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Note: this topic is dated 4/27/2010. |
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Posted on 04/27/2010 11:13:35 AM PDT by Little Bill
The story of the Ark that saved humanity from the flood seems wide spread in Eurasian mythos. In truth some of what has been passed down is far fetched, but may have a basis in history such as the bursting of the Black Sea dam.
Because we are living in an age of myths, Global Warming, Spotted Owls, and Obama, maybe we look at the realities behind these stories. As you might guess I think Campbell(Golden Bough?) sucks.
Lets speculate.
Campbell??
You mean Frazer, right?
There was a story published in Analog when John W. Campbell was editor, in the form of a letter to an editor in the future, in which the writer showed that WWII never happened because all the principal names in the stories were obviously selected for their symbolic meaning — and they couldn't have been referring to real people.
"Letter from a Higher Critic", Stewart Robb (this is from memory, hafta look it up.)
The last line was the joke. After all this discourse about the meaning of names like "Roosevelt", "Churchill", and "Stalin", the "writer" then signed his own name, "Frazer Boughton".
There musta been more than a couple coffee stains generated by that one.
Aside from that I liked Space Operas, man against the Universe as opposed to those socialist Galaxy types, LOL.
I pretty much stopped reading SF back in the Seventies, about the time it got all politically correct. I don't mind dystopias, but I won't be preached at.
Used to read SF aloud to the missus, back before the kids were big enough to join in. Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov, John Wyndham, Alfred Bester, all those classics.
Nowadays she likes the Retief stories, which are political satire. My screen name comes from one of those.
Harland Ellison is an enemy of mankind!!
Non-PC SF has made a serious comeback, although mainly in the military SF sub-genre.
I recommend David Weber, John Ringo, SM Stirling and Eric Flint, among others.
Ringo's The Last Centurion is perhaps the most politically incorrect thing I've ever read, and remarkably prophetic about the Obama administration.
David Weber has written some stories in Keith Laumer's Bolo canon, one of which I liked enough to read aloud to Mrs. T., but he still seems tainted by contact with PC, for all the military bluster. All those women in combat command — meh. I don't care how many years you project into the future, human nature isn't going to change THAT much.
That being said, I'll just hafta go check out Mr. Ringo. Thanks for the tip.
In defense of David Weber, he does an excellent job of writing exciting military SF. His women in combat issue is, I agree, overdone. But IMO a small price to pay. With that exception and some occasional nods to same sex marriage his message is actually quite conservative, certainly from an economic standpoint. The baddies are all statists and economic centralizers, while the good guys take the need for a free market for granted.
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Note: this topic is dated 4/27/2010. |
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The breaking of the Black Sea dam doesn't quite seem to fit, time-wise.
My thought is that the flood stories come from the thaw after the last ice age, when sea levels relentlessly rose, wiping out regions like Doggerland and Sundaland. Even today, most of the population lives near a coastline. It's likely most of humanity was displaced.
If the literalist-estimated date is used, there is no fit with either one.
Plato’s flood OTOH, which destroyed Atlantis, fits the date of the catastrophic flooding from the melting glaciers — and attributes the destruction of Atlantis to a change in the motion of the celestial bodies.
Literalists vary in their estimate of the Earth’s age, mostly by how literally they interpret a seven-days creation. Ussher’s calculation for the age of the Earth was actually 4004 BC, but I wholeheartedly agree that the age of the Earth actually is irrelevant to faith. Those who object to that regard the need to accept the dating as relevant because they believe anything they hold to be non-literal undermines the veracity of the entire Bible.
In Gilgamesh there was a flood from Heaven could this related? There was a bunch of stuff happening in those times and all we have is confused memories.
Note: this topic is from 4/27/2010. Thanks again Little Bill.
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How anyone with a modern brain could possibly think that Bishop Ussher was right boggles the mind. He gave a date of December something, 4004 bc based on his calculation of the number of years in the begats. Since a careful reading of the bible indicates that these were listed as years, not months and days, then it is impossible to come up with a precise date. Rather it is an indication of the need to present the faithful with a date certain in a prescientific culture.
It’s the last chapter in the Fall of the Date of Ussher.
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