Word: mcneills
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...Tribes, nations, peoples flourish and vanish. Customs and cultures evolve. Why? Is it God's will? Sheer chance? The power of greed? The pattern of history? All of the above is probably the safest answer. But even taking that much into account, argues University of Chicago Professor William McNeill, historians miss one of the prime catalysts in human history: infectious disease...
Caste System. In Plagues and Peoples McNeill, who won the 1964 National Book Award for The Rise of the West, offers a provocative medical man's view of why the world took some of the turns it did. Most writers figure that Rome succumbed to outer Goths and inner decadence. McNeill maintains that a series of epidemics-measles, smallpox, plague-so depleted the empire's population that by the middle of the 3rd century A.D. it was no longer able to resist the barbarians. Disease, rather than religion, also lay at the roots of India's caste...
Even the colonization of the New World may owe as much to epidemic disease as to gunpowder and the quest for gold. The Aztecs, McNeill notes, were on the verge of ousting Cortes from Mexico when an outbreak of smallpox blunted their assault. The disease spared the Spanish, who had already developed some immunity, but so devastated the Indians that even 50 years later the population of central Mexico was only one-tenth what it had been before Cortes landed...
Naturally, McNeill soon turns from war to peacetime plagues. The most famous, bubonic plague, was carried westward from China and Manchuria by the marauding Mongol hordes, and decimated Asia before being brought by ship to Europe. There, it hit the unprepared Continent like evidence of God's displeasure; between 1346 and 1350, plague killed a third of Europe's population, and it disrupted social and governmental structures for centuries. Disease apparently took a hand in ecclesiastical history...
...does not encourage homosexuality. He created human beings who later decided, by their own free will, to become homosexuals. Homosexuality is sin; it cannot be justified by McNeill's mutilation of Scripture...