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Exactly. All of your petty nit-picking trying to pretend that words with or without particular grammatical endings are "different" words on the same level. The letters for vowels were all derived from Semitic letters that were used different: A from aleph which meant "vowel; any vowel"; E...

The koan was supposed to go on the "Baha'i, Hell, and Judgment" thread; I glitched somehow, but I'm not going to make a duplicate.

Sort of an inversion of Shakespeare's line (in Julius Caesar I think?) that "the evil men do oft lives after them, while the good is interred with their bones." His beautiful buildings are still in service, while his little splinter sects are fading. I was re-reading about the Great Schism (of...

A bit of irony: the Sydney Temple ("Australasian House of Worship" is its official name) was designed by Mason Remey, who was a professional architect before becoming a close associate of Shoghi Effendi, and then causing the "Orthodox Baha'i" schism when he declared himself Shoghi's successor.

I met a Druze in Israel, back in the 70's. He was enormously patriotic about Israel, and proud of the scar on his leg from paratrooping into the Sinai during the Six-Day War; I would not have expected that.

The Parthians wrote in an Aramaic script, which like the Hebrew does not mark vowels (they also had the habit of spelling some words in Aramaic even though they were doubtless pronounced in Middle Persian: note that the inscription spells "king" in the phrase "king of kings" as MLK even though...

No you aren't. What you offer is no different in kind than what others in past times have offered in support of their belief that "now" was the time (1532, or 1847, or 1975). That is because there were only two.

OK, that's Parthian. "Eran" is how it was in Sassanian times. It's an extraordinarily common adjectival/genitive ending in every branch of Indo-European: American from America, Canadian from Canada and so on and so on. Eran was the word for the nation-state, the country of the "Era" (as...

Olive oil is the base of that ointment. Not in any scripture, no. That's in the generation after Alexander, which is far too short a time, less than the time from Shakespeare to now-- but "grease" in English is still pronounced as in Shakespeare's day. The kind of drift reflected among...

It is evidence that "striking" coincidences can be found at any time in human history, and therefore that the existence of any particular coincidence that strikes you as impressive is not, really, very much against the odds. Those others are just as "sincere" in thinking they are following the...

I'll probably keep writing "5771" on my checks for a while before I remember...

We are not talking here about theories but about factual observations; what has been seen cannot become unseen.

They wanted to be taken seriously. Martyrdom gives people a feeling of being really really important; it was appealing to people who had been treated as absolute nobodies. The Roman world was in an ideological crisis, with no solid foundations for their beliefs about the world, or about moral...

Re: Was JESUS the only heavenly being to incarnate into the human community from heav What letter->number codings are you using here?

Koan #57 from Shakesi-shu "Stone and Sand" by Muju (13th-century Zen teacher): A soldier named Nobushige came to Hakuin, and asked: "Is there really a paradise and a hell?" "Who are you?" inquired Hakuin. "I am a samurai," the warrior replied. "You, a soldier!" exclaimed Hakuin. "What kind...

No, actually I think it was the greatest of their worries: they were convinced that it was vital to get other people to believe their message, and that death would not be the end for them if only they succeeded in winning over others. It will not do to ignore their "salesman" urges.

The Sassanians spelled the word eran. Europeans rendered it "Aryan" because they recognized that it was a variant of the familiar Sanskrit term. "Substituted"? The suffix -n/-an/-ian to form an adjective, like American from America, is sufficiently common in English that I thought you would...

Whereas Jesus is not associated with cream or clarified butter or any other dairy product. But, mixing in cream or butter or anything like it is most distinctly not one of the likenesses. This kind of drift is what happens over the course of MANY CENTURIES. You are proposing a direct...

It did in fact explicitly state that the Germans were not descended from Aryans. I don't know what more you want than a flat statement that their use of the term was a mis-use. A tangent discussing the linguistics of thousands of years would be completely out of place. You are excluding the...

Precisely. The book is talking in code about the contemporary political situation of the 1st century. Deciphering it now, when we can't hope to catch all the references, is pretty hopeless; trying to apply it to the present day is an enormous mis-interpretation. At its most basic, it is...