What if christianity never existed ?

[paulpablo]

You were saying that the History of Christianity was holding back scientific achievement until these game of thrones type events happened killing enough of them off leaving not enough of them to hold the thumb screws.

-because that's how history played out.  

It seems like an illogical evaluation of what happened.
Reason 1) It isn't unique to Christianity to have internal wars with different sects within the religion. Christianity is no different from Islam in terms of it being a fact that both religions are fractured.  Yet game of thrones style internal fighting has never stopped Islam from having a firm grip of theological power over certain countries.  At least relative to Christianity.

No one said that it was unique to christianity.  Next.

Reason 2) It seems over simplified anyway to say the Christians were preventing scientific advancement until they killed each other off to the point where there were no longer enough of them to hold power.

Everything about christianity is simple...but that doesn;t change the fact that they -did- hold scientific advancment back until they no longer possessed the ability to do so, having engaged in a deleterious sectarian conflict with themselves.  

There's always been a fairly high population of Christians in the world so surely saying there wasn't enough of them to hold power after they were at battle with each other would be incorrect.

The number of christians involved is irrelevant, they were unable to suppress each others various seditious elements (read: science) because they no longer cooperated -with- each other to do so.  

This might be some historical event I'm unaware of, but I've never heard of this point in history when there weren't enough Christians to oppress other people anymore because they were too busy fighting each other.

You'd have to have missed something awfully big in western history not to have noticed the protestant schism and it's attendant effects.

I'm aware that king Henry split with the catholic church to form the church of England, but I'm unaware of any specific progression because of that.

From what I know it was still basically a church in control of the country.

As I say I can't elaborate on what I don't know but to put the separation of church and state down to battling sects within a religion seems oversimplified to me.

Just from some slight reading up on the topic the founding of America seems to have some part in this.  

I wouldn't say that was a result of there being a lack of co operation between Christians but because there was a geographical location people could flee to in order to escape religious persecution and they based the news laws of the land on a fear of a lack of freedom of religion which they just escaped from.

And that's just one other layer to the many that I'm sure there are of how the church became separate from the state.