How would the world look like if Christianity didn't exist?

early hominides were more advanced than renaissance europe?

but same stuff happend with christanity and islam

Obviously, did you even read the chart?

Europe would still have its native cultures and not be some judeo-humanitarian hivemind.

>kangdoms
nice touch

>Where are we?
>We're in the same time, but in this universe, William the Bastard lost the battle of Hastings, thus humanity is 1000 years more advanced.

We would possibly be having a conversation about Mithraism and what it ever did for the world and whether it is worth preserving. Comparing fond memories of going down to the Mithraeum with our grandfathers on the solstices.

To be honest I don't understand what the positives of Christianity were in the minds of the people who fetishise Byzantium and the crusades etc.
The negative aspects are so self evident to me that I would genuinely like to hear the arguments for the beneficial effect of Christendom etc. as I don't want to live an echo chamber. The arguments I have seen here tend to just be a meme and something arrogant along the lines of "hurdur you don't know history if you like aspects of the prechristian pagan world view."

They didnt do so as blatantly as manicheaism which had a pandemonium of deities beyond christ to which more where added in the far east. Manes critics often pointed out how it was a meshup of too many teachings.

>The negative aspects are so self evident to me
Care to share your enlightenment?

so it would be basicaly like catholicism in practice

Yeah Islamic scholars were pretty busy keeping classical literature alive and China was pretty busy too.

I suspect the dark ages are partially the dark ages because the church destroyed the records of that time because it was the period of most resistance to the introduction of Christianity in Europe.

Church narrative = and everybody converted because our religion was just so self evidently true.

Nestorian scholars were pretty busy keeping classical literature alive*

I wouldn't call it an enlightenment. But the lack of progress, significantly lower life standards than classical antiquity and human suffering caused by the church speaks volumes.

I've not really heard a convincing flip side beyond it apparently ending slavery in Europe and increasing charity.

>caused by the church
nice meme

uhm the church LITERALLY burnd every single Scientific treaty made by ancient secular pagan lesbian proto-Scientists in a great bonfire that blotted out the Sun for millennia and when they ran out of them, they started using eidetic Nordic shamans as fuel

why the f*ck do you think they're called the Dark Ages ?

fuckign educate yourself

Yep, total medieval memery the church dindu nuffin. I'm reaching out an olive branch here and trying to actually learn why other people think the way they do.

sorry, forgot pic.

is it from medieval period?
those clothes look more like renaissance to me

>The general desire of the Catholic Church's clergy to check fanaticism about witchcraft and necromancy is shown in the decrees of the Council of Paderborn, which, in 785, explicitly outlawed condemning people as witches and condemned to death anyone who burnt a witch. The Lombard code of 643 states:
>Let nobody presume to kill a foreign serving maid or female servant as a witch, for it is not possible, nor ought to be believed by Christian minds.
>This conforms to the teachings of the Canon Episcopi of circa 900 AD (alleged to date from 314 AD), which, following the thoughts of Augustine of Hippo, stated that witchcraft did not exist and that to teach that it was a reality was, itself, false and heterodox teaching. The Council of Frankfurt in 794, called by Charlemagne, was also very explicit in condemning "the persecution of alleged witches and wizards", calling the belief in witchcraft "superstitious", and ordering the death penalty for those who presumed to burn witches. Other examples include an Irish synod in 800, and a sermon by Agobard of Lyons (810).
>Pope Gregory VII, in 1080, wrote to King Harald III of Denmark forbidding witches to be put to death.

>The Inquisition ruled, at the time, that so-called witchcraft did not exist and that anyone claiming to possess "magical powers" was lying or insane. Actual self-professed "witches", who typically dealt in love philters, magic amulets and such, were seen as mere charlatans and punished accordingly, i.e. by whipping and public shame rather than burning. Historically, witch hunts were much more common in Protestant countries, and the Inquisition denounced them as backward and unorthodox. The Inquisition was not so much interested in enforcing 'old' Catholicism as it was in promoting the 'new' Catholicism of the Catholic Reformation or Counter-Reformation.
>Unfortunately, this did not stop civic authorities, who had their own court systems independent of the Church and the Crown and groups of angry villagers from rounding up 'witches' and hanging them anyway. Said authorities and mobs did not keep records, so the actual number of Spanish people killed as witches remains unknown. That said, it is generally assumed to be lower than that in, say, France.

Probably Lutherans burning Anabaptists. Sad.

Many such cases!

These guys understand how constructive dialogue works. I was not aware of this information, now I can research it myself and incorporate it into my own knowledge and adjust my worldview accordingly if it merits it.

What we learn from this is that some of the negatives may be exaggerated and that we should consider local authorities separately from the central church and its dogma.

What were some of Christianity's net positive effects?

>What were some of Christianity's net positive effects?
It provided a united force against Islam, which otherwise would have easily trampled over the divided pagan nations.

Catholic philosophy was central to the development of Western science, and in particular to that of the scientific method. To sum it up , the Catholic world view was that all the universe was created by a benevolent creator. This creator also gave us the capacity for reason. Being benevolent, he would not have given us that capacity while making his universe irrational. Therefore the universe works according to rational laws, like a mechanical clock made by a great clockmaker, and we are meant to use reason in order to understand those laws. Far from having anything to fear from reason, the Church should see it as the most reliable way of arriving at the truth, including the truth of Christianity.

This philosophy only emerged progressively, but by 1100 it was completely accepted by the Church, and laid the foundation of scholasticism. From then on all thinkers at the cathedral schools and universities had to be highly formed logicians, and natural philosophy (that is to say science) became the second most prestigious field after theology. All the precepts of the scientific method were born out of this. The belief in a logical universe governed by rational laws. The belief that all the universe can be translated into the language of mathematics. And perhaps most importantly the concept of the scientific theory.

This came about most prominently in 1277, when the Church intervened directly into academia by banning the teaching of Aristotelian physics as indisputable fact at the University of Paris. Not only did this free up scientific thinking which had previously been shackled to academic dogma, and make it possible for people like Buridan and Oresme to reinvent physics and maths (laying the foundation of modern science), but this and the general attitude of the Church towards science also forced academics to be a lot more careful about making claims. Instead of claiming guesswork as absolute truth the way the Greeks did, they had to be much more humble and disciplined, and any claim had to be considered mere theory, that is to say one of several possibilities, which can be held as true in practice if it is supported by evidence, but which can never become dogma and can always be put back into question again based on new evidence. This is the key to the scientific method and to the perpetual cycle of questioning things again which made the scientific revolution possible.

Islam only exists because of Christianity, which did most of the trampling over pagan nations in the first place.

How did witch burning even start? Was it a thing in pagan times?

Wow you're pretty retarded

What happened to Babylon anyway?
You'd think with their tech level they would be able to survive a little bit of rain

wouldnt blaming the mongols, huns, and other barbarian tribes be more appropiate. The church was the only institution left that the people could turn to.

All part of the plan

>Punishment for malevolent sorcery is addressed in the earliest law codes preserved; both in ancient Egypt and in Babylonia it played a conspicuous part. The Code of Hammurabi (18th century BC short chronology) prescribes that:
>"If a man has put a spell upon another man and it is not yet justified, he upon whom the spell is laid shall go to the holy river; into the holy river shall he plunge. If the holy river overcome him and he is drowned, the man who put the spell upon him shall take possession of his house. If the holy river declares him innocent and he remains unharmed the man who laid the spell shall be put to death. He that plunged into the river shall take possession of the house of him who laid the spell upon him."

>In 451 BC, the Twelve Tables of Roman law had provisions against evil incantations and spells intended to damage cereal crops. In 331 BC, 170 women were executed as witches in the context of an epidemic illness. Livy emphasizes that this was a scale of persecution without precedent in Rome.
>In 186 BC, the Roman senate issued a decree severely restricting the Bacchanals, ecstatic rites celebrated in honor of Dionysus. Livy records that this persecution was because "there was nothing wicked, nothing flagitious, that had not been practiced among them" Consequent to the ban, in 184 BC, about 2,000 people were executed for witchcraft (veneficium), and in 182–180 BC another 3,000 executions took place, again triggered by the outbreak of an epidemic. There is no way to verify the figures reported by Roman historians, but if they are taken at face value, the scale of the witch-hunts in the Roman Republic in relation to the population of Italy at the time far exceeded anything that took place during the "classical" witch-craze in Early Modern Europe. Persecution of witches continued in the Roman Empire until the late 4th century AD and abated only after the introduction of Christianity as the Roman state religion in the 390s.

>Likely we'd be more cultured

Wut

The graph is horseshit

You're almost wrong in every way and have developed the view of Renaisance scholars who tried to make the Middle Ages look as shitty as possible.

>The manuals of the Roman Catholic Inquisition remained highly skeptical of witch accusations, although there was sometimes an overlap between accusations of heresy and of witchcraft, particularly when, in the 13th century, the newly formed Inquisition was commissioned to deal with the Cathars of Southern France, whose teachings were charged with containing an admixture of witchcraft and magic. Although it has been proposed that the witch-hunt developed in Europe from the early 14th century, after the Cathars and the Templar Knights were suppressed, this hypothesis has been rejected independently by two historians (Cohn 1975; Kieckhefer 1976).
>In 1258, Pope Alexander IV declared a canon that alleged witchcraft was not to be investigated by the Church. Although Pope John XXII had later authorized the Inquisition to prosecute sorcerers in 1320, inquisitorial courts rarely dealt with witchcraft save incidentally when investigating heterodoxy.
>In the case of the Madonna Oriente, the Inquisition of Milan was not sure what to do with two women who in 1384 confessed to have participated the society around Signora Oriente or Diana. Through their confessions, both of them conveyed the traditional folk beliefs of white magic. The women were accused again in 1390, and condemned by the inquisitor. They were eventually executed by the secular arm.
>In a notorious case in 1425, Hermann II, Count of Celje accused his daughter in law Veronika of Desenice of witchcraft – and, though she was acquitted by the court, he had her drowned. The accusations of witchcraft are, in this case, considered to have been a pretext for Hermann to get rid of an "unsuitable match", Veronika being born into the lower nobility and thus "unworthy" of his son.

This bait must be older than me at this point.

>Everone says that chart is bullshit and bait
>Nobody explains why
Really makes my noggin go joggin

Hence why I asked for contrary info. I study classical history and classical antiquity is unashamedly my favourite part of human history. I know I am a biased Hellenaboo. This is why I love this board, it's diversity of opinion and outlook means less likelihood of echo chambering.

...

thank you for trying to keep it civil, m8
these threads often start and end in rampant shitposting from all sides involved
t. inquisition spammer

Define the unit of measure for "scientific advancement" right now

1 sagan = 1,000 dawkins = 1,000,000 beakers of Scientific Achievement

>dawkins actually doing anything except be salty and take credit for his wife's work
heh

Basically people stopped believing in the Roman Civic cults and Christianity was:

1. Similar enough to the Eastern mystery cults that had become popular.
2. Had something for everyone, fashionable rich ladies now had charity to feel good about and poor people were more valued than before.
3. One god=one ruler=one people was a better fit for a centralized monarchy.

It almost always devolves into shit slinging and heinous memes. I was curious to see if civil discussion was even really an option.

The super autismo was still in effect with ragrds to the witch burning pic. I have to confess I hadn't applied the same standard of judgement to classical examples as I would Middle Ages European. I think the point of contention would be intent in the persecution. The Roman example of the state persecution of the Bachchantes was born out of a sense of affrontery to moral decency and the growing power of the Bacchic priesthood. (Remember that Dionysius apparently sought to humble the haughty and powerful)

In my context of Scotland they tried over 3000 witches in About 50 years. A lot of it was superstitious nonsense but the trial of 250+ aristocrats in the Berwick witch trials always stood out to me. They stood accused of hiring witches to
kill king James and all were considered anti Stuart. Interesting parallel.

A comparative study of witchcraft persecution between European Middle Ages and antiquity would be a damn interesting paper for any of you academics out there.

So witch hunting seems to have gone away by the Middle Ages in Southern Europe and Mesopotamia. How was it so big a deal in Germany and Northern Europe then? Did the Gauls and Vikings execute witches?