Hate to be a buzzkill but if you check a Bible that contains the Apocrypha (that would be your Roman Catholic Bibles) there is a story in there called "Bel & The Dragon." One could suppose the dragon is a dinosaur.
Of course, the Roman Catholics aren't the ones making the big deal about evolution, I think the Pope released a declaration saying evolution and theology can exist side by side or some such. It's the fundiegelicals who believe evolution is a myth and the ancient Babylonian myths in the Bible are fact. And they all think the Catholics are going to hell for worshipping the pope. So.
Look, I say this all the time but there is not one Creation story in the Bible, there are three, and they are all distinctly different from one another. So someone needs to tell me exactly which Creation story they are talking about when they say it should be taught in schools.
You may be joking, but there has been a lot written about dragon legends resulting from the finding of fossilized bones by ancients who had no idea of how old they were. In China, dinosaur bones were ground up and sold as "dragon bones" used for medicine. There's speculation that fossil Mammoth and Mastodon skulls gave rise to the Cyclops.
Of course the story of Bel and the Dragon was in the libraries of Sumer long before Moses wrote Genesis (sure he did) and Yahweh was just a local storm god -- and there are indications that the Genesis stories replaced earlier legends that were more akin to the Mesopotamian ones, but the Bible, like any religious text I know of, stands on the shoulders of older religions, even if Joseph Campbell said it before I did.
Noah's flood seems a lot like Ut Napishtim's flood edited to back up a different god and Job was probably a Babylonian story about the hostility in injustice of the Zodiac gods Judaised during or after the Captivity. The story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife was taken from a popular Egyptian picaresque novel called A Tale of Two Brothers which long predated it. The lines from Ra and Isis "Lo, I have eaten the bread of sorrow and drank the water of affliction" seem hauntingly familiar to anyone who's attended a Passover Seder. The Code of Hammurabi finds it's way into the commandments and those are only a few examples.
Of course there are multiple stories in Genesis, the El stories and the YHWH stories, nicely interleaved because they were separate books from separate times and separate cults until they were put together, edited and redacted around the 8th century BCE. To this day we cover up the twin identities by translating Yahweh as "Lord" and the Elohim as "God" and nobody is the wiser.
So I'd like to know which flood story they're talking about too - the 100 day and night with animals 6 by 6, or the other one. Which set of ten commandments?
Hmm, perhaps the problem is that the great dinosaurs preceded mere humans and didn't frolic with Fred and Barney after all, but the video is still funny.
I taught world lit for several years at the high school level and I was fascinated by the number of cultures with very similar stories of creation and cataclysmic floods.
I think that many of the people that insist that the Bible is akin to a history book and should be taken literally haven't actually read very much of it. Even that pesky tree that Eve allegedly ate from is confusing. Genesis speaks of a Tree of Life and a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and it's not clear if they are the same tree or different trees. Of course, part of the problem is that a great deal of what people believe to be in the Bible actually came from Milton's Paradise Lost. It's MIlton who provides all the juicy bits about Lucifer's fall from grace and Dante's Inferno provides all that hell fire and brimstone, and suffering souls that some ministers shout about every Sunday in an effort to frighten small children.
As a literary work the Bible offers some interesting insights into the cultural norms of several generations arcing over the various eras in which parts of it were written but as a historical tome it has about as much value as one of my favorite childhood cartoons, The Flintstones.
Actually, I think Milton was taking the Calvinist concept, which Johnny C worked out by stitching together unrelated verses from all over the Bible.
Of course, that's just one theory. And if we all like your idea better, maybe we can just decide it's the truth and brutally stamp out all opposing ideas - we'll just call it Sheria Law...
Nameless, Milton was no doubt influenced by Calvin's writings, and those of Martin Luther as well,although some scholars argue that Milton eventually deviated from Calvinism in preference of the beliefs of Jacabus Arminius, who eventually split with Calvin on the issues of free will and necessity. Calvin believed in predestination, that God foresaw the fall of man, even arranged it and that only those upon whom God bestows his grace can be "saved." Arminius came to reject this position and to believe that grace is offered to all because to believe otherwise would place God as the sole arbiter of salvation, which didn't seem quite fair. Under Calvin's views, man had no choice, no free will to choice grace and grace was only bestowed on those who were chosen by God. Quite fascinating stuff and at the heart of Milton's PL. However, Milton also did his own cannibalization of the Bible in explaining the ways of God to men in PL. Milton wrote PL nearly a century after Calvin's death.
However my observation is based on my low expectations of the masses; I doubt that very many people have read Calvin's religious philosophy but they have at least some passing familiarity with Milton. Senior English classes teach Milton (or force feed it to disinterested high school seniors) or they did when I was in the classroom but nothing from Calvin. My reference to people's images coming from Milton wasn't really a new law, although I'm happy to make those on occasion (I do have to live up to my name) but merely a reference to the number of folks who have muddled Paradise Lost, The Inferno, and the Bible into some hybrid creature that represents Christianity. All those images of hell fire are not in the Bible and the name Lucifer is mentioned only once, in the book of Isaiah and it doesn't mean Satan. But try arguing that with a fundamentalist.
Lift up thine eyes unto the Dinosaur Gods! Hallelujah!
Sheria, I assure you that the Flintstones Theory is correct -- we dinos never really went away, we're just keeping a low profile. Why, some of us have even turned into birds! This is one of the only things the Fundamentalists have right, but of course for their multifarious other errors, Mother and Father T-Rex shall justly have them in derision on the Day of Reptilian Retribution.
As for Mr. Milton, he was interestingly heretical, no? Mortalism was one of his positions, I believe -- the idea that the soul dies with the body (at least until J-Day). Anyhow, yes, I think a lot of people's imaginations have been stocked by Paradise Lost, which is a magnificent work of poesy throughout. My own students often find early Brit Lit. hard going, but things always brighten when they get to the Elizabethans and then to Milton -- PL may be erudite and the poet's English resembles Latin in its stateliness, but the story isn't hard to follow, and it is as compelling as Macbeth or Oedipus the King for its dramatic qualities.
Dartmouth has a fine electronic rendition of PL at the following site: Paradise Lost. The same site contains lots of other Milton material.
And here I was just enjoying the quirky animation and the smooth comedy stylings of Mr. Bill Hicks, who also did a bit called "Goodbye Lizard Scum" in which he made disparaging remarks about those who prefer to live in the warm, sunny climes of Southern California rather than somewhere with actual weather.
We welcome civil discourse from all people but express no obligation to allow contributors and readers to be trolled. Any comment that sinks to the level of bigotry, defamation, personal insults, off-topic rants, and profanity will be deleted without notice.
Hate to be a buzzkill but if you check a Bible that contains the Apocrypha (that would be your Roman Catholic Bibles) there is a story in there called "Bel & The Dragon." One could suppose the dragon is a dinosaur.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the Roman Catholics aren't the ones making the big deal about evolution, I think the Pope released a declaration saying evolution and theology can exist side by side or some such. It's the fundiegelicals who believe evolution is a myth and the ancient Babylonian myths in the Bible are fact. And they all think the Catholics are going to hell for worshipping the pope. So.
Look, I say this all the time but there is not one Creation story in the Bible, there are three, and they are all distinctly different from one another. So someone needs to tell me exactly which Creation story they are talking about when they say it should be taught in schools.
You may be joking, but there has been a lot written about dragon legends resulting from the finding of fossilized bones by ancients who had no idea of how old they were. In China, dinosaur bones were ground up and sold as "dragon bones" used for medicine. There's speculation that fossil Mammoth and Mastodon skulls gave rise to the Cyclops.
ReplyDeleteOf course the story of Bel and the Dragon was in the libraries of Sumer long before Moses wrote Genesis (sure he did) and Yahweh was just a local storm god -- and there are indications that the Genesis stories replaced earlier legends that were more akin to the Mesopotamian ones, but the Bible, like any religious text I know of, stands on the shoulders of older religions, even if Joseph Campbell said it before I did.
Noah's flood seems a lot like Ut Napishtim's flood edited to back up a different god and Job was probably a Babylonian story about the hostility in injustice of the Zodiac gods Judaised during or after the Captivity. The story of Joseph and Potiphar's wife was taken from a popular Egyptian picaresque novel called A Tale of Two Brothers which long predated it. The lines from Ra and Isis "Lo, I have eaten the bread of sorrow and drank the water of affliction" seem hauntingly familiar to anyone who's attended a Passover Seder. The Code of Hammurabi finds it's way into the commandments and those are only a few examples.
Of course there are multiple stories in Genesis, the El stories and the YHWH stories, nicely interleaved because they were separate books from separate times and separate cults until they were put together, edited and redacted around the 8th century BCE. To this day we cover up the twin identities by translating Yahweh as "Lord" and the Elohim as "God" and nobody is the wiser.
So I'd like to know which flood story they're talking about too - the 100 day and night with animals 6 by 6, or the other one. Which set of ten commandments?
Q. What do you call a terrible, horrible, unpleasant dinosaur?
ReplyDeleteA. A Thesaurus.
Hmm, perhaps the problem is that the great dinosaurs preceded mere humans and didn't frolic with Fred and Barney after all, but the video is still funny.
ReplyDeleteI taught world lit for several years at the high school level and I was fascinated by the number of cultures with very similar stories of creation and cataclysmic floods.
I think that many of the people that insist that the Bible is akin to a history book and should be taken literally haven't actually read very much of it. Even that pesky tree that Eve allegedly ate from is confusing. Genesis speaks of a Tree of Life and a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and it's not clear if they are the same tree or different trees. Of course, part of the problem is that a great deal of what people believe to be in the Bible actually came from Milton's Paradise Lost. It's MIlton who provides all the juicy bits about Lucifer's fall from grace and Dante's Inferno provides all that hell fire and brimstone, and suffering souls that some ministers shout about every Sunday in an effort to frighten small children.
As a literary work the Bible offers some interesting insights into the cultural norms of several generations arcing over the various eras in which parts of it were written but as a historical tome it has about as much value as one of my favorite childhood cartoons, The Flintstones.
Actually, I think Milton was taking the Calvinist concept, which Johnny C worked out by stitching together unrelated verses from all over the Bible.
ReplyDeleteOf course, that's just one theory. And if we all like your idea better, maybe we can just decide it's the truth and brutally stamp out all opposing ideas - we'll just call it Sheria Law...
* Ba-dum! * -ching-
Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week!
Nameless, Milton was no doubt influenced by Calvin's writings, and those of Martin Luther as well,although some scholars argue that Milton eventually deviated from Calvinism in preference of the beliefs of Jacabus Arminius, who eventually split with Calvin on the issues of free will and necessity. Calvin believed in predestination, that God foresaw the fall of man, even arranged it and that only those upon whom God bestows his grace can be "saved." Arminius came to reject this position and to believe that grace is offered to all because to believe otherwise would place God as the sole arbiter of salvation, which didn't seem quite fair. Under Calvin's views, man had no choice, no free will to choice grace and grace was only bestowed on those who were chosen by God. Quite fascinating stuff and at the heart of Milton's PL. However, Milton also did his own cannibalization of the Bible in explaining the ways of God to men in PL. Milton wrote PL nearly a century after Calvin's death.
ReplyDeleteHowever my observation is based on my low expectations of the masses; I doubt that very many people have read Calvin's religious philosophy but they have at least some passing familiarity with Milton. Senior English classes teach Milton (or force feed it to disinterested high school seniors) or they did when I was in the classroom but nothing from Calvin. My reference to people's images coming from Milton wasn't really a new law, although I'm happy to make those on occasion (I do have to live up to my name) but merely a reference to the number of folks who have muddled Paradise Lost, The Inferno, and the Bible into some hybrid creature that represents Christianity. All those images of hell fire are not in the Bible and the name Lucifer is mentioned only once, in the book of Isaiah and it doesn't mean Satan. But try arguing that with a fundamentalist.
Octo,
ReplyDeleteLift up thine eyes unto the Dinosaur Gods! Hallelujah!
Sheria, I assure you that the Flintstones Theory is correct -- we dinos never really went away, we're just keeping a low profile. Why, some of us have even turned into birds! This is one of the only things the Fundamentalists have right, but of course for their multifarious other errors, Mother and Father T-Rex shall justly have them in derision on the Day of Reptilian Retribution.
As for Mr. Milton, he was interestingly heretical, no? Mortalism was one of his positions, I believe -- the idea that the soul dies with the body (at least until J-Day). Anyhow, yes, I think a lot of people's imaginations have been stocked by Paradise Lost, which is a magnificent work of poesy throughout. My own students often find early Brit Lit. hard going, but things always brighten when they get to the Elizabethans and then to Milton -- PL may be erudite and the poet's English resembles Latin in its stateliness, but the story isn't hard to follow, and it is as compelling as Macbeth or Oedipus the King for its dramatic qualities.
Dartmouth has a fine electronic rendition of PL at the following site: Paradise Lost. The same site contains lots of other Milton material.
And here I was just enjoying the quirky animation and the smooth comedy stylings of Mr. Bill Hicks, who also did a bit called "Goodbye Lizard Scum" in which he made disparaging remarks about those who prefer to live in the warm, sunny climes of Southern California rather than somewhere with actual weather.
ReplyDelete*sigh*
Dino, thanks for the insider information regarding the Flintstones Theory!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the link to the Milton site as well; heading to check it out.