http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=55032380&postcount=77
Sorry for the lateness. I went to bed.
Doesn't matter what Saul did. The Paul and Thecla thing was just an example of the cultural quirks of early Christianity not many people know about. People assume it's this one big monolithic thing from beginning to end and that everything retrograde or repressive in Western culture stems directly from Christianity, which is not the case at all.
The fact is the Graeco-Romans were just kinda jerks like that.
Also, what other unifying or civilising influences can you name that would have reached the Norwegian warlords at the end of the world other than Christianity and have done it as quickly? There were hundreds of years during which monasteries and churches were the
only stone buildings in the far wild north and monasteries the main source for spreading useful things like paper and post-stone-age level farming techniques. Without Christianity sowing the seeds, the tribesmen up north would have done what their fathers had done and their fathers before them, all the way back to the dawn of time - pointedly not build cities or write stuff down.
Even discounting all that, with the political situation as it was, the church was the only thing holding anything together. Even by Late Antiquity, people had lost faith in the central government and thought of themselves as Hispanians, Provencals or North Africans first, Romans second. When Belisarius took Rome from the Gothic kings in Italy, his army was regarded as an alien force. Without the Church giving the disparate parts of the former Western Empire a common identity, what hope could there have been for a renaissance in Italy to reach far-off Britain, or Germany or Spain?
Fair enough.
