Christianity was very different, and the evidence for that is undeniable and gigantic. The fruits of diversity within christendom is offered in great treasure heaps within science, music, art, philosophy, theology, lifestyles, ways of worship, mysteries of the faith, and culture in general.
Christianity merged with local cultures, removing some aspects and adding some aspects.
Translating the arabic texts of science (either copied and expanded from greek, latin and other places, or new research) and claiming that it was widom of the ancients?
Please educate yourself more on this. Step out of your bubble.
Christian nations have created the cultural and technical achievements over the last thousands of years. There is nothing even remotely comparable.
I wouldn't thank Christianity for the scientific advancements of the West, except maybe for protestant work ethic. Science only started to flourish when Catholic church started to lose power, and religion became a bit more separated from law and politics.
Best religion for progress of humanity is the one that embraces work, tells people to treat each other fairly, and otherwise keeps its hands off from irrelevant details of people's lives - things like what consenting adults do in bed, what they eat or drink, what they can or can't say.
Unfortunately Christians have been historically way too focused on the bad parts while ignoring the good parts, leading to madness like wars between Catholics and Protestants and discrimination of minorities. Think of the current conservative elite in America for example - it's hard to find people who are further away from teachings of Jesus Christ than those greedy, hateful idiots.
More like the last 500 years.
Before that the cultural and scientific centers of the world were variously in muslim, hindu, chinese, roman and other civilizations.
The Roman/Byzantine empire was pretty much destroyed by Muslims, though. Its a but like thanking the Franks/Goths/etc. for preserving Roman cultural identity in Western Europe by preserving some of their texts..
> The Roman/Byzantine empire was pretty much destroyed by Muslims, though
This is hilariously untrue, if one is talking about the Western Roman empire. An islamic state did conquer Constantinople, which I presume is what you mean.
The Roman empire (western) basically fell apart due to infighting more than anything else.
To be fair for the most part Christianity didn’t spread top down through violent conquest (obviously with some huge exceptions) at least in the Middle East and surrounding regions. Also it’s historically better at integrating local cultural practices and languages.
Unlike Islam which which usually wiped out local cultural and linguistic identities (during the periods of Arab conquests, that shifted quite a but later on of course)
And when you say “historically better at integrating local cultural practices”, India, China and Australia, would like a word with you. Holy shit you should just delete your account right now
No, why would you say I did that? Also if everyone ever referencing any historical event ever would have to explicitly list and condemn every single thing they think was wrong it would become rather verbose and boring to read. Overall the crusaders were worse than some violent conquerors and better than others.
Well the crusades, northern crusades and most of imperialism.
For the most part it's enough to conquer a place. People below the timing elite would switch religions as it would be beneficial for them, and eventually trickle down to peasants and such.
Many of the regions they invaded were still (or until quite recently) majority Christian. After all initially it was a defensive relief expedition organized by the pope and the Byzantine emperor to free the territories the empire lost in Anatolia very recently. Of course it was massively more successful than anyone anticipated and they just kept on going and then the whole thing got “slightly” out of hand..
But yes, as I said there were some huge exceptions. However early on the way Christianity spread was fundamentally different to Islam. It was usually not through violent conquest but bottom up.
European imperialism was quite mixed as well. Christianity played a huge part in the Spanish conquests of the Americas. Much less so in British India and other similar places.
Very peaceful when you convienently ignore all the violence.
Northern crusades were extremely bloody and defeated people would accept baptism or be executed.
Charlemange was more of the same deal.
Catholic church left pagans to their own devices?
Christian history is littered with these examples, it has not been a peaceful religion since it merged with Roman society. The only real good examples you could have are missionaries and top down conversion as kings and such voluntarily switched religions.
> Catholic church left pagans to their own devices?
It varied, although generally the Catholic church was fairly open at integrating or even occasionally tolerating pagan practices or providing alternative options to people used to more polytheistic religions. Like the whole saint worshipping (“venerating”) thing. Often (with some exceptions) pagans found conversion fairly easy since they could just map their gods to equivalent Christian saints continue worshipping them. Basically every converted pagan society had a multi-generationa transition period.
Then you had stuff lime praying to magical corpses or body parts, so their previous owners could perform miracles. With some exceptions it has generally been a highly flexible religion before the reformation.
Islam is much more rigid about following the rules and stuff like idol worship (as a consequence they brought back visual arts back to the stone ages..)
Christianity merged with local cultures, removing some aspects and adding some aspects.