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  1. #41
    Herald of the Titans GodlyBob's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Vegas82 View Post
    The biggest question with a lot of Ancient Egypt is just how much technology were they using to construct their monuments. It's too bad we lost the Library of Alexandria, I feel like it probably contained a lot of answers.
    The Egyptians didn't really write too terribly many documents on HOW certain things were done, just that things WERE done. We do have plenty of physical evidence as to what they utilized though. There are a good number of extent records for educational crafts though. We know how they did math, including all the steps to get to an answer. We can see how their medical practices worked as well.

    It's also worth noting that the library of Alexandria was constructed closer to the modern day than it was to the election of the pyramids. It would still have had a huge amount of information regarding the hellenistic world though.
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  2. #42
    Void Lord Elegiac's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Fascinate View Post
    I cant discuss things with this person, they literally are the status quo and will never be able to have an original thought in their lives.
    What, the status quo of believing people need to formulate positions based on evidence?

    What really bothers me about your posts endus is the way you assume to know how things are, when in reality you are incredibly off course and dont give near enough credit to the times. Stop typing like you do and think for a second, try and imagine what kind of motivation it would take to build the structures that still exist on this planet 4000-1000 years later (some have been dated to those numbers). Big things were happening then, please lets not belittle them.
    It's easy to imagine why a conscripted labor force that believes their ruler is divine might perform some impressive feats.

    I mean, if you think that the fact people aren't as easy to dupe into spending half their lives building someone else's grave and that people expect some level of public utility from that amount of expenditure is a bad thing, that's on you friendo.

  3. #43
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    Quote Originally Posted by Anaralah View Post
    Of course Tolkien's universe was real until some cataclysmic event reset it with every trace of it, he didnt write the story himself actually, just translated the Red Book of Westmarch.
    This thing all things devours:
    Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
    Gnaws iron, bites steel;
    Grinds hard stones to meal;
    Slays king, ruins town,
    And beats high mountain down.

  4. #44
    Quote Originally Posted by Didactic View Post
    What, the status quo of believing people need to formulate positions based on evidence?



    It's easy to imagine why a conscripted labor force that believes their ruler is divine might perform some impressive feats.

    I mean, if you think that the fact people aren't as easy to dupe into spending half their lives building someone else's grave and that people expect some level of public utility from that amount of expenditure is a bad thing, that's on you friendo.
    What i meant by that is this kind of person will not even entertain the type of ideas i put forth. Trust me more was going on back in those days than meets the eye, but people like endus love to explain it away easily......so they can sleep at night.

  5. #45
    I Don't Work Here Endus's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Fascinate View Post
    I truly believe there is a connection between the structures left here on earth from thousands of years ago, and KNOWLEDGE OF A CREATOR. I am not talking about religion here, i am talking about actual knowledge of why we are here and what our purpose is.
    That's literally religion. And there was no consistency on that issue among those early peoples, so your claim isn't even internally consistent.

    What really bothers me about your posts @Endus is the way you assume to know how things are, when in reality you are incredibly off course and dont give near enough credit to the times. Stop typing like you do and think for a second, try and imagine what kind of motivation it would take to build the structures that still exist on this planet 4000-10000 years later (some have been dated to those numbers). Big things were happening then, please lets not belittle them.
    You've provided absolutely zero evidence to support your claims. That's why they're dismissed. Everything we know about those earliest cultures directly contradicts what you're claiming. Those earliest civilizations didn't believe in a "creator". They had pantheistic faiths, and those pantheistic faiths shared only the broadest of similarities, similarities that can be traced to the common thread of human perception and psychology.


  6. #46
    Quote Originally Posted by Endus View Post
    That's literally religion. And there was no consistency on that issue among those early peoples, so your claim isn't even internally consistent.



    You've provided absolutely zero evidence to support your claims. That's why they're dismissed. Everything we know about those earliest cultures directly contradicts what you're claiming. Those earliest civilizations didn't believe in a "creator". They had pantheistic faiths, and those pantheistic faiths shared only the broadest of similarities, similarities that can be traced to the common thread of human perception and psychology.
    This is why we cant be friends, its impossible for you to think beyond what the textbooks tell you. I do wish you well though, and please dont stop thinking about this because i KNOW you had a passion for it once in your life, hopefully it comes back.

  7. #47
    I Don't Work Here Endus's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Fascinate View Post
    What i meant by that is this kind of person will not even entertain the type of ideas i put forth. Trust me more was going on back in those days than meets the eye, but people like endus love to explain it away easily......so they can sleep at night.
    Again, alt-history is a hobby of mine. I wrote my honors thesis on pre-Columbian transatlantic crossings. The difference between you and I is that I require evidence to back a theory before I put any credence in it. I don't just make up nonsense that the known facts contradict, and then complain when others won't believe my wild theories.

    If you read my first post, I'm not against the possibility of earlier civilizations. But there's nothing magic in human history.


  8. #48
    Herald of the Titans GodlyBob's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Fascinate View Post
    What i meant by that is this kind of person will not even entertain the type of ideas i put forth. Trust me more was going on back in those days than meets the eye, but people like endus love to explain it away easily......so they can sleep at night.
    But...it IS easily explained away. Unless you can disprove the simple answer, why should we entertain, beyond hypothetically, an explanation that is more convoluted and makes more logical leaps by at least an order of a magnitude than its opposition?
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  9. #49
    Quote Originally Posted by AcidicSyn View Post
    This thing all things devours:
    Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
    Gnaws iron, bites steel;
    Grinds hard stones to meal;
    Slays king, ruins town,
    And beats high mountain down.
    La Brea Tar Pits

    .

    "This will be a fight against overwhelming odds from which survival cannot be expected. We will do what damage we can."

    -- Capt. Copeland

  10. #50
    Older civilizations on earth or in outer space?

  11. #51
    Quote Originally Posted by GodlyBob View Post
    It's also worth noting that the library of Alexandria was constructed closer to the modern day than it was to the election of the pyramids. It would still have had a huge amount of information regarding the hellenistic world though.
    The thing is, that the library (more of an educational institution) actually required 4 different "burnings" to stop existing. Caesar, Aurelian, the Christian fundamentalists and then the Muslims in the mid 600s.

    Undoubtedly a lot has been lost forever, but the greatest loss wasn't really in the physical destruction of information, but rather in the loss of a centralized deposit of information where people could go for an education, to conduct comparative research (one of its primary purposes), and from where copies of countless texts could be obtained by the educated and wealthy.

  12. #52
    I Don't Work Here Endus's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Fascinate View Post
    This is why we cant be friends, its impossible for you to think beyond what the textbooks tell you.
    Not "textbooks". Primary documents and archaeological findings.

    If you don't have a grounding in facts for your claims, you're literally just making shit up. I dismiss that for the same reason I dismiss all that kind of stuff. If you want me to believe that Hercules rode unicorns into battle against Jormungandr, you're gonna be asked to provide actual facts to support any of that.

    Without facts to back it, you're literally just making things up.

    Occam's Razor says that the simplest solution is the most likely to be true. So since human ingenuity explains all these ancient structures and megaliths, why resort to claims of literal magic? How is that more reasonable?


  13. #53
    Void Lord Elegiac's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Fascinate View Post
    What i meant by that is this kind of person will not even entertain the type of ideas i put forth. Trust me more was going on back in those days than meets the eye, but people like endus love to explain it away easily......so they can sleep at night.
    People should not be entertaining baseless and fantastical ideas as if they were legitimate.

  14. #54
    The Insane Revi's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Fascinate View Post
    What i meant by that is this kind of person will not even entertain the type of ideas i put forth. Trust me more was going on back in those days than meets the eye, but people like endus love to explain it away easily......so they can sleep at night.
    Why? You're rejecting everything based on evidence we've found and our knowledge to date and claiming you have a truth that you can't prove and that doesn't make much sense.

    Why should anyone trust you and reject everything real scholars and scientists have put forth?

  15. #55
    Herald of the Titans GodlyBob's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mihalik View Post
    The thing is, that the library (more of an educational institution) actually required 4 different "burnings" to stop existing. Caesar, Aurelian, the Christian fundamentalists and then the Muslims in the mid 600s.

    Undoubtedly a lot has been lost forever, but the greatest loss wasn't really in the physical destruction of information, but rather in the loss of a centralized deposit of information where people could go for an education, to conduct comparative research (one of its primary purposes), and from where copies of countless texts could be obtained by the educated and wealthy.
    Oh, I definitely agree. My point is that the library itself wouldn't have she'd so much light on ancient Egyptian civilization as it would the hellenistic period that followed. Still, an incredibly fascinating subject, but I just wanted to make a point about chronology.
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  16. #56
    Quote Originally Posted by Endus View Post
    Again, alt-history is a hobby of mine. I wrote my honors thesis on pre-Columbian transatlantic crossings. The difference between you and I is that I require evidence to back a theory before I put any credence in it. I don't just make up nonsense that the known facts contradict, and then complain when others won't believe my wild theories.

    If you read my first post, I'm not against the possibility of earlier civilizations. But there's nothing magic in human history.
    You act like there is ANY evidence to explain the pyramids and time similar structures of that period lol. I understand some people can only live their lives by the scientific method, but when talking about things of this nature your method is gonna fall flat my friend...

  17. #57
    My favorite teacher was a history teacher in high school in his last year of teaching. He came to class with a Hawaiian shirt half buttoned up, brown pants that were not long enough, and tan boat shoes with no socks.

    The first day we all sat down, everyone was talking and all of a sudden he slammed a large book on his desk. He looked up at us and just stared into space for like two minutes. He then cleared his throat and said "history is a mystery, whoever wins the wars writes the books, shall we begin." We had to read chapter one of our history book. The next day he did the exact same thing. We were all thinking he had lost it and was crazy. He told us every other day we will be going to the library to test if anything in our textbook was true. He told us what books to look at, and any others we could find including online. Each test was one single question, was this chapter true or false, and why? All the correct answers for the many chapters we used were false, and it was obvious in each one where the times and dates were not only wrong, but if they were correct it would have far greater implications.

    On the last day we all said the quote he had been saying every day, and he did not, he just sat there looking into space.
    Last edited by thatmikeguy; 2017-02-10 at 05:49 PM.

  18. #58
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    Quote Originally Posted by Fascinate View Post
    You see this is the way those types of buildings get completed, it is that kind of knowledge that pushes people to accomplish such things.

    I thought slavery was what pushed those workers to accomplish those things. Was that not true?

  19. #59
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    Quote Originally Posted by GennGreymane View Post
    I mean our perception

    Is it possible there were civilizations far older than the ones we know of? Were they more advanced than we think?

    DISCUSS!
    There is decent evidence that the sphinx was built before thelast ice age.

  20. #60
    Herald of the Titans GodlyBob's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Didactic View Post
    People should not be entertaining baseless and fantastical ideas as if they were legitimate.
    There's nothing wrong with academic "what-ifs" just in believing that a hypothesis which suspends logical corner stones a dozen times is as valid as one that does so twice.
    /\ Was this sarcasm? Are you sure?
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    || The results may surprise you.

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