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Notes -
I think I've sprinkled several answers to this already but my apologies if they weren't clear. Here is a condensed list:
Your point is very well taken, I just brought this up myself in a similar thread. Mohammed was definitely a guy who in all likelihood said the things he did, same as Joseph Smith. But neither has any verisimilitude. How can Jesus just be an important prophet in Islam when his whole shtick was 'i am not just an important prophet'? And why would God send angels and gold tablets to one guy's backyard with the message 'ladies, if you sleep with this man, straight to heaven'
Yeah I'll entertain that premise! Hell I'll even go a step further and say Christianity has inadvertently enabled "wokeness" every step of the way for both millennia. But at least at first most (all?) of Christianity's changes on our ancestor's practices were genuinely positive. We did do human sacrifice. We did have sex cults. We did worship rocks and trees. Not swift.
Jesus doesn't hate beautiful things. We could have an entire conversation about this though if you're interested, would be fascinating
We were a bunch of mudpeople who barely bothered to invent an alphabet before Christianity. Yes, we had advanced metallurgy, agriculture, civil order, etc. But where were our poems, our philosophical treatises? Our monuments and great works? We were going nowhere fast. We were practically pre-historic before the Romans stumbled on us. If it's no coincidence that Europe rose to such heights as to conquer the globe only because of the syncretism you're describing, perhaps that was precisely what God intended for us.
I think that this is another example of cynical syncretism; Muhammad did not want to alienate potential converts who had been exposed to Christianity, of whom there were many in the region by that time. By paying that baseline level of respect to Jesus, Islam could piggyback on Christ’s message/legacy and incorporate it into the framework of Islam. To rescue things theologically, one could believe that Jesus was exaggerating his own divinity and power at the time in order to ensure that his message was received and promulgated as effectively as possible given the religious and cultural milieu he was in at the time.
The history of early Mormonism is definitely more complicated than that. I fully agree with you that the beginnings of the church are highly inauspicious; Smith was at best a fabulist and had that same narcissistic and grandiose cult leader personality I earlier attributed to Jesus. Much of the Doctrine and Covenants is simply a catalogue of various petty spats and disputes he had with his followers, many of whom were embarrassingly naïve. However, the fact that a church with such an unpromising origin could, within the span of less than 200 years, grow into one of the most successful and prosperous religious movements of all time, with some of the happiest, most well-adjusted, most affluent, and most fertile adherents of any extant religion, suggests that perhaps Smith truly was a vessel - however imperfect - for a genuine divinely-inspired message. (Perhaps that message is that European-descended people need to continue to further syncretize and shape Christianity in order to bring it more in sync with our natural instincts and with our modern needs.)
I’m somewhat more restrained in my praise of the effects of Christianization on European peoples, but I will start by acknowledging the ways in which you’re correct. Christianity did indeed put an end to the catastrophic cycles of interpersonal revenge violence which had fractured pagan European society. It ended the practice of enslaving fellow Europeans. It brought pagans within the fold of that network of commerce, political centralization, learning, and scholasticism which I mentioned earlier. It increased fellow-feeling between disparate European tribal groups - at least, that is, after the slaughter and subjugation of the people who resisted conversion was finally concluded, with the Saxon Wars and the Northern Crusades.
Still, I think you’re far too flippant when you say that they “worshipped rocks and trees”. It’s more accurate to say that they believed that real spiritual beings dwelled within nature, and that it was possible to cultivate a mutually-respectful and beneficial relationship with those spirits. The sacred groves which were a mainstay of all Indo-European-derived pagan traditions were seen as places wherein people could commune with the divine - not with the trees themselves, but with the gods whose power channeled through them. They were places of contemplation and supplication. The burning and destruction of sacred groves by Christian missionaries was a grotesque and desecrative act.
As for human sacrifice, this is a topic about which at some point I want to do a real deep dive and learn what that actually looked like, how the people conceived of what they were doing, etc. Most importantly, I want to understand what sort of people were being sacrificed. I can easily imagine that what we call “human sacrifice” was essentially functionally equivalent to how the death penalty is used today. Underneath all the spiritual woo, perhaps it was just a way to justify purging the most undesirable individuals from society. Perhaps the people sacrificed were criminals, or prisoners of war, or profoundly mentally ill - schizophrenic, or psychopathic - or were very sick in some other way, or otherwise a massive burden or pain on the ass to everyone else. Better to offer them as a sacrifice to the gods, and thereby redeem some value and significance and collective catharsis from their deaths, than to just quietly let someone take them behind the woodshed and strangle them to death so we could all be rid of them. I genuinely don’t know enough about the mechanics, the prevalence, and the contemporary justifications for the practice for me to cast informed judgment on it. There are tons of people living among us today whom I wouldn’t mind seeing burnt on a pyre or cast into a peat bog, so human sacrifice doesn’t really freak me out in the way that it seems to do for most people.
Your general complaints about the lack of literacy, philosophy, and poetry are valid, but you also need to take into account the extent to which a lot of pre-Christian culture was just forcefully destroyed by Christians and lost forever. Germanic pagans did build temples, and the Christians burnt them down or turned them into churches. Norse people did have an alphabet, and did have a thriving poetic tradition, which was later codified into the Sagas and the Eddas. I am not suggesting that pagan European society, as it existed before Christianity, was the sort of civilization that could have landed a man on the Moon. For that, integration into a more sophisticated, more centralized, more urbanized civilizational structure was indeed necessary; for that, I am thankful to Christianity, although I question the extent to which I should credit the tenets of Christianity specifically, or whether I should recognize Christianity as having inherited the Imperium from Rome, and as having been simply one step further in the still-ongoing apotheosis of Western society, a process which will require us at some point in the near future to move on from Christianity or syncretize it even further into something new and workable for the space-faring age.
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