[ExI] Existential hysteria [Mirco Romanato]

[BillK]

On Sun, Aug 3, 2014 at 3:40 PM, Mirco Romanato  wrote:
> The main big advantage of Christianity, at the time, was it cared of every
> human life whatsoever. So they adopted abandoned, orphan children (Romans
> would have, at best, taken them as slaves), they didn't practices exposition
> of the infants (so they had less dead children and more surviving one). They
> were altruistic and cared of their own and other's poor. And when plagues
> hit the cities, the clergy of the other gods flew away in the country
> leaving their own and every one else to die.
> Christians were willing to risk and die to take care of the others. So, in
> the end, after very plague, more people were cared and exposed to the
> behavior of Christians. Some would convert, some would change their attitude
> to them from negative to neutral to friendly.

I don't disagree with the above, but...

> They had this rule, left by St. Paul, about "who do not work shall not eat".
> So they were industrious and hard working (the first religion, I think,
> conceiving manual labor as a way to heaven).
> These rules made them more fit, as a whole, than the heathens.
>

I don't think early Christians were particularly hard working. The
hard work ethic didn't appear until the Protestant Reformation in the
Middle Ages.

Early Christians emphasised the early Second Coming of Christ and the
end of the world. Any idea of accumulating worldly goods and riches
was frowned upon.

The quotation of Paul to the Thessalonians has to be seen in context.
Paul was making up the rules for his new religion as he went along and
his first letter had talked about the imminent Second Coming. This led
to the problem that some Thessalonians stopped doing anything to help
the new Christian community, so he had to tell the Thessalonians to
stop feeding the freeloaders. Just common sense, not a spiritual rule
on how to live your life.

BillK