Ben Carson has nutty theories about the Egyptian pyramids

[anon8420928]

@alan_olsen

Evangelicals believe all sorts of crazy things. Find out for yourself. Find one of their bookstores and see for yourself. Read the books that they read. Don’t believe what they tell outsiders, learn what they tell each other.

There are several in this forum who came from evangelical backgrounds. We know.

[chenille]

@anotherone

I’ve heard that but no one seems to be able to point me in the direction of any such evidence.

Seriously? Even your link to Creighton doesn’t deny the long records of Egyptian pyramids as tombs. It just tries to keep from considering the three biggest that way, because although they are reasonably similar to the others and have been called tombs since back when there were still hieroglyph-writers, he has his own less supported notion to champion.

Edited to add:

@anotherone

Concerning consensus, without serious examination it seems as sound as the consensus that evil humors cause disease.

Ok, well, it’s just that you had started by asking about said consensus. My mistake for treating that as honest conversation, instead of just a ploy to mock it and set up your own goalposts for evidence. I’ll try not to let it happen again.

[smut_clyde]

@anotherone

As far as the grain theory goes, I don’t subscribe to it but it seems just as likely as the tomb theory given the evidence I’ve been able to find.

The empty spaces of a pyramid can accommodate a useful number of bodies (i.e. at least one). They cannot accommodate a useful amount of grain. Therefore both uses are equally likely. OK.

[CaptainPedge]

So your entire argument comes down to “I don’t believe that”, despite piles and piles of (admittedly circumstantial) evidence pointing towards the pyramids being tombs and no evidence of any other purpose?

[renke]

Another trigger word for strange BBS discussions: “pyramid”

[TobinL]

If we are gonna go down that road I prefer the cat monument as posted by you above.

[generic_name]

@anon50609448

nothing is more anti-establishment than having no idea what you are doing at all.

Zing!

I have to admit that did occur to me as I was typing.

[anotherone]

Basically yes. I don’t believe in any theory based on “1900 years ago someone told a greek they are tombs 2500 years after they were built” Without evidence to support the theory it’s not much more than that, an unsupported theory,

@chenille

Even your link to Creighton

I never said Creighton was right. That article is simply a list of 10 arguments why they are not tombs.

And let’s be real here, Carson was talking about the ‘Great’ pyramids just like everyone else is when they mention pyramids. That some small ones were built over but never used as tombs does not make them tombs.

@chenille

have been called tombs since back when there were still hieroglyph-writers,

People still write in english but I don’t believe the theories of Middle Age writers about the nature of things any more than I would those hieroglyph-writers. People are prone to repeating plausible crap all the time.

[OtherMichael]

Wasn’t it created as a gif-storage device?

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[ZzyzX]

[quote=“chenille, post:53, topic:68749, full:true”]
Well, there is certainly a definite consensus; you will have a tough time finding serious historians or archaeologists who question their role as tombs.[/quote]
And they are all part of the great grain pyramid conspiracy. They got you with their lies! Don’t just blindly trust these “authorities.”

Certainly none of them are built anything like granaries, which as pointed out are known, and amazingly tend to be built with space for storing grain.

That’s what the ancient Egyptians wanted you to think! See how successfully they fooled everybody?

[SpunkyTWS]

Now, these men weren’t idiots. They were geniuses who paid a high price for their genius because the rest of their thinking was other-world. A genius is someone who travels to truth by an unexpected path. Unfortunately, unexpected paths lead to disaster in everyday life.

–from The Men Who Murdered Mohammed by Alfred Bester

Granted I think it’s more than a bit of a stretch to compare Carson to Ludwig Boltzmann, Jacques Charles, and André Marie Ampère, but I think a similar principle applies. And Bester’s story is just pretty funny so I’ll take almost any chance to quote it.

[anon50609448]

@anotherone

And let’s be real here, Carson was talking about the ‘Great’ pyramids just like everyone else is when they mention pyramids. That some small ones were built over but never used as tombs does not make them tombs.

Okay, the real question is how this links back to Carson. Your link goes to an explanation of why we might reconsider whether the great pyramids were tombs. On that same page there is another essay saying what he thinks the pyramids actually were (kind of apocalypse vaults to store things in in case the world ended and new people needed to rebuild). I, being a complete layperson, find his 10 reasons why they might not be tombs to be a little suspicious (too many rhetorical questions), but I have no place to doubt it. I find his personal theory of what they were to have a plausible ring to it, but have no way to judge how good the information he is providing is.

So the question is, is Ben Carson more crazy to put forward his own idea of what the pyramids were for than I am to think they were tombs?

I’ll consider a parallel. When I was growing up dinosaurs were big lizards covered in scales. I believed that what they looked like. At some point, some people started to say, “Hey, they seem to be related to birds, they probably had feathers.” Suppose, when that theory was in its infancy, I decided that dinosaurs had semi-permeable membranes covered in mucous for skin. Would I be crazy to say that?

“A challenge to accepted theory exists” is not quite the same as, “Any old crank saying anything is equally likely to be right.”

The fact is, the great pyramids being grain stores built by Joseph at the instruction of God is an outrageous theory. You don’t build the largest manmade structures ever created to store grain and make them almost entirely solid with only small chambers and passages. It’s nonsense.

As a lay person, it makes far more sense for me to accept what I was taught about the scientific consensus in school when I was a kid then it does for me to go off making up my own ideas for no reason, even knowing that I might be wrong.

[daneel]

@anon50609448

When I was growing up dinosaurs were big lizards covered in scales

?

[Endo]

At CPAC and the Commonwealth Club Carson stated that socialism began when Europe looked at America and thought it was unfair how many millionaires we had. “Not many people know this,” he said.

[smut_clyde]

@anotherone

The sarcophagi seem to be just stone boxes unlike all the other sarcophagi in the Egypt

Those “stone boxes” are actually for riding in, along underground rivers, while escaping from rival Egyptologists.
I saw it in “Adèle Blanc-Sec” so it must be true.

[anotherone]

@anon50609448

the great pyramids being grain stores built by Joseph at the instruction of God is an outrageous theory… It’s nonsense.

I completely agree. That theory was very popular in the middle ages but isn’t taken seriously today.

@anon50609448

As a lay person, it makes far more sense for me to accept what I was taught about the scientific consensus in school when I was a kid

I’ve come to find that a great deal of what I was taught in school is a complete lie. The situation may even be worse today considering what’s happening with Texas’ textbooks. Armed with that knowledge, it makes more sense for me to question what I was taught. As such, I try look at ideas that are generally accepted without question or evidence as being highly suspect.

@anon50609448

then it does for me to go off making up my own ideas for no reason, even knowing that I might be wrong.

Carson is simply repeating an old religious answer to the question of the nature of the pyramids. He didn’t make it up on his own but I think I get your point. I looked at the total size of Khufu’s pyramid and it seems the internal space is about 350 cubic meters or roughly 10,000 bushels. That’s the grain you get from about 285 acres of land. The inside is very small but it holds enough grain for about 14,000 loaves of bread. Perhaps that’s why people thought that. It’s kinda a large volume of space. While it may not make sense to build something so very large for only 350 cubic meters of storage the idea that it may have been used for that reason isn’t nutty. It’s simply unlikely. And that’s my point. Calling him a nut for his pyramid ideas seems over the top to me.

[fuzzyfungus]

By all accounts neurosurgery is an especially demanding specialization(heavily vascularized; damage to the wrong spots can totally ruin the patient’s quality of life; lots of fine anatomy and more or less entirely made of cholesterol jello arranged so that the part that needs cutting is underneath a ‘do not cut’ layer); but even exquisite mastery of it doesn’t really demand much adherence to broader trends in biology; any more than being a watchmaker of exquisite skill, precision, and artistry would be impeded by adherence to Aristotelian physics, a flat earth; and a sphere of fixed stars. You wouldn’t have a proper understanding of why certain movements behave as they do, because your understanding of inertia would be wildly wrong; but so long as you accepted that they do behave as they do; you could do just fine.

You certainly wouldn’t need to have the slightest insight into any correlation between ‘brain’ and ‘mind’(which is good; because that would really cut down on the supply of neurosurgeons); and even a lot of knowledge of behavioral characteristics of CNS tissue could be skipped unless you were attempting to devise novel therapies for highly unusual or poorly understood problems(trying to resect away somebody’s especially nasty seizure disorder, say, would be pretty hard without a generous supply of electrodes and an understanding of neural pathways; but applying existing techniques to known problems just demands a great deal of skill and precision).

You could certainly get away with whatever nonsense you wanted about evolution; it’s not an issue on the OR timescale; and even enthusiasm for faith healing, in general, wouldn’t be a deal-breaker so long as you accepted that your patients also need surgical intervention, even if that makes them atypical cases in a population that can usually pray aneurysms away.

[TobinL]

@anotherone

Calling him a nut for his pyramid ideas seems over the top to me.

Can I call him a nut for his ‘Prison makes men gay’ ideas then?

[anotherone]

@TobinL

Can I call him a nut for his ‘Prison makes men gay’ ideas then?

please do. There are plenty of reasons to lambaste this fellow.

[anon50609448]

@anotherone

I’ve come to find that a great deal of what I was taught in school is a complete lie. The situation may even be worse today considering what’s happening with Texas’ textbooks. Armed with that knowledge, it makes more sense for me to question what I was taught.

Questioning what you were taught makes sense. Making up your own theories does not. But…

@anotherone

Carson is simply repeating an old religious answer to the question of the nature of the pyramids.

Okay, I can see how that actually makes a difference. If this is “accepted wisdom” in some segment of the population that he belongs to, then he’s not a nutcase for dreaming it up himself, he’s just doing something similar to what I’m doing - listening to what he thinks is a reliable source of information. I don’t think he’s very good at selecting reliable sources of information.

@anotherone

While it may not make sense to build something so very large for only 350 cubic meters of storage the idea that it may have been used for that reason isn’t nutty.

I just disagree with this. The total volume of the pyramid is about 11250 cubic meters. The idea of a grain silo with internal volume about 3% of external volume sounds outright absurd. The idea of a culture building the megastructures that dwarf all other structures in existence for the purposes of storing enough food to feed 1% of their population for 1 day is equally absurd. Another perspective - we estimate that 20,000 to 30,000 people were needed to build the pyramids. So, not even one loaf of bread each for the builders alone.