Christian Solidarity

[Joe McCarthy]

And the idea that the Roman Empire wasn't equivalent to the entire world and was divinely-ordained by Jupiter to rule the world didn't exist at all? Or does it take a Semitic deity to inspire that kind of idea? The bonds of Roman citizenship, patriotism, devotion to the state and its gods didn't motivate disparate ethnicities?

In the sense of building a united Europe of one whole the Romans were bit players compared to Christendom. How can this even be contested? What sense of a common European feeling existed between, say, Hungarians and Scandinavians before they were Christianized? The concept of Europe itself didn't come into common use until the 15th century. The Roman Empire wasn't even strictly European but a conglomerate of Europeans, Asians, and North Africans.

[StonyArabia]

I don't know about that, I was just raising the existence of the divisions within Islam. Sufis have been heavily-persecuted too iirc.

Not at all. I am Sufi myself, and the Sufis never faced prosecution or discrimination. They were left alone to grow. Sufism than grew to several different orders, which have now come to dominate many areas of the Caucasus, North Africa, Middle East and South and South East Asia. Sufism has several different orders as well within it.

[Ville]

... a Catholic Pole has almost nothing in common with a Catholic Filipino. They're simply not "brothers" on any level. These universalist religions, despite all the heads-in-the-clouds idealism, very rarely turn out to be universal. In the end, our human differences are just too great.

In terms of inner gravitation, modernity is establishing the following pattern of forces, ordered from strong to weak:

1. Economic Interests
2. Cultural Cohesiveness
3. Everything Else (including remaining religious attraction)