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I think that a very common and under-discussed fallacy that is often engaged in by people of all sorts of political persuasions is overestimating the degree to which the future is predictable.
Imagine telling a Roman in 100 AD that 1500 years in the future, the world's best scientists would be from Britain and Germany. Or telling him that for much of the next 2000 years, Europe would be dominated by a religion created by Jews. Imagine telling a Persian in 500 AD that his country would soon come under the domination of a religion and political system created by Arab tribes. Imagine telling a Marxist in 1870 that Russia would be the first country in which communists would seize power. Or telling pretty much anyone in 1870 about antibiotics, nuclear weapons, the moon landings, and computers. Or telling a Jew in 1900 that 50 years later, the majority of Europe's Jews would have been killed. Or telling an American in 1980 that 10 years later, the USSR would no longer exist.
The course of political, social, and technological change is very hard to predict yet people keep being convinced by arguments of the "we must do X because then Y will surely happen" and "we must do X, otherwise Y will surely happen" variety. Of course it is possible to predict the future to some extent, and we must try to predict it. And it would be foolish for people to blind themselves to obvious threats just because things might turn out well. And sometimes, an easily predicted future does indeed come to be. For example, it was obvious in January 1945 that Germany was going to lose the war, and it did. But many other things that it seemed would obviously happen never did, and many things that no-one or almost no-one had predicted did happen.
Any political argument that is based in a deep conviction, as opposed to just speculation, about what is going to happen in the future is suspect. And arguments that go "we must do X because then Y will surely happen" (for example, "we must create communism because then people will live better") or "we must do X because otherwise Y will surely happen" (for example, "we must create a white ethnostate, otherwise white people will be destroyed") should be carefully examined. If one does not remember the constant failure of humans, all through the course of history, to predict future events, it is easy to be seduced by well-crafted narratives into believing that the causal connection between X and Y is more certain than it actually is.
The fallacy is probably common in part because for most people, thinking "I know what to do to make things better" feels better than thinking "I don't know what the fuck is going to happen". But also, many people simply do not have much understanding of history, so they just are not aware of how seldom people in the past have been able to successfully predict the future.
That's what they want you to think. But there's a some amount of evidence Christianity is just disguised Imperial Cult that went a bit astray. Of course we as a civilization and especially academia cannot possibly acknowledge the truth of it, that'd be unthinkable.
See:
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/the-gospel-of-mark-antony-2-parallel
So, Christianity was supposedly a psyop ran on the Jews by Romans, although they kind of fumbled it at the end by not managing to deprecate the old testament entirely.
That article is the lowest form of conspirational thinking.
Caesar went to SPAin to cleanse it of pompeian forces; Jesus went to a SPA to cleanse his feet.
There are so many plums to pluck out of it, like the following:
Sparrows were also symbols of Venus, more so than doves. And didn't Jesus say something about sparrows?
Our boy is clearly not up on scholarship which denies that Mary of Magdala was a prostitute, how un-feminist of him! 😁
He also contradicts his own point, where he says something, adds a quote to demonstrate it, and doesn't see that the quote doesn't say what he just said:
There's nothing there about bloody robes or the effigy being affixed to a cross (certainly not, the cross was a shameful method of execution for slaves and the worst criminals, you're not going to put your murdered hero on a cross) but "a mechanical device" used to raise it up because it couldn't be seen as it lay on the bier.
He covers himself by saying it was a tropaeum and then illustrates it by a really dumb picture (famously balding and vain about it Caesar with long hair in the wax effigy?) which is a repurposed version of a crucifix:
Wikipedia has a handy article on this, and depictions of historical tropaions. While they might (and I emphasise might) have hung Caesar's bloody garments on such, they wouldn't have done the same with an effigy. Because tropaions were trophies, indicating the conquest and vanquishing of an enemy. Putting up the clothing, much less the funeral effigy, would have been annoucing "Caesar has been beaten by his victorious enemies". It would be like using images of George Floyd for BLM marches depicting him sitting on the toilet: not the associations you want to invoke in the outraged onlookers.
"But wouldn't Caesar's bloody garments be like the photos of Floyd with Chauvin kneeling on him? Wouldn't that show the same 'he was murdered unjustly' imagery to get the mob up in arms?" Perhaps, but the associations of trophies is probably too strong - it would be showing 'Caesar was killed rightly as a just punishment and is a loser', which is not what Antony wanted.
Anyway, see for yourself: compare John Carter's alleged "Reconstruction of Caesar’s wax effigy, hanging on a tropaeum, as it would have appeared at his funeral" with what genuine ancient Roman depictions of tropaeum look like, and judge for yourself. That's not even getting into the history of depictions of the crucifixion, which would have come much later.
(God damn it, anyone with a cursory knowledge of history and five feckin' minutes on Google can do the work, this is why I rant and rave about historical illiteracy).
EDIT: We have Suetonius' account, where he says that the robe was hung on a pillar:
There's the account by Appian, which John Carter quotes for the wax effigy, which again tells us about the bloody robe, this time it is Mark Antony who puts in on a pole and waves it about:
Appian then goes on to the part about the wax effigy and the mechanical device, but as I said, I'm not convinced this was a tropaeum or anything that looked like a body on a cross.
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