Ourcrazymodern?

"God is happy, sabu! He plays with us." -Out of Africa.

The layer all over the earth from the most recent catastrophic meteor event is more cohesive.

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DaveOrion

Alrighty then! I'll say it, Atlantis! So there...take that! I'd much rather discuss the unknown than the known, whether its a flood myth, galactic alignment myths, or the existence of Atlantis. The reference to nicotine & cocaine found in Egyptian mummies brings us to the realization that 3000 years ago trade 'may' have existed between South America & Africa.

http://www.science-frontiers.com/onl...=1&zoom_sort=0

I've heard theories that Altantis was everywhere from Antarctica, to the Himalayas, and everywhere in between.The antarctica theory proposes that it was in a temperate climate 10,000 years ago but moved to its present location. I reject that, continents just dont move that fast, at least to our current level of understanding.The island of Thera in the Agean sea, is also a candidate, the modern island of Santorini. I also reject that because this island simply isnt big enough. The written account by Plato states...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantis
Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your state in our histories. But one of them exceeds all the rest in greatness and valour. For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city put an end. This power came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean, for in those days the Atlantic was navigable; and there was an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Heracles; the island was larger than Libya and Asia put together, and was the way to other islands, and from these you might pass to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean; for this sea which is within the Straits of Heracles is only a harbour, having a narrow entrance, but that other is a real sea, and the surrounding land may be most truly called a boundless continent. Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire... (from Timaeus)

If Atlantis was larger than Libya(north Africa) and Asia(probably Asia Minor) then its a continent, or continents, that exist past the straights of Gibralter, in the Atlantic. 10,000 years ago more land would have been exposed, especially in equatorial and temperate regions(I'll exclude ice covered regions), maybe 400 ft lower than today. A civilization could have existed in South & Central America, which traded with the Egyptians, but all evidence has since been covered by water. The bimini road may or may not be evidence of that. During the next ice age, when sea levels are lower, we may actually find out.

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BadNick

I don't think this "angle" has been mentioned as a possible source of widespread, though still not totally global, flooding.

This came to my mind since I remembered the story in NG along with some nice supporting pics of huge dunes along certain shorelines around the world that can only be explained by huge sudden floods:

From NG:
Scientists have found traces of an asteroid-collision event that they say would have created a giant tsunami that swept around the Earth several times, inundating everything except the mountains 3.5 billion years ago. The coastline of the continents was changed drastically and almost all life on land was exterminated.

....and this is the link to that page http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...8_tsunami.html I didn't search this link to see if the interesting dune pics are shown, or if the connection is made to specifically identified impact sites that likely caused those dunes, but those things were in the magazine a couple months ago.

I later added this for my "edit"
If some astute ancient stone age woman noticed some subtle physical clues of these dune structures and noticed that they look like the little sand ripples on the beach caused by small waves and she figured out a huge flood that they did not actually experience or have any record of in language or written or pictures etc may have occured, that could be a scary thought and lead to mythic stories.

Ourcrazymodern?

Please reconsider the number of years.

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Val_1

Well, they did not find cocaine or nicotine in Egyptian mummies. They found trace amounts of the drugs during drug scans of the mummies.

The only mummies to test positive for cocaine were from the Munich museum, even though the mummies there were from different ages and origins. This makes it far more plausible that the cocaine contamination happened recently in the lab.

Most of the tobacco results were very low and are typical of environmental exposure.

The Egyptians documented all aspects of their lives very well, including drug use. They left no depictions of cocaine or tobacco use.


http://www.forteantimes.com/articles/117_toke.shtml

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DaveOrion

French scientists examining the stomach of the Egyptian Pharaoh Rameses II found fragments of tobacco leaves. Further analysis of the 3,200-year-old mummy indicated the presence of nicotine in the body. Conventional wisdom has it that tobacco was unknown in the Old World until the Spanish brought it back from the Americas in the Sixteenth Century.

(Anonymous; "Tobacco in Egypt," Anthropological Journal of Canada, 16:10, 1978.)



From Science Frontiers #7, June 1979. © 1979-2000 William R. Corliss

http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf007/sf007p02.htm

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Astrocloud

[QUOTE=Elphaba
It happened. We are free to ascribe any meaning we wish to, but the great flood did happen.[/QUOTE]

As long as you have the right pants on.

Ol' Man Mose

It is hardly surprising that flood myths are so common when manki...oops! how terribly un-PC of me!..better make that entitykind, tended to settle where there was plenty of water for his/her moonshine stills. For instance, around river mouths where it is prone to flash flooding and tsunami's. (Bible example: that notorious town drunk, Noah, set up his copper as soon as he got ashore and managed to get that maggotted that his son Ham apparently porked him)

As a matter of fact, there are cannibalstic Christians in Borneo, who still believe to this day, that the our Jewish "God" sends floods to punish them.

The_Jazz

This was on fark and seemed relevant. I'm not advancing it as an impartial source or even on that I particularly like, but it does raise some interesting questions about the Judeo-Christian flood story.

http://www.skepticreport.com/creationism/sillyflood.htm

I definitely don't like the smarmy tone of the writing, but some of the arguments are well-grounded.

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Val_1

I like this quote from the article.

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pai mei

If they prove the bible myth wrong they should do the same for all the other myths around the world.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html
I am sure they could easily say the same things about Homer and his Iliad, "it's just fantasy" , the people of the time did say this, lucky with that
Henrich Schliemann, he started digging.
Thinking "in the box" never solved any problems. This quote is from a commercial , but it is good

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BadNick

I'm not sure you directed that to my post mentioning 3.5 billion years but I'll elaborate anyway. My point was not that particular billions of years old global flood, but that an ancient humanoid might have had enough intelligence to see clues of previous ancient floods and those ideas led them to imagining how it happened, fear of the consequences if it happened again, and myths arising from those ideas. Plus, besides that "global" flood that may have occured billions of years ago, there were surely many other more recent impact related tsunamis that left dramatic evidence of floods. The NG article mentioned and showed some evidence of the formations on land left behind, and also evidence of the impact sites that created those features.

The_Jazz

Here's a question for you - why do you think that a wooden ship exposed to the elements for thousands of years has survived in any recognizable form? It's not like it would be buried in a tomb the desert. It would be exposed to rain, snow and wind, and we all know that wood rots. There are also lots of plants that like to grow on exposed wood, even in high-altitude conditions. I can't think of any 1000 year old wooden buildings that are still standing that haven't been undergoing constant upkeep, let alone many that have.

Given that the only real proof of the "flood myth" would be The Ark, aren't we several thousands of years too late to find it? At best, I expect that IF it did exist, it rotted and blew away in the wind a long time ago.

Doesn't the sheer complexity of plant and animal life basically disprove most of the flood myths in and of itself? For instance, orchids need a very specific environment to grown in and the flood that you're describing would kill them all. The same with all the varieties of elephants, snakes, and coral. A major rise in sea level would kill huge numbers of these species, and there's nothing in the fossil record to suggest anything of the sort, especially since modern humans have only been around for 100,000 years or so, and civilized enough to build a vessel of the required size for about 40,000 years.

At the same time, lots of cultures have myths about the sun either being or being directly controlled by a living entity. Why don't we try to "think outside the box" on that one too?

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Ourcrazymodern?

OK. I beg you to reconsider the number of years...

..... We haven't been around for long enough is all I meant to say.
Y'know, writing stories and what-not. Imagining things, even.

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roachboy

here's something that i learned again while being santa claus. notions of god and functions attributed much later to the superego tend to converge. it is as if there can be no authority without the possibility of retribution. myths like the flood in part lean on this logic and so are formally necessary. there is no reason why it follows that because lots of social groups posit something like the flood that there must have been a flood----there is no need to suppose that these myths are based on some kind of "genetic memory" of one.

or you could look at the flood myths as generalizations of anxieties about death.

or you could look at flood myths as devices fashioned by any number of groups to explain their relationship to a past that extends well beyond themselves, to explain disruption or radical change, to explain the passage of time and of civilizations (whatever). so you could look at flood myths as an aspect of the more general process of backwriting existing social relations---a function that sociologists since durkheim have argued is central to religion (or belief in a transcendent order more generally).

or maybe these myths have to do with the ice age and the extinction of the neanderthals and so do constitute a kind of continuity with a very distant past. but the generality of these myths--that they show up in so many variants--seems to indicate that it follows from structural features that are shared by a wide range of belief systems rather than from a genetic memory.

it doesn't seem to me that there is any way to know.
so it's an aesthetic question.

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Charlatan

There is no real need to believe that the first five books of the Bible are anything but etiologies.

Like any good myth, they have some universal truths and lessons that can be shared. But like Greek, Roman, Chinese, Norse, etc., myths, there is no need to believe they are factual stories.

It's fine if you want to believe in the power of God and the resurrection of Christ, but really... what benefit is there to believing the there was an actual flood, Tower of Babel or Garden of Eden?

I just don't get the need to believe in something that is clearly an important story but just doesn't jive with *anything* we know of the complexity of nature.

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KnifeMissile

You have a very low standard of "proof."

A lot of cultures have flood myths and, therefore, there must have been a global flood? How is that proof? Imagine the turn of events that let to what we're seeing, here. How did all these cultures come to learn about the flood? Apparently, it was never recorded since they all have different stories with only the flood in comomn. Verbal tradition run through the Broken Telephone phenomena? Maybe but I don't think that rises to the level of "proof." Why don't, literally, all cultures have a flood myth? Finally, if there was a global flood, where did the water come from? Where did it go?

Interesting... It sounds crazy but I will look into it...

Well, to be fair, of course they're going to work on the most popular myth in their culture...

Also, to be fair, "thinking inside the box" solves most of life's problems. It's only the occasional problem that can't be solved in this manner and, so, "thinking outside the box" is necessary...

Who is Henrich Schliemann and what's this about the Iliad?

smooth

I think he's the dude who believed that Troy was a real place and subsequently dug a bunch of cities up...

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roachboy

that's him.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

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DaveOrion

As already stated, Schliemann discovered the lost city of Troy, previously thought to be a myth. All myths are usually based on some sort of fact. A myth that the sun is driven by a living entity, wouldnt exist if the sun didnt appear to move across the sky. The garden of eden may have existed between the tigris & euphrates, but the story is anologous to the rise of man, from a primitive instinctual animal, to a self aware, reasoning being. The flood myths are almost certainly based on an epic flood. Most people at that time never traveled more than 50 miles from the place they were born. Their world wasnt quite as large as ours, so a global flood to them may have been regional.

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roachboy

how do you know this?

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

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smooth

Joseph Campbell told me
sorry, I know you were asking a serious question...I've been up all night grading papers

maybe that sentence should be amended to read: all myths are based on some kind of truth

btw, I know this gets some people twisted, but "myth" doesn't mean non-reality. Troy is still a myth...even after people realized it was real.
But even allowing that there is an underlying "truth" to the flood stories, it doesn't follow that there *had* to be an actual flood(s).

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Charlatan

I have no issue with a flood per se. I have an issue with the hyperbole involved in the Ark story. The whole world and ALL the animals in a handful of big ships for 40 days and nights...

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smooth

nah, just two of each

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"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman

Ourcrazymodern?

...and what was written down and passed along as facts was probably imaginary. What we "know" about where we came from probably pales in comparison to the truth. "TRUTH" being something everyone must recognize.
Having brains has not gone everywhere yet. Has it?

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DaveOrion

Sorry, I suppose my point wasnt clear, The myth that Thor strikes his hammer and creates thunder & lightening exists because thunder & lightening are a fact, but science had yet to explain their nature. Myths are usually a way to describe the world or events in the world which are inexplicable.

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smooth

I think Roachboy is asking how you "know," for example, that myths surrounding Thor and his mighty hammer stemmed from ancient people trying to explain thunder and lightening?

Your explanation sound plausible, but how do you know?

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DaveOrion

Through observations, deductive reasoning capabilities, all things considered the simplest explanation tends to be correct.

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politicophile

two characters

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DaveOrion

I think the simplest expanation for the flood myths is that an epic flood actually occured. When the last ice age ended it raised sea levels 400 ft, as I already stated. That would explain flood myths all around the world. Seems simple enough to me.

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Ourcrazymodern?

...damned if I don't agree with you.

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politicophile

two characters

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Ol' Man Mose

That just about sums it up, Charlatan.

Although I despair for a world that needs to fabricate increasingly irrational flights of fantasy to defend what is fundamentally a hand-me-down folk tale.

Of course it could have happened that the Hebrew’s hereditary Iraqi God did drown all his sinful snot gobblers, except for a prize crawler and his kids, in a fit of spiteful pique.

And furthermore, that he is gonna fry my agnostic arse forever for applying my God-given (or Satan-inspired, according to my reading of the Bible) logic to an ancient allegory, and not simply ILLogically grovelling before the unsubstantiated prose of some paper Pope, written exclusively by men with a vested interest in their subject.

However, I am just as sure as our global religious regulators that this is not so.

Omar Khyyam said it best for me,

DaveOrion

If the mediteranean and black sea were dry, during the height of the last ice age and ice dams held back the atlantic. When rising sea levels broke these dams, the ensuing flood would certainly be epic. Thats not as simplistic, but plausible. It may have been a compination of rising sea levels, catastophic flooding, and localized flooding. The simplest explanation tends to be correct, but not always.

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Infinite_Loser

I have a sense of humor and there's no blind spot regarding my religious beliefs-- Your 'joke', as you want to call it, just wasn't funny. Though, I find it odd because I can't make a 'joke' about atheists and their lack of beliefs without being jumped on by three or four people

(See thread floating around 'Tilted Living'.)

There's no need. As I stated earlier, people are typically blind to that which they actively participate in.

For argument's sake, let's just assume that Christianity did borrow the idea of a flood from other religions in the reason. How would you qualify the striking similarities between Christian belief, Mayan belief and many Native American beliefs regarding a great flood? Mere coincidence, right?

I don't believe I stated that I was offended anywhere in my posts.

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politicophile

two characters

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Infinite_Loser

Not really. It's been stated before, so there's really no use in continuing to re-iterate said points over and over and over again.

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Ol' Man Mose

The doco you saw was most probably Dr Robert Ballard’s exploration of the Black Sea floor on cable TV.

I also saw it, either on our History Channel or National Geographic channel.

Ballard had a series on cable ("Pay TV" we call it) about submarine exploration (The discovery of the Titanic being one of them) but I am rooted if I can recall its name.

KnifeMissile

I don't think it has been stated before, much less "over and over and over again" but I would love to be proven wrong on this point if only someone would actually say something meaningful! Seriously, in the amount of text that you have typed dancing around the issue, you could have simply said what bothered you...

Infinite_Loser

Oh, but it has! I'm pretty sure you've seen me explain why I (Amongst other people) feel the way I do in threads past. After a while I simply get tired of explaining it over and over again, only to garner the same reactions and (Non-) results. It's not dancing around the issue, so much as I'm tired of writing the same thing over again only to have it be promptly ignored.

Anywho... That's getting off-topic. To go back to my question: "How would you qualify the striking similarities between Christian belief, Mayan belief and many Native American beliefs regarding a great flood? Mere coincidence, right?"

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