From: salem@pangea.Stanford.EDU (Bruce Salem)
Newsgroups: talk.origins
Subject: Re: Uniformity:  miniscule cause and monstrous effect
Date: 15 Dec 1992 05:52:36 GMT
Organization: Stanford Univ. Earth Sciences
NNTP-Posting-Host: pangea.stanford.edu

In article <171@fedfil.UUCP> news@fedfil.UUCP (news) writes:
>There are other views in which man is ascribed a spiritual nature, but we have
>absolutely no way of knowing anything for certain regarding this in this life,
>or so it would seem.  One of the things which I have tried to point out a
>couple of times, is that at least a couple of the things which are normally
>ascribed to the next world were in evidence in THIS world in antediluvian
>times.  Paradise appears to have once existed here, at least in part.

	This is but a religious belief, and a prejudice, that the present
state is somehow degraded from an earlier perfection. So what is the message
if this fantesy were true? That the current hardship of existence is due
to some fault of our own which a vengiful or punishing God has taken
from us in a Flood? Again, this is BUT religious dogma, which I am not
compelled to accept upon your word alone. In any event, none of the
fantastical happenings given by Velikovsky are based on anything besides
the misguded need to give metaphors in Scripture a literal basis a pursuit
which I feel uncompelled to take as well. So tell me Mr. Holden, is the
upshot of all the megabytes of debate you post just that there had to be
some "Good Old Days" before the Flood?

>Richard Heinberg's "MEMORIES AND VISIONS OF PARADISE", Tarcher Books, 1989,
>is a sort of a spiritual companion to Talbot's Saturn Myth.  Amongst other
>things, he points out that enough data is coming in from descriptions of
>near-death experiences to generalize a number of common features which they
>all seem to have, and that these features correspond with classical
>descriptions of antediluvian conditions.  Amongst other things, telepathic
>communication is a common thread in almost all such descriptions.

	Funny word, "Data". It gives the connotation of objective truth
to the private and subjective. What if we leave spiritual and private
experience alone and not try to give it the force of authority and law?
What if divinity is an intensely private and individual presence? Then
there is no need for "Data", for an objective correspondance of facts,
which is really just a consensus of facts. So what need is there of
antedeliluvian, or other antecedant conditions? Is it just the play
out the unwarented assumption of there being a Fall? This is only
the acting out of the Judeo-Christian authority trip.

>For these reasons and others, I believe that it is necessary for man to 
>comprehend his own past in order to comprehend his own nature, and this
>strikes me as important.  The consequences of man failing to understand
>his nature are all around us.

	Aye, yes, but there are many alternative stories possible and
alot of assumptions driving each yarn. Rather than beating your myth
into everybody's head, and rather than having people rebut merely the
results of your theories, why don't you delve into the background, the
attitudes, the philosophy, of your belief. I think that there is belief
which you have not expressed to us, which we and you have not examined.

	It does not matter that you are a Catastrophist, and choose to
debate the details of what results from the Velikovsky models. This
is a rhetorical position where an underlying basis can be seen in the
beginnings of these theories in an attempt to make more of Scripture
historical. This is just the same misguided impetus of making sacred
texts pass the same standards as scientific journals or a legal briefs,
and it comes from the same corruption of spirituality that haunts
religion of the Near East, the quest for theocratic authority, the
very casting of God's image as a King who reins far above his people,
and not really within them. It is the confusion of languages for the
purposes of power and authority, and the sacrificing of simple spirituality
for worldly dominance. Leave science to science, limited knowledge and
all, but wash the gilt, or guilt, and smash the marbles, in the temple.

Bruce Salem


Newsgroups: talk.origins