If Christianity was a good thing for Europe, why was no aqueduct rebuilt? Theaters, bath houses, temples and shrines, almost all destroyed by Christian mobs, legislation, and lawlessness. Why is the literature childish compared to the Aeneid or ANY Greek play? How come textualists estimate that 99.9% of all literature was lost? Did anyone oppose the church laws calling for destruction of all things not Christian? There were several Iconoclasms where Christians were destroying art, literature, and churches of heretic Christians. Why is the art blocky and expressionless compared to Roman frescos? Why were the Olympics not restarted after Christians forced its end? Why didn’t the Academy or the Lyceum reopen even if under a Christian name? Why did Augustine become a theological champion for pushing that “curiosity of the natural world is a sin.”? Why massive population decline in every city after oppressive blasphemy laws and the routine burning of heretics? Every city had a sewer system in ancient Rome, none were maintained why? Of the roads surveyed in 1500, why were 95% of them built 1,000 years earlier? Why were the trades routes to the East severed regularly and easily so? Why almost zero jurisprudence such that the Justinian Code was still in use the 19th century? Yes, there was still culture. Not an enlightened one in any sense.Christianity did not just corrupt the Mediterranean, it also corrupted the North. Viking and Celtic women had so many rights that were squandered by Christianity. Also bathing was practiced better by them before Christianity.
OP here. Also I'd like to use this thread as an opportunity to talk about my god, Ganesh.
>>18515614Nietzsche collapsed after writing the anti-christ cause he realized christkeks have irreparably destroyed the world and severed the west from most of its cultural heritage.
without 4chan you'd have nowhere to express this drivel, nobody would stand and wait for you to finish
>>18515614They restricted cousin marriage (for their own selfish reasons) and that’s about it
>>18515614No correlation o algo
>>18515675This only happened when Europe became secular and less Christian
>>18515678
>>18515614Why would you need any of that when you have the bible?
Christianity is a fucking disease bro it's singular mission is destroying humanity.
Any religion that rules through fear is a false religion.
>>18515614You have Christians to thank for preserving the classics we have now, actually.You're so fucking retarded, you refuse to acknowledge that Christians did any good for the world because you're blinded with hatred for God because you love being a retarded homosexual.
>>18515614>Why massive population decline in every city after oppressive blasphemy laws and the routine burning of heretics?I don't think that affected population growth. The decline in the european population was more due to plagues.
>>18515759The onset of Christianity is what stopped the preservation of pagan traditions in the first place. Some Christians preserving a couple texts relating to larger traditions isn’t a service to paganism, it’s more like putting a bandaid on a stab-wound that you inflicted. Imagine if I lit your house on fire and burned it to the ground, but went inside and grabbed your television and handed it to you before it got destroyed. Would you get on your knees and thank me? Obviously not.Besides, pagans had already been copying and preserving these texts for centuries and would have continued to do so without Christianity. Christianity was absolutely not necessarily for the preservation of these texts.Also you worship the shitstain demon Yahweh-Typhon, the actual most high is Zeus yet you slander him with labels like “false god,” “demon”, or “fallen angel”. Enjoy Tartarus for your impiety.
>>18515759Christkeks create the problem they claim to be an answer to lol. Yeah 99% of ancient literature was destroyed but at least we got some scraps reinterpreted by christkeks based on how good or bad it made them feel
>>18515614christianity was improved during the great schismcatholicism took elements from hellenic paganism, which led europe to the renaissance
>>18515614>If Christianity was a good thing for Europe, why was no aqueduct rebuilt?They were and new ones were constructed. This was often even driven by monks and monasteries for Pete's sake:https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/mnlf9n/when_the_romans_left_england_and_left_behind/gtyhsly/
>>18515614You're just conflating the collaps of Western Rome with the rise of christianity.
>>18515614I think the Germanic invasions were good so I like the "Dark Ages."
>>18515614>What good did Christianity do for Europe?It saved countless souls, which is the primary function of the religion. Salvation.
>>18515759Wow thanks Christians for not destroying some of it
>>18516521Saved them from whomst and whatst?
>>18516834From the passage of time. Scrolls deteriorate and storage space gets repurposed for more pressing matters. Compared to other religions, Christians (and to a lesser degree, Muslims) invested an exceptional amount of effort to save bits of history, often even ones they disagreed with, for the future generations.
>>18516841Scrolls certainly do, but the post I was replying to was talking about souls.
>>18515759>heh, monks saved most pagan literature don't ya know? >just ignore the fact that early Christian mobs burned books and destroyed sculptures >WTFF how could these mudslimes convert the hagia Sophia into a mosque? Remove kebab! >umm sweaty, those pagan temples would've fallen to ruin if we didn't pillage them and convert them into churches ya know?Christcuck logic be like
>>18516950I think the logic is mostly 'losing texts to time was the standard and Christians did the most to counter-act it'.
>>18516971Except pagans had already been copying these texts for centuries and would have continued to do so without Christianity; it's foolish to suggest that Christianity was somehow necessary for their preservation (especially when pagan institutions that had already been preserving them for centuries like temple libraries and Neoplatonist academies were literally shut down by Christians). It’s less that Christianity “saved” the classics but rather they became the sole librarians after they helped dismantle the competition.
>>18517200>to suggest that Christianity was somehow necessary for their preservationI think the suggestion is 'losing texts to time was the standard and Christians did the most to counter-act it'.>pagans had already been copying these texts for centuriesThey lost most of their texts. Plato is kind of an exception, but 80% Aristotle's work is lost to time and a decent part of that loss happened before Christ was even born, 3rd-1st century BC. >Neoplatonist academies were literally shut down by ChristiansAnd yet, despite opposing the institution to the point of the emperor himself shutting it down, neoplatonic texts were preserved by Christians so well that we are currently seeing a near-revival of the movement among cogsci enthusiasts. QED
>>18515614Just think of where we'd be if we hadn't had the dark ages because of Christianity.
>>18515614>Christianity did not just corruptChristianity didn't do shit. The Romans left, removing an entire layer of organisation.
>>18517243>Christians did the most to counter-act it'.They didn't, they shut down pagan temples that had already done the job fine without them. The loss of classical texts lies solely on Christians since they actively refused to copy down texts they didn’t see as “useful,” even if pagans saw them as immensely valuable. The texts we do have only survived because they were essential for teaching Greek and Latin grammar or rhetoric (Virgil was the standard for Latin and you needed Aristotle to win debates), not because Christians appreciated the content itself which was pagan and thus considered by Christians to be “demonic superstition.”>a decent part of that loss happened before Christ was even born, 3rd-1st century BC.Other way around retard, the vast majority of texts were lost after paganism was outlawed in the 4th and 5th centuries AD. Explicitly anti-Christian works like Porphyry of Tyre’s 15-volume refutation of Christianity titled Against the Christians were intentionally destroyed because, well, they were explicitly anti-Christian.>neoplatonic texts were preserved by Christians so wellNot well enough since the Chaldean Oracles aren’t preserved.
>>18515626Nietzsche's claims make no sense even treating the Bible as literature. The characterization of 'slave morality' is easily countered by the fact so many prominent Biblical figures were literal nobles and exemplified noble virtues.It's best to take Nietzsche as using Christians to symbolize a particular kind of moral reasoning which he finds deplorable, but for which the actual symbol doesn't really matter beyond being recognizable.Of course Nietzschefags are obsessed with interpreting his philosophy in the most juvenile and superficial way possible, thus ensuring they mine no genuine insight beyond the textual equivalent of a soijak meme.
>>18517355Your only example of something not being preserved is an explicitly anti-Christian work which you then extrapolate to mean anything not immediately useful for Christianity. This is a dishonest framing.
>>18515614The crisis at this point on the mediterranean on that island sea were partly that symbol image presentation representation demonstration descriptorily crisis at that point at time and that after time period comes the humanist christian semiotics and the christian field were important as images and patterns the meanings to symbols and readings to stories and reading that circulate through symbol systems but christian and the circulation of these ‘pattern dubs’ that circulate and are communicated through and to christian there were an image gets continually over inscribed over other image dequincey talks about this palimpsest and for christian all the symbols that have been and gotten and were and was freshly were flawed and cracked for one thing cause to what thomas browne that everything made by god had crack on there and also the images and symbols composed had already fallen away from forms and the logos as immationasts would claim so and but those are some of the christian logos symbol discourse semiotic compute compleat ideas and this could be argued were an improvement to symbol systems that christians were doing but that was what christians were doing anyway or something like that
>>18517401It’s not just Against the Christians. Thanks to them, we also lost countless local histories and technical manuals as well as the Chaldean oracles, countless Orphic texts, and Varro’s 41-volume treatise on the Roman religion.The texts we do have only survived because they were essential for teaching Greek and Latin grammar or rhetoric (Virgil was the standard for Latin and you needed Aristotle to win debates), not because Christians appreciated the content itself which was pagan and thus considered by Christians to be “demonic superstition.”
>>18515759>Thank you Christcucks for preserving only the 1-2% of the ancient works.
>>18515614>why was no aqueduct rebuilt?Because the Roman state that built and maintained them collapsed. The Church didn't destroy the aqueducts. The Goths, Vandals, and Lombards didn't either, for the most part. They simply stopped being maintained when the centralized imperial administration dissolved. The Church was the only institution left standing, and it did what it could with what remained.>Theaters, bath houses, temples and shrines, almost all destroyed by Christian mobsSome were. Most fell into disuse because their funding dried up when the pagan state that patronized them vanished. The baths of Caracalla weren't destroyed by monks with hammers. They were abandoned and quarried for stone over centuries.>literature childish compared to the AeneidThe Aeneid is magnificent. So is the Confessions of Augustine. So is the Summa Theologica. So is the Divine Comedy. So is Paradise Lost. Different genres, different eras, equal stature. You're comparing epic poetry to theology and calling the theology childish because it's not epic poetry.>99.9% of all literature was lostAnd 99% of what survived was preserved by monks copying manuscripts in monasteries. The only reason you can read the Aeneid at all is because Christian scribes thought it was worth saving. They copied Virgil alongside Scripture. They didn't have to. They chose to.>Did anyone oppose the church laws calling for destruction of all things pagan?St. Augustine explicitly argued that Christians should take what is good from pagan philosophy and use it for Christian purposes. "The Egyptians had idols, but they also had gold." That's the actual tradition. Not destruction. Transformation.
>>18515614If nothing else, it protected us from Islam. As a divided continent of various pagans all with their own local gods, the Muslims would've done us like they did to the pagans they had back home. Christianity gave us a sense of unity, even if we were still divided into thousands of tiny feudal states.
>>18518910All of these talking points were already answered and refuted in this thread before this post.
>>18518910>And 99% of what survived was preserved by monks copying manuscripts in monasteries. The only reason you can read the Aeneid at all is because Christian scribes thought it was worth saving. They copied Virgil alongside Scripture. They didn't have to. They chose to.Pagans had already been copying these texts for centuries and would have continued to do so without Christianity; it's foolish to suggest that Christianity was somehow necessary for their preservation (especially when pagan institutions that had already been preserving them for centuries like temple libraries and Neoplatonist academies were literally shut down by Christians). It’s less that Christianity “saved” the classics but rather they became the sole librarians after they helped dismantle the competition.The texts we do have only survived because they were essential for teaching Greek and Latin grammar or rhetoric (Virgil was the standard for Latin and you needed Aristotle to win debates), not because Christians appreciated the content itself which was pagan and thus considered by Christians to be “demonic superstition.” Christians intentionally discarded countless other texts because the full works weren’t deemed “useful” to Christians, even if pagans considered them immensely valuable.
>>18518910>Some were. Most fell into disuse because their funding dried up when the pagan state that patronized them vanishedAnd this funding dried up because Christians hogged up all funds. Christian emperors forcibly redirected all funds to churches and monasteries. Funds that previously paid for professional rhetoricians and municipal philosophers were now forcibly redirected to exempting Christian clergymen from taxes and building massive churches.People who should have become politicians or generals instead became priests or monks which of course led to a decline of the army.>So is the Confessions of Augustine. So is the Summa Theologica. So is the Divine Comedy. So is Paradise LostAll of these are shit lmao. Actual grand theological works would include Plotinus’ Enneads or Iamblichus’ On the Mysteries of the Egyptians. Christianity is not a legitimate religion, thus they bring nothing of value.>St. Augustine explicitly argued that Christians should take what is good from pagan philosophy and use it for Christian purposesAnd he was a fool because Christianity is complete fucking nonsense + all pagan philosophy was good not “only parts of it”>Not destruction. Transformation.It is destruction when you reject polytheism
>>18515678Yes the famous secular and irreligious 15th.16th centuries.
>>18515614You asked why no aqueduct was rebuilt if Christianity was good for Europe. The aqueducts fell into disrepair because the Roman state collapsed — not because Christians smashed them. Centralized imperial administration that funded and maintained them dissolved. The Church was the only institution left standing after the Western Empire's administrative apparatus disintegrated. It wasn't equipped to run an empire's infrastructure. No one was.On literature: the claim that 99.9% was lost is accurate. The claim that Christians caused it is not. 99% of what survived was preserved by monks in monasteries copying manuscripts by hand. The only reason you can read Virgil, Cicero, or Ovid is because Christian scribes thought pagan literature was worth saving. They copied it alongside Scripture. They didn't have to. They chose to. Augustine's principle was explicit: the Egyptians had idols but they also had gold. Take what is good from pagan thought and use it. That's the actual tradition — transformation, not destruction.On art: you're comparing Roman naturalism to medieval stylization and calling the latter "blocky and expressionless." That's an aesthetic preference, not evidence of decline. Byzantine mosaics and Romanesque sculpture pursued different aims than Roman portraiture. They weren't trying to do Roman frescoes badly. They were doing something else.The "Dark Ages" framing is 18th-century Enlightenment propaganda. The monasteries preserved classical inheritance. Universities were Church foundations (Bologna, Paris, Oxford). The scientific revolution happened in Christian Europe partly because the belief in a rational God implied a rational universe amenable to investigation. That's not coincidence.The Church has real sins to account for. Witch trials (mostly early modern secular courts), Inquisition excesses, Crusader atrocities. But "Christianity destroyed classical civilization" is not one of them. It's the opposite of what happened.
>>18521433Already debunked your copypasta shit here (>>18519653) and here (>>18519678)
>>18521434>>18519653>>18519678The debunking has problems.The claim that pagan institutions would have preserved classical texts indefinitely without Christianity is a counterfactual. You can't prove it. The Western Roman Empire collapsed from civil wars, economic crisis, plague, and invasion. Pagan temple libraries and academies were already in decline during the 3rd century crisis, well before Christian emperors. The Platonist Academy in Athens had been disrupted multiple times (Sulla sacked Athens in 86 BC). By Justinian's time it was a shell.The actual historical sequence is: Roman state collapses, its institutions with it. Monastic scriptoria become the only functioning copying infrastructure in Western Europe. The texts we have survived because monks copied them. Whatever their motivations, whatever texts they chose not to copy, the brute fact remains. Without those monks, we have zero. Not less. Zero.On funding redirection: yes, Christian emperors funded churches. That's what happens when a state changes religion. But framing this as the cause of Rome's collapse gets the chronology backward. The Western Empire was collapsing for a century before Christianity became the state religion. The Eastern Empire Christianized and stood for another thousand years. Fund redirection didn't cause the collapse. The collapse was already in motion.You dismiss Augustine, Aquinas, Dante, and Milton as "shit" and offer Plotinus and Iamblichus instead. That's aesthetic preference, not argument. Plotinus is magnificent. No one disputes it. But if the standard is "pagan good, Christian bad," then you haven't made a historical argument. You've stated a religious preference.The actual position isn't "Christianity saved everything and pagans destroyed everything." That's a strawman. The position is: when the Roman state collapsed, what survived of classical civilization survived through the Church. That's not propaganda. It's what happened.
>>18521452Christianity was undermining Rome before it was adopted as state religion. Judaism isn't the official religion of the USA, but that doesn't stop AIPAC.
>Viking and Celtic women had so many rights that were squandered by ChristianityWhere do you get this idea?
>>18518910>They simply stopped being maintained when the centralized imperial administration dissolvedI wonder what, or rather who, dissolved it other than Germanic and Hunnic invaders and, to be fair, constant Civil Wars
>>18519560Islam only exists because of the Church. Muhummed was a merchant who, impressed by the splendor of Roman Syria, seeked to unite the Arabian tribes under the worship of one God. However, polytheistic Arabs were uninterested in the preaching of Christian monks, so Muhummed resorted to claiming he recieved a messenger from God. You can see parallels between Muhammed seeing a flash of light accompanied with revelation and Paul recieving a flash of light, Muhammed preaching in public akin to Roman monks doing the same at plazas, and the Islamic tradition claiming there were 365 idols around the kaaba and an apocraphyl Christian medieval text claiming that Mary and baby jesus on a donkey encountered a temple in Egypt with 365 idols.
