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This was an essay I wrote for one of my classes.  Thus it's referenced.

If the fates tampered with great men's lives and St. Augustine met with Cicero (who took sometime to familiarized himself with Christianity before conversing with the Christian Saint) . . .

St. Augustine: I am quite an admirer of your works.  The one thing that it lacked was the presence of the Lord.  Had you been a Christian, your writing styles would have improved ten folds.  The shroud of pagan beliefs is the only stain on your otherwise brilliant career.

Cicero: I thank you for your admiration but I fail to see why you view my religion with such distaste.  The very word that you have labeled my religion is insulting.  Pagan . . . I assure you that I am not a country bumpkin.  I have been asked by some of my friend to defend our religions.

St. Augustine: How can you defend a religion that is utterly flawed?  The very number of your gods is offensive.  As I have noted in The City of God one of the fundamental flaws in the nature of pagan religions is that you have multiple deities for similar events or objects.  Every concept, every action carries its own god.  In witnessing the consummation of a couple, "the bedroom [is] packed with a crowd of deities". (Beard, 2.2)

Cicero: That is simply a perversion of what we actually believe.  I have took the liberty of reading your works, and in this particular passage you named odd and rarely worshipped deities that are not evoked during real weddings.  I command you on your research into obscurity to drag up every single god that might want a share in the wedding rituals.  It is true that we worship many gods, but just because we accept the existence of many gods it does not mean all of them are influencing forces in our lives.  Women for example need not pray to Hercules because he does not guard anything related to their tasks.  In reality, an individual only worships few gods. Some may even devote their lives to one patron god who they believe to favor them.  The family of Julius Caesar for example allied themselves with Venus.  The number of gods that we have is not enough to discredit our religion.  Your fellow Christian Justin noted that there exists various forces other than your God, but instead of discovering their nature he simply accused whatever magic he could not understand to be the work of demons (Beard, 12.7a).  Where as we find new gods and honor them, you find new demons and condemn them.  If you call everything outside of your God demons, of course you only have one God instead of multiple ones.  Furthermore, there is no concept in our religion that each god constantly watches over us.  They are not present with us all the time.  Rather our religion is very much a religion of place.  We believe that our gods reside in places that are near the area of life they govern.  They do not follow us unless we have something sacred of theirs.  Thus we build temples to them at sites that is close to their domain.  Jupiter is high on the Capitoline because he is a sky god.  We go to the gods for prayers rather than let them come to us.  I do not see where you gained the idea that we have a horde of gods following us wherever we go.  Besides, if you believe gods or God is ever-present, I implore you, which is worse during a couple's consummation--to be watched by various gods that aim to help ease the poor bride’s trepidation, or to be seen by your God who by all your accounts, seems like a father figure.

St. Augustine: It is far worse to be on the path to damnation by taking comfort in false lecherous gods.  Your gods are no better than human are.  They resemble humans in their temperament and in their flaws.  They have no morals themselves, so their followers can easily excuse their own sins.

Cicero: We as humans are bounded by our human limitations.  "For it [is] not easy to depict gods in movement or in the throes of action except by imitating the human form" (Beard, 2.4b).  Your own scriptures states that God created men in his own image.  If you hold that to be true than surely anything that humans posses he must have inherited from your God.  Then is your God any less human than ours? Thus if you argue that our gods are false because they are too human, you condemn your our religion to the same fault.  Perhaps it is better to say that human is like the gods rather than the reverse.  "We think gods resemble human beings" because we believe in "man's superior beauty over others species" (Beard, 2.4b).  This is an arrogance that seems to be present in both of our religions.  While you and I may or may not believe in the physical semblance of god and men, the practitioners that is the bulk of our religion seek comfort in the humanization of god.  As for our morals, you are right that the behaviors of the gods are not to be emulated by men, as treacherous Clodius did with his sister.  The privilege to marry one's own sister is reserved for Jove and the gods alone.  (Cicero, On His House, 92)  However, just because we can not behave as the gods that does not mean that our religion is void of morals.  Our fear of the gods and their divine punishment leads us to piety.  That is we are "to keep our obligations to our country or parents or other kin." (Cicero, De Inventione).  Our religion is held so highly that even our laws are constructed around them.  I was exiled precisely because I tried to maintain moral uprightness of our religion.  You are well read, so I am sure you know of the affair of Bona Dea, when Publius Clodius interfered with the rituals that no men are to see.  Because I testified against him, I was exiled.  But in testifying against him, I was trying to maintain the purity and virtue of our religions.  Is it any less noble than dying for your faith?  I have read the works of one of your fellow Christians, Minucius Felix, I believe.  He accused the Vestal Virgins of impurity (Beard, 8.10a).  He speaks as if the Vestals' temple was a brothel itself.  Although there have been rare cases where Vestals broke their vows, his accusations hardly have any basis.  Our tradition and our own society have placed firm enforcement on morals from our fear of the immortal gods.  Just because we did not think it necessary to practice asceticism or remain celibate does not mean our lust is unchecked.  We value our morality and piety just as much as you do for "if piety towards the gods disappears, loyalty and the community of the human race and . . .justice will also disappear." (Cicero, De Natura Decorum)  Our ideals of morals are simply different from yours.  While we value fertility you valued celibacy.  Thus, how can you use judgment of morality to condemn our religion?  What is moral in your religion is offensive in ours.  We may point fingers and call each other immoral, but it will achieve nothing because the judgment of morality varies.

St. Augustine: Suppose we do judge each religion by what is moral in its own context.  My Lord's Truth would still win for he has one standard.  The scriptures proscribe specific commandments for us to follow.  He is immutable, unchanged.   But as Minucius Felix have noted, the stories of your gods are contradictory in themselves.  How can worship your gods when they are inconsistent?  Each god is depicted with several standards.  Jupiter himself has "strange manifestations [that] are as numerous as his names." (Beard, p.2.1d)

Cicero: You challenge my religion because each gods take on various forms and yet in your own religion you believe in the concept of Trinity where one God embodies three separate forms.  You honor all the aspects of your God in the church while our temples are built to honor specific aspect of a god that has grant us favor.  Jupiter is both the god of thunder as well as the giver of prophecies just as your God is both the redeemer of sins as well as the just punisher.  The presence of various characteristic in a singular god is not a sign of inconsistency, rather, it simply gives one god multiple functions.  Your God encompass everything including life and death, surely you must comprehend that a god can have influence in more than on area of life that can be conflicting.  As for the depiction themselves, they are no more than "the form that painters and sculptors have chosen for them." (Beard, p.37)  Minucius Felix is foolish to linger on an insignificant point of their appearance.  As if whether or not Jupiter have a beard or not somehow changes who he is (Beard, 2.1d).  Different parts of the Roman world see the same deity in various customs. Juno herself "has one appearance for the Argives, another for the people of Lanuvium, another for us" (Beard, 2.4b) Romans.  Your own God, Jesus is often seen wearing different robes depending where his depiction is located, but this variance obviously does not alters the substance of his nature.

St. Augustine: But when we worship Jesus, we know why we honor him.  While you yourselves know not the origins of some of your traditions.  Pagans find the origin of their faith and traditions better defined in the tales in Ovid's Fastii, than in a book written by a less lecherous man.

Cicero: For the origin of our traditions, what does it matter that the meaning is forgotten if the task if performed.  If a slave is told to do something, he does not need to understand the meaning of his task to perform it.  He does it so he is not punished for disobedience.  The same is with our traditions.  The aim is to pacify the gods, not to question them.  Because the aim of our religion is simply to keep our gods happy and maintain pax decorum.  The stories surrounding our gods are less important than your religious texts.  It's more important we remember how to appease a god, than to know how that god came into being.

St. Augustine: And in your appeasement of your gods, you stain yourself with "the putrid blood of the victim" (Beard, 6.7a) animals.  Why "when someone else has committed a sin, it is" (Beard, 6.8a) the animal that is to be put to death.  Tell me, what is this point of this savage tradition that you force upon the Christians so they might betray the true faith.

Cicero: We sacrifice because in giving up something that we value, such as an ox, we are showing the gods our devotion to them.  In both our religions, blood washes away sin.  The only difference is that while animals die for our sins, your savior as died for yours.  Is it more savage to kill a life stock or is it to drink the blood and eat the body of your Christ?

St. Augustine: Christ made a willing sacrifice while the animals did not.  What's more, in your religion, to become a god is easy.  One simply has to die to be worshipped and sacrificed to.  The emperors are routinely defied.  The honor of being a god is thrown away as if you did not have enough god already.  You even built a temple to your own daughter.

Cicero:  The dead in our religion is similar to the saints in yours.  You worship you saints as fervently as we do our dead.  It would appear that in both religions we see the dead as more approachable than the gods.  Christians believe your saints and martyrs can communicate more easily with God than mere humans while we believe that the dead become gods.  Either way, we both believe that the dead continues to have interactions with the living.  And in death they incur more power than in while they are alive.  Our main idea is de mortuis nil nisi bonum.  About the dead, nothing bad should be spoken.  We believe that even after death, their soul lingers in the tomb so we might go there and ask them for blessings or curse those we wish to harm.  We offer special honor of deification to the dead whose life have been so exceptional that it is only fitting that they become gods in death.  Just as you believe that those who have dead for your faith are more holy than those who have not.  I built a temple for my daughter; your mother became a saint through your influence.  I do not see how either of us can claim that we are unbiased in our religion.

St. Augustine: Our only salvation is through God himself, and not saints.

Cicero: That might be what you believe, but it is not how Christianity is practiced commonly.  It retains much of our traditions such as the honor bestowed upon the dead, especially the martyrs and the saints.

St. Augustine: We have yet to agree on a single point.  You are stubborn in your beliefs.

Cicero: As are you.  There is no point in arguing when we are both so set on our beliefs.  If you maintain that a religion is unworthy of your consideration, you will surely find evidence that it is so.  Thus I can not convince you of my point though your accusations are based more in ignorance than on knowledge.

St. Augustine: And I can not seem to shake your convictions even though I know that my religion is the stronger faith.  I remain puzzled why the Lord does not illuminate a great mind such as yours.

Cicero: Among other reasons, I would have to say the fact that I was decapitated more than thirty years before you Christ was born would play a major role in my choice of religion.