When did the European conquest of the majority of the world become inevitable?

When did Europe "win"?

  • Inevitable due to geography

    Votes: 6 4.3%
  • Greco-Roman civilization

    Votes: 1 0.7%
  • Fall of Rome

    Votes: 1 0.7%
  • Black Death

    Votes: 4 2.8%
  • Renaissance

    Votes: 26 18.4%
  • Discovery of the Americas

    Votes: 37 26.2%
  • Industrial Revolution

    Votes: 60 42.6%
  • Other

    Votes: 6 4.3%

  • Total voters
    141

fi11222

Banned
How does one argue that a religion that emphasizes faith alone over one that espouses faith and works is somehow more likely to issue temporal success?
Like I just did above, by arguing that "Faith alone" is a better feel-good masturbatory yoga than "Faith and works". The latter is more dependent on achieving success in the here and now and therefore will generate more disappointment (less resilience) in the face of adversity than "Faith alone". Hence, it will make people more risk averse.
 
Depends, which theory you believe
world systems
historical tradiional school
or the new california school.
World System is about the accumalation of capital over many centuries by European powers providing them foundation for achieivng dominence and the core-periphery theory eg marxist leninist view of divergence relating to resource extration.
Historical tradition school is the one all aout calvanism, thrift, western exceptionalism etc.
New california argues that the colonies, slavery, sea, and industrial revolution key to european dominence.

Since all three theories are currently contested their is no clear nswer to the question posited by the OP just competing theories one of which the poster follows and subscribes too. An argument is difficult given the equally valid points made by the above theories.
 
Depends, which theory you believe
world systems
historical tradiional school
or the new california school.
World System is about the accumalation of capital over many centuries by European powers providing them foundation for achieivng dominence and the core-periphery theory eg marxist leninist view of divergence relating to resource extration.
Historical tradition school is the one all aout calvanism, thrift, western exceptionalism etc.
New california argues that the colonies, slavery, sea, and industrial revolution key to european dominence.

Since all three theories are currently contested their is no clear nswer to the question posited by the OP just competing theories one of which the poster follows and subscribes too. An argument is difficult given the equally valid points made by the above theories.

I would say that I hold firmly to the more traditional view of history.

World systems in relation to the Mid East is piss poor.

California school is in a way true but in other ways false, it in my opinion inadquetly speaks to the Mid East.
 

fi11222

Banned
What about the pagan Greeks, Phoenicians, and Romans that built colonies across the Mediterranean world, and the Eastern Orthodox Russians who settled Siberia?
Regarding Russia, Orthodox Christian is better than not Christian at all. It is the same as Catholic Spain. Both Russia and Spain were able to acquire large Empires in weakly defended areas. But none of these two was able to tackle the Ottomans (though they both clearly wished) before the latter became decadent. And neither had an industrial revolution. Far from it.

Regarding Greeks, Phoenicians, and Romans, mentioning them here points to a potentially interesting interpretation of their unique character. I believe that it may be argued that all three are proto-monotheistic, at least at the beginning of their history. This is not so much apparent in the purely religious sphere as it is in the political one (noting that the two were much less separate then than now). All three are city-state based cultures which developed on a backdrop of large world-empires (Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia). In all three cases, the preferred form of government is republican-oligarchic, with a strong bias against personal rule. The Romans were anti-monarchic and the Greeks, at least in the classical era, anti-tyranny. In the Phoenician case, most Lebanese city-states had admittedly a king but Carthage had not. In other words, those who were most opposed to personal rule went away from home and were the most successful at expansion.

The "proto-monotheistic" character of these three civilizations is most apparent in the case of Rome, probably in large part because we have much more material on its early civic history than in any other case. In the 4th century, at the time of the early republic, Rome is strikingly similar to the Judean Jerusalem-centered city state of the post-exilic era. In both cases, the polity is centered on a hill-based temple and is ruled by a patriciate whose legitimacy is based on religious charisma. One tends to forget that the Roman patrician's right to higher office initially derives from his monopoly on religious priesthood and that, in the Hellenistic era, the Romans were known as "the most religious of peoples". In other words, the Roman patricians' social footprint is very similar to that of the few "Aaronic" families who dominated post-exilic Jerusalem and later became the backbone of the Sadducee party during the late Hellenistic and early Roman era.
 

fi11222

Banned
That your response is to project onto someone objecting to your position is indicative of the problems inherent in the argument, if it can be called such.
A counter argument would be nice, instead of a blanket denial accompanied by scornful remarks.
 
You seem to certain, so confident to peddle your doctoral thesis in this thread and then go after critics. If I must...

Absurd? I am certainly not the first one to make that case. Max Weber is the best known source of such ideas and there are many others.

I think that your reaction (along with the very widespread rejection of Weberian arguments of this kind) has more to do with anti-religious prejudice (and fear) than rational thinking. Let us clear the air first. I am not religious myself. I am not a Christian, nor a believer in any form of revealed religion. I do not either describe myself as an agnostic or an atheist as I find these words to be just as misleading as "Christian" and other similar labels. I think it is time we move beyond anticlerical resentment and start becoming able to cast a more impartial glance on the impact religion had in history.

That doesn't mean you don't have a slant or a bias, it just means you're unaffiliated. That is no credential on which to continue.

Humankind masturbates.
It shares this trait with many other species. What is peculiar to humanity is that it has become able to harness the power of non-sexual masturbation in order to modify its own instinctive behavior through masturbation-rewarded training. "Religion" is the word we use to describe a very wide variety of masturbatory behaviors in which groups of humans mimic political behaviors (display of submission / praise) by directing them at an imaginary supra-human authority. By doing so, the participants derive pleasure (Marx's "opium"). But, precisely because of the pleasure these behaviors generate, they also impart conditioning. It is classical operant-conditioning theory. Accompany a certain train of thought with pleasure and you reinforce its grip on your mind. Everything humans learn is based on this. Otherwise, we would only have instincts and could never deviate from them. We would still be living in small bands where the alpha male bangs all the females after slugging it out once a year with a few other male competitors and that would be it.

Some forms of masturbation encourage behaviors that make their practitioners more fit (in evolutionary term) while others make them less so. As a result, like anything else in evolution, the fitness-enhancing forms of masturbation get selected and the others weeded out.

If that's a shock-value and overly roundabout way of saying that man seeks things pleasurable to him in more ways than those of sexual gratification, I'm not really going to disagree with you.

Regarding Christianity, what I am saying is that Catholicism is a form of masturbation which makes its practitioners less fit than protestantism. How does that work? In order to understand that, one needs to have an intimate knowledge of how the two currents within Christianity operate at a deep level. If one looks at them as two more or less equivalent forms of "religion" and stops at that, one is of course never going to be able to distinguish what is truly going on.

That last sentence is an abstraction to the point of meaninglessness. I would agree an intimate knowledge is needed, though I am not sure you possess it.

First of all, one must understand that protestantism is "more" Christian than Catholicism.

[citation needed]

Again, this is not partisan. I am not Christian. I am not protestant.

Again, this does not mean your opinion is clearly colored or biased.

What is referred as "Catholicism" is not so much a religion than a socio-political outer shell which was generated by Christianity in late antiquity in order to allow it to survive in a world where most people, though officially called Christian, were anything but. In Catholicism, only monks are truly Christian.

That's simply a falsehood that has no real basis in fact. There's a plethora of historical evidence that would indicate the theology of Christianity emerged relatively unchanged from the end of the 1st century - whether or not those opinions were always "orthodox" or subsumed to be so later were open for debate, but again, there's no basis for anything you're saying. Catholic Christianity - that is, the Christian faith of the Western Roman area - was and is a set of beliefs, doctrines, and dogma, not unlike any similar religion. You're going with this bizarre "real" Christian dichotomy with which you've provided no evidence.

All other categories of people (priests, warrior-aristocrats and peasants) are not. What catholicism offers to these categories (i.e. 99% of the population) is a label of legitimacy ("Christian") together with a series of ritual practices which are in fact thinly whitewashed forms of Late Antique pagan religion.

Here's where you veer off into what another poster I believe called thinly veiled anti-Catholic rhetoric born of the 19th century. You can't make statements like this and then criticize when people don't believe you, since you've provided no evidence for the claim.

One can realize this just by entering a Catholic Church. Generally, you will have small chapels on the side, each dedicated to a saint. In the center there will be a cross, with a statue of Christ nailed to it but behind it, either hidden by the alter or sometimes visible, there will be a statue of the Virgin Mary. Very often, the statue of the Virgin is much taller than the small Christ on the cross and completely dwarfs it when the two are visible in alignment from the entrance or the middle of the nave. This is not a Christian place of worship. It is a temple of the Magna Mater represented, as was usual in Roman times, together with her son/lover Adonis.

Yeah, none of this is true. Many if not most Catholic Churches have devotion to the Blessed Mother in the lady chapel, and in no sense is that the center of the "temple" analogy you're going with. Before Vatican II, there was nothing at the center or visible behind except the high altar with the tabernacle, often adorned with the Crucifix. A quick example can be found in Munich, for example where the high altar is still mostly in tact with the new altar placed in front of it. We see the Tabernacle, a crucifix, a depiction of St. Michael (under the eye of God the Father) sending Satan to hell, and above that another statue of Jesus and still above that "IHS", a monogram for Jesus.

The Catholic cultural compromise works by restricting its ritual speech (what is said during mass) to purely Christian doctrine, while in fact allowing pagan ritual practices outside of mass: pilgrimages to saints' tombs, relics worship, Marian prayers and devotions, etc. For the bulk of Catholics even today, these practices are what truly binds them to the Roman Church. But for some, especially the monks, it is possible to be truly Christian in such an environment. And in fact, it is the only way to be a Christian in an era such as Late Antiquity or the Middle Ages when it is absolutely unthinkable that the bulk of the population might understand, let alone convert to "true" Christianity.

Again, this nonsensical dichotomy floats in. These monks, your "true Christian", types, spent days, hours, months, and years in devotion to Mary and the Eucharist, imitated the lives of Saints, and all of these other purportedly "pagan" activities as part of their Christian practice, arguably the central part aside from their reception of the Mass and the constant prayer.

So what is "true" Christianity. Setting aside what an hypothetical historical Jesus might have taught (and which is unknowable), it is the writings of Paul which provide the shortest and less ambiguous answer. Every Christian theologian, from Augustine to Luther is in agreement on that count. So what does Paul says? Essentially that "the righteous will live by Faith (alone)" which is equivalent to saying that the true Christian will derive his pleasure/comfort/sense of contentment in life only from a form of mental and verbal masturbation. Let us not enter into the details of how this process operates.

This is wandering off into Protestant theology and ignores various other evidences to the contrary in the Bible and by the early Church that forged the canon for the benefit of faith in addition to works (James, etc).

Let us just say that this is a highly evolved form of masturbation in which almost all material elements are done away with. This makes its practitioners extremely fit in every way. Since their source of masturbatory pleasure is basically free and completely portable, they are assured of always having access to it whatever the circumstances. This makes them more resilient and more adaptable than people who depend on a cumbersome apparatus of rituals, buildings, supplies and so on to produce the same effects of mental well being.

The numerous Protestant Churches that dot the West would like to argue otherwise.

Until the XVth century, 99.x% of the European population was Rome-authorised pagan while the infinitesimal proportion of true Christians (1-0.x) was slowly rising within the shelter of the monastic institution. Eventually this very small number reached a threshold at which it became realistic to try and convert the whole population to true Christianity. Basically, and in very schematic terms, the reformation happened when "true" Christianity came out of the monastic closet and attempted to turn 100% of the population into believers. Of course it failed. But it still managed to substantially increase the proportion of true Christians. Let us assume (arbitrarily) that Protestantism managed to increase the percentage of Christians from less than 1% to 10%. This is a huge change. In a society in which this obtains, it means that 10% of the population become super-adaptable, super-resilient individuals who are ready to embrace any kind of risky venture because they are absolutely certain (and rightly so) that whatever happens to them, they cannot lose their source of a feel-good masturbatory fix. This is perfectly expressed in Luther's famous phrase: "Sin boldly but believe in God even more boldly and rejoice (i.e. climax) in God's grace". Nothing can stop a man who thinks like that. This was present of course since the beginning of Christianity as can be seen for example in the parable of the talents and in the enterprising spirit that monks always displayed (they were the main drivers of economic growth in the Middle Ages). But it was not emphasized, hidden as it was under the legalistic and ritualistic protective shell of official Catholicism.

Again, this is wandering off into the realm of Protestant theology, particularly with the bigoted language of Protestants being the "real" Christians. Plenty of Catholics took risks, plenty of Catholic innovators, warriors, scientists, scholars, capitalists, etc. did things that you claim they apparently couldn't. As did the banks and other various fiscal and trade enterprises of Europe before the reformation, which, of course, brings us perilously close to the OP. There's something else going on here. It's not the reformation.

This is what explains the industrial revolution.

Metallurgy? If we want to come closer to the answer of the question posed in the OP, maybe that's the route we should be going.

You cannot run a bank for very long (or any other capitalistic enterprise) if you do not live by the maxim of "sin boldly, but believe in God even more boldly")

I'm lost. Are these sinners, then, real Christians, and the ones that simply did this before just "pagans" not working under the belief of Christianity? So these enterprising industrious monks - of which there were many, of course at Cluny but elsewhere - did they espouse the fundamental belief in sin?

I am not being cynical here. Quite the opposite. Indeed, this motto does not work if you do not believe in it sincerely; naively even (something we are no longer really capable of, I am afraid). Apart from industry, the fitness benefits that such a motto procures to its adherents is readily apparent in the agricultural conquest of the North American plains by European settlers in the XIXth century. Many of these settlers were not Anglo. There were as many Germans, Swedes and Dutch as there were Englishmen and Scots. But all were protestant.

Patently false - the Irish, for example, ring a bell? The somewhat sizable contingent of French-Americans in parts of the English colonial system?

For more than a millennium, European peasants had been serfs barely able to scrape a living and there, in less than a century,

Faulty assumption (Dark Ages myth) again based on faulty 19th century historical dogma. Most peasants ate fairly well, farm yields significantly outyielded Roman farmers, and aside from the occasional famine, this is a myth. Again, coming somewhat close to the OP - good European crops with good European farm equipment might bring us closer to the answer.

a few hundred thousand protestant settlers were able to put under cultivation an area twice as big as the whole of Western Europe. Why? because their portable masturbatory techniques (Indians would call that a "Yoga") made them able to psychologically withstand the tornadoes, the droughts, the prairie fires and the Indian attacks which were the inevitable corollary of this endeavor. I am not talking here of hardships per se but of the uncertainty that they generated. A XIXth century American settler was not afraid of failure. If his whole livestock and crops were wiped out in a catastrophe, he would just go elsewhere and start over (for an illustration of this, see The Little House on the Prairie. It is corny I know but accurate in that respect) European peasants were not like that. They stayed in one place because it was where their comfort base was located. And the sources of this comfort were not portable. They were firmly rooted in the myriad rituals of family, shrines and magic practices which sustained European peasant life as it did since the neolithic. Only true (i.e. fully internalized, therefore fully portable) Christianity was capable to turn the average European neolithic peasant into an American settler and also, into a banker, an entrepreneur, an inventor

Basically a summation of flawed history in various other points in your post, but you have uncovered a couple key things inadvertently that go back to the OP, namely:

1. The growth of industry and market towns (including those around monasteries) - as well as banking, investment, and much later joint stock companies - in fairly free areas lead to sustained economic activities that only decentralized European geography produced and lead to further economic activity elsewhere and further down the line, aside from those areas (such as Flanders) which eventually fell to autocratic state controls; and
2. The European farm yield was fairly high, allowing for a well fed populace and well fed armies, also allowing for additional commercial activities to occur.

It's for this purpose I answered after the Fall of Rome but would have probably preferred a slightly later option, perhaps the fall of the Carolingian Empire. I don't think at that point it was all that certain that Europe would dominate, but I do think by that point they would be a strong contender and not a place to be rolled over (as could be seen later by heavily armored cavalry making meals of Asiatic and Middle Eastern armies in various Crusading activities and in Spain, etc.)
 
I think that neither the immorality of colonialism nor its technological/cultural birth were inevitable until after major colonization efforts were completed/ossified.

G) After the industrial Revolution.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
Are you Catholic, or simply pissed off because what I am saying seems to make sense?
Enough of the insults. I have no idea which book happened to trip you today, but you have gone from a rather... unusual set of descriptions, more or less designed to insult every single Christian on the Board to plain old insults.

STOP.
 

fi11222

Banned
Ah, a detailed rebuttal. At last.
You seem to certain, so confident to peddle your doctoral thesis in this thread and then go after critics. If I must...
What is wrong with expressing your theory if you have one?

Unless of course it makes others jealous and bitter, that is.
Humankind masturbates.
...
If that's a shock-value and overly roundabout way of saying that man seeks things pleasurable to him in more ways than those of sexual gratification, I'm not really going to disagree with you.
With due respect, I am saying much more than that.

All animals seek pleasurable things of course. It is the very evolutionary purpose of pleasure. The idea here is that man is uniquely able to artificially trigger instinctual pleasure responses ("masturbate") and use this as a tool to modify his own behavior. Indeed, all human learning/training is based on masturbation in this sense.

One can realize this just by entering a Catholic Church. Generally, you will have small chapels on the side, each dedicated to a saint. In the center there will be a cross, with a statue of Christ nailed to it but behind it, either hidden by the alter or sometimes visible, there will be a statue of the Virgin Mary. Very often, the statue of the Virgin is much taller than the small Christ on the cross and completely dwarfs it when the two are visible in alignment from the entrance or the middle of the nave. This is not a Christian place of worship. It is a temple of the Magna Mater represented, as was usual in Roman times, together with her son/lover Adonis
Yeah, none of this is true. Many if not most Catholic Churches have devotion to the Blessed Mother in the lady chapel, and in no sense is that the center of the "temple" analogy you're going with. Before Vatican II, there was nothing at the center or visible behind except the high altar with the tabernacle, often adorned with the Crucifix. A quick example can be found in Munich, for example where the high altar is still mostly in tact with the new altar placed in front of it. We see the Tabernacle, a crucifix, a depiction of St. Michael (under the eye of God the Father) sending Satan to hell, and above that another statue of Jesus and still above that "IHS", a monogram for Jesus.
Ok so you are a Catholic, or at least, Catholic-educated. Honesty would require you to disclose this, I think.

You are not really contradicting what I said above. Of course, before Vatican II, the high altar was at the back of the worship area. But what was behind the high altar? Generally the lady chapel! I am talking here of large churches with an ambulatory passing behind the main altar (see here). If you look at the architecture of those churches (of which there are an uncountable number, all over Europe), it is readily apparent that a Catholic place of worship is shaped like a shopping mall. All around the walls are small shops (chapels) where devotions to various gods (called "saints") are offered. Devotees can shop around according to taste and mood. Then, in the center-line of the Church is the main attraction, similar to the "anchor" department store in a shopping mall. Its official facade is indeed impeccably Christian: the altar, the cross and the mass which takes place there. But behind this facade lies the actual form of worship which binds together the Christian community at large: the Marian chapel, i.e. a very close analogue of the various Mother Goddess cults which were popular in the Late Roman Empire under the name of Cybele, Artemis (in Ephesus), Isis, and so on.

I am no saying that this is wrong. It was the result of a vast trial and error process resulting in something quite resilient which safeguarded the essential teachings of true Christianity for their eventual use later on when times were more favorable. Basically, what this amounts to is that the Church became resigned, maybe one or two centuries after Nicea, to the fact that the most it could hope for from the overwhelming majority of the citizens of the Roman Empire was a purely outward profession of Christianness while at heart they remained pagan. And since they remained so, it was better to offer them what they needed within the Church building itself rather than having them congregate in the woods to perform older pagan rituals (which they did nonetheless for a considerable length of time, though less and less so as time went on and "Christianized" substitutes multiplied in the form of saints devotions, pilgrimages, relics and so on). In the Middle Ages, being Christian meant that you had in fact a wide range of religious options. You had to attend mass regardless of whether or not you understood what was said (most did not) and was offered a piece of lucky-charm magical bread at the end of it. Why not after all. Pagans are never averse to an additional source of apotropaic magic. Beyond that, you could worship the Holy Mother of the gods just as your ancestors had done from time immemorial. You could pray to her for protection and find solace in her warm embrace. Additionally, you could direct ancillary devotions to a large number of secondary deities (the "saints") with specific personalities and areas of expertise. Finally, there was an infinite array of amulets, blessed medals, holy water vials, etc. which you could acquire and use as magic charms. All this pretty much covered the whole gamut of ancient pagan religious practices and most people were content with that. But you had another option. You could also read the gospel and Paul's letters, understand them and become a true Christian. Benedict of Nurcia or Thomas a Kempis were such. They were rare but they existed. Most of them were monks but of course not all monks were true Christians. The monastic institution worked much like the later protestantism. It was founded by true Christians soon, victim of its own success, generally had no more than 5 or 10% of true Christians among its ranks. So what? This was way better than the less than 1% overall figure and it preserved the possibility of being truly Christian for centuries.

Again, this nonsensical dichotomy floats in. These monks, your "true Christian", types, spent days, hours, months, and years in devotion to Mary and the Eucharist, imitated the lives of Saints, and all of these other purportedly "pagan" activities as part of their Christian practice, arguably the central part aside from their reception of the Mass and the constant prayer.
Yes, many monks were not true Christians. But it was among them that the few true Christians that did exist were to be found, as a number of texts attest. Neither Benedict's rule, nor Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ display much signs of Marian devotion or of all the other non-Christian features of Catholicism. There were indeed some true Christians among Catholics at any given time.

This is wandering off into Protestant theology and ignores various other evidences to the contrary in the Bible and by the early Church that forged the canon for the benefit of faith in addition to works (James, etc).
....
Again, this is wandering off into the realm of Protestant theology, particularly with the bigoted language of Protestants being the "real" Christians.
I am not a protestant and I openly claim that I do not share their beliefs. Hence, I cannot be bigoted since one can only be so in favor of a group one claims to belong to. By the way, could you please openly state what religious group you belong to, if any?

However, I believe that the protestant claim to be truer Christians than Catholics is pretty solidly backed by evidence. At least in so far as you define "Christianity" by what is contained in the New Testament. It is pretty clear to an impartial observer that protestantism is a Sola Scriptura religious current while Catholicism is not.

I'm lost. Are these sinners, then, real Christians, ...?
This is the key. A "true" Christian admits he is a sinner. This is the whole point of the cross and everything that goes with it in the gospels and Pauline epistles. The point here is the realization that once you truly think that way, once you live constantly with the idea that you are a sinner, you are much less afraid of failure than you once were. It is worth remembering that the Greek word for "sin" is hamartia, which means "missing the mark" (as when you shoot an arrow). A true Christian is someone who lives in constant acceptance of the inevitability of human failure, instead of repressing this idea and trying to bury it under mountains of ritual and purity rules as almost all other religions do.

Patently false - the Irish, for example, ring a bell?
The Irish were very few among the agricultural settlers of the central plains. Most Irish immigrants stayed at or near their ports of arrival on the east coast and became salaried workers, firemen, cops ... and thieves.

The somewhat sizable contingent of French-Americans in parts of the English colonial system?
Two categories here: the hugenot, who were protestant, and the Cajun, who are not a particularly successful nor enterprising segment of the American population.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
Ah, a detailed rebuttal. At last.

What is wrong with expressing your theory if you have one?

Unless of course it makes others jealous and bitter, that is.

With due respect, I am saying much more than that.

All animals seek pleasurable things of course. It is the very evolutionary purpose of pleasure. The idea here is that man is uniquely able to artificially trigger instinctual pleasure responses ("masturbate") and use this as a tool to modify his own behavior. Indeed, all human learning/training is based on masturbation in this sense.


Ok so you are a Catholic, or at least, Catholic-educated. Honesty would require you to disclose this, I think.

You are not really contradicting what I said above. Of course, before Vatican II, the high altar was at the back of the worship area. But what was behind the high altar? Generally the lady chapel! I am talking here of large churches with an ambulatory passing behind the main altar (see here). If you look at the architecture of those churches (of which there are an uncountable number, all over Europe), it is readily apparent that a Catholic place of worship is shaped like a shopping mall. All around the walls are small shops (chapels) where devotions to various gods (called "saints") are offered. Devotees can shop around according to taste and mood. Then, in the center-line of the Church is the main attraction, similar to the "anchor" department store in a shopping mall. Its official facade is indeed impeccably Christian: the altar, the cross and the mass which takes place there. But behind this facade lies the actual form of worship which binds together the Christian community at large: the Marian chapel, i.e. a very close analogue of the various Mother Goddess cults which were popular in the Late Roman Empire under the name of Cybele, Artemis (in Ephesus), Isis, and so on.

I am no saying that this is wrong. It was the result of a vast trial and error process resulting in something quite resilient which safeguarded the essential teachings of true Christianity for their eventual use later on when times were more favorable. Basically, what this amounts to is that the Church became resigned, maybe one or two centuries after Nicea, to the fact that the most it could hope for from the overwhelming majority of the citizens of the Roman Empire was a purely outward profession of Christianness while at heart they remained pagan. And since they remained so, it was better to offer them what they needed within the Church building itself rather than having them congregate in the woods to perform older pagan rituals (which they did nonetheless for a considerable length of time, though less and less so as time went on and "Christianized" substitutes multiplied in the form of saints devotions, pilgrimages, relics and so on). In the Middle Ages, being Christian meant that you had in fact a wide range of religious options. You had to attend mass regardless of whether or not you understood what was said (most did not) and was offered a piece of lucky-charm magical bread at the end of it. Why not after all. Pagans are never averse to an additional source of apotropaic magic. Beyond that, you could worship the Holy Mother of the gods just as your ancestors had done from time immemorial. You could pray to her for protection and find solace in her warm embrace. Additionally, you could direct ancillary devotions to a large number of secondary deities (the "saints") with specific personalities and areas of expertise. Finally, there was an infinite array of amulets, blessed medals, holy water vials, etc. which you could acquire and use as magic charms. All this pretty much covered the whole gamut of ancient pagan religious practices and most people were content with that. But you had another option. You could also read the gospel and Paul's letters, understand them and become a true Christian. Benedict of Nurcia or Thomas a Kempis were such. They were rare but they existed. Most of them were monks but of course not all monks were true Christians. The monastic institution worked much like the later protestantism. It was founded by true Christians soon, victim of its own success, generally had no more than 5 or 10% of true Christians among its ranks. So what? This was way better than the less than 1% overall figure and it preserved the possibility of being truly Christian for centuries.


Yes, many monks were not true Christians. But it was among them that the few true Christians that did exist were to be found, as a number of texts attest. Neither Benedict's rule, nor Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ display much signs of Marian devotion or of all the other non-Christian features of Catholicism. There were indeed some true Christians among Catholics at any given time.


I am not a protestant and I openly claim that I do not share their beliefs. Hence, I cannot be bigoted since one can only be so in favor of a group one claims to belong to. By the way, could you please openly state what religious group you belong to, if any?

However, I believe that the protestant claim to be truer Christians than Catholics is pretty solidly backed by evidence. At least in so far as you define "Christianity" by what is contained in the New Testament. It is pretty clear to an impartial observer that protestantism is a Sola Scriptura religious current while Catholicism is not.


This is the key. A "true" Christian admits he is a sinner. This is the whole point of the cross and everything that goes with it in the gospels and Pauline epistles. The point here is the realization that once you truly think that way, once you live constantly with the idea that you are a sinner, you are much less afraid of failure than you once were. It is worth remembering that the Greek word for "sin" is hamartia, which means "missing the mark" (as when you shoot an arrow). A true Christian is someone who lives in constant acceptance of the inevitability of human failure, instead of repressing this idea and trying to bury it under mountains of ritual and purity rules as almost all other religions do.


The Irish were very few among the agricultural settlers of the central plains. Most Irish immigrants stayed at or near their ports of arrival on the east coast and became salaried workers, firemen, cops ... and thieves.


Two categories here: the hugenot, who were protestant, and the Cajun, who are not a particularly successful nor enterprising segment of the American population.
So certain immigrant groups stayed near the East Coast and became "...and thieves"

Shame you chose not to heed the warning.

Kicked for a week for nationalist trolling and bigotry.
 
Well as an American I have to say

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Really, though, I'd say sometime in the early industrial revolution in the late 18th century and early 19th century when Europe began to move forward too rapidly for the rest of the non-Western world to reliably catch up until well into the 20th century.
 

PhilippeO

Banned
between 1000-1500.

improvement in nautical capabilities, improvement in commercial system and government, destruction of tribes, creation of rule of law by church, spread of writing, glassmaking and clockmaking, accounting, spread of waterwheel, improved agriculture package, etc
All this making finding America and Rounding Africa possible. by 1500 European victory is near inevitable.

Middle Ages are source of Western Modern success.
 
The final scope of European hegemony could have been greatly reduced if Europe had faced serious competition during the Age of Sail (1500-1800). IMHO this had to come from East Asia. Japan is the likely candidate - a large and advanced country with a natural maritime orientation (population of France, tech level comparable to Europe, strong government, no land borders). But OTL, Japan closed in on itself, and did not participate.

If as late as 1700, Japan had gone out to sea... IMHO they would own the Pacific except the coasts of South and Central America. The Greater Japanese Empire could extend from Malaya to Polynesia, from New Zealand to Siberia. All this would therefore not be European-conquered.

The question remains: would this reduce European dominion to less than a majority of the world?

The world = 58M sq mi of land - 6M for Antarctica = 52M.

European conquests = 6.9M (S Amer) + 9.5M (N Amer) +11.7 M (Afr) - 1.4M (AK, BC, CA, OR, WA) + 1.4M (the 5 'stans) = 28.1M

So ITTL it is very close to half.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Actually a new wave of nomadic invaders around in mid-17th century might have really wrecked Europe because tech levels aren't quite at the level where nomads are no longer a threat and even if they are eventually defeated they would have carried around new diseases. Germany lost something like 40% of its population and a new wave of invaders might have devastated enough of Europe to seriously set back development in that region. Europe of the 1600s actually bared quite a bit of resemblance to the 14th right around the time when the black death hit.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Depends, which theory you believe
world systems
historical tradiional school
or the new california school.
World System is about the accumalation of capital over many centuries by European powers providing them foundation for achieivng dominence and the core-periphery theory eg marxist leninist view of divergence relating to resource extration.
Historical tradition school is the one all aout calvanism, thrift, western exceptionalism etc.
New california argues that the colonies, slavery, sea, and industrial revolution key to european dominence.

Since all three theories are currently contested their is no clear nswer to the question posited by the OP just competing theories one of which the poster follows and subscribes too. An argument is difficult given the equally valid points made by the above theories.
I don't think world systems have much of a following anymore, nor does the traditional school.
 
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