How close to OTL can you get a TL without Christianity or Islam?

About last week or so I started a thread about a world without Christianity or Islam, and the general gist of the replies was that after a few hundred years there was no way to make any meaningful predictions, so I figured I'd add a constraint.

So, let's pull a Turtledove and create a world that's wildly divergent at first which somehow inextricably becomes eerily similar to OTL by the time you get to the present.[1] Having a new messianic Abrahamic religion emerge in Christianity's stead is cheating, though.
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[1] I'm looking at you, TL-191. And Atlantis.
 

SunDeep

Banned
Having a new messianic Abrahamic religion emerge in Christianity's stead is cheating, though.

Does Zoroastrianism count? Because it had a lot of influence of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and comparable religions could well have developed from it along similar paths in an ATL without them...
 
Have the Romans stay pagan, but have some of them actually convert into Germanic Polytheism. With that, you can have medieval age without Christianity where everything stays the same, just no going to Church and celebrate Easter and Christmas but going to the Temple of Odin and sacrifice a man by hanging regularly instead of eucharist, as well as annual dance under the yule.
 
Does Zoroastrianism count? Because it had a lot of influence of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and comparable religions could well have developed from it along similar paths in an ATL without them...
I honestly don't know enough about the Zoroastrianism to say.

Have the Romans stay pagan, but have some of them actually convert into Germanic Polytheism. With that, you can have medieval age without Christianity where everything stays the same, just no going to Church and celebrate Easter and Christmas but going to the Temple of Odin and sacrifice a man by hanging regularly instead of eucharist, as well as annual dance under the yule.
I don't know, if you made a carbon copy of the middle ages just without the church, it seems to me that there'd be a power vacuum there somewhere.
 
I honestly don't know enough about the Zoroastrianism to say.

I don't know, if you made a carbon copy of the middle ages just without the church, it seems to me that there'd be a power vacuum there somewhere.

Perhaps rather than the church being the temporal power, you could have the emperor himself. Basically you end up with a Western and Southern Europe resembling Japan with an Emperor figurehead and tons of petty wars and occasional unity when outsiders have to be fought.
 
I think one has to quantify how much Islam and Christianity contributed to the creation and preservation of knowledge. Islamic scholars certainly did a lot but was that due to Islam or would they have done so if they were Zoroastrian or Jewish? There's also the problem of faith being the most powerful institution around, binding countries together and dictating regional politics, that would need to be replaced. Lastly, you'd need a crusade; a reason for Europe to travel to the Middle East to wage war but then to bring back ideas that were new or had been long since forgotten.
 
I think one has to quantify how much Islam and Christianity contributed to the creation and preservation of knowledge. Islamic scholars certainly did a lot but was that due to Islam or would they have done so if they were Zoroastrian or Jewish?

If I can recall correctly, there were Zoroastrian scholars during the late Sassanid era that were committed to preserving Ancient Greek texts and knowledge. Islam itself wasn't necessarily a prerequisite for the preservation of these texts and the spreading of the ideas contained therein.
 
If I can recall correctly, there were Zoroastrian scholars during the late Sassanid era that were committed to preserving Ancient Greek texts and knowledge. Islam itself wasn't necessarily a prerequisite for the preservation of these texts and the spreading of the ideas contained therein.
Yeah all I've ever heard is how Islamic scholars preserved ancient texts but wasn't sure if those claims were mixing correlation with causation or not.
 
Yeah all I've ever heard is how Islamic scholars preserved ancient texts but wasn't sure if those claims were mixing correlation with causation or not.

I suppose it's just that Islam was influenced by Ancient Greece early on (with Ancient Greek practices of medicine being mentioned in the Qur'an by the Prophet Muhammad) and also that the early Islamic civilisations expanded into lands with 'roots' in Ancient Greece.

I'm sure some Zoroastrian converts to Islam were scholars of Hellenic science and philosophy. Without Islam, these scholars would remain Zoroastrian and wouldn't probably deviate from their OTL work in many major respects.
 
Yeah all I've ever heard is how Islamic scholars preserved ancient texts but wasn't sure if those claims were mixing correlation with causation or not.

And also the byzantines - the fled of scholars when Constantinople felt is another thing that may have helped the Renaissance as well.
 
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