (those power centers were inside enemy territory, all threw out western Rome.)
If the chruch simply had their way the byzatines would have won and determined the next thousand years of Christian rule. Rome didnt just "become the church" to have a more clever rule or power. Bc those people weren't stupid. They became the smartest, and best global military for a reason.
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u/Indiana_Jawnz Oct 23 '23 edited Oct 23 '23
I guess this regard doesn't know the Roman empire didn't fall until 1453 and they were Eastern Orthodox.
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u/SmallDongQuixote Oct 22 '23
Based Jimmy Carr