h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It sound sdelicious!

...from something disgusting to something palatable...

i've been thinking since we got rid of the snake this way it would be quite safe to serve it up with apple sauce, no?

That might work.

afterwards we could put on some clothes

I am *not* eating your clothes no matter what seasonings you cook them with.

i wonder if adam and eve were into salads

According to the Young Earth Creationists all the animals were vegetarian before the Fall.

The Kentucky creation museum has a diorama with Adam and Eve and a tyrannosaur. The dino is eating plants. Good thing god gave him teeth that could shear through the toughest aubergine.

Did they have Jamie Oliver. He does a thirty minute meal at teatime on tv and he does salads with pork in them.

Oh and they must cost fifty pounds or even dollars to make. I didn't like the look of his king prawns though, he leaves all their bits on.



Liked the look of five fruit baked in brandy with real ice cream though.

He probably wouldn't have put pork in his salads in the Garden of Eden.

Whatever Adam and Eve's dietary preferences, God apparently preferred red meat, judging from the tale of Cain and Abel. (...one thing led to another...)

Even though Adam and Eve had been expelled from the Garden of Eden, they were still living in the environs and still paying God rent.

Adams' first wife, the one before Eve, Lilith, had on the other hand decamped for what are nowadays the British Isles, where she is credited in ancient Celtic legend for being one of the great progenitors of human kind.

The Mid-east and Celtic legends relating to Lilith agree that she was a red head with a fiery temper.

pork in the garden of eden doesn't sound kosher to me

...may have been one the things led to the falling out between Adam and Lilith...

...can you kind picture that final scene between the two, concluding with and angry and very loud "...enough of you! I'm out of here!" from Lilith to Adam just before she decamped for a more northerly clime?

According to the mid-east version, she also had some issues with God.

That is right, I think

I wasn't sure where Lilith came in. There are some who claim she was a witch, or something like that.

Lilith was Adams' first wife according to ancient mid-east and Celtic tradition.

Adam landed his job as caretaker in the Garden of Eden on the rebound, after Lilith threw him over.

The tales that relate to Lilith are not accepted in the official canon of the Bible, but they aren't strictly apocryphal either since they predate the official biblical account.

Wonderful multi interpretable soap

Sorry, I'm not following this all that well. If the tale of Lilith came *before* the tale of Adam and Eve, then how did she know who Adam was? Adam hadn't had a story written about him yet.

and according to the official ledger eve was the first woman ever

hard to wrap ones mind around this kind of religion, yes?

The 'official ledger' doesn't deny the process of evolution, or even specify that the world did not exist before the moment of creation as described in Genesis.

There are, none the less, people who believe that the world was created out of a prior state of nonexistence at about the point in time of the incidents described in Genesis, who also deny any possibility that humanity is a product of natural evolution, but instead believe that humanity is a product of a special and supernatural act of creation.

Myself, given my own syncretic outlook, given the corroborations of many of the events of Genesis by other mythological accounts, I'm inclined to credit that the events described probably really happened in prehistoric times, despite distortions originating with imperfect human beings that have crept into those accounts over time, but it's my opinion the creation described in Genesis was a political and religious act, not a physical or supernatural one.




My account of the history of humanity in 90 seconds or less:




Humanity arises!

Language!

Law!

Firemaking is discovered!!!

More language!!!

More law!!!

Humanity evolves hairless hides...

Humanity leaves Earth!!!!!




(Missing exclamation point intended for effect.)




I suppose that I might seem something of a paradox on the point of having an outlook founded in scientific rationalism on the one hand and being able to seriously credit that an event like the biblical account of Noahs' flood may have really taken place on the other.

I'd personally be inclined to identify the Noachian flood with the flooding of the Black Sea basin, approximately 6800 BC. (Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that he thought that the flood myth might have been inspired by the sea level increase incidents of the conclusion of the last ice age.)

Before that, in the late ice age conditions that obtained, the Black sea was a (mostly) dry, below sea level, landlocked basin, watered by the flow of the ancient Danube (not quite the Danube of today), which flowed into a fresh water lake, which in turn drained into a salt marsh in the basin. Dating of the flooding of the Black Sea basin was done on a basis of studies of freshwater clams found in core sections from the bottom of the Black Sea.

Since the basin was below sea level, it would have had ideal conditions for formation of a stable meteorological inversion layer, a warm air pocket covering it, over an area of a size about like an average sized American state or European nation, with a sea level thermocline producing its own clouds and storms.




[Since I live in a below sea level basin and have to endure the the torrid summer time heat, or take refuge elsewhere, this is perhaps more meaningful to me than it would be to most people.

Basins like that in the world today include Central Australia, the largest in horizontal expanse; the Dead Sea, the deepest; Californias' Death Valley, possibly the most famous on the point, if it is not the Dead Sea; the Salton Sink, also in California, which includes the most productive agricultural land in the United States, the Imperial Valley, in Imperial County and the the resort capital of the Greater Palm Springs Area in the Coachella Valley, the Riverside County and northern extension of the Imperial Valley. The Imperial Valley and the Coachella Valley taken together comprise the Salton Sink. (Same geological feature, it's just that it changes names at the county line.) Geographically the entire area of the Salton Sink is comparable in size to the Netherlands or Denmark.

All of these modern landlocked, below sea level, basins are notable for extraordinarily hot summertime temperatures, highs around 120F or 48C, sometimes exceeding 130F or 55C.]




So, at any rate, the Black Sea basin prior to its flooding in the late ice age conditions of the time was probably the warmest and most temperate region in the Mediterranean and European world of the time and it was so luxuriantly watered that it was probably also the most heavily populated area in the region as well.

Though ruins of the same type as the drowned ruins of the island of Malta have been found on the bottom, these probably date to a later sea level increase incident, that of circa 3000 BC (which I would personally identify with the flood of Deucalion), immediately before the rise of the classical Egyptian civilization of the pyramid builders. Studies are still underway.

Meanwhile, with respect to identifying the 6800 BC flooding incident with the Noachian flood, according to the account from Genesis, in the aftermath of the flood, Noahs' ark was deposited on Mt. Ararat.

The Black Sea is located in one of the most seismologically active areas in the world. Turkeys' earthquakes rival those of California and Chile.

Flooding a substantial area, even in connection with construction of a modern dam, produces changes in isostasic loading on the crust, generating earthquakes. Earthquakes in association with large and deep bodies of water engender tsunami waves. So do submarine landslides. Between the two, taken together with a lubricating effect due to water under pressure being forced into active earthquake fault lines and fissures, amplifying and aggravating seismic potentials, a 'pumping' effect would have been generated, raising the level of the Black Sea temporarily well above its current levels. There are geological evidences that the flood not only spilled over the mountains of northern Turkey, but ran all the way to the sea in what's nowadays the Persian Gulf along the course of the valley of the Tigris-Euphrates river system, so I have no trouble at all crediting that Noahs' ark may have fetched up on the slopes of Mt. Ararat.

Yet again, relating this against the Old Norse Tales, an ancient name for what we nowadays call the Balkan Peninsula, the peninsula between the Adriatic Sea and the Black Sea is 'Vanadia', which one might reckon as 'the land of the Vanir'. So, relating that to the cycle of the wars between the Aesir and the Vanir, one might reckon the region between 'Vanadia' and Asia Minor ('the land of the Aesir'), 'Middle Earth', or 'Midgard', corresponding to the tract now submerged beneath the Black Sea. 'Jotunheim' (the land of the giants) in turn lies to the north and west of 'Midgard', along the course the Danube, and 'Utgard' (the other land of the giants) to the south and east of it, corresponding to what is nowadays Palestine and the State of Israel.

Many people have trouble accepting this for many good and sufficient reasons. However, if you want a flood of magnitude adequate to deposit Noahs' ark on Mt. Ararat, I think this has got to be it. It really happened, there once was such a flood.

This would place Adam and Eve (and Lilith) sometime around 6900 BC, give or take a modern lifetime or so, probably just prior to the war between the Aesir and the house of Sigfried. It would also place Sigfried and Brunhilde between 7000 BC and 6900 BC. The war between the Aesir and the house of Sigfried, in the generation of Sigfried and Brunhildes' great-grand son and their great-great-grand children, was the precursor to the Rebellion in Heaven, which climaxed with Ragnarok, or the Great Flood. Identifying 'Loki' with 'Lucifer' doesn't seem to me all that far fetched, the two names mean exactly the same thing, 'light bearer', an ancient appellation for a herald or messenger.

Many people prefer to view 'Ragnarok' as prophetic, like the New Testament book of the Revelation, or the Apocalypse.

I prefer to identify it with the Great Flood, noting that there was conference of the survivors convened after the great flood of the book of Ragnarok, e.g., shortly after the Great Flood.




Concluding, I'm reminded of a commentary by the editor of the "Gesta Danorum", a late medieval official compilation of the Old Norse Tales commissioned by the Danish Crown, who remarked that in his opinion, the personalities of the Old Norse tales were in no way supernatural, but instead human beings, albeit exceptionally gifted ones, invested with a superior technology.

I thought that incredibly insightful for a medieval author.




A syncretic reckoning of the sort given above is always uncertain. It is, in a way, like trying to piece together an old and worn jigsaw puzzle with many of pieces missing and reconstruct the picture from that. What one comes up with may or may not closely resemble the original. With an exercise of syncretism of this sort, one at any rate has the basis of an exciting story. Fact can only be determined by examination of the historical record (if any) or archaeological evidences.




'Syncretic' philosophy: Syncretism embraces anything and everything in religion and the related history, except uncritical acceptance of anything.




A syncretic question: Did God himself once walk the Earth as Jesus later did? If so, when, where, and what did he do during his sojourn on Earth?