These critiques of Christianity are essential and important but in my experience it is easy to miss something. Secular humanism needs its critique, but the object is not to turn everyone into Flatlanders. Christians don’t understand their own religion, but secular humanists don’t under it either…
For example, the work of Gurdjieff in his All and Everything with their Sufistic/gnostic angle discuss the larger phase of emergent Christianity (in Axial Age parallel with much else, e.g Buddhism/Mahayana) rightly pointing to the mysterious triadic coordination of three savior memes: John the Baptist, Jesus, and Paul, and their mutual ‘communication’. This ancient legacy (about which I know almost nothing) resurfaces in the Christian generative moment. This larger operation whose exact significance has never been clarified (best of luck with Gurdjieffian mystification) was the larger generator of the strange mystery cult whose unknown inner meaning disgorged its strange cultural exoteric outcome as Pauline Christianity and with an unknown relation to what we suspect is the Roman Emperor cooptation of the ‘what was all that’ that came before, apparently. The source ‘savior’ types probably thought the coopted Christianity a useful disguised  outcome for their obscure operations which never reached the public. Ironically the Roman emperors provided a massive propaganda boost for the ‘lost cult’ soon the world of the  Popes, and finally Constantine. So it would seem the early Christian group outsmarted Rome.

I zipped through these books at high speed, and found them very compelling, but am unable to assess such a complex mass of similar yet distinct perspectives and datasets. I will have to read them a…

Source: Christianity and the Roman Emperors – 1848+: The End(s) of History