Reply #86: You can ask youself what the Romans left to Europe: they had some engineering savvy

[struggle4progress]

and so left roads and aqueducts, for example -- but the history of Rome rampant is not a great history of scientific progress; you can probably reckon on the fingers of one hand the important Roman scientists -- a rather different story than the story of the golden age of Greece or the golden age of Islam. The Romans were largely interested in extracting tribute from the empire to feed Rome itself

The collapse of the Roman empire represents an organizational collapse and the end of the Pax Romana -- but that is not a scientific tragedy. Perhaps the fall of Rome did mean that more European resources had to be devoted to European wars, but tribute was no longer paid to Rome

Wars, of course, are expensive. It is difficult to sum what Europe lost between 1914 and 1945, for example: a whole generation of French men, including many good scientists, vanished into the fog of the Great War; Germany, perhaps the leading scientific nation in 1900, lay in smouldering ruins at the end of WWII. The fall of Rome did not bring peace to Europe, and there were considerable social costs associated with that

But if war is expensive, so is the imperial abstraction of resources. Africa today has not recovered from the European predations a century or more ago. Rome was not known for its kindness towards those it conquered, and there were considerable social costs associated with that, too

The situation in Europe, following the fall of the Roman empire, was not that of a scientifically advanced continent suddenly plunged into darkness by the advent of Christendom: the region consisted of former Roman colonial territories, now wracked by military power struggles

It does not seem to me that one can uniformly blame the Catholic church for the "unspeakable savagery" of the pre-modern world. The Roman model was sometimes brutal in the extreme, including all manner of murders for mere entertainment. In this context of Roman extraction from the poor, and Roman cruelty to reinforce the claims of the Roman state, you can ask yourself (independent of any views you have regarding the historical authenticity of the old Christian stories): Exactly why would any of the Roman world subscribe to this strange tale, in which the Savior of the World appears as a homeless peasant in a backwater colony and is unpleasantly put to death by the authorities? What meaning could be found in that story, that anyone would tell and re-tell it?



... So in acts of violence, where there is a wish to hurt, whether by reproach or injury; and these either for revenge, as one enemy against another; or for some profit belonging to another, as the robber to the traveller; or to avoid some evil, as towards one who is feared; or through envy, as one less fortunate to one more so, or one well thriven in any thing, to him whose being on a par with himself he fears, or grieves at, or for the mere pleasure at another`s pain, as spectators of gladiators, or deriders and mockers of others. These be the heads of iniquity ...
Confessions Of St. Augustine
Book VI