Vasily Vereshchagin. Apotheosis of War (1871).
There have recently been discussions on Mesoamerican civilizations prior to the Spanish incursions on this blog, in light of the recently unearthed racks of thousands of skulls sacrificed in honor of the blood gods.
Interesting fact about Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec Empire: With a population of 250,000 in 1519, the only demographically comparable European city at the time was Paris.
What made this especially impressive, though, was that Mesoamerica was, strictly speaking, still in the Stone Age. Nor was Tenochtitlan some freak occurrence: In 500 AD, Teotihuacán – which the Aztecs claimed descent from – had a population of 125,000, just one millennium after the appearance of cities in that region. The first Eurasian cities to reach that size were either Nineveh (~700 BC) or Babylon (~500 BC). And if we are to take the Eurasian technological period most analogous to the late Aztec Empire – the cusp of the Bronze Age around 3500 BC – then the largest city then was Uruk, which had a mere 20,000 or so c.3500 BC. Tenochtitlan was almost an order of magnitude more populous than the largest Eurasian city at its equivalent point of technological development.
Although crop cultivation in the Americas began almost coterminously with East Asia, if a couple of millennia behind the Near East, the staple crops took a great deal longer to get domesticated.
Jared Diamond might have been wrong on zebras, but I assume this from Guns, Germs, and Steel is correct:
Contrast this quick evolution of wheat and barley with the story of corn, the leading cereal crop of the New World. Corn’s probable ancestor, a wild plant known as teosinte, looks so different from corn in its seed and flower structures that even its role as ancestor has been hotly debated by botanists for a long time. Teosinte’s value as food would not have impressed hunter-gatherers: it was less productive in the wild than wild wheat, it produced much less seed than did the corn eventually developed from it, and it enclosed its seeds in inedible hard coverings. For teosinte to become a useful crop, it had to undergo drastic changes in its reproductive biology, to increase greatly its investment in seeds, and to lose those rock-like coverings of its seeds. Archaeologists are still vigorously debating how many centuries or millennia of crop development in the Americas were required for ancient corn cobs to progress from a tiny size up to the size of a human thumb, but it seems clear that several thousand more years were then required for them to reach modern sizes. That contrast between the immediate virtues of wheat and barley and the difficulties posed by teosinte may have been a significant factor in the differing developments of New World and Eurasian human societies.
However, once corn was domesticated, it seems that not only urban life but technological progress in general happened faster in the Americas. For instance, while there was a 4,000 year gap between crop domestication in the Near East and the appearance of cities, the process took just a bit more than 2,000 years in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Writing first appeared 3,000 years ago in Mesoamerica, and the Mayans had a well-developed script and relatively advanced astronomy; the Incas were probably on the cusp of literacy (e.g. they had quipu, a sophisticated counting and information storage system). In contrast, Black Africa didn’t have a single written language before colonization.
The Americans were hampered by a poorer natural resources endowment (e.g. much fewer animals that could be domesticated), and a lack of east-west “tilted axes”, which precluded information and technological exchange across a wide swathe of different civilizations. However, this factor might not have been that important, especially early on, when crossing long distances even along similar latitudes was far from trivial – especially considering that the land in between was mostly steppe inhabited by aggressive nomads, and oceanic transport was not yet well developed. Mesoamerica and the Andes civilizations would have eventually developed oceanic transport, and cut out the impassable tropical areas in between. Civilization would also have spread north to the (higher IQ) American Indians; the economic and innovation center of gravity would have kept going north, just as in the Old World it crept north and west with each passing millennium.
Meanwhile, what is mentioned far less is that the Americas also had some major advantages. First, no horses might mean much less horsepower, but it also means no nomad raiders harrying civilization whenever there’s a failed harvest, dynastic dispute, or steppe drying event. Second, corn and potatoes are much more calorie dense crops than their Old World equivalents (wheat, barley, various roots and tubers). Finally, no horses or other powerful draft animals also meant no land set aside for grazing, resulting in higher total caloric output (at equivalent tech levels), much higher population densities, and hence much larger cities. Finally, no tilted axis also means much less parasite load, even adjusting for general development, since vast areas would not trade exotic diseases with each other. Diseases overwhelmingly strike the cities, and are dysgenic, since they don’t differentiate between rich and poor (though the really rich could escape to their country retreats, like the heroes of the Decameron). Since cities have always been the main rotors of scientific and technological progress, this means that the early American civilizations simply had far more potential “innovators” as a share of their population relative to their tech-equalized Eurasian counterparts. I suspect that these factors may have more than compensated for the Americas’ lack of tilted axis and a poorer natural resources endowment.
Commenter reiner Tor suggests that these ecological factors also explained the superlative scale of human sacrifice in the Aztec Empire:
Human sacrifice was probably also a function of primitive savages suddenly achieving relatively high levels of organization and population density. Primitive savages everywhere were, well, primitive savages, cannibalism was widespread in Europe, for example. But they only had small-scale organizations, so even though Europeans a few tens of millennia ago were all cannibals, they didn’t have the organization to capture and kill so many slaves.
There is the explanation that a lack of domesticated animals meant that human meat was an important part of elite diets (while the rest of the population suffered from a dearth of vital amino acids). I just checked Wikipedia, and didn’t find the counter-arguments terribly convincing. Yes, people could eat salamanders, but it’s difficult to extract a lot of meat from them, while human meat is much easier to consume.
However, the fast rate of technological growth might have meant that sacrifice was not due to survive much longer in that region of the world. Eurasia may have reached an all-time peak in organized, psychopathic cruelty with the Assyrian Empire in 1000 BC. But less a millennium later, the continent was dominated by much more humane empires dominated by Axial Age “universalist” religions. By extension, large-scale human sacrifice may only have had a millennium left in Mesoamerica c.1519 even if Eurasia was wiped out by a gamma ray burst before Cortes set sail.
Then again, the mega-empires of the Axial Age were enabled by… cavalry armies. These armies were created to defend those empires from the nomads, as Peter Turchin argues in Ultrasociety. But no horses in the Americas. And reiner Tor makes the grisly observation that the elites would have still needed their literal pound of flesh. Maybe the Aztec Chaos cults would have been self-sustaining for much longer?
Amerindians in North America had higher IQs than those in South America? Is that securely known? I would have thought that it wouldn’t be easy to get IQ data for North American Amerindians (especially ones without any European admixture).
The Assyrians didn’t do human sacrifice anymore though, unless I’m mistaken. They just had very brutal punishments and consolidated their rule with harsh methods like forced relocation of entire peoples…but so have many other empires throughout history.
I think the Aztecs are so horrifying (and fascinating) to modern Westerners not just because of the scale of their violence, but because of the irrational nature of it…ripping people’s hearts out to keep the sun from fading is a very alien way of thinking.
A few further observations based on the West Hunter comments.
These were fascinating civilizations, but they were as horrible as it gets.
Can anyone recommend a good and honest (non-SJW) book on Mesoamerican civilizations?
While the Assyrians were somewhat more brutal than the Romans, the latter were also quite capable of genocidal violence, and even their entertainment was… well, watching people getting slaughtered or something.
Anyway, the mass human sacrifice and the accompanying mass cannibalism was from a different planet.
Incidentally, the chick (problem glasses and all) who wrote up the findings favors the hardcore PoMoist interpretation of Aztec human sacrifice.
https://twitter.com/lizzie_wade/status/1010178688254730244
Apart from the obvious point that the subjugated peoples very much didn’t like being sacrificed and eaten, it doesn’t seem that the god-kings were popular amongst the people in general. For instance, here is a fragment from Turchin’s Ultrasociety:
And Hawaii was a relatively humane society, by god-king standards; they only sacrificed 10 people when their chief died.
Come to think of it, isn’t assigning such radically alien, psychopathic motives and feelings to other humans, as these postmodernists like to do… racist?
Come to think of it, isn’t assigning such radically alien, psychopathic motives and feelings to other humans, as these postmodernists like to do… racist?
I don’t believe that is what they do, AK. RT and GR are coming close to that description. LW seems to be saying that we shouldn’t judge these people by our norms. The corollory is that all cultures are valid and of equal value.
I visited the British Museum of London two months ago – and it’s very interesting to see the Assyrian art (sculptural/stone relief).
There is room in the museum, which is entirely just showing them killing lions in many kinds of different ways – if you are a lion this is a very fucking evil culture.
But there were many large cities in Europe at the time, even if a bit smaller than Paris. Same for ancient Mesopotamia. Whereas Tenochtitlan was one and only.
Incidentally, Constantinople/Istanbul was, at the time, at least twice as large as Paris.
There were other large cities as well, e.g. the Aztecs’s main rival Tlaxcala.
Interestingly enough its political system seems to have been rather different from that of the Aztecs:
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/it-wasnt-just-greece-archaeologists-find-early-democratic-societies-americas
(“democratic” is probably exaggeration, I guess it was more of an oligarchy, but still pretty different from the Aztec empire).
EDIT: LOL, I see now that this article is from this crazy Lizzy Wade. Still interesting though, even if one has probably to read between the lines somewhat.
BTW, if this Aztec stuff interests you, you definitely need to watch Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto.
It is a very good movie.
iirc it was criticized because the Maya language the actors were speaking wasn’t accurate.
But yes, very good movie.
A few points:
It should be kept in mind that sacrifice was a central, pervasive factor in the entire Meso-American worldview and religion. The sun would stop if hearts weren’t taken out and offered to it; it wouldn’t rain if kids weren’t tortured and killed. Sacrificing people permeated all aspects of life and therefore was probably taken for granted (not necessarily loved, as people do not love paying taxes). Barring the intervention of some sort of Christ-like figure who would completely subvert and turn that culture inside-out, sacrifice probably wouldn’t disappear. It might have even become more large-scale. If the Aztecs, not Europeans, had become technologically dominant and learned to sail the world there might have massive human-sacrifice raids, with such humans being valued commodities or delicacies, that would make the African Atlantic slave trade look like beautiful humanitarianism.
The conservative estimate for number of victims is 20,000 a year. That’s 2 million in a century, 20 million sacrificed at this rate in 1,000 years. Of course estimates go into 100,000 or even more per year.
Intellectual advancement isn’t so surprising. Jensen insisted that although Mexicans and Indians had lower IQs than those of whites, their pattern of lower scores matched those of Irish immigrants and were thus environmental rather than genetic (unlike in the case of Africans).
I am not sure, however, that the Aztecs would have, on their own, eventually achieved a high level of technology. Technological achievement is largely driven by culture, it isn’t genetic directly (genetics gives us maximum capability and limits us, and it may indirectly drive culture, however). There was something specific to Christianity that really drove people in Europe to study and manipulate the world. I do not think it is a coincidence that prior to Christianity northern Europeans had been rather backward for millenia, but after adopting it they surged past long-established civilizations in China or India. If Aztecs were isolated until 4000 AD they might have simply achieved much more sophisticated astronomical calculations and mathematics focused on astronomy or astrology, perhaps more advanced building techniques, and elaborate literatures but still not have been dramatically more high tech. AFAIK, highly intelligent Jews, prior to assimilation with the West, were mostly using their talents on developing Kabbalah or finding numerical patterns in the Bible or whatever. Technological achievement requires the cognitive capacity to achieve it, but also a worldview that motivates it.
It may have been his best movie.
The Meso-Americans had already domesticated the Muscovy duck when the Spaniards arrived.
As civilization spread north into what is now the United States, the noble American bison would be encountered, tamed, and ultimately domesticated. That solves the meat problem, and domesticated bison would be useful beasts of burden just as oxen are.
Bighorn sheep would also be found, tamed, and domesticated. More meat and dairy, and wool for textiles.
The “Great Bison Belt”, North America’s equivalent of the steppe, would also facilitate long-range overland north-south and east-west trade. America’s great rivers would become arteries of commerce as well.
You would even end up with a North American equivalent of Eurasian steppe nomads. Mobile tribes with herds of bison (and perhaps sheep), but no horses. Armies would only be able to move at human marching speed, but they would still have excellent strategic mobility since these bison nomadic tribes would not have any supply chains.
The Caribbean Sea and likely the Great Lakes as well would develop into areas similar to the Mediterranean. Atlantic Canada might develop Amerindian vikings.
It takes a lot of effort to avoid the obvious. That’s why it takes so many years to educate intellectuals like Lizzy. But she has mastered the art: commoners liked it, they looked forward to being slaughtered and eaten.
A bit of a slippery slope, though, who knows what will be labeled as desirable ‘sacrifice’ going forward.
It may have been his best movie.
That would be Braveheart.
The corollory is that all cultures are valid and of equal value.
Maybe I should make it clear that this is not my opinion, but rather my thinking on “their” thinking.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEVJ_48YgTg
I like Braveheart but it seemed kind of teenage-boyish. There is a place for that, of course, and it’s great for that.
Maybe the Aztec Chaos cults would have been self-sustaining for much longer?
I don’t buy in to the idea that it was a protein problem. It was a religious problem.
As you stated they had domesticated the Muscovy duck, domesticated the turkey and Hugh Thomas says that they utilized over 40 species of wild ducks, iguana, quail and partidges, rabbits (how long before domestication)? How long before domestication of doves?
it seemed kind of teenage-boyish.
Yes, to a certain extent, but most of us were teenage-boyish in the past, and we think we are a different person now, but we are actually the one and same being.
What are you? Some kind of fag?
I think he was offended that you like Braveheart, because it’s so anti-English (and probably also quite historically inaccurate). That other movie by Mel Gibson about the American revolutionary war was also pretty bad in this regard.
Apocalypto is great though.
I think you should stick to the defense of Ukrainian Nationalism. You convinced me by your arguments. When you leave this area you seem to be besotted with many mistaken and incorrect ideas. That raises the question as to whether you can be wrong about everything else and be right about the Ukraine.
iffen:
Gibson’s best movie: The Passion Of The Christ.
Followed by: Apocalypto.
That other movie by Mel Gibson about the American revolutionary war was also pretty bad in this regard.
This was a great movie as well.
Thanks for the comment. I can’t quite grasp the idea that movies are suppossed to be history and the fact that some people go sideways on the subject. It’s similiar to the cliche that the movie didn’t follow the book. They are two different things.
Gibson’s best movie: The Passion Of The Christ.
It is on my list.
The man has talent, even if he says stupid shit when he’s intoxicated.
Is this really worse than the American belief that we must kill millions of Vietnamese or Iraqis to advance democracy?
It strikes me as qualitatively the same.
If the Aztecs erred, it was perhaps – perhaps – in their metaphysics. I say perhaps because if we can practice intellectual distance – “meta-cognition” – I do not know if the American idea that we must destroy millions of Vietnamese and use napalm and Agent Orange to propitiate our own “Sun God” is any less silly.
It seems we all have our Sun God to which we must offer our hecatombs.
The two World Wars may be seen as massive human sacrifice to our Sun God.
Violence seems embedded in human nature. The Aztecs seemed merely more honest about – they literally thought it was necessary to keep Chaos at bay and the world from ending. Do we not think the same thing?
Is this really worse than the American belief that we must kill millions of Vietnamese or Iraqis to advance democracy?
Yes, it is.
We “know” that the sun will rise tomorrow, or, if you prefer, the earth will rotate. We did not “know” that the world would not be safe for democracy if we didn’t kill a lot of Vietnamese.
Never mind.
The Aztecs are indeed represented in the now defunct Warhammer Fantasy universe(Age of Sigmar is a farce) by the Lizardman. They were a favorite of mine, and hilariously, given the current knowledge of the Aztecs, are one of the few exceptional cases where Games Workshop versions were less grusome and grimdark than their real-life equivalents since the writers most likely thought that no culture could be that self-destructive. They were mysterious, savage and terrifying, but also fierce warriors against Chaos; wayward biological weapons of the Old Ones who still vaguely followed their original purpose.
I’ve always loved their colorful palate and generally alien depiction, which stood out even in an universe of orcs and elves. As a concept, I’ve always thought that they haven’t been played with enough, and I join the ranks of most other lizardmen fans who repudiated GW after they basically ruined the side in their rework(now they are “people made from stardust.”)
https://lustriaclog.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/lizardmen.jpg
Priest & Warriors.
https://explainingtheoldworld.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/lizardman-art.png
Cold One Rider.
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/warhammerfb/images/5/50/Warhammer_Lizardmen_Skinks.jpg
The small, cunning skinks.
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/warhammerfb/images/c/cd/Warhammer_Temple-City.png
Their crumbling temple cities, where they yet survive.
So the Aztecs were wrong about the sun not rising unless they sacrificed people, and we couldn’t be sure that democracy would survive unless we sacrificed people for it.
Fair point.
But in both cases each civilization was trying to keep what it understood as Chaos at bay.
My point is, were we “right” that democracy was needed to keep Chaos at bay? Aren’t we now seeing democracy devolve into oligarchic corruption and taboos and speech codes and anti-intellectualism returning?
Did the hecatombs we sacrificed for democracy succeed any better than the Aztecs at keeping Chaos at bay?
Could the human sacrifice have been a population control measure?
The calorie dense crops produced very high population densities that weren’t preyed upon by horse riding raiders or hit by diseases. In the Old World high populations would get hit by raiders and disease which would curb population.
Modern Bombay has 5 times the population of Paris.
Population estimates of Tenochtitlan vary.
Did the hecatombs we sacrificed for democracy succeed any better than the Aztecs at keeping Chaos at bay?
Well, I can’t help you here AB, this is something that each person had to decide for themselves.
I’ve decided it – and my answer is no 🙂
Was my comment wrong?
I think that those people were used to less housing space than modern Westerners, so the population density could well have been much higher than it is today in US cities which are mainly characterized by separated large family houses, lawns, cars… Look at pueblo peoples and how tightly-packed they lived…
Unfortunately for your BS:
https://www.thoughtco.com/thmb/bNaz4Sj8WXk-HIbVJj0CjPxZ8z8=/768×0/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/WP_001012-56a58ab93df78cf77288ba95.jpg
https://www.ancient-code.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/olmecas-cabeza-31.jpg
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/T9qfGPLnW4U/maxresdefault.jpg
https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/0e/3b/8f/59/this-is-one-of-several.jpg
https://www.ancient.eu/img/r/p/500×600/2408.jpg?v=1485680626
https://hiddenincatours.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/olmechead5-1.jpg
These ~3500 years old gigantic head statues are from the Olmec Civilization which was the mother civilization of the Americas, located on the southwest coast of Mexico a relatively short ocean voyage away from West Africa.
Btw, Amerindian mix students from South and Central America regularly beat students from Europe in the Math Olympiads.
we wuz asstegz
https://www.thoughtco.com/thmb/TB11dmt1IBgjdQA5u7D0CyDSBfI=/1280×828/filters:no_upscale():max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/aztek_cover-56a100775f9b58eba4b664a7.jpg
The aztecs were particularly brutal, it was religious and pretty psycho, and social organization, that people are meat, no different than animals, even within their civilization, the upper people killed, ate, and wore the lower people and the gods all ate people. It was a food chain religious world view.
We could try to compare it to european, I have never seen any evidence or even serious rumors about cannibalism on a societal level in any period of known history. If you push back far enough, I’m sure you’ll find it, not just isolated incidents but common, but you may be talking about extinct hominids or maybe neaderthals during the ice age. The proto-groups that went into making europeans are usually called hunter-gatherers, farmers, and herders but not cannibals. Never heard ancient egyptians accused of much cannibalism.
They certainly killed people in horrific torturous ways all the time, but it was for murder and stuff, not food.
But to test a lot of these theories and control for some of this like the corn, let’s try to look at the Americas. I am curious so I’m searching around to see, start north of the aztecs, was there pueblo cannibalism?
Apparently the ancestors of the pueblo were called the anasazi and yes, there was anasazi cannibalism but, apparently it only occurred in one area in one period and it’s very controversial and debated. And there are 2 counter-theories of sorts, 1 is that it was about witchcraft panic causing them to desecrate the corpses of witches. The other is that basically the aztec made them do it. There are lots of claims of invaders from the south that occupy them (and eat them) and push their religious cult on them during that time.
http://www.jeffposey.net/2015/08/18/were-the-anasazi-cannibals/
https://dnaconsultants.com/native-american-cannibalism-revisited/
Also (from the second site and others) there are claims that the anasazi, to the hopi, navajo and pueblo were ‘enemy ancestors’, which could be, and that the witches were called ‘skin walkers’ which could have nothing to do with xipe totec or then again maybe.
http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/aztecs/xipe.gif
So that’s controversial, maybe a bit of cannibalism, let’s go further north, how about plains indians? The most cited and undisputed cannibals I found looking for that seem to be these people called Tonkawa, and we’re barely north, we’re still in south Texas. They do at least ritual cannibalism. Here is a forum post I found.
http://historum.com/american-history/24484-tonkawa-cannibalism.html
The post is interesting because it claims that not only the european settlers but also the surrounding indian groups, like comanche, were disgusted and offended by their ritual cannibalism, which caused the comanche to aggressively annihilate them.
So how about the comanche, they’re full blown plains indians all over the midwest and interior west which is the next culture north of the pueblos. I cannot find any scrap of evidence or even frequent rumors that the comanche practiced cannibalism. Doesn’t mean they didn’t but I can’t find any. I can find accusations that they carved captives up, skinned them alive, and burned them (alive or dead) on the campfire, but none claim they ate them. Not even the people making claims from the ‘we need to genocide these savage comanche’ history perspective claim cannibalism as a reason.
Not everybody does this stuff.
Well, let me remind you again of the great African Emperor of Japan:
https://img.thedailybeast.com/image/upload/v1492196419/cheats/2014/09/09/emperor-warned-against-u-s-wwii-attack/140909-emperor-hirohito-cheat_dfsehs.jpg
The Inca, AFAIK, weren’t quite like that either, although they did mass sacrifice. It looks like they drugged their child victims before sacrificing them:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/07/130729-inca-mummy-maiden-sacrifice-coca-alcohol-drug-mountain-andes-children/
Meso-Americans were unique in terms of sheer cruelty and mass scale.
Sorry, but this argument feels a little like the one claiming that Yeltsin was as murderous as Stalin because a comparable population loss occurred.
But I’ll indulge your argument anyways.
For Aztecs, sacrifice was the point. There was no choice. There was nothing the victims could do. Gods wanted hearts, or children’s tears, or whatever. Vietnamese and Iraqis could have, of course, surrendered. Americans didn’t just capture them so they could meet a quota of X killed. Had Vietnam been subdued, Americans wouldn’t have kept killing Vietnamese every year. Vietnam might have become like South Korea. Had Aztecs conquered Vietnam (or any other place) they would have sacrifices over and over again.
In other words, you are conflating war deaths and “social” deaths. Aztecs also killed people in war.
A better analogy might have been Nazis sacrificing millions of Jews and Slavs for their “god” of Aryan purity and supremacy, or Soviets sacrificing millions of people for their “god” of Communism or Marxism-Leninism. Of course, Nazi and Communist deaths were generally not nearly as gruesome and cruel as Aztec killings. Getting gassed or shot near a mass grave beats getting one’s beating heart ripped out. And while Communism and Nazism were exceptional in time and place within European society, sacrifice was universal in Meso-American society (Mayans also practiced it).
Emperor Hirohito looked Filipino/Malay, like a lot of Japanese. Here is his grandfather the Emperor Meiji during whose reign Japan successfully modernized:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/ba/Meiji_tenno3.jpg/220px-Meiji_tenno3.jpg
http://www.awesomestories.com/images/user/7cce25f1f4.jpg
The Japanese are a mix of at least 3 races:
Northeast Asian mainlanders
Malayo-Polynesian islanders
Aboriginal/Ainu islanders
Hybrid Vigor?
In Japan, they also have a divide between the North and South of the country:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000949
Paper claims the Akita region of Northern Honshu island records the highest average “IQ test” scores at 108, while Okinawa Islands in the oceans furthest South of Japan, records the lowest in these test scores at only 97.
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0160289613000949-gr1.jpg
The explanation, for the author, though, is not based on originating races of the Japanese nationality though, but a result of more recent selective pressures.
But he looks African in that picture. Clearly the Japanese people were searching for a worthy Emperor who wasn’t really related to the previous ones, and looked to the place with the most intelligent, capable civilization-makers – Africa.
Here is another picture of Hirohito:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KNzahp5KstY/Uuewev7fe-I/AAAAAAAAcTo/WBL4G_v_yDs/s1600/Hirohito+2.jpg
And here is Sudan’s president:
https://i.imgur.com/oOR4gx8.jpg
Obviously Hirohito was chosen in Sudan, the birthplace of Egyptian civilization and thus all world civilization. Who but an African was worthy of leading the Japanese people?
Well, I would say sacrifice was not the point for the Aztecs. Keeping Chaos at bay was the point.
If the Sun God did not require sacrifice, and the Aztecs still sacrificed, then we might say it was the point. But that wasn’t the case.
According to what they believed, the Aztecs were doing what needed to be done in order to keep the world from destruction. The Sun God would destroy the world if he did not receive sacrifices.
In the case of Vietnam, of course if they submitted no one needed to be sacrificed. But so too with the Sun God – if he submitted to let the world survive without sacrifices, there would be none.
In both cases, the forces in control of Chaos did not submit, and so we had to sacrifice humans.
I would also say that whatever ideology one adopts it’s a pretty certain bet that at least some fraction of mankind will not accept it and will actively oppose it. So if you understand the world in such a way that unless everyone lives by a certain ideology the world is headed for destruction, you are setting yourself up for certain war.
In which case you are willing to sacrifice humans to keep Chaos at bay, as you understand the situation.
The Aztecs were trying to save the world within the limits of what they understood about it, just like we.
Qualitatively they are not unique, what is unusual about them from our perspective is their understanding of what was needed to save the world, which are so different from our ideas that we find them impossibly exotic.
However, from the perspective of an alien, our Western belief that the salvation of the world depends on everyone living by a certain ideology called democracy, of rather recent development, and that we must sacrifice untold millions of people to achieve this, may seem as exotic as the Aztecs do to us.
Of course I am not arguing in support of human sacrifice, but I am not sure an inhabitant of Vietnam or Iraq would rather be randomly bombed by an American plane or burn to death in a napalm attack than live in a system which sacrificed a certain percentage of its people to the Sun God.
By contrast, Vedic Aryans literally Worship their Kings despite the entire world trying to stop them.
Also organized Islamic mass slavery with regular forced infanticide sounds bad too.
Can atleast understand the Aztecs as being motivated by courage & bravery, certainly higher virtues than the carnal lust pervading judaic ideology.
Firstly, where is your evidence that northern amerindians have a higher IQ than the Central Americans? This is just another example of your irrational northern bias. Which, btw, is kind of amusing considering that some of your fellow russians see you as an alien “kebab” from the South.
Secondly, the Persian civilization reached north into the Caucasus and Central Asia yet the center of gravity stayed in the South. And the Chinese civilization never really took hold among the northern barbarians of north asia.
A lie repeated a million times does not turn into the truth. Africans were writing, building, inventing, calculating etc many centuries before Europeans:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/Great_Sphinx_of_Giza_May_2015.JPG/1200px-Great_Sphinx_of_Giza_May_2015.JPG
https://wonderopolis.org/wp-content/uploads//2015/03/700_f.jpg
Yes.
Northern Europe had an advanced Bronze Age Civ. until climate change hit them.
Being a Ukranian & facing 1000 years of Turkic raids along with India & Persia, I wonder how you think this doesn’t affect technology.
A Half Jew Half Italian creates computers, makes more sense though.
I’m continuously disappointed by Ukrainians.
I refuse to accept that we share Sarmation & Scythian blood when all you is find different ways of bending over for Germans. spits
But for the Aztecs, sacrifice was the only way to keep Chaos at bay. Keeping Chaos at bay = sacrifice. People were sacrificed over and over again. America did not keep invading South Korea, or Germany just to keep killings going.
Sun God never submitted and could not submit. OTOH people did surrender (Japan; Germany; cease fire was established in South Korea), and when Vietnamese didn’t surrender Americans eventually just left. They didn’t randomly bomb the place year after year for eternity for the sake of “sacrifice.”
Democracy is a Calvinist sect.
The idea that Men cannot live in their own lands, by their own laws & customs but instead there must be 6 year old trannies strutting in high heels across the pavement of every capital; is far more Extreme than some Aztecs eating hearts.
The Scythians you Ukranians love to LARP as did the same thing.
You’re being made into a Protestant you faggot & tbh, the nigger-muslim migrants + abortion clinics any American vassal who surrenders gets subjected to, is far worse & produces more casualties than Aztecas.
Eh, w/e just a Ukranian you won’t understand any of this anyway.
Hopefully your Kings sitting in Warsaw & Moskva understand these terms I’ve mentioned.
https://imperialenergyblog.wordpress.com/2017/10/01/crypto-imperialism-an-anglo-american-adaption-to-empire/
What can I say? You tried to sink Perun to the depths of the sea, and today it’s you who sinks.
I fully expect Karlin & others (Chieh?) to respond with memes when they can’t counter my arguments.
This post was fairly balanced till the end,
Any race that’s come en masse to the Americas has turned rotten & been destroyed is all we can conclude.
Karlin has changed, more of a Continental Catholic-Orthodox frame to posts now.
America has rotating wars – in our 300 years or so of existing we were pretty much always at war. Now Vietnam, now Iraq. Europe has also pretty much always been at war.
The particular ideology we are fighting for changes and the tribe we fight against changes – but we are always fighting.
The Aztecs took their sacrifices from various tribes defeated in battle, more or less like we do.
The Aztecs had a more consistent ideology and the system of sacrifice was more streamlined, but I still don’t see how its qualitatively different.
I also think that our total body count including the world wars probably exceeds the Aztecs.
At the very least, would you accept that the Aztecs were acting as morally as we do based on their understanding of the universe and how it operates, and that if there is something horrific to be found in their system it is in their flawed understanding of what is needed to keep Chaos at bay?
Ok Bliss has to win some kind of awards for trolling skills.
But stealing other people’s national heritage for your arguments is not cool.
Do I have to post the official posters of FIFA 2018 World Cup?
https://i.imgur.com/JvsYFwI.jpg
American bio leninism is worse than formal human sacrifice & is established + kept going by war.
Reminds himself, no point arguing with a Ukranian.
Yes, few decent ones but Russia is confused & Poles are a hybrid race, wtf would be in between?
Fkn Americuck
Fk U & Fk America
Your DUMBASS CONFLICT WITH RUSSIA MEANS YOU END UP ON THE SAME SIDE AS THOSE TRYING TO DESTROY LITERALLY HUMANITY
http://anepigone.blogspot.com/2017/06/global-population-growth-is-african.html
Yoruba & others have 40%+ archaic non homo sapien, so EurAsian = Human.
Nigga, you have farmland. It’s not worth destroying the world over.
You want to fight & die, do it that’s the best path but the only reason you need to come up with all this gay shit when your bloodline just loves to fight, is christianity.
It is true that Egyptian civilization originated in what is now northern Sudan and southern Egypt. It is also true that Egypt is the grandmother of western civilization (Greece being the mother), but not of all civilizations. Though it has indirectly impacted all of them.
Your straw man attempt at humor reflects your low grade sense of it. Here is something based on fact that is actually amusing: the rabid nordicists Hitler and Himmler anointing the Japanese, led by Hirohito and Tōjō, as “honorary aryans”. Here’s Tōjō:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/b4/65/be/b465be344bc7a963e49fd62508fa8961.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/Xn1O6K8.jpg
I can show you a Million Men, including me, who would gladly tear their hearts out for the Aztec America।।
I don’t think anyone can come up with a handful, given a million years, for their Son to march down Main Street as a Tranny in the United States of America।।
I’ll end my commenting on Karlin’s blog on this note।।
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾ।।ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ।।
Oops I thought Bliss was writing this comment to AP.
Lol Bliss how did you miss this opportunity.
We already have enough Ukraine poasting by all parties, it is no longer interesting after having had conversation after conversation with 90% old material. AP should talk more about other topics as well, it makes him more interesting.
You are right, but not in the way you think you are.
The Inca Empire had exactly the same technological/agricultural base. But without the human sacrifice.
mildly relevant
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/punishing-putler/#comment-2243564
This post makes excellent points. It is notable that large scale urban civilization in Peru started before that in Europe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caral
I don’t think human sacrifice was a result of the elites not having enough protein; it’s not like Shang China, Early Bronze Ur, or First Dynasty Egypt didn’t have protein.
“And the Chinese civilization never really took hold among the northern barbarians of north asia.”
Iowa is not Yakutia; it is more like northern Germany.
It is worth pointing out the populations of China, Russia, and especially Ireland skyrocketed when New World crops were introduced into their countries.
Yes; in regards to pre-Columbian population size, it makes much more sense to compare Mexico with Asia (especially upland India) than with Europe.
Oh; and professionally done human sacrifice was being practiced well into the 15th century AD in Peru:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/04/mass-child-human-animal-sacrifice-peru-chimu-science/
So it seems human sacrifice does have something to do with lack of technological development. I suspect poor weapons technology. Not much point in human sacrifice when you can kill your enemies on the battlefield.
They had llamas and potatoes. They didn’t have turkeys. So not exactly the same.
But anyway, the point is not really so simplistic that they definitely needed the protein (they could obtain it elsewhere), but ease of consumption, quality of meat, etc. all meant that they just liked their human flesh and so that made it easier to spread human sacrifice and more difficult to discontinue it, relative to Europe.
This is where I found that Karlin’s Russianness is suspect in some quarters:
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/portugal/#comment-2348596
Peruvian/Inca mass sacrifice was still on a smaller scale, was limited to children (often in times of famine – so it had a “practical” purpose) and involved efforts to sedate the victims to avoid suffering. It was very different from the Aztec mass torture which was unique.
The Phoenician practice of child sacrifice was pretty disturbing, though.
Not really. Korea ended in the 1950s. Vietnam ended in 1975. No real deadly wars (Granada, Panama operations don’t count) until Iraq , 15 years later. Another gap of 10 years (Yugo war wasn’t deadly), then Afghanistan and Iraq II. Nothing since that time.
Also, Korea and Vietnam and Iraq I involved invasions of US allies. Only Iraq II was an unambiguous attack. So America is not “always fighting.” But Aztecs were “always sacrificing.”
You don’t see a qualitative difference between harvesting people for sacrifice, keeping them in cages and fattening them up, then using deliberately painful methods to kill them, in peacetime or in war, and a wartime bomb aimed at some soldiers’ base accidentally destroying an apartment building, killing most of the people instantly?
Not when taking into account population size and spreading out time. Mesoamerica had about 11-16 million people before 1492 (6 million in Aztec Empire, about 5-10 million outside it among Mayan peoples, who also sacrificed). At the low estimated rate of 20,000 sacrifices per year among Aztecs and a similar number among the others, you get 4 million sacrificed over 100 years from a population of 11-16 million. This does not include the number killed in wars. But sacrifices alone over 100 years were about 25% of the of the high population estimate and 36% of the low estimate.
At the end of the 20th century Europe had 726 million people, with another 282 million in the USA, and 30 million in Canada. So over a billion Europeans.
For Europeans to have killed each other at the Aztec rate in the 20th century the death toll for both world wars plus Bolshevism plus Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan would have had to be 250 million (assuming high Mesoamerican population) or 360 million people (low Meso-American population estimate).
So not even close.
And these are mostly war deaths. Not deliberate harvesting and torturing to death of people.
The first bit is taking the piss out of the BBC intros which, at the time, had changed from animated numbers to various world cultures dancing. The guys that made this took exception to that and made their own to use between sketches. There was the one you saw, a stoning in Afghanistan and a punishment beating in Northern Ireland.
A somewhat revisionist view on the Carthagian sacrifices was that sacrifces were done, of sons of the nobility, whenever the nobility started a war and lost it.
Lizzie is less relativist when it comes to #MeToo.
https://twitter.com/dpinsen/status/1011382371801862144
I liked your stuff though most was way too cryptic for me.
In one of the Arthur C. Clarke/Gentry Lee Rama books, an alien civilization has a rule that if they go to war, anyone involved in the decision to go to war or the prosecuting of the war gets terminated afterwards, regardless of the outcome. The point was to make sure war was a last resort.
In Bernal Diaz’s account of the conquest of Mexico, he includes a couple of details that conflict with the stone age description. One is that the Aztecs apparently had copper axes and competent metalworkers. Why they used copper in axes but not in their weapons, he doesn’t say.
Another detail is that Diaz says men in the expedition who’d seen the great cities of old world were blown away by what they saw in Tenochtitlan.
An interesting alt history, and yes, I agree that it’s plausible.
I have read about this from Unz’s essays, but wasn’t Jensen making these arguments in the 1970s?
As Jason Richwine showed, benefitting from two more decades of accumulated data, third- and even fourth-generation Mexican-Americans in the US don’t converge to White norms.
https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2009-richwine.pdf (e.g. see pg. 44)
This also extends to socio-economic success: “Some scholars have extended the generational analysis even farther. Samuel Huntington (2004, 230-243) has summarized how specifically Mexican economic and social integration has lagged even into the fourth generation. Huntington cites a 1990 study showing that the percentage of Mexican households with incomes greater than $50,000 rises from 7% in the first generation to 11% in the second. But the statistic in the third and fourth generations stays right at 11%, at a time when the national rate (excluding Mexicans) was 25%. 41% of fourth generation Mexican-Americans also lacked a high school degree in 1989 and 1990, compared to 24% of all other Americans.”
My own opinion on this (though veering off-topic) is that (1) North Europeans are more intelligent than Indians (some Brahmin smart fractions aside) and than Middle Easterners, and (2) they are less rigidly conformist than East Asians, and weren’t hampered by a character based writing system (which suppresses the real literacy rate). [Jaychick would also mention the Hajnal Line, which surely helped too, but I think it was the least important of these reasons].
North European success had more to do IMO with the innovations that allowed the intensification of agriculture in Europe’s northern regions, and the associated greater urbanization and literacy. The Church helped by promoting literacy – this was supercharged by the appearance of Protestantism, with its emphasis on a personal connection of God, which required you to read and understand the Bible – but Christianity was hardly unique as a religion that promoted learning.
No, it’s just garden-variety basic demon worship. Europe never saw wide-scale demon worship because Europe is an older culture and thus closer to the original protohuman monotheism.
Wait a bit and you’ll see the same mass human sacrifice in Paris, as Europe continues to slide into post-Christian demon worship.
Lizardmen were my Warhammer: Fantasy army as well when I played in HS. Though only because they were what the starter pack consisted of. 🙂
I think pyramids are among the most impressive structures (and certainly require a great deal of organization and labor to build), but they are ultimately low tech. Essentially anything labor intensive was possible for the Aztecs, because they could have much higher population densities than Europeans, due to the lack of domesticated animals (lower quality but higher quantity nutrition), much lower parasite load (for this they would pay dearly after contact…) and the very high yields of maize.
So basically they could build huge pyramids, which looked very impressive, and would’ve been impossible in Europe, but ultimately didn’t require the level of development European cathedrals or renaissance palaces required.
After Eurasian parasites were introduced to the Americas, their population densities dropped despite the introduced new technologies and domestic animals, and so Latin America became a poorer, less developed and perhaps less creative version of (then already poor and stagnant) Southern Europe. This is why it looks like as if the Spaniards destroyed something worthy and built nothing in its place, when in reality most of the destruction was inevitable, and they introduced modern architecture and other technologies, so basically lifted the place.
Very interesting posts and comments.
As further evidence, the popular Greek peasants’ poet, Hesiod, complains that the local lords awarded his property to his brother: “you kept grabbing and taking much more, paying great tribute to the lords, those bribe-swallowers who see fit to make this their judgment.”
Hesiod elsewhere does speak of the heaven-blessed kings: “out of his mouth the words flow honeyed.”
And Homer, presumably singing to an aristocratic audience, has the rabble-rouser Thersites be appropriately ugly and then soundly beaten up by Odysseus.
Buy Guns, Lift Weights & Do so While Remembering your Ancestor Sri Peruna & the Great Death MahaKala।।
Ye I’ll make one more for my cousins. 🙂
Best Beginner
https://www.powerliftingtowin.com/greyskull-lp/
Resource
https://stronglifts.com/
Aryan Philosophy in One Line
ਯਾਂਤੇਸਰਬਖਾਲਸਾਸੁਨੀਅਹਿ।।ਆਯੁਧਧਰਿਬੇਉਤੱਮਗੁਨੀਅਹਿ।।
The Guru then said to his Sikhs, “All of the Khalsa should listen, carrying weapons is the highest action।।
AK47 is Best
https://youtu.be/S9p2suTKSK8
Knife
http://everydaycarry.com/posts/21773/the-beginners-guide-to-edc-knife-blade-steels
Guru Sahib said to carry Carbon steel
Pesh Kabz, Khanzar, Bichua or Kukri are Good
The Thorfinson Stainless steel folder is insult to Manhood
Just carry Kabar on belt loop everyday for Western Style।।
ਸਿੰਘਰੂਪਸ਼ਸਤ੍ਰਨਜੁਤਿਹੇਰੈਂ।।ਹੋਤਿਗੁਰੂਕੀਖੁਸ਼ੀਬਡੇਰੈ।।
The appearance of a Singh [is complete] with weapons, when the Guru see’s this He becomes extremely happy.
ਕਮਰਕਸੇਬਿਨਜੋਸਿਖਜਾਇ।।ਤਿਸਪਰਰੁਖਨਹਿਕਰੈਂਕਦਾਇ।।੧੦।।
Those Sikhs who went towards the Guru without wearing a Kamarkasa [waist band which holds weapons], the Guru would never look towards them.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170404132933/http://www.manglacharan.com/manglacharan/2016/1/11/the-merit-of-being-of-warrior-from-dasam-and-sarbloh-granth
https://i.imgur.com/jZdXL0M.jpg
A Dreadful War Ensued from Both Sides for the Attainment of Svarag (Heaven)
ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕਾਖਾਲਸਾ।।ਵਾਹਿਗੁਰੂਜੀਕੀਫਤਿਹ।।
Was my comment wrong?
I’m not sure that one can get to being right or wrong when giving an opinion on a movie, or other creative works for that matter.
The selfless hero has a long history and has been retro-fitted and recycled thousands of times and continues to this day. To the extent that the hero appeals to our boyish teenage years then I give partial credit for you being “right.” Some people don’t “believe” in “heroes” and consider the belief in others as a sign of naivety.
The first bit is taking the piss out of the BBC intros
I didn’t go past the intro.
because it’s so anti-English
I don’t understand how you can make this statement. I didn’t get any anti-English impression at all.
But Christ, however, was not a part of some sort of interchangeable set of god figures. His being and one time atonement for all of humankind’s sinful nature was a unique, one time event in the course of history. Having delved into the raw and graphic nature of human sacrifice and putting your imagination to work in seeing how things may have evolved for these Amero-Indian cultures, you must be quite pleased in retrospect as to how things worked out?
Romans 8:28
A regular low dosage of Risperdal would do you wonders 🙂
I actually agree with your first paragraph. But you slip back to your usual self in the second.
Correct. But I don’t think he revised it, nor AFAIK had his 1970s observations debunked. So if indeed the nature of their low IQs resembles that of 19th century Irish rather than Africans, the explanation for ongoing lags being probably environmental is still compelling. Perhaps the flood of new immigrants keeps later generations down. Does the pattern for poor performance in later generations hold in places with few Mexicans (how do Mexicans do there after several generation?). America stopped all immigration in the 1920s. What if Italian ghettos or Irish had continued being Italian or Irish ghettos due to the flood never ending. Would there have been improvement in later generations?
Correct. But promoting learning was only part of it. Teaching that the world was Man’s dominion, that people were made in God’s image and thus “above” nature, that the world was a rational place that could be studied and therefore manipulated, that it was pleasing to God to study and manipulate nature because learning about His world was to learn about Him, all fostered technological advancement. You see this even in Dark Ages monasteries were monks were working on alchemy or trying to create perpetual motion machines. Compare this to the more fatalistic Eastern worldview – Buddhism with its idea that the world was only an illusion. This might promote learning but not technology. Technological advancement would still occur but it would be very slow, by happenstance, and often rejected due to not being valued or never fully applied.
Of course one cannot exclude genetic temperamental factors. Christianity may have “taken” among Europeans very well because it may have matched their temperaments, which are genetic (although society also shapes genetic temperaments – it is a complex 2-way process). But without Christianity, Europeans had been savages for millennia and would probably have continued being so.
I am. The extinction and complete subversion of the evil Aztec demon-worshiping empire was one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments. Kudos to the relative small number of Spaniards, flawed as they were and as even normal humans tend to be (greedy, cruel on a smaller, European scale) for pulling this off.
Sure, the Aztecs were fascinating, as aliens, and in a horror-movie type of way, and it would have been nice to have more stuff preserved with which to understand them better, but that’s small change compared to the monumental task the Spaniards had succeeded in accomplishing.
The barbarian invasions are correctly considered as a net negative for development, but perhaps they helped speed up the development of Germany (the part never ruled by Rome) and Scandinavia.
The most important development was the moldboard plough. I’m not an expert on agriculture (though I did just learn a lot about silage–very interesting), but to my knowledge prior to the invention of the moldboard plough intensive cropping was only economic in relatively soft soil such as loess, loam, and volcanic soils.
I don’t think Northern Europe has any loess at all, and while loam exists on the North European plain (and England) it doesn’t in the Nordic area.
The “Black Earth” of the Ukraine, the Mississippi River Valley, and the Loess Plateau (directly connected to the North China Plain) are incidentally the world’s greatest concentrated centers of loess. Which really explains a lot.
Also important were rye and oats. These grains were known to the Greeks and Romans, but either despised or considered only fit for forage. They probably had a point for their climactic conditions. Rye is vulnerable to fungus and oats must be dried before storage.
The harsh winters surely served as a serious problem. Even in modern times Northern climes must invest consider resources in snow removal and deicing.
Northern Europeans would’ve suffered from lower agricultural productivity for the following reasons:
• Shorter growing seasons
• Increased hay production requirements for draft animals
• Increased caloric requirements for both people and draft animals in winter
• More timberland required for fuel (hence the itechniques like coppicing)
This all requires more physical capital as well relative to the Mediterraneans, at a time when physical capital was extremely expensive. More and larger barns and silos. More and larger hearths and fireplaces. Denser textiles containing more fiber and requiring more labor to weave and knit. A lot of work you could do with primitive tools in the Mediterranean would require iron tools in Northern Europe, at least for much of the year.
Some agricultural technologies very helpful in Northern climes also took a very long time to invent. Winter wheat (apparently an Anatolian grain adapted for Russian conditions by Volga Germans) and silage for instance date only to the 19th century. The late invention of silage is somewhat shocking given the long history of fermented foods globally.
Really the rapid convergence (in macrohistorical terms) of Northern Europe with the Mediterranean after Late Antiquity was quite remarkable. Northern Europe also weathered the Little Ice Age without skipping a beat, whereas similar events have frequently led to civilizational collapse at other times and in better climes.
Minor correction: alchemy came later than the Dark Ages, of course.
I don’t have time to tell you of the wonders that I’ve seen at the Museum Anthropolgia in Mexico city. It’s truly a world class museum filled with many wonders. It’s located in a nice part of town with many other museums and a zoo too (which I did not see). I spent one day there and could easily have spent three days there. Go, you must see it for yourself!
http://www.mna.inah.gob.mx/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Museum_of_Anthropology_(Mexico)
I had this in mind in my response to your lament for more ‘stuff preserved’. You’ll see it all, and plenty of it at the museum: Olmec, Aztec, Mayan, Conquistador etc; etc; etc;
Thanks! Some day…
I find it astonishing how the murderous rabble invading mesoamerica is feted with the excuse that the civilisations they destroyed were not pleasant either.
Reminds me of the R2P freaks who never skip a beat if told that their efforts in bringing democracy to places that did not ask for it each and every time cost more victims in the first year of liberation alone than the displaced dictator (usually quite grisly a figure) had murdered in the several dozen years before R2P struck.
R2P is quite a bit different–generally it’s complete bullshit. The only instance where acting on it might have improved things was Rwanda itself (which is what triggered Samantha Power into making it up). Certainly not many in the Balkans, Libya, Syria, Iraq, etc. benefited from these “humanitarian” interventions.
R2P is even invoked for the ridiculous ongoing occupation of Afghanistan because otherwise girls might not go to school. The horror…
Meanwhile the Mesoamerican civilizations really were exceptionally gruesome and murderous.
I agree in a way though. Who cares if the Aztec human sacrifices of squatemalans stopped? To conquer is glorious, as is to enrich yourself and strengthen the kingdom.
They’re called Conquistadors and not Libertadors for a reason.
Why waste your time responding to that Bliss troll?
He’s either an intelligent (relative to their 70-80 baseline) black guy who likes to waste his time trolling — or, more likely, a white nationalist troll who likes to stir up anger against blacks. In either case not a particularly interesting interlocutor. Just block him.
The main difference I see is in what is needed to keep Chaos at bay. From their respective understanding of the universe, each is doing the exact same thing.
The only alternative would be true pacifism of the kind preached by Jesus or Buddha – but there is little qualitative difference between what our civilization has done and the Aztecs, just a very large cognitive difference about what is needed to keep Chaos at bay.
So – not a moral difference, but a cognitive difference so vast as to appear a moral difference to one steeped in the cognitive assumptions (not moral assumptions) of his own culture and not used to practicing meta-cognition.
Either killing humans to keep Chaos at bay is wrong – as Jesus and Buddha has said – or it is right, and then each culture will proceed to do so based on its understanding if how the universe operates.
What we are seeing here is not a moral difference – but a cognitive one. And while it may be hard for us to see it, our own cognitive assumptions about how the universe operates may seem just as exotic and bizarre as that of the Aztecs.
I think a Ming Dynasty Chinese might find our notion of killing vast numbers of people over “beliefs” quite as bizarre.
Small potatoes though, in comparison to conquering your own soul, wouldn’t you say?
Mark 8:36
What, you doubt that modern Europe is a demon-worshiping state? Sexual perversion, greed, envy, infanticide — where you you think all this comes from?
Human cultures come in a bewildering variety of forms, but demons don’t. They’re immortal and they don’t innovate, which is why all demon-influenced cultures converge towards the same stable state, no matter the historical era or racial substrate.
Europe is heading there too, unless some catastrophic event happens to stop it.
Yes, I do agree.
That said to conquer one must (typically) first achieve self-mastery and then mastery over other men (retainers, followers, conscripts, whatever).
This isn’t what you meant, but it’s none the less a difficult personal achievement that most never achieve.
What probably sets the Assyrians apart is not their actual cruelty, which while spectacular was not much if any greater than that of the Greeks or Romans.
It was the pride they took in displaying their cruelty for all to see. The crucifixion of 6000 rebels by Crassus was an unusual event, and the object lesson worked. There were no more slave revolts in Rome. But Crassus wasn’t granted a triumph for doing this.
Crucifying or impaling hundreds or thousands of people was routine, normal and something to take pride in for the Assyrians. They bragged about it.
As, much more recently, did ISIS. Which, oddly enough, was centered in old Assyria.
The Romans, OTOH, did not seem to take pride in their cruelty, they seemed to view it more as a necessary task.
Jeez, dude.
Egypt isn’t Black Africa.
For the record I think the commenter Talha raises good points. People of our persuasion spend too much energy describing the problem (that is to say, whining) than proposing the solution. I don’t think I’ve ever seen German_reader propose much in the way of solutions, though in fairness he admits he isn’t cut out to be a leader.
I can see taking objection to Talha’s points since he’s an invader and at times it comes off as “concern trolling”. That said, he seems sincere to me and not engaged in the dreaded taqqiya. It’s a useful skill and thought exercise to place yourself in someone else’s shoes, and all the better if that person is an enemy.
The solution varies by country and continent, but there are plenty of solutions. For Germany itself:
• Immediate mass deportations of all people without lawful immigration status
• Denaturalization of settled invaders, they will be subjects with residency and civil rights but no political rights outside of their own communties
• Adoption of millet system for invader communities
• Comprehensive nationwide segregation
• Criminalization of miscegenation and interfaith marriage
• Targeted stripping of residence rights of troublemakers and subsequent deportation (or incarceration)
• Harsh policing and criminal justice
• Target countries which resist taking their kin back get strangled by EU sanctions and subjected to gunboat diplomacy if necessary
• Mosques (and others) placed under official state surveillance, and imams must be approved by the state
• Implementation of a population policy with specific targets, naturally this will require reforms of the Germans as well
• EU-wide border controls and border patrol. If the EU refuses start a separate service with Italy, Austria, Denmark, and the Visegrad group
• Invader boats will be towed back to the African coast and destroyed
• North African states induced through carrot and stick to BUILD THE WALL north of the Sahel
• Not that it really matters what Africans or Mohammedans do in their own rubbish countries, but any foreign aid to them that doesn’t have some quid pro quo purpose should be designed to limit their fertility (which, to be fair, the Mohammedans are already doing)
As for the commenter who brought up sanctions–we’ve seen what succumbing to sanctions means in Rhodesia and South Africa.
Unrelated to the migrant problem per se, but the left as a force needs to be eliminated. Forever. Any argument based on “equality”, “human rights”, etc. must be considered felony sedition with a mandatory prison sentence and loss of political rights as well as some civil (e.g. right to serve as a professor, teacher, civil servant, journalist, lawyer, etc.).
https://www.unz.com/akarlin/the-rights-human-capital-problem/
See comment 187 in that thread. Identical to some of your proposals (those which aren’t as fantastical as “criminalization of miscegenation and interfaith marriage”).
German Reader just seems as generally educated and a sceptical writer here.
It’s not likely most people in this demographic is going to join AaronB’s cult, or to believe in proposing miraculous solutions for the international deterioration.
Something funny about our forum is that, Talha (who is from Pakistan – although does not live there) and AP (from Ukraine), are very optimistic and positive about their countries.
And yet the dude in almost the world’s most successful and powerful countries (Germany) that most people everywhere dream of living in, is the most pessimistic.
Personal idiosyncrasies and small sample-size aside (e.g. Ukrainian I know has opposite views to AP) – maybe there is an inverse correlation between how negatively people talk about their countries, and the actual situation and living standards in their countries.
Or people are more sensitive to changes, than to absolute levels. So people in the most successful countries, are the most sensitive to a reduction in living standards or quality, e.g. quality of human resources from immigration. As someone who does a great painting, will want to varnish it, and become very sensitive about any scratches.
Very, very questionable statement. “something specific…. that really drove people in Europe to study and manipulate the world ” was already with the ancient Greeks. Рrior triumph of Christianity, northern Europeans-pagan colonized Iceland and Greenland and reached America.
Rather, we can assume that Christianity has slowed the intellectual development of Europe.
For the record you can link directly to comments by right clicking on the date stamp beneath the poster’s handle.
e.g. https://www.unz.com/akarlin/the-rights-human-capital-problem/#comment-2355150
There’s nothing fantastical about prohibiting miscegenation or interfaith marriage.
Miscegenation was once illegal in forty-four American states (and many within living memory) and, I might add, Germany itself.
Marriage was once a church matter and interfaith marriages (which in those quaint times meant Catholic and Protestant) would generally not be granted.
Good start on your part.
I agree that AP’s insistence on the importance of Christianity is rather reductive, there was advanced civilization in Mediterranean Europe well before Christianity, and it seems absurd to me that all that civilizational legacy should be attributed to Christianity. That’s just one of those feel-good stories Christians like to tell themselves.
Roman empire is often seen as somewhat stagnant though, with relatively little innovation during many centuries (due to the prevalence of slave labor which hindered innovation?)…maybe that’s a stereotype (one would have to ask an ancient historian), but in some ways the middle ages were probably more dynamical and saw the development of many new technologies (e.g. wind mills).
I don’t think that can be solely or primarily attributed to Christianity though, there were probably many other factors as well (e.g. competition between different centres of power due to Europe’s political fragmentation after the fall of the Roman empire). Generalizations about the positive or negative impact of Christianity always seem somewhat speculative to me.
Such laws have historically been quite rare in Western societies, I can only think of Nazi Germany, South Africa and some US states.
And imo there’s not much chance you’d get even a majority of those opposed to the ongoing invasion to support such laws. Even many right-wingers would reject that, either for personal reasons or on principle.
It’s also rather pointless imo to draw up wishlists of all the harsh measures one would like to enact. I can understand the motivation and indulge similar fantasies myself at times. But in the end that’s just political masturbation and a sign of one’s own impotence. Unless one has a convincing answer to the question “How do we get people around to our way of thinking? What programme could appeal to a majority in our country?” that’s all just fantasy.
They were rare in Europe for obvious reasons.
They were not rare in New World settler societies, and you can guess why.
Now that Europe has the same problem such laws are required.
I agree that criminal prohibitions on miscegenation should not be pushed as part of a public party program. As you know I’m in favor of a Straussian organization model.
Good answer. BTW, I hope that you don’t feel that I’m too critical of you, but that’s what might happen when somebody becomes interesting to me, and exhibits some knowledge and foresight in their comments. Unfortunately, that’s not something that I can say about a lot of the commentators I encounter. So, I do generally stop and read most of your comments, even though I may not subscribe to all of your points of view. So, Mr. Thorfinnsson, this is as close to a compliment as I’m possibly able to make. 🙂
(You have quite the interest in historical topics – this is good).
That doesn’t follow from what you said
Most conquerors don’t seem very self-mastered to me. Alexander the Great was infamously degenerate, Napoleon had a terrible temper and a nervous breakdown and Hitler was very unstable.
Give it time, Dmitry.
,
What is ironic is that you don’t see the significance if this and it doesn’t make you question your materialism.
How long do you think if is till your favorite secular and prosperous Azerbaijan begins producing people like GR en masse?
Nah – my father stood in line and filled out a bunch of forms and did things legally. I was six years old and along for the ride.
If you want to see invaders, it’s these guys:
https://news.usni.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/649019.jpg
I’m just what the classical jurists called a Muslim bi-dhimmat il-kaafir (a Muslim dhimmi).
Trust me bro, that has been waaaay oversold to you guys by Zionists. Traditional Sunni people like me don’t do taqiyyah (unless maybe you stick a gun to my head – and even then the more laudable option is to accept becoming a martyr – read our books). The Zionists want to make sure you guys never take whatever we say seriously. Which is fine – you decide who you want to believe.
The one thing that really pisses me off is that these guys have the gall to charge you for their snake oil…er books. The decent thing would be to subsidize giving them out for free – niggardly bastards.
The issue I find most disturbing is the growing trend among a lot of social-activist SJW Muslims to support the poz. The worst part is that they aren’t doing it as some taqiyyah strategy, they actually believe in it. If you have ever engaged with them about it like myself and some brothers I know – it scares the hell out of me how sincere these people are – the saving grace is that these people are hardly associated with or taking cues from traditional scholars – that would be a massive disaster and a huge crisis. And of course poz-support is a gateway to kufr (mostly atheism) – always has been.
Sweet.
Sweet.
Half sweet.
Sweet.
Man – you are on a roll there! Pretty sick and tired of having to hear about idiot Muslims doing stupid things in the West and getting coddled – let’s make it happen folks!
Two questions; 1) proselytizing (allowed or not? not that it matters much due to the internet, but just curious) and 2) what happens to your apostates? To Islam, I mean, I assume apostates to atheism are cool as beans.
Peace.
As your spiritual advisor, I must point out that you know the answer – you cannot get people around to YOUR timid and gloomy way of thinking GR. The Right has been trying to do that for the past century and the world’s highest quality people have voted by flocking to the Left en masse.
But if the Right offers an idealism to match that of the Left, then high quality people will be attracted.
Russian science, is dominated by such views on the history of Europee:
The fantastic success of Greece was caused by the hypertrophied spirit of AGON-the Greeks perceived life as a Grand competition, and sought to achieve fame in any way (this was the driving force of the grandiose rise of science and art). Then the Greek miracle ended (due to the collapse of the city states) because of pessimism and apathy. However, it was a temporary regression-in the middle ages the seeds of the ancient world (rather contrary to Christianity) germinate again, and the Renaissance means a return to the spirit of Ancient Greece (which means a new grandiose flowering of science, technology and art).
That is, Christianity is perceived as an optional (or even harmful) zigzag of history.
Very briefly: if we assume that the success of Europe is explained by the foundations laid down in the pagan ancient era, in this case, hostile to ancient paganism Christianity, was rather an inhibiting factor.
Medieval (Christian) technology had already surpassed that of the Classical world before the Renaissance (which didn’t have much to do with science). Similarly the developments in art predated the Renaissance; Art in Antwerp, for instance, was very advanced without significant influence from the rediscovery of the Classical world. I think if everything from the ancient world had been destroyed during the Middle Ages, it would have made little difference to European technological advancement, and the art would be, although different, equally sophisticated
I’m not sure that explains much…perpetual competition between aristocrats was a feature of many societies, but typically that led to nobles trying to win martial glory (often getting themselves and their men killed in the process), not to a flowering of philosophy and the arts.
And classical Athens of course to some extent transcended those aristocratic values.
I’m not exactly an expert on Renaissance thought, but that seems very doubtful to me, as far as I know most of the Renaissance wasn’t anti-Christian, or even really non-Christian.
I agree that there have always been significant anti-rational strains in Christianity that denigrated (secular) education, yet Christendom still proved to be more capable of intellectual development than most other civilizations.
Unfortunately, I don’t think it is likely Azerbaijan will en masse produce Germanic intellectuals of the type, who, although usually calm and resistant to insults, may erupt to brawls across the streets of Baku when disputing important questions such as which is the greatest of Beethoven’s late string quartets, or the correct interpretation of the final paragraph of Rilke’s 10th Duino Elegy.
But from the nationalities of this region, – after secularization and assimilation, can come civilized people of different political temperaments.
E.g. Sergey Guriyev is from this area by nationality. And our own spiritual leader, Karlin – has written yesterday he is a descendant of noble rulers of Lakia.
IIRC a great deal of Renaissance thinkers did indeed pursue Greek and Roman thought, enough that it has set a culture of “great lost civilization” into fiction. Newton’s fondness of mysticism is well known, including idealization of Hermes Trismegistus who is given various Greek and Egyptian roots. But probably the most significant thing I remember which indicated their admiration for pre-Christian thought was that I read that some Renaissance mathematicians believed that Euclid and Pythagoras had not only solved all of their mathematical challenges but that the ancients intentionally were hiding the answers in cryptic puzzles.
about the attitude to the achievements of antiquity “Bernard Chartres of the Cathedral school of Chartres, (one of the major centers of the Renaissance of the XII century.), claimed : “we are dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants”
It’s just wrong
In Russian science, this is called the “Northern Renaissance”. It is assumed that the driving forces were the same as the Italian Renaissance (or Greek miracle) – only the forms were different .
This is obviously wrong. Without Greek mathematics, astronomy and mechanics ( block, screw, water mill…) the development of Europe would be delayed for a thousand years.
This is the theory which was believed by early writing of Nietzsche.
And the end point of the Golden Age of Greece – can then be attributed to Alexander’s destruction of Thebes, which has ended the original configuration of agon between cities.
Of course, but the Greek society was absolutely unique in the scale of AGON, and unique in its direction. This is well-founded by historians. Read if you have free time:
Alexander Zaicev. Das griechische Wunder: Die Entstehung der griechischen Zivilisation
In this book, your objection is analyzed in detail.
undoubtedly, but the psychological motivation for the achievements of the Renaissance, was little related to Christianity (but very similar to the motivation of Greek philosophers or artists). Sandro Botticeli was a good Christian – but he paint Venus for reasons not related to Christianity
There have now been several genetic studies done on Egyptian mummies from various periods. They were predominantly Semitic and came across the Sinai from the Fertile Crescent. Their Black admixture was in fact lower than modern day Egyptians. Around 5-10% IIRC. I’ll let you Google the rest since you obviously need to get started on that anyways.
As I once heard someone say “even the smart ones usually have light skin”
I’m not particularly concerned about “taqqiya” for the record and find it amusing when I spot it. Crown Prince MbS’s rationalization of the Islamic conquests when being interview by The Atlantic’s Jeff (((Goldberg))) was highly amusing. Any “taqqiya” you encounter from a Mohammedan more than likely comes from a crooked merchant and has nothing to do with religion.
Compare this to the Jews gaslighting Americans that the true meaning of America is open borders.
Proselytizing not permitted, which as I understand makes it haram to live in a non-Islamic state.
White converts to Islam become legally considered Mohammedans and treated as such by the state.
Not a fan of atheism (or as Vox Day calls it, Dawkins Syndrome) but seems ditching Enlightenment era “Freedom of Religion” (quotes b/c no Mohammedans then and Jews still ghettoized and without political or civil rights) is terribly wise. Certainly don’t want to revisit the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries.
I suppose there are always salami tactics. Early America had religious tests for officeholders which seems like a reasonable start. During the Civil War there was a popular proposal to pass a Constitutional amendment to declare America a Christian nation.
Does this represent Sovok atheistic propaganda, or anti-Westernism?
Architectural techniques were essentially reinvented after their drop to a primitive level in the Dark Ages though.
But it’s not. Which scientific or technological discoveries came from the Renaissance?
But it wasn’t, it did not come from the rediscovery of Antiquity. The art was an organic development of Gothic art. It was also obviously very Christian.
Simple machines like the water mill were not even invented by the Greeks, but already existed in the Middle East. Medieval people showed themselves capable of independently developing agricultural, metallurgical and shipbuilding technology which surpassed that of the Romans or Greeks.
Thanks for the book recommendation! It’s nice to know that people in Russia are still interested in the classics.
They didn’t apply it nearly as much, preferring to study and contemplate. Compare Europe 500 BC to 500 AD little difference. 500 AD to 1500 AD enormous difference.
And Polynesian savages traveled even further around the Pacific.
Berdyaev was correct in essence:
“I am convinced that Christianity alone- made possible both positive science and technique. As long as man had found himself in communion with nature and had based his life upon mythology, he could not raise himself above nature through an act of apprehension by means of the natural sciences or technique. It is impossible to build railways, invent the telegraph or telephone, while living in fear of the demons. Thus, for man to be able to treat nature like a mechanism, it is necessary for the daemonic inspiration of nature and man’s communion with it to have died out in the human consciousness. The mechanical conception of the world was to lead to a revolt against Christianity, but it was itself the spiritual result of the Christian act of liberating man from elemental nature and its demons. When immersed in nature and communing with its inner life, man could neither apprehend it scientifically nor master it technically. This fact throws light on the whole of man’s further destiny. Christianity had freed him from subjection to nature and had set him up spiritually in the centre of the created world. This anthropocentric feeling had been foreign to the man of’classical antiquity, who had felt himself to be an inalienable part of nature. Christianity alone inspired man with this anthropocentric feeling which became the fundamental motivating power of modem times. It made modern history with all its contradictions possible,because it exalted man above nature. The recent adversaries of Christianity do not take sufficiently into account their own dependence upon this Christian principle. “
I think this view of Ancient Greece was already earlier popular in the 19th century – in the German language with men such as the young Nietzsche.
I believe it is from Nietzsche’s early essays (he has written an essay about this perhaps while he was still a professor in Switzerland), but I do not have access to the book now.
I agree here. In this day of the internet, it is pretty easy to bypass middlemen and go right to the source. Muslims ask our scholars for fatwas on various subjects all the time. If you want to know what the Islamic position is on something, simply find a reliable source and search their answers – that is unless you think our scholars do taqiyyah in answering fatwas (LOL!).
This is a great one for Hanafi rulings:
http://www.daruliftaa.com/biography (one of the scholars I have attended class under)
This is a great one for Shafi’i ones:
http://shafiifiqh.com/
No, it is fine to live there if it is part of the dhimmah contract. It would obviously be highly discouraging, and many might go to Muslim countries because of that change in rules, but it is not asking us to commit a haram act – it is simply asking us to halt a meritorious one. But like I said, a huge chunk of the people coming into Islam are doing so through independent research on the internet (of course a good chunk leaving Islam* are also due to the internet).
Nice!
Yeah – that’s the big issue you guys have to balance out. I agree this must be approached with wisdom.
Interesting – I wonder if there’s a chance that would ever happen again…
But that would simply mean joining a fairly big club of countries where there is an official (or preferred) state religion (go blue team!!!):
http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2017/10/03090603/PF_10.04.17_statereligions-00.png
Anyway, did you know it is officially against the Greek constitution to proselytize? No joke:
“The Constitution establishes the Eastern Orthodox Church of Christ (Greek Orthodox Church) as the prevailing religion, but also provides for the right of all citizens to practice the religion of their choice. While the government generally respected this right, non-Orthodox groups sometimes faced administrative obstacles or encountered legal restrictions on religious practice. The Constitution and law prohibit proselytizing and stipulate that no rite of worship may disturb public order or offend moral principles.”
https://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2007/90178.htm
Dag yo! Though I think they have not been super into enforcing it much these days since neo-pagans have started to take root there.
You’re an interesting guy with very interesting ideas. We need more people thinking out of the box. And a Swede, so I’m kind of biased towards you guys anyway.
Peace.
*So, what’s the deal on our apostates? Can we, you know…deal with them? We can make it a sport using Hanafi rules – if you make it across the border of the millet you win!
? The Christians in late antiquity and the middle ages believed just as much in demons as the pagans had…and unlike the pagans they regarded them not just as spirits that could be good, bad or neutral, but as malevolent soldiers in Satan’s host.
These over-generalized discussions about Christianity’s merits and flaws are kind of dumb imo, unlikely to be very illuminating.
6 stars in a 5 star system
You believe that devout Christians compartmentalized the faith that drove much of their lives and that their scientific pursuits could be separated from their faith?
For example, Kepler:
(article apparently written for high school students and the style matches)
https://www.space.com/35772-copernicus-vs-catholic-church-real-story.html
Going Bananas: The Real Story of Kepler, Copernicus and the Church
Paul Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University and the chief scientist at COSI Science Center
All mixed up
In modern times we neatly separate science, philosophy and religion into their nice tidy little boxes, and get annoyed when members of one box start talking about the contents of another domain. And we view the history of science as proto-scientists fighting against the Church to leave them in peace and let them do their science-y thing
However, there are two important things to remember when looking at the early history of science around the time of Copernicus and Kepler:
…What we now call science, philosophy and theology were all mixed up together.
…Kepler penned a work in defense of the Copernican model, but not on physical or mathematical grounds — Kepler’s argument was religious. He said that since the son of God was at the center of the Christian faith, the sun ought to be at the center of the universe. Ergo, heliocentrism.
Kepler’s day job was as the court astrologer for the Holy Roman Emperor. Yes: astrologer. Horoscopes and stuff. And he was way more obsessed with numerology than he should have been.
Or maybe not, since that obsession led him to develop his now-famous three laws. Convinced for quasi-spiritual reasons that the sun was at the center of the universe, he labored for years, poring over tables and tables of handwritten charts detailing the precise locations of the planets.
Kepler wasn’t just looking for a handy fitting formula; he was searching for signs of the divine. He was convinced that the heavens, being naturally closer to God, contained a sort of perfection not seen on Earth since the Garden of Eden. What’s more, if he could deduce the divine geometry of the heavens, he could look for similarities here on Earth to help predict the future.
Here’s an example. After years of continual frustration from trying ever-more Byzantine (and ever-more unsatisfactory) equations to fit the motions of the planets, Kepler gave the simple ellipse a shot. Besides working really, really well, Kepler was convinced he got it right because of the relationship between the motions of the planets and music.
Kepler found that the planets move in ellipses, not circles, around the sun. He also found that when the planets are closer to the sun, they move faster than when they’re farther away.
When it comes to the Earth, the ratio between its fastest speed and slowest speed reduces to 16/15, which is the same ratio between the notes fa and mi. Needless to say, Kepler thought this was fantastically important:
“The Earth sings Mi, Fa, Mi: you may infer even from the syllables that in this our home misery and famine hold sway.”
To Kepler, this was the clincher. Why were the heavens so perfect but the Earth so full of wretchedness? The music of the spheres tells us – it fit so perfectly! His new system wasn’t just a mathematical convenience, but a window into the mind of God and the hidden order of the universe.
Kepler was so convinced that there was some sort of hidden order in the heavens that he dug even deeper. Surely there was something that could unlock those juicy divine mysteries. After more years of laborious study, he found it: the square of a planet’s orbital period (the time it takes to get around the sun) is directly proportional to the cube of its semimajor axis (the planet’s farthest distance from the sun), and that proportion is the same for all the planets.
Why the square of the orbital period? Why not the semimajor axis to the fourth power? Kepler didn’t know and (probably) didn’t care. He found a universal constant, a single number that tied together the motions of all the planets — and the Earth.
Here, at least, was the divine music — and numerology — Kepler sought after years of labor. His model of the universe united the earthly and celestial realms in (literal) harmony, it found beautiful and simple geometric elegance in the motions of the planets, and his simple formulas for predicting planetary positions made for excellent horoscopes.
::::::::::
So scientist/theologian/astrologer was motivated by his faith and his work was the product of that faith.
Interesting, on this topic, to summarize the spirit of the most important moral and political philosopher of the Italian Renaissance, Machiavelli: belief in importance of rediscovery of Ancient Roman and Greek moral virtues; an carefully disguised and hinted understanding that religion is man-made; belief that religion can weaken men’s vitality; belief that religion can also be politically useful and to maintain order of society.
Ones that ought to be defeated, not served or placated. And could be defeated. Thus giving people control.
the world’s highest quality people have voted by flocking to the Left en masse.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by high quality people, but I don’t believe that this is accurate.
So being able to call one’s local exorcist was a prerequisite for industrialization???
One could just as well write “It is impossible to build aqueducts while living in fear of the demons”. But the pagan Romans did build aqueducts.
It seems an atheistic view.
It’s sounds like a continuum in this view, where progress is achieved when you think demons can be defeated. But then the next step surely (as in the 19th century for Europe at least), will be when you start to leave behind childish superstition about demons altogether.
There seems inherent flaws or dangers for a religious person in this narrative that Abrahamic religions are somehow more developed or advanced, because they replace many gods and spirities, with a single god. Because in such a train, it seems inevitable that the next – more advanced station – is no god.
I enjoyed Machiavelli’s Principe and Discorsi a lot, an inspiring thinker. And yes, given some of the things he wrote (religion judged by its social utility, iirc also statements like “If every Christian was like St Francis, the whole world would be exposed to the wicked”) it’s hard to regard him as genuinely Christian, even though he certainly went through the motions. But he was quite exceptional and heavily criticized, not typical for Renaissance thought. And he wasn’t just in conflict with Christian morality, but also with parts of the classical heritage (I have forgotten the details, but iirc some parts of the Principe are intended as direct counter-points to Cicero’s De officiis which had claimed the useful and the honorable could always be reconciled).
He was unusual in this regard though. His ideas were obviously very unpopular, even at the time. Erasmus, Thomas More and d’Etaples, along with most other humanists, were unusually pious. European intellectual life for the 100 years following his death was dominated by religion.
Actually, Dmitry, Nietzsche thought the golden age of Greece ended because of the rationalism introduced by Socrates 🙂
Kind of reminds you of someone on this board, doesn’t it. Its in his Birth of Tragedy.
And you are correct, the theory of the Agon was written up in one of his early essays but is also found in that book.
Nietzsche was an idiot who was enthusiastic about mutilating women’s genitalia and India’s horrible caste system. It was hilariously fitting that he got himself infected with syphilis and died a madman.
Apart from a few exceptions like our esteemed Dmitry, the only ones still interested in him today are lefties (deranged degenerates themselves), god-mongers (“an atheist who was perceptive enough to see where atheism would lead to!”) and obscurantists like yourself.
What is his writing style like in German?
I have only some translations of him. (I studied German language for a summer, but have forgotten everything.) I was recently dreaming about learning German one day – not to live in Germany (Austria/Switzerland), but simply to read some of these famous German writers.
Don’t worry, I am no fan of Nietzsche – but he was an excellent diagnostician of our modern condition, while his theory of the superman was ludicrous.
And he was not a fan of the Indian caste system – he actually used it as an example of how brutal “pure Aryans” could be.
At heart he was a deeply religious person, and he probably would not have went insane had he simply accepted this and not tried to create a secular religion out of thin air. The syphilis theory is unproven.
A tragic, pathetic figure. Still, with some good insights.
Not to be read by teenagers though.
Anatoly wrote s post recently about the Rights human capital problem.
It’s true. And its easy to see why.
Nietzsche wrote nothing after he became insane.
I have always wondered how they managed to achieve such feats, in an era where the machine gun was not invented yet and therefore the relative strengths of opposing groups was somewhat proportional to their respective sizes.
Half a dozen kebabs with AK47s can slaughter many dozens of unarmed people in a concert hall, with the latter group not even being able to take down a single assaillant.
However how can an army of a few thousand men equipped only with blades and spears force as many (or more) individuals to let themselves be crucified or impaled alive I don’t understand. At least the 6000 of so vanquished rebels could have charged their victors and be killed in the battle (while in this process killing many Romans), rather than being crucified. I really can’t fathom why many 1000s of able bodied men would have surrendered en masse to this most horrible mode of execution.
Reasonably clear, not that hard to understand (though I’m not sure that means he’s worth reading).
Mohammedans executing apostates in Christian states is a bad look and would not be permitted.
That said I would have no problem with lesser penalties, conducted of course under the framework of law including a fair trial with the right to defense counsel and the right of appeal.
A Roman Legion was a near unstoppable war machine. Perhaps the men who surrendered didn’t expect to be crucified. It wasn’t the way Rome usually treated defeated populations.
We’ll settle for automatic annulment of marriage and loss of inheritance rights.
Man, you are making it very hard for me not to support backing your imperial ascension with a Varangian-Guard-style set of loyal elite Muslim fedayeen…
Peace.
There is hope yet for the younger generation of whites 🙂
Yes but there are caveats; no – absolutely no – gay stuff on the imperial house seal/coat-of-arms like unicorns, rainbows or flowers!!!
Fedayeen ain’t going to take a bullet for House Lisa Frank.
Peace.
I had no doubt that you will appear with such a comment. I would like to inform you that the scientific views that I retold are best justified in the works of Alexander Zaitsev. Zaitsev was a believing Catholic (he was of Polish origin) and an anti-Communist. In the future, it would be better if you argue in fact, and not to denounce the enemies of the party line
And yes, I know the later Ottoman coat of arms had flowers in it – that’s what led to the downfall…
No flowers!!!
I propose the Double-Headed Eagle, given its imperial and autocratic undertones it should be very suitable for Thorfinnson’s national restoration.
I suggest some kind of crocodile theme on the imperial standard somewhere…
Seconded. I’ve personally always liked wolves…
https://i.imgflip.com/2d0zs9.jpg
…but that’s just me.
Peace.
.
Umm, I think you have a rather romantic image of our GR here.
It is s good vision, tho – you clearly yearn for a passionate cause worth fighting for, but can only imagine it being over some ‘civilized’ cultural pursuit that men in pajamas reclining in comfortable armchairs might engage in mildly animated debate over without spilling their wine.
Civilized meaning inoffensive, innocuous, lukewarm, rather boring people – not the passion of great art or great religion.
I am sure these Last Men or Last Mice are just the sort of human ideal we should all be striving for.
Who cares about Zaitsev. So Sovok propaganda did not claim something like:
That was the next step taken. It had not worked out well, as we see by Europe’s sad post-Christian history.
Just on a related note, religion is on the rise in Azerbaijan (partially due to demographics since seculars tend not to have kids, but it is also generational) The only question is, which way will it go? There are two different tensions going on there; Salafi vs traditional and Sunni vs Shiah. I’d say (from the stats I’ve seen) they are 15-20 years behind Turkey in religious sentiment and practice, inshaAllah. The one thing that could sabotage it is violence that grows out of the Sunni/Shiah divide. Also if Salafi extremists start doing stupid stuff and people associate it with religion in general.
Peace.
Talha, what purpose do the different Islamic schools of thought have (in terms of doctrines etc.) and what are the differences between the main ones? Is there crossover between Sunni and Shia in terms of schools or are they very distinct from each other?
That’s useless. Bliss has one genetic study with an African Y chromosome haplogroup of one pharaoh, which proves he was fully black, while your studies will be shown to be mostly from later periods and of small sample sizes. Sub-Saharan Africans wuz kangz ‘n’ sheet!
said:
“The man has talent, even if he says stupid shit when he’s intoxicated.
What “stupid shit” did he say?
And why was it “stupid”?
http://www.codoh.com
said:
“A better analogy might have been Nazis sacrificing millions of Jews and Slavs for their “god” of Aryan purity and supremacy”
Get serious. There is no proof of that impossible, laughable claim. None. Post it if you have it.
Holocaust Handbooks, Documentaries, & Videos
http://holocausthandbooks.com/index.php?main_page=1
Chemistry of Auschwitz / Birkenau
https://youtu.be/SUc6Y_E5zb0
The ‘6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers’ are scientifically impossible frauds.
See the ‘holocaust’ scam debunked here: http://codoh.com
No name calling, level playing field debate here: http://forum.codoh.com
Laughable.
You’ve seen too many Earth, Wind, & Fire albums.
https://is3-ssl.mzstatic.com/image/thumb/Features6/v4/53/d9/78/53d97823-d898-3c1a-22a4-250f19e7714a/dj.lbmiirfg.jpg/268x0w.jpg
http://images.45cat.com/earth-wind-and-fire-cant-let-go-cbs-2.jpg
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRFEPm0uIE9q6rRC-xKCGU03VSAm2V_Pe0z9196e7LHb5QeS4KePg
What’s wrong with civilized (parts of) Germany? – it’s how life should be.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0wkBuUezq8
Azerbaijan is considered the most disbelieving and secularized Muslim nation of all in the world. Modernization was achieved within the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.
How Baku looks.
Fortunately religious people, believing Muslims and Islamists are few in number and the secular population is the dominant and vast majority – as a result of this, it is this civilized place with a friendly atmosphere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFlK-JErebE
Well there are a couple of distinctions to be made…
The Sunni schools are four and they differ in jurisprudence – which are rules and legalities. They agree in about 75% of things, but differ on certain things which can be considered slight (how you hold your hands in the prayer) to big (can a Muslim be killed for murdering a polytheist dhimmi or only have to pay 1/3 the blood money) and everything in between. There used to be many more schools, but they died out due to lack of attention or got absorbed into the existing schools. Sunnis consider each school to be completely valid and basically hold the opinion that a rival school got the ruling wrong, but they could possibly be correct and we are right, but could possibly be wrong. Jurisprudence is what deals with the worship of the body.
The schools of Sunni creed are considered three; Athari, Ash’ari and Maturidi. The Atharis are fairly basic and generally tend to avoid speculation into theological minutiae. The Ash’aris And Maturidis tackle those issues head on and differ mostly in the semantics in how the explain an issue. Again, everyone agrees the differences are totally valid. Creed is what deals with the worship of the intellect.
The Sunnis share the same sources of Qur’an, hadith and other sources of deriving legal rules, but they differ in what they emphasize and how they interpret the texts – thus leading to the differences.
The Shiah are different in that they differ in both beliefs (enough to make them and Sunnis consider each other heterodox but not unbelievers) and sources of jurisprudence (they have their own books of hadith). Thus the foundation is quite different. Different enough that we usually attend separate mosques, but not separate enough that we differ radically; we both still pray (very similarly), fast, etc.
Sunnis and Shias don’t generally take from each other’s books, though there is some overlap. For instance, there are a few Shiah transmitters in our chains of hadith and they still utilize some Sunni books, like most Shiah seminaries use the works of Imam Taftazani (ra) – a famous Sunni theologian – when studying logic.
Hope this helps.
Peace.
There is (or was) an Islamic Party of Azerbaijan. They tried to fight against the ban of the hijab in the schools in December 2010.
The government arrested the leaders of the Islamic Party for hooliganism less than one month later – and “discovered” they were planning take over the country. As a result, they have been sent to jail for up to 12 years.
(Protesting against state secularism in Azerbaijan, is not a good idea).
https://www.trend.az/azerbaijan/society/1941923.html
It is one of the most secular, but that’s not the way it is trending. Look it up for yourself; use simple search terms like Azerbaijan Islamic Revival. That’ give you plenty to start with.
The parallels with Turkey in the 1990s is amazing. Well, they are also Turkic people so there’s that.
Peace.
Could be like when New York Times claims Russia is being taken over by religion, or Islam, etc.
https://www.quora.com/Are-Azerbaijanis-becoming-more-or-less-religious/answer/Sevinc-Abdullayeva
https://www.quora.com/How-common-is-atheism-in-Azerbaijan/answer/Rashad-Mamedli
https://www.quora.com/How-common-is-atheism-in-Azerbaijan/answer/Mammad-Hajili
–
It’s funny reading about the topic online, there are stories about how a Norwegian NGO is now attacking the Azerbaijani government for arresting people who distribute Islamic literature, and also for fining Jehovah Witnesses. But why is a Norwegian NGO in Azerbaijan – surely they have things to worry about closer in their country?
Brutality, and human sacrifice, was not restricted to S America:
Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, ‘ The world of the Huns’, 1973 Berkeley
E. A. Freeman, ‘Western Europe, In the fifth century, An Aftermath’, London 1904
Herwich Wolfram, ‘History of the Goths’, Berkeley 1988, München 1979
I think it was the corn god who needed the sacrifices. Therefore there should be some connection with sacrifices and the evolution of corn, like a sacrifice is putting a seed into ground. There is an old theory that human sacrifices are associated with agriculture in areas where water depends on rain, but then the god to whom to sacrifice should be the storm god.
Atztecs also had the theory of times: sacrifices were needed so that the times would not end and the sky not fall. There is still missing a satisfactory theory of this all. Your suggestion that the civilization would have dispensed with human sacrifices in a millennia is interesting. Maybe there is some dynamics, but it is in general odd that civilization arises in many places in so short time spell.
Lucien Febre, ´Le problème de l’incroyance au 16e siècle’, Paris, 1942, 1968
Translation ‘The problem of unbelief in the 16th century’.
I found the title somewhere, and was surprised, atheism in the 16th century ?
Well, the book is the opposite, atheism was unthinkable at the time.
So, to state that Keppler was motivated by his faith, at the time, one might say, anything was motivated by faith.
One sees this best in art of the time, biblical motives.
A present day comparison, maybe, anything is motivated by climate change.
The interesting thing about Keppler is that he did not know how heretical his planetary laws were.
Standard church teaching was Plato.
One should remove one or two zeros at the end of all very old numbers.
The concept of objective truth is relatively new
Felipe Fernández-Armesto, ‘Truth, A History and a Guide for the Perplexed’, New York 1997
Savages ?
Highly civilised people, excellent navigators
⦁ Guy Murchie, ‘Het lied van de lucht’, (Song of the sky, an exploration of the ocean of air, Boston), Bilthoven 1956
Renaissance, a fairy tale
Bertrand Gille, ‘Ingenieure der Renaissance’, Wien, 1968 (Les ingenieurs de la Renaissance, Paris, 1964)
J.Huiznga, ‘The waning of the Middle Ages, 1924, 1990, Londen (Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen)
What happens if someone is too poor to pay blood money, their family members pay or they take a loan or what?
How do these kind of things interact with the legal system? In states with Shariah law who and how is it decided which interpretation should take precedence?
Do theological institutions like Al-Azhar University have a main branch they adhere to or does it depend on the specific scholar one asks?
Do certain schools of thought predominate in certain countries or is it fairly mixed?
I’ve heard that a lot of Balkan and Turkish Muslims used to adhere to something called Bektashi Islam, is that one of the schools that died out?
And does Deobandism in the Subcontinent still exist or did it merge into another group?
Also, how do these kind of things relate to Sufism?
Thank you. That’s hilarious
The one undisputed genetic study of a known Egyptian Pharoah (and thus of all Pharoahs of that Dynasty) reveals a paternal Haplogroup that is African.
Stupid nonsense. Egyptian civilization is older than the semites, Arab or Jew. Your Hebrew ancestors may have originated in the Fertile Crescent (in what is now southern Iraq) but they ended up as slaves in African Egypt for a few centuries. Slaves speak the language of their masters. Which is why the language of the Hebrews is related to the ancient Egyptian language, which is an african language, not to the ancient languages of the Fertile Crescent. Centuries of being enslaved by the Egyptians also explains why the Hebrews practiced circumcision, which only Egyptians and Ethiopians practiced in ancient times
So the fact that the Torah/Old Testament and the Quran are both written in languages that belong to the Afro-asiatic language family, which originated in Africa, is an example of the extensive civilizational impact of Egypt.
Exactly.
Wolves have been domesticated for a long time my friend. I have a couple sitting right next to me(with me being the ring leader).
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/south-america-s-inca-civilization-was-better-skull-surgery-civil-war-doc
“South America’s Inca civilization was better at skull surgery than Civil War doctors”
Ignorance of one’s ultimate fate is indeed a possible explanation;l: say you let yourself be disarmed and subsequently put in chains, it is then going to be impossible to avoid being crucified (or otherwise barbarously murdered).
However I find this explanation unconvincing in the case of the Spartacus rebellion, for one simple reason: crucificion was the normal modus operandi to execute slaves. In fact even more than that, St Paul himself escaped crucifixion owing to his Roman citizenship (and was beheaded instead).
In the case of Assyrians it is even more puzzling as their way of dealing with the vanquished was widely known; they were even propagandizing about it.
One can observe that extreme stress (due to fear, hunger/thirst, pain) can lead to a post-shock stunning response. In that state the victim is extremely compliant. That physiological and psychological response can explain out a lot of submissive behavior after a siege, a battle, a long flight, etc.
So there were only 60 to 600 legionaries in the Roman Legions? And only 1 to 10 within a centuria?
I am sorry but that argument is entirely unconvincing.
The average IQ for Sioux Amerindians today is ~100; although their performance IQ is equal to that of the Chinese (110-113). The same is true of the Northern Cheyenne.
Keep in mind, that’s higher than most Southern European countries, some by a full standard deviation. And of course higher than Mexicans, too.
The verbal portion of IQ tests seems to be what brings them down; with strict education in concentration camps I have no doubt their average IQ would exceed that of Northern Europeans. The problem is they don’t want to go to school and don’t want to learn.
If anything, admixture with the lowest rung of European society (which explored the American frontier) would have lowered their IQ scores somewhat.
Oh, but the poor widdle children! The Aztecs were something all right, but the Mayans loved killing kiddies:
https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-americas/horrifying-history-midnight-terror-cave-belize-005783
http://www.calstatela.edu/academic/anthro/midnight-terror-cave
Mesoamerican child trafficking is NOT a new phenomenon.
A stack of empty skulls is a very prescient motif for the Skull Continent which, unknown for aeons, should have remained so.
Wait, I know! Hideously white kids:
http://library.flawlesslogic.com/biehl.htm
Watching ‘Apocolypto’ (legally) is no easy task these days. Its been memory-holed. Not available to stream anywhere. DVD copy (NTSC) on Amazon costs a bit. Its not as hard to get as ‘The Flim Flam Man’, but not easy.
Is there any standard answer- or any answer at all to the question why God/Allah allows the errors to persist uncorrected by him, given that he cares for mankind and cares about the details of faith and morals?
Yeah, I get what you are saying, but those aren’t wolves anymore – nobody calls them that.
Peace.
Hey now, what are you, some kinda Nazi? The Holocaust was the worst thing in human history and nothing, nothing, nothing, even comes close. And if you disagree, outside the US, you will go to prison for your ignorance.
Hey Talha, looks like you have a convert in the making albeit slowly. You are definitely not wasting your time on the site. Congrats!
Depends what you mean by civilized.
If you mean rising above the physical to the spiritual through great art, architecture, music, and literature, then yes. This means not being a materialist.
If you merely mean the technique of making physical life more comfortable and easy, then that is boring.
The Germans themselves seem to find your version of civilization as mere pleasant living as not worth defending – so the ideal life is one that people who live it are unwilling to defend and become gloomy and pessimistic?
The best bits of that civilized life are the old architecture and old art – so the best life is one in which we appreciate things created by people with the exact opposite mentality to us and we can no longer create?
You have interesting ideas my friend…
Lol, don’t worry, I eat too much probably-pork meat to qualify. The main reason I am asking all these questions is that Talha is accessible, friendly and some kind of religious instructor and I would have no idea where to find someone to ask this in real life.
If there was an Orthodox or Buddhist version of Talha commenting here frequently I would also be asking them questions about their religion.
LOL! People ask questions and I simply answer to the best of my ability.
God is the One who guides.
Peace.
I often compare the sacrifices against climate changes with those of the Maya’s, they sacrificed what was most dear to them, their children, we sacrifice oil, gas and coal.
The Maya sacrifices accomplished nothing, the drought continued, ours, is my opinion, also accomplish nothing, climate change will continue, as it always did.
In Europe glaciers melt, what nobody tells us is that where ice was there are ruins of buildings.
Ruins of houses also were found on high Himalaya passes, probably both date from the time the Vikings were on Greenland, green, also called Vinland, vin is wine, made from grapes.
I explained that the idea of objective truth is relatively new.
Old writers just wanted to impress readers, or honour rulers.
So one should be very cautious with old numbers.
If in the fifth century a Gothic fleet of 2000 ships is mentioned, one zero less seems probable.
Wonder if you ever visited ancient cities such as Knidos in present Turkey.
The harbours still are as they were.
Tiny.
Ephesos, one of the big ancient cities.
No bigger, I think, than present day Emmetsburgh in Iowa.
Carcassonne in southern France still has the original walls, in ten minutes one crosses the whole town from one end to another.
Walls are still to be seen, and tracable in Amersfoort Netherlands, sixteenth century.
In an hour one walks around the medieval town.
The Roman problem was defending the long frontiers, where there were no natural borders, such a mountains, seas, lakes, marshes and rivers.
Not enough manpower.
The Chinese built a wall, China did have manpower.
An illusion, see the books I mention.
” I am. The extinction and complete subversion of the evil Aztec demon-worshiping empire was one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments ”
For a somewhat different view
Hugh Thomas, ‘Rivers of Gold, The Rise of the Spanish Empire’, London 2003
Ward Churchill, ‘A Little Matter of Genocide, Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present’, San Francisco 1997
Charles C. Mann, Ancient Americans, Rewriting the History of the New World’, 2005, London, ( 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, 2005, New York)
Henry Kamen, ‘The Spanish Inquisition, A Historical Revision’, London 1997
I think the idea of a sacrifice gave us the crops.
That is, how did early humans selectively breed wild plants to better crops? They did not know of genes and before they started breeding plants, they probably did not know that plants can be bred by selection. Europeans had tamed a wolf to a dog, but it may be that wolves tamed themselves and there was no conscious selection by humans.
The key to plant breeding was the sacrifice: sacrifice the best plants by not eating them but by offering them to the mother deity by burying them to the ground. This process, if continued long enough, creates cultivated crops out of wild species. Always sacrifice the best and eat only the worse. Thus, we find sacrifice among agriculturalists. As children are the most valuable, this idea leads to sacrifice of children. That does not work, but is a consequence of a working idea of plant breeding.
This idea worked with plants, but it does not work with animals. With animal breeding, there is another idea: separate the best, the chosen must not mix with the non-chosen. This is also a religious idea, included in Judaism and some other religions that arguable come from herders. This idea works well with humans (apart of occasional persecutions), separation creates a tightly knit group.
Mayas sacrificed their children to get rain. This is a fairly reasonable development from sacrifice to the earth deity: if the main deity changes to the sky deity (a change associated with a shift form matriarchal to patriarchal society), then sacrifices go to the sky deity and ask for rain. It did not work, of course.
Levantine sacrifice of the eldest son is understandable as a way to avoid a population collapse in a polygamous society: without removing the eldest son, he inherits all women and the effective male population size drops too low causing mutational overload and population collapse. The sacrifice creates competition between males and the best male wins, not the oldest.
These four I understand in these ways, but the present article raised the problem of Aztecs and other American Indians. Aztecs sacrificed humans in order that the times would not end and before them human sacrifices were given to the corn god. I do not think meat eating was a major factor (it was a major factor in New Guinea, but there all large animals were hunted to extinction). This here is something different, and it may be connected with the special difficulties of breeding corn out of the wild plant. It could also have an association with the sacred ball game, also connected with human sacrifice. But I cannot see this connection in the way of the four that I mentioned. Somewhere there is the solution to this puzzle.
Correct. And it as this society in Europe, so strongly imbued with Christian faith, that produced humanity’s scientific miracle.
It is not a coincidence.
I think that you exaggerate, it is only most western European countries and Canada, Oz, NZ, USA.
Was going to raise those big edible rodents (if ever in Peru, want to try them), the potato (even bigger influence on history than maize), and lamas but noticing the topic was ‘Mezoamerica’, so off-topic.
On three serious points, though, it is noteworthy that all of the city and monument-building civilisations from what is now Mexico and what is now Peru were short-lived, in terms of history, and not just from Spanish conquest, it was an old pattern.
IIRC, Macchu Picchu had been abandoned or wiped out long before the Spanish incursion.
From reading and pictures (photographs), I think that some tribes in what is now the S-W U.S.A. had a more lasting model, small-scale towns, no human sacrifice or enslavement of neighbours, and a high aesthetic level.
Forgetting the third, tired.
Just a plug for Graham Hancock’s trilogy “War God” about Cortez encountering and defeating the Aztecs. Based on historical source documents with some fictional elements. It’s a great read.
https://grahamhancock.com/wargod/
Zionist / hasbarist Rob Reiner Tor doesn’t want free speech on his absurdly impossible ‘holocaust’ fantasies. Notice he doesn’t even try to refute what I post …. because he cannot. Yet he calls me a troll. LOL
The ‘holocaust’ storyline is one of the most easily debunked narratives ever contrived. That is why those who question it are arrested and persecuted. That is why violent, racist, & privileged Jewish supremacists demand censorship. What sort of truth is it that denies free speech and the freedom to seek the truth? Only liars demand censorship.
The ‘6M Jews, 5M others, & gas chambers’ are scientifically impossible frauds.
See the ‘holocaust’ scam debunked here: http://codoh.com
No name calling, level playing field debate here: http://forum.codoh.com
No study Lynn lists has a result even approaching that. Their SAT scores don’t suggest that either.
This is an interesting piece. Some comments rather than criticisms.
Susceptibility to disease is often a function of malnutrition. The Black Death struck medieval Europe at a point when burgeoning populations but a lack of burgeoning agricultural production meant that malnutrition was widespread. Conversely, not one crowned head of state died of the Bubonic Plague. It was a disease that cut a swathe through the malnourished peasantry of the time; and while the plague continued to recur — right up until the beginning of the twentieth century — it never exacted the toll it did in the fourteenth century. The same is true for other diseases: typhus ravaged concentration camp populations, for example.
However, I find the notion that there may have been a connection between the relatively large size of Mesoamerican cities and an absence of epidemic diseases intriguing.
Off-topic
Trump and Putin have agreed to a summit in Helsinki on July 16th.
A transcript of the G7 meeting was allegedly released to Axios: https://www.axios.com/donald-trump-foreign-policy-europe-nato-allies-worried-bd1e143a-e73a-415b-b688-d18ab2d902e7.html
Noteworthy:
That said I’m not that optimistic about the summit for the simple reason that almost everyone in DC other than Trump is now hysterically opposed to Russia, and Russophobia is codified in law which Trump can’t overturn.
And lol at Eurocucks:
As opposed to…?
said:
“Macchu Picchu had been abandoned or wiped out long before the Spanish incursion.”
Absolutely correct. And the reason it was built in the first place was for an Elitist Only save haven.
And what the unhinged left rarely tells anyone is that number of Spaniards in Peru at any given time were no more than 200. Because the brutal, human sacrificing, slave keeping Incas were hated by the other subjugated, enslaved tribes. Hence the Spaniards found willing allies everywhere.
Notice that the left always tries the ‘European disease’ canard, while ignoring the indigenous diseases.
And there are Muslims who drink alcohol. They’re still Muslim, but have a weakness in that regard. One is not expected to be perfect – everyone has their pet sins. One is simply expected to recognize Who sets the rules and to try.
No way – I am a student. I have been learning under scholars (part time) for years and for a particular school (Hanafi). The only ones my teachers have given me permission to teach are young boys in the basics of the religion.
My wife is very close to getting her alimiyyah degree though in the Hanafi school, so she will be qualified to teach for your average adult what they need to navigate through most of their life. Not give fatwas or anything (you need extra years of specialization for that), just basic guidance.
Peace.
That’s right! Anyone who questions 6-gorillion killed should go to jail. Case closed.
Some quibbles.
First off the “corn deity” who/what ever that was if it was a thing, was not some aberration. ALL Aztec deities and all Mayan deities required human sacrifice in one form or another. Human sacrifice was holistic in meso-american religions.
Secondly, not sure about Maya and Aztec but what I was reading about the Pueblo and ancestral Pueblo, the Uto-Aztecan language group cultures among the Pueblo who were associated most heavily with the cannibalism were matrilineal, not patrilineal (the Tanoan groups of Pueblo were supposedly patrilineal). The source I read claiming this also claimed, if it makes any difference, the Tanoan were endogamous while the Uto-Aztecans were exogamous, endogamy was typical of patrilineal types in the old world.
Finally, plant breeding. The idea of sacrificing the best would only even possibly be relevant with crops where you ate the part you propagate from. I will grant you corn for sure and possibly potatoes (I know they can be propagated from tubers but I assume they also have seed) are like this. However examples from the Americans (Amazon) that would be contrary are bananas, pitaya, and pineapple.
Lithic hunter-gathering types from the Amazon jungle have been selectively breeding those plants for millennia, and the practice was simply to propagate from the best, biggest, and most delicious fruits. They may not have known about genes or selective pressures but I bet they knew about heredity, that traits ran in family lines and apples don’t fall far from trees so to speak. Bananas and pineapple are actually most readily propagated clonally, since both plants produce new growth clones offshooting from the plant after fruiting which only occurs once per growth point. Pitaya is ridiculously easy to clone from cuttings, and is also known to be propagated by seed in the stool (the seeds come out the other end with plenty of fertilizer nearby).
So I would think selective breeding was known to them even if they did not know what the mechanisms were.
‘It is not a coincidence.’
The potential logical flaw in citing one instance and asserting that it wasn’t coincidence seems obvious. Mind, I’m all for the inherent dynamism of post-classical European civilization — I’m just not convinced it’s necessarily a function of Christianity alone. After all, Ethiopia has been Christian for over a thousand years. It hasn’t noticeably been a powerhouse of technological innovation.
That’s correct because Lynn never listed any studies on Cheyenne or Sioux Amerindians which I am referring to.
But it has been more advanced than the rest of sub-Saharan Africa.
It was a combination of Christianity and people with a certain general temperament and intellectual abilities. Both factors were necessary but neither was sufficient on its own.
Portuguese colonists introduced banas to America in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Andrei,
I recall my third point.
ossuaries.
If you have not read it, read the parts where Edward Gibbon mentions ancient temples replaced with temples to the bones of martyrs. It twas real.
Gibbon is far too sympathetic to musselmen, but none of the jerks claiming that hhs work is worthless have ever read it, and academics claiimg greeater insight are liars.
Are you talking about this? (unfortunately I can’t get it on sci-hub)
https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/dissertations/AAI9925492/
It says that the Cheyenne’s performance IQ is higher than average but that the Full-scale IQ is (contrary to your comment) significantly lower.
Man, you are putting me to work!
Correct, or tribe. This is one of the wisdoms behind why inheritance laws are fixed. Those relatives that are financially likely to benefit from your success are on the hook to be liable for your failures. It incentivizes the extended family to raise their children well.
If your family is too destitute as a whole, then ultimately the public treasury takes care of it or charitable organizations.
The qualified groups of scholars decide what rules to follow. Usually you have the official institute of a Grand Mufti and him and his support staff (also scholars) decide on the big stuff while local scholars in more local jurisdictions decide on the more local stuff. There are appeals processes similar to what is in the West.
There are also unofficial muftis that are even more qualified than the Grand Mufti, but the sovereign has the prerogative to decide the scholars they want to follow to guide the ship of state. For instance, the Abbasid Caliphate chose to follow the Hanafi school in most matters. The Shafi’i scholars were doing their job and issuing rulings left and right, and they were simply ignored…until the Ayyubids and Mamlukes came along.
And it’s not a perfect system – people screw up:
http://seekershub.org/blog/2012/08/what-is-a-fatwa-who-can-give-one-by-sheikh-musa-furber-washington-post/
Both actually. An institution like al-Azhar has scholars specializing in all the schools and they have bodies that can decide what might be the best rulings out of the various schools given a certain circumstance or – importanatly – deal with a new matter that is unprecedented (in vitro fertilization or stem cell research, etc.). Al-Azhar has a weird balance they have to do. Egyptians follow the Shafi’i school as well as the Hanafi school due to historical mixture, but much of the legal corpus is inherited from when the Ottomans were in charge (following the Hanafi school) and you can’t just overwrite everything. So generally, what I have observed is that Egyptians tend to be Shafi’i in private matters, but follow the Hanafi school in public legal issues (marriage, tort, etc.).
Even a country like Jordan where practically everyone follows the Shafi’i school, can’t escape from Ottoman (Hanafi) legal heritage.
And of course, the vast majority of the rules have zero to do with Shariah – parking violations, elevator safety codes, water purification standards, medical board certifications, etc. Muslim scholars don’t get involved with that stuff nor should they.
Depends on where you are – this map is fairly accurate:
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-SzLR81tgEnw/WQSRZnLhj8I/AAAAAAAABVw/VAihzcJo30oFg9ng95FlPutDRc0wPT7lQCLcB/s1600/islamic%2Bschools%2Bmap.jpg
No, it was a Sufi order (a heterodox one) often associated with some of the military elite (groups like the Janissaries). It died out just because orthodoxy became more and more prominent.
Big time. Deoband is simply just a school like Al-Azhar, Nadwat ul-Ulema, etc. – they tend to be a little bit more cautious about curbing anything that looks to be heterodox doctrine or behavior (for which they get mistaken as being Salafi), but they are totally within the Sunni spectrum of views. Sunnis have always had differences of opinion and approach.
So Sufism is basically the inner dimension of Islamic worship – basically it was defined well by the Sufi-scholar Shaykh Ahmad Zarruq (ra) as; developing sincere inner direction towards God.
So, a man could be performing the daily prayers and thinking about the subway sandwich he will order afterwards or about the shoes he plans to buy, etc. The goal of Sufism is very simple actually as defined in a hadith:
“To worship Allah as if you see Him, for even though you do not see Him, He sees you.” – reported in practically all of the books of hadith
The Sufi-scholars used to say; any moment spent being forgetful of Allah is a moment spent in unbelief.
But the term Sufis can cover a bunch of people; anyone from the very orthodox and pious Muslims to those involved in heterodox practices and beliefs and even non-Muslims. All claim to be Sufis – so when you ask about Sufism, you have to be specific about it to derive any benefit.
For instance, the Sufi order I belong to is very orthodox and many of its initiates are Muslim scholars themselves. We don’t have any strange practices, we basically do a lot of silent reflection/meditation and remembrance of God. We are so low key, we could be doing our stuff in the middle of a Salafi-Wahhabi mosque and nobody would pay us any mind.
This is a fairly good and concise article on the phenomenon:
http://www.oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t125/e2260
Again, hope this helps.
Peace.
I’ve read ‘1491’, and it’s a surprisingly balanced book, certainly without the Black Legend bullshit you’re perpetuating. It makes the case that Old World diseases conquered the Indians, not evil Spanish trickery.
They are still after Mel? Or they do not like the Christian message?
Bacon is the most convincing evidence for the superiority of American civilization.
Well, there certainly is no exact answer because only He knows the wisdom behind why He does what He does. We can certainly glean some insights though by bearing certain principles in mind:
1) He does whatever He wills and no one is entitled to question Him.
2) Creation (the universe) is other than Him, the manifestation of imperfection is to be assumed.
3) The choice to believe or disbelieve is a package deal, it’s up to everyone to decide and reap the consequences of their choice. That some people will make the wrong choice is a given:
“And had your Lord willed, those on earth would have believed – all of them, entirely. Then, [O Muhammad], would you compel the people in order that they become believers?” (10:99)
4) This world is a test. Being such, some will fail and some will succeed.
5) God does not regard all of mankind equally; some He has declared His beloved and His friends and others He has declared as rebellious and His enemies. He provides for both and often even provides for His enemies far more than He provides for His friends, but that should not delude us into assessing the situation incorrectly. The reality of where everyone stands vis-a-vis the choices they made, will be manifest in the afterlife.
6) People make mistakes and sins – not all mistakes and sins are on the same level; He has declared that some He will forgive and some He will not.
I hope that helps.
Peace.
Also, if you want a good source for a very concise (within 200 pages) and authoritative view of the subject, I would highly recommend this book (which is fairly inexpensive):
https://turath.co.uk/shop/islam-and-politics/
Here is a sample of the table of contents:
https://turath.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Islam-and-Politics-sample-pages-.pdf
It covers a high-level understanding of the basic outlines of how Islam influences government. It is written from a classical/traditional viewpoint as well as the practical/pragmatic one that takes our current environment (nation-state, post-WW2, etc.) into consideration.
The author is one of the top scholars in the Muslim world and served as Grand Mufti of Pakistan and was involved in negotiating the integration of Shariah codes into governance. So he has firsthand practical knowledge about how these things work.
Peace.
Selective breeding has been known long as is the idea of agriculture and animal breeding, but how did sacrifice start and why is it associated with agriculture?
Sacrifice (plant, animal or human) is rare in hunter-gatherer societies. It is common in agricultural societies. Human sacrifice is most common in societies where rain water was needed, not irrigation by rivers. It has been suggested that it is because of the uncertainty of rain. Agricultural societies also gazed stars and have the world tree myth, which should be the Polar Star myth. That myth naturally leads to the concept of times: the Polar star changes over time. The concept of times includes the end of the times and a catastrophe at the end of the times, which often includes a sacrifice.
“ALL Aztec deities and all Mayan deities required human sacrifice in one form or another. Human sacrifice was holistic in meso-american religions.” This is true. Most of the humans were sacrificed to the sun god (tribal god) Huitzilopochtli, but humans were sacrificed to most gods. The Aztec corn god was Centeotl, but seems that Aztecs did not sacrifice humans to this god. In Palenque, there were the Maya gods the Feathered Serpent and the Maize God as the main gods depicted in the buildings and there I think the sacrifices were for the Maize God, but I am not sure. However, let facts not destroy a fine theory in so hazy area as the origin of religion. Sacrifice started from something and has a connection to agriculture, so the god of agriculture must have originally been there.
It is interesting that endogamous groups should be less cannibalistic than exogamous, it does not fit to Kevin MacDonald’s phobia of endogamous groups. (Matrilinear more cannibalistic? Bonobos do not count matrilinearly or patrilinearly but females are higher in hierarchy and they are peaceful apes.) The New World is obviously very different, no wonder we worry about the New World Order.
I know I wrote a bit rubbish, but sometimes it is nice to do so.
Things are looking good for Russia: price of oil is up, the World Cup is a big success, and Putin is getting a summit with Trump…
I get annoyed at claims like this-that-or-the other ancient city had 250,000 citizens. REALLY? Give me modern-style census data please. Yes, accurate data. No, we have none for ancient societies.
There are plenty of excitable claims that ancient cities, civilizations, or even primitive hunter-gatherers had supersized massive populations comparable to modern times. There’s a phenomenon akin to this when ancient scholars write about warfare. The ancient writers always claim that so-and-so’s army was really, really, big, like several hundred thousand and even the millions, and from what we know of logistics today this is impossible.
In modern scholarship there is a similar phenomenon. Some prof wants a grant. He has to persuade some committee that what he’s doing is actually important, so he exaggerates. He claims X, the city or civilization he is studying, was super-massive, similar to modern cities in size, a big deal in the entire ancient world compared to everywhere else at the time, and therefore super-important, so that it would be a horrible crime if the committee turned down the funding of such obviously important research, blah, blah, blah.
Tenochtitlan has 45 remaining public building, most of them palaces and temples. If every ruler decided to build his own palace and temple to “make a monument to himself and his legacy,” a quirk that all egotistical rulers are prone to everywhere, that would mean layer after layer of accumulated building being produced every generation, but it does NOT mean they were all in use at any one time, or that Tenochtitlan had a large population at all. Tenochtitlan is the accumulation of hundreds of years of cultural detritis, nothing more than that.
Great Britain has about 700 castles still standing. Many others are in ruin. If all we knew about Great Britain were its castles, some yo-yo scholar would be saying, “Oh my God! I can’t imagine a place where 700 different armies were fighting each other all at the same time! They must have had a super massive population to support all those armies, etc.”
Tenochtitlan was a nasty place, but its importance is very likely exaggerated. Here’s a link to a paper that says it was more like 50,000. http://anth.la.psu.edu/documents/evans_2013_tenochtitlan
Well, it seems easy enough to calculate which of the two parts of your formula for a successful civilization was lacking for the Ethiopians, for I don’t think that their Christian religious zeal has ever been in question. So, it seems that the ‘out of Africa’ paradigm (and its several variants) that is pretty much orthodox dogma today, indicates that as human beings moved out of Africa and their skin tone mellowed to whiter tones, due to the colder and less sun soaked environments that they acquired, for some reason their intelligence increased? I wonder why?…
Speaking of the World Cup it’s halftime in the England vs Belgium game. Half the players on the field are non-white, mostly african. The team of France is majority african. All 3 teams have made it to the round of 16. France is one of the favorites to win the Cup.
Huh, I did not know that I thought it was American and plantains were old world. But apparently not, and there is no clear distinction between bananas and plantains.
The scientific name for pineapple, which definitely comes from the amazon, is Ananas, which comes from the Amazonian (tupi) ananas, nanas, and mananas meaning variations on “good fruit” or “delicious”. I thought bananas was also a derivative, but apparently etymologically it may come from some asian or african term.
I know the dragonfruit (pitaya or pitahaya) and papaya are south/central american and spread to asian and africa.
The era of rapid progress in shipbuilding, firearms and printing
Any phenomenon is the development of something previous. But realism and the turn to glorify the beauty of people – meant the retreat of medieval Christianity
This is not Christian art
http://www.arteveryday.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/211.jpg
The first written mention (as well as the first archaeological finds) belong to the to the “classical” ancient world.
These technologies have developed based on the achievements of the ancient world (not independently). Christianity for this development was not necessary. If Europe did not become Christian, Europe would still develop technologically. Perhaps at a faster pace.
It may be orthodox dogma but it is based on nothing really, not anymore. The original evidence that suggested it has mostly been overturned by new evidence. It’s a theory.
An article like this one can make me cry. I am a teacher in a technical college, and what I witness in the pupils seeking us, is a simplified knowledge on almost anything.They can not spell, they hardly know syntax, they annot do math “in the head” , they are unable to formulate a problem in a mathematical expression, theey are ignorant of “basic” physical laws and rules and they think that Google is the solution to any problem. And of course they cannot use a foreign language.
But they know how to find porn on the internet.
I only have to endure a few years more of this train-wreck, then I retire, thank something.
OK. Ergo, Ashkenazi Jews are Semites because our paternal Haplogroups are Semitic (60-70%, including me per 23andMe). But if you look at everything else (autosomal dna, mitochondria) Ashkenazis are 55-65% European… Heck, don’t half of all Black Americans have NW Euro Y chromosomes. Are Blacks really English/Irish? Are dark brown Mestizos European Spaniards?
Egyptians are not older than Sumer. Civilization started at the other end of the Fertile Crescent. Whether civilization spread to Egypt or arose there independently I don’t know. Yes, I assume there would be African influence. Regardless, the main “racial” stock of Egyptians (at least the well-preserved rulers) was not African. This isn’t history or cultural influence, it’s just genetic, scientific evidence.
I’m not sure what studies you’re looking at. Maybe Mossad has hacked my Google so all I see are the studies showing Ancient Egyptians were closest to Bronze Age populations of the Eastern Med.
I’m sorry Bantus didn’t build the pyramids (or really much of anything, for that matter). But hey, there’s Jazz.
Move to Russia, they can do all of the above, and also find porn on the internet.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0UjeiqueDM
They even are as kind as to share it with everyone:
https://gizmodo.com/5785446/a-man-is-going-to-prison-for-hacking-a-billboard-to-play-porn-nsfw
Probably my favorite “Russian hacker” story.
Reality check:
Christianity did not originate in Europe. The nations that have been Christian the longest, Armenia and Ethiopia, had no scientific miracle.
There is no STEM in the Bible. Not even a hint of it.
Correlation is not causation. Besides there is far more correlation to the contrary. For example: the peak of Christianity in Europe, the Dark Ages, was it’s most backward period in science and technology, while the greatest scientific and technological progress has occurred in the post-Christian Enlightenment Age. And in Asia the most Christian nation, the Philippines, is among the most backward in STEM while the least Christian nation, Japan, is the most advanced.
You won’t find many Christians in Silicon Valley or any other collection of cutting-edge scientists and technologists.
Capture people, tie them up and then do with them as you will.
Despite modern technology, the Mongols probably still hold the world record for most people killed in the shortest amount of time.
In multiple cases they captured a city, bound the inhabitants, distributed them among their soldiers and then at the signal everybody chopped heads.
This is well documented, with the only real issue being how many people were in the city so treated. Records of the time talk about 1M+, but this is probably not true, as cities of such size were really, really scarce back then.
But they probably did this to a good many cities of 100,000+ and quite possibly one or more of 250,000. So that’s 100k to 250k people dead in a few minutes. Multiple times.
Hiroshima, Hamburg and Tokyo weren’t that efficient. Hiroshima was about 150,000 total, but only about half died on the first day. Hamburg was around 50,000. Tokyo was perhaps 100,000. Auschwitz supposedly reached peak “production” of about 20,000 in 24 hours.
There is a commonly believed myth that you need “industrial methods” to kill a lot of people quickly. You don’t. All you need is sharp blades and a lot of willing killers..
The Semitic languages, all of them, come from the Arabian peninsula. Various waves of out-migration brought the languages that developed into Akkadian, Assyrian, Aramean, Hebrew, etc.
There is no consensus as to where the Afro-Asiatic family of languages originated. It may have been in Africa or the Levant.
The Afro-Asiatic language family is of african origin. The oldest written record of it is found in Egypt. The Levantines under Egyptian rule for centuries hence the language legacy
Rather Jacob Burckhardt
Northern Europeans handily beat the Mongols in massive slaughter: in 6 short years they killed tens of millions less than 80 years ago.
As for efficiency in killing nothing comes close to the nukings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: tens of thousands killed in a split second.
America gave many fruits and vegetable most people are not aware of. But Asia is even a bigger source. It is not about available plant diversity but about humans who domesticated various species that were available. It is all about culture/civilization. It seems that not that much came from Africa. Even manioc in Africa is South American cassava. South America and Mesoamerica were under European ‘management’ since early 1500’s while Africa only since mid 1900s. Europeans made a lot of improvements. Even turkeys eaten on Thanksgiving by Pilgrims were most likely domesticate turkey variety from Mexico via Spain and England that were brought to Massachusetts in 1600’s. Potatoes from Peru also made it via Europe. Sunflowers came back to America after being improved in Russia.
These had nothing to do with the Renaissance, except occuring at roughly the same time
Realism (in a sense of depicting things more realistically, not in the choice of subject matter) developed in religious art, in Christian Italy and Antwerp, taking Christian subjects. The people painted in religious art were much more attractive, in my opinion, than the ugly old women Rembrandt painted. I personally find the endless Dutch paintings of old women, men in black clothing, flat landscapes, cows, flowers and dead animals very boring, but perhaps this is a matter of personal taste.
They were based on the low level of technology in these fields that existed during the Dark Ages.
It is not as if Christianity cut short a thriving Classical culture. Great Classical literature was already essentially over by the adoption of Christianity, and their technology had plateaued.
“From writers of late antiquity, especially Caesarina and Boethius, the idea of harmony of the spheres was inherited by the medieval West and for centuries remained one of the few representations associated with the name of Pythagoras. Later, the picture of the universe, which is full of divine harmony, attracted many Renaissance poets and thinkers. Kepler was more interested in the idea of celestial harmony than any other astronomers of the New time . However, this idea appears in his highly modified form. Kepler didn’t believe in the real music of the spheres and looking for the harmonic ratio, not in the distances of the planets to the Sun, and between their lowest and highest angular velocity. But most of all, Kepler was distinguished from the former adepts of this idea by the fact that he was not satisfied with the approximate results. During his search for Kepler, based on the exact observations of Tycho Brahe, tried and discarded many options until finally formulated in his “Harmony of the world” the famous law: the squares of the periods of rotation of any two planets are proportional to the cubes of their average distances to the Sun. It is this law that has become, perhaps, the most valuable result of the centuries-old development of the Pythagorean idea.”
Л.Я. Жмудь. Наука, философия и религия в раннем пифагореизме
Please dont publish this comment.
There is more to the human being and the human soul than STEM alone. Also correlation does not prove causation (as you said). China and East Asia looks like it is going to do very well in STEM in the coming future. Is that necessarily a good thing for the world?
Iceland FTW!
Also: Kazakhstan is hostile to religion?
These events are just part of the Renaissance. Technical progress was driven by competitive spirit and the pursuit of glory , not by Christian ideas of the killing of the flesh and the salvation of the soul. This is except that the ancient philosophers were the authors of the idea of printing in typesetting and transatlantic voyages to America. Also great geographical discoveries were based on ancient achievements in cartography and astronomy. Round Earth is not a Christian idea.
If we imagine that Christianity disappeared in the 2nd century ad, what would happen to Europe? Perhaps Europeans (without Christianity) would become even more violent and bloodthirsty. Almost certainly-less religious fanaticism. Science and technology? Any positive influence of Christianity on these areas is impossible to see.
The cause is a complex question but differences in measured IQ, brain size, brain metabolism, and genetic underpinning are well-established.
Probably several factors are involved – Neanderthal ancestry and increasingly complex societies requiring higher intellectual capacity and come to mind.
Society can drive evolution. This society of people, who spend much of their time diving (a social position), have evolved larger spleens to enable them to spend up to 13 minutes underwater without breathing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3fOf5YZI-Q
It makes sense that peoples who have lived in complex urban social environments for hundreds or thousands of years have likewise developed greater cognitive ability (and altered temperament, such as reduced level of impulsive violence).
It was hardly unthinkable (it certainly wasn’t to, say, Anselm), it just wasn’t intellectually respectable.
Probably wouldn’t recover from the barbarian invasions. Or recover much more slowly.
To the willfully blind.
http://blogs.nature.com/soapboxscience/2011/05/18/science-owes-much-to-both-christianity-and-the-middle-ages
This week’s guest blogger is James Hannam, he has a PhD in the History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge and is the author of The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution (published in the UK as God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science).
Few topics are as open to misunderstanding as the relationship between faith and reason. The ongoing clash of creationism with evolution obscures the fact that Christianity has actually had a far more positive role to play in the history of science than commonly believed. Indeed, many of the alleged examples of religion holding back scientific progress turn out to be bogus. For instance, the Church has never taught that the Earth is flat and, in the Middle Ages, no one thought so anyway. Popes haven’t tried to ban zero, human dissection or lightening rods, let alone excommunicate Halley’s Comet. No one, I am pleased to say, was ever burnt at the stake for scientific ideas. Yet, all these stories are still regularly trotted out as examples of clerical intransigence in the face of scientific progress.
Admittedly, Galileo was put on trial for claiming it is a fact that the Earth goes around the sun, rather than just a hypothesis as the Catholic Church demanded. Still, historians have found that even his trial was as much a case of papal egotism as scientific conservatism. It hardly deserves to overshadow all the support that the Church has given to scientific investigation over the centuries.
That support took several forms. One was simply financial. Until the French Revolution, the Catholic Church was the leading sponsor of scientific research. Starting in the Middle Ages, it paid for priests, monks and friars to study at the universities. The church even insisted that science and mathematics should be a compulsory part of the syllabus. And after some debate, it accepted that Greek and Arabic natural philosophy were essential tools for defending the faith. By the seventeenth century, the Jesuit order had become the leading scientific organisation in Europe, publishing thousands of papers and spreading new discoveries around the world. The cathedrals themselves were designed to double up as astronomical observatories to allow ever more accurate determination of the calendar. And of course, modern genetics was founded by a future abbot growing peas in the monastic garden.
But religious support for science took deeper forms as well. It was only during the nineteenth century that science began to have any practical applications. Technology had ploughed its own furrow up until the 1830s when the German chemical industry started to employ their first PhDs. Before then, the only reason to study science was curiosity or religious piety. Christians believed that God created the universe and ordained the laws of nature. To study the natural world was to admire the work of God. This could be a religious duty and inspire science when there were few other reasons to bother with it. It was faith that led Copernicus to reject the ugly Ptolemaic universe; that drove Johannes Kepler to discover the constitution of the solar system; and that convinced James Clerk Maxwell he could reduce electromagnetism to a set of equations so elegant they take the breathe away.
Given that the Church has not been an enemy to science, it is less surprising to find that the era which was most dominated by Christian faith, the Middle Ages, was a time of innovation and progress. Inventions like the mechanical clock, glasses, printing and accountancy all burst onto the scene in the late medieval period. In the field of physics, scholars have now found medieval theories about accelerated motion, the rotation of the earth and inertia embedded in the works of Copernicus and Galileo. Even the so-called “dark ages” from 500AD to 1000AD were actually a time of advance after the trough that followed the fall of Rome. Agricultural productivity soared with the use of heavy ploughs, horse collars, crop rotation and watermills, leading to a rapid increase in population.
It was only during the “enlightenment” that the idea took root that Christianity had been a serious impediment to science. Voltaire and his fellow philosophes opposed the Catholic Church because of its close association with France’s absolute monarchy. Accusing clerics of holding back scientific development was a safe way to make a political point. The cudgels were later taken up by TH Huxley, Darwin’s bulldog, in his struggle to free English science from any sort of clerical influence. Creationism did the rest of the job of persuading the public that Christianity and science are doomed to perpetual antagonism.
It is a great thing for humanity. Mars must be terraformed.
Well, it’s there:
“Article 62
The Evangelical Lutheran Church shall be the State Church in Iceland and, as such, it shall be supported and protected by the State.
This may be amended by law.”
https://www.government.is/publications/legislation/lex/?newsid=89fc6038-fd28-11e7-9423-005056bc4d74
It’s very specific to name Lutheran Church – probably goes back to the day when Danes were in charge and apparently pushed it officially:
“In the year 1551 the last Catholic bishop of Iceland Jón Arason was beheaded in the North of the country for refusing to convert to Protestantism and recognize the Danish king. With the beheading, the history of the Catholic Church in Iceland came to an end. For the next three hundred years, there ceased to be Catholics in Iceland. Things started to change on the 5th June 1849, when Denmark got a new constitution and for the first time religious freedom became part of this new constitution.”
https://nome.unak.is/wordpress/09-1/c66-interviews-memoirs-and-other-contributions/regaining-iceland-for-the-catholic-church-in-the-mid-19th-century-3/
Very likely, many of the old Communist Central Asian countries are still hostile to religion, though it is changing gradually. Turkey (as a secular country) was officially hostile to Islam until fairly recently.
Peace.
Pfffshshsh. This all sounds good until some doofus settler accidentally goes into a cave and awakens the dormant advanced alien ant species after their millennia of slumber. Then we’ll see who terraforms who!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lcUHQYhPTE
Remember that I warned you all first.
Peace.
Wow.
Sumerians were not semites you ignoramus.
The latest about the origins of the Ashkenazi Jews is that they were Turks, Greeks, Romans who were converted to Judaism by Iranian Jews. Whatever their origins the fact remains that the two ashkenazi Jews whose names will be longest remembered are Einstein and Marx. What did they have in common? They both rejected Judaism and they both looked part-african. Their doppelgängers would be found among the mixed race populations of MENA and the Americas. Perhaps that’s the genetic legacy of the Jewish enslavement in Egypt? Quite a few Jews still sport a soft Afro.
Until the time of Herodotus and Aristotle the Egyptians still looked very much african, for that’s who they were equated with by the ancient Greeks. No one ever compared the ancient Egyptians to Levantines or Persians or Anatolians or Greeks.
Interesting, I had been unaware of that– Azerbaijan is certainly a shocker. “Hostility to religion” can hardly be very intense in these cases?
All the Norse countries have an official religion (the same one, I think) except Sweden– shows where the real Vikings are, I guess. 🙂
There is going to be a major dispute here: Arabs generally behead with the sword, Norsemen with the axe. Which one is right?
By ‘Renaissance’, I mean the intellectual movement connected to the rediscovery of Classical texts (which is, I think, the common usage).
Well, I suppose almost all technical progress is driven by competition in some sense. But none of those advancements were caused by anything to do with the Classical world. Was the reason that medieval knights didn’t invent better firearms because they were insufficiently competitive and didn’t care about glory enough?
Portuguese navigation and exploration was very religiously motivated. The vast majority of the demand for mass production of books came from a demand for religious literature.
We would know almost nothing about the Classical world and no Classical literature would have survived.
“the Mongols probably still hold the world record for most people killed in the shortest amount of time.”
You have to be careful with statements like this one. This record probably goes to the Americans, if you take the atomic age into consideration.
(1) You mean MARTIFORM.
(2) This definitely calls for “whoM.” Кто кого?
They can be, people get tortured fairly routinely in those places. Not just for religion though, I believe they go after labor unions, etc. Unfortunately, there is a lot of overlap in the anti-terrorism and hostility to religion issues. For instance, Kazakhstan banned the Tablighi Jamaat – the frickin’ Tablighi Jamaat – that’s about as non-political an organization as you get – they change the subject when you start talking politics. It’s definitely not as bad as it used to be in the 1990s right after the soviet collapse.
The one with his head still on his shoulders? 😉
Peace.
Excellent read – thanks!
Peace.
Your first sentence displays a complete lack of reading comprehension. Or you just didn’t read my post, which is also fine.
The rest of your post re the Ashkenazi reminds me of a certain poster on a human biodiversity forum I’ve come across that posits wild theories of commonly accepted genetic research re modern Jews. Well, whatever. Maybe all these genetic researchers are part of a conspiracy and we really are Khazars. Fine with me.
There are a quite a few facial reconstructions of Ancient Egyptians based on CT scans and DNA. I’ve actually recently seen some at a museum alongside the real mummies. They’re obviously primarily Caucasian and not substantially SSA. Do they have some African ancestry? Yes, of course, just as Black Americans have some English ancestry. Are Black Americans a Caucasian race because the median Black person is roughly 15% White? (25% average White but it’s not uniformly distributed, so I’m not sure what the median is – maybe someone here does).
Anyways, I’m talking about genetic differences not geographic/continental ones. The mummies that have been tested (regardless of geography, culture, history, etc) are not a Black African people anymore than Black Americans are a European people. They’re Caucasians with a small amount of Black admixture.
Again, I’m not talking about history, culture, etc. Just common-sense genetic classification of human subspecies.
And oh yes, we Jews wuz kangz!
The mummies were the ruling caste. Ruling castes are often somewhat different genetically than the mass of the population.
The British royal house is German and the Indian ruling caste recently were Europeans.
I wonder how much you can conclude about a population based on its ruling caste.
Jacob Burckhardt was a friend of Nietzsche. In fact, the two were colleagues at the University of Basel (in Switzerland).
Somewhere like Heidelberg – it’s far from my ideal or most favourite place in the world.
But it has in many ways, ingredients of human flourishing, which are absent from many parts of the world for primarily cultural reasons.
And this in quite a simple, objective (or rather, intersubjective) way – it’s why Africans and Arabs are flooding to live in Germany, whereas Germans are not flooding to live in African or Arab countries (beyond some workers in Dubai or Kuwait), for all the potential Africa and Arabia should have to be the nicest countries in the world (great landscapes and climatic conditions).
why God/Allah allows the errors to persist uncorrected by him
Perhaps no one has taken the time to point out his errors.
If you decide to give it a try and succeed in getting his attention, see if he will do something about all the waste involved when preparing a fresh pineapple for the table.
Often not much…
“The Persians ruled for a thousand years and did not need us Arabs even for a day. We have been ruling them for one or two centuries and cannot do without them for an hour.”
– Abbasid Caliph, Ma’mum ar-Rashid
Peace.
The Aztec cults never died. They went underground.
Besides the estimated 1.5 million Nahua peoples in Mexico (“indios mexicanos”) that speak a dialect of Nahuatl (Aztec), there seems to be a residue of the Aztec religion and culture still extant in Mexico and among Mexicans just below the surface, especially among those who live on the fringes of society. This is expressed in the worship of Santa Muerte (Sacred Death), whose roots can be traced to pre-Columbian practices, including human sacrifice and the notorious Aztec skull towers to gain favor with the gods for healing, protection, financial wellbeing, and the assurance of a path to the afterlife.
The worship of Santa Muerte has exploded in recent times, especially among the urban poor looking for an alternative to the traditional Catholic faith that has failed to deliver them from poverty and oppression.
This fits in with the original 16th Century transformation of an Aztec goddess into Our Lady of Guadalupe in the hope for a better life. When that fails to occur, there is understandable cultural pressure to return to one’s roots in Aztec hagiography (for lack of a better term).
Speaking of violence, the worship of Santa Muerte is especially popular in the violent subculture associated with drug cartels and their operations. This phenomenon warranted a feature article, “Troubled Spirits”, in National Geographic.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2010/05/mexican-saints/
Also, from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Muerte
I read your posts and your stupidity and ignorance is too obvious for anyone to miss. You were claiming that the Ancient Egyptians were predominantly Semites from the Fertile Crescent. I pointed out that Egypt was more ancient than the Semites. Your response to that was that Sumer was older than Egypt. I pointed out that Sumerians were not Semites. Now instead of responding to my point you are bullshitting about my lack of comprehension. Obviously you could not respond reasonably without admitting that you were wrong or that you lied. An honestly ignorant person can be led to the truth but a willful liar such as yourself cannot.
You must be thinking about the famous facial reconstruction of Tutankhamen which, btw, is controversial. Here is the reconstruction:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/05/photogalleries/king_tut/images/primary/tut02.jpg
And here are depictions of Tutankhamun from Ancient Egypt:
https://media.npr.org/programs/re/archivesdate/2004/dec/interviews_hawass/main-3ba479b94f0f1d33601dab8cc7eda07c703a7d11-s600-c85.jpg
https://i.pinimg.com/564x/01/1e/dd/011edd37083e8c122528ba2e371071cd–egypt-today-tutankhamun.jpg
https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRtPDyTDqtc30ooyIFwO6uW5Kst_GeeYP2M7PpzUCBadqQTfZC1
My thoughts exactly; I can confirm this with my own observation of the horrible decorum put forth by the Latrinos in “catholic” churches all across the southwestern US on the occasion of All-Saints (i.e. Halloween), with shameless permission of the local clergy. The “catholic” hierarchy in the US looks the other way from what is evidently a shallowly concealed mesoamerican cult, for the sake of inflating their numbers (and probably for other less avowable motives too). But yes indeed the Aztecs are not dead and they are still living amongst us.
Good example. It seems quite common for the ruling caste to be quite different. So it seems silly to conclude too much based on mummies, but sadly very much in line with the level of sophistication of much thinking today.
Certainly does not look negroid to me!
There is absolutely no doubt about that. Hard to beat many 1000s of kills within a few seconds.
Sounds like Mexico needs a real Inquisition.
Well — that is part of the problem. Have you ever tried to immobilize someone who does not want to be immobilized? How about many 1000s of such unwilling people? If you know you are going to be subjected to the most gruesome kinds of torture, why surrender and not fight until death? In both cases you will be killed; but the latter will be faster, less painful, and less humiliating. What’s the downside really of not letting yourself be tied up?
Put yourself in this situation (by the way I mentally already have, having served in the military and having been through bootcamp which is conducive to this kind of introspection): you are with a handful of comrades, surrounded by an enemy with greater strength than yours for whatever reasons (number; ammunition; whatever). You know you cannot flee — and you also know they are going to crucify you when they catch you. What would you do?
Again: in the absence of firearms, this model does not scale up. In order to achieve this plan, the executioners must overwhelm their victims. Otherwise the captives would simply just resist.
Unfortunately for you the mummy of Ramesses III a Pharaoh of native Egyptian ancestry was genetically tested and found to have the paternal Y-DNA Haplogroup E1b1a which is subsaharan african.
Caucasians with a small amount of black admixture tend to look like this:
James Watson (16% Black):
https://i.pinimg.com/236x/4b/f8/e4/4bf8e4d944d091ef7ca243d46824a38e–james-watson-inventors.jpg
Not like this:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/27/Egyptian_Farmers.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/GD-EG-Caire-Mus%C3%A9e120.JPG
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/AmenhotepIII.jpg
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/90/%C3%84gyptischer_Maler_um_1360_v._Chr._002.jpg/1759px-%C3%84gyptischer_Maler_um_1360_v._Chr._002.jpg
You do not understand psychology and morale.
It is not difficult to “break” someone down. Even very strong people. Not difficult at all. We are all vulnerable.
A defeated army particularly has just suffered a catastrophic loss of morale, and unless it has tremendous reservoirs of morale to draw upon, usually because of a very strong spiritual basis, can easily be broken down into sheep. Russians in German concentration camps were sheep, as were Jews.
The crucial element is psychology – a slave army is not likely to maintain morale and self respect after defeat by the mighty Roman empire. They were likely listless putty in the hands of their conquerors, finally accepting the “right” of the Romans to mete out justice to them.
I am sorry to say it, but in a small scale I have seen how a confident person can be broken down.
Almost all human battles are really fought on the level of psychology.
One of the most remarkable things in history is the way the Romans maintained morale despite bring repeatedly defeated in the most crushing way by Hannibal. That is a lesson for the ages.
No, that is not what I was talking about.
This movie is a hash of Aztec and Mayan. The Mayans did not do nearly as much human sacrifice as Azteca. Apocalypto takes place more in a Mayan environment. Just look where it was shot. Still a great movie. Mel Gibson was a driven genius to pull this off with all the filming done down there in steamy jungles and finding good, native enough actors. What a production!
True! The Cartels love killing the competition in creative ways. Very gruesome to say the least. Complete innocents also get caught up in this.
If you say so, that must be true, right? By the way have you ever served in the military? Here we all do and as I wrote earlier about my experience in bootcamp, I fully understand how easy it is to break someone. But you probably missed my comment in that regard.
You also probably missed my other comment where I was referring to a mental state of stunning due to extreme stress as a plausible explanation for such a submissive behavior (accepting to be put to death through agonizing torture without even trying to rebel).
But when one wants to become the guru of one’s own cult, there is no need to really pay attention to what others are adtually saying, is there?
Thorfinnsson, while we are off-topic, and because you are posting under the name of the first known white man born in America, I want to ask you what you think of this theory according to which the white europeans would currently be going through an evolutionary bottleneck.
Essentially, this theory goes as follows: the astounding success encountered by europeans over the past half millenium has allowed to survive individuals not especially fit for survival as a result of their pathological altruism. We are seeing the effects of this negative selective pressure in the form of inability to defend one’s country — something which is especially apparent in the case of white countries. However, this ill-fit will be naturally filtered out by darwinian selection, as can be already observed with the near-sterility of liberal, « educated » (indoctrinated really) young white wymyn.
Any strong opinions about that?
Hundreds confess to eating human flesh in South Africa
https://nypost.com/2017/08/22/hundreds-confess-to-eating-human-flesh-in-south-africa/
5 arrested in alleged South Africa cannibalism ring after man tells police he’s ‘tired of eating human flesh’
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/08/29/5-arrested-in-alleged-south-africa-cannibalism-ring-after-man-walks-into-police-station-saying-hes-tired-of-eating-human-flesh/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.4eada225921f
Cannibalism is not a crime, says expert
https://citizen.co.za/news/south-africa/1630805/cannibalism-is-not-a-crime-says-expert/
Cannibalism: ‘WitchCraft’ or Mental Illness?
https://thisisafrica.me/lifestyle/cannibalism-witchcraft-mental-illness/
Should South Africa legalize cannibalism?
http://www.debate.org/opinions/should-south-africa-legalize-cannibalism
Talha, thank you for the recommendation.
Conciseness is good (I have a tendency to read long books halfway and only finish them much later on).
I will have to cut our conversation short on the other thread, I am going on vacation (well, I was already on vacation in the sense that I was away from school but I wasn’t doing much before) to visit relatives for a few weeks; so I won’t be here at UR much (if at all) and unable to give comprehensive answers.
I did miss that comment. So if you understand, then there is no mystery.
I’m curious, do you know any of the cultures with this world tree axis myth? I thought that was specifically associated with shamanism from north eurasia. But I checked wikipedia and ironically it says also the aztecs and maya, I did not know they had an aztec yggdrasil. That comes out of nowhere to me, I guess it’s not just north eurasia.
At any rate, this type of speculation may be technically rubbish from the modern perspective but I think it is valid to speculate about this stuff and you may be right about some of that.
I also find it very disturbing that so many cannibals claim it is addictive, like a drug.
Oddly more comforting that so many people think they are witches and want to kill them all.
But this part is funny: accused cannibal Sthembiso Sithole.
I’ll make this as simple as possible:
The DNA of Egyptian mummies is primarily Caucasian in origin. Does this fact hurt your feelings? To be fair, as another poster noted, this doesn’t necessarily mean the majority of Egyptians had the same racial makeup as the ruling class. Also note that Caucasians come in many different colors. Just a couple thousand years before the Ancient Egyptians there may have still been dark-skinned people in Northern Europe.
For the sake of argument, I will retract all of my other points and concede everything else to you. Maybe the ancestors of Ancient Egyptians didn’t walk across the Sinai. Maybe they were another group that sailed from somewhere else. You can tell me which way the language flowed, etc. I’ll even concede your bizarre theory on the origin of Ashkenazi Jews (though I’m curious as to how you reconcile it with DNA evidence, both Y-chromosome and autosomal).
To repeat, the only point I’m left making is that the Pharaohs were not SSA. It’s relatively easy to distinguish the DNA of Black Africans from other groups.
BTW: are you Black? Why are you so invested in the idea that the Ancient Egyptians – or even just the ruling class – were somehow “Black”? Why not go where the evidence takes you? It seems more appropriate to rethink your understanding of history in light of new DNA evidence than to stubbornly cling to prior beliefs/conclusions.
On a personal note, as DNA research established that Ashkenazi Jews are primarily European my reaction was “meh”. I could care less if we came from Khazars. I’d rather know how history really unfolded. I’d bet money that some Palestinian groups have a much greater genetic affinity to the Biblical Jews than the Ashkenazi. And if we suddenly found some ancient Jewish mummies I would be happy to see their DNA tested, whatever the results.
Hey Wally, do neo-Nazis get a quantity discount on de-bunking oil?
My pleasure. Keeping family bonds is a great thing.
May God take you to your destination and back with safety.
Peace.
Of course, over the past several centuries the English have given many peoples throughout the world more than ample reason to be “anti English”, having committed outrages as savage as any in human history. In my opinion the most egregious “historical inaccuracies” are those portraying them as paragons of civility, fairness and enlightenment.
I remember that Mossad apparently did an experiment with their agents to see who would commit suicide given such obvious situations of “if you’re captured, you’re going to be tortured.” Most men chose to kill themselves, but not at all. Of the women tested, almost none of them chose to kill themselves even in spite of certain death after capture.
azteks were 40% ancetral north eurasians nearly as pure as the yamna the ones who spread all over the world conquering , genociding and slaving entire populations, they are the ultimate war machine
look at the chechen with 28% of north eurasian ancestry,the highest in europe you as russian know of what im speaking off
ANE people evolved to fight against mamuts and other megafaunas in the ancient time not to live in
the confy modern world,they were out of place already when the spaniards arrive
“Wow” … only to the uninformed.
http://www.codoh.com
That’s it? That’s your response? You are just another ignorant redneck Zionist.
IOW, you have no answers for my questions to you, which were:
What “stupid shit” did he say?
And why was it “stupid”?
iffen, another ignorant Zionist who dodges because he has no answers. LOL
‘So, it seems that the ‘out of Africa’ paradigm (and its several variants) that is pretty much orthodox dogma today, indicates that as human beings moved out of Africa and their skin tone mellowed to whiter tones, due to the colder and less sun soaked environments that they acquired, for some reason their intelligence increased? I wonder why?…’
My own pet theory is that in tropical Africa, resistance to disease and the fecundity necessary to overcome very high rates of infant mortality were disproportionately important.
As man moved out of tropical Africa, intellectual ability became more important. If you can think of sewing clothes, you get to live through winter! How about saving some dried meat for when these animals move off?
Etc. In non-tropical environments — at least for paleolithic hunter-gatherers — disease and the resulting mortality would be less of a concern. On the other hand, the rewards for innovation and foresight would escalate.
I don’t mind this, but at least drop the veneer of “objectivity” and come out straight and say you are challenging “we wuz kangz” with “wee wizz kingzz”.
Peace.
I know that. But Burckhardt is famous not for friendship with Nietzsche, but for his outstanding historical works. For local religious fanatics, I can add that Buchardt was a Christian, of very conservative (though unorthodox) views
Some of them do mind. I got lectured once for eating pork once by a Muslim, a somewhat presumptuous one in fact – despite the fact that aside from my ambiguous appearance, I had never given any indication that we shared the same faith, which he should have really guessed from knowing my name.
Don’t Eskimos have the highest IQs among hunter-gatherers?
Again with the Y-chromosome. There are 90+% Black African “African Americans” walking around with English/Irish Y chromosomes and there are blonde, blue-eyed White guys that have a Jewish great-grandfather walking around with Middle Eastern Y chromosomes. So the fact that Ramesses III had a SSA Y chromosome doesn’t tell us much.
So what did the rest of Ramesses III’s DNA look like? Was he 5% SSA? 35%? 55%? I’d genuinely like to know. Here’s your chance to change my thinking.
You could gather data on all of the Egyptian mummies, sort them by year, and provide the total SSA admixture for each of them.
In response to the pictures:
IIRC, didn’t the Ancient Egyptians distinguish between themselves and SSA (Nubians?) in paintings and writing? They depicted SSA as having different lips, noses (see the bridge in particular), and complexions, etc. I’d like to hear from any experts.
For example, see here (“ancient Egyptian depction of mankind”):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Four-%27species%27-of–Egypt.jpg
So Ancient Egypt was 4-5,000 years ago, and let’s say some of the alleles for White skin began to spread about 10,000 years ago. There’s no reason you wouldn’t find Caucasians that dark back then. In fact, you can still find Caucasians that dark today.
Look at the nose bridge, as it’s distinctly different between SSA and Caucasians. All the pictures I can find of Pharaohs show a distinctly Caucasian bridge. Please show me an exception that looks like the typical Egyptian depiction of a SSA (per above) with a recessed nose bridge, protruding lips and black skin.
In sum, I’m open to any theories that people here want to espouse, but you have to first reconcile those theories with recent DNA findings. This is not like DNA research that tries to distinguish the Roman from Levantine admixture in the Ashkenazi. The DNA of SSA is relatively easy to distinguish from other races so there’s far less guesswork. Second, there’s the depiction of the different races in Egyptian paintings, and their depiction of a distinct and separate SSA race unlike themselves.
The rebellious slaves were cut from all possible supplies and were probably starving. After the battle the vast majority of them were killed, but they managed to capture some 6,000 of them. Another 5,000 were captured later by Pompey’s legions. The 6,000 were probably exhausted, starving, thirsty, unarmed (to save their lives they probably threw away their weapons) and psychologically broken. Many of them could have been injured. The 5,000 were (besides these conditions) probably captured one by one, each of them by an overwhelming force.
By the way the passivity of the Jews in places like Treblinka was also strange, they could have caused considerable trouble to the Nazis if they refused to cooperate, but they were so broken that they followed the orders and undressed and went on their own feet to the gas chambers. I think I would’ve refused it, but it’s difficult to know how psychologically broken these people were.
Thanks. It doesn’t seem to be any basis for
1. believing that He is merciful or actually likes most of us, even at birth, at all
2. believing that any such being as the Abrahamic God exists or even could exist
3. believing anyone is right to attempt to insist on the rightness of either their religion based metaphysics or ethics.
Yes, it’s just comforting. The South African savages, for all their faults, are thoroughly opposed to this.
The Aztec method was more successful. They kept offering human sacrifices and the sun kept rising so clearly the Aztec priests knew what they were doing.
We sacrifice millions of millions of lives for the sake of freedom and democracy and at the end of the day we don’t get freedom and we don’t get democracy.
Our civilisation would appear to be slightly more primitive than that of the Aztecs.
To see the origins of Egyptians you have to look at the mtDNA of North Africans, like Egyptians. It is not L like in SSA. The main Y-DNA haplogroup E1b1b has the spread of afro-asian languages. Bantus spread E (notably E1b1a) to much of Africa, but it spread from the north, like R1b in Cameroon.
In the Middle East there were three different peoples at the start of agriculture. Natufians were Y-DNA E1b1b and they cultivated barley, Anatolians were Y-DNA G1a, they cultivated wheat and spread agriculture to Europe, Iranians started herding sheep and goats and had Y-DNA subgroups of P and J. Semites are J1/2 and come originally from herders. Sumers were most probably a mixture of all three peoples. All of these people are white (Caucasian). E1b1b people probably spread to North Africa, or came from the Horn of Africa and in North Africa they have old SSA admixture (before the slave trade). Original Levantine people (Natufians) had Y-DNA E1b1b. Semites Y-DNA J1 were quite early in Arabian peninsula and in Sumer, Akkadian is a Semitic language, Gutians destroyed Sumer/Akkad, not known who they were genetically. How the J2/J1 Semites got an afro-asian language? Possibly it was adapted from E1b1b people, not known. Greeks have J2 but also R1b, so J2 people probably were the older, not Indo-European and not Semitic.
As for Jews, Ashkenazi or not, they are Caucasian, like are the Middle Eastern people and North Africans. Ashkenazi Jews have 55-65% European admixture, mostly Italian, less Eastern European. The rest is still Mediterranean, so it is white and does not much differ from Greeks. Greeks and Turks are almost the same people, as Turkish tribes, which brought the language, did not much change the genetics of Anatolia. The division in Europe/Middle East is south-north where the northern peoples have Y-DNA I2, I1, R1a, R1b, N1 and C and admixture from south, while the southern have G1a, J2, J1, E1b1b, L and so on. As main races of humans all of these are whites and the differences between them are small.
I think your suggestion of the contribution of Christianity to the explosive way the (North) West leapt ahead of the rest needs qualification. After all the rate of progress was no greater in Europe before 1500 than in China or India.
So I suggest your best Christian candidates are literate Protestant individualist readers of the Scriptures for themselves who had also imbibed ideas revolutionary vis a vis existing secular authority as well. But maybe that wouldn’t have been nearly enough without
1. Increasing wealth of classes below the landed nobility. Some of that was Inca gold trickling through via the Netherlands to British wool producers…
2. Ideas from the sea travels starting in the 15th century
3. The renaissance of classical ideas and learning bit by bit from about 1400.
4. Competitiveness between European polities which was not replicated in China or Japan – though quaere India.
The world tree myth seems to come from Northern India, from around the place where Y-DNA haplogroup K may have spread to many branches. They have a myth of the world pillar (probably some of those high mountains), it is also known just above North Korea where the comb ceramic started, earliest pottery. In the Indian myth the pillar is shamba, in Finnish mythology Sampo, in the Near East it is the Near East it is the Tree of Life. I place the origin to 17,000 BC when Deneb was the Polar Star and the connection to Aztec sacrifices could be that the theory of the world pillar is that the pillar moves (precession of equinoxes) in about 2000 years and starts a new times. The sacrifices were made to prevent the times from ending as the end is a catastrophe. (crazy theory, but actually not so)
I am no expert in this and only have a bit studied the topic, but if you are interested on my findings, so I wrote some posts: (just for fun, very speculative)
http://www.pienisalaliittotutkimus.com/2018/01/15/the-polar-star-and-human-migrations-in-prehistoric-europe/
http://www.pienisalaliittotutkimus.com/2018/05/23/paradise-was-lost-9500-bc-the-myth-of-the-original-sin-is-in-the-stars/
http://www.pienisalaliittotutkimus.com/2018/06/04/the-polar-star-baal-cycle-messiah-and-the-temple/
http://www.pienisalaliittotutkimus.com/2018/05/30/the-fall-of-one-civilization-and-the-end-of-the-times-around-3000-bc/
http://www.pienisalaliittotutkimus.com/2018/06/01/the-very-ancient-origin-of-our-concept-of-god/
I suspect that pre modern Asian science and technology is not one of your specialties. I understand that a reading of Joseph Needham’s voluminous works would leave you in no doubt about Chinese STEM achievements (particularly) STE during what we call the Middle Ages. Also I doubt that Buddhism was the dominant philosophical influence on intellectual activity in a country where the Mandarinate would have been Confucian.
I was interested to see AK making a point I have long made in supplementation of Greg Clark’s ideas, namely that the East Asians would have been held back by the time it takes to learn their ideographic forms of writing.
Diseases certainly had a devastating effect.
Certainly when inflicted deliberately.
However:
Stan Hoig, “The Sand Creek Massacre’, Oklahoma, 1961, 1982
John R. Cook, ‘The Border and the Buffalo, An untold story of the south western plains’, 1907, 1989, Austin, Texas
A Dutch telescope made Galileo see the moons of Jupiter, and their movement.
After some 1600 year of no science at all, thanks to christianity, it was technical progress that made some minds doubt what the church said.
The experiment became the arbiter of truth.
If they doubted god, I do not think so.
Spinoza was most offended when accused of atheism.
He made a living making lenses, also his death, glass dust.
No historian has been able to explain agriculture.
Hunter gatherers had a lot of spare time.
How present corn emerged from the ancient predecessor, nobody has any idea.
sacred ball game:
Johan Huizinga, ‘Homo Ludens’, Basel, 1938
Your concluding remarks prompt the thought that people with civilizations based on cities may be very resilient against nomads and raiders. (Hannibal was in a sense just a raider).Byzantium held out for centuries. Vienna stood against the Mongols and Ottomans. The Western Roman Empire only fell after the Goths’ taking of Rome in the 5th century. Perhaps a combination of having a secure snd comprehensive culture with a possibility of military defence.
I doubt that no plausible explanation has been given. It is not difficult to believe that observant women – possibly keeping their families alive as gatherers after the hunters had failed to return – noticed that the wild nuts that grew near one water hole were a lot easier to eat than the tougher bitter ones elsewhere. They would have observed that plants sprang up from lightly buried seeds or nuts and might well have decided to try some of of the seeds from the better fruit or nuts in the soil where the less favoured plants grew. Just one little experiment or observation after another and soon the idea of improving plants by selection takes hold – and somebody even says “it’s really a bit like getting the finest wool from sheep innit?”.
It looks like arboculture (planting trees for getting food and other utilities) was used long before agriculture. Agriculture in the way of planting edible plants was known, but not used as long as there was game to hunt and plants to gather, but what I meant was invention of breeding plants.
Indeed, bonobos have “planted” most of the trees they use for food: they eat the fruits and shit out the seeds. But they do not consciously select for breeding.
Gatherers do not have the intention of developing better crops. It requires a scientific mind to think that by selecting better plants (instead of eating them) and using the best ones for seeds of new ones one can improve the plant. Science was religion (gazing stars was religion and science, there was no difference, making iron in the Iron Age required magical words that told you how to do it=get ground from a lake and heat it in a covered grave= the sacred words of the birth of iron).
It was the time of shamans, there had to be a religious rite that resulted in breeding. I think it is unnatural not to eat the better nuts but to plant them and to eat the worse. Humans developed new crops everywhere. This was not something women improvised. It happened so often and in so short time (see how many plants American Indians created) that this should have a basis on an important ritual behavior lead by shamans. I think.
Then what were you talking about?
Both are heretical strains of Christianity. (This matters, because heretical Christianity is highly susceptible to the Muslim virus.)
But in general you’re right, Christianity is necessary but not sufficient. It seems like the conflict between Christianity and Gnosticism drives scientific progress.
This experiment was actually conducted. You can look at India and see the result. (And not modern India, mind you, but the one before Britain made it modern.)
As I said, everyone has their pet sins – for some it is the arrogance involved in butting in to other peoples’ business without warrant.
Peace.
Quite stupid to directly denigrate the arresting officer. He should have asked, “Are you a Jew?” first.
This is intriguing actually.
Trad whites garnering support from Mohammedans?
I suspect this isn’t electorally viable beyond this blog, but something to think about.
That is interesting. Thank you for this comment.
This would supprt the following hypothesis that I am making, namely, that our minds have evolved to the point where delaying inevitable death takes precedence over all other costs. As if the “objective function” that we try to optimize in real time, all the time, put an infinite weight on immediate death itself (and not on assured but slightly delayed death — albeit in atrocious circumstances).
Another way to look at it might be that we are wired to believe in some miraculous outcome being always posssible. And women would be more prone to this “pathological hope”.
By the way I have always found it intriguing that the 3 Abrahamic religions (using this approximative designation here for concision) would all be against suicide under ANY condition. I think that suicide can be, in some cases, the ultimate act of courage and decency.
Sorry, I have to disagree. Europe progressed more from 500 to 1500 than did India or China during those times.
He should have said rich white male Republican racists start all wars to kill brown people and take their oil.
No one would have a problem with that.
Well, it wouldn’t be the first time:
https://www.militaria.at/Book.aspx?book=9009000&Language=en
Who said elections, I thought we were talking imperial ascendancy?
Peace.
I admit this.
China and India were ancient and already rather advanced, having developed over thousands of years. It had not been utterly wrecked by barbarian invasions. Northern/Western Europe in 500 was taken over by barbarians. By 1500 (and certainly by 1600) Europe had caught up to China if not surpassed it in terms of science and technology. This would make its trajectory a lot steeper.
There was no such thing before the early modern period. Engineers and technologists largely went their own way apart from “natural philosophers” who studied the universe.
Mathematics at a fairly low level was useful to everybody, of course.
A strong case can nonetheless be made that the Chinese due to not having Christianity and specifically the Catholic exhortation to find God in reason, never actually developed first principles. Due to the holistic nature of Chinese beliefs, it made advancement much slower and more difficult.
Went straight over my head sorry 🙂
Actually I suspect you are right, but Hannibal was also from s settled city people – it was city state vs city state, and despite suffering overwhelming defeat the Romans kept the faith and went on to conquer the world. They never lost faith in themselves.
The only other example I can think of is Jews – who did not lose faith in themselves despite suffering catastrophic defeat.
Clearly, what distinguished the Romans was some spiritual or psychological quality and not physical prowess, as they were crushed by a Phoenician people.
We know somewhat about Roman religion, but I bet we don’t really know what its driving force was in the earlier years. I’m sure there would be answers there.
Human sacrifice existed in the region what if now S Russia in the fifth century.
It existed in Africa even in the 19th century.
The catholic church practised burning to death even in 1600, how long these practices were continued in Spain, would have to check.
Even Calvin practised burning to death, with Servetius on green wood, it took longer to die.
One may object that punishing is not sacrifice, for the victim there was little difference.
Clive Ponting, ‘A green history of the world’, 1992, London
Something else to consider is that the combination of the practice of primogeniture and Catholic rationalism would mean that there would be a significant fraction of men who would be seeking to understand God’s world through natural studies, a kind of proto-scientist without distractions of family or non-religious politics. A Chinese version of G. Mendel, for example, would almost certainly not be left alone to experiment with peas for decades.
What distinguished the Romans was crushing taxes on the poor.
Each Roman soldier carried iron, weapons, armor etc., the value of a village.
Then there was the slavery consumption, estimated as high as ten millions a year.
3D reconstruction of Pompei villa’s have recently led to the conclusion that it existed on fifty slaves in the basements.
The soldiers knew quite well they needed an emperor for their existence.
Whenever there was none, someone was ‘put on the shield’, if he wanted or not.
If he did not lead properly, he was slain, and replaced.
Roman propaganda about the barbarians still is believed.
The high and democratic culture of these barbarians in what is now Germany and Austria, few know about it.
The high civilisation can be seen seen in the Celt Museum in Halle, Austria.
The democracy must be pieced together from ancient writers.
It’s not a matter of existence, but of degree.
Estimated total number of victims of Spanish Inquisition (people killed) over 300 years was about 5,000. Inquisition prevented heresy and stuff like the religious wars that roiled northern Europe after Protestantism got out of hand. It also prevented things like witch-burning hysteria.
Low estimate of people sacrificed by Aztecs was 20,000 every year. At this rate, you would have about 6 million people sacrificed in the time that the Inquisition killed 5 thousand. It’s an absurd comparison.
::::::::::
Villification of Inquisition and the exaggeration of its horrors stems from English anti-Spanish propaganda that was accepted by other anti-Catholics and later adopted by progressive anti-Christians.
Roman resistance of Hannibal was far, far pre-Imperial. Insofar as “spirit” was concerned, the Romans believed that they were fighting an existential battle while the Cathargians did not(except for Hannibal himself).
For his part: Hannibal was an incredibly spirited man, a genius driven by a vow to his dying father to be Rome’s eternal enemy, and who came extraordinarily close to destroying Rome. The Romans were generally better infantry overall but it would take quite some time to match Hannibal’s genius; Hannibal in many ways was an archetypical example of someone who did a lot with the limited means that he had.
What about all those Taoists retreating to huts or high officials retiring to lives of leisure or study or even banished to remote provinces – I would think these guys would make perfect scholars and scientists.
I suspect like all pre-modern people Chinese were focused on exploring the internal frontier rather than the external one. They had internal riches and just werent that interested in exploring the external world – something we moderns find baffling.
Whether the external world is more worth exploring than the internal one is something our age assumes, but is not qualified to answer.
Thank you for the succinct Y-DNA overview.
Plenty of people have fought existential battles, been crushed, and gave up and lost their identity as a distinct people. That’s probably the norm.
What the Romans did, refusing to give up after all hope seemed lost, is extraordinary and suggests some unusual psychological qualities (to use modern terminology).
Our records of the period are scanty, but it would be nice to know more about their culture at that time.
Its probably not an accident that the creation of gunpowder,most Chinese medicine and the majority of Chinese alchemy was done by Taoists. They were substantially fewer in proportion, though, being essentially a kind of occultism as opposed to the much more common monkism in Europe.
Well, they sacrificed the Vestal Virgins for victory.
Pre-imperial Rome was very different than later, and probably closer to the northern barbarians. I believe Tacitus when describing the Germans recalled the Romans to similar earlier virtues.
And people on this site say human sacrifice is a bad thing.
Buddhist monks however were extremely plentiful but they were bent on exploring the internal frontier.
I suspect it really depends on whether one thinks the internal frontier is worth exploring – or even exists.
That’s a deep insight.
Peace.
Well, He provides for all of His servants, whether they are enemies or not. Take the example of Richard Dawkins; the man literally goes around the world denigrating God, turning people away from Him, publishing books against Him, etc. The man has literally made thousands of dollars speaking out against God and yet…God allowed him to have children that love him, He feeds him every day, lets him live a life that is mostly full of health, etc. And if Dawkins was to simply turn back to Him and repent and say he’s sorry for what he did – that would be all. He wouldn’t have to give back all the thousands he made off of ridiculing religion…his slate would be erased, in an instance and God would consider him His loyal servant after decades of rebellion. Where does one find forbearance and magnanimity of this level?
“O son of Adam, so long as you call upon Me and ask of Me, I shall forgive you for what you have done, and I shall not mind. O son of Adam, were your sins to reach the clouds of the sky and were you then to ask forgiveness of Me, I would forgive you…” – reported in Tirmidhi
No human would ever simply consider someone his friend after that person spent decades tarnishing his reputation and turning his friends against him and simply came and said; I’m sorry for what I did.
Imam Ghazali (ra) mentioned that the majority of human beings that have never been adequately delivered the message will not be judged on it. If the Aztecs and Mayans lived for centuries without someone inviting them to the faith, then they will simply be judged on their deeds not on whether they believed in the details of a message they never received. The Maturidis slightly differ from this position in that they say one will be judged at least about belief in a generic monotheism because that can be arrived at by efforts of the intellect without Divine guidance.
As far as 2 & 3 – we will simply have to agree to disagree; at the end of the day, there is no way to empirically prove this out like a fact (such as Paris is in France or Boeing produces airplanes). The words faith and belief have a lexical significance after all, which imply a recognition of a reality that is unseen.
Peace.
Western countries are like junk food – unhealthy and unsatisfying but delicious looking on the outside and you only realize how disgusting it is once you’re hooked, fat, and without energy.
Germans may not be fleeing to live in Arab countries, but they sure seem intent on destroying their wonderful lifestyle and importing Arabs. A
The Barmakids – converts from a Buddhist priestly class – were instrumental in the organization of the Abbasid Caliphate and setting it on its course for its golden age:
http://www.abbasidstudies.org/?page_id=576
Shaykh Hamza Yusuf – who did a deep dive into this period of our history – mentioned once that the borrowing from the logic system of the Buddhists was very important in how the Muslim theologians countered some of the claims of Hellenistic philosophy. He said he wanted to write a short book or article on the matter.
If he gets to it, I’ll forward it to you.
Peace.
Gibbon mentions in a footnote that Tamerlane (Timur) made constructions of skulls, one of 70,000 and one of 90,000.
Very interesting. I would read about that.
It’s interesting the different paths to perfection humans follow – but the one thing that is common is that we all try and reach perfection. And any path that doesn’t reach for perfection dies out, gets defeated, and fails to attract adherents.
Even secular Leftism is a religious path to perfection which is why it inspires so many. Science is also really a path to perfection and not a mere pursuit of convenient gadgets as I once thought.
All the talk of IQ and and the other fake science which seems so intellectually unrigorous to those of us not part of that path is a path to perfection that inspires many – that is why they so blithely brush off our devastating logical objections and cheerily continue believing. We all need a path to perfection.
And the conservative Right was the only path that did not offer a vision of perfection – and do died out and steadily lost adherents till today it’s defunct.
The alt-right seems to me an attempt to offer a Rightist path that offers to some degree a path to perfection – but very haltingly, confusingly, poorly, with still too much materialism and too much of the old uninspiring practicality of the old Right.
But that’s to be expected from a first step back. Regeneration takes time. But the alt right with its half idealism half brutal materialism is probably a transitional phase that will die it when its served its purpose.
But anyways if be happy to be read about the Buddhist influence on Islam when you have a chance.
My favourite footnote from Gibbon
The Imperial Truth will fail you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-gSJW3sHXE&t=2s
Let’s engage in the spirituality of the stock exchange:
https://247wallst.com/autos/2018/06/28/observations-from-fremont-on-model-3-production/
This might be totally phony. We’ll know soon enough. A TSLA bankruptcy could trigger a general market crash, I believe, but maybe it won’t happen so quickly, at least that’s what these guys seem to be arguing. Their method hangs in the air, it’s impossible to tell if it’s accurate at all.
Frederick II was excommunicated for not going on Crusade with the alacrity the Pope desired. He then went on Crusade and was excommunicated for going on Crusade while excommunicated. He then didn’t fight but negotiated with the Saracens and so was excommunicated once more. At some point in his life he was excommunicated again. When he died he gave the church lands he had seized back to the Church and so was back in good standing.
Truly, God’s mercy is infinite.
A terrible waste of virgins, a definite minus in the evaluation of Rome.
Nah, Frederick was never reconciled to the church, in fact Innocent IV deposed him in 1245 and sponsored anti-kings in Germany (first Heinrich Raspe and then William of Holland); there were also some rather extreme accusations against Frederick in papal propaganda (iirc he supposedly had a bishop tortured to death by his Saracens, and then had friars who mourned that bishop buried alive). The conflict had become so embittered there really was no prospect for a solution through negotiation anymore. And after Frederick’s death the papacy was determined to exterminate the Staufer dynasty and succeeded in doing so with the help of the dreadful Charles of Anjou whose forces killed Frederick’s son Manfred in battle in 1266 and who had Frederick’s grandson Conradin, the last Staufer, beheaded in Naples in 1268.
Not that the Staufers themselves were that great, they were wannabe tyrants and losers who failed to arrest Germany’s political fragmentation and instead wasted much effort on conflicts with the Italian cities and the papacy.
You have to spend virgins to get virgins.
Frederick II was about as far as you could get from a chad white in the Middle Ages
What did he ever do to you? At least he was enthusiastic about attacking the Muslims
He was French, isn’t that enough?
and iirc he was more enthusiastic about fighting the Byzantines than the Muslims. And his stupid crusade failed before it had even started since he managed to lose Sicily to an uprising which must be evidence of serious incompetence.
Are you sure? I’ve never heard of that, iirc they just buried a few Gauls and Greeks alive during the Punic wars. Sacrificing unpopular foreigners was apparently still ok, but I doubt they would have sacrificed vestal virgins.
This is a very good point. It is like a chicken with its head cut off, but so was the poz in the Woodstock phase. It’s likely too early to seriously evaluate it as a movement. Eventually some kind of orthodoxy will emerge, perhaps a defined leadership structure, specific principles, certain goals, etc. and of course some kind of spiritual angle.
Peace.
You have to spend virgins to get virgins.
True, but you can spend one virgin and get 2, 3, n virgins.
And people say rednecks don’t know math.
He ethnically cleansed the Muslims from Sicily though (granted, he transferred some of them to the mainland and used them for his own service, but he definitely ended their aspirations to independence and reduced their capacity for trouble-making).
The negative view of him as a cynical unbeliever is nonsense imo, his personal religious views were probably quite conventional for a 13th century monarch. He did have marked despotic tendencies, but that was in line with the traditions the Norman kings had established in Southern Italy.
who failed to arrest Germany’s political fragmentation
What was the “ideal” Germany that fragmented? Owning my ignorance on the subject (I have books in the Q) I have the idea that the failure of the German Princes and Principalities to coalesce explain more of the story.
It is funny how all French overseas adventures end in (strategic) failure.
The pagan Arabs could one-up that, at least Banu Lakhm (aka Lakhmids) did:
“Mundhir returns with some 400 Christian nuns among his prisoners and he sacrifices the nuns to the Arabic goddess al-Uzza.”
Faiths Across Time: 5,000 Years of Religious History
If I recall correctly, he had them burned alive.
Peace.
Something more along the lines of England (which had had a strong “national” monarchy since the 10th century) or France (where royal power successfully overcame political fragmentation from the 12th century onwards).
That nationalist perspective may be somewhat ahistorical though, and it’s certainly pointless to lament the supposedly lost chances of the 12th/13th century.
Post-Cannae:
So sacrifice was not exactly the right word, but in the days of despair following Cannae, there definitely seemed to be an effort to find blame and assuage what had happened. Vesta clearly seemed to have abandoned them: three straight annihilations of Roman armies in a row.
Overseas adventures tend to end in strategic failure for everyone. Unless you have a bloody island so you can safely concentrate most of your resources on those adventures.
That nationalist perspective may be somewhat ahistorical though,
Thanks, I take this to mean that I may not need to do a lot of revision. I will continue to read on the subject.
Unchaste virgins; Orwell’s got nothing on my Romans.
The Hapsburgs, Prussians and Russians added a lot to their domains over the 1500-1815 period. By contrast, the French added Alsace, Lorraine and Corsica and failed to conquer even Wallonia.
Haiti was very profitable though before the slave revolt.
The Battle of Dien Bien Phu is definitive.
Da pregnunt virginz waz burreed unda da city gates. And all waz dubble-pluz-good ’cause da godz wuz happy.
Peez.
Yes, absolutely correct.
On the whole the Inquisition was a very good thing and it was a complete success.
You’re forgetting the illegitimate Enzo. He was the last Staufen I believe.
You are right. I shouldn’t have said he was in good standing. Though he was entombed in the Cathedral of Palermo and I don’t believe he was still excommunicated. That is what I should have wrote.
He was politically irrelevant though since he spent almost a quarter century as a prisoner and wasn’t released until his death.
I’m not sure what this means but I’ll take your word for it.
Yup.
A lot of confusion. Are we talking countries or dynasties? The Habsburgs had no overseas adventures, unless you count Cortés and Pizarro, and those were only successful because they were the first to stumble upon the Americas. They lost the Netherlands in 1568, but gained Portugal in 1580. Then they lost Portugal in 1640 and then Spain in 1700. They also lost Silesia in 1740. Meanwhile, the Bourbons gained Spain in 1700, and kept it in the War of the Spanish Succession. After 1789, the Bourbons lost everything, except that they still are the Spanish royal house. (Though lost that one for a while, too.) Meanwhile, the Habsburgs lost Belgium, then in the 1860s Northern Italy, then in 1918 everything. (Please notice that Habsburg gains were rarely comparable, because they were usually the case of peaceful dynastic succession due to strategic marriages, while their losses were due to losses on the battlefield. Even Spain was a case of losing the Spanish War of Succession. Portugal and the Netherlands were militarily successful rebellions, Belgium, Northern Italy, Silesia, and even the final collapse in 1918 due to battlefield losses. Did the Austrian Habsburgs win any major war after, say, 1700?
For continental powers, conquest was always difficult, especially when they got stronger, because then the British started to consistently support their enemies. This helped Prussia until maybe 1870, and the USSR in 1941-45. It was a major drag on Germany after the end of the 19th century, on Russia throughout the 19th century, or on France during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Britain from the safety of its island could safely build an empire and tilt the European balance against the strongest continental power. I’m not saying any idiot could’ve done so, but it was considerably more difficult for the continental powers.
Too funny. Look at a frickin map. Look at the Deep South of Egypt where the civilization began. How many hundreds of miles is that from the Mediterranean?
The “only point you are left making” is as wrong as all your other points. Civilizations are founded by men and royal lineages are traced on the paternal line. DNA test results reveal that the Y-DNA Haplogroup of the Pharaohs of the 20th Egyptian Dynasty, which was a native Egyptian dynasty, is E1b1a. Which is sub-Saharan.
Unfortunately again for your desperate attempts to deny the africanness of the Ancient Egyptians, we have the eyewitness testimony of ancient Greeks (a people far more honorable than your racist ilk):
Herodotus 2.104:
Still the Egyptians said that they believed the Colchians
to be descended from the army of Sesostris. My own conjectures were
founded, first, on the fact that they are black-skinned and have woolly
hair, which certainly amounts to but little, since several other nations
are so too; but further and more especially, on the circumstance that
the Colchians, the Egyptians, and the Ethiopians, are the only nations
who have practised circumcision from the earliest times. The Phoenicians
and the Syrians of Palestine themselves confess that they learnt the
custom of the Egyptians; and the Syrians who dwell about the rivers
Thermodon and Parthenius, as well as their neighbours the Macronians,
say that they have recently adopted it from the Colchians. Now these are
the only nations who use circumcision, and it is plain that they all
imitate herein the Egyptians. With respect to the Ethiopians, indeed, I
cannot decide whether they learnt the practice of the Egyptians, or the
Egyptians of them- it is undoubtedly of very ancient date in Ethiopia-
but that the others derived their knowledge of it from Egypt is clear to
me from the fact that the Phoenicians, when they come to have commerce
with the Greeks, cease to follow the Egyptians in this custom, and allow
their children to remain uncircumcised.”
Aristotle:
https://archive.org/stream/worksofaristotle07arisuoft/worksofaristotle07arisuoft_djvu.txt
Why are the Ethiopians and the Egyptians bandy-legged ? Is it because the bodies of living creatures become distorted by heat, like logs of wood when they become dry ? The condition of their hair too supports this theory ; for it is curlier than that of other nations, and curliness is as it were crookedness of the hair.
Ridiculous. As if all caucasians have the same nose. What are you? A nose nazi?
There are plenty Caucasians with low nose bridges. Look at the stereotypical Russian for example. Are they non-Caucasians? You must be out of touch with reality if you don’t know that africans are a diverse race.
Btw, as a Jew you must know that in recent history your oppressors in Northern Europe have caricatured your own noses as racially alien. Does that mean that Semites are not Caucasians? Or is it vice versa?
Secondly, there are plenty examples of Pharaohs who are depicted with low bridged noses. The Pharaohs of the earliest dynasties and the pyramid builders in particular:
Menes (the first Pharaoh)
https://i0.wp.com/amazingbibletimeline.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Menes.jpg
Djoser (Pharaoh who built the first pyramid):
http://www.timetrips.co.uk/pharaoh-djoser-statue.jpg
Khufu (Pharaoh who built the Great Pyramid of Giza):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/ff/Khufu2.jpg/190px-Khufu2.jpg
Khafra (Pharaoh who built the Great Sphinx and the second largest pyramid at Giza):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7e/%C3%84gyptisches_Museum_Leipzig_035.jpg/1515px-%C3%84gyptisches_Museum_Leipzig_035.jpg
You posted great historical information. However, modern DNA technology is the best tool we have to determine the origins of different peoples and their relationship to each other. Off hand, I don’t know what early anthropologists believed regarding the origins of Australoids based on their black skin, wooly hair and culture, but whatever their conclusions they have now been made obsolete by DNA research (unless, of course, they happened to be consistent with DNA findings).
I’m guessing the research is not yet complete, but all you need to do is chronologically list all the Egyptian Pharaohs and other mummies that have been (or can be) tested, and provide their: Y-DNA haplogroup; mtDNA haplogroup; and Autosomal DNA. That’s it. Case closed.
For example, Ramesses III had SSA Y-DNA. Did any other Pharaohs or any other mummies have Y-DNA? What was their total SSA? Was Ramesses 5% SSA or 50% SSA?
That is it. We’re arguing over something that will be (or already has been) settled by DNA research. I’ll go with whatever the overall DNA picture shows. Promise.
*I meant to write: Did any other Pharaohs or any other mummies have SSA Y-DNA?
Khorne would be proud. Blood for blood god, skulls for the skull throne!
https://youtu.be/9-gSJW3sHXE
Features of European civilization, which clearly contributed to the success in science and technology:
1)The presence of a large number of cities-republics and significant autonomy of other cities (this is a distinctive feature of Europe in ancient times, in the middle ages and in Modern times). Apparently this factor strongly contributed to progress (Athens, Florence).
2)Developed traditions of navigation in ancient times, in the middle ages and in Modern times (the geography of Europe is very favorable for this – two huge inland seas).
3)Created in ancient times, a powerful literary tradition. Greco-Roman literature was superior to literature of any civilization of that era, except China.
4)Greek science: logic, mathematics, astronomy and mechanics. In this area, Greece in the 4th century BC completely overtook all other civilizations. It was a powerful reserve for future development (for example, for transatlantic navigation).
5)It is impossible to exclude the possibility that some hereditary features of the population of Europe played a role.
The statement “India is Europe without Christianity” is just nonsense
What merits in science and technology has Christianity? The cult of the Bible certainly contributed greatly to the spread of literacy. But if Europe has triumphed other religion (Mithraism?, Neoplatonism?, Buddhism?), then (given the literary tradition of the Roman Empire) this other religion would also rely on sacred texts (and thus spread literacy).
What harmful (for the development of science and technology) did Christianity do? Early Christianity, with its hatred of the world and love for radical BDSM practices, probably contributed greatly to the decline of civilization in Europe. Later, Catholicism and especially Protestantism (to a much lesser extent – Orthodoxy) were reorganized into a more creative way. But it happened much later.
Probably an analogue of Europe without Christianity-China. The collapse of the Han Empire was analogous to the fall of the Roman Empire (the same decline and intellectual crisis). The role of Christianity was performed by Buddhism, but the continuity of culture in China was much more than in Europe. Then under the Tang dynasty came a new flowering of Chinese civilization. By analogy, we can imagine a history of Europe without Christianity – with the preservation (along with new cults) of the pagan religion, and with much greater cultural continuity.
In my opinion, it is impossible to see the positive influence of Christianity on the development of science and technology.
As for the Aztecs-it is believed that Nezahualcoyotl ruler of the city-state of Texcoco shortly before the arrival of the Spaniards held in his city religious reform, and canceled the human sacrifice. It can be assumed that with further development (without the Spanish conquiste), the example of Nezahualcoyotl would become the norm.
“In my opinion, it is impossible to see the positive influence of Christianity on the development of science and technology.”
Oh, but you are so wrong! It is exactly Christianity that led Europeans to science and technology. It is the dogma. The Church claimed that the truth is one and it is as the Bible states. To combat that Christian thinkers had to devise science, which is also dogmatic and claims that the truth is one, which included the scientific method to argue that some claim is true and some claim is false.
Think about those pagan Greeks. Platon claimed one thing, Aristoteles another, Sophists, Pythagoreans, Stoics and all those others claimed something else, and the poets explained it all by gods. And everybody was satisfied by this multitude of different truths. They could discover the true solution to something, but they could not purge the false solutions. These were just tales from wise old men and old men had been telling wise tales since the stone age.
Science needs the concept of one truth. Only one answer is correct. There cannot be contradictions. This is what Christianity taught and this is why the heretics had to develop the logical and scientific methods to show that they have the only truth. Modern technology used science, old practical technology is age old and in all cultures.
The reason why Judaism did not lead to science, though it also is dogmatic of the truth, is probably that they wrote so long and messed up religious books that only rabbis had the energy to read them, so the wannabe scientists did not know what the religion actually claimed and on what basis (they could ask the rabbi, but the explanation was too long and confusing), so they did not know what to oppose. Christian truth was simple and written in a single book. You could pick up a sentence that the sun circulates the earth and start claiming that it is just the opposite. As it is a dogmatic society, these two truths cannot both survive, therefore Christians now believe that Copernicus was correct.
Thank the Church!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nezahualcoyotl_(tlatoani)?wprov=sfti1
An interesting guy, I immediately started to like him. But it’s unclear if he actually abolished human sacrifice or if he merely started a cult of a monotheistic sounding god without human sacrifice, while leaving the other cults (with the human sacrifices) to continue. I think it’s the latter, and probably a great deal of obfuscation or idealization of his person was going on, due to his biography being written by his great-grandson.
But even so, it was probably still a big step in the right direction.
The Spanish won Milan and Naples in the Italian wars, and essentially kept them until 1815.
Austria went from being a minor power in Ferdinand’s time to gaining the other two thirds of Hungary, Northern Italy and Galicia.
The only round of wars in which the French ended up better off were those of Louis XIV, despite France being the largest and richest state in Europe by a significant margin for almost all of the period.
The only acquisitions made through marriage were Spain, which was united with the hereditary lands for only a lifetime anyway, and Burgundy, which had to be fought for by Maximillian.
They were on the winning (English) side in the War of the Spanish Succession, War of the Austrian Succession and the Napoleonic Wars and acquired significant territory at Vienna and Utrecht, plus they got Galicia at very little cost.
Thank you. Wally. Still have to give the Mesn-American and South American civilisations credit for contributions to agriculure (lasting), urban layout, art, record-keeping, observation of the heavens (even if mainly to work out when the next ripping out of hearts should proceed).
Gold being the easiest metal to work, know that there were many golden decorative objects, and that the level of many was high, perhaps even matching that of the very much older Danube civilisation and less older pre-Roman contact Germanics, and the Celts.
All have had small examples of art in gold to survive, only through them being found buried by archaeologists .
Must have been many small and fine pieces, in those parts of the Americas, too.
Classic case of extremely different valuation.
Japan faced something similar but only economic in effect after drunken Perry was forcing his way in, just a few years later Jews and their agents were delighted wien they worked out that silver was more highly valued than gold, rushed in to exploit the difference through trade in the two metals, it lasted for years, at least until the 1880s or nineties, before the new govt. was working out that the gold standard then in place was making it a very bad deal and clamping down.
By that time, the rulers had even considered melting down major gigantic monuments to sell the metal (not just gold), very many smaller ones were destroyed to sell the metal).
As you, I read much history, and am paying attention to it.
The E1b1a of Ramesses III can be considered as a fake news. Yes, there was a paper that reported it. The paper was signed by famous and infamous Zahi Hawass. The paper have been cited concerning its other findings about the murder of Ramesses III and X-ray technique used. But nobody quotes this paper for E1b1a thing as nobody really trusts this result. All the other DNA studies of mummies form Egypt show that the Sub Saharan admixture was lower in Egypt than it is now.
Copied a part from Majed Ahmed’s, Egyptologist, Quora answer where the STR markers are considered. “So the haplotype has several guaranteed erroneous values, and several more that look suspicious of being so, too. Amongst the normal looking ones, 390=21 favors E1b1a, 438=10 very strongly favors E1b1b and the most likely subclade is E1b1b-V22.”
Interesting question. So Ramses III seems to be E1b1b, like one should expect when all crops and animals in Egyptian agriculture are from the Middle East. They got it 2000 years later through E1b1b people in Levant. Brown people with curly hair, like Georgians (Colchians) as Herodotus wrote. That must be the case originally, but later?
It is not impossible that Ramses III was E1b1a, Bantus (E1b1a) came from the north of Africa 5000 BC and maybe they got the mitochondrial haplogroup L2 in Sub Saharan Africa and earlier were U8 or something.
The problem is the DNA Tribes autosomal DNA admixture analysis that claims SSA origins to Ramesses III. Apparently the 90 analyzed mummies (2017) were too young to settle the question, so it is open, or DNA Tribes is wrong?
This reminds me of the research years ago by Behar (Jewish name) et al which argued that the mtDNA of Ashkenazi Jews is Near Eastern. Going off memory, his methods were questionable to begin with and, subsequently, better techniques demonstrated that Ashkenazi mtDNA is primarily Roman, not Jewish (I believe this is still the consensus view at the moment).
Some people have a hard time being objective when ethnic/racial pride gets in the way. I think I’m pretty objective regarding my tribe. In fact, I fully acknowledge that the Jews killed Kennedy and orchestrated the 9/11 attacks. That we got away with it proves we’re obviously superior.
Don’t spread the stupidest conspiracy theories.
Though I’m interested in what Ron Unz has to say on the topic, maybe I’ll read his articles about JFK tomorrow.
I think some of the mummies were older than Ramesses III.
This is from comment about Ashkenazi and ME connection.
http://www.unz.com/article/jews-baptize-new-american-embassy-with-palestinian-blood-58-dead-and-2700-wounded/#comment-2330973
The stupidest? All the other “the less stupid ones” like for example that Aristotle Onassis did it can function in the space of public discourse and you can read about them in Daily Mail or have BBC documentary made about them while the Israel connection does not exist, because, yes you must be right, it is the stupidest one.
Anyway, Israel and the Z-lobby had the better motives than anybody and what is more importantly the death of JFK made their problems go away and permanently change the course of history for Israel and the Z-lobby: (1) preventing Israel’s nuclear program being weaponized, (2) forcing Israel’s Z-lobby to register as a foreign agent and (3) granting Palestinians right of return.
Read Ron’s article. He also made Piper’s book available.
Pretend you haven’t seen this comment and do not answer. Just do your research. Forget about me.
No, that was a poor attempt at humor.
I read both articles and browsed the comments – some really wild conspiracy theories floating around there.
Wild conspiracy theories, socialism and multiculturalism/globalism are best summed up by my favorite EO Wilson quote:
“Wonderful theory, wrong species”
Show us all these DNA studies.
Also, answer the question you avoided the last time: what possible reason could Herodotus and Aristotle have to lie about the physical appearance of the Egyptians?
Why did no one ever compare them racially to non-africans?
An absurd falsehood.
The Church banned the book by Copernicus that started the Scientific Revolution in Europe. Because it contradicted Christian dogma.
The Church forced Galileo, the first modern scientist, to recant his support for Copernicus’s heliocentrism (under threat of torture), and then put him under house arrest for the rest of his life.
Science owes nothing to Christianity.
A silly argument. The “truth” of Christianity comes from revealed Scripture (and Papal Infallibility in Catholicism), while truth in Science comes from observing Nature. In fact Science contradicts the “truths” of Christianity.
You are making the same moronic mistake as Utu did in another thread. The Y-DNA Haplogroup would be the same for all Pharaohs of a lineage. The Ramesside Period lasted for 215 years with 11 Pharaohs.
As for the percentage SSA of the Egyptians, the testimony of Aristotle and Herodotus tells us that it must have been overwhelmingly high for they compare them to Ethiopians.
Can you think of any reason why Herodotus and Aristotle would lie about the race of the Egyptians?
Right, the oil canard is exactly what Zionists want you to believe.
And it’s not the US that’s getting the big oil deals in the middle east. Try China & Russia.
‘There’s a sucker born every minute’.
http://www.codoh.com
Nothing stupid about Gibson’s statement. Well, maybe not every war.
Jews deserve to be denigrated, heaven knows they denigrate euro-white gentiles 24/7/365.
Rock-on Mel!
http://www.codoh.com
‘have to lie’ – lie and not lie are the only two categories you can imagine? Did you read Herodotus and Aristotle original texts? Did you compare and analyze translations? Is C. A. Diop’s work from where you get your quotes to Herodotus and Aristotle? You see nobody is accusing Diop of lying just of bad scholarship and elective reading of ancient texts. Diop’s book “Civilization or Barbarism” was summarized as Afrocentric pseudohistory by academic and author Robert Todd Carroll. PSEUDOSCIENCE!
The “Black Egyptian hypothesis” was criticized and rejected at UNESCO’s Symposium on the Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic Script in Cairo in 1974[34] (published 1978).
Afrocentrist C. A. Diop attended this symposium and when asked “what proportion of melanin was sufficient for a man to be classified as belonging to the black race” failed to provide an answer.
Show us all these DNA studies.. You re trolling. You know very well which study I was referring to.
I leave it to you for you home study to analyze the rhetorical equation you posed: Why did no one ever compare them racially to non-africans? to find out how many different fallacies it contains and why it is purely rhetorical manipulation on your part to pose it. I emphasize ‘manipulation’ because I presume you are not that stupid to pose it in a good faith. You are acting in bad faith. You can start with figuring out what was the meaning of the term of Africa to Herodotus and Aristotle first.
A stupid dishonest attempt at straw man argumentation. I gave the link for the Aristotle quote, and it’s not Diop. And for the Herodotus quote I gave it’s location in his magnum opus Histories. Look it up. And then answer my question: why do you think Herodotus and Aristotle lied when they related Egyptians to Ethiopians?
Another stupid attempt at avoiding the question. And this shyster has the nerve to accuse me of not “acting in good faith”….
Why didn’t you tell us what you think they meant by Africa? Are you afraid we will laugh at you?
Yes I know. I already debunked it. It is dubious because the egyptianness of the tested mummies is not proven, all the mummies are from one location, and from a period which includes many centuries of Greco-Roman colonization.
What else you got? Where are “all the other DNA studies” you were claiming supported your argument?
By assuming you were acting in a bad faith I was giving you a benefit of doubt thinking that you knew better because the only other option was to conclude you were stupid.
Some were older, but they are all from the Lower Egypt. Possibly in Upper Egypt genetics was somewhat different at the time. The problem is not Ramesses III being E1b1b or E1b1a, as E is a sister of D and both are non SSA, they developed either in the Horn of Africa or outside Africa, and E1b1a may have been associated with a non-SSA mtDNA. The problem is the autosomal DNA of this one firm, DNA Tribes. Well, these results seem to change. There are political forces behind much research.
What do you mean? Was this firm involved in testing of DNA from mummies?
From what I gathered from reading http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15694 the biggest problem is obtaining a viable sample that is not contaminated. The samples are fragmented with large DNA damage. Out of 150 mummies they got three nuclear DNA samples only:
And they got 90 samples with mitochondrial genomes.
It seems that no DNA claims made by papers authored by Zahawi Hawass are taken seriously. His paper
Hawass, Z. et al. Ancestry and pathology in King Tutankhamun’s family. Jama 303, 638–647 (2010).
was strongly criticized for sample contamination. See
So when his 2012 appeared with an incidental claim of E1b1a of Ramses III
it was ignored. The DNA tests in the paper are incidental and not critical to the study which mostly relied on X-ray topography and other imaging techniques in solving the murder mystery. I checked 20-something publications that cited this paper and none except for some high school or college student in South Africa cited the DNA claim. But when you google Ramses III and E1b1a it is all over feeding the hunger and righteous anger of black Afrocentrists.
I have not earlier looked at this question at all, I took it self-evident that they were very probably E1b1b, but just for this discussion I put it to google. If you scroll this blogger’s post, there is the DNA Tribes autosomal figures. It is not about the 90 mummies, and i for sure do not know
http://en.lisapoyakama.org/the-egyptian-dna-case-truth-and-lies/
Interesting link.
Here is one to DNA Tribes reports: dnatribes.com/dnatribes-digest-2012-01-01.pdf
My feeling is that DNA Tribes as far as the study of DNA in mummies can’t be taken seriously. They have no clue about sampling ancient DNA. Besides their for profit operation also does not look too good.
I get that. This is a laundry list of self-evident facts that I in no way intend to object to.
By the way I know Carcassonne very well, please remember that what is important about it in the fact that it’s the largest remaining fully enclosed medieval city — is the “remaining” part. It was not especially large as compared to other medieval cities in France, in fact it was rather small. It’s just that the walls had not been destroyed yet when Mérimée decided to prevent the locals from tearing them down, and effectively singlehandedly initiated the preservationist role of the government. For other, much larger medieval cities, the damage had already been done long before, as they were expanding. Paris is a prime example of that.
My point in either way is that if we want to make the claim that the size of the rebels’ armies were inflated by their contemporaries, then we must apply the same logic to, say, the Roman legions themselves. And, as a result, the relative sizes of opposing forces remain unchanged. And so remains unchanged as well the difficulty for one man to force another one to let himself be crucified, impaled, or whatever.
Yes, a state of mental stunning. There are many first-hand accounts of people being so broken and despondent to the effect of not even feeling pain.
When I was young in bootcamp in the military, I got so cold one night aboard a truck that all I was thinking of was to stop being cold. I wonder if I would not have let myself be taken prisoner by horrible foes if they had promised a hot soup and a blanket.
PC requires moral relativism cos
any behavior x defined as bad when white people do it is required to be not bad when non-white people do it.
#
i read somewhere (may not be true) that the Spartans had a thing once a year where they hunted and killed their Helots to keep the numbers down
so i wonder, given the high population densities in mesoamerica, if that was the driving force there – the dominant power culling their subject tribes?
the story of Abraham implies sacrifice of the first child was common practice in the Levant before it was abandoned and replaced with circumcision – the old pre-PC story on Carthage was the city was founded by dissenters who didn’t agree with the practice being abandoned.
Yes, but read the Talmud for a while. R. Akiva say one thing and R. Shimon says the opposite. They tolerate multiple answers. There is no single truth in Judaism.
But there is one truth in reality and there is one truth in Christianity. One truth is the principle of science and mathematics: no contradictions. If two “proofs” come to different results, one or both are wrong. This aspect of a single truth is in Christianity, it is not in Talmudic Judaism, it is not in classical Greek-Roman culture. And this is really the key to the truth: the truth is one, not many. It does not matter if the Church had the false truth. It forced the scientists to present the correct truth and to justify their truth with such methods that no thinking person could object. And that is just because the Church had imprinted in everybody’s mind that the truth is one.
So, there are no two historical truths, one is correct (what actually happened), one is false (what did not happen). We do not believe that millions could have died and at the same time believe that they did not die and accept that both truths are true. No, we are logical, only one is true.
Some modern people may think that the ancients did not have any basis to what they believed. They had, but modern people like to misunderstand what they meant. They tried to write just as correctly as modern scientist try now, only they knew less than we do now. There is a real basis to all those myths, often it is enough to look at the stars to see what they meant. It was science of that time. So, we know more, but no reason to despise those from older times.
Yes, indeed, the idea that one truth is correct and others are wrong, is a great discovery. It does not matter if your version of the truth is not the correct one. One truth that feels like the truth. Like when you solve a mathematical problem, you can feel that this is correct and not hazy.
the banking mafia’s Pearl Harbor conquest of the media is how the current political hegemony was achieved
Sorry, but the date of writing for a language group is comprehensively irrelevant to its origin.
You can come up with theories all you want about how people should behave, but my point has the advantage of being based on known historical facts about how people do behave.
Let’s look at the situation of someone is a city that’s just surrendered to or been taken by storm by the Mongols after a long siege. You are pretty sure what’s going to happen next, since the process is widely publicized by the Mongols to “encourage” populations not to resist.
But you are 90% starved to death, probably ill and quite possibly wounded. You are certainly in total despair. So do you attack, with zero hope of success, or do you just give up? After all, a line of competent soldiers armed with blades is no more vulnerable to effective attack by unarmed men than the same group armed with AKs.
In today’s world, how many people charge the mass shooter? Not many, as can be seen by the fact that in most such situations if everybody automatically charged instantly the shooting wouldn’t be very mass. Instead, people generally try to hide under a desk, though from a purely logical standpoint that makes no sense at all. And that’s with people who are healthy.
In the recent Eastwood movie about the Americans who took down the shooter on the train, they are lauded as great heroes, which they were. But from a purely logical standpoint, their actions were the entirely logical thing to do. Trapped in a railroad car with a shooter, it’s not like they had the option of fleeing, whereas attacking had some slight chance of success. But most people in such a situation cower or try to run away.
Which is why those who charged are considered heroes. They’re not the norm.
The banking mafia use the Left to undermine social cohesion as a self-protective tactic – the official Left’s human capital is vile but the media – also owned by the banking mafia – hide it.
Pretty much the only people more vile than the upper echelons of the official Left are the media themselves and of course the banking mafia.
Admittedly a lot of the official Right are vile too but then most of them are owned by the banking mafia as well.
When it comes to the activist base i’d say the alt-right has almost all the talent and creativity – as shown by how much their opponents are dominated by alt-right’s language and memes.
I don’t think many will consider Newton to be a Renaissance thinker. He came along after it and is generally considered one of the classic examples of an Enlightenment man.
Of course, the distinctions between these eras are somewhat arbitrary. There is no general agreement on when “the Renaissance” begins or ends.
Saudi Arabia has been using their oil money to fund jihadist mosques all over the world for 30 years – unless they’re stopped it’s just a matter of time.
blood sacrifice and corn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barleycorn
i think a region that could support a city of 100,000 could easily hold up to a million during a siege if everyone from the surrounding countryside had moved in.
Ok, seems to be that the DNA Tribes result is unreliable. And it looks like it was not autosomal DNA but Y-DNA based on this GenDNA guy. That settles it. Agriculture come these from Levant, other results would be strange.
if multi-generational close cousin marriage creates a form of ultra-conservative society which prevents innovation
then the Catholic Church’s ban of close cousin marriage would have removed that barrier
#
Cleisthenes did something which might have had a similar effect on a smaller scale in the early years of democratic Athens
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleisthenes
the oil wars aren’t about access to oil they’re about trying to enforce the sale of oil in dollars only…
countries that stopped selling oil only in dollars:
Iraq
Syria
Iran (partially)
which is the reason the Imperial faction (people like Cheney) and the banking mafia promote those wars – the “liberal” media obscure the petrodollar aspect cos they’re owned by the banking mafia and so choose to push the Imperial faction as the primary cause to deflect the banking mafia’s primary role.
of course that’s not the only reason – the Israel-First faction have an Israeli reason and the Saudi and Saudi-bought faction have a Saudi reason and the Turkish and Turk-bought faction have a Turkish reason etc.
You can’t be serious. Anyone can see that there is no single truth in Christianity:
Is the Old Testament the “single truth” or is it the New Testament? You can’t say that they are both true because they contradict each other in many ways. The most significant being the Old Testament emphasis on the Unity of God vs the New Testament Trinity.
Was Jesus a Teacher or a Blood Sacrifice? It makes no sense to say he was both, does it?
Who has the “single truth”, the Catholics or the Protestants? They both condemn the other. Who is wrong and going to Hell?
Sure, but that just means you burn through your supplies a lot faster. 1M people need a LOT of food. The overcrowding also vastly increases the chance of a devastating epidemic.
The world of the past was a great deal less peopled. The entire world’s population in 1200 is estimated at 350 to 450M. In such a world, where 90% or so of the population is by definition required to grow food, you aren’t going to have very many really huge cities.
Somewhere around 10% of this worldwide population died during the Mongol wars.
Yes yes, and Nietzsche has written down this theory at the same time he is colleagues of the venerable Professor Burckhardt in Switzerland.
2. Was Jesus a Teacher or a Blood Sacrifice? It makes no sense to say he was both, does it?
Why not? That’s like saying a man can’t be both a father and a firefighter.
3. Who has the “single truth”, the Catholics or the Protestants? They both condemn the other. Who is wrong and going to Hell?
Come on, get with the program. It much worse than that. Catholics are more or less in agreement, but Protestants are all over the block, with probably thousands of doctrinal disagreements amongst themselves, much less with Catholics and Orthodox.
Lol it came to Moscow with the World Cup – the Mexican “Day of the Dead”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8B3d0l-2o-0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhE57Jiu8pY
“Is the Old Testament the “single truth” or is it the New Testament? You can’t say that they are both true because they contradict each other in many ways.”
You know that and I know that and theologians always knew that, but despite of it, the church had the dogma and there was no actual contradiction. The truth was one, therefore evolution was false and the solar system model was false. And scientists had to fight the dogma and develop the method of science to overcome the dogma. Without this resistance, a scientist would stayed as just another wise man with his own ideas, but as these ideas might cause you to be burned on the stake, the scientist rose to a higher level and proved his claim.
Well, I see you do not like my sense of humor. So, let this issue be.
No it’s not like that at all.
If Jesus was a blood sacrifice what was the point of his sermons? Does following his teachings save you from Hell? Not according to Christian dogma.
Btw, in a blood sacrifice the sacrificial victim stays dead. Jesus didn’t stay dead. So this whole sacrifice business seems farcical. More importantly the entire concept of God needing a blood sacrifice to appease his anger is so primitive and indefensible.
It should be obvious to anyone who is not brainwashed that Jesus was a Teacher. He was crucified not as a sacrifice but as cruel punishment for preaching spiritual truths that contradicted the consensus of that place and time.
What was he teaching? Here is the Gospel of Jesus in a nutshell:
God is within you. Seek and you shall find.
What really sped up the development of Germany was its Christianization, in other words its reintegration into the civilized world after the barbarian disruption of the 5th century.
Wouldn’t have been better if the scientist had stayed as another wise man in his corner ruminating his own ideas (and seeking the salvation of his soul), than raising to a ‘higher level’ and inventing the atomic bomb (to prove what?)?
But how many people really seek it? God is virtually in all of us. The goal is to actualize it. It is a process that requires a strenuous effort, a sacrifice from our part.
“God Became Man that Man Might Become God”.
“I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.” (John 17).
I don’t understand the need to paper over the matter of degree in the quest for cultural equivalency.
Maybe it’s the anti-American thing? I mean if you’re looking for villains, communist regimes murdered like 100 million civilians in the 20th century. America’s got nothin’ on that.
Bah, I guess I don’t have much insight into someone who can say “the Aztecs were just more honest about it.” They made mountains of skulls and ripped out children’s beating hearts on a mass scale. Is “they were just more honest about it” really the first thing that pops into a sane person’s mind?
I think you probably have that backwards. The chaos crap sounds like the abstract rationalization for the rather more concrete reality of mass murder.
‘Blessed are the poor in spirit’ (i.e. the ignorants), they believe in ‘Science’.
That’s because you’re a materialist, so every spiritual reason must be interpreted as just a pretext to satisfy some physical appetite.
Even so, if true them out justifications for our wars were just pretexts because we liked committing mass murder – which still makesus no better than the Aztecs.
The Talmud encouraged the ‘double-think’.
Mexican fans- guys with a peculiar sense of humor
https://twitter.com/TheSportsman/status/1012597655522938880
Bullshit. That’s Gnostic doctrine and it’s antithetical to Christianity.
Here’s what Christ really taught, in his own words:
Jesus answered, “If I honor Myself, My honor is nothing. It is My Father who honors Me, of whom you say that He is your God. Yet you have not known Him, but I know Him. And if I say, ‘I do not know Him,’ I shall be a liar like you; but I do know Him and keep His word. Your father Abraham rejoiced to see My day, and he saw it and was glad.”
Then the Jews said to Him, “You are not yet fifty years old, and have You seen Abraham?”
Jesus said to them, “Most assuredly, I say to you, before Abraham was, I AM.”
John 8:48.
I wouldn’t call this bullshit:
I am in the Father, and the Father is in me (John 14:10)
Father, just as you are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us…that they may be one as we are one. I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. (John 17:21-23)
The kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:21)
Seek and you shall find. (Matthew 7:7)
“Wouldn’t have been better if the scientist had stayed as another wise man in his corner ruminating his own ideas (and seeking the salvation of his soul), than raising to a ‘higher level’ and inventing the atomic bomb (to prove what?)?”
I fully agree. Aztecs would also have agreed. Development leads to the end of the times (era). After the end of one era starts a new era and for a short time there should be development to fix the problems that caused the end of the previous era, but then development should stop. Nothing should be changed. This is why the wise men kept their wisdom secret, so that it would not cause development. Aztecs sacrificed humans to keep the era from not ending. It is like the punctuated evolution of the much despised Stephen Jay Gold: only for a short time at the beginning of a new era there should be evolution and then evolution should stagnate for a long time. This technical development that we now witness must either stop and stagnate, or it leads to so large problems that the era ends to a catastrophe. We already know that, yet cannot see the wisdom in keeping knowledge secret so that nothing changes. We do not see the wisdom of the stone age people when nothing changed for ten thousand years. They had cleaver people also, but they did not want to bring forth the end of their world, so they forbade all new inventions. Inversely, if you want to destroy the present system and to bring the era to the end (with the world wars and all), then liberate secret knowledge, make it publicly available. It will start development and development will lead to the catastrophe. Now you see why the new time started from modern science and why this modern science was connected with occultism and why it is a part of the messianic plan which also includes Jesus and Christianity. It was to bring the times to the end.
Nice humblebrag.
Excellent point. I agree.
But it is the Zionist / Leftist canard that ‘corporate access to & control of all that physical oil is what is driving these wars‘ is what I’m talking about.
Zionists realize that the average person quietly supports the notion that we will get all those oil big deals and control of the oil fields, which of course has not happened, per my original point. Hence ‘no blood for oil’ is a set-up.
That intentional diversion shields Israeli interests from scrutiny.
AND shields the point you are making.
Cheers.
Here is the Gospel of Jesus in a nutshell: God is within you. Seek and you shall find.
Not only is that not in a nutshell, it’s not in anything he said.
Yeshua said to him, “I AM THE LIVING GOD, The Way and The Truth and The Life; no man comes to my Father but by me alone.”
That’s not looking inside yourself to find God, that’s looking to Christ to find God.
The conspicuous silence of nazi-hunters about certain Banderite-in-power in Canada. Chrystia Freeland, a proud progeny of a well-documented nazi-collaborator and a staunch supporter of Ukrainian banderites herself, has been Canada’s Minister of Foreign Relations since January 2017. Not a peep from the Wiesenthal Center, ADL, and the Lobby at large. What a selectivity!
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/01/23/chrystia-freeland-kiev-minister-foreign-affairs-ottawa.html
“Chrystia Freeland says her maternal grandparents were victims of Stalinist persecution.”
https://www.globalresearch.ca/canada-lets-not-be-distracted-by-stephen-harper-we-have-chrystia-freeland-to-contend-with/5646107
“German military records have been found in a Polish government archive in Warsaw revealing that Michael Chomiak, grandfather of Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland, was trained in Vienna for German espionage and propaganda operations, then promoted to run the German press machine for the Galician region of Ukraine and Poland during the 4-year occupation. So high-ranking and active in the Nazi cause was Chomiak that the Polish intelligence services were actively hunting for Chomiak until the 1980s – without knowing he had fled for safety to an Alberta farm in Canada.
The newly disclosed documents expose Freeland’s repeated lying that Chomiak had been a victim of World War II…
The Polish records also point to the likelihood that US Army, US intelligence and Canadian immigration records on Chomiak – concealed until now – can confirm in greater detail what Chomiak did during the war, as well as for years afterwards, which made him a target for the Polish police until not long before his death in 1984.”
LOL, still spamming stuff by “globalresearch.ca”
This is still their best work though:
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-social-and-economic-achievements-of-north-korea/5594234
The Social and Economic Achievements of North Korea
“My conscience leaves me no other choice than to break the betrayal of my own silences…I know that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today is my own government.” The Reverend Martin Luther King, Recipient of the Nobel Peace prize.”
Part I
After just returning from an in-depth visit to the DPRK, it is difficult, if not impossible to convey in words, or even in photographs, the absolutely awe-inspiring achievements of the people and government of North Korea, who following an unspeakably barbarous attack by the US and South Korea, which, with shameful collaboration by the United Nations, obliterated their entire country, heroically rebuilt their nation.
Etc. etc.
The idiot savant Karlin strikes [out] again…
It must take a special kind of clown to screw it into his tiny head to write about things he is utterly and hopelessly unqualified and uneducated for…
The Ehtiopian Ge’ez script is nearly 3,000 years old…and is the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church…one of the oldest in Christendom…and mentioned by St Peter in the New Testament…[Acts 2:38]
https://s20.postimg.cc/wbf76sqel/Ethiopian_Scroll_comprising_prayers_against_various_ailments_Wel.jpg
It is better not to throw stones in a glasshouse. Karlin is wrong saying there was no writing in Africa. But neither does St. Peter mention any Ethiopian Church in Acts 2:38. The Ethiopian Church starts with the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch, the official of Queen Candace of Ethiopia, by the Apostle Philip. Anyhow there is scant evidence of a developed Church before the 4th century. Ethiopia was the second country to officially adopt Christianity (after Armenia did so in 301) in 324-330.
Funny how you you take exception to what I said…and then confirm exactly what I said…
Anyway only my reference to Acts 2 was mistaken…the story of the baptism of the Ethiopian eunuch by Philip is in Acts 8:26-40…
To be fair, Ethiopia is partially Semitic in origin and the Ethiopians who developed and used language were the lighter-skinned, partially Semitic highlanders. Here is a girl from the ethnic group who inhabit Ethiopia’s ancient capital:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Adigrat_Girl,_Tigray_(15156285596).jpg
And here is an Amhara:
http://amharaofethiopia.weebly.com/uploads/9/6/2/2/96222396/13266942-871706926288183-508997884-n_1_orig.jpg
Haile Selassie:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/75/Haile_Selassie_in_suit_and_cloak_in_1960s.jpg/220px-Haile_Selassie_in_suit_and_cloak_in_1960s.jpg
I don’t think these are the “blacks” AK had in mind.
The kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:21) Seek and you shall find. (Matthew 7:7)
Where will you find God if not in his Kingdom? If God is within you, why would you look outside yourself to find God? Isn’t that foolish?
‘…I don’t think these are the “blacks” AK had in mind…’
In all fairness, the question under consideration is whether Karlin even has a ‘mind’…and if so, just how stunted it actually is…
‘Brutality, and human sacrifice, was not restricted to S America:
Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen, ‘ The world of the Huns’, 1973 Berkeley
E. A. Freeman, ‘Western Europe, In the fifth century, An Aftermath’, London 1904
Herwich Wolfram, ‘History of the Goths’, Berkeley 1988, München 1979’
Yes, but.
Students of the subject reluctantly admit that human sacrifice was far more widespread, massive, and long-lasting than elsewhere — at least outside of black Africa.
I think one has to avoid thinking ‘human sacrifice bad,’ then either pointing to it or denying it depending on whether one is attempting to denigrate or defend American Indians.
Human sacrifice was very widespread in the New World. One just has to accept it and move on with whatever the discussion was about.
FYI ; despite the frequent insights this site provides, it also provides a voice for the bigoted segment of our society who need to feel ‘superior’ due their inmate inferiority. This article could’ve done much better with the disingenuous, racist opinions. But given the Right Wing climate today in the USA, one has to glean info where it’s available.
Are you suggesting that there is racism on these pages? That’s horrible!
There is no equivalence between the Christian sacrifice (and of normal societies) and the sacrifices of the Aztecs. The real sacrifice is an offering to God of your own life for the benefit of others: “Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends”. One renounce of something of his own to save his friends, relatives, country. Even the child sacrifices of the Canaanites or Carthaginians, gruesome as they were, were sacrifices of their own children (and only the first born). The Romans called it devotio.
The Aztecs and their like (Celts, Goths, Huns) were offering the life of others for their own egoistic benefit. It was a perversion of sacrifice by a perverted society.
It was a perversion of sacrifice
There is a proper method of human sacrifice. Who knew?
‘Sacrifice’ derives from the Latin term ‘sacrificium’, which combined the concepts ‘sacra’ (sacred things) and ‘facere’ (to do or perform). A sacrifice means then to ‘make a thing sacred’ and does not necessarily imply killing but the renunciation of something that belongs to you. So, offerings, alms, ascesis, fasts are sacrifices.
I see your point, and although the Aztec religious leaders were literate, I don’t believe that they were fluent in Latin.
In any case, I think that it is obvious that they believed that what they were doing was sacred as they understood the idea.
Owning my ignorance on the subject, I doubt that Abraham would have consumed Isaac had there been massive sunspot activity and the no-go message not arrived in time.
As you point out, there is a major difference between giving up something one desires and values as opposed to forcing another being to give up its earthly existence thereby providing you and your class with more calories. What exactly did the sacrificer give up?
Kim Stanley Robinson wrote an alternative history in which 99% of Europe was wiped out by Black Death (Amazon link below). In it, North American Indians, after a technological/political spark from the Japanese, become a continental power.
https://www.amazon.com/Years-Rice-Salt-Novel/dp/0553580078/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1531633594&sr=8-1&keywords=the+years+of+rice+and+salt&dpID=51ejCDhmLdL&preST=_SY291_BO1,204,203,200_QL40_&dpSrc=srch