For religion, the difference seems to persist over millennia, even under reasonably close contact, except in specific circumstances of authority and conquest — whereas for science and technology, adoption spreads over years or decades whenever there’s close contact and comparison.
Religious conquests such as the Catholic conquest of South America don’t seem more common worldwide than persistent religious differences such as in India, where Christians have remained a 2% minority despite almost 2000 years of contact including trade, missionary work, and even occasional conquest (the British Raj).
With religion, whenever there aren’t authorities with the political power to expel heretics, syncretism and folk-religion develop — the blending of religious traditions, rather than the inexorable disproof and overturning of one by another.
This suggests that differences in religious practice do not reliably bring the socioeconomic and geopolitical advantages that differences in scientific and technological practice bring. If one of the major religions brought substantial advantages, we would not expect to see the persistence of religious differences over millennia that we do.
(IIRC, Newtonian physics spread to the Continent beginning with du Châtelet’s translation of the Principia into French, some sixty years after its original publication.)
For religion, the difference seems to persist over millennia, even under reasonably close contact, except in specific circumstances of authority and conquest — whereas for science and technology, adoption spreads over years or decades whenever there’s close contact and comparison.
Religious conquests such as the Catholic conquest of South America don’t seem more common worldwide than persistent religious differences such as in India, where Christians have remained a 2% minority despite almost 2000 years of contact including trade, missionary work, and even occasional conquest (the British Raj).
With religion, whenever there aren’t authorities with the political power to expel heretics, syncretism and folk-religion develop — the blending of religious traditions, rather than the inexorable disproof and overturning of one by another.
This suggests that differences in religious practice do not reliably bring the socioeconomic and geopolitical advantages that differences in scientific and technological practice bring. If one of the major religions brought substantial advantages, we would not expect to see the persistence of religious differences over millennia that we do.
(IIRC, Newtonian physics spread to the Continent beginning with du Châtelet’s translation of the Principia into French, some sixty years after its original publication.)