![The Roman Colosseum](https://wp-media.patheos.com/blogs/sites/186/2016/02/800px-RomeColosseum-300x199.jpg)
Today, the Colosseum is a striking and sometimes even beautiful tourist attraction in Rome. But it wasn’t always beautiful. With other sites such as the Circus Maximus, it was a center of unspeakable human evil.
Some propagandists for atheism would have you believe that, in order to be truly evil, humans must be motivated by religion. This article provides convincing evidence — though vastly more such evidence could be supplied, from every era and every culture — that such insinuations are historically unsupportable and, indeed, blatantly untrue:
http://www.livescience.com/53615-horrors-of-the-colosseum.html
![Lion with Christians](https://wp-media.patheos.com/blogs/sites/186/2016/02/800px-Jean-L%C3%A9on_G%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_-_The_Christian_Martyrs_Last_Prayer_-_Walters_37113-300x175.jpg)
Jean-Léon Gérôme (1883)
Wikimedia Commons public domain; click to enlarge
It was, in fact, only with the Christianization of the Roman Empire that the gladiatorial games and their associated violent entertainments were banned.