draconic chronicler wrote:And guess what, your precious, pagan, vikings adopted Christianity, so who ulitmately was more powerful, the monks with the word of God, or the murdering Vikings who accepted their religion and gave up being murdering pirates becasue Christianity taught them right from wrong?
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I don't believe I said what I was a member of any religion. You made that assumption. What I did say, was the historical fact that the Vikings disowned their powerless, pagan Gods, and willingly accepted Christianity because they believed its God was real. Nobody forced the Vikings to do that (except the terror they had of dragons, but this can only be speculation).
Okay, your post is dangerously close to be considered as preaching and this is not the kind of discussion I want on this board.
First of, the Vikings had many gods, and it was no problem for them to accept the Christian's god alongside their own. In fact, you can still find gravestones in England with both the Thor's hammer and a cross (showing that Vikings must have thought it was better to be safe than sorry). Second, there was considerable pressure to convert to Christianity if they wished to have more peaceful relations with the Christians (ex: Treaty of Wedmore in 878). Moreover, it was frowned upon for Christians to trade with people of other faith. Lastly, Viking's settlements converting or not, was most of the time dependent on whether the local chieftain converted. The same idea can also be seen on a larger scale.
How quick people/Vikings converted to Christianity is meaningless. This has nothing to do with "my god is better than yours" because as far as I aware, no god showed him/herself up to the Vikings to enlightened them; it was the plain man-made preaching that win the day. How this happen is a question of politics. For example, Harald Bluetooth of Denmark supported both conversion by using Christian imagery on Danish coins during his reign and by establishing bishops in various Danish towns. Simply put, Vikings were raised with Christianity all around them and there were few to defend the old beliefs. Like with anything else, if you were raised in Iran, you would probably think Islam is THE religion and more likely to support Sharia Laws and if you are born in Texas, you are more likely to support capitalism, capital punishment and so on.
A modern example of "un" conversion can be found in the quiet revolution of Quebec from 1960 to 1966, where one of the most religious population switched side to be on of the less religious one in North America. How did this happen, simple... they removed religion from school, hospital, and secularized the government. Basically, once your institutions (schools, government, etc..) began to promote a particular ideology, a majority of people will follow within a generation or two. This however has nothing to do with the validity or even value of a particular faith.
draconic chronicler wrote:Yes, it is true that confused Children nowadays have dredged up the nonsensical false Gods that the REAL Vikings all rejected once they were introduced to Christianity.
Not really, they just faced determined people who wanted to convert Vikings to their faith, while Viking didn't had this "go out and spread the word of god" mentality. The people sending out spam and advertisement picked up on the concepts long ago, proving that repeating the same message over and over is actually quite effective to convince people that your brand/ideology is the best.
draconic chronicler wrote:It is very possible that the bravery of the unarmed Monks and Nuns that the Vikings slaughtered and raped proved to them the power of that God they they soon accepted themselves.
Okay, let get serious for a moment, are we speaking about the Middle Ages? Because today if such story may outrage people, back then I seriously doubt so. You see, back in those times before widespread usage of guillotine, the common execution methods were: the breaking wheel (breaking every bone of the victims and leaving it to die or to be eaten alive by birds), burning at the stake, drowning, boiling to death (legal form of capital punishment during the reign of Henry VIII), sawing (where they hang you upside down and saw you in two parts from top to down... since you are upside down, your brain still receive blood and you are conscious the whole time), to name a few and these were *execution* methods. Now with a bit of imagination you may be able to picture what torture may have looked like.
Now don't tell me that non-viking Europeans were mercy-killer, or that their torture methods were more humane. Vikings slaying monks and making "Blood Angel" doesn't sound any worst than what European did publicly in the rest of Europe. Moreover, you make it sound like Vikings raided a monastery every day before breakfast. True, some Vikings indeed attacked monastery because they were often quite wealthy and poorly defended, but that was not a common practice. Also, Vikings were not Saints, there were Christians, Jews, Muslims thieves, murderer and rapist too. Just recently a handful of US soldiers on duty decided it may be fun to raped and killed some Iraqis people (some of them little girls), history will remember these acts but that doesn't mean a majority of American soldiers are like that.
Beside in that time, armies were much more tolerant toward soldiers who wanted the warrior reward by looting and using the local population for their own enjoyment. So to claim that all Vikings were suddenly stricken by remorse because of a few monastery were raided, doesn't make much sense since most Vikings wouldn't even heard of the deed anyway (words to mouth distorts facts and I seriously doubt that a raider would give himself the bad role in all this).
Speaking of the pious Christians, you have heard of the Crusades? Those virtuous crusaders didn't hesitated to rape, murder and exterminate complete population in the name of their enlighten belief. Some believe that it was a purely was a defensive war, but this explanation is flawed since the crusaders where often on the offensive and also committed atrocities against Jews in the towns of Germany, France, England, Palestine, Syria and Hungary (to name a few).
All this to say that if you want to catalogue the atrocity committed during human history, you won't have to look very far. But I don't think Vikings were any worse or any more filthy than any other European at that time.
BTW: This is perhaps the thread that moved the most quickly off-topic, I had to seen in a long time.