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#41 |
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Philosopher
Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Dublin (the one in Ireland)
Posts: 7,105
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Yes I gave in and configured an avatar. |
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#42 |
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Philosopher
Join Date: Jul 2009
Posts: 7,972
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DOC, that's an impressive amount of silliness in one post.
But perhaps I've misunderstood you. Are you saying xtians have never torn down constructions from other religions? Are you saying the Persian miniaturists didn't exist? Are you saying one of the two religions MUST be right? I rather liked the wax option ANTPogo mentioned earlier. |
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#43 |
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Nitpicking dilettante
Moderator
Join Date: Mar 2007
Location: Berkshire, mostly
Posts: 24,560
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The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.Bertrand Russell Zooterkin is correct Darat Nerd! Hokulele Join the JREF Folders ! Team 13232 |
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#44 |
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a carbon based life-form
Join Date: Nov 2005
Posts: 26,695
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#45 |
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Mafia Penguin
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Netherlands
Posts: 10,318
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Proud member of the Solipsistic Autosycophant's Group |
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#46 |
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Philosopher
Join Date: Apr 2010
Posts: 8,015
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#47 |
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Anti-homeopathy illuminati member
Join Date: Oct 2003
Location: UK
Posts: 26,561
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Given Europe's climate you don't need people to actively destroy such things. Then there are always those who need kindling.
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#48 |
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Philosopher
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 9,829
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Yes, but now we moved from the church and religion having anything to do with the history of human learning, to such irrelevant waffling as that, yeah, but the theocratic government at least provided stability for laymen to do that. As grasping at straws goes, that's pretty low.
Again, by the same token, you could credit communism for providing the stability and resources that allowed some scientists to put the Sputnik in orbit. In reality, well, do you really think living in a corrupt communist dictatorship actually helped? Besides, exactly what DID that theocratic government provide? Do you think people would have just left invaders to roll in, if some upper class twit didn't claim divine right, or what? Exactly what did a theocratic government do that disproves my "this is your brain on religion" quip? |
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Which part of "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" don't you understand? |
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#49 |
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Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Apr 2008
Posts: 15,305
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I'd like to see only the faithful dismantle a pyramid...
No modern engineering aids permitted. |
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#50 |
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Philosopher
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 5,119
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#51 |
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Philosopher
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 5,119
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Well, actually, writing systems predated the Phoenicians. There are three basic writing systems, pictographic, syllabary and alphabetic. In pictographic systems, such as Egyptian hieroglyphs, each symbol stands for a word. So, if your language has 5000 words, you would need about 5000 symbols. There would, however, have to be certain symbols that stand for sounds, so that one can write foreign words down when needed.
In syllabaries, each symbol stands for a syllable. Usually, this is a consonant followed by a vowel. So, we might have a symbol for bah (long a), bay (short a), bee (long e), beh (short e), by (long i), bih (short i), boo and boh (varying "o" sounds), and buh. So, if we have about nine vowel variants for about ten consonant sounds, we'd end up with about 90 such characters, to which we might have to add ten end consonant symbols, for a total of 100 characters. The alphabet, invented by the west Semitic peoples (Phoenicians, Israelites etc.) of the Iron Age, was a vast improvement over the pictographic and syllabary systems. |
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#52 |
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NLH
Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 25,885
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I'd give good money to see anyone attempt to dismantle the pyramids.
McAlpines and the ghost of Fred Dibnah would have their work cut out. |
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#53 |
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Philosopher
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 9,829
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Just as a minor correction to what Tim otherwise correctly said, there is actually a fourth writing system, between full-tilt pictographic and syllabic: rebus.
In a rebus writing system, you can write bigger words by combining the symbols for smaller words, for no other reason than that they sound the right way. E.g., if English were rebus, if you lacked a symbol for 'charitable' you could for example approximate it as chair+table. (Not a very good modern rebus, but chosen to illustrate ancient rebus writing: it really was that approximative.) It's not composite words, like 'outreach' which actually combines the meanings of two words, but stuff where the symbols are combined just for the sound value. It's similar to syllabic, and some of the signs are indeed syllables, but symbols for stuff that's longer than just a consonant and a vowel can be used in the same way as the syllables would be. Really, it works exactly like a modern pictographic rebus puzzle. Which brings me to the minor correction: Egyptian writing was not full-tilt pictographic, but rebus. As were Summerian and Akkadian, for that matter, although those had their own category-signs twist (similar to Linear B) on top of the rebus. |
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Which part of "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" don't you understand? |
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#54 |
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Penultimate Amazing
Join Date: Aug 2007
Posts: 22,782
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Nice way to totally destroy Egypt's economy, which is heavily dependent on Tourism.
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#55 |
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Unique
Join Date: Jul 2008
Location: Birmingham, AL
Posts: 9,330
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For certain groups, that's a feature, not a bug.
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"A nation can survive with kufr, but not with zulm." - ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib "No more hurting people" - Martin William Richard Currently Reading: Righteous Victims, by Benny Morris |
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#56 |
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Muse
Join Date: Oct 2012
Location: Nelson, New Zealand
Posts: 887
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More and bloodier wars have been fought over, and more and bloodier campaigns of persecution have been justified using Religion than any other single philosophy in the history of humanity...
► Twenty Crusades in 400 years from the 11th C to the 14th C killed about a million people in the name of God and Christ!! ► The French Wars of Religion ► The 30 Years War ► The Lebanese Civil War ► The Civil Wars in Sudan ► The Irish Civl War then there are the persecutions. ► The Spanish Inquisition ► The Salem Witch Trials ► The Persecution of the Jews by the Nazis ► The Persecution of Huguenots by Roman Catholics (which is in my geneology) The list goes on. While Religions may well have been "seats of learning" it was more by accident than design. The Roman Catholic Church's dogmatic adherence to the Ptolemaic Theory of the Solar System effectively stalkled the advancement of science for nearly 1,500 years, and they persecuted anyone who questioned it (Copernicus, Galileo) sometimes murdering them (Giordano Bruno) if they dare question it, and all in the Name of God. The world would be a much better, more advance place without "organised" religion. |
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“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” - George Orwell |
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#57 |
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Salted Sith Cynic
Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: Rat cheer
Posts: 34,261
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smartcookie, I hate to tell you that Mao, by himself, made your whole shopping list look like picnics. (So did the bubonic plague).
His ideology and aims had the advantage of modern scientific methods and tools. His butcher's bill is at about 100,000,000, which makes Stalin and Hitler both look like utter pussies. Cheers. |
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Helicopters don't so much fly as beat the air into submission. "Jesus wept, but did He laugh?"--F.H. Buckley____"There is one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth ... His mirth." --Chesterton__"If the barbarian in us is excised, so is our humanity."--D'rok__ "I only use my gun whenever kindness fails."-- Robert Earl Keen__"Sturgeon spares none.". -- The Marquis |
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#58 |
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Philosopher
Join Date: Aug 2010
Posts: 5,363
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#59 |
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Illuminator
Join Date: May 2011
Posts: 3,894
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No. Tell me. And tell me that military affairs were of no interest to Christianity or Islam, only if you have the audacity to ignore the Crusades, and other similar events.
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What should be asked instead is: why was there no significant literature and education in the spoken languages of early medieval Europe? Answer, because the Church monopolised education. It educated a smll number of priests in fossilised forms of ancient languages. The ancient secular literature was forgotten, more or less, and was reintroduced into Europe by Muslim and Jewish scholars. The destruction of ancient learning is symbolised by the Emperor Justinian's suppression of the Academy in Athens, and the other seats of ancient learning in 529 AD. In the early middle ages even many kings and emperors were illiterate! Charlemagne learned his letters late in life.
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#60 |
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a carbon based life-form
Join Date: Nov 2005
Posts: 26,695
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#61 |
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Illuminator
Join Date: May 2011
Posts: 3,894
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I think we can conclude from these facts, if the figure for Mao's victims is accurate (let us accept it for the sake of this discussion), that none of these people were inspired by an almighty omnibenevolent Supreme Being. Neither, then, were the religious people who committed monstrous crimes or spent centuries fighting wars and torturing rivals and dissidents. If your historical facts prove anything it is that Soviet Communism, for example, is a false ideology. So then must be Christianity - by the same reasoning.
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#62 |
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Muse
Join Date: Oct 2012
Location: Nelson, New Zealand
Posts: 887
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__________________
“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.” - George Orwell |
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#63 |
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Philosopher
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 9,829
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Actually, no, that's BS.
For a start, whenever I hear such "but X killed more", the problem is that they ignore percentages. E.g., you could say that Mao killed more people than the 30 year war, a war of religion, but you're comparing a country of 1 billion people to Renaissance HRE which had 20 million total, INCLUDING Austria and Bohemia. But when you look at percentages, just that one religious conflict alone killed a frikken half of the population of Germany. Mao's revolution did NOT kill half the population of China. If we're talking the contribution of revolution to our species as a whole, and the climate it produced, as opposed to just tallying the score of individual dictators, then we must look at percentages of the total population. That's why for example the statistics for crime are per capita, not just number per country. Because it's just not the same thing if 1000 people are murdered in a country of 300,000 as if 1000 are killed in a medieval city of 10,000 people. The Stockholm Bloodbath of 1520 -- for offending a bishop by daring stand against him, I might add -- may have killed "only" 80 to 90 people, but that was a different thing back when Stockholm's population was less than 1% of what it is today. It actually had only 5000 to 7000 people total. To have the same impact nowadays, you'd have to execute at least 10,000. The massacre of Acre in the crusades may have only killed about 2700 muslim prisoners, but that was the whole population captured in the city, including the women and children. It was a complete genocide. As in 100%. Ditto for the witch hunts. Sure, they may have killed "only" 40,000 to 60,000 or so, but when you do the ratio between population of Europe back then and population of Europe now, you get more like the equivalent of half a million to a million. And that's just witches. And so on. Second, the scales are not stacked similarly. Which is frankly BS. E.g., for Stalin or Mao usually famines resulting from bad decisions are included in the death toll. And they should be indeed. But then we should do the same thing for religion. We should include all the famines caused by such idiotic decisions as condemning the merchants as guilty of a mortal sin, if they sell for more than the prescribed prices, or just recoup their "fees" paid to robber barons along the way. Countless people died because the church didn't let the economy function in a normal way that would have created the incentive to bring food to them. If deaths resulting from bad economic policy are included for Mao and Stalin, why wouldn't we do the same for bad economic policies dictated by the church? |
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Which part of "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" don't you understand? |
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#64 |
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Philosopher
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 5,119
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One should also remember that modern science and technology make killing large groups easier. So, tribal and religious groups in the Caucasus have been going at each other for centuries. During most of this time they were using spears, swords bows and arrows. In later centuries they had firearms, starting with muzzle-loaders. By the middle of the nineteenth century, they had breech-loading rifles. In the wars that erupted in the 1990s with the break up of the Soviet Union, the Armenians and Azers were going at each other with armored personnel carriers, hand-held rocket launchers and jet aircraft.
If we compare the "final solution to the Gepid problem," when the Lombards attacked the Gepids from the west, and the Avars attacked from the east, thereby annihilating the Gepids as a people, or Charlemagne's genocidal wars against the Saxons to the Holocaust; we must remember, in the first two situations the perpetrators were limited to, again, swords, spears, arrows and a virtually non-existant infrastructure. The Holocaust was helped along by railroads, making concentration of the Jews far easier, and the industrial mass production of hydrogen cyanide. |
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#65 |
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Philosopher
Join Date: Mar 2009
Posts: 9,829
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A very good and insightful point indeed.
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Which part of "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn" don't you understand? |
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#66 |
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Master Poster
Join Date: Jun 2009
Posts: 2,730
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__________ Hiding from the
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#67 |
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Master Poster
Join Date: Jun 2009
Posts: 2,730
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__________ Hiding from the
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#68 |
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Master Poster
Join Date: Jun 2009
Posts: 2,730
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Islam has various depths of obedience, the same as does Catholicism.
The deepest Roman Catholic is very different than the American Catholic, most notably in the stance on birth control, but in many other ways as well. |
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__________ Hiding from the
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#69 |
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Illuminator
Join Date: May 2011
Posts: 3,894
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A most excellent point, and I'm not detracting from you, but from the utter thoughtless blindness of religious "they killed more than we did" proponents, when I say it should be too obvious to have to state. They blow themselves up with their very own arguments!
In relation to the size of the affected populations, the Wars of Religion were vastly more costly than the depradation perpetrated by Stalin or Mao. Of the Thirty Years War it is observed that:
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In Ireland during the same period, population losses were comparable.
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So if the famines of the 1930s and 1950s prove that Stalin and Mao were inspired by false ideology (and they do!) what do the murderous deeds of Catholic and Protestant armies three centuries earlier prove about the validity of Christianity? |
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#70 |
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Philosopher
Join Date: Apr 2007
Location: Dublin (the one in Ireland)
Posts: 7,105
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__________________
Yes I gave in and configured an avatar. |
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#71 |
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Philosopher
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: USA
Posts: 7,741
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#72 |
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Olympic Equestrian Wannabe
Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Defending the Alamo
Posts: 9,255
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• There is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man. - Winston Churchill • Never wrestle with a pig - you just get dirty and the pig enjoys it. • My blog: Pardon me, may I ask... |
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#73 |
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Biomechanoid
Director of IDIOCY (Region 13)
Moderator
Join Date: Jul 2005
Location: New Texas
Posts: 24,545
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-Aberhaten did it - "Which gives us an answer to our question. What’s the worst thing that can happen in a pressure cooker?" Randall Monroe -Director of Independent Determining Inquisitor Of Crazy Yapping - Aberhaten's Apothegm™ - An Internet law that states that optimism is indistinguishable from sarcasm |
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