[asacrowflies]

What about all the horror death and suffering done in his name ? Like a huge proportion of these Christmas culture things come from pagan Norse culture that was very forcibly christianized in a rather brutal way??? You seem to be overlooking a lot to make someone "awesome" or at least the horrors done in their name long after death.

[aristofun]

All those horrors are not unique to human nature unfortunately, nor to the religion. Same or worth things were done in the name of any deity you can think of.

It’s not something that he brought to this world.

But what he brought was powerful and radical enough to slowly and eventually overcome many of the terrible animal-like human traits. Christian societies were the first that got rid of slavery, introduced human rights, democracy etc.

Yes, it took a long time to unravel and it’s not a finished process, but it’s not something that just happened. What feel natural for us today was not natural at all back then.

All critical ethical ideas that modern western civilization is based were either invented or popularized by that guy in some unique and unprecedented way.

[throwaway-11-1]

Absolutely not true and highly ahistorical. Seriously grow up

[aristofun]

Seriously grow up and learn to prove your points with some logic or examples.

[sethammons]

Oh my. Paste your stuff into ai and have an impartial conversation. You are not grounded in reality and I believe your views are dangerous because they rewrite truths into a package that has been and will continue to be used as a cudgel against others.

I challenge you to provide one thing that jesus introduced. It turns out, EVERYTHING he taught already existed. I can paste a table of data, but ai is cleaner and faster.

And democracy is _famously_ Greek. Over half six hundred years before Jesus lived.

His historical impact comes less from novelty and more from narrative power, charismatic delivery, and, later, institutional amplification. And it is largely Paul who should be credited for amplification.

[aristofun]

You know that greek democracy had very little to do with what we called democracy in the west right?

Show me other religion that taught to love your enemies and survived to these days at the same time. Just a tiny example of why you totally miss the point by not seeing how innovative was his ethical approach for that time. And yes, one of his great achievements is that he succeeded to make those simple and already existed ideas popular. This is novelty by itself.