mick wrote on 10/21/10 at 14:10:02:When I left home at the ripe old age of 15 my dad said 3 words to me.
"Don't Fu+k Up.
and ever since I have never made love to a woman while she is on top.
It took me a while to really understand the joke... but WHEW !!!
About the Fall of the Roman Empire...
Empires come and go, just like a man grows up and grows old.
The Roman Empire was born out of a riverslide hamlet next to a ford, and collapsed when it overstretched its borders and allowed so many "barbarians" from the Provinces to enlist in the military, even the Generals were barbarian, and eventually even the Emperors were barbarian generals "elected" by their own army.
Sure, some were enlightened rulers, such as Hadrian, Trajan or Vespasian, others were so "odd" (such as Caligula) they were often murdered.
Towards the end (the last three centuries of Empire) it was not odd for Rome to celebrate two, three Emperors in one single year...
So the Fall of the Empire was caused by its political instability, not by its debauchery.
To claim "the people ate themselves to death..." well, in those days you still had to walk wherever you wanted to go, climb up stairs and carry your own loads, no electric tricycles when buying your "Lard-o-Rama" at Walmarts.
As for Sodom and Gomorra, they were quite simply merchant cities that refused to pay ransom to whomever came to besiege them, and were riddled with catapults pelting incendiary bombs.
This, to the eyes of a beduin, was "fire raining down from the skies"
I sincerely doubt there was any hanky panky going on, not anything different from what was going on in 19th Century London or 20th Century NYC. Let's not forget that merchants would cheat their customers way back then just as easily as they cheat ni the present day, so when we read that "the townsfolk went to Lot's house and asked him to give them his guests, that they may welcome them in proper style", that to me is a polite way of saying "hand us those cheats that we may teach them some manners".
As for Lot's wife becoming "a pillar of salt", guys, grow up, it's ain idiomatic expression to say she was shocked speechless, and was translated word for word into greek by rabbis who were ordered to translate word by word.
Let's not forget that "the chosen people" was the same people who would sacrifice their first born sons to God, sell off kid brothers, cheat older brothers out of their inheritance, declare treacherous war on their own father-in-law and, last but not least, sack and pillage entire villages and kill the entire population down to slaughtering the farm animals themselves.
Read Genesis, Exodus and the Book of Joshua.
Pages: 
