Somehow, you managed to leave out the rest of Asia, including such cradles of Christianity (and Patriarchates) as Jerusalem and Antioch, and North Africa, including the Patriarchate of Alexandria, and Hippo, home to Augustine, in your recounting. This would seem to indicate that, rather than a “strong society and a strong faith,” it was only necessary to have a sufficiently strong army sufficiently distant from the source if Islamic power.
On the other hand, Christianity also attacked Muslim nations, gaining a small toehold, briefly, then being utterly repulsed.
I do not think that you are establishing the thesis that you seem to believe you are.
In response to ITR Champion post no.56;
" As for motive,claiming godliness is more likely to get you crucified by the Romans than to win you earthly power.Or if you think That Jesus never made such a claim, then whoever did start the claim also lacked a goods mean for spreading it also face considerable danger from making that claim."
If you read John 10 ch.34 you will note that Jesus did not think of himself as any more god than any other human, as he referred to the 82’d (or 81st Psalm in some bibles). I believe his saying" my father and yours" proved this point". Some explain this as meaning children by adoption but I do not see the inference.
Not that it’s particularly relevant, but this is not true. If you were to read the fascinating article in this month’s Scientific American about dark energy, you’d learn that the rate at which the universe is expanding is increasing. Nobody’s really worried about a “big crunch” anymore.
I said it was “one theory”, and yes, I am aware of the “infinite expansion” theory. Then again, science being the process it is, the “big crunch” theory could come back into vogue following some other discovery.
And you are right that it is not relevant to my OP. What I originally said is that an uncreated universe is more logical than an uncreated God, if we apply the principle of Occam’s Razor.
Although one person correctly pointed out that something can only be logical, not “more logical”. This is a point I conceded, but the fact is that the headline of a thread can only take so many words. What I should have said is that logic and the principles of Occam’s Razor would indicate to us that it is simpler and more reasonable to explain the existence of the material universe by saying that it has always existed and that it is uncreated, rather than saying that it was created by a God who was himself uncreated and has always existed. Or as Arthur C. Clark pointed out, by postulating a created universe that was created by an uncreated God, you simply double the problem of “where and how did it start”.
I would say that you just ratchet the question up a level, but hey, Clark is a best-selling author and I am not.
