Learning Mechanism Discovered

"Sadly, the story of history
is that almost no one
wants to learn
the easy way."

- Stefan Molyneux -

Tectonic Culture Values Shift

"..... whether or not we regard ourselves as Christians or in any way religious, we cannot altogether escape the tectonic shift of cultural values that was set in motion by those small and obscure

beginnings."

- Larry W. Hurtado. Destroyer of the gods: Early Christian Distinctiveness In The Roman World

"Accident in history is Rife; unintended consequences and perverse outcomes are the rule."

- Stephen Kotkin. Stalin. Paradoxes Of Power.

The History of Liars

"We forget everything. What we remember is not what actually happened, not history, not merely that hackneyed dotted line they have chosen to drive into our memories by incessant hammering. 

I do not know whether this is a trait common to all mankind, but it is certainly a trait of our people, And it is a vexing one. It may have its source in goodness, but it is vexing nonetheless. It makes us an easy prey for liars.

Therfore, if they demand that we forget even in the public trials, we forget them. The proceedings were open and were reported in our newspapers, but they didn't drill a hole in our brains to make us remember - and so we've forgotten them. Only things repeated on the radio day after day drill holes in the brain."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago.

Difference Between Tradition And Bad Habits

 "One of the biggest problems in this first step is discerning the difference between “tradition” and “bad habits.” A helpful metaphor in making the distinction is that of scaffolding. When we construct a church building we use scaffolding. But when the church is completed, we take down the scaffolding. How ridiculous it would seem if ten, twenty, or thirty years later the scaffolding was still up. Unfortunately, a lot of churches refuse to take the scaffolding down, clinging to it as if it were the church. They have confused the “scaffolding” of institutions with the “tradition” of the saints."

-Leonard Sweet. AquaChurch 2.0

The Massive Crucifixion

"The real life Spartacus, who led a major slave revolt, met his end about a hundred years before Jesus. Many died in the final battle, about six thousand of his followers were crucified all along the 130 so miles of the Appian Way from Rome to Capua (inland from Naples), making it roughly one cross every forty yards (Appian, Civil Wars 1.120)

- N.T. Wright. The Day The Revolution Began. 

The Bee Fertilizes The Flower It Robs

Charles A. Beard. He was once asked by one of his students whether he might be able to put the lessons he had garnered over a lifetime of historical study into a few brief maxims. Beard compiled and offered these four brief sentences: 

a. Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad with power. 

b. The mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly fine. 

c. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. 

d. When it is dark enough you can see the stars.20

History Speakes Louder

"To understand any event in history, you must put it firmly into that history and not rest content with what later generations have said about it."

- N. T. Wright. The Day The Revolution Began.

Seeing Behind To See Further Ahead

“The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”

-Winston Churchill

In Need Of Old Peoples Stories

The old fella with the lively eyebrows - and at sixty-three he i no way bote himself like an old man - was Abatoky Ilyich Fastenko. He was a big asset to our Lubyanka cell - both as a keeper of the old Russian prison traditions and as a living history of Russian revolutions. Thanks to all that he remembered, he somehow managed to put in perspective everything that had taken place in the past and everything that was taking place in the present. Such people are valuable not only in a Cell. We badly need them in our society as a whole. "

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1.

Needing Old Men With Histories Stories

"The old fellow withthe lively eyebrows - and at sixty-three he in no way bore himself like an old man - was Abatoky Ilyich Fastenko. He was a big asset to our Lubyanka cell - both as a keeper of the old Russian prison traditions and as a living history of Russian revolutions. Thanks to all that he remembered, he somehow managed to put in perspective everything that had taken place in the past and everything that was taking place in the present. Such people are valuable not only in a Cell. We badly need them in our society as a whole. 

Right there in our cell we read Fastenko's name in a book about the 1905 Revolution. He had been a Social Democrat for such a long, long time that in the end, it seemed, he had ceased to be one."

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1.

History With The Oppositions Eyes

Anabaptism lived under the shadow of Münster for a long time. In the public mind throughout Europe, Anabaptism became virtually synonymous with Münster. In spite of the peaceful and passive stance that came to be the norm for Anabaptism, religious and political authorities feared and assumed that Anabaptism's is rejection of the established ecclesiastical authority would inevitably lead to another Münster. Repression of Anabaptists was the result.. Historiography has reflected the presumed identity of Münster and Anabaptism. In a virtually unbroken line of writings from Martin Luther and Heinrich Bullinger to Karl Hall in the 20th century, it was assumed that early Anabaptism began with the revolutionary Thomas Münster and reached its logical conclusion in Münster. I American historiography, not till the twentieth century did scholars such as John Horsch, Harold S. Bender, and Cornelius Krahn successfully challenge that interpretation of Anabaptist origins."

- J. Denny Weaver. Becoming Anabaptist: The Origin and Significance of Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism 

Statistically It Would Have Been Me

Statistics are not in our favour.
Everyone who reads about the history of the Germany and Hitler during WW2, from the outside of Germany comes away thinking, "How could people have been that way?"
The assumption on our part is that "WE" would never have been like that.
Indeed some were not. But enough where to fuel a genocide and a war.
The humbling realization is that if we were in the same conditions and experiencing  the same variables, pressures, culture, words, media, etc, at the time. Statistically, as many of us would have become the same evil, with each little incremental act toward that end.
Our assumption that we would have been better people is naive and simplistic, if not arrogant. We could have risen above, as some did, but most of us are like the majority.
Not as history proves  in Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, nor the little discussed Japanese invasion of China. The brutality, the heinous torture and murder in various places when town were captured is blood curdling. The Japanese have a penchant more so for that right?
They were just evil people.
I'm reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's, "The Gulag Archipelago",  and he writes about a humbling  insight he gained in Stalin's Russia, as he understands the requirement  pressure bright or dependable people were under to join the ORGANS (NKVD)

"Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were executioners and we weren't." 

- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1, p16

This would apply to Orphanages, church abuse scandals, aboriginal and native boarding schools.
All horrors, we have come to find out after the fact. If we were a politician, or town official, or an educator, at those times and in those situations, statistically, most of us would have went with the flow of our culture, politics, and nation at that time.
You think not?
Humility is the end result. They were not worse people than we are. Like them we are a product of our times. And before you and I put pressure on people to conform to certain ideologies, we better understand that we still don't  know the end game result of most of them. Or we have indicators.
Maybe those playing ball will be the villains, maybe those who don't are setting up a catastrophe.
How do you know without hindsight?
Studying history and noticing human and patterns helps.
But  you and I have it all figured out, eh?
Ya! Right!

We Despise Them For It

"Here is a book that is against just about everything we believe in. I say that as a Methodist Bishop who ought to know what we believe in. Method is are those Christians who believe in trying to follow Jesus and attempting to be the church without letting any of that get in the way of our being successful. In other words, we methodists are just about everything that every anabaptist lives in fear of becoming.

I say thank God that the Anabaptists were run out of Europe so that they took up residence in Indiana and elsewhere. God has sent them into the Wilderness that is Contemporary American culture in order to keep the rest of us honest about Jesus, or at least to make us feel guilty. Here, as elsewhere, they have exercised and influence upon the extended Body of Christ far out of proportion to their numbers. They have been salt, light, yeast, and on unassimilatable lump in an otherwise comfortable and accommodated Christendom.  God bless them for their witness, though most of the rest of us despise them for it."

- William H. Willimin. Bishop, The North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church, Birmingham, Alabama

Forward written in : Becoming Anabaptist: The Orgin and Significance of Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism

The Bible Is Historically Accurate- Or Not - And Is Again

"The critics once insisted, for example, on the nonexistence of ancient Hittites in the Fertile Crescent, of camels in Egypt in Abraham’s time, of writing in Moses’ time, and of Sargon and Belshazzar in much later centuries. Now all learned men are aware that the Hittite empire rivaled the Babylonian and Egyptian, and even the Hittite language has been recovered; moreover, camels and writing have both been restored to ancient Egypt, and Sargon and Belshazzar are no longer dismissed as imaginary. Many other “historical impossibilities” once detailed to discredit the accuracy of the Bible and to caricature any notion of its total reliability have emerged to render ludicrous some gifted critics whose remarkable learning was dwarfed by a prejudice against scriptural reliability. Today the documentary theories of Wellhausen are no longer assigned mantic authority, and what was historically impossible to many biblical critics a few generations ago is frankly conceded by more critical historians to be now convincingly attested."

Carl F. H. Henry, God, Revelation, and Authority, vol. 4 (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 174.

Losing One Eye, Or two?

"But those same hands which once screwed tight our handcuffs now hold over there palms in reconciliation: "No, don't! Don't dig up the past! Dwell on the past and you'll lose an eye."
But the proverb goes on to say: "Forget the past and you'll lose both eyes. ""

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. Vol 1.

Losing One Eye, Or two?

"But those same hands which one screwed tight our handcuffs now hold over there palms in reconciliation: "No, don't! Don't dig up the past! Dwell on the past and you'll lose an eye."
But he proverb goes on to say: "Forget the past and you'll lose both eyes. ""

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. Vol 1.

Slapped For Celebrating War

"When they arrived back home, one of the girls ran into the house and exclaimed, “Hurrah ! There’s a war!” She was promptly slapped. The Bonhoeffers (parents) were not opposed to war, but neither would they celebrate it."

~ Eric Metaxas. Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy