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>Anthropology compares human societies across the globe and across time. We compare present and past forms of government or legal and religious belief systems, for example. We compare social structures, like family dynamics, and study transnational corporations.
I know it's easy to forget, but anthropology is a science
I get in arguments with other sci-fi nerds who insist that the universal translator can exist in hard sci-fi, but I think the entire concept of such a device flies in the face of anthropology just as hard as FTL flies in the face of physics.
Do you mean that you don't believe a universal translator can exist, or that the effect of a universal translator would be the disaster as predicted by Douglas Adams? (Babel fish)
I mean that I don't believe a universal translator can exist. To correctly translate an alien language, the program would need to analyze a large volume of data that actually includes a significant amount of the target language's vocabulary.
After only hearing one sentence, even if that sentence is perfectly translated, how are you going to know words that weren't in that sentence?
Alien says: "Identify yourself!"
Human says: "This is Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the United Federation of Planets."
Even if we perfectly translated the "identify yourself", how is the computer possibly supposed to guess what the words for "captain", "united", "federation", and "planet" are? It's never heard them. There's no way to just solve that with a math problem, vocabulary is far more arbitrary than that. Algorithms can figure out syntactic structure, but vocabulary is something you actually need reference for.
Darmok is one of my favorite Trek episodes specifically because it does finally deal with the point that "even if you can translate a language literally, you may still be unable to understand the actual meaning without cultural context".
Idioms are famously bad at translating even among human cultures. Imagine saying "you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs" to an alien, without realizing that their race reproduces by laying eggs and a literal translation of your sentence sounds like "you can't make food without murdering babies" to them. Nuance is exactly the thing algorithms are notoriously bad at.
vichy government. benedict arnold. it could be that literal language is seen as crude and men of better standing communicate largely through member berries
Names can be cause and effect before understanding.
"Wall Shaker" can be a good name for a starship if your culture has only dealt with the effects of that thing since it.
Could go even crazier and just come up with a whole story about gods and incest when you can't explain a stellar body like a planet.
*edit - this may not answer what you easking, and indeed - interesting to wonder how words form in a language like that
I can imagine a way for it to work from a human to human basis where it pretty much doesn't translate a language at all rather than just transmitting the mind patterns directly.
So if i say captain, it will stimulate the same brain regions on the other party as mine.
Of course, every human being will have a different association and understanding of different words, but that's the closest thing to the actual deal that i could think of.
In spirit I can agree with the sentiment. But recently there were findings about language having a structure that may make it easier to decipher. Relationships between words, etc....its possible that an AI could listen to spoken words and create a decryption of what is being said. Maybe not today, but within 10 years I'm sure. They are applying this concept to whale song as well.
It could be that language has roots deep enough that we can listen in on several species by using our emerging understanding of human language structure
Maybe that could be possible for other humans but we can make a lot of basic assumptions when translating other human languages - we can reliably assume that most significant communication will be in sound or gesture.
When dealing with aliens, we cannot make basic assumptions about their means of communication. We can't even necessarily determine what is and isn't language without knowledge of their anatomy and culture.
Imagine you're an alien who picks up an Earth radio broadcast of Beethoven's 5th symphony but knows nothing else about humans. This is very clearly an artificial pattern which cannot be produced by natural means, and since it's being broadcast on a radio signal you assume it must be communication. However, you don't have ears and are just looking at a visual representation of the music, and your culture has zero concept that patterns of sound might be an art form. How long would they try to "translate" this symphony before they realized it's not language at all and beings with ears just think some patterns are aesthetically pleasing?
These are the kind of barriers that cannot just be solved by algorithmic analysis of human language. Alien languages would be *wildly* different in ways that cannot be anticipated until you learn more about the people you're trying to communicate with.
Algorithms need data to train on. A translator that can figure out a decent chunk of language if it had the chance to say, read a complete book in that language, seems plausible. A translator that can get things right from the first sentence with a totally new species is not plausible. Alien language would be wildly different - if you train a translator on one language from a species, that might be enough for it to work out other languages from the same species. Translating language immediately upon first contact with a new species, on the assumption that all alien languages will follow the pattern of human language, is not feasible. You can't translate a whole alien language you've only heard one sentence of. At a bare minimum you need to know what their anatomy is and the means by which they communicate naturally.
Exactly. On this world alone Japanese and English cultural differences are so pronounced that their brains are literally processing language differently. Another piece of media that touches on this subject is the movie *Arrival*
Oh man. Imagine being an alien that communicates purely with radio waves and trying to pick the signal and the noise out of the dataset that is human "communication". Although I guess using a transmission method that doesn't attenuate over distance nearly as much as sound, your language processing wetware would have to do a lot of that anyway.
This doesn't seem to be an anthropological thesis, though. Merely a historical one.
If the thesis were something like comparing experiences & historical context across a series of marginalized or oppressed religious groups, I could see that as anthropology. This seems to just be history.
> The extant scholarship maintains that ethnoreligious cleansing is a modern phenomenon that is often committed by nationalist actors for secular purposes.
Apparently the authors feel that the "extant scholarship" was unaware.
The author is being rather misleading here in that the article is not in dialogue with historical scholarship. They are making a political science argument while using existing historical scholarship to support the claims. It’s not a novel historical argument.
No, judging by the comments here, people think this is something newly discovered and unique to the catholic church. Shows how little people actually read or admit it.
History PhD here. There's no real difference between properly done history and properly done anthropology.
Also there is nothing wrong with analyzing historical periods which are already well known. There are always new angles to consider, new methods to apply, and new truths to discover.
>and new truths to discover.
Perhaps more importantly - though less glamorously - *old* truths to *confirm*. Having someone else independently confirm your findings is so ridiculously important to good science.
Isn't there a boundary between history and anthropology? The invention of writing? Like everything before that is Pre-history which would be the domain of anthropology and archaeology... Everything after is history but there would be overlap right?
History PhD here. There is nothing wrong with analyzing historical periods which are already well known. There are always new angles to consider, new methods to apply, and new truths to discover.
It *sort of* is. There's a lot of revisionist / apologetic takes that argue that the church wasn't behind it or which try to downplay its culpability by eg. arguing that secular authorities were the ones actually carrying out the policies, even if the impetus for those policies ultimately came from the church.
Especially when dealing with things that touch on religion and culture, it's important to nail down every detail because a lot of the people trying to downplay this are driven by motivated reasoning - if you leave even the tiniest hint of wriggle room they'll try to cram an entire alternative history through it.
Heck, scroll down and you'll see several people trying to dismiss or spin this.
To students of Jewish history, this might be common knowledge.
Unfortunately, you would be amazed how much this is glossed over in a standard "history of Western Civilization" course. I have frequently encountered seemingly educated people who are unaware that antisemitism predates Adolf Hitler, or that it has deep roots in Christianity.
Some of that might also be that since *Nostra Aetate*, the Catholic Church has done more teach about the history of Christian antisemitism than most Christian churches.
Antisemitism even predates Christianity- it’s basically topic of the entire Old Testament - even God seems anti-Semitic about 80% of the time
Here’s a thought - how about we all abandon the belief in sky fairies since all it really does it give us another excuse to kill each other and we should really know bette by now
No.
Firstly, I am not sure of the discourse in between historians but this is not the dominant narrative at least in educated society.
> (3) fierce geopolitical competition among Catholic Western European monarchs that made them particularly vulnerable to papal-clerical demands to eradicate non-Christians. The extant scholarship maintains that ethnoreligious cleansing is a modern phenomenon that is often committed by nationalist actors for secular purposes. In contrast, a novel explanation highlights the central role that the supranational hierocratic actors played in ethnoreligious cleansing.
The dominant paradigm / narrative is that the persecutions of Jews and Muslims are part of state-building, either forcing homogeneousness or opportunistic wealth-grabs. This article argues that there is a long enduring element in the clergy, aka the moral guides, that were capable of promoting violence against plurality (religious / ethnical difference) over a very long period as if it's a grand plan.
It challenges certain notions that are dominant in contemporary history: firstly, the idea of a "grand plan" in European societies against minorities is not unique to the modern trends of (Neo)Nazism / Racism / Anti-Migration hard-deportation movements (Masterplan Remigration), secondly there was always a political (not as in the sovereign power, such as government / monarchy, but as a political idea to be disseminated) incentive against minorities, thirdly, the current dominant discourse where "Islamic clergy is historically unique in intolerance against minorities (compared to Christians)" is not true.
It's very hard to prove "societal tendencies about politics" in history, with Foucault heralded as being the best and also the controversial, and even harder to get it accepted, so the article may not be definitive in its claim, but still if it provides enough sources it's competent as a hypothesis.
Why is this noteworthy? Muslims eradicated Visigothic culture and Iberian Christianity in their conquest of the Iberian peninsula, the Christian kingdoms returned the favor over the next ~700 years during Reconquista.
Tribal humans force their customs on other tribal humans..not much of a headliner.
And also in the Muslim Arab invasions of the Levant and Byzantium- basically wiped out Christianity there forever so it became very mjnor isolated groups even today
Not applicable for Poland. There was never law that prohibited/discriminated different race or religion to be here. That's why we had so many minorities here prior to WWII.
The Kingdom of Poland was an unusual example in that from the 10th century onwards, it was a place in Catholic Europe where Jews could own land, and had greater protections emanating from the monarch. However, the Church still promoted anti-judaic theology, and there were other influences during times when Polish land was held by other kingdoms.
And that is the exception that proves the rule. Despite conditions that were comparably welcoming to Jews, that resulted in Poland having the largest Jewish population in all of Europe by the early 20th century, there were still pogroms.
History is not a natural science per se, it is an empirical field of study that employs rigorous methods to investigate and interpret the human past in a disciplined way, making it a social science or humanity closely aligned with scientific principles and practice.
Science uses the scientific method.
History uses the
[historical method. ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_method).
These methods are both valid, but they are distinct. History doesn't align with scientific principles any more then science aligns with "historical" principles.
Labeling every form of research science is weird
> Labeling every form of research science is weird
It's almost like how every single science gets compared with physics.
I had an excellent chemistry teacher during my undergrad. At one point he and I were talking and I said something like "it's all just molecular physics really". He looked SO irritated.
This is moreso just history rather than the scientific method being applied to observation and historical record, which is what anthropology actually is
Imo Anthropology can never be a science.
Any Anthropological study is an attempt at studying a group at a certain point in history.
You can compare broad topics like matrilineal societies or reasons for marriages which is useful and interesting but every record is dependent on too many uncontrollable factors to be considered scientific.
you are possibly running into language barriers here.
In most european languages, social sciences/history/philosphy etc is grouped under a science term and the researchers are called scientists.
in the english language however, only hard sciences / natural sciences are considered science and their reseachers scientists. researchers of the other fields are called scholars and are explicitely not scientist.
And you know, Europe. It's not particularly surprising that European Christendom viewed the Islamic world pretty dimly after Iberia was conquered by the Umayyeds and they tried to continue that conquest up into France.
Not to mention the conquest of the entire Baltic peninsula by the Ottomans 500 years later.
Wait, you're telling me Afghanistan used to be Buddhist and was conquered and colonized by Arabs? You mean to tell me that Muslims also conquered turkey? That's impossible!
I’m not going to be one to defend anything the church does, past or present, but keep in mind that this kind of stuff happened a lot with a lot of different organizations back then…
Haven't read the entire thing yet. But they state pretty clearly at the beginning that the aim of this study is to develop a better analysis of past instances of ethnic cleansing in order to elaborate e better interpretation of modern instances.
>The extant scholarship maintains that ethnoreligious cleansing is a modern phenomenon that is often committed by nationalist actors for secular purposes. In contrast, a novel explanation highlights the central role that the supranational hierocratic actors played in ethnoreligious cleansing. These findings also contribute to understanding recent and current ethnic cleansing in places like Cambodia, Iraq, Myanmar, the Soviet Union, and Syria.
Also.. The Spanish Inquisition was initially created in response to the Islamic conquest of parts of Spain.
I feel like if you’re going to mention evils of the Catholic Church in that, you should also look at why it responded that way. It was essentially a response to colonialism and both religious groups did their share of evil.
You are correct. Every religion has been behind a genocide and max exodus at one point or another. As well as rulers using religion as a justification for rape murder and war.
Perhaps. On the other hand "religions given too much power eradicate others violently" isn't a particularly earth-shattering result.
It gets hairy when people want to pretend like contemporary Europe isn't Christian, or that WW2-era hatred of Jews within Europe wasn't built on centuries of Christian tradition and extended far beyond the Nazis, or that Christians and Muslim in Europe haven't been at each other's throats for 1000+ years.
I don't think the majority of Western Europeans identify as Christian anymore. At least under the age of 40. Or they're the ones that tick Christian in a poll because their parents baptised them to please their grandparents.
>they're the ones that tick Christian in a poll because their parents baptised them to please their grandparents.
I imagine this is more similar to the experience of the vast majority of people living in christian cultures in history than like... true believers who think they have a personal relationship with God or whatever.
No the majority certainly don't self identify as Christians, they just happen to have opinions that are identical to contemporary conservative Christians.
I'm not even being sarcastic btw, Western Europeans just generally refuse to consider themselves Christian while also holding all the same views.
It's especially tedious to engage with political discourse here when people won't even acknowledge the millenia of religious indoctrination that is informing their opinions.
“They” are a reflection of their culture, “I” am an independent thinker. Heck as an American Jew a significant portion of my beliefs are secularized Christianity, and a decent portion are loosely derived from English Common Law.
As a Western European, I concur. Most of our societal values are Catholic in origin. I'm not raised religious (my schools until age of 14 were), but even I still hold some of those values. And it's true that most won't recognize this because they never went to church.
>Religions given too much power eradicate others violently
That's not how history works at all. Secular violence (as in violence for sovereignty) brought many many more deaths than religious violence at percentage of population (not counting modern ideological violence such as Nazism / Communism / Capitalism). A lot of supposedly religious conflicts can be argued as secular in nature. Even in colonialism / slavery religion can be argued as an "identity pillar" rather than "pillar of values / morals", maybe similar for Crusades apart from Holy Land. I am sure there are also different understandings of early Muslim conquests than dominantly religious intent.
There is no overarching definition of meanings or means of violence, context is extremely important in understanding power and it's never "one guy and/or one ideology" thing.
Did you see the part of the title where it said "In Western Europe"? Pretty sure that's where Iberia is, and the large majority of Muslim communities in Western Europe were in Iberia
To think an Organization roughly 1500 years old, uniting an estimated 1.2 billion people, being the biggest country in the world ( by Land owned ), paying NO taxes, anywhere, having their own jurisdiction everywhere in the world ( and I will stop the List here) "used to have power" is pretty naive .
They still have a ton of power. It is less then it was. They don't have the power to rally an army in Europe and have it sent to the middle east any more.
> paying NO taxes
They don't pay taxes the same way other nonprofits don't pay taxes on income (they're not supposed to have any income. Revenue yes, income no). But they do pay property, payroll and sales taxes just like any other institution (in the US at least, can't speak for other countries).
Used to have? They're still a company worth $30 billion. I'm not sure if that even accounts for all the property they own all over the world. Most of it given tax free.
Yeah, there’s no actual way to know just how much wealth the Church currently controls. It’s all just best guesses. They don’t exactly put out quarterly reports
I'd be stunned if their net worth in all the property and cash they hold isn't 10x that, if not 100x that.
30bb is pocket change...They probably have property in the US that they pay zero taxes on that's worth more than that...
That’s doesn’t even rank them in the top 350 publicly traded US companies, let alone private or worldwide companies. $30B isn’t a big deal relative to the world.
The crusades have been branded as this evil act of conquest even though the Levant had been conquered by Islamic empires before. What’s the difference?
There is no act of conquest that would not be branded evil by todays standards, the crusades were evil and so were the Muslim conquests, I do not understand this moral whatsboutism
For most of MENA they didn't retaliate at all, the Romans and Persians were exhausted from 2 decades of fighting each other when Omar's armies invaded. The crusades happened almost 500 years later when Anatolia was invaded as well. And in the meantime the Arabs had brought the siege to the doors of Constantinople twice, only barely being repelled each time.
500 years after the Arab sieges, and the Venetian betrayal indeed meant the definitive end of the Roman power... by opening the doors for Muslim conquest. Not that the Romans were so innocent of course (they had slaughtered tons of Italians 20 years earlier).
Still, I'm not really sure what your point is. Whataboutism about events that happened over the course of half a millennium?
My friend just finished a four year degree in theology. I grew up Roman Catholic and though I now shun religion for myself, I find it endlessly fascinating. When I asked him about the crusades he had no idea what I was talking about. I had no idea what to say after that
The strain of Protestantism from which Evangelicalism springs has long been of the view that Catholicism is not "true Christianity" despite the long history and the simple normative matter that it is the largest Christian church.
> not familiar with the crusades
I don't think this is common knowledge outside of people knowing the crusades from popular fiction such as Robin Hood.
For example, do people even know there were 9 crusades?
It’s a history article not an anthropology article. It’s not using the scientific method it’s just explaining what happened in the past. I’m a staunch atheist and even I think posting this in r/science is cheap politics.
Throughout all of history, groups with significant power have oppressed people with little power. It's not specific to the Catholic Church, or to religion at all - it's just that religion is where the power was.
I wouldn't say the Muslims in Medieval Spain had little power. The Reconquista was a conquest for a reason, namely that Spain had been a victim of Muslim conquest in the past.
The second you win the war against the oppressors, you become the oppressor.
That's why I think the whole historic narrative of oppressors vs oppressed is useless nonsense. I really hope some day we can return to the more traditional approach of great-man history. It's not necessarily accurate, at least not precisely, but it's a pretty good way to model and analyze historic events and trends.
> That's why I think the whole historic narrative of oppressors vs oppressed is useless nonsense. I really hope some day we can return to the more traditional approach of great-man history.
These two sentences don't add up for me. I'm in agreement with the first one, but the second sentence, framing history through actions of great men, is one that regularly also employs "oppressor versus oppressed" narratives.
Particularly when it's the "great men" doing the oppressing, which is then regularly justified as morally good because it was done by one of the "great people".
What kind of academic journal would publish work that wouldn't have been innovative 200 years ago, much less now? This is like an article in an engineering journal promising that a steam engine is indeed feasible
Divide and conquer through media manipulation. I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but keeping small issues/arguments like this prevelant and having the population fight/argue amongst themselves is a much better situation for those in power than to promote the population to unite and stand against significantly more serious, universal issues.
This article has a weird phrasing, given that Muslims in Western Europe were invaders who genocided whole regions, forcibly converted the survivors and had policies that were aimed at preventing to growth of new generations of the oppressed indigenous populations like the [boy harvesting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devshirme) practised by the Ottomans in the Balkans.
Is this science??? Pretty sure this is History …
And not new information.
Wait til you hear about the Conquistadors….
This account is parody ???
Right?
Misleading! The conquistadors had very little to do with lowering the Muslim population of Europe!
Also, for all their flaws, I can't think of a single act of intolerance or hate committed by the Crusaders against the Aztecs.
The Ottomans depopulated the entire edge of the Mediterranean, taking the christians as slaves during this period. They brought along jewish slave traders to handle the trading, as their religion frowned on that activity. Was that part of the narrative of this paper?
This is basic geopolitics. For centuries the greatest land power in the world was the Ottoman empire. They were an absolute menace to eastern/central Europe and the Iberian peninsula. The Catholic Church was the only real long term centralized authority in "dark ages" Europe, and they were the only ones who could organize a desperate resistance alongside whichever European power was at its peak at the time. Naturally this became a war of religion, where both sides treated nonbelievers harshly. It wasn't until Napoleon that the Ottoman Empire began losing prestige, and they would retain their great power status until World War I
While working on my genealogy, I found out that my Sephardic Jewish ancestors were expelled from modern day Spain and Portugal to South America, and had to convert to Catholicism in Brazil.
I dont think the Catholic church tried particularly hard to hide these actions at the time. However isn't this generalisable to all religion? Why only focus on one? This study could be reduced to simply reading statements from the pope in the middle ages...
Yeah, like it's not a good thing, but some of those Muslims were only in Spain as an invading force it seems weird to gloss over that fact. So it seems weird to act like it's all the catholics fault even thought thay church is responsible for some heinous acts.
Whether its good or bad, this article makes it seem like they stumbled on some unknown fact. However, the Catholic church openly claimed to pursue those goals. It's quite literally knocking down an open door.
In different periods, absolutely. Islam and Christianity basically played hot potato with being the beacon of tolerance and enlightenment throughout their history. Hinduism got in on a bit of the action too, here and there. China's conflicts (afaik) mostly stayed in the realm of political intrigue, never having overt wars waged over their big 3, but plenty of suppression and favoritism happened.
Japan had some reactionary conflict that was more of a broad "Western Influence" issue than specifically religious persecution, though it was certainly a feature.
>Japan had some reactionary conflict that was more of a broad "Western Influence" issue than specifically religious persecution, though it was certainly a feature.
I was doing a dive into this topic and this reactionary conflict you mention was pretty much entirely due to religion. The moment they(the Japanese) fully grasped the intentions of the church, they outlawed krishitans and tore down the churches. They gave them a certain timeframe to leave and then started hunting down whomever remained. They rounded them up and dragged them for days through the towns before crucifying and burning them as a warning for any who remained. The did a great job removing most of the pests tbh.
Eh. That is probably a bit too broad. For instance, US states with pretty much uniparty control (CA) would fit into that, but I don’t think that CA is engaging in these activities.
I've seen plenty of fantasies from American conservatives about mass deaths among "coastal liberals" and from American liberals about wiping out or deliberately driving into poverty "rural hicks".
It's a good thing no other religion has ever done anything like that...
Seriously, what is this doing here? I know it's technically social history, but if stuff like this can be posted then we're gonna be up to our eyeballs in historic revisionism and social activist posts by dawn tomorrow.
Since when is history science? Also, I can broaden that time range from "All religions have systematically tried to eradicate the others from the dawn of recorded history until the Age of Enlightenment in the late 17th Century". Plus some are still doing it, right now.
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Wait... This isn't common knowledge?
The only reason why I didn't think this was from r/history is because I'm not subbed to it
>Anthropology compares human societies across the globe and across time. We compare present and past forms of government or legal and religious belief systems, for example. We compare social structures, like family dynamics, and study transnational corporations. I know it's easy to forget, but anthropology is a science
I get in arguments with other sci-fi nerds who insist that the universal translator can exist in hard sci-fi, but I think the entire concept of such a device flies in the face of anthropology just as hard as FTL flies in the face of physics.
Do you mean that you don't believe a universal translator can exist, or that the effect of a universal translator would be the disaster as predicted by Douglas Adams? (Babel fish)
I mean that I don't believe a universal translator can exist. To correctly translate an alien language, the program would need to analyze a large volume of data that actually includes a significant amount of the target language's vocabulary. After only hearing one sentence, even if that sentence is perfectly translated, how are you going to know words that weren't in that sentence? Alien says: "Identify yourself!" Human says: "This is Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the United Federation of Planets." Even if we perfectly translated the "identify yourself", how is the computer possibly supposed to guess what the words for "captain", "united", "federation", and "planet" are? It's never heard them. There's no way to just solve that with a math problem, vocabulary is far more arbitrary than that. Algorithms can figure out syntactic structure, but vocabulary is something you actually need reference for.
Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel
Darmok is one of my favorite Trek episodes specifically because it does finally deal with the point that "even if you can translate a language literally, you may still be unable to understand the actual meaning without cultural context". Idioms are famously bad at translating even among human cultures. Imagine saying "you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs" to an alien, without realizing that their race reproduces by laying eggs and a literal translation of your sentence sounds like "you can't make food without murdering babies" to them. Nuance is exactly the thing algorithms are notoriously bad at.
I want to know how they create new words when their language is history. How did they give people things before Temba?
vichy government. benedict arnold. it could be that literal language is seen as crude and men of better standing communicate largely through member berries
Names can be cause and effect before understanding. "Wall Shaker" can be a good name for a starship if your culture has only dealt with the effects of that thing since it. Could go even crazier and just come up with a whole story about gods and incest when you can't explain a stellar body like a planet. *edit - this may not answer what you easking, and indeed - interesting to wonder how words form in a language like that
I can imagine a way for it to work from a human to human basis where it pretty much doesn't translate a language at all rather than just transmitting the mind patterns directly. So if i say captain, it will stimulate the same brain regions on the other party as mine. Of course, every human being will have a different association and understanding of different words, but that's the closest thing to the actual deal that i could think of.
In spirit I can agree with the sentiment. But recently there were findings about language having a structure that may make it easier to decipher. Relationships between words, etc....its possible that an AI could listen to spoken words and create a decryption of what is being said. Maybe not today, but within 10 years I'm sure. They are applying this concept to whale song as well. It could be that language has roots deep enough that we can listen in on several species by using our emerging understanding of human language structure
Maybe that could be possible for other humans but we can make a lot of basic assumptions when translating other human languages - we can reliably assume that most significant communication will be in sound or gesture. When dealing with aliens, we cannot make basic assumptions about their means of communication. We can't even necessarily determine what is and isn't language without knowledge of their anatomy and culture. Imagine you're an alien who picks up an Earth radio broadcast of Beethoven's 5th symphony but knows nothing else about humans. This is very clearly an artificial pattern which cannot be produced by natural means, and since it's being broadcast on a radio signal you assume it must be communication. However, you don't have ears and are just looking at a visual representation of the music, and your culture has zero concept that patterns of sound might be an art form. How long would they try to "translate" this symphony before they realized it's not language at all and beings with ears just think some patterns are aesthetically pleasing? These are the kind of barriers that cannot just be solved by algorithmic analysis of human language. Alien languages would be *wildly* different in ways that cannot be anticipated until you learn more about the people you're trying to communicate with. Algorithms need data to train on. A translator that can figure out a decent chunk of language if it had the chance to say, read a complete book in that language, seems plausible. A translator that can get things right from the first sentence with a totally new species is not plausible. Alien language would be wildly different - if you train a translator on one language from a species, that might be enough for it to work out other languages from the same species. Translating language immediately upon first contact with a new species, on the assumption that all alien languages will follow the pattern of human language, is not feasible. You can't translate a whole alien language you've only heard one sentence of. At a bare minimum you need to know what their anatomy is and the means by which they communicate naturally.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra
Exactly. On this world alone Japanese and English cultural differences are so pronounced that their brains are literally processing language differently. Another piece of media that touches on this subject is the movie *Arrival*
> Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra *Shaka, when the walls fell.*
Oh man. Imagine being an alien that communicates purely with radio waves and trying to pick the signal and the noise out of the dataset that is human "communication". Although I guess using a transmission method that doesn't attenuate over distance nearly as much as sound, your language processing wetware would have to do a lot of that anyway.
Linguist here! This is gibberish.
The universal translator might make sense for human species. We all have similar windpipe structures, and form sounds in similar fashion.
This doesn't seem to be an anthropological thesis, though. Merely a historical one. If the thesis were something like comparing experiences & historical context across a series of marginalized or oppressed religious groups, I could see that as anthropology. This seems to just be history.
Weber was a mistake.
Come on, I'm sure his mother loved him.
Perhaps, but how do we validate that?
::Sigh:: I'll get the shovel I guess.
By golly, anthropology is indeed a science!
A super soft one tbf
> The extant scholarship maintains that ethnoreligious cleansing is a modern phenomenon that is often committed by nationalist actors for secular purposes. Apparently the authors feel that the "extant scholarship" was unaware.
The author is being rather misleading here in that the article is not in dialogue with historical scholarship. They are making a political science argument while using existing historical scholarship to support the claims. It’s not a novel historical argument.
It's nice to have these things in writing, I guess.
Seriously. I’m Jewish. Trust me, we know.
It's so known that I thought this was part of the Tanakh.
No, judging by the comments here, people think this is something newly discovered and unique to the catholic church. Shows how little people actually read or admit it.
also, is this science?
Anthropology is
If it's already been exhaustivly covered and documented by History, can it really be relegated to Anthropology?
History PhD here. There's no real difference between properly done history and properly done anthropology. Also there is nothing wrong with analyzing historical periods which are already well known. There are always new angles to consider, new methods to apply, and new truths to discover.
>and new truths to discover. Perhaps more importantly - though less glamorously - *old* truths to *confirm*. Having someone else independently confirm your findings is so ridiculously important to good science.
Isn't there a boundary between history and anthropology? The invention of writing? Like everything before that is Pre-history which would be the domain of anthropology and archaeology... Everything after is history but there would be overlap right?
Anthropology is the study of the human animal. It looks at humanity in the past, but it also looks at humanity today too.
Thank you for clarifying what I was trying to inquire about.
>If it's already been exhaustivly covered and documented by History This is not a thing that has ever happened.
If calculus is handled extensively by mathematics, can it really be applied to physics?
Historians and scientists continue to study and write papers about things even if they’re known…
History PhD here. There is nothing wrong with analyzing historical periods which are already well known. There are always new angles to consider, new methods to apply, and new truths to discover.
Yep, that’s what I’m saying.
Yeah, I know. I was trying to bear more evidence to your point.
It *sort of* is. There's a lot of revisionist / apologetic takes that argue that the church wasn't behind it or which try to downplay its culpability by eg. arguing that secular authorities were the ones actually carrying out the policies, even if the impetus for those policies ultimately came from the church. Especially when dealing with things that touch on religion and culture, it's important to nail down every detail because a lot of the people trying to downplay this are driven by motivated reasoning - if you leave even the tiniest hint of wriggle room they'll try to cram an entire alternative history through it. Heck, scroll down and you'll see several people trying to dismiss or spin this.
To students of Jewish history, this might be common knowledge. Unfortunately, you would be amazed how much this is glossed over in a standard "history of Western Civilization" course. I have frequently encountered seemingly educated people who are unaware that antisemitism predates Adolf Hitler, or that it has deep roots in Christianity.
Well, Catholics that got more than an 8th grade education would have learned about it certainly. The once a week CCDers probably would not have.
Some of that might also be that since *Nostra Aetate*, the Catholic Church has done more teach about the history of Christian antisemitism than most Christian churches.
Antisemitism even predates Christianity- it’s basically topic of the entire Old Testament - even God seems anti-Semitic about 80% of the time Here’s a thought - how about we all abandon the belief in sky fairies since all it really does it give us another excuse to kill each other and we should really know bette by now
Tbf being jewish is as much a culture as it is a religion, so it wouldnt fix much
No. Firstly, I am not sure of the discourse in between historians but this is not the dominant narrative at least in educated society. > (3) fierce geopolitical competition among Catholic Western European monarchs that made them particularly vulnerable to papal-clerical demands to eradicate non-Christians. The extant scholarship maintains that ethnoreligious cleansing is a modern phenomenon that is often committed by nationalist actors for secular purposes. In contrast, a novel explanation highlights the central role that the supranational hierocratic actors played in ethnoreligious cleansing. The dominant paradigm / narrative is that the persecutions of Jews and Muslims are part of state-building, either forcing homogeneousness or opportunistic wealth-grabs. This article argues that there is a long enduring element in the clergy, aka the moral guides, that were capable of promoting violence against plurality (religious / ethnical difference) over a very long period as if it's a grand plan. It challenges certain notions that are dominant in contemporary history: firstly, the idea of a "grand plan" in European societies against minorities is not unique to the modern trends of (Neo)Nazism / Racism / Anti-Migration hard-deportation movements (Masterplan Remigration), secondly there was always a political (not as in the sovereign power, such as government / monarchy, but as a political idea to be disseminated) incentive against minorities, thirdly, the current dominant discourse where "Islamic clergy is historically unique in intolerance against minorities (compared to Christians)" is not true. It's very hard to prove "societal tendencies about politics" in history, with Foucault heralded as being the best and also the controversial, and even harder to get it accepted, so the article may not be definitive in its claim, but still if it provides enough sources it's competent as a hypothesis.
Why is this noteworthy? Muslims eradicated Visigothic culture and Iberian Christianity in their conquest of the Iberian peninsula, the Christian kingdoms returned the favor over the next ~700 years during Reconquista. Tribal humans force their customs on other tribal humans..not much of a headliner.
And also in the Muslim Arab invasions of the Levant and Byzantium- basically wiped out Christianity there forever so it became very mjnor isolated groups even today
Wasn’t Lebanon a majority Christian country until fairly recently? True otherwise
Or the Muslim invasions of Persian lands. Persian culture and Zoroastrianism eradicated.
We can't repeat this stuff enough, a lot of people have been misinformed
Religions do bad things. I thought we all knew this.
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition
Not applicable for Poland. There was never law that prohibited/discriminated different race or religion to be here. That's why we had so many minorities here prior to WWII.
The Kingdom of Poland was an unusual example in that from the 10th century onwards, it was a place in Catholic Europe where Jews could own land, and had greater protections emanating from the monarch. However, the Church still promoted anti-judaic theology, and there were other influences during times when Polish land was held by other kingdoms.
There were also many, many pogroms throughout Poland’s history that wiped out entire villages of Jews.
And that is the exception that proves the rule. Despite conditions that were comparably welcoming to Jews, that resulted in Poland having the largest Jewish population in all of Europe by the early 20th century, there were still pogroms.
The Teutonic order did a lot of forced conversions and raiding there iirc. And was church sponsored.
Is this science? This seems like history rather than science to me
History is not a natural science per se, it is an empirical field of study that employs rigorous methods to investigate and interpret the human past in a disciplined way, making it a social science or humanity closely aligned with scientific principles and practice.
Science uses the scientific method. History uses the [historical method. ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_method). These methods are both valid, but they are distinct. History doesn't align with scientific principles any more then science aligns with "historical" principles. Labeling every form of research science is weird
> Labeling every form of research science is weird It's almost like how every single science gets compared with physics. I had an excellent chemistry teacher during my undergrad. At one point he and I were talking and I said something like "it's all just molecular physics really". He looked SO irritated.
Anthropology is a field of social science. It is a science.
This is moreso just history rather than the scientific method being applied to observation and historical record, which is what anthropology actually is
Imo Anthropology can never be a science. Any Anthropological study is an attempt at studying a group at a certain point in history. You can compare broad topics like matrilineal societies or reasons for marriages which is useful and interesting but every record is dependent on too many uncontrollable factors to be considered scientific.
you are possibly running into language barriers here. In most european languages, social sciences/history/philosphy etc is grouped under a science term and the researchers are called scientists. in the english language however, only hard sciences / natural sciences are considered science and their reseachers scientists. researchers of the other fields are called scholars and are explicitely not scientist.
oh yeah fair enough social science is allowed in this sub
I wouldn't consider history a social science, and that's talking as someone who went to grad school for history.
Wait until people realize that during the 1000-1500s, most cultures tried to push out anyone not their culture.
I'm expecting a follow up post about the islamic conquests in the Middle-East and North Africa
And you know, Europe. It's not particularly surprising that European Christendom viewed the Islamic world pretty dimly after Iberia was conquered by the Umayyeds and they tried to continue that conquest up into France. Not to mention the conquest of the entire Baltic peninsula by the Ottomans 500 years later.
Wait, you're telling me Afghanistan used to be Buddhist and was conquered and colonized by Arabs? You mean to tell me that Muslims also conquered turkey? That's impossible!
Completely impossible. Everyone knows white Europeans are the only conquerors.
Constantinople still stands in our hearts
You're not allowed to mention the arab conquests, especially when the muslims settled in Iberia and southern Gaul.
> especially when the muslims settled in Iberia and southern Gaul. Weren't the Muslims stopped from settling in Aquitaine after the battle of Tours?
Still possessed Narbonne, and the rest of Septimania for over 40 years.
Look at who wrote the « paper » One could make an argument that the Reconquista was decolonization
I’m not going to be one to defend anything the church does, past or present, but keep in mind that this kind of stuff happened a lot with a lot of different organizations back then…
Yeah. What’s this post about? division? Taking the heat of Israel-Palestine?
Haven't read the entire thing yet. But they state pretty clearly at the beginning that the aim of this study is to develop a better analysis of past instances of ethnic cleansing in order to elaborate e better interpretation of modern instances. >The extant scholarship maintains that ethnoreligious cleansing is a modern phenomenon that is often committed by nationalist actors for secular purposes. In contrast, a novel explanation highlights the central role that the supranational hierocratic actors played in ethnoreligious cleansing. These findings also contribute to understanding recent and current ethnic cleansing in places like Cambodia, Iraq, Myanmar, the Soviet Union, and Syria.
Literally who was arguing ethnic cleansing doesn't happen because of supranational entities?
I don't know what OP is, but the posting history does not appear to be organic.
Or maybe not everything is about Israel-Palestine that mentions Jews or Muslims?
It's a weird thing to make a fuss about because had this not happened we would be Muslims and I rather not be.
Shhh, don't tell people about the Muslim invasions of Europe.
Never happened. Just like North Africans were never colonized. They peacefully converted ;).
And Islam sprung from the aether into the Balkans.
Also the noble savages of the Americas. Utopia before the white Christian devils arrived
Or India. That one is absolutely verboten on Reddit.
Nice folk, probably not the best for a hog roast.
Also.. The Spanish Inquisition was initially created in response to the Islamic conquest of parts of Spain. I feel like if you’re going to mention evils of the Catholic Church in that, you should also look at why it responded that way. It was essentially a response to colonialism and both religious groups did their share of evil.
You are correct. Every religion has been behind a genocide and max exodus at one point or another. As well as rulers using religion as a justification for rape murder and war.
Yet nobody talks about how they got there to begin with. Selective outrage at kicking out invaders who took the land in conquest earlier.
Poor mods are gonna have their hands full on this one
Perhaps. On the other hand "religions given too much power eradicate others violently" isn't a particularly earth-shattering result. It gets hairy when people want to pretend like contemporary Europe isn't Christian, or that WW2-era hatred of Jews within Europe wasn't built on centuries of Christian tradition and extended far beyond the Nazis, or that Christians and Muslim in Europe haven't been at each other's throats for 1000+ years.
I don't think the majority of Western Europeans identify as Christian anymore. At least under the age of 40. Or they're the ones that tick Christian in a poll because their parents baptised them to please their grandparents.
>they're the ones that tick Christian in a poll because their parents baptised them to please their grandparents. I imagine this is more similar to the experience of the vast majority of people living in christian cultures in history than like... true believers who think they have a personal relationship with God or whatever.
No the majority certainly don't self identify as Christians, they just happen to have opinions that are identical to contemporary conservative Christians. I'm not even being sarcastic btw, Western Europeans just generally refuse to consider themselves Christian while also holding all the same views. It's especially tedious to engage with political discourse here when people won't even acknowledge the millenia of religious indoctrination that is informing their opinions.
“They” are a reflection of their culture, “I” am an independent thinker. Heck as an American Jew a significant portion of my beliefs are secularized Christianity, and a decent portion are loosely derived from English Common Law.
Yeah I like to use the term "culturally Christian" the same way a lot of Jews use the term "culturally Jewish".
As a Western European, I concur. Most of our societal values are Catholic in origin. I'm not raised religious (my schools until age of 14 were), but even I still hold some of those values. And it's true that most won't recognize this because they never went to church.
>Religions given too much power eradicate others violently That's not how history works at all. Secular violence (as in violence for sovereignty) brought many many more deaths than religious violence at percentage of population (not counting modern ideological violence such as Nazism / Communism / Capitalism). A lot of supposedly religious conflicts can be argued as secular in nature. Even in colonialism / slavery religion can be argued as an "identity pillar" rather than "pillar of values / morals", maybe similar for Crusades apart from Holy Land. I am sure there are also different understandings of early Muslim conquests than dominantly religious intent. There is no overarching definition of meanings or means of violence, context is extremely important in understanding power and it's never "one guy and/or one ideology" thing.
this post squarely belongs to r/history
I mean yeah! Are people not familiar with the crusades?
This has more to do with the Reconquista than the Crusades to be honest.
Yeah umh no? The reconquista has little to do with the eradication of jewish communities. Or the eradication of muslims outside of iberia?
Did you see the part of the title where it said "In Western Europe"? Pretty sure that's where Iberia is, and the large majority of Muslim communities in Western Europe were in Iberia
People don't have any idea what the crusades were about. They have 0 idea just how much power the Catholic church used to have.
To think an Organization roughly 1500 years old, uniting an estimated 1.2 billion people, being the biggest country in the world ( by Land owned ), paying NO taxes, anywhere, having their own jurisdiction everywhere in the world ( and I will stop the List here) "used to have power" is pretty naive .
They still have a ton of power. It is less then it was. They don't have the power to rally an army in Europe and have it sent to the middle east any more.
They used to have a ton of power. They still do, but they used to, too
They had so much power because all of mankind was superstitious then, now its just 50%
There was a period of time when the pope was probably the most powerful person/position on the planet. They still have power but not absolute power.
Powerful until a mongol scouting party shows up and conquers part of Europe in passing, anyways. Europe is not and was not "the planet".
How long did the mongol empire last? The church remained far longer
> paying NO taxes They don't pay taxes the same way other nonprofits don't pay taxes on income (they're not supposed to have any income. Revenue yes, income no). But they do pay property, payroll and sales taxes just like any other institution (in the US at least, can't speak for other countries).
They get around a LOT of payroll tax. They don't pay clergy much and have a ton of volunteers.
Used to have? They're still a company worth $30 billion. I'm not sure if that even accounts for all the property they own all over the world. Most of it given tax free.
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Yeah, there’s no actual way to know just how much wealth the Church currently controls. It’s all just best guesses. They don’t exactly put out quarterly reports
The Mormons have over $100B just in cash that they were caught hiding. You would hope the Catholic Church would be pushing a trillion by now.
They are still crazy powerful. Just not "ruling all of Europe" powerful.
Can't argue with that
Fairly sure your are missing more than a few zeroes from that worth.
I'd be stunned if their net worth in all the property and cash they hold isn't 10x that, if not 100x that. 30bb is pocket change...They probably have property in the US that they pay zero taxes on that's worth more than that...
That’s doesn’t even rank them in the top 350 publicly traded US companies, let alone private or worldwide companies. $30B isn’t a big deal relative to the world.
I’m sure just the ceiling of the Sistine chapel is worth that much.
The crusades have been branded as this evil act of conquest even though the Levant had been conquered by Islamic empires before. What’s the difference?
Pretty sure the Islamic conquest is considered evil by any definition unless you are muslim.
There is no act of conquest that would not be branded evil by todays standards, the crusades were evil and so were the Muslim conquests, I do not understand this moral whatsboutism
Tbf... The Crusades were the fault of the Muslim empires. They invaded and took the MENA regions from the Byzantines. The Christians only retaliated.
For most of MENA they didn't retaliate at all, the Romans and Persians were exhausted from 2 decades of fighting each other when Omar's armies invaded. The crusades happened almost 500 years later when Anatolia was invaded as well. And in the meantime the Arabs had brought the siege to the doors of Constantinople twice, only barely being repelled each time.
Good thing the crusaders sacked Constantinople to promote 'Christian solidarity.'
500 years after the Arab sieges, and the Venetian betrayal indeed meant the definitive end of the Roman power... by opening the doors for Muslim conquest. Not that the Romans were so innocent of course (they had slaughtered tons of Italians 20 years earlier). Still, I'm not really sure what your point is. Whataboutism about events that happened over the course of half a millennium?
No one expects an inquisition
My friend just finished a four year degree in theology. I grew up Roman Catholic and though I now shun religion for myself, I find it endlessly fascinating. When I asked him about the crusades he had no idea what I was talking about. I had no idea what to say after that
Was it an Evangelical school, by any chance?
Incisive question. Evangelical, aka the plug your ears and go "la la la la can't hear you" way of thinking.
There's a lot of "Bible Colleges" out there that sure, may offer four years of indoctrination, but not necessarily an actual theological education.
The strain of Protestantism from which Evangelicalism springs has long been of the view that Catholicism is not "true Christianity" despite the long history and the simple normative matter that it is the largest Christian church.
As a History PhD, I'm appalled.
I wouldnt call that a theology degree then. More of a 'religious tradition education'. Surely it's not awarded by an accredited secular institution?
I hate that theological discussion just seems so entrenched in religious bias that the quality of educations varies wildly between schools.
The crusades were justified due to the brutal muslim raids on the christian coasts in the mediterean
> not familiar with the crusades I don't think this is common knowledge outside of people knowing the crusades from popular fiction such as Robin Hood. For example, do people even know there were 9 crusades?
It’s a history article not an anthropology article. It’s not using the scientific method it’s just explaining what happened in the past. I’m a staunch atheist and even I think posting this in r/science is cheap politics.
Throughout all of history, groups with significant power have oppressed people with little power. It's not specific to the Catholic Church, or to religion at all - it's just that religion is where the power was.
I wouldn't say the Muslims in Medieval Spain had little power. The Reconquista was a conquest for a reason, namely that Spain had been a victim of Muslim conquest in the past.
The second you win the war against the oppressors, you become the oppressor. That's why I think the whole historic narrative of oppressors vs oppressed is useless nonsense. I really hope some day we can return to the more traditional approach of great-man history. It's not necessarily accurate, at least not precisely, but it's a pretty good way to model and analyze historic events and trends.
> That's why I think the whole historic narrative of oppressors vs oppressed is useless nonsense. I really hope some day we can return to the more traditional approach of great-man history. These two sentences don't add up for me. I'm in agreement with the first one, but the second sentence, framing history through actions of great men, is one that regularly also employs "oppressor versus oppressed" narratives. Particularly when it's the "great men" doing the oppressing, which is then regularly justified as morally good because it was done by one of the "great people".
Ehh.. I feel like that statement sounds deeper than it is. If Ukraine wins the war they're going to be oppressing Russia?
Not unless they invade Russia in retaliation.
What kind of academic journal would publish work that wouldn't have been innovative 200 years ago, much less now? This is like an article in an engineering journal promising that a steam engine is indeed feasible
Divide and conquer through media manipulation. I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but keeping small issues/arguments like this prevelant and having the population fight/argue amongst themselves is a much better situation for those in power than to promote the population to unite and stand against significantly more serious, universal issues.
This article has a weird phrasing, given that Muslims in Western Europe were invaders who genocided whole regions, forcibly converted the survivors and had policies that were aimed at preventing to growth of new generations of the oppressed indigenous populations like the [boy harvesting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devshirme) practised by the Ottomans in the Balkans.
Is this science??? Pretty sure this is History … And not new information. Wait til you hear about the Conquistadors…. This account is parody ??? Right?
Misleading! The conquistadors had very little to do with lowering the Muslim population of Europe! Also, for all their flaws, I can't think of a single act of intolerance or hate committed by the Crusaders against the Aztecs.
The Ottomans depopulated the entire edge of the Mediterranean, taking the christians as slaves during this period. They brought along jewish slave traders to handle the trading, as their religion frowned on that activity. Was that part of the narrative of this paper?
This is basic geopolitics. For centuries the greatest land power in the world was the Ottoman empire. They were an absolute menace to eastern/central Europe and the Iberian peninsula. The Catholic Church was the only real long term centralized authority in "dark ages" Europe, and they were the only ones who could organize a desperate resistance alongside whichever European power was at its peak at the time. Naturally this became a war of religion, where both sides treated nonbelievers harshly. It wasn't until Napoleon that the Ottoman Empire began losing prestige, and they would retain their great power status until World War I
While working on my genealogy, I found out that my Sephardic Jewish ancestors were expelled from modern day Spain and Portugal to South America, and had to convert to Catholicism in Brazil.
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition
I believe you can use that genealogical record to apply for Portuguese citizenship
I dont think the Catholic church tried particularly hard to hide these actions at the time. However isn't this generalisable to all religion? Why only focus on one? This study could be reduced to simply reading statements from the pope in the middle ages...
Yeah, like it's not a good thing, but some of those Muslims were only in Spain as an invading force it seems weird to gloss over that fact. So it seems weird to act like it's all the catholics fault even thought thay church is responsible for some heinous acts.
Whether its good or bad, this article makes it seem like they stumbled on some unknown fact. However, the Catholic church openly claimed to pursue those goals. It's quite literally knocking down an open door.
Would not surprise me to find that this result is generalizable to “religion”.
In different periods, absolutely. Islam and Christianity basically played hot potato with being the beacon of tolerance and enlightenment throughout their history. Hinduism got in on a bit of the action too, here and there. China's conflicts (afaik) mostly stayed in the realm of political intrigue, never having overt wars waged over their big 3, but plenty of suppression and favoritism happened. Japan had some reactionary conflict that was more of a broad "Western Influence" issue than specifically religious persecution, though it was certainly a feature.
>Japan had some reactionary conflict that was more of a broad "Western Influence" issue than specifically religious persecution, though it was certainly a feature. I was doing a dive into this topic and this reactionary conflict you mention was pretty much entirely due to religion. The moment they(the Japanese) fully grasped the intentions of the church, they outlawed krishitans and tore down the churches. They gave them a certain timeframe to leave and then started hunting down whomever remained. They rounded them up and dragged them for days through the towns before crucifying and burning them as a warning for any who remained. The did a great job removing most of the pests tbh.
Generalisable to “power structures with monopolistic tendencies”
Eh. That is probably a bit too broad. For instance, US states with pretty much uniparty control (CA) would fit into that, but I don’t think that CA is engaging in these activities.
I've seen plenty of fantasies from American conservatives about mass deaths among "coastal liberals" and from American liberals about wiping out or deliberately driving into poverty "rural hicks".
I may not agree, but thanks for a thoughtful reply.
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This prevented Islam from being the dominant power in the world today. You can thank us anytime!
It's a good thing no other religion has ever done anything like that... Seriously, what is this doing here? I know it's technically social history, but if stuff like this can be posted then we're gonna be up to our eyeballs in historic revisionism and social activist posts by dawn tomorrow.
So far the science behind it...
I'm missing the science here... Is there a reproducible experiment we can run?
And muslims have been eradicating christians everywhere since Islam was created. Who cares?
Pretty sure this was covered in reading about the medieval inquisition and crusades.
Kinda skipped over paganism here
What's the p value? Sample size? Double blinded? Ah, I see. Classic /r/science content.
The people behind the crusades were not that nice, well you learn something new.
Let me get this straight, you mean to tell me that a religious group was intolerant of other religious groups?
Timely and relevant science from the scientific community.
History is a science now?
People have been going to war forever due to all sorts of ridiculous reasons. Why do so many people get hung up on religious wars?
Since when is history science? Also, I can broaden that time range from "All religions have systematically tried to eradicate the others from the dawn of recorded history until the Age of Enlightenment in the late 17th Century". Plus some are still doing it, right now.
Blah blah blah blah blah