“Atheist Delusions.” — in hand! Reading away. Introduction is impressive: “all narrative is interpretation, no intetpretation can be free of all prejudice”

Jumped to the section described as the heart of the book, there we read about the profound personal sea-change involved in a person who makes the change from pagan whatnot to catechumen, to baptized Christian back in the early centuries. Still hoping to read more about what it is that lead a ‘whatnot’ person to commit to such a thing as radical as Christianity over against the mundane other choices with fewer restrictions on behavior.

Fr. Hans: As I read the above I felt I was reading ‘about a picture’, ‘what effect the picture had on various viewers’, ‘the paint used in the picture’, ‘the nature of the picture’s frame’– in short everything except why I care: What’s going on there from the inside?

Here above in your remarks and the bishop’s remarks in the article we see observed the effects of such choosing to be Christian over against whatnot of the day. For example ‘the moral life was the driver that turned the conscience of the pagan’ and other various characterizations and metrics as to the extent of effects, notable political developments and so forth and so on. They remind me of the quality I feel are part of Archbishop Demetrios’ very thoughtful written remarks and often in his talks, I’ll call it ‘the observer relating what can be seen with high attainment’. Still and all, though, somehow, featuring, relating and organizing the many details available to sight and observation — all externals so to speak. Somehow, well, sterile, sanitary, tidy, missing the main event somehow. Not incorrect, on the contrary quite correctly organized and with as little internal meaning clashes and contradictions as the written language with the discipline of reason and logic appears capable. Still it feels like speaking about a barrel holding something– then talking about everything except what’s in it or why folk chose to interact with it, which certainly was not owing to deeply intellectual ‘broad sweep of history’ dynamics, at least not foremost.

I feel it most likely that the average dubiously literate Roman citizen in the early several hundred years in question considering Christianity was fantastically unaware of the article’s ‘broad sweep of history’ agenda goals. Most, if able to grasp it at all, certainly would NOT place those outcomes front and center as their motivators for why it was they chose to live as they did.

Was it because most ‘loved God’? That too is a consequence, the saying of that. Whether you love someone or not is a thing you either do or a thing that happens (or both)– in either case long before words issue forth about it. It certainly wasn’t ‘I love God so I’ll do this or that they say in church or in this gold book to prove it.’ Reaching for a strained but hopefully still useful metaphor: One’s mental personality chess pieces (both black and white) arranged on one’s inner ‘game board’ where both sets of pieces are arranged by one person in whose head this lives — lead to generally predictable ‘next moves’ and sometimes even predictable outcomes. Most Christians whether married or not have their inner ‘chess pieces’ arranged with tensions and relationships in such fashion they aren’t much interested in random sex, for example. There’s rarely this inner discussion: ‘Oh, I better not chat that person up because I’m a Christian after all and I need to prove it to God so I’ll not leap in the sack with whatever their name is I forget’.

Back in centuries before 1900’s to include the Roman era one could deem it ‘Machivellian’ pressure from civil authority leadership (usually dictators) to the Christian life among the people, owing to pragmatism about early death being bad for the army ranks and labor pool if the invaders next door were to be dealt with or if conquest was to be successful. But they were far from the daily life of the average person choosing how to live.

Consider real life, a family setting: A young girl soon to be wife (14 years old..) certainly might die in the course of pregnancy even if choosing abortion (popular at the time, risking the woman’s death though it did). If her parents are capable of love they would not want that for their daughter, the disease risk, the pregnancy risk, unless was ‘worth it’, lasting, leading to a future worth risking for. Not random. Having been 14 themselves they knew what impulses the local hot-bloods feel and so deemed protection from random sex by almost any means wisdom. Now unimportant disease then led often to death within days or a couple years at most. Fast forward to today. Big changes!! Sex today rarely leads to unwanted pregnancy and pregnancy almost never results in the mother’s death anymore. That’s a big change. Only ignorant, careless, mostly male-male promiscuous sex leads to horrific illness anymore.

Was it that then that folk past adolescence in government noticed that Christians didn’t die so soon and generally led lives they wished for themselves having made other choices, and so ‘got on the bandwagon’ for pragmatic government competitive reasons— still while rather missing ‘the reason for it all’, the reason the ‘usually not so literate everyman’ who chose it even at social peril, unaware of the ‘broad sweep of governance and history issues’ chose it?

To the extent the observer is willing to say that person lives the way they do seems not about choices owing to reasons at odds with ‘who they are’– but more about having arranged ‘who they are’ internally so that the internal chosen array of mental relationships that ‘just naturally follows’ is the observed ‘Christian life’. I suspect the often used scriptural metaphors of ‘flowing’ arise from this same theme. One arranges matters more or less ‘so that’ when life is then lived or ‘released’ what ‘flows forth’ or naturally follows is what observers call ‘The Christian life’. The life that led to the various outcomes described by mass attempts toward the practice of Christianity in the article.

What is it that causes folk to reach into their own chosen internal mental array of tensions and cooperations and various inter-relationships (generally called ‘personality’ by outside observers) and fuss those ‘personality comprising chess piece elements’ about so that ‘just naturally, the further flowing developments ‘ are such that the external observer calls how that person lives ‘The Christian life’? It’s not about agendas to do with ‘the sweep of history’ I think. And I don’t think it’s about anything like ‘they love God and so pay attention to his to-do list in the gold book’. What leads to the decision to re-arrange the personality so it all flows ‘natrually’ or ‘as everyone expected’ in a fashion described as Christian then?

Those are the sorts of articles I think will lead to growth, the sort I want to read.

Harry, read “Atheist Delusions.” It goes into great detail about this very question. In fact, it sees the Early Christian commitment to the moral life as the driver that turned the conscience of the pagan (there was no such thing as atheism back then) towards Christ. Constantine’s vision at the Milvian Bridge and the subsequent lifting of the persecutions would probably (historical speculation is always a contentious enterprise) have been impossible.

Looking closer at your question, are you asking too how come they were moral and we aren’t?

Why was it, back in those days, the Christians under such circumstances of persecution nevertheless deemed it worth-while to live the moral life?