The technique to making true Damascus steel was lost in the mid 1800s. The technique and composition to Greek Fire was lost in the 13th century or 19th, depending on whose stories you want to believe.

We were well on our way to losing the schematics and information on our original Apollo and Gemini space programs until they started trying to sort and salvage that data a few years ago. The problem is that when we replace something old with a better technology or limit the knowledge of a technique to a few people, we rapidly lose the methodology of 'how' to do the technique.

In the case of proper war and hunting archery, when guns became more common and easier to use, people gravitated to them because they were MUCH easier to learn than archery. Archery required specific training for war and for survival it was from the time you could hold a bow. Anyone could learn to use a gun quickly, so people just....forgot how to properly use bows. Probably as soon as the remaining archers died out.

Árstíðir is the band from Iceland singing the 13th century Icelandic hymn “Heyr himna smiður” at the train station in Wuppertal, Germany.

At my grandmother's pub, we used an old door to roll them down off the truck. Stopping a keg of 100+kg takes a toll on your legs though. Still, hauling it down a 13th century stair into the cellar was even worse. Gives me fucking nightmares even though I only fell down it once with a crate of plums.

Nowadays it's just 50 litres a pop or even 20. You can pick those off the truck and fling them straight down the driveway with ease.

>> ^Murgy:

>> ^shinyblurry:
Lilith was never in scripture and was written about over 1000 years after genesis. It was written as Jewish folklore, and developed mostly in the middle ages. Today it is particularly embraced by pagans, gnostics and radical femenists. It's yet another lie, out of millions, that tries to derail the Creation story and that people buy into without doing any research. There is no lilith conspiracy..she never existed.
>> ^xxovercastxx:
@0:34 "Ever since the earth's first woman..."
bzzt! Eve was the earth's second woman.


The very concept of Pagans and Agnostics including a story, altered or otherwise, from a book collaboratively written by groups of Judo-Christians in their religious beliefs is truly laughable. That's before even considering the fact that both spiritual ideologies existed prior to Abrahamic religion. Furthermore, your "Lilith was never in scripture and was written about over 1000 years after genesis." statement is completely invalid. A figure pulled from your metaphorical nether-regions, if you will. Your later complaint of "people buy into without doing any research" truly cements your spot on my "Wall of Hypocritical Nonsense."
I could go into further detail about your closing comment "It's yet another lie, out of millions, that tries to derail the Creation story. There is no lilith conspiracy..she never existed" in regards to your views about the integrity of a tale claiming all of humanity is descendent from two humans who sprung up, fully formed, out of the earth. Instead, however, I think I'll let your previous misinformation speak for itself.


A fallacious argument from incredulity does not provide a refutation of anything I've said; indeed, what I've said is well supported:

"In Jewish folklore, from the 8th–10th centuries Alphabet of Ben Sira onwards, Lilith becomes Adam's first wife, who was created at the same time and from the same earth as Adam. This contrasts with Eve, who was created from one of Adam's ribs. The legend was greatly developed during the Middle Ages, in the tradition of Aggadic midrashim, the Zohar and Jewish mysticism.[3] In the 13th Century writings of Rabbi Isaac ben Jacob ha-Cohen, for example, Lilith left Adam after she refused to become subservient to him and then would not return to the Garden of Eden after she mated with archangel Samael.[4] The resulting Lilith legend is still commonly used as source material in modern Western culture, literature, occultism, fantasy, and horror."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilith

With all your scoffing you are alluding to an intimate knowledge of the subject, certainly enough to call my arguments "laughable" and "Hypocritical Nonsense". So I'm all ears to hear the research you have uncovered with disproves my argument so succinctly.

THIRTEENTH CENTURY, guys. Good lord. Trumpet this fact one end of this country to the next!

Didn't start in the 1970s.

Excerpt: Despite constant debunking, this old husbands’ tale has endured for centuries. “The legal position that pregnancy disproved a claim of ra
pe appears to have been instituted in the U.K. sometime in the 13th century,” the medical historian Vanessa Heggie wrote in a blog post for The Guardian on Monday. She explained that one of Britain’s earliest legal texts, written in about 1290, included a clause based on this bit of folk wisdom: “If, however, the woman should have conceived at the time alleged in the appeal, it abates, for without a woman’s consent she could not conceive.”

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/myth-about-rape-and-pregnancy-is-not-new/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2_20120821

'Despite constant debunking, this old husbands’ tale has endured for centuries. “The legal position that pregnancy disproved a claim of rape appears to have been instituted in the U.K. sometime in the 13th century,” the medical historian Vanessa Heggie wrote in a blog post for The Guardian on Monday. She explained that one of Britain’s earliest legal texts, written in about 1290, included a clause based on this bit of folk wisdom: “If, however, the woman should have conceived at the time alleged in the appeal, it abates, for without a woman’s consent she could not conceive.” '

Thirteenth century. THIRTEENTH CENTURY.

Excerpt from: http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/20/myth-about-rape-and-pregnancy-is-not-new/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2_20120821

ecstatic states. focus. the unwobbling pivot.

This sufi dancer is known as a Whirling Dervish, and this dance is a form of dhikr (or remembrance of God) among a Persian Sufi order known as the Mevlevi. They are followers of Rumi, a 13th-century poet and among one of my favorite poets of all time.

>> ^Stormsinger:

How can he -not- fall over?

Searching religion and cats got me this sad piece of knowledge:

Beginning in the 11th century, tolerance for cats began to decrease in Europe for religious reasons, and “by the 13th century the church viewed witches as real and cats as instruments of the devil” (Lynnlee, p. 20). Dante (1265–1321), for example, mentioned cats only once in his work and compared them to demons. From the 14th century well into the 18th century, cats were regularly killed on specific religious holidays. “By the late 15th century the persecution of cats and witches was a mainstay of European society. . . . The 15th and 16th centuries are almost devoid of any cat literature and art. . . . During this period the cat still was used to control rodents, but it was rarely seen as a pet, for if so its existence and that of its owner were in jeopardy” (Lynnlee, p. 21). Cats became especially associated with heretical religious sects, such as the Waldensians and Manichaeans, and members of these sects were accused of worshiping the Devil in the form of a black cat.

On feast days all over Europe, as a symbolic means of driving out the Devil, they were captured and tortured, tossed onto bonfires, set alight and chased through the streets, impaled on spits and roasted alive, burned at the stake, plunged into boiling water, whipped to death, and hurled from the tops of tall buildings, all in an atmosphere of extreme festive merriment. (Serpell JA, The domestication and history of the cat, in Turner DC and Bateson P, eds, The Domestic Cat, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 156).

"At Metz, for example, on “cat Wednesday” during Lent, 13 cats were placed in an iron cage and publicly burned; this ritual took place each year from 1344 to 1777" (Kete K, The Beast in the Boudoir, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, p. 119).

(http://www.stanleyresearch.org/dnn/LaboratoryofDevelopmentalNeurovirology/ToxoplasmosisSchizophreniaResearch/IAllaboutCats/tabid/173/Default.aspx)


Great, as if we needed more reasons to hate religion...

So basically, you cannot provide a refutation to the information itself but instead try to discredit the source. I've got hundreds of these..it's not exactly a secret among palentologists that the evolutionary theory has more holes than swiss cheese. Another issue is just the dating itself..take these quotes out of context:

Curt Teichert of the Geological Society of America, "No coherent picture of the history of the earth could be built on the basis of radioactive datings".

Improved laboratory techniques and improved constants have not reduced the scatter in recent years. Instead, the uncertainty grows as more and more data is accumulated ... " (Waterhouse).

richard mauger phd associate professor of geology east carolina university In general, dates in the “correct ball park” are assumed to be correct and are published, but those in disagreement with other data are seldom published nor are the discrepancies fully explained

... it is usual to obtain a spectrum of discordant dates and to select the concentration of highest values as the correct age." (Armstrong and Besancon)

professor brew: If a C-14 date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a footnote. And if it iscompletely out of date we just drop it. Few archaeologists who have concerned themselves with absolute chronology are innocent of having sometimes applied this method.

In the light of what is known about the radiocarbon method and the way it is used, it is truly astonishing that many authors will cite agreeable determinations as 'proof' for their beliefs. The radiocarbon method is still not capable of yielding accurate and reliable results. There are gross discrepancies, the chronology is uneven and relative, and the accepted dates are actually selected dates. "This whole blessed thing is nothing but 13th century alchemy, and it all depends upon which funny paper you read.” Written by Robert E. Lee in his article "Radiocarbon: Ages in Error" in Anthropological Journal Of Canada, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1981 p:9

Radiometric dating of fossil skull 1470 show that the various methods do not give accurate measurements of ages. The first tests gave an age of 221 million years. The second, 2.4 million years. Subsequent tests gave ages which ranged from 290,000 to 19.5 million years. Palaeomagnetic determinations gave an age of 3 million years. All these readings give a 762 fold error in the age calculations. Given that only errors less than 10% (0.1 fold) are acceptable in scientific calculations, these readings show that radiometric assessment should never ever be used. John Reader, "Missing Links", BCA/Collins: London, 1981 p:206-209

A. Hayatsu (Department of Geophysics, University of Western Ontario, Canada), "K-Ar isochron age of the North Mountain Basalt, Nova Scotia",-Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, vol. 16, 1979,-"In conventional interpretation of K-Ar (potassium/argon dating method) age data, it is common to discard ages which are substantially too high or too low compared with the rest of the group or with other available data such as the geological time scale. The discrepancies between the rejected and the accepted are arbitrarily-attributed to excess or loss of argon." In other words the potassium/argon (K/Ar) method doesn't support the uranium/lead (U/Pb) method.

"The age of our globe is presently thought to be some 4.5 billion years old, based on radio-decay rates of uranium and thorium. Such `confirmation' may be shortlived, as nature is not to be discovered quite so easily. There has been in recent years the horrible realization that radio-decay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences. And this could mean that the atomic clocks are reset during some global disaster, and events which brought the Mesozoic to a close may not be 65 million years ago, but rather, within the age and memory of man." (“Secular Catastrophism”, Industrial Research and Development, June 1982, p. 21)

“The procession of life was never witnessed, it is inferred. The vertical sequence of fossils is thought to represent a process because the enclosing rocks are interpreted as a process. The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning, if it insists on using only temporal concepts, because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales.” (O’Rourke, J.E., “Pragmatism Versus Materialism in Stratigraphy,” American Journal of Science, vol. 276, 1976, p. 53) (emphasis mine)

"The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning . . because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of science, January 1976.

Dr. Donald Fisher, the state paleontologist for New York, Luther Sunderland, asked him: "How do you date fossils?" His reply: "By the Cambrian rocks in which they were found." Sunderland then asked him if this were not circular reasoning, and *Fisher replied, "Of course, how else are you going to do it?" (Bible Science Newsletter, December 1986, p. 6.)

It is a problem not easily solved by the classic methods of stratigraphical paleontology, as obviously we will land ourselves immediately in an impossible circular argument if we say, firstly that a particular lithology [theory of rock strata] is synchronous on the evidence of its fossils, and secondly that the fossils are synchronous on the evidence of the lithology."—*Derek V. Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphic Record (1973), p. 62.

"The intelligent layman has long suspected circular reasoning in the use of rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks. The geologist has never bothered to think of a good reply, feeling the explanations are not worth the trouble as long as the work brings results. This is supposed to be hard-headed pragmatism."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1976, p. 48.

"Material bodies are finite, and no rock unit is global in extent, yet stratigraphy aims at a global classification. The particulars have to be stretched into universals somehow. Here ordinary materialism leaves off building up a system of units recognized by physical properties, to follow dialectical materialism, which starts with time units and regards the material bodies as their incomplete representatives. This is where the suspicion of circular reasoning crept in, because it seemed to the layman that the time units were abstracted from the geological column, which has been put together from rock units."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1979, p. 49.

"The prime difficulty with the use of presumed ancestral-descendant sequences to express phylogeny is that biostratigraphic data are often used in conjunction with morphology in the initial evaluation of relationships, which leads to obvious circularity."—*B. Schaeffer, *M.K. Hecht and *N. Eldredge, "Phylogeny and Paleontology," in *Dobzhansky, *Hecht and *Steere (Ed.), Evolutionary Biology, Vol. 6 (1972), p. 39

"The paleontologist's wheel of authority turned full circle when he put this process into reverse and used his fossils to determine tops and bottoms for himself. In the course of time he came to rule upon stratigraphic order, and gaps within it, on a worldwide basis."—*F.K. North, "the Geological Time Scale," in Royal Society of Canada Special Publication, 8:5 (1964). [The order of fossils is determined by the rock strata they are in, and the strata they are in are decided by their tops and bottoms—which are deduced by the fossils in them.]"The geologic ages are identified and dated by the fossils contained in the sedimentary rocks. The fossil record also provides the chief evidence for the theory of evolution, which in turn is the basic philosophy upon which the sequence of geologic ages has been erected. The evolution-fossil-geologic age system is thus a closed circle which comprises one interlocking package. Each goes with the other."—Henry M. Morris, The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth (1972), pp. 76-77

"It cannot be denied that, from a strictly philosophical standpoint, geologists are here arguing in a circle. The succession of organism as has been determined by a study of theory remains buried in the rocks, and the relative ages of the rocks are determined by the remains of organisms that they contain."—*R.H. Rastall, article "Geology," Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 10 (14th ed.; 1956), p. 168.

"The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning, if it insists on using only temporal concepts, because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1976, p. 53.

>> ^MaxWilder:
Let us begin with this definition of "quote mining" from Wikipedia: The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as "contextomy" or "quote mining", is a logical fallacy and a type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning.
Thank you, shinyblurry, for your cut&paste, thought-free, research-absent, quote mining wall of nonsense. The only part you got right is that you should google each and every one of these quotes to find out the context, something you actually didn't do.
>> ^shinyblurry:
Even the late Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard University and the leading spokesman for evolutionary theory prior to his recent death, confessed "the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology..."

This Steven J. Gould quote is discussed in talk.origin's Quote Mine Project. Gould was a proponent of Punctuated Equilibria, which proposes a "jerky, or episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change" in evolution. The quotes that are taken out of context are arguing that the fossil record does not indicate a gradual change over time as Darwin suggested. The specifc quote above is discussed in section #3.2 of Part 3. Far from an argument against evolution, Gould was arguing for a specific refinement of the theory.
More to the point, your own quote says "extreme rarity", contradicting your primary claim that transitional fossils do not exist.
>> ^shinyblurry:
Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum and editor of a prestigious scientific journal... ...I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book... ...there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.

Dr. Patterson is discussed on a page dedicated to this quote in the Quote Mine Project. This page touches on the nature of scientific skepticism. As Dr. Patterson goes on to say, "... Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else." This is the nature of pure science. We can say that a piece of evidence "indicates" or "suggests" something, but there is nothing that may be held up as "proof" unless it is testable. As a man of principle, Dr. Patterson would not indicate one species evolving into another simply because there is no way to be absolutely sure that one fossil is the direct descendant of another. We can describe the similarities and differences, showing how one might have traits of an earlier fossil and different traits similar to a later fossil, but that is not absolute proof.
Incidentally, this is probably where the main thrust of the creationist argument eventually lands. At this level of specificity, there is no known way of proving one fossil's relation to another. DNA does not survive the fossilization process, so we can only make generalizations about how fossils are related through physical appearance. This will be where the creationist claims "faith" is required. Of course, you might also say that if I had a picture of a potted plant on a shelf, and another picture of the potted plant broken on the floor, it would require "faith" to claim that the plant fell off the shelf, because I did not have video proof. The creationist argument would be that the plant broken on the ground was created that way by God.
>> ^shinyblurry:
David B. Kitts. PhD (Zoology) ... Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of "seeing" evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of "gaps" in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them...

This quote is from 1974. Think maybe some of those gaps might have gotten smaller since then? Doesn't really matter, because the scientist in question goes on to explicitly state that this does not disprove evolution. He then discusses hypotheses which might explain his perceived gaps, such as Punctuated Equilibrium. A brief mention of this quote is found in the Quote Mine Project at Quote #54.
>> ^shinyblurry:
N. Heribert Nilsson, a famous botanist, evolutionist and professor at Lund University in Sweden, continues:
My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed… The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled.

First of all, Nilsson is only famous to creationists. To scientists, he's a bit of a wack-job. But that neither proves nor disproves his findings, it only goes to show that creationsists will frequently embellish a scientist's reputation if it will increase the size of the straw man argument. His writings would naturally include his opinions on the weaknesses of what was evolutionary theory at the time (1953!) in order to make his own hypothesis more appealing. He came up with Emication, which is panned as fantasy by the scientific critics. Perfect fodder for the creationists.
>> ^shinyblurry:
Even the popular press is catching on. This is from an article in Newsweek magazine:
The missing link between man and apes, whose absence has comforted religious fundamentalists since the days of Darwin, is merely the most glamorous of a whole hierarchy of phantom creatures … The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms that lie between species, the more they have been frustrated.
The popular press. Newsweek Magazine. 1980!!! What year are you living in, shiny???
>> ^shinyblurry:
Wake up people..your belief in evolution is purely metaphysical and requires faith. I suppose if you don't think about it too hard it makes sense. It's the same thing with abiogenesis..pure metaphysics.
Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums are filled with over 100 million fossils of 250,000 different species.
The availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track. What is the picture which the fossils have given us?… The gaps between major groups of organisms have been growing even wider and more undeniable. They can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection of the fossil record. 2

Well, now you're just quoting some anonymous creationist. Any evidence whatsoever that the gaps between major groups are growing wider? No? Can't find anything to cut and paste in reply to that question?
>> ^shinyblurry:
You've been had..be intellectually honest enough to admit it and seek out the truth. Science does not support evolution.

I wonder, shiny, if in your "intellectually honest search for the truth" if you ever left the creationist circle jerk? Your quotes are nothing but out of context and out of date.

>> ^Yogi:

Up until just after the 1960's children in our schools were taught that it's a wonderful thing that we massacre'd the Native Population. There was even a little boy in a cartoon telling everyone how he wishes he was there killing them when they would wait to the men went out hunting and massacre the women and children.
Also in the 60's there was an exhibit in a museum where children could play on a Blackhawk helicopter and fire on a Vietnamese village.
I'm not saying this isn't a good video I upvoted it...I'm just pointing out that we should look in the fucking mirror. QM I'm looking at you.


It's great, and it's necessary, that people in all cultures are capable of being self-aware, but I don't think it's at all important or relevant to what's being taught, and done, in Islamic schools in The United Kingdom. Say what you want about the UK - its faults are many - but it's not a 13th century culture. What's being demonstrated here is repulsive and poisonous, and not enough people are taking this seriously.*

Yeah, we've messed up. America's messed up pretty bad and Europe in general has a horrible track record. When you're in the road and the car is coming, don't pause to contemplate all those times you cut people off in your ridiculous SUV. Fucking move.

*(not enough people are taking this seriously who aren't paranoid, xenophobic racists who can't compute 2 plus 2 without thinking there's a brown man under the bed)

I get that this guy is doing satire, but there's a line between satire and a pure straw man--and NonStampCollector took a flying leap over that line in this video.

In the first place, any halfway competent theist using those arguments will of course make it clear that these argument do not necessarily support any one religion over the others. This is how Aquinas used similar arguments in the 13th century, and it's how theistic thinkers deploy them today. They are only intended to weaken the atheist position generally. NonStampCollector doesn't even attempt to address them on this level.

In the second place, it's asinine to assume that every religion is the same--either with regard to how well they are supported by the cosmological, teleological and moral arguments, or how much or little they incline their followers to religious violence. As it happens, the Hindu has a much better case than the Christian or Muslim for saying that these arguments support his religion. Brahma, unlike the God of Abraham, does not have a seemingly petty concern with particular tribes of humans or become angry or feel wronged because of sin. Brahma is described as illimitable, all-embracing. Brahma is a more cosmic God, better supported by the discovery of the age and vast distances of the universe.

Other Gods or divine realities so supported include Plato's Form of the Good, the Logos of the Stoics, the God of Leibniz or Spinoza, and even the God of A. N. Whitehead (co-author of the Principia Mathematica with acclaimed atheist Bertrand Russel) and Charles Hartshorne.

Tendencies toward violence differ considerably between religions. The Hindu and the worshiper of Amun have no reason to get into a fight about religion. Hinduism is not a single religion, but thousands of intertwined religions which have co-existed peacefully for thousands of years. A plurality of religious beliefs and practices--including atheism--has long been not fought by Hindus, but embraced. Only when aggressive evangelistic monotheisms actively attack Hinduism does anything like an instinct to violence come into play--and even then it tends to arise mainly in extreme circumstances. (As in Orissa in 2008, when the assassination of a Hindu leader by Christian Maoist extremists sparked a riot and violence by members of both religions, or the year before, in 20007, when Christians deliberately provoked Hindus by .) Likewise, there is no reason anyone would go to war over Amun. It would not be appropriate to describe the religions of Egypt as tolerant--the word implies a perception of annoyance or burden in allowing others to co-exist, when co-existence was assumed as a daily fact of life. In fact, the priests of Amun welcomed Zeus-worshiping Greeks to the oracle of Amun at Siwa, which once declared Alexander the Great to be the son of Amun.

But, of course, NonStampCollector doesn't actually know any of this. He just assumes, like nearly all the New Atheists, that all the other religions in the world are more or less just like the ones he's most familiar with. Makes it easier that way; you don't have to do as much studying or thinking.

>> ^imstellar28:
right, because there was no murder prior to the 13th century.


That's the most retarded logic, and yet the sort that is often rolled out against anyone speaking against guns.

To say that people have been able to kill people before the advent of guns is stating the absolute bleeding obvious, doesn't change the fact that guns make it a whoooole lot easier to kill people, and lots of them, quickly. And easier to accidentally kill people, or yourself for that matter.

Really, if the best you've got is to suggest that without guns there are still other, less effective, means of killing people then you could use exactly the same logic with nuclear weapons. Hell, we should all have our own little warheads.

Just for protection of course.

right, because there was no murder prior to the 13th century.

To be fair, it's mainly monotheism that causes the problems she mentions. Non-monotheistic cultures rarely have things like holy wars. (Or at least this was true prior to the rise of Marxist-Leninism. Wars for Communism certainly seem like holy wars.) In fact, Roman religion frequently stopped wars; any bad omens in the ceremonies held before going to war were seen as a sign that the war would end in defeat, and there were always numerous opportunities for bad omens.

It's also rare, for instance, for non-monotheistic religions to cause major sexual guilt for natural impulses. Rome had temple prostitutes. India had the Kama Sutra (though years of British and Muslim influence have had a serious dampening effect on Indian sexuality). Casual nudity is a regular part of Japanese advertising.

While non-monotheistic cultures seem just as prey to cultural imperialism, they tend to be more tolerant of religious dissent. The religious pluralism of Hinduism and of ancient Rome is very well known, but the tolerance in ancient and medieval China is somewhat less talked about. Records indicate that from the 8th (if not earlier) to the 19th century, there was even a substantial Jewish population. Marco Polo confirmed that there were many Jewish traders in China in the 13th century.

"The current definition of a mile as 5,280 feet (as opposed to 5,000) dates to the 13th century"