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TomC

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Posts posted by TomC

  1. I'm not even quite certain what it was that left me feeling let down. A combination of small things, perhaps. The one clear thing I can say about it is that it felt as if there was just too much trying to fit in to far too few pages - even though every individual page was pretty top notch, the next one by narrative necessity had nothing in common with it, and I found that disorienting and off-putting. It felt like reading an Yngwie Malmsteen album.

  2. Company of Heroes. Best RTS I've ever played, in all seriousness. The only drawback is that my own PC's too crap to run it, so I have to rely on friends' machines. But really, so good. No need for C&C outside the realm of nostalgia any more.

     

    I've been playing the shit out of Fable: The Lost Chapters on the Xbox lately - if ever a great game managed to be great while still falling wildly short of its own potential, it's this one.

  3. Hey guys! You can get cocaine for free in Big Brother England!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDJaJ9TDRoc

     

    In the chap's defence, he has Tourette's syndrome.

    Sure, but even allowing for that, I'm pretty sure he's had quite a lot of coke in between shots in that clip. Compare his demeanour as he leaves the main room with the hyperactivity once he's sat down.

     

    Damn, I feel dirty now. I'd actually managed to completely avoid seeing any of Big Brother this year.

  4. Question: why is the universe here and how did it start? If it didn't start, how can you have something with no beginning and no end? I'm not even gonna reach for a Bible on this one, we've entered smoke-up-and-stare-at-the-stars-over-the-campfire territory.

    As well to ask how can you have a spherical surface with no beginning or end - it's a quirk of geometry that the human mind has trouble grasping. The universe is part of space-time, and space-time is also curved, like the surface of the sphere, but with more dimensions. The terms "end" and "beginning" just aren't applicable to it, although there almost certainly is a "place-time" where there is no universe as we know it. Probably an awful lot of them, to be honest.

     

    At least, that's how I see it.

  5. It took half an hour after I read about it this morning before I got a text from a mate saying "Rumour has it Steve Irwin's last words were: "Now I'm gonna stick my thumb right up its butt - that should piss it right off!" "

     

    Dark, tasteless, yes - but my suspicion is, judging by the character that seemed to come through between the lines, so to speak, in his shows, that he'd have found it piss-funny.

     

    Current thinking at the office is that a bunch of crocodiles hired the stingray.

     

    And as others have said, the guy died in quite a nasty fashion, and had family. On that count, it's sad.

     

    On another, it was pretty inevitable that something like it would happen. I'm sure he knew that and had accepted it - else he wouldn't have carried on doing what he did, right?

  6. If you're having trouble with Last, you might like to try pandora.com, which runs in a web browser, so should work on anything. It's not quite the same, but it's in a similar sort of vein - you give it a band or song that you want to hear things like, and it toddles off and finds them for you. Quite often does a good job too, although it does still throw up occasional howlers :)

  7. Interesting assertion, Tom!

    How can it be otherwise? The earliest written record we have of anything is less than 5,000 years old, and the earliest intelligible written language is less than that. We know that civilisation in some form or other has existed for at least twice as long as that - but the only evidence of human thinking from that time that has come down to us is in the form of myths, which are not even genuinely artifacts of the time, but the results of 10,000 years of passing down through the generations, and hence no more than the descendants of that ancient thinking. Nevertheless, they are the best we have to go on, since potsherds, bones and jewellery show us very little in terms of philosophy and psychology.

  8. Fine, but isn't it more illuminating to take a further step back and examine what led the earliest church elders to write their documents and why they wrote them in the way they did?

     

    Sure, but I don't think mythology and history mix well. Witness, for example, the silliness that always results in "The Search for the REAL King Arthur!" But, OT is mostly mythology (but also law, wisdom, poetry, chronicle, history) and NT is mostly history (Gospels + epistles or letters; a collection of primary sources). I mean, how big a gap is there between the last book in the OT and the first in the NT?

     

    Regardless, I find the approach to OT fascinating. It's a Biblical area I could do more of, to tell the truth, my reading on this side of the spine is usual Samuel, Psalms, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes.

    But there comes a point where the hardest historical evidence (as distinct from archaeological evidence) available is mythology.

  9. Wow, Tom, you dropped a bomb in here! Nice. I'm going to RE-read your post in a minute here. Interested in that 101 Myths book - what's the perspective and objective of the book?

     

    Well, as I say, the title would suggest frothy-mouthed "EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG!!!!1!!!"-type populist crap, and that's what I bought it hoping for - but in fact, it's an examination of (less than surprisingly) 101 passages from the Bible and how they have been distorted from their textual and/or mythological origins. It's fascinating, it really is.

     

    As I said earlier, historians are able to place New Testament docs within 70 years of events. Maybe you're talking Old Testament, but the Catholic church includes in its tradition of scholarship the earliest church fathers and the earliest NT documents.

    Fine, but isn't it more illuminating to take a further step back and examine what led the earliest church elders to write their documents and why they wrote them in the way they did?

     

    I'd like to say at the outset that we're into the mythology part which I don't think threatens my faith at all.

     

    Absolutely not. Mythology poses no threat to faith whatsoever. Of course, one can examine the mythology which has led, over the centuries, to one's faith, and with luck, use that examination to find new illumination on or shape to one's faith.

  10. Did Sturlusson's Edda change the mythology at all? I take it Sturlusson was writing in an era far after the age in which people believed in Norse mythology as religion?

    As far as the nuts and bolts of the narratives go, no. The characters still did the same things and acted the same way as the original stories, but were stripped of any supernatural or divine attributes.

    He was writing in the early thirteenth century, so while it was distinctly after the heyday of the Norse religions, it wasn't that much later. Let's not forget that the traditions that he was trying to subvert (for want of a less pejorative word) still go on today in tiny isolated pockets.

     

    Scholars of all stripe, in favor of and against Christianity, use the scholarship of the RC church as a starting point.

    And that, from my standpoint, is an error. If you want to study something seriously, you go as close to first-hand as you can, rather than taking scholarship performed - at the earliest - centuries after the fact, and that undeniably has an agenda of its own.

     

    The Creation story, for example. I wonder why it is told in that specific order? Why did God create such and such on one day and something else on another.

    Well, here's a gigantic kettle of really big fish :)

    The Pentateuch, by general acceptance (of varying degrees - after all, academia never entirely agrees on any one matter) had four prime source documents, which gradually evolved into what we have today, and all of which are lost to us now. They're referred to as "J", "E", "P" and "D".

    "J" was a text which used the name Jahweh for God, and portrays him as distinctly human, interacting with the world, conversing with Adam and Eve, showing emotion and so on. It also lacked any particular focus on exact dates. The best guess is that it originated around about 1000 BC. "J" gave us the second Creation story in chapter 2 of Genesis, which has the story of Adam and Eve.

    "E" uses the name Elohim for God, and probably was derived from a combination of itself in an earlier form and "P", or the "priestly source". God in "E" was similarly human to God in "J", but in "P" was somewhat abstracted from emotion and humanity. "P" also concerned itself largely with rituals, dates, and so forth - it was probably a "Dummies' Guide to Being a High-Priest"!

    "P" may well have arisen as a propaganda defence against "E", when priests from the kingdom of Israel fled into Judah in about 700 BC, and then been combined with "E" at a later date. It was "P" which contained the familiar seven-day Creation, which does not mention Adam and Eve.

    "D" is only evident in Deuteronomy, and is somewhat irrelevant to this discussion.

    Unsurprisingly, this is all very shadowy - but it is backed up by very solid minds used to unravelling the origins of ancient texts.

    Of course, the next question is where these four seed-texts came from - and it seems, to me at any rate, that they are a product of the geosocial interface between very ancient Mesopotamian mythology and equally ancient Egyptian mythology, rather in the way that two separate languages like English and German, can have an intermediate language in the physical gap between their homes - like Dutch.

     

    On the Mesopotamian side of things, there is (or was - I don't know if it's still extant) an Assyrian tablet which dates from about 700 BC and forms part of the epic of Gilgamesh and describes, in almost precisely the same terms as Genesis, the Flood.

    It's polytheistic, which is the main obvious difference, but relates how a man named Utnapishtim was warned by a deity that the gods were angry with mankind, and would erase them with a flood. The deity tells Utnapishtim/Noah to build a huge boat on which to save animals and his family, and concludes with the release of three birds from the ark to find dry land, and the ark running aground on a mountain-top.

    There are differences, of course - the ark isn't the same size as Noah's, it lands on a different mountain, and so forth - but the narrative itself is largely the same.

    There are other Mesopotamian texts telling the same story which pre-date any known Biblical sources too - most interestingly, one from about 2000 BC which places the Flood in the reign of the tenth king of mankind - compare Genesis, which places it in the tenth generation after Adam.

     

    Now, on the Egyptian side of things, we need to go back to the roots of the Pentateuch - the roots of the "J" source seem to be in Heliopolis, which was a very old religious centre in Egypt, devoted largely, as the name suggests, to a solar deity called Atum. As a side note, Heliopolis is where Joseph (of technicolur coat fame)'s wife came from.

    Immediately prior to the Exodus, the Atum cult at Heliopolis was monotheistic. I believe, though I may be misremembering, that this was the monotheism espoused by the pharaoh Akhenaten, whose name cartouche was erased from his monuments after his reign. He caused major political and religious ructions in Egypt, suffice it to say.

    The "P" source is rooted in Thebes, which was effectively the capital of Egypt when the Israelites were living there. It was a polytheistic cult centre, promoting all the standard Egyptian deities, Osiris, Ra and the like.

    As well as Heliopolis and Thebes, Memphis and Hermopolis were major religious centres, and each of the four had its own subtly different version of the Creation myth - but in each one, a single Creator deity initiated the process, raising a mountain from the waters.

    In Heliopolis (pre-monotheism), Atum was the creator, and gave birth to eight elemental pairs of deities; in Memphis, Ptah (a god of craftsmen, bizarrely). In Hermopolis, a group of eight deities gave birth to Re, another solar god, who summoned forth Atum, who in turn initiated creation. Interestingly, as the Hermopolitan myth met the Heliopolitan myth, the story was altered such that these eight deities gave birth to Re/Atum, who then gave birth to them!

    In the Theban story, which arose later than the other three, the primum mobile was Amen - his priests decided that in each of the three other stories, the god/gods concerned were in fact merely different manifestations of Amen. Sounding familiar?

     

    Naturally, the Israelites knew, and were likely raised on, these stories, in much the same way as we as a culture are raised on Brothers Grimm-style fairy tales. Hence, when they left Egypt for Canaan, these were the cultural moulds which they took with them. When the time came for their priests to codify and structure their monotheistic religion (which, personally, I believe they took with them from Akhenaten's solar cult), naturally, they took these basic stories, and did their best to edit them to fit the new religion. The tales were eminently scientific, for their age, and there was certainly no reason to change the essential building blocks of them - in very much the same way as Sturlusson altered the Edda, but didn't change the stories therein.

     

    And here's the interesting bit! The four Egyptian traditions, once they'd been unified by the Theban priests, came to a distinct order for Creation, with Amen first appearing in the form of the Hermopolitan eight, then in the form of Ptah, then Atum, and finally as Re. The Hebrew scribes appear to have examined each of these deities, starting with the eight from Hermopolis, and decided exactly what aspect of nature they represented. Next, they stripped the natural phenomena of any divine trappings, and described Creation in the same order as the Theban Creation myth had it. For example, the Egyptians described a mountain emerging from Nun and Naunet, the waters, and Atum/Re appearing in the form of a flaming serpent - the Biblical version simply has land emerging from water, and light appearing. The land itself is a little unclear in the Egyptian version - it may be that Atum was himself the land. Either way, a divine representation becomes a mundane object.

     

    The waters in question may actually have been the original Hebrew universal flood - but once the Israelite priests were taken by the Babylonians, they encountered the aforementioned Utnapishtim myth. Clearly the same phenomena, but ten generations after Creation, rather than at the beginning! So, they tried to move the Flood in line with the Babylonian version. What's more, these rewritings on the part of the Israelites weren't a concerted effort, but an organic development (probably) - hence, not all the traces of Nun/Naunet were removed (cf. "the spirit of God moved on the face of the waters") - and nor were several other traces of polytheism.

     

    This is only a very shallow examination of the history of the texts. There are quite literally tons of books on the subject - as you might have guessed, I read one very recently, the abysmally-entitled "101 Myths of the Bible" by Gary Greenberg, and I've largely cribbed this summary from that book's introduction. Contrary to the impression given by the title, it's actually a thoroughly fascinating book. I'd highly recommend it as a brief introduction to the subject.

     

    For extra credit, compare the name "Atum" phonetically with the name "Adam"!

  11. Damn, curses and bollocks. I've only just seen this thread, and now don't have time to read it all before work. If only I'd paid more attention when Charlie posted it... so, random thoughts off the top of my head:

     

    Examples of saints whose attached stories predate the Christianising of Britain are thin on the ground off the top of my head, but for an example of the same principle in action, one might consider Sturlusson's prose Edda, wherein the Norse pantheon are downgraded from gods and demigods to saints, heroes and kings, specifically in order to assist in the assimilation of Christian thought into Icelandic religion

     

    Examples of myths absorbed into the old testament - the Flood myth has been well covered and is painfully obvious. At no point was the Earth covered in water for 40 days and nights - at least within humanity's lifespan - so we can safely discard it as a parable rather than historical fact. Further, it pops up in many different traditions all over the world, and especially in the middle east, suggesting a common folk tale of indeterminate origin. There are also a lot of parallels to be found beneath the surfaces of the OT creation myth and various Egyptian ones - likewise Cain and Abel. I forget the finer details right now, and don't have time to track 'em down, unfortunately.

     

    Jesus as a historical figure: fact. There was a guy called Jesus (or Yeshua or something along those lines) wandering around Galilee around about two thousand years ago telling people to be nice and have babies, and he may very well have claimed or been hailed as the Messiah (among various other Messiahs doing the rounds in the same area at the same time). Accepting him as the "son" of god in literal terms is a matter of faith, and I can make no firm judgements on that matter.

     

    The Roman Catholic church has indeed made a millennium-and-a-half-long career of scholarship and academia, but let us not forget that they come from a biased starting-point. It is the intent of those centuries of study to prove that everything they have claimed is in fact true, and thus, we cannot with any certainty accept their conclusions as objective and correct. I have no doubt that, given two days of unfettered access to the Vatican library, I could make a very persuasive case, backed up by textual evidence, for the world having been shat out by the Pandimensional Cosmic Zebra in 1707 AD, but it would not be correct. I hope.

     

    Further to this, the Gospels simply cannot be taken to be accurate primary historical sources. Nobody has ever, as far as I am aware, demonstrated definitively that any of the four were written at the time, and certainly they are not unbiased. We also have no firm idea of what was rejected from inclusion in the Bible - lest we forget, the oldest complete copy of the Bible dates only from the 700s AD. That's an awful long time for errors, misconceptions and outright manipulations of the truth to make their way in to a text.

     

    Anyway, my apologies for the general incoherence of this post - I'm largely spraying brain-offal out of my fingers and all over my keyboard. And now I need a shower.

  12. I'm just winding Tom up.

    Unsuccessfully, I might add :p

     

    You should really go and see Turisas if they pass by your direction. That gig was by a long stretch the best I've been at this year. Like watching the best ceilidh band you've ever heard play smushed together with the best metal band ever (Manowar, obv). I danced. Like a cossack.

  13. Alan Moore, pretty much any artist (except Liefeld, obv).

     

    That's the dream issue anyway. In real terms, I'd be delighted to see Delano return to the fold briefly, though I suspect that's about as likely as Moore.

     

    ...heheheh, "dream issue" :D

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