Atheist Memes

I remember reading about this.

IRC before Emperor Constantine there was still a bit of a religious taboo of portraying Jesus (a god), due to the whole bible being against idolatry thing. So it was mostly metaphorical images of a buff shephard, if there were pictures at all, because Jesus was a shephard to his followers, and buff because why wouldn't you make him buff?

After Constantine converted, Christianity was romanised. The Romans loved idolatary so that taboo went out the window ASAP. The image of Jesus was partly inspired by images of Apollo and Dionysus (hence white, fit and feminine) then later Zeus (hence the authoritative beard). It's not actually inspired by actual Jesus, whose appearance was (perhaps deliberately) not described properly in the New Testament. The Church basically adapted its product to the tastes of the Roman market, just like the whole Christmas tree and Saturnalia gift giving becoming Christian traditions.

Apparently there's a similar thing in Islam, where a lot of the stuff that's supposedly a core Islamic value, is just Arabic culture that predates Islam. Something that annoys non-Arabic Muslims. From what I can tell, Muslims are even more likely to pretend their religion came fully formed and never changed/adapted in its long history. Understandably, I tend to avoid discussing this with devout Muslims. LOL

Obviously, religious extremists can't admit that their religion changes and adapts, or they'd have to admit that that one value they think is really important might be changed too or that their religious texts aren't the inerrant word of their god. Which is probably one of the reasons why different religious sects love to fight each other over stupid shit, rather than admit that they're both the same religion, but just a bit different based on local tradition and history because their religious texts were written by humans not gods.

Or at least, that's my theory.