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11,000-Year-Old Temple Found In Turkey
Ralph Spoilsport writes "In Southeast Turkey, the archaeologist Klaus Schmidt has discovered an 11,000-year-old temple. Established civilization theory suggests that agriculture created cities, and cities created monuments. This discovery suggests just the opposite — people got together to build a huge monument to their religion, and in order to sustain it, communities were formed and agriculture (already in development) quickly followed on to sustain the population. Truly a startling find with significant implications."
Wikipedia entry on the subject is more clear and concise. Also it's not exactly a news - wiki entry dates from four years ago.
That applies only to religions that insist that their mythical stories be taken as fact. Not all religions do that. Try not to be so exclusive -- Christianity is not the only religion out there. Making sweeping generalizations like that makes you (and the others in this thread who did the same) look prejudiced.
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
In the original Hebrew, the term translated into days can also mean a kind of generic unit for time. Could've been days, could've been some other unit of time entirely, though the traditional interpretation is just to mean "days."
Pretty much all of today's theories are wrong, in the sense that they are inaccurate and incomplete. General relativity fails us at the beginning of the Universe and at the centre of a black hole. Quantum mechanics gives us no description at all of gravitational effects. In cases where we need to use both theories together we end up with infinities and singularities and contradictions all over the place.
A new theory will dramatically change our description of these exotic systems. But in order to work, such a theory must agree with the current theories in domains where those theories are known to be valid. General relativity replaced Newtonian gravity, but it could only do so because it made nearly the same predictions in conditions where Newtonian gravity worked. Newton's theory is still used for interplanetary navigation, because the calculations are so much simpler and the error is small - but if you had to do a gravitational slingshot round a neutron star you'd go to Einstein.
I'd just add that no scientific theory is ever proved. You want proof, the mathematics department is next door. You want certainty, there's a church down the road. In science we accumulate evidence, and the more evidence agrees with our predictions, the more confident in the theory we become - but you can never test every possible case.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
But wait, is there anything in that bible that says God's days are different? Or any other examples of God-units being different than man-units?
Different God-units:
II Peter 3:8
But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.
but the ten commandments gives specifically equates the six day creation to six literal days:
Exodus 20: 8-11
Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
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*Replying up here so people can see it*
You know I'm getting very sick of all these crap "Turkey.. OH WOW YUMMY!" jokes that everyone seems to find SO funny.
I'm half Turkish in fact, and what a lot of people here probably don't know is that the Ottoman Empire was one of the largest Empires in its time (chances are I am wrong--I'm open to criticism)
So before you make some witty comment about stuffing a Turkey, please think of something more "insightful" to say than that.
And think about it, an 11,000 yeah old temple is very old indeed.
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The Hebrew word used in Genesis is "yom", or if you are hassidic "yoim". It means day. It means day in classical Hebrew and in everyday modern Hebrew.
Without an Earth, the concept of a solar day is completely inconsequential, but the Earth is created on Day 1, so that puts a hole in that theory. You can make some other apologist excuses about creation and time frames if you like, you'll always find someone to believe something.
29 mpg. YMMV.
I read this article in the Times a year ago and it still makes me hungry to think of it: A Fruitcake Soaked in Tropical Sun, covering the tradition of "black cake, a spicy, fragrant fruitcake steeped in dark rum and tradition that is a Christmas classic throughout the English-speaking Caribbean." I foresee a trip over to brooklyn sometime in my near future. ;)
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Einstein also refused to accept quantum mechanics, usually embodied by his famous quote, "God doesn't play dice with the universe." Look what happened there.
Einstein may have been one of the most brilliant people who ever lived, but his blind faith caused him to reject some of the philosophical consequences of quantum mechanics. If it weren't for his blind faith, maybe he would have spent his later years giving us even greater gifts, instead of trying to prove quantum mechanics wrong.
If you don't want to read the whole thing, think of it this way: The word "yom" was also used in Biblical Hebrew in such contexts of "The day [yom] of the Romans" or "The day [yom] of God's wrath", neither of which specifically refer to a 24 hour period.
From the outset, we note that at least some of the acrimony over the interpretation of the Genesis days arises from language differences. Turning biblical Hebrew into English prose and poetry presents some enormous difficulties. Whereas biblical Hebrew has a vocabulary of under 3,100 words (not including proper nouns), English words number over 4,000,000. The disparity is even greater for nouns. Therefore, we should not be surprised that Hebrew nouns have multiple literal definitions. The English word day most often refers either to the daylight hours or to a period of 24 hours. As in "the day of the Romans," it is also used for a longer time period. English speakers and writers, however, have many words for an extended period--age, era, epoch, and eon, just to name a few. The Hebrew word yom similarly refers to daylight hours, 24 hours, and a long (but finite) time period. Unlike English, however, biblical Hebrew has no word other than yom to denote a long timespan. The word yom appears repeatedly in the Hebrew Scriptures with reference to a period longer than 12 or 24 hours. The Hebrew terms yom (singular) and yamin (plural) often refer to an extended time frame. Perhaps the most familiar passages are those referring to God's "day of wrath." Before English translations were available, animosity over the length of the Genesis days did not exist, at least not as far as anyone can tell from the extant theological literature. Prior to the Nicene Council, the early Church fathers wrote two thousand pages of commentary on the Genesis creation days, yet did not devote a word to disparaging each other's viewpoints on the creation time scale. All these early scholars accepted that yom could mean "a long time period." The majority explicitly taught that the Genesis creation days were extended time periods (something like a thousand years per yom). Not one Ante-Nicene Father explicitly endorsed the 24-hour interpretation. Ambrose, who came the closest to doing so, apparently vacillated on the issue. We certainly cannot charge the Church fathers with "scientific bias" in their interpretations. They wrote long before astronomical, geological, and paleontological evidences for the antiquity of the universe, the earth, and life became available. Nor had biological evolution yet been proposed. Lamarck, Darwin, and Huxley came along some 1,400 years later."
(Ross H.N. and Archer G.L., "The Day-Age View," in Hagopian D.G., ed., The Genesis Debate: Three Views on the Days of Creation, Crux Press: Mission Viejo CA, 2001, pp. 125-126, as cited by Jones)
[I'd link to the online source where I found this, but it's been 403'd]
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.