Backroom Poll. The (major) Religious Affiliation in Backroom...

[The Wizard]

I dissagree, Rome was areligious in the sense you mean, in that there was no real hold which any one religion had, and that most public religion was mostly for show. Until Christianity took over Rome was a city of apaphy really. The glut of Eastern cults (much like the modern rise of Islam) were a symptom of the general disregard for the traditional forms of religion, which by the Second Century AD fe took seriously. Look at Stoicism or Epicuranism, too of the most popular philosophical schools in Rome, both atheistic; or at best Deistic.

What exactly is areligious about the continuing and widespread worship of thousands upon thousands of deities? Just because they weren't part of the imperial cult doesn't mean Roman society was areligious. These people worshiped gods and did so quite dedicatedly, if in a way alien to Christian practice today. Why, taking your argument to its logical conclusion would indicate Hinduism is areligious (if India had a state religion, that is). Who would make such a claim?

Nope, I didn't link the two; I merely stated that the European Elite was both. I have said repeatedly that the two are not linked, and I would thank you to stop inflicting your prejudices against Christians on me. If anything, the elite are atheistic because they are amoral and relativistic, not vice versa.

What prejudices against Christians? Where did I attach what I have seen in your comments to Christians in general? And perhaps you should qualify your remarks some more, because putting amoral in the same line of adjectives as atheistic will very rapidly make you look like you're connecting the two, obviously.

Theism is an extremely vague term, at root it indicates a belief, so I haven't changed my position. If you had read the medieval priest's manuals that I have you would know that, in general, only a very small proportion of a congregation had a firm grasp of Catholic doctrine. If anything the numbers of "quality" believers have risen massively over the last 100 years or so.

the⋅ism  /ˈθiɪzəm/ [thee-iz-uhm]
–noun
1. the belief in one God as the creator and ruler of the universe, without rejection of revelation.
2. belief in the existence of a god or gods.

No-one sacrificing to Jupiter or taking part in the Bacchanalia likely rejected such ideas. I suggest you read up on your history.

The same elites as today, really. Bear in mind, most of those philosophers, Plato, Xenophon, Aristole etc. were very well connected politically.

Doesn't matter. Those elites were extremely tiny compared to the great mass of the population that was deeply devoted to the many cults of our ancestors. In fact, I'd wager a large portion of the elites were, too.

Do you know anything abour pre-modern religion? About the contractural forms of non-salvationary religion, or the small uptake in salvatory religion prior to Constantine?

Not enough, apparently, to know the terms you're using. But enough to know that a lack of belief altogether was impossible in pre-modern societies. People simply lacked the time, the resources and the education to contemplate matters and to doubt the words of priests. The closest you could get to widespread areligious sentiment in pre-modern society would be ancestor worship and related belief systems as seen in ancient Chinese religion. But that can hardly be called areligious, since it was still clearly religious in nature.

Oh, and to comment on your debate with Louis: organized religion is dying in the West, there's no way to get around it. Just because people like to go to church once or twice a year during major events doesn't change anything about that.