The West does not have a monopoly on modernity

[Theodarzna]

In some of those villages in Africa 50 friends and relatives will show up to celebrate your birthday. We say they are so backwards but maybe they have different priorities?

There exists always some non-descript, non-specific "african village," were literally everything is wonderful. Neighbors all love each other, nobody fights, there is no concept of sexaul immorality, love is pure, love is kind, everything is bountiful and they live in perfect harmony with nature and one another.....

Its right next to Avalon and South of Valhalla.

[Deleted]

The west has innovated so much more because of Christianity, simple as.

That is one fucking weird hypothesis.

[Ryme]

Today? Sure. Most consistently throughout history? I don't think so.

I understand and agree, but the past isn't relevant to the idea of modernisation.

[Deleted]

If a society is based on a rules written in a 1k year old book, it's not modern and can never be.

[Deleted]

But for the last several hundred years it has been. Just look up the inventions that have come out of the UK and the USA alone to see why the west pretty much owns the modern age.

The west has innovated so much more because of Christianity, simple as.

And yet social, scientific and technological advancement continue to accelerate at an exponential rate as we increasingly reject organised religion as a society.

[Deleted]

In some of those villages in Africa 50 friends and relatives will show up to celebrate your birthday. We say they are so backwards but maybe they have different priorities?

In my village in the Netherlands all my friends and living family that I am in contact with show up for my birthday.
Not sure what you're point is.

[PaladinBash]

The West does have an exclusive monopoly on modernization.

Empiricism, logic, secularism, humanism are essentially western concepts which played a key role in Western technological and social progress.

Modernity is synonymous with West.

Modernity rose out of the European Middle Ages.

Yeah pretty much this. There's the odd cool thing from the rest of the world but it was taken and advanced in the West.

[Underverse]

Right now, 'the west' and Japan/South Korea have a monopoly on modernity. I don't think anyone has argued that this is innate or permanent, so I'm not sure what the point of this thread is.

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The west has innovated so much more because of Christianity, simple as.

Absolutely. The west has also innovated so much more because of the holocaust. Conflict breeds innovation. But that innovation does not justify the conflict.

[Rukh]

The term was mainly in reference to enlightenment era Europe and the world, though it still is used sometimes today. Europe had an unprecedented level of development though that time that put it ahead of the rest of the world. Pre age of reason though, you could very well said "Islamisation" to mean the same thing, and a lot of places did take on the culture of mulsim countries for that very reason. They were the paragon of advancement for their region. Of course before that was Romanization. The enlightenment hasn't really stopped though, since then, humans have progressed technology at an insane pace, but it's not focused in Europe anymore. The US, Japan, China, Israel, India, and still europe, everywhere is making breakthroughs, sometimes in their own way.

The age of enlightenment was said to have begun around 1700. It's 2015 now, so that's a mere 315 years.

The time when Islam was the beacon of progress was probably between 630 - heck I don't know. Lets give them at least 1400 when they started having to deal with the Mongols, though the Ottomans were one of the most powerful empires of their era and went all the way until 1800. That still gives the age of Islam 800 - 1000 years.

Rome of course has around a thousand years or two depending on what you want to consider their prime years.

This is also centered around Europe, the near east and Africa. Asia was doing their own thing the whole time though there wasn't much cultural adaptation in Africa or Europe of Asian culture.

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The west has innovated so much more because of Christianity, simple as.

That's a weird thing to say. Christianity's history of spreading mainly comes around the time of the fall of the Roman empire. Christianity survived in a time that Europe was lagging behind the Muslims and Chinese. It wasn't until the enlightenment that "Westernization" had meaning, and that's some thousand years after Christianity was in its heyday in Europe. One might say that coming out of the hold of religion is what allowed Europe to rocket itself to the forefront.

[Enthusiastic Steward]

The west has innovated so much more because of Christianity, simple as.

For example, being placed under house arrest for suggesting that the earth moves around the sun in defiance of Scripture.

[minteK917]

In some of those villages in Africa 50 friends and relatives will show up to celebrate your birthday. We say they are so backwards but maybe they have different priorities?

My father 65th birthday we were 100+ in a room... Africans can go back home?

[Simulacrum]

If somehow the continent of europe had all gotten blasted back to the stone age right before the dawn of the age of exploration, then the rest of the world would today look exactly the same as it did 500 years ago. People would still be sitting around shunning new knowledge, or jerking themselves off to the thought that through their spiritual beliefs they already knew everything the unvierse had to offer, or adhering to some other some other explicitly stagnant belief system.

Which is why we call it westernization.

[Shibito]

We had one thousand years of scientific repression, imagine if christianity never existed what would have been invented by now.

[Forgettable]

We get it, you don't want to be labeled as Western. That's fine, you don't have to be. It's just a word that is used commonly these days - Don't use it if you don't like it.

[Bakis]

The west has innovated so much more because of Christianity, simple as.

lol? Christianity has nothing but gimped us. What would be correct is that Islam gimped more and for a longer period in our 'modern' era.