How Christianity Helped The West Get Ahead

[homercles337]

You do not know your history, do you?

You mean the Xian one that is washed, altered, and rinsed clean? Where i come from, we call it brain washing.

 

[micrometers]

TLDR most of it, but yoga isn't really comparable to the adiabatic process.

 

[Lemon law]

Pardon me if I agree that our OP, Karmypolitics, has a point, but totally missed the real political forces that caused Europe, to transform from a cultural and intellectual backwater. And in the space of only 250 years, Europe suddenly became most dominant continent on the planet.

1. First Europe had to wait for the rise of nationhood. Before circa 1300 AD all the real power was held by the land owning nobles, with the concept of a national king only rarely needed to raise a national army. As a result, travel more than 20 miles was rarely happened which suited the Catholic church just fine. As the crusades, the voyages of Marco Polo, and greed and envy for the goods of the far East was a Muslim monopoly almost unobtainable in Europe. But after 1300 AD and with increasing speed, The kings of various European countries gained the political power to unite their nations. As the Rising kings of various nations saw political power in building roads, and opening up national travel and commerce. And with that progress, suddenly intellectuals of various countries could share ideas and communicate like never before. People like Gallelo, the inventor of the telescope, and others looked at the sky, and what they saw, didn't square a bit with with the established and totally dominant Catholic church dogma.

2. As ideas began to rise various kings, namely Henry the Navigator in Portugal and King Ferdinand in Spain pioneered the technology of long distance sailing ship. As Henry tried to round the continent of Africa, and Queen Isabella took a long shot gamble on a Italian sailor named Columbus. And what an idiot Chris turned out to be. His math was all wrong, as he thought the spice isles of China was only 3000 miles away, and was only wrong by a factor of four. But still, better be lucky than right, ole Columbus set forth from Spain and on to the already populated Canary Islands. And then did something previous sailors did not, as he sailed due south instead of due West, and caught the West flowing trade winds when he finally turned West. Of course its absurd to say Columbus discovered The America's, but when he came back, he popularized the route for everyone else as the news spread like wildfire. As for Chris, when he came back, he was promptly tossed in jail for stealing from the crown. As he was the first and by no means the of last of greedy bastards to use European military technology to enslave a more primitive technologies. As somehow in the Marco Polo journals, the power of gunpowder was rediscovered too argument. New stolen wealth flowing into filled Vatican coffers too, as the Catholic church's mission was to save souls even if the adults had to be killed first.

3. Then the Catholic church met the disaster of all disaster, as a rascal named Martin Luther became the another in a long list of rouge clerics to challenge the corruption of the Catholic Church, nothing new in Catholic church history, and the Catholic Church has a standard playbook to deal with such rascals. (1) Option one, give them a chance to recant. (2) Failing that demand the leader of the given region, arrest the bastad, turn him over to church authorities, the duty of any Catholic, so the mother church could make an example of him by burning he or she at the stake. A playbook answer that had always worked for popes for a thousand years or so. But when the German people told the pope to stuff it instead, it opened up the floodgates to other protestant faiths, As Europe descended into religious orgies of violence.

4. But IMHO, the issue Karmypoltics maybe totally missed, almost all the Protestant faiths, differed from both Roman Catholic and Muslim dogma by allowing usary or the practice of collecting interest on borrowed money. The final foundation needed to sustain European colonialism. As we now live in a post colonial world,

 

[micrometers]

@4.

I actually was thinking about usury the other day. So Protestantism did away with that concept, eh? That might explain why Germany + England leapt so far ahead.

 

[werepossum]

@4.

I actually was thinking about usury the other day. So Protestantism did away with that concept, eh? That might explain why Germany + England leapt so far ahead.

The Catholics and the Muslims had gotten around those laws long ago by cleverly writing contracts. I loan you 6,000 marks silver for a year, you pay me back in goods worth 7,000 marks, or you pay me a fee for acting as your agent, or you pay me back in guilders worth 7,000 marks but which we agree are worth 6,000 marks . . . Not a difficult thing to avoid. Even the Church, both a lender and a borrower, paid only lip service to prohibitions against usury.

 

[Lemon law]

Thank you Karmypolitics, for being open to ideas, as an ametuer historian, color me somewhat confused. After all, documented human civilization is at least 6000 years old, yet the progress in making the whole world into one global world is barely 100 years old now.

As human civilization is advancing at an ever growing exponential pace, will it lead to paradise on earth, or global thermonuclear war?

IMHO, Biologically and emotionally, humans are the same the same people we were for 6000 years, only Technologically has greatly improved. Leaving a wisdom gap yet to be bridged and far behind human technological progress.

 

[Mursilis]

Pissed you off eh? I guess it worked and I am quite sure I know more about history then just about anyone in here.

Of course you do, of course you do. But then, everyone on the internet is an expert on everything (as you are well aware), so you're merely among peers here.