How did people in the ancient world just convince the polis to start worshipping a new god...

>the catholic church actually killed heretics and apostates for hundreds of years
>saying so is being a fedora
What did he mean by this?

>t. Meletus

He meant "I'm a fucking imbecile who has ZERO answer for your fair and accurate criticisms of my cult, so I'm going to quote a meme at you and imagine that I won the debate :^)"

Augustus got the Senate to officially Deify Caesar. The people loved Caesar already and Augustus was Pontifex Maximus, head of religion, so no one minded him.

t. science worshipper

Catholics aren't Christian

Nice meme, kike worshiping submoron.

>tfw invents wine

Corrupting the youth and impiety. Essentially he was asking questions about the nature, attributes, existences, etc. of the Gods. This was essentially seen as reckless endangerment and treason, as denial/disrespect of the deities put the lives of yourself, your family, and your state in extreme danger.

Also he was pissing off some very powerful people, who were tired of being publicly embarrassed.

protestants aren't Christian

Also he was accused of sophistry

My bad

It wasn't at all inconceivable to them that there were gods that they didn't know about. Gods were physical forces of nature, nobody knew how many gods there were, they just had a few of them which they felt reasonably sure about, owing to the lack of catastrophic failure after state rituals appeasing them in the past. When the Roman senate would beseech all of the gods they would list the ones they knew and then add "and all the other gods" in case they missed somebody they didn't know about and he got pissed.

Similarly foreign peoples gods were believed to exist, only their power was limited to the areas inhabited by foreign people. When the Romans entered Germania they sacrificed to Germanic gods. If a foreign god or a god they hadn't heard of before could be enticed to protect Rome they weren't going to reject it.

It wasn't a problem for them that Jews and Christians were engaging in monotheist religion, the Jews, however much the state hated them, could not be accused of a lack of religion because they worshiped an extremely ancient God as their ancestors had done before them. Christians however were persecuted as atheists, because rather than continuing to guarantee the safety of the state by honoring the gods of their particular household, which they were ancestrally obligated to worship, they rejected all the other gods apart from God.

Socrates forced to suicide
Alcibiades exiled
The Athenian sculptor friend of Pericles imprisoned because blasphemy charges so pagan conservatives were not to be messed with

>It wasn't a problem for them that Jews and Christians were engaging in monotheist religion, the Jews, however much the state hated them, could not be accused of a lack of religion because they worshiped an extremely ancient God as their ancestors had done before them. Christians however were persecuted as atheists, because rather than continuing to guarantee the safety of the state by honoring the gods of their particular household

The irony.

In ancient times, people didn't believe in science, can't form their own beliefs and lacked morality like we know it today (i.e the law), so they turn to god(s) and formed religions to guide them (selves) and entire societies.

How come Jews weren't condemned for that again? I heard that one of the problems was that Christians didn't have a "physical" form to their god, but that would also apply to Jews. I don't get it.

You can't be this innocent.

Seriously, why are atheists so fucking ignorant about religion? There was a time when you had to make sure all your shit was in order or you'd get btfo for not knowing what you're talking about.
Now any fatass can get butthurt about his mum making him go to Sunday school instead of playing Mario 63792 and can find a community on the internet.

Everything in the universe degenerates. Unless we stay patiently vigilant, the purpose of religion fades away like the colors on your shirt in the sun.

When a child doesn't find church interesting and doesn't want to go then something is wrong with the church, not the child.

Could be (talking out of my ass) that Jews were tiny, essentially an ethnic group, generally spatially condensed and didn't proselytize.

Christians were none of these things.

Think about it this way: you might have a big, ugly mole. But there are risks to removal so you leave it alone.

But then you get another which grows malignant and starts spreading everywhere.

That one you burn till it's dead.

Was atheism an offense for the Romans?

Considering religious reverence (to the Caesar, iirc) was important to keep the state powerful, it would make sense why they'd be intolerant of that.

The impiety thing was just another excuse to stack on him.
Most presocratic philosophers openly renounced traditional pantheons and some didn't even have a place for gods in their cosmologies at all, and they lived in less free city-states than athens.

Dionysos is attested in Linear B from at least Mycenaean times. So either he's a native Olympian or they adopted him real fucking early.

Oh the irony.
How different would Greece have been if Socrates didn't get executed? What if the people he pissed off didn't get that butthurt?

in a way you could argue that socrates halted "science" considering he shifted philosophy to a focus on ethics instead of understanding the natural world.

Interesting. I thought Christians were seen as weird in Rome because their religion was "new"

atheism in the greco roman world did not mean not believing in gods. It meant that you are disrespectful to nature and the cosmos. Which is the reason why christians and jews were hunted down.

well considering that two of his stundets started terrible dictatorships by usurping power and he was known for his antidemocratic stance, it was only a matter of time until they trialed him.
Most of the Athenians weren't happy with his death and even the court was split

considering his myths are as old as all the other myths its safe to assume he was already part of the pantheon.
But people atleast in the hellenistic era did not care how you would call a god. There were many other cults later on

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity#Catholic_Church

sure user

Socrates was a mentor to people who started building a rival power base to the Athenian establishment.

"Corrupting the youth" was a BS charge. They simply didn't want rivals organizing and Soctrates was a mentor figure for the other side.

Atheism related to the imperial cult would basically amount to treason. Disrespecting the gods they drew sovereignty from (Jupiter specifically) would amount to the same.

Not worshiping the rest of the pantheon was persecuted at various times under the belief it made the gods angry and was downright dangerous for the state to be 'complicit' in by not persecuting it.

However, for long periods the Romans didn't enforce much religiously and probably wouldn't have cared if some random peasants in North Africa weren't worshiping the pantheon, or denied all gods existed. As a member of high society closer to Rome, you'd be under more scrutiny.

Rome existed for a huge period though, and it obviously varied with the times.

>Atheism related to the imperial cult would basically amount to treason. Disrespecting the gods they drew sovereignty from (Jupiter specifically) would amount to the same.

Rome murdered like every other Emperor - I think you overstate the piety of the Roman upper class. By contrast Egypt had thousands of years with very very few assassinations of Pharaohs.

I don't think the Romans were very pious at all. But, the Julio-Claudian emperors had an air of divinity, Rome began murdering emperors like candy after their fall when the office became less divine. Publicly refusing to worship past Emperors as divine, for most of the Empire, was basically a giant middle finger to the authority of the state. It didn't have much to do with actually believing, just the political reality of acknowledgement of imperial supremacy through religion. I don't think what Rome thought of private atheism is relevant, or even knowable.

Catholics would disagree.

Romans hated Christians because they refused to honour Roman gods. is talking shit.

sources?
not even a better explanation?