There's nuance and interesting bits of history that are missing from the orthodox pov, but that get bulldozed by the absolutism of "Religion has always been a t

There's nuance and interesting bits of history that are missing from the orthodox pov, but that get bulldozed by the absolutism of "Religion has always been a tool for the powerful to control the masses," which, while true, is as interesting as saying "stairs are often used to ascend buildings." Power does what it always does: it grabs whats lying around and sharpens it into a spear of control. If you know a little about the history of Christianity, you see a gradual centralization over a period of hundreds of years. Christianity obviously didn't start centralized. Religious orthodoxy burned a lot of manuscripts and rewrote history to appear to be a powerful unbroken lineage in order to justify their legitimacy. We have to remember that the concept of heresy was invented. Hellenic and pre-hellenic cultures didn't demand compliance to doctrinal orthodoxy. Instead they practiced ritual orthopraxy. Ritual orthopraxy's sphere of influence begins and ends at the ritual. The sphere of doctrinal orthodoxy on the other hand made belief itself the battleground. The Greeks didn't care if you believed Zeus was literally real or metaphorically useful, as long as you poured the libation and didn't piss off the city. Christianity became not just "do you love God," but "is your metaphysical model of the Trinity exactly consistent with the Nicene formulation from 325 CE." Anything but that became heresy. And that rejection of the pluralistic orthopraxis and the inability to live in harmony with Hellenic culture is exactly what made Christians so unlikable at the time and incidentally created a bunch or martyrs. What gets lost is the weirdness of those early centuries before doctrinal orthodoxy created heresy in order to monopolize plurality of belief. We can learn important lessons from this and extrapolate to how heresy and orthodoxy get used today and why matters of doctrine end up being so encompassing and totalizing. If anything it gives us an additional point of view on our own culture.