What Would Happen if Christianity Went on Strike?

[Aiza]

The ancient Egyptian religion, with Isis, Osirus, Horus (another "holy family") went on for around 3000 years. I'm sure someone 2000 years into that would have said it was eternal, it had never stopped being practiced, it was believed by everyone that it was "Truth" and would go on forever. Today, we look upon it, and think it's silly to believe in such things, and absurd to have mummies and richly-filled tombs.

Was the Ancient Egyptian brutally persecuted during those 3000 years, particularly in its formative years? Also no, we don't think its absurd to have mummies or nice tombs and we embalm our dead and decorate graves to this day (if not half as opulently).

And am I supposed to be impressed at that "Holy Family" thing? Oh wow another family!

A better example you could have used might be Judaism, which has been deeply persecuted worldwide, but even then, not in its first few formative centuries, as Christianity was.

Note too, that as you point out early Christians were persecuted, but when Christianity took over the government of the Roman Empire (Constantine), then later when it broke up into many independent kingdoms - most being officially Catholic, and any belief but Christianity was outlawed, and believers in competing religion tortured and executed, all of society lost its scientific knowledge, mathematical knowledge. Instead of looking to science to explain or solve the problem with plagues, it was based on devils and witches, and a new frenzy of finding innocent people to torture and kill started. Galleleo was excommunicated and deemed a heretic for his astrononomical discoveries - he was not "rehabilitated" by the Catholic Church until just a few years ago.

Also your history here is pretty bad. I don't where to start. First of all, no, the Roman empire didn't break up into Catholic kingdoms--it originally was split into East and West (if thats what you mean), and the Western empire fell to various pagan Germanic tribes. Conversion happened gradually afterward.

While some scientific/mathematical knowledge was naturally lost after the Roman Empire went under, it isn't related to any persecution of non-Christians, or Christian tendency to "blame witches" (lol wtf?) The 'scientific knowledge' of the Greeks/Romans is of absolutely no use in medicine anyway (if anything it would have made matters worse). Plenty of plagues occurred prior to the fall of the Roman Empire and continued to hit in areas like the Middle East which retained the classics, and the Black Death occurred after the classics were recovered. It is true that some blamed Jewish people for poisoning the wells and making people sick, though this sort of scapegoating of the "other" happened long before Christianity (and indeed, this sort of scapegoating of Jews was expressly forbidden and condemned by the Pope at the time, so it seems to have more of a cultural root than anything).

Finally, although this is the least of the problems here, Galileo was never excommunicated, he died a faithful member of the Church. He was placed under house arrest, and the Church later made a formal apology for doing so. Its similarly weird that you would mention this in the same passage you bemoan the loss of the classics, since it was Aristotle that Galileo was trying to go against.

There's no point in "learning from" history if you don't even know what that history is!