PEOPLE WERE PRESSURED TO DIE FOR THE CHRISTIAN FAITH BY THE FAITH
One major reason Christianity spread so well was because people died for their faith in Jesus. The religion went as far as to distort the true circumstances around the deaths of some believers to turn them into martyrs. Ideology, the worship of the idea, loves martyrs.
The doctrine that those who do not believe in Jesus will rot in Hell forever was in the Christian religion from the start. This was a more frightening doctrine then than now for in those days life was short indeed and evidence that God ways were too seemingly mean to bear was there every time you opened your eyes so there was great pressure put on people to join the faith and to stay in it and maybe even die for it. The martyrs were not true martyrs when they had so much unbearable pressure to prejudice their minds against any contrary evidence for Jesus and his revelations and to compel them to die for him. For their martyrdoms to stand as evidence for anything about Jesus we have to be sure they went to their deaths freely and without mental disorders and there is no reason to think they did. Strange that the Church argues that a person can go to everlasting punishing for sin for he or she chooses this fate by sinning and then says that the apostles would not suffer for a lie or die for it! Christian apologetics are all incoherence and outright lies. The Bible doctrine that man on his own can do nothing without sin and that only by the help of God can man do good and that most people deserve to rot in Hell forever and indeed will would have terrified people into believing in Jesus even if the only evidence for his existence was a few dubious ghost stories for they were so desperate for a saviour. It would be natural for people to believe upon hearing the dreadful gospel that their only hope was for somebody like Jesus to obey God’s law in their place so that they could escape their fiery fate for there was nobody else on offer and the first person who allegedly knew how to save would be the one who counts. No other fictitious god would have had the incredible and supremely effective psychological impetus and attraction that Jesus had so he is more likely to have been a fiction than them.
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http://human.st/jesuspuzzle/CTVExcerptsOne.htm
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BIBLE VERSION USED
The Amplified Bible
The King James Version
