One of the biggest problems is that we have a generation of kids being brought up with cellphones and a 24/7 spew of trivia bullshit. This means that their brains are like batshit splattered over the net. Therefore, I have decided to put an amount of the neccesary information available here.

- Please read and enjoy -

Question:
Vic told me to watch this lecture
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDki0D2e ... e=youtu.be
But it is not my cup of tea. What do I do now?

Reply:
Who cares if it is your cup of tea or not. THE CUP OF TEA IS YOU. You are knee deep into this situation whether you like or not. Looking through the window instead of up is not going to prevent the rooftop from collapsing upon you unless you do something to help fix it.


Question:
Christianity took hold and decided that people could only love God, so they stole marriage and made it be about reproduction ONLY. Is it true that when the bards sang songs about love people enjoyed this and, therefore, the church picked this up, and decided to base marriage around the concept of love?

Reply:
Montesquieu writes in "L'espirit de lois" that the romance novel was invented to discipline the knights. To make them defend the ladies instead of raping the farmer maids. Essentially, to channel and control the masculine, virile energy. That is why the romance novel and the courting culture were created, according to Montesquieu.


Question:
People are stupid. Won't they therefore become radical and mess things up just like in the past?

Reply:
Isn't this tantamount to saying: "We all like to be unique snowflakes. Thus, I like to feel better about myself, being less 'sheep like' than my nextdoor neighbour"? Such a statement has little purpose beyond feeding someone's narcissim.


Question:
Will not people replicate and reproduce ideas until they become shadows of the former ideas?

Reply:
I can read the works of Plato because they were recorded 2500 years ago. And the same goes of the writings of Montesquieu written 500 years ago (roughly). It is only once people stop actual reading of the works that people can spew superficial statements of old ideas that others will take for granted. It all comes down to mastering the classics.


Question:
What is the point in imparting knowledge to others, is it seeking social approval?

Reply:
This is how superficial minds tick. There is no point just spouting out knowledge during a cocktail party to seem cool and wise, because this cool reputation will be fleeting as well. People will probably forget about it quickly once they or you leave the scene. Just seeming cool will achieve nothing in the greater scheme of things.


Question:
Then what is the goal in imparting knowledge to others?

Reply:
If you truly educate people, give them knowledge, one will boost their efficiency, and such people, if they are committed and unite, can give a new direction to a civilization that is about to topple over. Choose whether to be a gear in the machine or your own machine.


Question:
Would everyone have to adhere to the exact same ideal?

Reply:
Not necessarily, the Enlightenment philosophers shared many ideas but also contradicted each other. Newton disagreed with Spinoza, Rousseau disagreed with Voltaire. But ultimately the Enlightenment as a while influenced Western civilization very deeply and ultimately gave it the technology to lead the world.


Question:
What will it matter - when the universe itself crunches, will anything be spared?

Reply:
And yet you are alive. In the here, the now. If you pretend that nothing in the end ultimately matters, you pretend that you are not the one who will live your own future. Saying that all is perfect as it is because all must ultimately end with nothingness, is a mantra of death. If you will it or not, you do have a future ahead of you. You can give different shapes to this future. Even by not choosing, you make a choice. So you must strive to achieve something, whether you will it or not. Not choosing, is pretending you are not the one living your life. This means there will always be striving for betterment.


Question:
Is it troublesome that people may have different concepts of what defines knowledge?

Reply:
In saloons, they do disagree. In reality, they do not. A medicine will either cure, or will not cure. A tree will grow fruits, or will not grow fruits. A combustion engine will run, or not. The natural laws of Einstein and those of Newton contradict each other, but both are still applied by scientists to achieve practical results. There's a point at which relativism ultimately ends. A biologist and a lumberjack have different views upon a tree, they will derrive different knowledge from this same tree. But it will still be the same object, in the same world, with reconcilable facts and reconcilable knowledge.


Question:
What if people won't agree with you, just because they feel they are too small to affect anything? Instead of arguing with you or saying that deep down, they agree, they will just go their own way. What do you say to this?

Reply:
The majority of the people will always be defeatists. They try to break down any idea that is greater than they are, themselves. Either by questioning the person's motives or by just trying to derail the conversation. But the bottom line is that these people will never be the ones to make history. Therefore, they will also not have the power to really stop a Movement of the few who do care, and care with all their hearts, minds and commitment. Those who give up will never affect anything beyond their own ever-narrowing circle. And everything I do, is because there will always be a select few who will hear. Who will heed.


Question:
You write really well and eloquent, but do you think that for many people it will all seem too complicated?

Reply:
One should be grateful that there is the opportunity to have all this knowledge held out in front of your face. All one needs to do is reach out and pick it up. People who feel small in the vicinity of a great mind will always try to chip away at it with snappy statements as "keep it simple, stupid". If people cannot grasp a post or video which is, in truth, very clear and straightforward, there is little chance they could truly serve the purpose of a Movement.

The Christians could not attack the Romans, at first, because the Romans ruled over them. So they started devaluating Roman aristocratic culture by calling their philosophy folly and calling their power vainglorious. The weak love to gang up and tear down the strong, and if the knowledge of the strong seems beyond them, they will attack it for "not being mainstream enough."


Question:
But weren't the Christians right in a sense, isn't all human knowledge folly in the end?

Reply:
We live on vegestables grown by others. As long as one has the wealth, you can purchase them. And pretend that thinking creates all the problems. But as soon as people stop the thinking process, all the poverty, starvation and disease will come back, and one will end up writhing and grovelling unless you start to use your brain. The intellect is the gift that typifies the human being as its means of survival.

This thread is nothing but a rigmarole; devoid of any substance and contains blatant miseducation.

For instance:
Dammit. The Christians were marginal before they became mainstream under Constantine the Great. Constantine was anything but weak. He was one of the strongest Roman emperors in history.

A more logical explanation on the rise of Christianity is better explained by Rodney Stark, here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_Christianity.

Let's steer away from this pseudo intellectualism guys and sarge more girls. If we want to better educate ourselves, let's check the facts out there which are readily available through the Google search engine.

_________________
Approach. Open. Escalate. Isolate

Here are my two essential rules on texting that will save you tons of time and money:

general-questions/topic137931.html

It's always funny when people like you show up, coming in with big flamboyant trashtalk, and then, after a bit of debating, it is always found that you severely overestimated your own knowledge and underestimated mine. Here are some facts for you:

1 Christians were marginal in Roman society exactly because mostly slaves and women converted. Pretty much the powerless; exactly as I stated. The aristocratic classes kept adhering to the pagan religion for centuries until Constantine. One explanation that has been offered is that Constantine had enemies among the higher classes and made new allies this way. That Constantine's influence was not that great, is made manifest by Julian the Apostate, an emperor which still had enough space to make policy intending to bring Rome back to its religious roots. Julian just happened to die due to a war-wound.

2 You severely overestimate the influence of Constantine. His wife was a Christian before he was, himself. The Edict of Milan - this is what you mean but you scratch a bit at it instead of mentioning it, which you conveniently leave to me - which allowed Christianity as a religion, was not as important as Theodosius I, who made Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire.

3 That you overestimate the influence of Constantine is also evident by his exile to promoting a new city. Pretty much influential Romans turned against him and therefore he decided to leave Rome and use Constantinople as basis for his regime, instead.

4 The Christians at first were pretty much powerless. There is a letter between Pliny and emperor Trajan in which they are mentioned as a negliable sect. The Christians worked very slowly to undermine the Roman Empire (read Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire) - he described it as the triumph of "barbarism and Christianity". Nietzsche added to this view in The Antichrist with additional philological arguments. Also, if you read the chapter 'Revelations' in the bible where they talk about the Apocalypse, there is talk of the "blood drenched seven hills, the whore in purple and scarlet", by which they refer to the seven hills of Rome and the purple cloth of the aristocracy. It vents their resentment against the mighty empire.

5 You overestimate the influence of Constantine because of the Donatio Constantini. This was a document adhered to all through the Medieval ages, which stated that Emperor Constantine had donated all possessions of the Roman Empire to the Christian Church. It was discovered in early modern times by philologists that this was in fact a forgery (not surprising). In fact, in the Monarchia, Dante criticized Constantine and said that he damaged the Roman Empire. If he could make one wish, Dante wrote, he wished that Constantine had never been born. The involvement of Constantine within affairs of Church laid the root for he later internal division and fracturing of Italy, Dante argues.

The bottom line? You come in here guns blazing, take a single statement to chip at the entire post since you cannot challenge the logic of the rest. Having read this post, it is obvious to everyone who is the pseudo-intellectual here.

Who is this it, hmm?
Nah. I replied to your thread because of several stupid statements from your end. Such as the one quoted below where you implied that Christians were mainstream and weak back when they 'devalued' Roman power. On the contrary, Christianity expanded Roman culture and power for several centuries.
You're on the wrong side of historiography. That's a very dumb statement.

The Byzantine Empire which Constantine founded was the most powerful economic, cultural, and military force in Europe during most of its existence. Constantine was so great in fact that historians call him 'Constantine The Great'. He reunited the entire Roman Empire at its weakest point. What sort of influence are you rooting about?

"In 293, emperor Diocletian created a new administrative system (the tetrarchy), in order to guarantee security in all endangered regions of his Empire. He associated himself with a co-emperor (Augustus), and each co-emperor then adopted a young colleague given the title of Caesar, to share in their rule and eventually to succeed the senior partner. The tetrarchy collapsed, however, in 313 and a few years later Constantine I reunited the two administrative divisions of the Empire as sole Augustus."
Yeah right. You are mentioning an emperor who lost major wars under his leadership compared to Constantine's victories over much superior forces. This Roman emperor of yours has also been threatened by a 'lowly' and 'weak' Christian bishop with excommunication. You have a false sense of who made what and an idiotic assessment of historical facts. Instead, you are promoting the opinions of authors with overly active imaginations like Dante Alighieri which has no place at all in historiography.

This thread is plainly stupid. You are miseducating the forum visitors here on a lot of things like history and logic. I'm done with this thread.

_________________
Approach. Open. Escalate. Isolate

Here are my two essential rules on texting that will save you tons of time and money:

general-questions/topic137931.html

For starters, it is okay to admit that you are wrong. I meant that I cannot take the things you write truly serious, because previously you admitted not having read the content of the thread you attacked. It seems you have dug yourself into a trench, and now your ego prevents you from climbing out.

Constantine did not baptize until his deathbed, so we cannot call him a Christian Emperor in the true sense. You call him such a great leader because of the chaos of the tetrarchy, but after his death the warring and civil strife started all over again. Augustus, for instance, secured a hundred years of relative peace. Why do they call him 'The Great'? Not only because of his political accomplishments but also because bolstering his status was so useful to the clergy, who thrived on using the Donatio Constantini for a long time. Remember, the clergy were the only literates for a very long time, and thus the only ones to record history.

Gibbon pointed out that the Christians enjoyed the peace and prosperity the the military power the Romans offered them, but refused to take service, themselves, on the grounds of pacifism. When the Visigoths pillaged Rome, the Christians faced criticism because of this. Augustine, in his time, responded by posing a duality of two cities; the Earthly City, like Rome, based upon fleeting temporary power. Ones loyalty should only be to God, according to Augustine; empires rose and fell, inevitably. It was about the true faith of ones individual soul, and those who had this true faith were united in the City of God.

Thus, Christianity undermined the military cult of the Res Publica, where one was supposed to lay down his life and go fight, if necessary, to safeguard his civilization. The story of Curtius is an example of this cult. Instead, Christianity emphasized the individual soul, rather than being loyal to heritage and realm. George James Frazer substantiated this assessment in The Golden Bough. Due to Christianity, there were religious zealots like Ignatius of Antioch who wrote about how eager they were to be thrown before the lions and be instantly taken to God.

Gibbon has no place in historiography? . . . . . . Scholars won't take you serious when you state this. I could not take you serious, to begin with, because you once commented on a thread which you claimed not even to have read. But your personal resentment laid aside, let's take Procopius, then. He described the campaigns of the Christian emperor Justinian I. Although being a Christian, Procopius states that the religiously-inspired wars of Justinian were tearing the Empire up between sects with differing views on the true nature of Christ. The Romans had been fairly tolerant in terms of religion until Christianity took over; they oftentimes adopted parts of other pantheons, for instance. Christianity caused the Bishop of Rome to declare himself, based upon Peter and Paul, the head of the Church, which meant that the Emperor did not come to his aid when the Longobards invaded. This lead to the conflicts between East and West, which ultimately culminated in the pillaging of Constantinople by Christian crusaders. Liudprand of Cremona is another source that testifies the hatred between East and West.

Christianity did so much damage to the culture of Antiquity; from the destruction of the monument of Seraphis to the lynching of Hypatia, a neoplatonist female scholar who expanded the system of logic devised by Aristotle and the Stoics. Other examples include the burning of Livy's historical works, which was done by the clergy to wipe out the memory of a great non-Christian civilization. There is also a report of a Scottish traveler who went on pilgrimage to Rome, and described how many of the great monuments of antiquity have been deliberately destroyed by the Christian clergy. Later on, Christianity has done much to repress other findings that eventually lead the Western civilization to progress, such as those by Darwin and Galileo.

The bottom line is that, in a masculine culture, you will stand up for yourself. You will stand your ground and confront someone who wrongs you. Even if that person may be more powerful than you are, you will just not let anyone piss over you. Christianity introduced the morality of turning the other cheek, of loving those who harm you. Of not taking action yourself, but believing that God is putting you through an ordeal to reach a more perfect afterlife. When a lord runs you over with his horse, you will pray and say to yourself that God will eventually put that person in his place. The culture of "Be the better man - just take it, just ignore them when they mock you. 'forgive them father, for they don't know what they are doing' . . ." Just as the man in the twentieth century just had to take it while the feminists took over and framed the provider males as warmongers and wife-beating drunks.

The icon of the Christian faith is a man who loved his torturers, who refused to defend himself. The Christians converts, as I said, were in the beginning the most vulnerable ones. No doubt many of them had gotten into slavery because their submissive natures made it impossible for them to stand up for themselves. Instead of attacking their rulers head-on, they started subverting their values. These slaves started celebrating submission, meekness and humbleness. It was the birth of a passive aggressive culture. "The meek shall inherit the earth." They called the power of the Roman aristocrats savagery - the Christians called the Roman Empire a vain delusion of this world. They framed their wealth as idolatry, their human philosophical knowledge as idiocy and foolishness in the mind of God. Ultimately, they taught that the powerless were the children of light, that the powerful were the children of darkness. They taught these things because such power was not available to them due to their state of submission.

Mark 10:25 - It is easier for a camel to pass through a needle's eye, than for someone who is rich to enter heaven.

Corinthians 3:19 - 20 -For the wisdom of this world is foolishness before God. For it is written, "He is the one who catches the wise in their craftiness." The Lord knows of the reasonings of the wise, that they are useless.

Matthew 20:16: Those who are first, will be the last, and those who are last, will be the first.

I take issue with a few things here:

1. Dante may not be a "philosopher" , but you can learn from many sources. And let's say he was. Would this eliminate others, such as Ayn Rand from being a philosopher, since it her stories were merely in story format?

2.Christianity was merely a stop gag, not the reason for the fall of Rome. Monetary debasement, corrupt morals (morals are important to trade), excess wars, and a non functioning budget, among other things, led to the fall of Rome. Christianity temporarily replaced the non existent morals of the day. This is being replayed throughout Europe with Muslims and the replacement of the non-existent moral structures.

3.Just because Constantine said he was Christian, does not mean he was. His conversion experience, that of seeing a cross on the battlefield, seemed various dubious, and merely converted due to wanting to win. It was various common to have multiple gods, Polytheism, thus could it be beyond the pail to believe he added to his collection? Was his version an Apostate version according to the original Apostles? We can't know, but if actions are any indication, at best his views were bastardized Christianity, which mixed in with other pagan beliefs.

And that is all. Not trying to start a fight, just merely interjecting this into the thread.