[Mage]

(10-24-2017 06:38 PM)Samseau Wrote:  

(10-22-2017 06:09 AM)Mage Wrote:  

(10-21-2017 10:32 PM)911 Wrote:  

The Romans had an advanced civilization, as the inheritors of Greek and other civilizations, but prior to their leadership embracing Christianity, they lacked the moral foundation to keep their empire going. No amount of technolgy can make up with the kind of moral decay they've undergone. The northern pagans had very little in terms of technology or civilization.

What are you talking about? The Roman decline started after embracing Christianity. It made their warriors soft and not willing to fight.

Roman empire hit their peak at 117 AD, when Christianity was still underground. It kept close to that that peak condition for two more centuries. Rome became Christian during reign of Constantine 306–337AD and shortly thereafter a rapid loss of territory and influence fallowed.

Completely false. Ovid was writing poems about how to pick up Roman women, how they never stopped riding the cock carousel, and how women would get abortions back around 100 AD.

Anyone who has done a modicum of research into Roman decadence knows it started with the birth of the Emperor system, right around 100 AD.

It was only after 200 years of a fucked up Roman world of homosexuality, easy divorce, broken families, and endless bastards did Christianity find a huge Roman population looking for salvation from their hurtful lives.

Constantine himself was a bastard, his mother a believer because she had no one left to turn to except God, and Constantine imposed order on a broken Roman world through God's wrath.

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Romans had a very virtuous pagan culture as did Germans. Not many know this but for instance monogamy in contemporary Christianity is inherited from Roman laws and not from Jews. Jews practiced polygamy from time to time, but Romans were strictly monogamous. The moral decline in Rome's last years has to do with new religions like Christianity overriding the old traditions and some people just losing faith in anything, not being able to preserve old ways and also not being able to accept the new ways.

False again, Roman's had tons of sex slaves. They weren't monogamous unless in the sense they did not marry more than one woman, but they fucked whenever they felt like it.

Same with the Jews, the rich Jews all had concubines. For Christ sake, Augustine, a saint, had concubines. All Roman men had easy access to pussy, but marriage became more and more unobtainable due to broken laws and a broken culture.

Rome was an unsustainable slave economy. It was doomed to end the second they could no longer conquer more land and people.

And slave economies are morally toxic for the slave-owners. This is a big part of why Romans fell into decadence.

It seems that everybody had concubines, Romans, Jews and even early Christians. I think concubinage is not that bad if that helps to keep the family together. It's the legitimacy of children that is most important and therefore the monogamy of married women.

You are right that slave based economy has limitations and it is probably more important factor then religion. It could be that Christianity at that time fared better because Christianity generally was less mean to slaves compared to paganism of that time, so for many people of that time it was an upgrade. However a modern paganism without slavery could do better then Christianity.

I think the Emperor based system could have done moral harm, because it also is a de facto step away from paganism and looking at nature to find inspiration about what is right and what is wrong and starting to look at a single corruptible person, putting that mortal person on the level of Gods, which is blasphemous and most Romans probably knew emperor is no real God, but having to proclaim that belief about loud developed some double think and consequentially - loss of morals.

Thank you for correcting my knowledge about Roman history. I think my point still stands about natural law imposed paganism being more sensible then worshiping of a single individual, be he an emperor or a deified human.