Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Zwaarddijk · 11-28-2012, 12:48 PM

So, do you think these successes will convince modern-day Theosophy fans?

spin · 11-28-2012, 08:04 PM

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Originally Posted by Zwaarddijk

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Originally Posted by spin

I'm puzzled. Beside the fact that the source seems to me--regarding quality--on a par with Velikosvskii and von Daniken so I don't see any value in pursuing it, why are we dealing with Nostratic at all for the origins of christianity which surely only emerge in the last few centuries before the change of the era?

Not only is Acharya's theory a mythicist theory of Jesus - I would say that's the least of the major claims she's making; she also claims that
- homo sapiens has been around for at least 2.8 million years
- there have been at least one great high-culture which has done works *around the world* in times we would consider prehistoric
- this culture was the culture of African Pygmies

- Ireland has been colonized by Hindus or Buddhists during antiquity
- Indian civilization is at least 100 000 years old
- the Indo-European theories that posit an Indo-European invasion of India from the North is a colonialist ploy made up by European thinkers who couldn't accept the idea of civilization having apepared in India without European contributions

This is but a sample of her claims.

Approaching the other two for silliness! And Mr Tulip adheres to this without having the philological, historical or anthropological expertise to evaluate the material? Hmm, if he likes leaps like the above, I can sell him a bridge that leaps the Pacific.

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Originally Posted by Zwaarddijk

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Hey! When one doesn't know what they are talking about, they have to go somewhere. Stop being such a spoilsport. Is it all any worse than Allegro's mushroom stuff? Thinking about it, Allegro was pretty damned entertaining.

Haven't actually read Allegro, but I have a hard time imagining he'd be any worse than Acharya is.

Allegro was a highly trained text scholar with a strong foundation in the Semitic languages as well as the necessary training in Greek and Latin. I've never been able to tell if he believed the mushroom rubbish, but it was certainly had the appearance of seriousness with oodles of Semitic examples for his claim that a mushroom cultus lay behind the christian religion. He'd put most to shame for being able to put the air of scholarliness on a load of unmitigated crap.

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Originally Posted by Zwaarddijk

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Originally Posted by Zwaarddijk

You know, at times I am actually happily surprised by her getting a thing right. However, at that point I've probably done interlibrary loans and read in excess of 200 pages for that particular claim, so there's that side to it as well. If you have been reading my blog recently, you will see I do point out that parts of her argument are reasonable - the sources for the historical Jesus are indeed weaker than most RE teachers and such will admit even if they're atheists or agnostics.

U got nothin better 2 do.

My foot's been hurting at random times - and a rather intense pain at that - so I can't dance as actively as I used to any more. I have to do something with the time that went into that (about 10 hours a week); in addition, the course load at uni right now is light, and I am only doing a part-time job.

Let's hope your foot gets better, pronto.

Robert Tulip · 11-28-2012, 09:53 PM

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Originally Posted by lpetrich

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Originally Posted by Robert Tulip

It was the ancestors of the Polynesians, not the Polynesians themselves, who made open sea voyages 30,000 years ago.

What gives you that idea? Where's the evidence?

This is something I have already been through at some length with Zwaarddijk. Archaeological evidence indicates that humans traversed the open ocean to reach islands in Melanesia in Paleolithic times, for example the Solomon Islands, although the settlement of Polynesia - by the descendents of these early ocean crossers - was not until about 4000 years ago. http://arf.berkeley.edu/projects/oal...pacislands.htm states "Late Pleistocene sites in the Admiralty Islands, New Ireland, and Buka (Solomons), all would have required open ocean transport, suggesting the presence of some form of watercraft (possibly rafts, bark boats, or dugouts) (Irwin 1992)." Zwaarddijk's denial of this point was his initial reason for asserting that Acharya S is guilty of pseudoscience.

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The basic hypothesis of Christ as the sun inspires Acharya’s use of nineteenth century sources, looking back to a time when scholars had an open mind to exploring the relations between Christian origins and the surrounding culture.

Those are NOT primary sources, or even good secondary sources. Shoddy "research" is shoddy "research", and no amount of whining about the orthodox being oxen will change that.

Assessing whether material is shoddy is contested. Just because some theosophists engage in baseless speculation does not invalidate all the work of nineteenth century astrotheologists. Intellectual history has fashions and prejudices. The current prejudice against astrotheology leads to an unfair disparagement of much scholarship.

spin · 11-28-2012, 10:41 PM

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Originally Posted by Robert Tulip

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Originally Posted by lpetrich

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Originally Posted by Robert Tulip

It was the ancestors of the Polynesians, not the Polynesians themselves, who made open sea voyages 30,000 years ago.

What gives you that idea? Where's the evidence?

This is something I have already been through at some length with Zwaarddijk. Archaeological evidence indicates that humans traversed the open ocean to reach islands in Melanesia in Paleolithic times, for example the Solomon Islands, although the settlement of Polynesia - by the descendents of these early ocean crossers - was not until about 4000 years ago. http://arf.berkeley.edu/projects/oal...pacislands.htm states "Late Pleistocene sites in the Admiralty Islands, New Ireland, and Buka (Solomons), all would have required open ocean transport, suggesting the presence of some form of watercraft (possibly rafts, bark boats, or dugouts) (Irwin 1992)." Zwaarddijk's denial of this point was his initial reason for asserting that Acharya S is guilty of pseudoscience.

You are not being attentive. The discourse centers around Polynesia, not Melanesia. Your examples which are correct do not regard Polynesia, which was indeed colonized basically as Zwaaddijk indicates. Read the three pages of the google book The Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation of the Pacific (you seem to be indirectly working from by Geoffrey Irwin, CUP, 1994) starting here, if necessary. Many sources are available on the issue, including the link you supplied which goes on to confirm the issue.

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Originally Posted by Robert Tulip

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The basic hypothesis of Christ as the sun inspires Acharya’s use of nineteenth century sources, looking back to a time when scholars had an open mind to exploring the relations between Christian origins and the surrounding culture.

Those are NOT primary sources, or even good secondary sources. Shoddy "research" is shoddy "research", and no amount of whining about the orthodox being oxen will change that.

Assessing whether material is shoddy is contested. Just because some theosophists engage in baseless speculation does not invalidate all the work of nineteenth century astrotheologists. Intellectual history has fashions and prejudices. The current prejudice against astrotheology leads to an unfair disparagement of much scholarship.

History is in continual reassessment and development, with a few non-historically motivated exceptions, such as examples that regard religious or nationalist areas of interest. If history from the 19th c. doesn't get referred to and/or developed it usually means that it has been abandoned as non-functional. When a non-historian goes back to an area abandoned since the 19th c. it usually means that they are not historically motivated.

Zwaarddijk · 11-29-2012, 03:17 AM

A thing that does impress me is Robert Tulip's ability to (selectively?) mix terrible reading comprehension with what at first sight does look a lot like eloquence, and then accuse others of the flaw of terrible reading comprehension while practicing the very same flaw.

Of course, this inability to actually get what a text says seems to be fairly common among Acharya's fans, see for instance FreeThinkaLuva's defense of Acharya's contention that the African pygmies are Caucasians:

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Originally Posted by Freethinkaluva22

We know you're on an ad-hom smear campaign, because in this thread on rationalskepticism.org, you try to defame Acharya as a racist:

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Originally Posted by Seirios/Miekko/Zwaarddijk

Hrm, it seems Acharya S thinks the pygmy people had a worldwide civilization in several thousand BCE. But it turns out she doesn't even stop there. She thinks ... get this ... that the pygmy people are actually caucasian. Is there some weird racism here that I don't get? If a culture had a worldwide (imaginary) civilization, they can't be real africans, they have to be caucasians?

She actually argues for this in a book that mainly tries to explain why Jesus didn't exist - The Christ Conspiracy.

If that kind of bullshit is permissible, .... what the hell else goes? FACT CHECKING ANYONE?

What you didn't include in your despicable attempt at defamation here is the CONTEXT. On p. 389 in Christ Con, Acharya writes:

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The Pygmies represent an anthropological enigma, however, as they have been described as both negroid and caucasoid.

She mentions both NEGROID and CAUCASOID - just discussing races makes someone a racist now? All those anthropologists are all racists? Then she quotes Barbara G. Walker:

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...pygmies are caucasoid people: thin-lipped, light-skinned, often blue-eyed. Anthropological investigations show the pygmies were not true primitives but remnants of a formerly sophisticated race, the proto-Berber people inhabiting what Hallet called "old white Africa." Pygmies have about the same stature as Egyptian mummies; the ancient Egyptians were not large people.... Not only are pygmy myths and deities derived from those of ancient world, but their traditional stories plainly speak of the time when their ancestors lived in a high state of civilization, in great cities, with wonderful tools to use, and skills that enabled them to work miracles.

So, Acharya's quoting Barbara Walker, and somehow you've turned that all into a racist hatefest. Walker in turn is quoting the work of Belgium anthropologist Dr. Jean-Pierre Hallet, who wrote Pygmy Kitabu, which Acharya has reviewed and quoted at the link there. Hallet lived off and on with the Pygmies in the Congo for something like 30 years and proved that the Pygmies were an intelligent, civilized people who themselves told those stories.

After she quoted Walker on p. 389, Acharya says:

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In the Pygmies can be found not only very ancient origins of human culture and religion but evidently a "missing link" between the black and white races as well. It should be noted that this extraordinary people is now in danger of becoming extinct.

That was in 1999 at the latest - I think she completed the book in 1998. Since then, anthropologists now say that the "Genetic Eve" who was the source of all races outside of Africa and most inside of it, was in South Africa, among the San people. That's not very far from the Congo, and the San people aren't very different from Pygmies. So, nothing she's said here is wrong. In fact, she apparently got the science right before it became popularized. So, who's full of "bullshit?" YOU.

It's obvious you're looking for some insidious motive behind her work that just isn't there but that you will find by misrepresenting her work and taking things out of context. You are also an incompetent researcher and not qualified to judge the accuracy of her work. I'm having to wonder if your motivation is just more of the same misogyny we've seen elsewhere.

It's clear you're not interested in the facts, not interested in a civil discussion and are just posting across the internet just to trash her character because you don't like her conclusions. So, I have to ask, are you a Christian apologist, because you certainly sound like one? Or just another nasty militant atheist?

I don't even know where to start if I were to respond to this, the amount of pure misunderstanding in Freethinkaluva's post is staggering enough to put me off the entire idea of ever communicating with this person ever again.

I would actually claim that Acharya's works foster and reinforce scientific illiteracy.

Robert Tulip · 11-29-2012, 03:40 AM

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Originally Posted by spin

You are not being attentive. The discourse centers around Polynesia, not Melanesia.

I know perfectly well what is going on here. Zwaarddijk and I debated this Polynesia issue at other websites. Zwaarddijk's prime initial exhibit for why Acharya is supposedly guilty of pseudoscience was her reference to "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." Polynesia itself was not settled until 4000 years ago, but the ancestors of the Polynesians undertook long sea voyages to settle Melanesia more than 30,000 years ago. Acharya's statement is factually correct, although perhaps it could have been more clearly worded to forestall malicious misreading. There is no basis for Zwaarddijk's accusation of pseudoscience.

Robert Tulip · 11-29-2012, 04:17 AM

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Originally Posted by lpetrich

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As Acharya has shown, the Egyptian term ‘krst’ was used to mean to anoint a mummy, suggesting a link with the concept of Christing as anointing.

What's her evidence?

http://freethoughtnation.com/forums/...hp?f=20&t=4167 cites evidence from Budge and Champollion.

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The Vedic Sky God Dyaus Pita is etymologically linked to Zeus Patera, Jupiter and Deus Pater,

Do you know *how* they are linked? Describe it to us without referring to anything in Acharya S's works.

Jupiter c.1200, "supreme deity of the ancient Romans," from L. Iupeter, from PIE *dyeu-peter- "god-father" (originally vocative, "the name naturally occurring most frequently in invocations" [Tucker]), from *deiw-os "god" (see Zeus) + peter "father" in the sense of "male head of a household" (see father). Cf. Gk. Zeu pater, vocative of Zeus pater "Father Zeus;" Skt. Dyauspita "heavenly father."
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=Jupiter

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and the Abraham-Sarah-Haggai triad appears to reflect the movement of the Brahmans from the Sarasvati and Ghaggar Rivers following the earthquake that redirected these rivers in about 1900 BC.

WHAT earthquake? Where's the geological evidence? Yes, geological evidence. Seems to me that this Abraham-Brahma bit is a coincidence.
Abraham - from Hebrew - "father of many" Brahma / Brahman - likely cognate with Latin flâmen, a kind of priest

Abraham and Sarah are very obviously evolved from Brahma and Saraswati. The similarity of their names is a first clue. Then we have the fact that both pairs are both married and blood relatives, with Sarah Abraham's half sister (Genesis 20:12) and Saraswati variously Brahma's daughter or sister.

The Saraswati River was one of the main rivers discussed in the Vedas. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarasva...Identification explains that the river disappearance is estimated to have occurred in 1900 BC, and http://www.omilosmeleton.gr/pdf/en/i...ajor_River.pdf provides an interesting discussion of the science.

My view is that the most probable origin of the Abrahamic religion was out of a migration of the people from the Saraswati River following its collapse.

Zwaarddijk · 11-29-2012, 04:46 AM

Robert,
do you genuinely think the Polynesia thing is the reason why I decided to call her work pseudoscience? If so, please fucking think a bit.

I decided to do so once having read through all of the Christ Conspiracy, and based on any number of misconceptions I found in it. I am working slowly to document and substantiate my opinion of the work, there's just so much bullshit in it that no matter what thing I start looking into, there seems to be no end to the chain of n:th hand references, quote-mines, misrepresentation etc. Every time I reread a chapter new things jump out at me.

But yeah, go on and cling to your pseudoscience guru. I bet she loves the adoration you give her.

lpetrich · 11-29-2012, 10:47 AM

No idea, but I like to try to set the record straight, to keep errors from going unchallenged. I know that this seems like the SIWOTI syndrome, but I can't help it.

Here are some source materials for testing how well comparative-linguistic methods can work:
Numbers in Over 5000 Languages from 1 to 10, like Indo-European Languages
Appendix:Swadesh lists - Wiktionary, like Appendix:Proto-Indo-European Swadesh list - Wiktionary

Ideally, one might want to automate the comparisons, but there's a problem: how to encode "phonetic distance" as it might be called. /t/ is close to /d/ but not very close to /m/, for instance. I recall a paper from somewhere that handled this issue by looking only at initial sounds, and coding them into a few articulation-point types: T, P, K, S, H (h-like, vowels), etc.

But once one gets a good coding and comparison system going, one has the ideal sort of test. Compare a list with both itself and a scrambled version of itself. It ought to be much closer to itself than to any of its scrambled versions. Likewise for comparisons between lists.

Zwaarddijk · 11-29-2012, 12:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lpetrich

No idea, but I like to try to set the record straight, to keep errors from going unchallenged. I know that this seems like the SIWOTI syndrome, but I can't help it.

Here are some source materials for testing how well comparative-linguistic methods can work:
Numbers in Over 5000 Languages from 1 to 10, like Indo-European Languages
Appendix:Swadesh lists - Wiktionary, like Appendix:Proto-Indo-European Swadesh list - Wiktionary

Ideally, one might want to automate the comparisons, but there's a problem: how to encode "phonetic distance" as it might be called. /t/ is close to /d/ but not very close to /m/, for instance. I recall a paper from somewhere that handled this issue by looking only at initial sounds, and coding them into a few articulation-point types: T, P, K, S, H (h-like, vowels), etc.

But once one gets a good coding and comparison system going, one has the ideal sort of test. Compare a list with both itself and a scrambled version of itself. It ought to be much closer to itself than to any of its scrambled versions. Likewise for comparisons between lists.

I somewhat suffer from the same SIWOTI syndrome, but this is even worse as this isn't just OTI, but IN PRINT. I have considered writing a short review of some Deepak Chopra book as well, and I'll most definitely debunk this piece of crap at some point: http://www.merliannews.com/artman/pu...icle_415.shtml

Seriously though, people who understand why this kind of shit is mistaken should speak out at least sufficiently to give those who want to know the chance of learning how to use reason and fact-checking.

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11-28-2012, 12:48 PM	#241
Zwaarddijk Regular Member Join Date: Sep 2012 Location: Finland Posts: 314	So, do you think these successes will convince modern-day Theosophy fans?

11-29-2012, 04:46 AM	#248
Zwaarddijk Regular Member Join Date: Sep 2012 Location: Finland Posts: 314	Robert, do you genuinely think the Polynesia thing is the reason why I decided to call her work pseudoscience? If so, please fucking think a bit. I decided to do so once having read through all of the Christ Conspiracy, and based on any number of misconceptions I found in it. I am working slowly to document and substantiate my opinion of the work, there's just so much bullshit in it that no matter what thing I start looking into, there seems to be no end to the chain of n:th hand references, quote-mines, misrepresentation etc. Every time I reread a chapter new things jump out at me. But yeah, go on and cling to your pseudoscience guru. I bet she loves the adoration you give her.

11-29-2012, 10:47 AM	#249
lpetrich Contributor Join Date: Jul 2000 Location: Lebanon, OR, USA Posts: 16,829	No idea, but I like to try to set the record straight, to keep errors from going unchallenged. I know that this seems like the SIWOTI syndrome, but I can't help it. Here are some source materials for testing how well comparative-linguistic methods can work: Numbers in Over 5000 Languages from 1 to 10, like Indo-European Languages Appendix:Swadesh lists - Wiktionary, like Appendix:Proto-Indo-European Swadesh list - Wiktionary Ideally, one might want to automate the comparisons, but there's a problem: how to encode "phonetic distance" as it might be called. /t/ is close to /d/ but not very close to /m/, for instance. I recall a paper from somewhere that handled this issue by looking only at initial sounds, and coding them into a few articulation-point types: T, P, K, S, H (h-like, vowels), etc. But once one gets a good coding and comparison system going, one has the ideal sort of test. Compare a list with both itself and a scrambled version of itself. It ought to be much closer to itself than to any of its scrambled versions. Likewise for comparisons between lists.

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