"Searles O'Dubhain"
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> "Tom"
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>> "Searles O'Dubhain"
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>>> The Druids were a noble class of the Celts who included priests in their
>>> ranks.
>>
>> An elite group which reserves education and leisure for itself alone
>> while its people slave away for generations in squalor and hardship,
>> pathetically grateful for the crumbs falling from their masters' tables.
>> Ah yes, the "noble class".
>>
>
> The Druids did not exclude other classes from rising to their ranks. The
> Irish saying is that a man can be better than his birth. In Celtic
> society, families owned all the property in common according to how the
> head of the family parceled it out. The family head was elected.
I agree that the old Irish attitude towards land ownership was much more
egalitarian than that of the English and this was the main reason why the
English wiped out the Brehons. As for the "election" of family heads,
that's never been much of a real election. Anybody who actually remembers
their own upbringing knows that family authority is not elective.
> The people generally did not live in "squalor and hardship" unless times
> were tough for everyone. You're projecting 21st and 20th century values
> and morality on much older practices which were fairly advanced for their
> times.
I'm not projecting any modern values on that evaluation. It's not even my
evaluation. It's Julius Caesar, who actually saw real Druids, not just the
pretend one's you see now. From Caesar's "Gallic War Book VI":
"Throughout Gaul there are two classes of persons of definite account and
dignity. The common people are treated almost as slaves and are neither
heard nor listened to in councils. Most of them, in debt or under heavy
tribute or by the injuries of those more powerful commit themselves in
service to the nobles, who have over them all the rights which masters hold
over slaves. Of the two notable classes, one consists of druids and the
other of knights."
>> No wonder it couldn't compete against the Romans, who distributed the
>> benefits of its wealth a little more generously among its citizens. A
>> century or two of co-existence, and *poof!* No more Druids.
>
> The Romans were no more civilized or moral than the Celts. The Celts and
> the Romans existed side by side for perhaps a thousand years before the
> Roman orgnization and military defeated them in Gaul and Britain (but not
> in Ireland or the highlands and islands of Scotland).
If by "side-by-side" you mean in nearly complete ignorance of and
disinterest in one another, I'd agree. The Greeks had no interest in
conquest in that direction, since they didn't think the Celts had anything
worth fighting over. The Romans, on the other hand, turned their attention
west rather than get muddled up in the eastern conflicts and rather easily
swept away Europe's disorganized indigenous tribal cultures, much as the
Europeans later went on the sweep away the Native American cultures they
found once they stumbled across North and South America.
The only difference is that the Romans themselves showed some respect for
the cultures they conquered, but the Roman-Celtic mixed cultures of Europe
showed no such respect to cultures on this side of the pond, preferring
genocide to assimilation. Might that indicate that Druidism actually
devolved the Roman ideal and made it less civilized?
>> Then you're not really following the Brehon laws at all but a Christian
>> reconstruction of them.
>
> I'm recovering what was lost from the Brehon Laws in a reverse way of how
> Padraig and others edited them over the years.
Sorry, but you don't have the raw material for such a recovery. Once you
kill the possessors of an oral tradition, that tradition is unrecoverable.
Any attempt to do so is frought with supposition, inference, and blue-sky
speculation. Your "recovery" of such information is not dissimilar to the
process of "recovering" repressed memories by hypnosis. All you're doing is
fantasizing and then convincing yourself that the fantasy actually happened.
>>> You are now stating nothingbut opinion without giving a single valid
>>> example to substantiate what you've just stated.
>>
>> We have just agreed that the Brehon codexes are expurgated, anything in
>> them which volates the tenets of the Catholic Church was expunged by
>> Padraig. That's not just *my* opinion but the opinion of the vast
>> majority of historians. It is a single example and it's valid. However,
>> since truthiness is a belief held despite evidence, not because of it,
>> you choose not to perceive the valid example I gave.
>>
>
> Your slant and spin on things seems to me to be very biased opinion.
You discount any evidence that you find inconvenient and then accuse me of
"bias". You read my very specific and historically accurate example of St.
Patrick's admission of have edited the Brehon law in his codices and then
announced I had not provided "a singler valid example" of it. That's what
I'd call a whopping huge bias on your part.
>>> It would be incorrect for a person to act against the traditions without
>>> having the power of truth in their actions.
>>
>> Pretty slippery. Wopuld you say that whatever one can convince oneself
>> of automatically becomes the "truth" and permits one to ignore any
>> inconvenient laws or even the tenets of one's own religion? If not, how
>> is truth determined?
>
> Everyone has their own truth which establishes who they are and usually
> how they act.
No, everybody has some excuse that they like to label "the truth" in order
to justify whatever it is they want to do. Not everybody has "their own
truth". Truth is not personal property.
> Every society also has its own truths, traditions and laws. It is not
> slippery to acknowledge that this is so.
Sure it is. Those are not "truths". Those are negotiated agreements and
tall tales. They are open to revision at will. Truth isn't something you
can simply decide for yourself, differently than anybody else.
The motto "Truth against the world" is nothing more than an assertion that
you're going to hang onto your comforting lies no matter what the evidence
actually indicates.
> Truth is what remains for a person or a people after tradition, experience
> and discoveries have been evaluated according to logic, induction, need
> and desire.
Truth is what remains after you do away with tradition, personal
experiences, logic, induction, and desire.
