If you are curious how this would turn out, take a look at theSaint ThomasChristians of India, their faith evolved with very little involvement in politics or foreign meddling.
That’s a toughy… you are gambling that the new guy would be able to defeat Hitler. What if his replacement took a more humane and sustainable but slower attitude to growth, hundreds of millions of ‘subhumans’ would be at the mercy of the SA. Then again, it’s unlikely the replacement would be crazy enough to do the officer purge or to ignore Richard Sorge’s advanced warnings.
By quite a lot I’d guess, you see, if Tesla wasn’t around to rip off, the other great electrical genius of the time would probably kill himself out of frustration.
Even if you kill Constantine before he converts, that’s not going to change the amount of politics or foreign meddling of Christianity in the Roman Empire.
Hmmm… Someone of great historical significance. Aristotle or Newton maybe. In order to gain a competative advantage over this new timeline and prevent them sending any killbots our way. (I realise this doesn’t strictly make sense, but I’m not taking any chances.)
[troll]Now you see why the makers hardcoded against killing Jesus/Paul/Mohammed, they were afraid that sans Abrahamism, the new timeline would supercharge its rate of scientific progress and curbstomb us[/troll]
Seriously though, you aren’t Donald Rumsfield by any chance?
But Constantine did have three major effects on the development of Christianity. He stabilized the Roman Empire at a time when it was breaking down, which gave Christianity a united politicial structure to work in. He promoted Christianity as a favored religion, which was an unexpected reversal of what had been Imperial policy and which vastly increased Christianity’s prominence. And he got the government involved in doctrinal debates, attempting to establish an “official” version of Christianity that everyone would follow.
So without Constantine, there would have been Christians, but there never would have been any united Christianity even on a local level. You would have had a bunch of separate countries like twentieth century Europe with no central political authority to impose a singel state religion over the continent. Christianity would have been a popular religion but other non-Christian religions would exist alongside it. And there would be a variety of different Christian churches rather than a single church such as existed for centuries in western Europe under the Pope.
I think my answer there would be yes, no, and maybe. Yes, Constantine’s victories stopped the Empire from falling apart and without him, it might have fallen apart, which would have gotten in the way of a unified Christianity (or maybe not. Christianity got a lot more powerful in Western Europe after the Roman Empire fell. If the Roman Empire falls apart in some post-Diocletian collapse, assuming somebody like Licinius isn’t strong enough to hold it together, Christianity is still a universalist faith that might have stepped into the vacuum, and would have made an even more appealing contrast to Roman paganism, which would be, under those circumstances, pretty much headless and flailing). And that’s assuming the Roman Empire falls apart. Licinius was a pretty effective administrator and good general. He might have been able to hold it together.
As to the second, he promoted Christianity as a favored religion, which helped its spread, sure, but if he hadn’t done that, somebody probably would have. Christians at that point made up too big a group to be ignored, and it made good political sense to try to keep them happy. The persecutions had left a pretty bad taste in a lot of people’s mouth, and championing the Christians was also popular with a lot of sympathetic pagans. Even Galerius admitted the persecutions were a mistake. And Constatntine’s patronage pretty much only amounted to ordering the Christian land seized during the persecutions returned and financing the building of new Christian churches. The state didn’t even stop financing the old Roman religion.
As to the third, Constantine wished he could have imposed doctrinal unity on Christianity. His attempts to do so, and exile of bishops that didn’t really go along with it, didn’t really do much. The doctrinal disputes continued after his death, and if anything got worse. The Council of Nice a, for instance, didn’t shut up the Arians. In fact, Constantine’s own son became an Arian.
Now if you kill Constantine before he executes Crispus, and Crispus becomes emperor, that would be interesting.
I think the important point about Constantine is that he was able to creat an institutionalized stability rather than a merely personal one. In that sense, he was the equivalent of Augustus - he built a system that was able to keep on functioning even after he was no longer around.
Diocletian hadn’t really done that. He had created a system that was stable - but only as long as he personally held it together. As soon as he was out of power, his successors all started fighting each other. If it hadn’t been for Constantine pulling everything together, the Diocletian era would have been nothing more than another short-term reprieve like Aurelian’s reign had been.
And without a single strong central authority like Constantine created, there wouldn’t have been any institution that could have promoted Christianity like he did. Other rulers would have made the same proclamations he made but those proclamations would have only affected a regional kingdom rather than a major empire. Only a Roman Emperor was in a postion to make a proclamation that had an effect over millions of people on three continents.
I’ll certainly concede that Constantine wasn’t successful in his attempts to establish a single official Christianity. But he did establish the principle of trying to do that. After Constantine, rival theologians no longer disputed their differences through debate. They instead worked on convincing political leaders to advance their theological position by force.
Norman Borlaug. There might be a billion fewer people around today competing for a limted supply of natural resources.
(Admittedly, his accomplishments would have been done by someone(s), but it might have bought us another 20 or more years.)
Surprised nobody said him yet: Christopher Columbus
Somebody else would have inevitably discovered the Americas for the Europeans, but taking out Columbus might have given the natives another century or two of peace before being decimated by the Westerners. I look back on world history today and I still think that the tale of the indiginous population of North & South America is one of the biggest travesties of human history.
Keep in mind though, Constantine allowed freedom of worship, even if he DID promote Christianity as the state religion. It was the Emperor Justinian who outlawed any other religion than Christianity. So I’d go for him instead.
Lumpy, considering it was a whole conspiracy, I’d go after the entire group. Good idea, though.
I would argue that, unless you can get both, don’t kill Hitler or Stalin. A weaker Russian leader might have lost the war to Hitler. OTOH, without Hitler around, maybe Stalin would have gotten more… ambition for territory than he already was. They kinda balanced each other out, in a horrible gruesome way.
World War I might be inevitable but even a slightly different one might be less bloody and cause so much political shakeup. For example Russia’s military was growing stronger so if given a few years, the Russians could easily have overrun the Germans in the East and have World War I end in a year or two.
In addition, the Allies might be more willing to align with a moderate Soviet leader thus preventing a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. However OTOH the most likely successor to Lenin besides Stalin was Trotsky who would have waged endless wars in favour of spreading the revolution. But then again that might simply mean the Soviets collapse decades earlier.
I don’t understand how you guys are getting that killing someone with descendants is a no-no. The rule is “Anyone alive today(and don’t try getting around it by bumping off their ancestors)” which would mean not killing off a currently living person by bumping off an ancestor so they’re never born, not that you couldn’t kill off a dead person who had kids…
I’ve got to hold off picking because Dr Martin Cooper is still alive at 83 and Andrew Wakefield is only my parents’ age.
