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Oh cool. A thoughtful response. I appreciate that.
I think the extent to which Christianization was accomplished by the sword is massively overblown. I'm sure there's a lot of truth to these claims, especially discussing the Western Roman Empire and the Papal States, but it's also easy to forgot the Roman Catholic Church was actually the weaker empire for the majority of it's lifespan until the crusades, and they were the ones who preferred that method. Unlike pretty much every fucking other ideology on the face of the planet, the Holy Roman Empire actually worked to preserve the traditions and history of pretty much every culture it came across. People really don't understand how fucking rare that is. We take it for granted. Think of these leftists today who would love nothing more than to tear down and erase every remnant of our history. Muslims destroying ancient artifacts. China cannibalizing all of its own history. Doesn't that say something for the philosophy behind Christianization, juxtaposed beside the image portrayed of knights on horseback burning down villages and killing infadels?
But that aside, it's a far cry from regimes that literally have to perform regular purges on its own population in order to continue functioning. I'm thoroughly convinced this would've been the ultimate fate of the National Socialists.
Not even out of malice necessarily, but because central planning doesn't work, and the only way to keep it rolling is increasingly brutal force. It's like whack a mole. But as time goes on the rubber mallet doesn't work and you need an iron fist. An economic issue here, a little unrest there, these things snowball into larger and larger issues. They were employing slave labor, for example. You will not find any strong economy employing slave labor. So they "got around" the issues other regimes faced by enslaving and pillaging surrounding countries rather than their own people.
I think the extent to which Christianization was accomplished by the sword is massively overblown.
Let Varg answer that for me: https://files.catbox.moe/rajpi3.webm
As I said earlier, feudalism doesn't deserve it's bad reputation, and rome doesn't deserve it's good one. During feudalism large parts of what became christianization can be seen as the results of local conflicts leading to war with non-christians losing out over time, while being bribed into accepting the foreign religion with all kinds of otherwise unavailable riches and power. One can still argue, that pagans fought a defensive war, similar to the crusades, which were a defensive war against islam, but even then it's still something entirely different than what happened under rome, when the military superpower of it's time decided to use it's civil, political and military institutions to destroy the culture of it's own provinces.
the Holy Roman Empire actually worked to preserve the traditions and history of pretty much every culture it came across. People really don't understand how fucking rare that is.
That's a problem brought by monotheistic religions, e.g. christianity. If you have a pantheon of gods to choose from, you don't have to care to which god someone else prays, and there's no need of conversion. If you believe however, that there's only one god, and everyone must submit to it, then you'll end up having a problem with each and every foreign culture you'll come about, and your drive will be to assimilate them into your version of universal truth and justice, and thereby destroy their culture and religion. So I think that it's more that christians during the middle ages tried to preserve some of their own ancestral traditions, which have been much stronger and more alive than they are now. And if I'm correct with those assumptions, that preservation didn't happen because of christianity, but despite of it. Plus, later on, when the reformation came, christianity tried to got rid of those preserved traditions, and purify their religion down to it's original middle-eastern core. Which, at least in europe, was completely rejected. Regions that became lutheran nowadays are comprised of something like 90% of atheists.
Leftists
Did it ever occur to you, how much leftists act as the avangarde of the values of modern society, which still are in essence christian values? The enlightenment thinkers quite often tried to prove christian morals to be true even without asserting the existence of god. You know, humanism is like (at least ragtag-) christianity without god, and leftists promote humanism. However, it's not entirely without god, because god became the state, e.g. the thing closest to an omnipotent being with a claim for autarchy humans can create, which now certainly plays the role of the christian god, but in real life. So while oldfashioned christians pray to something, which, when seen rationally, in all likelihood doesn't exist - that's why christians stress the importance of belief - leftists have their all-powerful being that reigns over their life in actuality.
P.S.
You've changed large parts of your post, my answer was written for the old version, that doesn't exist anymore ;)
Nazis pillaging
I think, that you're correct in that regard. They used moneyprinting to finance their big recovery. Of course this would have ended in huge inflation, e.g. same amount of stuff but far more money, e.g. what sent the weimar republic down the drain. However, they solved that by taking away other people's stuff. First by kicking out the kikes and taking their stuff, and later by taking over other regions and imposing yet another on the conquered people, for which people hat do exchange real goods, that were transported into the reich to increase the availability of stuff in relation to the availability of money.
However, what people don't get is, that the bad parts of their system survived and are alive and well. The US Dollar and the Euro are a continuation of the nazi's monetary policies.
Not so much changed my post as fine-tunes/elaborated. I do this all the time and it's really bad. I think I just enjoy exploring concepts.
I'll watch the video tomorrow, wife is sleeping (and I should be. It's been a particularly interesting night though).
If you believe however, that there's only one god, and everyone must submit to it, then you'll end up having a problem with each and every foreign culture you'll come about, and your drive will be to assimilate them into your version of universal truth and justice, and thereby destroy their culture and religion.
This is the chasm between Eastern and Western philosophy, because the Eastern Orthodox Christians didn't believe this at all. It was the opposite. They believed that pretty much every religion and God was foreshadowing Christ, and representing the attributes of God in different terms. But the Roman Catholics had a more rigid stance. This is a good breakdown of the philosophies.
An Orthodox scholar recently observed that there are basically three views that Christians have taken with regard to non-Christian religions. The first is that the non-Christian will be damned because there is no salvation outside the visible Body of Christ, the Church, The second is that the non-Christian may be saved in spite the religion he practices, but only through the mercy of God. The third is that the non-Christian may be saved by means of the very religion he practices, for nonChristian religions may also contain saving truths.[9] These three views parallel the three approaches identified elsewhere as exclusivism. inclusivism and cultural pluralism.
https://www.goarch.org/-/an-orthodox-christian-view-of-non-christian-religions
And again, the third stance was the prevailing opinion of the Christian world at the time, up until the crusades. So it's actually the exact opposite.
However, it's not entirely without god, because god became the state
That's what we would call the "God shaped hole". It's not exclusive to Christianity either, look at Asia. The idea is that either someone will worship God, or worship man (themselves, the state). There is logically no other conclusion. Either man will worship something outside of himself, a divine being, God, or will deem himself to be God. There is no alternative conclusion.
If you are an atheist then you can envision a future in which, through science, technology, and knowledge, you can achieve some type of transhumanism, some type of immortality, and effectively become God. Elon Musk's brain chip, crispr gene editing, thinking along those lines.
This has nothing to do with Christianity in the way you're outlining, and yet everything to do with Christianity in terms of the philosophy.
I'll watch the video tomorrow, wife is sleeping
The video is text only. And yes, you too should be sleeping. Kek. Doesn't the bible say something like "thou shalt not stay awake 'til morning if thou doest not wantest to be trashest by thy hangover!"? Sinner.
An orthodox christian view of non-christian religions
Actually, that's very interesting. I'll have to look into that.
The god-shaped hole
I think, that you ignore every perspective that isn't monotheistic. As I said, this all-powerful, all-knowing, merciful, law-giving being, this singular thing, that's the only thing with the legitimacy to rule, is a monotheistic concept.
Despite my often quite staunch , I still consider myself to be an anarchist. And anarchy, when put into practice, is a polylegal system, e.g. a system that consists of entirely independent sets of laws and law-givers, that compete with each other. That's a perspective most people really don't understand, even though that what's been the default for most of human existence. I don't want to put the blame for this lack of understanding of something that should come natural on anything in particular, but I'd like to point it out.
Of course you may say, that even polytheistic heathens, like the romans, created a singular state, and, worse, that this singular state served as the blueprint for much of the abomination of law and statehood we're encountering today. Well, this may be true, even though one may point out, that the roman state soon became genocidal after monotheism became state-religion, but not before, or at least not to the same degree. One may also point out, that in reality, all we know about the roman state are the opinions of a handful of ancient writers, which leave many blanks. And when the roman state was used as a blueprint, those blanks were filled with contemporary preconceptions, so the roman state as a blueprint might have looked entirely different from the roman state as it really existed.
Chink's god-shaped hole
IMHO you can explain much of the non-western "worship of men" with them emulating the western approach after having been defeated by westerners. Asians still venerate europeans and their culture, and still go to unhealthy lengths when emulating it. You know, they wear european clothes, follow european political ideologies, see europeans as more sexually attractive when compared to their own race, travel to europe when they want to see great culture, see it as cultured to teach their children to play european instruments and european styles of music, and so on. No matter what they say, asians are the biggest fanboys europeans have ever had. See for some fanboydom. Asians hold european culture in higher respect than europeans themselves.
So maybe they follow the same patterns, simply because they're trying to impersonate westerners, and not because of some "god shaped hole".
An important follow up to my previous statement
This has nothing to do with Christianity in the way you're outlining, and yet everything to do with Christianity in terms of the philosophy.
Indeed this is what the Bible outlines as the final battle. There will be a point in the future, where it will not be about political ideologies, it won't be about race, or whatever else. It will be about remaining human. Quite literally. You will have these transhumanists, who believe they are God, fiddling around with DNA, literally changing what it means to be human, merging man with machine, all kinds of other crazy shit, you will have the others who believe there IS God. Each camp considering the other foolish and ignorant.
There's no other conclusion. There simply isn't. It's unfolding right before your eyes. They will not stop. What happens when trannies can actually, literally change their sex? Or anything else they want? Lab grown body parts or who knows what else.
You're either one type of person or the other. There's no in-between. Why would there be? Either you have an "irrational" innate part of you that says "this is wrong". Or you don't.
(post is archived)