Abraham's month. The past. The present. Hannukah & Christmas.

[Contrarian]

--> Is irrelevant what my birth religion is, it wasn't even practiced that much due to the system around. I have a strong opinion that in 313 AD, Emperor Constantine (Picture below) of the Roman Empire made a grave mistake by accepting the new Abrahamic religion in the empire. 

--> He therefore buried the memory of Marcus Aurelius (Picture below), shamed the Roman Empire in my view and destroyed the teachings of reason for a political decision. 

We are in 2022.

-> This December I will call it: Abraham's month. It is what it is, they won the war at the end. I am not a savage, part of life is to accept the realism around one's.

-> The melancholia is still there, no matter how one moves away from one's tribalism, the programming is still there. 😄

-> For all the Jews and Christians: Hanukkah Sameach & Merry Christmas. 

*This is I think an Eastern European girl's music about Jerusalem, is the reason I started this thread, it showed up on my YouTube recommendations:  

Edited December 19, 2022 by Contrarian

[Contrarian]

The Romans before Constantine's decision did not have the same idea of “religion” that we do.

To them “religio” was the proper veneration of the gods, and had nothing to do with “belief”.

Belief was philosophy.

This modern idea of classifying “religions” based on people's ideas about metaphysics would have been totally alien. 

The Romans had their traditional tribal gods. The ones you learn about if you read any book on Roman mythology.

But as polytheists they believed that every tribe had their own gods. Unlike monotheists it doesn’t bother polytheists if other people worship different gods.

Marcus Aurelius believed in the Roman gods and said so. But like many polytheists he also believed in a higher power (higher than the gods) who he referred to as Reason, the Kosmos, and Providence.

It is the higher power that is sometimes translated as “God”. (Since he was writing in Greek and did not use the word “God” ever.) In ancient Rome it was generally accepted that the Jews (who refused to honour the Roman deities) still worshipped the same higher power as the Romans.

He believed in piety, which means he performed the proper rituals to all the Roman gods and even some foreign ones when the occasion warranted it. The Romans were notorious syncretists and considered most foreign gods to variations on their gods.

Source: A response of a user on Quora

Edited December 23, 2022 by Contrarian