There is very little direct evidence that Christianity was the driving cause of the Dark Ages.
I'd like to see where you heard this from.
We can see this simply from looking at the collapse of the Roman Empire. We all know that the Western half of the empire collapsed first, and hardest. Guess which half was more Christian? Right, the Eastern half.
Germanic or "Gothic" invasions happened mostly to the Western part of the empire and they weren't able to defend while East dealt with less and they were able to handle it. There is no "more Christian half"... there is no basis for that and good luck telling the Catholics that. Catholicism and Orthodoxy just had different administrations, systems, etc..
So if you'd like to make Christianity out to be a big factor for the fall of the empire, you've got that fact to contend with.
Nobody mentioned that but ok....
Hell, the more-Christian Eastern half survived long enough to become the Byzantine Empire well into the 15th century.
Answered above. The fact that ER lasted longer was specifically an administrative factor not a religious one.
Was Christianity a cultural revolution? You bet your ass it was. Constantine becoming a Christian was ridiculously huge. Was it as destructive as most people believe? Not at all.
There's nothing wrong with this point. When the other redditor said "Islam is a clusterfuck" he generalized. In turn, I generalized all of Christianity with Western Christianity. Blame my lack of making a proper response to such a stupid comment.
Over and done with? Also yeah.
How dismissive of you to count a couple hundred thousand deaths at that time period...
Honestly, the Christian Guilt Thesis has a couple of handles to grab onto, but on the whole there's just not enough evidence to conclude that they caused, or were even the largest factor during the Dark Ages.
I've never heard of this "Christian Guilt Thesis" you seem to keep talking about. If you had explained the entirety of the Dark Ages you'd see that it is clearly the case.
1.Western Europe was Catholic. 2.Church mismanaged. 3.People questioned their beliefs. 4.People started believing different sects of Christianity believing that its the "purer" form.
The Nazis never used Christianity as a major platform for justifying their actions.
They have and there are interesting readings about this reasons. (In fact, you can look at talks between Hitler and Franco to see that religious disagreements were the reasons while Spain didn't join the Axis.) All you need to do is some Googling. Hypothetically lets say that weren't the case. People draw inconclusive connections with ISIS representing Islam and in this case those people can just do the vice-versa with Nazi's representation of Christianity to draw those exact same conclusions no matter however inaccurate.
No one is ignoring Christianity. They just aren't doing what Islam is. There's a key difference, wouldn't you agree?
You were in your arguments so you're contradicting yourself. They did their own versions of it for sure. Religious persecutions occurred within Christianity as well. Read about the Huguenots. Want to go back further than the Dark Ages and the Huguenots? Okay. Crusades. They would be clearly be defined as acts of terrorism in today's standards.
They grew the fuck up.
Christians these days aren't lining up en mass to join cells of belligerent zealots. They aren't beheading women, children, journalists, or people who listen to the wrong sorts of music.
They didn't "grow the fuck up" there are Christian terrorist groups in Africa still who does the exact same shit as ISIS, Boko Haram, etc. Ever heard of the Lord's Resistance Army? It still operates.
To put it simply, Christians for the most part are living in the present, and Islam is trying its damnedest to drag itself back into the Dark Ages (which is funny because Islam during the Dark Ages did a great job of preserving scientific documents).
(Part of it was answered above.) Islam hadn't been through Dark Ages because that was specifically a Christian event. That "living in the present" thing didn't occur because Christianity matured. It happened because people matured and became more secular. Some would argue its because religion as a whole is dangerous. Almost nobody today would be considered religious if we had actually put it to a standard.
How is it not productive to point out plainly and clearly that an ideology is both poisonous and incompatible with western civilization?
You point it out by pointing out specific groups and separating fact from fiction. If what he said were the case, you'd have a hell of a lot more terrorists on your hands than bandits in selective regions of the world.
The words themselves aren't solving any problems, but you aren't going to get very far if you close your eyes for the sake of political correctness.
Nobody's closing their eyes to anything and its not for the sake of "political correctness." It's for the sake of actual correctness.
This is coming from a bleeding heart liberal, by the way.
Hopefully you aren't surprised about my disbelief about my statement.