Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: July 2022

Sunday, July 31, 2022

Fr. Gregory Pine OP attempts to talk about evolution - part 2

Fr. Gregory Pine OP attempts to talk about evolution: part 1, part 2

Same video as previous part.

11:41 Nice summing up of what Original Sin + Fomes Peccati means.

12:51 That comment by Karol Wojtyla is one reason for rejecting:

his having been when saying that Catholic
or Pope
or being a real saint.

There are two healing miracles attributed to him, one being with relapses (the nun in France with Parkinson symptoms) and the other being with delay (the Latin American who had some brain trauma). In Lourdes, a healing has to be both sudden and complete, apart from being beyond then known natural explanations.

Jose A. Abell M.: So what kind if sede are you? Who is your favorite last pope?
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Jose A. Abell M. I am technically not a sede, but a conclavist.

My favourite recent pope is Pope Michael.
Jose A. Abell M.: @Hans-Georg Lundahl I hear he passed away yesterday, God have mercy and may he rest in peace.

You are now a sede though.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Jose A. Abell M. Like every Catholic between a pope's death and a new popes election.

I am not a candidate for succession.

RIP.

13:19 "evolution is born out by certain evidence in genes"

For what may broadly be termed micro-evolution, definitely yes. Not just change within a species, but "within a created kind" you can have both speciation and even division into more than one genus. There was one couple of hedgehogs on the Ark and there are now 17 species in 5 genera, and a possibility that the 9 species in 5 genera of gymnures also belong here.

But if you mean that human feet, quadrupedal hindlimbs, fins, have similar genes for similar functions and a kind of gradation in how close or not close they are to ours, that doesn't prove a common ancestor, it proves as much (or even rather) a common designer.

Oh, just on the level of genetic code coming "in the same language across species" ... the genetic code codes for proteines made up from diverse amino-acids. When herbivores get proteines from plants or (after the fall) carnivores and omnivores get such from animals, it is actually practical if the proteines digested are made from amino-acids getting into the proteines of the creature digesting.

One could also invoke "artistic economy" in so far as composers tend to be content with 12 notes (albeit in more than one octave).

Tammy Williams-Ankcorn: Amen!
adrian hanessian: There is no such thing as a "Kind" mutations given from genetic drift over time result in evolution, resulting in new Species. "Created kind" is not a scientific term.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @adrian hanessian It is indeed not a modern scientific term, fortunately.

In both Latin and German and for that matter Swedish, the translation of "kind" was chosen as the Linnean term for species.

Baraminology means, this was a mistake.

We consider the created kind as more close (at least with mammals) to Family or Subfamily. It intuitively makes sense "hedgehogs" are one kind. But they are, by now, 17 species in 5 genera. They are a subfamily, with 9 species (in 5 genera) of gymnures as the other subfamily of the same family.

So hedgehogs (all 5 genera, all 17 species) are one kind within themselves. Gymnures are also one kind within themselves, either same kind or different kind as hedgehogs.

@adrian hanessian lə·mî·nōw, kata genos, juxta genus suum, after its kind all have priority over the scientific usage in its current state since Carolus Linnaeus.

13:34 I have heard about "vestigial organs" and also about them not being so much "pure vestiges" ... Kent Hovind is not the brightest bulb in the lamp when it comes to theology of what the Church is or when it comes to Church history, but when it comes to vestigial (so called such) organs, he's a match for people who unduly admire a comment by Wojtyla.

14:06 Did one on the fossil record myself, the so called "levels" actually aren't such, when it comes to presence of land vertebrate fossils.

The Austriadactylus is not found below the Cetotheriopsis lintianus, but Cetotheriopsis lintianus is found in Linz, in Upper Austria, and Austriadactylus cristatus is found in Anckerschlag, Tyrol.

The distance from Seefeld, where Ankerschlag is, and Lienz is 194.9 km. This is 121 miles and 185 yards.

This is not selective cherrypicking, there are no Oligocene layers of fossils above the pterosaur in Ankerschlag and there are no Norian layers of fossils below the early whale in Lienz. And this is very typical, outside marine biota. Grand Canyon, drill holes in Bonaparte Basin, drill holes generally - that's marine biota. There are several layers of biota while they are still alive and swimming in the sea, scurrying on the bottom or swimming near surface.

Before I go on, for those admiring Wojtyla, the kindest thing is to remind yourself of another comment of his.

"We in the East block are brain washed and know it, you in the West are also brainwashed and don't know it."

So, his admiration of Evolution could likely be a result of East block brainwashing.

14:12 "there is a bridge between a more primitive and a more advanced species"

1) You are borrowing the language of "evolution going upward"
2) There usually isn't.
3) Specifically, there is no combination of Broca area (lacking in apes and Australopitheci) and half-ape ears (of Australopitheci and of Paranthropus, near human outward, but ape inward of the hammer), no combination of human FOXP2 gene with ape-like hyoid (as in Australopithecus), on the contrary, for Australopithecus, we have an ape-hyoid and no palaeogenetic tests so far (last time I checked), for Neanderthal you have a totally human hyoid (Kebara 2) and also a human FOXP2 gene.

I would like to add, K-Ar has in recent times been replaced, often enough, by Ar-Ar. I am less sure about the reason for inflated measures with this one.

15:37 "anatomically modern humans arise between 200 000 and 100 000 years ago"

According to K-Ar dates, probably, which are basically worthless.

You cannot exclude Argon having been trapped, if the lava cooled down during the Flood with lots of water flowing in sideways and from above to cool it down.

You cannot even calibrate the halflife, as you can with Carbon 14, by using objects with organic material of historically known age. Sth that is 2000 years old has a known age in certain parts of the world (like Roman Empire) and 2000 years is a significant part of 5730 years.

Beyond 3000 years ago, historical dating gets a bit iffy, and that is peanuts, it's microscopic, in relation to the purported halflife of 1.28 billion years.

I would like to add, K-Ar has in recent times been replaced, often enough, by Ar-Ar. I am less sure about the reason for inflated measures with this one.

15:41 "behaviourally modern humans arise between 100 000 and 75 000 years ago"

It is easier to ascertain human behaviour with someone buried in a grave than with someone buried under lava, right?

So, the earliest examples of these (or all other) would often be carbon dated, and would be pre-Flood men, while the "anatomically, not behaviourally" would be people in the Flood who got trapped under lava with human customs less observed by them and theirs and less observable by us.

16:08 "never bottlenecked more narrowly than 10 000 breeding pairs"

Ouch.

1) The purported reason is debunked if you look at the population of Pitcairn Island. It has bottlenecked to very few, comparable to "one couple" if that one had a perfect genome, which we today have not;
2) and the consequence is a denial of Adam being individual and ancestral to all men who die. In other words, a denial of Catholic dogma.

16:49 Nicanor Austriaco is one "Dominican" who doesn't even bother to answer emails.

I have emailed him twice with links to my refutations, not even an acknowledgement.

17:22 "there may have been some mutation in the human species that predisposed for the reception of the rational soul"

Broca's area, Wernicke's area (which by itself doesn't seem to leave traces in the skull, it's deduced from Broca's being there), human FOXP2 gene, human ears (both inner and outer parts), human hyoids are all present even in Neanderthals and most of them (hyoids haven't been found, genes haven't been tested) in Homo erectus soloensis.

I would not say these "predispose" to a rational soul, they are intimately connected to one. They are basically useless without one.

More importantly, none of these can be explained with one mutation.

So, Nicanor Austriaco is widely off the mark in presuming there was one mutation in the species Homo sapiens which predisposed to the reception of a rational soul. His view of what mutations do is on the level of Spiderman technoblabla.

17:28 "has something to do with our capacity for language"

Well, it cannot be proven any of that was lacking "before the rise of anatomically modern humans" on the evolutionary view.

Homo erectus soloensis needed language to do tools which were technically close to the Levallois technique, but bigger. Tools which on this dating scheme is dated to more than half a million years ago.

So, if Nicanor Austriaco took his stance seriously, he should conclude Adam lived 1/2 million years ago, which makes the historic transmission of Genesis 3 events an impossibility.

18:26 There is no warrant for distinguishing a biological from a theological kind, when it comes to man.

There are so many traces of men (Sapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans, Heidelbergians, Antecessors - these last three may be synonyms - and Homo erectus soloensis) having a rational soul either for material equipment for language or from behaviour, that it's ludicrous to "limit" the theological species man to a kind of subspecies of Sapiens sapiens.

18:47 "before the infusion of the human soul"

Sorry, but the material conditions for language only make sense in a kind that has language and having human language is in and of itself a proof of already having a human soul.

19:20 Here we already have the evil I was previously speaking of.

1) "all the descendants of that pair" - Eve would not have had the mutation unless taken from the rib of Adam, but Nicanor may be granting this to the Bible
2) descendants "within that community" - if the pair was the first to speak a human language, it would, with its children, not be able to effectively communicate with the rest of what is here abusively called a "community" since these would be lacking human language
3) making therefore any interbreeding as much a form of rape as bestiality is - it would in fact be a bestiality, except for the infertility and on top of that, any real human having that magic "mutation" would by interbreeding with ... anatomical humans that aren't anatomical humans because they can't have language ... be risking the offspring would not inherit the mutation from them, but the unmutated and bestial form of the gene from the other "parent" ...

Not to mention the evil involved in Adam biologically coming from a community without language:

1) if he was born human among non-humans, no one was their to teach him language, he would, before sinning, have been a feral child
2) or he was miraculously taught language, for instance by angels, and this would have disposed him to despise his progenitors who had no language;
3) or he was only infused with a human soul later on and had (physically necessarily) memories from having been a beast in a community without language,
4) or God spare him that by inducing amnesia;
5) not to mention the loss of perceived and emotionally relevant biological kin necessary before he could set up a mankind with Eve, in this case.

So, the theory is not just false, if you look into the implications it is evil and involves God committing cruelty to Adam before he had sinned.

20:12 "through mating, that is through bestiality, which is a crazy part of that story"

Indeed.

Replace the overall Biblical story with the overall evolutionary one, and you end up with crazyness.

However, even the need to outmuscle and kill off beings from which your ancestors get their biological origin is in itself sufficiently crazy, and I suppose Nicanor and the other guy mean this would have taken place even without original sin.

Me: Goo to you by way of the zoo—and apparently some bestiality too. How is this not heresy?
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Me Exactly.

Theistic Evolution is either heresy or apostasy.

20:25 I think Nicanor Austriaco actually understands it less well than you. And so does the other guy.

In doing well, experience is source of knowledge. But in doing ill, experience is source of ignorance. Basically in Aristotle, he applies it to purely Ethical disciplines. But in so far as "concluding" is in some fashion an ethical act, it can be applied to theoretical disciplines as well.

Nicanor has sullied his soul with Evolutionism more than you have.

[added later]

Probably St. James has given you some protection against apostasy, it seems you did the camino.

[see the video: Witnessing to Marxists Feminist on The Camino /w Fr. Gregory Pine]

Saturday, July 30, 2022

Fr. Gregory Pine OP attempts to talk about evolution - part 1

Fr. Gregory Pine OP attempts to talk about evolution: part 1, part 2

I'm breaking off at 11:45 when he starts to bring on "sin of Adam" connexion. It can be mentioned, under my comment at 10:40 (not the first one) someone was commenting "Graphic language, please avoid reading if you're prone to scandal." Possibly good advice.

Let's Talk About Evolution...
30th July 2022 | Pints With Aquinas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYeu7wtO-0o

1:19 I think the double truth theory was indeed condemned in a very early syllabus of errors - that of Bishop Tempier of Paris (Archbishops only came in the time of Lewis XIV, between two Gondi's). Letare Iherusalem Sunday of late 1276 (what we would now refer to as early 1277).

1:25 St. Thomas Aquinas fought Sorbonne Averroism with argument, Bishop Tempier with condemnations.

4:23 I think you have some reviewing to do on St. Thomas' actual words.

How about this (from New Advent's translation), Prima Pars, Q 74, A 1, Corpus:

I answer that, The reason of the distinction of these days is made clear by what has been said above (I:70:1), namely, that the parts of the world had first to be distinguished, and then each part adorned and filled, as it were, by the beings that inhabit it. Now the parts into which the corporeal creation is divided are three, according to some holy writers, these parts being the heaven, or highest part, the water, or middle part, and the earth, or the lowest part. Thus the Pythagoreans teach that perfection consists in three things, the beginning, the middle, and the end. The first part, then, is distinguished on the first day, and adorned on the fourth, the middle part distinguished on the middle day, and adorned on the fifth, and the third part distinguished on the third day, and adorned on the sixth. But Augustine, while agreeing with the above writers as to the last three days, differs as to the first three, for, according to him, spiritual creatures are formed on the first day, and corporeal on the two others, the higher bodies being formed on the first these two days, and the lower on the second. Thus, then, the perfection of the Divine works corresponds to the perfection of the number six, which is the sum of its aliquot parts, one, two, three; since one day is assigned to the forming of spiritual creatures, two to that of corporeal creatures, and three to the work of adornment.

Yup, St. Thomas actually is stating that there was a (fairly short) point in time when world was half made and a few days later a time when it was fully functional as we observe it now. Heaven and Earth, Day and Night, Water, Dry Land, Plants, Seasons and Heavenly Bodies, Birds and Fish, Land Animals and Man, Adam and Eve, first marriage.

He had also sworn an oath to uphold three previous writings. Sentences by Peter Lombard, Decree of Gratian, and, most properly to this question here, Historia Scholastica. It's from there that the Roman martyrology has (Dec 25, obviously) Christ born 5199 after Creation, 2957 after Noah's Flood, 2015 after Abraham's birth and so on.

YAJUN YUAN: You make as many timestamps as I do lol
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @YAJUN YUAN Perhaps because we comment same way.

5:19 Actually, I think you need to review the doctrine of providence as well.

God certainly does control each thing, and does so according to His plan. He usually uses the mode inherent in the beings, plus what one could term, for lack of better words "chaos control" and on some rather rare occasions uses His power or the power of angels obeying Him outside this scheme (like when the angel of the Sun, the angel of the Moon, and Himself ceased to move Sun, Moon and stars for 12 or 24 hours on behalf of Joshua).

So, "inherent principles" or "puppet master" is not an "either or" but a "both and" ...

Kevin Kelly: Now you are just being silly.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Kevin Kelly No, you are being dense.

Perhaps on purpose.
tiago guinhos: Wait, what happened to Free Will if he controls everything? Or does he control us so but so well we only think we have Free Will? That would be smart from his part, uh..
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @tiago guinhos God controlling each thing does not mean He overrides each thing. See the words I already said:

// He usually uses the mode inherent in the beings, plus what one could term, for lack of better words "chaos control" //

Now, the mode inherent in man is to have, if not 24/24 each day, at least on sufficient occasions to be responsible, precisely free will.

His control therefore takes the form of giving us freedom.

Things that are purely physical do not need this degree of respect on his part : my genes are not going to get judged (except as along with me) and I am not getting judged for my genes, but for what (having those genes) I chose to do.

Occasionalism is not what I am saying, since I already said - once again:

// He usually uses the mode inherent in the beings, plus what one could term, for lack of better words "chaos control" //

but the one item where occasionalism would be actually forbidden by the magisterium is when free will becomes non-autonomous to the point of doing only what God directly wills it to do.

Malebranche and Guélinckx differed on this point, and of these it is the one who denied freewill who got on the index.
tiago guinhos: @Hans-Georg Lundahl Thanks for the in depth response, but sorry my lack of understanding:
I still don't get how you can control everything and still allow for freedom: if God made us, then he knew with his omniscience what we would do in our lives, right? And if that's the case, why would he create humans in an environment or with genes that would have that future?

Am I making myself clear on this confusion I'm having? If I were a God that wanted everyone to go to Heaven, why would I put people in a situation where I knew they wouldn't?
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @tiago guinhos 1) No created circumstance is determining our free will beyond freedom remaining (well, when we are asleep and so, that's another matter);
2) God controls both when He exercises direct control imposing what He wants and when He so to speak "steps aside" to let a created thing follow its own inclination;
3) The own inclination of a stone is getting down, of a flame is getting up and of man is his free will;
4) What God knows by omniscience doesn't make His gift of freedom any less real;
5) However, also does not oblige God to change things so those He foreknows as going to Hell go to Heaven instead.

You see, since Adam sinned, we are born in sin and deserving of damnation (Limbo for those not reaching maturity of freewilled actions, Hell for those who do, when own mortal sins are added).

This means salvation is an extra to everyone who gets a chance to have first grace and then a death in the state of grace. It's what we are made for, what we are obliged on our part to strive for, but it is not what God is obliged to give each of us.
tiago guinhos: @Hans-Georg Lundahl Firstly, I do believe that, no matter one's Free Will, you are incapable of choosing certain actions.. either because of how you were born, how you were raised, or any combination of those (and I believe this because I have studied psychology a bit, so it's not a baseless belief). So I do hold God accountable for that.

Anyways, if God is all good and all loving, I actually think it's his obligation to let everyone into Heaven, eventually.
You probably heard about this before, but "No finite crime deserves an infinite punishment" and that's the same for everyone; it's innately unfair and unreasonable.

Given my stance on this topic, I don't see why God would borderline prevent people from reaching him.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @tiago guinhos "no matter one's Free Will, you are incapable of choosing certain actions.. either because of how you were born, how you were raised, or any combination of those"

Possible. Most people are very fortunately incapable of suicide or of agreeing to a sex change operation.

This does not mean the actions (or sometimes non-actions) and inner acts one has to chose to stay in a state of grace are among those one is incapable of choosing. Or if they are, for someone, this is what God would have removed, unless the person had deserved for other reasons too to get damned.

"(and I believe this because I have studied psychology a bit, so it's not a baseless belief)."

Non sequitur. The superstition taught as psychology is not a source of well based beliefs.

"So I do hold God accountable for that."

God certainly knows what He is doing - but it cannot be an accountability of guilt on His part, since, as said, salvation is not owed anyone in particular.

"Anyways, if God is all good and all loving, I actually think it's his obligation to let everyone into Heaven, eventually."

No. God is not obliged to override someone's free will who choses to reject Him (it can be the rejection of the full plan needed to get saved, or it can be the rejection of a preliminary).

"You probably heard about this before, but 'No finite crime deserves an infinite punishment' and that's the same for everyone; it's innately unfair and unreasonable."

A mortal sin may be finite in time and Hell may be infinite in time, but the mortal sin is infinite in a more important respect, namely as against the dignity against Whom it is a crime.

"Given my stance on this topic, I don't see why God would borderline prevent people from reaching him."

He doesn't, He's just not helping some all of the way, and your take on what one is accountable for or not owes something to your studies in the superstition known as psychology, I wouldn't be surprised.
tiago guinhos: @Hans-Georg Lundahl I think we should agree to disagree in most of those points, then. Thank you for your time, though!
Hans-Georg Lundahl: Noted.

5:54 If you are talking of human genes being part of the reasons why we have blondes and blue eyes, black haired and brown eyed, redheads with green eyes and a few combinations other than these stereotypes, fine. God has imparted on human genome the dignity to be part of the cause of why the human genome looks like it does with its variations right now.

But recall that human beings are the most high of all bodily creatures (except according to those who consider angelic beings have a kind of corporality). It is absolutely not part of the dignity of man to have one celled creatures or lampreys among its ancestry and that instead of God directly as cause for its genome.

And before you say "but it adds dignity to lampreys and to one celled creatures" - that's absolutely not how St. Thomas views the cooperation of creatures with the creator, it's rather higher creatures that cooperate with God about lower ones. It's perfectly fine to say man cooperated in making Chihuahuas and Great Danes from an ancestor looking more or less like a wolf, for example. It's not perfectly fine to say lampreys cooperated with God in making us us.

And I am not making up lampreys. They are not one species, they are a class, and the actually "earliest" class of vertebrates "on the grand evolutionary scheme." I looked it up.

So, while micro-evolution clearly does give the proper type of dignity to creatures (human genes and mutations and recombinations contribute to make humans what they are, wolf genes and recombinations contribute, with human selection to make dogs what they are) the "grand evolutionary scheme" clearly does not, but puts the order of created hierarchies upside down. As I have already mentioned to a Dominican who gave no answer.

Thomas Bailey: Okay, but what makes us higher than the other animals? Is it our physical design, or is it our soul?
Melissa T: Very well put!
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Melissa T Thank you - unless you meant Thomas Bailey!
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Thomas Bailey Our physical design is made to suit our soul.

No animal without a rational soul would profit from the physical design with which we are made capable of speech.
Melissa T: @Hans-Georg Lundahl No, hahah I meant you! I don’t usually comment on videos so maybe my reply didn’t go through clearly. 🙃
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Melissa T No problem, and thank you again!
Melissa T: @Hans-Georg Lundahl Thank you for advocating for the truth!
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Melissa T I thank God for having the opportunity and so should you!
Thomas Bailey
(disappeared from thread?): @Hans-Georg Lundahl right and ours is the ONLY possible physical design that would befit a soul? Cmon now, that's just ridiculous. Besides, our physical design would be pointless without one, we'd just be another animal. It's not our physical design that separates us from Chimps.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Thomas Bailey You forget that human language both is a sign of the soul and something requiring a physical apparatus very different from that of the chimps.

Another FOXP2 gene, a Broca's and Wernicke's area that the Chimps lack, a hyoid that has no hooks for airbags, an ear that is much less thick, ductus, malleus, incus and stapes. Of these, Wernicke's area cannot be verified on a fossil, but Broca's can, and the FOXP2 gene is verified if you take a palaeogenetic examination.

Neanderthal is on all accounts human, Australopithecus is, while not for ductus and malleus, but for all the rest, basically Chimp (and unlike Neanderthal has not undergone sampling and sequencing of the genome). And a human ductus and malleus with a chimp incus and stapes is definitely not enough to give anyone the human hearing necessary to hear certain consonants, that are too high pitched for such an ear.

I am not accepting a being with human apparatus was non-human or one clearly lacking such was human.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Thomas Bailey You said very correctly, our physical apparatus would be pointless without a human soul. But we would not be simply another animal, we would, without a soul but with the apparatus, be fairly misadapted for a state without a soul.
See also:: Creation vs. Evolution : Soul, Anatomy, Speech
https://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2022/08/soul-anatomy-speech.html

6:44 Actually, the only diachronical story you can prove (more or less) is that Meganeura and Dinosaurs have died out.

Meganeura being giant dragonflies. I'm happy to say the Flood wiped them out, I'd not like to live close to a dragon fly that's one meter from head to tail. Even if it ate only insects. The two fossils we have for that one are at a proper distance from any pre-Flood habitations, there is no proof Creswell Crag was inhabited by Neanderthals who were a pre-Flood race, and there is definitely no proof Grotte de Fées was (apart from its being 53 miles from the Meganeura in Commentry).

Dinos or more properly pterosaurs and dimetrodontes (neither of which classify as dinosaurs, technically) may have died out somewhat later, if Gundicarius' brother in law and Chlochilaicus' nephew killed one of each.

xymi: Prove the flood.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @xymi Let's distinguish proof from defense. Proof means saying, why am I believing it. Defense means saying why this, that or sundry other consideration doesn't make me not believe it. You asked for proof, don't complain I didn't defend.

Because Noah recorded the Flood with his sons, in writing or orally, the textmass IS small enough to permit a very faithful oral transmission over the time from the event to 942 years later when Abraham was born (especially as lifespans were longer than ours) and the fifty years later date when his great-grandfather Sarug had to cease telling him about it.

Abraham had the physical means of keeping notes in written form in his caravans, and that's how the story was both preserved and reread up to the time when Moses included it in his magnum opus as researcher, the Genesis (the other four books are his works as autobiographer, campaign documenter and prophet).

The Genesis was then copied and recopied professionally - he had been instructed by Egyptian scribes - by his brother Aaron and his descendants, to our day, plus branch off translation versions from the Hebrew one, also to our day.

That's my likeliest text history for the relevant chapters of Genesis. A possible hypothesis is, the events were in fact documented by each of his sons, so that we have double accounts for that reason (the repetitions could be analysed otherwise, like recapitulations, if Noah himself were the author).

At each known stage, except lately through the enlightenment and possibly also through Sadducees at an earlier time, these events were taken as literal history, not as a fairy tale conveying symbolic truth.

Such a reception argues, it is historic truth, unless you can offer a good scenario for why a fairytale became tacked on to the national memories of a people involving them to be a small remainder of a stage of mankind that other peoples (and Abraham's father and grandfather) went away from.

It's not like "back to year X, we have historic memories, before that, we known nothing for an unknown number of centuries, then we believe that a few highly peculiar events, unlike what came since then had happened" - in that case those events could be tacked on.

Genesis through Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, Four Books of Kings, this is a gap free history from Creation to Babylonian Capitvity. Some of it resumed in Two Books of Chronicles. That leaves very little place for tacking on fairy tales at the back end of a real history.

Compare the gap between Mahabharata times and Ashoka, Hinduism has lots less to say for Mahabharata and Ramayana, even so I believe in a rough historicity for these (notably due to parallels with Genesis) - but only rough, like obvious borrowings from Greek clearly pre-Indo-Greek times Homer, like bad theology, like displacing Flood and Rama's journey into pre-Mahabharata times (probably the most radical anachronism in orally preserved history I know of).

It's also notable (sorry, tired, forgot what I was saying, I'll get a coffee).
Hans-Georg Lundahl: Back.

It is also notable, and the chronologically displaced but extant Hindoo flood legend examplifies it, there are 100's of parallels to the Biblical Flood story all over the world in many cases clearly independent of Moses, and if you want to cavil about "na, so many differences there, so many differences those ones, and so many more at these ones" you are demanding the level of correspondence of independent eywitness accounts, not the level expected from independent retelling.

Imagine a geneticist saying "no, they aren't second cousins, I can't detect the similarity of homozygotic twins" ...

7:36 "to operate with its particular nature and operation"

Just mentioning, developing new functional genes and developing new cell types does, scientifically speaking, definitely not fall within the scope of the nature and operation created biological beings show off to scientists observing them.

Mutating an already functional gene so it functions somewhat differently, yes, eumelanin producing genes have on occasions mutated to pheomelanin producing genes, but they still produce some kind of melanin. You also have albinos who simply don't produce melanin. They were not the original genome of man on this point. Or you can have a gene allowing you to produce lactase up to age ... 5? puberty? whichever it was ... mutate into one that produces lactase and forgets to shut that production off. But you don't have lactase production mutating from a total lack of lactase production. (Lactase helps you to digest lactose, in milk).

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

Historicity of Moses Revisited

somewhere else : So, Dionysus was a Copy of Moses, may One Presume? · Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere : Historicity of Moses Revisited

I: Why do people believe that Moses didn't exist just because they can't find historical evidence due to looking in the wrong place and time and a misunderstanding of how legend is born out of historical facts like is the case for King Arthur?
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-believe-that-Moses-didnt-exist-just-because-they-cant-find-historical-evidence-due-to-looking-in-the-wrong-place-and-time-and-a-misunderstanding-of-how-legend-is-born-out-of-historical-facts-like-is/answer/Geoffrey-Sea
Geoffrey Sea: writer, historian
25.VII.2022: Legend is born out of historical fact? You mean like the Easter Bunny? Huckleberry Finn? Little Red Riding Hood? Cinderella? Jesus? Godzilla?

Why do people believe that Moses existed just because a storyteller 2400 years ago made up a story about him?
Hans-Georg Lundahl
25.VII.2022: Easter Bunny, Huckleberry Finn, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Godzilla are not legends in the first place.

Including Jesus in the list was cheap polemics.

For your question, if a storyteller 2400 years ago made up a story about Moses, why did the audience so obviously come to believe Moses existed?

If Lovecraft invented a story of Harvard being founded by a man haunted by the Old Gods, would you have a tendency to believe that that really happened? Or would you rather insist John Harvard was a Puritan clergyman from Cambridge UK?

Why would people 2400 years ago have been more stupid and extremely gullible than you?
Geoffrey Sea
25.VII.2022: There was no audience. The Penteteuch was written by temple priests for temple priests. We have no idea what ordinary people of the time believed. It was people centuries later who took the Torah mistakenly to represent some belief of “the Jewish people.” The only part of the Torah widely disseminated were the law codes. Remember, there was only one temple, and for a long time, only one copy of the Pentateuch, a copy we no longer have access to. Moses did not become popular until the Christian Old Testament was promulgated by Rome.
Adding comments: disabled

Which shows his grounding in cancel culture. Let's suppose someone else is interested in the answer he is blocking his ears from. The Pentateuch was supposed to be read aloud to the people every seven years, and from very soon after 2400 years ago, there were Pharisees who were reading the Pentateuch in their synagogues, because Ezra had decided that the Pentateuch should no longer be locked up in the temple alone.
II: Why do people believe that Moses didn't exist just because they can't find historical evidence due to looking in the wrong place and time and a misunderstanding of how legend is born out of historical facts like is the case for King Arthur?
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-believe-that-Moses-didnt-exist-just-because-they-cant-find-historical-evidence-due-to-looking-in-the-wrong-place-and-time-and-a-misunderstanding-of-how-legend-is-born-out-of-historical-facts-like-is/answer/Donald-Davie-4
Donald Davie: Former Self Employed /Retired
25.VII.2022: King Arthur never existed anymore than Moses they are folk tales , the Egyptians were very meticulous about keeping records and the fact is that Moses's name is no where to found in any of the temple's or on any tablets from the time of pharoahs
Hans-Georg Lundahl
25.VII.2022: r i g h t …
Nennius (a historian) was obviously incapable of distinguishing folks from folk tales and that the time of Mons Badonicus battle matches a time when a man victim of adultery could (if in a very honourable position) in Roman law be obliged to get his adulterous wife executed is obviously coincidence (this was the law between Constantine and Justinian).

Egyptians may on and off have been excellent at meticulous record keeping, but partly due to changing capitals and dynasties, and partly due to foreign invasions, they were not always lucky in preserving the records to our time.

Plus, there is a highly probable Egyptian custom called “damnatio memoriae” which we see in Moses not naming the pharao of the Exodus, or any other of them, and which Egyptians would not name Moses, for the same reason.

Plus there is what seems a trace of the ten plagues in the Ipuwer papyrus.
III: Why do people believe that Moses didn't exist just because they can't find historical evidence due to looking in the wrong place and time and a misunderstanding of how legend is born out of historical facts like is the case for King Arthur?
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-believe-that-Moses-didnt-exist-just-because-they-cant-find-historical-evidence-due-to-looking-in-the-wrong-place-and-time-and-a-misunderstanding-of-how-legend-is-born-out-of-historical-facts-like-is/answer/Michael-Chase-Walker-1
Michael Chase Walker: Lives in Santa Monica, CA
25.VII.2022: Gosh, I don’t know, have you ever read a book, watched a play, sat through a movie, sat around a campfire, told a story to a child at bedtime? Brace yourself, because this will come as a shock. Humans tell stories. Yeah, I know, crazy, right?

They’ve been telling stories for ten of thousands of years. They’re good at it. Now, some of those stories get adopted by kings who insist that everybody in their realm believes them. They don’t just stop there, sometimes they invade other realms and demand everyone in that region believes them too. Sometimes stories just spread all on there own. Sometimes those stories get told so many times for so long people forget they’re just stories from ages ago and believe they actually happened. The thing is not only do we have storytellers, but we also have historians, scientists, archaeologists, and anthropologists. They’re really good at what they do too which is distinguish between a legend, fable, myth, religious belief, or an actual person or event. Sometimes they search and search for evidence of a legendary person and discover they were just made up. Sometimes people don’t care about that and believe in them anyway. Religions are especially good at taking a mythological person and making them seem like they actually lived. Storytellers are good at that too. Priests, rabbis, and theologians are really good at convincing others too. They’ve got all kinds of books, artifacts, music, and art to further persuade others too and even get people to give them money. Lots of folks fall for it. Lots of others don’t.

Best thing you can do is use your intellect and investigate the evidence on your own. Some times you just have to grow up and learn when some is pissing on your leg and tells you it’s raining. I know, crazy, right?
Hans-Georg Lundahl
25.VII.2022: “Sometimes those stories get told so many times for so long people forget they’re just stories from ages ago and believe they actually happened.”

Would you mind telling us a probable scenario with some details of how such a thing would happen?

Key word : probable.
Michael Chase Walker
25.VII.2022: The two versions of the creation stories in Genesis

The Garden of Eden

Noah’s flood

Moses and The Exodus ( Evidence shows they were entirely fictional

The Conquest of the Canaanites

The Story of Job

"I wrote to frustrate biblical minimalists, then I became one of them"*

William G. Dever
Biblical Archaeology Review 2007

Archaeologist William G. Dever further writes:

"With most scholars, I would exclude much of the Pentateuch, specifically the books Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers... much of what is called the English Bible, "poetry", "wisdom" and "devotional" literature must also be eliminated from historical consideration... Ruth, Esther, Job, and Daniel, and other historical novellae with contrived real-life settings, the latter dating as late as the Second Century, BCE."

The interesting part of this is for a great deal of ancient Jewish history up until the 6th century, the story of Moses, Passover and Exodus were unknown to the Jewish People. It wasn’t until the eighteenth year of King Josiah (621 BCE) that the High Priest Hilkiah claimed he miraculously “found” “the book of the law of Moses in the house of the lord.”

II Kings

The story was reworked for 300 years and only finally declared The Book of the Law of Moses in 400 BCE by Babylonian Rabbi Ezra the Scribe, and by virtue of the power vested in him by the Persian Emperor Artaxerxes IV - binding for all Jews,

(See Eduard Meyer’s Geschischte des Alteriums Vol II Part 2 page 208)

“The truth is that virtually every modern archeologist who has investigated the story of the Exodus, with very few exceptions, agrees that the way the Bible describes the Exodus is not the way it happened if it happened at all.”*

Rabbi David Wolpe: “Did the Exodus Really Happen?”
* note: I uniformatted Michael Chase Walker's use of italics for quotations.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
26.VII.2022: I think you are trying to give me examples of stories that were first told as stories, and then accepted as true.

My actual question was if you had a likely scenario in which this could happen, and by scenario I did not mean a list of supposed examples in which accprding to Wolpe or Dever “it actually happened” …

All people living now (or at least all communities existing now) would agree that Silmarillion is fiction. All would agree that deviating from Tolkien’s text for Akallabêth and Of the Rings of Power and Appendices may be a good or a bad artistic choice on the part of Netflix, but it’s neither adding historic scholarship, nor deviating from a historic source. How would, on your view, a 22:nd C. audience come to believe this had actually happened?

What Hilkiah found would not have been when either Exodus events or Genesis events came to be believed, it would be a correction on technical details “what were we going to do with a lady raped in the countryside who didn’t cry out” and so (correct answer : outside cities, there was no one to cry out to so she’s treated like a genuine rape victim and not stoned).

It cannot have been a parallel to Joseph Smith receiving “golden tablets” since the time when things had been in disorder in Judah had been so short it would have been impossible to forget whether those events happened or not.
Michael Chase Walker
26.VII.2022: I selected Rabbi Wolpe and Archaeologist Dever as they were commenting on Moses (and the Exodus) as first mentioned in the OP, but not as historical figures turned to legend, but precisely the opposite. To this day, many still believe Moses and the Exodus were actual events when even Israel’s most acclaimed national archaeologist has frustratingly admitted there’s no evidence to substantiate it. Christopher Hitchens tells the story of Ben Gurion commissioning an archaeological team to “go forth and find the keys to the kingdom” after Israel became a modern nation but alas to no avail.

Obviously, there are die-hards who still cleave to the idea that King Arthur was historical. I don’t subscribe to that theory either and as I have authored numerous screenplays and musical books on Camelot I found nothing in my research to persuade me toward historicity.

Certainly, the predominant view for eons has been Moses was a historical figure, but now it has become a kind of insider joke at the Museum of Israeli Antiquities where they display empty baskets labeled evidence for “The Ark of the Covenant” and “Evidence for the Exodus”.

The Israel Museum’s The new exhibition chronicles the meeting of ancient Israel and Egypt and makes this point very graphically:

The hall devoted to the best-known part of the story — the Exodus from Egypt — is an empty room with exactly one exhibit on display: a movie featuring co-curator and Israel Museum Egyptologist Dr. Daphna Ben-Tor, who explains that the hall is empty because there is no archaeological evidence whatsoever to support the biblical tale.

Just narrow focusing on Moses: His mythological origins are overwhelming, so again, as with most religious figures when empirical evidence is insufficient, we must consider the mythology. While it is certainly widely discussed amongst scholars, and controversial indeed, there is strong evidence that while the Moses of the Ta’anakh is a mythological hero he is also a composite character comprised of historical figures of the Akkadian King Sargon of Agade, and Hammurabi, the lawgiver, and the mythological Greek horned Gods Bacchus/Dionysis and Orpheus/Musaeus.

This was the widely held belief of both Plato and the Jewish philosopher Artapanus, and oddly enough one of the various reasons why early depictions of Moses were with Dionysian horns on his head. (See: Why even some Jews once believed Moses had horns )

(See: Myths of Babylonia and Assyria, by Donald A. MacKenzie, [1915], The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Hesiod's Theogony,).

Oddly, it was none other than Sigmund Freud who first attempted to excavate the archetypal psychology around Moses’s origin story in Moses and Monotheism, and was excommunicated by the Jewish community for suggesting he was not Jewish, but a heretical Egyptian monotheist who was banished to the desert along with his followers.

“Freud speculates in his book Moses and Monotheism that Moses was an Egyptian subject, probably of noble origin whom the myth undertakes to transform into a Jew.”

(Freud OpCT page 15)

Freud's Moses and Monotheism is a brilliant treatise on how myths become religions and the psychology behind them. But Freud is just one of those I mention.

We have the actual account of Sargon’s birth from his own writings which predate the Moses legend by thousands of years. The same story is told and retold long before Jews even knew there was a Moses.

Dr. Otto Rank in his equally brilliant Myth and the Birth of the Hero analyzed and compared the Sargon/Moses legend to some seventy-odd variants of the same legend drawn from Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China, Japan and Polynesia, Greece and Rome, Iran, Celtic and Germanic, Turkish, Esthonian, Finnish, and European lore.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
27.VII.2022: “Obviously, there are die-hards who still cleave to the idea that King Arthur was historical.”

Count Chesterton and myself as some.

You recall how Arthur is supposed to execute Guinevere, but is reluctant to do so, delays, and gives Lancelot (the adulterer, the name need not be factual) the opportunity to save her?

You may know that this was not the Roman law in Codex Iuris Civilis … the problem is, Arthur is before CIC, and it was actually the law from Constantine to Justinian.

And the timespan for Mons Badonicus battle fits the time between Constantine and Justinian.

But back to Moses.

“he is also a composite character comprised of historical figures of the Akkadian King Sargon of Agade, and Hammurabi, the lawgiver, and the mythological Greek horned Gods Bacchus/Dionysis and Orpheus/Musaeus.”

I have written a piece reversing the connexion between Moses and Dionysus.

Stage 1 : Egyptians call Moses demonic;
Stage 2 : they are obliged to call him divine;
Stage 3 : his adversary is no longer the Pharao but Pentheus (a composite, apart from non-Egyptian nationality, of the Pharao whose daughter picked Moses up and of the Pharao who saw Hebrews walk off and got his son ending up dead);
Stage 4 : ends up getting more adored by Greeks than by Egyptians.

There is a theme too. Moses, Jesus, Dionysus, Hindoos and Buddhists have a cult with some kind of altered mind (drunkenness in Dionysus-worship, prayer being autohypnotic in the four religions now still extant), which contrasts with the very businesslike cults of Egyptians, Olympians (except Dionysus worship), Capitolians (except Bacchus worship).

There is also the fact that any group tends to be less accurate and more variable when speaking of outgroup phenomena rather than when speaking of own origins.

So, I think my mechanism for Moses - > Dionysus is fairly well covered. Unlike yours for a strange god become an own patriarch to the Hebrews.

“none other than Sigmund Freud”

The ultimate anti-realist when it comes to analysing the human psyche. A N Y improbable allegation can be made about a human psyche, individually, collectively or on the scale of mankind, because A N Y improbable connexion would end up “censored” and therefore inaccessible to the concerned.

That’s what I call admitting your roots.

In other words, given you trust in Freud, you don’t feel the need to invent a probable transition from made up story to perceived own history, you are totally content with a totally improbable one.

And like Freud, obviously the Hebrew archaeologists would merit excommunication by the Jewish religious community, if the Jewish religious community meant anything.

Btw, do you have a good source for Freud getting the well-merited excommunication?

Now, you mentioned Sargon. Yes, there is a parallel - with lots of contrasts - when it comes to the childhood survival. But who says that massacres of children for superstitious purposes is not a thing? Recently, under Roe v. Wade, 63 million unborn children were massacred under superstitious pretexts like “he would live a miserable life” or “he would not integrate but become a criminal” … and obviously some children escape such attempts.

Donald A. MacKenzie, [1915], is from a time when the idea myths just sprung up like mushrooms and even crept into niches of history, and no more thoughts about that. In other words, not at all the kind of guy I’d go to for a “probable scenario” (my words in the first comment) how a made up story came to be believed as history.

If you actually tried to provide a probable scenario (as opposed to appealing to MacKenzie and Freud and Israeli archaeologists), I think I missed it.
IV: Why do people believe that Moses didn't exist just because they can't find historical evidence due to looking in the wrong place and time and a misunderstanding of how legend is born out of historical facts like is the case for King Arthur?
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-believe-that-Moses-didnt-exist-just-because-they-cant-find-historical-evidence-due-to-looking-in-the-wrong-place-and-time-and-a-misunderstanding-of-how-legend-is-born-out-of-historical-facts-like-is/answer/MPS-46
MPS: BSc (Hons) Astrophysics from University of Leeds
25.VII.2022: Prove to us all beyond even a scintilla of doubt that Moses and King Arthur are not just historical, but historically true, and within that post you will explain the data and allyou read to come to this conclusion. So, as you agreed, you will reply to this, with completely irrefutable, independent, peer reviewed evidence and explain the “right places” that you have obviously been looking in, and using. Correct? Of course I am. So we will be waiting for you to send all of your data that have obviously have close to hand, and on your laptop, well in your cache (it will only take a few seconds to copy and paste it), which will enlighten me, and everyone else to the sources that you have found showing the non-wrong evidence. I would love to a have an unquestionable, rock solid date of Moses’s life and death. You obviously do, so let us know when you are pickeinllll
Hans-Georg Lundahl
25.VII.2022: It seems you know a little too little on how historic discussion is conducted.

The one thing I appreciate is that you make a distinction between “historical” and “historically true” …

King Arthur’s wife being an adulteress and law requiring at the time the execution of a such is in fact consistent with Roman law between Constantine and Justinian, and that is the space of time in which the battle of Mons Badonicus is set, with which he is credited (along with Aurelius Ambrosius).
MPS
25.VII.2022: Thank you. Apologies for getting certain detail wrong. And I’m always happy to admit it so, and thank you for the correction sir. I didn’t know that. (Obviously) 😉
Hans-Georg Lundahl
25.VII.2022: Now, what would you consider to be proof positive of Moses?

Testify is Not the Greatest Fan, But Also Not the Greatest Foe of Marian Apparitions

Excuses for this getting published without the html done, I was planning the publication in advance and forgot it. Then I looked on the post ...

He only deals with them because some counterapologists have said basically "as a Protestant, you don't believe Marian apparitions, but their evidence is comparable to that for the Resurrection appearances" - here is his answer:

Appearances of Mary vs. Jesus’ Resurrection Appearances
25th July 2022 | Testify
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZ2o74Y-L6I

And here are some of mine to him:

4:14 With regards to Medjugorje, there is a difference in so far that the supposed authorities of the Church (hardly many remaining at more than 20 years after Pius XII died and more than 11 years after the new liturgy, in 1981, when apparitions begun, but still) actually have said no to the Medjugorje apparition.

So, a Catholic believing Fatima and Lourdes could agree with Samples that the apparition in Medjugorje was demonic.

Before doing so myself, I would want to know, how well did he check that the book recommended to one of the seers was occultic, was it just the title, or did he look up things, and was the seer in question seduced to occultism or just tipped off as to some move that both he or she and some occultist could have had to face?

I am very far from a Medjugorje fan.

5:27 The Blessed Virgin didn't eat with the seers of Fatima. But they did pray the rosary and see Her move the beads along, and they did converse.

It is also to be noted, they stuck (as pre-puberty children) to their story in a Masonic dominated country where a nearby mayor could be a very anticlerical thug and threaten them with death if they didn't recant. Sure, he was not able to carry that out, but they didn't know, and if they had tried to police report him, their complaint would have been laughed out "of course he didn't say that, ha ha ha ..." - so, the parallel with seers in a Protestant country who could be killed for converting to Catholicism (like England in some periods of the Penal laws) is not completely lacking.

Now, there is a somewhat bad parallel in your "what would convince me" scenario, namely you'd require the seers to be Protestants. That's like requiring that the 11, the 500 and the rest were "Jews" not in the ethnic sense, but in the sense of having taken their distance from Christianity, as Judaism did before St. John wrote his Gospel (hence his use of Jews as narrator corresponds very well to how Synoptics use "Pharisees and Sadducees" or other combinations of entities within the ethnically Jewish community). This was not the case with Christ's disciples.

5:39 Indeed, none except St. James the Greater was acquainted with the Blessed Virgin in Her earthly life.

And he had after all also already seen Our Lord, risen from the grave.

The Marian apparitions, however, need less proof, since they are not there to found a new theological doctrine. They have (apart from Medjugorje, with claims "Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims are equally dear" to God or to Mary) only confirmed Catholic dogma already believed and accepted for other reasons.

For instance, the Lourdes apparition said the words "Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou" / "that I am the Immaculate Conception" on March 25th 1858.

But Ineffabilis Deus was already from December 8, 1854, more than three years earlier.

And the doctrine was believed before being so raised to status of dogma for centuries before that.

Hence that there need be less proof for the Marian apparitions than for Our Lord's resurrection.

5:45 "Mary was still alive at the time"

Yes, St. James of Zebedee was one apostle who was not present at Her deathbed and empty tomb. He had already been martyred.

Her appearance was not an appearance from Heaven, but a bilocation, like (if it's true) Padre Pio appearing in Chicago to a dying Italian lady who could get no Italian priest to confess to, for some reason.

8:07 I Cor 15:5 mentions "the twelve" - we can discount the theory it means "11 + Judas Ischariot" (I think), so do you think it means 11 + Matthias or that he used "the twelve" as a generic term, even if they were 11 on the occasion?

On some occasions Matthias and Joseph Barsabas Justus must have been with them, Acts 1:23 is not wrong.

10:09 The "twelve" (11 + Matthias, 11 + Justus, 11 simply) didn't have any Antichristian Jewish carreeres to defend by not claiming the Resurrection. Hence your parallel request of a carreere as Protestant pastor is faulty.

They did risk their lives, though, at least after some time, and even after the Crucifixion, it should be evident they would be doing so sooner or later.

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

Bone Houses - Some Guys in Indonesia and Pakistan May Need to See This

Just sharing:

Let's Visit the Churches Made of Human Skulls
23:rd July 2022 | Ask a Mortician
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTHLb8QGxf4

Too long, didn't watch? Well, all the bones in these Chapels are bones of Catholics. Being buried like this is a kind of honour./HGL

Sunday, July 24, 2022

Creation Myths Tried to Debunk Answers book chapter 2

Wrong Answers Only #2: The New Answers Book 1, Chapter 2
23rd July 2022 | Creation Myths
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LzYFeuq2Is

4:40 "we have fossils in layers, going from earliest deepest"

Fish over trilobites in Bonaparte Basin and similar ... OK. Layering could be layered habitat of the water creatures.
A km or so worth of different shellfish in Grand Canyon ... OK. Layering could reflect different inflows of shellfish coming in to there from several different sources around. Also aquatic, by the way.

A geologist spoke to me about a dinosaur being above a pelykosaur. OK. Where? North Dakota. It turns out, they are in opposite ends of North Dakota. In normal layman's terms, we do not find the dinosaur above the pelykosaur, so, in normal layman's terms, we do not have a layering of fossils of land creatures.

And this is fairly typical when it comes to land creatures.

A possible exception would have been in some part of Lower California or where it was ... some Ceratopsians from the obviously Cretaceous buried beneath some Decapods, that is shrimps and lobsters or whatever, from the Palaeogene. I lost the reference. My guess : it was land before the Flood, but so near sea lots of shrimps could come in with Flood waters.

4:50 "We see a pattern of increasing complexity ...."

If you count trilobites as less complex than fish, sure. That's perhaps the very reasons trilobites were roaming the sea bottom instead of swimming higher up along the fish.

5:02 (citing creationists) "well, the more complex animals were smarter, meaning they climbed up to ..."

Read that in Edgar Andrews too.

As said, I have myself contributed, as a creationist, to debunk this as superfluous and as predicting a much more layered fossil record than we in fact do find.

5:43 Whales would typically be swimming higher up in the seas than trilobites, though.

And often higher up than sharks too.

But, about same level up as mososaurs. I tentatively predict, you will not find whales and mososaurs together and also not whales above mososaurs.

If you look up Laetoli, Ethiopia, the place where they found footprints considered australopithecine is not above dinosaurs.

5:56 "not very high in the geological column"

Whatever that means, when you add the magical words "in the geological column."

Ankerschlag in Tyrol is higher up than Lienz in Upper Austria. In Lienz you find marine Tertiary, like some "early" type of whale. In Ankerschlag you find a Jurassic Pterosaur.

6:44 Your point being, flowering plants don't come "earlier" than Cretaceous, and that includes grasses.

A dinosaur koprolith was featured on CMI because it contained - grass.

So, you seem to be giving your audience a counterfactual account of what we actually find.

7:49 "You can't carve out a canyon under a Flood"

Yes. You can have a sediment saturated Flood water that by saturation deposits sediments quickly. And part of these can then be eroded quickly, by Flood waters from the right angle, that are, as said, sediment saturated. "Work like liquid sand paper" to use a phrase Kent Hovind likes. So, you can.

Peter Gaskin: Just definitely not the Grand Canyon. Or any other Canyon that's been around for more than a week or so.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Peter Gaskin Well, the thing is, the mud may not have been around for more than a week or so when the canyon was carved.

9:22 James Hutton directly observed erosion and weathering over years - and interpreted the past as an uniformitarian back-projection from that, and guess what, he was not a Christian.

Wikipedia has, for his page, a category called "British deists" ... hence, presumably, his uniformitarian interpretation of his observations of the present as key to a past excluding the Flood.

9:37 It so happens, Charles Lyell, on his wikipedian page, gets the sobriquet (or category) "Scottish deists" ... as well as CMI actually giving quotes that make him the kind of liberal theologian that already back in the day wanted nothing to do with Moses (including Genesis, obviously).

So, forget the intervention of Dapper Dinosaur.

10:29 Darwin's earthquake was also tiny compared to the Flood.

By the fact of reading Lyell, he was already before this compromising his faith, if he even still had any left.

Btw, height of mountains, on my view, comes from a centuries long process of verticalisation in the early post-Flood times, which helped to dry out the Flood water from the land.

The Patu industry in Nepal (lower edge of Himalayas) shows these inhabitable, with my recalibration of the carbon dates, a bit before the birth of Abraham - so within 942 years after the Flood, Himalayas had in fact rosen to a considerable portion of their present height.

Peter Gaskin: And which flood would that be and where is the evidence of it occurring anywhere other that Mesopotamia.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Peter Gaskin 1) Noah's.
2) Ankerschlag und Linz, zum Beispiel. A Jurassic Pterosaur in Ankerschlag and a Miocene or something whale in Linz area were buried by the Flood. You actually have less evidence of the Flood in Mesopotamia than most other places, that famous mud layer being very clearly post-Flood.

@Peter Gaskin 2 continued - and obviously, the Himalayas too.

11:22 "we have proved that the world is that old"

By assuming that lead 206, 207 and 208 always come from decay, starting for instance by Uranium.
By assuming you can correctly calculate the very long halflife, when even the much shorter halflife of C14 needed corrections by checking with historically known objects, or at worst objects known from dendro, to get the correct halflife.

Ross Benners: I hear your point but prefer to think scientists, who are willing to admit they’re wrong and update decay rates etc as and when new evidence becomes available, and who work with uranium in reactors and understand decay rates intimately are at the very least not 99.99999% wrong.

Could be that they’re way out on uranium dating by millions of years but I don’t think this argument lends any real credence to a young earth.

Nobody who understands science expects anything to be perfect.

But, as I say, I do hear your point - it took x volumes to prove 1+1 really did = 2 after all ;)
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Ross Benners Fission in reactors has quite another rate than decay in natural samples.

Plus, when was there furnished a proof that only lead 204 was naturally occurring?

That 1 + 1 = 2 is actually the definition of 2.

It does not involve any dubious steps.
Ross Benners: @Hans-Georg Lundahl regarding 1 + 1 = 2 - I was agreeing with your point that we shouldn’t say “we know!” So easily, and just mentioning the 1000s of pages it took just to prove that 1+1=2 beyond doubt. Forget the name, principia perhaps. So there’s little point arguing when I agree with you ;)
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Ross Benners It doesn't take 1000's of pages to prove 1 + 1 = 2 without doubt. It takes knowing the definition of 2.
Ross Benners: @Hans-Georg Lundahl but it did in principia. And, again, I’m agreeing with your original point of not being so quick to proclaim “we know” - insert another analogy if you dislike it.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Ross Benners Thank you.

I'm curious of what book would be using 1000 pages on proving 1+1=2, though ... what was the author called?
Ross Benners: @Hans-Georg Lundahl bro I’ve just told you twice: Principia ;)
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Ross Benners Principia is a title.

I highly doubt it could be Principia Mathematica by Newton, because it doesn't deal with Mathematics, but with making physics more mathematical.

So, what was the author?
Ross Benners: @Hans-Georg Lundahl whitehead and Russell
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Ross Benners Ah - yes, when I read the works list of Bertrand Russell on wiki, it says:

1910–1913. Principia Mathematica.[221] (with Alfred North Whitehead). 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Thank you.

So, they spent 1000 pages on proving 1+1=2?

13:15 If the problem were a technique "below the detection threshold," it should be giving "age zero" and not a very old age.

Peter Gaskin: It might give totally random dates. If it's Monday it's 2 billion years; if it's Friday it's 32 years.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Peter Gaskin Would you mind telling me how something below the detection threshold (which 32 years certainly are for K-Ar) could sometimes give dates like 2 billion years?

Or anytime, whether sometimes or always?

15:05 For radiocarbon in diamonds, your objection is close to the one that Jonathan Sarfati answered.

// The 14C readings in the diamonds are the result of background radiation in the detector. // This shows that the objector doesn’t even understand the method. AMS doesn’t measure radiation but counts atoms. It was the obsolete scintillation method that counted only decaying atoms, so was far less sensitive. In any case, the mean of the 14C/C ratios in Dr Baumgardner’s diamonds was close to 0.12±0.01 pMC, well above that of the lab’s background of purified natural gas (0.08 pMC). //

https://creation.com/diamonds-a-creationists-best-friend

So, no, it wasn't a misunderstanding of someone else's study, it was a new one. Done with well adapted equipment.

15:38 For Ka-Ar, U-Pb, and so on, I don't see the need for "orders of magnitude faster" - but this could be my infamiliarity with these methods.

If this conclusion is also meant to apply to C14, they have jumped to the Setterfield bandwagon, which I oppose.

My own model for C14 involves:

1) level at Flood rising very slightly above zero, to 1.4 pmC or so (35 000 extra years + actual time = c. 3000 BC = 38 000 BC, 40 000 BP);
2) rising to present level between Flood and Fall of Troy (c. 1200 BC);
3) which rise involved a much faster, up to ten times faster, production rate of C14 just after the Flood, that radioactivity also feeding into lowering of life spans and into ice age.

16:31 Unlike "much faster rates of decay" this model does not lead to a heat problem for the Global Flood.

17:53 Unlike Baumgardner, I don't think the pre-Flood world was configured as Pangaea, and the configuration into the world as we have it would at its hottest be sth like Indian plate bumping into Asia (Tibetan plate?) and building Himalayas.

What if it was some centuries before they were in place?

Peter Gaskin: @Hans-Georg Lundahl What if it were several tens of millions of years?
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Peter Gaskin How would you remotely know?

Reconstruction without the aid of narrative history.

How do I know (or as good as I can get near that)?

Reconstruction with the aid of narrative history.

It's the narrative history that trumps the reconstruction, not the other way round!
Brenda Paduch: @Hans-Georg Lundahl it still causes the same heat problem, and is still orders of magnitude faster than possible
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Brenda Paduch Ten times faster production of C14 so much does not cause the same heat problem.

Plus with radioactivity making for ionising particles for cooler weather, that would take care of any heat problem.

24:38 The radiometric example from Gabon is impressive, still, it would be the discrepancy.

For carbon, you can check 5730 years as halflife by testing objects that are, for instance 1/8 of the halflife old. 716 years can be verified by historically dated objects. You can't that with a billions of years old halflife.

Carbon and geology are perfectly compatible with the Biblical data.

Creation Myths: You can't ignore the non-carbon radiometric methods.
Apollorion: Nor should dendrochronology (a.k.a. tree-ring dating) be ignored. This helped verifying the carbon dating method and shows that the oldest still living tree is older than the YEC's Earth's age.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Creation Myths For most of non-carbon, I presume it is K-Ar, and that lava was solidifying quickly, trapping much argon, during the Flood.

At Laetoli, there are several layers of lava, the higher ones are younger, and obviously, the more the timeline of the Flood went on, the shallower the water was that was cooling down, because the higher up the ground with the lava was already.

Phenomenon comparable to a Hawaii volcano, erupted some time before 1900 but after 1800. Lava above ground - present is within error margin. Two km or so out into the sea, 2 million years or whatever it was.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Apollorion "This helped verifying the carbon dating method"

Like history, the other "lignine based" dating method, dendro is more abundant at 1400 AD (the example in Arizona helping to confirm carbon, btw, at 1400 AD the atmosphere had reached the present level and vaccillated around it for 2600 years, so no discrepancy at carbon expected on my part).

"and shows that the oldest still living tree is older than the YEC's Earth's age."

Ooooops ... if you meant bristle cone pines or similar, it would be beyond the Ussher date for the Flood, but not the Ussher date for Creation. I am anyway involved in LXX based Biblical chronologies, specifically using the one of the Roman martyrology for Christmas day (pre-90's version!).

And if you meant Old Tjikko in Lappland, Sweden, still living, supposed to be 9000 years old - that is not dendro, that's carbon dating of the root system.

So, your bad whichever you meant.
Apollorion: @Hans-Georg Lundahl "YEC's Earth's age" meant about 6000 years ago.

But you're right that I indeed confused our achievements with respect to Bristle Cone pines and clonal trees such as the oldest one, in Australia, or the second oldest, Pando, in the US of some A.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Apollorion The oldest living one would be c. 5000 years - consistent with a LXX date for the Flood. When it comes to those dendrochronologically dated, that is.
Apollorion: @Hans-Georg Lundahl I agree with "The oldest living one would ca. 5000 years, "-"when it comes to those dendrochronologically dated, that is." <- That I agree with, but that does not mean you can ignore dendrochronology.

P.S. I cut that "LXX date" and "the Flood" out because I don't know what you mean by that.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Apollorion Masoretic and Ussher dates of the Flood make it less than 4500 years ago.

LXX dates make it c. 5000 years ago.

Do you get the connexion?

Oh, by the way, the thing with the Flood (of Noah) is, trees might have had a hard time of surviving it. That is why 5000 years old trees are big news if you think the Biblical date of the Flood was 4400 years ago, less so if you think it was 5000 years ago.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Apollorion Oh, one more, when it comes to freestanding dendro samples from "1400 BC" I do feel perfectly justified in ignoring that, since back then so much tree and wood samples are gone and so much of what remains is small, so matches are on pretty slim ground.

So, you can guess what I think of "dendrochronological dates" of 10 000 BC - even the carbon is worth more, I can at least translate that to a little before Babel (a little before Noah died 2607 BC).

Nope, It Wasn't Joshua 10 This Video

Joshua 12, Are you Fighting A Battle?
24.VII.2022 | Kent Hovind OFFICIAL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvK2piSAyCA

9:18 The Palestinians of the Gaza strip are not Philistines.

They may have admixture from Algerians and Circassians, since the 1860's, but they are basically Muslim Israelites, like the Palestinians of Bethlehem, Cana, formerly also Nazareth are mainly Christian Israelites.

12:41 "are you keeping any records?"

Hmmmm .... sounds like you read Ejercicios Espirituales ... St. Ignatius of Loyola recommended keeping diaries with letter symbols for diverse sins, and numbers for how many times you did it ... and be happy when a symbol becomes less frequent or the numbers get lower.

14:25 AA are a Masonic bunch or heretics / apostates.

I was one night sheltered by an ex-AA. He gave me the book on 12 principles and the other book on 12 steps.

I analysed and found it highly Masonic and un-Christian.

Why would you listen to them?

Oh, sorry, AARP = American Association of Retired Persons
My bad ...

24:24 I am not just willing to work, I am working.

Made half a post on what people before the Flood were not living together with Bohemiatupus elegans, had to stop to check a distance by mail, couldn't do it by search.

Made a post of reader statistics, a re-post of my second co-edition with wikipedia on Geocentrism in French (point being, it has lots of good stuff the present version of wikipedia is missing), a notification to readers I signed a protest against making abortion a constitutional right in France (yes, they did make such a damnable proposal), some dialogue on the shift in world view leading up to abandoning Geocentrism, hope to get more before making a post of it ...

But I do nead an editor for the paper version, since the internet version is offered for free.

25:54 No, the battle with lust started a bit later, after Adam bit into the forbidden fruit.

43:45 There are some articles on carbon dating on my blog too (search "creavsevolu" + "New Tables").

Friday, July 22, 2022

Answering "Bio-ethicists and lawyers" a k a Glenn Cohen

I am happy Roe v. Wae was overturned and that states can now legislate openly against abortion. Since this is thanks to two or three Supreme Court Judges nominated by Donald Trump, naturally a kind of backlash would be to re-promote a video from before his election (the video is from September 2016, his election from November). It has been done. By linking and telling my comments, I repromote it some more, unfortunately, but I think marginally compared to what it will already be getting:

Abortion and Personhood: What the Moral Dilemma Is Really About | Glenn Cohen | Big Think
18th Sept. 2016 | Big Think
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ezS5vQ1j_E

2:00 If so and so is living and a human being, it's a person.
Fine.

2:20 Peter Singer is what used to be called a heretic.

berkah: Most of the pro-choice arguments can be used to justify infanticide as well (unwanted babies shouldn't exist, foster homes are overrun, etc.). There isn't much difference between a late term fetus and an infant other than where it happens to be located. So we are becoming painfully close to justifying infanticide. Autonomy of the mother is an argument toward justifying the removal of a fetus, not killing it.

The fact we also mercilessly kill other animals with consciousness and feelings is not a sufficient reason to also do so to human babies.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @berkah I don't think the "other animals" can be considered to have rational consciousness, but thank you for the point!

3:25 Hydrogen and Oxygen have the potentiality to become water together. Neither has as long as separate from the other.

The parallel is spermatozoon and ovum, not a fetus.

Spermatozoa and ova are not persons. The fertilised egg is.

That doesn't mean pills meant to inhibit ova are (within this question) licit, since they also inhibit the fertilised egg from nesting and thereby kill it, kill something which looks different from, but is, a human person.

4:01 Brain dead people are persons and should not be killed for extracting organs.

5:05 No, the woman carrying the fetus does not have the right to stop that gestation, even if it will result in the death of a person.

The one possible exception is, if it were the sole means of saving her own life.

5:54 Jarvis' analogy is a counterfactual.

In her "analogy" the person would be dialysis machine for the other, not during nine months, but during the remaining life of the violinist.

Whatever incommodity you have with the physical arrangement, in gestation it will cease at birth, but with her "analogy" the physical discomfort would cease only by death of the violinist.

Also, the "analogy" one would be hooked up to a stranger already grown up and already having his ways.

Gestation also tends to hook a woman up in a life long way with a thitherto stranger, but one who can in fact be stranger no longer, for he's of the woman, and for the woman has the occasion to raise him.

Jack Willson: @Hans-Georg Lundahl
"In her "analogy" the person would be dialysis machine for the other, not during nine months, but during the remaining life of the violinist."

Hmm... that's interesting to think about. Then now, lets say that giving a birth to a child will result not in death, but a permanent/lifelong injury for the mother that will never recover, will the parallel then be equal? And if so, would abortion be justified or not? And why?

You have stated on the top comment that abortion is only justified when either life is at stake either the mother or the baby must be chosen. But what if one will get a lifelong injury?
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Jack Willson Some would consider that an occasion, I wouldn't. I am even iffy for breaking off the pregnancy or otherwise saving the mother's life in ways that would result in indirect killing of the child, since the mother is an adult who can prepare for a Christians death, the child is as yest unbaptised.

Angelo Kelly's mother Barbara Ann did the right choice (in her case it wasn't breaking off the pregnancy, but taking chemotherapy that would have saved her life, after gestation, the chemotherapy came too late).

I am not sure it has always been just a choice in Christian countries.
Hans-Georg Lundahl: @Jack Willson "You have stated on the top comment that abortion is only justified when either life is at stake either the mother or the baby must be chosen."

Depends on what you consider "abortion." Only extraction of live fetus (with already dead one there is no issue) and then not doing anything to kill it. Only that would be justified.

Definitely a friendlier atmosphere to the unborn than at Planned Parenthood.

It can be mentioned after these my comments, that when I converted, Roman Catholic bioethics was not imposed on me as a surprise or sth I was pushed to take along the way, it was one of the major attractions, expecially compared to mainstream Lutherans, what I was leaving, who did not even back then want to stand up against abortion. I could have gone Free Synod or I could have gone Roman Catholic, I could not have stayed indefinitely after finding out that kind of compromises in the Swedish Church./HGL

Wednesday, July 20, 2022

Greek Myth - Up to 34:44 in the Video

Greek Mythology 3500 BC to AD 2014
3:rd Feb. 2014 | University of Birmingham
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCaDjvcaWpo

2:05 "but we all know they didn't, or not like that"

Do we? Does the genre assignment actually prove it?

6:00 First Olympiad may certainly be singled out as a convenient starting point for history with dates, as opposed to what could be called "legendary" time spans.

But the dates are not a guarantee what we get is really factual in history, their absence is a risk of anachronisms (I am sure Dido was one in the Aeneid, I find it possible some scenes about Troy are so - btw, we do have "Troies ptoliethron epersen" in the opening of the Odyssey, so Troy does exist, equalling Ilios). But not a guarantee of them, not a guarantee of other error.

17:30 We do not have the actual text of Mahabharata from pre-Greek times in India. The texts we have may go back to those times - or have been added to by Greek presence.

Alexander certainly brought Homer to India in some shape or portion.

Unless you believe Alexander getting there is a myth ... and even so, it would seem Greco-Bactrians invaded India:

The Indo-Greek Kingdom, or Graeco-Indian Kingdom, also known historically as the Yavana Kingdom (Yavanarajya),[4] was a Hellenistic-era Greek kingdom covering various parts of Afghanistan and the northwest regions of the Indian subcontinent, (virtually all of modern Pakistan).[5][6][7][8][9][10] This kingdom was in existence from ca. 200 BC to ca. 1 BC.

During its existence the kingdom was ruled over by 30 successive kings. Menander I, being the most well known amongst the Indo-Greek kings, is often referred to simply as “Menander,” despite the fact that there was indeed another Indo-Greek King known as Menander II. Menander I's capital was at Sagala in the Punjab (present-day Sialkot).[11]

The kingdom was founded when the Graeco-Bactrian king Demetrius (and later Eucratides) invaded India from Bactria in 200 BC.[12] The Greeks in the Indian Subcontinent were eventually divided from the Graeco-Bactrians centered on Bactria (now the border between Afghanistan and Uzbekistan), and the Indo-Greeks in the present-day north-western Indian Subcontinent.

This is before the Turkmenistan content list for the Mahabharata.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Greek_Kingdom

18:19 Before you start out with Indo-European diffusion, how about digging up evidence of Mahabharata content matching the Iliad or Odyssey (sanskrit texts in devanagari or other - not yet extant - or at least pictorial) from before the Greek presence in India?

18:52 By analogy of your reasoning, we must conclude Northerners are an Ancient Near East people displaced up there.

Earth is (despite what Thor's mother could have been) the carcass of a monster. Check - Ymir, Tiamat
Earth is a kind of disk set on some vertical object that is gnawed or ensnared by snakes. Check - netherworld pillars in Babylonian art with Yggdrasil, gnawn by Nidhögg
The noblest god of pure light is slain by his brother and becomes ruler of some blessed in the netherworld and shall come back. Check - Baldr, Osiris.
The ruler of the gods identifies in some fashion with an allseeing bird of prey. Check - Horus, the ravens of Odin.

These traditions are absent from Greece or from Finland and Balto-Slavic countries.

The other option is, as you mentioned, travel. And both Saxo and Snorri mention Odin as an immigrant conman. Snorri credits him with telling these things, and he poses - well before 1453 or even Turks taking Kosovo - the "Troy" from which he came as being in "Tyrkland" - back then it would however already encompass East Turkey. How about, a real origin in Esoteric Edessa (East of Anatolia) is exchanged for one in more royal Troy (same general region from an Icelandic pov, and now also in Tyrkland)?

22:53 Indians, Greeks, Celts have story telling poets. So do West Africans. Griots are the Bards of Mali and nearby countries.

And as metrical patterns were mentioned, there are indeed similarities between the sloka and the hexameter .... BUT we have no written sloka prior to the Greek presence in India.

24:35 Before you take any "extremely troubled people" I think I would single out Hercules and Achilles as the probably worst cases, next after which comes Theseus.

Let's take their so called myths as history.

Hercules thought he was the son of Zeus, was extremely strong and apt to sudden bursts of madness and rage. Who played Zeus to him? The real God? No. Leaves Satan.
Same for Theseus with Poseidon, where there certainly was some kind of "meeting" with the "divine" father, the last of these leading up to him getting Hippolytus killed by the "father's" magical agency on the "son's" wish. Did God do this? No. Leaves Satan.
Achilleus' mother had left him when he was very small, after being caught doing suspicious magical rites. She was considered a goddess by the father, but sounds like a witch to me.

Would people growing up in an atmosphere of Alistair Crowley become "extremely troubled people"? I think so. Satan was around when Hercules was born too.

26:09 When we come to a catalog of sins against humanity, take a look at the Oracle of Delphi. Or other manifestations of Apollo.

Bad counsel, as self fulfilling prophecy, given to Laios and to his son Oidipous.
Bad counsel, as orders to kill a daughter or a mother, given to Agamemnon and Orestes.
A plague worked on Greeks, and Homer's name in Iliad A for that "deity" on that occasion is echoed in Apocalypse (Revelation) 9:11.
Both Apollon, all five cases, and Apollyon, add up to 666. Not to that same number below 1000, but to 2666 and to 4666. And Hebrews (the author of the Apocalypse was one) have a cultural tendency to leave out thousands. Their year recently (2007?) 5777 was colloquially often referred to as 777. So, how would a Hebrew refer to 2666 or to 4666.

Yeah, I would say that Apollyon was culpable of more than one crime against humanity, and it's good news that St. Paul exorcised a girl in Thyatira from him or his likes!

27:55 Dumézil was more than once just repeating the works of a Swede. And more than once adding to them. Not sure which of these two I am thinking of, they are the two I read:

L’Idéologie tripartite des Indo-Européens
Heur et Malheur du guerrier, aspects de la fonction guerrière chez les Indo-Européens

But denying historicity to a text received previously as a basically historical type of text, and this because accepting comparatistic approaches already in vogue in Uppsala ... the compared Hindu gods have no older written text sources than the historical (or otherwise) existence of the corresponding Roman kings (I - IV).

28:46 Like, real life sins are all so creative, so highly individual, that a coincidence in sins proves literary dependence (on each other or earlier third source) ???

29:21 Yeah, no Hercules could hail from Cain in manners, so, if a Hindu hero also killed a best friend, also not hailing from Cain, the heros must be similar due to literary borrowing ... N O T.

32:42 Greek mythology is by its nature tragic.

Yeah, with people who seem to have taken Satan as their "invisible friend," would you expect much other? Recall what I said about Crowley .... (with Ulysses' "Athena" I get a sense it could be a guardian angel, at times, since he actually came home and finally could enjoy it).

33:35 "people in Thebes told a story and ... set it in Thebes"

Perhaps because it happened in Thebes?

Insert Satan or Apollyon or Pythonic spirit for "Apollo" and you are set for the type of ride we observe.

Oidipous was - after hearing a priest mention that the Sibyl in Aeneid VI was a very realistic Voodoo medium - the point where I ceased to consider Greek "mythology" as a very attractive (though inferior to Tolkien) fantasy genre. An atheist wouldn't have, but I am a Christian.

Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere

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