Conservapedia talk:World History Lecture Two

Peoples who only had primitive languages were easily conquered by groups that had more powerful languages. - What in all that is holy, is a "primative" language, and how the F does language have ANYTHING to do with winning. What exactly is a "primative" language, sir? One that grunts? Got's to go make me a sock! --WaitingforGodot 10:32, 22 July 2008 (EDT)

Rant 2, yes, I'm talkign to myself.... Had Christ come into this world in 2000 or 1000 B.C., would there have been a language powerful enough to express His ideas? HOly Spirit could not be expressed...- What exactly does this mean??? Does he think that Jesus spoke English??? he spoke GREEK, which exist 2000 years earlier. dear god in heaven, this guy is ruining your good name.--WaitingforGodot 10:34, 22 July 2008 (EDT)

Aramaic, actually, but yes, true. Interestingly, very few people speak Aramaic these days, and it's clearly an endangered language. I wonder if that means it's a primitive language as well. --AKjeldsen^{Cum dissensie} 10:38, 22 July 2008 (EDT)

True that. but i hadn't read his comments on the Greek (and as you said, NOT aramic) translation and how "perfect" those are for holy spirit, but english apparently isn't good enough for "holy spirit". Hello, idiot boy. Define "love". there is a reason some concepts are termed "abstract", cause no amount of language can actually define them. HELLO

Rant 3 (i sware, this is the last one, cause the idiot is done expounding on one of the many things he knows nothing about - that I happen to care about) "This was one of the greatest advances in the history of mankind, perhaps as great as the invention of the wheel, because now language could begin to describe powerful concepts and abstract ideas." see, first comes the language, THEN comes writing, not the other way around. If speakers haven't invented a concept yet, the language doesnt need to code it down. and by the way, China and japan, with its annoying little Character-Based language manages to do just fine in that "philosophy" area. IDIOT!!!!!!!!! ok, Godot is done ranting.--WaitingforGodot 10:41, 22 July 2008 (EDT)

I can't bring myself to read most of this - maybe later - but you're quite right, the stuff about language really is bad.--Bob^{bing up} 10:48, 22 July 2008 (EDT)

Sour grapes

Sorry, but Assfly is right on this one. Very briefly the fable goes that the fox, unable to reach the grapes, comments that they were probably sour anyway. [1]. As such "sour grapes" is a term referring to someone saying that they never wanted what they have just found they can't have. Jack Hughes (talk) 00:52, 26 June 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the correction! I'll amend that now.--Ironclad (talk) 01:25, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Reliability of Herodotus

This is nitpicking but the idea that archaeologists accepted his work as gospel, or even remotely reliable, at any point in history strikes me as being extremely unlikely given that his reliability has been questioned since ancient times. His critics include Cicero, Aristotle, Josephus, Harpocration and Plutarch. One early modern commentator (I can't remember who) said that Herodotus was both the father of history and the father of liars. It is worth mentioning that Herodotus does in fact admit that he relied on hearsay evidence. Alsto003 (talk) 04:37, 1 October 2014 (UTC) Alex

OK I insist on nitpicking about this one little thing

"It's rich of Andy to bitch about Assyrian cruelties, considering the unpleasant things which the Lawd's Believers get up to in the Old Testament." As far as Ancient History goes the Old Testament isn't shocking. All the cruelties in it were not unique to it. But that's besides the point, on principle I cannot criticize anyone for bitching about the Assyrian Empire. Those bastards had the unique ability to unite every single nation in the entire Middle East in common hatred of their rule. That is after all, the reason why their empire ended up being destroyed, because a motley coalition of their enemies rose up against them and burned Nineveh to the ground. Bias against the Assyrians you imply? The Bible is most definitely not the only ancient document biased against the Assyrian Empire. There were few things in the ancient world that the Egyptian, Phoenicians, Babylonians, Urartians, Medians, and Hebrews could agree on, but hatred of the Assyrian Empire was one of those things. Alsto003 (talk) 21:51, 6 May 2015 (UTC) Alex

More stuff about Late Antiquity

So I read this passage: "Go on, Andy. Tell us how early Christians made use of Plato's work. Go on! What Mr Schlafly means is that in the 'thirteenth century, some two thousand years after Plato's death, some of his writings were rediscovered by Europeans in Arabic libraries, and medieval theologians merged ancient philosophy with Christian teachings. Early Christians - although of a more decent breed than today's right-wing morons - were not exactly tolerant when it came to pagan teachings, and burned non-Christian texts on sight." I see eye to eye with Ironclad on a great many things. But why on earth does Ironclad as well as most anti-theists in general insist on getting their information about Late Antiquity from writers like Gibbon? Based on what I've read so far I am under the impression that Ironclad, both read Gibbon and got a lot of ideas from him. Ironclad is hardly unique in that regard, I've met plenty of people like that. However the problem with Gibbon's work is that he had a very transparent bias against Christianity and nowhere does that bias do more of a disservice to the scholarly study of late antiquity than when we discuss the Byzantine Empire and its legacy. I've discussed that before but now I'll talk about something slightly different the early Church fathers like Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine did use classical writings to bolster there own theology, it was only after everything truly went to sh** that Christians began to start treating literally everything associated with pagans like the plague. For instance take Hypatia. She was a famous philosopher who ended up being lynched by a mob Christian fanatics in the fourth century during a dispute between the biggest jacka** in ecclesiastical history, Saint Cyril of Alexandria, and the Byzantine governor of the city, Orestes. The earliest source we have for this event is from the Christian scholar Socrates Scholasticus, while he does not hold Cyril directly responsible for Hypatia's murder, he tends to portray Cyril unfavorably and is well disposed towards Hypatia. I bring up this story because the way he wrote about this event (and the way he says other Christians apparently received news of this event), was very, very different from the way Christians living a couple of centuries after him wrote about this exact same event. Those authors, like John of Nikiu, tended to portray Hypatia as an evil pagan sorceress bent on corrupting pure souls. Thus we see an evolution of Christian attitudes towards pre-Christian scholarship during Late Antiquity. In the fourth and fifth centuries Christians, or at least the Church fathers, were ambivalent about stuff associated with "paganism" and Hellenistic scholarship. However by the seventh and eighth centuries many Christians had gradually become hostile towards any scholar who wasn't Christian or any scholarly work that wasn't explicitly Christian. Nevertheless even after the complete loss of the Western Roman Empire to the barbarians Christians still made use of Greek Philosophy. Neoplatonic ideas in particular were popular among early Christians, and uniquely, stayed popular both in the Byzantine Empire and the West. The popularity of Neoplatonism is no accident, early Christians found neoplatonic arguments useful when arguing with gnostic heretics. It's worth mentioning that the Muslims were not the only people who preserved works of classical philosophy, the Byzantines also copied down Aristotle and Plato's works. The reason why we in the west ignore Byzantine scholarship is because one, we like to ignore the Byzantine Empire in general, and two, because Islamic scholarship had far more of an influence on the west than Byzantine scholarship did. To say that we are in debt to Islamic civilization solely because they preserved ancient wisdom which westerners could later expand upon would be both insulting and untrue. The west is not indebted to Islamic civilization simply because they copied a bunch of ancient Greek philosophical texts, the west is indebted to Islamic civilization because of the scholarship of Islamic philosophers like Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and especially Ibn Rushd, who expanded upon the works of Plato and Aristotle. Alsto003 (talk) 00:36, 7 May 2015 (UTC) Alex

Agree with this one, somewhat. Early Christianity was steeped in Platonism and some of it stuck around, not to mention that a limited selection of Plato's works were always available, namely those translated into Latin. Ironclad is simply wrong here.

However I think both he and Alsto are reiterating the old tale about the rediscovery of the texts of antiquity being due to the Arabs, whereas Constantinople was far more important, because it had preserved both Greek texts and language and due to the close ties between the Italian trading states (especially Genoa and Venice) allowed for an influx Byzantine scholars who helped reignite the Renaissance's appetite for these "lost" works in Greek. Such Byzantine scholars found that they could earn a nice coin by going to Italy by "enlightening" the Western Christians on Antiquity. As one scholar on Antiquity put it: What we have of these writings today is essentially the Byzantine curriculum for clerics and similar scholars. True, some material did come via the Arabs (particularly through Spain and Sicily), but the well-meaning praise of the Arabs as a mere repository culture for the thoughts of antique European ideas is as wrong and as backhandedly insulting as Alsto points out. ScepticWombat (talk) 16:24, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

More nitpicking

What can I say, when it comes to history I'm a pedantic stickler for accuracy. That is after all the only reason why I comment on threads that have been absent of any activity for four years. I may know a lot about History but as I've said before, Ironclad knows as much (that would be generous, I may know a little bit more about certain select time periods, but not overall) if not more about history than I do, but nevertheless I still reserve the right to complain about a mistakes I think Ironclad made. So here we go again: "'It became Greek...even though the Greeks considered (them) to be barbarians'. What? If they became Greek, they'd be indistinguishable from Greeks. It's pretty basic logic, Andy." Once in a while the blind man hits the target and as bizarre as it sound, here in this instance Andy is partly right. The Ancient Greeks were xenophobes par excellence. The moment you spoke and opened your mouth they judged you. They had tremendous respect for peoples like the Egyptians, Babylonians, and even the Phoenicians, Persians, and Etruscans, but they had very little regard for any other "barbarians" as they called them. The position of the Macedonians as far as whether or not they were Greeks or barbarians is sort of confused. Greek authors like Thucydides and Herodotus both provide contradictory information that suggests that both of those authors viewed them as intermediaries. Despite the fact that the Macedonians spoke a Doric dialect of Greek both of those authors still talk about them as though they weren't actually Greeks. By the first century they were considered Greeks, as Strabo made it clear that by his time "Macedonia" was a purely geographic term. But nevertheless it took a very long time for the Greeks in the South to accept the Macedonians as fully Greek rather than as barbarians. Alsto003 (talk) 01:45, 7 May 2015 (UTC) Alex

The distinction that Andy misses here is first the one between the somewhat Hellenised Macedonian ruling class and the broader Macedonian society, but also that to what extent Macedon "became Greek" is an extremely vague and immeasurable contention. Andy's claim that Macedon "became Greek in culture and language by the 5th century" is somewhere between not entirely wrong and misleading. Macedonian royal culture with its tradition of polygamy, for instance, set even the more Hellenised ruling class aside from (other) Greeks and it persisted into the three hundreds BC. Most importantly, Macedon did not adopt the polis as its socio-cultural and political principle, and considering that the polis was at the heart of Hellenic life in practically any sphere you care to mention, then no, Macedon did not become Greek. ScepticWombat (talk) 16:10, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Dogs and grapes

I have no idea if dogs enjoy eating grapes (as I am a cat person). I do know, however, that it never ends well for them; as little as one grape or raisin can be fatal. Thanos6 (talk) 09:51, 11 July 2015 (UTC)