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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31654 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023

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So, what does this mean for pre-Christian societies? It wasn’t Christians who built the Parthenon or all of those gorgeous Greco-Roman statues. You draw a distinction between “post-Christian” and “post-pagan” societies, but, at least in the entirety of Europe, Christian societies are all post-pagan societies. Pagan Europeans made beautiful representational art many centuries before they were converted to Christianity.

Just what I was thinking. The essential features of Western civilization were all there BC or at least pre-Constantine. Mosaics too, as well as statues. Indeed, Christianity brought with it the introduction of iconoclasm as an idea, which caused long and ridiculously bloody (for the tininess of the stakes) factional strife in the Byzantine empire.

We had Roman Law, we had Plato and Aristotle, we had vaguely representative government and the rights of the citizen. That is the essential components IMO.

Linking pre-Christian Greece and Rome(and these were different societies even if they had a few similarities due to being indo-European and Mediterranean) to the modern ‘west’ can only be done through Christianity. The Italian renaissance that revitalized classical art? That was at the behest of Christianity.

To the extent that they’re similar to Christianity, it’s either because of geographic similarities(Christianity being, like Rome and Greece, based out of, well, Rome and Greece) or Christian borrowing.

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