The history of the origins of Christianity is shrouded in mystery. With a religion like Buddhism, one can easily see how it grew out of the various philosophical schools of Hindusim....
The early Christians also stamped out a great deal of paganism--in Rome you can see a Church built on top of a Mithraeum till today. There were no monastic orders in the Western world before Christianity--the Buddhist sanghas for monks were already established in 5 century BCE. How did the monastic orders pop up all of a sudden in the Western world? I have always been intrigued by the origins of Christianity.
I find that Christians who do not know much about the Greek and Roman civilizations, dismiss paganism as idol worship, without understanding the whole Greek world view as contained in the work of their tragedians, poets and philosophers. And it is in this way that Christians dismiss the non-Christians who do not have one book and one revealed truth without understanding that you need to make a study of HInduism which grows from polytheism, to henotheism, to monotheism and to the abstract concepts found in the Upanishads in the course of millenia.
And as a non Christian, it is far easier for me to understand the Greek outlook than the Christian world view. This is not to say that I do not respect what I do not understand. And I can see your point about Catholicism being more pagan.
Perhaps there will be a thread on this topic.

A most interesting statement. At some point this would make great topic for discussion.

The problem with Judaism, Islam, and, to some extent, Protestantism, is that they are not pagan enough. Fr. Alexander Schmemann once described the Reformation as an attempt to scrub clean all the pagan residue in Christianity. This is bit harsh as Protestants at various times and places have supported a classical education. Nonethelesss, there seems to be some truth in it. The Catholic/Orthodox traditions which include a multitude of saints, feast days, and devotional acts such as kissing icons (Ed Abbey pointed out that creating idols was a natural and universal part of human religious experience), fit quite well with traditional pagan religions. I'm not sure what this means for us in the present, since in an industrial/technological society we are divorced from those things that supply the religious imagination-- namely, nature, ritual and community--so that natural religion loses its meaning.

I apologize if I was disrespectful in any way. I am disrespectful only inadvertently, and have been taught to respect elders.

this is a post on Lincoln so I will only briefly comment:

"Buddhism, and perhaps Hinduism and Confucianism."

Perhaps Hinduism and Buddhism? Surely you must be jesting. But this is largely due to Hindus themselves who are these days utterly uneducated about their own culture, so they can hardly expect others to understand their religion. With the beginning of Buddhism, you already see a steady decline in the creative energies of a peoples...Buddhism had to leave its homeland, and I think Buddhism never grew in the sense that Christianity did. The Greeks and Romans transformed a tribal religion in the sense that a Mid-East graft no longer remained a sterile graft but grew in the creative soil of the the genius of the Western culture. Whereas Buddhism lost the original rational basis on which it was founded after it left its homeland due to Muslim invasions: people like the Dalai Lama who are harmless have given it more of a bad name than good: you just have to compare the early Buddhist monks who were the most educated men of their society, rational and very much active in the world they lived in, interested in all that constituted learning of their day, to the Buddhist monks of today who are more interested in transcendental meditation than in the affairs of the world, to see the cultural decline. Which is why although it spread to places like Japan and China and the tradition was preserved in this sense, Buddhism never produced the kind of philosophical innovation it first did in its own homeland...Confucianism cannot be compared to HInduism and Buddhism in that it is limited in scope and concern.....

Do not apologise. I tend to post quickly without checking what I write, and do not lave a lot of patience, so it is usually too late to edit or correct--which is what happened in this case. But it is clear there are a lot of intelligent people who post on this site.

What the Greeks would have thought of Christianity is an extremely interesting question, and your remark about "Semitic fairytales" certainly captures what many ancient pagans thought of the Old Testament and Judaism. It is very difficult to break out of the ghetto of one's mind and culture, without falling into self-hatred. Herodotus is perhaps the greatest exception I can think of. I think too many Christians have misled too many non-Christians into thinking that it is a question of belief in certain ideas. Ideas and creeds are important, of course, but Christianity from the beginning depended on 1) the acceptance of Christ as son of God, 2) acceptance of his moral teachings, 3) participation in common rituals. The Greeks would have no trouble with the first and third--though they would have wondered about the exclusivity that rejected all other traditions, and as for 2, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and the Stoics would have found a good deal of common ground. Seneca the younger sometimes writes--as has been pointed out--as if he really did hear something about St. Paul from his brother who interviewed him. Plotinus is the most interesting case. His philosophy is quite compatible with many aspects of Christianity, but he disliked what he knew of the new religion, largely, it would seem, because he had only met with Egyptian Gnostics.

Now I am going to say something that always annoys my friend and colleague Aaron Wolf. When people talk about the world's great religions, they usually mean, in addition to Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and perhaps Hinduism and Confucianism. I think Greek paganism is a far richer and more humane religion than any but Christianity, and it has a theology that is far deeper than anything in Judaism or Islam. Who were these great theologians? Hesiod and Aeschylus, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. But this is a thought best left for another time.

First of all, I do not watch TV as there is nothing to watch on it. And secondly, I understand Lincoln might not be a hero to some. But I find the journalist has a rather cavalier way of putting down figures far greater than she--that was my sole point. I see an exaggerated annoying sense of ones own self-importance in a person not so important. But these days, every Tom, Dick and Harry can write without reverence about anything. And this is a very irreverant society.
As for the white supremacy, I was startled at the comments of some people. But people are free to think as they wish, I am not one to try to change such types, it is not my business...far from it. Moreover, I like to understand all points of views, even the extreme one because there is a reason people espouse them.
I can also understand religious conservatism in a society which does not have anything to fall back on if it gets rid of religion. I am the last one to ban prayer, religious music and such in schools. In fact, even though I am not Christian, I went to a Catholic school during my elementary years. I understand all to well the importance of tradition and values. It is ironic that the most troubled of my American friends are from the bible belt. It seems that they are just angry at religion altogether and rebellious. I wonder if this has to do with having a very rigid upbringing?
Well regarding the white supremacy, I read that this site was affiliated with it. I did not realize that everyone comments here and the comments are not necessarily endorsed by the Chronicles. And you are right, it is hard to speak one's opinion these days without getting into trouble and being misunderstood. There must be a way such that freedom of expression does not entail the abuse of the very freedom it is designed to protect.
As for our taste in poetry, I guess we differ. Perhaps Whitman is too pagan for Christians.
I wonder what the Greeks would have thought of Christianity--I mean the greatest ones who are all pre-Christian. Would they not dismiss it as Semitic fairy tales (no offense mean to the religion itself and I respect all the Christains out there). I sometimes wonder if the Semitic religions have not changed the true classical heritage of the West and put blinkers on the way people think? The notion of a reveled absolute truth faces great challenges in the modern world. It will be interesting to see how the West deals with it and reconciles its religion to a changing world. However, I respect all those are brought up in tradition and values. When you lose these things, you lose everything and it is more difficult to create new ones than to just preserve the old.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7792239.stm

One can hear Dr. Trifkovic saying "I told you so."