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Re: poptarts with a twist of lennon
Peter wrote:
> I would place economics over religion
I was thinking of writing something along these lines, but ya beat me to it.
:-) Of course, for most of the world's history (and perhaps even now), these
two forces could not be disentwined. Those who had the more powerful god would
be more prosperous. That land was promised to us by our God. Whether the
economic desire for land drove the religious motivation or vice versa would, I
suspect, depend strongly on the eye of the beholder.
> Before the advent of such religions, my hunch is that nations were more
> interested in *dominating* other nations than they were in *converting* them
> to their own faiths.
It's more complicated than that. Polytheism was often tied to places, and then
of course there was the "divine right of kings". So when one culture
"dominated" another, one way in which they dominated was to force the people to
worship *their* gods rather than the old ones. The Babylonians destroyed the
Jerusalem temple, where many Hebrews believed Yahweh dwelled, and hauled the
intellectual elite off to Babylon, where they figured the exiles would
assimilate and give up on their old beliefs, without access to the old holy
places. As you can see in the Psalms, this was not an easy transition: "How
can we sing the Lord's song in a foreign land?". They came up with the radical
idea that their god was still accessible to them in Babylon, and more than
that, he wasn't tied to any particular place at *all*! Radical innovation.
The Seleucid greeks tried to declare Judaism a capital crime, leading to the
Maccabean revolt. The Romans tried at first to leave Judaism alone, as long as
the conquered Jews acknowledged Rome's gods as more powerful, which all the
other roman satellite states were willing to do. The Jews were not willing to
make even that concession.
I'm focussing on Judaism because that's the history I know best, but I think
you'll find it's universal, long before Christianity came on the scene, for a
conquered culture to take on the religion of their conquerors, willingly or no.
As with economics, I think it would be very hard to say whether the religion
was enforced simply in order to make the conquest more complete, or whether
they really believed their religion was better and should be foisted on their
conquests.
Must sleep now...
--
Don Smith Robotic Optical Transient Search Experiment
donaldas at umich_edu http://xte.mit.edu/~dasmith/
"Poppa... The more you talk, the more I don't hit the ball!" - Maddy Hordinski
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