Chronological Snobbery

By -
I was sitting at my local near someone who is, in fact, a college professor. He happened to bring up how ancient literature is filled with barbaric practices such as crucifixion and stoning, and how "We've advanced past that" today.

"Boy, we sure have!" I thought. Today, we don't mess around taking hours to kill three people by hanging them on crosses! No, we wipe out 100,000 or more with a couple of button pushes, or tens of thousands in a single night, or use efficient, high-tech means to kill 6 million over the course of a few years.

We certainly have "advanced past" those primitive times when books like the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita were being written: today, we can kill thousands using science in the time it took the ancients to kill dozens! Thank God we are not as primitive as they were.

Comments

  1. Gorilla Bananas5:57 PM

    And don't forget that pre-historic humans practised cannibalism, whereas modern humans waste all the human meat they create, most of which is just as edible as pork or beef. Eating German POWs would have been more civilised than bombing their cities.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah6:06 PM

      Is there a point to this comment?

      Delete
    2. Gorilla Bananas2:19 AM

      There is a moral difference between a necessary evil (which may be the lesser of two evils) and an unnecessary one.

      Delete
    3. gcallah12:59 PM

      How in the world is that distinction (which I don't buy, by the way: is something is necessary, it is not evil!) relevant to this post?! Are you trying to claim that crucifixions were unnecessary evils, while the Holocaust was a necessary one?!

      Delete
  2. Josiah Neeley12:35 PM

    We used to kill people over religion. Now we're more advanced. We kill people for other reasons.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more