I've always gone with the more plausible notion that atheists simply entirely make up that any theists say any such thing, are so motivated, or act in such a way, even for the statistically insignificant percentage one hears this about as a biased estimate.
Yeah, atheists have to make up scary stories about religious nutters, because real ones are impossible to find.
And besides, atheists would feel obligated to join some cult if they couldn't find any disreputable poop on it.
I'm going to spend it the same way I spent the last eight apocalypses - standing near the eastern edge of my time zone to see what happens on the other side. Then I'll have 59 minutes to decide whether to head for a church or a whorehouse.
No. Babel is the anglicized form of "balal", which means "to jumble" in reference to the mixing of languages. "Babili" is Akkadian for Babylon. Different words, different meanings, no connection.
My etymological dictionary, and Wikipedia, beg to differ.
While I appreciate your historical references and teachings to us, please please please please (did I mention please? I'm trying to be nice) DON'T use acronyms. Unless you've been inundated with the name "adolf hilter", and whatever HG stands for, you don't translate the acronyms on the fly.. and it just ruins your entire paragraph.
Sorry; I was too lazy to look up the spelling for Hermann Göring (and not sure the umlaut would render correctly for readers using a different operating system).
Do you reckon that recent breach of lightspeed might indicate that Einstein was seriously wrong?
I would dearly love to learn that Einstein was wrong and we can go as fast as we please.
But although we occasionally get an experimental result that tells us our understanding of nature is all wrong, it's vastly more common that we learn that the experimental result is wrong. If you're going to bet, go with the odds.
Hmm, "Shifting habitats"... I've read that climate changes so fast that even birds can't keep up with it. They didn't mean those of seasonal migrating kind?
Around a decade ago they noticed a problem in the far north, with plants and the critters that eat them getting out of synch on when spring is supposed to happen. Apparently one depended on the time of year, the other on the ambient temperature, which of course is happening earlier w.r.t. time of year. So the plants were blossoming before the bugs that depend on them come out, or vice versa. (Sorry; don't remember the details.)
More recently, the buckeye tree, namesake of a certain powerhouse football team in Ohio, has had its range shifted northward due to warming, so that the team's home town is now barely within the trees range, and won't be within it at all in another decade or two.
As one wag put it, when it starts messing with football, people will get serious about global warming.
This is just evidence that the story of the Tower of Babel is a very old story. Nothing more.
It's not even that much. "Babel" is just the anglicized form of the Hebrew word for "Babylon", and the Babylonians did in fact build towers, such as the one depicted.
I suspect that the inscription has deliberately been translated to put a biblical-mythical spin on it, instead of the obvious secular-historical translation.
The tower of Babel could refer to any of the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, and it's never been determined that it refers to the ziggurat of Babylon, or to another one, or is really not referencing any one in particular. The Book of Genesis never tells us, and it's later interpreters who associated it with the ziggurat of Babylon.
"Tower of Babel" just means "Tower of Babylon", so the association is hard *not* to make. And so for the prior poster, we can assure him that the Tower of Babel *did* exist. But the story of God scrambling a universal language is just nonsense. (And also portrays him as incompetent, since we can in fact understand one another's languages, and people of diverse linguistic backgrounds do work together on marvels that the builders of the Ziggurat could never have dreamed of.)
And a global flood never happened. Never. Not once. Not ever. The flood as described in Genesis is physically impossible, and there is not one iota of evidence for it. Maybe it refers to a regional flood in Mesopotamia (they're common enough, and certainly there have been really big ones), but the idea that there was a flood so great it covered the mountain tops was long ago rejected. It did not happen.
Of course, if he magicked in the water he could have magicked out the evidence afterward. Religious beliefs are not amenable to analysis on the basis of evidence.
But this story also portrays God as incompetent. Why magick in the water and out the evidence to drown a bunch of wicked people, rather than just magicking them away directly? And of course, this fix didn't actually fix the problem; Noah is drunk on his ass in the next scene, and the world has never lacked wicked people after the time of the purported flood. If God regretted creation, why didn't he just uncreate it?
Why didn't he foresee where it was going to begin with?
People who believe this silly stuff simply haven't ever paused to *think* about it.
If the tower of Babel story equates to a Babylonian tower, it would seem that suggests that the book of Genesis, which presents itself as having been written thousands of years before Babylon, actually dates to the era of Babylon (or perhaps parts of Genesis actually are older, but someone 'inserted' the Tower of Babel story much later)?
I think the Man on the Tablet ruled the Neo-Babylonian Empire, but the city itself had already been around for about a thousand years (according to Wikipedia).
Also, IIRC scholars think the books attributed to Moses assumed their near-final form around the time of Solomon, which would have pre-dated the Neo-Babylonian Empire, but not Babylon itself. So if the Babylonians had been building ziggurats all alone, there wouldn't be any anachronism involved.
Not to imply that I think the stories of Genesis have any credibility. Most of it can be understood as a collection of etiological myths, "why the snake crawls on its belly", "why people have to die", "why farming and childbearing are hard work", "why not everyone speaks the same language", etc.
While the origin of languages thing is clearly out of place, the tablet itself apparently refers to it as "the Great Ziggurat of Babel." That's an easy step to the biblical Tower of Babel.
According to my etymological dictionary, "Babel" is just "Babylon". (Not exactly a difficult guess to begin with.)
Which, BTW, originally meant "Gate of God", which probably explains the silly idea that the ziggurat of Babylon was built as a Stairway to Heaven.
Didn't fascism involve socializing all of the industry?
As late as 1944, when the world was tightening the noose around the Nazi neck, the heavy industries were *bidding* on who would get the contract to build the next tank.
I think fascism is more a matter of the military and industry getting in bed together, but it's hard to find anything to read about it that isn't peddling some bias that obfuscates the issues.
At any rate, whatever meaningful socialism there was in Hitler or in Nazism was wiped out [when] Rohm was executed during the Night of the Long Knives.
For those who haven't bothered reading up on it, TNOTLK was the result of the fact that Rohm wanted to "complete the socialist revolution" on behalf of disgruntled WWI veterans after AH and HG got public offices with a certain amount of power, but at that point they perceived that revolution to be a threat to *them*.
But clearly, people who want to use 'socialism' to make people's knees jerk aren't interested in what was really going on. Just saying "Hitler was a socialist, so our social programs are bad" suits their purposes better.
I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a deliberate parody of religion, or genuine crazy. Impossible to tell sometimes. It's also very common in US poltics for the term 'socialism' to be thrown around to scare people without any obvious relation to its correct meaning - the cultural relics of the Red Menace never entirely left the country.
Using 'socialism' as a scare-word started after the Soviet Union fell apart and 'communism' lost its ability to cause knees to jerk.
Some people just have to have a Menace to campaign against.
Every time I read about an R&D achievement at an American university, the lead (and often associate) researchers are Chinese nationals. Do Americans no longer conduct advanced R&D at American universities? Seems foolishly short-sighted, if so.
Nothing like a Qi spell to give technology a boost...
And maybe he is an American, or is working on his citizenship. This country used to take pride in being a melting pot.
Must stop using electricity and save the planet before man made global warming frees us from this ice age we're in.
By some accounts, GW is in fact counteracting the onset of an ice age. Unfortunately, according to these analyses, GW's forcing is much stronger the IA's forcing, so it's not keeping us in a stable state. (Hence the melting glaciers, shifting habitats, etc.)
If we could cut our GW's forcing back to a small fraction of what it is, we might be able to apply it as some practical terraforming, to extend the duration of the paradise that our species grew up in.
But most people just invoke "ice age" as an excuse to avoid doing something that will cost a lot of money in the short run.
And an *enormous* amount of money in the long run. Politicians like to fall down and kick their feet over the public debt that our descendants will inherit, but those same clowns don't care a fig if we leave them a foobar planet to live in.
This melt off should be an interesting opportunity for archaeology and paleontology. Will such treasures reach back 1000, 5000, 40,000 years?
Possibly. I know there have been instances where parts of mid-Twentieth Century air crashes were recovered (including body parts whose prior owners have been identified). And the Iceman's state of presentation indicates that he had not been melted out since he died ~5000 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
I give an outline of a scientific argument. [...]
The problem is that all these conclusions are inferences. [...]
*All* of science is inferences.
There is nothing in the Bible associating Burj Babel with the Akkadian Bab-ilan. They may mean the same thing, or they may not.
Other than the fact that "Babel" is the Hebrew word for Babylon?
It would be the luck of those 52 million tourists to visit the same mountain peak at the same time, only to have it suddenly explode as a volcano.
Oh - think of the engrams!
I've always wanted to get into the apocalypse-business and figured that if I'll miss this one, I might not get another chance.
Don't be silly; there will always be another apocalypse. I think we've had two from the same profit^w prophet this year.
I've always gone with the more plausible notion that atheists simply entirely make up that any theists say any such thing, are so motivated, or act in such a way, even for the statistically insignificant percentage one hears this about as a biased estimate.
Yeah, atheists have to make up scary stories about religious nutters, because real ones are impossible to find.
And besides, atheists would feel obligated to join some cult if they couldn't find any disreputable poop on it.
Does anywhere know where I can place a bet that the world won't end?
No, but you can bet me any amount of money that it will, because I won't have to pay if you're right.
I'm going to spend it the same way I spent the last eight apocalypses - standing near the eastern edge of my time zone to see what happens on the other side. Then I'll have 59 minutes to decide whether to head for a church or a whorehouse.
No. Babel is the anglicized form of "balal", which means "to jumble" in reference to the mixing of languages. "Babili" is Akkadian for Babylon. Different words, different meanings, no connection.
My etymological dictionary, and Wikipedia, beg to differ.
While I appreciate your historical references and teachings to us, please please please please (did I mention please? I'm trying to be nice) DON'T use acronyms. Unless you've been inundated with the name "adolf hilter", and whatever HG stands for, you don't translate the acronyms on the fly.. and it just ruins your entire paragraph.
Sorry; I was too lazy to look up the spelling for Hermann Göring (and not sure the umlaut would render correctly for readers using a different operating system).
Do you reckon that recent breach of lightspeed might indicate that Einstein was seriously wrong?
I would dearly love to learn that Einstein was wrong and we can go as fast as we please.
But although we occasionally get an experimental result that tells us our understanding of nature is all wrong, it's vastly more common that we learn that the experimental result is wrong. If you're going to bet, go with the odds.
Hmm, "Shifting habitats"... I've read that climate changes so fast that even birds can't keep up with it. They didn't mean those of seasonal migrating kind?
Around a decade ago they noticed a problem in the far north, with plants and the critters that eat them getting out of synch on when spring is supposed to happen. Apparently one depended on the time of year, the other on the ambient temperature, which of course is happening earlier w.r.t. time of year. So the plants were blossoming before the bugs that depend on them come out, or vice versa. (Sorry; don't remember the details.)
More recently, the buckeye tree, namesake of a certain powerhouse football team in Ohio, has had its range shifted northward due to warming, so that the team's home town is now barely within the trees range, and won't be within it at all in another decade or two.
As one wag put it, when it starts messing with football, people will get serious about global warming.
This is just evidence that the story of the Tower of Babel is a very old story. Nothing more.
It's not even that much. "Babel" is just the anglicized form of the Hebrew word for "Babylon", and the Babylonians did in fact build towers, such as the one depicted.
I suspect that the inscription has deliberately been translated to put a biblical-mythical spin on it, instead of the obvious secular-historical translation.
The tower of Babel could refer to any of the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, and it's never been determined that it refers to the ziggurat of Babylon, or to another one, or is really not referencing any one in particular. The Book of Genesis never tells us, and it's later interpreters who associated it with the ziggurat of Babylon.
"Tower of Babel" just means "Tower of Babylon", so the association is hard *not* to make. And so for the prior poster, we can assure him that the Tower of Babel *did* exist. But the story of God scrambling a universal language is just nonsense. (And also portrays him as incompetent, since we can in fact understand one another's languages, and people of diverse linguistic backgrounds do work together on marvels that the builders of the Ziggurat could never have dreamed of.)
And a global flood never happened. Never. Not once. Not ever. The flood as described in Genesis is physically impossible, and there is not one iota of evidence for it. Maybe it refers to a regional flood in Mesopotamia (they're common enough, and certainly there have been really big ones), but the idea that there was a flood so great it covered the mountain tops was long ago rejected. It did not happen.
Of course, if he magicked in the water he could have magicked out the evidence afterward. Religious beliefs are not amenable to analysis on the basis of evidence.
But this story also portrays God as incompetent. Why magick in the water and out the evidence to drown a bunch of wicked people, rather than just magicking them away directly? And of course, this fix didn't actually fix the problem; Noah is drunk on his ass in the next scene, and the world has never lacked wicked people after the time of the purported flood. If God regretted creation, why didn't he just uncreate it?
Why didn't he foresee where it was going to begin with?
People who believe this silly stuff simply haven't ever paused to *think* about it.
If the tower of Babel story equates to a Babylonian tower, it would seem that suggests that the book of Genesis, which presents itself as having been written thousands of years before Babylon, actually dates to the era of Babylon (or perhaps parts of Genesis actually are older, but someone 'inserted' the Tower of Babel story much later)?
I think the Man on the Tablet ruled the Neo-Babylonian Empire, but the city itself had already been around for about a thousand years (according to Wikipedia).
Also, IIRC scholars think the books attributed to Moses assumed their near-final form around the time of Solomon, which would have pre-dated the Neo-Babylonian Empire, but not Babylon itself. So if the Babylonians had been building ziggurats all alone, there wouldn't be any anachronism involved.
Not to imply that I think the stories of Genesis have any credibility. Most of it can be understood as a collection of etiological myths, "why the snake crawls on its belly", "why people have to die", "why farming and childbearing are hard work", "why not everyone speaks the same language", etc.
Such myths can be found in lots of culture.
While the origin of languages thing is clearly out of place, the tablet itself apparently refers to it as "the Great Ziggurat of Babel." That's an easy step to the biblical Tower of Babel.
According to my etymological dictionary, "Babel" is just "Babylon". (Not exactly a difficult guess to begin with.)
Which, BTW, originally meant "Gate of God", which probably explains the silly idea that the ziggurat of Babylon was built as a Stairway to Heaven.
This article is pretty blood suspicious. First of all, it isn't the Tower of Babel, it's the ziggurat of Babylon.
Yeah, but who will want to pay an outrageous price for your tablet if it's just a picture of a boring old ziggurat?
It's hard to look at Naziism as anything other than the most well organized dickishness in human history.
Nice turn of phrase.
Didn't fascism involve socializing all of the industry?
As late as 1944, when the world was tightening the noose around the Nazi neck, the heavy industries were *bidding* on who would get the contract to build the next tank.
I think fascism is more a matter of the military and industry getting in bed together, but it's hard to find anything to read about it that isn't peddling some bias that obfuscates the issues.
At any rate, whatever meaningful socialism there was in Hitler or in Nazism was wiped out [when] Rohm was executed during the Night of the Long Knives.
For those who haven't bothered reading up on it, TNOTLK was the result of the fact that Rohm wanted to "complete the socialist revolution" on behalf of disgruntled WWI veterans after AH and HG got public offices with a certain amount of power, but at that point they perceived that revolution to be a threat to *them*.
But clearly, people who want to use 'socialism' to make people's knees jerk aren't interested in what was really going on. Just saying "Hitler was a socialist, so our social programs are bad" suits their purposes better.
I'm not sure if it's supposed to be a deliberate parody of religion, or genuine crazy. Impossible to tell sometimes. It's also very common in US poltics for the term 'socialism' to be thrown around to scare people without any obvious relation to its correct meaning - the cultural relics of the Red Menace never entirely left the country.
Using 'socialism' as a scare-word started after the Soviet Union fell apart and 'communism' lost its ability to cause knees to jerk.
Some people just have to have a Menace to campaign against.
How much do you think it's going to cost to move, say, New York City, to higher ground?
How many other cities would that question be relevant to?
And that's just the one glaringly obvious cost.
It lets heat go in one direction only! That the biggest change in Thermodynamical Law since Claude Shannon.
Are you thinking that infrared mirrors are not possible? Does the article claim that his device does work without increasing entropy?
Every time I read about an R&D achievement at an American university, the lead (and often associate) researchers are Chinese nationals.
Do Americans no longer conduct advanced R&D at American universities?
Seems foolishly short-sighted, if so.
Nothing like a Qi spell to give technology a boost...
And maybe he is an American, or is working on his citizenship. This country used to take pride in being a melting pot.
Must stop using electricity and save the planet before man made global warming frees us from this ice age we're in.
By some accounts, GW is in fact counteracting the onset of an ice age. Unfortunately, according to these analyses, GW's forcing is much stronger the IA's forcing, so it's not keeping us in a stable state. (Hence the melting glaciers, shifting habitats, etc.)
If we could cut our GW's forcing back to a small fraction of what it is, we might be able to apply it as some practical terraforming, to extend the duration of the paradise that our species grew up in.
But most people just invoke "ice age" as an excuse to avoid doing something that will cost a lot of money in the short run.
And an *enormous* amount of money in the long run. Politicians like to fall down and kick their feet over the public debt that our descendants will inherit, but those same clowns don't care a fig if we leave them a foobar planet to live in.
This melt off should be an interesting opportunity for archaeology and paleontology. Will such treasures reach back 1000, 5000, 40,000 years?
Possibly. I know there have been instances where parts of mid-Twentieth Century air crashes were recovered (including body parts whose prior owners have been identified). And the Iceman's state of presentation indicates that he had not been melted out since he died ~5000 years ago.