I know it is an extremely, perhaps recklessly broad generalization โ and, moreover, once pointed out, it seems so obvious that it deserves no special notice โ but Christianity appears to have made the Western mind far more difficult and frightening to open up to than its non-Western equivalent(s). This general problem is due largely to the bitter Christian legacy of demonizing, tainting, and vilifying natural (erotic, aggressive, acquisitive, ambitious, etc.) drives and instincts that most non-Western and pre-Christian pagan cultures more sanely and sensibly ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ก๐๐, tamed, andโinsofar as it was possibleโdomesticated. By refraining from stigmatizing, wounding, and poisoning the natural drives and instincts, these pagans and non-Western heathens found it wiser to create channels and circuits for the discharge of these powerful forces in ways that we, in the modern West, can still learn from.
And I donโt for a minute buy the shallow, current claim that because โGod is deadโ in our โmodernโ (Darwinian-Nietzschean-Freudian) era, all this Christian shame, guilt, repression, and sense of sinfulness is a bygone thing of the past. The roots of the Judeo-Christian heritage go deep, just as those of the Greco-Roman heritage do, but I would argue that the best gifts from our classical pagan ancestors require some serious effort and cultivation to restore to life, while the Judeo-Christian moral dualism and spiritual unease regarding the โanimalโ body permeate our psyches, even if in a slightly diluted form.
So how does all of this tie into my claim about the โfrightfulnessโ of the Western mind? If Plato, the moralizing pagan-Puritan, helped to nudge the European West in the direction of Christian โgood-versus-evil dualismโ with his moralistic myth of Er at the end of the ๐
๐๐๐ข๐๐๐๐, the Catholic Churchโs promotion of purgatory, hell, mortal sin, and priestly gatekeepers of the superstitious consciences of our recent ancestors finished off the โcontra naturaโ project. The Enlightenmentโs effort to eradicate such benighted superstitions and to rehabilitate split and wounded Western psyches were only partially successful, were they not? 
If we look at scientism, technological utopianism, and the secular humanism today, are we really witnessing the transcendence of messianic religiosity and the promise of salvation โ or just its migration into ostensibly non-religious arenas? And havenโt psychiatrists and psychoanalysts replaced the old clergy โ dispensing both diagnostic judgments and pharmaceutical Eucharist โ thus performing much the same priestly functions of confessor and absolver of the perversions, disorders, obsessions, and addictions that are the ๐ ๐๐๐ of today?
