Church History Limerick

[beatrice_otter]

Okay, 99.9% of the people who read this aren't going to get it, but I've been trying to remember this limerick for a couple days and I finally did and I'm really glad so I'm going to post it here. I got it from Dr. Marvin Slind, a history professor at Luther, in a class called Rome: Republic and Empire. We were studying the latter days of the Empire, and since the Christian Church was one of the major players at the time, we ended up discussing a lot of early church history as well. Facts you need to know to understand this limerick: one of the early councils codifying Christian doctrine took place at Nicaea, and one of the doctrines they decided was heresy was called "aryan" because it had been thought up by a guy named Arius, iirc. It had to do with the nature of God, and after three years I don't remember all the details. The opposing view, that the Nicene Council approved, was trinitarianism, that God is one God made up of three distinct beings: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Anyway, for some reason a lot of barbarian tribes who converted to Christianity as the Roman Empire was crumbling preferred arianism to trinitarianism.

The heretical creed of the Arians
Appealed to many barbarians
They liked the idea
Condemned at Nicaea;
Not many became trinitarians

(Thanks, Dr. Slind!)

Comments

[kuna-yashmaa.livejournal.com]

Aryans. Iran means 'land of Aryans'.

'Aryans' was (allegedly) the self-name of the population, which brought the Indo-European languages (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages#History_of_the_idea_of_Indo-European) into the Europe and India, which brought bronze and the idea of the chariot in China, which use to build kurgans - burial mounds - over the graves of their chieftains (from them Scandinavians got the kurgan idea). Another name for that population is Proto-Indo-Europeans.

Genetically they were descendants of the population which spend the last glacial maximum (LGM) in the glacial refuge #3 (namely Ukrainian glacial refuge, which was located in steppes at the Northern shores of Black sea). LGM peak was about 21000BP, and 10000bp climate became milder, and people started to spread from the European refuges, repopulating the Europe.

Europeans of the Black sea shores domesticated the horse sometimes between 3000-2000 BC, and started to spread in all directions along the steppes. They were migrating before that, but not as fast. European-looking mummies are found all the way up to the Baikal Lake, and in Chinese province of Xinjiang. Ancient DNA analysis confirms (where it was successful) that those peoples were European (by 500 BC those who lived in Siberia/Altay, and Kazakhstan started to show DNA-signs of admixture with the East Asians, but before that Kazakhstan apparently was populated totally by Europeans). Another name of this population is Scythians (they called like that starting from 500BC). Existed European Scythians (Ukrain/South Russia), so called Scytho-Siberians (Altai - some scholars do not like that term), some Eastern Scythian brunch was called Sakas.

Genetic marker of their spread - is Y chromosome haplotype R1a1 (as many scholars believe, and I find the data convincing), which comprises about 50% of all Y chromosomes in Ukrainian population, 40% of Russian, 20% Norwegian (and I think same goes for Swedes and Islanders, with minor variations), and barely 10% of German population. Poor, poor fascists - that what happens to you, if you don't know your biology too well - you annoy the Aryans and those guys are about as pleasant as Goa'uld (according to Jack O'Neill).

[beatrice_otter]

Yes, yes, I know all that. But the name "Aryan heresy" has nothing to do with the ethnic group you mention. It was named after the guy who thought it up, whose name was Arius or something very close to that. As I said in my post, if you had bothered to read it.

[kuna-yashmaa.livejournal.com]

Well, you are the first one who does. I didn't mean to insult you, net just makes me totally autistic. I apologize.

[beatrice_otter]

Yeah, well I was a history major. I didn't know all of the specific details (that's not my area of specialty) but I knew the general gist of it.

As to the autistic, don't even joke. I have a brother who is autistic. :(

[kuna-yashmaa.livejournal.com]

I meant I often insult humans over the net... no, wrong... humans tend to get insulted talking to me over the net, and I don't get that kid is hurt until it's too late. Without seeing the facial expression or body language I am pretty deaf for human emotions.

[beatrice_otter]

That's normal, actually; it's a lot of the reason why flame wars get so out of hand. There was a study done a few months back about e-mail (the findings apply to all written communication, though). I don't remember all the methodology, but I do remember it seemed sound to me at the time. They were studying perception of emotion.

They found that people assumed they understood the emotional context of an e-mail completely correctly about 80% of the time, when in fact they only correctly understood it about 50% of the time. So basically, extrapolate it out, what that means is that 30% of the time when you're absolutely sure you know what the person speaking to you means, you're actually wrong. Nice to keep in mind.

[kuna-yashmaa.livejournal.com]

So you think our little chats were some sort of flames? Good Infinity. It was just a game heavily greased with my love to cheesy theatrics.

[beatrice_otter]

Flames? No. Just debate.

But with two people less rational and more hot-headed, or even just one person who was very belligerent, they could have easily become flames. I've seen it happen many times.

If I thought you were trying to start a flame war, I'd have blocked you and deleted all of your comments by now. I don't have time for that $&!%. Well, I don't really have time for our little chats, either, but that's different.