(July 18, 2023 at 12:30 am)Sicnoo0 Wrote: I think Biglino's translation can be assessed on its own merits. The fact that he likes von Daniken doesn't impact whether or not his translation is accurate

Let's just say that anyone who considers Daniken to be a legit intellectual is probably stupid or a fraud. So all it proves is that the Bible can be interpreted in as many ways as there are people who read it, like if you want to say that god and is an alien then they are aliens. And that's how it goes with the Bible and other texts about gods and supernatural beings - since it is a fairytale and these beings are not explained, they can be anything. Just take the star of Bethlehem - so far people have claimed it to be Hailey comet, an alien spaceship, special conjunction of planets, Krishna, and so on, and none of these explanations are wrong because the star of Bethlehem is a magical thing and thus can be anything or nothing at all.

Yeah, people often do things that are at odds with their own best interests when they go down the rabbit hole.

The general idea that old magic book describes angels or divine beings using flying machines..well, sure, it's not even that controversial. The vatican isn't going to fire anyone for reading ezekiel...and it gets pretty explicit. This is something that alot of people used to believe. That the gods had or used or were amazing things.

(July 17, 2023 at 11:52 pm)Sicnoo0 Wrote: Mauro Biglino has made the claim that anyone who understands the Hebrew in the Torah would have to agree with his translation. Pretty strong claim

That claim is all practical purposes as good as a stamped certificate of blustering fraudulence,     People who understands the Hebrew in the Torah are not far in between.    If what he said was true he should have no trouble citing the actual agreement from some actual scholars of the Hebrew in the Torah who may have, say, an academic reputation in the field?    And he might publish the favorable result of a poll?

(July 18, 2023 at 12:24 am)Sicnoo0 Wrote: Biglino understands the Torah as a whole, not me. All I'm saying is that a holistic and thorough understanding of the Torah as a whole might be necessary to debunk Biglino.

But maybe not. Maybe we can pull out google translate and start translating some Hebrew and see that his claim (that any Hebrew speaker would agree with him) is not on firm ground

I married into a family who have 'a holistic and thorough understanding of the Torah as a whole'.  The topic of ancient aliens has never come up.

Biglino describes himself as a successor to von Daniken and Sitchin. That's enough for me to dismiss him out of hand.

Boru

Did a cursory google crawl on the guy..and it looks to me like he follows the same basic formula as the other ancient aliens nuts. Find some obscure and cool facts that might be pretty well known to academia but not to the average joe, and spin a wondrous tale of conspiracy and aliens based on them. I think his storyline is helped along by the reluctance of the abrahamics to publicly acknowledge the plain fact of their polytheistic origins, and the disparity between how the originating culture thought about god and how their contemporary (ideological) descendants think about god. It's not that his translations are bad, his talent in that regard is pretty widely acknowledged...it's that his good translations really do paint a picture that rubs up against common belief and the long maintained official line of religious authorities - even if they don't really nail the alien landing.

I'd summarize it as one grifter grifting off the holes in another grifters grift.

(July 18, 2023 at 12:30 am)Sicnoo0 Wrote:

(July 18, 2023 at 12:24 am)Fake Messiah Wrote: So you consider Daniken to be a fraud but you think Mauro Biglino is legit although he declared that his ideas are mostly based on the literary works of Daniken.

I'll happily denounce whatever he's gotten from von Daniken. I didn't know that Daniken spoke Hebrew and ghostwrote The Naked Bible
I think Biglino's translation can be assessed on its own merits. The fact that he likes von Daniken doesn't impact whether or not his translation is accurate

But it does impact his interpretation of that translation.

Boru

(July 18, 2023 at 12:50 am)Sicnoo0 Wrote: Although we can't take a look at the Hebrew over yonder at the Vatican, I don't see any reason as to why the Church would've wanted Biglino to come out with his translation. The Church fired him as soon as they caught wind of it. The guy was willing to lose his job in order to come out with his controversial translation. He knew the Church wouldn't like his work.

How true is this story though? I don't see any source that I would consider to be neutral that confirms he was indeed a former translator for the Vatican.

Not that it matters anyway if this was true, since whatever his motivations were, his ideas about what the Bible is about sound quite ridiculous (from what I've checked so far) and not in line with what we hear/read from actual Bible experts.

I don't like ancient alien theories, they just take away from the awesome and insane accomplishments of early humans.

But aliens in *modern* times I'm a little more open to...

So far we've had nothing but stupid aliens.

(July 18, 2023 at 3:11 pm)Aegon Wrote: I don't like ancient alien theories, they just take away from the awesome and insane accomplishments of early humans.

But aliens in *modern* times I'm a little more open to...

What are the odds that the first ever appearance of aliens on Earth happened these past few millennia as opposed to having happened in one of the previous millennia?

Then again, maybe they've only been interested in Earth for as long as we've had nukes