Posted on 10/09/2008 8:19:10 AM PDT by BGHater
I spent a week in Killarny once and for most of it my wife and I wondered around the ring of fire. There was the Muckross house and Killarny is beautiful but it compares to just the land around it. Ireland is a grand country.
“No one is paving over any artifacts.”
No, according to the article, they’ve been dug up and destroyed. They haven’t got around to paving them over, yet.
I’m of extremely mixed European ancestry, and I don’t see a problem with respecting antiquities, AND Christianity.
Maybe we could all agree that we disagree about what should be done over there, and that it’s interesting to know that they’re having some of the same problems we have, and have had, and probably will have again, over here.
Among other things, I’m certain that quite a few of the Irish kings were bandits and sheep thieves, but there were probably quite a few heroes, as well. Humans are like that.
Agreed. Spent a week in May of 2005 and had a marvelous time. Saw the glow of green from the aircraft windows as we landed in Dublin and enjoyed every moment thereafter. It’s the only other place I’ve thought I could live other than home.
Pre-Christian Ireland was neither Greece nor Rome. It was a sparsely populated backwater with a very rudimentary culture that could not even be favorably compared to that of the Gauls.
I mean the Ogham alphabet and such — just a bunch of lines - it didn’t mean ANYTHING!
There is little evidence that Ogham script existed before the evangelization of Ireland. Many archaeologists are of the opinion that Ogham was created by Christian missionaries as an evangelization tool.
Many of the oldest known ogham inscriptions explictly incorporate Christian symbolism or phraseology.
They were all just super-bored in between battles and all...
If the pre-Christian Irish did much more than fight each other or the elements each day for their hand-to-mouth existence, not much evidence of their expansive and refined leisure activities have come down to us.
And, you know, the medicines and such that those illiterate druids discovered, well of course NONE of them actually WORKED or anything, it’s not like any of their wisdom was EVER passed down to those glorious Catholic monks
The popular myth that the druids were a caste of wise healers in communion with nature is simply myth. All we know about them is that they were a caste of ancient Celtic society that performed fertility rituals and who had a reputation of being able to work magic.
No druidic medical tradition is known, and no concept of druids being anything other than a leisured caste associated with the nobility is known.
because they didn’t NEED any wisdom besides what Rome and the Bible gave them!
The monks, unlike the druids, actually worked for a living - doing the hard manual labor that the common people did. They also, unlike the druids, could read and keep records. Likely their most popular feature was their non-adoption of the druidic practice of requiring the common people to hand over expensive livestock for ritual slaughter.
And those magnificent swords and such — they were really just wood with shiny paint! And that jewelry they made - mere trinkets worth NOTHING!
Pre-Christian Irish weaponry was unimpressive. Mostly short bronze swords of middling quality - nothing magnificent about them. The pre-Christian Irish did make some very pretty jewelry out of gold, silver and semi-precious stones. But attractive bracelets and necklaces are not much of a peg to hang a culture on.
People don’t need to learn anything from history - much less be able to see it with their own eyes! After all we have BOOKS now! It’s much better to destroy numerous archaeological sites with backhoes! Don’t ya know???
Far from being destroyed with backhoes, these archaeological sites were carefully excavated and their contents preserved.
You should be totally ashamed of yourself. SERIOUSLY. And I say that as a devoted Christian,
A good rule of thumb to follow is this: if someone describes himself as a devoted Christian, he's probably not as devoted as he imagines himself to be.
who just happens to be an ex-Catholic, and was raised to respect my ancestors who came over from Ireland
Rejecting the faith that many of those ancestors chose death to preserve isn't really showing them a whole lot of respect.
The thousands whom Cromwell slaughtered weren't killed because they liked shiny necklaces or practiced imaginary folk medicine. They were killed because they went to Mass.
May your future progeny wipe your memory from existence, just as you wish to wipe away your past and everything that went before you, and made you who you are today.
It doesn't really matter if I am remembered or not.
If I am remembered I would hope it would not be as part of some fake mythology invented about me - like the pre-Christian Irish are remembered today.
Their sacrifices obviously mean nothing to you - so why should yours mean anything to anyone else in the future?
The only sacrifices pre-Christian Irish kings and druids made were sacrifices of other people's livestock that they confiscated.
The true Irish sacrifice was the centuries of abuse and ignominy the Irish suffered for refusing to relinquish the true Catholic faith that was handed down to them from the apostles.
Tens of thousands of Irishmen have lost their lives and fortunes because they refused to bend their knees and renounce the faith that you have thrown away.
Your devotion to druidic medical lore does them no honor at all. It is an invented legacy created in the nineteenth century by neopagans and has no relationship to any Ireland that ever really existed.
The article says no such thing. The sites have been excavated and the antiquities preserved.
I’m certain that quite a few of the Irish kings were bandits and sheep thieves, but there were probably quite a few heroes, as well.
Pre-Christian Irish royalty were basically chiefs of clans. They were "kings" of realms consisting of a few hundred to a few thousand subjects and a few dozen to a few hundred square miles.
In the moral world they inhabited their job was to increase the wealth, size and status of their clan.
This ethos required them to sometimes die in battle - to die so that the clan might live.
> Paganism is over. It never did the Irish any good.
>
> Go to Mass and shut your mouth, Slavin.
You, sire, sound not too different to the Taliban. I bet they talked something like that just before they blew up the Buddha statues: nothing good ever happened before Mohammed, ay.
I find pre-Christian New Zealand history fascinating. Can’t see why pre-Christian Ireland would be any less fanscinating.
You’re sick. Really, really sick.
In other words, you have zero arguments for your untenable and uninformed position.
Hint: calling your interlocutor "sick" or a "damn idiot" isn't reasoning.
What a load of crap.
Get a job.
Ah, the
reductio ad Bin Ladenem fallacy.
Not too impressive.
I find pre-Christian New Zealand history fascinating. Can’t see why pre-Christian Ireland would be any less fanscinating.
Pre-Christian New Zealand basically existed until 1840. As a result enormous amounts of data about pre-Christian Maori culture have been catalogued and documented by the Christian ethnographers of the nineteenth century who carefully observed and recorded Maori life.
There are Maori alive today whose grandparents lived in an essentially pre-Christian society.
As such we have an excellent grasp of Maori language, music, artwork and social structure. There is plenty to study and interpret. There is the additional factor that Maori culture is so alien to European sensibilities in so many ways that it is all the more interesting and arresting.
Pre-Christian Ireland, unlike pre-Christian New Zealand, is not well documented.
As a result, many people have invented a fictional pre-Christian Ireland that never existed and imported all kinds of modern concepts - like environmentalism, naturopathy, chivalric romance, ethnonationalism - that have no rational foundation in what we have been able to actually reconstruct of pre-Christian Ireland.
There is the added issue of Ireland being a peripheral border region of a much larger Celtic culture centered in northern France, southern England and the Low Countries. What was "indigenous Irish culture" and what was borrowed and adopted from the much wealthier and more populous Celtic centers of the continent? No one can really say.
The Maori were more or less isolated from other Polynesian cultures for a thousand years - 1300 miles from Australia and 1000 miles from New Caledonia by sea - and became extremely distinctive. Scotland is visible from Ireland and Brittany was a day's journey by sea.
> reductio ad Bin Ladenem fallacy.
Last I checked, Bin Laden wasn’t a Taliban... but let’s for the moment pretend that he is. How is your reasoning any different to what muslims did to the two statues of Buddha?
> The Maori were more or less isolated from other Polynesian cultures for a thousand years - 1300 miles from Australia and 1000 miles from New Caledonia by sea - and became extremely distinctive.
The Maori in Tahiti speak essentially the same language as the Maori in New Zealand. Indeed, the local chief to were I live is also a chief in Tahiti, and has distant relatives in Hawaii.
Plain fact is the Maori drove around in their dugout war canoes and navigated the Pacific with the same ease as we drive along interstate highways. As did other Polynesians.
We are only just now learning the extent of their capabilities to read ocean currents and perform stellar navigation. These are arts that have almost become lost in a very short time — just over 150 years.
> What was “indigenous Irish culture” and what was borrowed and adopted from the much wealthier and more populous Celtic centers of the continent? No one can really say.
It won’t be any easier to find out if they mow their archaeological sites under and pave them over with asphalt, will it?
This is from the article. Sure looks to me like "dug up and destroyed."
The "damage" they are talking about is their objection to these artifacts being moved to museums and research facilities (i.e. "vanished") rather than kept under glass exactly where they were found.
My wife lived there for 2 years and we have friends that live in Rush (just north of Dublin). I told her that if Obama starts to turn America into a socialist dictatorship we will just move there. They are pretty liberal there, but at least they are honest about it.
And the reason they feel that way is because, with the technology of today, we can learn much more from an undisturbed site than was possible as recently as a decade ago. Modern archaeologists dig only part of a site these days, saving much of it for new technology of the future to extract more information from. I understand where they are coming from, and agree with them. The sites are destroyed.
Further more, it wouldn't have disturbed things that much to go around at least a few of the discoveries. The wooden “Stonehenge” for example.
Irish lore and mythology still play a critical role in our society, government and economy. Just last week, the U.S. congress passed a bill that is largely contingent on finding a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.
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