[B0rsuk]

Originally Posted by OmikronWarrior

I do not think this does a good job in describing the origins of slavery in the New World. Long story short, a handful of crops proved to be so profitable that plantations owners did whatever the hell it took to get bodies to work the fields.

One point stressed by Black Mother is that it was really 3 transactions. First they took cheap manufacture products, fabric etc and bought slaves with them. This was already very profitable. Then they sold the slaves to colonies in the New World. Finally, they sold the spices and stuff back. Year after year after year it provided in over 300% return of investment. Not to say what you said is wrong, just not complete.

Borsuk, you are all kinds of wrong here. You do know that the Romans persecuted and martyred thousands of Christians? The exact offense was usually refusing to burn an offering to the Emperor. That is neither tolerant, nor seperating governance from religion.

True, but I have to wonder why were Christians persecuted ? Why did they grow stronger than most other religions ? I don't know the historic context, but I don't think this is necessarily at odds with what I said earlier. One of most basic Christian dogma is there's only one god. That's inherently intolerant. I wish I knew more of religions of the time. One book I read about Romans said they wouldn't persecute other religions if they were not a threat to the state. I don't rule out that Jesus was indeed a troublemaker. And frankly, some of the stuff attributed to him (like accepting and not defending against any aggression) is plain stupid and immoral in my view.

And for that matter, "intolerant and xenophobic" are great words to describe the Chinese throughout history.

Yet two wrongs don't make a right. The Chinese managed to keep their government free of religion by being more intolerant themselves.

Actually, they probably describe 95% of all human societies. Christianity and Islam are both exceptions that argued all humans could earn divine favor by joining the faith.

Oh, that's the tip of the iceberg. To make people dislike each other, it's enough to artificially divide them into two groups. That's what one scientific paper said anyway.

Do you know how farmers deal with baboons in Africa ? They catch the cheekiest baboon using a bait. Then they paint him white, and set him free. Once the pack sees him, the response ranges between ostracism and murder. A white baboon will never be accepted, yet he can't understand what's wrong with him. This method is illegal.

Another of my hypotheses:
the most popular religions are the most kind ones, in the sense they declare the most kindness to others. Look what happened to Aztecs. Voodoo still exists by some miracle, but as a curiosity.

Well, Islam was harder on women. However, Christianity gave women an enormous amount of equality. If you look at some of the big name converts to Christianity, they often had mothers or wives who converted before them and played a large role in their conversion (Constantine's mother was Christian, for example). I do not think monotheism lends itself to this kind of unity on its own face.

Sounds reasonable. The equality granted to women could be one of the main offending factors (why share if you don't have to ?). No, this isn't caused my monotheism alone, but supports my hypothesis that Christianity was disliked because it threatened the old order. The cult of Priapus would never be seen as a threat.

Judaism, for example, puts an enormous emphasis on its adherents being "God's chosen," or a special people apart from the rest. They further emphasized these differences with strict labor, dietary, and bodily alteration.

In my opinion the only reason why Judaism is no longer one of the warring religions is because they've been kicked so hard. Of course there's Israel/Palestine, but it never came near the scale of crusades or jihad.

The ancient world was not any more stable, we modern observers looking back upon it just tend to clump and generalize more.

Another thing: we know little about the ancient world, it appears simpler due to lack of information.