Three major world religions (Christianity, Islam & Buddhism) have spread tens of thousands of kilometres from their place of origin, to hundreds of millions of followers. I want to briefly compare what techniques each used to achieve this reproductive success.
Islam
The cliche is of Arabs gallopping through the desert on their trusty steeds, converting thousands at the point of a sword. The truth is a lot more complicated: although there were forced conversions, most of Islam is accounted for by other methods. Think about it, how practical is it to conquer a country and then go door to door telling people “convert or die” over and over again? The Islamic conquest was successful because they weren’t idiots: they knew that to keep a country stable once capturing it the best thing is to leave the population alone and not impose too many changes.
A lot of conversions were made by proxy: the leader of a large clan would, as part of political wheeling and dealing (we’ll all convert to Islam as part of our alliance). This is a much more efficient way — convert the leaders and their subjects follow in one swoop. It created many more Muslims than direct compulsion did. The other method was cultural influence and discrimination: barring non-Muslims from entering public service posts above a certain level, making them pay the dhimmi tax etc. When they captured a new land and installed themselves as rulers, most of the population would be non-Muslim. But a few centuries later, and suddenly everyone’s going on Hajj.
Christianity
Again, a huge portion of conversions came on mass with entire clans and kingdoms converting. Of course force was also applied at times. This was most prominent was Christianity’s spread to the Americas. But again, it was probably more indirect than conversion at gunpoint. When the Spaniards destroyed the Inca, Aztec and other civilisations, they destroyed the entire elaborate religious hierarchy. Which left the population wide open to receiving the Gospel.
A great marketing tactic was of course the interpolation of local customs and beliefs into Catholicism. There are the well-known pagan origins of Easter and Christmas, but it goes deeper than that. Because Catholicism had saints, they could effectively recognise the gods/spirits of a population, subsuming them within Catholicism. Thus, a lot of Latin American religious festivals are connected to pre-Columbian spirits and beliefs. As Thomas Paine said: the Mythologists had gods for everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for everything; the church became as crowded with one, as the Pantheon had been with the other, and Rome was the place of both (Age of Reason I,2).
Buddhism
Finally Buddhism used a combination of all the above marketing tactics (except forced conversion as far as I know). It had the distinct advantage of being non-exclusive, thus it would be a much easier sell to either a king/leader or a commoner (you don’t have to leave your old beliefs, you can be Buddhist in addition). Local gods/beliefs were melded with Buddhist traditions very smoothly, such that in some Buddhist countries they cannot be separated.
There is an interesting bit of hypocrisy often played out by westerners: they see the Catholic appropriation and toleration of local customs as something sinister. And yet a very similar thing in Buddhism is seen as a strength (it’s non-exclusive and therefore tolerant). Yes, Catholicism shook up more of the local customs and was more exclusive. But if there’s talk of Catholicism committing “cultural genocide” then so did Buddhism on many occasions (eg. all but replacing the native Tibetan Bon religion).
Call me a cynic but I don’t see appropriating the beliefs of others as pure tolerance, but also as a way of insinuating yourself onto others in a subtle manner. Call me a cynic but I did not discuss the 3 religions’ actual content in talking of their spread. I think content isn’t nearly as important as might be thought: the marketing is as important if not more.
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It’s long been established that to convert someone to your way of thinking, the best way is to pretend they already think like you and just change some minor details. Then you slowly reinforce your ideas while ignoring their old ones. It’s a standard practice of cult indoctrination.
Although I guess the complete opposite (you’ve been lied to all your life, everything you know needs to be rethought completely) works well for cults too
>”There are the well-known pagan origins of Easter and Christmas”
Easter and Christmas are not of pagan origin.
The word “Easter” is of pagan origin, but the Christian liturgical event is named “Pascha”. The term Easter is used in some Western countries, but most of the world’s Christians refer to the holy day as Pascha.
Christmas is also not of pagan origin. The date was set long before the famed astronomical events. The date for Christmas is based on the fact that it is about 9 months from Christ’s traditional date of conception. The inherent problem in the pagan origins of Christmas myth is that it doesn’t explain why Orthodox Christians observe Christmas on January 6th, well after the astronomical event.
The myths are popular where as the facts are not.
BTW, since your two paragraphs on Christianity are nearly exclusively regarding Catholicism, why not just rename that section from Christianity to Catholicism?
God bless… +Timothy
Hi Timothy
I was mainly referring to the celebratory traditions of Xmas/Easter (eg. eggs and tree) which certainly don’t have a Biblical basis — I don’t think you’d disagree that these elements had pagan roots? I was not talking about the official basis for the festival itself or the date. The idea is that the Church incorporated elements from pagan holidays close to the date it set for its festivals.
However, I think the Orthodox Christmas is on the 6th simply because the Orthodox Church still follows the old style calendar in its liturgy (being a bit more conservative than the Catholic church), hence the difference of about 11 days [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates].
The two dates originally coincided and my parents’ Russian friends still have a drink on I think Jan 11th to celebrate the “Old New Year”
Timothy,
You are confused, and rightly so, because you seem to be someone who believes in ad hoc things, such as transfiguration.
Christmas does have pagan origins. In fact, the whole Christianity does have pagan connections. By the way, the word “pagan” refers to myths, religions, cultural habits, etc, prior to Christianity.
Let me give you one example of a pagan concept in Christianity: the concept of virgin birth. It was common amongst the Pythagoreans.
Let me give you another example of a concept borrowed by Christianity: that of trinity. Zoroastrians had it, some thousand years before Christianity. Incidentally, the concept of halo (which certain Christian sects use to depict their saints) is the same halo found on Ahura Mazda’s head.
Why is number 12 important? We have 12 apostles, we have 12 gods on Olympus, and there are other instances of its appearance in the long past. I think the answer is that 12 has a relatively large number of divisors: 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12. Whereas 10 has fewer: 1, 2, 5, 10. This is to say that often practical rules have been embodied into religions.
Religions like yours adopt many things from the past. It is only natural. Religions appear in times of tumult, they serve some group’s purposes, they have helped people click to one another and survive. They have been a basis for cultural and sexual development, and a basis for overcoming the fear of the unknown.
It is true that, to-date, there are many religious people, but this is because most of us still have primitive biology and cannot logically overcome what has been instilled into us by the environment or, perhaps, by evolution.
There is a continuum of social evolution and this includes religion. It is absurd to think that a particular religion has no connections to the past. Everyone does, like every other human activity!
Incidentally, the reason that the Russian Orthodox still use the Julian rather than the Gregorian calendar (resulting in delayed celebrations of Christmas and New Year) has nothing to do with religion but with politics: When the bolsheviks decided to adopt the new calendar, the Russian Orthodox Church made a statement by saying “no, we are not going to do what the communists want us to”–a silly statement, of course. And, to this day, the Russian Orthodox (idiots) still use the Julian calendar.
The Greek Orthodox (idiots too) use the Gregorian calendar and celebrate Christmas on 25 December.
Many cultures before Christianity had 25th of December (or around that day) as a Winter Holiday; a way to take a break from the long cold winter. Christianity, merely changed the name of it from whatever it was before to Christmas.
All Christian sects (Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Scientologists, etc) do suffer from conservatism: they do not want to admit they have anything to do with religions before them. No matter how you try to reveal them the facts, they will not accept them. You cannot blame them. The part of their brain that processes their religious ad hoc beliefs cannot accept logic. Hence it has to reject anything that goes against blind faith. It’s not their fault. It’s the nature of Christianity (and, to be fair, other religions too) to resist logic and rationality.
Just to make another point, when I (and probably Takis) say “belief X has a pagan origin”, it’s not suggesting that it’s of solely pagan origin and that it was lifted wholesale from a particular religion — only that it was one of the many direct and indirect influences on belief X.
Michael,
This is to confirm that I agree (and it is my intention) that the word `pagan’ has to be interpreted more broadly. After all, nobody considered himself or herself pagan at the year, say, 800 BCE. The word `pagan’ was introduced by later religions. Moreover, I don’t think that people considered themselves religious or non-religious in, say, classical Greece. Religion was part of the whole system of life. And there was not a *single* religion. There was Orphism, there was the religion of Dionysus. There was the moral system of the Pythagoreans. And so on… All these have been lumped into a single word by the Christians: Pagansim. In Plato’s Academy, nobody studied religion only; they did so in combination with other subjects: mathematics, philosophy, rhetorics, etc. We should be aware that the terms we use have been introduced at later times and offer a skewed view of what society was about in these times.
As a matter of fact, it could very well be the case that Jesus never thought he was starting a new religion. He probably considered himself as an enlightened Jew.
Let me offer another example of direct connection between Christianity and “paganism”. The origin of the architecture of proto-christian churches was, for long time, a mystery. In the early 20th century a neo-Pythagorean basilica was discovered in Rome. Carcopino wrote a book on it–long forgotten. When you look at the basilica you immediately recognize the shape of an Eastern Orthodox church! Except that there are no icons, no crosses, just Pythagorean symbols.
I’m afraid that, contrary to what our fellow blind-believers want to believe (but that’s their job: to believe, to have faith even though facts suggest otherwise), almost any religion is a direct consequence of religions preceding it. Still, no matter how many proofs of this fact you give, whoever wants to ignore them and, simply, say that proofs are Satan’s work, will certainly ignore you and me and anybody else who looks at the facts with open eyes, who questions everything, who does not accept anything unless proven true.
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