On Friday, January 25, 2019 at 12:32:52 AM UTC, wrote:

Where Christianity did not get a strong hold you had things like the Emperor of Japan that allowed his military to attack the USA

Hang on a minute, Tom. I'm not at all certain -- nor are quite a large number of professional historians -- that the Emperor of Japan was a volitional actor in that war. He lived in fear of his life if he disagreed with the warring party, whose young officers had killed several of his ministers for not being hung-ho enough. Even Yamamoto was threatened with assassination for saying, "With present resources I will run wild considerably for six months, but after that it will be in the hands of the gods." So the emperor basically said nothing one way or the other, and let his ministers speak for him, and take the risk. The Americans recognised that after the war when they left him as the emperor of a constitutional state, no longer theoretically "divine". It's a fascinating period, powerfully summarised in the chapter "The High Noon of Aggression" in Paul Johnson's standard history of the last century, A History of the Modern World, from p311 in my 1984 Weidenfeld & Nicholson paperback edition (called "Modern Times" in the States, see https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Times-...dp/0060935502).. "In Japan, nobody was in charge," says Johnson. An all-round firstclass read.

All the great civilizations without Christianity were ephemerous? Because of Christianity, Rome still survives in every western nation.

One of the local wannabe polemicists will probably try to make an argument that the classical Greeks had a good run before the birth of Christ, but Rome was pretty much a copy of the more fascistic elements of Greece, and Rome thus came down to us as a unit with the civilisation of Greece through the separate preserving elements of two Greco-Christian initiatives, Byzantium and St Peter's Rome, plus the Islamist scholars Avicenna and Averoes in Muslim Spain, who preserved Plato and other important Greek thinkers in Arabic translation, to be put back in retranslation into mainstream thought by Peter Abelard in the 12th century. So, yeah, all other civilisations, except the Judeo-Greco-Roman-Christian continuum, which we shorthand as "the culture of the West", proved to be ephemeral.

Andre Jute
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