The world was ruled by religion, and they call(ed) it "The Dark Ages"

I found this sig-line in the comments section of a game review. You find the truth in the most unlikely places.

In fact the eastern roman empire would beg to differ, as would the Caliphate and Byzantium's successor the Ottoman Empire. They forgot to have our dark ages.

uh, no Europe's dark age. Hardly "our" anything.

I do. But if you insist 'their dark age'.

The Chinese, Indians, and Japanese have had stagnating societies since Roman Empire times, the Eastern Roman Empire was a story of a slow, noisy decline where independent thought was snuffed out by religious conformity, the Caliphate wiped out the burgeoning secular scientific progress made by Arabs and replaced it with a static empire worn out by infighting and economic decline, while the Ottoman Empire did little but destroy what little contributions the Byzantines made to the world, and replaced it with a degenerate Sultanate and massive cultural and intellectual suppression throughout its empire. Nice going, Cisco.

since 300 or so. Quite the opposite. But our (or if Cali insists Europe's) Dark Ages was not a stagnate society, it was a collapse of social organization into feudal warlord fiefdoms. The Chinese, for example, did not lose their institutions, their centers of learning, their vast government organizations. Their system did not even stagnate until fairly late - the late 1700 - early 1800s or so. The Song and Ming Dynasties were hardly stagnant, for example, and China provided just a few key technologies, such as gunpowder and movable type, to Europe that helped usher in the modern era and the European conquest of the planet, which conquest you seem to have mistaken for proof of an Asian Dark Ages that somehow spanned our ancient era to the modern age.

See:

"You want to know something? We are still in the Dark Ages. The Dark Ages — they haven't ended yet."

(and in large part still is) using religion as an excuse for their conquests...

sP