Is "picking and choosing" from a dogma, religious or no, a good thing to do?
I would argue it's just being honest. Acting on or believing things you don't really believe in doesn't make sense.
Pic unrelated.
No, because it demonstrates that your universal truths aren't universal at all.
By picking and choosing you're essentially debunking your own claim to absolute truth
>>1318834
What if one didn't have a problem with that and thought like many others that no major world religion has it completely right?
But that's just a bunch of snowflake nonsense, innit? After all, theres such a variety of 5 religions to choose from!
I have no respect for anyone who "chooses" a religion like they're a catalog
I don't know where to go to find an answer to this, /his/ seemed like the closest board to the topic, if this isn't applicable I'll fuck off
>inb4 OP should fuck off anyway
So, I recently purchased this old looking incense pot/urn/burner which looks kind of like a gryphon or hippogryph. It has two "pipes" for ears which allow the incense smoke to float out when using cones
>Pic related is the burner
I thought it looked interesting, and for 5 dollars at a junk sale I figured I'd at least have a burner if nothing else.
I've been trying to look up where it might be from, how old it is, or if it is even really an incense burner or not but I've come up with very little. I love following the history of objects like this and trying to learn about them, but I'm stumped.
I'm hoping if there are any anons knowledgeable about this stuff on this board they might be able to offer me some insight.
The best I've found is this:
>It is similar to some older asian incense burners, but most look more like traditional animals
>It might be really old depending on what it is made out of, but I also get the feeling it might just be a replica/fake
>>1318656
Prolly a granade tbqh desu
>>1320859
Great response, thanks anon, you sure did save me
No idea what it is, but it makes me want to replay shadow of the colossus.
Its probably just random kitschy pottery bit or something a random incense company made. Good luck finding out anything
Can we have a moment of silence for the death of Coptic.
>>1318647
Good night, sweet prince.
Isnt it still alife as a church language for the christian egyptians?
>>1319049
Yes
They're ~10% of the Egyptian population
Is freedom of religion a fundamentally atheistic ideal?
The only way you can guarantee the free practice of all religions is if you believe that none of them have a special monopoly on the truth. If you believe that Christianity is the truth, or Islam is the truth, or Hinduism is the truth, shouldn't you want to promote that religion, that truth, over the others? Promoting the equality of all religions is the same as declaring all religions invalid. Am I wrong?
This was actually a Danish Government philosophy for a while.
Religious freedom is atheism.
I don't speak enough danish though to find the names and texts you want.
From the looks of it those people were spot on about religious freedom .
No. If you believe that only God can pass judgement than you have no power to tell others to believe in things they don't want to. That's a part of Christianity and Islam from what I've read. People obviously just ignore things they don't like.
>>1318299
From a Christian perspective there isn't anything wrong with freedom of religion, there is no political mandate to enforce Christianity as the state religion anywhere in the New Testament. I think a Christian theocracy would be the ideal for a true Christian, but a state which allows freedom of religion is committing no sin, nor is a politician who believes all people ought to at least have the right to associate with whatever religion they wish to associate with. Christianity is almost entirely apolitical sans a few things that have to do with usury. A Christian can, by political persuasion, disallow freedom of religion, but does not have to.
This is in stark contrast to Islam which demands that all believers seek to instate Shariah. Not obeying Shariah is a sin to a Muslim, as is failing to enforce it, so they can not and will never tolerate freedom of religion in their nations because that is not a part of Shariah. At the very least non-Muslims must pay a special tax and are afforded fewer rights than Muslims.
Freedom of religion is a secular ideal, but is perfectly compatible with Christianity, and not compatible at all with Islam.
Bringing this around again because I'd like to try and get closer to a conclusion.
This is kind of a long story so I'm going to dump the facts as they were discussed on /sci/ a little over 3 years ago. As far as I know, no one has really done any more work on this mystery since then. It got 2 threads on /sci/ back in 2013 and we figured out as much as we could. Then I posted it on /x/ last year. They were interested, but not particularly helpful or willing to put in any extra effort into solving the mystery. Plus it's not really on topic over there.
Anyway, what you're looking at is a scrap of paper that an anon found behind the paper backing of a mirror he bought at auction. There is seemingly a code and some other symbols written on it. On /sci/, we decoded the message as best we could and obtained the message. I'm pretty confident that the resulting message we got and the location are correct, however, I'd like to know more about what it could possibly mean, any estimate to the age, and possibly who could have written the message.
I haven't been sure where to post this. The people on /sci/ seemed to have little interest in doing anything with it after we cracked the code, and none of them really knew much about this part of the world or history in general. /pol/ is a little bit crazy and I doubt they'd be interested, and /x/ wasn't that interested either. I feel like you guys would probably have the best chance of figuring this out, and it's really made me curious for a while now. My major isn't history or anything and I never really had time to sit down and do research.
I'm assuming /his/ is a bit of a slow board so I'll post a bit of background info first and some pictures from the thread (unfortunately, I only save the original note picture, none of the mirror). The photos of the mirror are going to be thumbnails, but they should give you an idea of what we're working with.
>>1318173
The first order of business was deciphering the text. Since it was hidden in a mirror, an anon had the brilliant idea that the numbers were actually supposed to be mirrored. Once this was done, the little arrow shown going over 6 spaces was guessed to be indicative of a simple Caesar cipher. Shortly afterwards, this message was posted.
I've got a summary of some other facts which I'll post at the end of this dump, but for the most part this message seems correct, considering the other clues on the note which I'll post next.
>>1318173
It's a formulaic fugue, dumbass. Of course /x/ can't figure it out, because fucking aliens, and /sci/ probably completely overlooked the simplicity of the answer.
>>1318185
Next up, the letters and numbers underneath the arrow. These were solved in a similar manner, although they were not mirrored. So just a simple Caesar cipher and we got Latitude and Longitude coordinates. I'm not exactly sure why they aren't mirrored, but that's the only way they line up reasonably close with any sort of landmass.
If vast cities and communities existed thousands of years ago, where are they? It seems as though most cities were built within the last 500 years. Did people from thousands of years ago have cities?
>this is an average /his/ poster
Literally, not figuratively, literally, literally kill yourself.
>>1318149
wew, lad.
Is this a real question? Not sure if trolling.
Why was this great ancient civilization so easy to conquer and hold onto for centuries at a time?
>>1318100
Fucking desert, dude
>>1318100
Egypt was notoriously easy to conquer after it had already been going for about 2500 years.
China was also notoriously humiliated by Western powers at about that age.
Western civilization has been going for about that time too (depending on when you start counting) and is proving to be notoriously weak nowadays, with the only real reason it hasn't been invaded being that one of its out-shoots is merely about 300 years old.
Maybe it's just the lifespan of civilizations. Keep in mind that, for all intents and purposes, Egypt was Greece's Greece. Look at Greece nowadays.
>>1319469
>western civilization is notoriously weak these days
If you live in the real world and not /pol/ you'd notice that the West is more powerful than any other civilisation in the world, economically, militarily, culturally, politically, and so on. In absolutely no way comparable to Egypt or China in the decades you talk about. And Chinese civ had been going for 5,000 years in the late 19th century so take your teleological 2,500 mysticism and eat shit with it :/
>Someone tells me I'm living on stolen land from the Indians
>Look it up
>All the land in my area was negotiated, paid for, and had treaties signed over it by all local tribes
wow fucking racist pay reparations
>Founder of your state was a pacifist who is hailed for how he treated the natives here
>Still get told the land is stolen and your ancestors were evil
>aliens come down to earth
>they have tons of gold
>we trade them land for it
>we learn that there is no value for gold in their economy after their economy envelopes us
>they call it "space dust" and use the Quartonium Standard to back up and gauge the worth of their currency
>our gold is worthless
>200 years later some alien post on an imageboard about how his people got the land fairly
>you take another shot of Fireball and shut down your computer
Please educate me on the Duchy of Brittany, how come they managed to remain independent from Charlemagne's Empire?
>>1317728
Pretty sure it was tributary or something similar to Charlemagne.
Also it was christian and relatively irrelevant so not really a prioritary target.
Other anons may know more about the subject.
So Brittany = French Wales?
>>1317749
Pretty much.
Why did Japan lose so badly?
>>1317724
When you're outbuilt about 8:1 on most relevant classes of ships, against an opponent who tends to build better ships and planes than you've got, it almost always ends badly.
inferior technology, inferior industrial output, inferior leadership, inferior spirit
>>1317724
Outnumbered, outgunned, fighting on multiple fronts, inferior industrial base, inferior material base, inferior technology, outdated tactics, extreme distance from allies
Who is your historical husbando, Anons?
Personally, I have a certain attraction and fondness for Basil II, 'the Bulgar-Slayer':
>expanded the Empire to its greatest territorial extent after the losses of the Muslim conquests
>subjugated the barbarian Bulgars
>put down the land-owning aristocracy and ensured the continuation of the Byzantine bureaucratic system while crushing the nobility's hopes of a more feudal arrangement
>was a prudent and competent administrator who left a surplus in the Imperial Treasury upon his death
>extended Greek influence far beyond the borders of the Eastern Roman Empire, as far away as Kievan Rus'
>was a stocky and burly DILF who was known for his distinctive beard
10/10, would kiss
>>1317721
Why is it that land-owning aristocracy fuck everything up from the Byzantine, to the HRE, to France (thank you based Robspierre), and almost England; if they didn't get their feefees pandered to with the house of lords?
>>1317935
And to Poland-Lithuania, who's aristocracy needed to be pandered to to defend their own clay, in a way that more or less doomed the nation to be impotent later on?
Another debate resolved
>tfw China never joined the USSR
>tfw Vietnam never joined the USSR
>tfw Cambodia, Laos, Korea didn't join the USSR
>tfw Japan never switched to the superior Economic Ideology
>tfw we never witnessed the USSR take over Asia
>tfw the USSR never expanded into Africa despite all the quasi-Socialist and Communist states being erected
>tfw the USSR was on it's way of adding Europe to it's Union
>tfw South America including Cuba never joined the Union
>tfw we never saw a struggle for a world power between the USSR encompassing 5 continents against Capitalist powerhouse USA
>tfw we never got to see USSR reach it's maximum potential
but its maximum potential was to collapse
>>1317666
>Japan
I doubt they'd want to involve themselves with the ideas of land stealing Ruskies
>>1317666
This is some really shitty bait, man. It peaked when it had control of all the satellite states in the Warsaw Pact after WWII, and that was really its highest potential. Do you actually think China and countries as far flung from Russia as Cuba ran on the exact same principles as Soviet communism? There's also a reason the U.S. propped up so many dictators during the Cold War, so the commies wouldn't spread their malign influence further than it already had.
Last one went swimmingly so ill self bump with some of my favorites from our last thread
If religion collapsed in the west, would that be good or bad?
>>1317539
If the Orlando shooter was atheist, do you think he would shoot up a gay bar?
>>1317542
You can be homophobic and atheist. Like you can be gay and homophobic, see the breitbart reporter. In this case he would still have killed people, as he was insane. In fact his family suspected he was gay.
>>1317563
Right but you can't get the idea to kill gays from atheism.
Is it worth a read?
general histories are for fags and contribute to the globalist system tb h
>Europe
There's that buzzword again.
>Tenth Century
Well at least he got the date right.
>>1316249
Why is Europe a buzzword?
