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Define modern era! Did it start before or after Hitler and Lenin. Does it include Pol Pot, Nicolae Ceausescu, Idi Amin, Yahya Jammeh, Kim Jong-il or his fat little mentally retarded son Kim Jong-un?
Need to get out and see the world from someplace other than your recliner while watching MSNBC. And the list I gave is SMALL, there are thousands of small despot rulers within countries that are never even talked about on any news cast. These animals don't kill thousands cause they only have hundreds to work with, but they do a great job of killing in a high ratio to the population they control.
Mao Zedong probably holds the record (somewhere between 50-70 million estimated) of killings and torture, but many will say Pol Pot (estimated 2 million killed and tortured) was the worse since he actually killed off approximately 25% of the population of his country. And no one will ever know, the actual number for any of the great killers of the 20th century.
I realize you acknowledged that your list was incomplete, but I can't resist adding the genocide in Rwanda where over half a million Tutsis were killed by Hutus (or was it the other way around?) mostly one by one by hand (machetes). That was a MAJOR event, and it was post World War II.
Last edited by Escort Rider; 04-10-2016 at 08:41 PM..
I always wondered if the same people who watched Star Trek and admired Spock are the same ones today who demand that gays go back in the closet.
What?!? That doesn't make one bit of sense. Have you ever watched Star Trek? What does admiring Spock have to do with bashing gays? He was logical but not judgmental, rational, but with empathy. I'm thinking the exact opposite applies.
Most of you are focusing on violence. In fact, empathy is an old human emotion. The anti-slavery movement began in the 1700s, earlier in a less organized form. There have always been big critics of empire and colonialism. Christianity began as a religion of peace and empathy, there were anti-poverty programs going back to the ancient world.
What you are all focusing on is simple: people in power will do anything to maintain power. That has never changed.
Average people are violent, too, but not everyone, and we have legal structures to restrict violence and punish it. The ancient world was simply too few in population and spread out to have any standard response to things.
Before the modern age, it seems the good majority of people were capable of killing others even torturing them without feeling a sense of remorse or guilt. Killing thousands and torturing people just for fun was something very few seemed to have an issue with, why was this? Up until the modern age did people just completely lack a conscious of any kind? You look back in history and there doesn't seem to be any king/emperor or ruler that existed that not only had absolutely no issue killing tens of thousands of people but torturing their own people or watching them suffer, even just for fun.
Before the modern age did ANY ruler anywhere ever feel bad for anything that today we would view as not only wrong but abhorrent?
Nothing has changed on that front since Cain slew Abel; it's just escalated with the number of people involved. Do you honestly believe that humans are now kind?
Take for example the Romans. From the beginning of the Roman Kingdom to the end of the Roman Empire there were MANY emperors/rulers, yet every single one has stories of brutality and killing others with no pity or remorse. I find it shocking how not one seemed to even stop to think perhaps killing and torturing others was wrong. Yes lots of bad people have been responsible in more modern times, even today but now, at least in the west it is considered a bad thing to kill/torture people just for fun or for personal gain, why did it take so long to reach this point?
Are humans default setting to brutalize and hurt others it is simply a matter of living in and being raised in a place where such things is considered wrong that more people don't do it?
Every human is capable of murder, Twilightnight; most of us simply choose to not carry out our (sometimes) uncharitable thoughts. Who do you think fights the wars the rulers you mention contrive? The truth is: MOST people alive today have already committed murder.
How do you feel about abortion, Twilightnight? Are you aware that one in five pregnancies is ended by planned abortion, and that 84 babies are murdered every single minute globally? How about the fact that more babies have been murdered since 1960 (just 55 years), two billion globally, than the number of people who have died (both combatants and noncombatants) in all the wars in human history? These innocents are sacrificed on the alter of 'self' (for personal gain), the 'hip' false god of today.
We are not good, not one of us, although some of us are still aiming for the perfection of Christ. We won't attain it in this life, but through translation and the Grace of God, we may attain it when we pass the gate. We have that hope, thank God, undeserved as it is.
We're a wretched lot, all of us, but it warms my heart that you yourself are 'shocked' by violence. May God bless you for it.
Love,
Mahrie.
Edited to add: Are you aware of the present Christian Holocaust? Last year, 2015, over 7,000 Christians were martyred for their faith, with hundreds of thousands more either imprisoned or in labor camps, enduring unspeakable suffering at the hands of their captors. Check this out:
I think we have it too easy now whereas back say in Medieval times everyday was a fight for survival. There was plagues, famine and the average life expectancy was really short. People were more in tune with nature and nature is a really harsh teacher killing at will.
Today we place so much value on life that even in war our soldiers have rules to follow when it comes to attacking the enemy. American society has evolved to something higher than what we see in third world countries where people live closer to the edge of death and life doesn't mean as much.
IN some countries in the middle east we see that they have not evolved much beyond medieval times, they still stone people to death, torture, conduct public executions, throw people off rooftops that are different and they behead people.
It is barbaric and shocking in these modern times but Fear still works to keep people in line.
We have life easy compared to many but if our society ever collapsed and things became really difficult we would see our world become much more violent as people fought to stay alive.
I realize you acknowledged that your list was incomplete, but I can't resist adding the genocide in Rwanda where over half a million Tutsis were killed by Hutus (or was it the other way around?) mostly one by one by hand (machetes). That was a MAJOR event, and it was post World War II.
It was 850,000, Escort Rider, and the kicker is that the Tutsis and Hutus were blood relatives - and actually from the same tribe. The UN 'Peacekeeper' troops stood and watched the atrocity, aiding the victims not at all. Too sad.
I think we have it too easy now whereas back say in Medieval times everyday was a fight for survival. There was plagues, famine and the average life expectancy was really short. People were more in tune with nature and nature is a really harsh teacher killing at will.
Today we place so much value on life that even in war our soldiers have rules to follow when it comes to attacking the enemy. American society has evolved to something higher than what we see in third world countries where people live closer to the edge of death and life doesn't mean as much.
IN some countries in the middle east we see that they have not evolved much beyond medieval times, they still stone people to death, torture, conduct public executions, throw people off rooftops that are different and they behead people.
It is barbaric and shocking in these modern times but Fear still works to keep people in line.
We have life easy compared to many but if our society ever collapsed and things became really difficult we would see our world become much more violent as people fought to stay alive.
It is human nature to stay alive and to fight.
Morning!
Sorry to disagree, CCT, but American society has not evolved in a good direction. If you want to know what your government and troops are doing, just rent (or buy) the movie Good Kill. And that's a sanitized version of the reality there.
Having worked as a missionary in the Middle East, and mostly with Muslims and Bedouins, I can assure you that the everyday man and woman (Joe and Jane six-pack) certainly do value their lives - and those of their children. It is those in power who sacrifice those they enslave, and that includes the U.S.
Do you honestly believe that Americans and Brits don't torture prisoners? Throw people off rooftops? Electrocute, gas, and/or hang dissenters? Use FEAR to hoodwink and control the populace? Why d'you think 9/11 happened in the first place? Who wanted a war and strategic advantage in Iraq and Afghanistan?
The reason they use stones there is because they are poor (poor beyond the level that most in the west can comprehend) and can't afford more sophisticated weapons.
Don't tell me you believe what you hear on the six o'clock news!
P.S. Where do you think AIDS came from, and who do you think engineered it? At whom was it targeted, and why?
IN some countries in the middle east we see that they have not evolved much beyond medieval times, they still stone people to death, torture, conduct public executions, throw people off rooftops that are different and they behead people.
The middle east? Aside from the fact that in the case of ISIS many of these barbarities are being carried out by individuals born and raised and educated in Europe's most advanced countries, it wasn't in middle ages when thousands of Americans attended and participated in public lynchings where men were openly tortured, mutilated, hung and immolated after which the crowd would cut off body parts for souvenirs.
And while I don't wish to turn this into a "you hate america" argument, the fact remains that there simply is no escape for any group of humans to point to another and attempt to argue in favor of their evolutionary advancement when the difference between one extant group of humans and humans who lived even a thousand years ago amounts to a blip in the 200,000 years of human evolution.
Location: New Albany, Indiana (Greater Louisville)
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Before modern times hunger and sickness was a daily occurrence even for the rich. There was no air conditioning, pain medicine, etc. Life was hard and short and you might as well risk your life and take someone else's life in the attempt to maybe get some war booty or see some exotic locations.
Also, there was a different mentality about how powerful and powerless should interact. Our modern view is that everyone should be equal and a weaker person / nation should be pitied and treated with love. The view used to be hard core Darwinism: you as the stronger people had a duty to subdue weaker people so their genes wouldn't be spread. You obliterate your enemy and then rape their women so they can have children with Winner's genes. What ISIS did to the Yazidis has happened many times before.
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