What about discussing why religions like Buddhism and the like never resulted in widespread crusades in the Abrahamic style? I mean, there was certainly infighting and war, but was it mainly because everyone just sorta went with converting? Or do I just know nothing about Asian history?
Buddhism never had crusades but I can think of a few times where it didn't spread by the sword, but had its path cleared for it by the sword. Such as when the great Emperor Ashoka slaughtered his way through India and had a crisis of conscience, famously observing the ruin he had brought his enemies and rhetorically asking is that what his victory looked like? Anyways he has a crisis of conscience and after failing to torture some Buddhists to death converts to Buddhism and forsakes violence, ceasing his campaigns and the like, spreading the teachings of Buddhism far and wide through India and all the world, even as far as Greece and China. Indian Buddhism spread into China through the Ferghana valley but after the Chinese were kicked out by invading Muslim nomads Indian and Chinese Buddhism lost their direct links and developed onto separate paths. Buddhism would be carried on eastwards just by people teaching it to others (India and China both having good education cultures) until it reaches warrior cultures like in Japan, where they found ways to rationalize violence. Or like in Burma where they likewise did too. I'm reminded of when Christianity expanded into the warrior cultures of the Germanics, hell became depicted as a cold place because they had difficulty imagining a burning place, and Jesus went from being the austere matyr to a noticeably Germanic warrior prophet. I reckon there were no great religious wars until the Muslims and Christians arrived because the Chinese had no problem causing gargantuan wars over heaven's mandate and India in religion or statehood was rarely united or organized. I suppose Buddhism had an advantage in that it didn't require you hold exclusive belief in it as the Abrahamics do with theirs, no my prophet is only prophet and so forth, the overlap between Buddhism and Hinduism or the Buddha being a deity in both Hinduism and Chinese spiritualism being a good example of this
Mongol O'clock
12:58 AM on the doomsday clock?
Russians are so lucky the Mongols got too brilly and decided to go home before finishing the job
Nuclear war is preferable to Mongol O'clock, Finngolia will rise again
Comparing Islamic fundamentalists to Savonarola is a pretty good analogy, but those two losers you mentioned are puny small fries next to the Original Bad Boys of religious zealotry.
Reading Islamist materials on how they view Jews and Christians is very interesting, especially how they view Christianity as fundamentally broken twice; today it is weak and corrupt (there's a list somewhere of 1,700 years of European scholars interpreting the revalations passages in regards to the beast being the Papacy, not surprising) whereas before it was morality by force, with the strongest state deciding what form of Christianity was the correct one - culminating in WWI where all the protestants, catholics and orthodox nations warred with each other so brutally with each convinced they were the true Christians fighting heathens that the end result was all of the Christian faiths were broken and the populations gave up their faith in favour of secularism, hedonism or a bit of both
Especially hard hit were the countries whose first waves were always volunteers - threw away their most zealous into the meat grinder. Noticeably Russia is the exception to this, as its Orthodoxy has experienced some modern day revival, so maybe Islamist scholars are wrong on this or Russia is a special case. I find it odd that they acknowledge the Christian faiths broke each other but then also think warring with the Shia won't end up with the same fate for them ?
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It would be much more accurate to compare the friar to al-Wahhab himself, in which case the only slight difference between the two would be that the latter's political legacy has weathered over two centuries of ceaseless conflict, and is currently as influential as ever. (And that is despite the fact that al-Wahhab is just as dead as Savonarola, although perhaps not quite as ashy.)
I think assassinating Savonarola's character might have helped, when you discredit someone you kill their legacy as well as their life. Also very ashy.
Another slight difference is that less than twenty years after the friar went from ashes to ashes, this guy called Luthor or something took some of his ideas and started this thing called the Reformation. It doesn't look like Wahhabist ideas could ever motivate a similar movement from within contemporary Islamism, for various reasons...
To be fair Martin's cheeky bants were going to happen anyways
Unless they had the foresight to set him on fire too hahaha