Above; Roman Emperor Nero
Christians were persecuted in Rome for refusing to worship the giant man god emperors as gods. People killed in the Colosseum by Romans dressed as their gods was designed to psychologically affect the crowd; subliminally show the strength and power of their ubermensch nobility. It sort of backfired. Some people were impressed by the martyrs who refused to renounce their faith instead. Christianity’s influence slowly increased.
By the Third Century persecutions had ceased. Christianity, though technically illegal, created schools, preached and fed the hungry. In 274 the Roman Emperor Aurelian revived the cult of Sol, the sun god, as an alternative monotheism. Sol Invictus became a dominant Roman sect but could not compete with Christianity’s popularity. It was suppressed in the 4th Century with the formal legalization of Christianity and formation of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox religions.
Monotheistic belief in an unknown, all powerful and undefinable divine force supplanted polytheistic beliefs throughout history. In Hinduism the concept of Brahmin, the ultimate reality of the universe, is similar. There are many deities and sects but Brahmin is the source of all.
The fascist man gods don’t really like this. With Sol Invictus they hoped to establish their own monotheism and supplant the one unknown, unnameable infinite power with one of their own actors. Defining, altering and adopting Christianity as their own was more convenient.
This wouldn’t make sense if the Earth weren’t the center of the universe (Galileo Affair).
Of course there was always those darn Jews, with their book. Historians and archeologists know that Yhwh and Moloch were Canaanite gods. Could one possibly believe the Jews of 3500 years ago didn’t know this? Of course they did. And they wrote down a history of stories to illustrate the point; incredible.
God doesn’t walk around on a planet at the edge of some galaxy, in a universe of billions of galaxies, telling people what to do.
A fourth major school of thought was Gnostic Christianity, an elaborate theological system characterized by several emanationist cosmologies and the notion of a “divine spark” trapped in matter, which regarded Jesus Christ as a divine being sent by a supreme, Unknown God who pre-existed and was superior to the malevolent Hebrew God of the Old Testament (actually the Demiurge or false creator of the material universe), and who brought salvation through direct, experiential “knowledge” Wikipedia