The latter, according to DL. They kill more, because they are frustrated more, because they have fewer opportunities, because they are not as resourceful, because they are not as clever, because they are comparatively stupid.

In a twisted, sick sort of way, there is a symmetry to it.

Except for the inconvenient fact that he has not proven the premise, and is blatantly misusing Murray's findings.

 

Uh... Okay. This is interesting.

First printed book was the Gutenberg Bible in 1450s. Before that, the only things that existed were religious documents, from Bibles and psalters to Papal edicts and missives. The merchant classes were barely literate and the only real trading outposts were religious or monastic; any 'paperwork' from trade was thus written by the scribes.

I reiterate: the only texts were religious. There simply wasn't the money, time, or manpower to go making texts that would offend the Church. And so I ask you:

What are these burnings of which you speak? Burnings, to quote you, of that time period? The Inquisition may have started in the late 1100, but there was simply nothing to burn at the time and, until the invention of movable type in the 1450s, that continued to be the case. The Renaissance began at the start of the 1400s anyway so, by the time Gutenberg was printing, the time that's being referred to was over by a good 50 years.

 

The simplest thing to do is ignore any futher posts..all pointless arguement ends..its hard to argue when no one is bothering to respond.

Its not academic I grant you but it's terribly effective.

 

I strongly suspect that the book was written specifically to BE misused by people like DL.

 

You don't know our doggo, if no one responds then he'll just keep arguing with himself untill he riles someone so much that they respond......and then he's off again with his written diarrhea....

 

Really? Then Plato and Socrates were actually contemporaries of Gutenberg or did their writings and the writings of the entire several levels of Greek Culture exist before Gutenberg? I think the answer is obvious.

Now as an example when ships docked in the harbors at Alexandria they were boarded searched and all written material and maps were confiscated, copied for the library and then returned.

And I believe it was Alexander who demanded to copy all the original Greek writings and to facilitate that put up a huge ransom in Gold for their safe return. However, the library at Alexandra kept the originals, sent the copies back, and the Greeks got to keep the gold.

All that was lost as well as the advance of mathematics, astronomy, chemistry, and medicine. And not just at the library at Alexandra. The book and library burnings were common as the doctrine of the Holy Bible being the only acceptable source of knowledge spread through people who had probably never seen the bible and couldn't read it if they did.

That's what Gutenberg did. He facilitated common people getting their hands on the Holy Bible and finding out it was full of bullshit.

 

. dbl post

 

I've had a knife put to my throat while being restrained by two other people in Belfast. I was able to elbow my way out and run away. This attack was done by white people.

I went to a high school in Birmingham in England, the violent people there were not the blacks but the Pakistanis and white people.

When you base your life philosophy only on events that happen to you, your sample size becomes 1. The event skews your perception of others.

 

Oh, you're talking about the library at Alexandria?! You should have said! I mean, Christ, I was talking about the so-called Dark Ages, not the fucking Library that was burnt to the ground centuries before said so-called Ages actually started!

Christ, man, if you're going to go on about 'during that time' when you've quoted a post about the phrase 'The Dark Ages' then please, try and talk about that time period, yeah? Dark ages: 400AD to 1400AD. Burning at Alexandria: 48BC.

So - and I'll spell this out: The Library was burnt before the advent of Christianity, so it wasn't the 'Catholic Church' getting uppity and trying to control people.

But please! If you're telling me that these book burnings took place then find me a credible source that shows that, throughout the Dark Ages (forgive me), swathes of libraries were burnt to make way for a single Bible chained to a post.

 

Here are a few more notable black people taken from the linked list in post 216, which D.L. kindly re-posted in post 218....
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Philip Emeagwali
(b. 1954) Born in Nigeria in 1954, Philip Emeagwali's determination to succeed grew out of a life of poverty and little formal education. An expert in mathematics, physics, and astronomy, Emeagwali won the Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineers' Gordon Bell Prize in 1989 for an experiment that used 65,000 processors to perform the world's fastest computation of 3.1 billion calculations per second. Emeagwali's computers are currently being used to forecast the weather and predict future global warming.​

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Aprille Ericsson

(b. 1963) Born and raised in Brooklyn, N. Y., M.I.T graduate Aprille Ericsson was the first female (and the first African-American female) to receive a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Howard University and the first African-American female to receive a Ph.D. in engineering at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Ericsson has won many awards, including the 1997 "Women in Science and Engineering" award for the best female engineer in the federal government, and she is currently the instrument manager for a proposed mission to bring dust from the Martian lower atmosphere back to Earth.​

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Patricia Bath

(1942-) Born in Harlem, New York, Bath holds a bachelor's degree from Hunter College and an M.D. from Howard University. She is a co-founder of the American Institute for the Prevention of Blindness. Bath is best known for her invention of the Laserphaco Probe for the treatment of cataracts.​

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Mark Dean

(1957-) Dean was born in Jefferson City, Tennessee, and holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Tennessee, a master's degree from Florida Atlantic University, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. He led the team of IBM scientists that developed the ISA bus—a device that enabled computer components to communicate with each other rapidly, which made personal computers fast and efficient for the first time. Dean also led the design team responsible for creating the first one-gigahertz computer processor chip. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1997​

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As in the cases of Philip Emeagwali and Patricia Bath, you can see that both of these people WERE NOT born in affluent areas. YET they have overcome the stigma that The Bell Curve depicts and have achieved more than any white person in the same field... ​

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Certainly.

http://www.hermes-press.com/DAtruth.htm
​

 

Well - I most sincerely apologise. I was not aware of these instances.

 

This is me paraphrasing from a few history books, so if I don't get it quite right, be gentle with me. I am typing- not pasting:

Caesar purportedly burned the library of Alexandria during the siege of Pompey, in 48BCE. If he did in fact burn it, he did not burn it entirely, and he may have done so accidentally, at that. (He had given orders to set fire to an enemy fleet, but the fire had spread into the city.)

Large portions of the library survived, and is said to have survived other tribulations.

For instance, in 392CE, early Christians under the Patriarch Theophilus burned a great many parchments, but only a small share of the total.

However, according to legend, the Alexandria Library was finally done in by a Moslem, an African conqueror named Amr ibn al-As, who laid siege on Memphis under the orders of Caliph Omar in 641AD.

The early Christians of the area were culpable in the siege; they led Amr to Memphis. In their defense, the local Christians at that time (a sect called the Monophysites) were being hunted down and slaughtered by the Byzantines, and so they saw the imperialist Moslems as liberators.

Now, in Amr's defense, he did restrain his army from sacking Memphis. When a Memphis scholar named John Philoponus asked Amar for the library's manuscripts, Amar sent messengers back to Caliph Omar, requesting permission.

Then it gets murkey. Omar is reported to have replied, "If these writings of the Greeks agree with the Book of God [the Qu'ran of Mohammed, just 9 years deceased at the time], they are useless, and need not be preserved; if they disagree they are pernicious, and should be destroyed." The Qu'ran, still a work in progress at the time and being authored by Mohammed's chroniclers, shortened this response down to, "Burn the libraries, for they are contained in one book" [i.e., the Qu'ran].

Did all of this really happen? There may have been grains of truth, according to the written record of the time. Contemporary chronicler and historian Bar-Hebraeus wrote that Amr had distributed the contents of the library to the 4,000 furnaces of the Public Baths of Memphis, which for six whole months used them as fuel to heat the pools.

So, did any of these attacks really happen?

Most likely all three of them, yet also most likely none of them. The 48BCE, 392CE, and 641CE sackings read like fables, and now it is generally believed that the Library suffered death by a million cuts, over the course of centuries, but that the biggest detriment by far was simply neglect and decay.


In any event, all of this, whether fact of fable, predates the Middle Ages by many centuries.

The Holy Roman Empire of the Middle Ages kept the fire of western civilization burning. Long before the Gutenberg press, legions of Catholic monks transcribed and illuminated not only the Bible, but also every "pagan" document they could find. It is thanks to their work of preservation and continuance that civilization still has Aristotle, Sophocles, Homer, and all the other Greco-Roman luminaries of antiquity. The monks also chronicled the histories of the Byzantines, the Jews, and the Moslems. They brought Hindu and Moslem mathematical advances (such as algebra and the number zero) back to the West. And so on.

The Middle Ages were not "Dark." They paved the way for the Renaissance.


(sources- various history books, but mostly Will and Ariel Durant)

 

And no need to apologize because you accurately represent the other school of thought that while these instances have happened the conversion and influence of Christianity is what eventually established the basis for democracy, better agriculture, the Renaissance and eventually evolved into the western world that dominates to this day.

But yes that's what happened to our accumulated knowledge up to that point.

 

DL, your "answer" makes no sense. One might be able to argue that the Tuskagee Airmen were exceptional and/or statistically insignificant since there were less than 10,000 of them and they were an all black squadron for less than 5 years. Might, if one buries one's head far enough in the ground and ignores the facts.

You cannot blow off the conduct of the Japanese or Germans in WWII as "exceptional". I know you are intelligent enough take an unbiased look at the facts and ask yourself "How would the Bell Curve thingy address these contradictions?" I'm convinced that if you REALLY ask yourself the question, you will arrive at the same conclusion I did when I had to read The bell curve for a college class; the premise is flawed and the figures cited to support it are not used in context, flawed, incomplete or plain fabrications. The premise of the Bell Curve is proven false.

The conduct of the Japanese in WWII involved MILLIONS of Japanese who invaded China, and raped, murdered, burned and brutalized the entire population they encountered. Their conduct was extreme; they would systematically rape and kill in the most brutal ways imaginable. They destroyed infrastructure (even when they had already conquered an area) only because the few refugees left behind might benefit from it. They brutalized and murdered enemy forces who had surrendered, systematically violated basic human rights, and even brainwashed their own population to the point of brutality. This was not isolated conduct, not a single division or battalion, or field commander. It was rampant through out the entire Japanese nation from about 1934 through 1945. It was condoned at every level of Japanese government and it served no military purpose in their conduct of the war. The Japanese NATION'S conduct over this extended period of time was contrary to their history and culture. And, their conduct completely refutes the premise of the Bell Curve Thingy.

Exceptional indeed.

The German nation stood by while it's leadership engaged in a course of genocide in the most brutal possible way. DL, a NATION did this. it wasn't a group of wackos who got loose from an asylum, or an "exceptional" generation that suddenly decided to ignore it's heritage. An ENTIRE NATION set out to drive to extinction an entire race of people. People who were fellow citizens, and neighbors, and in some cases, even family.

Exceptional indeed.

Please, DL, explain to me how the "exceptional" behavior of a few MILLION orientals and white Europeans spanning more than a decade can be reconciled with the bell curve thingy.

And your diversion about the brutality in the Congo will get a response from me once you actually answer my question.

 

Doggo, nobody needs to attack your character. You yourself successfully manages that whenever you link "respect and affection" with anything to do with Hitler......and your self attack is highlighted when you claim to have a great love for anything Jewish.

 

You were not aware of those instances for the mere fact that they never happened.

I think it is a bit presumptuous to advise other people in how to reason, but might I suggest in the future that you at least take an extra glance at the "evidence" you've been given. A cheap website, run by a singular soul who refers to his target in constant "Christian" quotations and whose front page is leaden with conspiracy theories which refer to president Barrack Obama as a puppet, strung up by a cabal of ancient and demonic capitalists who are seeking to brainwash the masses for military purposes, is probably not the best place to find scholarly and objective statements.(The front page detailing the devilish nature of Obama becomes quite hilarious if the fellow using the site as a source happens to lean towards the left, which, after seeing him in a previous discussion on contraception, I'd wager he does.)

You would indeed hear if "all the books in the western world not having to do with Christianity" were burned. That sounds rather important...I dare say we all would have heard about it. Theodosius II did of course burn books. More precisely, he burned a book. He burned the book of Nestorious because it claimed that Mary was not the mother of god and was therefore considered heretical. I would hardly call this "all non-christian books." But then, I am not delusional.

It would be rather ironic if, while the monasteries were preserving all ancient knowledge, the Christians were also destroying all ancient knowledge. Sadly, such an exciting and punch-myself-in-the-face spectacle never took place. In fact, it is due largely to those christian monasteries and their work that the Dark ages are no longer referred to as such by scholars. I haven't had time to read much of the discussion, but I'd wager a guess that you had a much tighter grasp on the facts.

 

I am sorry you were attacked, but you cannot say or prove this attack would not happen in a jewish or oriental neighbourhood. This is just your oppinion, i have been attacked by whites also, these things do not happen just in a black neighbourhood.

 

One could equally highlight the behaviours of Orientals in the Pol Pot regime or Caucasians in the Yugoslav civil wars but I'm sure these will just be classed as exceptional too.

 

Shhh! You'll reignite the argument!

On the whole, though, I agree with you. There were certainly rather terrible things done by Christian mobs; the murder of Hypatia, for one. But it's interesting to note how such a thing came about, for starters. Some websites indicate that she was murdered in an anti-pagan gesture; others (including this transcript of one of the chapters from History of the Later Roman Empire (by J. B. Bury) indicate that she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time in a gratuitously bloody struggle between the Hebrews and the Christians - as well as being personally hated by the theocratic tyrant, Cyril, at the time. But to say it was 'incited'? That's dangerous territory. As the aforementioned book says:

The cause of the tragic fate, which befell her in March A.D. 415, is veiled in obscurity. We know that she was an intimate friend of the pagan Orestes, the Prefect of Egypt; and she was an object of hatred to Cyril, both because she was an enthusiastic preacher of pagan doctrines and because she was the Prefect's friend.

...

It was then that Hypatia fell victim in the midst of these infuriated passions. One day as she was returning home she was seized by a band of parabalani or lay brethren, whose duty it was to tend the sick and who were under the supervision of the Patriarch. These fanatics, led by a certain Peter, dragged her to a church and, tearing off her garments, hewed her in pieces and burned the fragments of her body.28 The reason alleged in public for this atrocity was that she hindered a reconciliation between Orestes and Cyril; but the true motive, as Socrates tells us, was envy. This ecclesiastical historian does not conceal his opinion that Cyril was morally responsible.​

So it's not as nearly cut and dried as Stumbler's source would like it to be.

As far as the Parthenon goes: I have difficulty in finding sources (credible ones, at least) that explicitly use the word 'sacked' when speaking of the issue of Christians taking over the temple. I certainly can't find evidence that, from 400 to 450AD, Christian mobs "demolished all the monuments, altars and temples of Athens, Olympia, and other Greek cities." Such a statement makes me wonder why so much of ancient Greece is still standing - clearly the Christian mobs weren't very good at pulling down buildings...!

The ordering by Theodosius of all non-Christian books to be burned: I can find evidence that he ordered one set of books to be burned (The books of Nestorius, declared to be heresy) but apart from that he seems to have been fairly quiet on the 'setting fire to libraries' front.

Justinian I did indeed close the Platonic Academy (or the Neoplatonic academy, one might call it; the original having been razed some centuries before) but I am skeptical as to his motives. Was it a desire to quash knowledge, or a desire to quash potential uprisings?

Lastly: Stumbler's final comment on the Gutenberg bible - saying he "facilitated common people getting their hands on the Holy Bible" - is simply wrong. The Bible was printed in Latin, so the common man wouldn't be able to read it, and the books were prohibitively expensive, so only the rich could afford it.