Although Christian writers in Europe from the early medieval period expressed concern about the Epicureans' denial of a creator god and their views on the soul's mortality and sexual pleasure, there were some areas of overlap between early Christianity and the Epicureanism of the Garden, as it existed before the creation of a vast bureaucratic power structure. Aside from the obvious parallels between leadership and friendship, including friendship between men and women in both systems, the historical Jesus was astonishingly nonjudgmental when it came to common concerns of pleasure.
Jesus' exhortation to 'consider the lilies of the field' echoes Epicurus' claim that nature has given us with all we actually need. His connection with Mary Magdalen, the 'fallen lady,' may be likened to Epicurus' friendship with Leontion, the 'courtesan.' Both moral thinkers were opposed to their culture's established standards, and neither was interested in ritualism, divination, or priestcraft, or the amassing of money.
The Epicurean, like the good Christian, does not do things for the sake of money after she has attained a reasonably gratifying level of personal enjoyment in food, drink, clothes, furniture, and entertainment.
Equality and tolerance do not logically follow from a belief in the supernatural or the authority of sacred scriptures. At the same time, religion has the ability to defend and, more often than not, does defend moral principles that are at contradiction with those of corrupted political governments.
Most global religions exhort their adherents to abstain from at least certain types of pleasures, even when doing so is neither unwise nor harmful to others. In this respect, they are at odds with Epicureanism. Nonetheless, at the core of religion is a sense that is almost certainly universal: the idea that our activities are monitored and judged for their moral worth even when no other human beings are present to do so. The source of this universal sense is known as 'God.' Although Epicurus did not link divinity to conscience, when he said that the gods exist because everyone thinks they exist, he was implying that religious thoughts and sentiments are a part of the basic human psychological makeup.
We need an alternative picture of reality to be able to look at religion with a critical but not dismissive eye, and this is what the ancient Epicureans attempted to provide with their accounts of how the universe and its living inhabitants came to be, the nature of the human mind, the nature of morality, and how to choose and avoid. The Epicurean makes a distinction between the superstitious parts of religion in its culture-specific myths about the gods, their qualities, and their deeds, and the basic truth that drove the human imagination to invent these stories, namely, that morality matters to us.