Romance V Germanic

UPDATE: As of 2008, please refer instead to this site

     This morning I woke up and I had the answer to a question that had been bothering me, namely, why did Protestantism flourish where it did, and why did Catholicism remain in other places?  I had heard economic arguments which I didn't like, or knew to be untrue.  Nor did I prefer to think of religious people as picking and choosing based on the basis of cash flows, a mild bias, and one which I could ignore if I had been presented with good evidence.

     It turns out to have been linguistic.  If you have been following my blog, or clicked on the links in the sidebar, you'll learn about my theory of the linguistic basis of terrorism, which I have been hoping will dominate the debate for the last year or so.  Now I find that religion, at least once, operated on the same principles!  Thanks to the dozens and dozens of people who disagreed, and only convinced me further (the most ironic being a Slovenian, who rejected the idea, even after we discussed how modern Slovenian borders were linguistic).

     The Religious map matches the linguistic.

     A couple notes.  The Treaty of Augsburg, 1555, was what gave Lutheran German Princes and Peasants the right to be Lutheran within Germany.  That date is not on the map.  The linguistic map is the modern map.  I think I know where to get a ~1648 linguistic map of Europe, but I'm afraid it isn't nearly as clean as these other two maps, nor does it distinguish between Romance and Germanic families as sharply.