In the second and third centuries, The Christian Church set out to evangelize the pagan world. But it found that the only way it could gain many converts from paganism was to compromise the clear teaching of scripture to accommodate pagan views, so making ‘Christianity’ much more acceptable. Offered the choice of paganised ‘Christianity’ or the sword, the pagans saw they did not have to change their basic views about death and the hereafter. They only had to accommodate the new teaching with their own. They could live with paganized Christianity, but to remain wholly pagan they would die. Most people would rather live with compromise than die with inflexible religious ideas.
In this way the so-called ‘Christian Church’ compromised Biblical Christianity and the pagans compromised paganism. The result is what we have largely all around us even to day, a mixture of Christianity into paganism, or, paganised Christianity. This, with the fear of death, helped along by the Crusades and The Inquisition, brought wholesale national conversions. Europe, which had been wholly pagan, became a little less pagan in accepting Catholicism rather than the sword. It became mainly Catholic and called ‘Christian’. Religious doctrines and customs remained largely the same – only the names/symbolisms of things were changed!
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