131–140 of 145 posts
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Now that you mention it, it matches up exactly with Caprica's plotline!
I decided to look it up on Wikipedia. As best as I can make out they have basically nothing in common except the polytheist/monotheist division between characters.
A smarty pants answer would be, yes, but it took 2000 years.... The problem with this is that you end up with lots of additions to the premise. So, you ask the question: "Could Romans build a computer, if plans were magically given to them?. Then, you have to say, if they had plans they understood, then if they had plans using a certain technology, then if they had zero, and if they had an understanding of x, then y,…
It depends on what you mean by clever. If you mean proficiency at building tools and mechanical technology, then I suspect the reason is because the Romans had a culture conducive to developing certain types of technology. How much technology is derived from the need for military conquest? How much is military conquest dependent on the type of religion you have? How much of the capacity to develop technology is dependent on having a privileged class that has enough free time to think about things unrelated to food and reproduction? These are political and social conditions and they depend on the political and social conditions of surrounding tribes.
The people that still live in a tribal society today have found a cultural and resource equilibrium with their environment. They are fortunate enough to have avoided or overcome all external and internal pressure to change. They don't need to develop technology because their environment and way of life don't require it.
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Quite a lot depends on when we say the dark ages began / ended. By say 1066 I would say Darkness was lifted, trading and Europe stabilised and by 1200 and Marco Polo Western Europe became fully involved / aware of with the rest of the Eurasia continent. Taking 1066 as a uk centric cutoff much of the above had either not been invented / rediscovered Kingdoms and city states - The Roman Duc and knightly organisation of…
I am just re-reading this and something has struck me - my posts sent by iPhone are always less coherent and more difficult to read than those I type at a desk. It may be because I am more rushed on the phone, but I suspect it is a function of how I think - I seem to think by typing and my typing speed on Iphone is much slower than my brain can handle
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Actually, from what I understood from listing to a TTC lecture series about this, the "decline and fall" of the roman empire is somewhat of a fiction, in that it wasn't a brutal event, more of a long slow disintegration over the span of a thousand years. To give some sense of perspective, that's 3 times longer than the US has existed, and people have been clamouring that the US is in decline for the last 50 years. Wh…
For the people living through the supposed transition between the Classical Period and the Dark Ages, though, apparently, there was no such stark difference. Yes and no. Roman decline really happened, but the significance attached to 476 AD is an artifact developed later, when the decline actually happened over hundreds of years. As you noted, the Eastern Roman Empire carried on for another thousand years, and the Ca…
The average European went from a free citizen of Rome to a serf, laboring under conditions that bordered on slavery. I'd say that's a pretty radical negative change.
Pre-Newton: rules out ballistics calculations, the favourite of early computers.
No Enigma machine or other calculating devices, pretty much rules out codebreaking.
No long term high capacity storage, or much in the way of large scale precise information available to work with.
Large, expensive, only one in existance, no lights for output. Nothing it could do that a dozen trained slaves couldn't do much quicker.
Maybe they could. Why would they?
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A lot of the Roman impatience with early Christians was due to their energetic ... disagreements ... about your statement that "the trinity is nothing if not an expression of polytheism". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arian_controversy
Right, however the Pauline creed places Jesus as divine alongside God. This is polytheistic as it has assigned divinity to something/someone other than God alone. And predates the period you describe. Of course, Christianity has become more and more polytheistic over time and now resembles, particularly in the third world where saint worship and veneration of bones is common practice, a belief system that is only mar…
It sounds like you're outside your comfort zone. Jesus is not other than God [the Father or God the Spirit] in orthodox [little-o] Christian belief. It's confusing for sure.
Catholicism includes the veneration of saints but they are categorically not gods, nor are relics gods, so how can the inclusion of such elements indicate polytheism.
Interesting that you mention Islam as one of the criticisms of Islam is that many supposed adherents appear to worship Mohammed as a god, certainly as much as Catholics "worship" the beatified. There is also the notion, warned against in the Quran IIRC, of worship of the djinn which could be considered analogous in some ways with veneration of the saints.
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Right, however the Pauline creed places Jesus as divine alongside God. This is polytheistic as it has assigned divinity to something/someone other than God alone. And predates the period you describe. Of course, Christianity has become more and more polytheistic over time and now resembles, particularly in the third world where saint worship and veneration of bones is common practice, a belief system that is only mar…
>* This is polytheistic as it has assigned divinity to something/someone other than God alone.* // It sounds like you're outside your comfort zone. Jesus is not other than God [the Father or God the Spirit] in orthodox [little-o] Christian belief. It's confusing for sure. Catholicism includes the veneration of saints but they are categorically not gods, nor are relics gods, so how can the inclusion of such elements i…
As for veneration of saints and relics, then anything that worshipped is a god and asking for blessings, intervention in worldly affairs, etc are all acts of worship. So when someone prays to a particular saint seeking something they are engaging a polytheistic act just as one who prays to an idol is engaging in polytheism.
I am not sure about Muslims worshipping Muhammad. Maybe in some polytheistic branches of Islam such as sufism and so forth which were themselves influenced by hindu/christian/etc ideas.
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Mad max worlds are deeply crazy and whilst there were I am sure equivalents (without the fast cars and the hacksaws) Mostly they would be short lived - no-one benefits from madness and humans don't like it. So pretty quickly a more stable equilibrium asserts itself, usually around one strongman. Democracy definitely optional. Will it happen again - pretty likely. We are on a growth treadmill - the Romans growth fed b…
Yeah, I didn't mean mad max worlds literally, as much as I meant "a darker period of 'civilization'", or a loss of knowledge/ability/technology. That's interesting thought you have though, of building society on "energy consumption" (labor, work, joules, whatever) whether it be slaves or oil. I suppose you could say it boils down to physics.
The first wood burner must have halved the energy needed to keep warm - probably the best investment society made ever.
Of course energy efficiency as a metric Must make bankers even less useful to society than we think :-)
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>* This is polytheistic as it has assigned divinity to something/someone other than God alone.* // It sounds like you're outside your comfort zone. Jesus is not other than God [the Father or God the Spirit] in orthodox [little-o] Christian belief. It's confusing for sure. Catholicism includes the veneration of saints but they are categorically not gods, nor are relics gods, so how can the inclusion of such elements i…
The orthodox belief you state that Jesus is the same as God is basically equivalent to the Hindu belief that their various gods are just different facets or aspects of God (with a capital G). If Christianity is monotheistic then, by this definition, so is Hinduism. As for veneration of saints and relics, then anything that worshipped is a god and asking for blessings, intervention in worldly affairs, etc are all acts…
For those that don't consider the Brahman to be personal, and some that do, then within their philosophy [or practise] there are certainly distinct gods with distinct beings.
Not everything that is worshipped is a god. You can certainly worship something which is not divine - one of Jehovah's big beefs (!) with the early Hebrew tribes was their tendency to make things to worship.
When Catholics appeal to dead "Saints" (quite contradictory to NT use of saints to mean those who believe in Christ Jesus and so are saved) they ask for them to intercede before God for them. The thought is that the Saints are in heaven and so have the ear of God in a way that mortals do not - that is not deifying the Saints. It is not polytheism in practise or reality.