When did people stop believing in the old gods like Greek and Norse? Did the Vikings just wake up one morning and think ”this is bullshit”?
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Active conversion efforts, better trade opportunities, violent conversion efforts, the allure of belonging to a secretive or selective group, for the Roman empire enveloping religious traditions of conquered peoples into your own myths was a deliberate piece of their statecraft.
Lots of individual and immediately understandable reasons we don’t really have to guess as, they are happening today. People change their religious affiliations today all the time. You can ask them and get answers. People still claim to speak with and/or for some version of the divine and even today you will see such traditions carried on by doomsday prophets on the sidewalk and twats behind the pulpits of mega churches.
Scientology exists, Thousands of years of Abrahamic Hindu and Buddhist proliferation and a charismatic nutter can still talk his way into enough power to become his own Jesus but with sci-fi and hookers. There are plenty of cults that manage to draw in people and grow.
If a powerful enough leader gets sucked into a cult, or maybe they need their cults support to navigate some tricky political drama then you can get a real power behind the spread of a religion. As christians are to Justinian so SeaOrg is to Tom Cruise.
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