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Notes -
Afghanistan is wracked by multiple decades long wars and governed by lunatics. It’s not clear to me that Bangladesh is worse and it’s unclear that Pakistan is significantly worse, especially not in ways that aren’t just side effects of geography(mountains+third world is a bad combination).
The last civilized society run by an elite with Indo-European religious beliefs was what, Persia in the 600’s? Abrahamaic religions, Confucianism, and communism have all shown they can run a civilized and technological society. It may not be to your or my preferences, but they can. In contrast Indo-European religions have not.
Hindu supremacy is laughably dumb to me. Hindus didn’t rule themselves for centuries before British budgetary constraints came due for a reason. My ancestors stopped practicing Indo-European paganism under king Clovis for a reason. Some beliefs are just better.
Many pagan societies were at the same level of technological development as their Abrahamic/Confucian contemporaries, though. They weren’t comparatively primitive. They were defeated militarily, yes, but it’s nowhere near as simple as saying that this was because their societies were not able to maintain civilization and technology while the non-pagan ones were.
A huge number of the “conversions” of pagans to Christianity were compelled by military force and just straight-up slaughter and torture. Charlemagne had to fight the brutal thirty-year Saxon Wars to conquer, subjugate, and forcibly convert the pagan Saxons, who were a peer society.
The Northern Crusades were fought in the 12th century to conquer and forcibly convert the pagan Slavic, Baltic, and Finnic people, who had managed to resist Christianization over a thousand years after the birth of Christ. These peoples were not savages living in mud-huts.
The Muslim conquest of the Zoroastrian Persians led to such brutal persecution of those who refused to accept Islamization that they had to flee all the way to the Indian subcontinent, where their modern descendants, the Parsees, are very disproportionately successful and wealthy relative not only to Hindus but also to the Abrahamic Muslims who, in your formulation, should be the ones who are the most successful and civilized.
Abrahamic religions didn’t simply “win in the marketplace of ideas.” Certainly a great number of conversion were sincere! A much larger number of them, though, were made either out of political/economic considerations — leaders wishing to become integrated into the political and financial networks emanating from the Christian Mediterranean — or by force. We didn’t have any opportunity to observe how a pagan society with a European level of human capital would have handled the Industrial Revolution, as they’d all been wiped out hundreds of years prior. The closest example we do have — Japan post-Meiji Restoration — is one of the most successful and civilized industrial societies on earth. I think it’s wildly dishonest to claim that paganism can’t sustain civilization or technology, when we simply have no idea whether or not it could. We have little to no data to work with.
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