Great post on a very interesting question. Some thoughts:
I think a big unaddressed question is "Why the period 100 AD - 300 AD?". Surely there was someone with a peace-and-love religion around in say 500 BC, but that religion didn't catch on. What was going on culturally in Rome that enabled the rise of Christianity? Did the Empire outgrow paganism? Did philosophy catch on and make pagan superstitions seem illogical, creating a gap that the more theological Christianity could fill? I've been told that Jews and Jewishness were in the vogue in Rome after the Jewish war, which could have helped if true. Compare with the Second Great Awakening and its causes (on which we can debate endlessly) and how it enabled Joseph Smith and mormonism. Was something similar going on in Rome?
Per the fertility argument: I've also read somewhere that Christians adopted orphans and children left to die from exposure, further bolstering their ranks.
>Around the time of Christ, there were a million Jews in Israel and five million in the Diaspora
I too would love more background on how the pre-war Jewish diaspora came about. Isn't its existence at odds with cities-as-population-sinks (emigrant Jews would mostly live in cities?).
Richard Carrier seems to just be making the diametricly reversed mistake because he hates the influence of Christianity on modern... America, I assume?
> Dignitas and its related ideas, even in the sense of the common worth of persons, was already a widely known pagan concept. So Christianity can’t claim to have invented it. And valuing freedom, rights, and autonomy was all a pagan idea. Invented legally by Greek and Roman constitutionalists, and developed philosophically by Aristotelians, Epicureans, and Stoics. The Enlightenment laureates who brought them back from the dead, to re-paganize Christianity with them, did so against opposition from Christian authorities. The “taboos” we inherited from Christianity are, rather, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, even racism and anti-semitism, and an unhealthy obsession with monogamy and a pathological phobia of human sexuality in general. In other words, garbage we need to get rid of, not praise or be thankful for.
Am I supposed to believe the Romans weren't sexist until they converted to Christianity? That they weren't racist, or homophobic, or transphobic? Their views on those things were very different to modern racism etc., but they certainly didn't hold to what we would consider correct or ethical. Pagan Rome was not devoid of moral reasoning, but neither was Christian Europe, and neither really lived up to the implications of their ideas (and neither do we, of course).
Yeah, basically he's cherrypicking the examples that match his preferred conclusion, as far as I can see. I still think it's good to have someone question the orthodoxy.
The Romans weren't at all homophobic in the way we use the term. Fucking a guy or a boy was no problem - _being_ fucked was shameful, though (as it meant being treated like a woman).
I think it's also fair to say they weren't racist. Sure, _foreigners_ were bad and stupid (obviously!), but we have no real indication that the colour of your skin particularly mattered (a lot of emperors were dark-skinned in a way a lot of U.S. presidents weren't).
That's the kind of thing I was intentionally glossing over when I said their views were different to anything common today. If "bottoming is morally degraded" was a common view today, we would call it homophobic, it just doesn't come up in practice. Likewise the Romans divided humanity into races differently to how the KKK did, and had different theories of racial essentialism, but if those views were common today we would call them racist.
Not positive about the race/racist bit. We would probably call the Greeks massive chauvinists/ethnocentrists whose concept of the broader group nevertheless had porous borders ("Greek is he who shares our culture") and Romans obvious imperalists (um, obvious) (let's expand our empire, whack our enemies in the head, create a solitude and call it peace, and, why, only a fraction of imperial subjects are Roman citizens, though that privilege does seem to become broader over the generations, doesn't it). Not sure either would get called racist outside Twitter.
(PS. on what comes up in practice: "bottoming is morally degraded" was a common opinion in many Latin-derived cultures a generation or two ago, to the point that some otherwise progressive people had it unthinkingly.)
Like JohanL said, the way Romans expressed bigotry was bashing foreigners as bad and stupid.
"Moreover, even once a people had come under Rome’s protection and even received Roman citizenship, that didn’t mean that other Roman elites immediately dropped their bigotry. Quite to the contrary, Romans complained bitterly about the presence of ethnic outsiders – even those with Roman citizenship – at Rome, often in extremely vile and bigoted terms."
The Greeks coined the word barbarian for foreigners who didn't speak their language, because their speech all sounded like barbarbarbarbar to the civilised ear.
(I can't promise that's not an uban legend but I've heard it said many times.)
The way I think about this is that (which I hope is accurate; I'm not a historian) is that ethnocentrism has been the norm throughout human history, but the particular kind of "racism" that focuses on biological heritage wasn't much a thing until Europeans became involved in the African slave trade. I'm guessing the Romans were ethnocentric, but didn't care much about skin color.
If your problem with outsiders is that they're not Roman (cultural) rather than something about their race, and you have no issued with race once they're culturally Roman, then it seems like xenophobia rather than racism?
Technically it isn't, "one drop rule" and all that, but in practical terms most people equate race to skin color. I don't thin the Roman had our concept of "race", as that word is usually used today. Note they were just as bigoted as we are, just in different ways.
People could and did assimilate to Romaness. By the late Empire even the Greeks claimed to be Romans (and in some parts of Greece today people still claim to be Roman).
Upon reading that, I got the immediate impression of a guy who wants to bang as many chicks as he can get, or even have a string of them, but the women just won't oblige him. Since he is such a wonderful high-value catch, naturally it can't be him turning them off, so it must be something like bad old Christian values infecting them!
How fair that is to Carrier I don't know, but generally the guys complaining about "I'd be drowning in women except for..." are not such prime specimens as they think they are.
Well, if you weren't aware, multiple people in the skeptic movement accused him of sexual harassment, and then he sued all of them, and I don't know how those cases broke, in the end.
According to Wikipedia, "Carrier has both apologized for and denied the alleged misconduct". Which sounds confusing, but the things he apologized for, and the things he denied, are not the same things.
This is a webpage made by the people he sued, and... maybe I missed some important details, but it seems like his accusers don't have much of a point:
To give a specific example, the accusers say that Carrier "initiated flirting" with one of them, by calling her a "cute girl". A few lines before that, the girl offered sex to him, in a joking way. So I guess to see things from the perspective of the accusers, you need the mindset where jokingly offering sex is not flirting (I wonder how they would call that if a man did it), but calling someone cute is (and that's somehow a bad thing).
Could be. One of the problems with poly is always the large number of guys who just want to sleep around. It's part of the reason there's so much feminism and misandry in these poly and progressive areas--I mean, you read the polyamory subreddit and they're always going on about how horrible cishet men area. I suspect selection bias.
Christian sexual hang ups also creased taboos for widows/widowers remarrying and led to grotesque punishments for people who had extra-marital and even pre-marital sex. It almost seems odd to me that someone would find it so unreasonable that anyone would think Christianity has an unhealthy obsession with morning and immediately interpret it as the critic just being a horndog. It seems obvious to me that Christianity has just such an unhealthy obsession, and I’m glad we live in a society where even Christians don’t take it very seriously any more.
Christianity is also a religion which lauded celibacy, even before monasticism took off. And for that reason we should be careful about pronouncing ancient Christianity as some sort of natalist cult. In modern Christianity much of that is owed to Protestantism where marriage and parenthood is seen to be normative. Europe's very slow recovery from the demographic collapse of the 6th century is can be attributed to the popularity of celibacy both in and out of monasteries.
<i>Dignitas and its related ideas, even in the sense of the common worth of persons, was already a widely known pagan concept. So Christianity can’t claim to have invented it.</i>
I don't think that's really accurate. The Romans had a concept called "dignitas", but it was somewhere in between what we'd call "dignificed behaviour" and "the respect due to someone with great achievements to their name" (Caesar famously started the Civil War in order to protect his dignitas). The idea that everyone, of whatever rank or station, had an inherent dignitas was foreign to the Roman mindset, which is why they had no problem with (inter alia) making people kill each other for popular entertainment.
<i>And valuing freedom, rights, and autonomy was all a pagan idea.</i>
Again, pagans did value those things, but they usually meant something different to what we mean -- e.g., "freedom" mostly meant the ability of aristocrats to compete for high office on a more-or-less equal footing with their peers, "autonomy" was conceived politically, as a city-state's ability to make war and peace with whomever it chose, and so on.
Of course, that's not to say the Greeks and Romans were totally morally alien to us, but they certainly weren't Enlightenment-era liberals, and we can't assume that terms like "dignitas", "libertas", etc., meant the same to them as their common English translations mean to us.
Actually, if we think that the urban jewish communities would have had slightly higher growth rates (or not actually negative ones like other urban groups) do to the same factors as the christians, this would explain how the diaspora happened. The jewish communities that were specialized in urban profesions would not have been able to stay in Judea and Gallilea since you needed much more land to feed large cities than those areas could provide, and the people in the countryside was already living at the malthusian maximum. As such any urban group that were actually growing, even if only slowly, would have had to spread to other cities in the empire, where they would help replace the pagans with negative growth.
Maybe, but wouldn't this require an implausibly high urban growth rate even giving the pro-growth factors discussed in the post? But I guess it did happen so it wasn't implausible.
Much of Mosaic law is tightly correlated with disease prevention. If a whole neighborhood is consistently following such policies, they're going to see far less disease-related attrition - each individual practitioner is less likely to catch a given minor illness per potential exposure event, and their neighbors spend less time infected, so fewer exposure events.
Keep in mind it's not just the big-name citywide-crisis plagues that kill people. Rome didn't have an FDA or CDC. Somebody sells cholera-contaminated pork, and their customers start getting terminal diarrhea? Options for legal recourse resemble "bad Yelp review" or the opening scene of The Godfather. Stuff like that was background noise - we don't have records of every small-time restaurant, much less gossip about their relative merits from one week to the next.
During the Black Death the Jewish population in Europe ghettos was much less likely to die of the plague probably due to their greater cleanliness and hygiene, and also their segregation from the Gentiles. Though this fueled the rumor that the Jews were causing the disease and led to pogroms.
the main difference between 100-300AD and 500BC is that the entire Mediterranean was part of the roman empire, people and ideas could move relatively easily
It has to be mainly the Pax Romana, surely - allowing relatively free movement of people and ideas, and making armed resistance incredibly unappealing, for the first time in European history. Lasting peace probably had cultural impacts on Roman culture as well, but I'd weight the practical/logistical benefits more.
Also, Christianity was probably a quite specific convergence of appealing religious ideas that were more prone to going viral than other proto-peace and love religions that may have existed.
Please tell me more about this peace-and-love religion of 500 BC. My understanding is that "love your enemy, pray for those who persecute you, judge yourself and not your neighbor" originated with Jesus.
Those are both fine improvements over their respective status quos, but do either of them directly teach people to love their enemies? The closest pre-Christ statement I'm aware of is Buddha's "Let a man overcome anger by kindness, evil by good. Victory breeds hatred, for the conquered is unhappy. Never in the world does hatred cease by hatred. Hatred ceases by love."
Daoism can't be an improvement over the status quo, because it's defined as the status quo. Daoism is to China what Hinduism is to India: the set of whatever the people there believe and/or practice.
> Mohism promotes a philosophy of impartial caring; that is, a person should care equally for all other individuals, regardless of their actual relationship to them.
> he argued directly against Confucians who believed that it was natural and correct for people to care about different people in different degrees. Mozi, by contrast, believed people in principle should care for all people equally. Mohism stressed that rather than adopting different attitudes towards different people, love should be unconditional and offered to everyone without regard to reciprocation, not just to friends, family and other Confucian relations.
Thanks for the reply! I'll have to learn more about Mozi, and am humbled that I hadn't heard of him before. Did he go so far as to say, "love your enemy"? From my reading of Wikipedia and Wikiquote he seemed to stop short of that.
Well, there was Buddhism, which says a lot of the same stuff about nonviolence, not stealing, not sleeping around, honesty, and... not getting drunk. It spread in a different part of the world most of us don't know as much about (and was quite successful over there), but I'm sure there's a Buddhist around who could fill us in on the differences, might even be enlightening.
It was reabsorbed into Hinduism (from which it had never fully separated itself). Elsewhere it was sufficiently different from local religions that it survived as a distinct cult.
Humans are unoriginal and risk averse. Coming up with theological innovations would be usually seen as blasphemy and carried the risk of dying on a cross.
You could say that there was a clear predecessor to Calculus around 250BCE, and also the correct infinite-series expansions for sin, cos, etc., in India around 1500CE. In Europe, Descartes and Fermat were clear forerunners.
The way I see it, loving your enemy (e.g., the guy who burned your house down, stole your possessions, raped your wife, and killed your children) is like calculus because it does require building upon previous moral breakthroughs.
First, you consider that not everything should be handled with selfishness: the family/community is worth sacrificing food/time/money/your life for. Second, you prefer justice over power (almost all ancient religions worshiped their gods for their power, not their morality). Third, you treat the stranger kindly by sharing or trading honestly with them (many communities instead tried to dominate all the outsiders they could). Fourth, you treat outsiders like one of the in-group. Fifth, you don't take revenge on your enemy for what they did, and instead just leave him be. Sixth, you forgive your enemy and forget about what he did to you. Seventh, you love your enemy and pray for his prosperity.
I don't see that seventh step anywhere in the world before Jesus, just like I don't see calculus anywhere in the world before Leibniz/Newton. Forerunners, yes. But not the full thing.
I don't want to come across as confrontational here, because I think we are all guessing in the dark, but I find it highly unlikely that the steps you lay out are necessary at all. I think it's equally plausible that a different set of steps would suffice as easily, or none at all. It just requires the adoption of a certain mindset. Whereas it is flat out impossible to do calculus, or even to understand what it is, prior to mastering certain other mathematical concepts.
I think steps one through six are in our nature and have been around since prehistory. Sometimes people would be cruel to outsiders, other times they would be kind. We of course don't have written accounts from prehistory, but we do have accounts of how other cultures, untouched by Christianity, treated outsiders (such as the various indigenous people in the Americas).
We evolved traits like compassion and altruism because they help us survive. We evolved to let our anger fade and forgive people because it's more adaptive. Other mammals show these traits too, which suggests they originated far back in our evolutionary history.
These intermediate steps were never new innovations. They've always been around.
Buddhism! Even the math works! And it was a peace-and-love-religion (and is!) And it did catch on...in a different part of the world! It's one of the big religions in the world!
It's worth noting that Christianity was not actually unique in rapidly rising and challenging the traditional Hellenistic religion. The cult of Sol Invictus and Mithraism are two other examples of roughly contemporaneous movements. I think it really is "everyone pretends to believe in Hellenistic religion but no one has taken it seriously for a century, and also the old folk spirituality stuff is kind of dead, and now everyone is hungry for meaning in life". so maybe we shouldn't be surprised that *something* arose in Rome. the more interesting thing, to me, is that Christianity displaced traditional polytheistic faiths all over the place and not just Hellenism.
Good points! Maybe Christianity won because it had the passion and zealotry that Sol Invictus lacked? I feel like the competitors were all too philosophical and logical. But maybe that's just because less primary sources about them survive. But then again if there were any Mithric martyrs we would have heard of it?
My limited understanding is that Christians, once they had sufficient power, persecuted the Mithrians out of existence and in some cases built churches directly on top of the Mithraeum structures. Maybe the winners write the histories?
This is a major idea of Razib Khan's, that Christianity spread because it enabled the administration of a large-scale society while paganism didn't, but it doesn't make sense to me. If you look at India and China, they're pagan today.
> Did philosophy catch on and make pagan superstitions seem illogical, creating a gap that the more theological Christianity could fill?
The first part of that definitely happened. It happened a long time before 100 AD. The pagan Greeks saw pagan superstitions as illogical. Xenophanes, from the 6th century BC ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophanes ), is remembered today for his observation that if horses were to make statues of gods, those statues would be in the shape of horses.
It's not obvious why this would be an advantage for Christianity, though; its superstitions are no better.
Robin Lane Fox has an interesting take on this in Pagans And Christians. In his view, Greek paganism was essentially a communal activity, local to each city. It was built on civic cohesion, maintained by philanthropy, festivals, etc. Lane Fox argues (not very rigorously) that imperial rule undermined this cohesion, both through higher levels of migration and by ensconcing the rich families in power. This created a social vacuum which was filled by empire-wide institutions: the mystery cults and especially Christianity.
I've also seen a claim (in "The Fate of Rome") that the economic troubles of the 3rd century-- hyperinflation etc.-- bankrupted the old civic cult temples so they could no longer afford the mass sacrifices and festivals which had made them popular.
In the 7th century BC the Babylonians also dispersed the Jews (at least a good many of them) after conquering Judea. Some of their descendants did return when Cyrus the Great allowed it, but others, having prospered in the meantime among the Gentiles, did not. After the conquests of Alexander the Jews spread into the Hellenistic world often encouraged by the Successor kings-- we know that Alexandria had a huge Jewish populace. It was for their sake that the Septuagint was translated, and there were regular riots between the Jewish and Hellenic populations. Rome had a Jewish population by the beginning of the Empire; an anti-Christian riot among them is recorded there in the reign of Claudius.
Child and infant mortality in pagan Rome was terrible, but that's not because of infanticide. Has Stark examined the many tombstones put up by grieving parents throughout the empire? The imperial families certainly weren't practising infanticide - they wanted to have as many surviving male heirs and spares as possible - yet Vespasian was the only one in centuries who had two sons surviving to adulthood. Also, in between celebrating the birth rate among Christians, does Stark remember to explain that, unlike either gentiles or Jews, the Christians - following Jesus's injunction in the Gospel of Luke (18:29-30) to leave one's family, and Paul's grudging approval of marriage - basically invented, and certainly promoted, professional celibacy? Aristotle had thought that there might be such a thing as excessive self-control, only because his theory required that the virtues were means between excess and deficiency, but it wasn't until Christian monasticism that it was actually evident on a daily basis. Also, it's almost certainly the case that the early Christians were attempting to imitate pagan virtues; they were certainly attempting to present Christianity as 'another philosophical school,' like Platonism, Pythagoreanism, or Stoicism (this is evident from Justin the Martyr's work), just the only correct one - and educated pagan men (as well as wealthy women) were the most valued converts. That suggests a desire of emulation, at least at first.
> [The imperial families] wanted to have as many surviving male heirs and spares as possible
I don't think this can be true. It's oddly difficult to find any contemporary source discussing the topic, but I struggle to believe that almost this whole set of supremely powerful, ambitious men could miss their mark so badly. Compare them for instance to medieval kings, who lacked the same freedom to divorce & remarry. As Scott says, the general population trend was slow growth, and these men with limitless resources, secluded estates & free choice of wives were surely ideally placed to exceed it.
Again, I don't know any contemporary source which substantiates it, but to me the only credible explanation is that the emperors were going to great lengths to avoid splitting their inheritance. According to e.g. Colin Wells and Robin Lane Fox, this was the general pattern of the Roman upper class.
Thanks Taj for taking the point seriously. I think the exception which proves the rule is Marcus Aurelius, and his wife Faustina. Out of fourteen (!) live births, they had six children including only one son, Commodus, surviving to adulthood. Clearly, they were trying to have as many children as they could, no doubt in part because Marcus was conscious that his role required all the help he could get (as he and, for a time, his co-emperor Verus had helped their adoptive father, Antoninus Pius), but also because he seems to have loved children - and parental love was, for Stoics, part of the 'glue of the cosmos.'
The widespread practice of adoption, btw, must also be one piece of evidence that there weren't enough surviving natural heirs. Historians (e.g. Walter Scheidel) have asked 'Was Marcus "just unlucky"?' to have so few children survive out of so many (one factor in the high mortality of their children may have been that Marcus and Faustina were first cousins, and had some genetic problem/s amplified by the relationship).
Interesting case! I can't find a similarly strong example for my theory. I wonder if anyone's tried to collate all such fertility accounts for the senatorial class?
Isn't some of this the "history is written by the victors" effect?
Also wrt to Mormonism, they seem to have similar assimilation patterns to Jews. There's a high fertility highly religious "core", and as people move away from that, their fertility rate drops to similar to the surrounding population, and they're more likely to intermarry and assimilate completely.
I think the main advantage Mormons have vs Jews is that Mormons have conversion *and* fertility, while Orthodox Jews just have fertility.
My favorite story about Julian is that he tried to build the Third Temple so that Judaism would defeat Christianity, but Almighty God judged this to be naughty in His sight and literally sent balls of fire from underground to wreck the whole project. As far as miracles go, this gets incredibly little attention relative to its historical significance. Materialist dopes on Wikipedia will tell you that it was an earthquake or something, but Materialism is always wrong and the truth is that God didn't want any more animal sacrifices from His chosen people (the sacrifice of the Cross having replaced it) so He killed it with fire.
There has to be a strong "history is written by the victors" effect. For the 1500 years between Rome's conversion to Christianity and the Enlightenment, 99% of literate Europeans were Christians. Let's say you're a 13th-century monk who has to hand-copy a bunch of decaying old manuscripts from the 200s. Most of them are boring, tedious stuff written by pagans that doesn't relate to your life at all. One of them is the thrilling tale of Saint X, who did something brave, and now there's a fun little festival for Saint X once a year. Which manuscript are you going to copy?
It's honestly impressive that Judaism has survived has long as it has despite being completely out-competed memetically by Christianity. And uh, also despite everything else that happened to its followers.
...Almost all of them? There's a reason we're just calling them "pagans" instead of referring to the religions by name. There's a huge amount of religions out there that were followed seriously in the past but are nothing more but trivia in the modern day. A lot of them were out-competed by more optimized religions, some of them we just converted all of its adherents or just killed them all. Just think of all the weird tribal religions that died out because of colonialism. Not that anything of value was lost, of course.
Out of all the variety of indo-European religions existing in the 5th century bce - Greek, Roman, Slavic, Norse, Iranian, Hindu, etc - only one still survives today.
If you call hinduism one religion, maybe. But "hinduism" is a term the british invented for a great variety of competing (and cooperating) religions in India. Shaivism, shaktivism, krishnaism come to mind. Buddhism also started in the 6th or 5th BCE
Clearly it wasn't out-competed. They had different target audiences - pagans had nothing to lose memetically, whereas Jews were already the chosen people, so for them it was a downgrade.
The power of a religion is mostly proportional to the amount of followers it has, as well as the military and geopolitical influence of its followers. Christianity completely dwarfs Judaism in both of these, and even Islam is magnitudes more powerful them, the only thing stopping them being the fact that the Christians are allied against them. In that sense, the Jews of this world have every right to fear for their lives: they only continue to exist because the rest of the world allows them to exist. They have no real agency over their future.
Those are proselytizing religions though, whereas Judaism never was one. An ethnic religion has its own specific advantages, and the fact that Jews thrive nowadays compared to their Semitic relatives, who ended up being absorbed into Christianity and Islam, should be compelling evidence.
>They have no real agency over their future.
They certainly appear to have more of it than generic "white people" of the West.
Judaism was a proselytising religion in Roman times. Plus, genetics seems to confirm that it has generally tended to open up a bit in times of migration, especially when there are not enough Jewish women around at first.
Also, Jews being weird and different was accepted in a way that Christianity wasn't - the Romans were aware it was a very old religion, and they respected that (while obviously bringing down the hammer in case of actual *revolts*).
I think if Christianity invented “love” then Judaism invented responsibility. They pull this wonderful trick of, whenever things go poorly, they re-assert with probability 1 that God loves them, and interpret the evidence as, “we must have screwed up.” This meant they would reason about what they did wrong to incur God’s wrath. “If we don’t look out for each other, the poor and widows suffer and our social structure becomes fragile, and this means we can’t defend ourselves .” Pretty clever! This is why I think they are still around: their religious believes act as a cultural form of memory and reflection, with the goal of learning how to survive and thrive. They learned a fully generalized model of survival: learn a set strict of traditions and stick to them no matter what, which requires the cultivation of virtue and willingness to sacrifice. The orthodox pass this on, generation after generation. It’s longevity across multiple different technological eras is, to me, evidence of its fitness across niches.
Cannot the same "we did something wrong and angered the god" sentiment lead to completely opposite direction: The god is angry so let's sacrifice some children to please him". What makes the difference? Is the main difference that some gods are perceived to be evil and others good? In this case there's a question that historians of culture maybe can answer, when did Jewish God become good. Because early on it feels like just a standard demon-like regional god like most others, right? Was it Zoroastrian influence, or much earlier?
It can, and did, but the sacrifices didn't work. Jews came up with things like "don't eat certain [parasite laden] animals" and other changes in behavior that affect the molecules impinging on their bodies.
The parasite problem of pigs sounds interesting, though I strongly suspect that cheap highly nutritious foodstuff would have been more beneficial than avoiding parasites by refusing that easy food. Another theory suggests that keeping pigs was relatively easy and cheap compared to other meat animals, so this was overwhelmingly done by poor people, which made it low status, and at some point some group of people decided to avoid eating that filthy low status food to make themselves look better. I have no idea which theory closer to truth. In case of parasite problem the best working cultural shift would be heating your meat for longer, I'm sure this has occurred several times.
In a preindustrial context, the fuel necessary for sufficiently thorough cooking wasn't a negligible expense, and precise thermometers (to clearly define a safe compromise point) weren't available at any price.
According to the bible some neighboring Canaanite religions did the whole child sacrifice thing. But Judaism specifically descends from those Canaanites whose holy book says that child sacrifice is an abomination unto God and warns them to not copy their neighbors.
I know their neighbors to the north sacrificed children, but did Ammonites, Moabites, etc., all sacrifice children as well? There’s a Moabite stele (if I remember correctly) whose logic is basically Israelite: our god (not YHWH, something else) is the greatest god, we owe fealty only to him, when we were defeated, it was because we were wicked and unfaithful, now he’s on our side again, etc.
My point is less that Moabites practiced child sacrifice and more that Judaism has very strong taboos against child sacrifice, which is why that wouldn't come up as a "solution" to things going badly.
(The bible does indeed mention at least one Moabite king sacrificing his child, but of course that could just be propaganda)
Both the Greeks and Romans, in classical times, had a horror of human sacrifice. The Athenian tragedians rewrote the myth of the sacrifice of Iphigenia such that Artemis saved the girl and substituted a stag in her place. Lurid tales of human sacrifice were part of the propaganda used by the Romans to justify conquering Carthage and the Gauls.
If you interpret Jesus symbolically, he represents sacrificing your life, with love, for the good of Man (humanity). Embracing that path _actually_ brings your reality, your consciousness towards "heaven" in the long run. Placing something else above that, whatever it is you choose to "worship" (money, sex, fame, etc.), _actually_ brings your reality / consciousness towards "hell" in the long run.
This is an odd misstating of Pascal’s Wager. His wager essentially hinged on the idea that believing in God had unlimited potential upside (Heaven for eternity, etc.) and that not believing in God had limited potential upside in comparison. Either way, it’s an interesting hypothesis, but there are of course plenty of Protestant sects that do not hold the belief that “Gentiles” will go to hell. Mormonism, for example, does not hold that to be true.
I wonder if pre-christian religious movements tended more to be optimized for agriculture, eg "pray to the harvest god" type and so Christianity emerges and flourishes, because it fits the more cosmopolitan, urban folk better? Maybe the Greek/Roman thing of having many gods with various attributes and domains over varuous human affairs was just over-stretched for its context?
The monotheist "one god fits all" approach, avoid hell, go to heaven, may just have been more durable. Ex: an agricultural worker would have to temporarily switch gods if he moved to the city to find work for a season - but not if he became Christian. Same with someone who apprentices and learns a craft.
The Hardcore History podcast episode series Twilight of the Æsir goes into how Christianity spread in Scandinavia in 900-1200. Basically it was politics. A Christian country wanted it's largely unorganised pagan neighbours to convert, because that would improve relations with them, make them less likely to raid and most importantly mean that they could send bishops to influence foreign policy in their favour. So often during peace deals they would have the pagan kings convert. Christianity was also a good deal for kings, because it consolidated their rule better than their local variant of paganism did, so they would often aggressively promote it and treat it as treason if people were pagan or de-converted.
And on top of this all, the pagan religions didn't put effort into conversions (and the few that did did it too late), and in some cases were heredity, so they couldn't convert people to it. Whereas the Christian missionaries spent a lot of time and effort to figure out how to make Christianity appealing to pagans, so naturally they had the advantage.
Similarly, if you've listened to the History of Byzantium podcast, you know there were centuries of back-and-forth in southeastern Europe where local potentates would convert to (what would become) Orthodox Christianity for political reasons, and then convert back to paganism because their local populations hated it and it was costing them too much support among lower-level nobles. A lot of the history of Europe's conversion to Christianity, especially after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, involves conversion at the point of a sword or spear.
That doesn't surprise me that it was led by the kings. We tend to think of religion as an individual choice now, but historically it was a collective one - the King converted, and then everyone under him converted as well (the flip side is that you had communities resisting conversion for centuries to a dominant surrounding religion from it, because conversion meant essentially social death in many cases - a total breach of all family and community ties).
This is kind of true, at least as far as the fact that in many Scandinavian countries the kings converted before the main population. However, we also have some imprtant facts:
-According to the Gesta Danorum, king Sweyn Forkbeard actually lived part of his life as a crypto christian in order to not lose support among his subjects.
-The farmers of Norway successfully rebelled and killed their violently missionarying king Olaf. Then they mainly converted on their own, and sent people to find his son, Magnus, in Kiev so they could make him king.
-The Icelanders, the most learned and culturally self confident of all the northeners, didn't have kings. Apparently they mad a sort of democratic decision to all convert to christianity after a long public discussion in the year 1000 AD. Paganism then disappeared in the country despite a lack of organized persecution.
A few had already converted and each side didn't want to recognize the laws of the other side. To avoid a civil war, the pagan leader of the Icelandic parliament thought about it for a while and then decided that it would probably be best if everyone just converted, or something like that. Seems a bit implausible, but this is at least the myth that was written down more than a century later. https://sagamuseum.is/overview/#thorgeir-ljosvetningagodi
"Around 961, Eldgjá, a volcano in Southern Iceland, erupted 7.7 square miles of lava and lifted up huge clouds of sulfuric gas that affected all of Northern Europe and spanned out as far as Northern China. It also created rare hazes and multiple food crises in different parts of the world, including that year and many years that followed. Early Norse settlers in Iceland followed Paganism, however, after the Eldgjá volcano eruption, many thought of it as an act from God and started to convert to Christianity instead with the help of Alþingi. It is also believed they converted to Christianity to maintain peace with their European neighbors and the Catholic church.
In the year 1000, as a civil war between the religious groups seemed likely, the Alþingi appointed one of the chieftains, Thorgeir Ljosvetningagodi, to decide the issue of religion by arbitration. He decided that the country should convert to Christianity as a whole, but that pagans would be allowed to worship privately. "
Ya I think it came down to trust. In pagan societies the only people you could trust were your clan. Christianity gave higher ideals so you could trust other Christians not in your own clan. That was super revolutionary at the time!
Nowdays society has so far injested that trust that we don't even notice it. And religions like Christianity don't have the same advantage.
From the podcast that didn't seem to be the case. There was even an instance of one group of pagans seeking out another to rule over them. And they followed roughly the same pantheon after all.
It was more their attachment to paganism wasn't nearly as strong as Christians were attached to Christianity, and politically Christianity was very important and advantageous to them.
302 people per acre, no indoor plumbing for most people - that sounds like urban life in a metropolis up to the end of the 19th century. Look up Table 1 in page 2 of https://sasn.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/2024-02/ManhattanDensityApril2014.pdf (just what a quick Google search gave me). In 1893-4, Manhattan had 143.2 people/acre, but the Eleventh Ward had 964.4. In 1891, Paris had 125.2 people/acre, but the Bonne Nouvelle neighborhood (central and hence now expensive) had 434.2. Density in a neighborhood can be more telling than density in a city, as the latter depends heavily on how the city is defined.
Squalor was a fact of life also later, in the Middle Ages, when population densities were lower. Not sure density tells us much more than 'people were living in multi-family buildings that were several stories high'.
Makes me wonder why so many people moved from the country to the city. The life of a farm hand doesn't seem nearly as bad in comparison, and the countryside didn't smell any worse back then than it does now.
There was still opportunity and freedom in the city, which you don’t have when you are a subsistence farmer living in the same house as your parents and cousins. You go the city, you live in shit, but also you can spend your whole day practicing a trade and making money, and meeting new people, and changing your life one way or another.
Yea. The scholarship on what it was like to live in the country, for 95% of the rural population anyway, is pretty hair-raising.
For centuries European serfs were legally bound to the ground they were born onto, because being born a serf sucked so much that striking out to try pretty much anything else was rational for many people at many times in many places. And if they were allowed to do that in numbers then the feudal lords would quickly not have enough serfs for their purposes.
This isn't a case where the law is telling you anything. In the wake of the Black Death, there was a frenzy of legal activity binding serfs to the lands they were supposed to work. The reason for the activity was that they were leaving en masse. The new laws did nothing to change this.
There wasn't enough land or work for everyone. If you had no inheritance to look forward to your choices were A) starve B) become an outlaw (which did not come with a long life expectancy) or C) migrate to a city and hope to make your fortune there.
Right up into the 19th century (when the sanitary revolution began to change things) urban death rates were everywhere higher than urban birth rates; cities only survive because of constant migration from the country.
Also, what percentage of the population enjoyed Roman sanitation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_ancient_Rome)? Was it only a tiny elite? Or was it more like a typical Third-World capital nowadays - a tiny elite lives very well indeed all things considered, a large group barely hangs on (but manages to get water and the like most of the time) and another large group lives in shanties or seriously derelict tenements?
Great post! This is connected to another mystery I've wondered about: The fast spread of Islam. In contrast to Christianity, it was blindingly fast! Within Mohammad's lifetime, eg basically in 20 years, pretty much the entire Arabian peninsula was Muslim. A hundred years later, the entire middle east, Persia, north Africa and Iberia had followed suit.
I looked into this a bit, and it seems that forced conversions were a tiny part of this story. People just really loved it, couldn't get enough of it for some reason! It's not the birth rate or 40% per decade growth rate. It might be the morality thing...? I think there's a real question here.
I like the contrarian theory that "Islam" was created by the Umayyad Caliphate who standardized and canonized the Koran and then pushed down on the populace from the top.
Oh, that would explain a lot! So to fill in the gaps, Mohammad was an expansionist military leader with maybe some religious ideas, the Rashiduns were mostly secular but wildly expansionist, and the Umayyads quickly converted everybody and rewrote and canonized the history of Islam.
I feel like probably this is contradicted by a million little things, but I'm not a historian - I'd love to read about this if it's really a thing.
But still: The Turks (eg the Seljuks) just massively converted to Islam at the drop of a hat, as did Indian, Mongolian and even Indonesian populations. Why? How?
Basically so but I wouldn't call the Rashiduns "secular": they were religious but it wasn't as formalized as later sources imply.
I agree that the later mass conversion is interesting, but I don't think it was at a drop of a hat. Someone conquers your land. Their new overseer says that there's this thing called "Islam" and you get better treatment if you adhere to it. You say "sure, I'll be a muslim" and continue with your life as usual but go through the motions of muslim practice when it's needed to impress the overseer. Six generations later your decedents are "muslim" but still cling to much of your old religions as folk beliefs.
But the Seljuks were Turks who conquered the Arabs! And yet instead of converting everyone to ... Tengrism? They took on the religion of their conquered foe.
Great post on a very interesting question. Some thoughts:
I think a big unaddressed question is "Why the period 100 AD - 300 AD?". Surely there was someone with a peace-and-love religion around in say 500 BC, but that religion didn't catch on. What was going on culturally in Rome that enabled the rise of Christianity? Did the Empire outgrow paganism? Did philosophy catch on and make pagan superstitions seem illogical, creating a gap that the more theological Christianity could fill? I've been told that Jews and Jewishness were in the vogue in Rome after the Jewish war, which could have helped if true. Compare with the Second Great Awakening and its causes (on which we can debate endlessly) and how it enabled Joseph Smith and mormonism. Was something similar going on in Rome?
Per the fertility argument: I've also read somewhere that Christians adopted orphans and children left to die from exposure, further bolstering their ranks.
Richard Carrier has a very contrarian (some might say "crank") take that Pagans were the moral ones actually. May be worth reading but I don't agree: https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/15259 and https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/25530
>Around the time of Christ, there were a million Jews in Israel and five million in the Diaspora
I too would love more background on how the pre-war Jewish diaspora came about. Isn't its existence at odds with cities-as-population-sinks (emigrant Jews would mostly live in cities?).
Richard Carrier seems to just be making the diametricly reversed mistake because he hates the influence of Christianity on modern... America, I assume?
> Dignitas and its related ideas, even in the sense of the common worth of persons, was already a widely known pagan concept. So Christianity can’t claim to have invented it. And valuing freedom, rights, and autonomy was all a pagan idea. Invented legally by Greek and Roman constitutionalists, and developed philosophically by Aristotelians, Epicureans, and Stoics. The Enlightenment laureates who brought them back from the dead, to re-paganize Christianity with them, did so against opposition from Christian authorities. The “taboos” we inherited from Christianity are, rather, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, even racism and anti-semitism, and an unhealthy obsession with monogamy and a pathological phobia of human sexuality in general. In other words, garbage we need to get rid of, not praise or be thankful for.
Am I supposed to believe the Romans weren't sexist until they converted to Christianity? That they weren't racist, or homophobic, or transphobic? Their views on those things were very different to modern racism etc., but they certainly didn't hold to what we would consider correct or ethical. Pagan Rome was not devoid of moral reasoning, but neither was Christian Europe, and neither really lived up to the implications of their ideas (and neither do we, of course).
Yeah, basically he's cherrypicking the examples that match his preferred conclusion, as far as I can see. I still think it's good to have someone question the orthodoxy.
Above is spam...
The Romans weren't at all homophobic in the way we use the term. Fucking a guy or a boy was no problem - _being_ fucked was shameful, though (as it meant being treated like a woman).
I think it's also fair to say they weren't racist. Sure, _foreigners_ were bad and stupid (obviously!), but we have no real indication that the colour of your skin particularly mattered (a lot of emperors were dark-skinned in a way a lot of U.S. presidents weren't).
That's the kind of thing I was intentionally glossing over when I said their views were different to anything common today. If "bottoming is morally degraded" was a common view today, we would call it homophobic, it just doesn't come up in practice. Likewise the Romans divided humanity into races differently to how the KKK did, and had different theories of racial essentialism, but if those views were common today we would call them racist.
Not positive about the race/racist bit. We would probably call the Greeks massive chauvinists/ethnocentrists whose concept of the broader group nevertheless had porous borders ("Greek is he who shares our culture") and Romans obvious imperalists (um, obvious) (let's expand our empire, whack our enemies in the head, create a solitude and call it peace, and, why, only a fraction of imperial subjects are Roman citizens, though that privilege does seem to become broader over the generations, doesn't it). Not sure either would get called racist outside Twitter.
(PS. on what comes up in practice: "bottoming is morally degraded" was a common opinion in many Latin-derived cultures a generation or two ago, to the point that some otherwise progressive people had it unthinkingly.)
The blog ACOUP gets into this: https://acoup.blog/2021/07/16/collections-the-queens-latin-or-who-were-the-romans-part-iii-bigotry-and-diversity-at-rome/
Like JohanL said, the way Romans expressed bigotry was bashing foreigners as bad and stupid.
"Moreover, even once a people had come under Rome’s protection and even received Roman citizenship, that didn’t mean that other Roman elites immediately dropped their bigotry. Quite to the contrary, Romans complained bitterly about the presence of ethnic outsiders – even those with Roman citizenship – at Rome, often in extremely vile and bigoted terms."
Sounds familiar…
>let's expand our empire
The Roman Empire wasn't particularly expansionist, certainly after the first few emperors; but the Republic was.
The Greeks coined the word barbarian for foreigners who didn't speak their language, because their speech all sounded like barbarbarbarbar to the civilised ear.
(I can't promise that's not an uban legend but I've heard it said many times.)
The way I think about this is that (which I hope is accurate; I'm not a historian) is that ethnocentrism has been the norm throughout human history, but the particular kind of "racism" that focuses on biological heritage wasn't much a thing until Europeans became involved in the African slave trade. I'm guessing the Romans were ethnocentric, but didn't care much about skin color.
Why is racism limited to the colour of one's skin?
If your problem with outsiders is that they're not Roman (cultural) rather than something about their race, and you have no issued with race once they're culturally Roman, then it seems like xenophobia rather than racism?
Technically it isn't, "one drop rule" and all that, but in practical terms most people equate race to skin color. I don't thin the Roman had our concept of "race", as that word is usually used today. Note they were just as bigoted as we are, just in different ways.
People could and did assimilate to Romaness. By the late Empire even the Greeks claimed to be Romans (and in some parts of Greece today people still claim to be Roman).
"An unhealthy obsession with monogamy"
Upon reading that, I got the immediate impression of a guy who wants to bang as many chicks as he can get, or even have a string of them, but the women just won't oblige him. Since he is such a wonderful high-value catch, naturally it can't be him turning them off, so it must be something like bad old Christian values infecting them!
How fair that is to Carrier I don't know, but generally the guys complaining about "I'd be drowning in women except for..." are not such prime specimens as they think they are.
Well, if you weren't aware, multiple people in the skeptic movement accused him of sexual harassment, and then he sued all of them, and I don't know how those cases broke, in the end.
According to Wikipedia, "Carrier has both apologized for and denied the alleged misconduct". Which sounds confusing, but the things he apologized for, and the things he denied, are not the same things.
This is a webpage made by the people he sued, and... maybe I missed some important details, but it seems like his accusers don't have much of a point:
https://allegedlythewebsite.org/timeline
To give a specific example, the accusers say that Carrier "initiated flirting" with one of them, by calling her a "cute girl". A few lines before that, the girl offered sex to him, in a joking way. So I guess to see things from the perspective of the accusers, you need the mindset where jokingly offering sex is not flirting (I wonder how they would call that if a man did it), but calling someone cute is (and that's somehow a bad thing).
This sounds truly exhausting.
Could be. One of the problems with poly is always the large number of guys who just want to sleep around. It's part of the reason there's so much feminism and misandry in these poly and progressive areas--I mean, you read the polyamory subreddit and they're always going on about how horrible cishet men area. I suspect selection bias.
Not saying I'm any better, of course. ;)
Christian sexual hang ups also creased taboos for widows/widowers remarrying and led to grotesque punishments for people who had extra-marital and even pre-marital sex. It almost seems odd to me that someone would find it so unreasonable that anyone would think Christianity has an unhealthy obsession with morning and immediately interpret it as the critic just being a horndog. It seems obvious to me that Christianity has just such an unhealthy obsession, and I’m glad we live in a society where even Christians don’t take it very seriously any more.
Christianity is also a religion which lauded celibacy, even before monasticism took off. And for that reason we should be careful about pronouncing ancient Christianity as some sort of natalist cult. In modern Christianity much of that is owed to Protestantism where marriage and parenthood is seen to be normative. Europe's very slow recovery from the demographic collapse of the 6th century is can be attributed to the popularity of celibacy both in and out of monasteries.
<i>Dignitas and its related ideas, even in the sense of the common worth of persons, was already a widely known pagan concept. So Christianity can’t claim to have invented it.</i>
I don't think that's really accurate. The Romans had a concept called "dignitas", but it was somewhere in between what we'd call "dignificed behaviour" and "the respect due to someone with great achievements to their name" (Caesar famously started the Civil War in order to protect his dignitas). The idea that everyone, of whatever rank or station, had an inherent dignitas was foreign to the Roman mindset, which is why they had no problem with (inter alia) making people kill each other for popular entertainment.
<i>And valuing freedom, rights, and autonomy was all a pagan idea.</i>
Again, pagans did value those things, but they usually meant something different to what we mean -- e.g., "freedom" mostly meant the ability of aristocrats to compete for high office on a more-or-less equal footing with their peers, "autonomy" was conceived politically, as a city-state's ability to make war and peace with whomever it chose, and so on.
Of course, that's not to say the Greeks and Romans were totally morally alien to us, but they certainly weren't Enlightenment-era liberals, and we can't assume that terms like "dignitas", "libertas", etc., meant the same to them as their common English translations mean to us.
About the jewish diaspora:
Actually, if we think that the urban jewish communities would have had slightly higher growth rates (or not actually negative ones like other urban groups) do to the same factors as the christians, this would explain how the diaspora happened. The jewish communities that were specialized in urban profesions would not have been able to stay in Judea and Gallilea since you needed much more land to feed large cities than those areas could provide, and the people in the countryside was already living at the malthusian maximum. As such any urban group that were actually growing, even if only slowly, would have had to spread to other cities in the empire, where they would help replace the pagans with negative growth.
Maybe, but wouldn't this require an implausibly high urban growth rate even giving the pro-growth factors discussed in the post? But I guess it did happen so it wasn't implausible.
Much of Mosaic law is tightly correlated with disease prevention. If a whole neighborhood is consistently following such policies, they're going to see far less disease-related attrition - each individual practitioner is less likely to catch a given minor illness per potential exposure event, and their neighbors spend less time infected, so fewer exposure events.
Keep in mind it's not just the big-name citywide-crisis plagues that kill people. Rome didn't have an FDA or CDC. Somebody sells cholera-contaminated pork, and their customers start getting terminal diarrhea? Options for legal recourse resemble "bad Yelp review" or the opening scene of The Godfather. Stuff like that was background noise - we don't have records of every small-time restaurant, much less gossip about their relative merits from one week to the next.
During the Black Death the Jewish population in Europe ghettos was much less likely to die of the plague probably due to their greater cleanliness and hygiene, and also their segregation from the Gentiles. Though this fueled the rumor that the Jews were causing the disease and led to pogroms.
the main difference between 100-300AD and 500BC is that the entire Mediterranean was part of the roman empire, people and ideas could move relatively easily
"Why the period 100AD - 300AD?"
It has to be mainly the Pax Romana, surely - allowing relatively free movement of people and ideas, and making armed resistance incredibly unappealing, for the first time in European history. Lasting peace probably had cultural impacts on Roman culture as well, but I'd weight the practical/logistical benefits more.
Also, Christianity was probably a quite specific convergence of appealing religious ideas that were more prone to going viral than other proto-peace and love religions that may have existed.
I hadn't thought about the "Romans make armed resistance sucks -> room for religions without emphasis on violence". Good idea, I'll ponder it!
Christianity also picked up a good deal of Neoplatonism and some ethics from the Stoics. This made it less strange to educated Greeks and Romans.
Hi MC!
Please tell me more about this peace-and-love religion of 500 BC. My understanding is that "love your enemy, pray for those who persecute you, judge yourself and not your neighbor" originated with Jesus.
Kind regards,
David
Well obviously the 500 BC Jesus didn't get traction and in the unlikely case that anyone wrote about him then that writing didn't survive.
So you're saying it wasn't the 'fullness of time'? ;)
Jainism and Daoism, I guess, but admittedly they're not very relevant to the spread of Christianity.
Hi Concavenator!
Those are both fine improvements over their respective status quos, but do either of them directly teach people to love their enemies? The closest pre-Christ statement I'm aware of is Buddha's "Let a man overcome anger by kindness, evil by good. Victory breeds hatred, for the conquered is unhappy. Never in the world does hatred cease by hatred. Hatred ceases by love."
Kind regards,
David
Daoism can't be an improvement over the status quo, because it's defined as the status quo. Daoism is to China what Hinduism is to India: the set of whatever the people there believe and/or practice.
I linked this elsewhere in the thread, but here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohism
> Mohism promotes a philosophy of impartial caring; that is, a person should care equally for all other individuals, regardless of their actual relationship to them.
> he argued directly against Confucians who believed that it was natural and correct for people to care about different people in different degrees. Mozi, by contrast, believed people in principle should care for all people equally. Mohism stressed that rather than adopting different attitudes towards different people, love should be unconditional and offered to everyone without regard to reciprocation, not just to friends, family and other Confucian relations.
Hi Michael!
Thanks for the reply! I'll have to learn more about Mozi, and am humbled that I hadn't heard of him before. Did he go so far as to say, "love your enemy"? From my reading of Wikipedia and Wikiquote he seemed to stop short of that.
Have a great weekend!
Kind regards,
David
Well, there was Buddhism, which says a lot of the same stuff about nonviolence, not stealing, not sleeping around, honesty, and... not getting drunk. It spread in a different part of the world most of us don't know as much about (and was quite successful over there), but I'm sure there's a Buddhist around who could fill us in on the differences, might even be enlightening.
> It spread in a different part of the world most of us don't know as much about (and was quite successful over there)
Note that while that sentence is technically true, Buddhism was a complete failure in the area where it originated.
It was reabsorbed into Hinduism (from which it had never fully separated itself). Elsewhere it was sufficiently different from local religions that it survived as a distinct cult.
"Surely there was someone with a peace-and-love religion around in say 500 BC, but that religion didn't catch on."
Why are you so sure such a religion existed in 500 BC?
Because there were many humans around and humans tend to have ideas about things.
Humans are unoriginal and risk averse. Coming up with theological innovations would be usually seen as blasphemy and carried the risk of dying on a cross.
Yes, you're right. That's why in the entire history of mankind, no one has ever come up with any.
Hi MC!
In 500BC was there also an understanding of calculus that failed to catch on?
Kind regards,
David
You could say that there was a clear predecessor to Calculus around 250BCE, and also the correct infinite-series expansions for sin, cos, etc., in India around 1500CE. In Europe, Descartes and Fermat were clear forerunners.
Hi Gerald!
I agree. And there were predecessors to "Love your enemy" at that time, too. But not the full-fledged idea in either case.
Kind regards,
David
Unlike calculus, loving strangers doesn't build upon previous breakthroughs in logical reasoning.
Hi Victor!
The way I see it, loving your enemy (e.g., the guy who burned your house down, stole your possessions, raped your wife, and killed your children) is like calculus because it does require building upon previous moral breakthroughs.
First, you consider that not everything should be handled with selfishness: the family/community is worth sacrificing food/time/money/your life for. Second, you prefer justice over power (almost all ancient religions worshiped their gods for their power, not their morality). Third, you treat the stranger kindly by sharing or trading honestly with them (many communities instead tried to dominate all the outsiders they could). Fourth, you treat outsiders like one of the in-group. Fifth, you don't take revenge on your enemy for what they did, and instead just leave him be. Sixth, you forgive your enemy and forget about what he did to you. Seventh, you love your enemy and pray for his prosperity.
I don't see that seventh step anywhere in the world before Jesus, just like I don't see calculus anywhere in the world before Leibniz/Newton. Forerunners, yes. But not the full thing.
Have a great day!
Kind regards,
David
I don't want to come across as confrontational here, because I think we are all guessing in the dark, but I find it highly unlikely that the steps you lay out are necessary at all. I think it's equally plausible that a different set of steps would suffice as easily, or none at all. It just requires the adoption of a certain mindset. Whereas it is flat out impossible to do calculus, or even to understand what it is, prior to mastering certain other mathematical concepts.
I think steps one through six are in our nature and have been around since prehistory. Sometimes people would be cruel to outsiders, other times they would be kind. We of course don't have written accounts from prehistory, but we do have accounts of how other cultures, untouched by Christianity, treated outsiders (such as the various indigenous people in the Americas).
We evolved traits like compassion and altruism because they help us survive. We evolved to let our anger fade and forgive people because it's more adaptive. Other mammals show these traits too, which suggests they originated far back in our evolutionary history.
These intermediate steps were never new innovations. They've always been around.
> In 500BC was there also an understanding of calculus that failed to catch on?
Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_exhaustion
Hi again Michael!
I think you meant to say, "No:" because your link says: "The method of exhaustion is seen as a *precursor* to the methods of calculus."
Have another great weekend!
Kind regards,
David
You failing to understand your own question is not good evidence of... anything, really.
Buddhism! Even the math works! And it was a peace-and-love-religion (and is!) And it did catch on...in a different part of the world! It's one of the big religions in the world!
Would make an interesting compare-and-contrast.
It's worth noting that Christianity was not actually unique in rapidly rising and challenging the traditional Hellenistic religion. The cult of Sol Invictus and Mithraism are two other examples of roughly contemporaneous movements. I think it really is "everyone pretends to believe in Hellenistic religion but no one has taken it seriously for a century, and also the old folk spirituality stuff is kind of dead, and now everyone is hungry for meaning in life". so maybe we shouldn't be surprised that *something* arose in Rome. the more interesting thing, to me, is that Christianity displaced traditional polytheistic faiths all over the place and not just Hellenism.
Good points! Maybe Christianity won because it had the passion and zealotry that Sol Invictus lacked? I feel like the competitors were all too philosophical and logical. But maybe that's just because less primary sources about them survive. But then again if there were any Mithric martyrs we would have heard of it?
My limited understanding is that Christians, once they had sufficient power, persecuted the Mithrians out of existence and in some cases built churches directly on top of the Mithraeum structures. Maybe the winners write the histories?
> Surely there was someone with a peace-and-love religion around in say 500 BC, but that religion didn't catch on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohism
> Did the Empire outgrow paganism?
This is a major idea of Razib Khan's, that Christianity spread because it enabled the administration of a large-scale society while paganism didn't, but it doesn't make sense to me. If you look at India and China, they're pagan today.
> Did philosophy catch on and make pagan superstitions seem illogical, creating a gap that the more theological Christianity could fill?
The first part of that definitely happened. It happened a long time before 100 AD. The pagan Greeks saw pagan superstitions as illogical. Xenophanes, from the 6th century BC ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenophanes ), is remembered today for his observation that if horses were to make statues of gods, those statues would be in the shape of horses.
It's not obvious why this would be an advantage for Christianity, though; its superstitions are no better.
Robin Lane Fox has an interesting take on this in Pagans And Christians. In his view, Greek paganism was essentially a communal activity, local to each city. It was built on civic cohesion, maintained by philanthropy, festivals, etc. Lane Fox argues (not very rigorously) that imperial rule undermined this cohesion, both through higher levels of migration and by ensconcing the rich families in power. This created a social vacuum which was filled by empire-wide institutions: the mystery cults and especially Christianity.
Interesting take, thanks for sharing!
I've also seen a claim (in "The Fate of Rome") that the economic troubles of the 3rd century-- hyperinflation etc.-- bankrupted the old civic cult temples so they could no longer afford the mass sacrifices and festivals which had made them popular.
In the 7th century BC the Babylonians also dispersed the Jews (at least a good many of them) after conquering Judea. Some of their descendants did return when Cyrus the Great allowed it, but others, having prospered in the meantime among the Gentiles, did not. After the conquests of Alexander the Jews spread into the Hellenistic world often encouraged by the Successor kings-- we know that Alexandria had a huge Jewish populace. It was for their sake that the Septuagint was translated, and there were regular riots between the Jewish and Hellenic populations. Rome had a Jewish population by the beginning of the Empire; an anti-Christian riot among them is recorded there in the reign of Claudius.
Child and infant mortality in pagan Rome was terrible, but that's not because of infanticide. Has Stark examined the many tombstones put up by grieving parents throughout the empire? The imperial families certainly weren't practising infanticide - they wanted to have as many surviving male heirs and spares as possible - yet Vespasian was the only one in centuries who had two sons surviving to adulthood. Also, in between celebrating the birth rate among Christians, does Stark remember to explain that, unlike either gentiles or Jews, the Christians - following Jesus's injunction in the Gospel of Luke (18:29-30) to leave one's family, and Paul's grudging approval of marriage - basically invented, and certainly promoted, professional celibacy? Aristotle had thought that there might be such a thing as excessive self-control, only because his theory required that the virtues were means between excess and deficiency, but it wasn't until Christian monasticism that it was actually evident on a daily basis. Also, it's almost certainly the case that the early Christians were attempting to imitate pagan virtues; they were certainly attempting to present Christianity as 'another philosophical school,' like Platonism, Pythagoreanism, or Stoicism (this is evident from Justin the Martyr's work), just the only correct one - and educated pagan men (as well as wealthy women) were the most valued converts. That suggests a desire of emulation, at least at first.
<i>Has Stark examined the many tombstones put up by grieving parents throughout the empire?</i>
Or, indeed, the many tombstones put up by widowers praising their dead wives.
> [The imperial families] wanted to have as many surviving male heirs and spares as possible
I don't think this can be true. It's oddly difficult to find any contemporary source discussing the topic, but I struggle to believe that almost this whole set of supremely powerful, ambitious men could miss their mark so badly. Compare them for instance to medieval kings, who lacked the same freedom to divorce & remarry. As Scott says, the general population trend was slow growth, and these men with limitless resources, secluded estates & free choice of wives were surely ideally placed to exceed it.
Again, I don't know any contemporary source which substantiates it, but to me the only credible explanation is that the emperors were going to great lengths to avoid splitting their inheritance. According to e.g. Colin Wells and Robin Lane Fox, this was the general pattern of the Roman upper class.
Thanks Taj for taking the point seriously. I think the exception which proves the rule is Marcus Aurelius, and his wife Faustina. Out of fourteen (!) live births, they had six children including only one son, Commodus, surviving to adulthood. Clearly, they were trying to have as many children as they could, no doubt in part because Marcus was conscious that his role required all the help he could get (as he and, for a time, his co-emperor Verus had helped their adoptive father, Antoninus Pius), but also because he seems to have loved children - and parental love was, for Stoics, part of the 'glue of the cosmos.'
The widespread practice of adoption, btw, must also be one piece of evidence that there weren't enough surviving natural heirs. Historians (e.g. Walter Scheidel) have asked 'Was Marcus "just unlucky"?' to have so few children survive out of so many (one factor in the high mortality of their children may have been that Marcus and Faustina were first cousins, and had some genetic problem/s amplified by the relationship).
Interesting case! I can't find a similarly strong example for my theory. I wonder if anyone's tried to collate all such fertility accounts for the senatorial class?
This is the Scheidel article - you may be able to get free access if you can use JSTOR. I am not sure if anyone's updated the research (this version of Scheidel was 2012): https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/classical-quarterly/article/abs/emperors-aristocrats-and-the-grim-reaper-towards-a-demographic-profile-of-the-roman-elite/C28EC329BF79D6D4C529DE08BD471259
There's a theory that lead plumbing damaged urban fertility, especially among the upper classes who had water piped directly into their homes.
Isn't some of this the "history is written by the victors" effect?
Also wrt to Mormonism, they seem to have similar assimilation patterns to Jews. There's a high fertility highly religious "core", and as people move away from that, their fertility rate drops to similar to the surrounding population, and they're more likely to intermarry and assimilate completely.
I think the main advantage Mormons have vs Jews is that Mormons have conversion *and* fertility, while Orthodox Jews just have fertility.
See the quotation discussing the opinion of the Emperor Julian, an enemy of Christianity.
My favorite story about Julian is that he tried to build the Third Temple so that Judaism would defeat Christianity, but Almighty God judged this to be naughty in His sight and literally sent balls of fire from underground to wreck the whole project. As far as miracles go, this gets incredibly little attention relative to its historical significance. Materialist dopes on Wikipedia will tell you that it was an earthquake or something, but Materialism is always wrong and the truth is that God didn't want any more animal sacrifices from His chosen people (the sacrifice of the Cross having replaced it) so He killed it with fire.
There has to be a strong "history is written by the victors" effect. For the 1500 years between Rome's conversion to Christianity and the Enlightenment, 99% of literate Europeans were Christians. Let's say you're a 13th-century monk who has to hand-copy a bunch of decaying old manuscripts from the 200s. Most of them are boring, tedious stuff written by pagans that doesn't relate to your life at all. One of them is the thrilling tale of Saint X, who did something brave, and now there's a fun little festival for Saint X once a year. Which manuscript are you going to copy?
Remember that Pascal's Wager also came from Christianity. I think this is memetically powerful:
Unlike Judaism where you can simply be a Righteous Gentile, and not burn in hell for eternity, Christianity doesn't offer that option.
You can either be a Christian and go to heaven. Or a non-Christian and go to hell.
And if you buy into that idea at all, you are strongly incentivized to buy into it fully to avoid hell.
It's honestly impressive that Judaism has survived has long as it has despite being completely out-competed memetically by Christianity. And uh, also despite everything else that happened to its followers.
Is it that impressive? How many religions just died?
...Almost all of them? There's a reason we're just calling them "pagans" instead of referring to the religions by name. There's a huge amount of religions out there that were followed seriously in the past but are nothing more but trivia in the modern day. A lot of them were out-competed by more optimized religions, some of them we just converted all of its adherents or just killed them all. Just think of all the weird tribal religions that died out because of colonialism. Not that anything of value was lost, of course.
Mh true, I was thinking of "bigger" religions probably.
Zoroastrianism was huge but down to no more than 200,000 adherents today and falling.
Many Thanks! That was the example I was thinking of.
Zoroastrianism is a close analogue to Judaism in so far as it has long been the religion of a small minority outside its country of origin.
Manichaeism was once practiced all the way from Spain to China, and is now almost extinct.
Out of all the variety of indo-European religions existing in the 5th century bce - Greek, Roman, Slavic, Norse, Iranian, Hindu, etc - only one still survives today.
If you call hinduism one religion, maybe. But "hinduism" is a term the british invented for a great variety of competing (and cooperating) religions in India. Shaivism, shaktivism, krishnaism come to mind. Buddhism also started in the 6th or 5th BCE
Allow me to express regret that much of value was, in fact, lost.
Clearly it wasn't out-competed. They had different target audiences - pagans had nothing to lose memetically, whereas Jews were already the chosen people, so for them it was a downgrade.
The power of a religion is mostly proportional to the amount of followers it has, as well as the military and geopolitical influence of its followers. Christianity completely dwarfs Judaism in both of these, and even Islam is magnitudes more powerful them, the only thing stopping them being the fact that the Christians are allied against them. In that sense, the Jews of this world have every right to fear for their lives: they only continue to exist because the rest of the world allows them to exist. They have no real agency over their future.
Those are proselytizing religions though, whereas Judaism never was one. An ethnic religion has its own specific advantages, and the fact that Jews thrive nowadays compared to their Semitic relatives, who ended up being absorbed into Christianity and Islam, should be compelling evidence.
>They have no real agency over their future.
They certainly appear to have more of it than generic "white people" of the West.
There is at least some evidence of proselytizing for Judaism before the first century CE, e.g. https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2022/03/19/proselytism-in-the-ancient-mediterranean-before-christianity/
Judaism was a proselytising religion in Roman times. Plus, genetics seems to confirm that it has generally tended to open up a bit in times of migration, especially when there are not enough Jewish women around at first.
Also, Jews being weird and different was accepted in a way that Christianity wasn't - the Romans were aware it was a very old religion, and they respected that (while obviously bringing down the hammer in case of actual *revolts*).
I think if Christianity invented “love” then Judaism invented responsibility. They pull this wonderful trick of, whenever things go poorly, they re-assert with probability 1 that God loves them, and interpret the evidence as, “we must have screwed up.” This meant they would reason about what they did wrong to incur God’s wrath. “If we don’t look out for each other, the poor and widows suffer and our social structure becomes fragile, and this means we can’t defend ourselves .” Pretty clever! This is why I think they are still around: their religious believes act as a cultural form of memory and reflection, with the goal of learning how to survive and thrive. They learned a fully generalized model of survival: learn a set strict of traditions and stick to them no matter what, which requires the cultivation of virtue and willingness to sacrifice. The orthodox pass this on, generation after generation. It’s longevity across multiple different technological eras is, to me, evidence of its fitness across niches.
Cannot the same "we did something wrong and angered the god" sentiment lead to completely opposite direction: The god is angry so let's sacrifice some children to please him". What makes the difference? Is the main difference that some gods are perceived to be evil and others good? In this case there's a question that historians of culture maybe can answer, when did Jewish God become good. Because early on it feels like just a standard demon-like regional god like most others, right? Was it Zoroastrian influence, or much earlier?
It can, and did, but the sacrifices didn't work. Jews came up with things like "don't eat certain [parasite laden] animals" and other changes in behavior that affect the molecules impinging on their bodies.
The parasite problem of pigs sounds interesting, though I strongly suspect that cheap highly nutritious foodstuff would have been more beneficial than avoiding parasites by refusing that easy food. Another theory suggests that keeping pigs was relatively easy and cheap compared to other meat animals, so this was overwhelmingly done by poor people, which made it low status, and at some point some group of people decided to avoid eating that filthy low status food to make themselves look better. I have no idea which theory closer to truth. In case of parasite problem the best working cultural shift would be heating your meat for longer, I'm sure this has occurred several times.
In a preindustrial context, the fuel necessary for sufficiently thorough cooking wasn't a negligible expense, and precise thermometers (to clearly define a safe compromise point) weren't available at any price.
Foodborne illnesses aren't necessarily the sort of thing any reasonable amount of extra nutrition can offset. https://narts.sylvanmigdal.com/?date=20200509
You can cook your meat. That gets rid of the parasites.
Read "Odysseus' Scar" by Erich Auerbach, it appears to have come much earlier.
According to the bible some neighboring Canaanite religions did the whole child sacrifice thing. But Judaism specifically descends from those Canaanites whose holy book says that child sacrifice is an abomination unto God and warns them to not copy their neighbors.
I know their neighbors to the north sacrificed children, but did Ammonites, Moabites, etc., all sacrifice children as well? There’s a Moabite stele (if I remember correctly) whose logic is basically Israelite: our god (not YHWH, something else) is the greatest god, we owe fealty only to him, when we were defeated, it was because we were wicked and unfaithful, now he’s on our side again, etc.
My point is less that Moabites practiced child sacrifice and more that Judaism has very strong taboos against child sacrifice, which is why that wouldn't come up as a "solution" to things going badly.
(The bible does indeed mention at least one Moabite king sacrificing his child, but of course that could just be propaganda)
Both the Greeks and Romans, in classical times, had a horror of human sacrifice. The Athenian tragedians rewrote the myth of the sacrifice of Iphigenia such that Artemis saved the girl and substituted a stag in her place. Lurid tales of human sacrifice were part of the propaganda used by the Romans to justify conquering Carthage and the Gauls.
It wasn’t just the ancient Israelites - Moabites were in the same game very early on.
If you interpret Jesus symbolically, he represents sacrificing your life, with love, for the good of Man (humanity). Embracing that path _actually_ brings your reality, your consciousness towards "heaven" in the long run. Placing something else above that, whatever it is you choose to "worship" (money, sex, fame, etc.), _actually_ brings your reality / consciousness towards "hell" in the long run.
This is an odd misstating of Pascal’s Wager. His wager essentially hinged on the idea that believing in God had unlimited potential upside (Heaven for eternity, etc.) and that not believing in God had limited potential upside in comparison. Either way, it’s an interesting hypothesis, but there are of course plenty of Protestant sects that do not hold the belief that “Gentiles” will go to hell. Mormonism, for example, does not hold that to be true.
I wonder if pre-christian religious movements tended more to be optimized for agriculture, eg "pray to the harvest god" type and so Christianity emerges and flourishes, because it fits the more cosmopolitan, urban folk better? Maybe the Greek/Roman thing of having many gods with various attributes and domains over varuous human affairs was just over-stretched for its context?
The monotheist "one god fits all" approach, avoid hell, go to heaven, may just have been more durable. Ex: an agricultural worker would have to temporarily switch gods if he moved to the city to find work for a season - but not if he became Christian. Same with someone who apprentices and learns a craft.
The Hardcore History podcast episode series Twilight of the Æsir goes into how Christianity spread in Scandinavia in 900-1200. Basically it was politics. A Christian country wanted it's largely unorganised pagan neighbours to convert, because that would improve relations with them, make them less likely to raid and most importantly mean that they could send bishops to influence foreign policy in their favour. So often during peace deals they would have the pagan kings convert. Christianity was also a good deal for kings, because it consolidated their rule better than their local variant of paganism did, so they would often aggressively promote it and treat it as treason if people were pagan or de-converted.
And on top of this all, the pagan religions didn't put effort into conversions (and the few that did did it too late), and in some cases were heredity, so they couldn't convert people to it. Whereas the Christian missionaries spent a lot of time and effort to figure out how to make Christianity appealing to pagans, so naturally they had the advantage.
Similarly, if you've listened to the History of Byzantium podcast, you know there were centuries of back-and-forth in southeastern Europe where local potentates would convert to (what would become) Orthodox Christianity for political reasons, and then convert back to paganism because their local populations hated it and it was costing them too much support among lower-level nobles. A lot of the history of Europe's conversion to Christianity, especially after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, involves conversion at the point of a sword or spear.
That doesn't surprise me that it was led by the kings. We tend to think of religion as an individual choice now, but historically it was a collective one - the King converted, and then everyone under him converted as well (the flip side is that you had communities resisting conversion for centuries to a dominant surrounding religion from it, because conversion meant essentially social death in many cases - a total breach of all family and community ties).
This is kind of true, at least as far as the fact that in many Scandinavian countries the kings converted before the main population. However, we also have some imprtant facts:
-According to the Gesta Danorum, king Sweyn Forkbeard actually lived part of his life as a crypto christian in order to not lose support among his subjects.
-The farmers of Norway successfully rebelled and killed their violently missionarying king Olaf. Then they mainly converted on their own, and sent people to find his son, Magnus, in Kiev so they could make him king.
-The Icelanders, the most learned and culturally self confident of all the northeners, didn't have kings. Apparently they mad a sort of democratic decision to all convert to christianity after a long public discussion in the year 1000 AD. Paganism then disappeared in the country despite a lack of organized persecution.
Interesting. What was the advantage for Icelanders of converting to Christianity?
A few had already converted and each side didn't want to recognize the laws of the other side. To avoid a civil war, the pagan leader of the Icelandic parliament thought about it for a while and then decided that it would probably be best if everyone just converted, or something like that. Seems a bit implausible, but this is at least the myth that was written down more than a century later. https://sagamuseum.is/overview/#thorgeir-ljosvetningagodi
Wikipedia:
"Around 961, Eldgjá, a volcano in Southern Iceland, erupted 7.7 square miles of lava and lifted up huge clouds of sulfuric gas that affected all of Northern Europe and spanned out as far as Northern China. It also created rare hazes and multiple food crises in different parts of the world, including that year and many years that followed. Early Norse settlers in Iceland followed Paganism, however, after the Eldgjá volcano eruption, many thought of it as an act from God and started to convert to Christianity instead with the help of Alþingi. It is also believed they converted to Christianity to maintain peace with their European neighbors and the Catholic church.
In the year 1000, as a civil war between the religious groups seemed likely, the Alþingi appointed one of the chieftains, Thorgeir Ljosvetningagodi, to decide the issue of religion by arbitration. He decided that the country should convert to Christianity as a whole, but that pagans would be allowed to worship privately. "
Ya I think it came down to trust. In pagan societies the only people you could trust were your clan. Christianity gave higher ideals so you could trust other Christians not in your own clan. That was super revolutionary at the time!
Nowdays society has so far injested that trust that we don't even notice it. And religions like Christianity don't have the same advantage.
From the podcast that didn't seem to be the case. There was even an instance of one group of pagans seeking out another to rule over them. And they followed roughly the same pantheon after all.
It was more their attachment to paganism wasn't nearly as strong as Christians were attached to Christianity, and politically Christianity was very important and advantageous to them.
302 people per acre, no indoor plumbing for most people - that sounds like urban life in a metropolis up to the end of the 19th century. Look up Table 1 in page 2 of https://sasn.rutgers.edu/sites/default/files/2024-02/ManhattanDensityApril2014.pdf (just what a quick Google search gave me). In 1893-4, Manhattan had 143.2 people/acre, but the Eleventh Ward had 964.4. In 1891, Paris had 125.2 people/acre, but the Bonne Nouvelle neighborhood (central and hence now expensive) had 434.2. Density in a neighborhood can be more telling than density in a city, as the latter depends heavily on how the city is defined.
Squalor was a fact of life also later, in the Middle Ages, when population densities were lower. Not sure density tells us much more than 'people were living in multi-family buildings that were several stories high'.
Apparently Edinburgh was like that as well. Thankfully, they had sloped alleyways so that the shit slid down into the nearby lake.
Every city under the sun was like that until several decades into the industrial revolution.
Makes me wonder why so many people moved from the country to the city. The life of a farm hand doesn't seem nearly as bad in comparison, and the countryside didn't smell any worse back then than it does now.
There was still opportunity and freedom in the city, which you don’t have when you are a subsistence farmer living in the same house as your parents and cousins. You go the city, you live in shit, but also you can spend your whole day practicing a trade and making money, and meeting new people, and changing your life one way or another.
Yea. The scholarship on what it was like to live in the country, for 95% of the rural population anyway, is pretty hair-raising.
For centuries European serfs were legally bound to the ground they were born onto, because being born a serf sucked so much that striking out to try pretty much anything else was rational for many people at many times in many places. And if they were allowed to do that in numbers then the feudal lords would quickly not have enough serfs for their purposes.
This isn't a case where the law is telling you anything. In the wake of the Black Death, there was a frenzy of legal activity binding serfs to the lands they were supposed to work. The reason for the activity was that they were leaving en masse. The new laws did nothing to change this.
There wasn't enough land or work for everyone. If you had no inheritance to look forward to your choices were A) starve B) become an outlaw (which did not come with a long life expectancy) or C) migrate to a city and hope to make your fortune there.
Right up into the 19th century (when the sanitary revolution began to change things) urban death rates were everywhere higher than urban birth rates; cities only survive because of constant migration from the country.
Also, what percentage of the population enjoyed Roman sanitation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanitation_in_ancient_Rome)? Was it only a tiny elite? Or was it more like a typical Third-World capital nowadays - a tiny elite lives very well indeed all things considered, a large group barely hangs on (but manages to get water and the like most of the time) and another large group lives in shanties or seriously derelict tenements?
Great post! This is connected to another mystery I've wondered about: The fast spread of Islam. In contrast to Christianity, it was blindingly fast! Within Mohammad's lifetime, eg basically in 20 years, pretty much the entire Arabian peninsula was Muslim. A hundred years later, the entire middle east, Persia, north Africa and Iberia had followed suit.
I looked into this a bit, and it seems that forced conversions were a tiny part of this story. People just really loved it, couldn't get enough of it for some reason! It's not the birth rate or 40% per decade growth rate. It might be the morality thing...? I think there's a real question here.
The Arabian Peninsula has very few people due to being mostly desert, though.
I like the contrarian theory that "Islam" was created by the Umayyad Caliphate who standardized and canonized the Koran and then pushed down on the populace from the top.
Oh, that would explain a lot! So to fill in the gaps, Mohammad was an expansionist military leader with maybe some religious ideas, the Rashiduns were mostly secular but wildly expansionist, and the Umayyads quickly converted everybody and rewrote and canonized the history of Islam.
I feel like probably this is contradicted by a million little things, but I'm not a historian - I'd love to read about this if it's really a thing.
But still: The Turks (eg the Seljuks) just massively converted to Islam at the drop of a hat, as did Indian, Mongolian and even Indonesian populations. Why? How?
Basically so but I wouldn't call the Rashiduns "secular": they were religious but it wasn't as formalized as later sources imply.
I agree that the later mass conversion is interesting, but I don't think it was at a drop of a hat. Someone conquers your land. Their new overseer says that there's this thing called "Islam" and you get better treatment if you adhere to it. You say "sure, I'll be a muslim" and continue with your life as usual but go through the motions of muslim practice when it's needed to impress the overseer. Six generations later your decedents are "muslim" but still cling to much of your old religions as folk beliefs.
But the Seljuks were Turks who conquered the Arabs! And yet instead of converting everyone to ... Tengrism? They took on the religion of their conquered foe.