It never made any sense to me, that Ireland was the only country in the world where christianity was introduced without the sword. I don't believe it. History is written by the winners.
It was introduced in the same way as it was to Norway, Sweden and parts of eastern Europe; Evangelists would target the kings and chieftains for conversion, who themselves would have been aware of the advantages of getting into the imperial club (in fact, if you adopted Christianity, it made you safe from invasion, so it was like a protection racket) . Once rulers were converted, the people had to convert. Their traditional religion was then increasingly suppressed by the newly converted rulers, until eventually made illegal. The old propaganda that the Christian missionaries were 'brave, persecuted martyrs ' against vicious 'pagan' tyrants and savages is just that; bs propaganda. There may have been martyrs, but not to be too facetious about it, if you are going into other societies and telling people how they're all damned or stupid or both, what do you expect? Lol. We had in Ireland a perfectly worthy culture of native wisdom and spirituality that had existed for millennia, in which all Irish people had a place and was just as elaborate in a unified way as anywhere else, until we became a fiefdom to Rome and ended up unable to look each other in the face without fighting over essentially a foreign ideology that didn't (unlike traditional European 'paganism') tolerate any variations and that insisted it alone was the truth. That crippled us.
That makes a lot more sense. It absolutely did cripple us. It was the start of our sorrows. Reminds me of something I read a few years ago, an alternative view that Rome started to crumble when the Legions stopped venerating Vesta.
There are ancient writers who described how mobs of Christians defaced the images of the old gods and burned the temple writings. Europe generally had it's own past and native traditions either wiped out or edited and made subservient to the imperial church
They awaken, Ross. This is so good! 👏✨
Thank you, Trudi!❤️❤️
This one really made me think about the old ways and the ancient ones who were buried and then feared or forgotten. A great poem!
It never made any sense to me, that Ireland was the only country in the world where christianity was introduced without the sword. I don't believe it. History is written by the winners.
It was introduced in the same way as it was to Norway, Sweden and parts of eastern Europe; Evangelists would target the kings and chieftains for conversion, who themselves would have been aware of the advantages of getting into the imperial club (in fact, if you adopted Christianity, it made you safe from invasion, so it was like a protection racket) . Once rulers were converted, the people had to convert. Their traditional religion was then increasingly suppressed by the newly converted rulers, until eventually made illegal. The old propaganda that the Christian missionaries were 'brave, persecuted martyrs ' against vicious 'pagan' tyrants and savages is just that; bs propaganda. There may have been martyrs, but not to be too facetious about it, if you are going into other societies and telling people how they're all damned or stupid or both, what do you expect? Lol. We had in Ireland a perfectly worthy culture of native wisdom and spirituality that had existed for millennia, in which all Irish people had a place and was just as elaborate in a unified way as anywhere else, until we became a fiefdom to Rome and ended up unable to look each other in the face without fighting over essentially a foreign ideology that didn't (unlike traditional European 'paganism') tolerate any variations and that insisted it alone was the truth. That crippled us.
That makes a lot more sense. It absolutely did cripple us. It was the start of our sorrows. Reminds me of something I read a few years ago, an alternative view that Rome started to crumble when the Legions stopped venerating Vesta.
There are ancient writers who described how mobs of Christians defaced the images of the old gods and burned the temple writings. Europe generally had it's own past and native traditions either wiped out or edited and made subservient to the imperial church