Belindi wrote: ↑February 18th, 2019, 8:37 am
My examples of top-down imposition of an ideology were Muhammad's, Constantine's, and Lenin's.
Yes. Constantine comes before Muhammad.
Rome already had a strong Christian community and the sect was spreading across the colonies through zealous missionary work. It had a wide appeal to the underclasses, and the polytheism of ancient Rome was badly diluted by identification with foreign gods; the reigns of Nero and Caligula did a huge amount of damage to its credibility, which later persecution of other religions did not mitigate (good for extra taxation and circuses, though). By the time Constantine came along, Rome was ready for a fresh, uncorrupted religion. His own mother and probably many of his troops were already openly Christian. It was a popular move to declare it the official religion after a military victory, and an excellent vehicle to promote Roman law through the conquered territories, since he could send in the priests with a carrot behind the armies and their stick. It caught on pretty well, too, in most places.
So, for top-down, yes, it was a shrewd political move - as it proved later on for the progeny of the Roman empire: Imperial England, Spain, Portugal, Belgium and France. The difference was that Rome practiced its proselytizing with a lighter hand, incorporating local rituals, totems and feast-days in its version of Christianity, declaring local heroes Christian saints. It was also quite brilliant to raise Mary to prominence, as some pagan peoples wouldn't accept a sole male deity.
What happened to the moral values as a result?
Muhammad was concerned for the future of his people. The Christians were becoming very aggressive and intolerant by the 600's; Arabs were comparatively few and scattered, fighting among themselves. He knew that they must unite in order to survive. He had some knowledge of both Christianity (some local forms, which may not have been mainstream doctrine) and Judaism through his travels as a merchant. He saw what a unifying force a single, strong, law-making god can be, as compared to all the little tribal demons and djinns besetting the Arabs of his time. So he went and had himself some visions - providently enlisting a scribe to record them. He was a smart man, an excellent organizer; he had deep psychological insight and could motivate people (women, too). This was no top-down imposition of an ideology: he was nowhere near the top when he began, nor did he have the means to impose anything on anybody. What he did was
persuade other men to follow him and inspire passionate loyalty. Interestingly, for one with no formal education, he prized knowledge greatly and made it a tenet of his religion, and eschewed idolatry of the human. We know what happened to the people who took on this new religion: they formed a very successful armed alliance and set out to build empires.
What happened to the moral values as a result?
Lenin was no king or emperor, either. What he had was an understanding of how his people were oppressed, trampled down and terrorized by the aristocracy - and their complicit priesthood. Europe flourished all through the Industrial revolution; its middle class increased and prospered; its standard of living was high; even its exploited working classes were better off than the Russians, still mired in feudal practice if not law. The rulership was so rotten, in fact, that they were close to a French-style revolution long before Lenin came along. Some attempts had been made by illicit political organizations to affect change: one finally managed to assassinate a czar in the late 19th century (ah, here we are - Alexander II, 1881,
https://www.bl.uk/russian-revolution/ar ... revolution ) A whole lot of heavy **** went down then - repression, rescinding of previous rights, persecutions, pogroms, etc. - all the same mistakes the French had made a century earlier. Then famine, riots, a world war... Russian people so desperate they'd follow anyone who promised them a different government; betrayed and disappointed by one leader after another; civil war. Lenin never had power to impose anything on anybody. (Stalin eventually did, but that's not an ideology so much as an autocracy with ideological makeup on its face.)
What happened to the moral values as a result?
I accept that your warning applies to me, as I want history to shed light upon the present day and a generalisation such as the above might help, and this is for me to be biased before all possible evidence is in. I do however keep an open mind, and I support the airing of ideas including half baked ideas for testing opinions from others.
How is the testing to be done? And what are you testing for? (I mean: methodology, parameters and intent)
Regarding the theory of threefold deaths of priest kings as an aid to social order...
I still don't know what priest-king you're talking about. What period? Which region of the world? What religion?
The only candidates I can think of without more information are the Aztec semi-divine kings. I'm not aware of any pre-civilized, hunting, fishing or early farming peoples who combined the two offices of leadership and priesthood, and I don't know of any who ritually killed their chiefs. (Human sacrifice, yes. Young men usually considered most valuable, but children are common.)
The threefold death of a priest king arguably was an ancient custom that was still observed by a certain religious sect when Jesus was killed.
What is the custom of three-fold death? Can you provide a citation?
Jesus, assuming there was such a person, was killed at the height of Roman Imperialism. By then, there were and had been numerous urban, highly organized, militant, multi-layered civilizations. What ancient sects would be left to exert an influence in the Middle East?
Gospel evidence
is an oxymoron.
Crucifixion takes a long time. Some kind (or impatient) guard would help a condemned man out with a spear (just as a kind, or bribed executioner would strangle heretics condemned to burning at the stake) and the sponge was soaked in dilute vinegar - a cooling drink.
Bog bodies also reveal (questionable)evidence of threefold death.
I'm sorry - they don't. They're all over the place and all over the time-scale; some murdered in the 20th or another century, some killed in battle or by highwaymen, stabbed, hanged, head bashed in; some just died, sometime, of something.
The main generalisation that may be abstracted from the threefold death of the priest king theory is that human social order may be such that sometimes and in some places the society is vastly more important than the individual and that this ethic is not confined to modern communism.
In fact, you can generalize more, and without the king: all social order is predicated on the collective taking precedence over the individual. And that organizational principle goes back to long before humans evolved. The degree of disparity in importance varies, yes. In theocracies and monarchies, as well as dictatorships
ostensibly based on some ideology, the general population doesn't count at all, and has no enforceable rights, while a few individuals - an elite - have all the rights. In hereditary divided societies like slave-owning, Indian-massacring American colonies, feudal states and caste systems, some categories of people have zero rights, some have limited rights and some have sweeping rights. In constitutional governance, individual and class rights are spelled out in a formal declaration and codified in a body of laws - which invariably allow the state to override citizen's rights in many instances, in many ways and for many reasons. (taxation, conscription, eminent domain, search and seizure, trade regulation, crowd control, internment, licensing and inspection, capital punishment, etc.).
(ps There is no modern communism on a national level; communes exist in low profile under other political regimes.)