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Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!cmcl2!harvard!seismo!elsie!imsvax!ted
From: ted@imsvax.UUCP (Ted Holden)
Newsgroups: net.origins
Subject: Logical knock-out
Message-ID: <449@imsvax.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 30-Oct-85 23:52:10 EST
Article-I.D.: imsvax.449
Posted: Wed Oct 30 23:52:10 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 3-Nov-85 07:45:03 EST
Organization: IMS Inc, Rockville MD
Lines: 33


      I can't believe some of what I'm seeing on the net these days.  I
mean, I try not to let it get to me, but.....  Take this latest monstrosity
in two parts by Michael McNiel for instance.  He spends one entire page,
something like eighty lines, making the point that EVERY BODY in the ancient
world knew how large the earth was, and that it was round, and then, in
Chapter II, we read the following:

>Remember Homer?  His was
>an age when it was still a big deal to sail from Greece to Sicily!
>
>This was at least as true for the Hebrews of the Old Testament.
>During early times the Hebrews were nomadic herdsmen and women who
>had originated in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley, and never wandered
>very far from that region.  They weren't seafarers or caravan
>operators, they weren't really cosmopolitan at all.  Foreigners
>were heathens who carried contaminating ideas.  The Hebrews'
>concept of "foreign" was Phoenicia or Egypt.  Legends and myths
>regarding supposed "world-wide" disasters can be trusted only as
>far as the limits to the travels of the people who invented them.

   And he begins all of this with:

>[all persons stand back of white line.]
and,
>Ho, hum.  This is a big lie only to persons as ignorant as Ted Holden.

    Ever consider trying to accomplish the physical equivalent of what you
have just accomplished logically, Michael?  That would amount to nailing
yourself on the chin with a really hard over-hand right and then counting
ten over yourself as you lay unconscious on the floor.  If you got really
good at it, you might could get a job working for Ringling Brothers and
Barnum and Bailey's Circus as a clown.