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Notes -
Fun belated Eastertime thought. I’ve been musing over the idea of Christianity causing human domestication in Europe. It strikes me that to get anything out of the Christian ritual, you need (1) obedience to believe what the religion says, (2) empathy and guilt that your sins led to the pain and death of Jesus, and (3) gratitude and love that Jesus took your place on the Cross. As everyone was forced to believe this for so long, those who were the most obedient / domesticated would be getting the most positive emotion from the ritual. The ritual also ensures that the most obedient have the most repentance of sins, which promotes more prosocial behavior. So the Christian ritual itself would have led to some non-negligible increase in gene proliferation among domesticated Europeans. This doesn’t even factor for the effect of a widespread “Jesus” and “Mary” ideal that would influence male and female hierarchies and dating behavior.
There’s also the whole eradication of blood feuds and distaste with marrying cousins that helped have better genetic outcomes.
Then again Christians weren’t exactly domesticated, they fought wars all the time. Also many of the elite were not exactly ideal Christians.
That being said Christianity absolutely led to a lot of scientific inquiry and building of knowledge, something often forgotten nowadays.
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