The Lost History of Christianity
The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died
Chapter One
The End of Global Christianity
Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
—Oscar Wilde
Religions die. Over the course of history, some religions vanish altogether, while others are reduced from great world faiths to a handful of adherents. Manichaeanism, a religion that once claimed adherents from France to China, no longer exists in any organized or functional form; nor do the faiths that dominated Mexico and Central America half a millennium ago. In some cases, religions may survive in some parts of the world but are extinguished in territories that they once regarded as entirely their own. For a thousand years, India was mainly Buddhist, a faith that now enjoys only marginal status in that land. Once Persia was Zoroastrian; most of Spain, Muslim. It is not difficult to find countries or even continents, once viewed as natural homelands of a particular fa ... read full excerpt from: The Lost History of Christianity ebook
