The X virtuous men of history or whatever

[Ganbare Gincun]

Yes, because if people didn't go to church they would always be nice to each other, the end.

Human beings may be inclined to treat each other poorly in the absence of religious inculcation. But we'll never really know whether that supposition is true or not because just about every culture in the world is deeply intertwined with some crazy religion of one kind or another. But even assuming that your premise is true, religion still ends up as a greater force for perpetuating evil then any individual ever could. The whole purpose of a religion is to set up a command structure that allows theocratic leaders to set themselves at the apex of their society, acquire funding from their followers, and to spur their followers to organize and do horrible things to non-believers and/or those that have been marked for death by the theocracy. The only way to escape this kind of evil behavior is to be a member of the faith... and even then, you might not be entirely safe from harm if you aren't considered "faithful enough" by the crazy people running the show.

[mean_liar]

You're arguing for anarchy, not strictly just atheism. Any organization can perpetuate evil more than an individual.

The "do horrible things to everyone" is a little subjective. Most organizations screw those around them, so you have the same hurdles.

Certainly the death tolls from government-sponsored wars outstrips religion-sponsored wars, so there's an easy metric for "evil" the way in one way that it could be measured.

Then there's the follow-on that anarchy is inherently unstable and then what actions are you taking to limit the power of organizations?

Religion isn't the easy target you're making it with your demonizing. There are notable historical exceptions but as a general rule they don't practice large-scale mass murder.

[mean_liar]

Religion paid for great art, yes.

Religion killed and suppressed other artists, including and possibly especially, art produced by prior or other religions.

Someone here seems to be arguing that the creation of Christian frescos seems to outweigh the Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Cathar, and etc art and artists smashed to pieces under the same regime.

And now you're trying to say that the sum of created art since Justinian (minus the Albigensian Crusade) is less than the destroyed art, and that this destruction outweighs not only the European art it fostered afterwards but also the entire contribution of the Asian continent's religious art.

An honest treatment of the subject wouldn't use the Taliban or Justinian as your baseline for religion.

That said, I already stated that measuring "net effect" is so horribly nuanced as to not be worth the effort to hash it out. Suffice to say you and a few others feel differently than I do.

[Crissa]

Wait, you are arguing that the lost techniques, artists, voices, accumulated history is outweighed by religious art made in its place?

Yes, Communism destroyed a bunch of art. And it was... Well, it acted much like a religion, but we'll say it wasn't. And yet, you're saying that it was a net positive that entire temples and songs and artists and cultures were burned or smashed or eviscerated... Is outweighed by a handful of Christian temples?

You're really sick, you know that?

-Crissa

You do know, right, that Christians have been smashing and burning for quite some time after Justinian, yes? I mentioned Cathars. They burned the actual people, leaving no writings or song or even record of birth. How about Mayans? The Christian representative, sent to make sure no one deviated, burned every single book he could lay his hands on, and break every pot and temple. The Cherokee, inspired by the formation of the United States wrote down their history... And the Christians stole their lands, labeled them demons, and stole their children. The Aboriginals - dozens of languages and cultures - had their children stole in this century. As a base line, that's a hellish amount of damage to the term 'art'.

That's just Western culture, which has ravaged five continents. In Eastern culture, there are Hindi and Shinto and even Buddist examples of denying people to create the art they desire. From caste denial to scourging opposing viewpoints, the negatives may vary, but it still is a negative to art when expression is denied. Turned into a mythos of monsters, they were stamped out by mobs led by each of those religions.

[mean_liar]

The Albigensian Crusade is the Cathar persecution, so yes, I'm aware of it.

You somehow think that religion makes no contribution to art and that destruction - sanctioned and fostered by social instruments outside religion - is therefore never able to be recovered in any fashion, as if history was one long stretch of religious loons eradicating everything in their path, and that these swaths were the sole product of religion and had nothing to do with anything else.

You see no benefit to religion, no unifying elements to society that allow it to function better and create, nothing. It's all so much irredeemable crap to you. I get it. A lot of very smart people agree with you. A lot of very smart people disagree with you.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that your understanding of history is unnecessarily pessimistic. It's akin to the people that equate 9/11 to MURDEROUS MUSLIMS without really thinking about the magnitude of what's involved. Are bad things bad? Yes they are. Are bad things the sum of history? No.

I'm not sick, I just don't fixate on terrible things as the whole sum of whatever it is I'm discussing, especially in relation to anything as large and amorphous as "religion", "society" or anything else so astoundingly chimeric.

Anyone that thinks that the Romans didn't do the same, or just about any organized society didn't eradicate its opponents are just deluding themselves. Placing a label on it as "religion" is just a fig leaf for the genocidal nature that most power structures deal with civil war and conquest.

You might as well say that "society" and "human nature" are bad for art and in the end, everything other than creating art is bad for art. I can get on board with that.

[Ganbare Gincun]

You're arguing for anarchy, not strictly just atheism. Any organization can perpetuate evil more than an individual.

I'm not arguing for anarchy at all. I'm simply stating that you can't really say an organization is a force for advancing good in the world when they sanction things such as enslaving people based on the color of their skin, murdering people because of their sexual preferences, and waging wars against other countries because they follow a god that is different from yours. The fact that religious officials are able to justify this kind of evil behavior to otherwise reasonable people by claiming that the Sky Wizard said that it was acceptable makes it all the more outrageous and offensive.

Religion isn't the easy target you're making it with your demonizing. There are notable historical exceptions but as a general rule they don't practice large-scale mass murder.

Religion is an incredibly easy target for "demonizing" because almost all of them concoct arbitrary bullshit to justify committing atrocities against people that aren't members of the faith. And even if you ARE a member of the faith, you're not guaranteed to be spared assault at the hands of your fellow "believers". It doesn't matter if we're talking about civil war between Sunni and Shiites, children being molested by priests with the knowledge and consent of the Catholic Church, or Islamic women being gang-raped and murdered by male members of their community because they aren't acting like "proper" women - you're can still be declared as "fair game" by theocratic authorities no matter how innocent, pious, or devout you may be. This kind of behavior isn't good, it certainly isn't holy, it doesn't sound like the kind of thing that a loving and benevolent god would approve of, and it's all completely inexcusable to a rational outside observer.

[mean_liar]

As official policy the Japanese raped more people in Nanking than the Catholics ever managed. Toss in Korea and they're way over that amount.

It's already crazy OT - let's keep it to art.

[Maj]

Someone here seems to be arguing that the creation of Christian frescos seems to outweigh the Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Cathar, and etc art and artists smashed to pieces under the same regime.

Can we talk about the Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Cathar, and etc art and artists for a little bit here? Isn't the Parthenon art? Wasn't it religious? What artists did the Greeks kill off to make that? Angkor Wat - isn't that temple art? What artists did the Khmer kill off? The Temple of Aset in Philae... It was religious. What kinds of artists were the Egyptians persecuting when that was built? The carvings of Chaac at Uxmal... What sort of artistic expression did the Mayans suppress? Or the Estruscan paintings at Tarquina? The Itsukushima Shrine?

Seriously. If it's going to be argued that Religion did nothing for art, and that Religion's main work was suppressing art, can we actually talk about Religion and not just specific sets of monotheism (though weren't the Cathars considered Christian? Who did they suppress and kill)?

And I'd like some clarification on the idea of censorship... If you draw anime because your bosses are paying you to draw it, is that censorship of non-anime art? If anime is the most valuable type of art, and other types of arts are not appreciated (but they don't necessarily kill artists of other types), is drawing anime because you like that style censorship? If not, how can you tell the difference between someone who's drawing anime because they like it, and someone who's drawing anime because that's the only thing that pays?

Who hasn't stamped out art?

Religion is an incredibly easy target for "demonizing" because almost all of them concoct arbitrary bullshit to justify committing atrocities against people that aren't members of the faith.

Religion is an incredibly easy target - just like skin color and gender. It's a big-ass bull's eye painted on people that allows others to simplify everything that person/group of people stands for based on a stereotype. It's easy.

At the point where anything bad doesn't ameliorate anything good, humanity is a pox on the face of the earth - we're super great at polluting it, overusing it, altering it, and claiming that we know how it works based on an incomplete understanding compiled by our favorite measuring stick at the time. Humans should all die because we suck - it's the first instinct we have.

[Ganbare Gincun]

As official policy the Japanese raped more people in Nanking than the Catholics ever managed. Toss in Korea and they're way over that amount.

1) I doubt that this is statement is correct given the long history of the Catholic Church and its penchant for committing atrocities. Catholic priests managed to molest approximately 10,000 children in America alone between 1950 and 2002. Can you imagine what things were like when they basically controlled all of Western Civilization? Between nine Crusades, a couple of Inquisitions, African slavery, and the Holocaust, I think they have quite a lot of rape and murder to apologize for. And those are just the highlights of their glorious history.

2) Even if the Catholic Church were to take second or third place in the "Rape & Murder Olympics" and we had to give Japan the Gold Medal, why on earth would any reasonable person think this somehow made their atrocities any less horrific? Am I supposed to think that 10,000 rapes is any less horrific because someone else committed 400,000 rapes? That being said, the rape of children at the hands of Catholic priests would be considered by many people to be even more horrific then these atrocities because they were not perpetuated by enemy soldiers, but were instead committed by clergymen and allowed to continue unabated by church elders. The Catholic Church betrayed the trust of their parishioners, the core tenets of their faith, what most would consider to be basic human decency.

3) Unfortunately, the example you use for your rebuttal sucks because the Japanese believed that their Emperor was "akitsu mikami" (manifest god) - a human being in which the property of kami nature was perfectly revealed. They worshipped and obeyed their Emperor, and were more then happy to march to war and commit all manner of atrocities in his name, fully confident in the fact that they had the power of Heaven on their side and could not be defeated on the field of battle. And although this line of religious "reasoning" was firmly rooted in Shinto beliefs, the Japanese Buddhists were also totally cool with idea of killing people from other countries to grow their power asymmetrically. Here's what the Buddhist leadership of Japan had to say about Japan's war effort:

In order to establish eternal peace in East Asia, arousing the great benevolence and compassion of Buddhism, we are sometimes accepting and sometimes forceful. We now have no choice but to exercise the benevolent forcefulness of "killing one in order that many may live".

Alas, their "Eternal Peace" became Asia's "Final Solution". Their "official policy" was in fact "divine decree". The Rape of Nanking, Unit 731, the labor camps - all of it was ultimately justified by religious doctrine. Even at the end of the war when all seemed to be lost, Buddhist and Shinto priests were still recruiting and training suicide bombers, assuring them that the Emperor was a "Golden Wheel Turning Sacred King" and they would reap massive rewards in their next incarnation in exchange for sacrificing themselves in a last futile attempt to stop the Allies.

It's already crazy OT - let's keep it to art.

I'd be more then happy to limit this discussion to art. Unfortunately, there seem to be quite a few people here that think it is perfectly reasonable to praise religions for "paying for art" while they went around oppressing, raping, and murdering people for fun and profit, and that is completely insane. I don't care how many cathedrals you build or paintings you commission - you can't wipe the blood from your hands by paying people to make pretty things while you're hacking people to pieces for completely arbitrary reasons.

[mean_liar]

Where you go off-track is that you assume this is somehow unique to religion, and if only religion wasn't part of the equation things would be better.

The argument isn't about the Japanese so much as it is human nature: if you took out religion entirely, you wouldn't have a better situation, you would just have a different label on the target. I argue that there's nothing unique about religion's oppression that makes it any worse than enlightened colonialism, or capitalism, or any other power structure. Religion's atrocities can be attributed more to the fact that it holds people's attention than it can to anything else.

In that light, it's just as bad as anything else though it has enough high points that I'd put it in front of, say, colonialism as far as "most likely to advance art".

Peaceful secular humanism is a minority trait trying to overcome the baser nature of the human tide, and as far as numbers go I imagine it to be roughly equivalent to the religious folk that don't want to kill and destroy everything. The only actively non-religious power I can think of - and this may be a failure of imagination and/or history - is the Soviet Union or Maoist China, which is a fine example of the dangers of creating a social power vacuum. While they supported their own art, I don't think that in general you would call them net positives for art unless you view them as aberrations that created their own styles without harming the progress of art as a whole.

[Ganbare Gincun]

Religion is an incredibly easy target - just like skin color and gender.

People are born black, or gay, or female. Were you born into the world as a Christian? A Muslim? A Hindu? Did you come out of the womb with a Bible or an E-Meter in your hand, or perhaps reciting passages from the Koran even as the doctor pulled you from the womb? Of course not. Your race, your gender, and your sexuality are all innate characteristics that you have no control over that you cannot change. But your religion isn't natural. You choose to buy into a religion. So don't imply that I'm no better then a racist because I think it's ridiculous that Scientologists believe that Xenu exists, Christians think that homosexuals can go to summer camp and magically change their sexual orientation, or that Muslims they think it's totally cool to blow themselves up because they'll get to fuck virgins for all eternity.

I'll be first to sign up with the first group that can empirically prove that their God exists and that their claims are in fact true. In the meantime, have fun murdering each other, I guess.

[Lago PARANOIA]

GG - unfortunately, due to the way human knowledge and acculturation works religion may as well be heredity. You are very likely to grow up having the religious views of the people you were raised with--what's more, you didn't even have a choice to have Christian or Buddhist or whatever values put into you.

Yes, people can change their religion more easily than they can change their genes. But it's really, really hard. For example, being European and non-Christian for until very recently was one of the stupidest things you could do in your entire life; it instantly raised the chance that you and your family were going to be killed for no reason. Unless you had an exceedingly good reason, no one would 'choose' this lifestyle.

But the problem is, by the time most people could understand this risk they were already raised non-Christian. So they stuck with this extremely irrational choice. If they were going to stay non-Christian even through this, you might as well say it was as immutable as changing their gender.

[Ganbare Gincun]

The argument isn't about the Japanese so much as it is human nature: if you took out religion entirely, you wouldn't have a better situation, you would just have a different label on the target.

If you took religion out of the equation, you would have a much better situation because warmongers would have to come up with a much more compelling reason for people to go to war with each other then "kill, rape, and loot those guys because God said that we have to". And how do you argue against waging war with someone that claims that they are carrying out the orders of the creator of the universe? The answer: you can't, and you're going to get your fucking head cut off for trying. There is no room for argument, dissent, or oversight in a theocracy. You either toe the line, or you get tortured and/or murdered. It's as simple as that. It doesn't matter if we're talking about waging war or if we're talking about art under a theocracy - the same thing applies if you want to paint portraits and your local theocracy doesn't approve. They can use whatever justification they want to support their arbitrary decision to censor your portraits, the decision isn't up for debate, and you'll be murdered if you try to defy their religious law.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Religions that are not intolerant of opposing viewpoints do not last long if they don't hold onto power. They tend to be crushed. Religions that are intolerant of opposing viewpoints that exist in a more tolerant society linger for an incredibly long time. This was especially true in the formative years of human history.

It's just a sad truth. It's like saying 'wouldn't it be great if human beings didn't have to kill things to live?' well, yes, it would be, but you don't live if you don't kill shit even if it's just plants. Tolerant society get crushed by more intolerant ones if they take hold; Akbar had all of his work undone in a generation. Marginalizing intolerant religions is much harder in a tolerant society--the best we can do is point to the clear advantages of tolerant society, the disadvantages of intolerant society, and keep intolerant religions from getting a hold on peoples' brains before they're old enough to make a choice.

[Ganbare Gincun]

Yes, people can change their religion more easily than they can change their genes. But it's really, really hard. For example, being European and non-Christian for until very recently was one of the stupidest things you could do in your entire life; it instantly raised the chance that you and your family were going to be killed for no reason. Unless you had an exceedingly good reason, no one would 'choose' this lifestyle.

But the problem is, by the time most people could understand this risk they were already raised non-Christian. So they stuck with this extremely irrational choice. If they were going to stay non-Christian even through this, you might as well say it was as immutable as changing their gender.

This is all very true. We are very fortunate indeed to live in a day and age in America where you can (usually) change your religious affiliation without the ever-present implication that you will be murdered at any moment for daring to make that kind of choice. It's a pity I can't say the same for the rest of the world.

But atheists still get a raw deal here in America. Most people cannot wrap their heads around the idea that an atheist is capable of being a good and moral member of society. The very concept that someone could live a good and moral life without the constant threat of divine punishment hanging over their heads like the Sword of Damocles is completely alien to them and will often make them quite uncomfortable when they take the time to consider how they would behave without a Sky Wizard around to keep them in line.

There's a very good book called "Towing Jehovah" that touches on this issue. It's a novel about a supertanker captain that is hired by the Roman Catholic Church to tow the dead body of God (who fell from Heaven into the Atlantic Ocean, stone dead) to Antarctica to be hidden away under the ice for all time. I thought it was an entertaining read, anyway.

[Maj]

People are born black, or gay, or female. Were you born into the world as a Christian? A Muslim? A Hindu? Did you come out of the womb with a Bible or an E-Meter in your hand, or perhaps reciting passages from the Koran even as the doctor pulled you from the womb? Of course not. Your race, your gender, and your sexuality are all innate characteristics that you have no control over that you cannot change. But your religion isn't natural.

That's all well and good - if it were relevant. But whether you've chosen to belong to a group or you're born to it is irrelevant to the fact that it's about the labels that others apply to you.

Religion is easy. It may not be something you're born with - though I think Lago has some good points on that - but it's still a delineation that people take advantage of. If race and gender aren't good enough analogies, think of it in terms of gangs. Or high school cliques.

If you took religion out of the equation, you would have a much better situation because warmongers would have to come up with a much more compelling reason for people to go to war with each other then "kill, rape, and loot those guys because God said that we have to".

You are so naive. Haven't you ever heard of lying?

People have been practicing the art of dehumanization for at least as long as written history. The minute there's a situation of "Us v Them," it's all over. Didn't the Stanford Prison Experiment teach us anything? Or Blue Eyes, Brown Eyes?

There is no room for argument, dissent, or oversight in a theocracy.

No. There's no room for argument, dissent, or oversight in an assholeocracy. It doesn't matter if you're Mao or the Pope. Assholery is part of human nature, and powerful douchebags will always crush dissent, regardless of religious affiliation.

[Username17]

Can we talk about the Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Cathar, and etc art and artists for a little bit here?

You're certainly on much better ground arguing on behalf of polytheistic religions than any monotheistic one, for obvious reasons. But just like mean liar you get caught up in meaningless crap the moment you proceed from this quote, so I am cutting you off there.

Finding a religious piece of art does absolutely nothing whatever to counter the claim that religion is without exception a negative actor upon the arts as a whole. It's not a counter example, it's just static. A religion's impact on the arts is a state function. It's like free energy equations, there's just two possibilities: with and without. A -5 modifier could be represented as a +2000 bonus and a -2005 penalty as easily and completely identically as it could be as a -5 penalty. It doesn't matter.

Everything that happens today would be different if the past was different. So you could say that every time Green Day has a good song that this is because of the cult of Mithras. Or Zoroaster. Or Shango. If any of those gods didn't have idols raised in their honor then history would be different and the present would be different and that cool Green Day song wouldn't exist. There would be other songs of course, but every song you like would never have been written by definition.

But it's just not useful to go all Pangloss on this or any other discussion about history. We don't live in the best of all possible worlds. We can change things for better and for worse. And the people who lived in the past could as well, and a lot of them made things worse. With their choices. So even though everything we presently enjoy would not exist if everything were different, that in no way means that things in life would be any less enjoyable.

So sure, I'm willing to have a discussion about whether the cult of Athena did more to foster the arts by making the Elgin Marbles than it did against that goal by burning down Troy, killing all its artisans and desecrating all its temples. That's a reasonable discussion to have. But I'm still going to side with the "No" verdict.

But it's trivial and pointless for you to bring up isolated art works that wouldn't exist if the timeline were changed at all, because that's just going to end up with you listing all art in the world. It doesn't support the claim that there is a religion anywhere which has had a positive effect on art and science.

-Username17

[Psychic Robot]

If you took religion out of the equation, you would have a much better situation because warmongers would have to come up with a much more compelling reason for people to go to war with each other then "kill, rape, and loot those guys because God said that we have to".

Haha, oh, wow.

I don't think you understand human nature. Indeed, religion can be the banner under which men rally for evil, but it can just as easily be some other cause. Then again, religion can be a banner under which men ally for good. I'm sure that Mel Trotter has secret Nazi experiment labs in an underground facility, though.

[Starmaker]

The Albigensian Crusade is the Cathar persecution, so yes, I'm aware of it.

A Most Holy War[/i]]Only a handful of heretics were actually named Cathari in the Middle Ages and, most important, no Provencal heretic was ever styled ‘‘Cathar’’ (by choice or accusation) during the years of the [Albigensian] crusade.

[mean_liar]

Starmaker, you are so full of shit you could turn yourself inside out and still not be released of the terrible excrement load you carry.

Are you seriously saying that the Albigensian Crusade had nothing to do with Cathars or Catharism? Or is this some bullshit pedantic "they were actually predominantly referred to at the time as 'Albigenses' and even though they were since labeled Cathars and were a branch of Cathars and commonly understood by scholars to be Cathars and THIS WAS WHAT CRISSA WAS REFERENCING WITH THE TERM CATHARS IN HER POST, lol the Albigensian Crusade had nothing to do with Cathars".

You are a complete and total shitbag cocksucker.

http://www.languedoc-france.info/1206_crusade.htm
http://xenophongroup.com/montjoie/albigens.htm
http://www.chemins-cathares.eu/index_uk.php
http://www.crusades-encyclopedia.com/innocentIII.html
http://www.crusades-encyclopedia.com/al ... usade.html
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01267e.htm
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/ent ... an_Crusade
http://crusades.boisestate.edu/Albi/02.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albigensian_Crusade
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharism

[Starmaker]

Are you seriously saying that the Albigensian Crusade had nothing to do with Cathars or Catharism?

Yes. Go argue with him.

[Crissa]

Dude, the Cathars and millions of people still died, at the say-so of religious purity, destroying all sorts of song, art, and culture.

That's rather why I just named people who died, and not a crusade that did it. Of course people take advantage. That's where we get the modern definition of 'witch hunt'.

And if you're taking the guy's position that they didn't call themselves Cathars... Well, that's just stupid. Japanese people didn't call themselves Japanese, Germans call themselves Dutch, and we don't have a fucking clue what Neanderthal called themselves. We need to choose a name to associate with them for posterity.

-Crissa

[mean_liar]

Pegg's book is an outlier and an anomaly. It contradicts the preponderance of scholarly research about the existence of Catharism. Without being a medieval scholar and without having read his book I can say that I don't know how seriously to take him. Maybe he has something really groundbreaking. However, I do know that to take the word of a singular outlying scholar and then trumpet it as some sort of obvious fact that only an idiot would miss is still bullshit.

Ditto Crissa's remark: no Gypsy ever died because apparently they're all Roma?

Also, the Albigensian Crusade had plenty to do with Catharism. It's just Pegg's contention that they never actually existed... but I'm pretty sure that the crusaders were looking for gnostic heretics.

[Username17]

Also, the Albigensian Crusade had plenty to do with Catharism. It's just Pegg's contention that they never actually existed... but I'm pretty sure that the crusaders were looking for gnostic heretics.

Well, they spent an awful lot more time killing Aragonese people whether or not they were gnostic heretics. Indeed, with the structure of Europe at the time, the vast majority of people had no idea whether they or the people around them were gnostic heretics.

-Username17

[ckafrica]

I think we are forgetting this

As a species we are incredibly good at being shitty to each other when fighting each other for resources and we latch onto whatever excuse is convenient to make us feel justified in doing it. And lets face it all these atrocities we're talking about are not just because of religion, or nationalism or whatever, it's all resource acquisition or an expression of power to make future resource acquisitions easier. "I kill in the name of GOD and the U S of A, to give you FREEDOM... and for your oil (sorry Zimbabwe no oil, no killing)"

All moral codes place restrictions on our actions, on what art is and isn't acceptable.

I mean I don't think any of us would argue that child erotica is unacceptable yet to those who seek it out and desire it and who produce it, it is surely deemed art. Closer to the border is stuff make from animals like this which had animal rights activists up in arms. Either we must allow it because we must allow all attempts at artistic expression no matter how distasteful or we must accept that all cultures place restrictions on art based on some seemingly arbitrary definition of what is unacceptable.

Now I would like the catholic church, as an institution, to curl up and die just like any other sensible person but I would never suggest that any and all who follow a religion are dim-witted and easily cowed, as is too often suggested around here. Anti-religious atheism is just as bad (if not worse) a form of bigotry as many of the things people complain about religious people doing.

On the Cathars: to the best of my recollection, they were a bunch of hard core aesthetics who likely were not big art producers or lovers.


Fixed tags --Z