[Sethomas]

To the first article: someone tried to use the term "Brights" to describe people who strive for ethical behavior without the belief in an afterlife. My understanding was that it never caught on and the only people who paid attention to it were the ones who were offended. I think Secular Humanism works well, but it's a term that I frequently see abused in some sense.

I figured that there were a lot of European wars, and the only reason they stopped was because capitalism does better without conflict in the market, and if they didn't stop then they would blow themselves to eternity

Well, there are several things to consider. I would throw out the thought that warfare was a pretty mild problem for most of the medieval period but unbridled, violent plundering was a disastrous feature of specific timeframes. There was the frequent intermittent clash of basically Iron Age European societies that spilled blood everywhere because it was more profitable (as with the Vikings) or desirable for the sake of identity (as with the Saxons) and this cleared up by roughly 950. For about 150 years after that there was a recurring problem of class warfare (read: proto-knightly class exploiting independent agricultural workers) going on as a result of feudalism having not yet fully crystallized. Once certain edicts had been issued and the Crusades outsourced a lot of this tension, medieval warfare found a stasis where even at its most absurd it was generally more civilized and contained than any period since then. The reason why is that it was the social responsibility of knights to do all the fighting (though they frequently got around this by hiring yeoman mercenaries) and the social structure couldn't withstand and rarely tolerated general conscription of the working class. This stasis brutally dissolved during the 100 Years War, but I think most historians have reservations about taking instances after, say, the Battle of Poitiers and calling it medieval war as opposed to falling into the non-feudal Renaissance style of war. (In general, although parts of Europe were distinctly medieval or renaissance in the same period, I think that the 14th century should be regarded as its own species in a way that future historians will probably apply to the 20th.)

In any case, your point about the steady conglomeration of small kingdoms into present-day Europe is an astute one but the vast majority of it took place during the Enlightenment, driven by economical factors and social adaptations such as the implementation of "Cuius Regio, Eius Religio" and philosophical articulation of statehood.

To be clear, I assume that both of us are in agreement about why Africa is the mess it is today. I would dismiss the idea that the lack of the Christian Church or an analog is the cause of their present woes, I was merely originally using its present condition as a baseline comparison regardless of the circumstances that led to it. Although, without Christian cohesion in the Middle Ages Europe would not have had "straight development" and it would have been prey to outside Imperialism. The Crusades were sandwiched by expansionist campaigns by Arab civilization, and whether you prefer to look at the Battle of Tours or the Battle of Nicopol I don't think it would have looked pretty had it happened. I don't intend that as a specific indictment against Islam, that's just how things work as I'm sure you'd agree.

"Capitalism and arms development probably play a larger role in the peace of Europe in modern times than the church of medieval times"

That's sort of a weird argument to make because it requires a counterfactual assumption that capitalism and arms development would have proceeded more cleanly out of a different medieval period. Seeing as the Thirty Years War, the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Franco-Prussian Wars, and World War I are the primary case studies involved I'm not sure how helpful that argument is anyways. I'm getting the mental image of a Victorian officer reading Ivanhoe and getting warm feelings of camaraderie with the plutocratic warrior knights of the middle ages, then setting it down to send a telegraph to Verdun for thousands of his impoverished men to march into mustard gas.

With the USSR, isn't it more or less accurate to say that the obvious Western regions (and geographically disparate metropolitan pockets) that have been assimilated into Western culture are doing reasonably well, but achievement in places that are distinctly "Post-Communist" are sort of falling into a gross social disparity of poor living conditions upholding an unscrupulous Nouveau Riche class? In a limited scope, that sort of matches the early middle ages pretty well. It's fine to argue that the Information Age accelerates the jump from one stage to the next, but I still don't think things are settled enough to fully realize where they've landed.