[QUOTE=Quetzalcoatl;60849]Hi vimoh,
actually I wanted to reply to your reincarnation and karma-reply, but now go with this. Maybe I’ll drop the religious stuff overall, my time is sorta limited and the politics are more interesting to me.
I would go with that, yes, any horde a civilisation. I’m, though, not so sure what a horde now is. Germanic people of Indias prime I would consider civilisations for example. However, I don’t think there are hordes involved here, unless you want to call any conquerer of India a horde.
No, it means that Athens was not superior to Sparta.
Not really. To put things in perspective you have to understand that my innocent questions are simply a reaction to the performance of Surya Asura and Nietzsche. Neither me, nor any other member of this board ever came forth and spoke of the superiority of one, and the inferiority of another culture or civilisation. I think this whole concept is plain and simply bullshit, even if it’s the case. You know, even if one civilisation is ahead of another, it’s bullshit to point that out over and over again. But: These guys do exactly that, latest example:
New age spirituality: Stupid Yoga
Makes a decent person :roll:. Also you might have noted that whatever I say I get the spam from these guys. They want to shut me up, you know. They’ve done it dozens of times before with other people. But as I said: I’m stubborn and don’t drop it. That, again, blows the whole thing out of proportion too. However. :lol:
The “discussion” about occupation and conquest works like this:
Culture A had the good life in a great part of the world, lots of food, great climate, fish are jumping and the living is easy. The people have enough time to care about technology, philosophy, and so forth. Culture B is not so fortunate, has not so much food, faces a long and hard winter every year, has to work a lot harder to survive, has less time to care about sanitation-systems and philosophy.
But culture B grows physically strong and learns very well how to fight and then pays culture A a visit, and sacks it. Takes the land with the lot of food and the great climate and now lives the easy life.
Now which culture is superior? The one that invented a flush toilet and has a ton of fancy scriptures on philosophy, or the one that subdued these intellectuals? If you want to evaluate which culture is superior, you can’t just isolate an area that you think is neat. Sure are philosophy and arts more likable than crushing skulls. But what do these virtues mean to a crushed skull?
Get the point? It’s really simple. That India had the greater philosophy and all, man I had admitted it ages ago. Pointing out what I just mentioned would receive a “that’s indeed a good point” from a decent guy. From freaks like Nietzsche and Surya Deva one receives hysterical insults and that’s where we standing right now in this forum.
And additionally, as I admitted, I am not mentionably knowledgable in India’s history + it’s probably depicted wrong by Surya Asura, who was my basic source of information about it. I guess he was just whining in his depictions to present India as the eternal victim. I had done some minor research before and indeed it looked like India was a very peaceful culture with barely a war going on. All I had found before recent researches were a few very brief incidents with only a very few casualties.
Depends on the topic, for anything natural science for example, it’s a great source.
Well, I’ll go to our local Nazi library and grab a couple of books on the issue and then cross-read them, I still fail to be mentionably interested in history and I guess whatever the outcome of such research might be, I won’t ever submit to any of the hilarious superiority-claims this forum is spammed with, so don’t bother to expect that.
But after asking these regular and obvious questions and all the fuzz it created, I grew to actually desire to understand how a huge country like India could be enslaved by tiny nations like Britain and Portugal (+ I need to get rid of all these false information that have been planted into my mind). Particularly Britain has been at war with a lot of European nations and never made it to conquer one and hold it occupied for centuries. How was it possible for Britain to hold down a huge country with a strong warrior culture?[/QUOTE]
Q:
Whatever you want to discuss, I am right here and not going anywhere. If you don’t want to get into reincarnation and karma, that’s fine by me as well.
Some questions:
You say Sparta being militarily superior to Athens does not mean that Athens was inferior to Sparta. But you also say that it means that Athens was not superior to Sparta. Are you saying they were equals? A bit confused here.
My definition of a horde is a group that conquers for the sake of conquest. An aggressive group that dominates, subjugates, and destroys. The British raj was not a horde, but the Islamic attackers before them were certainly hordes. They attacked India for the money. Later on the Mughals came and stayed. I call them oppressors, but not hordes. Of course, their work had become easier because of the hordes that had come before them.
By “civilisation”, I mean a group that has a considerable part of its energies dedicated to the pursuit of humanity’s higher goals – arts, scientific advancement, literature etc. This is what makes Greece a civilisation but not the Mongols. If a human group creativity finds expression through aggression alone then it is not “civilised” according to me.
Of course, this is also a matter of degrees. Creativity goes in various directions and it’s not easy to box it within walls with labels and descriptions. But on the whole, the definitions do give you a general idea of things.
These are fairly common definitions by the way – not something I am pulling out of thin air.
And even in spite of these definitions, there are people who would think that the Huns were a “fitter” human population than the Chinese because they managed to sack Chinese settlements a number of times. It depends on the person’s perspective on the matter.