How Europe Traded a Thousand Living Spirits for One Distant King in the Sky

The Forgotten Gods — A Four-Part History · Part 1 of 4 · by Lovepreet Singh

Imagine you are a young man living in Germany (a country in modern Europe) in the year 50 CE. There is no Bible — the Bible is the Christian holy book. There is no church — a church is the building where Christians gather to worship. There is no Sunday service

In this part

• Before the Cross: A Continent That Worshipped What It Could See
• Why People Worshipped Nature in the First Place
• How a Religion From the Desert Took Over a Continent of Forests
• The Real History of Forced Conversion
• The Crusades, the Jews, and the Myths That Refuse to Die
• Where Islam Actually Comes From
• What Was Actually Lost
• What We Can Still Learn From the Old Ways

1 Before the Cross: A Continent That Worshipped What It Could See In plain words What is “the Cross”? The cross is the main symbol of Christianity — two pieces of wood joined to make a “+” shape. Christians believe that Jesus, the founder-figure of their religion, was killed by being nailed to a wooden cross. So “Before the Cross” means the time before Christianity arrived in Europe. And a continent is one of the huge land-masses of the Earth; here we are talking about the continent of Europe. Imagine you are a young man living in Germany (a country in modern Europe) in the year 50 CE. There is no Bible — the Bible is the Christian holy book. There is no church — a church is the building where Christians gather to worship. There is no Sunday service — Christians meet once a week, on Sunday, to pray together. You have never even heard of Jesus, because he was born only 50 years ago in a f…

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