M. Demetrius

Merry Christmas, all.

I want the Roma Victrix Beaker @UNRV http://bit.ly/romavictrix

Cohort V, a Central Texas Living History group of Romans will host the second annual Old Fort Parker camp Jan 27-30. Friday for setup, Saturday competition, Sunday awards and fellowship, discussion of how things went, suggestions for next year, etc. RAT topic here: http://www.romanarmytalk.com/rat.html?func=view&catid=23&id=299474#299982 Find out more about the fort: oldfortparker.org Nice restrooms and showers, running water adjacent to camp site. Camp info below: INTENTE! Cohort V proudly announces the Second Annual Old Fort Parker Encampment. January 28-29, AD2012, at Old Fort Parker, near Mexia TX. Campers may arrive any time on Friday the 27th to set up camp and get ready for the activities. The public will have access to the camp from 10 to 5, both days. Be prepared to explain gear and answer questions. Some table top displays may be on hand, also. Modern camping area and "period" tent camping area available. This year's theme is "Preparing for the Siege". Saturday, the events will be broken into two parts, morning training and afternoon skills tests. Prizes awarded to winners. Mess hall food available, or you can bring your own. If the burn ban is lifted by then, we may be allowed to cook in fireboxes raised off the ground. One unit standard per unit is welcomed. We will have an Honor Row to display them at the HQ tent. Bring your own means of standing it in the ground. Events include: raising the siege tower, building a bridge, javelin throwing, marching drill, flint and steel firemaking, flat bread baking, storming the gates and more. All members of this group and their guests are welcome to join in and attend. Men, women, and children welcome. Unruly children will be sold as slaves to the Fort. Sorry, no pets. From dawn Saturday until camp ends on Sunday, Roman period clothing is required, 1st C AD preferred, but any Roman era will be accepted. Some loaner gear may be available with advance notice. Non-Roman reenactors will serve as Roman auxilia. All non-period objects (ice chests, propane stoves, flashlights, etc.) are to be kept out of sight. Registration is mandatory. No walk-ons. Deadline for registration is Jan 15 for mess hall, Jan 22 for camp only. Write cohort.five@yahoo.com for general information, and gverret@gmail.com for registration packet. Camp only $10 per person. Camp and mess hall $20 per person. A donation will be made to the Fort from registration fees collected. Online registration: docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?for...NZaHJvWkV5cFlmc1E6MQ Pay registration via PayPal by sending funds to cohort.five@yahoo.com You'll kick yourself later if you miss this camp. BE THERE or BE QUADRA!

But the the whole affair is contrived. Its fiction. It was designed to take the story of Jesus (whom Paul never met) and embellish it to the point where his divinity was made clear. The problem with Jesus is that the closer you look at his story the less you find. He was certainly a real person, he certainly did preach to the masses, and he certainly did disappear in a hurry. But notice how contrived the accounts are. On the one hand Jesus arrives in Jerusalem to cheering crowds, a sell-out success story. Within a short time, those same people condemned him to death. Why? The bible explains it all away by saying that Jesus martyred himself for our sins, but since when did God need an act of this sort? According to the Old Testament, if God thought mankind was sinning excessively he did something about it. The various miracles supposedly performed by jesus are unlikely to say the least, and there's no supporting evidence that they ever took place. In fact, had Jesus performed such miracles, he would more likely have been parceled up and sent to Rome for an interview with the emperor. No, these stories are either exaggerations of real events or simply made up for the purpose. There's no guarantee these miracles were present in Pauls original draft, or perhaps his version was even more outlandish. We don't know. Paul took two years out to create this mythology and it must be said, despite poor sales at the beginning its been a best seller ever since. What Paul wanted was a career in preaching religion which effectively makes him no different to those bible bashers who fill auditoriums and get interviewed on prime time tv. It was about money. It was his nine to five. As NN correctly states, the original works (not only those by Paul, there were others trying the same thing) were censored. Constantine, painfully aware how damaged his empire was by a civil war that brought him to power, shamelessly used religion to a unifying factor. Arguably he made a good choice. Roman religion was too loose and disorganised for that purpose, but christianity had a hierarchy and loyal worshippers seeking absolution for their sins. However, christianity at that time was not a single movement. It was a ployglot of individual churches saying similar things but with their own twist. What Constanitine insisted on was that the church leaders got together and sorted out exactly what christianity was. Even though he wasn't a christian, Constantine saw the value of this religion in holding his empire together. Christians of course would quote this as evidence of superior belief, but that simply isn't the case. This was an example of political expedience. Sigh. It wasn't two years, it was seven, as Acts clearly says. The people who condemned Jesus weren't the masses, they were the lawyers and priests, but you know, there's no point in going over this same information with you again. Believe what you want, sir, but if you are wrong in the end, you are in a whole lot of eternal trouble...and the worst of it is you deliberately alienate the very people who could give you the answer you will need in that day. If you investigated the Gospels more carefully, you'd see that Jesus' divinity is clearly explained from four different vantage points, confirming prophecies from centuries before: from a Jewish prophetical viewpoint, from a medical doctor's views, from a spiritual man, from a Gentile tax collector. It's pointless to keep saying things like "It's fiction", when it appears not to be so to over two billion people worldwide. Nuff said, I'm done. I guess I misunderstood: thinking this was more about Roman history than antiChristian dogma. Moderator/owner, you may close or delete my account if you wish, because I'm tired of having to listen to the constant pagan and other anti-Christian diatribes. Fare well, all, and remember, if I'm wrong, then I've lived a life under some self-restraints in an effort to live more like I believe God wants: If I'm wrong, well, see above. May the Lord God bless you all with a true knowledge of His will for your lives.

I still maintain that they'd frequently get nicknames for colloquial use. Not all soldiers even today are called by their names, and our naming is different, of course. Imagine a contubernium with 8 men all praenamed "Marcus" (entirely possible). Some would be named by events, "Thunder" was one name given by J. Caesar to a soldier, e.g. Some by deed, "Gaul gutter"..."Line breaker"..."Ox", whatever would be easy for the nearby soldiers to remember, based on some common event or attribute. Or they could be called "Marcus the Calabrian", etc. Nicknames existed, and many are recorded for Romans. Often not complimentary when written of opponents on the Senate floor.... Today, in the military, last names are frequently used, but if there are three "Smiths" in a group, one may be called "Smitty", another "Lefty" and the third, just "Smith". I think that would have been the same back then, since their naming system was much more limited.

Additionally, if she heard Paul (Saul) of Tarsus speak directly (provided he existed in the commonly understood sense), then (in my opinion) the story we are familiar with now would've been considerably different. It would've been far more ideological and transcendental than the physical Jesus story we are so familiar with today. I'm not sure how you arrive at that, Pilus. What Paul writes in Romans, Ephesians, Philemon, Corinthians, etc., is pretty down to earth. He speaks clearly of the physical death, actual burial and amazing resurrection of Jesus Christ--not making it sound ideological or mythical at all. He gives sound advice concerning marriage, divorce, foods sacrificed to idols, obedience to God, et al., all of which are foundational to Biblical Christianity. I think he wrote about 2/3 of the New Testament, also known as the Greek portion of the Bible.

The Book of Acts says that Paul was under house arrest, but he evidently could receive visitors, as he requests things from different people (his cloak in one instance--winter must have been on the way). Imagine being the Roman soldier who was charged with guarding him, having to listen to his discussions, and so forth. In some cases depending on how serious a threat the prisoner was, a soldier would be chained to him to prevent his escaping.

Yes, he did. And finally, his century rebelled, and drowned him in the river. I had the book just the other day that had his name in it, and the episode, but can't see it right now. (*gotta clean this place one of these days...no telling what's lurking in here*)

The trouble with them is they're not made for contact drill. The tang is welded to the blade, right behind the brass at the guard. The originals were made from a single piece of metal. It's more work for the factory to do it the "old way", so they don't. Most of the reenactors use a special variety of gladius if they're going to contact mock combat. They typically have a large, blunt point, so nobody gets pierced.

Right all the way. I'm reading Polybius' The Rise of the Roman Empire, and he's making that point clear. Add in the difficulty of not being able to get fresh supplies or troops from the homeland, and Hannibal's position is increasingly less tenable each day that goes by, each soldier he loses in battle or to normal attrition. Plus, he was fighting to fulfill his blood oath to hate the Romans, while they were fighting for their very existance, and they knew it.

Maybe, but we are discussing evolution - not the origin of life itself. Life developing and changing due to environmental factors is a proven fact, and it does NOT rule out the existance of a god. Why should it? That species become extinct is not arguable. I've never seen a velociraptor, nor would I want to. Today, species become extinct when they cannot adapt to changes in the environment, or over predation brought on by a large number of causes. No more jackrabbits in Wyoming, so the wolves and coyotes are now attacking a larger number of calves and lambs. This will provoke the ranchers to deplete the predators, which will cause... In Texas, we have a South American species of fire ant, that was introduced sometime early in the last century on the East coast, and has spread westward. They eat the hatchlings of ground nesting birds, like quail. There are very few quail. This decreases the rattlesnake population. These ants are also driving out the native ants, as they enter their mounds and eat their young. Several species are on the verge of extinction, including the famous Texas Horned Lizard. Natural selection is a fact of nature. Variations within a species are facts of nature. Case in point, all dogs are Canis Familiaris. Same species, from the chihuahua to the Great Dane. If left to their own devices for a dozen generations or so, most of our familiar breeds would disappear, and a generic dog would emerge, likely around the size of a German shepherd, and litters of pups would have more variety, floppy ears along with erect ears. Breeds can be made, hybrids produced, but that's not evolution. Just selective breeding. Evolution, as I understand it, proclaims that simple organisms on one way or another become new species of increasingly complicated organisms through a process of gradual adaptations. To oversimplify, amoeba becomes yeast becomes eventually man. That's the part that is not clearly proven: that one species becomes another, over and over, as if by some unseen force. Water flows downhill unless energy is used to raise it uphill. Entropy will be maximized, not minimized, unless energy is expended to prevent it. It's true that Prime Cause is not essential to evolutionary theory, but common sense says that if the planet is not eternally existant, then there must have been some strand of replicating DNA spontaneously generated somewhere, somehow, quite a long time ago, else there would be no DNA today. Since there is, it had to come from somewhere. At that point, a person makes a "faith decision" to believe that it happened as a result of random chemical combinations, or that it was created by an external force, such as God. Random accident, or deliberate design. That's where the argument becomes unprovable. Anyone is free to choose whichever (s)he wishes, and I'm not browbeating anyone over their choice. From my personal perspective, I don't see why the hard line evolutionists are so worried about just presenting the information and data as we find it, giving the models that would support whichever theories exist, and letting intelligent students work through the scientific process and arrive at the most likely conclusion, based on their . If one or more theories don't measure up to the known evidence, then reject them and continue to narrow down the field to as few choices as may remain. OTOH, to slant the discussion in any direction on the basis of a "faith decision", is to depart from true scientific thought, and begin to indoctrinate based on non-factual assertions. At the same time, I don't see why creationists are afraid to allow evolutionary theory to be explained. At least the creation theory addresses the issue of Prime Cause. Either way, it's not productive for people on either side of the argument to call the others by derogatory names, or imply that a belief in God is archaic or small minded. I point out that Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal and Albert Einstein believed in God, and few doubt their intelligence or belittle their scientific achievements. Just my view. Not being contentious.

I lay no claim to being a great mind, but since you asked, I think this kind of topic is provocative and leads to the two viewpoints simply arguing both unprovable points of view. None of us were around then, and either you believe the Bible or you don't, either you believe in spontaneous generation of DNA or you don't. But that's just me.

Did you get the part about his two favorite horses he talked to the boy about? Scatto and Argento? (Ok, it's Italian, not Latin, but it means "Trigger and Silver") I know that they didn't write that in by accident.

If that doesn't work try: THIS But wait! I heard on the news that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance. How could they let this happen?

This has got to be one of the most over rated war films ever, I thought it was weird and boring, it's not a patch on "Platoon" or "Full Metal Jacket". Even "Hamburger Hill" is better than this. IMO off course. The Mel Gibson film "We Were Soldiers" is one of the best war films I've seen in a long time. Saw Stardust the other day. A fun movie: not to be taken seriously, of course. It's like "Harry Potter meets the midieval sorceress sisterhood with the Princess Bride somewhere in the background." Fun. I agree that We Were Soldiers was good. Sam Shepherd stole the show with his dry lines. "...well, if I need one (a rifle) there will be plenty of them lying on the ground...."