US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8188

On July 26 2017 10:05 ZerOCoolSC2 wrote:

I got the gist of that through self research. The Enlightenment and Reformation was touched in high school, but not in depth. I learned about Martin Luther and the philosophers of the era. And the Inquisition as well. But like I said, just the basics were touched throughout schooling.



When did you go through school, just out of curiosity?

On July 26 2017 10:25 mozoku wrote:
I'm not really sure how a majority of the posters in here are arguing that modern Western culture was not influenced by the Romans, Greeks, or Christianity.

The concept of a democracy originated in Greece. The concept of republic originated in Rome. Puritans fled to America to escape religious persecution (from other Christians). The framers of the Constitution wrote the Bill of Rights with under the idea that all men were created equal before God.

I'm pretty sure that phrase is roughly in the Constitution ffs.

No, this isn't all of Western culture. But it led to the first modern democracy, and set in motion formation the tenets of Western culture that xDaunt laid out.

Yes, there are also a bunch of Enlightenment thinkers that contributed as well. That doesn't mean the Greeks, Romans, and Christianity didn't influence the development of Western culture/thought.

On July 26 2017 10:25 mozoku wrote:
I'm not really sure how a majority of the posters in here are arguing that modern Western culture was not influenced by the Romans, Greeks, or Christianity.

.

On July 26 2017 09:17 KwarK wrote:

Stop pretending that you know about Roman and Greek influences, thanks.

As for Arab culture being a product of Islam? Of course I would claim that it's not. Islam is a product of Arab culture, not the other way around. It's the "divine" and unchanging word of a 7th century Arab warlord and his followers. How could it be anything else? Muslims all around the world have distinct and differing cultures, if we were to accept your proposition that Arabs are Arabs because they're Muslims, well, explain Bosnia. Or Singapore. Hell, the timeline doesn't even make sense. Arabs came first, Islam can't cause Arabs, Arabs cause Islam.

On July 26 2017 10:25 mozoku wrote:

Puritans fled to America to escape religious persecution (from other Christians). .

On July 26 2017 10:29 IgnE wrote:


i dont know what xdaunt knows or doesnt know about greeks or romans or countrymen but you are beyond obnoxious flouting your classics major. xdaunt is being pretty vague but he has t made any claims that are simply wrong. augustine and aquinas and duns scotus were all devout christians and yet you didnt even respond to xdaunt's mentioning of them.

its actually quite hard to even understand what your point is other than haranguing xdaunt and telling us you all read aristotle in greek. the american constitution isnt christian or greek or roman. its barey lockean i guess. it must be no thing.

List the exclusively Roman elements of western culture (and don't do cop outs like "law" as if the Romans were the first people to write down a legal code).

List the exclusively Greek elements of western culture (and don't give me "asking questions like Socrates" as if nobody would have come up with the idea of asking questions without the Greeks).

Specifically I want some kind of causal line that shows the ideas being communicated "classical Greek culture" to western culture. Ideally it'll outweigh other cultural influences from other parts of the world because you didn't list, for example, Arabic mathematics.

The purported definition of "Western Culture" the US education system's lack luster treatment of world history. Which flows like this:

1: ancient Egypt, because pyramids and tombs.
2: ancient Greece, because Sparta, Plato, kinda democracy and theater
3: ancient Rome, because they made a bunch of movies about it

And then

4:The Enlightenment
5:The Renaissance
6: America

On July 26 2017 10:38 mozoku wrote:
@Plansix and zlefin


This was literally what KwarK said.


This is literally what Plansix said.

As far as I can tell, they're doing most of the posting besides xDaunt here (no offense to others who chimed in).

What else was I supposed to get out of those? Most of the other posts were not even related to the original question. Including those about the Catholic Church holding back the West in the Middle Ages.

On July 26 2017 10:38 mozoku wrote:
@Plansix and zlefin


This was literally what KwarK said.


This is literally what Plansix said.

As far as I can tell, they're doing most of the posting besides xDaunt here (no offense to others who chimed in).

What else was I supposed to get out of those? Most of the other posts were not even related to the original question. Including those about the Catholic Church holding back the West in the Middle Ages.

On July 26 2017 10:29 KwarK wrote:
mozuku, that's mostly a foundation myth from the 18th and 19th century who knew very little about the classics but knew that an old idea rediscovered sounded way more legitimate than a new idea. For example Greek democracy is a misnomer, a poor understanding of the citizen-soldier dynamic of the polis city state structure, specifically that found in just one polis which was an unusual example of a fundamentally oligarchic system. I can go into more detail if you wish.

The ideas that were subsequently assigned to the classical world would have been unthinkable to them. Even within the classical world these concepts don't have a stable basis. For example Roman citizenship as Marius would have understood it had absolutely no relationship with the Roman citizenship of the Roman Empire, and far more in common with, say, Theban citizenship. What it meant to be a citizen, what rights one had within the state and so forth are not ideas that one can easily pin on the classical world and declare continuity because they lack even internal consistency within their own frame of reference. The question of whether the Socii were Roman was controversial, the Constitutio Antoniniana unthinkable.

The culture that emerged in western Europe was pretty much new. It took the word senate from Rome in the same way the Russian Tsars took the word Caesar, and with about as much understanding of what it meant. It's all rather absurd. Fetishism of classics from a time before historians had learned how to do real history.

yes, so you're makign the formal negation error then. my dota game is starting now, I'm not sure how to explain this, it'll take some time; but basically you're making an error in how you're negating the statements, in a formal sense I'd reference the rules for negating existential/universal quantifiers, but I'm guessing you haven't studied those. i'll have to think how to explain it best to you and come back later when I have time.

On July 26 2017 10:38 Plansix wrote:

Do you think that is intentional? That his theory on what is "Western Culture" and how the left is destroying it isn't vague by design? The entire argument reeks with allusions to ethnocentric rhetoric without pulling the trigger. The "left" and "multiculturalism" are the enemies of vague, cipher like concept of "Western Culture."

On July 26 2017 10:45 xDaunt wrote:

I'm not interested in getting into the weeds of the evolution of Western philosophy. It really doesn't have anything to do with the point that I originally discussed with Igne: why Western culture deserves a defense. All I needed to do was provide a definition of Western culture and, tangentially, discuss its origins. Mission accomplished.

On July 26 2017 10:47 Nyxisto wrote:
Especially in the context of this natural law discussion you should probably talk of 'American' instead of 'Western' culture because The rest of the West for the most part has moved to more positivist systems.

Natural law has a heavily religious and Lockean touch to it that was never really relevant in modern Europe.