Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
Modern cohesive factors cut across divisions like European and Muslim, while internally each of these continue to find cohesion historically out of reach. Don't fear the "outsider", the fragmentation was inside us all along!

Thankfully, one side effect of global civilization has been to widen the moral circle or whatever they call it. Thus new societies will be poised to form from the motley refuse of the old. The SPQR is dead forever, long live &c. Any new project of similar scale will look like Imperium of Man Human Commonwealth.
Sadly, my reference flew right over your head.

"Romanitas" was a function of being Roman, acting like a Roman, dressing like a Roman, talking like a Roman. It did not, in the main, include modern concepts of ethnicity or even religious observance beyond lip service to the Imperial Cult.

However, Modern Western Society has no such centralised concept of itself, it is a fragmented mish-mash that can mean very different things to different people.

Damn, why do you think Muslims are doing more aggressive missionary work than Christians today? Ongoing missionary efforts in Asia and Africa seems to decisively dispel that impression, even where large-scale conversions in the Western Hemisphere are mostly intrafaith, Catholics being targeted by bastard forms of Calvinism and evangelism.
Well, "aggressive" is your word not mine, and I was talking about the West - the arena from which the gunman hails. Westerners often find Islam attractive because it is stricter and more moralistic than forms of Christianity they are usually exposed to. Similarly to Evangelical Christianity, but more so, it fills a need for structure and authority that many people crave.

Christianity doesn't really offer that anymore in its main guises because it has moved from being tollerant of other beliefs to accepting of them.