That’s covered by my words “Not only by such atrocities as…the worldwide genocide of indigenous peoples or the most brutal slave system ever invented by man. But everywhere else, everywhen else.”

https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/100627-most-fatalities-in-an-african-war

Because its philosophy was closer to reality, and everything closer to reality is closer to Secular Humanism and further from toxic worldviews.

This is because, in particular, Epicurean ontology was closer to reality and it’s metaethics (particularly under Aristippus) was closer to reality.

Aristotelianism surpassed it only in epistemology, but as eclecticism was the most popular thing under the Empire, it would be easy for a Neo-Epicureanism to integrate Aristotelian epistemology. But just as well could be Aristotelianism integrating Epicurean metaethics and ontology.

Why do you think epicureanism would have been better?

I am not familiar enough with India to answer that question.

Sooner, you mean, than the black slave trade. Christians had slaves from day one, and in fact created serfdom (de facto slavery, effectively mass-ending the freedom of millions of farmers—that was Constantine).

The duration isn’t the comparison. The severity is. The “post exploration” slave system created by Christians was by far the worst in the world—far more dehumanizing, brutal, and relentless. And it essentially created modern racism. Islam, by contrast, kept what was essentially the Roman system, with a continuous practice of manumussion and integration and actual slave rights.

(Note I am only counting authorized slavery, not illegal systems fought by mainstream religious authorities; hence fringe Mormon sex slavery today does not count against Christianity in this comparison any more than Nigerian does against Islam.)

When asking contrafactuals, we usually mean, what most likely would replace a thing removed, not what we would prefer would replace it. The comparand there is religion, and the answer there is “had Rome never been Christian, likely it would have remained pagan,” i.e. polytheistic, which was not exclusivist and facilitated cultural and political integration of subject peoples, requiring no genocide to pacify and profit from.

But if you want to change tack entirely and ask “what would have been best to replace it,” in terms of outcomes (the best society, including the fastest social and scientific and technological progress), the answer is Secular Humanism, which in context would mean something more like Stratonian Aristotelianism or Posidonian Stoicism (either of which were closer to modern humanism than anything else likely to gain elite support then; even better would have been Aristippan Epicureanism, but that was too liberal for the ancient elite to widely adopt).

http://necrometrics.com/pre1700b.htm#ISlave

if for example a belief in Christianity was replaced by stoicism how different would our world be, is that a useful drug? what are the things that make a good society if not christianity

I don’t understand the question.

Are you asking if aspirin is useful?

Or are you asking if it is possible to have a beneficent false belief?

If the latter, see What’s the Harm? Why Religious Belief Is Always Bad.

You’d have to be more specific as to what you want to know.

Christianity isn’t a person. It’s a system of ideas. So “responsible for” depends on what you mean by that. It can mean “was a participating cause of” or “was a sufficient cause of” or “was a necessary cause of,” and none of those are the same thing. There is even a fourth thing, negligence, which is “it was not capable of preventing” which is not a cause at all but the absence of one (which is why Trolley Problems are hard).

You also have to define “Christianity.” Do you mean, first century Christianity, or 10th century Christianity, or 17th century or 19th century? Western Christianity? Eastern? Majority Christianity? Fringe? Etc.

And then there is the question of swaps, i.e. contrafactual modeling. Apart from all that is the question of “If we deleted Christianity from history, what would have happened differently?” And the answer might not be black-and-white (e.g. you might get a far milder form of genocide, rather than the mere absence of it).

To illustrate the problem:

Most people (including until recently me) assumed slavery was a universal outcome of cultural evolution and thus a necessary failure mode we all had to find our way out of. But then I discovered China never had a slave economy. It had a fringe category of slaves, but punitive and scarce; its agricultural and mining industries (or any other) never depended on slave labor. Ever. Yet the Han Dynasty achieved nearly the same level of civilization as the Roman Empire (see Rome vs. China: What Made the Difference? and Debunking John Davidson’s “Pagan” America).

So, it isn’t true that Judaism or Christianity invented slavery. But it also isn’t true that the introduction of Christianity was necessary for or even likely to ever end slavery (hence: China). It appears to have been causally indifferent to slavery. But it might have exacerbated slavery.

The Christian systems of slavery were, after all, the most brutal and horrific ever implemented in human history. It is hard to find any cause you could remove that would have changed that outcome other than Christianity. Even Islam didn’t devolve into such evils (Islamic slavery remained the relatively more humane variety developed by the Romans). So why is Christian culture the only culture on Earth to have done so?

I do not know. I only know that it did. And this looks causal.

One hypothesis is that Christianity, to survive, had to become anti-intellectual and authoritarian (just as Islam did), but in Christianity’s case, it stumbled upon a mechanism of rationalizing evil that permitted it to do far worse things (the history of Christian justifications of racialized slavery and brutalist chattelism illustrates this). Islam certainly had its own mechanisms for that (hence there are manifestations of brutalism in Islam), they just never went so far as to justify anything like the Christians did with respect to slavery.

Okay. Now switch gears to native genocide, which mostly means Manifest Destiny, but not only that (that was just the worst of it); secondary manifestations can be cited in the history of Spain in the Americas, and of Australia and Canada, for example. It appears to be a Western Christian thing (examples in Eastern Christianity are harder to come by).

Suppose we took Christianity out of the picture, and suppose that this resulted in the Roman Empire surviving its fall and carrying on. Either it would inevitably gravitate to some other aggressive exclusivist religion that would just replace the evils of Christianity (which is unlikely, considering that other societies didn’t, e.g. India and China remained polytheistic and so there is clearly no cultural-evolutionary trend), or it would remain pagan, which is the more likely.

Then, what would have happened in the Americas when Rome discovered them? Well, we can reasonably infer, the same thing that always did: Rome would do some conquering, followed by a lot of assimilating. Rather than kill off its conquered populations, it tended to educate them and integrate them and tax them, until foreign peoples literally were sitting in the Senate and even becoming Emperor (the Severans, for example, ultimately hailed from Africa; its founder was predominately native Libyan, and they ruled barely a hundred years after the Empire was established, a mere two hundred since Julius Caesar).

In other words, Western Christianity, for whatever reason, appears to have caused the uniquely evil belief that it was Christlike to kill off populations rather than having to rule them. There isn’t really any other factor to credit. It can’t be European culture apart from Western Christianity, since there weren’t any European cultures like that (hence: Roman Empire).

Perhaps Western Christianity generated such a peculiarly arrogant sense of superiority that allowed rationalizing greater and more pervasive and selfish evils than other religions did (even Eastern Christianity). And perhaps this was a random walk (stumbling into this toxic version of the religion) caused by its inevitably necessary anti-intellectualism and authoritarianism (but not with necessity; hence: Eastern Christianity and Islam did not do this, despite having many of the same defects).

Those qualities were necessary for any virus to dominate (by aggressively killing all competitors). But Western Christianity somehow stumbled into the very worst form of this virus. I do not know the specific reasons why. But it would make a good dissertation subject.