A paragraph in Adrian's book, "The Truth About 2012" caught my eye.
When the Spanish invaded, the Roman Catholic Church ordered that all of these codices, which the church held to be the "work of the devil", be placed in piles and burned before the Mayan people as an example, when they were forced to submit to the Roman Catholic Church.
a. I do not think the Church ordered that all of the codices be burned (otherwise the ones we still have would not exist).
{The author also failed to mention the "Codex Yoalli Ehecatl" preserved in the Vatican Library}
One Bishop Landa is known to have burned 40 codices describing diabolical practices, while no other reports on any significant scale are recorded on this burning of codices being some sort of pervasive practice. Bishop Landa was bent on destroying these books when he came upon a ritual where a young boy was about to be sacrificed. (Even today, recorded ~c1965, Mayan elders will toss a young boy off a cliff to appease the gods when there is a sizable earthquake).
b. "the work of the devil" referred to the routine ritual sacrifice of thousands of men from sunup to sundown on High Holy Days. (The burning of some codices began shortly after the Conquistadors witnessed the horrendous slaughter of countless human sacrifice victims and the soldiers were intent upon eliminating anything that ordered or instructed anyone in such demonic behavior. This opinion was not merely something which the church held to be the "work of the devil").
c. The Mayan people were not forced to submit to the Roman Catholic Church.
Their society was in headlong decline and what we know as 'ancient Maya' were nearly extinct when the Spaniards arrived.
The native people of the Americas were NOT some brilliant, advanced culture. They were barely developed beyond the Stone Age. They basically had no domesticated animals. They had no real agriculture beyond pushing a sharp stick in the ground and dropping a seed in. That may be because the plow had not been invented because they had no metallurgy (gold was not mined but simply picked up off the ground near certain creeks and rivers and then melted down by dropping it into a really hot fire. Silver and iron can be smelted at similar temperatures but no European observers ever saw this happening. Archeological digs show that "maybe" some sort of smelting was going on around 2000 BC but that art was completely lost over time. Their knowledge of chemistry was nearly zero. They never even figured out how to attach a sail to their canoes.
When will people stop pretending that these were advanced cultures?
When the Spanish invaded, the Roman Catholic Church ordered that all of these codices, which the church held to be the "work of the devil", be placed in piles and burned before the Mayan people as an example, when they were forced to submit to the Roman Catholic Church.
a. I do not think the Church ordered that all of the codices be burned (otherwise the ones we still have would not exist).
{The author also failed to mention the "Codex Yoalli Ehecatl" preserved in the Vatican Library}
One Bishop Landa is known to have burned 40 codices describing diabolical practices, while no other reports on any significant scale are recorded on this burning of codices being some sort of pervasive practice. Bishop Landa was bent on destroying these books when he came upon a ritual where a young boy was about to be sacrificed. (Even today, recorded ~c1965, Mayan elders will toss a young boy off a cliff to appease the gods when there is a sizable earthquake).
b. "the work of the devil" referred to the routine ritual sacrifice of thousands of men from sunup to sundown on High Holy Days. (The burning of some codices began shortly after the Conquistadors witnessed the horrendous slaughter of countless human sacrifice victims and the soldiers were intent upon eliminating anything that ordered or instructed anyone in such demonic behavior. This opinion was not merely something which the church held to be the "work of the devil").
c. The Mayan people were not forced to submit to the Roman Catholic Church.
Their society was in headlong decline and what we know as 'ancient Maya' were nearly extinct when the Spaniards arrived.
The native people of the Americas were NOT some brilliant, advanced culture. They were barely developed beyond the Stone Age. They basically had no domesticated animals. They had no real agriculture beyond pushing a sharp stick in the ground and dropping a seed in. That may be because the plow had not been invented because they had no metallurgy (gold was not mined but simply picked up off the ground near certain creeks and rivers and then melted down by dropping it into a really hot fire. Silver and iron can be smelted at similar temperatures but no European observers ever saw this happening. Archeological digs show that "maybe" some sort of smelting was going on around 2000 BC but that art was completely lost over time. Their knowledge of chemistry was nearly zero. They never even figured out how to attach a sail to their canoes.
When will people stop pretending that these were advanced cultures?