Fulgour said:
For the first 500 years, Christianity was rather pleasant.
It was tolerant and catholic, in the truly universal sense.
You must be dreaming. This was the period when it was purging itself of gnosis itself, and of the Gnostic warning against having a priesthood (whose corruption was inevitable and now, of course, fully realized), hence of whatever tolerance
and universality it
had in the beginning. Moreover, once it became the state religion of the (evil and tyrannical) Roman Empire, did it not assume the intolerant stance
all state religions assume?
I will grant you but one concession: the form Christianity took in Britain was somewhat different and did not come under the heel of Rome fully till later. Hence, if you were to limit consideration to the insular Kelts, you might have a point. Indeed the British-spawned Pelagian 'heresy' was a revolt of gnosis
against the dismal view of Augustine that man cannot avoid sin, insisting instead that man
could avoid sin if he so chose. Indeed even I, Gnostic enemy of orthodoxy, revere Arthur as protector of said form of Christianity, this in spite of the fact that I have more real affinity for such as Myrddin and Gwenddoleu (Myrddin's liege), who defended the right to be pagan
against the forces of Christianity in Britain a century after Arthur.