Mind your business.

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Joined 7 months ago
Cake day: April 18th, 2024
  • Amoxtli@thelemmy.clubtoHistory@lemmy.world•If Judaism is the oldest Abrahamic religion, why does it have so few followers compared to Christianity and Islam and why by such a large margin?English
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    1 month ago

    There were many streams of Judaism in ancient times, and they were not as closed off as they are today. Jews converted other people. The major distinction between Judaism and that of Christianity and Islam is the sense of universalism. The concerns of Jews are mostly toward Jews. Not outwardly toward non-Jews. It is a covenant with God. Christianity and Islam proselytize for universal reasons. For Christians, to save the souls of people against the eternal damnation of the original sin and to seek eternal existence with God. For Islam, it is to expand the community of Muslims, and in a similar Abrahamic eschatology, to prepare mankind for the end times, which strangely involve Jesus. In belligerent times, more Muslim recruits for war.

    Christianity was a religion for the lower strata of society. In a world, where poverty was considered normal, and frowned upon. Poverty, disease, and oppression were considered a deserved affliction. It was a world without compassion. Entire economies were run by slavery and a Roman, saw it as his duty, without any doubt, to discipline his rebelling slave, because of what is at stake. Since there were more poor people and downtrodden people, Christianity spread like wildfire. It was not a religion just for the elites and the rich, whose gods were only concerned with superior things, even pettiness. This type of morality is the basis for Marxism, feminism, communism, etc., because the New Testament is about Jesus being against oppression, regressive taxes against the poor, and treating people equally, and against corruption. The poor in Christianity have a special purchase on the rich. For the Romans, who were looking for a religion to unify the empire, saw Christianity as the most marketed religion, and made it a state religion for that purpose.

    I think Islam started as a war booty army that expanded control of ceded territory by the bankrupt Eastern Romans, who sacrificed much to lay a technical defeat on the Sasanian Empire. The Saracens, who were anti-Roman as pagans, and even as Christianized tribes afterward, they were known as thieves who robbed the caravans of the Eastern Romans. That culture was palpable to the Turks. It is important to note that the evolution of Islam involved different factions of people. For the example, the Turks, the Saracens, the Persians, etc. The Qur’an is a collection of heretical literature and theologies that are not mainstream Christianity today, but were in significant communities under the thumb of the Eastern Roman rule, who had a policy of orthodoxy. What was to become Islam, was originally anti-Trinitarian Christianity. The Qur’an contains mostly a Christological polemic against other Christians. If you were anti-Roman, how fitting it is to be against Trinitarian Romans by being non-Trinitarian. I digress.

    For the Jews not having any type of universal mission for mankind in general, this was a disposition of being dominated by those religions that were universal.