The Garden of Eden

Quahom1 said:
How many can you speak fluently Tao?

I know one who can vouche for the fact that I speak 5 fluently...

Are you sure I don't understand the diversity and the commonality of something as simple as vocal language?:eek:

I could be off...been there before...:D
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Language is an interesting subject, one that really deserves its own thread. We have some good speculative models on language as an indicator of social development. You can use an old book to believe there was a single root language within the timescales possible to get recorded in our written legacy but linguistics suggests different. Indeed the linguistic models support an ancient out of Africa story of migration and isolation. Yet the truth is that we cannot be sure about such things. These ancient voices leave no trace. But you do not have to be a genius to see how fast language changes. Accents and slang vary from city district, towns, countries and generations very rapidly. I'd have a hard time following the language of my predecessors even 3 or 4 generations back.

Quahom1 said:
Two Rotties, three Gray Tabbies, one current Black as midnight kitten, a dozen gold fish in an outside pond, and 16 (sixteen) ferrets...why do dogs and ferrets adapt so fast, but cats and goldfish never do?..:confused::eek::D
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The variety of cats species is greater than that in canines and when you go to the fossil record even more so. Well again the world is not your pond. There is huge variation in goldfish and koi and indeed wild carp.
 
Another point is that people are the same the world over, and for all our advances and technical wizardry, and leaving all the illusions of linear and empirical progress aside, we still ask the same philosophical questions our ancestors asked.

As someone said, the Sacred Texts of the world are the 'winnowed wisdom' of the human race and it should come as no surprise that there are remarkable correspondences between texts when its the same issues that we question most profoundly — where have we come from, where are we going, why do we suffer?

Meanwhile we are still led in out thinking to operate almost entirely within the cramped confines of post-Enlightenment secularism that radically reduces the intellectual landscape. Even though the laws of Newtonian physics, which led to a denial of miracle and of human freedom, has been questioned and relativised by the new physics, the imagination of the individual has been so programmed that they are still on the quest for a closed and comfortable world of uninterrupted causal series.

Anything beyond hackneyed everyday experience, reproducible at will to ‘scientific’ observers, tends to be treated as superstition, magic, or myth, whilst 'Quantum Physics' begins to take on, in the minds of many, all the aspects of the Mysteries that stiffled thinking has stripped from the world.

How can anyone claim science as a basis to test the meaning and value of Scripture, when science cannot adequately explain its own axioms, let alone criticise an axiom to which it can lay no claim?

So some people question texts, and words, and times and dates and places, with a ferocious attention to forensic detail and never actually consider the texts at all, other than to rationalise them and explain them away ... the Text Critical Method is a testament to this reductive and essentially fruitless process when taken to extreme ... meanwhile for others the texts shine out, lastingly and luminously, as a testament to the endeavour of the whole person whose very experience should teach him that not everything in the world can be subject to empirical measurement, nor reduced to a comfortable formulae.

Thomas
 
Tao, I think Q meant the household cat (felis catus.) Keeping it all in one species, like with the dogs and wolves (technically the same species as they can produce viable offspring when bred.)

And there are quite a few different breeds with different traits within the household cat family, but none with quite the same level of difference as vastly different dog breeds.

Goldfish the same way.

I believe that it's just a matter of dogs being useful trainable companions able to perform a number of helpful tasks. They were optomized for these tasks by humans and thus their physical appearance was shaped for function and preference. Not to mention the different temperaments that were bred for in order to perform said tasks.
 
Thomas said:
Another point is that people are the same the world over, and for all our advances and technical wizardry, and leaving all the illusions of linear and empirical progress aside, we still ask the same philosophical questions our ancestors asked.

As someone said, the Sacred Texts of the world are the 'winnowed wisdom' of the human race and it should come as no surprise that there are remarkable correspondences between texts when its the same issues that we question most profoundly — where have we come from, where are we going, why do we suffer?

Meanwhile we are still led in out thinking to operate almost entirely within the cramped confines of post-Enlightenment secularism that radically reduces the intellectual landscape. Even though the laws of Newtonian physics, which led to a denial of miracle and of human freedom, has been questioned and relativised by the new physics, the imagination of the individual has been so programmed that they are still on the quest for a closed and comfortable world of uninterrupted causal series.

Anything beyond hackneyed everyday experience, reproducible at will to ‘scientific’ observers, tends to be treated as superstition, magic, or myth, whilst 'Quantum Physics' begins to take on, in the minds of many, all the aspects of the Mysteries that stiffled thinking has stripped from the world.

How can anyone claim science as a basis to test the meaning and value of Scripture, when science cannot adequately explain its own axioms, let alone criticise an axiom to which it can lay no claim?

So some people question texts, and words, and times and dates and places, with a ferocious attention to forensic detail and never actually consider the texts at all, other than to rationalise them and explain them away ... the Text Critical Method is a testament to this reductive and essentially fruitless process when taken to extreme ... meanwhile for others the texts shine out, lastingly and luminously, as a testament to the endeavour of the whole person whose very experience should teach him that not everything in the world can be subject to empirical measurement, nor reduced to a comfortable formulae.

Thomas
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lol, nice try Thomas but you are still making a cleverly disguised straw man of science and never mention what you are really attacking - critical thinking. You are free to romanticise an age of spiritual harmony but it never existed. Most people were too busy just surviving to 30 or 40 years old to think, even if they had the education. What you are saying is you regret the education of the masses. A well established Papal constant that has been.
 
I took it that Thomas was trying to say that over analyzing things is kind of the state of mind in this day and age. Not that that is always a bad thing. And the over analyzing mindset was partly brought on by science. We break everything down to it's parts, trying to find out what makes them tick. We read things therefore very differently than people would in say one AD. We have completely different ways of looking at things than people would have back then. Masses or not.

Oh, man, I most definitely don't regret the education of the masses. I do however regret in some cases, scratch that, most cases, how that "education" was delivered.

I don't agree with the parts of Thomas's post that rip on science. It is a wonderful thing.

But I also disagree when scientists say that if they can explain something it is no longer a miracle. Like, if science sufficiently explained all of the things that were labeled miracles in the bible, I wouldn't see that explanation as making the thing any less miraculous.

Just because you understand the innermost workings of something doesn't make it everyday and blase. Or, rather, it doesn't have to.

I don't know what I'm trying to say really. It's just that I see the mindset of people today as greatly affecting how they interpret ancient texts. And I think that is probably a counterproductive thing. If we are to find what the texts really meant to the people who wrote them, who would have been able to interpret them correctly, then we should try our hardest to read the texts from their perspective. And not our own, modern one.

Does that make any sense?
 
Thomas said:
How can anyone claim science as a basis to test the meaning and value of Scripture, when science cannot adequately explain its own axioms, let alone criticise an axiom to which it can lay no claim?
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This is the view of someone who is on the outside looking in who does not realize that competent scientists are well aware of the limitations of the scientific method.

The science versus religion issue is partisan and false. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit priest. He was also a paleontologist whose work yielded discovery of a Homo erectus skull in China.
 
immortalitylost said:
If we are to find what the texts really meant to the people who wrote them, who would have been able to interpret them correctly, then we should try our hardest to read the texts from their perspective. And not our own, modern one.
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Mmm. Sanskrit as a second language?
 
Thomas said:
Anything beyond hackneyed everyday experience, reproducible at will to ‘scientific’ observers, tends to be treated as superstition, magic, or myth ....
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I doubt whether scientism as a philosophic outlook has had as much of a direct impact on people's world view as industrialization and the attendant distribution of labor and the commodification of human potential in the context of a marketing society.
 
immortalitylost said:
I took it that Thomas was trying to say that over analyzing things is kind of the state of mind in this day and age. Not that that is always a bad thing. And the over analyzing mindset was partly brought on by science. We break everything down to it's parts, trying to find out what makes them tick. We read things therefore very differently than people would in say one AD. We have completely different ways of looking at things than people would have back then. Masses or not.
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Thank you.

immortalitylost said:
Oh, man, I most definitely don't regret the education of the masses. I do however regret in some cases, scratch that, most cases, how that "education" was delivered.
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Nor do I. I am one of the 'masses'

immortalitylost said:
I don't agree with the parts of Thomas's post that rip on science. It is a wonderful thing.
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I don't rip science, I was pointing out the misuse of science (as you noted). I revel in what little science I know, my tutor keeps banging on about Quantum Physics — good grief, theology is a science! I watch/listen to all the science programmes I can get hold of ... I am in awe of science ...

There are many scientists who are believers, of whatever faith, so the assumption that science de facto disproves religion is false, that's my point, and yet often that seems to be the way science is evoked in the argument.

The assumption that the empirical sciences specifically can provide data about the existence or non-existence of God is also an error, based on the fact that quantifiable data is all there is ...

immortalitylost said:
Does that make any sense?
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Yes, it does to me.

The scientists I like, like the people I am drawn to, are the ones who haven't lost their sense of wonder ... whether they are believers in a faith tradition or not ... I think when man surrenders his right to wonder, then a rich seam of human activity is lost.

Thomas
 
Ok, I reread your post Thomas, and you totally don't rip on science. I guess I was just trying to cover all my bases to make sure no one got mad at me... :eek:

I'm just stuck in da middle tryin to say something while not making anyone mad. A very tough thing to do in this forum, lol. I concede the point to you tho. I was in error. :)
 
immortalitylost said:
Ok, I reread your post Thomas, and you totally don't rip on science. I guess I was just trying to cover all my bases to make sure no one got mad at me... :eek:

I'm just stuck in da middle tryin to say something while not making anyone mad. A very tough thing to do in this forum, lol. I concede the point to you tho. I was in error. :)
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rofl welcome to my world.. my views arent always the most popular!
 
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