Crucifixion was of course extremely painful. (We get our word “excruciating” from the Latin ex crucis: “from the cross”.) Yet, more than this, it was humiliating. To be impaled, naked, before the watching world was as undignified an end as the Romans could devise. And the shame was a large part of the point.

These are our origins: chaos, violence, and death. And this is the case wherever we turn in the ancient world. The Romans adopted much of the Greek mythology, performing more of a rebrand than a rewrite.

“In the sexual life of the Roman Empire, it would be impossible to overstate the decisive influence of social position in the determination of sexual boundaries.”[46] It was the status of your partner—not their consent, their age or their gender—that mattered. And it was your reputation within a shame-based culture that determined the rightness of

equality, compassion, consent, enlightenment, science, freedom and progress. None of these values are self-evident, nor are they widespread among the civilisations of the world. So where did they come from, and how did they get to become “the air we breathe”?

The earliest surviving depiction of Christ’s crucifixion is a piece of graffiti mocking the strange new cult called Christianity. It was found scratched into the plaster of a wall on Rome’s Palatine Hill. The graffiti shows a figure on a cross with the body of a man and the head of a donkey. Standing by the cross is a devotee with his hand raised i

“The grim horrors of slavery rise in all their ghastly terror before me, the wails of millions pierce my heart, and chill my blood. I remember the chain, the gag, the bloody whip, the deathlike gloom overshadowing the broken spirit of the fettered bondman, the appalling liability of his being torn away from wife and children, and sold like a beast

As far as a medieval Christian was concerned, technology was a place where the good of humanity and the glory of God would embrace.

if you feel yourself to be “done” with Christianity, my desire is to take your critiques more seriously, not less. I want you to embrace those difficulties and press into them since, in truly owning those standards, you may well find yourself coming closer to the essence of Christian faith.

The future is not in our hands, nor is it in the hands of the powerful, the popular or the perverse. The government is on Christ’s shoulders, and he has promised: “I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.” (Matthew 16:18)