What do you think is the worst mistake in history?

I would say the beginnings of religions that feel they are the only true religions, and therefore have the right to impose their beliefs on others. I have to wonder how many wars would never have been fought and how many lives would have been saved without these religions.

My second choice would be the election(?) of bush.

atomic and nuclear bombs maybe! :shrug:

Those are just scary!

That stuff is just...nasty

I dunno, that's just me.

the problems bush has caused in our country and other parts of the world will be with us for decades to come.

:cry:

so it's a mixed thing. They might have won a "one-front" war. Interesting "what-if".

Attack a country with a brazillion soldiers and bad weather ... great decision.

I see them as the same thing, in an objective light.

Invading Russia created a shitstorm for years to come

Lost his entire army.

Some high ranking Nazis thought Russian citizens would turn against Stalin if the USSR was invaded.
Sound familiar? The same "we'll be greeted as liberators" nonesense Cheney embraced.

...rid of Communism they would join the Germans right away.....surprise, surprise...

ALTHOUGH....I have read that the Soviets first tried to exort the citizenry to fight the Germans with a 'defend the revolution' slant.
It didn't work.
but when they shifted the emphasis to 'defend your families and the motherland' the soviets began to fight like mad.
(please don't ask me for a source...)

...millions of German troops and was a major factor in WWII victory.,

Things could have been so much simpler, I tell you.

Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move and they should have never left the oceans."

It's gone rapidly downhill. :blush:

:thumbsup:

No Contest.

I kinda think those wars would have been fought regardless, the leaders would've simply found another justification.

Let's see, the biggest "D'oh!" moment in history... the invention of shrink wrap, and glue stronger than packing boxes for consumer goods. Yeah, it's not a doozy, but it's made me curse more in my life than anything else.

Led to environmental destruction, the ability to support massive populations of humans, concentrations of wealth (and corresponding wars over it), and the ability of humans to live out of balance with nature.

I doubt we'll ever recover as a society.

I've never had one! I wonder if they will be as good as the originals!

tasting the goodness that is the banana cream twinkie. Such a waste. :P

Cause that sounds just really sinful. :P

Deistic discussion aside, this execution opened a big can of worms.

nt

A man was crucified that was a teacher of a small but growing band of people. That band of people were the first Christians. Whether or not he was a deity is irrelevant in regards to my answer to the OP's question.

Council of Nicea circa 324 AD.
I think Constantine just put together a bunch of stuff
to support his own aspirations.

what historical accounts...? :shrug:

"Scholars must therefore look to other sources to corroborate the existence of Jesus, Kloppenborg says. One such source is Jewish historian Josephus, who compiled a history of the Jewish people and gave a fairly neutral account of Jesus: "About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, for he did very many surprising deeds and he was a teacher of such people as accepted the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many Greeks…And this tribe of Christians as we call them now has not died out even to our day," Josephus wrote. Josephus had little reason to invent this account, and his description of Jesus does not seem dependent on any Christian accounts of Jesus. In addition, there are brief mentions of Jesus by the Roman historian Tacitus and a Syrian philosopher named Mara bar Sarapion and, later, in the Babylonian Talmud."

http://www.newsandevents.utoronto.ca/bios/askus50.htm

nt

being a liberal Christian, I see it as a necessary thing overall. It seems man would have had useless wars over religion regardless.

and the Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

The Great Leap Forward is now widely seen, both within China and outside, as a major economic disaster, effectively being a "Great Leap Backward" that would affect China in the years to come. As inflated statistics reached planning authorities, orders were given to divert human resources into industry rather than agriculture. The official toll of excess deaths recorded in China for the years of the GLF is 14 million, but scholars have estimated the number of famine victims to be between 20 and 43 million.<4> The three years between 1959 and 1962 were known as the "Three Bitter Years" and the Three Years of Natural Disasters. Many local officials were tried and publicly executed for giving out misinformation<5>.

:shrug:

#2 = The Industrial Revolution (call me crazy!): slums; child labor; pillaging of the planet;pollution (AKA, Global Warming); and all the deadly war machines that have come forth.

I got nothin'.

We were naive.

so now we have christianity to deal with.

That was a big one...

Whichever dipshit fascist greenlighted that...I would say I hope he died at some point, but I hope he's still alive somewhere (allegedly, most of them are).

That may have been the death knell for civlization right there. I hope the assassins get to suffer the bitter end along with the rest of us.

It's all been downhill since then. 'Nuf said.

for a tribe or a clan...a way to control the sexual activities of the members as well as the rituals around events like birth and death. What spreads the religion from one people to the next is rarely peaceful conversion, so that is probably the worst oft-repeated mistake in history.

I once heard that she considered doing just that. Don't know if it's true or not.

ooops

nt

Religion is often used to spur the people to action, or to find a justification, but it's rarely, if ever, actually about the religion.

If not religion, then it's patriotism. If not patriotism, then its racial. If not racial, then it's just "You want them marrying your sister?" kinda crap.

Ba-dum-dum.

Rimshot.

:hide:

That genie's out of the bottle. And besides, women have better verbal skills. :evilgrin:

Bad mistake not killing the European colonists.

Then the selection of Bush.