Zwaarddijk

My favorite this far is the claim that the Nag Hammadi library says Jesus and the disciples were not Jewish. The source for this statement is in a reprint of Notovitch's The Unknown Life of Jesus. The claim itself is in a foreword written by Frank Muccie, the leader(?) of a splinter group from Jehovah's Witnesses. I went and read all the NH books I could find, and there's indications that he is Jewish in there, and none to the contrary as far as I could find.

However, maybe she is misrepresenting Muccie as well; maybe Muccie said he was not (typically) Jewish in doctrine - which wouldn't be much of a surprise, and Acharya quote-mined it as him saying he was not (ethnically) Jewish at all? I have not been able to obtain that particular edition of Notovitch, and will not waste money on it just for the sake of a foreword by a cultist.

I wonder what will happen to my mind from reading all of this bullshit... well, it's an interesting experiment, and I hope I do not turn out like her fans.

spin

One wonders why Herr Muccie ever mentioned Nag Hammadi in the forward of a book written 65 years before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts.

You don't appreciate the beauty of New Age thought (which is certainly beauty in simplicity). So many books are by cultists, they merge and it becomes one soothing melange. There are carpet squares on the floor and a few chairs to sit and read, while there is little space for corridors so the book shelves seem to be bursting. You are greeted by incense as you enter and its such a holistic experience. You sink into an old chair and you meditate on the deeper meaning to things, while in your hands is a reassuring book about antediluvian high technology or alien big brothers guiding your ancestors. Astrology and lost continents become part of your mental space and everything seems so cosmic and simple that modern scholarship and its desires to understand as much of reality as possible just seem so... so inconsequential.

I can imagine that it will have turned into marshmallow, but you're one contrarian soul. I wonder more about all those sad specimens that don't know any better. This stuff is the Mills & Boon or Harlequin books of biblical research: it saps your brain out of your ears.

youngalexander

Ah, that takes me back. Good old Col. Churchward.

Wiki says 1926 for an earlier version of 'Continent' and I have
'The Sacred Symbols of MU' 1933 and
'Cosmic Forces of MU' 1934
in my 1965 Neville Spearman repros. They were fairly expensive for those times @ AU$3.95 :wave:

Robert Tulip

Humans appear to have reached India from Africa about 80,000 years ago, walking around the coast after walking across the Red Sea mouth at Djibouti during a periodic precession-induced low sea level. The first 75,000 years of human life in India is an extremely long period of time of which we now know relatively little.

It seems the great Toba eruption of 74,000 years ago divided the human genome into east and west by dumping its ash from Sumatra on to India, and also proving earlier human settlement of India. Stone tools made by modern humans have been found below the ash layer in India, showing early occupancy, as discussed by Petraglia.

We have no clear evidence of astronomy in India during the paleolithic. However, humans then had brains the same size as now. The absence of lasting remains of early culture gives us little basis to assess the level of intellectual life. But it seems for example to be plausible that Indians had early awareness of precession of the equinox, subsequently lost, in view of the use of the "4320" precessional number in the old myth of the Day of Brahma. Since Zwaarddijk claims to be such a stickler for accuracy, I hope people don't mind me again pointing out his inaccuracy here. Murdock never claimed Polynesian ancestors made voyages of thousands of miles in the Pleistocene, that is just his misreading.

Murdock stated in her 1999 book The Christ Conspiracy, "ancient mariners who journeyed thousands of miles through the open seas, such as the Polynesians, whose long, Pacific voyages have been estimated to have begun at least 30,000 years ago."

Scientists agree with the following. Melanesians made open sea voyages more than 30,000 years ago to colonize islands in New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Descendents of these Melanesian seafarers (likely interbred with new settlers eg from Taiwan) colonized Polynesia from about 4000 years ago.

The debate here turns only on semantics. Polynesians did not settle Polynesia 30,000 years ago, and Murdock never said they did. But their ancestors did make long sea voyages to settle Melanesia at that time, albeit not as long as their more recent settlement voyages. Murdock never to my knowledge states or implies that anyone travelled thousands of miles at sea in the Pleistocene. Zwaarddijk is just wrongly inferring that from her text.

Such reading-in of incorrect assumptions pervades Zwaarddijk's commentary. I discuss this Polynesia example at greater length here.

This is how Zwaarddijk builds his house of cards. He gets a wrong reading into his head, and then no amount of explanation of his misquoting will lead him to stop repeating his silly error. He did just the same thing in misquoting Murdock on the spread of Christmas. It is as if I say "I can walk ten kilometers, but before I could walk I could crawl", and Zwaarddijk says "aha - you claim a baby can crawl ten kilometers!"
I thought she argued Ireland was influenced, not colonized. Buddhist influence on Druidism is plausible. There is considerable evidence of Buddhist missions to Europe in classical times. A Buddhist monk immolated himself in Athens during the reign of Augustus.
http://kwelos.tripod.com/celts/druids.htm argues that the only religion existing to the present day which resembles Druidism is Buddhism, but before accepting that, it is worth reading Roger Pearse's more critical commentary on Origen and Buddhism in Britain.

Zwaarddijk

I see Tulip is hung up on that one specific thing - on which I will not back down. My house of cards is just growing, and in fact the cards are solid concrete by now. It's interesting how he no longer responds to any of the new things I point out, even if they are ten times as damning.

Why does Acharya lie about where Nostraticist scholars consider the urheimat of Nostratic to be?

spin

This stuff is no solace to you, Robert Tulip. You'll notice from the linked article that there is no attempt to identify the hominins responsible for the remains found by Petraglia et al. Here we are told only that the "research agrees with evidence that other human ancestors, such as the Neanderthals in Europe and the small brained Hobbits in Southeastern Asia, continued to survive well after Toba." No human remains were found by Petraglia, just signs of hominin activity.

The first homo sapiens who passed around the subcontinent, descendants of the African M130, never actually set foot on the continent proper, using a coastal zone accessible in a cooler age (the same age naturally enough that made Sunda and Sahul) that is now underwater around India circa 60,000 years ago. These first homo sapiens out of Africa went off to Australia and to Mongolia, Korea, etc. Descendants from this group would after 55,000 years move out into the Pacific.



Petraglia is cited here as supporting a theory involving hominins with a tool production not very much advanced than that of homo heidelbergensis (a precursor to homo sapiens), though he thinks these hominins were "modern". Petraglia & James's report "presents evidence of creativity and culture in India starting about 45,000 years ago. Sophisticated stone blades arrive first, along with rudimentary stone architecture. Beads, red ochre paint, ostrich shell jewelry, and perhaps even shrines to long-lost gods—the hallmarks of an early symbolic culture—appear by 28,500 years ago."

The culture that Petraglia is dealing with emerging in India has nothing to do with the M130 descendants that became the Polynesians (or Indigenous Australians or Mongolians, etc).

tanya

Physical evidence, primarily skeletal remains, reveal that
This is not some kind of religious rubbish, being peddled by the likes of zzwwarrddikk, this is real science, so, spin, if you want to argue with me, GET SOME DATA. Your pretty little maps are lovely, but utterly irrelevant. You need evidence to show that there were no instances of homo sapiens in India, 80,000 years ago. Absent that evidence, I will conclude that to reach "Australia, and to Mongolia, Korea, etc" the earliest tribes would have passed through India, Burma, and China, following the great river basins, to reach Mongolia and Korea.

Stop maligning Acharya, and start producing data.

Better still, focus on the issue, which is not geophysical and anatomical data to support or refute a theory of the true age when emigration from Kenya began (circa 200k years ago), but rather, evidence supporting or refuting a mythical theory of the origins of Christianity, as introduced and elaborated by D. Murdoch. You are inexplicably wasting your enormous talents, attempting to refute a handful of amateur scholars seeking to investigate alternative dimensions to the conventional theory of human evolution. Let them be. They aren't harming your endeavors. FOCUS. Bible. That's the question. And that's your strength. Not India, not Mongolia, not Australia, and certainly not Anatomy. Leave Anatomy to those of us with credentials in that field. Stick with your unparalleled skill in explaining/arguing about ancient documents, not ancient bones.

outhouse

Please let the man have some fun, Im learning from him.

Theres not many to challenge his knowledge or further it here, really. he must be bored at this point with theological debates.



Acharya doesnt even qualify as a amateur scholar does she?


This took 10 seconds.


http://www.merinews.com/article/trac...n/130228.shtml

everybody believed human habitation was found in India as far back as 45,000 - 50,000 years. But recent scientific surveys do not support this belief. According to the Anthropological Survey of India’s latest survey, human habitation was noticed some 10,000 to 24,000 years ago. The first human being had settled in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.




Please provide sources.

Zwaarddijk

tanya,
why do you repeatedly fail to understand that cooking the books is wrong in science?

tanya

Stanyon, Roscoe; Marco Sazzini, Donata Luiselli (2009). "Timing the first human migration into eastern Asia". Journal of Biology 8 (2): 18.

An analysis of Y-chromosome genetic diversity published by Shi et al. [2] in BMC Biology has now clarified migration routes and times of settlement for East Asia, with wide-ranging implications.

I am personally unaware of skeletal evidence for human settlement in Japan, prior to 40k ybp:
Norton, Christopher J.; David R. Braun (2010). Asian Paleoanthropology: From Africa to China and Beyond. Springer. p. 194.