Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site 3comvax.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!oliveb!3comvax!michaelm
From: michaelm@3comvax.UUCP (Michael McNeil)
Newsgroups: net.origins
Subject: Re: The Rock of Ages and the Ages of Rocks (Big Lie, Part 2)
Message-ID: <254@3comvax.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 28-Oct-85 16:04:44 EST
Article-I.D.: 3comvax.254
Posted: Mon Oct 28 16:04:44 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 30-Oct-85 06:19:11 EST
References: <430@imsvax.UUCP>
Organization: 3Com Corp; Mountain View, CA
Lines: 164

[posted -- no eating or drinking.]

Part 2 in response to Ted Holden's recent outpouring:  "The Big Lie."  

>	1.   The big  lie:  Man  has been  on this  planet for at least a
>	     million years, but only learned to read and write within the
>	     last few thousand years.
>
>	     The reality,  as stated  by an  Egyptian priest, speaking to
>	     the Greek sage, Solon,  in Plato's  dialogue, "The Timaeus":
>
>	     "Whereas just when you and other nations are beginning to be
>	     provided with letters and the other  requisites of civilized
>	     life, after the usual interval, the stream from heaven, like
>	     a pestilence, comes pouring down, and  leaves only  those of
>	     you who  are destitute  of letters and education; and so you
>	     have to  begin  all  over  again  like  chilodren,  and know
>	     nothing of what happened in ancient times, either amongst us
>	     or amongst  yourselves.  As  for those  geneologies of yours
>	     which you  have just now recounted to us, Solon, they are no
>	     better than the tales of children.  In the  first place, you
>	     remember a  single Deluge only, but there were many previous
>	     ones;..."

It is precisely because civilizations have fallen, and what has come
down to us has been transformed by centuries of folk tale and myth,
that science discounts it as history.  Yes, the Greeks, among other
ancient civilizations, *have* been literate more than once.  That's
precisely the problem.  How do people who have been blasted back to
illiteracy manage to remember their history perfectly, hum?  Are you
arguing, Ted, that the Egyptians alone managed to survive a world-
wide flood (and all the other disasters, apparently) and keep their
correct history?  Were the Egyptians -- not the Israelites -- God's
Chosen People to have pulled off such a trick?  Or could it perhaps
be that the flood didn't *quite* extend around the *entire* world?  

I quote further from Plato's "Timaeus," which Ted conveniently omits
(also attributed by Plato to the Egyptian priest speaking to Solon):  

	When ... the gods purge the earth with a deluge of water,
	the survivors in your country are herdsmen and shepherds
	who dwell on the mountains, but those who, like you, live
	in cities are carried by the rivers into the sea.  Whereas
	in this land, neither then nor at any other time, does the
	water come down from above on the fields, having always
	a tendency to come up from below; for which reason the
	traditions preserved here are the most ancient.  

So much for the world-wide flood, as well as the forty days and forty
nights!  But, despite direct contradiction by ancients whose words he
claims to revere, Ted continues to maintain his same old swan song:  

>	3.   The big lie:  Stories of global floods and  disasters really
>	     amount to  some imaginative primative hyping a story about a
>	     flood in his back yard, or  the local  river overflowing its
>	     banks, as in the words to "Zorba the Greek", thus:  "I gotta
>	     bigga creek, a shee'sa runnina thrua my backa yard, awhat'll
>	     I do?..... You  takea bigga  spongea, an  you putta da bigga
>	     spongea inna da backa yard, an it'll
>	     abZORBA DA CREEK."

*Tee, hee*.  How amusing, Ted.  For comments, I simply refer to Plato.  
I quote from your earlier quotation, with the Egyptian priest speaking:  

	... like a pestilence ... [it] leaves only those of you who are
	destitute of letters and education; and so you have to begin
	all over again like children, and know nothing of what happened
	in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves.  As for
	those geneologies of yours which you have just now recounted to
	us, Solon, they are no better than the tales of children.  

I'd say that Egyptian priest back in the sixth century B.C. is smarter
than you are, Ted.  You're pretty gullible to believe children's tales.  

>	     The Old Testament describes only one global catastrophe, the
>	     flood of Noah's day, in any  detail; it  describes meteorite
>	     storms and near misses by other celestial bodies in numerous
>	     other places, mainly the books  of  Isaiah,  and  of Joshua,
>	     although    these    descriptions   are   laconic.    Ovid's
>	     "Metamorphoses", however, provides  lengthy  descriptions of
>	     the flood  as well as another global disaster, the legend of
>	     Phaeton, which goes on for several pages.  This is the Greek
>	     and Roman  legend of  the near  destruction of  the world by
>	     fire, and Ovid specifically  recites devastation  wrought in
>	     every corner  of the  Earth of  which he had any possibility
>	     of knowledge, other than China, Siberia, and the Americas.

This says it all, if only Ted would listen to himself -- "other
than China, Siberia, and the Americas," indeed!  Romans and Greeks
were highly traveled but, as Ted admits, had no knowledge of areas
outside of Europe, northern Africa, and western and southern Asia.  
Therefore, they had no "possibility of knowledge" whether purported
devastation was "wrought in every corner of the Earth."  Naturally,
the poems and stories of the Greeks took place in those areas they
knew something about.  But the people who were alive during the
much earlier epoch when those stories supposedly took place were
even more restricted in their movements.  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.  

Regarding Plato's "Timaeus," I might also mention that Solon's tale is
written in the form of a dialogue between four persons -- none of whom
was Plato -- with the actual tale being related to Socrates and others
by historically a rather infamous person known as Critias.  Critias
states that he heard the story in Athens when he was some ten years of
age from another man named Critias, who at the time was about ninety.  
How the elder Critias knew the story so well is unclear, since Solon
lived some 200 years before either Critias, and apparently Plato was
the first to write it down.  The elder Critias mused, wrote Plato:  

	Yes, ... if Solon had only, like other poets, made poetry
	the business of his life, and had completed the tale which
	he brought with him from Egypt, and had not been compelled,
	by reason of the factions and troubles which he found
	stirring in his own country when he came home, to attend
	to other matters, in my opinion he would have been as
	famous as Homer or Hesiod, or any poet.  

In other words, after an unknown amount of interpretation over many
centuries in Egypt, the story arrived in Greece, spent some 200 years
being told and retold in the streets of Athens, then was related by
a very old man to a young boy, who many years later repeated it to
a small group, one of whose pupils much later wrote it up.  Sounds
like just the sort of story on which Ted Holden would bet his life!  

Plato has the last word:  

	Solon ... made the discovery that neither he nor any other
	Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old.  

--

Reference

[1] Plato, "Timaeus," *The Dialogues of Plato*, translated by
Benjamin Jowett, Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., reprinted by
arrangement with Oxford University Press, 1952, pp. 444-445.  

-- 

Michael McNeil
3Com Corporation     "All disclaimers including this one apply"
(415) 960-9367
..!ucbvax!hplabs!oliveb!3comvax!michaelm

	Who knows for certain?  Who shall here declare it?  
	Whence was it born, whence came creation?  
	The gods are later than this world's formation;
	Who then can know the origins of the world?  

	None knows whence creation arose;
	And whether he has or has not made it;
	He who surveys it from the lofty skies,
	Only he knows -- or perhaps he knows not.  
		*The Rig Veda*, X. 129