Creationism, Myths & Catastrophism

Beyond the boundaries of established science an avalanche of exotic ideas compete for our attention. Experts tell us that these ideas should not be permitted to take up the time of working scientists, and for the most part they are surely correct. But what about the gems in the rubble pile? By what ground-rules might we bring extraordinary new possibilities to light?

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Brigit Bara
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Re: Creationism, Myths & Catastrophism

Unread post by Brigit Bara » Tue Dec 03, 2019 12:25 pm

JP Michael says, "The only way one can suggest that Earth = Saturn...as Talbott, Cardona, Cook and others claim, is to utterly ignore the religious/theological overtones of the whole Hebrew narrative. I believe Brigit Bara might share this significant criticism of Saturnian Configuration theory."

Oh no, I wouldn't dream of criticism of DT or the Saturnian Configuration theory!

I would have some reservations on the use of psychoanalysis and imagery to entirely re-write history, though.
“Oh for shame, how these mortals put the blame upon us gods, for they say evils come from us, when it is they rather who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given…”
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Re: Creationism, Myths & Catastrophism

Unread post by moses » Tue Dec 03, 2019 6:41 pm

A. What is the main claim of each theory?
B. How and when did the Earth form?
Unknown.

C. How and when did the largely granitic/sedimentary continents and the largely basaltic ocean basins form?
It is clear to me that the oceans were carved out by EDM and the geological column was formed from that material and possibly material from another planet. I also ascribe the asteroids being from the same material. Thus Earth would have been where the asteroid belt is now along with one or two other planets, likely Mars and possibly Ganymede.

D. How and when did sedimentary rock strata form?
As above.

E. How and when did mountains form?
Primarily the above process left the Earth flat, ie no mountains. The mountains formed after the Earth left it position where the asteroid belt is now, and went on a very elliptical orbit where it interacted with at least another planet and the thunderbolts produced in such an interaction lifted up curved to linear sections of land or retarded the spin of the Earth which resulted in some sections of the Earth 'running into' neighbouring sections. Basically the bible starts after this.

F. What Earth cataclysms occurred and when?
Just what were all the interactions that Earth had whilst in the very elliptical orbit, and associated ice ages, is unknown but towards the end of these ice ages Venus was near where it is now and Earth was near where it is now. Mars moved between Venus and the Earth possibly becoming a moon of both at times. Noah's flood was around this time. After this whenever Venus and Earth were in conjunction electrical interaction occurred between them becoming quite severe when the orbital factors were favourable for large electrical interaction.

G. Which space objects caused which of the cataclysms and how
As above.

Cheers,
Mo

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JP Michael
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Re: Creationism, Myths & Catastrophism

Unread post by JP Michael » Tue Dec 03, 2019 7:33 pm

@Charles Chandler
A cursory reading of your reply leads me to suppose that you lean heavily on the theories of Wellhausen's Documentary Hypothesis (Jawist-Elohist-Deuteronomist-Priestly-Redakteur -- JEDPR) in order to support late editorial authorship of the Hebrew Scriptures, especially of the Book of Deuteronomy in the time of King Josiah. This theory has been so thoroughly debunked elsewhere I do not feel the need to write extensively against it here.[1] If you have an alternate view to that of Wellhausen and his ilk, please explain it or direct me to your website where you do explain it.

While I will not deny periods of editorial work upon the Torah and the Writings, most of the editorial work seemed to have been explanatory glosses, eg. Gen 12:6; 14:14; 36:31; 1 Sam 2:12-14; 9:9; Ruth 4:7, in order to culturally enlighten later audiences to earlier practices, names or peoples/kings. Proponents of JEDPR and similar textual reconstructions consistently fail to deal with the Scripture's internal testimony of Mosaic authorship of the entire Torah at the time of the Exodus and the following 40 years of wandering in the deserts of Arabia. [2]

To invoke the "Deuteronomists" in support of your hypothesis is no different to modern physics invoking Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Black Holes to support theirs. They are all inventions of the human mind based on faulty reasoning and erroneous, indeed, thoroughly falsified, assumptions. Without a credible JEDPR assumption to undergird your bifurcated "Hebrew" and "Israelite" genealogical reconstruction prior to the time of King Josiah, which the "Deuteronomists" then conflated and reorganised into a singular linear construction utilised (erroneously according to your theory) by Luke in his Messianic genealogy, the rest falls down by itself.

Cheers,
~JP.

[1] Eg. C.V. Taylor, "Who wrote Genesis? Are the toledoths colophons?" Journal of Creation 8(2):204-211 Aug 1997; R. Grigg, "Who wrote Genesis?" Creation 20(4):46-49 Sept 1998; M.W.J. Phelan, The Inspiration of the Pentateuch (Twoedged Sword, 2005); R.N. Whybray, The Making of the Pentateuch (JSOT, 1987).
[2] T. Mortensen and B. Hodge, "The Documentary Hypothesis: Moses, Genesis and the JEDP?"

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Re: Creationism, Myths & Catastrophism

Unread post by Lloyd » Thu Dec 05, 2019 9:13 am

474

Brigit said: "I would have some reservations on the use of psychoanalysis and imagery to entirely re-write history, though."

You were referring to Talbott and Thunderbolts. Please reference what psychoanalysis and imagery you're referring to. Is there a particular book or article you have in mind?

Mo, I hope to have time to add your model to my list soon, like this weekend. Maybe I should add Thornhill's too, since yours seems to borrow from his.

JP, your reply to Charles is interesting. I look forward to his reply, which will very likely be very reasonable, as usual. Charles bases much of his thesis on archeological findings. Your case would be helped if there were similar evidence for your conclusions. Isn't it true that the Septuagint is the oldest remnant of the Torah and Tanakh. If I recall right, it was written in Greek by Jewish translators of the original Hebrew back around 323BC under the command of Alexander the Great after the Greek conquest of Israel etc. There isn't an actual original Hebrew Torah/Tanakh extant, is there? Charles pointed out a lot of contradictions in the present Torah and shows that the archeology supports his own thesis. The New Testament seems to be much better supported than does the Torah. I look forward to learning more from both of you and others.

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Re: Creationism, Myths & Catastrophism

Unread post by CharlesChandler » Thu Dec 05, 2019 1:22 pm

JP Michael wrote:The only way one can suggest that Earth = Saturn...as Talbott, Cardona, Cook and others claim, is to utterly ignore the religious/theological overtones of the whole Hebrew narrative.
I agree with this. There is very little in the way of astronomy/astrology in Judaism, and even an absence of an afterlife/heaven/hell, through the 1st Temple Period. So there was little in the way of otherworldly specifics, and nothing in the way of generalized principles. It wasn't until the 2nd Temple Period that Jewish prophets started explicitly describing a concept of heaven/hell. Jesus later commented that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was the God of the living, not of the dead (Matthew 22:31-32, Mark 12:26-27, Luke 20:37-38), suggesting that the 2nd Temple prophets had strayed from Judaism's roots. So Judaism lacks the obsession with the "heavens" in word and in spirit necessary for it to be an echo of Saturnian events.

There might still be a catastrophist thread in it though. Recent research has identified evidence of a meteoric airburst over the Dead Sea in the Middle Bronze Age, around 1740 bce. The explosion knocked down mud-brick walls up to 10 km away, and with just half the energy of the airburst over Tunguska, Siberia in 1908 ce (which knocked down trees over 30 km away). The flash was bright enough to instantly vitrify clay, as if it had been fired in a kiln for hours. Surely anybody nearby looking directly at the airburst would have been blinded. The shock wave in the air also would have created a wave in the Dead Sea that would have crashed ashore and flooded the surrounding farms with salt water. This might explain why the land was barren through the Late Bronze Age, and wasn't cultivated again until early in the Iron Age — salt water is toxic to wheat & barley. The authors of the airburst research note significant parallels with the peculiar story of Sodom & Gomorrah in Genesis 19, such as the blinding light, people becoming entombed in salt (such as Lot's wife), and fire raining down from above, which would have been the meteor shower after the airburst.

Collins, S.; Silvia, P. (2015): The Civilization-Ending 3.7KYrBP Event: Archaeological Data, Sample Analyses, and Biblical Implications. Near East Archaeological Society
Brigit Bara wrote:I would have some reservations on the use of psychoanalysis and imagery to entirely re-write history, though.
He might have been referring to Freud, S. (1939): Moses and Monotheism, in which Freud applied his methods to the study of the Jewish psyche, and concluded that there had to have been formative events responsible for the distinctive characteristics of Hebrew culture, and that the Amarna Heresy fits the required specification. The mainstream archaeological community continues to turn its nose up at such methods. ;)
JP Michael wrote:To invoke the "Deuteronomists" in support of your hypothesis is no different to modern physics invoking Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Black Holes to support theirs.
Well, to not invoke redactors who reworked the chronology requires invoking divine intervention to get the conventional chronology to work. That's fine if that's what you choose to believe, as long as you clearly state your assumptions. If you believe that the Tanakh's own assertion that the Torah was written by Moses is the proof of its authenticity, then you already took the Tanakh as authentic, meaning that it's an opening assumption, not a conclusion based on evidence.
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Re: Creationism, Myths & Catastrophism

Unread post by moses » Thu Dec 05, 2019 5:21 pm

Lloyd wrote:
"Mo, I hope to have time to add your model to my list soon, like this weekend. Maybe I should add Thornhill's too, since yours seems to borrow from his."

I think that you will find that I got my theory in this forum before Wal published his. I certainly did not get my ideas from him although I read most of what he writes, and I extremely doubt that he got ideas from me, perhaps we can both think a bit!

Cheers,
Mo

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JP Michael
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Re: Creationism, Myths & Catastrophism

Unread post by JP Michael » Thu Dec 05, 2019 7:38 pm

CharlesChandler wrote:There is very little in the way of astronomy/astrology in Judaism, and even an absence of an afterlife/heaven/hell, through the 1st Temple Period.
If one limits oneself to the Biblical corpus, this assertion is partially true at best. For example, the Hebrew religious calendar and sacrificial system is based on daily-monthly astronomical observations (Leviticus ch 23; Numbers chs 9; chs 28-29). There are also established Hebrew names for the sun, moon and planets (even if not all of those names occur in Scripture) which clearly date from a time in antiquity, prior to the 1st Temple period (ie, earlier than ~1000 BCE), during which they were witnessed:
  • Sun - Shemesh (From שם, sham, a verbal root describing breath or wind, that is, an object's essential characteristics. Can imply a desolating blast of air. Also Akkadian shamash - Saturn); Chammah (The Hot One).
    Moon - Yareach (From רח, rach, a verbal root dealing with routine, following a pre-ordained path or journey, hinting at the ever-revolving Saturnian crescent); Levanah (The White One, hinting at the moon's cometary-flare origins eyewitnessed in human history and carried over to its present reflection); Chodesh (From חדש chadash, new (moon), meaning the start of each month).
    Mercury - Kokhab Chammah (The Hot-One's Star, associating Mercury with closeness to the Sun); Kokhab Lekhet (Wandering Star, akin to much mythology of Mercury as the messenger of the gods and akin to the Greek astera planetes from which the English wort planet is derived).
    Venus - Nogah (The Brilliant One, immediately reminiscent of most ancient near east descriptions of the beautiful comet); Ayelet HaShachar & Heilel ben Shachar (Isaiah 14:12 - conjectured appelations of Venus, the Morning Star); Kiyyun (Amos 5:26 - conjectured Akkadian appelation of Venus the Star-god(dess)).
    Mars - Madim (Reddening, From אדם, adam, red [soil]. Self-explanatory).
    Jupiter - Tseddeq (Justice/righteousness. Associated with a legend that Jupiter shone all night when Abram's force defeated King Chedarlaomer [Genesis 14]. Note that Abram was blessed by Melchizedek [same root word here, tseddeq] that day, the priest of El Elion, the Most High God [Genesis 14:18-19]).
    Saturn - Shabtai (From שבת, shabath, rest. Ancient Hebrew cosmology does not typically associate shemesh above with Saturn but rather a much older concept that Saturn was the One at Rest. Traditional Judaism has always loathed pagan "Saturn's Day" worship for its association with their 7th day Sabbath, but could it be that both traditions find some aspect of their origin in the Saturnian Polestar ever at rest in the North [Zaphon]?)
    Neptune - Apparently unknown to the ancient Hebrews and unattested.
    Uranus - Apparently unknown to the ancient Hebrews and unattested.
    Pluto - Unknown to the ancient Hebrews.
Whilst Biblical (written) eschatological notions certainly come to the fore in the period of the prophetic ministry from Samuel onward, 1st Temple eschatology also persists in oral traditions such as those recorded by Louis Ginzberg's Legends of the Jews. Of course, dating such oral tradition is always a disputed process, but I offer such as evidence that the claim is not entirely correct.
CharlesChandler wrote:Jesus later commented that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was the God of the living, not of the dead (Matthew 22:31-32, Mark 12:26-27, Luke 20:37-38), suggesting that the 2nd Temple prophets had strayed from Judaism's roots.
This is incorrect. Jesus was primarily rebutting two fundamental errors of the Sadducee sect:
  • 1. Torah-only. The Sadducees accepted only the Torah for faith and practice and rejected the revelation of the prophetic ministry.

    2. Resurrection rejection. Based on 1. above, the Sadducees adduced no evidence in Scripture of the resurrection, a doctrine that is easily demonstrated from the prophets (Ezekiel 37; Daniel 12:2). Jesus thus utilised the Torah alone to demonstrate it does, indeed, teach the resurrection. This is further evidenced by the Pharisees apparent awareness that Jesus had 'silenced the Sadducees' regarding this doctrine that they, the Pharisees, (rightly) accepted (Matt 22:34). Paul makes excellent use of this theological disagreement later in the book of Acts (Acts 23:6-7).
Jesus extensively utilised the Torah, Prophets and Psalms to attest to his person, work and ministry throughout Luke's gospel especially (eg. Luke 18:31; 22:37; 24:44). He was by no means suggesting the prophets had strayed from Judaism's roots. He was suggesting, especially in the passages you cited above, that the Sadducees had strayed from their phophetic roots by their rejection, not only of the prophetic testimony of the resurrection they refused to acknowledge, but also the testimony of Law of Moses they did supposedly accept. To suggest from this passage in the synoptic gospels that Jesus disagreed with the 2nd Temple period prophetic ministry is to deny everything he himself is reported to have claimed about said prophetic ministry.
CharlesChandler wrote:So Judaism lacks the obsession with the "heavens" in word and in spirit necessary for it to be an echo of Saturnian events.
This is a complicated conclusion which I agree with for reasons stated previously. Whilst I believe there is significant absence of explicit Saturnian imagery in Scripture, I think there are many places where it can be deducted accurately. I am no-where near presenting a paper of all such places as I am still collecting, analysing and collating the evidence. Theologically, the claim that "earth" in Gen 1 = "Celestial earth" cannot be sustained in the oldest strains of Hebrew thought sourced from the Scriptures alone.

I believe this changed significantly post-Babylonian exile with the increasing emphasis, and syncretism, within Judaism on oral, esoteric traditions such as those cited extensively by Talbott, Cardona and Cook which absolutely emphasise celestial theology ("Navel of the Earth", "Celestial Jerusalem/Zion", etc.). This is where I draw a significant distinction in Jewish theological traditions: Scripture only (eg. Karaite) versus Scripture + Oral traditions (Talmud, Mishnah, Kabbalah, etc). I believe this distinction has been widely overlooked by scholars investigating Biblical evidence of the Saturnian Configuration and they have widely conflated the latter (oral tradition/interpretation/esoteric mysticism) to be evidence of the former (Biblically/textually derived).
CharlesChandler wrote:If you believe that the Tanakh's own assertion that the Torah was written by Moses is the proof of its authenticity, then you already took the Tanakh as authentic, meaning that it's an opening assumption, not a conclusion based on evidence.
It's called axiomatic. It's like asking, "Will a red-hot poker burn human flesh?" The only way you can find out is to press said red-hot poker into your (or someone else's) flesh and see if the claim is true or not, else rely on the experiential testimony of someone who has already ascertained the truth or falsehood of the claim. I may/may not have believed a red-hot poker could burn human flesh until the moment I pressed it into my palm, but the moment I do, it becomes axiomatic, self-evident.

If the Bible itself claims, multiple times in multiple seperate sources, that Moses wrote the Torah, how else can one ascertain the truth of that statement except examining that selfsame Torah-Prophets-Writings-New Testament for internal, axiomatic evidence of its own claim? The Bible states repeatedly that the Torah was primarily the work of Moses, not the mythical redactors of the debunked JEPDR hypothesis. All the internal evidence points to the same conclusion, internal evidence which JEPDR proponents routinely ignore due to their own a-priori assumptions that the text is a hodge-podge collection of 4 primary sources and final 7th-4th century BCE redactor(s). An axiomatic truth is not circular reasoning.

What you (and JEDPR proponents before you) suggest is that major detectable alterations of the original documents have occured in the textual transmission of the Scriptures (particularly the Torah). What this claim can never demonstrate, however, is:
  • 1. What the 'original' documents were.
    2. How/when/where the 'original' documents were changed to become the present documents.
Any argument on these two points is conjecture only, and easily falsified conjecture. Until JEDPR theorists can produce tangible documentary evidence of a Hebrew corpus that pre-dates the Masoretic/Dead-Sea Scroll/LXX textual traditions, such theorising of tampered-with Biblical texts remains based solely upon the powers of human imagination alone. Biblical critics believe this nonsense for the same reason modern physicists believe their Relativistic fairytales: it is simply unacceptable that an ancient tradition can actually be an accurate (even if somewhat incomplete and editorially compiled) record. It is futher assumed that the transmission of ancient religious texts evolved over time. This might be true of mythohistorical religious traditions, such as in Sumer, Egypt, Babylon and Mesoamerica, traditions which were based on observations of the 'gods' in an ever-changing sky, but it is demonstrably false when applied to the transmission of the Biblical material and Judaism's central tenet of the unseen God of Abrahamic monotheism.

I feel a need to illustrate this point further: Josephus' Antiquity of the Jews Book 18:3:3.
Antiquity of the Jews wrote:About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.
This passage comes up for dispute because Josephus was well known as a devout Jew. Why would a devout Jew claim explicitly, in the 1st century CE, that "He [Jesus] was the Christ"? That this passage finds its earliest extant citation in the work of Eusebius, a 4th century Christian historian, gives strong credence that there is Christian redaction at play here. The problem is that there are no earlier texts of Josephus by which to compare theories of redaction. Eusebius' citation is the earliest. This leaves scholars in a quandry, identical to JEDPR theory, that there is a supposition of redaction in a text but no earlier textual evidence to prove it. But here is where redaction theory of Josephus makes a radical departure from JEDPR: despite strong suspicion of redaction in this passage (and a few others), scholars did not conclude that the entirety of the Antiquities of the Jews was a later Christian effort of redaction and reconstruction. They continue to promote Josephus' authentic authorship of Antiquities as a whole in spite of this disputed passage.

Where this example differs from the Hebrew Scriptures is that very few, if at all any, of the Bible's textual edits are this kind of radical, targeted re-interpretation of history. As I stated in my previous post, most of the clear editorial comments, especially in the Torah, are glosses explaining some early cultural or linguistic phenomenon to a later, culturally-linguistically divergent readership. So I agree that it is quite possible that canonisation/final redaction of the Hebrew corpus took place between the 7th-4th centuries BCE, especially when we're given internal evidence of textual scholars like Samuel, Nathan, Hilkiah, Shaphan, Jeremiah and Ezra. Yet JEDPR wants us to conclude, from this handful of evidential editorial glosses and scholars, that Moses was not the author of the Pentateuch and that the whole thing is conflated, contrived and concocted by Josiah and his bunch of pseudo-Moses scribal cronies.

No other book in the history of the world is treated this way.
Last edited by JP Michael on Thu Dec 05, 2019 7:56 pm, edited 8 times in total.

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Re: Creationism, Myths & Catastrophism

Unread post by Younger Dryas » Thu Dec 05, 2019 7:41 pm

I think it may be helpful to take a wider view of this particular period:

It seems almost unbelievable that the altered night skies, and especially the rotation of the dome of the stars, would have the effect that it did in generating a half dozen new religions, initiating an historical awareness, and be the genesis of the study of physics. It is even more astounding to see these changes happening worldwide and at almost the same time -- in Babylonia, Greece, India, China, and Mesoamerica. The simultaneity of the interests in these topics is amazing, especially considering the lack of cultural contacts. This has been remarked upon by others.

If you look for the history of any of the Greek cities, or the nations of the Middle East, or China, you will see that in most instances history cannot be traced back before 600 or 700 BC. Everything disappears into legends. It is as if the world suddenly woke up, and abstract thought was first allowed after 600 BC.

The fact is that far-flung regions of the world all simultaneously came to the same conclusions about the universe and the world. This suggests the possibility of something global being the cause of the new sciences, philosophies, and inquiries.

About the period of 600 to 500 BC, Irving Wolfe wrote, in 1997:

"there is evidence for what I call a 'Kultursturz' or cultural crisis in which a large number of cultural elements underwent quick and sharp change within the same short period of time. These include the appearance of secular as opposed to strictly religious art, a host of new religions of a new type, new philosophies of a new type, writing, dynastic upheavals, the quick upsurge and removal of several tyrannical regimes, urbanism, new patterns of consciousness, behavior, and dreaming, new types of social organization, vast pan-Greek ritualistic athletic games, the institution of democracy and the use of money. All of these elements are totally different in spirit from those of the previous (Bronze Age) cultures."

-- Irving Wolfe, "The 'Kultursturz' At The Bronze Age / Iron Age Boundary" Natural Catastrophes during Bronze Age Civilizations, SIS Conference (1997).

Wolfe continues with:

"If all of these cultural revolutions can be correlated chronologically among themselves and to scientific evidence for similar upheavals well documented in the geological, archaeological and climatological record, then we have before us the outline of a global natural event which not only ended one historical era, but led to the distinctive cultural characteristics of our modern age. After all, we are the children of this period of upheaval."

We have to understand the "new religions" as having the same purpose as the "new philosophies". Both sought a moral order independent of the older Gods, and both were meant to democratize thought and religious practices, in effect taking these functions away from a priestly cast. The coincidence of dates is as follows:

Zoroaster (Zarathustra, Northeastern Persia, 628-?? BC), of the tribe of the Magi, developed Zoroastrianism (Mazdaism). The monotheism of Mazdaism influenced Judaism during the Babylonian captivity of the Jews (597-536 BC), and spread throughout the eastern portion of the Middle East and into Arabia. It gave rise to Mithraism by perhaps 300 BC, and was a very important model for Christianity and, at a much later date, for Islam.

Lao-tse (China, 604-531 BC) devised the philosophy of Taoism. His existence may be in doubt, but that would serve his philosophy of restraint well.

Confucius (China, 551-479 BC) extended to everyone the worship services originally only allowed to the emperor.

Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, (India, 563-483 BC) founded Buddhism, one of the major influences in the reformation of Hinduism, and later a major philosophical influence in China.

Vardhamana Mahavira (India, ??-527 BC) was the founder of Jainism, with ideas partially derived from Hinduism and Buddhism.

The mystery religions of Anatolia and Greece (the worship of Demeter, Orpheus, Dionysus) all seem to date to the 6th century BC, although some elements, as, for example, the Eleusinian rites of Demeter, may be much older and more primitive.


The new religions were testaments to hope -- hope for a good life on Earth, hope for the abatement of evil, hope for an afterlife, hope for union with God, hope for victory of a nation, hope for the conquest of others. The specifics vary with the politics and philosophy of various peoples. The Christians hoped for the return of their savior. Their The Mexicans and Maya hoped for the return of Quetzalcoatl for 2200 years. The promise of a redemption resulting in life after death is almost universal.

I should also point out that the older Gods were not simply put aside, the honors and ceremonies extended to the elder Gods continued unabated for the next thousand years. But it should also be noted that no new Gods were added. As Alfred de Grazia wrote:

"No new sky god has been 'invented' in any part of the world since the Martian age ... Nor did the Teutonic peoples invent new gods, try as they might, after the 'Ragnarok' or 'Götterdämmerung.' Nor did a new sky god come out of India, China, or America."

"Whence one concludes that 'real gods' cannot be 'invented' by the human mind as a pastime, or as a cold decision. Further, the abstract God of the Jews and of Christians and Muslims, and the abstract Heaven of the Chinese, are gods of philosophy. Insofar as a tangible presence is given to them, that presence becomes manifest in the behavior, appearances, visitations, rituals and iconography of the ancient sky gods and their heavenly hosts."
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Re: Creationism, Myths & Catastrophism

Unread post by CharlesChandler » Fri Dec 06, 2019 12:37 am

Thanks so much for your very informative response! It will take me some time to fully digest. So for now, I just have one quick comment...
JP Michael wrote:JEDPR wants us to conclude, from this handful of evidential editorial glosses and scholars, that Moses was not the author of the Pentateuch and that the whole thing is conflated, contrived and concocted by Josiah and his bunch of pseudo-Moses scribal cronies.
Some people think that the whole thing was made up, by Josiah, or during the exile, or immediately thereafter. But they aren't source critics, because for them, there weren't any original sources. Rather, those subscribing to the Documentary Hypothesis acknowledge the existence, and significance, of earlier documents, with J & E getting dated to the 1st Temple Period. Then comes the question of whether the authors of J & E were writing fiction, or relaying what they considered to be fact. At this point, I'm taking all of the historical details from the Torah and the Deuteronomic History to be rooted in fact, unless they're just not physically possible. For example, Noah was said to have been 500 years old when he fathered Shem, which wouldn't seem to be biologically possible. So I leave Noah & Shem on the timeline, to be as true as possible to the original text, but I reduce the age to 50 years old, just to have a number that's possible. So as revisionists go, I'm actually kinda conservative. Of course, there is an all-or-nothing difference between literalists & revisionists, which I guess is the difference between us. ;)
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Re: Creationism, Myths & Catastrophism

Unread post by Maol » Fri Dec 06, 2019 6:56 am

Are any of you familiar with the Urantia Book?

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JP Michael
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Re: Creationism, Myths & Catastrophism

Unread post by JP Michael » Fri Dec 06, 2019 5:38 pm

CharlesChandler wrote:...those subscribing to the Documentary Hypothesis acknowledge the existence, and significance, of earlier documents, with J & E getting dated to the 1st Temple Period.
Notwithstanding that such 'documents' have 0 evidence in reality other than the mental scissors of 20th century Torah scholarship, cutting and pasting the extant and attested text howsoever they see fit to force it to obey their JEDPR hypothesis! :lol:
CharlesChandler wrote:At this point, I'm taking all of the historical details from the Torah and the Deuteronomic History to be rooted in fact, unless they're just not physically possible. For example, Noah was said to have been 500 years old when he fathered Shem, which wouldn't seem to be biologically possible. So I leave Noah & Shem on the timeline, to be as true as possible to the original text, but I reduce the age to 50 years old, just to have a number that's possible.
I would like to highlight what I perceive as a uniformitarian imposition upon the ante-deluvian world here, and this brings this thread right back around to one of the cores of the discussion: catastrophism vs. uniformity.

When you suggest it is "not physically possible" for a human to live to 900+, are you not imposing the physical restrictions of our current world, current climate, current medicine, current sky, back on theirs? Isn't the whole point of EU reconstruction to reconsider this slavish obeisance to uniformitarian dogma and forcing our current world back onto historical times? Has this not been the central fundamental error which eliminated the mythohistorical record as a critical line of important evidence supporting the catastrophic challenge, that their world, their sky, their earth, was radically different to our own and we should not just keep imposing what we know now back upon what they claimed then? In my mind, the question isn't "Is it physically possible to live to 900 now?" (No!), but "Was it possible to live to 900 in Noah's ante-deluvian world which was radically different to our own, both in sky and earth and everything that entails?"

This is where I believe Thornhill and McLachlan have a strong case about the postulated plasmapheric reflection of proto-Saturn's light, the encasing 'mist' of water (which the Bible indeed mentions as a characteristic of the ante-deluvian age, Gen 2:5-6), and the overall ideal conditions for plant (and by extension, animal) life at the time. That the earth was covered in abundant, lush vegetation in the past is clearly evident from the copious amount of hydrocarbon fossils found in sedimentary geology now (ie, coal deposits worldwide), enormous insects, mammals and dinosaur fossils that we do not see today (eg. meganeura, megafauna), in addition to evidence extracted from Siberian/Alaskan woolly mammoths prior to whatever icy disaster snap froze them in what is now the artic circle with sub-tropical plants between their teeth.

By rejecting the dogma of uniformity, all of a sudden one is opened to a realm of biological and astronomical research to determine whether plasmaspheric reflection warmed the globe and standardized the climate to such a state that it promoted 900+ year lifespans (which is, in my opinion, the reasons dinosaurs, insects and animals grew so large in the past: they were 900 years old too), instead of being shut down by a falsified a-priori assumption, "The present is key to the past." I am astounded at how much modern thinking is plagued by this single, parroted ditty, especially by members of this forum who really ought to know better.

One simply cannot argue, on the basis of human longevity today, that human longevity could not have been different in the past. The conditions of earth and sky then were clearly radically different, so much so that it has, I believe, a clear reflection in human longevity by a factor of 10.

Once again I find the authentic testimony of the ancient Hebrew scriptures reflecting this awesome truth: their world was not anything like our world. Theirs was truly a Golden Age, one we will never fully comprehend because we were not there to experience it. All we have are a handful of extant Hebrew texts and associated mythohistorical accounts in other cultures describing the wonder of that age. Yet the ancient Hebrews are so accurate, they even chronicle the drop-off in human longevity post-Flood (Gen 11:10-32), exactly as we would expect if the Earth had undergone a monumental alteration in its climate-biome due to a sudden, world-destroying catastrophe. This testimony is reflected in other mythohistorical sources, such as those of the Chinese Shang Dynasty emperors, so it is far from alone in its claims.

Genuine scholarship will begin when we begin to respect their world according to their terms and desist from imposing our supposedly 'modern and superior' understanding of human longevity, or any other uniformitarian "present key to the past" assumption, back on their recorded history.
Maol wrote:Are any of you familiar with the Urantia Book?
First time I've ever heard of it, actually. Thanks for that reference. I will check this out.

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JP Michael
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Re: Creationism, Myths & Catastrophism

Unread post by JP Michael » Fri Dec 06, 2019 7:14 pm

Younger Dryas wrote:... it should also be noted that no new Gods were added.
This is a fascinating point. Thank you for posting! Obviously I would disagree with the philosophical 'abstraction' of the Judeo-Christian God, nevertheless there is much food for thought here. I will have to add de Grazia and Wolfe to my (already too-long) reading lists!

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Re: Creationism, Myths & Catastrophism

Unread post by CharlesChandler » Fri Dec 06, 2019 9:16 pm

JP Michael wrote:When you suggest it is "not physically possible" for a human to live to 900+, are you not imposing the physical restrictions of our current world, current climate, current medicine, current sky, back on theirs?
Indeed, my approach assumes that the rules were the same back then. And indeed, modern laboratory evidence does not prove that the rules were always the same, because it doesn't even acknowledge the question. More significantly, our immature understanding of modern laboratory evidence cannot be successfully applied even to the modern laboratory evidence itself, much less to ancient scriptures, when the rules might have been different. The same issue shows up elsewhere -- I have no way of proving that terrestrial science applies to astrophysics, since the rules here might be different from the rules out there. So the applicability of the "here & now" to the "there & then" needs to be questioned, especially since our understanding of the "here & now" is far from complete.

As an example, as our understanding of biology has progressed, we now find it difficult to understand how dinosaurs such as the Argentinosaurus could have ever roamed the Earth, since their legs weren't strong enough to support their body masses, and their hearts weren't powerful enough to pump blood all of the way to their brains. So modern biophysics doesn't apply to the dinosaurs -- either modern biophysics is wrong, or the conditions were different. I'm favoring the latter -- perhaps the atmosphere was a lot thicker then, providing a lot more buoyancy, enabling larger/taller animals. Then came the KT impact, which killed the dinosaurs, along with the dominant plants at the time. The assumption is that everything was killed by the direct and immediate effects impact itself, but the permanent extinction of so many fauna & flora species might have been due to a dramatic reduction in atmospheric buoyancy, which would have caused problems for both the animals & plants. So the KT impact might have boiled off a significant portion of the atmosphere, and that's what might have killed the dominant fauna & flora.

If so, the whole inquiry matures -- first we didn't know that we had a problem, then we found that modern science couldn't explain ancient phenomena, and then we came to a fuller appreciation of both modern science and ancient conditions. Thus it wasn't that modern science was wrong -- it was that it was incomplete. We might even be able to calculate the density of the atmosphere prior to the KT impact, by applying what we know about skeletal & cardiovascular systems to the study of the Argentinosaurus. Then we might be able to apply that finding to other studies -- a reduction in atmospheric pressure might have affected vulcanism, where less pressure holding the stuff down might have enabled more of it to bubble to the surface. This might help explain the flood basalts in India at the time (i.e., the Deccan Traps). And the volcanoes help explain the KT extinctions, in that they released gases that the fauna & flora might have found toxic, in addition to the climate change due to greenhouse gases like sulfur dioxide. At that point we come to appreciate life as a fine balance among lots of factors.

Yet at the beginning of the inquiry, when we first realized we had a problem, how did we know what of our current "understanding" would have to be tossed, and what new insights would have to be gained, in order to make sense of the observations? We didn't. Were the physical principles different back then, and/or were the conditions different? This we do not know in advance. IMO, even if we think that we have fully reconciled the relevant theory with the observations, we might still be fooled, where ongoing investigations might reveal phenomena not handled by the theory. So it's important to keep track of the assumptions, because they might have to be revisited, even after we think that we understand.
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Brigit Bara
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Re: Creationism, Myths & Catastrophism

Unread post by Brigit Bara » Sat Dec 07, 2019 1:28 pm

catastrophism subsection: the two great lights of Genesis 1


by Lloyd » Wed Nov 27, 2019 8:54 am

I met JP on this forum [Ancient Tech]. He's interested in biblical clues that hint of the ancient Saturn configuration. I'm paraphrasing and partially quoting my recent discussion with him. We invite anyone to join this discussion.
_JP: There are many portions of the Scriptures, particularly early portions, that have been routinely misinterpreted due to uniformitarianism. For example, Genesis 1:14 says there were two 'great lights' in the ancient sky. These lights are never identified as the sun and the moon. That is an interpretation foisted on the text from observations of the current sky by all past and present Biblical interpreters. Mention of the 'sun' (shamash) does not occur until Gen 15:12, and the moon (yareach) until Gen 37:9, and in both cases translating them "Saturn" and "Crescent" (following David Talbott's The Saturn Myth, pp.276-280) respectively does little violence to the text, but much violence to the imposition of the modern sky upon the ancients'.
by Brigit Bara » Fri Nov 29, 2019 10:35 pm
I want to say right here that the Bible does not say that God created the sun and moon at the time of the six days of the reformation of the earth, in Genesis. In case it does not come up again, or in case I forget, I want to make clear that Genesis says that God made "two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night." The word Shemesh, the sun, does not appear until Genesis chapter 15, and the word Yareach, the moon, does not appear until Genesis chapter 37. I think this leaves room for the views of Velikovsky, that Saturn and another body were the original sources of light on the earth.
It is fantastic to find someone else who has worked on this, and even if it was by accident, I am glad that I restated it on this thread. There is one objection to interpreting the "two great lights" as possibly indicating heavenly bodies other than the sun and moon. I will cite the text, then give my answer to the objection.
“Oh for shame, how these mortals put the blame upon us gods, for they say evils come from us, when it is they rather who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given…”
~Homer

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Brigit Bara
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Re: Creationism, Myths & Catastrophism

Unread post by Brigit Bara » Sat Dec 07, 2019 2:23 pm

catastrophism subsection: the two great lights in Genesis 1

Gen 1:16
Then God made two great lights:the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night.
הַמְּאֹרֹת הַגְּדֹלִים


There is a similar verse in the Psalms which may seem, at first glance, to state outright that the "two great lights" were the sun and the moon. However, there is a small difference between the terms for "lights" which merits careful attention.

Psalm 136
Oh give thanks to the Lord, for He is good!
...To Him who by wisdom made the heavens...
To Him who made great lights...
The sun to rule by day...
the moon and stars to rule by night.
אֹורִים גְּדֹלִים

I have highlighted the word for "lights" in each verse, so that even if you don't read Hebrew, you can still notice that the endings are different. The verse from Genesis 1:16 has a feminine plural ending, and the verse from Psalm 136:7 has a masculine plural ending.

Therefore, I suggest it is possible that the language in the Hebrew text does express a former era in which the "greater and lesser lights" were different than they were in the day when the psalmist wrote this hymn -- a hymn which reflects the "great lights" of the present sky.
“Oh for shame, how these mortals put the blame upon us gods, for they say evils come from us, when it is they rather who by their own recklessness win sorrow beyond what is given…”
~Homer

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