Many members of this board see a world without Abrahamic religions especially Christianity as better than our own. So what if Christianity had remained a fairly minor religion, which did not win a large number of converts? How would history have devleloped? What religion would Rome convert to instead?
What do you think it would like like, Qin?
Without any Abrahamic religions, or just non-Christian?
I suspect another proselytizing, probably mono-theistic religion would have arisen and spread. Possibly something like Islam.
Regards,
Shodan
to another monotheism - an alternative form of Judaism or to a form of Zoroastrianism like Manichaeism.
Especially given how things turned out, your hypothetical should either nuke both Judaism and Zoroastrianism from orbit or else the whole region will convert to some form of one or both of these things in any event. In real life everybody did in fact convert to a form of Judaism, right?
That’s your Christian monotheist worldview talking. What makes you think they’d convert to a religion? In my view, one likely effect of Christianity not taking over (and presumably Islam not existing at all) would be far less large scale religious conflict. The monotheistic nature of Christianity and its belief in Hell is a major factor in how destructive it is; hostility to all other beliefs and a mission to convert by any means necessary is part of its basic theology. There would still be plenty of religion unfortunately, but unless a similarly successful monotheism arose there’s no reason to assume that Rome would convert to just one religion.
There would also probably be less hatred of sex and other “pleasures of the flesh”, as well as less of an infatuation with the end of the world.
And this is why there’s so much sexual freedom in India and China.
Back to the OP, assuming we don’t have one or more replacement universalist religions, we’d have a religious background more similar to India and China. Hinduism is just a word that means “Modern pagan religion as practiced in India”. There are all sorts of deities and gurus and spiritual beliefs and ceremonies and people from different ethnic groups and families follow different beliefs, and people belonging to those groups have their own ideas about those beliefs. To some it’s just traditional family celebrations, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Others take it more seriously. Some think it’s all humbug, some think it’s a symbolic representation of a more ineffable truth, and some think it’s literally real, that there is a real being called Ganesh and he really has an elephant head and really rides on a rat. Or to put it another way in ancient Rome, “To the common people all religions were equally true, to the philosophers equally false, and to the rulers equally useful.”
Both of which were subjugated by Christian powers for some time, and contaminated by Christianity’s anti-life ideology. The malignant effects of Christianity have spread well beyond Christianity itself.
The level of whining about persecution of Christians would remain the same as it is today, but the fewer followers would whine proportionally more to compensate.
I was going to comment, but on second thought never mind.
In Years of Rice and Salt, Latin Christendom is wiped out by the 14th-Century Plague, leaving the world mostly to the Islamic and Chinese civilizations. The result is, overall, not worse than our timeline.
The world would look pretty different i think. Without the aggressive influence of the Abrahamic religions, a great deal of political decisions, wars, and practices would never have arisen. The largest immediate difference I could forsee is that the native Americans would likely hold a great deal more of the American continents than they are now reduced to. Without manifest destiny, missionaries and the aggressive conversion practices of the Spanish it is likely that the indigenous peoples would have banded together better against serious incursions and held a lot more territory.
It’s also likely that the first serious trade with the new world would have been through the Icelandic vikings who also went through political troubles due to Christianity. Considering the rising power of those areas during the conversion periods it would not surprise me to find Scandinavia holding significant cities of culture and power by this period in time.
You know, there was quite a lot of imperialism before Christianity, and in non-Christian countries. Remember, you know, the Roman Empire? China? Japan?
Religion is a tool of imperialism, not the other way around.
Sure, but a great of the culture is shaped by the religion. Unless you are going to deny the power of the church from the dark ages through to nearly the enlightenment period.
Sure many people, me included, would like to see less of the Abrahamic religions today. That does not necessarily mean that they were a bad idea at the time of their inventions - though that can probably be an interesting debate. In any case, a handful or more centuries have passed by now, and it’s definitely time to do away with the last gods.
Anyway, keeping my personal preferences and prejudices out of the way for a bit; as far as I can see, aside from the ethical and political points of the Abrahamic religions, the main differentiating point of Judaism and Christianity around the 1st century was the insistence on monotheism. Judaism had been around for a lot longer of course, but AFAIK it had only recently been “officially” monotheistic.
A monotheistic faith means more than simply not having more than one god; it means people have only one power to appeal to; that other faiths aren’t just inferior, but fake; that whoever “owns” the “true” god is almost as powerful as the “true” god, and that the traditional fairly muddy “folk” religion of Rome could be turned into a very powerful hierarchical system of political influence that remains in place till this day.
If another popular monotheistic faith came about at around the same time in place of Christianity, I would guess the political effects would have been more or less the same. I don’t think any other polytheistic faith would have had the same kind of influence.
If you eliminated two of the world’s big proselytizing religions - Christianity and Islam - you’d leave the field open for the remaining one - Buddhism.
Or maybe Mithraism would be the top religion. It was popular in the Roman Empire around the same time Christianity was catching on.
And? No one is saying that removing Christianity will eliminate all strife; it will just remove one of the causes.
No, that’s just a standard excuse for the behavior of religion. Never blame religion for the bad things done in its name, only give it credit for the good. Apparently religion is unique among human belief systems in that its true believers never do awful things when it calls for them. :rolleyes:
Der Trihs would be a fundamentalist Christian, railing against the evil oppression of Humanism and all the evil that it begets.
What pulled Europe out of the dark ages was largely a combination of Islamic scholarship and monastaries who had preserved ancient translations of Classical era texts. Without those 2 influences, what would have taken place instead?
As opposed to ignoring the good that religion does, and only focusing on the negative? Apparently religion is unique amongst human belief systems in that it’s believers never do good things when it calls for them.
In fairness Christianity was largely responsible for losing all those books and repressing education in the first place as well. Call that one a wash.
That is your anti-religion worldview talking. A lot of these evils you blame on Christianity probably would have risen in some form or another. Religion has often been a scape goat when looking for an excuse to do atrocities. If one wants to irradicate a people, particularly in those times, religion was convenient. Even before Christianity, people would claim their god, or some other god supported a cause, and people would go to war over it.
Look at China for a good example, long before Christianity ever set foot, the emperors took claim of a mandate of heaven as reason to conquer neighboring lands, and when the empire would fracture, each new kingdom would have it’s own claim as to why they had the mandate. Sure, they had some influence from Christianity over the millenia, but were any of their countless wars ever based upon that justification? Rulers will always leverage whatever means they need to get what they want, and religion was a very easy one to use for a long time.
Even now that religious reasons for wars, at least in the west, have declined, we still see leveraging of the public consciousness to justify wars and oppression. How many horrible things got done in the name of stopping global terror?
Regardless, I highly doubt the world would be that different. We may not have had certain wars, but we’d likely have had other ones instead. We may have ended up with another monotheistic religion, or we may have ended up with a polytheistic one, or perhaps something else entirely. But short of a fundamentally different worldview by humankind, I think the only real difference we’d see is the names and the mythologies associated with the world’s largest religions.