Is Clyntahn an atheist?

Highjohn wrote:n7axw

Yes the family does tend to be the basic unit of human groups. However. This can be changed. Examples, single people within larger societies. Tribal groups, these can turn into a larger family were basically everyone is your immediate family even if there are fifty of them. Some groups completely remove any loyalty to the immediate family. Religions, see monks/nuns in Catholicism. OR in modern times at least the entire Catholic priesthood.

Also you may want to look up fictive kinship with regards to the 'barbarians' who 'invaded' the Western Roman Empire. Those groups may have been called various names, but they could also have been completely artificial.


Louis R

Welcome to the forum.

However, you need to look up how the Spartans decided to go to war. The Spartans were not a democracy(Which Athens was) but they did have votes on some topics, make them at least a partial republic.


Note One: Athens was NOT a republic. It was a democracy.

Note Two: The word king gets misused allot. For instance after the Revolution of 1688 William the III was 'king' of England. However he actually had very little power and in was given too little money by parliament to run the kingdom and therefore had to ask parliament for new funds each year. So saying Sparta had kings doesn't automatically mean it was a traditional hereditary monarchy.

You are correct to note that none of this should be set in stone. However what I was seeking to express is how things evolve on a general level.

Tribal groupings tend to be clans who share a common culture who group together for purposes of mutual protection -- or perhaps even aggression. We might consider clan to be the equivalent of today's extended family although I'm not sure how equivalent that is. All of this can be very fluid. For example, the Saxons were a grouping of tribes rather than just one tribe. So also the Dakota and the Apache.

What I wonder about is how these groups, whatever terminology you want to use, is how they avoided interbreeding, or even if they did avoid interbreeding, although I imagine that to survive intact, they had to manage it to at least some extent.

Gonna have to study that sometime.

Don

n7axw, I think all of that woman stealing that went on back then helped to keep their genes fresh.

I'm new at this so if I make any errors be gentle.

To get back to the original question, I sort of agree with *Kaemar* (sp?). I don't have a very good memory, but I seem to recall a scene that kind of leapt out at me. Someone was giving a report to Clynton for the first time and it described the chair he sat in shifting under him to conform to his comfort or physique or something and Clynton smirking at him over his surprise. To me, that meant that Clynton had access to and knowledge of certain things (technology) that others do not know about. I think that also means that he does NOT have the knowledge or means needed to use the "holy fire" (rakurai?) or Charis would be a smoking ruin. I think it's entirely possible that he is an athiest because he knows at least part of the story. If he's not, then it's all hubris.

Again, my apologies for any spelling errors, etc.

nail soup wrote:I'm new at this so if I make any errors be gentle.

To get back to the original question, I sort of agree with *Kaemar* (sp?). I don't have a very good memory, but I seem to recall a scene that kind of leapt out at me. Someone was giving a report to Clynton for the first time and it described the chair he sat in shifting under him to conform to his comfort or physique or something and Clynton smirking at him over his surprise. To me, that meant that Clynton had access to and knowledge of certain things (technology) that others do not know about. I think that also means that he does NOT have the knowledge or means needed to use the "holy fire" (rakurai?) or Charis would be a smoking ruin. I think it's entirely possible that he is an athiest because he knows at least part of the story. If he's not, then it's all hubris.

Again, my apologies for any spelling errors, etc.

Welcome to the forums!

No, that scene does not imply that Clyntahn has secret knowledge of technology. It simply means that he has had experience with the miraculous chairs in the Temple, and his visitor has not. There are numerous miraculous features of the Temple which people who have never been there have never heard of. Knowing about them and smirking at yokels who marvel at them does not mean possession of forbidden knowledge--it just means that Clyntahn is being small-hearted and lording it over the visitor. Clyntahn is reveling in the comforts he has become accustomed to in the Temple, comforts which those outside the Temple cannot even dream of.

actually, i don't need to look it up; it's quite fresh in my mind, having just been working through the history of the Peloponnesian War - and the definition you're indulging in here would make the UK a "republic". Every polis had an Assembly, which had to approve all such measures, and any or all are as accurately described as republics as they are as democracies: not terribly, in modern terms. in their own terms, I don't think any would have considered itself a republic. Or maybe they all would have. It's hard to say, since using the term in reference to Classical Greece is anachronistic anyway. The key difference between Athens and the rest of the Greeks [unless the Athenians had shoved democracy down their throats, of course] was in how matters could be brought to the Assembly and who had the right to hold public office.

And the reason why Athens more closely resembled a republic than any of the other cities is that the democracy was, in fact, usually dominated by one or a few leaders who effectively determined the policies of the state, but who were neither hereditary nor self-selected. Their positions depended on their ability to guide debate and keep the Assembly's bit between its teeth, and lasted, as Alcibiades discovered, only as long as they were able to ride the tiger. I would argue that it wasn't a republic in any modern sense, or even in the Roman style, because there wasn't a formal mechanism for selecting these men or acknowledging their positions in the polity.

Highjohn wrote:

Louis R

Welcome to the forum.

However, you need to look up how the Spartans decided to go to war. The Spartans were not a democracy(Which Athens was) but they did have votes on some topics, make them at least a partial republic.


Note One: Athens was NOT a republic. It was a democracy.

Note Two: The word king gets misused allot. For instance after the Revolution of 1688 William the III was 'king' of England. However he actually had very little power and in was given too little money by parliament to run the kingdom and therefore had to ask parliament for new funds each year. So saying Sparta had kings doesn't automatically mean it was a traditional hereditary monarchy.

SWM wrote:

nail soup wrote:I'm new at this so if I make any errors be gentle.

To get back to the original question, I sort of agree with *Kaemar* (sp?). I don't have a very good memory, but I seem to recall a scene that kind of leapt out at me. Someone was giving a report to Clynton for the first time and it described the chair he sat in shifting under him to conform to his comfort or physique or something and Clynton smirking at him over his surprise. To me, that meant that Clynton had access to and knowledge of certain things (technology) that others do not know about. I think that also means that he does NOT have the knowledge or means needed to use the "holy fire" (rakurai?) or Charis would be a smoking ruin. I think it's entirely possible that he is an athiest because he knows at least part of the story. If he's not, then it's all hubris.

Again, my apologies for any spelling errors, etc.

Welcome to the forums!

No, that scene does not imply that Clyntahn has secret knowledge of technology. It simply means that he has had experience with the miraculous chairs in the Temple, and his visitor has not. There are numerous miraculous features of the Temple which people who have never been there have never heard of. Knowing about them and smirking at yokels who marvel at them does not mean possession of forbidden knowledge--it just means that Clyntahn is being small-hearted and lording it over the visitor. Clyntahn is reveling in the comforts he has become accustomed to in the Temple, comforts which those outside the Temple cannot even dream of.

Agree. Think of it as reading a book. Someone who has never seen a book or knows about reading would be amazed.