Pure Brutality

[Leonardo17]

Yet another thread where you claim that there's no connection between these silly religions and the things their most ardent followers keep doing.  You believe that something like the taliban couldn't have existed in the old ages, but big mo and his merry band of slavers rapists and warlords were the prototype.

But that’s a fact. In medieval times you had the crusades, women were not that free after all, the justice system was nothing like our modern legal codes that are based on reason and the demonstration of guilt. But we can still say that these things still existed in a more rudimentary form. Perhaps less in Europe and more in the East.
 
But take a look at this for instance:
 
https://www.yahoo.com/news/taliban-moral...32228.html
 
   In medieval times, religion was the de-facto ideology of everyone. Outside the aristocracy no one could even read and write, so the religion was the main identification for people and for states. That’s how the Northern Crusades happened in 1209 for instance (you can just check it on Wikipedia).
 
So that’s just my assumption. There were still ways of doing things in the dark ages. The term “Sultan” meant “The will of God”. So I am just imagining an emissary arriving from some neighboring country reporting half of the things that are happening in Iran right now. In the mentality of that age, it was the duty of the Sultan to react on that.
 
That’s the ideology behind the crusades as well. While the real goal was basically the plundering of the riches of the East, the ideology behind it was what I say it is. That’s the difference between scholasticism and our more modern / rational way of thinking.
 
So these guys are living on our backs in way. They are only doing what they are actually doing because it is possible to do these things in our age. In ancient times they would probably been eradicated in very cruel ways. And these things did happen a lot in the Ottoman Empire. Groups like that would challenge the emperor and end up getting tied up to trees until they die of starvation and/or be eaten by wild animals.
 
All I am saying is that these things were taken very seriously since the main ideology at the time was that only one way of practicing religion was correct and all the rest were incorrect.
 
So a land that is ruled by bearded people slaughtering their own people for no reason. What would be the reaction of Tamerlane?

Sheldon:

 
You don’t just “read” these books. I mean you do, but I study them in a more gradual manner. Trying to understand one issue at a time. Spiritual progress is no a 1 or 0 situation. I see it as a lifelong process in which main religious books are useful tools in achieving just that.