How do atheists celebrate Christmas? The long nights and short days of the Christmas season can be quite depressing. It would be an even bleaker time of year if those of us who do not believe in the myth of Jesus were unable to celebrate the happy Christmas season. I certainly do not believe that the eternal and almighty God who created the universe came down to earth and allowed himself to be born as a human being. That is a myth of many religions, not just Christianity, and it speaks to man’s inner needs rather than to any historical happening. It is possible for the nonbeliever to celebrate Christmas, however. Christmas as a holiday has a long and ancient history that goes back long before Jesus.
For thousands of years before Jesus, people celebrated the Winter Solstice. This was the period around December 23-25. It is obvious that ancient people began celebrating the winter solstice because that was the time when nights were longest and days were shortest. The long nights made people depressed and sad and no doubt motivated the need for some kind of celebration to rouse people’s spirits.
The history of Christmas dates back over 4000 years. Many of our Christmas traditions were celebrated centuries before Jesus was born. The 12 days of Christmas, the bright fires, the Yule log, the giving of gifts, carolers who sing while going from house to house, the holiday feasts, and the church processions, can all be traced back to the early Mesopotamians. Many of these traditions began with the Mesopotamian celebration of New Years. The Mesopotamians believed in many gods, and their chief god was Marduk. Each year as winter arrived it was believed that Marduk would do battle with the monsters of chaos. To assist Marduk in his struggle, the Mesopotamians held a festival for the New Year. This was called Zagmuk, the New Year's festival that lasted for 12 days.
In ancient Germany people honored the pagan god Oden during the mid-winter holiday. Germans were terrified of Oden. They believed he made nocturnal flights through the sky to observe his people, and then decide who would prosper or perish. Because of his presence, many people chose to stay inside. The Germans brought trees inside the house at the winter solstice and hung gifts on the trees to placate the gods and in hopes of keeping green things alive for the coming Spring.
There were mid-winter festivals in ancient Babylon and Egypt, and Germanic fertility festivals also took place at this time. The birth of the ancient sun-god Attis was celebrated on December 25th. Attis was the son of the goddess Cybele. The worship of Cybele, known as “The Great Mother,” was introduced into Rome from Phrygia (in today’s Turkey) around 204 BC. She was worshipped in Greece in the 5th century BC. The adherents of this religion celebrated the death and resurrection of Attis, who was Cybele’s, lover, eunuch attendant, and driver of her lion-driven chariot. Attis was killed by being castrated. After fasting on the “Day of Blood,” on which Attis was mourned, sorrow was turned into joy with the Hilaria celebrating his resurrection on March 25. The celebration included a sacred meal of thanksgiving, or, in Greek, “eucherista."
The Romans celebrated Saturnalia, a festival dedicated to Saturn, the god of peace and plenty, that ran from the 17th to 24th of December. Public gathering places were decorated with flowers, gifts and candles were exchanged and the population, slaves and masters alike, celebrated the occasion with great enthusiasm.
One of the the myths which closely resembles the story of Jesus was that of the God Mithras (or Mithra). Many aspects of Mithraism parallel Christianity. It is not known exactly when Mithraism began, but it preceeded Christianity by hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Although some scholars claim that it goes back to the Persian empire fourteen centuries before Christ, when the Persians worshipped a god “Mithra,” others claim that the worship by Romans of Mithras originated much later in Tarsus of Cilicia (today’s Turkey). Mithras was the god of light, or the Sun, and was born of a virgin. He was identified with a bull who had to die as a sacrifice for all humanity. His worshippers believed that Mithras promised resurrection from the dead and that he ascended into heaven. The worship of Mithras included forgiveness of sin by baptism of initiates and a communion of bread and wine to commemorate Mithras’ last meal on earth.
Evidence of Mithraism can be found in the ruins of Pompeii. It was popular among the Roman soldiers.
The early fathers of the Christian Church did not know the date when Jesus had been born, so up until the fourth century AD there was no celebration of Christmas. The worship of Mithras presented a real problem for the Church fathers because of the similarities to the worship of Jesus. In around 353 AD, the church fathers decided to combat Mithraism and other pagan holidays by celebrating the birth of Jesus on Mithras’ birthday, December 25. Merry Mithramas!
Biblical scholars agree that the Christian story of the Nativity is fictitious. In the first place, the story says that Caesar ordered a census to levy taxes and that Joseph, as a descendent of David, had to travel to Bethlehem, the city of David, to register (Luke 2:1-5). This was supposed to fulfill the prophecy that the “Messiah” would be “from the house of David.” The story is inherently preposterous!
There is no evidence that Augustus Caesar ordered a worldwide census at the time of Jesus’ birth. There was a census under Quirinius, the Governor of Syria (Luke 2:2), but that occurred after the death of Caesar and years after the birth of Jesus. The late Raymond E. Brown, S.S., a Catholic priest, internationally regarded as the dean of New Testament scholars, and former Professor of Biblical Studies at Union Theological Seminary in New York, said in his magisterial The Birth of the Messiah, “Luke’s reference to a general census of the Empire under Augustus which affected Palestine before the death of Herod the Great is almost certainly wrong.” Said Brown, “Luke begins his story with a reference to a census of the whole world ordered by Augustus, conducted by Quirinius, and affecting Joseph, a Galilean inhabitant of Nazareth, so that he had to go to his ancestral city. This supplied the occasion for the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem....this information is dubious on every score...We have no evidence of one census under Augustus that covered the whole Empire, nor of a census requirement that people be registered in their ancestral cities.” In a census, they counted people at their place of domicile, not where they were born. They would not have required Joseph to travel to Bethlehem. The Romans cared nothing for genealogies. They would have wanted him to stay in Nazareth and be counted where he lived
The distinguished biblical scholar, E.P. Sanders, points out that David lived 42 generations before Jesus. He asks, why would the Romans require Joseph to register for a tax in the town (Bethlehem) of an ancestor who lived 42 generations earlier? He describes Luke’s story of the Nativity as “Fantastic!” Bart D. Ehrman, another renowned biblical scholar, asks: “Can it be possible that everyone in the empire was to return to the place their ancestors lived a thousand years earlier?”
Another mistake by the authors of the Gospels is that they place the census of Quirinius and the birth of Jesus during the Reign of Herod. Scholars know that Herod was already dead at the time of Quirinius’ census. Raymond E. Brown says, “...the one and only census conducted while Quirinius was legate in Syria affected only Judea, not Galilee, and took place in A.D. 6-7, a good ten years after the death of Herod the Great.” Moreover, Caesar would not have taxed Judea while Herod was king. And, at the time of Jesus’ birth, Bethlehem would have been in an area that was exempt from taxation.
The world renowned biblical scholar and Catholic priest, John P. Meier, notes that it would have been impossible for Mary to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem in an advanced state of pregnancy. Meier says, “Somewhere around 7-6 B.C. a Jew named Yeshua, a shortened form of the Hebrew Yehoshua (Joshua), was born in the hillside town of Nazareth in lower Galilee. The Infancy Narritive traditions that locate his birth in Bethlehem of Judea (traditions isolated in chap. 2 of Matthew and Luke respectively) are probably later Chriustian theological dramatizations of the belief that Jesus was the royal Davidic Messiah.”
There are many reasons to disbelieve in the Christmas story as recounted in the Christian Bible. The whole story is absurd. Nevertheless, it has given us the modern holiday of Christmas, a joyous celebration of the winter solstice. I may not buy into the Christian story, but I happily join in the celebration of the season.
Sunday, December 11, 2016
Saturday, December 10, 2016
TRUMP AND THE UNEDUCATED
I don’t think that the tape by Donald Trump in which he made vulgar statements about women, or the fact that a number of women came forward with accusations of Trump groping them, or his many outrageous statements had much of an impact on his campaign for the presidency. Sure this information offended many women, especially women who were already planning to vote for Hillary Clinton, but for the most of his supporters they had no adverse effect.
They say that most of the people who supported Trump are uneducated. I’m sure that many of the people who voted for Trump do not think of themselves as low class or uneducated. Nevertheless, by the mere fact of supporting and voting for Trump they have defined themselves as low-class.
Mel Robbins is a CNN commentator, legal analyst, best-selling author, and keynote speaker. She wrote that neither Trump’s statement that he wanted to grab women’s “pussies,” nor his other outrageous acts and statements, made any difference to his supporters. She said: “This election isn’t about greatness, the future, or even Donald Trump. It’s about defiance. To his supporters, a vote for Trump is a way to flip the middle finger to the system, the media, the elite, the liberals, the know-it-alls, and the people who pretend they’re better than “us.”’
For many of Trump’s supporters his lies, verbal abuse, insults, and foul language were not to be held against him, but rather, were reasons to admire him. They felt that he was sticking his thumb in the eyes of the hated upper-class who graduated from colleges, read books, enjoyed the arts, had some sophistication, and basically ran this country.
While we may not have an institutionalized class system in America, most people understand that they are either upper-class, upper middle-class, lower middle-class, or low-class. I have known people who have both money and college degrees, but who act like they are lower class and even look at themselves as lower class. Their speech is rough like that of the working class. They have no books or tasteful works of art around the house. They do not go to art museums, or sit for classical music concerts, or travel abroad. These people probably voted for Donald Trump.
I think that today, social class is not so much a matter of money as it is a matter of education and sophistication. Better educated people may not be wealthy in the classic sense. They may be writers, musicians, artists, college professors, social workers, or teachers. They may also be highly sophisticated and well educated. Despite lack of great wealth they are often looked upon as high-class in modern society. Some very educated people are not wealthy, and may not have even been able to afford college. Instead, they may be self-educated. Autodidactic people are often readers of books, periodicals, newspapers. They may visit museums, Broadway-shows, classical music recitals, and other art forms. People who know them count them as educated people.
Because the well-educated people are big readers they are usually very well-informed. They are not influenced by the idiotic conspiracy theories that sway the less educated. They realize that there really is a global warming and that it is caused by human actions. They look with horror at the wild statements of Donald Trump. Their politics are usually liberal. Likewise, because the less educated people do not read, they are easy prey for purveyors of odd conspiracy theories and phony stories about politics.
The uneducated people of America resent the government and the leaders of the media, arts, universities, women’s groups, and others because they feel that those people look down their noses at them. Maybe they do. Trump, who has been very wealthy and has attended college, gives evidence of being one of the uneducated. That makes him low-class. He appealed to the low-class people of America, many of whom are not poor but who are uneducated.
I think that we may be in the first stages of a class war in America. It is not a war between the rich and the poor, but rather, a war between the educated and the uneducated. This may be the beginning of a long dark period in American history.
They say that most of the people who supported Trump are uneducated. I’m sure that many of the people who voted for Trump do not think of themselves as low class or uneducated. Nevertheless, by the mere fact of supporting and voting for Trump they have defined themselves as low-class.
Mel Robbins is a CNN commentator, legal analyst, best-selling author, and keynote speaker. She wrote that neither Trump’s statement that he wanted to grab women’s “pussies,” nor his other outrageous acts and statements, made any difference to his supporters. She said: “This election isn’t about greatness, the future, or even Donald Trump. It’s about defiance. To his supporters, a vote for Trump is a way to flip the middle finger to the system, the media, the elite, the liberals, the know-it-alls, and the people who pretend they’re better than “us.”’
For many of Trump’s supporters his lies, verbal abuse, insults, and foul language were not to be held against him, but rather, were reasons to admire him. They felt that he was sticking his thumb in the eyes of the hated upper-class who graduated from colleges, read books, enjoyed the arts, had some sophistication, and basically ran this country.
While we may not have an institutionalized class system in America, most people understand that they are either upper-class, upper middle-class, lower middle-class, or low-class. I have known people who have both money and college degrees, but who act like they are lower class and even look at themselves as lower class. Their speech is rough like that of the working class. They have no books or tasteful works of art around the house. They do not go to art museums, or sit for classical music concerts, or travel abroad. These people probably voted for Donald Trump.
I think that today, social class is not so much a matter of money as it is a matter of education and sophistication. Better educated people may not be wealthy in the classic sense. They may be writers, musicians, artists, college professors, social workers, or teachers. They may also be highly sophisticated and well educated. Despite lack of great wealth they are often looked upon as high-class in modern society. Some very educated people are not wealthy, and may not have even been able to afford college. Instead, they may be self-educated. Autodidactic people are often readers of books, periodicals, newspapers. They may visit museums, Broadway-shows, classical music recitals, and other art forms. People who know them count them as educated people.
Because the well-educated people are big readers they are usually very well-informed. They are not influenced by the idiotic conspiracy theories that sway the less educated. They realize that there really is a global warming and that it is caused by human actions. They look with horror at the wild statements of Donald Trump. Their politics are usually liberal. Likewise, because the less educated people do not read, they are easy prey for purveyors of odd conspiracy theories and phony stories about politics.
The uneducated people of America resent the government and the leaders of the media, arts, universities, women’s groups, and others because they feel that those people look down their noses at them. Maybe they do. Trump, who has been very wealthy and has attended college, gives evidence of being one of the uneducated. That makes him low-class. He appealed to the low-class people of America, many of whom are not poor but who are uneducated.
I think that we may be in the first stages of a class war in America. It is not a war between the rich and the poor, but rather, a war between the educated and the uneducated. This may be the beginning of a long dark period in American history.
Friday, June 3, 2016
Switzerland
We woke up in the small skiing village of Zermatt at the base of the magnificent Matterhorn Mountain. The Matterhorn is a sublime icy finger of snow pointing up to the sky and attempting to contradict the disbelief of doubters like me. The air is clear and clean, devoid of the pollution of American politics.
We had come from Geneva on a train with broad, high Windows, along lush green valleys beneath ice-capped mountains. One's only comparison would be an idealized imagination of Shangra La. My lady, Julie, said it was like being on another perfect planet.
The people of Switzerland are all slim. The women are all lovely and the men are all handsome. As Garrison Keelor might say, the children are above-average. The residents favor cheese fondue, croque monsieur, (or ham and melted cheese sandwiches), and good French wine. So do I. Geneva is surrounded by France, and everybody speaks french. The people are friendly. Everything is frightfully expensive. They speak German in most of eastern Switzerland and Italian in the South. In a couple of isolated mountain villages they speak something called "Romansh" which is like ancient Latin.
Surprisingly, there are Pizza restaurants everywhere. One doesn't know whether this is because of tourist preference or local taste. The pizza is thin-crust and delicious. You can pick-up a Rolex watch anytime for a few thousand bucks. Everything is clean and orderly. The chalets are brown and white and charming. There are occasional castles and chateaux, and the chateaux of the great misanthrope, Voltaire, is in nearby France.
Because Switzerland remained neutral during World Wars I and II, most of the structures are preserved from long ago (I question the morality of neutrality against the Nazi horror, but I can see the advantages of avoiding the barbarity of war's mass slaughter and destruction).
The people are among the wealthiest in the world. You better be to afford the prices. The banks hold much of the world's money. Every bakery and candy store makes its own chocolate. The chocolate is outstanding. So is the cheese.
Geneva is at the foot of Lake Geneva and a huge spout called the "Jet d' Eau" springs up out of the harbor. The harbor is bejeweled by gorgeous balconied hotels. Word is that many of the mansions along the east coast are owned by billionaire Russian oligarchs. You can eat at one of the hotel restaurants if you cash-in you 401-K retirement account.
We took pictures everywhere and sent them to friends and family. One beloved friend wrote back, "Stop sending the d....d pictures. I'm on my way to Kiwanis."
Well, it would be nice to live in this lovely corner of the world, but it will be good to get home to Xenia.
We had come from Geneva on a train with broad, high Windows, along lush green valleys beneath ice-capped mountains. One's only comparison would be an idealized imagination of Shangra La. My lady, Julie, said it was like being on another perfect planet.
The people of Switzerland are all slim. The women are all lovely and the men are all handsome. As Garrison Keelor might say, the children are above-average. The residents favor cheese fondue, croque monsieur, (or ham and melted cheese sandwiches), and good French wine. So do I. Geneva is surrounded by France, and everybody speaks french. The people are friendly. Everything is frightfully expensive. They speak German in most of eastern Switzerland and Italian in the South. In a couple of isolated mountain villages they speak something called "Romansh" which is like ancient Latin.
Surprisingly, there are Pizza restaurants everywhere. One doesn't know whether this is because of tourist preference or local taste. The pizza is thin-crust and delicious. You can pick-up a Rolex watch anytime for a few thousand bucks. Everything is clean and orderly. The chalets are brown and white and charming. There are occasional castles and chateaux, and the chateaux of the great misanthrope, Voltaire, is in nearby France.
Because Switzerland remained neutral during World Wars I and II, most of the structures are preserved from long ago (I question the morality of neutrality against the Nazi horror, but I can see the advantages of avoiding the barbarity of war's mass slaughter and destruction).
The people are among the wealthiest in the world. You better be to afford the prices. The banks hold much of the world's money. Every bakery and candy store makes its own chocolate. The chocolate is outstanding. So is the cheese.
Geneva is at the foot of Lake Geneva and a huge spout called the "Jet d' Eau" springs up out of the harbor. The harbor is bejeweled by gorgeous balconied hotels. Word is that many of the mansions along the east coast are owned by billionaire Russian oligarchs. You can eat at one of the hotel restaurants if you cash-in you 401-K retirement account.
We took pictures everywhere and sent them to friends and family. One beloved friend wrote back, "Stop sending the d....d pictures. I'm on my way to Kiwanis."
Well, it would be nice to live in this lovely corner of the world, but it will be good to get home to Xenia.
Friday, May 6, 2016
THE NOAH'S ARK MUSEUM
The State of Kentucky has subsidized the construction along U.S. Route 75 of a replica of Noah’s Ark along with other biblical projects in a religious park. The ark is built according to the dimensions set-out in the Bible. The state justifies this involvement in religion as a way of creating jobs for construction people and of attracting visitors from around the country to the park. The people behind the project are not doing it to create jobs, but rather, to provide inspiration and belief in the biblical account of Noah’s flood. They are fundamentalist Christians who really believe that there was such a flood and that there was a man named Noah who built an ark and saved his family and the animal kingdom from the flood.
Some time ago ABC News did a story about some Christian archeologists from Texas who claimed to have found the remnants of Noah’s Ark. They apparently found something that looked to them like the Ark on Mount Suleiman in Iran's Elburz mountain range rather than on Mount Ararat in Turkey, the site identified in Genesis 8:4. Nevertheless, they believed it was the Ark. "I can't imagine what it could be if it is not the Ark," said Arch Bonnema of the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration Institute--a Christian archeology organization dedicated to looking for biblical artifacts.
We have to wonder at the pathetic spectacle of “scientific” teams of grown people going out and climbing mountains to find the remains of Noah’s Ark. It is a little sad. Serious archaeologists, geologists, historians, and theologians know that the story of Noah’s Ark is an ancient myth, a fairy tale, not history. It never really happened.
In the first place, there are two flood stories in Genesis. In one, God tells Noah that he is going to destroy sinful mankind with a flood and that Noah is to take his family and two of every kind of animal on board the Ark (Genesis 6:19). In the other, God directs Noah to take seven pairs of clean animals, of every type, and one pair of the unclean (Genesis 7:2). The reason that there are two stories is because there were different people who wrote different stories at different times which were later stitched together into what we now call Genesis. It was not written by Moses as is claimed in the Bible.
According to the Bible, the Ark was 300 cubits (about 450 feet) long. This is considerably longer than the largest wooden vessels ever built in historical times. Shipbuilders know that wooden ships over 300 feet long (the size of a football field) would not be able to float. The schooner Wyoming, launched in 1909, was the largest documented wooden-hulled cargo ship ever built. It measured only 350 feet and needed iron cross-bracing to counter warping and a steam pump to handle a serious leak problem.
Try to imagine fitting all those millions of animals onto the Ark. There would be two (or seven) of every kind of elephant, rhinoceros, hippo, gorilla, ox, cow, horse, lion, tiger, bear, giraffe, wildebeeste, elk, moose, buffalo, etc. It would have been impossible for many of the animals to come from distant parts of the world. How could kangaroos and koalas get from Australia to the Middle East? How did Noah keep lions, tigers, bears, panthers, and hyenas from attacking deer, elk, antelope, sheep and other kinds of natural prey? How did Noah feed all those animals?
Anthropologists and paleoanthropologists have used fossils and DNA to trace the history of man. They know that our species originated in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. They recognize that man evolved from lower animals over a period of millions of years. There has been no worldwide flood interfering with human history. Moreover, geologists are unable to find any physical evidence of the kind of worldwide flood spoken about in the Bible.
The story of Noah and the Flood did not originate with the writers of the Hebrew Bible. It was borrowed from ancient Mesopotamian myths that precede the writing of the Bible by thousands of years. The Mesopotamian myths were written about different gods and different people.
The Babylonian Epic of Atrahasis, written over a thousand years before the Hebrew Bible, is an account of a pious hero who is warned by the god Enki to build a great ship and load it with family and selected animals in order to escape the coming deluge. The rains come, and everybody else in the world is drowned. The ship grounds on a mountain in Armenia and the hero releases three birds. The third bird does not return. A sacrifice pleases the god, and the god promises never to send another flood. Sound familiar?
The Sumarian story of Ziusudra, and the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, both written thousands of years before the Bible, have similar stories. In the Babylonian flood myth, the central story is about a fight between the gods Marduk and Tiamat.
Fundamentalist Christians and Jews might argue that the building of the Ark was a miracle and that the whole story must be taken as miraculous. Why then do they expect to find the actual Ark? Surely if it was a miraculous vessel that God created only for that one period of time, it would not still survive today.
Fundamentalist Christians have constructed a “Creation Museum” out near the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport. In order to get there from Dayton the one has to drive over bedrock of Ordovician and Silurian rocks that were deposited between about 435 and 445 million years ago. World geography was quite different then. North America straddled the equator and Ohio was located south of the equator. The Ohio River did not exist. From a geological standpoint, the Ohio River is quite young. It was formed on a piecemeal basis beginning between 2.5 and 3 million years ago from north-flowing rivers dammed by the early ice ages.
In late May, 2009, seventy paleontologists took a break from a conference at the University of Cincinnati and drove over Ordovician bedrock to visit the Creation Museum. I’m sure that they were interested in seeing not only the displays at the museum, but also the living fossils of a species that was thought to have become extinct at the time of the European Enlightenment--the irrational, superstitious, religious believers for whom modern science means nothing. Those believers insist that the earth is 6000 years old. They believe this despite the fact that everybody knows that even Dick Clark is more than 6000 years old.
One display at the museum shows two prehistoric children playing while dinosaurs, which became extinct 63 million years before the human species developed, cavort nearby. The scientists visiting the museum were astonished. "I'm speechless," said Derek E.G. Briggs, director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale; "It's rather scary.” Jerry Lipps, professor of geology, paleontology, and evolution at University of California, Berkeley, said: “It's sort of a monument to scientific illiteracy, isn't it?” Lisa Park, a University of Akron professor of paleontology, who is an elder in the Presbyterian Church, called it "bad science and even worse theology -- and the theology is far more offensive to me."
Leaving aside the geological evidence, it doesn’t seem likely that the earth began 6000 years ago. There was already a flourishing civilization in Egypt over 6000 years ago. British archaeologists have found 30 sites rich in art chiseled into rocks up to 6,000 years ago in the desert east of the Nile. The rock drawings show cattle, boats, ostriches, giraffes, hippos and the men and women who lived in the area in 4,000 BC, long before the first pharaohs or the first pyramids.
“Lucy” was the name given to an early ancestor of the human species discovered by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in 1974 at Hadar in Ethiopia. Its age is about 3.2 million years. Lucy was an adult female of about 25 years and was assigned to the species “Australopithecus Afarensis.” There have been hundreds of discoveries of pre-human fossils going back millions of years.
Fossils of the now extinct species of human called Neanderthals have been found in various places in Europe and the Middle East. The first proto-Neanderthal traits appeared in Europe as early as 600,000–350,000 years ago. Fossils of our ancestors, Cro-Magnon men, date back 40,000 years. Archaeologists in Oregon have located an ancient trash dump and latrine which was found to contain human DNA linked directly to modern-day Native Americans with Asian roots. The materials found were radiocarbon dated to 14,300 years ago. It is believed that the ancestors of Native Americans came over the land bridge to Alaska around 20,000 years ago. People who believe that the Earth is 6000 years old don’t want to hear about science or truth. They want to live in their own world of nescience.
Some time ago ABC News did a story about some Christian archeologists from Texas who claimed to have found the remnants of Noah’s Ark. They apparently found something that looked to them like the Ark on Mount Suleiman in Iran's Elburz mountain range rather than on Mount Ararat in Turkey, the site identified in Genesis 8:4. Nevertheless, they believed it was the Ark. "I can't imagine what it could be if it is not the Ark," said Arch Bonnema of the Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration Institute--a Christian archeology organization dedicated to looking for biblical artifacts.
We have to wonder at the pathetic spectacle of “scientific” teams of grown people going out and climbing mountains to find the remains of Noah’s Ark. It is a little sad. Serious archaeologists, geologists, historians, and theologians know that the story of Noah’s Ark is an ancient myth, a fairy tale, not history. It never really happened.
In the first place, there are two flood stories in Genesis. In one, God tells Noah that he is going to destroy sinful mankind with a flood and that Noah is to take his family and two of every kind of animal on board the Ark (Genesis 6:19). In the other, God directs Noah to take seven pairs of clean animals, of every type, and one pair of the unclean (Genesis 7:2). The reason that there are two stories is because there were different people who wrote different stories at different times which were later stitched together into what we now call Genesis. It was not written by Moses as is claimed in the Bible.
According to the Bible, the Ark was 300 cubits (about 450 feet) long. This is considerably longer than the largest wooden vessels ever built in historical times. Shipbuilders know that wooden ships over 300 feet long (the size of a football field) would not be able to float. The schooner Wyoming, launched in 1909, was the largest documented wooden-hulled cargo ship ever built. It measured only 350 feet and needed iron cross-bracing to counter warping and a steam pump to handle a serious leak problem.
Try to imagine fitting all those millions of animals onto the Ark. There would be two (or seven) of every kind of elephant, rhinoceros, hippo, gorilla, ox, cow, horse, lion, tiger, bear, giraffe, wildebeeste, elk, moose, buffalo, etc. It would have been impossible for many of the animals to come from distant parts of the world. How could kangaroos and koalas get from Australia to the Middle East? How did Noah keep lions, tigers, bears, panthers, and hyenas from attacking deer, elk, antelope, sheep and other kinds of natural prey? How did Noah feed all those animals?
Anthropologists and paleoanthropologists have used fossils and DNA to trace the history of man. They know that our species originated in Africa hundreds of thousands of years ago. They recognize that man evolved from lower animals over a period of millions of years. There has been no worldwide flood interfering with human history. Moreover, geologists are unable to find any physical evidence of the kind of worldwide flood spoken about in the Bible.
The story of Noah and the Flood did not originate with the writers of the Hebrew Bible. It was borrowed from ancient Mesopotamian myths that precede the writing of the Bible by thousands of years. The Mesopotamian myths were written about different gods and different people.
The Babylonian Epic of Atrahasis, written over a thousand years before the Hebrew Bible, is an account of a pious hero who is warned by the god Enki to build a great ship and load it with family and selected animals in order to escape the coming deluge. The rains come, and everybody else in the world is drowned. The ship grounds on a mountain in Armenia and the hero releases three birds. The third bird does not return. A sacrifice pleases the god, and the god promises never to send another flood. Sound familiar?
The Sumarian story of Ziusudra, and the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, both written thousands of years before the Bible, have similar stories. In the Babylonian flood myth, the central story is about a fight between the gods Marduk and Tiamat.
Fundamentalist Christians and Jews might argue that the building of the Ark was a miracle and that the whole story must be taken as miraculous. Why then do they expect to find the actual Ark? Surely if it was a miraculous vessel that God created only for that one period of time, it would not still survive today.
Fundamentalist Christians have constructed a “Creation Museum” out near the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport. In order to get there from Dayton the one has to drive over bedrock of Ordovician and Silurian rocks that were deposited between about 435 and 445 million years ago. World geography was quite different then. North America straddled the equator and Ohio was located south of the equator. The Ohio River did not exist. From a geological standpoint, the Ohio River is quite young. It was formed on a piecemeal basis beginning between 2.5 and 3 million years ago from north-flowing rivers dammed by the early ice ages.
In late May, 2009, seventy paleontologists took a break from a conference at the University of Cincinnati and drove over Ordovician bedrock to visit the Creation Museum. I’m sure that they were interested in seeing not only the displays at the museum, but also the living fossils of a species that was thought to have become extinct at the time of the European Enlightenment--the irrational, superstitious, religious believers for whom modern science means nothing. Those believers insist that the earth is 6000 years old. They believe this despite the fact that everybody knows that even Dick Clark is more than 6000 years old.
One display at the museum shows two prehistoric children playing while dinosaurs, which became extinct 63 million years before the human species developed, cavort nearby. The scientists visiting the museum were astonished. "I'm speechless," said Derek E.G. Briggs, director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale; "It's rather scary.” Jerry Lipps, professor of geology, paleontology, and evolution at University of California, Berkeley, said: “It's sort of a monument to scientific illiteracy, isn't it?” Lisa Park, a University of Akron professor of paleontology, who is an elder in the Presbyterian Church, called it "bad science and even worse theology -- and the theology is far more offensive to me."
Leaving aside the geological evidence, it doesn’t seem likely that the earth began 6000 years ago. There was already a flourishing civilization in Egypt over 6000 years ago. British archaeologists have found 30 sites rich in art chiseled into rocks up to 6,000 years ago in the desert east of the Nile. The rock drawings show cattle, boats, ostriches, giraffes, hippos and the men and women who lived in the area in 4,000 BC, long before the first pharaohs or the first pyramids.
“Lucy” was the name given to an early ancestor of the human species discovered by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray in 1974 at Hadar in Ethiopia. Its age is about 3.2 million years. Lucy was an adult female of about 25 years and was assigned to the species “Australopithecus Afarensis.” There have been hundreds of discoveries of pre-human fossils going back millions of years.
Fossils of the now extinct species of human called Neanderthals have been found in various places in Europe and the Middle East. The first proto-Neanderthal traits appeared in Europe as early as 600,000–350,000 years ago. Fossils of our ancestors, Cro-Magnon men, date back 40,000 years. Archaeologists in Oregon have located an ancient trash dump and latrine which was found to contain human DNA linked directly to modern-day Native Americans with Asian roots. The materials found were radiocarbon dated to 14,300 years ago. It is believed that the ancestors of Native Americans came over the land bridge to Alaska around 20,000 years ago. People who believe that the Earth is 6000 years old don’t want to hear about science or truth. They want to live in their own world of nescience.
Wednesday, May 4, 2016
WHY ARE THE VOTERS ANGRY
After winning several states’ primaries on Tuesday March 15, Donald Trump trumpeted, “The people are angry!” Virtually every commentary trying to explain the recent primaries and polls favoring Donald Trump mention that “Voters are angry.” Aren’t you a little sick of hearing about the angry voters? Most of the commentaries on television and in the papers explain that the reason for Trump’s electoral success is that the voters are angry. Do the voters have legitimate reasons for their anger or are Americans simply a bunch of pampered, coddled, spoiled brats who love to whine about their government no matter who’s in charge and no matter how things are going?
If the economy were in distress the voters would have something to be angry about. But when we look at the facts, there is no cause to whine. When elected, President Obama inherited one of the worst recessions in American history. Since 2009 the economy has recovered to the point where unemployment is down from 10% to 5.5%. The federal deficit has shrunk from 12.1% of GDP in 2009 to just 2.4% in 2014. And the US economy grew at 2.4% last year, (including 5% in Q3 of 2014) the highest growth rate since the beginning of The Great Recession. The United States now has the strongest economy in the world.
It is true that not all blue collar workers have fully recovered from the recession. Many are angry because of the damage done to them by that period of lost jobs and lower income. They know that although the economy has rebounded, the real profits are going to the top 1%. But that is not the Democrats’ fault. Yet they seem to blame the Democrats and look to a man who is a personification of the top 1%, Donald Trump.
Are they angry about world affairs? Now that the economy is so good, Republicans have difficulty slamming President Obama over his domestic achievements, so they attack him on foreign policy claiming that he is weak with and obsequious to radical jihadists. Tell it to Osama bin Laden! It is interesting to hear how Republicans waffle about how to handle ISIS. One never hears them say explicitly that we should send an army of “boots on the ground” to the Middle East. Yet despite the president’s campaign of heavy bombing, and despite the fact that ISIS is now administering their shrinking “Islamic State” from the smithereens of their remaining headquarters, the Republicans whine that Obama is doing too little.
The President has many important accomplishments, including a deal that will delay and even cancel Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, a worldwide pact that will significantly reduce global warming, the Affordable Care Act that has provided health insurance for tens of millions of previously uninsured people, and others. So why are the voters angry?
I attribute this anger to the eternal war between blue collar and white collar voters. It is nothing new. By blue collar voters I mean all of those millions of people with low education, low wages or no jobs, small houses or trailers, rough manners, and lower class tastes. Even though white collar liberals have always supported unions, better pay, better hours, and other improvements for blue collar workers, such love has never been reciprocated. Blue collar workers have always resented and envied the better educated, better paid, white collar workers who seem to patronize them. They have always been angry. In the past they supported George Wallace, Lyndon LaRouche, Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, and others. So what’s new?
If the economy were in distress the voters would have something to be angry about. But when we look at the facts, there is no cause to whine. When elected, President Obama inherited one of the worst recessions in American history. Since 2009 the economy has recovered to the point where unemployment is down from 10% to 5.5%. The federal deficit has shrunk from 12.1% of GDP in 2009 to just 2.4% in 2014. And the US economy grew at 2.4% last year, (including 5% in Q3 of 2014) the highest growth rate since the beginning of The Great Recession. The United States now has the strongest economy in the world.
It is true that not all blue collar workers have fully recovered from the recession. Many are angry because of the damage done to them by that period of lost jobs and lower income. They know that although the economy has rebounded, the real profits are going to the top 1%. But that is not the Democrats’ fault. Yet they seem to blame the Democrats and look to a man who is a personification of the top 1%, Donald Trump.
Are they angry about world affairs? Now that the economy is so good, Republicans have difficulty slamming President Obama over his domestic achievements, so they attack him on foreign policy claiming that he is weak with and obsequious to radical jihadists. Tell it to Osama bin Laden! It is interesting to hear how Republicans waffle about how to handle ISIS. One never hears them say explicitly that we should send an army of “boots on the ground” to the Middle East. Yet despite the president’s campaign of heavy bombing, and despite the fact that ISIS is now administering their shrinking “Islamic State” from the smithereens of their remaining headquarters, the Republicans whine that Obama is doing too little.
The President has many important accomplishments, including a deal that will delay and even cancel Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons, a worldwide pact that will significantly reduce global warming, the Affordable Care Act that has provided health insurance for tens of millions of previously uninsured people, and others. So why are the voters angry?
I attribute this anger to the eternal war between blue collar and white collar voters. It is nothing new. By blue collar voters I mean all of those millions of people with low education, low wages or no jobs, small houses or trailers, rough manners, and lower class tastes. Even though white collar liberals have always supported unions, better pay, better hours, and other improvements for blue collar workers, such love has never been reciprocated. Blue collar workers have always resented and envied the better educated, better paid, white collar workers who seem to patronize them. They have always been angry. In the past they supported George Wallace, Lyndon LaRouche, Ron Paul, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, and others. So what’s new?
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