(April 27, 2015 at 10:50 pm)Jenny A Wrote: If there was just paganism following Rome's fall, we might have gotten the Renaissance hundreds of years earlier, or the lack of common ground might have delayed a couple hundred years. You got me.I Respectfully disagree on this. A lot of the Pagan cultures of Europe (only excluding the Greeks, the early Romans and possibly the Vikings) were too conservative and tribal in nature to usher in a renaissance. What you had in Europe before the Romans was somewhat comparable to pre-Columbian America; illiterate or semi-literate tribal societies, with limited agriculture. It's just not the right social or political conditions for an age of enlightenment and learning.
I can't say whether it's the Romans, Christianity, or both combined, but Europe would still have been a political and cultural backwater by the Middle Ages if there were no Romans or Christianity. I think so anyway.
"Adulthood is like looking both ways before you cross the road, and then getting hit by an airplane" - sarcasm_only
"Ironically like the nativist far-Right, which despises multiculturalism, but benefits from its ideas of difference to scapegoat the other and to promote its own white identity politics; these postmodernists, leftists, feminists and liberals also use multiculturalism, to side with the oppressor, by demanding respect and tolerance for oppression characterised as 'difference', no matter how intolerable." - Maryam Namazie
"Ironically like the nativist far-Right, which despises multiculturalism, but benefits from its ideas of difference to scapegoat the other and to promote its own white identity politics; these postmodernists, leftists, feminists and liberals also use multiculturalism, to side with the oppressor, by demanding respect and tolerance for oppression characterised as 'difference', no matter how intolerable." - Maryam Namazie
