Lots of people in the past have seemed uincharacteristically modern, at least in aspects of their work: Archimedes – a whole list of inventions and concepts
Titus Lucretius Caro – His De Rerum Natura has a lot of surprisingly modern physics concepts, including that objects in a vacuum fall at the same rate, how light and vision work, and how people’s ideas of the nature of god are rooted in their own quirks.
Lucian and Martial – the satirist and the pigrammaticist are sophisticated in their humor. In a good translation, they’re still funny and witty. Which is more than I can say for some comedians from only half a century ago.
Leonardo da Vinci – of course. The original Renaissance Man, with thoughts and drawings on damned near everything. Theodoric/Dietrich of Freibourg and Qutb al din al Shirazi and his student Kamal al din al Farisi had essentially the modern explanation of the rainbow, which they discovered independently by experimental work in the lab in the 13th century. al Shirazi was the first of them, and he observed third-order rainbows for the first time ever. Theodoric seems to have made the same discoveries independently 20 years later (unless he learned, in France and Germany, of al Shirazi’s work in Persia, which seems incredibly unlikely), and his surviving drawings of the rays passing through raindrops and forming primary and secondary rainbows look as if they could have come from a modern optics book. When you consider that only 50 and 200 years later people were fumfering around with plainly unworkable theories of the rainbow obviously uninfluenced by any experiments, the work of these three stand out as incredibly as a theory of the real elements would have in medieval Europe.
I don’t really get why you’re trying to argue about Zoroastrians by bringing up the Greek or worse Americans. Zoroastrians had no influence on either of those societies. WTF?!?!
First of all religion has got NOTHING to do with race. If you equate religion and race, perhaps that’s the problem? Second, was the lack of inter-racial marriage in ancient times a matter of racism or geographical/transportation constraints? Modern Zoroastrians do marry people of other races and religion. Just go to any of their social or religious gatherings in North America to see it in action, the door’s open to everybody.
It’s not unheard of for a society to profess a set of ideals, and then blatantly, completely and shamelessly fail to put those ideals into action and in fact probably practice the exact opposite. Basically, what a society writes down as their beliefs means jack shit. Show me what a society does in real life that show they actually practiced equality and you might have a point.
I would like to include Newton and Hooke and their contemporaries (as well as some of the Lunar Men), but I confess I’m a bit uncertain about how much of their discoveries and life are real and how much sensationalized.
It never started. To start the conversation, you’d need to give some examples of Zoroastrian practices that were modern or enlightened. It doesn’t mean anything that they said that all humans were equal.
> Just go to any of their social or religious gatherings in North America to see it in
> action, the door’s open to everybody.
You’re trying to argue that Zoroaster, who lived in Iran no later than 600 B.C., was far ahead of his time by looking at the enlightened practices of his modern-day North American followers. Tell us about the practices of Zoroaster himself and how they compared with other people of his own time and place. “A lot of people today who I consider to be good people admire him” is no proof that he was good himself.
After reading a little about him recently, I’d nominate Epicurus. In addition to a number of important scientific, ethical, and philosophical innovations, e.g.
he also personally adopted practices which are remarkably consonant with modern sensibilities.
Though I hesitate to respond without mentioning Zoroastrianism, I just wanted to thank you for showing me this. I’d never heard the quote (or of the speaker) but this is pretty badass.