Last night a friend and I were discussing “The Passion”. I mentioned off hand that I couldn’t beleive that Mel Gibson’s father would publicly deny the worst event in world history. My friend quickly countered that the Holocaust was not the worst event in history, the Inquistion was.
So what do you think? Should we measure by lives lost? The negative long term effects on the way we live?? Is there something I haven’t learned yet?
Share your history with me! What was the single worst historical event?
I know I am knew, and I mean no disrespect. But it seems to me that any answer to your question would necesarrily be subjective. Disregarding the philosophical and ontological issues, wouldn’t it depend on your perspective?
But, to me your question “Begs the Question”. What in fact does wort mean. It reminds me of “The Nicomachean Ethics” or “Euthyphro” or “Beyond Good an Evil”. It is a question that has yet to be answered. What is good? What is bad? How do we decide? Is that which is worst, that which displeases me most? I am sorry I cannot add more to your question. But at least I have suggested another way for you to view the question.
If you consider that without the occurance of the Permian Trassic extinction, there is a great possibility that neither you nor I nor any Homo Sapien Sapien would be her to discuss the issue, can we really consider it a “bad” event?
Well, the Stalinist purges, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Foward over a cliff both beat the Holocaust & Inquistion in terms of shear death count, the question of the “worst event in history” is to vague to answer conclusively.
You know flonk? Despite my earlier posts I must ask, to which genocides do you alledge? Considering that the stalinist purges combined with th Nazi Holocaust and the Japanese massacres in China totaled more than 35 million individual murders, to which genocides are you referring? Or or you disregarding the sheer number of humans killed in favor of some ideological preference?
The fact that something as described would be truly awful doesn’t oblige us to believe it occurred – there are massacres described in other religions (I think) that a Christian, by implication, would not believe. During the First World War, it would have seemed unpatriotic to suggest that the Germans did not, in fact, skewer newborn babies on that spike on their helmets. But they didn’t……the holocaust, though, does seem to be irrefutable given the evidence.
For me the collapse and death of Dermot Morgan (Father Ted) at a dinner table in Islington affected me as much as anything (that is, apart from family and friend- related events).
But world-wide, I’d say the worst event in terms of bloodshed and danger might be the ‘publication’ of one or other of the two books that seem to be tearing the world apart at the moment, by being placed in direct opposition to each other, rightly or wrongly.
Over 90 million American Indians were killed during the first century of the European occupation of America, 90% of the entire population of North and South America.
My nominee for the worst event in history (aside from the Holocaust) is the destruction of the Library at Alexandria. An immense amount of information lost to history. Had it not happened, the so-called “Dark Ages” might have been greatly reduced or even eliminated…
The thing that I find most horrific about the holocaust is not the scale (although that is bad enough), but the mindset of the people making it happen - the systematic slaughter of people, orchestrated as an exercise in cold and meticulous logistics.
