I wouldn’t be a Christian

[Belacqua]

If you want to put the idealist christian thinkers throughout time on a pedestal I'm OK with that (for you).

Both the idealists (Plato/Augustine etc.) and the materialists (Aristotle/Thomas etc.) are essential if we want to understand Western thought. I don't know if they're on a pedestal, if that means accepting them uncritically. I enjoy studying those things but, as I said, if you don't that's no problem. 

I think that you'd have a difficult time giving examples where the totality of these thoughts were taken up and practiced by the church or the masses. Philosophical academia rarely survives outside of academia except as ideals. 

There are surely no examples at all of the "totality" of these things being taken up and practiced. Real world applicability is case-by-case. But I don't see why the opinions of the masses are any indication of quality, or of the value of my studying those things. 

I was in academia briefly, and didn't like it. My own experience has been that if you want to talk about art and theology (instead of publications and conferences) you're better off outside of academia. But again, that's an institutional problem and not the fault of the topics I'm interested in.

And I'd still like to see examples of "only with/by/thru god" can these ideals exist. Any god is a mental concept/construct created by man. Claiming a god exists, other than as a concept, is a psychological tool for human manipulation.

That's an interesting question. I can't say to what degree certain key ideas in Western thinking depended on theology to be worked out. That would be a counterfactual sort of thing, in which we imagine a different history than the one we have. Given the history we have, the history of many ideas that are still important is best studied through their development by Christian thinkers. Because Christian thinkers are the history we happen to have. 

As a random example, the philosophy of language was largely originated by people who wondered about the words that Adam used before the Fall. The idea that there could be a necessary and not contingent relationship between the word and what it refers to began in this way, and has been taken up by more modern non-religious thinkers. It's not even clear if the original philosophers of language took the Adam story literally or just used it as an imaginary case of non-contingent language. The well-known scholar of Thomas Aquinas, Umberto Eco, who was an atheist, wrote a fascinating book about this. 

https://www.amazon.com/Search-Perfect-La...t+language.