I'm currently rewriting a novel, based loosely on my experience with the JW's. I invented my own apocalyptic religion as it gave me more creative leeway. As part of that I tried working out different sets of dates for Armageddon using the same sort of "year for a day" type calculations. I concluded that I could pull a year out of my ass and cobble together a "scriptural" proof that this would be the date for the end of the world. In other words its all meaningless.
Numeracy
by jws 13 Replies latest jw experiences
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waton
Waton, numeracy is being "literate" with numbers.
Numerology is some nonsense where numbers have some kind of mystical significance.thank you. surely, we must not ignore the most important aspect of Numbers that is measure reality, even the concept of Zero, that eluded wt chronology for a while.
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jws
Crazyguy. I have to problem postulating even more ancient civilizations than we're aware of. If we have proof, we have proof.
What is make-believe on the part of Hancock is that these ancient civilizations were somehow way more advanced than later civilizations. Perhaps in some ways more advanced than today. I do think that sometimes civilizations do have some things that get lost. For instance, in 200 BC Eratosthenes calculated the approximate size of the earth (as a sphere). Yet years later and even today, we have people who claim the world is flat. Though I think the flat-earth thing wasn't as widespread as people like to claim, it was a thing.
But that's a far cry from implying they had modern-type knowledge of cosmology. Or that Egyptians needed help from advanced earlier civilizations to do the things they did.
Here's another article I read a few months ago about him: https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/defant-analysis-of-hancock-claims-in-magicians-of-the-gods/
Once again, claiming that something was too advanced to be done by the people who apparently did it. In this case, Göbekli Tepe.
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under the radar
Basically, you can correlate anything to anything else if you try hard enough. Especially if you're willing to fudge things a bit to make them fit better (think "Pyramid inches.")
But this denies a scientific principle that has been proven over and over again: Correlation is not the same as causation.
The fact that two or more sets of facts or events can be shown to correspond statistically does not prove that either one actually causes the other. There are usually many other factors in play, some unknown.
My hat's off to jws for starting this thread. I like the way he used logic and reason to demonstrate the folly of looking for hidden signs and meanings to prove a hypothesis you've already accepted as fact. That's pretty much the opposite of the scientific method.
Oh well, whatcha gonna do? People are gonna believe whatever they wanna believe... no proof or logic required.