Religous debates and questions [2]

 

Neither my Sister nor I am impressed with that answer, Mr Bluebottle! No fee, I say! No fee!   

I also wish to complain about your deliberate misinterpretation of my point! Of course - having acknowledged that, I now feel obliged to give  you your fee, as you have clearly fooled someone with your legalistic manipulation - Petty* in this case - and that's what lawyers do get paid for (apparently).  


{{{* Petty is a Scotshobbit and, therefore, a dolt - and the closest approximation we have in Forumshire to a Judge (apparently).   }}}

{{{Of course, Petty may have just been enjoying the manipulating... which might mean he is a lawyer himself... and I do seem to recall him winning the Thuglyffe Murder Case (apparently)}}}

Well, one way to negate some of the problem is to write a will.   Though a large chunk of the estate would still go to the persons life heirs and spouse.

And don't worry about it, it's all included in the fee.   

On the first day, God said "Let there be light", but he waited until the fourth to create the sun, the moon and the stars. So what was the source of light the first three days?

If the word were translated as "energy" rather than "light", would it make more sense to you Ringo?

Not 100% certain but im fairly sure the word, even in the original language does mean 'light' not energy.

David H wrote:If the word were translated as "energy" rather than "light", would it make more sense to you Ringo?

Well, yes. Though it isn't, at any rate not in any translation I've read. So this is still a mystery to me

I've always wanted to know what the word was. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God.
My money's on 'abracadabra' or 'suprise!' or as outside bet 'Hey! Look what I can do!"

Let me ask you this then Petty. Hypothetically, if you were a time lord and you were trying to explain all the forms of energy to nomadic shepherds in poetry, what would word would you choose? "Light" and "Heat" are the only ones that occur to me, and in some languages I understand that the concepts can be blurred, as sunlight and sun-warmth are more or less equivalent.

Remember that our current understanding of energy really only dates back to about the time of Sir Isaac Newton, unless you want to dabble in Alchemy. {which you'd probably enjoy, now that I think about it!  }

Yes but there was a concept of energy in the ancient word, they had a word for it- the force emitting from RA (the sun) was different from either its light or heat and had a different word. They knew the difference even if they did not know exactly what it was.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:I've always wanted to know what the word was. In the beginning was the word and the word was with God.
My money's on 'abracadabra' or 'suprise!' or as outside bet 'Hey! Look what I can do!"

In ancient Greek, in which the Gospel of St John was written, there is no clear distinction between Word, Language, and Thought. It's all Logos, the word from which we get Logic. Make of that what you will.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:Yes but there was a concept of energy in the ancient word, they had a word for it- the force emitting from RA (the sun) was different from either its light or heat and had a different word. They knew the difference even if they did not know exactly what it was.

Are you talking ancient Egyptian mystics now? Quite a different culture for early Hebrews.

In that case I'd guess at "Ive got an idea!"

Hebrew culture has much of its religious roots in Egyptian- the members of the exodus punished by Moses were punished for reverting back to worship of the Golden Calf- representative of the Bull cult of Egypt.
It more than likely, ans indeed confirmed in the OT that whilst the proto Jews were in Egypt they worshipped the local Egyptian Gods, as when Moses meets Yahweh He has to introduce Himself as the 'God of your fathers'- he'd been out of date since Abraham and Joseph.
And Joseph himself was an Egyptian vizier who would have worshipped the Egyptian Gods or he would not have remained Vizier for very long given the power and influence of the various Egyptian priesthoods in court matters.

Also Genesis references the waters being divided- which parallels the Egyptian creation myth with the island of order rising from the waters of chaos.

So are you saying that you don't believe Genesis, or at very least the creation story, predates the captivity in Egypt? I've always assumed it was one of the oldest of the oral traditions of the Hebrew people, like creation myths all around the world, potentially going back thousands of years (or 10's of thousands for that matter.)

Ringdrotten wrote: So this is still a mystery to me

Nothing wrong with a mystery, is there? Of course if you were looking for demystified astrophysics, there are other books that have more modern explanations.  

So are you saying that you don't believe Genesis, or at very least the creation story, predates the captivity in Egypt?- David

The Creation myth in Genesis is based on several sources and influences from different time periods- the earliest written being the Summerian, particularly the Sumerian Flood story and the Garden of Eden, but the opening creation of the world seems to owe more to the later Egyptian myths on creation than the earlier Summerian.
Although the influence may not have come in chronological order.

The Creation of the world influenced by Egyptian myth probably came first, and the additions or at least the details of the garden and Eden and the Flood probably not until the Captivity in Babylon (when most scholars think the OT was set down)- and coincidentally at that time the, by then, ancient and revered Summerian tales were the test of choice for teaching scribes (just like how Latin was used in schools even after it ceased as a a living language in its own right, in Babylon if you couldnt write and read Summerian you werent a proper scribe at all. Most of the tablets carrying the Summerian myths we have now come from there and the time period of the Jewish captivity).
At that time the Summerian Creation story was a bit like the Big Bang theory, it was popularly accepted it as the way it happened, so when the Jews came to set down their own they could not stray to far from the consensus of the time on creation or people would not have believed it. It would be like coming up with a new origin of the universe now and not even mentioning the Big Bang even to explain it away.

Thats my reading of the history of the composition anyway.

I'm sure my perspective is influenced by living in a part of the world where Native American communities have still preserved many of their oral traditions.

There are many different creation stories, some similar and some different, but there never seems to have been a need to standardize. On the contrary, having a different creation story seems to be as important as having a different language or dialect in defining a culture.

Some of the similarities between North American creation stories and Asian and European creation stories are fascinating. Of course it could be total coincidence, but I prefer to believe that some seeds of the stories have survived for 10,000 years or more, passed from generation to generation like fire, knives, weaving, and language. The thought pleases me.

My reasoning is partly to do with the recorded movement in the Bible- Abraham was from Ur which was a Summerian city- and he worshipped Yahweh in his earliest form, as one of the Summerian Gods El/Ea (Elohim in Hebrew)- he took that religion with him into Egypt but it seems to have been lost by the main bulk of his people and only preserved in a small group near Egypt.
This is the group Moses flees too in the Bible story and who reintroduce him to the God of Abraham.
He then leads the Exodus of a people clearly more used to worshipping the local Egyptian Gods.
And then by the time of the Captivity the original stories of Abrahams time have become accepted general background to several religions who all draw on the older creation myth with its Garden and Flood story ect and the Jews when they set down their own story draw on these scholarly works in Babylon no doubt mixed with their own oral tales that have been passed down in one form or another from the time of Abraham himself.
So there is a gaining, a losing, a reintroducing and an oral thread through their own people, all combining into what we call the OT.

That all seems quite plausible to me, as long as you're acknowledging that there are quite a few speculative links in that chain.

I'm personally fascinated by the oral transmission of knowledge, which until fairly recently has been dismissed by many scholars with a strong prejudice in favor of written history.

Yet if you look at places like Gobelki Tepe which is something like 7 thousand years older than Ur, yet in many ways familiar and recognizable in form, you have to acknowledge that humans are pretty damn good at passing on information, even without a written language!

It makes you wonder where the Sumerian origin stories came from and, if we could know, whether they bore any resemblance to the stories of the Gobelki Tepe people, doesn't it?

There's a few puzzles still about the Summerians. No one is sure where came from exactly (down from the Zargos mountains is my reckoning for the record, where I also think was the 'enclosure', usually translated as Garden in he Bible, of Eden. But thats a whole lot of other speculation based on likelihood, geography, what texts there are, and gut feeling   )
And at a point in their history a new people with dark hair appeared and they became the dominant Summerians. And they are a bit of a mystery too.

Interesting stuff, Petty! I wish I had more time to poke into this. I find mysteries are much more fun than simple answers.    

Well technically it was light, but it is so redshifted we now see it in the microwave (CMB). If you want to take poetry literally..

The most obvious point from the Genesis account #1 seems to be that the world was created in stages and humanity was the last to arise. Although the Jewish records uniquely emphasise a purposeful and "good" creation note there are similar babylonian creation accounts (check out panbabylonism); I see this has been pointed out.

And for your deconstruction of state marriage; note there are psychological (and often physiological) changes that accompany child birth, and they along with raw genetic resource allocation interact with mate selection - I doubt any society would have marriage without these.

richardbrucebaxter wrote:Well technically it was light, but it is so redshifted we now see it in the microwave (CMB).

You can do that?   My eyesight has never been that keen.   

Until fairly recently, the word "light" simply referred to that part of the electromagnetic spectrum visible to the human eye, or more accurately, whatever it was that made our eyes see. In ancient times all kinds of theories existed, but few that we'd recognize now.  Here's a snip from Wikipedia on light:

In the fifth century BC, Empedocles postulated that everything was composed of four elements; fire, air, earth and water. He believed that Aphrodite made the human eye out of the four elements and that she lit the fire in the eye which shone out from the eye making sight possible. If this were true, then one could see during the night just as well as during the day, so Empedocles postulated an interaction between rays from the eyes and rays from a source such as the sun.

In about 300 BC, Euclid wrote Optica, in which he studied the properties of light. Euclid postulated that light travelled in straight lines and he described the laws of reflection and studied them mathematically. He questioned that sight is the result of a beam from the eye, for he asks how one sees the stars immediately, if one closes one's eyes, then opens them at night. Of course if the beam from the eye travels infinitely fast this is not a problem.

In 55 BC, Lucretius, a Roman who carried on the ideas of earlier Greek atomists, wrote:

"The light & heat of the sun; these are composed of minute atoms which, when they are shoved off, lose no time in shooting right across the interspace of air in the direction imparted by the shove." – On the nature of the Universe

Despite being similar to later particle theories, Lucretius's views were not generally accepted.

Lucretius' On the Nature of Things is a very pleasant, satisfying read. Quite modern.

I was under the impression the seven day week and the sabbath dated from the Babylonian captivity, for they kept a 7 day week and the version of the genesis story dates from about then.

I don't have a major problem with light and darkness being divided before the sun and moon appeared (Tolkien did much the same thing). If you look around during the day, it's not immediately obvious that all the light comes from the sun. Light is everywhere - it's easy to see light as a property of 'day' with the sun just being a major provider of the light.

And darkness is often sensed as a 'thing', something that envelopes and cloaks, not an absence of light. Light 'dispels' the darkness rather than simply filling an absence. We know better now, but much of this comes from being trained to it, and we only find such thoughts confusing if we cling tightly to modern understanding.