US not a white Christian Country anymore, we have to preserve the West-Putin
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Dude that shit about MMA fighters was a hilarious and pointless anecdote.
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Lol where are you getting this garbage from? Modernity is antithetical to Christianity. Being modern means separation of church and state, also less socioeconomic privileges of the church, less influence of the church in education, less influence of the church in the development of the social organism, I can go on and on. The development of modern society is the product of the Enlightenment and its thinkers, no matter how flawed they were. Saying that Christianity was responsible for Modernity is pure trash that is not based on historical evidence.
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It probably is a better situation than Europe but part of the reason that Muslims are perceived as friendly to Russia is that Russia has a huge Muslim population but a tiny amount of terrorist activity
I personally believe that it is because the Russian government can spy on and torture citizens unlike European governments.
As you've pointed, Kadyrov has embraced Islam but will murder and torture anyone who uses Islam to go against the Russian state.
Is that a natural alliance? Of course not. And Russia would probably suffer the same consequences of many European states if they weren't authoritarian
You and Cuahetemoc are right though that the demographic issue is not a huge problem because Russia doesn't have birthright citizenship and doesn't respect human rights but it still doesn't change the fact that millions of illegals are in Russia and that it is illegal to speak up about it - Or you will get arrested for inciting hatred between ethnic groups
This is the opposite of the image that misinformed people have of Putin, as far as they know, he's a badass anti-immigrant alpha male that is saving the white race.
Putin will get no criticism for this and Trudeau will get no credit for being anti-illegal immigration
How so? That same motivation has driven great people for centuries.
Do you think Bach would have written his masterpieces without him dedicating his music to God?
Just a single example of a man who's beliefs propelled him to greatness.
That modernity that you love so much was built on a foundation created by men of faith.
Study some history FFS.
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Don't conflate Deism with Christianity, dumbo. Jefferson, Voltaire, Paine, Rousseau, and many more Enlightenment thinkers were not Christians.
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I get where you're coming from but it's certainly closer to truth than it is to being false.
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And many of them were just as many of the founding fathers were.
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Correction, Russians hate gays, Putin is neutral. Anti-Gay laws was the only time he actually did something that people wanted.
EDIT: Besides anti-gay laws are about gay propaganda.
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At one time this was true.
It is no longer true.
Also there is much more to Christianity than the Vatican and extreme Evangelicals.
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It's responsible for the dark ages, a time when progress ceased for 800 years or so.
You're clearly not well read... perhaps a little copy pasta will nourish your brain.
5 Major Causes Of The Dark Ages
Europe’s Dark Ages have captivated people for centuries. There’s been whole history textbooks written about them. They’re shrouded in mystery and myth. From them, we get stories like Canterbury Tales and King Arthur and Camelot. There’s an entire genre of literature we call Fantasy that usually draws on the historical costumes, weapons, and customs of the time. But why was Europe plunged into what historians call a “dark age”? What happened? Where did all of the knowledge of the Greeks and Romans go? Why did people forget how to read and write and sculpt and build? A lot of books and a lot of peoplelike to put it down to one or two factors, but it isn’t as simple as that.
The Fall of the Roman Empire
The end of the world began in AD 476, when Odoacer deposed Emperor Romulus. The great Roman Empire had been falling apart for hundreds of years, but that was the final straw. Rome fell into chaos and ruin, into the hands of the various tribes. The city was sacked, its occupants put to the sword, and the barbarian tribes moved in. With Rome gone, a chain of unstoppable events was unleashed. Libraries fell into disrepair. The unifying languages, Greek and Latin, fell out of use and people could no longer communicate with each other. With Rome no longer producing a safe environment for learning, philosophy, and science, nobody could keep up the Great Conversation, or make scientific discoveries. The architecture and learning and thoughts of the Empire were completely forgotten in the wake of its fall from greatness, plunging the world into darkness.
The Little Ice Age
From about AD 950 to AD 1250, around the time of William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings, the world enjoyed a warm period. After that, however, the world began to get colder and colder. This phenomenon began around AD 1300 and lasted in varying degrees all the way up to 1850. Nobody knows exactly what caused it. Some cite changes in ocean circulation or a decrease in human population. The point is, when the cold hit Europe, it was a devastating blow. Up until the industrial revolution, Europe was, primarily an agrarian society. People just couldn’t grow enough crops to survive, and this, of course leads into our next point.
Famine
The Little Ice Age ushered in a period of horrible famine for Europe. The overwhelming cold, the cold that stole up on Europe on little kitten feet stole food right out of the mouths of sleeping children. The trouble with famine is that it’s really, really hard to think about scientific discovery and art and mathematics and culture when it’s all you can do to survive. People started to drop like flies. They worked their 13th century butts off just to put food into their mouths, and that food wasn’t usually very nutritious. People’s immune systems broke down, and it isn’t hard for historians to piece together where this all was headed.
The Black Plague
Rome has fallen. The world’s plunged into a cold, pitch-black, chaotic hell. Crops won’t grow, children aren’t being fed, people’s bodies are weaker than ever. The science and medicine of the ancients has been all but forgotten. Nobody understands the concept of contamination or germs, people are living in close, crammed, dirty quarters all together with animals and manure. It’s a recipe for disaster. In 1347, three Genoese ships docked in a Sicilian port of Messina after crossing the Black Sea. Most of the sailors aboard were dead or gravely ill. Their bodies were covered in boils that nobody had ever seen before, black boils that bled and oozed pus. Even though the authorities tried to hurry the ships out of the harbor, it was too late. Within the next five years alone, Europe would lose 20 million people to the Black Death, over a third of the living population. With a third of the population dead, people turned to superstition instead of science, too terrified of things they didn’t understand. Nobody had the time or courage to make any discoveries or work on art or poetry or music. Everyone was too busy dying.
A Lack of Good Roads
This is, surprisingly, the crushing blow. Not the Fall of Rome, not the Black Plague or famine or wars or the Little Ice Age, but the simple fact that people couldn’t circulate. When Rome fell, there was nobody there to maintain the roads, nobody to protect travelers. The roads fell into disrepair, traveling became dangerous. People went missing, or died. It became commonplace for people to be born and to live and to die all in the same place. If nobody moved, nobody was communicating. Language barriers and dialects developed. Communication is to learning as oxygen is to fire. Because of the lack of good roads, there was a lack of dialogue. Even if there was someone writing or making discoveries, they had no way of getting them out there to peers or to the public. Learning was an isolated, slow affair, and it would be until the first printing press was invented and books began to be circulated en masse around Europe.
The Dark Ages is a complicated conundrum that continues to fascinate historians to this day. Many people don’t know exactly why the Earth grew colder, or why the Black Plague just suddenly appeared in Europe in the 1300s. What we do know is that there was no one factor that we can pin as the cause of the Dark Ages. It was a chain of events that were wildly out of anyone’s control. It was a chain of events that made Europe fall into ruin, and it would be a chain of events, too, that would lead it out.
Did Christianity usher in the dark ages? The term ‘dark ages’ has not been defined by the questioner but it commonly refers to the cultural and economic deterioration that occurred in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. There are normally two aspects to what might be termed the ‘Christianity guilt thesis’; firstly that Christianity was a significant contributing factor to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire and secondly that the new religion was hostile to classical learning and did not foster and preserve enough of it as the empire collapsed.
The first theory has an illustrious pedigree as it was promoted by Edward Gibbon in chapter 39 of his Magnus Opus ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’. Gibbon speculated that ‘the introduction, or at least the abuse of Christianity, had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire’. His view was that Christianity broke the ideological unity of the Empire and hindered the state’s ability to win support. Financial and human resources were diverted from vital material ends and discontent was fostered, thus undermining imperial legitimacy.
As a broad general theory Gibbon’s view has very little going for it. In the first instance, any explanation which is proffered for the fall of the Roman Empire has to contend with the fact that the eastern half of the Roman Empire remained relatively strong and stable while the western half collapsed. The Eastern half was even more Christian than the Western half and yet, not only did it not collapse, it continued as the Byzantine Empire into the 15th century.
Does Gibbon’s theory work at a lower level to show Christianity was a contributing factor? Here too it suffers from a lack of evidence. While Christianity ushered in something akin to a cultural revolution following the conversion of Constantine it is hard to see that this had a seriously deleterious effect on the empire. Christian religious institutions did require large financial resources; however these were replacing pagan religious institutions with large endowments (which were progressively confiscated). Therefore the rise of Christian organisations appears to have largely involved a religious to religious transfer of assets rather than a diversion from secular coffers.
Similarly the manpower lost to the cloister appears to have been minimal – maybe something in the region of a few thousand individuals – hardly a massive dent to the Empire’s manpower. A handful of the aristocracy gave up their wealth and power for a life of Christian devotion – a figure which is insignificant compared to the numbers that chose to serve in the imperial bureaucracy.
Did Christianity undermine the ideological unity of the Empire? No; in fact religion and the empire acted to foster unity with the Christian God cast as inspiring Roman Imperialism with a mission to conquer, convert and civilise the world. Emperors were seen as hand-picked by God, thus imbibing them with sacred status. Rejection of the Empire was only a fringe position among Christian thinkers.
Did the Christian squabbling over doctrine undermine the Empire? Again there is little evidence for this. Certainly histories of the time are dominated by theological disputes, thereby giving an impression of religious frenzy and discord. This is because the sources for this period are largely Church histories. It would be like relying on the memoirs of Fred Phleps for a history of the early 21st century United States. In fact secular minded historians like Ammianus Marcellinus barely mention doctrinal disputes. Large scale rioting occurred on a few occasions but by and large conflict was confined to the bishops.
To sum up Christianisation appears to have been effectively subsumed into the structures of the Empire and many historians argue that it acted as a stabilising influence. Gibbon’s theory has thereby been turned on its head.
What about the second theory? Did the rise of Christianity cause a malaise in intellectual culture and usher in a scientific dark age.
There was undeniably a decline in scientific knowledge in the Western Roman Empire as it and collapsed but the roots of this are deep and can be traced to the pagan Romans. After 200 BC there was a fruitful cultural contact between Greeks and the bilingual Roman upper classes. This introduced a version of the classical tradition into the Roman Empire but it was a thin popularised version which was translated into Latin. Bilingualism and the conditions which favoured scholarship then declined rapidly after AD180 as the empire entered the 3rd century crisis. The chaos of the 3rd century AD caused disruption to educational infrastructure and the division of the empire into two caused knowledge of Greek to decline in the west . Roman citizens who were gradually becoming Christian were therefore limited to pieces of the classical tradition which had been explained and summarised by Latin authors.
Intellectual culture then declined dramatically in the west due to the collapse of central control in the west under the barbarian onslaught, the decline of literacy and loss of Greek, the reduction of trade, sharp falls in population density and the sheer amount of destruction. Western Empire was overrun by illiterate Germanic and Northern barbarians from the fourth to the eleventh century utterly destroying the Imperial infrastructure. Meanwhile the richer, more complete version of the classical tradition fell into the hands of the Muslims as they rapidly expanded across Asia and the Mediterranean. It was then translated into Arabic, further developed and moved across North Africa to Spain. As soon as Western Europe had recovered sufficiently its intellectuals travelled to Spain to translate the materials and bring them into medieval culture.
But was there an anti-intellectual streak in early Christian culture which made it a haven of anti-scientific sentiment? Here the most commonly quoted example is Tertullian, who famously said 'What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?' in fiery opposition to the classical tradition. Ultimately however, this counter-cultural point of view was a minority position which lost out to those like Justin Martyr who sought common ground between classical philosophy and Christianity, and (more importantly) Augustine of Hippo. Augustine - while being ambivalent toward Greek learning - applied it vigorously to scripture in his writings and came up with the vastly influential 'handmaiden formula' whereby natural philosophy could be put to use in the interpretation of the bible (Of course we now all think that – in principle - science should be studied for its own sake, but this would have been alien to the classical world in which it was always subordinated to ethics and the wider philosophical enterprise). The handmaiden formula was employed throughout the Middle Ages to justify the investigation of nature.
Ultimately the second theory fails because Christianity is the most important framework within which late-antique culture survived. Far from intellectual dullards, Christians appear to have been very interested in Greek philosophy, science and medicine which they preserved through a laborious process of hand-copying. These include the works of Euclid, Ptolemy, Plato, Aristotle, Galen, Simplicius and many more, including a staggering 15,000 pages of Greek commentary on Aristotle dating from the 2nd to 6th centuries AD. The medical works of Galen makes up a full fifth of the entire surviving classical Greek corpus – some two million words all copied out by hand and preserved over the centuries.
Of course some might argue that the Christians should have preserved more works of ancient ‘scientists’- for example the lost works of Neokles of Kroton (who argued that toads has two livers – one poisonous and one healthful – and that the moon was inhabited by the Nemean Lion). To address this I have devised a ‘Dark Ages Boot Camp’ where the critics will be forced to don a monk’s habit and hand-copy Bill Bryson’s ‘A short History of nearly everything’ onto papyrus while extras dressed as barbarians smash up their stuff.
To conclude then, the two Christianity guilt theories suffer from a lack of evidence. They persist purely due to their illustrious pedigree and the fact that people insist on making the past fit into a modern framework.
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1. Do you seriously believe that Christians are treated worse under Assad than they would have been under the rule of "moderate" (islamist) moslems or other jihadis like IS?
2. If Russia had more generous welfare systems than Western Europe the migrant leeches in Europe would most definitely continue on to Russia.
3. Take a look at a map of Russia and you will see how those illegals get in. If Putin could protect his borders against illegals I have no doubt that he would.
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You said Christianity made the modern world. I debunked that by demonstrating that 300 years ago, the origins of modernity, was inherently not Christian. Now you're backtracking and talking about "men of faith" lol. C'mon kid you're wrong. Get it together.
That Christianity created modernity? Not really. The late 1700s, 1800s, and even 1900s were times in which men and women could still not publicly and overtly denounce Christianity. They, however, did so privately. The French Revolution, at the very onset of modernity, demonstrated the real modern hatred against Christianity. Many other revolutionary and decolonization processes also demonstrated that.
America is one piece of the global puzzle and they are not solely responsible for Modernity. Europeans, Africans, Latin Americans, Middle Easterners, Asians, were just as influential in the construction of the modern world and they were not "Christian."
I agree, but to say that Christianity is the main impetus of Modernity is nonsense. Scientific thought is the real core of Modernity. The natural sciences and the social sciences are what truly created Modernity - not Christian or religious views of the world, history, politics, culture, society, or economics.
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Care to summarize?
