Who knows what I'm aware of, really.

As a student of history you are of course aware of who kept civilization going while Christianity was clawing up the furniture and pissing on the carpets in Europe.

The problem with saying things like this is that it reinforces surface-level history, and people share it, and then other people come later and read it, etc, etc. It is a vast oversimplification. However, I'm not about to take you to task for that because I oversimplify every single post I make on purpose, mostly to see who I can provoke into spewing bullshit. Tonight I was hoping someone would wander by who had majored in theory of religious equality but no dice.

Anyway, it continues to take a hell of a lot of rationalization to mount what might be called the progressive position in this particular debate.

Aside, I don't think Mithras gets mentioned enough. Something that should be on everyone's bucket list is the Vatican Necropolis, which shelters a lot of "pagan" rock drawings which were possibly/probably Mithraic. It's literally directly under the high seat of Catholicism on earth. That's so fantasy.