Agnostic Atheism? Your opinions thread's landfill

[dtango]

We contend that myths are the product of imagination because thats where evidence leads us. We do have myths that might have some basis in some event. The particulars of the event being lost to time, but more so being lost to the myth itself. I'm not arguing that this cannot be the case, because we do see evidence for this sort of thing. I'm arguing against your interpretation of all cultures myths based off of your interpretation of an egyptian funerary text.

The Egyptian texts provide the details of the story that mythology has to say.
Whether my interpretation is correct or not is not so important as the fact that the… Academia, as you call it, is unable to provide an explanation for unexplained human behavior such as deforming artificially the skulls of the infants all over the world.
The excuses given are ridiculous as ridiculous are the excuses given for the killing of the firstborn or amputating infants in order to purify them.

The Absarkoes (Sparrow Hawk), a Plains Indians group wrongly called the Crows, have many versions of a creation myth that features the familiar Old Man Coyote, the trickster-creator.
[…]
Then Little Coyote did something bad. He suggested to Old Man that he give the people different languages so they would misunderstand each other and use their weapons in wars. (David and Margaret Leeming, “A Dictionary of Creation Myths,” Oxford University Press, p.64)

The Pomo Indians of California say the creator was Old Man Madumba.
[…]
After a time he was amazed to learn in his dream that these people, too, were all wrong. Kuku advised Madumba to destroy these people with wind, which he did. Only the ground squirrel escaped in his hole.
Madumba made new people out of willow wands. This time he made many groups that spoke different languages.(ibid p.230)

A magic creation chant of one group of Eskimos:

In the very earliest time,
When both people and animals lived on earth,
A person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
And sometimes animal
And there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.(ibid p.88)

The Mayas say that when the people left Tulan with their gods, they did not speak one language any more but many.

And the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. (Gen. 11:1).

I'm beyond skeptical about the certainty you feel you have demonstrated regarding the subject and I'm to the point of calling you a fanatic, and your theory fantasy.

The difference between my fanatism and yours is that mine is based on… common sense!
It was not the Christians that told the Indians about the mother language because the Christians believe that the God tried to destroy humanity once, with the flood, not many times as the Indians say.
Your answer to this… extra coincidence is that men think in the same way and they produce the same fantasies everywhere.
The Egyptians say that the gods, there in the famous Near East, were killing those who did not know how to speak the gods’ language and so all of them were speaking one language.

Which of the two explanations is based on some evidence and seems a bit more reasonable?

[The Grand Nudger]

Common sense (or more correctly what you've called common sense) vs evidence, hmn, what to choose what to choose. People have created stories to explain the simple observation that people speak different languages (people have created stories about almost anything you care to imagine, actually). Simple explanations. You seem to have ignored the glaring differences in those stories (even though you took the time to copy paste them) because you'd like to focus on that single commonality amidst the sea of disparities. Read those stories again, chalk up the the differences and the similarities. Then take a look at the tally. A question you should be asking yourself is "why are these stories so different if they're all trying to describe the same event, which actually happened" Again, simple answer, they're not. You simply interpret them that way because you've decided that it is so. Bias. This is akin to claiming that all stories with the sentence "and then god spoke" or "it then came to pass" are actually the same story.

Many myths have similarities, I don't argue against that. Again, it's the conclusions that you draw from this that flirt with absurdity (or just downright kiss it on the mouth).

[dtango]

Many myths have similarities, I don't argue against that. Again, it's the conclusions that you draw from this that flirt with absurdity (or just downright kiss it on the mouth).

Very well! The myths have similarities. Among the many differences in the myths of the previous post there is a hint for a mother language. A common language for all people.

Then we have another bunch of myths with differences between them but again with a hint to, let’s say, repeated attempts by the gods to get rid of the humans.

Then another bunch and another hint and another, until we realize that the hints when put together constitute a story from start to end.

But what a pity!
It is a story we cannot accept. It is against everything we have been taught.

Forget Campbell. Cross the border and come to this side, with the winners to be.

[Shell B]

The unbiased, unpolluted truth of the point you are trying to make it that it is wrong. No matter how many quotes you post, you will remain wrong. It doesn't matter what race was responsible for the first genocide. The fact of the matter is that genocide isn't a "white" crime. It's a human crime, no matter how you want to spin it.

As for your comments about Jews, I know a hot Jew here who would procreate with a person of just about any race, if she loved them. Of course, I have never heard her say so, but I have also never heard her spout anything about racial purity. I'm offended for her that you are describing the Jewish people in such a way. It's not about race, it is about religion. They are not the only religious "race" that supports marrying into the same religion and it is not a universal thing.

Opinions are opinions and should never be stated as fact, if it is obvious they are mere opinion. I think that is where the problem lies here. Obviously, without any research into genocide, you have come to the conclusion that it is a Caucasian crime. Because of the lack of knowledge involved in this conclusion, it is an opinion. Anyone with any knowledge of what genocide is and the history of genocides on this planet is going to disagree with you. Genocides have occurred all over the world.

[The Grand Nudger]

Tango- One can make a coherent story out of any number of random newspaper clippings, if one were so inclined. I'm sorry, you don't seem to have any evidence for your conclusions.

[Epimethean]

Tango is arguing for a mother tongue without evidence of the mother. His theories are constantly denominative and take no account of the multiregional origin theory of evolution, nor do they take into consideration the fact that man's expansion out of Africa most likely predates developed language. There is no understanding in his fanatical theory of speciation, of the lack of evidence for a mother tongue, or of any real and accepted theory of how language develops in man.

[dtango]

It doesn't matter what race was responsible for the first genocide. The fact of the matter is that genocide isn't a "white" crime. It's a human crime, no matter how you want to spin it.

It does matter because racism is the crime, not genocide. If the parents were not telling their kids that the “others” are inferior there would have been no genocides.

Humanity’s collective memory blames the gods for the original genocide.
Anthropologists suspect Hss for the original genocide.

As for the Jews, read their history. There is no other nation on earth with a similar history. The Jews are unique and in the course of thousand of years they have chosen to remain Jews and to pay the price. There would have been no pogroms and untold misery if they had merged with the people of the countries where they were living. They remained pure not because the “others” regarded them as inferior and did not want their children to marry into Jewish families. It was the Jews prohibiting their children to marry into the families of the others.
I am not offending them by just stating facts. I am fascinated by them and I like them although I loath all kinds of devotion to tradition (btw, how do you know I am not an atheist Jew? )

As for the white race, if it was not for the Japanese I would say that it is the only race who feels superior to the others.

I asked Epimethean for the English term of «Καθαρμός της χώρας» but he only provided a translation: “cleansing of the country.” Eventually I found out that the Greek term is used written with Latin characters “Katharmos” and when it refers to the entire country is called “The great katharmos.”
To my opinion it was by the process of this katharmos that people became racists.

The original katharmos having, of course, been ordered by the gods.

I'm sorry, you don't seem to have any evidence for your conclusions.

Don’t be! I am not expecting you to accept the evidence I am offering. But next generation, your kids, will accept them (as always happens with ingenious ideas )

Tango is arguing for a mother tongue without evidence of the mother. His theories are constantly denominative and take no account of the multiregional origin theory of evolution,..

I am a fan of Milford Wolpoff's and his book “Race and Human Evolution” I read not long after I finished Campell’s books. I regard the Eve theory quite funny.
I’ll come back to explain about the mother tongue.

[Shell B]

It does matter because racism is the crime, not genocide. If the parents were not telling their kids that the “others” are inferior there would have been no genocides.

Don't be fucking ridiculous. That's like saying hate is the crime, not murder. Racism isn't even a fucking crime. Granted, certain expressions of it are crimes. At any rate, how do you even pin that on every genocide? In the cases of Hitler's genocide and Stalin's genocide(s), the hate was built up over a period of decades. That is hardly long enough for anyone to blame it on what parents taught their children. The very adults who were driving out Jews or starving Ukrainians were living among them as children without issue.

Humanity’s collective memory blames the gods for the original genocide.

Dude, you are logged on to a defunct collective memory. Try clearing your cache.

Anthropologists suspect Hss for the original genocide.

Source?

As for the Jews, read their history. There is no other nation on earth with a similar history.

There is no Jewish nation. It looks like I am not the one who has to read.

The Jews are unique and in the course of thousand of years they have chosen to remain Jews and to pay the price. There would have been no pogroms and untold misery if they had merged with the people of the countries where they were living.

Are you saying that the Holocaust would not have happened if the Jews had just learned to live with the Germans?

They remained pure not because the “others” regarded them as inferior and did not want their children to marry into Jewish families. It was the Jews prohibiting their children to marry into the families of the others.

So? What is your point? Indians do not like their children to marry non-Indians. Christians don't like their kids to marry non-Christians. I'd be hard pressed to think of a race or religion that has no history of such behavior.

I am not offending them by just stating facts. I am fascinated by them and I like them although I loath all kinds of devotion to tradition (btw, how do you know I am not an atheist Jew? )

Have you ever seen the Chappelle (sp?) Show? The racist black guy was hilarious. It would be less funny if you were an atheist Jew spouting this nonsense.

As for the white race, if it was not for the Japanese I would say that it is the only race who feels superior to the others.

So, if it weren't for the Japanese, you would be completely wrong, instead of virtually wrong.

[Epimethean]

Tango, my dear friend: Oh, but you are devoted to a tradition. It is called confirmation bias, though in your case I am coming to wonder whether it may actually be belief bias instead.

[dtango]

Are you saying that the Holocaust would not have happened if the Jews had just learned to live with the Germans?

The Holocaust would have happened because Jews were not the only ones regarded subhuman but it would have not affected the Jews if there were no Jews.

With regard to mother tongue:

Anyone who will stop for a while thinking of the myths about gods as stories created by the imagination and decides to see if he can make any sense out of them, he will discover that he has to work as if for solving the mystery of a detective story.

We have “reports” from native Americans and the Middle East saying that… once upon a time all people on earth were speaking one language. That language therefore was spoken at some time, more than 15,000 years ago, in a place where both the ancestors of the Indians and Mesopotamians were present.
Although according to most of the myths humans were created by the gods, the memory of the humans seems to reach to a time before their own creation. We are, therefore, obliged to deem more accurate the myths reporting simultaneous creation of gods and humans.

Is that the mother tongue? No, because according to Homer and the Egyptian texts gods and humans were speaking different languages.
The last piece of information comes from the Egyptian texts which “report” a Judgment of the speech. Thus we know that the people, in that place where all the ancestors happened to be together, were forced to speak the language of the gods.

People all over the earth were speaking their own languages, but those who left the Near East spreading the genome of the hybrids to the people living in Northern Africa Asia and Australia, told the story of that language once spoken by everybody.

It is certain, I can say, that they did not spread only their stories but their customs too. “Katharmos” was practiced by everybody. By driving out the human scapegoats the scapegoats were obliged to look for new lands, the scapegoats of the scapegoats new lands again and thus the last scapegoats arrived a few centuries ago at the remotest and loneliest place on earth: Easter Island.

What are the flaws of the story?