Creationism, Myth and Catastrophism

[Lloyd]

26270

TOWER OF BABEL & SAMSON

Hi JP. Glad you're back.
"Could you please specify which part of this narrative is referring to the axis mundi, and the criteria by which you arrived at that conclusion?"
The tower is the polar column. I provided a link to Catastrophism.com links to articles on the topic at https://www.catastrophism.com/intro/sea ... oom_cat=-1
The 17th excerpt there says this.
"17. The Cosmic String of Pearls [Journals] [Aeon]
... . G. Frazer, The Worship of Nature, Vol. I (London, 1926), pp. 135 ff. [51] J. G. Frazer, op. cit., p. 174. [52] Ibid., p. 195. The strong resemblance these folk-tales bear to the Biblical account of the tower of Babel is no coincidence, as all are symbolic elaborations of the same visual prototypes. One of the common symbols of the polar axis was the tower, whose layers corresponded to the divisions in the string of pearls. All sorts of permutations occur. In Pindar"s poetry, the notion of a string of ascending souls is...."

"Could you please specify why 'brick' and 'mortar' and 'city' and 'tower', etc, do not mean 'brick' and 'mortar' and 'city' and 'tower' but supposedly mean 'plasma column', 'birkeland currents', 'stairway to heaven' etc?"
It's because the ancients who inherited such myths assumed that what their ancestors reported were occurrences on Earth, when in reality they were in the sky.

"Could you please specify other internal (to Scripture) or external evidence of 'confusion of language' and 'dispersal across the earth' occuring at the same time as the supposed collapse of the axis mundi?"
I'll see if I can find if other myths say that or anything similar.

"Could you please specify other internal (to Scripture) or external evidence of a watery cataclysm that took place at this time resulting in the confusion of human languages and their dispersal across the world?"
I discussed Tiahuanaco here recently in that regard. I'll try to find more evidence of that flood. I believe Randall Carlson said that the North American ice sheet melted at that time and flooded much of North America.

""Could you please explicate your criteria or methodology by which you decide which portions of the biblical text are historical narrative (like how you determine that the world is 6,000 to 10,000 years old, a YEC position) and which portions are "late retellings" of earlier incidents (I presume you might rather mean 'mythological' narrative)?""
I quoted a Creation.com article lately here which mentioned that the amount of helium in zircons indicates that Earth is 6,000 years old. I stated that to me it indicates that the former supercontinent which became the continents are 6,000 years old. There was another indicator of the age of the Earth in that or another Creation.com article which also stated something like that, i.e. thousands of years old, which I also took to be indicative of the age of the continents. I think it's likely that the Earth is somewhat older, but it looks like the continents may be that young. So I judge by solid evidence, rather than Bible statements. The existence and ages of the biblical patriarchs are uncertain to me, but I consider that data as plausible. But it's very possible that Adam and Eve etc were Mars and Venus and the Garden of Eden was the Saturn configuration.

""The only portion of this narrative which is of any use to your argument is the vague and inconclusive "YHWH came down to see the city and the tower which men had built." If men built the city and the tower, how can it have been an unmade-by-human-hands plasma polar column? And if you say that the latter is what it 'really' means, on what basis do you conclude this? For it will only expose your epistomology and exegetical methodology as a pick-and-choose absurdity, and interpretation of the Bible becomes an impossibility, excepting whatever I (or you) feel like we want it to mean at the time.""
I favor the comparative mythology methods that Talbott, Cardona, Cochrane and others use. So comparing the Bible's stories with myths is one of the ways to determine what is probable. But physical evidence is better.

""Could you also explain the same of the Samson incident (Judges 16:3):
*By what criteria do you decide which portions of the Bible are historical narrative and what is mythological narrative?
*By what criteria do you suppose the references to "the doors of the gate of the city and the two posts, bar and all" refer to the plasma polar column(s) and not to the doors of the gate of Gaza city, posts and bar and all?""
The two pillars seem to refer to some other aspect of the Saturn configuration instead of the polar column, but I'm not clear on what they refer to yet, though it may be the two horns of the crescent of Saturn.

"How do you know the world is 6,000 years young when your epistemology can simply decide, with no rationale or justification, that certain portions of biblical history are talking about mythological (= 'made-up' later? Poorly reconstructed ex eventu?) events, but other portions of history are talking about actual (=reliable?) history? On what basis do you conclude the chronogenealogies of Gen. 5 or 1 Chronicles 1-9 are not made up mythologies and can therefore be utilised to reliably date the age of the universe?"
As I stated above, I based my guess about the age of the continents on the Creation.com article that mentioned helium in zircons suggest the age is 6,000 years. Yes, the Bible and other histories often seem to include myths, i.e. heaven history, along with actual history. I discussed the Iliad here recently, which is another place that occurs.

I don't have time to say more now, to speak of. Going to work.

[moses]

I don't believe that the helium dispersion in zircon invalidates, say, a 100,000 year old Earth. It certainly negates a billion year old Earth. Which is a 10,000 times difference.

The polar column was simply the very same current direction we have now but in glow mode. And that larger current then would have acted to increase the spin of the Earth. Also there would have been stable configurations in the plasma column. (Just like the labyrinth was a stable configuration in the magneto-tail of the Earth.)

The pre-flood kings in the Sumerian king's list may be referring to something in their very first stories about the past civilization. Putting planets and things in the sky as characters in their ancient stories makes them read like plasma. It is the precession times they use for the ages of the kings that places them in the sky.

Mo

[JP Michael]

"Could you please specify why 'brick' and 'mortar' and 'city' and 'tower', etc, do not mean 'brick' and 'mortar' and 'city' and 'tower' but supposedly mean 'plasma column', 'birkeland currents', 'stairway to heaven' etc?"

It's because the ancients who inherited such myths assumed that what their ancestors reported were occurrences on Earth, when in reality they were in the sky.

In other words, you assume that the ancients are completely retarded, with no ability whatsoever to know or explicate the difference between actual, man-made realities like a city, tower, bricks, mortar, etc, and then record the same in ancient writings; rather, ancient man was in a perpetual state of confusion about the reports of the past: he had no way to discern man-made realities from heavenly, plasma apparitions and the mythologies spawned therefrom, regularly confusing the one for the other.

If this assumption is correct - how can you trust anything the ancients say at all? If tower = plasma column, why cannot brick = duck? Or mortar = digereedoo? This method of interpretation can make anything mean anything else. There's no rhyme or reason to it.

"Could you please explicate your criteria or methodology by which you decide which portions of the biblical text are historical narrative (like how you determine that the world is 6,000 to 10,000 years old, a YEC position) and which portions are "late retellings" of earlier incidents (I presume you might rather mean 'mythological' narrative)?"

I quoted a Creation.com article lately here which mentioned that the amount of helium in zircons indicates that Earth is 6,000 years old. I stated that to me it indicates that the former supercontinent which became the continents are 6,000 years old. There was another indicator of the age of the Earth in that or another Creation.com article which also stated something like that, i.e. thousands of years old, which I also took to be indicative of the age of the continents. I think it's likely that the Earth is somewhat older, but it looks like the continents may be that young. So I judge by solid evidence, rather than Bible statements. The existence and ages of the biblical patriarchs are uncertain to me, but I consider that data as plausible. But it's very possible that Adam and Eve etc were Mars and Venus and the Garden of Eden was the Saturn configuration.

This is a case of cart before the horse. The reason CMI utilises such argument is because they've already established the age of the universe at 6,000-10,000 years old utilising a historical-grammatical (otherwise known as the historical-critical) exegetical methodology of biblical interpretation. They regard the Scripture (particularly the portions identified as 'narrative genre') as a trustworthy, perspicuous and self-explanatory. Thus, when a CMI interpreter reads the chronogenealogies in Genesis 5, they can garner the time of the Flood as being year 1656 after creation (anno mundi - AM) by using arithmetic to tally the ages of the father-son genealogy until Noah "entered the ark in his 600th year". For CMI, what the Scriptures say is of primary authority: they assume (with good reason) it is God's Word to mankind, authoritative in its account of history. This is a theological position. Their position is that scientific argument, like helium in zircons, when interpreted utilising bible-derived assumptions, will confirm this already established biblical chronology.

Your exegetical methodology, as you've already admitted above, does not allow you this foundation. On what biblical basis do you argue the universe is 6,000 years old? You can't. Because you have no means of discerning which parts of scripture are misunderstandings of plasma mythology or the so-called Saturnian configuration myth, and which parts are accounts of human, not celestial, history.

The primary reason groups like CMI, ICR and AIG affirm a young universe is because that's the unequivocal teaching of Scripture. Only when Lyell and Darwin came along in the 19th century was that teaching ever challenged (and Christianity, on the whole, quickly capitulated, unjustifiably, with nonsense like the Gap Theory, Day-Age Theory and more recently the Framework Hypothesis).

When a CMI interpreter reads Genesis 11, they're not reading it as a mistaken account of something that actually happened in the sky (your methodology); they read it for what it purports to say: humanity settled in Mesopotamia after the Flood, built a city and a tower, and God judged them by confusing their languages and scattered them across the face of the earth. The only place to factor in celestial events in this account is in mankind's attempt to "build a tower with its top in the heavens" (Gen. 11:4; here one may hypothesise what constituted 'in the heavens' and I would argue the polar configuration could be implied here, especially if the 'tower' was an attempt to copy what they saw); secondly is where the text says, "YHWH came down to see the city and the tower that mankind was building." What came down at that time exactly? Velikovsky argues quite cognently that the planet Mercury was birthed at the time from some conflagration, because myth across the world often associated the planet Mercury with confusion of languages and mental instability (although this hypothesis could use some more work).

Obviously the biblical text says that YHWH came down: Cardona and co. want to say YHWH = planet Saturn. I reject this interpretation for theological reasons (esp. Deuteronomy 4:12-19 "you saw no form; there was only a voice"): YHWH had no physical form until He was made manifest in the person of Jesus Christ (John 1:14; Phil. 2:7-8). But this does not mean that YHWH could not have sent a messenger ("angel"), a matter which I will explore further another time. I have suspected for some time that there is a planetary aspect to angelology but I haven't had time yet to read or write about it.

I favor the comparative mythology methods that Talbott, Cardona, Cochrane and others use. So comparing the Bible's stories with myths is one of the ways to determine what is probable. But physical evidence is better.

And yet Talbott, Cardona, Cochrane and others have similar (bogus) exegetical approaches to biblical interpretation: it means whatever they want it to mean to support what they already believe from elsewhere. So for example, Cardona reasons that "the Light" in Genesis 1:3 meant Saturn's first nova. This is quite irregardless of the fact that, according to Genesis 1:14-16, no stars or planets existed prior to day 4 of creation week. So Cardona has to explain that away by saying, "Oh that was added later and wasn't original." No justification as to how he arrived at that decision. No methodology. At least JEDPR, as wrong as they are, utilise a criteria for their excision of the biblical text: the names of God. Cardona & co. make no attempt whatsoever to understand the text according to a historical-grammatical hermeneutic, and use whatever arguments necessary to justify what they already supposed.

"Could you also explain the same of the Samson incident (Judges 16:3):
*By what criteria do you decide which portions of the Bible are historical narrative and what is mythological narrative?
*By what criteria do you suppose the references to "the doors of the gate of the city and the two posts, bar and all" refer to the plasma polar column(s) and not to the doors of the gate of Gaza city, posts and bar and all?"

The two pillars seem to refer to some other aspect of the Saturn configuration instead of the polar column, but I'm not clear on what they refer to yet, though it may be the two horns of the crescent of Saturn.

So Gaza doesn't mean Gaza, prostitute doesn't mean prostitute, gate doesn't mean gate, door doesn't mean door, post doesn't mean post, bar doesn't mean bar: they're all misunderstandings of things originally in the sky? How do you know? And by what methodology do you decide that is what they mean, and not, say, horse, water, apricot, falafel or anything else I choose them to mean?

But it's very possible that Adam and Eve etc were Mars and Venus and the Garden of Eden was the Saturn configuration.

Then who was Jesus Christ your Saviour descended from, according to the flesh? Luke's genealogy of the Saviour concludes in 3:38 with "the son of Adam, the son of God." Romans 5:17 says "it was one man's tresspass (in context = Adam, Rom. 5:14)" that introduced death into the world. Are planets human? Did a planet disobey the word of God to introduce death into the universe? Did Jesus Christ die as a planet to redeem humanity's tresspass?

This is where this argument hinges: exegetical methodology. How are you interpreting scripture, Lloyd, and is your method valid and defensible? At the moment, it's just a post-modern "my truth is whatever I make it to be" interpretive absurdity.

[Lloyd]

26434

EXTERNAL EVIDENCE RE TOWER OF BABEL

JP asked: "Could you please specify other internal (to Scripture) or external evidence of 'confusion of language' and 'dispersal across the earth' occuring at the same time as the supposed collapse of the axis mundi?"
_I searched on "Babel" and "language" at https://www.catastrophism.com/intro/sea ... zoom_xml=0
_I posted the best results at https://futureschool.boards.net/post/199
_Here's the best one of the bunch, which indicates that at least one ancient myth referred to the Tower of Babel and the dispersion of languages. But there are several other excerpts there that look promising for that too.
18. From Creation to the Death of Isaac [Books]
... The place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of that ____language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean by the word ____Babel, confusion. The Sibyl also makes mention of this tower, and of the confusion of the ____language, when she says thus: "When all men were of ....

ANCIENTS WERE CONFUSED RE HEAVEN

JP, you said that I "assume that the ancients are completely retarded, with no ability whatsoever to know or explicate the difference between actual, man-made realities like a city, tower, bricks, mortar, etc, and then record the same in ancient writings ... [etc]."
No, I assume that the ancients of the myth-making period saw the sky much differently than what it is now and they described what they saw in the sky, which they thought were gods, but were actually planets, meteors, dust, electrified plasma etc. The sky was different for their descendants who saw no such gods in the sky, so, since they tended to revere their forebears and largely assumed that their forebears were honest, they tried to find evidence of what their forebears saw. And the best they could do was see the nearest mountain as the one that the gods used to live on, a city on a hill. The city was said to have 4 rivers running through it in the shape of a cross. It was described as paradise or Eden with a Tree of Life, which was the polar column. Since their forebears didn't know exactly what they were seeing, the descendants couldn't know either. It's like describing clouds in the sky. It can look like many different things. The polar column could look like a column, a pillar, a tower, a beanstalk, a Christmas tree, etc. Likewise regarding the Saturn configuration of the planets and other transient events. Early civilization was obsessed with building structures that they thought resembled the heavenly scenery that their ancestors described. They built pyramids, temples, shrines, statues etc and hoped that the god/gods would return and recreate paradise.

SCIENCE VS FAITH
I'm not required to believe in any so-called sacred teachings in order to seek to learn true history etc. Creationists use good reasoning in much of their science, but their religious views are by definition not rational or scientific and I'm not interested in that. You're not going to persuade me to change. No one understands the truth perfectly. I try to give the reasons for my statements. You seem to prefer to ignore them.

PLASMA COLUMN

Mo said:

The polar column was simply the very same current direction we have now but in glow mode. And that larger current then would have acted to increase the spin of the Earth. Also there would have been stable configurations in the plasma column. (Just like the labyrinth was a stable configuration in the magneto-tail of the Earth.)

Cardona thought the polar column was half of a bipolar jet from Saturn to Earth. Brown dwarf jets may be plasma. The Sun makes flares often and sometimes superflares. I don't think they form into a column. Charles Chandler thinks brown dwarfs produce superflares, but I don't know if they could be columnar. The heliospheric current sheet is not a column. The auroras are not a column, but Peratt said high intensity auroras would be a column. The labyrinth was on Saturn or Venus, not the magnetotail, as I understand.

[Lloyd]

26564

TOWER OF BABEL: VELIKOVSKY SAID THE ANCIENTS WERE CONFUSED

_Brigit quoted Velikovsky in her recent post at https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum3/ph ... =360#p3474 . He said electromagnetic disturbances could have caused partial memory loss and inability to speak. He supposed that the planet Mercury had a close encounter with Earth and interplanetary lightning struck the Tower of Babel and caused the memory and speaking problems.
_His article was called "The Confusion of Languages". It's available online in the Velikovsky Archive at https://www.varchive.org/itb/confus.htm .
_I did a search at Catastrophism.com on Babel & lightning. Here's the first relevant excerpt.
5. Mercury and the Tower of Babel [Journals] [SIS Workshop]
... From: SIS Workshop Vol 5 No 2 (Apr 1983) Hugh Eggleton
_In a different work I intend to bring out that what is known as the catastrophe of the Tower of Babel (Babylon) was caused by a close passage of Mercury, Nebo of the Babylonians (heard ...
... look far more dominant than it really was. Rather than seeing two planets involved, Earth's inhabitants saw it as one and attributed Jupiter's glory to Mercury. A bolt of lightning sprang from Mercury and hit the Tower of Babel accompanied by an Earth shock, as happened with Venus some centuries later. Ginzberg states that half the Tower was consumed

CENTURIES BETWEEN CATACLYSMS 2 & 3

_Part of Brigit's quote of Velikovsky is this.
"It appears that after the Flood the plain of Mesopotamia became one of the few cultural centers of the world. Another flood would have caused the utter destruction of the human race, and this was feared because the memory of the Flood a few centuries earlier was very vivid. Observations of the movements of the heavenly bodies may have provided a warning of a new catastrophe and large structures were built for refuge. But when the event came, the structures were overwhelmed and destroyed by hurricanes and powerful electrical discharges."
_Velikovsky apparently thought the Tower of Babel was a physical tower, but he quoted myths/traditions from several places around the globe that describe the same event with a tower and confusion of language etc. If people in many places on Earth saw the same tower, it had to be at least hundreds of miles tall and must have been the polar column of plasma. The article attributes the destructive forces of the Babel event to a great wind. Again, see https://www.varchive.org/itb/confus.htm .
_Cataclysm 1 was the Genesis event; 2 was the Great Flood; 3 was the Younger Dryas event. I've concluded since I started discussing Tiahuanaco this fall that there were likely two major global floods. The first was Noah's Flood, i.e. the Great Flood, and the second was the Younger Dryas Flood, which destroyed Tiahuanaco and flooded North America via rapid melting of the ice sheet. This quote from Velikovsky agrees that the Great Flood occurred a few centuries before the Tower of Babel catastrophe, which also agrres with my idea that the two floods were a few centuries apart, though he doesn't call the Babel event a flood event. Tiahuanaco was flooded at over 12,000 feet elevation, so it must have been a major flood, but the small moon which was said to orbit at that time (maybe in combination with the forces of the Saturn polar configuration) may have caused high equatorial sea level or a constant very high equatorial tide, which rose briefly (drowning the TIahuanacans) before falling to present sea level. Re Tiahuanaco, see my thread index at https://futureschool.boards.net/thread/ ... read-index or see these 3 thread pages.
1. https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum3/ph ... &start=285
2. https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum3/ph ... &start=315
3. https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum3/ph ... &start=330

[Brigit]

Yes, Lloyd, Velikovsky said that their were cognitive effects from an interplanetary electric arc. He determined that the planet Mercury was in some way involved. It appears to me that his method of arriving at this hypothesis was through examining mythology and legends. He found themes relating to the abrupt development of many languages, and, as shown in the passage above, he also felt that the planet Mercury was implicated. We can come to some agreement that many legends say that language was once shared, and then communication became dispersed, both linguistically and geographically.

I do not object to reading myths, legends, and folk beliefs, along with the oldest texts, for these extraordinary themes. I have really enjoyed this approach since first watching the Thunderbolts of the Gods; and not only that, I was inspired to share myths and legends from around the world with my children when they were young. We had such a wonderful time. However, I did feel it was very important to read the entirety of the legends of a particular people, and also to try to learn a little of the history in their own words wherever possible, and not assume any kind of homogeneity or sameness in beliefs, practices, laws and material cultures. It was never enough to read a statement here and a statement there, and then assume we knew anything about the cultures we were studying. It takes a lot of time to get to know people, and all records are very very incomplete.

I respect very much Velikovsky's approach and hypothesis, that the planets were captured by the Sun. I enjoy the scientific inquiry this has led to.

However, speaking as one who is on the receiving end of the psychoanalytical approach to history, I must point out that there are some major flaws with it. For one thing, this very methodology rules out the existence of people who did not worship planets, nor did they practice idolatry or astrology. In the case of the Hebrew Old Testament, the psychoanalytical method of analyzing people from many millenia ago for phobias and disorders pertaining to Saturn only works by totally ignoring the exceptions and the plain language of what surviving texts we do have. It cannot recognize plain statements forbidding the worship of any heavenly body, and the clear teaching that they are only a created thing, -- that is, not a god.

Next, it does not allow for a multiplicity of responses to the catastrophes. And this -- by the way, did I mention -- is why Karl Popper himself used psychoanalysis as an example of a theory that is not scientific, despite its appearances as a scientific explanation for human behavior. In psychoanalysis, Popper pointed out, there are no exceptions to the psychoanalyst's diagnoses. Here's an illustration. First, let's suppose the traumatized individual does what he does because he is traumatized and is suppressing this traumatic memory; and then let's further suppose that he is constantly unconsciously revisiting that trauma. When we test it, we find that whether the sufferer goes and perpetrates crimes, or loves and raises a family; whether he commits enormities or sacrifices himself to uphold lawful civil society, he is always acting out his previous trauma. This is not a scientific explanation of human behavior; it is a blanket assumption which is proven correct with every observation.

Maybe it would be easier if I just asked a question: are there any people, in all of history, who do not worship planets or any other created things, and who instead worship the spiritual (non-physical) Creator of those things?

[Poppa Tom]

Check out my friend Randall Carlson, some incredible findings and.pics on mega disasters/the flood and causes. Many l8nks.
https://youtu.be/g9R_CeQZJTI

[Lloyd]

26960

BIBLE STORIES VS ANCIENT MYTHS

Brigit, you said:

(T)his very methodology rules out the existence of people who did not worship planets, nor did they practice idolatry or astrology. In the case of the Hebrew Old Testament, the psychoanalytical method of analyzing people from many millenia ago for phobias and disorders pertaining to Saturn only works by totally ignoring the exceptions and the plain language of what surviving texts we do have. It cannot recognize plain statements forbidding the worship of any heavenly body, and the clear teaching that they are only a created thing, -- that is, not a god. ... Next, it does not allow for a multiplicity of responses to the catastrophes. ... Maybe it would be easier if I just asked a question: are there any people, in all of history, who do not worship planets or any other created things, and who instead worship the spiritual (non-physical) Creator of those things?

The authors of the Bible did indeed tell readers to not idolize planets, objects, people etc, but the Bible itself plainly shows that many or most of the Israelites disobeyed the Bible's religious teachings much or most of the time. And it's pretty obvious that they did worship Saturn and believed in idols and myths just as most of the other peoples of the world did. The stories of the Tower of Babel, Samson, Noah's Flood, Creation, the Garden of Eden etc are all entirely like the myths of other peoples. To deny it seems to be religious bias.

RANDALL CARLSON & THE YOUNGER DRYAS EVENT

Poppa Tom, you said:

Check out my friend Randall Carlson, some incredible findings and.pics on mega disasters/the flood and causes. Many l(i)nks. https://youtu.be/g9R_CeQZJTI

Hi Tom. You're welcome to plug Randall Carlson's material here any time. I have plugged it myself frequently on my other thread, Evidence of Ancient Global Cataclysm at https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum3/ph ... 3488#p3488 But I don't know of any new material from him the last few months.
_If you're his friend, can you persuade him to discuss catastrophism with us here?
_He has a lot of good info about the Younger Dryas event and other catastrophism. One or more of his videos explained that Halloween came from frequent cataclysms at that time of year when Earth passed through the Taurid meteor stream and the ancients indicated that it was seen to come from the Pleiades in the constellation Taurus. This link has a view of the stream, which is in the inner solar system within Jupiter's orbit https://i1.wp.com/sacredgeometryinterna ... .44-AM.png . I think Randall was suggesting that Halloween was originally the ancients commemorating those who died from cataclysms caused by meteor impacts from the Taurid meteor stream. The larger meteors apparently eventually cleared out of the meteor stream, leaving much fewer large ones, and mostly just sand grains and dust. Some of us believe that the meteor stream originated during the Younger Dryas event, but I have quite a bit of evidence that the YD event occurred much more recently than it is conventionally dated. It would be fun to discuss ancient cataclysms with Randall or anyone else knowledgeable about any of them.
_To find what's been discussed about the Younger Dryas event so far in this thread, see my index at https://futureschool.boards.net/post/69 and https://futureschool.boards.net/post/120/thread

[Lloyd]

27033

My second post today.

CREATION EVENT POSSIBLY FORMED THE FORMER SUPERCONTINENT

Repeating a bit from an earlier post at https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum3/ph ... =360#p3439
Re Geochronology: Understanding the Uncertainties, by Jim Mason https://creation.com/geochronology-uncertainties
_I submit that the geological record shows considerable evidence that the earth is actually about 6,000 years old, including:
a. measurements of the amount of radiogenic helium retained in zircon crystals from deep in the earth’s crust
b. measurements of the amount of radiogenic argon retained in feldspar in granites from deep in the earth’s crust.
c. measurements of the amount of radiocarbon in coal from various layers in the geological column
d. measurements of the amount of radiocarbon in diamonds from rock deep in the earth’s crust
e. measurements of the amount of radiocarbon in dinosaur bones from various layers in the geological column
f. discovery of various soft biological tissues in dinosaur bones found in various layers in the geological column
[The first measurement was clarified in the following article.]
Radiometric dating breakthroughs, by Carl Wieland https://creation.com/radiometric-dating-breakthroughs
_Measuring the rate at which helium leaks out of zircons, ... these crystals [from] Precambrian basement granite ... could not be older than ... [7,700] years.

Charles Chandler and Mike Fischer independently found that the former supercontinent from which the continents formed, must have previously been a granite-like asteroid that soft-landed on Earth, possibly via a decaying/spiraling orbit. The dating methods described above, if they are fairly accurate, suggest that this asteroid landing likely occurred a mere 7 or 8 thousand years ago. That may have been the "Creation" cataclysm of Genesis. In my post at https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum3/ph ... =360#p3466 I said:

As Cardona suggested, I think there was no "Creation Week", but a "Re-creation" Event. I mean the so-called Creation was actually the end of a prior cataclysm. Since I recently posted on the Earth, i.e. Earth's continents and former supercontinent, being only 6,000 or so years old, I'm wondering if the supercontinent could have formed that recently (from an asteroid soft-landing). If so, I don't know where humans, animals, plants etc would have come from, unless maybe Mars etc. But I don't know how they would have landed on Earth. I think those who said in the Bible "Let us create man" etc may have been angels, i.e. angels of God, where God would mean universal consciousness or something.

I later remembered that Mike Fischer determined that there was likely a land mass, i.e. a large island, on Earth before the supercontinent formed, which was part of what is now Antarctica. He found that the rest of Antarctica came from the breakup of the supercontinent which then collided with the island. So it's possible that humans and wildlife already existed on that island and they dispersed onto the supercontinent before it broke up into the continents and major islands.

NEW SCENARIO

If the above-mentioned dating of continents holds up, then we can see a little farther into the past.
1. Earth existed as a non-orbiting satellite of Saturn. It had one or more large islands and a global ocean. The island or islands had animals, plants and humans.
2. 8,000 BP, a large asteroid soft-landed, possibly on top of some islands, and formed a supercontinent. One large island remained intact.
3. The supercontinent would have been very hot for some decades or centuries, then it would have been gradually colonized by plants and animals from the island.
4. Humans would then multiply on the supercontinent along with other creatures.
5. 4,700 BP, the Great Flood occurred when a small moon came and orbited the Earth, causing tidal waves that produced the Flood, while other meteors impacted and formed basins on the supercontinent and shallow parts of the ocean floor. The Flood lasted 6 months or so and, just before it ended, a large asteroid impacted the supercontinent and broke it up into continents which were pushed rapidly apart on the Moho plasma layer. Antarctica collided with the original island. The Flood formed nearly all of the sedimentary rock strata on Earth.
6. The Saturn configuration became prominent in the sky after the Flood and Edenic conditions prevailed on most of the Earth. Saturn warmed the Arctic and Antarctica may have remained warm as well, while part of North America was covered with an Ice Sheet, due to a dusty aurora that made it cold. Humans used advanced megalithic construction to build shelters from the electrified environment. The proximity of Saturn, Venus, Mars and a small moon provided a reduced gravity so large stones could be moved easily and plants and animals could grow much larger than now.
7. 4,300 BP, the Younger Dryas impacts, possibly caused by a Saturn flare-up which also caused a conflagration, melted the Ice Sheet. Flooding and impacts killed most megafauna. The former small moon caused flooding of the equator before that moon disappeared. The Saturn system broke up. Saturn left first to its new orbit and was replaced by Jupier. Then Mars, Venus and Earth fell away from Jupiter. The polar column broke and released water that it had previously vacuumed up from the oceans, causing Arctic permafrost almost a mile deep in Siberia (protons from the ionosphere may have mixed with Oxygen in the atmosphere to produce ice or flooding as discussed at https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum3/ph ... f=11&t=364 ). Antarctica went into a deep freeze.
8. Afterwards people moved from northern locations to more southerly ones, due to colder climate in the North. Gravity became stronger so humans then used smaller stones for building. They often built on top of the former advanced megalithic structures. The Great Pyramid was formerly a megalithic platform, possibly used for irrigation as the climate grew more arid. People began to build structures to resemble the ancient Saturn configuration and hoped to bring back the Edenic conditions that existed before the YD cataclysms.

[Lloyd]

27284

SOME BIBLE STORIES ARE SKY MYTHS

My comments are at the end.

SAMSON MYTHS COMPARISON

I searched at Catastrophism.com on Samson and Pillars. Following are the best results.

Samson Revealed [Aeon]
_From: Aeon IV:6 (May 1997) Ev Cochrane
... The episode of Samson carrying the gates of Gaza has long troubled commentators. As Margalith observed, the account in Judges is impossible to believe as it stands: "One of the strangest stories about Samson is the one depicting him carrying the doors of the city-gate with their posts on his shoulders up to the top of a hill that is before Hebron'. This story cannot refer to a real city-gate, as archaeological facts prove. The city-gates of the period that have been excavated consisted of two posts', huge monoliths dove-tailed into the threshold and the lintel which were also huge monoliths, and the whole upper part of the wall rested on them. The doors of the gate turned on bosses protruding top and bottom which fitted into sockets in the threshold and lintel. Thus, in order to remove the two doors intact bar and all' (xiv 3) one had to lift off the lintel with the whole upper city-wall (usually including a tower) resting on it, and when the posts were removed the whole wall would collapse. Such unrealistic stories are usually aetiological." (39) If it is deemed unlikely that the Danite strongman would carry a several ton gate forty miles to Hebron simply to mock his Philistine pursuers, how then are we to interpret this episode?
... "The association of Samson here with the two pillars through which he passes to his death, corresponding to the two posts of the gate of the city of night through which he had issued triumphantly (xvi. 3), forcibly reminds us of a scene which is very commonly depicted on the ancient Babylonian cylinders, and must have been well known to the early Hebrews. In these, Shamash, the sun-god, is shown making his exit with flaming streamers (equivalent to Samson's hair) through the pillars of the gateway of the East, to pass at evening through a similar gateway in the West to the darkness of death." (40) As numerous scholars have observed, the gates of Samson find a remarkable parallel in the gates of Heracles....

Indra: A Case Study in Comparative Mythology [Aeon]
_From: Aeon II:4 (1991)
_The seething wrath of the quivering Celtic hero can't help but conjure up the spectacle of the Biblical Samson, himself a blinded berserker identified with the planet Mars, a primary manifestation of whose furor was likewise a "hot anger" and terrible "shaking."

In Search of the Exodus [Catastrophism & Ancient History]
_From: Catastrophism and Ancient History VIII:2 (July 1986)
_Beth-Shemesh (a dialectal variant of Babylonian Shamash, probably Amorite) may be connected with the Samson cycle and in turn with the Labors of Heracles. [21] We may note the long hair of Samson (Shemesh) has cometary parallels....

Martian Metamorphoses: The Planet Mars in Ancient Myth and Religion, by Ev Cochrane [SIS Review]
_From: SIS Chronology & Catastrophism Review 1998:2 (Mar 1998)
_[Mars?] In his fury he becomes a great destroyer, felling both sides in wars indiscriminately and is consequently often referred to as blind. Samson was also a blind berserker and the Norse Hoder, Oedipus and Bellerophon. Nergal, Indra and Thor of the red beard all shake heaven in their fury.

Night of the Gods: The Axis and the Universe-Tree [Books]
_Krishna, the new-born infant, uproots the two trees reaching to the heavens, between which he was laid.227 This is a Samson myth also, and an infant Hercules myth too.

On Mars and Pestilence [Aeon]
_From: Aeon III:4 (Dec 1993) Ev Cochrane
_the heads of Thor and Cuchulainn were distinguished by projections of one form or another. (165) His lameness recalls that of Samson, Lykurgos, and Bellerophontes, each of whom was similarly deformed. (166)

VELIKOVSKY AND OEDIPUS [Aeon]
_From: Aeon I:6 (1988)
_The blind hero, frequently a great sinner against the gods, is a universal mythological figure, most familiar from the Hebrew story of Samson and the Norse myth of Hoder.(92) There are several such figures in Greek myth in addition to Oedipus, the most intriguing of which is Lykurgos.

Velikovsky's Legacy [Articles] Ev Cochrane
_Thor; among the ancient Celts, Cuchulainn; among the Latins, Mars; among the Aztecs, Tezcatlipoca; among the Ulates, Batraz; among the ancient Hebrews, Samson; among the Chinese, Kung kung; among the Japanese, Susanowo; among the ancient Egyptians, Shu or Horus.

Letters [SIS Review]
_ From all the above evidence it seems sensible to assume that no character in the Bible should be considered to be unassailably factual, especially where their attributes and histories can be shown to parallel those of characters quite happily accepted as mythological in other cultures. This includes, just from above considerations, Noah, Moses, David, Samson, Solomon - and therefore also Sheba.

SAMSON STORY IN THE SKY

This is an interesting site: starmythworld.com

Samson
https://www.starmythworld.com/samson
_In Hamlet's Mill (1969), authors Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend devote an entire chapter to the Samson story, and its echoes in other myths and sacred traditions around the globe. They offer compelling evidence that the events of the Samson myth are founded upon the constellations of the starry sky, and not upon actions that took place on earth among literal historical human beings.
... Samson does not merely represent one single constellation, but instead that he is the sun-god, rolling through all of the zodiac constellations in turn throughout the year.
... the "seven locks of his head" described in the Samson story might be a clue telling us that Samson is also a solar hero.
... The fact that Samson has his power stripped from him by Delilah almost certainly refers to the sun passing through the sign of Virgo at the point of the year where night begins to take over as longer than day. on the way down to see the woman of Timnath....
... he encounters a young lion, which Samson slays with his bare hands.... Leo the Lion is found immediately prior to the sign of Virgo.... next time Samson comes to the lion that he had slain, he finds that a "swarm of bees and honey" were now there in the carcass of the lion -- which is indicative of the Beehive Cluster found in the zodiac constellation Cancer, immediately preceding Leo. ... Samson himself frames the episode of the lion and the swarm of bees as a riddle to be solved....
... (Judges 15:4) And Samson went and caught three hundred foxes, and took firebrands, and turned tail to tail, and put a firebrand in the midst between two tails. (5) And when he had set the brands on fire, he let them go into the standing corn of the Philistines, and burnt up both the shocks, and also the standing corn, with the vineyards and olives. ... The most likely celestial foundation for the foxes of the Samson story, I believe, is the constellation Lupus the Wolf, located close to Virgo.... [The Milky Way galaxy by Virgo is said to be symbolized by the smokey cornfield.]
... The authors of Hamlet's Mill also point out that Ovid tells us in his poem called the Fasti that there was an ancient feast of Ceres in which a fox was set on fire to punish the species for once burning up the wheat-fields, after a fox was set alight by a wicked twelve-year-old boy in a story very reminiscent of Samson's act....

EVIDENCE OF SAMSON ON EARTH?

An Ancient Seal Shows Samson Fighting a Lion
https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-l ... ed-0010282
_The seal was found in a home in Beth Shemesh, the city in which Samson is said to have been born and the place where he was buried. It seems to depict a story from his life: his barehanded battle with a lion. And most significantly of all, it was made in the 12th century BC – the century in which he’s believed to have lived.

ADAM & EVE IN THE SKY

The story of Adam and Eve and the Serpent
https://www.starmythworld.com/adam-and-eve
_the "Golden Age" under Solomon [is] described in the text of 1 Kings 4:25 and elsewhere as being the time when every one sat under his own vine and his own fig tree
_There are a few constellations ... playing a serpent.... ... The constellation Hydra is located in the sky immediately adjacent to the zodiac constellation of Virgo the Virgin -- and I believe it is almost a certainty that this constellation (Hydra) is the primary celestial analog to the serpent in the Adam and Eve story.... The earth turns on its axis towards the direction we call "east".... This causes objects [like constellations] in the sky to appear to move from east to west.... This motion causes Hydra [the serpent], Virgo [Eve], and Bootes [Adam] to sink into the west due to earth's daily rotation. ... so, they exit the heavenly "garden" ... first the serpent, then the woman, and then the man [just as stated in the Bible]. ... When Adam is cast out of the garden in Genesis 3:19, God says to him, "return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken." This is literally true: the constellation rose out of the ground (the eastern horizon) and now is sinking back down into the ground again (the western horizon). ... God places at the east of Eden an angel ... with a flaming sword which "turns every way," to guard the way to the tree of life. ... At just the moment that Adam and Eve are departing, the constellation Perseus ... is rising above the horizon in the east. ... Perseus in the sky is a brilliant and "rampant" constellation, with arms flung wide and often envisioned as carrying a sword....

EARTH'S TILT IN THE BIBLE

Measurements in time and space, and in ancient scripture
https://www.starmythworld.com/mathisenc ... nd-in.html
_Note that in Psalm 23:4 [Earth's axial tilt is 23.4 degrees], the "valley of the shadow of death" can be very convincingly argued to refer to the lower half of the zodiac wheel, which was anciently depicted in the world's celestial "star myths" as Hell, Sheol, Tartarus, the Land of Bondage, the Underworld, etc. -- just as the upper half of the zodiac wheel was variously depicted as Heaven, the Garden of Eden (Paradise), the Promised Land, the City upon the Hill, the City whose streets are paved with gold, Mount Zion, Mount Olympus, etc.

ABRAHAM IN THE SKY

Abraham lifted up his eyes
https://www.starmythworld.com/mathisenc ... -eyes.html
_According to my interpretation of the celestial players, the constellation Perseus corresponds to Abraham. ... Flying in from the upper right is the Angel, played by the stars of the constellation Andromeda. ... Directly below the Angel in the night sky is the Ram of Aries.... Finally, the column of the Milky Way rises up like smoke from the horizon and passes right beside Perseus (he is actually partly in it). This column of smoke corresponds to the smoke of the "burnt offering" described in Genesis 22. ... But understanding that [this], like the other sacred stories of humanity, is founded upon a celestial metaphor does not take away its profound message: quite the contrary. For, as Alvin Boyd Kuhn has asserted, "the sacred scriptures of the world are a thousand times more precious as myths than as alleged history".

DAVID & GOLIATH IN THE SKY

Star Myths of the World, Volume Two
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ ... ampler.pdf
_By noticing that the Old Testament figure of David is also describ ed as vigorously dancing (in a specific and fairly well-known passage in the Hebrew Scriptures, after he slays Goliath), and by noticing that David slao shares characteristics which indicate correspondence with the same constellation that we suspect corresponds to Shiva, our understanding of the Star Myth pantheon is greatly enhanced and confirmed.
[[NOTE: Shiva was likely initially Mars, which Thunderbolts showed reeled about for a time during the Saturn system breakup, looking as though it was dancing or drunk.]]

MY COMMENTS

The constellations don't seem to have been visible until the Saturn system broke up during the Younger Dryas / Saturn Nova period, about 4,300 years ago, I reckon. From the above it looks like the main myths originated near the end of the Golden Age as the Saturn system was about to break up and during that event. When the event was over and Constellations became visible, many of the myths were transferred to the Constellations, but many myths probably also were invented based on the appearance of the Constellations themselves.

[Lloyd]

27856

YOUNG EARTH OR YOUNG SUPERCONTINENT

In this recent thread https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum3/ph ... =360#p3439
I quoted this article https://creation.com/geochronology-uncertainties as follows.

_I submit that the geological record shows considerable evidence that the earth is actually about 6,000 years old, including:
a. measurements of the amount of radiogenic helium retained in zircon crystals from deep in the earth’s crust
b. measurements of the amount of radiogenic argon retained in feldspar in granites from deep in the earth’s crust.
c. measurements of the amount of radiocarbon in coal from various layers in the geological column
d. measurements of the amount of radiocarbon in diamonds from rock deep in the earth’s crust
e. measurements of the amount of radiocarbon in dinosaur bones from various layers in the geological column
f. discovery of various soft biological tissues in dinosaur bones found in various layers in the geological column

A. DATING HELIUM IN ZIRCONS
Regarding item "a", I then quoted this article https://creation.com/radiometric-dating-breakthroughs

_Measuring the rate at which helium leaks out of zircons ... these crystals (and since this is Precambrian basement granite, by implication the whole earth) could not be older than 14,000 years ... [later] updated to give a date of 5,680 (± 2,000) years.
_Interestingly, [rock?] specimens which appear to definitely be pre-Flood seem to have 14C present, too, and importantly, these cluster around a lower relative amount of 14C. This suggests that some 14C was primordial (existing from the very beginning), and not produced by cosmic rays — thus limiting the age of the entire earth to only a few thousand years.

B. DATING ARGON IN GRANITE
Regarding "b", I found the following two articles.
Uluru and Kata Tjuta [mountains in Australia]: Testimony to the Flood, by Andrew Snelling
https://creation.com/uluru-and-kata-tju ... -the-flood
_March 1998

_Uluru consists of a type of coarse sandstone known technically as arkose, because a major component is grains and crystal fragments of the mineral feldspar.
_ Feldspar breaks down when exposed to the sun’s heat, water, and air (e.g., in a humid tropical climate), and relatively quickly forms clays. If the arkose was deposited as sheets of sand only centimetres (an inch or two) thick spread over many tens of square kilometres to dry in the sun’s heat over countless thousands of years, then the feldspar crystals would have decomposed to clays. Likewise, if the arkose had been exposed to the destructive forces of erosion and tropical deep chemical weathering even for just a few million years, as is claimed, then the feldspar crystals would have long ago decomposed to clays. Either way, the sandstone fabric would have become weakened and then collapsed, as the clays and remaining unbound mineral grains would have easily disintegrated and been entirely washed away, leaving no Uluru at all!
_One only has to consider the amount and force of water needed to dump some 6,000 metres (almost 20,000 feet) thickness of sand, and a similar thickness of pebbles, cobbles, boulders, etc., probably in a matter of hours, after having transported these sediments many tens of kilometres, to realise that such an event had to be a catastrophic flood. And this traumatic event had to be recent, otherwise the feldspar crystals in the arkose would not be as fresh (unweathered) as they are today.

Argon diffusion data support RATE’s 6,000-year helium age of the earth
https://creation.com/argon-diffusion-age
_August 2011

_Here I present a new analysis of old (1986) argon retention data from the same borehole that provided helium retention data for the Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth (RATE) research initiative.1 The deepest part (4.56 km) of the borehole was hot enough to cause more than a 20% loss of radioactivity-generated argon-40 from feldspar in the granitic basement rock, conventionally dated to be 1.5 Ga old. Data and equations from the 1986 article show that at the present temperature (313°C) at that depth, it would take only 5,100 (+3,800/-2,100) years for the feldspar to lose that much argon. This supports the 6,000 (± 2,000) year helium diffusion age that RATE found for zircons in the same borehole.

COAL, DIAMONDS, DINOSAUR BONES
Regarding "c, d, e, f" I quoted in the same thread as for "a", showing that they all date to under 40,000 years.
I figured that the above works dated the continents rather than the entire Earth, because the supercontinent should have been just a layer on top of the basaltic crust, if it had formed when the Earth formed. This was Charles Chandler's idea and it seems most probable to me. As he said, since the supercontinent didn't form around the whole globe, it must have arrived from an impact, i.e. a soft landing.

SO THIS IS MY SLIGHTLY REVISED TIMELINE
1. 1st Age GENESIS EVENT from SUPERCONTINENT FORMATION to COLONIZATION 7,000(±1k) BP
2. 2nd Age EARLY GOLDEN AGE began with SUPERCONTINENT COLONIZATION, ended with the GREAT FLOOD 4,700(±2c) BP
3. 3rd Age LATE GOLDEN AGE began after the GREAT FLOOD, ended with the YOUNGER DRYAS EVENT 4,300(±1c) BP
4. 4th Age PRECHRISTIAN ERA began after the YOUNGER DRYAS EVENT, ended with the CHRISTIAN EVENT 2,020-1,990 BP
5. 5th Age CHRISTIAN ERA 1,990 BP to PRESENT
NOTE: As I've said, the supercontinent was likely initially a large asteroid which soft landed on Earth within the Saturn system, which system had weak gravity. The supercontinent likely remained hot and partly molten from the impact for decades. Then living things gradually colonized it.

SEVERAL POSSIBLE MEANS OF SUPERCONTINENT COLONIZATION
1) Plants and animals came from a large island, not too far from the new supercontinent
2) They came from rapid evolution of marine life
3) They came from another planet, like Mars
So far, I expect that #1 is most probable, although how life came to the proposed island is then in need of explanation. #2 may be the most probable way for that, but #3 also seems possible. I don't know of other possibilities offhand, except for something like Genetic Engineering. I did read long ago that some domesticated plants and animals have duplicated chromosomes etc that suggests possible genetic engineering, but maybe that would've been more recent than the origin of wildlife.

[Brent72]

Creationists use good reasoning in much of their science, but their religious views are by definition not rational or scientific and I'm not interested in that.

'but their religious views are by definition not rational or scientific?' What do you mean? You must think that the religion is defined as believing in something (or Someone) despite the rational and scientific evidence? Or even believing in something/someone for which there is no evidence? In fact it's the opposite. Lloyd, faith is simply believing the evidence.

I'm a christian because I have followed the evidence, not because I have disregarded it.

A couple of examples: Which historical document has more evidence (internal and external) for it's validity than the bible?
Whose genealogy has a 1 in 40 million chance of being created randomly? https://www.khouse.org/articles/2020/14 ... b5850b3bcc

[JP Michael]

I'm a christian because I have followed the evidence, not because I have disregarded it.

Precisely, although there are not a few propositions of Christianity in general (and creationism in particular) that are taken on good faith (trust/belief), not evidence.

One of these is the doctrine of revelation: God has spoken and continues to speak to humanity. But how do you 'prove' that divinity has spoken to humanity in the past, and continues to speak in the present? How is this position different from assertions of Egypt or Babylon, etc, that their gods 'spoke' to their priests and diviners? Modern occultists might even assert their gods continue to speak in the present time as well. There will be many of the Thunderbolts community who would assert that all gods (including YHWH of the Hebrews) were just actors of nature: planets and plasma and the gamut of resulting phenomena. Such gods dont really 'speak'.

Objectively, one can offer proofs of historical reliability from the Scriptures for past speech (e.g. the Split Rock of Meribah). But there are significant paucities of historical evidence which are difficult, but not impossible, to verify (e.g. Joshua and the stoppage of the sun and moon; creation took 6 days; Noah's gargantuan barge survived the global flood). Also, is God's speech only true if it can be verified (thus holding truth hostage to the archaeologist's spade), or is it true because of its origins in the One True God (a theological position)? This does create a trite dichotomy between history and theology which I think is unnecessary, but recently conservative Christianity has hinged their truth claims in verifiability, not origin. There is an unavoidable dovetail between belief/trust and evidence which should not be bifurcated by a false dichotomy.

This is the immense gulf between my position and Lloyd's. I believe the Bible as revelation, and the God who spoke it as reliable and trustworthy. So when its genealogies compute to a universe ~6200 years old, I trust that figure as more accurate than the ever-changing meanderings of uniformitarian geology. I trust Scripture's depiction of a global flood, acknowledging it is a firm basis by which one may augment information from elsewhere. I trust the depictions of lesser cataclysms post-flood (Babel, Sodom, Exodus, Conquest, etc), even if we must continue to work hard to fully identify all the potential celestial players involved.

[moses]

There will be many of the Thunderbolts community who would assert that all gods (including YHWH of the Hebrews) were just actors of nature: planets and plasma and the gamut of resulting phenomena. JP Michael

Thus false gods but extremely powerful false gods. Perhaps the priests of the ancient past worked out the gods were planets but the general population would have been overly violent with such an idea, because upsetting a god in those days would be considered highly undesirable.

Although there is evidence of internal communication with god in the OT, the NT specifically has Christ as the internal god. For example the spiritual Christ is nailed to the physical cross as indicating conception. And thus putting god within and confirming the breakaway from the idea of god being something in the sky.

Cheers,
Mo

[Brent72]

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, let me just explain my position a little more from what has been said.

But how do you 'prove' that divinity has spoken to humanity in the past, and continues to speak in the present?

If I can just come back to the evidence. Internal evidence - e.g. the hundreds of prophecies that have been spoken and fulfilled, including very specific prophecies about the time, place and nature of Jesus' birth, as well as prophecies about how He would die, how he would rise from the dead and even how much money would be paid to betray Him.
External evidence - e.g. the thousands of historical documents that corroborate the events of the bible, the historical records proving the life, death and resurrection of Jesus (including eye witness accounts) and the archeological evidence (to some extent).

I believe that, although there are - as JP says - 'paucities of evidence for certain things', the overwhelming evidence is what makes this position different from the other assertions of Egypt or Babylon etc, - that their gods 'spoke' to their priests.

I believe that although God has not given us all the evidence, he has given us enough evidence to make a reasonable assertion about the truth of what has been revealed through the bible and through creation and through our consciences.
If you had to put all the evidence on trial in a court of law, which story would a jury be most likely to believe? That is the level of faith that is required.

Although we can't physically see God, we can see the evidence for Him. An analogy is that we can't physically see the wind blowing, but we can see the trees bending and feel it on our faces. The bible says that faith is 'the evidence of things unseen'. It is our choice, through our own freewill, as to whether we accept the evidence or not. A relationship can follow.

Jesus told a story of a rich man who went to Hell and a poor man named Lazarus who went to heaven to be with Abraham. The rich man begged Abraham to send Lazarus to his five brothers, to warn them. However Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.’
‘No, father Abraham,’ the rich man said, ‘but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.’ Abraham then said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’