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My understanding more or less coincides with both your opinions. I doubt that WWII was inevitable, and I do think that Hitler was singular in his vision and activities, but here was probably a decent chance that a leader would play on sentiment against the oppressions of post-WWI to gain or hold on to power. Hitler just happened to do this with another angle of ruthlessness.
Well I'm able to get to the sites now. I am at a different computer, though, and at a different internet connection. No idea what had happened.
Well that's truly odd, then, since I'm getting a “problem loading page” on both sites….for the past 10 or 15 minutes. I've tried refreshing the cache as well and no luck. How many people are currently logged on?
Donnie has created a portal for his Christian Legacies site, which also serves as a place to post or find site status for Western Civ Forum if this site ever goes down. The site is located at:http://www.christian-legacies.com/ (click on the portal button)There's also a place there to play chess or chat live. Donnie and I are currently on our Christmas match which is pretty fun.
Hmmmm....what happens when the backup portal ever goes down? 😕 😮 🙁
I think that touches on an issue which affects us even today. How much responsibility do we place on the human individual's decision to partake in evil and how much do we place on the object which helps to facilitate evil? It's the same issue with guns; some want gun control to prevent crime, others want to control criminals to prevent crime. Because alcohol is addictive, I can see how Carrie Nation and others could have found this to be the end against which their crusade was aimed. As I've stated in another thread, cocaine was discovered to have a very detrimental and addictive effect on people in the early 20th Century. Other drugs probably underwent the same scrutiny around this time. It's important to take all of this into account when we ask why alcohol was prohibited. If we consider that liquor was outlawed in a vacuum it might seem odd, but if we consider that it was prohibited along with cocaine, perhaps heroin, opium, etc, all of which were seen to have had a demonstrably evil effect on Americans and their family life, it's a different story. It then took some time for the public to separate the evils of drugs from the evils of alcohol and to realize they weren't quite equivalent.
Well, I don't think that comparing alcohol to drugs is ridiculous, but merely that some distinctions should be made between the two. Based on my understanding, alcohol was taking its grip on people of the early 20th Century and it especially became hurtful to married women and families. In a day where messages of moderation might not have been heard, or where the culture of drunkeness more prevalent, you can see how the effect of alcohol could have felt like a scourge to American society. It may have been the case where Prohibition had an effect of changing the culture to one of more moderation between 1920 and 1933 (though I do not know this to be fact). Today our culture has become one where moderation is key. There are still those who drink to excess (e.g. colleges) but I think that your mainstream customer of wine does not buy wine to drink excessively. Furthermore, I think we've probably become more sensitive to crimes such as drunk driving, so this has probably decreased.
I don't know the answer to that question. I do know that the Roman war machine was so powerful from a tactics and technology perspective that it could probably have beaten powerful opposing armies even if the Roman one was not on top of its game. However, it's important to remember that the Romans did lost some battles well before it eventually fell in the 5th Century. You can see, for example, a list here of Roman battle, most of which they won, but some of which they lost.
Alcohol in moderation is not a bad thing and some of it has even been shown to have health benefits (red wine) but I cant see things like Cocaine and Meth having any kind of health benefits just because of the addictive nature.
That is the key; one is fine in moderation, another is not. This is my question about the pro-marijuana movement as well; a glass of wine won't necessarily make you unfit to drive a car, but a joint will.
To add to this we have another thread where we discussed some of this at . It was humanists from Italy who coined the temr “Dark Ages” and nowadays there's a recognition that this term, even though it remains, is not really a good one.
I was watching a program on the history international channel about the dark ages. The general consensus was that the dark ages were dark because of the church and religion in general. What are your thoughts?
That they're wrong. I mean, when you think of it, there's the Glory of Rome at one end of the timeline and the growth of cities and nations in the Middle Ages. The Dark Ages were the formative years. The ideals of Rome had to have passed somehow, and it is my understanding that it was the Church and religion that actually maintained a number of Roman ideals which brought structure to the rest of Western Civilization later on.
what does it mean when you see that a 'guest' is posting on a particular thread and then the post never appears?
It may mean that a search engine or other robot clicked on the "post" button....well they didn't really click on it, but they followed the link. However, they're not actually going to do any posting of actual messages.
What I found interesting about the story is how they got so many of the documents back from those who bought them. Perhaps a few buyers bought a lot of them. I wonder if they used any “strong arming” to forcefully tell people to return them.
But I think if calling persecution “localized” in ancient Rome is like calling the entertainment industry “localized” in California. At a city of a million people, Rome would perhaps have been even greater (relatively speaking) than modern New York, and certainly so in regard to power and prestige. And I think there were other offenders aside from Diocletian and Nero. For example, during the tenure of Decius:
The Decian persecution was the severest trial to which the Church up to that time had been subjected and the loss suffered by the Church in consequence of apostasy was almost as damaging as the losses by martyrdom.
Also, it would be anachronism to assume that pagans merely responded to Christians because Christians "maltreated" pagans. Even if this did happen between the time of Constantine (~311) and the end of Rome (~456) after Christianity became "acceptable", this would have occurred after the time of persecution of Christians.What I do not know is if the use of "pagani" was really an "insult" toward pagans or not. I saw that the word "is derived from the Latin pagus, whence pagani (i.e. those who live in the country), a name given to the country folk who remained heathen after the cities had become Christian." http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/11388a.htm There's also a Wikpedia entry on PaganismPaganism [/wiki]which explores the meaning of the word, and based on that it seems that Christianity was at first spread in urban areas. However, the "insulting" use of the term "pagan" may not have come until some centuries after Christianity's beginning:
It was only after the Late Imperial introduction of serfdom, in which agricultural workers were legally bound to the land (see Serf), that it began to have negative connotations, and imply the simple ancient religion of country people, which Virgil had mentioned respectfully in Georgics. Like its approximate synonym heathen (see below), it was adopted by Middle English-speaking Christians as a slur to refer to those too rustic to embrace Christianity.
But getting back to the original teacher's manual, calling someone a name hardly justifies throwing them to lions or other murder and systematic oppression. This is what the teacher's manual was effectively doing.
