[Hopey]

Splendour,

I'm a little surprised that you are responding to my posts. You made a big production out of putting me on "ignore" a few weeks ago.

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Then we've got Hopey's little laundry list...First of all Hopey the Mongols weren't atheists...they believed in multiple gods, goddesses and demons and had an extremely high number of taboo practices...They managed to seize power thru their superior military tactics. i.e. horsepower...Atheism had nothing to do with their successful conquers...
The Japanese aren't Atheists either...They are a combination of Shinto/Buddhist for the most part. They marry Shinto and they bury Buddhist. A merciful country known as the United States of America bailed Japan out by helping to rebuild them after WWII...I daresay you could go to Japan today and find Japanese amazed at Americans doing this since Japan never handled any surrendering enemies in such a gentle fashion in their whole history prior to WWII...take a look at the Bataan Death march or how warring Shogunate factions handled conquered enemies...Not to mention how the U.S. bailed out Germany following WWII through the generosity of the Marshall Plan...

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I may have been wrong about the Mongols being atheists (they most likely practiced Shamanism), but the point is that they weren't Christian and yet controlled the largest empire the world has ever seen.

I am well aware that the Japanese practice Shintoism. All I stated in my post is that they are not Christian.

I never stated that "atheism" is what made these nations to be great powers.

What I was responding to was this post:

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But overall, the great ecomonic powers of today have serious Christian roots, perhaps with fading church attendance, but solid roots.

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I was pointing out that over the last 1000 years, there have been plenty of instances of non-Christian world powers. If we want to solely limit ourselves to non-Christian world powers *today*, we can point to Japan and China.