Indeed! If you haven't already, you might find reading up on a bit of ancient Chinese accomplishments in philosophy, government, and technology (to name just three areas they excelled in) truly fascinating.
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If Everyone Followed Your Religion...
- Thread starter Kirran
- Start date
Indeed! If you haven't already, you might find reading up on a bit of ancient Chinese accomplishments in philosophy, government, and technology (to name just three areas they excelled in) truly fascinating.
Which could've been the origin of the nickname, "The Gentle Johnstons".
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
But Johnston appears to be a rather thinly disguised reference to getting "stoned". Now that explains why your posts are the way they are.
the "stone" portion evolved from the word for "farm".
Tis unlikely that MJ was one of our crops.
metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
No, my idea is much more logical than yours, and I betcha my daddy was bigger then yours too!
Take that!
My father was Duplo.No, my idea is much more logical than yours, and I betcha my daddy was bigger then yours too!
Take that!
I'm pretty sure the current consensus is that the Colosseum wasn't actually built for that purpose, nor was that a common occurance in it. The bulk of the games played in it were between athletes who very much wanted to get out of there alive. It was also certainly not the only stadium built.
In addition to Eurocentrism, another thing to be careful of when examining history is the very thing you brought up: the highly engrained influence of Christianity. Christian writers were highly invested in making pre-Christians look as immoral as possible when compared to the morally upright Christians, as a propaganda tool. As far as I can tell, the spread of Christianity through Europe didn't actually alter peoples' behavior all that much for several centuries.
I think any "answer" to your question would necessarily rely on so much speculation that the question itself might be meaningless, and all we can say is that we'll never know. But if you mean to imply there was no moral progress during the Roman era, then I think you're wrong. To take one instance: Nero made it illegal for masters to kill their slaves.
By the way, I do think that Christianity introduced some important moral points to the West. Perhaps the most notable of those was the notion that "all souls are equal before God". The notion seems to have influenced some of the Enlightenment philosophers in so far as it might have inspired them to think of all men as equal, etc. Another point that Christianity seems significantly responsible for was the notion that everyone -- even the most powerful -- could be held to a common moral code. e.g. Murder was just as wrong when the king did it as it was when the lowest commoner did it.
Having said all that, I think we must also take into account the many non-Christian sources for today's enlightened, liberal morals. For instance, we sometimes forget how much the ideals of the American Founders originated, not in Christianity, but as conclusions drawn from their practical experience of politics in the colonial legislatures. You might want to check out "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" for more information on that.
Guy Threepwood
Mighty Pirate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladiator
The gladiator games lasted for nearly a thousand years, reaching their peak between the 1st century BC and the 2nd century AD. The games finally declined during the early 5th century after the adoption of Christianity as state church of the Roman Empire in 380
we must also be careful to avoid Europhobia and Christophobia, Christians in much of history were not only the only people who were literate, but who recognized immorality amongst themselves to record and oppose it.
Primitive/ pre Christian people did not record and admonish themselves for their own atrocities, they did not recognize them as such
From that page:
Irrespective of their origin, gladiators offered spectators an example of Rome's martial ethics and, in fighting or dying well, they could inspire admiration and popular acclaim. They were celebrated in high and low art, and their value as entertainers was commemorated in precious and commonplace objects throughout the Roman world.
While I stand corrected on my supposition that death wasn't necessarily as common as we suppose, I will point out a few things. We still glorify "dying well" in our modern, post-Christian culture, through our fiction, mythologized history, and in cases where people die "doing what they love" or "in service to the people". Additionally, near as I can tell, this attitude continued well into Christianization, taking the form of martyrdom and crusades during the Middle Ages.
Oh, yeah, either of those wouldn't be good, either. However, the rest is actually quite... inaccurate.
From what I've seen of history, things simply didn't change much after Christianization, or at least because of Christianization. When Tacitus wrote his Germania, writing about the "Germanic peoples" (and perpetuating the incorrect notion that they were generally homogenous when they were anything but), he was also subtly comparing them to Rome in a way that actually made the latter look... not so great. It was a subtle criticism of his own culture, through the descriptions of foreigners. In other words, he was using the well known and highly problematic Noble Savage trope.
500 years later, Charlemagne tried to revive the Holy Roman Empire through shameless raping, pillaging, and plundering in the name of spreading Christianity (and may have directly inspired the first Viking raid on a British monastery, depending on your interpretation of events).
So, it's simply incorrect that "Christians were the only people who were literate through much of history", or that they were the only people who were self-critical, even when considering just Mediterannean and Northern Europe. Nevermind that us Northerners had writing systems, too. The famous Runes date back to at least the 2nd century and were largely used by non-Christians. There's also the Ogham alphabet used in Ireland and parts of Britain, which may or may not have been invented by Irish Christians, and may have derived from an earlier system. Nevermind either of these; writing in Mediterannean Europe dates back to WELL before Christianity, and the spread of Christianity after West Rome's fall didn't do much to spread that literacy among the general population of Northern Europe right away, certainly not during the Migration Age.
And then there's just those other regions of Europe nobody in the US talks about. Only West Rome fell; East Rome lasted for another thousand years. And what of the people of Northeastern Europe, many of whom held on to their pre-Christian traditions the longest of any European culture?
History is not simple. I've come to learn that making any judgments about who was "better overall" than whom is a waste of time. They were who they were. Roman Christianity did help set the foundations of the modern world, yes, but that includes the problems AND the benefits that came with that. It's neither inherently better nor worse; it just is what it is.