Please don’t put Jesus and cultural relativism in the same post
You probably don’t realize but your attempt to equate us with them mixed with Christian betterment of culture demonstrates how weak we are culturally
Newsflash for you respectfully submitted
We are better than the Mayans
They were superstitious savage Maniacs who built stacked blocks to worship elemental Gods and butcher their own people upon
Whoop tee do
No written phonetic language
No wheel
And so forth
To compare that with Egypt or Athens or Rome is absurd. And wishful thinking fomented by those who ...like I said earlier...want to diminish western culture as nothing more than a long history of social injustice
Now if you wish to compare the Mayan to say other Indian tribes that really went nowhere or to Bantu culture
Then have at it
This time last year I flew down to port canaveral for a cruise to the western caribbean. Across the bay is cape canaveral. A few days before we set sail. Elon Musk’s SpaceX took off
and landed on a barge in the atlantic. That was something that no aerospace company had been able to do in 50 years. It promises to slash the cost of space travel dramatically—because most of the
cost of going into space consists of the cost of getting the first 200 miles of the planet’s surface.
From port canaveral we sailed across the caribbean to cancun. I took a tour of an old mayan city called tulum. Tulum had its astronomers too. This city was a walled enclosure
with an entrance so tiny that
we were forced walked through single file. Inside were two square towers aligned east west. each tower had a square hole in the middle that sunlight would come
through perfectly at the summer and winter soltice. this marked the time for planting. The central americans are so deeply attached to the
rising sun that their graves to this day all face due east.
The ability to reveal the summer and winter solstice gave the priest class and aristocracy of the old mayas so much power they were supported in everything by the farmers outside the walls.
Sometimes things did not go well. The rains didn’t come for a season or two.
In such instances the aristocracy of maya thought it an honor to give themselves up for sacrifice. Their hearts were cut out and offered to their gods to bring back the rains. The rains returned.
The system went on for about 600 years from about 200 AD to 800 AD.
Then something happened.
About 800 AD the climate changed. this is the beginning of what has come to be known as the medieval warming period. It went on for about 500 years from 800-1300.. In the north the weather
got warmer.
The viking population exploded. They outstripped the ability of their lands to produce food for themselves so they sailed south to raid, and
to establish new colonies in england ireland france and russia. They sent outposts to Iceland and what was then Greenland. Their most adventurous explorers even traced
the outlines of north america.
In central america the rain stopped. Naturally the nobility and priest classes offered themselves up for sacrifice. But the rains didn’t return as usual. So they kept on sacrificing themselves.
As the decades wore on and the rains still didn’t fall—sections of the
leadership of mayan cities all over central america were sacrificed—including their children. They were so weakened that in 880 AD the Toltecs from central mexico invaded the Yucatan.
they had a different
sacrificial procedure.
They would raid neighboring cities in order to take prisoners
from the warriors and elites and sacrifice them. (The Aztecs learned their sacrificial practices from the toltecs.) The toltec practice spread all over the mayan cities of central america.
In an orgy of wars
over the next century the mayans succeeded in killing off all the people in their cities. Leaving only farmers outside the walls to dig out a living. Still the rains didn’t come Mel gibson’s movie Apocolypto gives a good
visual of that time—except that Gibson shows a spanish ship in the end his movie. The problem was that the spanish arrived in central america about 1519 or 500 years after the Mayans
killed themselves and emptied
their cities. 200 years before the spanish arrived — the medieval warm ended in Europe, rains returned to central america and jungles grew over the old empty mayan cities.
(hat tip to sunkenciv for getting me thinking along these lines.)
How could the mayans be so dumb. How could they not know there was no amount of sacrifice would bring the rains? They were just pouring their blood away.
In 1967 a book called the Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich was published. It rocked the academic world. In the 1971 roe v wade was was passed. In 1973, the Club of Rome published The Limits of Growth which postulated that technology would grow linearly whereas population would grow exponentially. That the only solution to population explosion was to curb population growth. They made the same point as Malthus did in his book published in 1798. In 1798 Malthus was ignored. In 1973, the club of rome became gospel. Unlike the Mayans who were faced with actual starvation. The west was faced with the possibility of potential starvation in the distant future. Population growth for american and europe was curbed. something like 55 million babies have been aborted in the USA since roe v wade. they have all been replaced by foreign legal and illegal immigration. Technology has continued to improve exponentially.
Israel has performed a feat of literally biblical proportions. faced with a drought since 2000 they have created a desalination system that moves water at the world’s cheapest price for desalinated water—to their cities and then cleans the water again to brown water standards—and moves the water to their farms and fields.
Israel has freed themselves from the ancient drought cycle which has gripped the middle east for thousands of years going into prehistory.
The same drought destroyed Syria’s farmers and sent them to Syria’s cities where they were tinder for the collapse of that country and the refugee migrations to Europe.
why was malthus ignored and the club of rome’s tome become gospel? Because the western civilization of malthus was christian. the western civilization of the club of rome 200 years later had turned pagan.
I don’t want to get into a huge thing about this, but Central American culture was living in cities of a million people while Rome was a group of huts on a hill.
One doesn’t grow cities like that being stupid savages. It’s all relative to their times. Empires come and go. I guess people always think of “their” times as the best. Being able to look at one without shitting on the other is a skill that many people haven’t developed.