History (or not)

[Shiftless2]

Imagine, for a moment, a carpenter opening his toolbox to find T-squared pillars, bas-relief animals, and carved serpents — and a plaque that reads, “Built by hunter-gatherers, ca. 9600 BCE.” If you were raised on a literal-days, literal-genealogies reading of Genesis (the sort that gives you a neat creation date of 4004 BCE), the plaque would be either an inconvenient nuisance or the beginning of a very polite existential crisis. This essay, written from an atheist, evidence-first angle with a wink at irony, asks the polite question: if the Bible’s literal chronology places “first people” a handful of millennia ago, who — in plain archaeological fact — built Göbekli Tepe? The short answer: prehistoric people long before the biblical “few thousand years” — organized, ritualizing, and sophisticated in ways that force us to rethink when and how complexity arose. The long answer is more interesting.

By Religion: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Göbekli Tepe: the polite bulldozer in the backyard of chronology

Göbekli Tepe sits on a gentle hill in southeastern Turkey and astonished the archaeology world when Klaus Schmidt and later teams revealed ringed enclosures built of huge T-shaped pillars, some carved with animal motifs and abstract symbols. Radiocarbon dates place construction and use of its monumental enclosures in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic — roughly between 9600 and 8200 BCE (often summarized as “about 11,000 years ago”), long before pottery, metallurgy, and — crucially for many lay readers — long before the dates implied by a literalist reading of biblical genealogies. The site’s scale and the craftsmanship of its pillars make it, arguably, one of the earliest known examples of large-scale communal architecture anywhere on Earth.

Those radiocarbon results were not a one-off fluke: multiple samples from contexts associated with the enclosures give dates in the 10th–9th millennia BCE. Archaeologists now routinely describe Göbekli Tepe as being erected and used by groups who were still primarily hunter-gatherers but who seasonally aggregated in large numbers for ritual or communal activity. That combination — mobile subsistence plus the capacity to marshal labor for monumental architecture — was not what most scholars expected thirty years ago. It rewrites a tidy, teleological story in which .....

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[sear]

#1

Fine.
The Genesis at 9:AM Monday October 4004 BC notion results from exhaustive Biblical study by committed churchman Irish Bishop James Ussher, who "did the math" based on Biblical disclosures. Kudos to his scholarship.
We can do better than Göbekli Tepe for such ancient time marker. Radio Carbon dating is fine, for those that have a Geiger counter. For those that don't?

Visit our Grand Canyon, where the walls of the canyon reveal geological strata orders of magnitude older than the Biblical Genesis indicates is possible.

By Religion: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Some "snake oil" salesmen may wish you to believe:
- YOU are either "saved" or not, and or
- anyone that rejects THEIR bizarre description of God is godless.

Please do not fall for this.
You, we need not choose simply from among ancient mythic gods, Jehovah or Allah for example. Anyone that has already found salvation with either of these, god bless them.

Our true panorama of options is vastly broader, validated, indisputably verified not by an ancient story book, but by logic.
Many believers in such supernatural phenomena admit they cannot prove the god they worship actually exists.
Instead, they may try to fill the gap with simple truism:

For skeptics, no proof is possible. For the faithful, no proof is necessary.

- perhaps -

Anyone that's climbed a tree, gone swimming in a river or lake, enjoyed an apple, demonstrates that Nature exists.
By acknowledging the existence of Nature, sometimes called "Creation", we acknowledge the existence of god,
for if there is a Creation, there must be a Creator. By convention we call this Creator "God".

"The fact that somebody over-sells an idea doesn't make it a bad idea. It makes them a bad salesman." Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA ret)

Not fully accepting a religious zealot's conception of a god does not necessarily render one godless.
To the contrary, rather than bias confirmation from stories millennia old from pre-literate cultures, analytical discovery helps refine our understanding.

"I would rather have a mind opened by wonder than one closed by belief." Gerry Spence, Attorney at Law

Special thanks to S2 for post #1 in this thread. During this second Trump administration, tenacious commitment to truth is all the more rare, all the more valuable a commodity.

 

[Shiftless2]

By acknowledging the existence of Nature, sometimes called "Creation", we acknowledge the existence of god ....

Nonsense

for if there is a Creation, there must be a Creator. By convention we call this Creator "God".

And if there's a "Creator" (by whatever name) the obvious question is "Who created the Creator?" Which leads to the question of "Who created that Creator?" and "Who created ..." ad infinitum ....

 

[sear]

"Nonsense" S2 #3

So it may surely seem, to those that have swilled a decisive dose of Bible-thumper Kool-aid.
You are correct that it's "nonsense" in the sense of a guy in the sky, at a U.S. military surplus desk, omniscienting everything all the time. BUT !!

If instead we think of what has produced what we subjectively know of the world today, the product of 5 separate forms of evolution:
1) cosmological evolution: the big bang. We can't have a cosmos without a cosmos.
2) geological evolution: we need more than Hydrogen. We need Iron, & all the other indispensable chemicals that compose human bodies.
3) biological evolution: life on Earth has come a long way since stromatolites.
4) sociological evolution: microorganisms, primarily cyanobacteria ignored "honor thy father and they mother". Many asexual reproducers do. Mammals means mammary glands, and that means suckling, nurturing, parenthood, division of labor, omnivorous lifestyle, & much much more.
5) technological evolution: got an early start wearing animal pelts for warmth & protection ... leading to the Hum Vee, and streaming Charlie Kirk's funeral on smartphone.

IF "God" is the creator, and since these 5 stages of evolution are what it took to get us a 2nd Trump term, and if "God" is what they call the creator, THEN
these 5 stages of evolution are "God".

"Nonsense" S2 #3

Actually, not so much. It's rather more a fact-based refutation of ancient religious nonsense.

You may not like such linguistic abuse any more than I do. BUT !! If there's to be a quibble, please quibble with THEM. THEY are the ones that insist "God created the Heaven and the Earth". That's the Biblical allusion to step #1, and perhaps step #2 explicitly listed above.

"And if there's a "Creator" (by whatever name) the obvious question is "Who created the Creator?" Which leads to the question of "Who created that Creator?" and "Who created ..." ad infinitum ...." S2 #3

Correct.
And therefore by the Biblical standard, Genesis doesn't really answer the question of the origin. BUT !!
1 - 5 above does.

"The fact that somebody over-sells an idea doesn't make it a bad idea. It makes them a bad salesman." Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA ret) #2

Representative Frank nailed it here.
Dismissing the notion of "God" on basis of Jim & Tammy Faye is transcendently preposterous, ultra self-defeating.

We can acknowledge steps 1 through 5 above, acquiesce to religious terminology (THEY say "God" is the creator, and 1 - 5 is what created) fine.
Is it better to forfeit appreciation of Creation simply for the sheer joy of contradicting Kool-aid overdosed religionists?

I do not believe so. Reductio ad absurdum: if we don't appreciate, how can we persuasively argue we're not wasting food?

 

[Shiftless2]

And therefore by the Biblical standard, Genesis doesn't really answer the question of the origin. BUT !!

On a related note there are multiple creation stories in the Bible - two contradictory ones in Genesis alone.

2 Biblical Stories of Creation

In addition to the two in Genesis, there is one referenced in the Books of Isaiah, Psalms and Job. In this version, the world is created in the aftermath of a great battle between God and what theologians say is a dragon in the waters called Rahab.

But it doesn't stop with those three stories - there are additional stories scattered thru the Bible for a total of (at least) twenty:

The 20 (+) Creation Stories in the Bible

A few people emailed me after they caught a comment I made during a brief BBC4 “Songs of Praise” programme last month. Asked by the presenter what I thought about those who wanted to t…

tcbmcleish.wordpress.com

BTW, on a related topic, atheists and agnostics generally know more about religion (and the bible in particular) than most practitioners (that’s one of the reasons that many of them are atheists)

Survey: Atheists, Agnostics Know More About Religion Than Religious

Interestingly enough they’re closely followed by Jews and Mormons, not Evangelical Christians.


https://www.quora.com/Are-there-rea...ur-evidence-to-suggest-that-there-is-isnt-two

 

[sear]

"On a related note there are multiple creation stories in the Bible - two contradictory ones in Genesis alone." S2 #5

I'm not clear on the cause of such divergences. The following is one I refer to because of its unmistakable terms, a numerical difference of an order of magnitude.

And Solomon had forty thousand stalls of horses for his chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen. 1 Kings 4:26

And Solomon had four thousand stalls for horses and chariots, and twelve thousand horsemen. 2 Chron. 9:25

I don't know much about horses, or Solomon's neighborhood. But maintaining 40,000 horses would be a monumental task, even on the prairie. Would it have been any easier at Solomon's house? Nearly a millennium before Christ?
Not merely feeding 40,000 horses, but maintaining their stalls, shoveling their pooh, training them for saddle or harness, and the many many humans required to do all this over ten centuries before the invention of the motor.
4,000 stalls (2 Chron. 9:25) may well be an exaggeration.
And what's the sense in maintaining thousands of horses without the horsemen to ride them? For what purpose? Farmers? Soldiers need to be housed, and fed. Enough soldiers for 40,000 horses?

How Many Horses Can Your Pasture Maintain? | Iowa State University Extension and Outreach Small Farm Sustainability

www.extension.iastate.edu

• 1 - 2 acres with an excellent, dense sod, permanent pasture
• 2 - 2.5 acres with an average permanent pasture (spring growth will be OK but summer forage is average)
• 3+ acres with a thin, poor sod that is unmanaged (supplemental forage will likely be needed)

Based on this ISU disclosure, the 4K figure seems wildly exaggerated.

Survey: Atheists, Agnostics Know More About Religion Than Religious
"Interestingly enough they’re closely followed by Jews and Mormons, not Evangelical Christians." S2 #5

A distinction demonstrating the difference between "belief" and "knowledge"?
Knowledge requires continuity. Belief does not.

"I've had 16 death threats. None of them have come from Buddhists or atheists, they've all come from Bible quoting true believers, which I find rather interesting." Episcopal Bishop John S. Spong