I've asked this question before, but as there are so many new and diverse people here (at least to me ) I thought I'd raise it and see what people think.

Imagine a world with no Christianity - apart from maybe as a minority cult in the middle east.

So - the native belief systems of each country / continent are still in place. How would the world be ?

Would science have developed the way it has ? Would we have developed along the environmentally friendliest routes and not be so consumer driven ??

Loads of room for discussion here.................what do you reckon ?

First thoughts:

Well the cynic in me thinks that one of the other mainstream faiths would've "evangelised" the UK so we'd be Jews or Muslims instead!

Science has been at odds for so many years with religion. I can't help believing that scientific progress (or at least the spread of understanding) would've been more rapid without widespread Christianity.

The main milestones in life (birth, naming, marriage and death) would all still have had their own special ceremony (and probably much more personal too) so no loss there.

Also much less needless personal guilt! You would not beleive the grief I used to give myself over perfectly natural things when I was at the height of my Catholicism!

To be honest, I've become so hacked off with the arrogance of Christian dogma that I'm struggling to see the other side of the argument at the moment!

We'd be 500 years further on in terms of science and philosophy and, I suspect, the air and water would not be so poisonous as they are now, what with there never being the whole 'this world is evil, so it doesn't count' kind of claptrap lurking in people's brains.

The monarchy would have dissolved, the irish would have one less major excuse to hate eachother, there wouldnt have been the spanish armada or philips mission to subdue the english, no english civil war per se, henry viii would have had a better time of it, idk mate, religion has played such a huge part in things. Whats to say paganism wouldnt have become the organised monster christianity is?

Firstly, I don't consider myself to be particularly "diverse". I am a Tas.

As to whether xianity has created a monster in its midst? Probably it has NURTURED the pre-existent horror.

Human beings are not terribly nice or altruistically inclined. They have a history of vindicating their Gods/Goddesses with blood sacrifices and wars since way back when. The OT was rather big on the subject too, if I rememer rightly.

Nowadays, the world is relatively evenly split bewtween non-xians and xians. (NB I don't refer specifically to the followers of Allah as it's currently a fair cop guv. Etketera.)

I doubt that any one specific belief system is responsible for either the world's ills or the wonderful (and evolutionarily relative) accomplishments of mankind.

Im sceptical it would be very different!
We are still Human after all, some things may have developed earlier or later, but I'd say basically the same, except many of us would probably be Christians!

Argh - NO! Cruel EVULL person! I have just glimpsed into the maw of true terror!

I don't think it would be much different. Xianity didn't spread itself, it was spread by a number of empires who would have spread another religion if it wasn't that one, just like they do with their laws, culture, language, etc.

Erudition at its finest!

True, the main purpose of organised religion is to organise the people. Leaders who have conquered new countries have instituted unified religions to keep the peace and to keep control of things.

Historically it has seemed that the Jews were making more headway in science. But I believe the main spur for advancement in science has been war rather than religion.

So would it make a difference if it had been a different religion? I don't think so. Not much.

I once watched a programme which claimed that if Boudicca had won the final battle against the romans, that this country would have eventually become a muslim country as they would have headed this way if the romans failed to conquer! The programme was on a while ago on either the History or Discovery channel.

I have no idea. Perhaps Islam would have never started. Perhaps Graeco-Egyptian religion would have been dominant. The problem is that although it is fun to speculate there are too many variables to do so.

I think one of the other ancient religions would have probably taken Christianities place and who can say how that would have evolved over the last two millennia.

Yup.

I've discussed (briefly) with JohnMac that I think the rise and survival of monotheism was inevitable (we must revisit that one!)

I think there would still be wars about religion - hell, we do that here!, still insisting that OUR way is the RIGHT way...

There are, though, so many variables as Wulfric says - who's to say we wouldn't have ended up here, as we are now, no matter what the origins.

Personally I think that there would be a lot less cassocks and I'm not too sure that would be as good a thing as people think. Just try saying Cassocks loudly several times in a row and not SMILE

BB
TR

I know, and that's why I tried to take a fair few of the religious possibilities out of the equation as possible by saying in the original post

Its a really interesting question and made me go away and think. And then I realised it was a loaded question.

Does anything take the place of Christianity or would we just have continued in our wee sects? TBH the Church created the advances we have today in many respects. The whole organised thing is what caused the wars and hence revolutionised medicine, it was the church that had enough money to educate people and develop science... its all a bit... loaded.

I have to agree to a point tho with those that say there probably wouldnt be that much difference.



Exactly. I mean "Rome" is a good example of this. The expanse of the empire is no differnet to the religious advancement of Christianity it just didnt last as long.

Cassock, chasuble, censer, synod, pontiff, presbytery, crozier, reliquary, ciborium, paten, pyx, sexton

Loads of good sounding words

Indeed. People should look up Mithraism sometime to see what would have been the religion of Rome at the time the Empire collapsed. It was only because Constantine converted to Christianity that it grew so popular.

ah Mithra. The similarities between this story and that of Christ is more than a bit uncanny

It wouldn't be that Christianity was altered to be more like an existing religion to make it more desirable to an enormous empire, would it? Political machinations within Christianity? Surely not!!

By removing Xtainity from the world the west would probably view the Middle Eastern God as just that a Middle Eastern God. We would have no New Testament & from that have no link to the Old testament & it's teachings.
I suppose we would have had some other cult come out of Rome such as Mithras or Isis, Flippently I suppose we could argue that's what we have got

Dear Moongazer,

What a lovely subject! Apologies for dropping in late - I've been away on holiday and thus deprived of the chance to pontificate for ages .




I think that the indigenous, pre-Christian, religion(s) of Europe would inevitably have undergone enormous changes as the cultures they were embedded within changed over the centuries, through the usual processes of cross-fertilisation and syncretism. So that even without Christianity, what would still be in place would be significantly different from what we know of religion back then. That said, it seems likely that evolved forms of the cults of the old Pagan Gods and Goddesses would still be a very visible part of European life.

I'd respectfully disagree with Wyrdwoman that Mithraism would have taken the place that came to be occupied by Christianity. It's undeniable that Christianity borrowed some of its imagery and mythology from Mithraism, and equally undeniable that the cult of Mithras was very widely spread across the Roman world. But Mithraism was not a mass religion, it was an initiatory Mystery tradition largely confined to soldiers, civil servants and traders, and it did not admit women. It was not in opposition to the cults of other Pagan Gods and Goddesses, and while Mithraists were probably a rather influential lot given their backgrounds, they were probably never all that numerous.

I had an interesting discussion about this with Pomona a while back, but I'll backtrack a little on claiming that the rise of monotheism in the strict sense was inevitable and substitute a somewhat woolier assertion that the universalist attitudes that underlie monotheism, and perhaps the approach to social/religious organisation that produced the Christian Church, would inevitably have found expression somehow and probably brought about far reaching changes. Christianity, after all, did not come from another planet. It was a product of the interaction of the Graeco-Roman world with Judaism, and Judaism was already a long-established and exclusive monotheism in those days. Not only that but it was, at times, a monotheism that welcomed converts in many parts of the empire, yet never came close to taking over the Roman world.

In many ways, the structure and ethos of the Church probably had more to do with the rise to power of Christianity than the appeal of Christian theology. Just as Rome itself had developed an unprecedented and extremely effective system for the political conquest and assimilation of other cultures, so Christianity rapidly developed a not dissimilar system for the religious conquest and assimilation of both Graeco-Roman and barbarian societies. While various emperors had long used religious elements to strengthen the state - Aurelian's promotion of the cult of Sol Invictus for example - nothing truly like the Church had been seen before and it's not stretching an analogy too far to say that the Church cut through the traditional fabric of Graeco-Roman religion in much the same way as early Roman Imperial armies cut through much larger, but less well prepared, barbarian resistance.

So, for Christianity not to have taken over the Graeco-Roman world, and the barbarian cultures on its edges, the old Pagan religion(s) would have had to develop forms of social organisation capable of beating it at its own game. That's perhaps not as far fetched as it may seem. The Emperor Julian, in his intelligent efforts to turn the tide, did try to establish a Pagan (though as a devout Hellenist, he'd never have used so vulgar a term) Church to oppose the Christian one - which even, if memory serves, attracted a few 'reconverts' from amongst the Christian clergy. Of course, that idea died with Julian soon after its beginning so we can't know how it might have turned out but as it's perhaps the most likely route Moongazers scenario, we can speculate.

It would have been difficult to create anything like the same sense of unity and purpose amongst the Pagans of the day as gave Christianity, for all its schisms, such an advantage, but the creation of a unified, empire wide, well-funded, hierarchically structured, organisation with a clear sense of mission to hold the line might, in time, have achieved it to some degree. Particularly if Julian had not been silly enough to get killed invading Persia and thus been in a position to continue his policy of undermining Christian unity by ordering them to forgive each other and welcome their heretics back into the bosom of the Church!

Lets presume, and I admit it's a stretch, that had worked. While ancient Paganism was overwhelmingly polytheistic, there were within that various concepts of Divine unity and equivalence that could operate as unifying influences while still embracing all the local cults and traditions of the many distinct Gods and Goddesses. So we'd probably now be living in a religious culture with many similarities to modern Hinduism, but with an even greater diversity of cult belief and practice.

Some of the more hideous parts of European history might never have taken place if things had taken such a course. No reason for the Crusades to the Middle East. No theologically-driven traditions of anti-Semitism to lead up to the Holocaust. But human nature being what it is, we'd probably have found lots of other reasons to kill each other.





I agree with those who've suggested science (and philosophy) would be probably be considerably more advanced than they are now. That said, we shouldn't underestimate the capacity of the medieval Christian mind to sustain scientific thinking. And we should acknowledge that there were examples of a life-denying mentalism, the kind of thinking that splits mind and spirit from body, and human being from nature, in Greek philosophy long before Christianity came along.



Sadly I doubt it. Perhaps a strong cultural sense of the indwelling sacred in nature might have prevented some of the environmental destruction of recent centuries. Or perhaps not. Our Pagan ancestors seem to have been every bit as greedy and brutal as modern people, just possibly less hypocritical about it.

BB,

John Macintyre