religion, Rod Fleming's World, Page 4

21/10/2023

Time travel and the cutting edge of Creation.

Originally posted 2020-05-17 12:46:27.

Time travel has fascinated us for over a century, leading to all sorts of speculation about it.

HG Wells wrote perhaps the first of the many books about this and, of course, the beloved Doctor Who is dependent on time travel.

Time Travel and Space

Wells’ vision, however entertaining, overlooked one major problem with time travel: even if you could move to a different when, establishing where that would be is staggeringly complex. The Earth is not stationary, indeed nothing in the Universe is. You would need to calculate precisely where in space you wanted to be at the time you wanted to be there. Suppose you just want to go back a week. It’s not just a matter of going back a week where you are now, because last week, where you are now was 11.25 million miles away.

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21/10/2023

Who we are 2: Cooking, Chattering and Time

Originally posted 2020-04-23 17:59:17.

Cooking is now seen as the definitive characteristic of modern humans, from which all others followed. It seems to have directly led to the development of tools, especially blade design, but it had many other consequences.

Cooking, particularly of meats and fats but also starches, partially pre-digests the food, making more energy available to us and allowing us to use less to digest it. We put this extra energy into growing brains. Growing big brains burns many calories and just running them consumes a significant part of our daily food intake. We know that the physical structures which allow us to speak were evolving at the same time as our brains were growing larger. Speech allowed more complex and efficient communication and cooperation. This encouraged conceptual thinking and other intellectual skills, again leading to the development of bigger brains.

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21/10/2023

Who We Are 1: the beginning of culture

Originally posted 2020-04-20 16:46:22.

Modern humans first appeared in Africa around 150,000 – 180,000 years ago; one of a closely-related group of hominids that had populated the savannah over the preceding three million years. During that time, our ancestors learned how to talk, how to make fire and cook and how to cooperate in groups. We probably lived in a similar way to earlier hominids, but something extraordinary happened: we developed culture.

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15/10/2023

Unlimited sex: the foundation of Islam

Originally posted 2022-09-13 11:30:31.

Unlimited sex after death is the foundation of Islam.

To understand this you need to know something about the origin of Islam. It was, certainly, based on the delusions of an ambitious, illiterate camel-trader, but it appeared in a culture that was entirely Goddess-worshipping. When Mohamed rails against ‘the polytheists’, he specifically means these worshippers; so his cult is completely misogynistic.

The Goddess in this case was triple, Al-Uzza, Al-Lat and Menat. Their followers were Mohamed’s sworn enemies and so, unsurprisingly, he wrote out every possible element of femininity in his proto-cult and turned it into one of warfare, killing and misogyny It was fuelled by his promise of unlimited sex after death.

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29/08/2023

Inanna and Jesus: a tale of syncretisation

Originally posted 2018-09-20 06:25:57.

In an oral culture — one that is not written down — mythology evolves as it is passed from storyteller to storyteller. The Jesus myth was created in exactly this way, pasted together from earlier sources. This process is called ‘syncretisation.’

There is no fixed record of an oral tradition, by definition. In an oral culture or tradition, myths grow and develop to reflect the lived experiences and cultures of the people telling them. It was only when writing was invented that these traditions could be codified and by that time, they had been evolving for thousands of years. This means that there are many versions of the same myth, as different peoples carried it forward.

So we cannot say that, because detail differences exist between two similar myths, they are different or have different origins.