(March 22, 2013 at 10:41 pm)Minimalist Wrote: To paraphrase Davies....crudely which is what I do best.... Cyrus wanted to avoid a situation where his designated rulers went back and the inhabitants said "who the fuck are you?" So they came complete with this silly doctrine about how they were the rightful rulers who had been promised the land by "god" and were being returned by the great Cyrus to resume their destiny. One imagines that the peasants who had been working for the Babylonian overseers would not really have given two shits about which hand held the whip but might respond better to the illusion of having their own "lost" rulers being restored to them.
That would explain the "prophecy" of Isaiah 44:24-28. You ease our return to our home, we make you divine in our "prophetic" book. Now that's how you exchange political favors!
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
