cradle of civilization

WHY IS IT THAT CIVILIZATION WAS FIRST IN THE FERTILE CRESCENT, AND NOT IN EASTERN ASIA, INDO-CHINA OR INDIA?  IS IT MERELY THAT OUR CIVILIZATION IS FOUNDED AND FORGED WITH THAT ANVIL?)

The Underlying Unity of All Religions

In considering the Magnus Opus of The late Rev. Alexander Hislop, The first point is that one must either accept the doctrine of cultural diffusion or postulate the agency of a grand adversary to account for convergent cultural evolution because the underlying unity of world religions is the concomitant thread of Ariadne throughout his comparison of the Roman church with the religion of Babylon to whom he ascribes the origin of all paganism and polytheism. His first Support for his Universalist contention is the dispersal of the worship of a Madonna and child. It becomes etymologically important to this universal image that The Great Mother is one who gazes and that her consort the Horned One often a serpent was “hidden”. Jacob wrestling with the angel, Beowulf and Grendel and Gilgamesh and Humbawa, are these not the same stories or the same image at least? The same shoulder. Hislop adopts an orthodox chronology that makes Job a far antecedent to Moses. But an essential underpinning to his position involves or is involved with the identification of Ninus, Nimrod and Orion, for which the construction of Nineveh as a Sumerian city is necessary.

On the divergence between a strict monotheism and the veneration of the saints: Imagine God as a jewel and conditions arise that jewel is splintered. This would either be another exploitation of the extension of the universal into the particular in a monist pantheistic sense or a realistic materialist sense or at any point on the spectrum between. If one accepts the Veneration of the saints, then one necessarily gravitates toward either a polytheism or a pantheism. Or the congruent concatenation of the particular to construct The Universal. In the one, a gem on geometrical depiction of the formula would description ate describe an intersection not a union of the two sets (Universal, Particular). The balefire ceremonies described by Sir James George Frazer, while more detailed, in essence agree with those of the late Reverend Alexander Hislop. Frazer identifies the Taurian Diana with Vesta. We know that archaeological evidence puts the beginnings of pottery, (and thus brick making) and agriculture north of Mesopotamia in The hilly region that was later to become the southeastern extremis of The Hittite Empire (Campbell). Also,Velikovski identifies the Carians, with The Hittites and the Chaldeans.

Therefore it becomes of paramount importance to ascertain the origins of The Sumerians. If the technology that allowed them to build their cities is of Armenian origin, then it becomes better established that they migrated out of The Tarim basin as climate change made it into the desert it is today as climate change drove pastoralists out of The Sahara to The Nile. The key to reconciling Hislop and Velikovski is the myth of Phaethon. Syncretism was rampant in the ancient world. Tacitus and Cesar readily called Teutonic gods by Latin names recognizing the similarities in their cults. This trend continued until it was eventually used deliberately in the Alexandrine age to design the cult of Serapis. Accordingly it should not be surprising that Marduk should be called by the name of a much more ancient name "Bel". Nebo, the Babylonian Hermes was associated with The Birs Nimrod. It is interesting to note that truth and righteousness were the attendants of ‘the servant’ Shamash. Tammuz, the shepherd, may actually be the oldest cult. Born of incest, and also born of a tree, he is the same as Adonis. Hidden in a chest, he was also loved of Persephone. The dual association with a goddess of the upper and lower worlds mirrors the vegetative cycle as the sojourn in the chest mirrors both Osiris (also born of a tree) and Perseus.

Water damage to the Great Sphinx need not indicate its greater age; it might indicate that our dating of Pleistocene and Holocene might be wrong, what? Arbitrary? The earliest Sumerian Kings ruled for multiples of 3600 years. Cyclical? Is there more than just similarity to the stories of The Caledonian Boar and the Bull of Heaven? Are the presumptions of the temporal location of the Aryan invasion of Northern India set to coincide with a Dorian invasion in order to perpetuate a myth of a Greek Dark Ages? Are there no art facts from The Dorian darks ages because all knowledge was lost or because that time corresponds to a non-existent period of history elsewhere in the world? What if those Dorians were refugees from an advanced sophisticated civilization? Was trephination evidence of an advanced state of medicine or evidence, of a particular barbarous religious initiation?

Was Karl Barth building upon a foundation laid by Schleiermacher? Upon first glance Schleiermacher appears to be a foaming at the Mouth ranting fundamentalist. But after further inspection it appears as though he was influenced far more than even he would like to admit by Fichte. And by the same Token is the development of functionalist psychology from the ashes o structuralism any mirror image of the self evolution of phenomenology from the debris of post-Kantian Idealism? But for Husserl, radical means an equivalent to Cartesian skepticism, like a red-tailed hawk gingerly picking at the marrow of his petrified bones.

The theory of Materialistic Monism lends itself to a denial of free will.  There are those that would attribute this theory to evil in that a denial of free will is in effect, a denial of moral responsibility.  The observations of Konrad Lorenz, and Robert Audrey have great value, but do they really support a denial of spirit without prejudiced interpretation.  Does one’s philosophical presuppositions determine one’s opinions.  Does De Omnibus Dubitandum apply when looking in the mirror?

Man is not a moral agent. Man does not make choices. He merely gravitates sensationally in one direction or another due to the electro-chemical disposition of the body at the moment. God has a mind which is greater than mine, however, the mind of God encompasses mine; absorbs it. I am part of it, therefore God understands my mind even more so than I understand myself, and since God teaches us to accept, (S)He Her(Him)self accepts. God accepts and understands me, this follows naturally and logically from the fact of our mutual existence. Inadequacy is the natural result of finitude just as excess is the result of infinity. However, the finite and the infinite are not separate; the finite is contained within and is part and parcel of the infinite.

Modern research on long-term potentiation  gives an appearance of a denial of Materialistic Monism in this respect.  For it may well be that in making choices, we alter the manner in which individual neurons in the brain are more (or less) likely to activate in response to similar stimuli.