Religious DNA, I guess that would be RDNA, but I have never seen it used that way. The first time is seen it used was in story about the Jewish religion. I was written by a top Rabbi, I didn't copy because I got to many files now. I have seen it used many times but always in relationship to Israel and the Middle East. The Palestinians were claiming closer DNA roots to Israel than most of the Israelis and Rabbis and they wanted to do a DNA test. They were claiming most of the Jewish people in Israel were originally from Europe and Russia and the DNA test would prove it. Israel came back with religious DNA for proof that Israel has always been theirs.Well, that is another way of using the term that didn't occur to me. Judaism is unique among the Abrahamic religions in that it is comprised mostly of Jews who can theoretically trace back their biological heritage through the maternal lineage. One could be Jewish and be an atheist, but they would still share DNA in common with other Jewish people.
[What about the definition of “theist"?] In today’s world I would have to throw theist in the same box. History shows us that man did not always have this problem. All gods had names, most had wives and children. And the use of terms like atheist and theist would have presented different problems depending on the Gods. Note, of course earlier god were animals and some were part human and part animal. I am not going that far back in history for this answer. How much do we understand god today? Answer some simple questions. a. When did your religion begin? b. How many gods are there in your religion? c. What other religions is your religion related to? d. Who was the first man to go to heaven? e. Who was the first man to go to hell? f. Who was the first man to go to heaven and hell and return? Who do you think would be most likely to have looked for these answers, an atheist or a theist?Duh? An Atheist. You'd likely find that more self-claimed atheists know relatively way more than the average believer of any particular religion popular within their region. The reality is that most 'believers' are actually secular in their attitudes and only believe they believe in some common faith that they find obsessively too boring to bother investigating!
Sr. Member, “An atheist is one who LACKS a belief in any god or gods." That’s good. And I have always seen and understand what you are saying. But, In ten thousand years of religion, we have had atheist for what, a couple hundred years. I am just saying, mankind created gods. History shows us that man needed gods before he need pottery. And look at the red ochre burials, that show up everywhere on earth, some going back over 100,000 years. I just think that there is the possibility that as gods have changed so much that people do not believe in today’s gods. I know I don’t. I called myself an atheist for years. Mainly because I don’t believe in belief. I want facts and knowledge. Today I have a harder time calling myself an atheist, mainly because of the studying of the Gnostic word and older religions history. I just get a feeling that I am not 100% correct in calling myself an atheist. So, what has changed? Well mainly my views of what god is and should be. Now, look at the Gnostic Jesus, just a man. A man telling us to learn and seek knowledge. And that we are all part of god. The Gnostic Jesus never said god created everything or there was a heaven or hell. So, if the Gnostic Jesus’ god is built on knowledge and not belief, and you and everyone on earth is part of god. Then god is found by using knowledge. Then your statement “An atheist is one who LACKS a belief in any god or gods." Will work for everyone except the Buddha, Hindus and Gnostics. Now I might be 100% wrong on that last statement. But I would have a hard time calling the above groups atheists because their thinking itself is in a way god like. Sorry for using so many words to get my thoughts out. It’s the first time I've been vocal about these thoughts.You're confusing the concept of "Gnosticism" of a particular religion (the belief that God can only be known, understood, or experienced by a particular prescribed set of 'knowledge') to the generic term, "gnostic" (knowledge). A good example may suffice: the term, abracadabra was derived from the religious Gnostics of Egypt that mimicked the idea that their words, as secret wisdom, could cause reality to occur. The Gnostic roots are also revealed in, "In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God and the word was God." Since writing was rare due to its expense and intensive investment to create in ancient times, it was seen as having power in and of itself. This phrase indicated that (?)John believed that probably the evidence of the written word either predated God's existence or that the word had spoken God into existence metaphysically. Or, it makes God and "The Word" interchangeable (the literal manuscript of God's story is God itself). "LACKS" is the inappropriate word to describe an atheist because it suggests they are missing something. An atheist would be better described as anyone who proposes the the position of their absence of belief in theistic principles or claims of truth about the world based precisely on them because the support for such beliefs do not provide sufficient evidence to justify their claims either directly or indirectly; Also, for those atheists who have invested learning in it can easily find sufficient reasons to justify that theistic beliefs have equally valid human sources of origins or creation without requiring the content to be based on reality.
... Two things the super churches don’t like are Gnostic and DNA. You know according to “religious DNA" all things in the bible are true. Talk about misdirection. Can any atheist please define to me what “religious DNA" is?Religious DNA is a reference to the proposed God Gene a gene that may presumably predispose one to spiritual or mystic experiences. I think it's too vague and abstract to credit any gene to complex religious thought. It could have been just as easily been labeled the Creative Gene and its logic fits with that too: a gene that predisposes one to creative or imaginative experiences, taken lightly as anything you speak on the top of your mind that doesn't fit with reality to serious schizophrenic hallucinations. It would be the idea that God is somehow fixed to be known within your DNA that the fundamentalists would want people to latch on to. Then things like Atheism is a real aberration because then we would be truly considered to be going against our scientific nature. Familiar DNA within religious cultural groups are only arguments regarding the legitimizing of land and resources. Obviously, Jewish Israelis would love to provide more reason to justify their unappealing actions to the world at large by demonstrating DNA connections that link them directly to the historical lands of Palestine. It also gives them better self-justification for whatever injustices that they possibly perceive themselves to be doing to the Palestinians.
I hadn't heard the term “religious DNA", but I assume it refers to how cultural belief systems are passed on in an analagous way as are biological traits. i.e., those cultural beliefs that are most beneficial to the maintenace and survival of a particular culture are most likely to be passed on through the progression of time. Alternatively, it could refer, I suppose, to proclivities toward becoming religious that are passed on by actual DNA. This would suggest that such proclivities, if they exist, have either been of survival value to our predecesors or that they are at least a spandrel (a sort of by product of evolution that is artifactual but has not been necessary in and of itself to promote survival to reproduction).I think the evidence clearly points to religiosity being highly heritable. And FWIW, I am inclined to see it as a byproduct of other traits. religiosity is passed on through memes rather than genes. A meme [1] is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures. a b Dawkins, Richard (1989), The Selfish Gene (2 ed.), Oxford University Press, p. 192, ISBN 0-19-286092-5, "We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory', or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'." Wikipedia.
religiosity is passed on through memes rather than genes. A meme [1] is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.Lois, I think that you would be correct about this, if you had said that "particular religious cultures" are passed on through memes. And you may be correct, to some extent, in asserting that "religiosity" (which I consider to be a bias or proclivity toward seeing the world in religious terms) is passed on by memes. However, I think that you should not rule out that "religiosity" is an inherent quality in humans. The ubiquity of religiosity across the world, and across human history and even, seemingly, prehistory, suggests the possibility of something being in play beyond just memes. If nothing else, at some level, our ability to produce memes is a product of evolution. But I suspect that "religiosity" involves more than just our ability to produce memes.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God and the word was God."
Scott Mayers,
My thinking is Jesus was Gnostic in his teachings.
Do you think that “In the beginning was the Word" is Gnostic?
I know little about Gnosticism, but, in retrospect, the verse cited seems ironically revealing, in that I think that human’s development of complex language was a prerequisite for humans creating the concept of God.
For the concept of God, yes. For the thought of a supreme power, I got to give that to mother nature as the driving force.
I’m not sure I understand what you are saying. But we exist in a natural world, so, of course, nature provides context for so much of what we do, including having thoughts and forming concepts.
“In the beginning was the Word, and the word was with God and the word was God." Scott Mayers, My thinking is Jesus was Gnostic in his teachings. Do you think that “In the beginning was the Word" is Gnostic?The Gnostic concepts were mostly taken out of European Western ideals because it's obscurity with mystery made it less of something people could grasp on to. Because of this, people had too many varying personal interpretations and thus didn't have a uniform agreement as to what is true about those writings. This mystic interpretation spread to the Eastern Asian forms of religions like Hinduism. Such claims that "God is one" or "God is in you to discover" was a somewhat democratic acceptance of various personal beliefs for the multicultural societies that lived in relatively peaceful and secure environments like India during that time. It didn't hold well in areas like Europe because the survival of beliefs required unifying the concepts to something common which requires clarity and definition. So when Constantine legitimized Christianity, they had to abandon most (not all) of the Gnostic interpretations and scripts that were too personally interpreted. What was left was the content that was more declarative and specific. It also assured people collectively that the people, events, and God, himself, were literally real as opposed to presuming the Bible as a collection of possible myth or metaphor. I think the original religious content was mixed in meaning and that the Gnostic views were becoming more recognized for its actual mistaken view that originated from the awe of earlier people to the invention of writing and its seemingly 'magical' ability to transport one's thoughts precisely to others without speaking directly to each other. A good example I saw recently was in the 1991 movie, Black Robe, where in this scene, these natives observed a French missionary to the early French colonies of North America reading the Bible and inquired what the hell he was doing. It didn't make any sense to them for someone to be so seemingly obsessed with staring at an object that had what appeared to be confusing arbitrary markings. In order to demonstrate its significance, the missionary took a blank page and asked the Indian to tell him something that no one but he himself knew. He wrote it down. Then he lead them to his assistant who was in the distance and clearly did not hear what the Indian said. The missionary gave the piece of paper to his assistant and asked him to read out loud what it said. The natives were in such awe that they thought that it was the work of a demon. Gnosticism evolved from this. Gematria, Numerology, and astrology were all part of this construct as well and is still evidenced in the bible in lots of places. Matching symbols that represented both numbers and phonetic alphabets made people think that there was some magical connection between how one's name 'added' up. If their numbers matched other names' or word numbers, they associated the two as significantly connected. Notice how God renames people in the Bible. Although some of it's original connections are lost to why this was done, one of them most likely was to re-associate a prior meaning that the names added up to to numbers that matched other understood names and concepts of the time. This began before the New Testament and so Gnosticism is not Christian in origin. Egypt was the world's capital of permanent writings from their original hieroglyphs in stone and the birth of transferable writing (paper). I believe that secularism always coexisted with religion. As writing became less mysterious, the secular understandings eventually proceeded the Gnostic views and so they began to be less accepting.
I know little about Gnosticism, but, in retrospect, the verse cited seems ironically revealing, in that I think that human's development of complex language was a prerequisite for humans creating the concept of God.I agree as you can read above. I think that evolution of any intelligence from living creatures that must adapt through the neural logic of association must actually incidentally require stages of thinking that always initiate religious conceptualizing until sufficient experience proves otherwise. In other words, what is found in the origins of religion is identical to the origins of knowledge and wisdom itself. It's the logic of any possible natural consequence of neurological evolution, not specific genes, for example, that determine how we learn. So within religious manuscripts is hidden the evolution of reasoning itself and the shows marks of its various stages during the first attempts at making sense of the real world.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I was trying to come up with a name for the loss of Harappan knowledge after the Great Flood. The Great Dark Age seemed to fit well except it was a natural disaster and religion should have been able to move forward, not backwards.
So if the Vedic knowledge base was destroyed in the Great Flood then you say one should expect the religious wisdom to decline?
The same with Gnostic, the lost of the teachers would cause a decline.
Is my understanding correct?
The vedic was verbal, the Gnostic was not, therefore the books were ordered destroyed.
By the way, great work in your post.
That makes a lot of sense to me. I was trying to come up with a name for the loss of Harappan knowledge after the Great Flood. The Great Dark Age seemed to fit well except it was a natural disaster and religion should have been able to move forward, not backwards. So if the Vedic knowledge base was destroyed in the Great Flood then you say one should expect the religious wisdom to decline? The same with Gnostic, the lost of the teachers would cause a decline. Is my understanding correct? The vedic was verbal, the Gnostic was not, therefore the books were ordered destroyed. By the way, great work in your post.If you're responding to me, I'm confused about you're knowledge base. I'm getting some impression that you believe that there existed an event you refer to as "the Great Flood". The Deluge or Flood stories are seemingly derived from likely observations of fossils of fish in higher elevations like mountains. But there are many versions. Which are you assuming and why? If you are wondering why the Indian subcontinent kept a more esoteric belief in religion as opposed to the Middle East and Europe, I presume that they had a longer history of the gnostic (or vedic, in Indian) ideology and that they lacked a need to change or adapt to the European concept because the those times and places were relatively stable as their land was producing well and they were isolated geographically. India/Pakistan was not a highway between conflicting civilizations and thus didn't have the high capacity exchange between traders like the Middle East being a trade route between many differing groups. Their religious works were likely not known or understood through the pass of the Afghanistan other than the fact that they likely also shared influence in regions like Mesopotamia at times. You're probably right to presume that the Vedic's mostly verbal reliance on passing scripture would mean that they their traveling traders of the time had a less likely opportunity to get to the West but even if the development of Western religions destroyed works, they didn't go out of their way to go to some distant land (India/Pakistan) to destroy whatever possible traces of gnostic-style beliefs. Why would they? By the time of Constantine, however, the Vedics were all recorded in various writings within India/Pakistan. They had relatively no actual informative content to Gnostic Christianity though because Gnosticism is not itself a particular belief, it is a descriptive term to describe how they believed. "Gnostic X" is an X (religion or belief system) that believes in the magical nature of various degrees or forms of symbols and the languages they create, spoken or written. The literal symbols and structures of language itself was worshiped as the source of their Gods.
I got to go to strictly theory here.
- Take the DNA timeline of grains out of India.
- Take the apple, orange and other fruit, nuts and vegetables.
- Look at the animals, like the chicken.
- Take what we know about the Cowry Shell, where it was use and traded.
- The language being Asia/African.
- How bad were the plagues?
- Take the theory of the Burckle Crater.
- Make a timeline graft of BC dates of the new discoveries and white paper theories in India over the last ten years.
Then without any information of the Yellow River Valley history which should be factored in.
Look at the direction theories are going. Plus what is not theory, the many beginning dates of a range of items that have been moved backwards in time in just the last couple of years.
I think the next twenty years are going to be very interesting in finds and theories. Instead of waiting years for good discoveries, they are happening monthly and weekly.
One item worth mentioning out of a book about the finding of the Ark and the tribe in the middle of Africa that claimed they were Jewish. The DNA showed Yemen and the Africa tribe was connected by DNA. The black Africa tribe was 50% from the tribe of Abraham, 40% African and 10% other.
If the Burckle impact did occur or one similar, many questions could be answered.
Sorry for being out of the norm on communication skills, self-taught.
I’m still confused, Mike. Are you claiming there was a “Great Flood”?
There were likely a number of megafloods in human pre-history that could have essentially wiped out some rudimentary human societies.
Scott,
Yes, it is being more accepted that there were two floods. The last one around 2807BC time period. Myself I have no way of knowing. Only going on the theories by researchers.
As far as the pieces of the puzzles I have, yes there was a great flood.
Nola, I don’t think lived to be 900 or whatever years old. The records were lost. And it took some time to get back in order.
The good part is, if it was a flood, then the proof in buried.
Notice that Egypt went from mud to stone after 2807BC.
They say Ur was by the ocean, it is now, what, I think seventy miles away.
Scott, Yes, it is being more accepted that there were two floods. The last one around 2807BC time period. Myself I have no way of knowing. Only going on the theories by researchers. As far as the pieces of the puzzles I have, yes there was a great flood. Nola, I don’t think lived to be 900 or whatever years old. The records were lost. And it took some time to get back in order. The good part is, if it was a flood, then the proof in buried. Notice that Egypt went from mud to stone after 2807BC. They say Ur was by the ocean, it is now, what, I think seventy miles away.First of all, by 'Great Flood', you seem to be implying a world flood as far as I and most are concerned who use the term. Certainly there were likely great big floods here and there for various reasons. But these aren't the same thing. Also, even if temporary local flooding due to tsunamis were a possible supporting candidate for flood myths, these stories are everywhere at all times and places supporting different religious stories. Either way, any flooding has much more natural explanations than mystical ones of any particular religious claim. Ages of people in ancient times are just as likely to come from the passing on of the lunar age of a person rather than the annual one. Noah's claimed age is likely to have been originally a reference to 900 moons or months. 900/12 = 75 years old. Soil is a mix of past living organisms and various grounded rock from river or other water erosion silt. Normally, the land gets its living stuff from the very things growing on it. But if everyone is eating or consuming it, where could the soil get it's new living stuff to keep the soil black (good)? If it is not continuously replenished, eventually their will be no good soil left. Therefore, you get desert.
Posted: 15 June 2013 12:31 AM [ Report ] [ Ignore ] [ # 117 ] Jr. Member Total Posts: 100 Joined 2013-06-01 Scott, Yes, it is being more accepted that there were two floods. The last one around 2807BC time period. Myself I have no way of knowing. Only going on the theories by researchers. As far as the pieces of the puzzles I have, yes there was a great flood. Nola, I don’t think lived to be 900 or whatever years old. The records were lost. And it took some time to get back in order. The good part is, if it was a flood, then the proof in buried. Notice that Egypt went from mud to stone after 2807BC. They say Ur was by the ocean, it is now, what, I think seventy miles away.Mike, who's accepting the idea that a flood in Egypt during the Early Dynastic period changed Egyptian culture? At that time proto dynastic upper and lower kingdoms were uniting to form the first Dynasty era under Narmur (some Egypologists believe him to be Menes) and the Egyptians began to create temple complexes, later beginning the massive civil projects that led to the pyramids. No flood caused this, it was the Egyptians themselves. They do have a flood story but that would be typical as the Nile floods twice annually and the people depended on this for their grain supply. And if you're mentioning "Noah" that Semetic character was a rip off of the Sumerian folk tale "Gilgamesh" where Utnapistim is tipped off by a god to build an ark. And who said that the Sumerian city of Ur was anywhere near the ocean? There are maps of the period that clearly show Sumian cities in the exact position where later archeologists found their remains, e.g. The Ebla tablet. Cap't Jack