Get a life and open up your narrow rigid mind - your comment says far more
about you.  I'll leave it to your response for the last word.

LOL.   do you think there's documentation on why christmas is on Dec.25?

<snip>

Paganism and Christianity 100-425 C.E. (Paperback)
by Ramsay MacMullen (Author),

A review:

       39 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
      When Christians do really bad things., September 22, 2002
           By  pnotley@hotmail.com (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my
reviews

     Concise, elegant, massively documented and beautifully endnoted,
Ramsay MacMullen's book is a devastating account of the rise of Christianity
and the destruction of Paganism.

      With 85 pages of notes to 159 pages of text, with widespread use of
primary sources, archeological evidence and the secondary literature,
MacMullen's book is an exhaustive update of Gibbon for the present day. The
book consists of four chapters, those being Christian Persecution, the
losses of the Pagans, the rise of superstition and the assimilation of pagan
elements into Christian practice. I think Stalin would find it grimly
amusing reading, since it suggests that whatever success Christianity
achieved was by fanaticism and violence. We start off with an account of how
Christians systematically suppressed non-Christian works, as well as the
"heretics" amongst themselves. We hear Eusebius, the first great Church
historian, announce that it is not the duty to tell the whole truth but only
what is of profit. Students of the Russian Revolution will remember the
gruesome story of the child who informed on his "kulak" parents, was
murdered by his relatives, and became the hero of a gruesome cult. In this
book we hear how the emperor Justinian was moved to raptures on hearing of
how a Jewish boy convert survived being thrown into a furnace by his father.
Justinian learned how angels prevented the boy from being burned, and then
he had the father crucified.
     Persecution: MacMullen challenges those who argues that Christianity
was an improvement for women and slaves. Women did play some role in leading
Pagan cults, none at all in Christianity, and he tells how while a pagan
governor demanded the compensation for the family of a murdered prostitute,
Saint Jerome supported beheading for extramarital fornication. He discusses
how exorcisms, resurrections, and healings played a greater role in
conversions than sermons or reasoned argument. He discusses the increasingly
bloodthirsty demands of bishops, monks and imperial decrees as well as
pointing out the weaknesses of the bureaucratic machinery.

     Cost to the Persecuted: MacMullen notes how Constantine still claimed
a sort of divine status for himself and his father. He discusses the joyous
pagan festivals, including feasts, dancing, poetry orations and their long
presistence despite the opposition of the bishops (Augustine tried to argue
that giving friends presents was wicked). MacMullen also gives accounts of
pagans who thought idols had actual magical powers. He discusses the
destruction of pagan temples and shrines, as well as the cutting down of
sacred trees.

     Superstition: MacMullen discusses the shifiting attitude from the
rational world view of Pliny, Seneca and Plotinus and the increase in
credulity throughout the third and fourth centuries. MacMullen argues that
this was a result of changes in the elite as more vulgar and less literate
people increased their predominance. Whatever the merits of this thesis,
MacMullen points our the contempt prominent Christians such as Tertullian,
Augustine, Lactantius, Ambrose and John Chrysostom had for ancient
philosophy. They denounced Plato and Aristotle by name, and mocked the idea
of skeptical study and the scientific attitude. Nor did they stop there.
They told stories about appartitions over the battlefield, miraculous cures,
the everpresent existence of demons, people raised to life by Christians,
and dragons turned to dust by the sign of the cross.