Cindy

“How many victims were consumed by these ceremonies? In 1487, well before any contact with Europeans, the Aztecs inaugurated their great new Templo Mayor. The day began with four lines of victims, each line stretching for two miles. The historian and anthropologist Inga Clendinnen has estimated the total number sacrificed on that occasion as twenty thousand, although others have placed the number as high as eighty thousand.12 This was, of course, a onetime occasion. During regular festivals, the numbers killed at a particular temple probably ran around two thousand a day,13 and there were hundreds of these sacrificial sites. Hence, piles of skulls numbering into tens of thousands were widespread, just as Díaz reported.”
― Rodney Stark, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity

“An additional indication of economic growth in ancient Greece comes from the major increases in the average size of Greek houses: in the eighth century BC it was 53 square meters; by the sixth century BC it had grown to 122 square meters; and by the fifth century BC it was 325 square meters.54”
― Rodney Stark, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity

“It is difficult to know how anyone, even the most bitter anti-Catholic, could truly have believed any of this! By itself, the biography of Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) makes a travesty of all these claims. In 1148, the Maimonides family pretended to convert to Islam when the Jews of Córdoba were told to become Muslims or leave, upon pain of death. Note that when most historians mention that in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella ordered the Jews of Spain to convert to Christianity or leave, they forget to mention that the Muslims had imposed the same demand in the twelfth century. Nor do they mention that many Jews who opted to leave Moorish Spain rather than pretend to convert settled in the Christian areas of northern Spain. In any event, after eleven years of posing as converts, the Maimonides family became so fearful of discovery that they fled to Morocco where they continued their deception. Thus, throughout his adult life, the most celebrated medieval Jewish thinker posed as a Muslim.64 His story clearly reveals that, as Richard Fletcher has put it so well, “Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch.”
― Rodney Stark, Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History

“You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.”
― Mary Beard, Women & Power: A Manifesto