Archaeology Without the Bible

[Guest]

As Sam notes, that if the claim that the Levantine religions prevent crime, then Sweden, which now is 80% non-believers would have a higher murder rate than the US which is 80% Christian. But in fact, the crime and murder rate in Sweden is far *lower*.

Not true; Sweden is still 87% Lutheran, as of last year- http://www.worldinfozone.com/country.ph ... n#religion
It also has a population of 9 million www.sweden.se/ as opposed to America's 298 million. www.census.gov/ THAT'S why Sweden has a lower murder rate; religion has nothing to do with it.
Here's some interesting crime data www.benbest.com/lifeext/murder.html The statistics further down the page are more recent.

The Fundamentalists have made a lotta money by ignoring the ultimate environmental and hidden social costs of their operations. And they have used that money to control the political process so that no rational policy can be formulated. Which is why the national debt is 8.6 trillion.

A blanket statement which you have no way of proving. National debt of where btw?

This...

As Spinoza noted, when a fallacious idea is accepted in youth (based on inadequate information such as scripture) it is later defended with remarkably ingeniuity. Thus the remarkable scholarship that dredges up every obscure data point that does not conform to dendochronology, Greenland ice core data, C-14, or other scientific methods of dating events.

...is contradicted by this...

But the Bagavad Gita has a better explanation for all these trivial anomalies. The world that you see was not created 4.2 billion years ago, nor 6000 years ago, but just a minute ago, projected, as Quantum physics says, in several dimensions, and as we say now, its a 'virtual reality'. complete with Fundies to debate with that make you feel superior to fools.

Why is the Bhagavad Gita superior to Levantine Scriptures?

[daybrown]

The Bagavd Gita dont claim to be literal truth. If you dont get the allegory, nobody's gonna damn you to hell. The allegory is, so far as I can see in the world I live on, consistent with the findings of quantum physics, suggesting that everything I see is projected in several dimensions out of the divine mind.

The world was not created 6000 years ago, nor 4.2 billion, but is undergoing creation right now. From what it can tell, the projection software uses fractle algorithms that render in convincing precision everything, right down to the ink in a bible. There may indeed be a world created 6000 years ago just as scripture says for all I know, complete with a Jesus and a hell to save souls from. But that's not the world I see. YMMV.

i dont see any point in trying to convince a follower of levantine scripture, You either get it or you dont. There are sound neurological reasons that I could go into as to why this is so, and similar neurological reasons why the Vedic Brahmins used Soma to achieve an altered state of consciousness from which they drew these insights. But that would be a rational outline, and not sufficient to convince a mind deluded with "faith".

I wont defend Harris on Sweden even tho I understand the distinction he makes between the officlal data and what people actually believe. The lesson is far more evident in Finland, where the royal house did not convert to Christianity until the 17th century, and most of the boondocks of Finland are *still* indigeously pagan. There are wooden pagan grave markers in rural parts of Finland, and the interest of 'neo-pagans' has reinvigorated the folklore of the rural areas just as it has done for Native Americans.

But are the Fins any less moral than Christians? I dont *think* so. Their heroism has been repeatedly praised in their successful defense against the commies during WWII. It was Finish and Ugarit shamen still using a psychedelic potion made from Amanita Muscaria that gave RG Wasson the insight he needed to reconstruct the recipe for the famous ancient Vedic potion, "Soma". And it is the use of that mushroom in ritual that resulted in the ubiquitous polka dotted toadstool in folk art all the way down to "Alice in Wonderland" when she meets the caterpillar smoking a hookah on just such a toadstool. Lewis Carol was certianly a stoner. :-)

There are allegorical lessons like this in folk art and myth all over Europe going back to the Chalcolithic era 7500 years ago. But if you dont get it, thats all right. For those of us who do, it is a tartan tapestry, the remants of which we find all the way to China and all the way back to the Bagavd Gita.

[Guest]

i would like to change directions here and explore the topic of archaeology without the Bible.

can any of you explain to me why is it that cultures who live thousands of miles apart, and as far as we know, no contact with each other be able to come up with similiar concepts in building. i.e. the pyramids of egypt and of mexico (if i remember correctly there were a couple other cultures who had pyramid-like structures in other parts of the world).

i do not ask this out of ignorance so don't assume i don't know anything. i am sure we all need a break from discussions involving spiritual matters, so lets have a go at this subject.

[Frank Harrist]

It's simple. A pyramid is the easiest, most efficient, most stable way to stack things up high. Put fifty people in seperate rooms with a few hundred blocks each and ask them to make a high, stable structure without glue or mortar and I'll bet every one will come up with a pyramid shape. It may be a step pyramid. It may have slated wall like a pyramid and be flat on top, but most will build a pyramid because it's the most stable design.

[stan]

Of course, I don't know the answer, but maybe there was some contact...another story.

But without the contact...how about something that started as a mound of earth with someone buried inside. (A basic response to the need or desire to bury someone, or maybe an important someone.) And gradually as people became more sophisticated and cultures more wealthy, the mound was refined and perfected into a geometric form.

It seems that the rectangular plan is a very basic form in architecture, so
that it isn't hard to imagine that this plan would have been applied to
a large monument.

Just my thoughts. No proof.

[Minimalist]

It's simple. A pyramid is the easiest, most efficient, most stable way to stack things up high. Put fifty people in seperate rooms with a few hundred blocks each and ask them to make a high, stable structure without glue or mortar and I'll bet every one will come up with a pyramid shape. It may be a step pyramid. It may have slated wall like a pyramid and be flat on top, but most will build a pyramid because it's the most stable design.

I agree that the design is easy but the engineering is a different story. I frequently am amazed when Egyptologists "explain" how the pyramids were built using simple tools and earthen ramps. I'd love to see them try to build one using those methods.

As the saying goes: Everything is easy for the man who doesn't have to do it himself.

So to get back to Arch's very valid question, why do we see these particular forms repeated in many apparently unconnected places? I agree that the design is easy but what about the need and the willingness to pay the price to accomplish the task? Those cannot be universal facts.

[FreeThinker]

I find it baffling when people argue against the scientific method as the path to truth. How else can the truth be revealed if not by putting the disputed issue to the test? Are we just to guess? Are we to just accept untested dogma?

[Guest]

But that's exactly what the evolution supporters seem to want, Freethinker, since they're either unwilling or unable to cite reliable evidence, regardless to how many times they're asked.
On the subject of pyramids (sort of), Stone Age peoples in Scotland built chambers by consecutively putting stones slightly over the edge of the one below, until they closed a gap and created a roof. There are examples of this in the Orkneys -Maes Howe springs to mind, but I could well be wrong. These 'vaults' are still strong thousands of years later. It's not hard to see how a leap in experimentation in other places could lead to pyramids.

[Guest]

i dont see any point in trying to convince a follower of levantine scripture, You either get it or you dont.

Once again , I'm not a 'follower of Levantine scripture'. And I'm going to keep repeating that until you people come out of your ivory towers.

and similar neurological reasons why the Vedic Brahmins used Soma to achieve an altered state of consciousness from which they drew these insights. But that would be a rational outline, and not sufficient to convince a mind deluded with "faith".

Rational by whose standards? Didn't you state in another thread that the way to cure violence was ply the young with LSD?

I wont defend Harris on Sweden even tho I understand the distinction he makes between the officlal data and what people actually believe

I would imagine the Swedish government know their own people better than he does!

But are the Fins any less moral than Christians? I dont *think* so. Their heroism has been repeatedly praised in their successful defense against the commies during WWII

They were Hitler's allies until around August 1944! As was Stalin before June 1941!

[old_historian]

. The lesson is far more evident in Finland, where the royal house did not convert to Christianity until the 17th century, and most of the boondocks of Finland are *still* indigeously pagan

That's just plain wrong. The Swedes converted the Finns to Christianity in the 100s http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe ... 032683.stm

[old_historian]

1100s even.

[Minimalist]

They were Hitler's allies until around August 1944! As was Stalin before June 1941!

Do you suppose that may have had something to do with the Soviet attack on Finland in 1939?

Other nations do things for reasons of their own which have nothing to do with our Anglo-Saxon values.

I wish our President could understand that.

[FreeThinker]

OK, even though this topic is about archeology without the bible, not proof of evolution or the structures of pyramids, I will offer some solid evidence of evolution.

First, if the geological record is examined in conjuncture with the fossil record it is found that the oldest geological deposits that hold fossils only hold bacterial fossils. Fossilized stromatolites are a prime example of this. (see: http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/bacteria/cyanofr.html for an example) There are no macro life forms or even multicellular life forms. This surely implies one of two things. Either there was some unknown selective process going on that preserved only baterial fossils and not multicellular fossils or there were only bacteriums and no multicellular life forms. As there is no evidence of an unknown selective process the strength of the evidence falls to the bacteria first model...just as evolutional theory postulates.

Next we get into a geologic zone that does have evidence of multi-cellular life forms in the fossil record. One of the more famous of such deposits is the Burgess shale (see: http://www.geo.ucalgary.ca/~macrae/Burgess_Shale/ ). Although there are more advanced life forms than just bacteria represented in the Burgess fossils there are no vertebrates...they come later. Again there could be some selective mechanism that would weed out all the vertebrate fossils but just how such a mechanism would work is unknown and there is no evidence that such a mechanism even exists. So we now see that as time has gone on for earth life has evolved from its simplist form (bacteria) over 3 billion years ago to simple multicellular life forms as seen in deposits like the Burgess shale over 1/2 billion years ago but had yet to evolve into the more complex life forms to come.

Vertebrates come into the picture about 100 million years later in the form of the first primative fish. Accompanying them are yet more complex life forms than ever before. A good example of this is the famous creature the trilobite. They got their start in this period and went extinct by 250 million years ago. Again, deposits from these time periods do not contain the fossils of such things as whales. Why? Because no whales existed yet and would not for hundreds of millions of years. There are NO examples of whale fossils and trilobite fossils in the same deposit. Why? Because they lived in vastly different epochs of the earth's history. If you dont believe me look it up online. The dates for fossils of trilobites and whales are well understood and there is no overlapping. If you dont believe the research of others then it is incumbant on you to produce proof (as in a fossil of a whale deposited with a fossil of a trilobite) that refutes the research done by so many. Good luck on that.

The story of evolution revealed in the fossil record goes on uninterrupted. The earliest fossils showing vertebrates on land do not show up until about 400 million years ago. There are none found in earlier geologic deposits. Why? Because they had yet to evolve. BTW, rocks from this period are very rare on the surface of the earth, the most accesible are in Greenland but when the US highways were built some of the roads in Pennsylvania were blast cut through mountains and the resulting exposed rock was from the same time period, hence the name science gave to this epoch...the Pennsyvanian. You can check those rock cuts all you like but you will find no fossils of horses there, only primative amphibians, ferns and insects. Why? Because horses were still hundreds of millions of years into the future.

And so it goes from epoch to epoch, from bateria to muticellular, to vertebrates, to amphibians, to reptiles, to dinosaurs, to mammals up to the present. In all these geologic time zones there is no mixing of, say, mammals and trilobites. Why? Because they didn't exist at the same time.

This does not in and of itself prove evolution but it does prove that there were distinct eras of life and that life started out simple and as time went on the life forms grew more complex. The age of the geologic deposits in question comes from the science of geology and unless you dont believe in geology as well as not believing in evolution these dates are, literally, set in stone. The fossil analysis of course come from paleobiologist. For more info on the dating of rocks and fossils check out: http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/fosrec/McKinney.html

Most of the best evidence of evolution of individual species comes from much more recent fossils. This is to be expected. The more ancient the geologic deposit the more degredation nature subjects it to, whether this be subduction from plate techtonics that crushes and fuses the rock to just simply getting covered by subsequent deposits, thus hiding the older material. The fossilization process is rare and random and the fossils surviving from the earliest deposits are rarer still, thus the picture that emerges from those earliest fossil deposits is often fragmentary at best. It is very difficult to follow an ancient species of say flatworm as it evolved because of this (difficult but not impossible. Good fossil evidence has been found showing the earliest vertebrates evolved from worms and that the earliest amphibians cam from fish. See: http://science.kennesaw.edu/biophys/bio ... ordev.html & http://www.devoniantimes.org/Order/new-order.html) That said the more recent fossils are more numerous, better preserved on the whole, and more accesable. I will use some well known evolutionary examples from more recent times.

A great example of fossils showing evolution is the case of the horse. The ancestry of the horse is well known from the fossil record. An unbroken continuum of fossils showing a smooth transition from the earliest little horse ancestors up to the good sized modern horse is well documented. It is no coincidence that the fossils of eohippus (the earliest horse ancestor) are older than miohippus (the next step in horse evolution) and the fossils of miohippus are older than those of pliohippus (still further up the evolutionary line), and of course all these ancestral horse species are older than the modern horse, equus. Nowhere will you find a deposite of a modern horse fossil along side an eohippus fossil. For more info on horse evoulution see: http://www.equiworld.net/uk/horsecare/e ... istory.htm or just google it. Lots of info on horse evolution out there.

Another good example of a great evolutionary fossil sequence is the case of the whale. Creationist were once fond of pointing to the whale as proof evolution was false because it had no transitional fossils from a land animal to an aquatic animal but as science has continued to probe the fossil record, guess what!, the very thing creationist said didn't exist was found in India, a transitional fossil form was found! For more details check out: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/libra ... 34_05.html

This brings us to the most pertinent question of evolution of all...the evolution of homo sapiens. As with other fossil evidence of evolution, our own species shows transition from one form to another. Nothing is out of temporal sequence (for example the steady increase in brain size as time went on, ie brain size did not fluctuate up and down) and the picture is still emerging. It is true that the picture of human evolution originally envisioned has been forced to change as new data was and is collected (a case in point: originally it was supposed that the brain grew first and that our bodies grew into their modern form later...the reverse turned out to be the case) but the human fossil record clearly shows our evolution from earlier more ape-like ancestors millions of years ago gradually evolving to the modern human form we have today. A great resource to examine the question of human evolution can be found at: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/

One last point and then I will give it a rest for now is the quite modern science of genetics. When Darwin developed the ideas into the mechanics of the origin of species the concept of genetics completely and totally unknown. Genetics offered us yet another chance to put evolution to the test. If evolution was wrong one would expect to find no correlation from the genetics of one species to the next. What genetics reveals of course is a close correlation of similar species (example: chimp and human DNA having a 94% match) and great difference between dissimilar species (example: starfish and humans sharing less than a 50% DNA match). What was even more fascinating about the genetic story revealed was that ALL life forms share common DNA, from anaerobic bacteriums to redwoods to butterflies to humans and that by examining the percentage of shared DNA conclusions could be drawn about how all life evolved from a common ancestor and how far back in time two species shared a common ancestor. When this data was checked against the known fossil record the genetic data, the fossil data, and the geologic data all matched.

I don't know what would constitute proof to a doubter of evolution and I am sure there are those who will never give a fair examination to the mountains of carefully collected data, but to those with an open mind the weight of the argument for or against evolution leans totally for evolution.

[Minimalist]

I don't know what would constitute proof to a doubter of evolution

Perhaps if Jesus were to appear, slap them silly and say "WAKE THE HELL UP!"

Then again, that probably wouldn't even do it.

[Guest]

I find it baffling when people argue against the scientific method as the path to truth. How else can the truth be revealed if not by putting the disputed issue to the test? Are we just to guess? Are we to just accept untested dogma?

why? here are a couple of articles to answer the question:
'piltdown man: Britain's greatest hoax by Kate Bartlett--BBC.co.uk/history/

'is the spirit of piltdown man alive and well?' no author listed sept. 8th, 05--connected.telegraph

it is not wrong to test or check even dogma. just be honest in doing so. science is fallible, run by fallible people and can not be taken blindly even after many tests for no one outside of those tests can be sure of which influences have altered the results or if the results have been left alone.