"There's nothing new under the sun."
Thank you for your thoughts. They are clearly well thought out and researched.
I would be intereted to hear you expand on the similarties in Empires, Governance, and Warfare, between the ancient world and American culture. I'm quite ignorant on the matter.
Lol well really you just have to breakdown each one into smaller subgroups because those three topics we could have an entire topic on. For better or worse, humanity has a lot of eery parallels throughout time echoed in the Bible and even history outside the Bible. Heh a good example be look at the Olympics which have just recently passed and how prominent that was in Hellenism and ancient Greece and Rome. Ay, look at the American Sports Athletic Culture, even the stadiums are similar in architecture to the Romans. American pop culture and TV "teen" dramas are highly sexual and modelled after many Hellenistic, Roman, and ye olde Englishe notions of romance (ever wonder why Hollywood movies suck so much? It's because you can only rehash and mutilate the old mythologies so much til it gets stale lol.) Much of the Mainstream Corporate American ideas and images of fleshly beauty are actually quite ancient from areas like Ptolmey era Egypt and the pre-islamic pagan Middle East. Though I suppose this changes frequently too though and you get fun synergies of style. Like the Mohawk hairstyle of course traditional native american hairstyle, hgihly counter culture hairstyle of 1980-207until it reached brief cultural acceptance and popularity in 2007-2008 though has kinda faded since (even had a few friends suspended in high school for this then two years later it was acceptable lol.) Even a lot of the 1960s-1970s fashion, music, themes in media are rehashes and mixtures of a lot of far east/india meets native american and british styles lol.
In terms of politics, nothing is new under the sun. Lol, like most American politics and theory our very concept of Citizenship and Rights are mostly a synergy of English Common Law and ideals of the Roman Republic (which explains why in our culture these two cultures are the most frequently glorified and represented.) Then we get into good old fashioned Machiavelli politics, which really even goes back before Machiavelli, and all the other ill parts of politics are nothing new and hearken back far far into history of scandals, affairs, subordinates falling on their swords literally or metaphorically, The Political Elite vs the Merchant Class, protests, riots, and crackdowns, and the clash of World Leaders. American Politics is great just by how many different factions and intrigues and very public knowledge there is of it because of this lol. Ancient Politics, again mostly Roman Republic/British hybrid, has had deep influence on our society and fact we do not have a king. George Washington only served two terms and our public schools say he set "precedent" when he only served two terms. However, Washington was not setting a precedent, he was living out a precedent set for him because Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus set the precedent of a roman dictator surrendering absolute dictatorship thousands of years beforehand and Washington was a member of the Society of the Cincinnati which at that time basically espoused political philosophical views reflecting on Cincinnatus life. (also whom the city in Ohio is named after and has a statue of in fact.)
Then we have Empire, for this maybe I should call it Geo-Politic. Look at the Russians taking over Crimea. This surprised many people, didn't surprise me so much that they choose to take Crimea, I was just surprised they took it so quickly with no resistance when historically they've had to shed major blood to gain Crimea. If one even looks at economic systems, modern capitalism theory comes from Adam Smith of Britain, however, capitalism and trade has always been around beforehand. Even much of our central banking practices (federal reserve type stuff) has been practiced before for instance with Kubilai Khan according to Marco Polo. Or how about the issue of Piracy, which has been a problem stretching back as far as ancient history goes even up to today. America actually has stuck to its own rules of never paying a ransom as far as I am aware of and our first conflicts as a nation, the Barbary Wars when we captured Tripoli (quite an ancient city!) because the Barbary Coast pirates of the region were well... pirates harassing our nation's sea routes and vessels. This is why we didn't pay ransom and elimianted the Somalian Pirates in the Maersk Alabama incident. China is a good example too in and of itself. America has taken a different approach at empire though, it's again sort of a synergy of Rome and Britain but with American flavor. Like Rome we put many nations under our yolk by mutual treaty and alliance. Like Britain our focus is mostly on gaining strategic fortress locations typically upon wate routes. Unlike both instead of straight up conquering and annexing lands, what America does is it "liberates" lands by regime change and then has the new regime sign favorable agreements, primarily Base Agreements which allows our Empire to stretch worldwide and control much commerce and militarily strategic locations making America today ironically one of the most far-reaching and most powerful empires in history but at the same time it is one of the smallest by total land size.
Lol and that's all jsut scratching the surface really. Lol like I said we could probably spawn a few good topics on any of these smaller topics or the broader topics of Empires and Warfare and Culture throughout the ages both in the Bible and outside of it.
