Lost Languages Discovered in One of the World's Oldest Continuously Run Libraries (smithsonianmag.com) 164
Saint Catherine's Monastery, a sacred Christian site nestled in the shadow of Mount Sinai, is home to one of the world's oldest continuously used libraries. Thousands of manuscripts and books are kept there -- some of which contain hidden treasures. An anonymous reader shares a report: Now, a team of researchers is using new technology to uncover texts that were erased and written over by the monks who lived and worked at the monastery. Many of these original texts were written in languages well known to researchers -- Latin, Greek, Arabic -- but others were inscribed in long-lost languages that are rarely seen in the historical record. Manuscripts with multiple layers of writing are known as palimpsests, and there are about 130 of them at St. Catherine's Monastery, according to the website of the Early Manuscript Electronic Library, which has been leading the initiative to uncover the original texts. With the rise of Islam in the 7th century, Christian sites in the Sinai Desert began to disappear, and Saint Catherine's found itself in relative isolation. Monks turned to reusing older parchments when supplies at the monastery ran scarce. To uncover the palimpsests' secret texts, researchers photographed thousands of pages multiple times, illuminating each page with different-colored lights. They also photographed the pages with light shining onto them from behind, or from an oblique angle, which helped "highlight tiny bumps and depressions in the surface," Gray writes. They then fed the information into a computer algorithm, which is able to distinguish the more recent texts from the originals.
So CSI was correct (Score:1)
Re:So CSI was correct (Score:5, Informative)
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(I did read TFA - sorry, won't happen again)
You're on thin ice, buddy.
fed the information into a computer algorithm (Score:1)
Not completely lost languages (Score:5, Informative)
But perhaps the most intriguing finds are the manuscripts written in obscure languages that fell out of use many centuries ago. Two of the erased texts, for instance, were inked in Caucasian Albanian, a language spoken by Christians in what is now Azerbaijan. According to Sarah Laskow of Atlas Obscura, Caucasian Albanian only exists today in a few stone inscriptions. Michael Phelps, director of the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, tells Gray of the Atlantic that the discovery of Caucasian Albanian writings at Saint Catherine’s library has helped scholars increase their knowledge of the language’s vocabulary, giving them words for things like “net” and “fish.”
Other hidden texts were written in a defunct dialect known as Christian Palestinian Aramaic, a mix of Syriac and Greek, which was discontinued in the 13th century only to be rediscovered by scholars in the 18th century.
Of course, with sea related words discovered, the obvious line of jokes is to connect this with the Deep Ones, Dagon and Cthulhu. No doubt, the true horror in the more obscure texts is being kept quiet, possibly known only to the Laundry and the Black Chamber.
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Are you trying to tell me... (Score:2, Interesting)
...that Islam is a relatively new religion in the Middle East, and that both Judaism and Christianity predated it by centuries? How can that be?
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It's OK, eventually some fanatical Muslim group will destroy that blasphemous evidence and the next generation won't know it ever existed.
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Just like Christian fanatics burned all books related to Cthulhu?
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Sure. But my example was selected for the region and the current risk.
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All religions are cults, some are more extreme than others.
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Then "cult" has no meaning at all. Religions may start as cults, but once you have a sufficient number of followers, and the cult is no longer bound to a charismatic leader, then I'd say it has become a religion. Not that religions aren't all bunk, but that's just my own assessment, and I can still twell the difference between a cult and a religion. For instance, Joseph Smith and his band of gullible idiots in 1830 were a cult. Mormonism in 2017 is a religion. It's still all concoction, absurdity, and of co
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The term "cult" in theological terms relates to a specific set of beliefs and/or practices. For example, the "Marian cult" is the worship of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and the belief that she was conceived without sin. This is shared by the Catholic and Orthodox Christian churches, as well as some of the Middle Eastern and north-east African groups. Most Protestant groups (particularly Calvinist sections) refuse the Marian cult as a form of pseudo-pantheism.
The vernacular use of "cult", though, is ill-defi
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Catholics and Orthodox do not worship Mary. Worship is due to God alone. We venerate and honor Mary much like secular society venerates people like Lincoln and Gandhi.
Re:Are you trying to tell me... (Score:5, Funny)
After you defeat Scientology you get to fight Mormonism. Then Protestant Christianity, then Islam, then Catholicism, then Confucianism, then Buddhism, then Judaism, then Hinduism. And then you get to the good part! You have to fight Bahamut, Gilgamesh, Ra, _and_ Tiamat. And only after you've beaten those four do you get to fight Cthulhu.
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I believe if you're going to take down religions you have to do so in order. After you defeat Scientology you get to fight Mormonism. Then Protestant Christianity, then Islam, then Catholicism, then Confucianism, then Buddhism, then Judaism, then Hinduism. And then you get to the good part! You have to fight Bahamut, Gilgamesh, Ra, _and_ Tiamat. And only after you've beaten those four do you get to fight Cthulhu.
You forgot Sikhism, but it's probably a good idea to avoid that one since you know they're armed.
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For a moment there I thought you were going to say after defeating the gods of earth, wind, fire, and water that Chaos himself would have to be defeated. Only then the Four Orbs will shine again, balance restored to the universe, and the time loop closed.
Then again, perhaps I've been playing too many old video games.
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I believe if you're going to take down religions you have to do so in order.
After you defeat Scientology you get to fight Mormonism. Then Protestant Christianity, then Islam, then Catholicism, then Confucianism, then Buddhism, then Judaism, then Hinduism. And then you get to the good part! You have to fight Bahamut, Gilgamesh, Ra, _and_ Tiamat. And only after you've beaten those four do you get to fight Cthulhu.
Mostly academic. While getting past the "Dude" might not be too hard (but that is just my opinion), no one makes it past the flying spaghetti monster and his noodly armaments.
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Zoroaster?
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"A millennia"? And here I thought "millennia" was the plural of "millennium"....
No a thousand years is about right. That is what there is evidence for, the rest is religion.
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...that Judaism^H^H^H^H^H^H the Sumerian pantheon is a relatively new religion in the Middle East, and that the Sumerian pantheon^H^H^H^H^H^H the GÃbekli Tepe religion pred
Re:Are you trying to tell me... (Score:4, Informative)
It's still about 1,400 years old, as opposed to Christianity which is about 2,000 years old. Judaism as we know it is really a merger of the ancient Hebrew monotheistic faith and Aristotlean thought, so is maybe two or three hundred years older than Christianity.
Another damned apostate (Score:2)
Melted butter?!?!?
Heretic! The butter is to be solid, fresh from the churn, lightly salted, then lovingly applied to the pasta by the worshiper. The only exception to this allowed by the canon is when The Sauce is to be applied, and yea, verily, it is still holy to use the butter with the sauce. Cheese also is holy, very holy. And I'm not talking about the Swiss; for that, we have to go back to the vat again.
Ramen
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Depends on who you ask.
According to the Muslims and Christians, Islam started when Abraham sent away his son Ishmael he had made with his sex slave and his son Isaac started Judaism. Judaism eventually became Christianity.
According to scientific evidence we have (which is sparse), all the religions in that region started from the pantheon of gods of various sheep herders that eventually streamlined into the different branches we now know. They all claim the same god and ancestry and they all can be traced b
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Depends on who you ask.
According to the Muslims and Christians, Islam started when Abraham sent away his son Ishmael he had made with his sex slave and his son Isaac started Judaism. Judaism eventually became Christianity.
According to scientific evidence we have (which is sparse), all the religions in that region started from the pantheon of gods of various sheep herders that eventually streamlined into the different branches we now know. They all claim the same god and ancestry and they all can be traced back to the same groups of people with similar religions, so to say one came first is dishonest.
Just because that's when it's claimed it "started" doesn't mean that's when it actually did. Muhammad created Islam in the early 7th century when he claimed Gabriel spoke to him, and created the retro history of the religion in writing the Quran. There is no mention of Allah or Islam prior to this.
Even the official religion of Christianity didn't actually begin in Jesus's time, who was a jew, (and would self-identify as such) it took several decades after Paul and the other apostles wrote their gospels. T
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In college, I took a "History of Religions" course which the professor started with telling us that we'd most likely be offended at some point, but he was giving us a historical perspective, not a religious one. One of the interesting things I picked up in that course was that the historical Jesus actually advocated for stricter laws. He was a rabbi (teacher) among many, many of the time and thought that sin was incurred not only if you DID an action, but if you thought about doing it. For example, there's
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I was under the impression that the disease of Christianity was invented by someone called Paul some decades after the alleged death of the alleged Jesus, to try to rationalise his psychotic imaginations. And he was very explicit that for someone following his version of mumbo-jumbo, it did not matter if they followed some of the laws of Judaism.
Of co
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Well, you've also got to remember that there were a ton of rabbis on the fringe of Judaism at that time. There were probably dozens of "Jesuses" who attracted followers, got the attention of the Romans (who were okay with Judaism being practiced as long as nobody got too noisy), and were executed only for their followers to disperse. If a historical Jesus did exist, he was like all these other rabbis except, after his death, his followers kept "following" him until this Judaism fringe group spawned its own
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In my marriage, looking has always been OK, and it's been very solid. If a man finds it difficult to stick with his partner just from window-shopping, it wasn't that good a relationship in the first place.
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There's idly looking and then there's longing...
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It's an interesting archeological research project that sadly even media like National Geographic or PBS seldom covers because they don't want to piss anyone off with reality.
Actually, I recently saw a fantastic PBS documentary on the birth of Judaism, which pointed out that Abraham picked up his monotheistic faith and the name of Yahweh from somewhere in Arabia, and how Yahweh worship was used as an agrarian revolution among the lower orders of the Caananites which overturned the nobility there. There was no "exodus" from Egypt, seemingly; rather, the Caananite rulers were vassal kings under the pharaoh, and the leaving of Egypt was really just getting the land out from the Egy
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Or maybe it's because they've covered it already, and realize it's all extrapolation and speculation.
No, Christians do not believe Islam started with Ishmael. Christian theologians are familiar with Islam's claim on Ishmael, but realize that the religion was created by Muhammad ibn Abdullah out of tribal legends and what he learned second-hand from Jews and Gnostics.
Down with hateful Islamophobia (Score:3, Interesting)
A co-worker has complained to our manager, when I pointed a similar fact out during a conversation.
The manager then reprimanded me pointing out the company's policy against "harassment" — even though no one on our team is a Muslim.
Re:Down with hateful Islamophobia (Score:5, Funny)
Clearly such "facts" are fake news and the byproduct of white nationalist agitation.
By repeating such facts you inflame the sensibilities of everyone oppressed by the rise of fascist right-wing movements.
Re: Down with hateful Islamophobia (Score:2, Funny)
Dude, you are harassing Allah. Your coworker doesn't want to be caught in the wrath that is meant for you.
Re:Down with hateful Islamophobia (Score:4, Insightful)
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A co-worker has complained to our manager, when I pointed a similar fact out during a conversation.
Discussing religion in the work setting is dubious. Why would you want to do that anyway?
The manager then reprimanded me pointing out the company's policy against "harassment"
Whether the slap on the wrist was justified can only be judged if we had audio recording of the conversation.
even though no one on our team is a Muslim.
I'm not sure this makes the situation much better. If all white co-workers were discussing dem-lazy-ni**ers, management might still find it problematic.
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Dubious or not, the statement of fact is not harassment. You are blaming the victim.
Only a follower of a religion can claim being harassed, when the religion is portrayed negatively. Thus, there being no such followers within earshot may not make it "better", but it certainly means, no harassment has taken place.
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Dubious or not, the statement of fact is not harassment. You are blaming the victim.
As I pointed out to AC in parallel thread, I don't care about legalities of the situation since there was no official sanction by the manager (at least that is how I read your comment). This is why I don't see you as a victim.
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Three such complaints, however frivolous, and the manager has to escalate the matter to HR. The HR then begins to look into means and ways to get rid of the trouble — me.
Though I'm not (yet?) a victim of undue firing, I'm already a victim of undue reprimand.
Now, on the one hand, it is the company's right to fire anybody for any reason — or without a reason at all. On the other hand, they may be forced to
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We do not know who started the conversation
That is kind of irrelevant. Getting yourself involved in discussions about religion ends well only if everyone agrees with each other already. I can kind of understand tabs vs spaces religious wars, since that impacts day-to-day work life. But getting drawn into discussions about 7h century events is not necessary, so why do it?
Harassment is not a victimless crime, where is the victim?
I'm not saying that whatever the OP said was legally harassment. I don't care about legalities because OP was not sued, not even a disciplinary action was taken. My point is that jus
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If you know everyone else in the conversation, and know that they're good with such discussion, you can get away with religious discussion among people who don't agree. Workplaces are not safe places for that. You're likely not to know people's religions, and very likely not to know how they feel about someone disagreeing with theirs.
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Of course there's two sides to a story. I've encountered many people who play the victim and paint a compelling picture of victim hood (many I think even believe their own narrative) until you find out the full picture.
Basically, I think there's likely more to your story than a casual discussion about history as your story doesn't add up.
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Thanks for affirming his story.
This is a common experience even though the left like to scoff us when we say anything.
Klingon (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if they'll find some Klingon texts.
"Today, I am to do battle with this book. I will mercilessly stab the book with my pen, until it dies the final death. On the way to Kahless, it will bleed the appropriate text onto its page-like corpse."
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It is a good day to dye.
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Today is a good day to die. I say we release into production.
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Reminds me of the joke that "Klingons do not "release" software. Klingon software escapes, leaving a bloody trail of design engineers and quality assurance testers in its wake."
really? (Score:2)
researchers have photographed 74 palimpsests, which boast 6,8000 pages between them
That's a lot.
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It was a pretty nice microprocessor too for a while. Then we got the 6,8010, 6,8020, 6,8030, and finally the 6,8040 on the A,miga.
Jokes on the researchers (Score:1)
Really their algorithm is AI and has become sentient writing its own languages. Once they finally decode the language they will find its full of "your floppy disk is so small, even if you could upgrade to a hard disk, you still couldn't get an OS to boot with you." Jokes.
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I thought the AIs mostly focused on 'Yo motherboard' jokes, like 'Yo motherboard so old it's only got ISA slots!' or 'Yo motherboards form factor is double-wide!'
You know it's going to happen... (Score:3, Funny)
Current Text: Jesus wept... ...and said, "Damn those hot wings are spicy!"
Recovered Text:
I thought this was about programming langues... (Score:2)
...I was sure of it.
same thing happening now (Score:3, Insightful)
With the rise of Islam in the 7th century, Christian sites in the Sinai Desert began to disappear,
The same thing is happening now in Europe
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No it isn't. While secularization has reduced the number of Christians in Europe, the notion of "Christian cities dissappearing" due to Muslim immigration is preposterous. Stop spreading lies.
Re:No-Go Zones (Score:4, Interesting)
No, they're not. I live in the middle of one of those purported no-go zones. I'm no unsafer than anywhere in the country.
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With the rise of Islam in the 7th century, Christian sites in the Sinai Desert began to disappear,
The same thing is happening now in Europe
Except in this case it's because the Christians are becoming atheists, and there's simply no critical mass (no pun intended) to fill Christian places of worship. I doubt there's anyone under 40 going to the kirk in the village I grew up in.
Re:Christian (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Christian (Score:4, Funny)
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bugs2squash explained:
It's not another language, it's just scribes writing random things over the old text a million times to obscure what was originally there.
Somebody mod parent +1 Funny, please ... !
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Book burnings, although they did happen, didn't happen early on. Before the printing press, books were very, very expensive and thus reserved only for the very rich and the church which, even after the printing press became ubiquitous, the church wanted to keep it that way, hence the book burnings. It's also why the mass is still held in Latin in many denominations or why Mother Teresa didn't actually help anyone, it's just a matter of keeping the poor dumb, sick and dependent on the church.
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Mass is not held in Latin except in rare situations. A few churches have a single Latin Mass celebration out of many. And the word "denominations" inherently means "Protestant", which by definition: A. do not call it a "Mass", with the possible exception of the Anglicans and Episcopals, and B. do not use Latin at all. In fact, one of the major driving factors behind the Protestant Reformation was the desire to use the vernacular in wo
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I'm surprised they didn't burn it.
You're confusing Christianity with Islam.
After 1,700 years, Buddhas fall to Taliban dynamite [telegraph.co.uk]
The propensity of Muslims to destroy things even has multiple [wikipedia.org] Wikipedia pages. [wikipedia.org]
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sure some Thalidomide-brained idiot is going to drag up the Crusades or something else that happened a thousand fucking years ago in order to justify Islamic barbarity TODAY.
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Well, I would not call it "the left", considering people like Ayn Rand would be considered nowhere near "left", and Ayn Rand found religion, and Christianity in particular, to be moronic.
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My friends in the Christian Left would disagree with your statement. Leftists tend to be against most organized religion, and against religion playing a role in politics. Religion itself isn't that big a deal.
The Muslims were not the original invaders of that area. Very likely ancient Egypt wasn't the first either, but it's the earliest invader I can think of offhand. That area has seen invasion after invasion.
The Crusaders were in general not the people kicked out by Muslims, or even their descend
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sure some Thalidomide-brained idiot is going to drag up the Crusades or something else that happened a thousand fucking years ago in order to justify Islamic barbarity TODAY.
Christ on a bike, that's the most insult-dense post I've read in a while. Islamophobia, ableism and insulting people who disagree with you all rolled into one.
Every broad group has contained some iconoclasts at some point, and you don't have to go as far back as the Crusades to see Christians destroying totems of other religions (we did it throughout the Imperial era). However, the acts of the extremists of I.S. do not represent the mainstream of Islam in any way.
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However, the acts of the extremists of I.S. do not represent the mainstream of Islam in any way.
They do. Destroying pagan totems is something that goes as far back as Mohammed destroying the idols in the kaaba. You should learn something about Islam before you presume to speak for mainstream Islam.
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Re:Christian (Score:4, Insightful)
Stand alone complex ad hominem (Score:3)
Because there's a difference between burning books at some points in time (which Christianity certainly did, as did many other religious and ideologies) and burning books being such a complete default that one should be "surprised" by it. In that context, just like some of the other Islam related comments in this thread, it is classic trolling, and if sincere says more about the people making the statements than it does about the groups they are making comments about.
Says more what?
This is a nice example of "innuendo from nothing". It implies that the people in a debate are somehow inferior, while saying exactly nothing about them.
It's a cross between an ad-hominem attack and a stand-alone complex.
Shouldn't we focus on the debate instead of the character of the debater?
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JoshuaZ claimed:,/p>
I suppose one could point out to the person who is making comments about Christianity that in fact Christianity was responsible for the preservation of many texts from other religions and cultures and that of what we have of classical Greek and Roman literature is due purely to the preservation by monks, but why bother?
Sorry, but that's absolutely incorrect.
While Christian monasteries did, in fact, collect and preserve many ancient texts, they are FAR from our only source for such materials. Just to name three off the top of my head, there are caches such as the Dead Sea scrolls, middens such as the famous one at Oxyrhynchus, and Islamic libraries such as the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. all of which preserved Greek and Roman Latin texts, exemplars of which were absent from European Christian collec
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Modern day muslim lands, at any rate.
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He already pointed out what it says about them in the first part of what he wrote. Succinctly.
There is no innuendo. It is easy to ascertain his logic and viewpoint. He showed his work before making that statement.
What seems blatantly obvious is that you are looking for an opportunity to be argumentative with this person because you side with the AC. What I can't tell is if you had that little voice in your head telling you your post is intellectually dishonest and you did it anyways out of some misguide
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Re:Christian (Score:4, Informative)
Why? Because it is? I know that you're a small minded individual unable to critically think but you might be shocked to learn that religion is not immediately anti-education or anti-science. For example, evolution has been considered "most probably fact" within the catholic church since the late 1800s. The pioneering work in evolution being done by a monk of all people. Toss in that for a very long time (we're talking centuries) if you wanted a science based education you went to the Jesuits (you'll be shocked to find out who they're associated with) and you'll start to understand what a moronic statements the OP as well as your post are making.
Does this help? (Score:2)
Why? Because it is? I know that you're a small minded individual unable to critically think but you might be shocked to learn...
Does this address the points he made, or is it an attempt to derail the issue by getting into a shouting match?
How does something like this get modded up?
If we allow this sort of thing on our debate floor (and yes, this forum is ours) we will never have reasoned debate.
It'll be trivial to take any subject out of view by derailing it.
If we let it. Please don't mod this crap up.
Re:Does this help? (Score:4, Insightful)
Please, your myth of the "Will to Truth" being widespread among any significant population is absurd. Humans have always been emotional reasoners. They will always be emotional reasoners. Your so-called bastions of critical thought and rationality are emotional reasoners, with their precious "rationality" chiming in every now and then.
The sooner we quit pretending that there was some halcyon era of widespread critical thinking among any population the sooner we can actually move forward. You sit here and decry Idiocracy and can't even understand that people are, and have always been, largely "stupid" and think emotionally far more than "rationally". Your persistent belief that we're somehow losing ground to irrational, emotional thinking is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to puff up your own ego.
"Oh look at me, I'm part of the Rational Critical Thinking Elite, bravely steering Humanity through the perils of ignorant emotional reasoning! Please, tell me more how amazing my faculties for reason are! Never mind my deep seated need for such reinforcement is itself emotional reasoning, it's irrelevant!"
Get the fuck out of here with that shit, you're pathetic.
Re:Christian (Score:5, Informative)
They did promote him to be abbot of his abbey, where he didn't have time from science. I guess that's technically a confirmation of the Peter Principle.
Re:Christian (Score:5, Funny)
If he is referring to Gregor Mendel(d. 1884), the founder of modern genetics, no they didn't.
They did promote him to be abbot of his abbey, where he didn't have time from science. I guess that's technically a confirmation of the Peter Principle.
If the Peter Principle is divinely proven, does that mean it applies to God as well??
That would explain sooo much.
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One of Darwin's mysteries, which he talks about in The Origin of Species, was how variability didn't just get washed out in populations, in the same way that a spoonful of sugar gets washed out in a bathtub of water. The answer was that inheritance was a discrete variable, not a continuous variable, i.e. genes. While it's true that Mendel didn't (afaik) set out to solve this mystery, nor does it make him the person who did "the pioneering work in evolution" (in the words of the poster at the top of this t
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Why is this modded troll? Why not post proof that the Christian religion did not burn books instead of putting your head in the sand?
Why not stop being a douchebag and realize that just because Christians did, at times, burn books, that is not the de-facto standard of Christianity? Sounds like you're the one with your head in the sand and it's really a shame that tiny-brained cowards like you are allowed to post anonymously here.
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Javascript?
PHP?
C++?
Python?
What are we doing?
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Javascript? PHP? C++? Python?
What are we doing?
It's the modern form of a palimpsest: a CVS repository showing all the different fad languages your PHB insisted the company codebase be rewritten in over the decades.
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Oh... "lost languages".
I miss coffee.
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"...Christian sites in the Sinai Desert began to disappear." That tends to happen when the inhabitants are brutally murdered and the structures burned, as was usually the case.
Oh, like in the Crusades when sacking Christians armies would often wipe out every inhabitant-whether Jewish, Muslim, or Christian-of a conquered city?
Re:"With the rise of Islam in the 7th century..." (Score:5, Insightful)
I know you are playing the moral equivalence game here, so it might be worthwhile for me to point out some salient facts:
1) I am not Christian, so I do not excuse any specific or general barbarity on the part of the Crusades by Christians.
2) Muslim conquests of the Levant and North Africa starting in the 7th Century triggered a three century long archeology dark age (also, a similar dark age throughout the Mediterranean). Populations collapsed from their Roman and post-Roman levels. The ecologies of the North Africa and Levant regions were destroyed, and to this day have yet to recover. Numerous Roman settlements were sacked and the inhabitants slaughtered, never to return. That's why you can go to Algeria or Libya or Syria and find intact Roman ruins today.
3) Christianity didn't have the concept of Holy War until exposed to Islamic Jihad. The Crusades were basically a Christian reaction to the Muslim Jihad which had been attacking Christian lands for a solid 350 years before the first Crusade kicked off, during which millions were killed, and millions more sold into slavery. The time frame of these Christian sites "disappearing" was during the initial Muslim conquest, when Christians and Christianity had done nothing to Islam or Muslims except not converting when it was demanded by Mohammed and his acolytes. So they got murdered by him and his followers, their books and buildings burned, and their children sold into slavery.
4) Despite all the supposed raping, plundering, and massacres at the hands of the Crusaders, they had almost no demographic impact on the region. Contrast that with the demographic impact of the initial Muslim conquests, and you come up with two different tales. Islam didn't fall into a dark age because the Crusades destroyed their cities, murdered their people, and destroyed their culture.
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Hmm, hand-wavy tone, entirely unlike Wikipedia. What could possibly go wrong?
Wikipedia:
Now the stool has three legs of decline, and two of them are inside jobs.
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Except the population decline was universal across the former Roman Empire - not just the ERE under control of Constantinople, and only started in earnest after the Arab conquests. Sure, Italy was devastated by the Gothic wars and the later Langobard invasion, but Spain under the Goths? Carthage under the Vandals? Egypt under the ERE? Gaul under the Franks? They were all prospering after the end of the barbarian invasions an
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Strange...I have distinct memories of reading of wars the Jews were commanded by God to wage, sometimes without mercy. At least some of these were described in the collection of books that became the Christian Bible.
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"...Christian sites in the Sinai Desert began to disappear."
That tends to happen when the inhabitants are brutally murdered and the structures burned, as was usually the case.
They didn't. This is not an understatement. They started to disappear. Very slowly. Islam discriminated against Christians by making them pay taxes and making muslims tax free. That in turn meant muslims states before the crusades went out or their way to not harm Christians and Jews because they were their tax-payers. Of course over time people converted to get the priviledges of being Muslim at which point the priviledges went away and the harasment of minorities begin, but that is a lot more recent (the
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Islamic conquests were usually preceded by years of Islamic raiding, by which the Muslims would raid settlements with cavalry, disrupting food production and causing famine over successive years in order to weaken the state(s) under attack.
Initial Muslim conquests usually had relatively benig