t3h h0tness

So, oneway, in an act of great friendship and kindness, gifted to me two incredible books before I journeyed out here to the Golden State. I have said nary a word about these two books, which is indeed a shame. It is highly likely that your head would explode if I hit you with the full awesomeness of both of these two books in one post, so I will just give you a taste of something referenced in one of the books. This will greatly reduce the probability that anyone's head might explode. The book is called simply A History of Christianity and the author is Paul Johnson. This guy set himself the task of giving a fairly complete history of the Church from the 1st century AD to about 1975. From what I can tell and what other people wrote about this thing, he pretty much hit a home run. It's gonna hit you up at 513 pages (before the bibliography and index) so Paul didn't come to mess around (much like his namesake, but that's another story for another time). Anyway, at one point in the book, Paul is going about making his case for why it is that Christianity went from being alternately semi-ignored/viciously persecuted, to eventually becoming the official state religion of the Roman empire. He makes a rather scholarly argument about how the institution of the Church changed to where it became mutually advantageous for the Roman state and the Church to align themselves, but this is only part of the answer. The historian cannot get away from the fact that while, at first, the persecution of Christians by the Roman empire was essentially bowing to the will of the mob (due to the fact that people were told Christians engaged in cannibalism and other despicable acts), eventually, the general populace did *not* support the persecution of Christians, and the final bouts of torture and execution were not endorsed at all by the masses. To understand why, I highly recommend peeping the Epistle of Mathetes to Diognetus, but first probably this to explain it all. It was written about 200 A.D. and the author is explaining to the tutor of the Roman emperor how Christians live among the people. Since you are all busy people, I will just give you this snippet, which I found very inspiring. There's a lot more good stuff in there besides this, but this can be a little food for thought until you have time to look at the whole thing:

(slightly different translation from the link)
"They live in their own countries, but simply as visitors... to them every foreign land is a fatherland, and every fatherland foreign... They have a common table, but not common. They exist in the flesh, but they do not live for the flesh. They spend their existence on earth, but their citizenship is in heaven. They obey the established laws and in their own lives they try to surpass the laws. They love all men, and are persecuted by all... They are poor, and make many rich. They lack everything, and in everything they abound. They are humiliated, and their humiliation becomes their glory. They are abused - and they bless. They are reviled and are justified. They are insulted, and they repay insults with honor."

Let it be so, let it be so.