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Post by terroreign on Nov 10, 2011 21:05:55 GMT -5
well albanians were christians until the ottomans showed up. they're godless though by all means. unless if you believe money can be a deity.
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Post by Moe Lester on Nov 10, 2011 21:12:15 GMT -5
Godless? I used to believe, the less religious a country is, the more it advances. I guess I was proven wrong.
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Post by plisbardhi on Nov 10, 2011 23:32:07 GMT -5
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Post by Shqipni13 on Nov 11, 2011 2:13:52 GMT -5
well albanians were christians until the ottomans showed up. they're godless though by all means. unless if you believe money can be a deity. Te qift krishti ne goj, shkavell!
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atdhetar
Amicus
tonight we dine in hell!
Posts: 3,124
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Post by atdhetar on Nov 11, 2011 4:08:28 GMT -5
on a scale of incest, albanians rank #1 in the balkans. evidence, see: atdhetar you a poster child for inbreeding
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atdhetar
Amicus
tonight we dine in hell!
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Post by atdhetar on Nov 11, 2011 4:14:36 GMT -5
well albanians were christians until the ottomans showed up. oh, so we were in the balcans before the ottomans invaded it? don't you go changing that tune later on now rat boy. what does that even mean? are you implying that we are capitalists by nature then? you just say the most ambigious shit that makes no sense, how do we woship money?
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atdhetar
Amicus
tonight we dine in hell!
Posts: 3,124
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Post by atdhetar on Nov 11, 2011 4:19:59 GMT -5
Godless? I used to believe, the less religious a country is, the more it advances. I guess I was proven wrong. dude when you get sucked into this imbecile's world, you find out that nothing makes much sense, like most arguments follow a logical structure, a linear progression of thought if you will...but all of that goes out of the window when he decides to chime in with his ideas.
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Post by derk on Nov 11, 2011 14:06:02 GMT -5
Krivo, in his last few sentences, showed us a guideline on how to lose an argument with self-destructive methods. He utterly destroyed his own hypothesis, and then because of his lack of knowledge in that particular area, embarrassed himself while trying to insult another member. Bravo...
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Post by uz on Nov 11, 2011 14:14:32 GMT -5
He stated Albanians were christian before the Ottomans came in, he is correct. Regarding the idea of money being a deity, doesn't stricly apply to them, but jumping alliances with whoever is stronger is a pretty weak mentality to say the least. They have sold themselves over and over to be an obedient pet to higher-masters/empires. Which is why they hold so much mix of other Balkan cultures within their own.
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atdhetar
Amicus
tonight we dine in hell!
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Post by atdhetar on Nov 11, 2011 18:06:25 GMT -5
but jumping alliances with whoever is stronger is a pretty weak mentality to say the least. They have sold themselves over and over to be an obedient pet to higher-masters/empires. Which is why they hold so much mix of other Balkan cultures within their own. that's the most inaccurate statement any human being has ever come up with, if you had read anything even remotely resembling an historical account by an unbiased author, you'd know that albanians were considered as ill tempered, disobedient, free thinking and stubborn people that did not take well to authority and were clan-like in structure...but that's if you actually read literature other than serbian propaganda and if you are fair natured enough to actually state the truth, its a question of willing to say it like it is as opposed to saying smth because it is convenient to your school of thought and the doctrine bred into you.
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Post by Anittas on Nov 11, 2011 18:54:42 GMT -5
but jumping alliances with whoever is stronger is a pretty weak mentality to say the least. They have sold themselves over and over to be an obedient pet to higher-masters/empires. Which is why they hold so much mix of other Balkan cultures within their own. that's the most inaccurate statement any human being has ever come up with, if you had read anything even remotely resembling an historical account by an unbiased author, you'd know that albanians were considered as ill tempered, disobedient, free thinking and stubborn people that did not take well to authority and were clan-like in structure...but that's if you actually read literature other than serbian propaganda and if you are fair natured enough to actually state the truth, its a question of willing to say it like it is as opposed to saying smth because it is convenient to your school of thought and the doctrine bred into you. This "clan-like" attitude that you mention did, for the most part, protect the patriarchal culture within the Albanian society. All of the qualities that you say the Albanians possessed, such as being a "disobedient, free thinking and stubborn people", weren't invested in keeping your religion. Otherwise, the vast majority of you would've kept it, much like most of the Bulgarians and Croats kept to their religion. So yes, if someone touched your women, it got ugly. But if someone told you that you'd pay less taxes if you converted to Islam, you converted. I remember when Donnie tried to turn this into a positive thing by arguing that the free-spirit Albanian was never subdued by any religious dogma, which meant that the Albanian converted to whatever religion suited him best. He specifically pointed to the Albanian nobles who had converted from Orthodoxy to Catholicism in order to suit their political alliances with Venice and the Papal States. However, there are quite a few differences between converting from Orthodoxy to Catholicism, and, converting from Christianity (Catholicism or Orthodoxy) to Islam. The first difference is obvious: Orthodoxy and Catholicism are two Christian branches that were (and still are), in many aspects compatible with one another. They're both considered Christian religions. Islam, on the other hand, was a different religion altogether and was seen as hostile and as a threat to Southeastern- and Central Europe. The other difference is that while the Albanian nobles converted to Catholicism for political reasons, the majority of the Albanian population converted to Islam for monetary profit (which can explain the innuendo directed at you: "money can be a deity"). I'm not buying into Donnie's argument. Religion in those days was an importact factor in a man's life, even if the Albanian culture was more loose on matters pertaining to religion (which alludes to an inferior administrative presence). To try to portray the every day Albanian as some kind of rock-and-roll rebel just doesn't fly. Sure, you were stubborn and you resisted authority, but that doesn't make you unique. Many regions in the Balkans resisted authority, some did it a lot better than you did; and those regions even managed to retain their religion.
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atdhetar
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Post by atdhetar on Nov 11, 2011 19:34:08 GMT -5
that's called nit-picking, taking certain attributes out of context in order to suit a preconcieved notion that you have concocted in your head,
first of, those are all adjectives which have been used to describe albanians by foreign authors that roamed those lands back in the day....therefore we start to create an idea for what an average albanian was like back in the day and we get a feel for the prevailing views, so far we have comprehensively refuted UZ's claims that we were lapdogs for empires.
then you introduce another unwarranted element into the argument, you are tying in religion and i am not sure how that is relevant here and it is throwing the whole thing off on a tangent, i don't think we are still discussing the same thing,
i guess you are trying to say that traits like stuborness, disobidience and indiscipline exclusively found in those people who preserved their religion? the innuendo being that if we were all of the above we would have preserved our former religion, i don't necessarily think that converting and being stubborn are mutually exclusive, and to make such statement is poor judgement,
you have to put events in a chronological context and draw meaning from them, yes you can say that traits like being disobedient and stubborn would resist change, but the flip side of that is that such character traits are also attracted to social status and power, therefore whilst some might have converted for obvious financial gain others might have it done to move up in stature, other simply embraced islam....point is, you don't cease being all those things simply because you convert. besides, we are talking about a process which span for a number of decades, it didn't exactly happen overnight, and everyone else was up to the same thing across the balcans, it wasn't a phenomenon confined to albania, greeks had a vast number of muslim converts which were traded in exchange for christian counterparts.
as far as the money thing goes, its just a stupid argument to bring up really, is an albanian more easily swayed by money? no more so than any other nationality, we can debate this point till the cows come home, lets just keep it simple.
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Post by Anittas on Nov 11, 2011 21:00:15 GMT -5
I disagree with Uz's assessment of Albanians adapting to regional powers, or, that doing so would be a sign of weak mentality, as he called it (although in some instances, it can be considered so). My argument was not really related to what Uz was saying, although Krivo did mention religion and I somehow picked it up and connected it to your praises for the Albanian people.
My argument should be considered unrelated to any other argument discussed in this thread and the real reason I brought it up is because I witnessed--and also participated--in a similar argument with Donnie, a few years back and I wanted to renew the argument because it ended inconclusive.
You're right when you say that converting to a different religion doesn't disprove one of holding the aforementioned qualities. My argument was that religion (Christianity) must've been important enough for the every day Albanian, and considering that he converted (those who did), means either that he was subdued in doing so by force (which he wasn't), or that he converted for a variety of reasons that we both seem to agree on, namely the advancement of social status, power, and profit (or any combination of the three).
If we say it was so, then what would that say of the Albanian character (considering that religion in those days was held in high regard)? My point is this: the Albanian remained individually strong and fought for his clan, but he didn't hold any high virtues reserved for his people as a whole until nationalism made its entrance in the Balkans. In that regard, he remained weak.
Additionally, there's nothing special in pursuing your personal interests by employing the qualities that we've discussed here. People do this every day and have done it for a long time. I still don't see the uniqueness in that, other than some passerby noting that you were skilled in being steadfast. Then again, so were many others: but it's what you fight for that matters.
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Post by plisbardhi on Nov 11, 2011 22:43:12 GMT -5
Regarding religion the same that is said for Albanians can be said for Dinaric Serbs/Montenegrins and Croats who's Muslims are now known as Bosniaks. The difference is that Albanian ethnic consciousness was stronger and never excluded the other faith on the ethnic level. Dinarics converted for power essentially, unlike eastern Balkan peasants who are essentially peasant-like people. This would all make sense to these Gypsies if they were informed about the power-seeking Dinaric personality elaborated by Dr. Dinko Tomasic.
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atdhetar
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Post by atdhetar on Nov 12, 2011 4:59:12 GMT -5
If we say it was so, then what would that say of the Albanian character (considering that religion in those days was held in high regard)? My point is this: the Albanian remained individually strong and fought for his clan, but he didn't hold any high virtues reserved for his people as a whole until nationalism made its entrance in the Balkans. In that regard, he remained weak. but as i hinted above, i am not convinced that converting to another religion chips away at your character and somehow stains your reputation simply because the rest of the balcans is still christian...who is to say that albanians didn't trade up? everyone one used to be a pagan before christianity spread like wildfire, are we questioning their character and virtues too? i'd be shocked if albanians didn't resist the conversion and i'd be surprised if religion didn't mean anything to albanians back then...but let us not trivialise a highly complex sequence of events and get tangled up in semantics, you can't summarise such an extensive time frame in one paragraph. now you are passing judgement on a peoples by analysing a snippet of history. the uniqueness, in my humble opinion, can be found in the irony that those traits i described, which you claimed to make us individual in nature, helped us preserve a sense of unity despite belonging to different religion, whereas in the rest of the balcans, people of the same nationality split up into factions, plisbardhi explained that above.
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Post by Anittas on Nov 12, 2011 8:27:48 GMT -5
Albanians achieved better unity than others, but let's not forget about the Arvanites who were assimilated due to having the same religion as the Greeks. This unity that you speak of was achieved much later after the idea of Nationalism spread out to the Balkans and it's not such a big deal. The Turks accepts its Christian minority of Turks just as well. Paganism had no chance against an organized monotheistic religion like Christianity so the comparison is wrong. Christianity, on the other hand, did have a chance to survive and in most places in the Balkans, it did.
This doesn't go well with your presentation of the Albanian as a warrior who wanted to remain fully independent from any external influences. If the Albanians traded up is irrelevant here because if one is strong in his beliefs, he will invest great effort to hold on to them. The Albanians were not overwhelmed by the Turkish presence, nor were the isolated as was the case with the Iberians who converted to Islam before the Reconquista.
And now Kosovar Albanians use religion as a source of strength and to some extent, as a regional identity, which points yet again to religion as an important role in their lives.
Lastly, I will also say that it seems the Albanians never really achieved a cultural revolution in their own country. The Albanian cultural revolution started in Romania. Maybe I should start a thread about that. What do you guys think? Are you ready to discuss that subject?
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Post by derk on Nov 12, 2011 8:59:32 GMT -5
^The ghicas?
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Post by najpos on Nov 12, 2011 9:54:40 GMT -5
Our conversion to Islam was a consequense of our disobedient, stubborned and ill-tempered nature. I'm just going to quote Noel Malcolm from his Bosnia: a short history (p 57).
So basically, to stop the rebellious nature of the Albanian he had to be converted. As Noel Malcolm also mentions an important factor was the fact that only the areas with competition between Christian Churches saw mass-conversion.
This also goes against the Serbian notion of Serbs being the most resistant against the Ottomans, while Albanians in particular, immediately accepted the Ottomans as their superiors.
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Post by Anittas on Nov 12, 2011 11:32:17 GMT -5
The Gikas what? Is that how you formulate a sentence and structure an argument? Do I look Serb to you? Put on a good effort if you want a promt reply.
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Post by Anittas on Nov 12, 2011 11:40:34 GMT -5
Our conversion to Islam was a consequense of our disobedient, stubborned and ill-tempered nature. I'm just going to quote Noel Malcolm from his Bosnia: a short history (p 57). So basically, to stop the rebellious nature of the Albanian he had to be converted. As Noel Malcolm also mentions an important factor was the fact that only the areas with competition between Christian Churches saw mass-conversion. This also goes against the Serbian notion of Serbs being the most resistant against the Ottomans, while Albanians in particular, immediately accepted the Ottomans as their superiors. I don't understand your argument. If the Turk wanted to convert you in order to lower your rebellious nature--and if he succeeded in doing so (which he obviously did)--what does that say about you? It says that you were subdued. Your source indicates that Albanians were hostile to their Ottoman occupiers and that goes against the Serbian argument of you serving the Ottomans. Yes, you can argue that you were curbed because you possessed a threat to the regional stability, and you can refer to that as being a strength, but the end-result is that you were subdued, while others were not. There's no escaping that.
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