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Could you have faith without history? I think you can. the truths of god are self evident so when you hear them, you will know they are true, you do not need the history behind them to believe.
You are very naive, considering all the evil that has been thrust upon the world in the name of god and religion.
If you define history as that which has happened in the past, then what do you do about what's happening now?
You would have to insulate yourself in a small room with no access to TV, radio, newspapers, or the internet.
In other words, total sensory deprivation and, perhaps, a lobotomy to erase all your memories of everything you already know about the past.
Once you have accomplished all that you may certainly achieve nirvana or the rapture or whatever euphemisms are going around these days.
However my point is wold it be better if people had just not passed on history? Not written it down, not told their kids what happened in the past. If everyone was starting fresh with no influence form historical events, would things be better?
You are suggesting nothing short of the repression of knowledge and free thought. I don't care if history is bad or good, that is irrelevant. The impact to the standards of fundamental human rights is - thus even your mere suggestion is reprehensible.
he who does not study the past are destined to repeat it.
Wouldn't it be better if we LEARNED from history and not make the same mistakes again? Not that we really do this now, unfortunately. . . .
A) If you are going to quote George Santayana you should at least provide an attribution.. and at least get the quote right.
B) Just because someone famous said something, does not necessarily mean that it is true. This was Santayana's opinion, not some absolute rule of natural law. People here on this board seem to draw that quote like a gun whenever they wish to make some vague point.
You can remember history quite well, and still screw up badly. Consider France in the 1930's. They remembered the huge casualty rates of WW I due to the supremacy of the defensive weapons and works, and decided that a system of strong static defenses was what was most needed to deter or defeat future German aggression. Instead it turned out that mobility was the key to winning in WW II.
Faith is a part of history, especially Western History and it is critically important to some people. I am simply anticipating a concerns. Are you so afraid of faith that you have to attack at any mention of it? Makes it a bit hard to study history.
However my point is wold it be better if people had just not passed on history? Not written it down, not told their kids what happened in the past. If everyone was starting fresh with no influence form historical events, would things be better?
How would not knowing history be of any real help?
It would be like waltzing into a theater halfway through the movie without having a clue what it's about and no one to tell you what has happened before you arrived.
Now let's say that you have the power to make decisions for the characters in the movie -- you can literally edit the movie on the fly as it is playing.
On what would you base your decisions? You have no historical precedent to draw upon and everything you're seeing in the movie has no context. You would be powerless to make any predictions based on past examples and thus every decision would be as if it's being made for the first time.
Which brings me to another point -- without history, civilization itself would have a very difficult time advancing or evolving. The current generation, for instance, couldn't draw upon the knowledge of past generations, thus we would always find ourselves reinventing the wheel -- perhaps even literally.
All of the mistakes we've made over the decades and centuries would have to be made again and again, causing society to stagnate. Sure, history does tend to repeat itself on many occasions, but some lessons do stick with us. God forbid, for example, if today we had no idea just how horrible nuclear weapons are because no one knew about Nagasaki and Hiroshima -- and we had to learn that lesson again and again.
Or for that matter, even having any understanding about the horrors of war because no one was taught about it, no movies were made about it -- and so every couple of generations we end up in a WWII situation because we are utterly clueless about what war does to people.
Finally, I'll conclude by saying that, without history, we wouldn't even have a measuring stick by which to compare current society with past societies -- we really wouldn't know if we were progressing or receding, whether we were advancing or retreating. Are we heading in the right direction? Who knows? How could we tell without the past with which to compare ourselves.
Granted, there are aspects of history that we would probably be better off forgetting -- generational hatreds, old feuds, religious differences, and suchlike. When hate is passed down as history, kids will eat it up and absorb that hatred and then go off and kill -- even though the source of the hate happened decades or even centuries ago.
But ... I guess we have to take the bad with the good in these sitations.
A) If you are going to quote George Santayana you should at least provide an attribution.. and at least get the quote right.
B) Just because someone famous said something, does not necessarily mean that it is true. This was Santayana's opinion, not some absolute rule of natural law. People here on this board seem to draw that quote like a gun whenever they wish to make some vague point.
You can remember history quite well, and still screw up badly. Consider France in the 1930's. They remembered the huge casualty rates of WW I due to the supremacy of the defensive weapons and works, and decided that a system of strong static defenses was what was most needed to deter or defeat future German aggression. Instead it turned out that mobility was the key to winning in WW II.
Can't it be simply said that if a person makes a mistake that they may well make that mistake again? Or that even if they do remember but don't take the steps to be sure that this mistake is not repeated that it may be repeated anyway?
Can't it be simply said that if a person makes a mistake that they may well make that mistake again? Or that even if they do remember but don't take the steps to be sure that this mistake is not repeated that it may be repeated anyway?
Sure, all those things may be true at times and false at others. That is the reason one should not try and hang their hat on a singular assertion such as Santayana's.
However my point is wold it be better if people had just not passed on history? Not written it down, not told their kids what happened in the past. If everyone was starting fresh with no influence form historical events, would things be better?
Yah. If I understand you, you're arguing that we should imitate H. G. Wells' The time machine - & turn ourselves into the Eloi, more or less. They were pathetic creatives, helpless, mechanically inept, adults of the size & build of children (the movie versions notwithstanding, too creepy otherwise). One of the points to civilization is that writing/history is how values are perpetuated down the centuries.
Otherwise, you leave everything to the Morlocks, who used the Eloi for cattle. Not the kind of Paradise on Earth I had in mind, myself.
I am aware of the old saying those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it, but I have doubts of the veracity or at least certainty of that saying. It seems like a lot of the social problems we face (hatred, prejudice) could be avoided if no one knew any history at all.
I respectfully and totally disagree with you. There are remarkably similar parallel stories to the Bible in parts of the world that could have no memory of the Bible.
The Prose Edda opens with a section called Gylfaginning, or the 'Beguiling of Gylfi', that describes how a legendary Swedish King Gylfi visited three Heathen gods in order to question them about the origins
of the world. Snorri uses the replies King Gylfi receives to layout the creation myth and cosmological structure of northern Heathendom. Gylfi learns that everything began in an empty chaos that contained a world of heat and light called Muspelheim, and an opposing dim, dark and cold world called Nifelheim. The two worlds were separated bya chasm, Ginnungagap. In the extreme physical forces that operated across Ginnungagap a giant named Ymir came into being. He was nourished by milk from the udders of a primordial cow, Audhumla. Audhumla next licked the salty stones around her into the shape of another giant, Buri. By an unspecified process Buri fathered a son, Bur, who wed a giantess, Bestla. The couple produced three sons, one of whom was Odin. Odin and his brothers created the physical world by killing Ymir and, in an act of prodigious violence, tearing the body apart and flinging the pieces in all directions. The giant's blood became the sea, his flesh the land, his bones the mountains and cliffs, his skull the vault of the heavens. Later, as Odin and his brothers were walking by the sea, two logs washed up on the sands, and from these the gods created the first human beings by breathing life and consciousness into them. They named the first man Ask and the first woman Embla. Ask means 'ash', the meaning of Embla remains obscure.
The Vikings and the Christians thus knew different history. Yet it's similar.
We don't want to and indeed can't suppress human knowledge.
You are suggesting nothing short of the repression of knowledge and free thought. I don't care if history is bad or good, that is irrelevant. The impact to the standards of fundamental human rights is - thus even your mere suggestion is reprehensible.
The thought that springs to my mind is Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.
We have knowledge of terrible things that occurred in the past, but we also have knowledge of wonderful things as well. We build upon that knowledge.
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