The Paradox of Power....

[Cyberman]

It's not like Marco Polo was exaggerating, either. Oh, except when he was.

But his great love was Catai, as he called China. No kingdom ever had a better PR person. Time and again Polo wrote of Catai's wealth in silk and spices (no exaggeration) and declared that people had "all things in great abundance." So far, so good. But soon he was claiming that Hangzhou had 12,000 bridges arcing over its canals, a ludicrous inflation, even though Hangzhou was the world's largest city at the time; he even accorded the much smaller Suzhou 6,000 bridges. "Take that, Venice!" he seemed to be saying to his canal-rich hometown. (A later traveler could find only 347 bridges in Hangzhou, including those in its suburbs, and just 290 in Suzhou.)

Polo practically bubbled with enthusiasm as he described the palace of Kublai Khan, the Mongol ruler of Catai, in what is today Beijing. (He called the capital Cambaluc, a corruption of its Turkish name, Khanbalikh, "Khan's city.") The palace was "the greatest that ever was seen," with a hall large enough to accommodate 6,000 diners, and was encompassed by a wall four miles around. In some versions of his book, the wall grew even longer, in one case to 32 miles. Mangling his claims according to their own whims, The Description's translators, scribes and finally printers (beginning in 1477) often took his inconstant veracity down a further peg or two.

Whenever Polo mentioned Kublai, he laid it on thick. His hunting retinue, we are told, included 20,000 dog handlers; 10,000 falconers carrying gyrfalcons, peregrines, saker falcons and goshawks (Polo showed himself to be an avid birder); and unstated numbers of lions, leopards and lynxes to go after wild boars and other big animals. Still extolling his overlord—he claimed to have been a trusted servant of Kublai's regime—Polo wrote that the new year was celebrated in Cambaluc with a parade of Kublai's elephants, "which are quite five thousand, all covered with beautiful cloths," and with gifts to the ruler of "more than 100,000 white horses very beautiful and fine."

It's true that Mongol lords reveled in the royal hunt, a huge spectacle, and that they celebrated holidays grandly. And no doubt Kublai, like many Asian potentates, kept stables of elephants as a mark of power—but nothing like 5,000. And historians are confident that he didn't hunt with any 20,000 dog handlers or 10,000 falconers. "The numbers are staggering—they're obviously exaggerated," says Professor Morris Rossabi of the City University of New York, author of the definitive study of Kublai's reign. It is difficult to imagine his people maintaining, for example, a royal herd of 100,000 steeds in the region of Beijing. "People in the north didn't grow enough food to sustain themselves," Rossabi says. "Most of it had to be brought from the south. I can't believe they devoted tremendous amounts of pastureland to having 100,000 horses." Some scribes who copied Polo's text shrank the elephant herd to 500 or omitted it altogether, probably smelling excess, while one version raised it to 105,000.

[Rhondazvous]

Lying and deception from a theist. How completely novel.

Never thought I'd see the day.

[Angrboda]

"What's a cubit?"

[downbeatplumb]

"What's a cubit?"

A three dimensional squarbit. Not really, its a measure used all over the ancient world, about 46 cm.

[Rhondazvous]

I just wanted to address the knucklehead's claim about Noah's Ark.

A wooden ship of those proportions would be unable to survive a catastrophic storm lasting 40 days because of a phenomenon called "hogging". This happens when a ship breasts the waves -- as the ship tops the wave and the wave passes under the hull, the unsupported or less-supported ends, both bow and stern, sag due to gravity. Then as the ship enters the trough the ends regain buoyancy. Given enough repetitions, the ship will end up breaking apart. It wasn't until the advent of metal framework for ships in the mid 19th century that ships larger than about 350' could be built with the expectation of surviving any length of time in stormy seas.

Noah's Ark was reputedly 450' long, about 100' feet past the seaworthy mark. It would have been broken up in such a cataclysmic storm.

That story is simply false, for that reason alone.

That's an interesting point.

And how could such a ship sail in the first place. With the rain constantly coming down. the water would cover it long before there was enough under it to make it float. Maybe it should be called Noah's submarine.

[robvalue]

But if you believe in magic being the glue that holds the story together, everything is possible and nothing needs explaining. Lots of special magic. Lots of pointless tedious backbreaking hundreds of years of work to make a boat not fit for the job, then some lovely magic to make it work anyway.

[Thumpalumpacus]

Here's the thing, Just because we don't understand how something was built doesn't mean it didn't happen. If we had no surviving examples of the pyramids, you'd be hard pressed to prove that they could be build using modern technology, let alone ancient.

Ken Ham apparently does know ... which is why his Ark is nowhere near water.

[Crossless2.0]

The "Was Noah's Ark a True Story" argument is so stupid it's just infuriating to me that the idiots who insist it's true won't just stop and fucking think for a moment.

As many have pointed out both recently and in threads past, the vessel, if it was built, would have broken apart almost instantly in such conditions. It would have been structurally unsound! The story is simply not true!

But what's the point in saying this, since the people who believe this goofy legend collectively know fuck-all about the engineering behind ship design, ship building, sailing, stowage and stability calculations, materials science, or any other field of endeavor that would actually be relevant to the discussion? Present them with facts, and they respond with "magic".

I work as a cargo ship agent. Our company represents owners and charterers for vessels that routinely load cargo that would be comparable in net mass to the cargo Noah supposedly loaded onto his wooden vessel. No one in their right mind would even dream of loading such a large cargo on a wooden ship. That's why we have steel vessels, to handle such size cargoes at sea. That's why chief officers spend painstaking hours putting together their stowage plans and making their stability calculations. That's why representatives from the National Cargo Bureau check and re-check those stability calculations, to ensure that the vessel can safely carry its cargo over the open sea in all types of weather.

I deal with Masters and Chief Officers on a daily basis. These are busy men with real jobs and serious responsibilities. There is no room for error in their business. And if I didn't already know that it would be a complete waste of their valuable time, I'd run past them the "Noah question". But it is a fucking waste of their time, and I'm not going to ask such a stupid question of them. Nor will I waste a moment of an NCB Captain to inquire about what I already know to be true: the Ark would not have been seaworthy in ballast, much less laden with that much biomass.

Huggy and all the rest of you confirmed fantasists, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Period. If you wish to persist in your ridiculous fantasies so you can keep telling yourselves that Genesis is true, knock yourselves out. But you're just a bunch of willfully ignorant clowns, and further "discussion" on this question is nothing more than a waste of our time. Mental masturbation is best kept private.

[drfuzzy]

As long as there is hardship and difficult times for human beings, the less critical, less analytical people will be drawn to religion. It's very likely that the catholic church will last a very long time because of this. However, if everything to do with christianity was destroyed, every bible, every church, every painting etc and all memory of it was wiped from human minds, it would never be rediscovered.

Fabulous 



If christianty didn’t exist
1. No relationship with God
2. No Path to heaven
3. Don’t have a true aim and purpose in life
4. No inner Peace and Joy
5. No Reconcillation
6. No Forgiveness of sins
7. No Freedom
8. Don’t have a healthy body and mind
9. No knowledge,understanding and wisdom about God and Life

Geezer Ebenezer, is that you?  We've had that one copypasted here so many times.  
There is no god.  There is no heaven.  Plenty of opportunities for true aim and purpose and peace and joy and health. 
Just ask the 6 billion people on the earth who aren't xtian.

[brewer]

"What's a cubit?"

Part of a cheer. Cubits, fourbits, sixbits, a dollar. All for Noah stand up and holler!