00:00:01.000Greetings, my esteemed subscribers. I aim to make a book review every week or every other week.
00:00:08.180I will see how well I can stick to this schedule, but I thought since I've read quite a few books I might as well talk about them.
00:00:16.080It's always interesting and fun to share some interesting passages I find in the books.
00:00:22.760So I'll start off by a book I've briefly mentioned before. It's The Darkening Age.
00:00:29.260It has a bit of a provocative title, I'd say. It's called The Christian Destruction of the Classical World.
00:00:36.620And it is a bit more, it's a bit clickbaity, you could say.
00:00:39.940If this was a video, you would say it's a clickbait because it is much more measured than, you know, your usual stuff you hear.
00:00:48.080So I was hesitant to make this video because I've seen a certain conflict over all of my years in the Metapolitical Crusade.
00:00:56.900And that's been, you know, between pagans attacking Christianity, etc.
00:01:01.840And I've always found it quite immature and quite bothersome.
00:01:07.160But I thought to talk about this book anyway because it's an interesting historical depiction of the Roman Empire.
00:01:16.360Well, or the early days of Christianity.
00:01:19.760So before I begin to talk about the book, I would just like to say that I found it especially interesting since the author, Catherine Nixie, and I, we come from two completely different angles.
00:01:31.580I come from an atheist Swedish household.
00:01:35.340And, you know, during my upbringing in school and everything, Christianity has always been seen as something outdated and something that wasn't really good for much.
00:01:44.840She, however, comes from a Catholic religious household in Wales.
00:01:50.660So for her, she has come from the position that Christianity was something good.
00:01:55.520Then she realized it also had some bad sides.
00:01:58.660For me, however, it's been the opposite.
00:02:00.480I've come from, yeah, again, atheist Sweden where Christianity has been under attack for a very long time.
00:02:07.040And then I realized that, yeah, you know, Christianity wasn't the worst at all times.
00:02:13.860But what this book is and why I even talk about it is because it's an excellent argument against something I've seen from certain Christian scholars or authors, etc.
00:02:26.960My daughter agrees exactly with what I'm saying, as you might hear.
00:02:31.060But anyway, some Christian scholars will say Christianity created Europe.
00:02:37.020It was barbaric and uncivilized and not particularly good at all before Christianity.
00:02:45.080And this is obviously completely false.
00:02:47.720And this book is an excellent counter-argument to it.
00:02:54.020But before I begin to do so, this is the video I mentioned I talked about briefly before because the Temple of Serapis actually appears in Assassin's Creed.
00:03:03.720So I thought it was a really nice touch.
00:06:44.280Then also, the book contains quite a few pictures of various statues, etc., that were defaced and destroyed by the early Christians.
00:06:57.280Now, I'm not going to go all too much into detail about the actual destruction that took place in primarily the Middle East,
00:07:05.660that part of the empire, the Roman Empire.
00:07:10.740But there was such occurrence, at least, that the new religion took over in a violent way.
00:07:17.860And what I really want to say with this video is that Western civilization, it began with this, basically.
00:07:24.500Ancient Greece or, perhaps even more accurately, ancient Rome.
00:07:29.500If you look at how our societies are built now, if you look at law practices, for example, we have gained so much, we have inherited so much from the Roman Empire.
00:07:40.020And that was, of course, pre-Christian.
00:07:42.440Then, of course, Christianity had certain roles.
00:07:45.640I write about this in my book as well.
00:07:49.100But we also need to be clear that Christianity did not create Europe.
00:08:01.760And that's ultimately how we need to analyze Western civilization, how we need to analyze Europe in terms of biology.
00:08:09.740It's biological Europeans that created the Roman Empire, ancient Greece, the Holy Roman Empire, the Frankish Empire, whatever you...
00:08:20.960Whichever main power in Europe, it's always been due to biology and not due to religion.
00:08:26.680So that's something really important to keep in mind.
00:08:30.080So if you want to trace the origins of Western civilization, yeah, you can start in, of course, pagan Greece, pagan Rome, then Christian Rome, and then Christian, the Frankish Empire, etc.
00:08:42.340So religion is secondary to biology and bioculture.
00:08:47.660Then also, as a note here, there is no such thing as Judeo-Christian.
00:08:51.820That is a lie, and that's stolen valor, I would say.
00:08:55.720So if someone says that Christianity created Europe, it's absolutely false.
00:09:15.120It's because bioculture influences your religion.
00:09:18.040And this is also why I show appreciation for churches, because it has nothing to do with religion as you knew it in the early days of Christianity in Jerusalem.
00:09:30.860But it has to do with what our ancestors made out of it.
00:09:34.720So if I see a beautiful building, I see a beautiful building built by our ancestors.
00:09:39.000I don't necessarily think about Christianity per se.
00:09:43.660So that was just my little review of the book.
00:10:09.020It is, again, nuanced and well-written and very interesting.
00:10:12.760Then, of course, I'm also aware that there are plenty of good Christian things you could bring up in terms of, you know, monks continuing on the path of knowledge that the classical world brought to us.
00:10:29.320So it is also false to view it as Christianity came in and destroyed everything.
00:10:33.500Christianity also preserved a lot of things.
00:10:35.260But the main point, main point for me making this video is that Western civilization is based on European bioculture and not on religion.