As a student of history you are of course aware of who kept civilization going while Christianity was clawing up the furniture and pissing on the carpets in Europe. "That's not fair, that wasn't about religion, that was about politics, see Christianity was a better method of social control than the big mess of every conquered people's religions that preceded it because a monotheistic state religion doesn't leave room for dissent and it was close enough to the cult of Mithras to not alienate the army, so it was encouraged to be violent and repressive from the start to keep the proles in line and that was ingrained by the time it was all that was left of the Empire..." Sure, but using most of the Middle East as proxies for the cold war was politics too.
Who knows what I'm aware of, really. The problem with saying things like this is that it reinforces surface-level history, and people share it, and then other people come later and read it, etc, etc. It is a vast oversimplification. However, I'm not about to take you to task for that because I oversimplify every single post I make on purpose, mostly to see who I can provoke into spewing bullshit. Tonight I was hoping someone would wander by who had majored in theory of religious equality but no dice. Anyway, it continues to take a hell of a lot of rationalization to mount what might be called the progressive position in this particular debate. Aside, I don't think Mithras gets mentioned enough. Something that should be on everyone's bucket list is the Vatican Necropolis, which shelters a lot of "pagan" rock drawings which were possibly/probably Mithraic. It's literally directly under the high seat of Catholicism on earth. That's so fantasy.As a student of history you are of course aware of who kept civilization going while Christianity was clawing up the furniture and pissing on the carpets in Europe.
Hermes is my shepard Meanwhile at Siena Cathedral