I wouldn’t be a Christian

[Belacqua]

The things that christianity is made of, are western traditions.

Well, that's certainly true. Nothing is wholly original, and Christianity from its beginnings is both Hebrew and Greek. The Gospel of John makes sure that Neoplatonism is baked into the theology from the beginning. 

It didn't go underground when christians were influential..they literally burnt it -to- the ground...

Well, sort of. They "burned it to the ground" by incorporating the parts they liked from the beginning. Let's say the Gospel of John is 1st century or thereabouts. The Cappadocian Fathers are very Neoplatonic and 4th century. St Augustine is Neoplatonic and 5th century. So they kept aspects of it alive by adopting them. They rejected the parts they didn't like of course, that's what new ideologies do. 

(The literal "burning to the ground" is sometimes exaggerated. That whole thing about the Library of Alexandria, for example, is largely a myth.) 

So when Aristotle was reintroduced from Muslim countries in the 13th century and Plato was rediscovered and translated in the 15th, it all seemed familiar enough. And these rediscoveries helped to reinvigorate theology and give it new possibilities. Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, for example, allowed Thomas and Dante to ignore a commandment-based ethical system in favor of virtue ethics that are more adaptable and still useful, I think. Dante's system is quite modern, if we translate his use of the word "sin" into something like "emotionally self-destructive." 

Hellenism was not what happened to greek culture when judaism influenced it, it's what happened to judaism influenced by greek culture.  

Right, that's basic.

So the earlier elements of what we're calling "western tradition" were pre-Christian and adopted into Christian theology. (Of course those earlier elements weren't pure either, being influenced by Egyptian and Mesopotamian ideas as well, though this is not well documented.) And then once Christianity became the dominant system of thought in Europe it shaped that tradition for several centuries. Like it or not, Christianity is how western tradition shaped and expressed itself for centuries. We are still influenced by it and -- if you don't like it -- you could say that even non-believers are still getting over it. Many of the more optimistic views I see expressed from anti-religious people seem entirely millennial and faith-based to me, in a sort of de-Christianized hope for apocalypse and salvation. 

Now, ofc, they spent the next thousand years swearing they invented everything from puppies to sliced bread, and regardless of the absurdity in this claim it became a part of the conceptual framework of "the west" as history was memory holed.

We should all aim for scrupulously correct views of history, uninfluenced by what we would have preferred.