Were people in the Dark/Middle Ages dumber than other ages?

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Mon Sep 14, 2009 3:01 pm

Also, they seriously had a group of Romans who had the job of convincing people not to get killed for their beliefs. They'd try to reason with the churches and say "Look, you can even keep worshipping your own heathen gods in your spare time, just show up to our temples and pretend you're with us."

And the Christians, secretly masturbating to their persecution complex, shouted "No, I'd rather die than abandon my god!"

And eventually the Romans would say "Fine, some people just can't see reason, these idiots would be more useful being used to feed giant cats that need constant feeding due to their inability to make soup."

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Mon Sep 14, 2009 7:19 pm

FrankTrollman wrote:Please. They tied you to a cross. The Romans didn't waste one single nail on murdering people by crucifixion. That idea was added later by Christians who thought being nailed to a cross sounded awesome.

...No one got nailed to a cross. That's Christian propaganda.

-Username17

Tacitus (56 – 117 AD) wrote:Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.

wikipedia wrote:In 1968, archaeologists discovered at Giv'at ha-Mivtar in northeast Jerusalem the remains of one Jehohanan, who had been crucified in the first century. The remains included a heel bone with a nail driven through it from the side. The tip of the nail was bent, perhaps because of striking a knot in the upright beam, which prevented it being extracted from the foot. A first inaccurate account of the length of the nail led some to believe that it had been driven through both heels, suggesting that the man had been placed in a sort of sidesaddle position, but the true length of the nail, 11.5 centimetres, suggests instead that in this case of crucifixion the heels were nailed to opposite sides of the upright.

Archeological evidence is Right Here, not to mention the testimony of the self proclamed god hater and historian Tacitus himself, and it totally disagrees with your statement.

Count_Arioch_the_28th wrote:...but Christians were creepy little fuckers back on those days. They did Jove-knows-what during their weird rituals that they only performed in the dead of night in private, and during the say[sic] they walked around complaining how much Rome sucked.

No, they were persecuted because christians didn't cotton to the idea of breaking the first and second commandments to worship the emporer, which started between 63 BC and 1 AD under Caesar Agustus.

As a corollary, I never said that they only tossed christians to the lions. But that kinda makes people butt-hurt, you know? the whole being eaten alive part?

Also, Rome was a Christian nation, as in they executed you for not being Christians for the last couple centuries of its existence. People like to gloss over that fact.

Ok. And I raise you the Edict of Milan signed and put into place by Constantine I, the first christian roman emperor, and Licinius his co-emperor, which proclaimed religious toleration throughout the empire. I seriously can't find anywhere where the empire (and I assume you mean Byzantine empire, as the only true christian empire in history* and the brother and successor of the western roman empire that fell in 476 AD) killed it's own citizens, unless they were heretics. Could you please help me out with a source?

*Ok, yeah, there was the red headed bastard stepchild empire: the Holy Roman Empire, but they sucked. Compleatly. And then there was the crusader kingdom of jeresulem, but they sucked too. The western byzantine empire lasted unbroken for nearly a thousand years, untill the ottomans, after a two-month siege on 29 May 1453, broke through constantanople's walls. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, was last seen casting off his imperial regalia and throwing himself into hand-to-hand combat after the walls of the city were taken.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Mon Sep 14, 2009 9:58 pm

They also used a cross which was shaped like an X, propped up on a wall or another support.

Of course, they did things like weld iron bands to convicts, as well, which honestly was far worse.

-Crissa

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Mon Sep 14, 2009 10:01 pm

I have no opinion as to whether people actually were tied of nailed, but quoting what is widely regarded as a late 7th Century or later Monk addition to Tacitus as evidence of anything is pretty fucking dumb.

Also the part where you pretend that an Edit of Religious Toleration means actual Toleration.

Yeah, and I'm sure the Muslims just want to put a tax on those evil Jews too.

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Mon Sep 14, 2009 11:58 pm

Kaelik wrote:I have no opinion as to whether people actually were tied of nailed, but quoting what is widely regarded as a late 7th Century or later Monk addition to Tacitus as evidence of anything is pretty fucking dumb.

Ummm, is not? Look man, I can say "is not" just as you, but at least I got a source. Hell, I went out of my way and found a source that hated christians so you wouldn't claim a bias. Could you please provide a link that says "Hicks, your totally full of shit"? Or a different historian that lived in 70 AD? Or a cake that isn't a lie? I'm so hungry...

Yeah, and I'm sure the Muslims just want to put a tax on those evil Jews too.

Beats the hell out of having the state take all your possessions, tie you to a post, then light you on fire and be used as a street lamps.

Any way, ignoring the "christian persecution" distraction, FUCK ANCIENT ROME. Sure, back in the Iron Age they were all fuckers, but stop jizzing your shorts over a decadent empire of thieves and murderers. Truthfully? Life could be considered to actually be good in all the major ancient, mideval, and modern civilizations, as long as you were one of the ruling class. Otherwise you were a wageslave serf mewing for bread and circuses, or worse a slave to the mewing wageslaves or ruling class.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 2:47 am

Wait, 'fuck' one of the handful of nations that lasted a thousand years?

Which was responsible the great strides in expanding the human lifespan and technology?

What, 'fuck them' because they were taken over by dictators and lived another thousand years in free-fall destroyed by religion?

Fuck you, too.

Sheesh. Our own current technologic surge isn't as old as Rome lasted.

-Crissa

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 2:56 am

Hicks wrote:Ummm, is not? Look man, I can say "is not" just as you, but at least I got a source. Hell, I went out of my way and found a source that hated christians so you wouldn't claim a bias. Could you please provide a link that says "Hicks, your totally full of shit"? Or a different historian that lived in 70 AD?

Fuck you

You find a bunch of Christians who claim it's totally real, then turn right around and claim the Josephus thing is real using all the same arguments, and you find a bunch of mean old crotchety atheist historians that claim it's fake.

You didn't find a source that hates Christians, you found one guy with a political axe to grind against a previous Roman Emperor who might have made a reference about something he had no evidence for, if it wasn't inserted later, which is pretty likely.

That's like claiming that George Washington chopped down a fucking Cherry tree based on a 1950s text book.

Hicks wrote:Beats the hell out of having the state take all your possessions, tie you to a post, then light you on fire and be used as a street lamps.

I think you missed the point dumb fuck. Byzantium totally had 'religious tolerance' just like Muslims just want to tax Jews when they take over Israel, no one's going to kill anyone.

Yes, Muslims are really going to kill Jews, and yes, Your pretty tolerant Christian Empire really did kill heretics all the time and oppress minority religions.

A government statement claiming that they treat people nice and don't kill them doesn't mean jack shit without something to back it up.

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 8:16 am

Kaelik wrote:Fuck you

Said Suetonius Tranquillus in his "Lives of the 12 Caesars", on page 40 that Nero did it exactly as Tacitus said
Emperor Decius did it
So did Emperor Diocletian

Saying that the early church was not persecuted for 300 years is tantamount to saying that the salem witch trials, the inquisition, slavery in the united states, the trail of tears, all of Stalin's purges and "deportations" to siberia, the holocaust, and the nippon empire's war crimes didn't happen. For every historical account you won't produce, I'll find three. On that note:

A government statement claiming that they treat people nice and don't kill them doesn't mean jack shit without something to back it up.

The Edict of Milan
Wikipedia
Encyclopedia Britannica, Paragraph 18
The Edict of Milan, translated into english

"...so that we might grant to the Christians and others full authority to observe that religion which each preferred..."

You are out of your league. Out of your depth. And you must be out of your mind if you think you can shut me down with smoke and mirrors. Sit down and shut up you god hating, unwashed heathen. You have nothing, and you prove you have nothing by flaunting nothing in my face. It is not my job to do yours. Curse the earth, sea, and heavens above, and hear your hollow cry to the nothing you so desperately believe in say nothing in return. Be cold and frightened as you face that infinite nothing, alone.

Crissa wrote:Wait, 'fuck' one of the handful of nations that lasted a thousand years?...

...What, 'fuck them' because they were taken over by dictators and lived another thousand years in free-fall destroyed by religion?

That is not, strictly speaking, true. Though the city of Rome has lasted for over an estimated 2,700 years, no roman government or system of government except under christian rule has lasted beyond 500 years.

The Kingdom of Rome lasted from about 1000 or 700 BC to 509 BC (491 or 281 years), when it was overthrown by the Roman Republic. That lasted until 31 BC (478 years) when Octavian became Caesar Augustus, transforming the Republic into an Empire. Well, at least until 330 AD (299 years), because that was when Constantinople was completed, and Emperor Constantine I (the Great), who converted 7 years before to christianity, moved his seat of power to his new and custom designed capitol, with it and its rulers lasting until the Tuesday of May 29, 1453 (1123 years), then falling to the Ottomans

Which was responsible the great strides in expanding the human lifespan and technology?

Except they didn't do that. All of Rome's vaunted technology was stolen from the neighbors through conquest, and furthermore Rome actively held back the progress of technology because "slaves were cheaper than donkeys". I do not disput the imutable fact that the romans built many wondrous and magnificent structures, each one a testament of human suffering. There is no way that you could be arguing that a nation based entirely on the slave labor of subjugated enemies, political prisoners, and religious dissenters expanded the human lifespan? especially those very same slaves who were forced to fight to the death in gladiatorial blood sports as entertainment?

Aristotle lived to 62. Plato lived to 84. Ramses II lived to be 90. What do they all have in common? None of them were romans. What does this imply? That the ruling patricians live longer than the plebes and slaves. The average life expectancy of a classical roman citizen? 30 years at best, the same as in medieval britain.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 9:36 am

Hicks wrote:There is no way that you could be arguing that a nation based entirely on the slave labor of subjugated enemies, political prisoners, and religious dissenters expanded the human lifespan?

Didn't Glorious Lord Stalin also expand the average life expectancy and cause many good things? Yet I hear that some argue he was all for slave labour of subjugated enemies, political prisoners, religious dissenters and your mum.

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 10:11 am

Dungeonomicon wrote:It is historical fact that you can take a ridiculous and crumbling imperium with serfs and horse-drawn carts managed by a tyrannical and squabbling aristocracy and boot strap it into being a technologically sophisticated global power that can win the space race and such in a single generation even while being invaded by an evil and genocidal empire. The people at the top don't even need to be nice or sane, they just have to understand that economics is an entirely voodoo science, and the limits of production can be broken by thousands of percentage points by getting everyone to buy on credit, work on projects that people looking at the big picture tell them to work on, continuously invest in productive capital, and believe in the future.

Stalin totally did it. He was also a compleatly psycopathic despot. Not that the people of Russa had it any better under the Czars, because they didn't. They traded a life of a Czar and his noble cronies telling you what to do and enforcing his rule with secret police that kidnapped you in the night for a life of a Despot and his party telling you what to do and enforcing his rule with secret police that kidnapped you in the night. He did genuinely positive things for the people, still a psycopath though.

In a very real sense, Stalin utilized slave labor in his GULAG operated "re-education camps", where in 24 hours you could be convicted of treason without judge, jury, or the ability to mount a defense. If you were blamelessly innocent, you recieved a 10 year sentence in an Arctic or Siberian work camp instead of the more normal 25 year sentence, or death.

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 10:54 am

Nitpicking: Nails are a blessing if you are crucifixed, because you die earlier.
Its not an real-life example, but an in-depht use of it as an terror tactic:
http://www.webscription.net/p-661-carnifex.aspx
somewhere in there...

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 12:25 pm

Yes, Hicks, and he also did a lot of good all-round. That's rather my point. Despite the slave labour, the suffering, the executions and the fact that his only regret was that he couldn't execute more people, he was a good thing for Russia.

That was in response to your "How could an evil scary place like Rome ever do anything good such as increase life expectancy?"

Now sure, there are those that cause death and suffering and don't even give us anything good in return. An example would be Christianity.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 12:38 pm

Koumei wrote:Now sure, there are those that cause death and suffering and don't even give us anything good in return. An example would be Christianity.

Fair is fair now, they may have inadvertently given Europeans a high resistance to certain very nasty diseases.

Those that survived.

Count Arioch the 28th · Tue Sep 15, 2009 12:43 pm

Hicks wrote:
No, they were persecuted because christians didn't cotton to the idea of breaking the first and second commandments to worship the emporer, which started between 63 BC and 1 AD under Caesar Agustus.

Look, I'm not going to argue with you until you take at least a 100 level history course. I don't argue with illiterates. Go back to your holler, drink your hooch, and knock up your sister. You're not worthy of being spoken to as a human being as far as I'm concerned.

Cielingcat · Post by **Cielingcat** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 1:40 pm

Count, your quote broke the thread, and worse, I'm not sure what you're quoting and what you wrote.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 1:40 pm

Hicks wrote:Said Suetonius Tranquillus in his "Lives of the 12 Caesars", on page 40 that Nero did it exactly as Tacitus said
Emperor Decius did it
So did Emperor Diocletian

Saying that the early church was not persecuted for 300 years is tantamount to saying that the salem witch trials, the inquisition, slavery in the united states, the trail of tears, all of Stalin's purges and "deportations" to siberia, the holocaust, and the nippon empire's war crimes didn't happen. For every historical account you won't produce, I'll find three. On that note:

WTF you giant ass retard. No one is claiming that early Christians weren't persecuted. No one fucking cares. All I said was to not use a fucking probable late insertion into the text as an example, because there is real evidence for it. So when I present fucking evidence for the fact that it's an interpolation, why not address that instead of bitch whining about people wholly and completely unrelated to you who also preached a very fucking different version of your ideology were persecuted by some people over a thousand years ago.

Let's put that in review, since you are too stupid to follow a short conversation:

1) That passage is quite probably a late insertion.
2) You should not use a late insertion for proof about shit that happened at the time the non inserted text was written.
3) Present actual evidence for your 'Romans crucify people nails.' argument, that involves people who might actually know if people were crucified with nails.

Hicks wrote:
A government statement claiming that they treat people nice and don't kill them doesn't mean jack shit without something to back it up.
The Edict of Milan
Wikipedia
Encyclopedia Britannica, Paragraph 18
The Edict of Milan, translated into english
"...so that we might grant to the Christians and others full authority to observe that religion which each preferred..."

So in other words, you are too stupid to read the words that I am actually typing.

Let's try this again:

1) The passed a fucking edict saying 'grant Christians and others...observe religion'
2) Therefore they never burned heretics at the stake.

Is exactly like the argument:

1) The Koran says that you can only tax Jews heavily, and you can never kill them except in war. This is a super special rule for Muslims.
2) Therefore, no Muslims ever kill Jews except in war!

Tough shit, your fucking edict passed for the express purpose of helping Christians with a side note about religious toleration has nothing to do with what actually happened, which is that heretics were burned at the stake, like they always are.

A Generic government statement about toleration does not mean the government never oppressed people, you retard.

Hicks wrote:You are out of your league. Out of your depth. And you must be out of your mind if you think you can shut me down with smoke and mirrors. Sit down and shut up you god hating, unwashed heathen. You have nothing, and you prove you have nothing by flaunting nothing in my face. It is not my job to do yours. Curse the earth, sea, and heavens above, and hear your hollow cry to the nothing you so desperately believe in say nothing in return. Be cold and frightened as you face that infinite nothing, alone.

WTF? Why the hell are you preaching at me? I mean, other than a book tells you to convert everyone, because your masterful sky god who never actually talks to you commands it.

Fucking retarded. Seriously. What the flying Monkey fuck, I have never in all my life seen something so fucking retarded as this paragraph. And I have seen Ken Ham give a speech.

Here's your first hint for attempting to convert the evil heathens, don't project your inadequacies when talking to them. We really don't call out to nothing, because we aren't retardedly demanding answers that we never get. Similarly, not afraid of the evil infinite nothing, because reality doesn't fucking scare us and we don't have to hide behind a fucking sky god who weawy weawy loves us to feel safe.

Starmaker · Post by **Starmaker** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 2:00 pm

Hicks wrote:Stalin totally did it. He was also a compleatly psycopathic despot.

Fuck you, with sexual harassment on top.
The proper punishment for treason was death penalty (and imprisonment for those family members who were able to report but didn't). Now read some reports from certain Eastern European countries (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine). Actual Nazis in these countries have a frightening amount of political power. Not neo-Nazi clowns - actual SS veterans, alive and well. Stalin didn't have enough people killed. A real fucking shame.

KGB didn't wander the streets peering into windows and arresting anyone at random. But they did have to check all reports of suspicious activity submitted by the "concerned citizens". Want to replace your boss? Say he's a US sympathizer (he probably isn't, but he does take bribes, and the KGB will fuck up his life). Solzhenitsyn (the guy who claimed that Stalin had 60 million people murdered by the KGB), knowing perfectly well that the KGB reads his letters, wrote stuff like this:

Solzhenitsyn, sort of, wrote:Dear <insert name>,
regarding your statement that we should reform the political system of the USSR to make it more like the US, which you admire so much, and your proposed plan to just kill off the whole Politburo...

Solzhenitsyn was that huge a dick. Also, the real numbers:

Code: Select all

Demographics of the Soviet Union, Wikipedia
Date           Population
January 1937&#58;  162,500,000
January 1939&#58;  168,524,000
June 1941&#58;     176,446,000 + 20,270,000 annexed = 196,716,000

The period from 1937 to 1940 was the peak of the alleged "mass murders". At present, the population decreases by 800,000 per year, and that including immigrants.

Most reports were submitted anonymously, but even those that were actually typed (as opposed to the handwritten majority) were laughably easy to identify. The shittiest aspect was that the falsely accused were unable to sue back, as it was not a civil matter.

Stalin was an awesome leader and an okay guy.
Political censorship wasn't any worse than elsewhere. Artists were sponsored by the government instead of production companies, something that sucks like a vacuum now but was not bad back in the day.
Deficit goods were a natural consequence of the command economy, which meant one had to exchange favors and bribes to get anything good without waiting for like five to twenty years, depending on the item. Thus, widespread corruption (like software piracy now) and everyone a potential target for a report.

Sure, the USSR conquered some neighboring countries. But the citizens of these countries were not treated any worse than others. Everywhere in the USSR was supposed to be a good place to live (excluding the northern regions of course, where people had to sign up for seasonal work to get paid in huge sums of money and luxury coupons). Russians moved into other republics not as colonial overseers, but as citizens. That's why the average Russian is concerned about what happens in these former republics now: friends and family live there.

Stalin didn't want to engulf the whole world in revolutional fires. That was a goal supported by the guys whom he ousted from power and who attempted to label him a traitor of Communist ideals and the worldwide revolution.

Much is said about him (as represented by Molotov) signing a pact with Hitler and dividing Poland between their respective countries. Well guess what, he did it after Britain and France 1) refused a Soviet offer of an anti-Nazi pact and 2) made Czechoslovakia refuse Soviet military aid and surrender to Hitler. Also, Poland itself made a pact with Hitler in 1934.

Discrimination, depending on how you define it, was almost nonexistent. Scholarships were reserved for ethnic minorities. Jews were disliked by the populace, and sadly nothing was done to propagandize otherwise, but that didn't prevent them from attaining high positions within the government.

One thing Stalin did fuck up a lot was the matter of choosing a successor - because he didn't choose anyone and probably thought it unnecessary, the USSR ended up led by Khrushchev, who was so fucking retarded that Bush is a genius compared to him; Brezhnev, who would've been good if he weren't on drugs all the damn time; the others until Gorbachev, too old to give a flying fuck and of course Gorbachev himself,

a British spy (Frank disagrees).

I don't expect the anti-Stalin propaganda to cease any time soon. No country wants another country to have an [awesome] leader. But at least a measure of competency and sanity is required - no one needs another Khrushchev (who could've launched nukes for the lulz) or Bush.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 2:12 pm

Heh, someone Godwined the thread right before I was about to. Anyways.

The mother fucking NAZIs are less reprehensible than Christians. I am dead fucking serious. See, while the Nazis were terrible people that were responsible for millions of deaths, Christians wank off to a sky god who has a serial murder count of around... the entire world population, ever. Which is a lot more than 'millions' by anyone's count, including the counts that measure the world as less than 10 millenia old and the counts that say hundreds of thousands when they mean millions. They also try to pass this guy off as one of the good guys. Further, there are some good things that have come of the Nazis such as most modern medical knowledge (garnered from experiments on their prisoners) which is also completely reprehensible but still less so than doing it for the lulz.

When you can be unfavorably compared to Nazis in any honest way, it's time to do the world a favor and go play in traffoc.

Also, no one honestly mistakes the Nazis for good guys.

CatharzGodfoot · Post by **CatharzGodfoot** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 3:17 pm

Hicks wrote:...
You are out of your league. Out of your depth. And you must be out of your mind if you think you can shut me down with smoke and mirrors. Sit down and shut up you god hating, unwashed heathen. You have nothing, and you prove you have nothing by flaunting nothing in my face. It is not my job to do yours. Curse the earth, sea, and heavens above, and hear your hollow cry to the nothing you so desperately believe in say nothing in return. Be cold and frightened as you face that infinite nothing, alone.
...

I'd just like to say: You preach it, brother!*
That whole post was pure gold--and not the kind they make false idols out of, either. Beautiful rhetorical gold.

Disclaimer: although I don't hate God (or dragons, unicorms, Vegeta, or the FSM), I haven't had a shower yet today and I'm an atheist (even worse than just any old heathen!).

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 4:51 pm

You know what, Starmaker? Fuck you on three counts.

1) Your little bullshit demographics thing masks that fact millions of people died. Yes, the population of Russia grew. So fucking what? It would have grown even more without his deportations.

2) What part of deporting millions of ethnic minorities is lost on you? That is supposed to be evidence of Stalin treating minorities better? Fuck you, minorities are never treated better under dictatorships. I cannot stress this point enough--minorities are not treated better under dictatorships ever.

3) Stalin was an astoundingly terrible political leader; obvious highlights include decimating his officer staff in the Great Purges during the period of time when Hitler was ramping up his belligerence and hiding in a little cubbyhole when Germany invaded. The latter is disastrous when the country is a dictatorship.

4) You're trying to paint Stalin not spreading communism as a good thing? Stalin deciding to sit on his hands and build up his Soviet Union was astonishingly selfish and shortsighted. He should have tried to engulf the world in revolutionary fires, because most of the world lived in bullshit poverty. Imagine how much better off Africa would be if Communist revolutions got started there.

Mass murders aside, Stalin completely delegitimized communism both by completely fucking the actual system up (by making it a dictatorship with an egalitarian middle and lower class). We used to have actual Communist parties in the U.S. before that fucker rolled around. So in addition to hating him for his bloodthirst and incompetence we can also hate him for setting back the goal of economic rights by decades.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 4:59 pm

For the record, I'm not a communist, I'm a democratic socialist.

But if given the choice between capitalism and communism (the actual stuff, not the bullshit dictatorship the Soviet Union had) I would pick communism. Just thinking about Stalin pisses me the fuck off, even more than Hitler, because if that man wasn't such an enormous cock our world might be much better off than it is today.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 6:42 pm

PS, followers of John didn't pay taxes and didn't follow the local laws.

Prosecution isn't persecution.

Also, what did all three people mention have in common? They were royalty. Rich people who didn't have to pick up a stick a day in their lives, and didn't fucking care if there was enough food for a thousand more people today than yesterday.

Public baths, actual pay scales, public granaries... These things expand the actual expected lifespan of people. Not that some specific dude lived a long time.

-Crissa

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 7:10 pm

Hicks wrote:The roman empire has hands down won (like they do in nearly everything before the renaissance) the "absolute most hard-core torture and terror tactic" award. They invented a manner of death so tortuously painful and humiliating that we still use it to describe "torture unto death" after two-thousand years, excruciating. As in they nail you to a cross, untill you die not from blood loss but thirst after 2 or three days of constant, labourous suffering. Who got crucified? Anyone who fucked with the roman empire.

A couple of points: Death could be much shorter if you wanted it to be. Basically speaking if you hang in a cross position the nature of the body makes it almost impossible to breathe. That's where the nails came in, not to hold the body on the cross but to really make the cost of continued life painful.

Once at the execution site, the victim would be nailed through the hands (or wrists) and feet. If he put his weight on a small shelf (sedile) below his feet, enough pressure was applied to the chest that made breathing difficult to impossible. Pulling and pushing oneself up, though, greatly increased the pain in both feet and hands. The victim would thus be left like this, desperate to find an even moderately tolerable position, for as long as was necessary for them to die — usually from suffocation. Afterwards, the body would be left to rot until it fell from the cross.

Second point: Crucifixion was normally reserved for non Romans, but Roman citizens could be crucified under extreeme cases such as treason.

Third point: It's actually Greek; blame Alexander the Great who brought the practice to the West.

Fourth point: The nail thing was recorded by Josephus; mind you he has his own problems but he is definitely not a "Christian" apologist.

“They were first whipped, and then tormented with all sorts of tortures, before they died, and were then crucified before the wall of the city. This miserable procedure made Titus greatly to pity them, while they caught every day five hundred Jews; nay, some days they caught more... The main reason why he did not forbid that cruelty was this, that he hoped the Jews might perhaps yield at that sight, out of fear lest they might themselves afterwards be liable to the same cruel treatment. So the soldiers, out of the wrath and hatred they bore the Jews, nailed those they caught, one after one way, and another after another, to the crosses, by way of jest, when their multitude was so great, that room was wanting for the crosses, and crosses wanting for the bodies.”

So that I am not accused of "Christian Revisionism" I got this stuff from atheism.about.com.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 7:23 pm

Hicks wrote:No, they were persecuted because christians didn't cotton to the idea of breaking the first and second commandments to worship the emporer, which started between 63 BC and 1 AD under Caesar Agustus.

I don’t want to get into nit picking, but the fact that Christians were atheists (at least from the Roman perspective and definition of the word; they did not believe in the Roman gods) was a convenient excuse. Jews were also in the same situation but they had managed to get an “exception” from Rome. When Christianity began to spread to non Jews, the authorities began to recognize it as a threat to the state religion, which it was.

The Roman ideal was you could worship anyone you wanted, as long as you also worshiped their gods as well.

But the real fact was that many Roman emperors considered Christians a group of scape goats. Whenever Nero was politically threatened (for example after his attempt to burn down and rebuild parts of the city) he diverted the attention of the people by blaming and then executing those atheists. The others did likewise.

Hicks · Post by **Hicks** » Tue Sep 15, 2009 7:37 pm

Kaelik wrote:So when I present fucking evidence for the fact that it's an interpolation, why not address that

What evidence? All you have shown me and those watching at home is that you can say "Is not" three times. I sleep on a library of over a thousand books of classical/midieval/church history, and have gone out of my way to use references that are easily accessable and readable through the internet.

I call you a God-hating heathen, because you hate the notion of a single supreme, triune creator and master of all creation. This is an observation.

I call you unwashed because your posts in this thread stink like shit. This is also an observation.

I don't care if you worship Jehovah, Vishnu, Allah, the Horned God, Odin, Osirus, Zeus, your Ancestors, the Sun, the Moon, Gaia, Yourself, or that chair in AA meetings. What I do care about is that you have shown to me nothing that supports your claim that my quotation of Tacitus was:

Kaelik wrote:...widely regarded as a late 7th Century or later Monk addition...

...historians that claim it's fake...

...an interpolation...

...probably a late insertion...

Put up or concede.

You wrote:1) The passed a fucking edict saying 'grant Christians and others...observe religion'
2) Therefore they never burned heretics at the stake.

I wrote:I seriously can't find anywhere where the empire (and I assume you mean Byzantine empire, as the only true christian empire in history* and the brother and successor of the western roman empire that fell in 476 AD) killed it's own citizens, unless they were heretics. Could you please help me out with a source?

I never said that they didn't burn heretics. You have done nothing but misrepresent and condemn my position by shouting things you refuse to back up.

"Starmaker" wrote:Fuck you, with sexual harassment on top.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:STFU, NOOB!

Hilarious!

Roy, I honestly have no idead what you are talking about. Did you post this while drunk, or are you seriously a fire and brimstone satanist (like "black mass", not the LaVey variety)?

Thank you CatharzGodfoot; I live to entertain.

Crissa wrote:Public baths, actual pay scales, public granaries... These things expand the actual expected lifespan of people. Not that some specific dude lived a long time.

You know what also increases life expectancy? Not drinking from lead pipes. As I previously noted, Classical Rome and Midieval Britain have the same average upper life expectancy

tzor wrote:Support

Thank you tzor.