The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom is a 2013 book by Candida Moss, an award-winning historian and professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame.

The traditional idea of the "Age of Martyrdom", when Christians suffered persecution from the Roman authorities and lived in fear of being thrown to the lions, is largely fictional.

There was never sustained, targeted persecution of Christians by Imperial Roman authorities. Official persecution of Christians by order of the Roman Emperor lasted for at most twelve years of the first three hundred of the Church's history.

Most of the stories of individual martyrs amassed by the early modern period are pure inventions.

According to the 2011 census of India, about 7.9 million (7,937,734) out of 1.21 billion people did not adhere to any of the subcontinent's main religious communities of Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Sikhism, Buddhism, or Jainism. The census listed atheists, Zoroastrians, Jews, and various specified and unspecified tribal religions separately under the header "Other Religions and Persuasions".[1]

Of these religious census groupings, the most numerous are Sarna (4.9 million respondents), Gondi (1 million), Sari Dharam (506,000), Donyi-Poloism (331,000); Sanamahi (222,000) and Khasi (139,000), with all other religions numbering less than 100,000 respondents, including 18,000 for "tribal religion", 5,600 for "nature religion", and 4,100 "animists".[1] The Scheduled Tribes account 89.39% (7,095,408) of total ORP in India.[2]

In this contribution, I provide an ethnography of the Maya New Year’s pilgrimage and sacrifice ritual, in which a delicate relatedness between people and animate mountains is established, enacted, and expressed.

The material I use here for presenting this particular kind of life and animacy has been collected during my ethnographic fieldwork among the Akatek Maya. in the Sierra de los Cuchumatanes, one of Guatemala’s most mountainous, isolated, and traditional areas.

Firstly, I will provide an ethnography of the pilgrimage from Chimbán to the mountain of K’utataj, where a young turkey is sacrificed. The ritual takes place at the end of a delicate five-day period (Wayeb’ or Oyeb’ K’u) before the advent of the Maya New Year. It is consciously understood as paying respect to the mountains and asking for good weather, a plentiful harvest, and all the best in the year to come.

The settlement of Chimbán, with a population of about 1,600, is the religious centre of all Akatek traditionalists inhabiting the municipalities of San Miguel Acatán and San Rafael La Independencia. In their eyes, the importance of Chimbán stems from the rigour with which local ritualists perform costumbre (literally the ‘custom’), a set of rites inherited from the ancestors that must be followed. The number of ceremonies and feasts, just as the number of saints in the local church, evidences the ritualists’ good work and justifies Chimbán’s reputation as the ‘real centre of the world’, where there is ‘still something going on’, as I learned from the mayordomo who was holding the service.

This video is actually terrifying. So many scholars and politicians from all sides of the political isle ignored the holodomor for decades.

A horrifying story about a french serial killer, Dr. Marcel Petiot, who operated before and during WW2.

He pretended to help people escape France but then killed them instead. He was caught be the Gestapo and tortured but refused to confess and pretended to be a resistance member. At least one real resistance members believed him and it hampered his trial but he was eventually executed.

Commissaire Georges-Victor Massu, a 33-year police veteran with more than 3,200 arrests to his credit, immediately took charge of the case. Examining the death house, he noted basement sinks large enough for draining corpses of blood, and a soundproof octagonal chamber with wall-mounted shackles, a peephole centered in its door. Massu was still on the scene at 1:30 a.m., when a telegram arrived from Paris police headquarters. It read: “Order from German authorities. Arrest Petiot. Dangerous lunatic.”

Jerri Lin Nielsen (née Cahill; March 1, 1952 – June 23, 2009) was an American physician with extensive emergency room experience, who self-treated her breast cancer while stationed at Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica until she could be safely evacuated.