Novosedoff

A little bit of dark Nordic ambient to charge you up for the weekend 🙂https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zLSKgqULxyY

Let's say you are about to die, and I am a chaplain who succeeded in converting some of your heirs. Let's say over the years of your life time you didn't give a damn about attending church service, killed your wives, children, enjoyed watching your enemies being torn apart by wild beasts in the arena while chewing popcorn, became a full-fledged dictator by eliminating your opponents one by one, robbed temples for gold, you even less cared about all that bullsh*t nonsense recorded in our books with resurrections, moon walks on the water and Jews all over the place. The day you die I walk out from your house with tears in my eyes and address the crowd with words full of piety, I tell the crowd that you died in peace and we all witnessed your baptistry on the deathbed. I tell the crowd I have a few witnesses who can confirm my words (all of my witnesses turned out to be Christians like me). Is my fairy tale enough to turn you into a Christian?

https://youtu.be/GgnClrx8N2k

You must be very lucky to survive after everything you've been through, novus

Well, my personal view of the decisions of the council of Nicaea may strike someone as very cynical, but I do believe that Arianism and the holy trinity concepts certainly were not the top priority. I think the top priority was the decision that forbade priests to engage in usury. Basically the decision meant a few different things: 1) Christian priests did engage in usury, so usury could be regarded as a source of their regular income before the council, 2) Constantine turned Christianity into a state-sponsored religion, so priests would no longer need to engage in other activities

Well, Constantine knew very little to nothing about any authorities except for his own 🙂 He was more like a twisted army serge with rather limited knowledge of any religious matters he oversaw, that's why thanks God he barely spoke at the Nicean council. Have you ever wondered WHY the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople was founded? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecumenical_Patriarch_of_Constantinople#Early_history The conflict between the Eastern and Western churches was everlasting, it started perhaps in 1st century AD when Roman bishop Clement tried to lecture the Corinthian priests, the later pope Victor attempted to lecture the Eastern church how to celebrate the Easter festivals. In the 3rd century the Carthaginian bishop Cyprian and the Roman pope Stephanus had a dispute over whether heretics should be allowed to re-join the church again. In 4th century there was a conflict between the Eastern and Western churches over the destiny of Athanasius of Alexandria. Perhaps the most interesting is the Council of Chalcedon of 451 and the dispute over canon 28 about the bishop of which church has a higher authority.

Hi all, I was curious what are the most significant sources of wealth of the Catholic church in the historical retrospective? Can we regard the Sadducee gold from the Second temple amongst the earliest sources? Since Romans were known to provide the tax redemptions to the church, new monasteries popped up as offshore tax havens for anyone seeking to evade taxation. Can we regard this as second most significant source of the Catholic church? Then preceding the era of the new Crusades the Pope established a 2.5% income tax that all kings of all Europe's christinized countries were supposed to transfer to Rome. That's how the Medici and other trading houses came into play with their cross-border operations. Anything else to add to the list?

Well, I shall agree with most of the things you've written, caldrail. Though I do believe that there must have been a real protagonist for the whole Christian story - how many, one or more, doesn't really matter. Otherwise any attempts to record many times the same fiction story lacking anything real behind it would seem a little odd in terms of hours of someone's work 🙂 I also believe that there must have been some real inspiration not only for Jesus, but for Paul as well. We need to better understand the realities of the ancient Mediterranean world back then. Semites used to be the dominant power of the whole region, they were populous, perhaps even represented 1.5-2% of the world population back then (which is comparable with today's Russian share of the world population) and Romans experienced real troubles trying to establish their own order and kick Semites out of Sicily, then Spain and finally out of northern Africa over the course of 3 Punic wars before they even launched their final incursion into the most wild semite region of Palestine. One must be very naive to think that the transition of power from Semites to Romans over the region could be peaceful. Paul's sect must have been just one of many other dozens of early Jewish sects that arose during that period, many Jewish sects were decentralised and independent from each other. The Paul's sect was pro-Roman and had close affiliations even with the very top of Roman ruling elite (St Pudens as senator's son is just one example named among the seventy disciples, while seventy disciples are often regarded as nothing less but the 2nd generation succeeding the very first 12 apostles of Jesus' own gang). Most importantly Paul's sect was effectively the one behind the modern Catholic church. Even Constantine and later emperors couldn't undermine the political authority of that early Roman organisation by establishing their own home-grown orthodox episcopacy as counter balancer to it. Syncretism was widespread in the ancient world. No wonder many Eastern ideas were absorbed and survived in the written sources of later Christianity.

I think in Europe the idea of reincarnation was popularized mainly through the Pythagorean community a few centuries before Jesus, but the attribution or origin of the belief must have been in the East, because Hinduism and later Buddhism all seemed to be full of reincarnation ideas and they had been around long before Pythagoreans came. The funny thing is that Pythagoreans are viewed as heresy by the official modern Christian church (all of them) for that very same thing of sharing belief in reincarnation despite the fact that the very founder of Christianity, Christ himself, must have had a very different and rather positive view of it 🙂 That's how far the modern Christianity has diverted from what its founder meant to be.

Wow.. you know Russian songs that I never even heard of. But this song is indeed not my type of songs. In fact, 95% of music on my playlists is not even made by Russians or in Russia. However since you are seemingly curious about Russian culture, here is the link to a song that I could find among the most recent ones which I liked. The song ain't in Russian though, it is seemingly the language of a Russian minority.

Btw I thought the most common image that American have about travelling on trains in Europe would be as follows 🙂

I quite like German Rammstein

How about this techno-version of Habanera?

Rhonda Vincent & the Rage - Orange Blossom Special kinda reminds me the Tyrolean song by old Soviet Estonian band Apelsin James Last was extremely popular in the USSR too, his music was even featured in old Soviet movies like An English Murder (based on Cyril Hare's story). Here is the part one can find on youtube, it starts at 56m20s (I hope you won't need VPN to open it up). A Half of the cast of the movie is actually from Estonia too, the others are Russians

Find any difference between the following 2 tracks 🙂 Oscar - Between me and you (2007) Moby - Everloving (1999)

I quite like this old track by Brian Eno. It was featured in the movie Wall Street if you watched it PS What tags do you use to insert the Utube videos?

Find any difference between 2 tracks 🙂 Cappella - Move on baby (1994) Dj Smash - Moscow never sleeps (2007)

Ok, I think I am finally getting the hint as some of your words ring a bell for me, as you say in English. Glad to see you here too. Reviving a youtube music thread here would be a good idea - I will definitely contribute. I am currently techno-nostalgic of 90s, but also follow the Dirty Art Club with Madwreck, as well as Brock Berrigan, all of whom are from the US, I think But even if you are up to stage here a sequel to Muppets Most Wanted, I may take a role in the crowd from the Gulag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPDfnzCEgaQ The statistics of social unrest of the last 10 years proves that we all may end up in Gulag very soon (see pic below), no matter where we reside Diocletian's innovative policy of restrictions on movements for colons, which contributed a lot to medieval serfdom, seems just in tune with all that, and I am sure the death of new 3,500 martyrs is to be awaited

PPS Btw Novus, did you watch this movie? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martyrs_(2008_film) Although it doesn't have Shostakovich music ...

Well, it could be attributed to a general misconception how the Christian story of martyrs or suiciders first appeared. It was apparently written under Pope Mark's guidance in the 4th century AD when Constantine made Christianity legal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope_Mark So by that time it had been quite a while since the described events actually took place. It's almost like if tomorrow's issue of FT is gonna be printed in 2350 by nostalgic reminiscence of our remote descendants trying to recollect the way market moved 3 centuries ago in the obituaries. The way it's gonna be written oughtta be very distorted. The scenario of the past market movements would be elaborated as a series of constant market crashes, where every other Pope of the 1st century AD is killed and every next pope knowing of the sorry lot of his predecessors consciously chooses the same destiny of mature kamikaze robot. As editors in chief what would we want a casual reader to know? Do we want our future readers to envisage the picture of an early age Pope sitting by the bath and so drunk that almost unable to move a limb, so he has to wave it to the nearby slave girl to approach with a vessel to urinate or throw up.. Sorry, that's not the case. PS. To be honest, Novus, I ain't so much adherent of the old classical music schools. I am more a funk or progrock type of guy also keen on modern electronic music like trip-hop. But I do pay tribute to your ages. Btw back to our profiles, I quite like the virile avatar image of yours, Novus. This is Caracalla, I suppose. Why would you pick up the one out of 70 other? Why wouldn't you choose an early Christian saint, if I don't mind me asking? 🙂

Hello there, I though it would be interesting to discuss the topic given the widely available Google search statistics 🙂 Indeed if one googles by keywords "how many christian saints are there?" Google returns the answer: "There are more than 10,000 saints recognized by the Roman Catholic Church". If we do a similar search by substituting the word "martyrs" in place of "saints", then "computer says" .. The Center for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC) says 900,000 Christians have been 'martyred' in the last decade, equating to 90,000 a year and one every six minutes. So now we can compare how the numbers stand against what we know from the early ages of Christianity. Here is the first list to investigate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_early_Christian_saints It can be seen that the number of early Christian saints from the 1st century AD equals 145 (out of 1064) individuals. If we check the list of early Christian martyrs from below link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_martyrs it can be seen that the number of martyrs in the 1st century AD equals just 17 (excluding obviously the Holy Innocents of Bethlehem who are not known by their names) So can we say that it was way more likely for a person back in early ages to become a Christian saint than a martyr compared to how it works today? 🙂

Well, I just spotted from the above figure that over the course of WW1 the British national debt rose from about 25% of GDP to 130%. The end of WW1 is obviously marked by sudden drop in the amount of debt from 130% to 120%, and then something miraculous happens as the debt rises again from 120% to 180%. Let's stop for a second and think over it again: the whole WW1 contributed to 105% increase in the amount of debt, and then basically over a half of that amount is added on top after 1919 because of I dunno what, but something happened 🙂 So I've decided to do some reverse reconstruction of the historical events to see what it was all about. Apparently I've glanced over the list of wars you've mentioned. Two things are noteworthy. Firstly, the number of conflicts Britain was involved since 1919 was high enough. I dunno how this number aligns with the number of conflicts Britain had been involved in any other time periods before 1919, but the geography of the conflicts seems a bit overstretched to me. Secondly, Britain actually came out as a loser from many (if not the majority) conflicts of that period between 1919 and 1923. I ain't that sure as to how British investments in railways and other fixed assets could have contributed to that amount. I have this screenshot (see attached) that shows that British capital spending used to be much higher than it is now, although the picture covers only the last 45 years, but at least we can see the trend.