Atheist Memes

All religions have equal claim to this. And they’re all fucking bullshit made up by patriarchal assholes who were so terrified of losing their absolute power, they would kill anyone who would challenge it. For millennia.

'Christianity' and 'the Roman Catholic Church' are two very different things. Christianity had very little traction in the world until a certain Roman Emperor saw his empire in decline, realized that military power alone would not keep it strong. What he needed was a borderless, stateless religious empire, with this mythical God as his power source, so he appropriated the Christian religion, made himself the leader (Pope) of it, and used religion, not military power, to control the people. To this day, the Roman Empire and the power of the Roman Emperor to rule all mankind continues under the guise of the Holly Roman Catholic Church. It has very little to do with Jesus Christ, and everything to do with the perpetuation of the dominance of the Roman Empire and the dictatorial authority of the Roman Emperor.

Did Buddhism become a major religion by the quality of its truth? I am doubtful ...

Why Christianity became the superpower religion it did is quite debatable. But it probably wasn't through all that much violence. The violence happened later.

Christianity spread first in Europe, and in general, by offering the toiling classes something to look forward to besides suffering. For a bit charlemagne tried to spread it at the tip of a sword but that was more the exception then the rule.

It spread through the America's partly through violent colonization but also for the above reasons and the natives desire to assimilate into the new ruling class.

It spread and continues to spread through sub saharan Africa mostly due to heavy evangelical prosthelyzation from the west. By the time of African colonization the Europeans were directing there violence towards securing resources, not securing converts, even though that was the excuse they often gave.

Christianity may not be true but it is an attractive world view. Yes you may suffer the cruelty of others on earth but that is temporary, at the end of it all you will spend eternity in paradise and your torturers will be sent to hell. There's a reason Marx called it the opiates of the masses, and the promises of opium don't need to be true to sell.

Christianity became a major religion by first generating mass appeal among the lowest class and then winning the support of key figures within the highest class. The class contradiction of the proletariat and aristocracy was (somewhat) reconciled through articles of religious faith that promised egalitarian utopianism to those that played nicely within their respective rolls.

The meme is overly simplistic, as it neglects the prevailing systems of violence predating Christianity. Systems which Christianity promised relief from - first by way of its evangalized utopianism and then by its capacity for resolving contradictions between classes which expanded the military and economic power of its adherents.

Later iterations of Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, and more baroque cult faiths like Scientology have repeated this pattern while the earlier iterations stagnate and calcify around a permanent gentry class. It isn't the Truth or the Violence that gives these religions its rapidly growing pool of adherents, but the promise of upward mobility and economic expansionism.

These faiths fail when alternative social structures outperform them. One religion replaces another when the growing congregants create more opportunities to join the prelate class and rise above one's inherited role in society. Capitalist institutions supplant church institutions when more people can join these large multinational management structures than can join the religious ministries (and church institutions infiltrate capitalist structures when religious denomination dictates one's managerial ceiling). Socialist institutions replace capitalist ones when state bureaucracies outperform private enterprises and party politics expands to encompass more of the proletariat.

"Truth" only matters in so far as individuals can realize a better standard of living. "Violence" only matters when participants can harvest their higher standards of living at their neighbors' expense. But the root of success in all these institutions is the speed and efficiency through which they incorporate more unaligned people into more (perceived) prosperous conditions.

Uh... Christianity spread a lot nonviolently though? Also a lot violently, but there's a reason Constantine (it was Constantine right?) converted and it's not because he was threatened with violence.

I honestly don't think this is true, I think it's the savior part that made it successful.

Say you're a shitty person by stealing, lying, slept with married women and being a con man. If you can repent in your older years and all is forgiven by god, that releases the guilt.

In my mind, guilt is the emotion of control for most major religions. If you give rules that if you break are super "wrong," but actually human nature (like sex), you will be able to control the masses. The religion alone can release the guilt that the religion made up.

Not by the quality of its truth but by the quantity of its violence.

Very true, but don't disregard the quality of its truth. I'd say that most of the claims of miracles were used to justify the violence. And both can be dropped in favor of the core truth.