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.
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.)