What if criticism of religion had been allowed throughout history?

[Major Nikon]

Imagine a world where religion was allowed to freely promote itself, but dissenting opinions weren't met with the threat of torture and execution. What would organized religion look like today, or would it even exist?

[DetlefK]

1. Maybe it would have been like the ancient Middle-East.

Dozens of truly different religions side-by-side and religious intolerance is not a thing because then people will refuse to do business with you.

There were wars in the ancient Middle-East, but they weren't fought for religion. They were fought for mundane reasons like politics, conquest, power, ressources...

The rapid spread of Christianity is proof how tolerant people were to different religious ideas.

[Major Nikon]

2. During that time, heretics were routinely crucified

What religious tolerance existed, was borne out of necessity. You can't annex vast areas without allowing differing groups of people to retain at least some of their culture and superstitions. The reason Christianity spread rapidly isn't because of freedom, but rather because it was recognized as a more effective method of control compared to what it replaced, especially since the Roman empire had entered a period of negligible growth of its borders. It spread rapidly because it had the force of law behind it.

[Voltaire2]

3. Hmmm... in the city state period

basically each city had its god or gods and there likely wasn’t much tolerance for other religious practices within a specific city.

[MineralMan]

4. Our knowledge of the ancient Middle East is sketchy, really.

It's really hard to determine which of the many wars had or did not have a religious basis.

It's really only recently that criticism of the dominant religion in a place was simply accepted. As recently as the 17th century, people were executed for heresy and apostasy. It's hard to imagine acceptance of criticism in earlier times. Execution was used for all sorts of behavior that was unapproved.

Even today, apostasy is a capital offense in several Islamic countries.

So, it seems to me that it would be impossible to have a situation where criticizing a dominant religion would not lead to very serious consequences. Human nature just doesn't accept alternative viewpoints very well, it seems to me.

[Major Nikon]

5. It depends on what time period

The Romans wrote down pretty much everything and while those records were certainly biased in favor of the Roman empire, we also have other written records which give us a more complete picture of what was going on. Now consider a fellow named Jesus during this time period who was allegedly performing incredible miracles and drawing big crowds with virtually no written records at all.

[MineralMan]

6. I guess I think of "ancient history"

as a time before that. Old Testament times. You do have an excellent point, though, about the lack of records of that Jesus fellow who was supposedly executed by the Romans after being prompted to do so for criticizing the local religion.

[Major Nikon]

7. Consider a fellow named Socrates

He lived hundreds of years before Jesus, and while he wrote nothing down himself, we still have accurate 2nd person written accounts of his teachings at the time they were being taught. Compare that to Jesus with nothing written by anyone who actually knew him in the flesh. The very best we have are 3rd person accounts with all the four primary canonical gospels being 4th person at best written decades if not centuries after He was physically gone.

[MineralMan]

8. True. The entire Jesus story is deeply suspect, historically.

I suspect there was a Yeshua or Yoshua, along with multiple other would-be Messiahs, around that time. Christianity only became a force to be reckoned with after the Romans decided to adopt it as an official religion. They fine-tuned the story to suit their own cultural needs and exported it wherever they went.

It's very difficult to put much credence in the edited non-contemporaneous writings that become the official Canon, if you really think about it. As Bob Dylan so aptly put it, though, "If you don't think twice, it's alright."