When Presence tried to argue with me about Jesus and God, vulture replied with this post that is the inspiration for this post:
Originally posted by vulture987@Aug 11 2004, 02:13 PM
After that he will explain other things that are beyond our ability to realize such as:
the formation of life on earth
why the dinosaurs really died
the bermuda triangle
the founding and crumbling of the antlantian empire
how the universe was formed
how to find the cure for cancer<div align="right"><{POST_SNAPBACK}>
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I have this theory: that religions were formed long ago by elders to explain things to their young. Lol. I&#39;m sure lots of you are just going.. "No, really, when did u figure that out sherlock homes." But that quoted post above really made me start thinking about it, and I&#39;m going to start some research on it. This is mainly for all of the people who&#39;ve chosen to beleive in any religion without exploring alternatives. It&#39;s going to be a long one, so mods, if you want to move it to the Articles Section, go ahead. Here&#39;s what I know so far.

Such is the myth about Arachne <a href="http://" target="_blank"> and how she challenged Athena to a weaving contest. Upon her boasting she was punished because of her disrespect towards the great God of art. For "hubris," she was was doomed to be lowered into common house spider, hence the scientific name for spiders/scorpions, "Arachnids."

When studying Greek mythology in class, our English teacher also had us explorer how and why they were written and told. Of course one reason was entertainment. Of the hundred great mathmaticians and inventors of the BC&#39;s nobody had yet invented radios or tvs, so they had to keep themselves entertained. They were one of the Greatest civilizations in the history of the human race, and were extremely creative, but lacked in government. We explorered how all of the myths taught us something. Something about life, something that actually related to us, and not only at that time, but these principles can even be applied to our life now. Eventually these stories became very popular from authors like Homer and Romans soon stole the stories, changed the names of the gods, and used them.

All over the world, people have been writing stories like the one above, most of which are for kids, as they are the most impressionable age group, and beleive anything. One of the mot famous is Little Red Riding Hood. It teaches us, perhaps, one of the most important lessons of life, don&#39;t trust just anyone. A lesser sublime related lesson from the story is to listen to elders.

My family is Hindu, and so they&#39;ve tried to raise me up on it. My mother&#39;s told me stories many times before similar to these. One of them involves Ganesh. He lived in a village, with his mother. During this time, it was very tabboo for a man to look at a woman in the nude unless he was his husband. When Ganesh&#39;s mother was taking a shower in the comunity-urm shower area which had a wooden door with a hole in it-she told her son to guard the door to make sure nobody looked in. Well, something distracted him, and he walked away. Soon on of the men of the village did come by and unknowingly witnessed the woman in the nude. She was very angered at her son and cursed him. "You will receive the head of the next creature you lay your eyes upon," she said. To make a long story short(er) the boy received the head of an elephant.

Conclusively all of these stories are about life lessons, but of course most of the people on this board being Christian or Jewish, can&#39;t relate. Now I don&#39;t know much about the Judaism, or Christianity for that matter. But from what I&#39;ve read from the Christian Bible (only up to Genesis: ch4) so far, which I guess isn&#39;t all that much, but it talks about the creation of the world. It also speaks of Cain and Abel the first two brothers, the older of which, Cain, killed Abel from jelousy. And of why Eve and the rest of females from this race are the ones to bring forth children.

Most atheists, like myself and I guess, vulture as well, are unhappy with these explanations. They just seem too... logical. It shouldn&#39;t be that simple. It&#39;s almost like people just made them up, to explain things we don&#39;t know. And that&#39;s what I beleive most texts to be. The 7 deadly sins for example, it&#39;s like our society made them so we wouldn&#39;t be sluggish, wouldn&#39;t be lustful, gargantuan and the rest - because they are causes for a defective society, almost like they want us to be pre-programmed robots, to this day they are unsuccessful.

Now going back to the main topic and quote above, I want to also express my ideas about how we, humans, might have wanted to create these myths about the creation of the world and of our human behaviours. In vulture&#39;s post, he talks about five things that so far, we haven&#39;t been able to viably answer: (1)Life Earth. (2)Dinosaurs extinct. (3)Bermuda triangle. (4)Atlantis. (4)Formation of the Universe. (5)Cure for Cancer. This post is in no way directed to start a fight with vulture, or anyone for that mather, and nor am I trying to convert people to atheism, I&#39;m just trying to publicize my opinion as well as try to learn from you, please reply with any comments!

(1)Okay, so the first question, the formation of life on Earth. How did we get here - Did we just blow up out of nowhere? There&#39;s one theory about an agent from outter space landing on our planet. That would mean that we actually originated on another planet, or elsewhere, in space. Also totally possible, but it would be extremely lucky that they found a planet capable of living on, and could actually multiply through water. Another theory i witnessed on the Discovery Channel was about how certain chemicals mixing together, along with the numerous rays from the sun and elsewhere could actually come together to form singular celled organism which would actually start to reproduce itself. I beleive this theory, but it also seems to revolve around extreme luck, or we would have it happening everyday.

The first life forms were actually thought to be from the plantae kingdom, but when we started examining smaller kingdoms, we discovered more kingdoms, and started classifying &#39;things&#39; into groups other than just Animalia, Plantae, and Mineral (repealed later on). Either way, it&#39;s supposed that animal life started after moss started to grow on rocks. So why did life on Earth start in water vs. land, still uncertain.

How we as in humans&#39; got here is equally controversial. The Bible speaks about two original humans, and us being their children. But they were supposedly.. stupid. I don&#39;t mean stupid as in low IQ, I mean stupid as in nieve and innocent. Until Eve took from the tree of knoledge. We once also thought that we had evidence of us evolving from other primates via fossils of Neanderthals Homo neanderthalis. Today, we know this simply is not true. Neanderthals were simply another species, as we are Homo sapiens. We were though, actually related to them. So closely that we could actually mate with them, as evidence suggests, but since the only evidence is of a hybrid child(ren) it&#39;s inconclusive wheather they could live a full life time, which at that time is thought to be circa 40yrs.

The Bible states that Adam lived a hundred-thirty years, and some of his sons lived almost a thousand years (Gen 5:3-5:32). While this sounds paposteramazing,(!) a website I once read by (I think it was) a PhD talked about sexual energy and egyptians of the older days that lived into their first century. Today most people don&#39;t live past 85.

(2)Ahh. Dinosaur extinction, that&#39;s something everyone&#39;s been fighting about for a while. Most people beleive that the world was hit by a meteor some billion years ago, which caused temperature and environment changes, which is a great theory, something like that would definately wipe out a large portion of the Earth&#39;s animals. Another theory blurbs an ice-age without a meteor. That&#39;s also possible. It&#39;s up to you. It might have even been over-population or competition with other creatures. Or even a sickness that&#39;s died out since - Perhaps the animals that survived were somehow immune to it.

(3)Bermuda Triangle. I once did a project in the fourth grade on this topic. I didn&#39;t find much, I googled it just now and here&#39;s what I found. Bermuda-Triangle.org didn&#39;t seem to offer much other than would a sci-fi fanatic&#39;s site on aliens... Going through a couple different locations, I also couldn&#39;t find a viable date for the start of the phenomenon, one page suggested 1950, another 1918. It is estimated that a total of 1000 have been victim to the triangle. Comparably that&#39;s not much - considering the time frame. Off of istina.rin.ru, I found some possible causes for the phenomenon that aren&#39;t so unexplained: Tropical Weather, Amature Sailors, Earthquakes, Traffic, Gulf Stream, Pirates and Gas Bubbles (sinkage from water decrompression). I wouldn&#39;t exactly call this any more unexplained that the whole Area 51 thing, especcially with the factor of how media can totally fool people into beleiving in consperiancies where they aren&#39;t.

(4)Atlantis. I also don&#39;t know much about this one, and as I search, I hope it&#39;s not going to be as inconclusive as the Bermuda Triangle.... YES! I found a great site on Google that claims to have found Atlantis under the China Sea. It has a great deal of content, and so I&#39;m just going to put in a link instead of quoting the whole damn thing. [url="http://www.atlan.org/sci/"]Here</a>.

(5)And lastly, the formation of the Universe. By dictionary definition, a universe is quite litterally "Everything that exists anywhere." The most popular theory is the one on the Big Bang: an atomic explosion. But where exactly did all the matter come from. Scientists today are working on this. What stars do is they take elements/compounds, and burn them, and since this is a chemical reaction. Hypothetically, what if there was this element/compound. A super element/compound that had the capability of being turned into all of the elements now in the universe.

It is said that the universe is constantly increasing in size (proportionately, not physically), although I really don&#39;t see anything for this, there is the fact that everything has a gravitational pull, which would probably hint that it would be getting smaller and smaller. Most scientists do agree though that since the stars in galaxies orbit around a centerpoint, just like planets do a star, so would galaxies in a cluster, and clusters in a sector, and they in a universe.


This post topic wasn&#39;t created for me to answer these questions.. so, no hate posts please.. but i would like you to add what you know. I will periodically add my sources and references.