EoRaptor013
Posts: 45
Joined: Sep. 2007
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| Quote (Wesley R. Elsberry @ Jan. 16 2008,00:05) | | I've driven in Boston, and I'm still among the living. |
There can be no greater demonstration of driving skill!
WRT to ideas | Quote | | ...based on well-accepted theories backed by factual evidence... |
I want to mention a History Channel program I saw recently. (Yeah, yeah, I know, it's the History Channel. Worse, it was an episode of History's Mysteries, but even a comic book can provide food for thought!) The episode discussed a folklorist's efforts to understand what significance, if any, the Hellenes of the Classical period ascribed to the Pliocene and Miocene fossils abundant on the Greek mainland and many of the Agean islands. She discovered several lesser-known historians of the Classical, and later Roman, period describing the giant bones of the heros, demi-gods, and monsters of Greek mythology. One ancient account relates the story of how Spartans, following counsel from the Oracle at Delphi, searched the Agean seeking the bones of Orestes, son of Agamemnon. Eventually, they found several bones, including a huge femur -- nearly 3 feet long -- that simply had to be Orestes's. These were sent to Sparta and Sparta became the most powerful City-State in the Hellene world.
More interesting, the folklorist reviewed notebooks from several archaeological excavations of ancient Greek temples. Even as late as 1978, archaeologists presumed that the ancients would not recognize the organic origin of fossil bones. Thus, when mammoth, wooly rhino, and other Pliocene/Miocene bones were found at these excavations, they were noted on the anomolies (sp?) page, and the bones were discarded!
The point of all my blabbering is that the Greeks, and later the Romans, actually had evidence for their so-called myths! Of course, their interpretation of the evidence was wrong as all we God-fearing Christians know, but still in the context of the times, they had the goods. I have wondered, since this show, whether there was more than the nomadic nature of the early Jewish tribes that underlay the prohibition against worshiping "idols."
$0.02
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