DO NOT LICK FINGERS.
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The really rich thing about all of this for me:
The story that Joseph had great granaries built is a Biblical thing. Okay. The idea that the pyramids were those granaries is not in there. Carson is staunchly defending the literal Biblical truth of shit he just made up.
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Hey man, if you can convince people that you speak for a god they believe in, you can get all kinds of free shit and benefits without having to do anything other than command it.
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nah, this would be cheating.
Hereâs that citation from The Book of John Mandeville circa 1357 to 1371.
Vanity is a very good theory. But calling a stone box a crypt is merely speculation.
On the other hand, we found out that vitamin D fights cancer, so he was only off by one.
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I cannot read off by one anymore without thinking frog. SMBC is to blame.
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Thus explaining much of his appeal to the rabid base.
As a historian⌠I was being sarcastic! 
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Theyâre in Sudan! Probably not a great time for a vacation there. [ETA] Although plenty of folks seem to keep vacationing in Sinai!
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And was this a common belief in the middle ages or is it just this one fantasist/fake traveller? I mean we have a source. But we can no more infer that Joseph making the pyramids is a common belief now from one strange manâs comments in a commencement speech than we can from one man and one book that has survived from the middle ages. We have way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way,way more sources for burial than we do for that so Iâm not in any way convinced that the belief in granaries rather than tombs and religion was popular in the Middle Ages.
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I actually know an historian with a PHD in ancient plumbing.
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Ancient shitholes are frequently where the good stuff is.
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Both actually. According to wikipedia [Despite the extremely unreliable and often fantastical nature of the travels it describes, it was used as a work of reference][1]
It helps to remember that scholars of the middle ages repeated falsehoods due to teaching and ignorance rather than malice and deceit. When your teacher tells you a thing is fact, you are well advised to agree with them if you are interested in being considered a real scholar. After all, thatâs what their teacher told them and who are they to question that. This was just as true then as it is now.
We shouldnât take the naive stance that because a thing is agreed upon by those who wish to be taken seriously by their peers that thing must be fact. There exists real pressures in academia to tow the line and not question our teachers. After all, they have built a career upon these ideas and to question them is to invite ostracization by your peers and an end to your career.
Itâs better to base your positions on verifiable facts rather than consensus without evidence since our history is full of ideas we have later learned to be simply not true -unless of course you are an academic with a career to consider. Having âway way wayâŚâ more sources when none of those sources have hard evidence is a great example of this. Sure most archaeologists will say the pyramids are tombs. Thatâs what people they respect told them after all. This is known as an appeal to authority and is a classic logical fallacy many of us fall in to.
[1]: Mandeville's Travels - Wikipedia
Can I get them to come round and sort out my boiler?
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So having said that, what other contending theories are there regarding their use? We know that âgrain silosâ is silly and âtombsâ is argued. What other ideas are posited then, and with what evidence?
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Iâm certainly in no position to offer or to support any ones theory. We have to be careful to assume the lack of an alternate credible theory might lend weight to the currently favored. That would bring us to an appeal to ignorance in which we state that due to a lack of evidence to the contrary, a position must be true. Such a position is not one Iâm going to take.
âAnother way that Men ordinarily use to drive others, and force them to submit their Judgments. And receive the Opinion in debate, is to require the Adversary to admit what they allege as a Proof, or assign a better. And this I call Argumentum ad Ignorantiamâ â John Locke
Fair enough. Can we get a general âfuck anthropologistsâ consensus while weâre here? Seriously, I hate those guysâŚ
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If whatever evidence we have points to them being tombs, and the only contending theories are grain-silos or space-alien-energy-emitters, then it makes no sense to argue against them being tombs without positing either a competing theory or providing evidence against the current.
Itâs true that ideas are overturned all the time, and that nothing should be taken as âprovenâ on face value, but thatâs how science works, ideas are accepted on whatever evidence is available until shown to be false, then ideas are discarded or evolved.
That they were tombs has not yet been shown to be false.
So current understanding is that they were indeed tombs.
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