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In reply to the discussion: With the goal of making the world a better place, prevent one person from having been born. [View all]Aristus
(66,275 posts)Constantine turned Christianity from a faith system into a socio-political empire, a term that would become literal with the emergence of the Byzantine Empire, which was simply a Christianized, Greek-speaking Roman Empire.
A book I finished reading last week, about Alaric the Goth, points out that as much as Roman persecution of Christians is depicted in popular media, it was actually confined to a few shorts periods in the history of the Western Roman Empire. But when Christianity became the official religion of the Eastern Roman Empire, religious persecution by Christians of nearly every religion that wasn't became non-stop for roughly a thousand years. And still exists in many forms today, including the xenophobic, wealth-obsessed American evangelical churches of today.
Without Constantine's imprimatur, so many of the evils visited upon Western civilization might never have happened; black chattel slavery, imperialism, witch hunts, child labor, vulture capitalism, etc.