spin

Apparently not.

Sheesh. The reason why Polynesia itself was not settled until 4000 years ago is that the navigators had not resolved the distance issue. Please look at a few maps on the distances involved.

Your attempt to justify statements about Polynesia seem to be based on the awareness that there is a problem regarding the statements themselves. You misrepresent them in order to support the proponent. She doesn't talk of ancestors of the Polynesians, but "peoples of Polynesia" with "In fact, the so-called primitive peoples of Polynesia are considered the “greatest navigators in the history of mankind” and successfully colonized a number of Pacific islands as early as 30,000 years ago." Acharya S quotes James Churchwood (the lost continent of Mu man!) about the issue: "The Marquesans and other Polynesians could not possibly have got these traditions from the outside world. The traditions of the Polynesians start from 12,000 years back, and how much more no one can surmise." You might check out where the Marquesas are.

Your approach here seems to me in the main stream of apologists who come here to try to sell their beliefs, ready to fudge them to fit them into acceptability. You don't seem to know anything about the linguistics behind your examples of parallels in names, otherwise you wouldn't so naively present those incoherent things you have on the subject. And dutifully going back to outdated scholars of the 19th century without having first dealt with the contemporary writings in the field that should have developed since their time should tell an independent observer that you are not approaching the material rationally.

You don't go back to Budge when there have been so many discoveries and so much analysis since. You don't go back to James Churchwood when there have been very many modern scholarly works on the prehistory of Pacific settlement. You don't go back to pre-anthropologists like Blavatsky and Kersey Graves when they were fumbling in the dark with only their own imaginations to fill in their ignorance. They were playing without a full deck because so little cultural material had been made available through archaeology. Comparative mythologists such as S.H. Hooke and Joseph Campbell certainly had a bit more evidence at their disposal; because they were scholars they knew the limitations of their data and what they could talk about. Parallels were insufficient grounds for assuming connections: there must be means, opportunity and a coherent body of supporting evidence. Linguistics and anthropology were just stirring in the 19th century and pioneers make uncontrolled errors that their successors must resolve.

Going back to rather old works and ideas without good reason doesn't inspire any uninvolved observer. It should be a warning bell to you that something isn't right. You could fob it off by telling yourself that their ideas were not appreciated or you could wonder why they were left by the way and see what current scholarship says on the issues.

stephan huller

Whenever I see examples of two men fighting the same battle over numerous forums I am always reminded of that Star Trek episode with that culture of black and white people, where the rulers had black on their right side and white on their left and the oppressed had white and black in reverse order from this.



In this case, why isn't this stupid? Why should anyone bother to prove that the idea of a 'truth' that is passed on across cultures and across time is just plain naive? Why should this be taken seriously? Why travel across time and land on the Enterprise and ask the crew to get involved? This is for girls and the Oprah network. This isn't serious enough for this forum.



Women aren't allowed to study the Bible. Didn't you watch Yentl?



Take this girl stuff somewhere else. LOL

Robert Tulip

Spin, in the post you quoted (but the part you omitted), I said "Acharya's statement is factually correct, although perhaps it could have been more clearly worded to forestall malicious misreading." Now you are simply engaged in more malicious misreading, nitpicking to say "She doesn't talk of ancestors of the Polynesians, but "peoples of Polynesia". This is nothing but a small erratum, a true statement that could have been phrased better.

I am well aware of the cultural history around the academic disdain for alternative perspectives on religion. As I mentioned earlier, one good book on academic corruption is Black Athena, by Martin Bernal. He shows how academia has fallen into methodological holes of cultural prejudice, such that it is incapable of engaging with some of the big ideas in the philosophy of religion.

Speaking of Blavatsky, she is obviously full of mistakes, but the problem is that disdain for her mistakes makes people incapable of engaging with her insights. The influence of India and Egypt on ancient religion is something that theosophy has studied in depth, some times accurately, some times not. But when people like you express such intimidatory language about these topics, it is hardly surprising that this material remains marginal to intellectual discussion. That intimidation makes analysis of the natural origins of religious concepts very difficult, especially when Christianity is privileged as a special topic outside normal research methods. So we see that the question of the historical existence of Jesus Christ remains a cultural taboo, as does the whole idea of analysis of the natural origins of religious ideation.

I think Zwaarddijk is providing some useful scrutiny, but he has a tendency to make careless exaggerated statements, for example on Polynesia, Sicily, Christmas, and to ignore the big picture. I haven't been able to find where anyone questioned his credentials, a claim he has now made several times.

This work is not a cult, as Zwaarddijk has asserted. It is a sincere effort to come to grips with the evidence of religious evolution. I do not try to speak for Acharya, but I agree with her that a hidden cosmic framework provides a basis for an elegant and parsimonious scientific explanation of myth. This idea is a basic stumbling block for critics, and needs to be explored in depth.

The examples discussed here are illustrations of the basic astrotheological thesis, and are often based on fragmentary and inconclusive evidence. So it is not a matter of empirically proving for example that Abraham is related to Brahma, but rather of starting from the hypothesis that the myth of Abraham evolved naturally from earlier myths, and looking to find the most plausible pathway.

Zwaarddijk

Where the fuck have I asserted that Acharya's fans form a cult (except in hyperbole)?

Regarding the claims regarding my credentials, see http://www.freeratio.org/showthread....03#post7287503

Regarding Sicily, Robert, you were the one quote-mining. The relevant source - the one you quoted - indicates that Sicily is the island that corresponds to the island of the sun god in the Odyssey; nowhere does it state that Sicily "means" the island of the sun - which is what Acharya claims it does!

How you still have the guts to claim you're in the right regarding Polynesia is beyond me - you must either be unreachable by reason or in denial.

Regarding Christmas, she does indeed misrepresent what her source is saying in a so-called quote-mine. The fact that she later *contradicts herself* on that particular issue does not help her whatsoever, only goes even further to show that her argument is of the kind that stacks the decks such that any factoid can be twisted to fit it - and sometimes she uses both the factoid and its negation as if both were true.

If you cannot learn reading comprehension and how to reason, I find it impossible to

ApostateAbe

I have called Acharya S's circle a cult, and I have likewise been a strong critic.

Zwaarddijk

Ah, what the hell, I might just as well go ahead and say I fully agree explicitly. I do think it has enough traits of cultism to qualify. Especially the intense hatred members show whenever any criticism is aired, and the willingness of members to misinterpret real science as though it meant the same thing as whatever Acharya has said even when it's clear the science says something entirely different.

spin

I appreciate your apologetic zeal, but you are merely doing what we've seen here so frequently, the careful repackaging of errors such that they seem to the apologist to be insignificant. Get real. The Churchwood reference should shake you from your stupor. Step away and look at the stuff with disinvolvement.

The significance of Bernal's work is not so much his thesis, but the criticism of the status quo. It is not particularly helpful for the resurrection of old fallacious theories.

Studying things in depth doesn't in itself validate the conclusions. There has always been an interconnectedness of cultures, especially those engaged in wide area trade. Shrines along trade routes disseminate religious ideas. Egypt's influence was one of conquest and hegemony and it stretched to the Euphrates for a short while, but it was always limited in the north by similar expansion from Mesopotamia, which provided a natural barrier for Egyptian cultural influence. This put the Southern Levant under that influence for over a millennium before Mesopotamian realms ended it.

India influence westward there surely was, but it was necessarily mediated by the cultures it passed through, which picked and chose what they pleased, though we would expect to see traces of what was chosen and passed on.

Read Blavatsky at your own peril... or for your own entertainment.

My heart goes out for you, but you are not dealing with anything that has been said to you, which will be obvious to those on the forum beside yourself. By constructing a complaint about others' language you are merely buffering yourself from confronting the issues presented to you. You are already showing your willingness to manipulate the material you support (as in the case of Polynesia) and now your covering your own rump by deflecting onto other people's language. If language intimidates you, fight back. Defend yourself wielding your winning evidence rather than pleading technicalities.

It seems to me that 1) you are somewhat unaware of the discourse of this forum, which attempts to bring normal research methods to christianity, and 2) you believe you are purveying normal research methods, when you cite antiquated theories from writers of yesteryear rather than those who deal with the materials today with a lot more data and a lot more scholarly analysis preceding them. (This latter point you try to face by rejecting the whole modern discourse through the necessary hectoring of its methods by a few outsiders, some of whom have justification, others not, though the justification does not remove the edifice, but rather polishes it to remove the roughnesses.)

Saying that here just makes you look misguided. A lot of people on this forum question the historical existence of Jesus Christ.

The quest may be noble but the methodology presented reflects an inadequacy that doesn't know how inadequate it is. What is someone going off the grid to talk about say India for, rather than starting with all the local data first? Can you explain, if Abraham is a part of earliest Judaism, why Jacob/Israel gets so much attention or why Jacob is mentioned in the prophets so much more than Abraham? It suggests that Abraham as father of the people is a much later graft into the religious consciousness. We see growth of "early tradition", ie the evolution of Genesis, by its steady development backward in time. Jacob is more strongly a part of Hebrew culture, but the ur-ethnos-rhetoric entailed in Abraham is placed before him, just as the priestly notion entailed in Melchizedek is placed before the standard priestly families of Aaron, marking a change in priestly emphasis. Greek interest in ancestry of the world's people is reflected in the Noah tradition. The more universal wet creation (similar to those one would encounter in Babylon) is placed before the more localized dry creation. There is so much that needs to be understood in the literature and its relationship with the political context in which it flowered. Running off and musing on India before having developed the foundational understanding of the literature and cultural/religious artefacts doesn't seem credible.

I was horrified with your mishmash of name parallels, as it suggested a total lack of methodology. Linguistics and philology are obviously not your fields of expertise and you've shown no inclination to get to know them. What proposed trajectory would you argue links Indian Brahma and Sarasvati with Hebrew Abraham and Sarah? It wasn't astral projection; it didn't just leap from India to the Levant, ignoring everything in between. It's fine and dandy to note the parallels, but you need to provide realistic systems that would make such parallels meaningful. What you've provided thus far doesn't do much justice to either yourself or Acharya S.

Robert Tulip

http://vridar.wordpress.com/2012/11/...mill/#comments "I was accused of fabricating my credentials – credentials I’ve never claimed – so … yeah, it’s a cult alright.
Comment by Miekko — 2012/11/13"
But that just says (from Tanya, who to my knowledge has had no direct contact with Murdock) "Right now, I have my doubts about Miekko's claim to be a linguistics scholar with knowledge of algorithms and logic." It does not accuse you of fabricating credentials.

I am not going to go round in circles again on your efforts to falsely magnify tiny errata to concoct evidence of scholarly failure (unless others ask with specific questions). Your conclusion of pseudoscience does not flow from your evidence of minor errata. From your above cult accusations and wrong statement about fabrication, you have a clear track record of willful distortion.

ApostateAbe

Got you there, Zwaarddijk. Keeping tabs on affronts to Acharya S made outside of this forum.

Robert Tulip, I knew I wasn't the only one who believed that Acharya S's circle is cult-like, and I suggest you take that into consideration. A good exercise for members of cults is to search for disagreeable claims from the leader, confront those claims, and accept them as being disagreeable.

tanya

Hmmm.

strange thinking.

1. I have had no contact with, or knowledge of, anyone on this forum, including Acharya S.

2. I have read almost nothing, and certainly nothing of significance by her.

3. I acknowledge incredible ignorance, almost unfathomable;

4. This thread lacks substance, in my opinion.

With those caveats:
"real science", I have no idea what members of this forum include in the category of "real science".

In my opinion, "real science" affirms that human ancestors separated from non-hominids, roughly 2.5 million years ago.
In technical terms: skeletal remains of the genus Homo have been found with dates established by radiometric analysis (of the volcanic ash encasing the bones), via mass spectrometry. Controversy exists within this field, as with any other--for example, Ardipithecus ramidis was prognathic with a cranial capacity only 20%, yet had skeletal adaptations for bipedalism.

The sapiens species evolved over time, perhaps beginning roughly half a million years ago, so, personally, I am not offended by the minor error in writing Homo sapiens, 2.5 million years, since the Genus Homo was there at that time.