@hingehead,
Most likely there were, yes.
@edgarblythe,
edgarblythe wrote:Went in the yard, to be swarmed by mosquitoes. Either there is no god to give a **** about me or there is one that torments me. In either case, it's a right bastard.
Ever heard of the Lord of the Flies, also known as beelzebub?
Of course he would be on the mosquitos' side, not yours. You just presented evidence against your own position!
@Thomas,
Perhaps the beastie is us.
@FBM,
Ethiopia (Axum kingdom) adopted Christianity as a state religion around 320, a century before the Roman empire did so.
@Olivier5,
My ethiopian pal of years ago (who made it to the US) was a coptic christian; I don't know the history of that but I bet it's a long time.
@ossobuco,
Long before JC, Judaism had made inroads in Ethiopia. E.g. there's the story of the Ethiopian eunuch baptized by Philip in the Acts of the Apostles. According to the story, the Ethiopian guy was traveling to Jerusalem to study religion... This is consistent with Ethiopian legends who state that their emperors descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Saaba. Whether these legends are based on anything real or not, the country's connections to the middle east does go back to the most ancient antiquity.
The Aramaeans were a semitic people who, having been defeated militarily, became merchant traders, eventually reaching as far east as China. They embraced Judaism, and spread it wherever they traveled. Marco Polo attests the presence of Jews and Christians in central Asia and China. Aramaean merchants also took Judaism into Egypt, the Sudan and Abyssinia. There are confessional Jews in South Africa, and genetic studies have confirmed that there is Jewish DNA among tribesmen
The Aramaeans intermarried with Arabs, and at the time of the rise of Islam, confessional Judaism was the dominant non-"pagan" religion in the Arabian peninsula. Christians followed the Aramaeans' path, which is how Christianity reached China. The Christians who took the silk road east, and who went to Africa were mostly Nestorians.
@Olivier5,
Thanks, that makes sense.
I misspoke though - my friend was Eritrean. He did have Ethiopian friends in L.A.
This was a lab friend back in the late seventies. I know I've told it before so I'll be short - he and a brother were in the u.s. but he still had family in Eritrea, many children of which didn't get to school because of ongoing war. The bunch of us in the lab were pals but after I left to go study another lot of years on a new subject, I lost track of those lab people. I do know he worked his way up in the med world, but not what ever happened to his family back there. He and his ethiopian friends did introduce the lot of us to good food via the U.C. student international house.
Be that as it may, I'm willing to bet that the majority of slaves brought over from Africa weren't Christians. I have absolutely no data to back that up, though. Maybe after this pot of coffee.
@FBM,
On the Slave Coast of Africa,
the west coast, Christianity was almost unknown. If the native population subscribed to any organized religion at all, it was Islam. It just appalls me how people will speak of an entire continent as though it were a small, homogeneous county.
@Setanta,
I reckon I have enough coffee in to have a quick look:
Quote:The Atlantic slave trade peaked in the late 18th century, when the largest number of slaves were captured on raiding expeditions into the interior of West Africa. These expeditions were typically carried out by African states, such as the Oyo empire (Yoruba), Kong Empire, Kingdom of Benin, Imamate of Futa Jallon, Imamate of Futa Toro, Kingdom of Koya, Kingdom of Khasso, Kingdom of Kaabu, Fante Confederacy, Ashanti Confederacy, Aro Confederacy and the kingdom of Dahomey.[137][138]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery#Christian_slaves
So I scrolled through the links provided for each of those countries and found none that were Christian at the time. A few Muslims, but mostly tribal religions.
There was this, though:
Quote:Christian slaves[edit]
In Algiers during the time of the Regency of Algiers in North Africa in the 19th century, 1.5 million Christians and Europeans were captured and forced into slavery. This eventually led to the Bombardment of Algiers in 1816.[139]
Christians and Europeans? Interesting contrast.
@Setanta,
I am similarly appalled that 'black man' is applied homogenously.
@Setanta,
Actually, I am unfamiliar with the movie
Lord of the Flies or the novel it is based on. Are they worth watching or reading, respectively? I liked Heinlein's
Tunnel in the Sky, which is apparently a counterpoint to
Lord of the Flies, so I feel somewhat obliged to read the book it is a counterpoint to. But I never got around to it.
@Thomas,
My post about the beastie was taken from the book and movie. I assumed you had read or watched it.
@Thomas,
Thomas wrote:
Actually, I am unfamiliar with the movie
Lord of the Flies or the novel it is based on. Are they worth watching or reading, respectively? I liked Heinlein's
Tunnel in the Sky, which is apparently a counterpoint to
Lord of the Flies, so I feel somewhat obliged to read the book it is a counterpoint to. But I never got around to it.
Well worth the read/watch.
While I was still in awe, having recently read the book and also seen the movie, I spoke with a woman I knew in Brooklyn. She told me her daughter's teacher assigned the class to watch it when it aired on TV. So, they sat through the entire movie. And, then, she said, "There wasn't anything to it." That was in 1968 and I still shake my head over it.
It's utterly absurd to speak of "Jewish DNA" as if there were some gene pool, or worse, some race that distinguishes "Jews" from other peoples. These simplistic utterances play at once into the hands of the Zionists and the anti-Semites.
