I feel you give Constantine far too much credit. He was a pragmatic politician and military leader with battles to win, and seized upon a way to roll a stubborn and disaffected sect into his camp. It removed an enemy from his rear, and provided zealous troops for his armies. The sincerity of his 'conversion' to Christianity has always been a point of contention.

Orangutans get too much credit too: once you've been on the internet for some time, you discover there is plenty of 'evidence' that a wide variety of animals can be convinced to mate across species lines. Assigning it some sort of sociological significance is a little dodgy, to my thinking.

Agreed about Constantine. It was a masterful powerplay for him to 'seize' the 'sect' of Christendom.

It's revealing, the historical fact that some of the most important doctrines of the Church (i.e., the "Holy Trinity") were decided by Constantine, and not by insight on the Scriptures.

The Council of Nicea did not decide doctrine, it confirmed doctrine. Arianism was condemned as heresy.

Constantine had nothing to do with it.

I am a Pentecostal. Although I am neither a Catholic or a mainstream Protestant I do accept the early church confessions and creeds as truth.

They are not inspired documents but useful in seeing how Church doctrine developed over time.

Bertrand Russell is one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. Anyone should check out his wonderful 'In Praise of Idleness' collection and especially 'The Case for Socialism' and 'Scylla and Charybdis, or Communism and Fascism'. Both are interesting and thought provoking reads.

Well the thing was that it wasn't just orangutans.
If you look at Sodom and Gomorrah, that was nothing compared to Rome and the Roman Games.

The history of Rome is heavily censored. If as an example, you were at the Market, in Rome, in those days, and in conversation, you asked then, so, what did you do yesterday?

Whatever they said to you, you can be sure, that today, you could not print it.

You have no idea. So what changed with Constantine really?
I mean you still have war, you still have blood guts and gore, at the movies what changed? Rape, and those things were outlawed.

Rome was founded on the Rape of the Sabine women.

Hundreds of thousands of women were raped by trained animals of all varieties, in the Roman games, 300 days a year. That was outlawed.

If you have a stomach for some real Roman life, take a look at this book on-line.
Those About to Die by Daniel P. Mannix.

Personally, I think adults should be allowed to study Roman life, but you cannot. It is censored. You will not find real Roman life on the net. The closest thing you will get is the heavily censored stories such as Suetonius 12 Caesars.

So people have no concept, how barbaric and depraved it was at that time.

As an example of how Roman history is censored completely today, here is a quote from Wikipedia...

"The Rape of the Sabine Women is an episode in the legendary history of Rome in which the first generation of Roman men acquired wives for themselves from the neighboring Sabine families. (In this context, rape means abduction — raptio — rather than its prevalent modern meaning of sexual violation.) "

In this context it means abduction not sexual violation, no, actually it means abduction and repeatedly raped, to the point of the Stockholm syndrome.

But then in those days, rape and abduction was probably not that uncommon. The fact is they just kept them, and the women got used to it, and it stopped being rape after a few days and became like matrimony.

But that doesn't change the fact that it was abduction and rape.

Just because they kept them, does not mean they didn't have sex with them.

Get real. These were bloodthirsty killers. The dregs these early Romans. Barbaric unconscionable butchers basically who had no country, no place to call home because they would not be welcome anywhere.

You know what I think happened, was that you start out with a whole bunch of renegades who have no conscience. Through whatever means, the sociopaths and psychopaths gathered together as outcasts.

So they form a state, their descendants probably were not much different, but over the centuries of the games, enough of them were killed off, until at some point, around Constantine, enough of them were dead and gone and displaced by other people, who would naturally not want to be involved in that like they would, and then by Constantine, it was possible to bring in some semblance of morals and ethics from the Greeks essentially.

America should take a lesson from history, and hold its own games, to kill off its psychopaths, who would be attracted to participate, by the sheer gore and glory of it all.

It would make the world a much safer place.

History begs to differ. Constantine decided that Jesus and God Almighty were the same person. Later they added the holy spirit to conform to pagan customs, made it a third "person" and voilá: we got the "holy" trinity.

About Constantine's influence:



http://www.fsmitha.com/h1/ch24.htm