July 16, 2013 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
12:44
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| Approximately 2,500 years ago, in what is now Iraq, the city of Babylon stood at the centre of a vast empire that stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea, and ruled over numerous and diverse peoples. | |
| In the centre of Babylon, the great Ziggurat Isagilla towered over the ancient capital as a permanent and immovable reminder to all who travelled from as far west as Italy and as far east as India that the great lord Marduk reigned supreme in the heavens and kept a watchful eye on the world. | |
| At the top of the ziggurat was an altar, upon which sacred offerings of animals, grain, wine, and incense were sacrificed to Marduk by his priests. | |
| These priests derived great authority and prestige from their position as the servants of the greatest of all the gods, and they knew beyond doubt that Marduk sat on his throne and pronounced judgment on mankind through omens that they interpreted from their sacrifices. | |
| When the priests returned from their rituals, they would pronounce the god's will to the king of the four quarters of the earth, and he would know what his patron demanded. | |
| If the great god was pleased with his worshippers, he would reward them, with bountiful harvests, victory of their enemies, and longevity. | |
| If the great god was displeased, he would send famine, ravaging armies of demented barbarians from the fast and noble steps beyond the Black Sea, or plague. | |
| Knowing that this was so, you can see the importance of the priest's ability to correctly interpret the omens given from the sacrifices. | |
| One mistake, one misinterpretation of the great god's will, and it could spell the end of not only the empire, but the city itself and all her people. | |
| Of course, to us, this seems laughable. | |
| We can hardly conceive of what it must mean to so intensely believe in an obsolete deity. | |
| If you're an atheist, you probably find it very hard to understand belief in any kind of deity at all. | |
| You may even find the concept of belief itself difficult to understand. | |
| Why believe something when you can just know it instead? | |
| The priests of Marduk knew that the order of the world was good, just, and correct. | |
| They knew that Marduk was indeed watching and judging, but no amount of imagination can suffice to resurrect their world. | |
| The past isn't just a foreign country, it's an entirely different planet. | |
| Now, imagine if, one day, a man from the future walked into Babylon, through its winding streets to the Ziggurat, climbed the immense steps, and violated the sanctuary of the god while the high priest was conducting the rituals. | |
| Imagine if he said to the high priest, One day none of this will exist, and nobody will care. | |
| Presuming that the time traveller spoke Babylonian, what would you imagine the high priest's reaction to be? | |
| Would he laugh? | |
| Look at where we are and what we are doing. | |
| Surely a people as pious and blessed as the Babylonians would last until the end of time itself, just as they have existed from the beginning of it. | |
| Such a massive structure that you now stood on was built to last until the universe ended. | |
| The power and wealth of Babylon was so legendary that she has become the queen of cities and was revered the world over. | |
| Perhaps he would be outraged. | |
| The time traveller has intruded upon a ceremony that likely only a few hundred men in all of history have witnessed. | |
| It was sacred. | |
| How could the time traveller possibly fail to comprehend the sheer gravity of what was taking place? | |
| Could he not see where he was and what they were doing? | |
| Did he wish to threaten the order of the entire universe by displeasing the ruler of all? | |
| The mere act of an unclean person interrupting the ceremony could lead to the death of all mankind. | |
| Would he be able to even understand what the time traveller was trying to tell him? | |
| A high priest, literate, aged, versed in all known hymns, and an advisor to multiple kings and emperors, could he conceive of a time when men did not understand the sanctity of his role? | |
| Perhaps he was a particularly wise and patient man. | |
| Perhaps given the extraordinary nature of the situation, he would attempt to explain to the time traveller precisely what they were doing and why. | |
| Would the time traveller be able to understand that the very order of the cosmos hinged on this ceremony? | |
| Probably not. | |
| To the time traveller, belief in Marduk would be as alien to him as string theory would be to the high priest. | |
| Too much has changed in the intervening years. | |
| The time traveller could not believe in a god he knew not to exist, and the priest could not understand that the time traveller did not believe in any gods at all. | |
| Critical thinking is on the decline in modern society. | |
| People are simply less inclined to think about what they are doing before they do it or what they are saying before it is said. | |
| Look at this picture. | |
| What does this man think he is saying? | |
| Everyone on earth should become a farmer. | |
| But what does that mean? | |
| The sole reason for human civilization was the invention of agriculture. | |
| Without it, there are no food surpluses. | |
| Food surplus is so necessary to the development of civilization that we take it for granted. | |
| If everyone were to be a farmer, there would be no professionals. | |
| How many part-time farmers would it take to develop a cure for cancer? | |
| None, because it would never, ever happen. | |
| We have thousands of professional scientists who have dedicated their whole lives to work on this problem, as I say these words, and we still do not have one. | |
| What this man is suggesting is that we retard the future of human development by eliminating the division of labour. | |
| Division of labour is made possible because of agriculture. | |
| When you free people from the burden of having to manually collect their own food, they can put their time into more productive use. | |
| Literacy, philosophy, construction, technology, medicine, all of these things are possible because not everyone is a farmer. | |
| What this man is suggesting is the abandonment of 8,000 years of human effort, all because he thinks it would make us a little bit happier. | |
| He has not considered all of the good and necessary things that make modern life the pinnacle of not only human achievement, but any achievement we have ever encountered. | |
| I have unlimited access to water. | |
| I have a home that I can adjust to the temperature of my desire. | |
| I have access to medical care that has reached the levels of science fiction. | |
| I can travel thousands of miles in a day. | |
| I can eat food from any country in the world without leaving my town. | |
| I can be entertained by pulling my phone out of my pocket and accessing a resource that contains the sum total of all human knowledge, all while I'm using my hygienic toilet. | |
| All of these things are made possible because previous generations of humans that came before me were not committed to back-breaking labour that would wear them out before their time. | |
| Imagine if Archimedes had been a farmer. | |
| Socrates, Aristotle, Galen, Jesus, Muhammad, Galileo, Leonardo, Voltaire, all the great minds of history would have not flourished because they would be tilling the dirt. | |
| Freeing people from the burden of farming allowed mankind to reach a pinnacle of excellence that no other species could possibly have achieved. | |
| And this man thinks it would be worth throwing all of that away because it would be, in his opinion, a direct path to a pleasant land. | |
| He has clearly not considered what his words actually mean. | |
| He has not thought of the ramifications of everyone being a farmer. | |
| He has looked at his life, with which I am sure he is satisfied and with good reason, and assumed that everyone's life should be like this. | |
| He has not thought about what the actual result of that would be. | |
| I found this image on Facebook, where it received thousands of likes and shares. | |
| People clearly think this is an idea worth getting behind. | |
| I find it terrifying that thousands of people are happy to use their minds to only touch the surface of a concept before they embrace it. | |
| It is a truly awe-inspiring thing to watch thousands of people actively wish to perform hard manual labour in exchange for sacrificing everything comfortable in their lives. | |
| People are becoming increasingly accustomed to simply taking a source as fact. | |
| Any media you consume on a daily basis is biased, and the concept of investigative journalism is all but dead. | |
| Media outlets do nothing more than broadcast the latest lines from their respective governments, but that is a topic for another video. | |
| My issue in this video is that people don't stop and think about what they are seeing and hearing. | |
| They do not even think it is worthy of consideration. | |
| They have heard something from an authoritative source, therefore it must be correct. | |
| On any given subject, the public at large has a tendency to side with authority and accept the official story. | |
| Authority has one goal, to maintain and propagate its own power. | |
| That is the nature of power, and those who achieve it rarely give it up without a fight. | |
| So why are people content to accept the lies they are fed? | |
| Because they do not need to challenge them. | |
| It does not affect their daily life. | |
| In fact, they are actually encouraged not to do so. | |
| And so they carry on believing the lie because it is easier than using their own minds to examine what they have been told and arrive at their own conclusion. | |
| And with the amount of celebrity gossip in the world, who can blame them? | |
| Kate Middleton is going to have her baby ownature, if you didn't already know. | |
| I know, she could have had a C-section. | |
| But what a brave woman, giving birth like every other woman from now back until the dawn of man. | |
| This is a trend on the rise. | |
| As generations are born who have no knowledge of what it is not to accept the official story at face value, they will find themselves less and less able to conceive of what it is to even question it. | |
| Why would you? | |
| Can't you have a look around and see the wonders we have? | |
| I have pictures of cats on my phone. | |
| I work in a job that does not challenge me. | |
| All I do is what I am told. | |
| I do not have to use my own initiative because I am a comfortable wage slave. | |
| I get up, I do my job, then I come home, and I erase my day with mindless distraction after distraction. | |
| I am not interested in bettering myself because I have no need to do so. | |
| I do not read the classics, I do not understand philosophy, I do not care that I do not know. | |
| How many generations will pass before the very concept of questioning what we are told disappears entirely? | |
| Too few, unfortunately. | |
| And before you know it, we critical thinkers have become the priests of Marduk. | |
| The time traveller who comes to us would simply not be able to understand the reasons for critical thinking. | |
| It is alien to his time, it is an outmoded concept, and it has been retired to the dustbin of history. | |
| History teaches us that this is where we are heading. | |
| Please, I beg of you. |
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