[Michael Cantor]

Anybody who wants to waste more time discussing this with Charlie should keep in mind that he is perfectly willing to believe that the world was formed six thousand years ago, and that all of the science that contradicts that is "speculative fiction". Did I get that right, Charlie?

[Julie Steiner]

Never mind, I'll take it to PM.

[Charlie Southerland]

Michael, I have set a trap and am waiting for someone to step into it.

Now that I've made you aware of the trap, I dare you to spring it. Hint. You won't get out of it.

At any rate, it is irrelevant what I think of Creation or when Creation happened. Another hint. Someone put this universe together.
Do you care who it was?

And even you skeptics and atheists out there, I don't need to believe in Creation or God Almighty to prove I'm right about the Global Warming/climate change religion. Who will come first?

Michael, tell me what year you want to start with past what I've referenced, if you dare.

[Michael Cantor]

Charlie, I don't think you got my message. I'm not going to waste my time discussing religion, or God, or global warming with you, for reasons which are obvious to me, if not to you.

[Shaun J. Russell]

I've read all the posts, yet I still can't see how this got from being a discussion about global warming to a discussion about a God who apparently grew up with the Sumerians.

[W.F. Lantry]

I've been waiting for days, literally days, I tell you, to be able to use this link:

http://blackbag.gawker.com/is-ancien...man-1694539419

"Can you recall your middle-school social studies lessons? How, at some willowy point in your 11th or 12th year, you learned that recorded history begins with the appearance of writing? There were the Mesopotamians with their cuneiform scripts; the Egyptians' hieroglyphs and demotic scrawls; and later, the Greeks and Romans, whose societies form the backbone, for better or worse, of our own—if only because they kept such meticulous records.

We have all sought and found these connections to our past—in museums, in books, in the ground. This is our inheritance. And it is ingrained in us so early, so matter-of-factly, that it permeates most of our existences without demanding critical reflection.

What if it's all bullshit?"

After all, we just take it on faith, because we were taught by somebody, who was taught by somebody, who...

Kasparov buys it, and we all know he's WAY smarter than I am. Everything we know is wrong. Everything! Six thousand years? It's way less than that.

Seriously. Read it. It's worth your time.

Thanks,

Bill

[Edward Zuk]

Originally Posted by W.F. Lantry

I've been waiting for days, literally days, I tell you, to be able to use this link:

http://blackbag.gawker.com/is-ancien...man-1694539419

That article actually brings back many memories for me. When I was an undergrad, I spent a summer on an NSERC grant fixing up the English for some translations that Anatoly Fomenko made of his work.

Just so people know, Fomenko is a giant in mathematics, having proven some of the most important results in modern topology and surfaces (trust me, this is a big deal in mathematics!). I'd say that his intellectual importance dwarfs that of Kasparov. This is not the work of a quack.

I'm delighted to hear that his theories are gaining ground in Russia and a (small) presence on the internet.

[Julie Steiner]

Isaac Newton was not exactly an intellectual lightweight, either, but some of his ideas were reeeeeeeeally out there....

[Brian Allgar]

Originally Posted by Charlie Southerland

Brian,

Rational discourse is a two way street. I used what I know to be recorded history, not speculative fiction. Harrrumph. There is no mantra position here. I was trying to be accurate, not colorful.

Accurate? Well, according to your system of beliefs, six thousand years ago there were only two people alive. Even according to mine, there were approximately seven million. Now there are more than seven billion. That's three and a half billion times your number, and a thousand times mine. So not only were their numbers infinitely fewer, but they lacked all the technological means we have today of pumping filth into the atmosphere and the oceans, notably heavy industry and the internal combustion engine. I'm sure even you can accept the equation: Many more people + fossil fuels + industrial technology = vastly increased pollution.

And by "speculative fiction", I take it you are referring to the entire body of knowledge acquired by archaeology, geography, physics, chemistry, anthropology, biology, botany, astronomy, and other disciplines.

[Stephen Hampton]

Haste, Tiresias; believe, and thou wilt see. Christ, by whom the eyes of the blind recover sight, will shed on thee a light brighter than the sun; night will flee from thee, fire will fear, death will be gone; thou, old man, who saw not Thebes, shalt see the heavens. O truly sacred mysteries! O stainless light! My way is lighted with torches, and I survey the heavens and God; I become holy whilst I am initiated. The Lord is the hierophant, and seals while illuminating him who is initiated, and presents to the Father him who believes, to be kept safe for ever. Such are the reveries of my mysteries. If it is thy wish, be thou also initiated; and thou shall join the choir along with angels around the unbegotten and indestructible and the only true God, the Word of God, raising the hymn with us. — Clement, Exhortation to the Heathen, xii

Content and happy I am, to be among the heathen, to live upon the hinterlands of Edon, Earth. Here there be lions of knowledge, gazelles of intelligence, bulls of information; all these, and much much more, to be realized, and utilized, from the source ---- the Cosmic Codex of Creation.

Sincerly,
Stephen