Quote:
Originally Posted by Brutha  What do you mean with bloody.
If we take for example the conquest of the holy land by Jews in the old testament (and I think that other groups were as violent as them), where God is said to have commanded them to slay all men and all woman who have sleept with a man.
That genocide, very bloody genocide.
We just have very good reporting about the victims of the twenty century and not so good reporting on the blood that flow in the centuries before.
The evidence we do have points in another direction. Archologist Lawrence H. Keeley for example found that in prehistory tribes a lot more people died through the use of weapons than today. http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html makes the case in a bit more detail.
The point is that there are also a lot of other sources for empaty, as seen in the level of empaty of non christian nations like Japan. |
I really doubt that more people died from weapons in any previous century than they did during WWI and II combined in the 20th. That's what I mean by "bloody", sheer human induced carnage, death, and genocide against other humans. Of course that's gone on forever, but nothing on the same scale all at once in such a short time period that I can think of, or would think possible.
As an interesting side question to this, at what point in history did the standard practice of "take enemy city, butcher the men and infants, rape and keep the better looking women, enslave or kill the less attractive ones, and steal everything not bolted down, and burn all that you feel like" suddenly become "bad"? WWII?
The Hebrews as depicted in the Old Testament were as murderous and nasty as the Huns- ironic that so many people today revere them thanks to religious indoctrination while claiming that god to be "Pro Life".