Modern Religion Without Rome
- Thread starter English Nationalist
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The idea of religions based on human sacrifices to Baal spreading through the Carthaginians is scary.
I don't think Far East religions will spread that much into Europe, but rather Middle East religions will prevail in Europe. Of course, exchange of ideas will enrich religions all across Eurasia, like OTL Hellenistic Era.
More specifically, I'd argue that Europe will religiously be much like Latin America today: officialy monotheistic, sincretical pagan de facto.
Maybe those official large religions (Zoroastrism, alt-Christianism, whatever the Hellenic religion was) will pull a Crusade against the religions based on human sacrifice.
Middle East will be the cradle of western civilization for much time, just like it was in OTL until the Mongols. But I've read that the Gauls had roads, agriculture, social classes and many other signs of non-barbarian-ness, but I know close to nothing about pre-Roman Gaul and Northern Europe in general.
If the Middle East civilization develops gunpowder before any masive barbarian invasion, forget about Europe becoming the center of the West for a long time.
I don't think Far East religions will spread that much into Europe, but rather Middle East religions will prevail in Europe. Of course, exchange of ideas will enrich religions all across Eurasia, like OTL Hellenistic Era.
More specifically, I'd argue that Europe will religiously be much like Latin America today: officialy monotheistic, sincretical pagan de facto.
Maybe those official large religions (Zoroastrism, alt-Christianism, whatever the Hellenic religion was) will pull a Crusade against the religions based on human sacrifice.
Middle East will be the cradle of western civilization for much time, just like it was in OTL until the Mongols. But I've read that the Gauls had roads, agriculture, social classes and many other signs of non-barbarian-ness, but I know close to nothing about pre-Roman Gaul and Northern Europe in general.
If the Middle East civilization develops gunpowder before any masive barbarian invasion, forget about Europe becoming the center of the West for a long time.
The million-dollar question here, IMO, is how likely or unlikely it is for there to be a number of continent-spanning religions wiping out most of the interesting religious diversity. On the face of it we might infer that it's more likely then not, just from the fact that their have been at least three OTL, with Hinduism and the assorted East Asian faiths being the only non-big three faiths holding a majority in a meaningful swath of territory.
If we were to try and make an argument against that though... we might observe that Buddhism is the only one of three that really spread itself on it's own merits. Christianity and Islam wouldn't have been half as successful if they hadn't been hitched to Rome and the Caliphate respectively. They then proceeded to win additional converts mostly due to having dominated such a large amount of territory that converting was politically and/or commercially beneficial for the converts. As for Buddhism, it fell to pieces in India under the weight of Hinduism's resurgence, to say nothing of the difficulties it faced due to persecution in China.
So maybe Christianity and Islam's near-duopoly outside of the South-East quarter of Asia could be considered a historical fluke? After all their were plenty of long lived empires that didn't adopt and coercively impose a single monotheistic faith. And there are plenty of empires who's founders weren't religious prophets. Rome and the Caliphate stand out as the exceptions, not the rule.
It's also worth noting that they were both unusually large. No other empire has come close to uniting as much of the Euro-Mediterranean region as Rome did, nor has any empire other then the early Caliphates maintained longstanding control over both the Eastern Mediterranean and the Persian plateau. So, if we assume their size is a fluke, maybe we could presume that their ATL analogues are likely to dominate far less territory early on. And given that their later expansion mostly relied on either a)conquerors arising from the established conquests, or b)pagan conquerors deciding it was too much bother ruling them without converting to their faith or c)coercive trade monopolies... well, the smaller the base that's initially established the less the distance those three factors are likely to carry them.
TLDR: It might be that the territorial scope of Islam and Christianity is a fluke, given that most empires weren't founded by or converted to a new and absolutist faith, and given that most empires weren't able to maintain long term control of such wide expanses of territory as the Roman Empire and early Caliphates did. So, in our hypothetical multiverse, it might be that our planet is abnormally undiverse when it comes to religion.
If we were to try and make an argument against that though... we might observe that Buddhism is the only one of three that really spread itself on it's own merits. Christianity and Islam wouldn't have been half as successful if they hadn't been hitched to Rome and the Caliphate respectively. They then proceeded to win additional converts mostly due to having dominated such a large amount of territory that converting was politically and/or commercially beneficial for the converts. As for Buddhism, it fell to pieces in India under the weight of Hinduism's resurgence, to say nothing of the difficulties it faced due to persecution in China.
So maybe Christianity and Islam's near-duopoly outside of the South-East quarter of Asia could be considered a historical fluke? After all their were plenty of long lived empires that didn't adopt and coercively impose a single monotheistic faith. And there are plenty of empires who's founders weren't religious prophets. Rome and the Caliphate stand out as the exceptions, not the rule.
It's also worth noting that they were both unusually large. No other empire has come close to uniting as much of the Euro-Mediterranean region as Rome did, nor has any empire other then the early Caliphates maintained longstanding control over both the Eastern Mediterranean and the Persian plateau. So, if we assume their size is a fluke, maybe we could presume that their ATL analogues are likely to dominate far less territory early on. And given that their later expansion mostly relied on either a)conquerors arising from the established conquests, or b)pagan conquerors deciding it was too much bother ruling them without converting to their faith or c)coercive trade monopolies... well, the smaller the base that's initially established the less the distance those three factors are likely to carry them.
TLDR: It might be that the territorial scope of Islam and Christianity is a fluke, given that most empires weren't founded by or converted to a new and absolutist faith, and given that most empires weren't able to maintain long term control of such wide expanses of territory as the Roman Empire and early Caliphates did. So, in our hypothetical multiverse, it might be that our planet is abnormally undiverse when it comes to religion.
And rulers of countries did not convert to Buddhism? It had institutional support, it just didn't (usually) wipe out existing indigenous religion in the process. The monumental Buddhist art, like in the Longmen grottoes is enough to prove that.
My point was that Buddhism didn't "get lucky" by becoming the national religion of gigantic empire as Christianity did or hitching itself to the founders of a gigantic empire as Islam did.
Which I suppose means that Buddhism is the weak point in my argument, in that it was able to gain state patronage in multiple different countries without conquest or coercion. Also, since a great deal of what is now Muslim-dominated territory in South and South-East Asia was previously Buddhist or Hindu... and I suppose the considerable Hindu presence in South East Asia before Islam also adds weight to the notion that hegemonic religions covering large swathes of territory was more likely then not.
*You say usually? I know very little about Buddhism's history, how many examples are there of conversion due to state-based coercion?
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What heresy! The birth of Jesus was God's will! Of course he'll be born, just like Obama will be elected president!
Flocculencio
Donor
Buddhism is interesting because it has historically acted as an expansion pack to existing religions. In SE Asia it coexisted with Hinduism, and even where it is now the dominant religion (e.g. thailand) it has substantial Hindu elements. Whether Hindu or Buddhist elements were dominant depended on the preferences of individual rulers.
It's analogous to how Buddhism and Shinto coexist in Japan.
Now of course what then happened in Indochina was that for whatever reason Buddhism became theologically dominant with Hindu elements becoming practiced more as folk religion and fringe aspects of state religion. In the Malay world Hindu-Buddhism was largely subsumed by Islam. The Buddhist elements went extinct and Hinduism again integrated itself into folk religion (except in Java, to an extent, and Bali of course).