How can you study history thoroughly and remain a committed Christian?
History makes it quite clear that:

1) There have been multiple functional non-Christian societies, some of which lasted for a very long time, and a few are still around, and somehow that doesn't mean Christianity is only one of many religious cultures
2) Christianity doesn't enjoy divine favour, as four of its five holy cities (Jerusalem, Antioch, Nicaea, Constantinople) have been held by non-Christians for a very long time, and the fifth one (Rome) is no longer seen as overly important by several Christians
3) History doesn't favour any specific denomination over another: Catholics, Protestants, Orthodox forces all experienced wins and losses, with no coherent pattern over which one is supposed to enjoy divine favour
4) A country converting to Christianity doesn't mean all its inhabitants become sincerely devoted and ethically-minded, in particular the clergy is known to abuse its social status in multiple countries, perhaps even everywhere
5) Pagan or Muslim persecution of Christians seems to be just as cruel as Christian persecution of "heretics" and other religious outsiders, why should the former move us to compassion and the latter be ignored?
6) Somehow Europe was fully Christian for centuries and Judgment Day failed to materialize. If the end of the world won't come when people are literally fighting Crusades in the name of the religion, why bother trying to convert or reconvert as many people as possible?

You guys feel wronged when someone says "CE" instead of "AD" to count years, and yet history has a whole doesn't really seem to have a Christian bias

I'll pray for you. Jesus loves you and forgives you.

>>17832240
How exactly do you pray for an anon?

>>17832239 (OP)
Ask John Henry Newman or Christopher Dawson

>>17832239 (OP)
Jesus is a real entity, but that doesn't mean Christianity is true. It's up to you to determine whether or not you think the fruits of practicing the religion are worth it. All religion is political and more meant to change behaviors on a wide scale. My advice is this. Does being Christian help you, an individual, prosper? Good, then practice it. Presume that the world will continue to be as it is for a very long time and that nothing will happen day-to-day except for small, incremental changes. It'll strip away a kind of sacred narrative to history and give you more mental clarity.

>>17832239 (OP)
>1) Multiple options exist
That is fine.
>2) Non-christian governments control holy cities
That is not fine. But it is precedented. The book of Judges is pretty much entirely about this.
>3) You couldn't tell truth from a survey of battle wins
Why would you?
>4) Sinners will exist in a country
That's who the Church is there for
>5) Christians both suffered and enacted persecution
On all other points I think your expectations were weirdly exaggerated or misplaced, but in this particular one can in my opinion be solved by doing further research. Early Christians would shun heretics but virtually never attempt any kind of persecution, torture or mudred. It is only when the state apparatus (which has been doing this for centuries) merged with the Church when the Church can be said to be doing this. Not before, not after. It's a sleight of hand.
For Muslims it is not a sleight of hand because in their own communities they still do persecute and stone heretics, unbelievers etc. and it ironically takes the state apparatus to calm this tendency down.
>6) Timing of the Judgement day. Why even convert?
It is not for us to know the day or the hour. It is for us to spread the truth, part of which is converting people.

I would invite you to describe a world where you would find Christianity plausible:
>All other religious societies fall apart in an instant
>Christian armies kick everyone's ass (in the brief moments before non-Christian armies fall apart too)
>Christians control land
>All sinners are eradicated and what's left are only sincere believers who rarely stumble
>The state learns to not persecute people even if they deviate from literally the only socially viable option
>Judgement day comes on July 19th, 2125
Is that what you would expect?

>>17832521
>Jesus is a real entity, but that doesn't mean Christianity is true.
What do you mean exactly?
As in Jesus is a historical figure or as in he is well-defined at least as a character?

>>17832240
What am I supposed to be forgiven for?
Someone I am very distantly related with stealing an apple 6000 years ago?
Is that my sin?
Is that what gets me eternal hell?

>>17832617
For all your sins. For continuing to live in sin instead of turning towards the only one who can defeat it and who in fact has defeated it.
Adam and Eve are relevant but you don't bear their guilt. Just the consequences of their actions, as all kids do for their parents' decisions. Your ancestors' actions led to them moving to a toxic wasteland part of creation and now you're being offered a way back. That's roughly what people mean by "Jesus will forgive you". It means he will heal you from all the sicknesses that are your fault and also ones that aren't even your fault at all.

>>17832634
If you have a problem with how sinful the world is, maybe try complaining with its creator instead of praising him unconditionally

>>17832239 (OP)
Christcucks literally and unironically believe 1st century judea was full of jews flying around on magic clouds and jew zombies walking around shooting the shit with people.

>>17832239 (OP)
How can you study history thoroughly and not remain a committed christian ?

1) Functional non-christian societies are functional on account of their alignement with justice (respect for life, property, virtue) and fall once they become misaligned with those laws. The cyclical rise and fall of all empires shows the supremacy of God's laws that cannot be violated without consequences. No non-christian society lives forever by championing anti-christian values such as the murder of the unborn or usury or adultery. In fact, our account of civilizational decadence is essentially an account of how abandoning virtue dooms societies to fall.
2) Christianity enjoys the most divine favour any religion has ever enjoyed. No religion has ever expanded its dominion to all corners of the Earth, enjoyed such a wide and long lasting preeminence in Europe, Africa, the Americas, nor had its sacred book become the best selling, most read and studied books of all times. Look at a map of world religions and see how predominant Christianity is, no religion has ever achieved such expansion. A world religion map is the carthographic equivalent of Gustave Doré's Triumph of Christianity over paganism. Islam by comparison remains confined to its historic Middle East-North Africa axis, Hinduism is forever locked in India, Buddhism is dying in its original South Asian sarcophagus.
3) Christian doctrine acknowledges that the prosperity of believers and their nations is conditional on their obedience to God. At the peak of their piety, Spain and Portugal shared the world together, Victorian England had a quarter of the planet under its crown despite being a mustard seed-sized island, reminding us of Isaiah's prophecy that "the wealth of Egypt and Ethiopia will be yours, and the tall men of Seba will be your slaves; they will follow you in chains. They will bow down to you and confess, "God is with you - he alone is God. '' God exalts and humbles nations, with no favoritism.

>>17832239 (OP)
4) Piety-building is a transgenerational work, Rome wasn't built in one day. Cathedrals took several centuries to be built, saints are harder to build than cathedrals. But we know one thing, historical christian societies produced the most high trust, prosperous, peaceful, non-violent societies the world has ever seen. Where do the refugees go when they seek a paradise ?
5) Because the truth is precious enough to be protected at all costs from counterfeits. Persecution in and of itself means nothing, what gives it its quality is whether persecution is made to protect falsehood or to protect the truth.
6) This is a misunderstanding of christian doctrine on Judgement Day. The end of the world has nothing to do with how lany centuries have passed or people fighting for their faith. I don't know what made you think that ?

>>17832239 (OP)
Enjoy Hell asshole

>>17832239 (OP)
>There have been multiple functional non-Christian societies, some of which lasted for a very long time, and a few are still around, and somehow that doesn't mean Christianity is only one of many religious cultures
Christianity is not a utilitarian tool.
>Holy cities
No such thing as a holy city
>Denominations
Don't care
>A country converting to Christianity doesn't mean all its inhabitants become sincerely devoted and ethically-minded
Read Romans 3.
Also in the future you should try to keep topics contained to one thread in order to keep it focused and have an actual discussion. I can tell you are new here but it's just too many questions that are going in too many directions.

>>17832239 (OP)
Your critiques of modern Christianity are valid. The universalization of the faith robbed it of both purpose and power. They've made it into a doomed jew worship cult that, ironically, causes the destruction of peoples that practice it.

>>17832687
>believes Jesus lives in a kingdom in the sky and will fly down if you let bad people win

Lol

>>17832647
I tried. Turns out complaints aren't the prime moving force of the cosmos.

>>17832866
A complaint is worth filing to make it clear one believes something is wrong.
Whether the other side replies to a well-founded complaint or not says something about the other side, if the merits of the complaint have already been established as valid

>>17832786
>No such thing as a holy city
Oh, someone should tell that to all the people who died in the Crusades then, seems like they got something wrong
>Christianity is not a utilitarian tool.
Seems like you didn't get the point that God wouldn't allow non-Jewish, non-Christian societies to exist if not being Christian is enough to go to Hell
>
Also in the future you should try to keep topics contained to one thread in order to keep it focused and have an actual discussion. I can tell you are new here but it's just too many questions that are going in too many directions.
You got both things wrong at once.
I'm not new, nor is this thread about multiple unrelated topics, it's about whether history vindicates the Christian narrative or not.
You haven't convinced me that it does

>>17832682
>No non-christian society lives forever by championing anti-christian values such as the murder of the unborn or usury or adultery.
Usury was a thing in Medieval Europe, so was adultery.
As for abortion, well, child mortality used to be very high, so those foetuses would have died after rather than before birth typically

>Hinduism is forever locked in India
Is it a bad thing for a religion to be tied to a race?

>Buddhism is dying in its original South Asian sarcophagus.
If you think Buddhism is dying but Christianity is thriving, you're just seeing what you want to see

>At the peak of their piety, Spain and Portugal shared the world together
Show me the piety graph since that's what you're appealing too

>Victorian England had a quarter of the planet under its crown despite being a mustard seed-sized island
So who got it right, Catholic Spain and Portugal or Protestant Britain?

>>17832687
> Rome wasn't built in one day.
It wasn't built by Christians either

>historical christian societies produced the most high trust, prosperous, peaceful, non-violent societies the world has ever seen
You're a lot less likely to be robbed or murdered in East Asia than in Europe or the US

>Because the truth is precious enough to be protected at all costs from counterfeits
Some nice words for "I'm going to torture you to death if you disagree with me"

>The end of the world has nothing to do with how lany centuries have passed or people fighting for their faith
And what then does it have to do with, I wonder?

>>17832239 (OP)
>How can you study history thoroughly and remain a committed Christian?
Narrow it down to only those who correctly practiced believer's baptism and believed in religious freedom.

In 1663, the colony of Rhode Island and Providence plantations was given express permission to practice religious (and ideological) freedom, becoming the first territory in modern history to have such freedom. In the early years of the American colonies, those who were persecuted by the puritans and forced to pay church taxes in places like Plymouth could find a home in Rhode Island. Later, the principle of religious freedom was enshrined in the United States Constitution. Since then, we have seen the potential unlocked by allowing freedom, and it all started with some Christians allowed to exercise their faith freely without compulsion.

John Clarke worded his appeal to Charles II for religious liberty for the colony in the following way:

"That they might be permitted to hold forth a lively experiment that a most flourishing civil state may stand, and best be maintained, with a full liberty in religious concernments; and that true piety, rightly grounded upon gospel principles, will give the best and greatest security to sovereignty, and will lay in the hearts of men the strongest obligation to true loyalty."

Also, if you survey the scope of history prior to this, you will find that there were always churches in various parts of Europe which tenaciously exercised these same biblical principles. Both the protestants and the catholics opposed them during the Reformation era. The famed reformer Heinrich Bullinger compared the credobaptists of his day to the ancient Donatists. The Donatists represented a faction of 4th century Christians who had refused to join up with Constantine's state church, resulting in them being demonized and even persecuted to some extent for it. They had always refused to coerce anyone to convert, unlike Catholicism under Augustine's "just war" theory.

>>17832682
Your problem is that you want to eat your cake and have it too.
You want to simultaneously claim that Christianity exists everywhere, which supposedly makes it the right religion z while refusing to acknowledge that lots of Christian countries in Africa and in the Americas are shitholes, which surely says something about the impact the Church had over the local infrastructure

>In fact, our account of civilizational decadence is essentially an account of how abandoning virtue dooms societies to fall
What caused this transition to a secular society?
Surely the clergy must be responsible somehow for this tragic decrease in faith among the general population?