Nuggin writes:
So, let's assume for a second that there was a historical figure Jesus and he died at the end of a Roman sword or was thrown in prison and never heard from again.
The Bible would still read verbatim as it does today.
Well, let's set aside for the moment the fact that the Romans didn't imprison criminals as a general rule, but only confined them until such time as they could be sent on to be enslaved, crucified, enrolled in a gladiatorial school, or just turned into tiger bait in the arena. An efficient lot, those Romans.
I essentially agree with Nuggin. "Christian" scriptures without Christ might feature a few different names and stories, but I don't think that some sort of evangelical monotheism could have been held back forever. However, monotheism might have evolved into something more philosophical and less evangelical, like Neoplatonism without all the absurd attempts by the early Christians to shoehorn their nonsensical mythology into Plato's philosophy. The geopolitical forces that eventually broke up the Western Empire into various Gothic and Frankish states were probably unstoppable, but an enlightened Eastern Empire based in Constantinople would have held together and preserved the Greek culture and science that the Christians felt obliged to obliterate.
End result? No Renaissance because no loss of Greek culture, and the emergence of the real scientific method at least a thousand years earlier than it did in our timeline. Without the Christian church to smother learning and experimentation with its dogma, it's entirely possible that we'd have a far more enlightened and advanced civilization today. Native civilizations in the Western hemisphere, descendants of the Aztec and Maya, receiving technology from Europe instead of disease and slavery? Maybe. Spaceships on Mars in the equivalent of our 14th century, instead of Europe losing a third of its population to the Black Death? Who knows?
Of course, it's also entirely possible that, humans being what they are, we would have found another equally ignorant and destructive path to follow, and we'd be no better off than we are now. But it's fun to consider a world without Baptists and Republicans, anyway.
Your beliefs do not effect reality and evidently reality does not effect your beliefs.
-Theodoric
Reality has a well-known liberal bias.
-Steven Colbert
I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it.
- John Stuart Mill
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