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When talking about large groups of people over time, the only constant is change.
Dante might have been a Christian, but he also saw himself as an inheritor of Roman culture, and so his Divine Comedy ends up with a strange mix of references to Classical Mythology and the Aeneid, in a book about the Christian Afterlife. And before Rome "Hellenized" and adopted Greek philosophy and Homeric myth as its own, it saw the Greeks as foreign and other. We know that Cato the Elder considered Greek philosophy "un-Roman" and he probably would have hated to learn that his great grandson, Cato the Younger would be remembered as a sort of Stoic martyr and sage. It only took four generations for a resistant Rome to Hellenize in this way.
Just as there is no "truer" Rome, there is no "truer" West. All of those version of Rome are the real Rome, whether pro-Hellenistic or anti-Hellenistic, whether Pagan or Christian, all of them were Roman. So too, the West has been a lot of different things. The West is Greece and Rome, and Geneva, and London and Paris. It encompasses secular enlightenment ideals from the Encyclopedists of France, to the Marxists of Russia, and the Christians of the Crusades, and the Pagan Romans.
CertainlyWorse was expressing concern for the fate of "the West", and I was addressing him in those terms. But the simple fact is that the only thing we can say for sure is that "the West" is going to change in ways we can hardly predict, and would have no matter what happened. That's the weird thing about concerning yourself about a civilization instead of a nation or an ethnos or a tribe. Civilizations contain multitudes and are ever-changing. At least if you zoom in to the tribe level, you can say that there is a continuity of genetics, even if there is cultural drift and change over time.
This is completely incoherent, unless what you mean by the 'real Rome' is merely that these different cultures all existed in the same place. But then the 'real' is not doing any work. You can't just adopt a phrase while rejecting the premise behind it, which is that true forms exist in contrast to non-true forms.
Yes, but this is not really relevant. If people interpret 'Western culture' as one involving things like individualism, democracy, capitalism, etc; then pointing out that parts of the history of Western Europe didn't have those things is at most a criticism of a sloppy choice of words, but it doesn't invalidate that people can have a preference for a certain culture and put a label on it. That the label is sloppy, does not mean that the things the label refers to is not something real, or that it is invalid to have a subjective preference for things that the label covers.
Note that by adopting the 'real' adjective, people are in fact making it clear that they reject your belief that just because things happen in a place, things all fall under that label of 'real X'.
And historians recognize the distinction between the early 'Romanitas' and the later Greco-Roman culture, so a change happened, that destroyed the thing that Cato the Elder loved and considered to be true Roman. His belief was based on a true fact (a cultural distinction), plus a subjective preference. You seem to agree with the fact, but only disagree with the subjective element, but there is no right or wrong when it comes to subjective preference. There is a wrong when it comes to denying others their subjective preference, by claiming that this preference is objectively wrong.
Your own argument can also be used to argue that it is weird to have a concern for a nation or an ethnos or a tribe, which are of course all ever-changing. Even the human race is changing or if you abstract away even further, the animal population of earth (with mankind being just one of the animals). So does your reasoning not require total apathy, even to the survival of humankind, or the quality of humankind (see Idiocracy)?
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