Thought experiment

[エボラちゃん]

I won't be mad if the thread goes off-topic as long as it isn't a slap fight, just be respectful. I'm happy to learn more!

 

[Penis Drager 2.0]

I won't be mad if the thread goes off-topic as long as it isn't a slap fight, just be respectful. I'm happy to learn more!

I'm bored, so I'll give a bit more detailed a response to your OP:

But instead of unifying people across Europe, it divided them. Then it became weak and needed to spread to other continents.

As we already discussed, this simply isn't true. So we can effectively discount any assertions that come downstream of that claim.
Europe became even more united in the years between 313 and 1054. That's 741 years! Walking back an equivalent time in the past from the year Rome adopted Christianity, that brings us to 428 BC when Rome was still a republic. The Roman Empire was Christian for longer than it was pagan.

It was also a fertile ground that permitted for Humanism and modern Western "Universal" system of belief. This is how colonial empires felt a duty to "civilize" the savage by giving them technology that will later backfire on the native Europeans.

Do you not think there was a transfer of technology in pre-Christian Rome?
Pagan Rome was vigorously expansionist and notorious for their massive infrastructure programs.

Christianity is downstream of Judaism. Jewish influence is a symptom, not the cause.

There is a shared history between Christians and Jews, yes. But that's about where things end. Even as far back as the First Council of Nicea (325), the Christians had chosen to divest themselves with the Jewish community by declaring that they will no longer rely on the Jewish calendar to calculate Easter.
It wasn't until much, much later that American Protestants developed the Scofield Reference Bible that Evangelicals started sucking Jewish cock. The Early Church hated Jews.

>WHAT ABOUT DA MUSLIMS?!?!
Tool of the Jews to keep midwit distracted.

Muslims have quite a complex and fascinating history, really. And this can also be seen as a caveat to my earlier point.
There were, in fact, a few schisms prior to 1054 (though these groups were exiled or later brought into "proper" Christianity). Many of these schismatics ended up directly influencing Islam (eg. Arius, Malicious, Nestorius) or their schism directly contributed to Muslim hordes gaining military superiority to the Eastern Roman Empire (notably, Egypt split from The Empire after the Coptic schizm during an active military invasion by muslims to the East).
I am drastically oversimplifying here but hopefully I gave you some helpful terms to look up.

 

[エボラちゃん]

Great post! Thank you for taking the time to develop your thoughts. I must concede that the OP is somewhat obtuse. But I want to emphasize that I have no stake in this discussion. I'm not seeking to provoke or offense anyone. There's no reddit karma to be gained. We live in an interesting timeline, and like many people I'm just trying to make sense of what is going on today.

 

[Tornado]

Everyone always forgets that the Filioque first showed up in a random parish in Spain as an attempt at stopping the Arian heresy from re-emerging, then was pushed to the pope by Charlemagne.

It actually took a while for things to fully settle in, but what sealed the deal was a mixture of the Pope being far too big-headed and a single German Cardinal being extremely autistic in how he tried to engage with the Ecumenical Patriarchate concerning papal supremacy.

If the Pope had been more humble and the Cardinal had been less autistic, Rome would have potentially resolved it's issues and would still be in communion with the Church today, but here we are in the modern era.

This is the kind of nonsense you believe when you listen to Dyerslop all day at work. Have you ever tried reading the Fathers? Is your exposure to St. Maximus exclusively through YouTube videos? See what he has to say in his letter to Marinus on the Filioque. Then read what your Metropolitans say on the matter.

But isn't Deep Thoughts about trying to have constructive discussion? I can understand that you don't like the topic of the thread because it offends you or you think it's stupid. I just don't understand why you'd feel so invested in discrediting the discussion I'm trying to have. What do you gain from calling me an idiot? All I see is user derailing a thread that you could just ignore.

I'll outline your historical and your philosophical failure in as broad as terms as possible. You said Christianity has a "universalizing" tendency for various reasons. I countered by saying that the dominant pagan philosophy between the late third and the early seventh centuries in Europe was Neoplatonism, which is in point of fact as "universalizing" as any philosophy could ever be since it is primarily concerned with understanding being-as-being through intellection. There is quite literally not a major concern with the particulars because of the Platonic bend toward forms and universals. The main mechanism, you presented, therefore, cannot be valid, because philosophy was already taking on this "universalizing" tendency apart from or even opposed to Christian theology.

Your other failure is in your historical analysis. I cited Caesar's Gallic Wars because it is a primary source and effectively what we might consider a propaganda piece for the instigation of a massive war in a place that was, for all intents and purposes, not the Roman Republic's problem. Caesar explains how a barbarous tribe of Gauls threatened one of Rome's allies and could thwart Roman interests in the region. By the end of the conflict, Western Europe was filled with Roman garrisons and their kings were either dead or captive. This was the beginning of their integration into the Roman hegemony. Livy describes this period as one of fascination and respect for them which is testified in such sculptures as The Dying Gaul. Your argument that colonial interests reflect a xenophilia originating from Christianity is therefore DOA.

 

[エボラちゃん]

You're still missing the point I'm trying to make. Allow me to clarify the premise of this thread.
Can we both agree that there's something wrong going on in the West?
If yes, then that's all I'm trying to understand. All the mental gymnastics displayed to claim:
Christianity has absolutely 0 correlation with what's presently going on, sounds like absolute cope.
Now, allow me to add another retarded theory, just to complete the shit pile I started:

Some White (Western Europeans) subgroup are genetically predisposed toward xenophilic preferences.
Xenophilia is embedded in their genes from generations of brainwashing.
Like any other animal, you can selectively breed innate behavior into humans (basic social engineering).
Only the subgroup that retained some racial awareness with in-group preference will survive.
On the main chopping block:
Angloid(+DLC), germanics and non-arab mediterranean subtypes.

This is one of the point I wanted to raise to explain the absolute state of Western Civilization.
The second point being the early adoption of one of the sand trilogy book, which effectively set the ground work for what's happening right now.

Don't hate me for trying to think outside the box.

 

[Tornado]

You're still missing the point I'm trying to make. Allow me to clarify the premise of this thread.
Can we both agree that there's something wrong going on in the West?
If yes, then that's all I'm trying to understand. All the mental gymnastics displayed to claim:
Christianity has absolutely 0 correlation with what's presently going on, sounds like absolute cope.

The modern West is largely a project concerned with reinterpreting the theological framework it received from the medieval period. Whether justified or not, there was a widespread rejection of classical metaphysics, not just Christian but also Hellenistic metaphysics, in the 14th century. This movement then accelerated into a more tectonic shift in philosophy, because the Christianity served as the foundation for European ethics and customs which was thus decisively undercut, becoming functionally the same as having tribal taboos. I am not making an original observation. There's a reason Nietzsche called the most popular philosophies of his day "Tübingen theology" and why most of the famous "Enlightenment" thinkers are heavily associated with the cultural morass in Dutch and German territories, pooled around Lutheran seminaries. These ideas have been discussed since the 70s and the 2009 book The Theological Origins of Modernity documents the whole thing pretty well.

This is all to assert that we don't need to come up with harebrained theories about what happened between the 4th and the 21st centuries that made things the way they are now. Coming up with an anachronism like "in-group preference" as the mechanism of action here doesn't do anyone any favors. We fortunately do not need to rely on the think tank here at Kiwi Farms to figure out what happened to the European people and their nations.

 

[エボラちゃん]

The modern West is largely a project concerned with reinterpreting the theological framework it received from the medieval period. Whether justified or not, there was a widespread rejection of classical metaphysics, not just Christian but also Hellenistic metaphysics, in the 14th century. This movement then accelerated into a more tectonic shift in philosophy, because the Christianity served as the foundation for European ethics and customs which was thus decisively undercut, becoming functionally the same as having tribal taboos. I am not making an original observation. There's a reason Nietzsche called the most popular philosophies of his day "Tübingen theology" and why most of the famous "Enlightenment" thinkers are heavily associated with the cultural morass in Dutch and German territories, pooled around Lutheran seminaries. These ideas have been discussed since the 70s and the 2009 book The Theological Origins of Modernity documents the whole thing pretty well.

This is all to assert that we don't need to come up with harebrained theories about what happened between the 4th and the 21st centuries that made things the way they are now. Coming up with an anachronism like "in-group preference" as the mechanism of action here doesn't do anyone any favors. We fortunately do not need to rely on the think tank here at Kiwi Farms to figure out what happened to the European people and their nations.

I don't disagree with what you say, but I feel like you're personally invested in proving yourself right and you're not interested in considering the plausibility of my observation, it is not funded on theology but evolution and sociology. I'm pleased to read your point of view but I believe it is incomplete. I'm appreciative of the effort you put in your reply and I'm not denying the validity of your statement, in fact I think it is complementary to mine.