why should i be naked, if i can slay something for hides?
Are you using the archaic definition of usury as interest, or the modern definition of usury as exorbitant amounts of interest? Because I was referring to the latter.
mamboman posted exactly what I was going to post.
I’ve heard tell that its creation made a lot of people very angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad idea.
That damned chihuahua gets around.
That slut.
In medieval Church law, “usury” meant charging any interest on a loan, not just excessive interest. And who would be in the business of lending money with no profit to be made?
My mistake then. I was thinking of the term in its modern definition.
Since “things” is a vague word, I will state motivations for atrocities, instead of specific events.
Religious oppression
Racism
Being quick to anger
Slavery
The lack of motivation to seek knowledge
Okay, so that could be seen as a cop-out answer, but I think all of the human-created events in the past could be attributed to a combination of the things I have listed.
No Christianity probably means no Islam.
Some things had horrible short-term negative effects, but long-term they actually turned out beneficial. If we stick solely to the immediate negative effects, then in no particular order, I would say:
- The dinosaur extinction event
- The invention of religion
- The world wars
- The Black Plague
- The explosions of Tambora and Krakatoa in Indonesia
Krakatoa didn’t really have that much of an effect on things. The Deccan Traps probably did though.
I too am unable to think of anything worse than the creation of nuclear weapons.
That said, it seems that it was inevitable. Ditto for the creation of religion. We were doomed from the start.
I hope that somewhere on another planet (or time!) will be a super smart species without these tendencies.
Another hijack, but the “Burning Times?”
An ill-defined, historically dubious, indeterminate period of history that has essentially become a cry for validation from the tarot-cards-and-crystals camp?
Mind you, I think that the idea that anyone would would burn another human being based on spurious or nonexistent evidence and a healthy dose if ignorance-fueled religious fear is horrible in its stupidity and absolutely chilling in its frequency.
That said, however, the Armenian Genocide, in both its brutality and its efficiency (so efficient that people today are woefully ignorant even of its existence), is a much more shocking example of how intolerance and perceived moral superiority can affect the world than an umbrella term used to bind together somewhat similar incidences in a quest for legitimacy.
That’s my opinion, anyway.
My list of the 5 worst things to happen to the world:
- The Holocaust.
- The Inquisition.
- The US’s American Indian policy- engagement, warfare, or treaties.
- The USSR’s mishandling of its interior.
- British Colonialism.
I fully admit that my answers are biased and particular to my experiences and worldview, as are my exceptions to the lists of others, and I welcome debate and exceptions to my own list.
But by the same token no Judaism probably means no Christianity, you could keep going back in time and blame any particular one but it is easier to just say all religion and pointless to single one out.
Judaism has never had the rabid expansionism, the missionary zeal of Christianity or Islam. If Christianity had never existed Judaism would be just one more minor religion.
I said that Islam was as bad or worse than Christianity, to which you responded that Islam would likely not exist without Christianity, your point seeming to be that since Christianity was the precursor it had a greater negative impact, but by that logic Judaism would have to be worse than Christianity and Islam because it was the precursor to both. So are you more concerned with which religion came first, or which one caused the most damage wholly on its own?
I’m concerned with the one which first came up with the Christian/Islamic brand of aggressive, ruthless monotheism. That’s Christianity. Judaism is nothing special; just another religon, like them dangerous mostly due to it’s irrationality. Unlikely to be much more than a regional threat.
Christianity and it’s spawn Islam on the other hand are aggressive on the grand scale; that’s why they have spread so far, by genocide and and cultural destruction and conversion by the sword.
Surely the Spanish colonisation of South America was worse than anything we Brits pulled off?
European diseases (smallpox, influenza, measles and typhus), to which the native populations had no resistance, and systems of forced labor (such as the encomienda, and the mining industry’s mita), decimated the native population. The diseases usually preceded the Spanish invaders, and the resulting population loss (between 30 and 90 percent in some cases) severely weakened the native civilizations’ ability to resist the invaders.
It was a tough call between the two, to be perfectly honest. Being Irish, already having “diseases as weapons” in my list, having less sympathy for the (admittedly my perception and not based on any research) more barbaric practices of the invaded people, and a couple of other fuzzy factors bumped Cortez et al to number 6.
I do, however, see your point, and if the list were longer, it’d be on there.