Bumping so this survives. Some good arguments here
>Christianity as a uniter of Europe against the Muslim threat during The Crusades.
What Christianity? Orthodoxy? Catholicism?
All it eventually did was throw Europe into more religious wars. Even during the Byzantine Empire, you had pagans like the Varangian Guard defending Europe.
>maturely explain
Not many people here are good at that. I'll try:
Multiculturalism is part of the problem. All the world's cultures are slowly devolving into a globalized, overcommercialized mishmosh.
The larger problem, though isn't political correctness and anti-racism but the mentality behind it. It's a plague of victimitis. It's becoming more and more acceptable, even desirable, in society to be a victim of something, to be a charity case that's being bullied and persecuted by bigots. People fucking brag about it–gays about how they're being hated and bullied, women about how they're being denied jobs, blacks about how they're being targeted by cops. Now, that's fine as far as it goes. Bigots do exist, and they can be a problem. The real problem is the mentality of emotional vulnerability. Nowadays, everyone is expected to be vulnerable to the opinions and social pressure from other people–everyone having "triggers" and such. This means that society thinks it is everyone's responsibility to coddle everyone else's feelings and avoid offending them, rather than the individual's responsibility to deal with offense given to them as part of everyday life. This makes people emotionally weak. They are taught that it's okay to be sensitive to the point that simple words from other people can stop them from functioning in everyday life, so they are. They're taught that it's normal to become horribly depressed and give up on life when one feels like they're the target of public ridicule, so they are. That's the problem with political correctness–people are no longer considered responsible for handling their own feelings.
Christians were busy killing pagan Europeans while Muslims were attacking Spain and later on when the ottoman empire was fucking up eastern Europe and the Mediterranean the only reason they didn't conquer us is because the Mongols attacked them from the other side.
Christianity killed far more europeans than it killed non-europeans thus this lie that it united europe is just that.
>Specifically, they love to throw up the argument that Christianity became based on Greco-Roman culture
The trouble with Christianity is that it take the broad spectrum of Hellenic philosophy and uses it to justify the theological primacy of a very specific mystery cult. There's all sorts of implications that come with that which I've only started to become aware of, but the gist of the matter is that B does not follow from A, and pretending that it does while aggressively insisting that any other interpretation of A is flawed will likely corrupt A.
>They usually springboard from the above into a screed on how Christianity made Europe great
While it's true that Europe did become great during the Medieval period, the effect of Christianity can be measured by looking at the "control population". What about the Christians in the Near and Middle East? Despite the immense material head-start over Europe, they stagnated quickly and fell to the Saracens.
This also disproves the claim of Christianity being a spiritual bulwark against islam. When most of the population converts after a few centuries, the true faith brand suffers a blow.
Same goes for the claims about chivalry and forbearance being Christian virtues. Did similar virtues develop in the ME? A fortiori this goes for sub-Saharan Christians, Haitians etc. Did they become better people?
>B does not follow from A, and pretending that it does while aggressively insisting that any other interpretation of A is flawed will likely corrupt A.
By the way, in "Against the Neopagans", Evola argued that, in their zeal to react against it, neopagans, reconstructionists and the like failed to do a proper dissection of Christianity. They discarded B and adopted the corrupted A. Moreover, the Medieval Church being what it was, did more or less successfully manage to salvage bits and pieces of the original A from the first few centuries of iconoclasm, and thus, in hitherto discarding B, neopagans unknowingly discarded parts of uncorrupted A. It's a failed strategy in both directions, you see.
As long as the AFA and others have this confused orientation towards what is traditionally sound and what is corrupted by centuries of spiritual bolshevism, the Christians kind of have a point when they dismiss paganism as inauthentic.
So the counter to Christianity supposedly single-handedly making Europe great is to point out the fact that Europe's greatness has more to do with European nature than Christianity (especially under a Christianity so heavily influenced by Paganism.)
Makes sense considering the Renaissance is pretty much the product of European Christian culture essentially picking up where the Mediterranean Pagans left off in terms of technology and knowledge, upon reacquiring said technology and knowledge.
Nevertheless, how then does one counter their assertions of the Germanics Celts, and Slavs being less technological and philosophically advanced than Greco-Roman culture?
One thing I thought of is the fact that the Germanics, once exposed to Mediterranean culture, adapted and contributed rather quickly. (i.e. The victory at Teutoberg Forest being the product of Arminius using the Romans' own tactics against them; the Holy Roman Empire being the product of Germanic culture being influenced by the Mediterranean, etc.)
He led them out into a forest and forced them to move in a long snake-like formation, which was completely against roman battle tactics and formations and left them extremely vulnerable to attacks from the sides. He also goated Varus into leading his legions farther and farther into the forests, where the Germans had the home court advantage, while the heavy armor of the Romans started bogging them down in…yknow, bogs.
Also "comrades" is like saying the foreman slaves were "comrades" to white men. They supplanted him with wine and women, but he was still a slave and servant to Rome. The romans had beat down his tribe after they had been loyal to them for generations, and forced their children (including him) into slavery. It would have been a bigger act of backstabbing to have sided with the Romans.
This thread has been dead for a while, but I thought I'd contribute a few points that might be interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Library_of_Alexandria#Decree_of_Theodosius.2C_Christian_destruction_of_the_Serapeum_in_391
Theodosius I, Roman Emperor, declares that the pagan temples in Alexandria be destroyed. Contained in one of these temples, the Serapeum, is the library of Alexandria. Although many of its contents were moved or already destroyed, it was still one of the largest sources of classical knowledge in the ancient world at that time, containing many of the works of the ancient Greek philosophers. It's destruction destroyed one of the few vast sources of information of classical pagan philosophy in Europe that would've been easily accessible, and is symbolic of the Christian belief that the old pagan ways of life, which encouraged philosophy and scientific advancement, should be destroyed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion
The European Wars of Religion, which were a series of wars across Europe which were almost totally caused by the conflict between Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox branches of Christianity, were among the most devastating and violent in European history, leaving large sections of Central Europe, France, and Eastern Europe heavily damaged and decimated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aragonese_Crusade
A coalition of Catholic nations ordered by the Pope decide that the King of Aragon is illegitimate and that Aragon (one of the leading nations in the crusade against the Muslims in Iberia…) should be cut down to size because they were threatening Papal possessions.
And of course, the Crusade by the Venetians that sacked Constantinople, and the Northern Crusades are great examples of Christianity fucking over their Aryan brothers because muh Bibble.
>Technology continued to process throughout that entire time.
Not sure what you mean by this. If you mean that technology continued to progress during the Dark Ages, it is clear that you're a fucking idiotic Christfag. Technology stagnated and in many cases went backwards during the dark ages. Concepts such as writing became very rare, practiced only by small sects of monks (who were often considered outlandish and crazy by the Church, who never really accepted them fully until after the Renaissance) and a small amount of the wealthy elite, and even then, writing became very sloppy and poorly done (if you've seen manuscripts written during the Dark Ages, the script is fucking impossible to read, especially when compared to earlier Roman writings). Many concepts and writings about architecture, engineering, and science were dead during this time, with only a few books or writings about the subjects being preserved in the West, and mostly by monks, who usually guarded these books quite closely. Much of the wealth of ancient knowledge created by the Romans and Greeks was contained in the Eastern half of the Empire in areas that were quickly conquered by the invading Muslim armies (Anatolia, Egypt, the Levant, etc.). It should also be noted that Eastern Christianity is not as bad as Western Christianity, as Eastern Christianity is far more esoteric and accepting of the sciences and of logic than the Western Catholic church, which was completely obsessed with "rationalizing" the faith and killing anyone who didn't follow its teachings to the letter. Not to say that Eastern Christianity is good, however, as it still promotes the worship of a dead Jew on a stick and many disgusting theologies like turning the other cheek for your enemies and encouraged chastity for its bishops (although it didn't outlaw marriage for bishops, unlike the West). Technology did progress during the Dark Ages, albeit at a stupidly slow rate as compared to previously (and from a lower starting block, since they fucked up the Roman Empire's wealth of knowledge beforehand) until the Renaissance.
>The church actually preserved a lot of older Roman knowledge that would have otherwise been lost.
This is simply wrong. The church (specifically in the West) burned and destroyed many ancient Roman libraries and other centers for learning, destroying thousands of priceless books and scrolls in the process. Very VERY few "books of knowledge" (coincidentally all originally created by Pagans) actually survived in the West, and the ones that did were tightly locked away in the monasteries of the Benedictine monks, who as stated before, were not always warmly welcomed by the church. Knowledge that wasn't destroyed by Christians burning Pagan temples and libraries was certainly not applied very much if at all during the Dark Ages, or was taken by the invading Muslim hordes who actually had two braincells to rub together and actually used these writings to their advantage, culminating in the Islamic Age of Enlightenment, wherein the Muslim world actually surpassed the technological standards of Europe for a time, despite starting on a lower foothold.
I agree that the picture should be changed a little bit, to at least show a very shallow slope upwards during the Dark Ages, because some technologies were progressed (castle-building, for instance), but definitely not at the same speed as during the Roman era.
I sincerely hope you don't think that the Dark Ages were actually one of the better periods of European history.
TL;DR of this thread: OP tries to gain some insightful knowledge, and is willing to learn, then some autistic fedora tippers start screeching at him, while a few guys try and actually help, but their arguments are grossly over-inflated and easily punctured by some possible Christfag trolls who somehow think that by deflating an extremely superfluous argument they've somehow "defeated" it even though the main idea of the argument went straight over their fucking heads.
>Christianity as a uniter of Europe against the Muslim threat during The Crusades.
I dont understand this shit. How do people not know history?
Christianity only created more fracticide and separatism. Once christianity came into Europe there was NEVER a UNITED Europe period. There was more war between the people than before christianity.
MOST of the crusades were against Europeans! They crusades were mainly fought by the French, Germans, and English. sometimes together, sometimes alone. They also lasted about 1000 years. During this time Europe was in constant conflict with its self as well.
They historically, factually, and LITERALLY never united Europe against muslims. That is just gross cognitive dissonance on the part of christbergs who WANT their desires to be true. But its just not history.
>getting this triggered
There continued to be advances in agricultural and industrial technology between the fall of the Western Roman empire and the late medieval/early renaissance.
Ancient writings were preserved by the Eastern Roman empire, the church, and further eastern empires.
This desu. Christianity only ever divided Europe. Paganism was insular and non-universalist. Intra-european wars prior to Christianity were fought for land, wealth, and women, not for ideology.
Most of those agricultural and industrial technologies were already available and being used in the Roman Empire prior to its fall in the West, and were either rediscovered by accident or on purpose.
Take crop rotation, for instance. The big "breakthrough" in this technology in the Dark Ages was the movement from a two-crop rotation to a three-crop rotation system, wherein a field was divided into three sections, rather than two - one section for a staple crop like grain, another for a soil enriching crop like beans, soy, etc., and the third was left barren. Earlier farmers had half their field planted with a staple crop, and the other half barren. This "new" crop rotation technique drastically increased the amount of food that could be produced, as well as the quality and variety of food being produced. However, there is evidence of Romans using this three-crop rotation system far before the fall of the Roman Empire, and some historians have suggested even the ancient Sumerians used a similar system to this.
I will say that the development of the heavy plow was something unique to the Dark Ages, but this is simply because the Romans didn't widely settle where this type of plow was useful (in Germany and Britain), and could suffice with the lighter plows that were used in the Mediterranean, even if they were less effective. I have no doubt that if the Romans would've needed that type of technology, they could've developed it - but they simply had little or no need for it.
Much agricultural technology "developed" in the Dark Ages was simply a rehash of what had already been done before, but some significant contributions were made.
In terms of ancient writings, not many were preserved in the West. The reason for this? The Western half of the Empire was much poorer than the Eastern half. There were far fewer major cities and much less economic potential and a smaller population in the Roman Empire from Italy westwards than there was in Greece eastwards. It certainly didn't help that Christian mobs often burned and destroyed pagan temples and schools, which were usually where vast stores of knowledge were kept. Much knowledge was destroyed by Christians in both the East and West, but the opportunity for it to be saved was greater in the East than in the West.
In the West, texts were usually preserved in monasteries, where they were kept under careful lock and key and were often not studied or their ideas practiced until later agricultural and technological redevelopments allowed non-religious authorities to examine and study them.
I will credit the Eastern Empire to at least paying lip service to the knowledge preserved in many pagan writings, however, many times the educated and upper class were discouraged from examining and practicing the knowledge preserved in these books because "muh ebil pagan gnosis". I guess somewhat fortunately is the fact that many portions of the Eastern Empire were conquered by the invading Muslim armies early on (places like Egypt, the Levant, parts of Anatolia), where the Muslims actually found the knowledge in those writings useful, and helped preserve those writings far better than those in the rest of Europe, hence leading to the Islamic Age of Enlightenment. Eventually, some of those texts began making their way back into Europe, and combined with the limited literature and technological advancements made in Europe during the Dark Ages, helped usher in the Renaissance.
Technological progress in the Dark Ages was slow, and often was simply a reiteration of things already in practice during the Roman Empire. Christians were often the forces responsible for the destruction of a large amount of knowledge during the fall of the Roman Empire, and were not the greatest at keeping that knowledge preserved, spread, and practiced, especially compared to the Muslims later on who embraced ancient pagan learning, rather than fearing and rejecting it.
No matter how you look at it, Christianity as been a dividing force for Europe, directly influenced the fall of the Roman Empire, and stifled possible technological advancement in the periods after the fall of the Roman Empire.