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Archimedes Plutonium...

Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 2:06 pm

Guest

Logic can sometimes estimate very well when the first appearance of
clubbing came in relation to rock throwing. When the first appearance
of manmade fire, the first appearance of clothing, of the drill bit,
of the bow and arrow. Logic can piecewise assemble when these
discoveries took place and under what circumstances.

As for the very first appearance of a God worship ceremony, I would
say that logically it was in farming communities, especially in
dry places like the northern parts of Africa and southern Mediterranean.
It was in response to rain and getting rainfall for crops.

So I would hazard to guess by logic that the first clear signs of
a religion worship had to wait and come for farming communities. So that
means religion is a outcome of farming and agriculture. When our species
realized that crops depend on rain and this desire for rain conjured
up the idea that a deity controls rain.

Now to test this timeline of religion, some would say that northern
regions where farming and agriculture did not exist, yet they had
religion worship. I would reply back that it was eventually those of
the southern regions who would migrate into the northern regions
and populate them bringing with them their religion.

Farming is not in the millions of years old, but in the thousands of years.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

...

Posted: Mon Jul 21, 2008 9:34 pm

Guest

Archimedes Plutonium wrote:

Quote:

Now there are going to be those that say they found some burial site
of ancient
human remains that look as if they were in some sort of religious
ritual. But I
would question the age and whether it was a agriculture community.

The brunt of my argument above is that we can use logic to evaluate
the likely
scenario in which a important discovery came about.

As for the discovery of Religion by a community, the likely scenario
is that the
community as a whole seeks a desired result from Nature. And rain/
rainful is
above in the skies and a seeking by a entire community of rain for
their
crops to grow and be bountiful.

So for the first time in human evolution do you get a concentration of
affects that would
promote the inception of "organized religion" which you never had
before.

You have these, to name a few:
(1) future expection -- harvest of a big crop
(2) rain makes good crops
(3) rain comes from sky -- heaven
(4) rain is controlled by deities
(5) not just one or a few individuals see the need for rain but the
entire
community has this "feeling"

So the logical methodology would point to the discovery of religion or
organized religion
or the religious ritual as first coming from agriculture community and
connected with rain.

Now I know some civilizations worshipped the Sun and called it Ra god.
And I have heard of
Raingods but never any specific names for a Rain god.

Now which came first, a Sun god or a Rain god? Well if my above is
true and accurate, then
a Rain God was the first god and it was the one which formed the first
religious behaviour.

The single need by many members of a community for Nature to provide
and to specifically
provide for rain.

Now some may say, well, the same argument would hold for hunting, that
a community would
psyche themselves up before a hunt. But I do not buy that because each
individual would be
feeling very much differently before a hunt and there is no appeal to
Nature, that the animals
would be easy. Contrast that with a group who has crops growing and is
appealing for rain to
come. So the first church, ever on Earth was probably a group of farm
community, say 50,000
years ago ( I do not know how far back farming goes in time) who were
in desperate need of
rain and as a group, started to pray to the skies to rain.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
> where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

David Hume...

Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2008 8:16 am

Guest

Archaeology usualy relies on analogy from existing hunter/gatherer
societies. None of these that have not been infiltrated by modern
religions demonstrate any kind of religion of the sort one might call
"worshipful".
There are supernatural notions, and other superstitions but none that
I know of actually worship a human-type god head father figure.
I would agree that the stimulus for a powerful god or god, is a mirror
of society and where you have a growing population and spreading
community based on the common storage of grain, and all the
bureaucracy that entails, the priesthood become extended "fathers" or
herders, who gather their flocks, and become the bridge to a higher
power.
The Neolithic period marks a point in time when the general public
suffer a huge drop in person liberty, loss of autonomy, and a massive
increase in labour. What is required for people to continue to "buy-
in" to that sort of society is a strict belief system which impels
them to work for god, and to suffer sanctions if they did not. Often
their own leader was a god, or born of a god - this is common to
Mediterranean lands.
In Catal Huyuk, the godhead was a Bull, bull crania were found in
ritual conditions on the various sites of the Levant, but this was
superseded by anthropomorphic gods, in priestly societies who managed
to learn how to read the stars to predict when the most propitious
time for planting was to be.
By the time we get to "Christ" every leader claimed descent from god,
as this was the key way to get yourself noticed as the celebrity "jet-
set". Religion was the glue that kept society together controlled at
the top by the divine emperor, for example

On Jul 21, 8:06 pm, Archimedes Plutonium <a_pluton... at (no spam) hotmail.com>
wrote:

Quote:

Logic can sometimes estimate very well when the first appearance of
clubbing came in relation to rock throwing. When the first appearance
of manmade fire, the first appearance of clothing, of the drill bit,
of the bow and arrow. Logic can piecewise assemble when these
discoveries took place and under what circumstances.

As for the very first appearance of a God worship ceremony, I would
say that logically it was in farming communities, especially in
dry places like the northern parts of Africa and southern Mediterranean.
It was in response to rain and getting rainfall for crops.

So I would hazard to guess by logic that the first clear signs of
a religion worship had to wait and come for farming communities. So that
means religion is a outcome of farming and agriculture. When our species
realized that crops depend on rain and this desire for rain conjured
up the idea that a deity controls rain.

Now to test this timeline of religion, some would say that northern
regions where farming and agriculture did not exist, yet they had
religion worship. I would reply back that it was eventually those of
the southern regions who would migrate into the northern regions
and populate them bringing with them their religion.

Farming is not in the millions of years old, but in the thousands of years.

Archimedes Plutoniumwww.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

...

Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2008 12:18 pm

Guest

David Hume wrote:

Quote:

We have to be careful about psychological fears differentiated from
religious experience. Being scared of big cats or crocodiles and
giving them supernatural powers. Or fear that conjures up witches
and demons and devils is not what I am calling religion.

What I am doing is applying Logic as to what is a likely chain of
events that brought religion into being.

Some of your slices are useful but my methodology is far different
from your analogy.

Quote:

I would agree that the stimulus for a powerful god or god, is a mirror
of society and where you have a growing population and spreading
community based on the common storage of grain, and all the
bureaucracy that entails, the priesthood become extended "fathers" or
herders, who gather their flocks, and become the bridge to a higher
power.
The Neolithic period marks a point in time when the general public
suffer a huge drop in person liberty, loss of autonomy, and a massive
increase in labour. What is required for people to continue to "buy-
in" to that sort of society is a strict belief system which impels
them to work for god, and to suffer sanctions if they did not. Often
their own leader was a god, or born of a god - this is common to
Mediterranean lands.
In Catal Huyuk, the godhead was a Bull, bull crania were found in
ritual conditions on the various sites of the Levant, but this was
superseded by anthropomorphic gods, in priestly societies who managed
to learn how to read the stars to predict when the most propitious
time for planting was to be.
By the time we get to "Christ" every leader claimed descent from god,
as this was the key way to get yourself noticed as the celebrity "jet-
set". Religion was the glue that kept society together controlled at
the top by the divine emperor, for example

Wikipedia says that agriculture in the Middle East is at least 10,000
years old.

So I would guess that we can safely say the first planting of crops at
50,000
years ago may be a good date.

Now let me use the Chimpanzee as an example of the first Chimpanzee
religion. And let us
assume all of humanity is gone from Earth. Let us say we all shipped
off to the Moon and
Mars and now is just watching what happens back on Earth where there
is no more humanity.

Well the way I see it, chimpanzees in a few million years will begin
to throw rocks and stones
and become on the road of evolving intelligence and then evolving full
bipedalism.

Then after millions of years elapsing, still no religion. But then one
fine day these Chimps that are
throwing and walking erect and eating seeds, start to plant seeds.

Elapse about 40,000 years from the first chimps that plant seeds.
Within that time interval the Chimps
would have recognized that you need water in the form of rain to make
your crop grow.

They probably would not have realized that the Sun makes the plants
grow for they would not know
of the concept of energy. But they would have realized that water is
essential for the plants since they
have to have water also.

So the only thing in Nature, that these Chimps ever had to confront as
a *group* is the need for rain
for their crop. Every other need by these Chimps (by early Humans) was
not a group experience, a group
need that called for a specific action of Nature.

Only Rainfall is a specific act of Nature that an entire group of
chimps or humans would demand of in their
earliest history.

Only Rainfall would they realize is vital to their life as well as the
crops. Not the Sun since they never
realized it gives energy.

Since Rain comes from the sky they would have thought that a
SuperNatural Power, or God controls
Rain.

And the entire group of chimps or humans would focus on Rain.

Now in your study of archaeology or history, what Rain gods have you
come across? The ancient Egyptians
did they have a Rain god?

Now what would be the first religious ceremony? Well if you wanted
Rain and thus made your first god
as a Rain God, what sort of actions would you partake in? It seems to
me, that you would probably do
a dance, and a song.

So probably the very first religious activity was some sort of dance
and song to get some rain.

Archimedes Plutoniumwww.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

David Hume...

Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2008 11:51 pm

Guest

On Jul 22, 11:18 pm, plutonium.archime... at (no spam) gmail.com wrote:

Quote:

There are serious problems with this approach. You only have to get
one retrograde step wrong and the rest falls over. The other key
problem is that you are likely to be able to imagine a variety of
reasons as you pan back, only one might be true, but they could all be
true in different societies.
This method is not new and various versions already exist as putative
histories of Hesiod, Rousseau, Hobbes, and Locke. Rousseau and Hobbes
used this method to determine the nascent quality of "primitive"
society before the state was formed: they both came up with completely
different viewpoints. Rousseau with his "noble Savage" and Hobbes with
live being "Nasty, poor, brutish and short" in staggering contrast.
Rousseau's original state of grace was free and noble, whereas Hobbes'
early man could not wait to create the Leviathan - a monster of a
state in which any personal freedoms were willingly traded for the
security of the state machine with absolute power.

Quote:

Some of your slices are useful but my methodology is far different
from your analogy.

I would agree that the stimulus for a powerful god or god, is a mirror
of society and where you have a growing population and spreading
community based on the common storage of grain, and all the
bureaucracy that entails, the priesthood become extended "fathers" or
herders, who gather their flocks, and become the bridge to a higher
power.
The Neolithic period marks a point in time when the general public
suffer a huge drop in person liberty, loss of autonomy, and a massive
increase in labour. What is required for people to continue to "buy-
in" to that sort of society is a strict belief system which impels
them to work for god, and to suffer sanctions if they did not. Often
their own leader was a god, or born of a god - this is common to
Mediterranean lands.
In Catal Huyuk, the godhead was a Bull, bull crania were found in
ritual conditions on the various sites of the Levant, but this was
superseded by anthropomorphic gods, in priestly societies who managed
to learn how to read the stars to predict when the most propitious
time for planting was to be.
By the time we get to "Christ" every leader claimed descent from god,
as this was the key way to get yourself noticed as the celebrity "jet-
set". Religion was the glue that kept society together controlled at
the top by the divine emperor, for example

Wikipedia says that agriculture in the Middle East is at least 10,000
years old.

So I would guess that we can safely say the first planting of crops at
50,000
years ago may be a good date.

No - you are missing the point entirely. You cannot plant crops and
keep them without a state. 10000bp is the start of agriculture and
the start of the state. They go together like a fist in a glove. If
you want to reap the rewards of all that hard work, then you need to
establish property right over the land. You also need to be sedentary
to stay to look after your crops and protect then form hunter/
gatherers who don't know what the hell "property" is. If you are
sedentary then you soon become reliant on the crops, because you can't
go too far to hunt and gather - this means you need storage. These
vital conditions existed in the Middle East where there was sufficient
density of resources for groups of humans to organize and form
powerful groups. It is likely that the groups predate the agriculture
as the protection of the group is a pre-requisite.

Quote:

Now let me use the Chimpanzee as an example of the first Chimpanzee
religion. And let us
assume all of humanity is gone from Earth. Let us say we all shipped
off to the Moon and
Mars and now is just watching what happens back on Earth where there
is no more humanity.

Well the way I see it, chimpanzees in a few million years will begin
to throw rocks and stones
and become on the road of evolving intelligence and then evolving full
bipedalism.

Then after millions of years elapsing, still no religion. But then one
fine day these Chimps that are
throwing and walking erect and eating seeds, start to plant seeds.

Whoooahh!!! Why bother? That is not what humans did. They left Africa
and followed herds of animals all over the world 100s of thousands of
years before agriculture.

Quote:

Elapse about 40,000 years from the first chimps that plant seeds.
Within that time interval the Chimps
would have recognized that you need water in the form of rain to make
your crop grow.

Listen all the scholarship has been done on this stuff. Archaeologists
have been doing this for over 100 years, and they have evidence to
back up their findings. I suggest you pick up a book!

...

Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 11:00 am

Guest

plutonium.archime... at (no spam) gmail.com wrote:
(all else snipped)

Quote:

Now what would be the first religious ceremony? Well if you wanted
Rain and thus made your first god
as a Rain God, what sort of actions would you partake in? It seems to
me, that you would probably do
a dance, and a song.

I say that because, you are hot and dry and frustrated and looking to
the sky to
give rain. So how would you behave feeling that some deity controls
rain and you
want it to rain. Well it seems reasonable to expect some sort of
begging or pleaing
type of action which is that of song and dance.

Quote:

So probably the very first religious activity was some sort of dance
and song to get some rain.

Now, here an interesting crossroads of logic appears. The question is
whether the burial of dead
humans came before the planting of seeds to grow new plants or whether
it was the planting of
seeds to grow new plants that ushered in the idea that whenever there
are dead humans-- bury
them?

And this leads into the question of the first religious ceremony, as
to whether it was a song and dance
to a rain god.

What would be awfully helpful is a timeframe of when the first
religion appeared. From what I remember
of the cave art in France, there was no religious hints in those
animal graphics. That they were more of
what we would call in modern day times as a advertisement picture of
the food we eat. Amazing that
those earliest of painting did not paint themselves, instead they
painted the animals that fed them. Perhaps
they never painted themselves because in those times, life was so
brutal, that if anyone was upset or
complained about the picture would cost the artist his/her life. So
they painted something neutral such
as their prey animals. But their cave art has no hint of a religion in
their lives.

So I am going to focus in on two events. The first time a ancient
human "planted seed". Whether he poked
it into the soil or scattered it, makes no difference, but rather that
he realized it was to start a new plant.
And the second event of when a human buried a dead human. The burial
of the dead may be perceived
as a religious event. So I need to focus on such a event.

Now in chimpanzees, as was seen on TV, of an actual grieving mother
whose dead baby she carried
around for days and then finally abandoned. Would we say that
chimpanzees had religion if that grieving
mother had buried her dead son? Probably yes. For that would indicate
thoughts of something larger than biological
life.

Now the burial of humans in the Middle East where agriculture began
would be difficult in dry and hard
soil and without implements like shovels. So when was the invention of
the shovel? Was it before
agriculture, or probably during the rise of agriculture.

So here I have some nice cross currents of events and a likely
timeline is this.

(1) Approx 50,000 years ago the first human planted seeds with the
knowing expectation that they
would grow into the plant which they were taken from. This is the
start of agriculture
(2) There was no religion at this time
(3) As more plants were seeded, it became known that rain is vital and
a Rain God was the first
god invented
(4) worship of a Rain God was usually performed by a dance and a song,
so that music was
first invented at this time, approx 25,000 years ago
(5) Tools such as shovels were invented, say about 25,000 years ago
(6) As the religion ceremonies increased, someone had the realization
that their dead should
be buried like a "seed" and they used their shovels to bury their
dead, probably thinking that like
plants, the dead may come back to life.

So the above is a nice timeline to check against data and evidence
gathered.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

...

Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 11:49 am

Guest

plutonium.archime... at (no spam) gmail.com wrote:

Quote:

Now the burial of humans in the Middle East where agriculture began
would be difficult in dry and hard
soil and without implements like shovels. So when was the invention of
the shovel? Was it before
agriculture, or probably during the rise of agriculture.

The first invented shovel I imagine looked more like a hoe than a
shovel of today.
Some 25,000 years ago there was no metal working, but there were many
tree branches
with forks in them and there were many rocks which could fit into that
forked branch. So that
the digging of a hole by ancient humans was more of a act of hoeing
and then removal of
dirt by hand. Or one strong man could use a rock as a scraper as a
shovel. So the first
invention of a shovel could have simply been a forked branch hoe or a
large rock that was
thrust into the soil and used to scrape away the dirt.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

David Hume...

Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 1:33 pm

Guest

SNIP gibberish

Listen, all the scholarship has been done on this stuff.
Archaeologists
have been doing this for over 100 years, and they have evidence to
back up their findings. I suggest you pick up a book!

David Hume...

Posted: Wed Jul 23, 2008 1:33 pm

Guest

Listen, all the scholarship has been done on this stuff.
Archaeologists
have been doing this for over 100 years, and they have evidence to
back up their findings. I suggest you pick up a book!

...

Posted: Thu Jul 24, 2008 2:45 am

Guest

plutonium.archime... at (no spam) gmail.com wrote:

Quote:

Come to think of it, the pelvis bones look like a scraper or shovel
design.

Now maybe some prey animal of early humans has a larger pelvis that
looks even more like a shovel.

Yesterday I went to see how well a brick performs as a scraper of
soil,
as a pre-shovel. And it works pretty well.

I suppose if caught on some camping trip without a shovel, what would
be
the best substitute? I guess a rock shaped like a brick that you could
use
to scrape the dirt and then with the hands move away. Rough on the
hands
and no ancient hand lotion.

I do not know what the ground and dirt of North Africa looks like as
for digging,
whether rocky.

Anyway, have there been found ancient human sites with a significant
number
of pelvis like bones where human bones are found?

Because that just may indicate the shovel used.

Now we would also have to ask, what would be the first reason for
digging into
the ground? The first motivation? Probably to dig for food such as
roots and tubers.

Now I do not know if chimpanzees ever dig for food. They seem to use
tools to
go after ants and termites if I remember correctly. But have any
chimps been
seen in the wild that actually dig?

There is an animal bone from some species that looks like our modern
day shovel?
Is there a pelvis of some large animal that would make a good "bone
shovel"?

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

...

Posted: Thu Jul 24, 2008 8:44 pm

Guest

Did a search to see if any pelvis of animals were found in
anthropology as likely shovels or spades and
came up with this site:

JSTOR: Notes and News
Lithic arti- facts recovered through excavation include hoes,
spades, ...... a 6-inch wedge of elephant pelvis bearing numerous
lines which it is believed ...
links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-7316(196104)26%3A4%3C580%3ANAN%3E2.0.CO
%3B2-9 -

So just maybe there was an ancient animal bone that was ideal as a
spade or shovel. Which
had a handle-- the leg bone, and some broad surface like a pelvis for
the blade.

Now the question becomes as to what would likely have been the first
motivation to dig into the soil?
Would it have been for food such as tubers and roots? I think so. And
it probably came before
agriculture and probably older than 100,000 years. So it is reasonable
to think that the shovel or spade
had been discovered long before agriculture and the planting of the
first seeds was discovered.

Now I am going to hazard to guess that the burial of humans is
tantamount to having a religion present
in that society. And the evidence so far by science is that humans
were not buried when they died
until recently of about 25,000 years ago (my estimate). So that
religion is no older than 25,000 years
ago. Defining religion as the belief by a group of people in a
supernatural deity.

Archimedes Plutonium
www.iw.net/~a_plutonium
whole entire Universe is just one big atom
where dots of the electron-dot-cloud are galaxies

Day Brown...

Posted: Thu Jul 31, 2008 4:14 am

Guest

David Hume wrote:

Quote:

Hodder, who reports on his dig there in "The Leopard's tale", says he
didnt find any cattle bones. But he does report on all the bowls.

It does not occur to him that they were there for the milking, which in
economic terms beats the hell out of all the work it takes to get meat.

Ulysses at Langdale Tarn...

Posted: Fri Aug 01, 2008 10:28 pm

Guest

On Jul 31, 4:14 am, Day Brown <daybr... at (no spam) daybrown.org> wrote:

Quote:

David Hume wrote:
Archaeology usualy relies on analogy from existing hunter/gatherer
societies. None of these that have not been infiltrated by modern
religions demonstrate any kind of religion of the sort one might call
"worshipful".
There are supernatural notions, and other superstitions but none that
I know of actually worship a human-type god head father figure.
I would agree that the stimulus for a powerful god or god, is a mirror
of society and where you have a growing population and spreading
community based on the common storage of grain, and all the
bureaucracy that entails, the priesthood become extended "fathers" or
herders, who gather their flocks, and become the bridge to a higher
power.
The Neolithic period marks a point in time when the general public
suffer a huge drop in person liberty, loss of autonomy, and a massive
increase in labour. What is required for people to continue to "buy-
in" to that sort of society is a strict belief system which impels
them to work for god, and to suffer sanctions if they did not. Often
their own leader was a god, or born of a god - this is common to
Mediterranean lands.
In Catal Huyuk, the godhead was a Bull, bull crania were found in
ritual conditions on the various sites of the Levant, but this was
superseded by anthropomorphic gods, in priestly societies who managed
to learn how to read the stars to predict when the most propitious
time for planting was to be.

How do you know its a bull and not a cow?
Hodder, who reports on his dig there in "The Leopard's tale", says he
didnt find any cattle bones. But he does report on all the bowls.

It does not occur to him that they were there for the milking, which in
economic terms beats the hell out of all the work it takes to get meat.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Archie,

May I recommend "When God was a Woman" by Merlin Stone ?
This is a scholarly tome with all her sources listed and footnoted.
In it you will find the explanation for 50,000 years of fertility
earth
mother religion compared to 5000 years of animal worship and god
worship. The Canaanite religion was so powerful that the Jews had
to kill off whole nations in order to end goddess worship. The Bible
mentions "the Queen of Heaven." And she was not Jewish nor Christian.

Cheers, David H
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Day Brown...

Posted: Sat Aug 02, 2008 8:56 am

Guest

Ulysses at Langdale Tarn wrote:

Quote:

May I recommend "When God was a Woman" by Merlin Stone ?
This is a scholarly tome with all her sources listed and footnoted.
In it you will find the explanation for 50,000 years of fertility
earth
mother religion compared to 5000 years of animal worship and god
worship. The Canaanite religion was so powerful that the Jews had
to kill off whole nations in order to end goddess worship. The Bible
mentions "the Queen of Heaven." And she was not Jewish nor Christian.
The cover is a figure I have in one of the books by Gimbutas.

I'll havta ask, but it looks promising.

Campbell, for one, reconstructs the original Aryan creation myth:
1 Chaos was first.
2 Gaia emerged out of chaos.
3 Gaia, as we now say, 'evolved' to achieve sentience and-
4 differentiated Herself from Maya, the physical world.

Gaia, Maya, and Chaos, the original Trinity, have been dancing ever since.

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