black robes brought dark ages...,

Credo in unum Deum,
Patrem omnipoténtem,
Factórem cæli et terræ,
Visibílium ómnium et invisibílium.
Et in unum Dóminum Iesum Christum,
Fílium Dei Unigénitum,
Et ex Patre natum ante ómnia sæcula.
Deum de Deo, lumen de lúmine, Deum verum de Deo vero,
Génitum, non factum, consubstantiálem Patri:
Per quem ómnia facta sunt.
Qui propter nos hómines et propter nostram salútem
Descéndit de cælis.
Et incarnátus est de Spíritu Sancto
Ex María Vírgine, et homo factus est.
Crucifíxus étiam pro nobis sub Póntio Piláto;
Passus, et sepúltus est,
Et resurréxit tértia die, secúndum Scriptúras,
Et ascéndit in cælum, sedet ad déxteram Patris.
Et íterum ventúrus est cum glória,
Iudicáre vivos et mórtuos,
Cuius regni non erit finis.
Et in Spíritum Sanctum, Dóminum et vivificántem:
Qui ex Patre Filióque procédit.
Qui cum Patre et Fílio simul adorátur et conglorificátur:
Qui locútus est per prophétas.
Et unam, sanctam, cathólicam et apostólicam Ecclésiam.
Confíteor unum baptísma in remissiónem peccatorum.
Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum,
Et vitam ventúri sæculi. Amen.

Constantine chose Christianity, and not one of the other dying god cults chosen by his predecessors. Perhaps because his mother had been a Christian, perhaps because he was attracted to the authoritarian nature of what the early bishopricks had managed to organize. Constantine planned to use the organization of the bishopricks to help him unite and control what remained of his empire. The problem was that the bishops had been disagreeing with one another since the beginning of their hustle.

Constantine's solution? He organized the first ever pan-bishoprick conference and invited all the important bishops to Nicea to ratify a common Christian playbook. No sooner had the dogmatic bishops arrived, than they began petitioning Constantine to adopt one or another of their irrelevant little creeds in preference to the others. Constantine's solution? He burned all their inconsequential petitions, asserted a unitary creed and enforced it.

A unitary and literally magical-thinking creed was composed and imposed at Nicea via a simple carrot and stick. Those bishops who signed on to Constantine's new playbook got to stay on for months of lavish entertainment as Constantine's guests, those who refused were banished from the Roman empire as criminals. The Nicene Creed was constructed by a despotic Roman emperor, imposed on the bishopricks by force, and is still mindlessly repeated in churches all across the world today.

Bishop Eusebius arrived at the Council of Nicea in opposition to the what became the creed, and he left the Council as Constantine's right-hand man. Eusebius became Constantine's biographer and wrote The Oration which praised the evil Roman as a living saint. (When Constantine returned to Rome from Nicea, he had his wife suffocated and his son murdered) You would never know this, however, from reading Eusebius.

Eusebius also wrote the hugely influential History of the Church, which history is as accurate an account of Christian origins as The Oration is an accurate portrait of Constantine. The History of the Church is a complete fiction crafted to serve the authoritarian aims of the new Holy Roman Church. Yet this complete fabrication serves as the basis of the traditional understanding of Christian history because for centuries it was all anyone had to rely upon as a source. Why? All alternative accounts of Christian origin were banned and burned.

From the 4th century forward, the Holy Roman Church (the embodiment of the Roman empire) began violently persecuting their Gnostic and Pagan rivals completely out of existence. Armed with a New Testament that repudiated heretics and an Old Testament (Tanakh) that advocated and validated scorched earth and genocide, the Holy Roman Empire enforced Constantine's Christianity with centuries of black-robed violence. Not only did the Holy Roman Empire manage to exterminate all other religions, it even managed to destroy civilization itself, plunging Europe into many centuries of the Dark Age.

The wealth of temples was plundered and shared between the emperor and his bishopricks. Priests and priestesses were murdered, temples burned and razed. Libraries were put to the torch and nearly all the literature of antiquity was destroyed. The lights of civilization went out all across Europe and the west reverted to a brutal life of apocalyptic ignorance and superstition vaguely but resonantly preserved for us in the Grimm's Faery Tales....,