Thugs who use torture instead of positive incentives and reason to change behavior and psychology are tyrants unworthy of worship. A mugger is not worthy of your wallet. It may be strategically wise to give them your wallet, and maybe to try to talk yourself into hanging out with an idiot tyrant’s hippie son to not be tortured. But that is coercion, and morally unworthy.

Fair suggestion. I just don’t want to commit to any specific legal regime that may get corrupted under judicial rulings into something I am not stating. So I’m just stating my own terms as they are. Which are public record now. So essentially, this is my license.

That’s almost half a century obsolete by now.

I recommend you consult more modern studies of the subject.

Even Graßhoff’s The History of Ptolemy’s Star Catalogue, is more carefully argued than Newton, and corrects him.

My point is that you are being misled by Newton. Newton is miscategorizing his own observations to create the false narrative you just abstracted. All objective analyses find instead what I just said. This is ably explained in Graßhoff. Especially as regards specious translation and taking comments out of context.

I’m less certain of that. While Judaism colonized the minds of ancient Israelites by violence and threats, it’s no longer evangelistic, and most Jews don’t support the ongoing violence in their name. So there is a commonality one can point to, but it’s actually fading faster, which is why Judaism is so small. It simply isn’t doing what Christianity and Islam have to do to occupy and dominate the world and cling to power over entire societies and hobble or abolish competition. Israel is more like South Africa than Iran or the British Empire or America’s “Manifest Destiny.” For what that’s worth.

Indeed, those aren’t really evangelistic. Hindu Nationalists are not sending missionaries to every nation to convert it; their Christian-empire-inspired intolerance mode is locally directed and xenophobic. Likewise Shinto was a local power grab, not a mission to convert the world.

Note that phrase is not in my article.

And Islam is not growing faster than population anywhere. So it is no longer evangelistically successful. It is sustained by laws and gangs who punish anyone who leaves.

Examples of Indonesia are like the examples in Europe I reference for Christianity where the tactic was conversion of the kings (or equivalent rulers) who then themselves compelled conversion of subjects. It wasn’t outside armies holding the sword. But there was a sword. Implied or real.

There were also civil wars, where native Islamic pretenders slaughtered their Hindu-Buddhist predecessors and coerced population compliance. And so on.

Indonesia didn’t become Muslim because people just thought it was a better life plan or something. It was not persuasion. It was coercion, soft or hard. And over a lot of bloodied bodies.

Indeed, I don’t recommend his other books for a reason. Pagans & Christians is an important background survey. I’ve not found any of his other work recommendable or useful.

I think I just misunderstood what you meant by “never leaving.” If that’s inclusive of “leaving but still being stuck in the religion’s culture” (and thus never being able to really get away from it, you’re either struggling with it or fighting it or giving in to it, even if you no longer believe in it), then I think you’ve covered all the realistically available options.

Indeed. This is item 6 in Ten Ways the World Would Be Different If God Existed.

Well, not “that’s it,” really, since it’s not obedience for mere obedience’s sake.

Organized religion has agendas that it needs the obedience to accomplish. And organic religion is powered by subliminal agendas of the communities that enforce it with soft power, which can be as simple as ego (e.g. parents cannot stand children talking back or questioning their authority, so they need obedience to control their kids and they need to control their kids because of their egotistical arrogance and abusive self-image) or as convoluted as sociopolitical superstitions (e.g. “gay people cause floods”) and everything in between.

There are entire sciences of studying this (the psychology of religion and the sociology of religion and the anthropology of religion all have entire textbooks about these sustaining motives and agendas; “obedience” is just a tool, not the end game).