Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Roger Pearse · 11-06-2012, 01:54 AM

tanya · 11-06-2012, 02:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sheshbazzar

'debauched'? 'bad conscience'? 'dealing with the sin' ?

Roger's post is needlessly vile and slanderous.

Hi Shesh, I don't interpret Roger's comment, literally.

In other words, I read Roger's post interpreting it as a bit of tongue in cheek.

Maybe I err.

Perhaps he did intend to communicate the notion that Acharya S, had committed "sin", by writing something which he views as blasphemy, however, I thought, when I read the passage, that he was poking a bit of fun at those of us who take her work too seriously, either, supporters of her work, like me, or antagonists of her work.

I apologize here, Roger, if I misunderstood your intention.

Sometimes, in ordinary conversation, we can use facial expression as a discriminant, but here, on the forum, we are stuck with phonemes. Then, one can perceive, in an instant, why the Chinese method of writing is superior to our own: they think in terms of ideas, not sounds.

Strangely, though, there have been as many violent, bloody, deadly conflicts throughout their long history, as we have in ours.....

In other words, please consider whether it makes more sense to either ignore Roger's post, else, interpret it in the broader context: How will it affect our friend, and fellow forum member, Acharya S? I think, though I surely cannot speak for her, anymore than I could for Roger, that if she were to interpret Roger's post literally, it would be nothing more than water off a duck's feathers, in her opinion.

Perhaps I am wrong....Won't be the first time.

Zwaarddijk · 11-06-2012, 03:50 AM

On a forum, we are not stuck with phonemes. We are stuck with graphemes, which are not at a 1:1 correspondence with phonemes. The Chinese method of writing is neither superior or inferior, it only uses a different mechanism for encoding things. In both cases, ambiguities and unclear intentions muddle the understanding of the intended message. We don't think in terms of sounds, nor is English writing even close to a sound-based writing by now. If that were the case, right, rite, wright and rite would all be spelled identically.

Your reasoning, Tanya, is flawed to the core.

Sheshbazzar · 11-06-2012, 04:48 AM

Quote:

definition of DEBAUCHED

1.
a archaic: to make disloyal

b: to seduce from chastity

2.
a: to lead away from virtue or excellence

b: to corrupt by intemperance or sensuality

Definition of DEBAUCHERY
1.
a: extreme indulgence in sensuality

b: plural: orgies

2. archaic: seduction from virtue or duty

The lady is not present to defend her character. What justifies this slanderous and needless stab in the back?

Is Roger claiming to have been intimately acquainted with Archya's past personal conduct ?

I'm saying these kind of comments regarding a lady not present, with reference to 'arguments mainly based on someone's genitals' are not needed, are vulgar, and extremely ungentlemanly.

But then Roger does claim to be a 'Christian'. Perhaps that explains why he needs to stoop so low.

.

Zwaarddijk · 11-08-2012, 05:28 AM

I see the willingness to defend her work has abated here, I guess that's either a good sign or a sign that some people are sticking their fingers in their ears in the hope of not hearing anything.

Sheshbazzar · 11-08-2012, 06:30 AM

As far as her work, I find it entertaining, and to be very educational, in that her often off the wall speculations generate controversy, and force her detractors to get up off their comfortable ..er..duffs, and actually examine the claims and produce whatever evidence that can refute some of her material.
However, it is noteworthy that they can only go after the weakest of her claims, as a body, it is still evident that she is correct in that much of what christianity consists of certainly was culled from a wide range of older 'pagan' religions and their practices.

I see it as a situation where perhaps only 5% of what Archarya S writes is incontrovertible fact, with the other 95% being nothing more than speculations or in error. And I have no problem at all with that, given that most equally familiar and accepted Christian writings tend to run to being about .005% fact mixed with 99.995% unverifiable religiously motivated horse shit.
That in my view, is sufficient to place her work far and away ahead of any of the christian opposition and of her detractors.

Zwaarddijk · 11-08-2012, 06:53 AM

Tanya,

here is the entire post, SOURCES AND ALL.

http://somerationalism.blogspot.fi/2...nguistics.html

Your denial is getting sillier with every post you make.

Zwaarddijk · 11-08-2012, 07:02 AM

I see Tanya decided to delete her post, which my previous post was in response to.

Quote:

You are perceived as one having difficulty understanding something of forum etiquette.

We don't mind criticism. We welcome it.

However, we have rules (and you may have noted that stephan huller, an admirer of Luis Bunuel's masterpiece Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie, who delights in avoiding questions, offering insults, and contempuous replies to forum posts including sexual innuendo in order to convey his own dislike of both forum conventions and participants), and one of them, is to offer links to relevant texts on the subject under discussion.

You have twice mentioned something about Irish this or that, without however, providing either link to the original text, or to the supposed dictionary which you claim contradicts her writing.

"the supposed dictionary"? Check dil.ie, an etymological dictionary of the Irish language, or MacBain's Old Irish Dictionary, available online at http://www.ceantar.org/Dicts/MB2/index.html

Her claim is as follows, and is one of the bits of evidence she presents - and the only bit that would incontrovertibly support her thesis - that Ireland was colonized by Hindus in early antiquity or earlier.

See the relevant bit of my blog-post, which I will quote here:

Quote:

Further, at least two non-existent Old Irish words are claimed: budh (sun, universe, fire) and krishna (sun). First of all, krishna is not possible as a word in either the orthography of modern or Old Irish - as the letter <k> was not used at all [7]. If Krishna as a word existed in Old Irish, it would be Cris?na - I do not know OI orthography well enough to know how a voiceless postalveolar or palatalized fricative is spelled, except that it isn't <sh>. When it comes to things such as this, it is important to use either a standard transliteration, the native orthography or explain what principles of transliteration are being used in the work. Acharya does not provide anything of the kind in any of the books I have read. This makes debunking or verifying claims of this nature tedious and frustrating.

Straight from her book, we have this little nugget of untruth:
In Old Irish, the word "budh," as in Buddha, means sun, fire and the universe.[1, EttS, a bit after J]
She does provide a source - surprise enough, a non-linguist not knowledgeable about Old Irish whatsoever. The source, Godfrey Higgins, was an 18th and 19th century general esotericist. He provides a source: Vallancey - who has written a grammar of Old Irish, but who seems to have been rather unreliable as to the veracity of any claims he made. My sources on the matter, on the other hand, include actual dictionaries. Since dictionaries are well ordered, I will not provide page numbers for them - the interested debunker-of-debunkage can easily find what he or she is looking for. [8, 9, 10]

As noted, in Greek Krishna is also Christos, and the word "Christ" comes from the Hindi word "Kris," which is a word for the sun, as is evidently "Krishna" in ancient Irish.
She does not provide a source for this. No such word is to be found in any dictionaries. K, as already stated, as a letter, does not occur in Old Irish, so if this word did exist, it would be cris... Sh is not used as a digraph either [7], so the word is twice malformed by Old Irish orthography. We do find griensna or something like that in reconstructed proto-Celtic, but this meant "hot"[11], whereas krishna means "black" in Sanskrit - a thing Acharya herself accepts [12, p. 190]. Nowhere does she mention what transliteration scheme she uses, and I will not search through all potential candidates for what the original form was.
Sun in Old Irish and Modern Irish is a word along the lines of griena.

Finally, Hindi is the name for a language spoken from roughly medieval times onwards, with earlier forms being called by other names[*]. If Hindi "Kris" is the source of Christ, some Hindu has mastered the art of time travel, apparently. It is impossible to guess what languages she claims kris to originate in. A philologist should get these things right when making as outrageous claims as Acharya is, or expect to be taken to task for it.

In addition, this claim is made:
In addition, the Scandinavians purportedly called the sun "John," and in Persian the sun is Jawnah. [1, ETts, a bit after Jonah]
I figure what has happened here is she (or some source) has interpreted a fact - viz. the midsummer eve being called Johanni-afton or somesuch in some dialects as evidence that the sun is called John, and reported this interpretation of facts as fact. That would be deceptive - especially as naming that particular day for John the Baptist is a practice Christianity brought with it. So I will assume what has happened is that she has - again - bad sources. If there is some source for this statement, I do ask that she provide it so the source's quality can be scrutinized. Ancient Scandinavian, for that matter, does not permit "hn" except syllable-initially[*]. Also, I am being a bit lazy with this, but the only words for sun I find in Persian are more along the lines of khorshid. (A friend who speaks Persian natively tells me aftab does not mean sun, but rather something along the lines of light, "the opposite of shade".)

Quote:

So, we have no idea which text of hers you are attempting to refute, nor the method that you have employed to engage her, critically.

You're being precious aren't you.

Quote:

Simply asserting that you and your friend consider her presentation to be incorrect, doesn't cut it on this forum.

I DOCUMENT IT GREAT GODDAMN DETAIL ELSEWHERE, AVAILABLE IN PUBLIC, AND WITH SOURCES. What the fuck else can you ask for?

Quote:

If you found an error in a C program, would it suffice to point that out? No, anyone would then turn to you and ask, if the pointer were misaddressed, how the code should be modified, so that it would point to the correct address.

yada yada blablabla blargh. Stop spewing out stupidity, please.

Quote:

We also demand context. Was her error related to something essential to the thrust of her book as a whole, or was her error based on a misinterpretation of something written in a side note?

Which is why I provide ample quotes of her work in the documentation.

Quote:

I must respectfully disagree with him. I do not find any evidence that you understand forum conventions. We do need links, and data, not simply an outpouring of bile.

I find no evidence that you grasp thinking at all.

Zwaarddijk · 11-08-2012, 07:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sheshbazzar

As far as her work, I find it entertaining, and to be very educational, in that her often off the wall speculations generate controversy, and force her detractors to get up off their comfortable ..er..duffs, and actually examine the claims and produce whatever evidence that can refute some of her material.
However, it is noteworthy that they can only go after the weakest of her claims, as a body, it is still evident that she is correct in that much of what christianity consists of certainly was culled from a wide range of older 'pagan' religions and their practices.

I see it as a situation where perhaps only 5% of what Archarya S writes is incontrovertible fact, with the other 95% being nothing more than speculations or in error. And I have no problem at all with that, given that most equally familiar and accepted Christian writings tend to run to being about .005% fact mixed with 99.995% unverifiable religiously motivated horse shit.
That in my view, is sufficient to place her work far and away ahead of any of the christian opposition and of her detractors.

I will not contest that Christianity very often presents wrongful claims. However, the problem here is that readers of Acharya who swallow her claims in full will learn to think in manners that are unlikely to lead to correct conclusions regarding basically anything - people who believe her will believe that the most fanciful justifications are all that is needed to establish something as fact.

A source were 5% of the claims are fact is still rather bad - even half of the claims being accurate is bad enough, as if we know there's a good chance half the claims in a book are false, we're pretty close to getting very little useful information out of that book. When we get to something like 95% accuracy, that's a reasonable cutoff point. Which is why I believe neither the claims of fanciful speculators like Acharya or religious dogma.

Sheshbazzar · 11-08-2012, 07:57 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zwaarddijk

When we get to something like 95% accuracy, that's a reasonable cutoff point.

When you find whomever it is that you think that it may be that can write with 95% accuracy rate regarding the origins, and the validity of 'Old' and 'New' Testament 'Scriptures', and 'Early christian' writings, Please DO introduce this paragon of knowledge to this Forum.
The only one that I can even imagine having such a repertoire of unquestionably accurate knowledge regarding these texts and true human history would have to be no less and none other than 'the Son of Man' of Scripture himself.
The rest of us, even at our best, in these matters, are by nature virtually ignorant and tend to generally be little more than woefully misinformed braggarts and liars.

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11-06-2012, 01:54 AM	#151
Roger Pearse Veteran Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: N/A Posts: 4,370	<deleted>

11-06-2012, 03:50 AM	#153
Zwaarddijk Regular Member Join Date: Sep 2012 Location: Finland Posts: 314	On a forum, we are not stuck with phonemes. We are stuck with graphemes, which are not at a 1:1 correspondence with phonemes. The Chinese method of writing is neither superior or inferior, it only uses a different mechanism for encoding things. In both cases, ambiguities and unclear intentions muddle the understanding of the intended message. We don't think in terms of sounds, nor is English writing even close to a sound-based writing by now. If that were the case, right, rite, wright and rite would all be spelled identically. Your reasoning, Tanya, is flawed to the core.

11-08-2012, 05:28 AM	#155
Zwaarddijk Regular Member Join Date: Sep 2012 Location: Finland Posts: 314	I see the willingness to defend her work has abated here, I guess that's either a good sign or a sign that some people are sticking their fingers in their ears in the hope of not hearing anything.

11-08-2012, 06:30 AM	#156
Sheshbazzar Veteran Member Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: On the path of knowledge Posts: 8,889	As far as her work, I find it entertaining, and to be very educational, in that her often off the wall speculations generate controversy, and force her detractors to get up off their comfortable ..er..duffs, and actually examine the claims and produce whatever evidence that can refute some of her material. However, it is noteworthy that they can only go after the weakest of her claims, as a body, it is still evident that she is correct in that much of what christianity consists of certainly was culled from a wide range of older 'pagan' religions and their practices. I see it as a situation where perhaps only 5% of what Archarya S writes is incontrovertible fact, with the other 95% being nothing more than speculations or in error. And I have no problem at all with that, given that most equally familiar and accepted Christian writings tend to run to being about .005% fact mixed with 99.995% unverifiable religiously motivated horse shit. That in my view, is sufficient to place her work far and away ahead of any of the christian opposition and of her detractors.

11-08-2012, 06:53 AM	#157
Zwaarddijk Regular Member Join Date: Sep 2012 Location: Finland Posts: 314	Tanya, here is the entire post, SOURCES AND ALL. http://somerationalism.blogspot.fi/2...nguistics.html Your denial is getting sillier with every post you make.

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