“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law—a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household."

'One of the most dramatic stories of the early Christian ascetic rejection of family is recounted in John Cassian's Institutes. He tells the tale of a certain Patermutus, who wished to join a monastery in the company of his young son. To test Patermutus's ascetic resolve, the child was struck, abused, and left to wallow in his own dirt, tears smudging his grimy face. Yet the abbot of the monastery had a harder test in store: he ordered Patermutus to throw his son into the fast-flowing river--and Patermutus did. Unknown to the father, the abbot had stationed two monks by the shore to rescue the child from drowning. The point of the story, however, centers not on the fate of the child but on Patermutus's obedience: he was proved such a worthy renunciant that he later assumed the abbot's place as head of the monastery. To us the tale signals child abuse; to ascetic listeners of yore, Patermutus was a hero copying "the deed of Abraham."'

When one is a student of Medieval Studies, one becomes familiar with a genre of writing not well known by the general public: hagiography. Hagiography is a genre of literature dealing specifically with saints’ lives. However, it differs from biography because hagiographies were written with an agenda to spread the Catholic cult of saints. They were very popular during periods of conversion, when the church targeted locally venerated deities and attempted to replace them with Christian saints. One such swap out is very well known – goddess Brigid to Saint Brigid.

In their campaign to build up the saint while diminishing the god, hagiographers literally made shit up. Straight up inventions based on nothing but the imagination of the writer. They bullshitted their way through it. Sometimes a real figure could be used as a model, and then merged with the god they were trying to erase. But the lives were typically completely contrived, and all manner of miracles and benevolent acts were ascribed to the newly invented saint.

"In the first study, the subjects consisted of two experimental groups and a control. A third of the subjects were instructed to think about their deep roots from the 15th century, another third to think about their great grandparents, and the control group did no such preparation.

What were the subjects specifically asked to think about? They were told to imagine their ancestors, how they lived, their professions and their families, the trials they faced, and what these ancestors would tell them if they were around today.

Results indicated that both groups that looked back performed significantly better on the problem-solving test than the control.

The second study by the same research group then extended these findings with a less obvious direction: by having the experimental group construct a family tree before taking a battery of intelligence tests. In this way, the experimental group was not told exactly what to think, but still had to consider their ancestors to complete the activity.

Again, the group that meditated upon their roots performed better on the test scores. They also scored higher on a test of “perceived life control.” In other words, those who considered their pasts said they felt more control over their life, career, and ability to best adversaries than those who did not.

The group was still not satisfied with the conclusions. What is this ancestor effect? How does “ancestral salience” work? The researchers, comprised of social psychologists from Germany and Austria, conducted a third study to test if thinking about living ancestral relatives (grandparents and great grandparents) versus distant ancestors made a difference. The test scores of this group were compared to a control group that was instructed to think about a close friend who is still living.

This time, both family groups outperformed the friends group, but with no significant difference between the deep ancestral groups and the living ancestral groups. So the effect is not simply due to thinking about people you like and who happen to be alive."

In the Old Testament, the Israelites were forbidden from charging “usury,” or interest, on loans to fellow Jews (Deuteronomy 23:19), but they were permitted to charge interest on loans to foreigners (Deuteronomy 23:20). A mention of this usury law in Leviticus 25:35-38 makes it apparent that it applied to loans made to fellow Israelites who were in poverty. Having to pay back the loan with “usury,” or interest, would only put them further into debt and was not beneficial to the economy. Loans to foreigners, however, were considered international business and approved. This law served as a reminder to the Jews that helping those in need is something that should be done without requiring anything in return.

Most of the loans we know of in modern terms come from banks, and the Bible doesn’t speak much about this. Although the Bible does not explicitly forbid the charging of interest, it does warn against becoming too concerned with money, teaching us(gentiles) that we cannot serve both God and money at the same time (Matthew 6:24). We are cautioned that wanting to be rich leads to despair and that the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil (1 Timothy 6:9-10).

"In 313AD Christianity was tolerated by the Edict of Milan and from 380AD was established as the official religion by Emperor Theodosius I (347-395AD). From this time monetary power resided in the religious authority of the pontifex maximus. A feature of the imperial era was social injustice and the undermining of the middle classes through excessive taxation. The Roman businessman was not a trader, but a looter of the provinces, as the homeland had a weak industrial production base, which was incapable of providing the required manufactured goods. As the monetarisation of society continued, with the rich parasitising of the common man, the plebians became more like slaves. The abolition of the jury system was symptomatic of the declining respect and importance for the common man in Roman society.

Role of the Church in the Decline and Fall
The tax that Emperor Constantine decreed, viz. that 1/10 of all income had to be tithed to the Christian church, hastened the destruction of the empire. Eventually the Church held one third to one half of all lands and accumulated wealth. This concentration of wealth produced a great scarcity of coinage. Money existed, but there was no circulation or distribution of goods and services. Instead of recycling the tithed money by means of investment in the community or charitable works such as construction of hospitals, schools and libraries, vast hoards of gold were concentrated behind the 20 foot (6.1m) thick walls of the fortress city of Constantinople and the Vatican fortress in Rome.

In its last years in the fifth and sixth centuries the Roman Empire had become a parasitic organism, subject to alternating phases of inflation and deflation. Its economic ruination preceded its political ruination. There was no industrial production, almost all food had to be imported and usury was practised on an unprecedented scale. The wealth of the empire that was not held by the Church, was controlled by 2,000 Roman families. The rest of the population lived in poverty.
[...]
Major factors in the decline of the Roman Empire were the concentration of wealth,[7] the absence of mining deposits for industrial production, and the vast importation of non-White slaves with the resultant degradation of the genetic value of the nation. By the 4th century AD, as a result of the continuing decline in Roman female fertility, slaves outnumbered citizens by five to one. The most important economic reason was an inadequate supply of an inexpensive circulating medium of money and the false notion that money should be a commodity. Thus from an economic perspective, the lessons from the fall of Rome are that a dishonest economic system will inevitably contribute to the forces of dissolution. No society can survive a false economic system. For any society to function and prosper it is absolutely fundamental that the means of exchange be issued free of debt and interest by the legal authority of the state as representatives of the people in perpetuity."

"Of course, it could be claimed that there were indeed many such mentions but none were preserved. And that may even be true (in the case of Jewish and Neronian literature, it almost has to be true). It’s certainly true for countless other people, fads and events in the Roman Empire. But none of those people, fads or events had a massive Church devoted to preserving records of its resurrected God, which then became almost solely responsible for preserving all literature whatever. This is why we have a hundred times more faith literature from Christians about Christianity (even just from the first to fourth centuries) than we do from any other faith group of the period. Only Judaism comes anywhere near a (very) distant second, and that only because Christians also avidly preserved a lot of Judaica, and because apart from Christianity, Judaism is the only religious community to continuously survive from the Roman Empire to the present."

The Christian…is distinguished by acting differently: by not resisting, either in words or in his heart, those who treat him ill; by making no distinction between foreigner and native, between Jew and non-Jew (‘the neighbor’ — really the coreligionist, the Jew); by not growing angry with anybody, by not despising anybody… (sec. 33)