Somehow, this theme seems vaguely familiar.
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It’s good to see their millions squandered on fake artefacts. It leaves them less money to use effectively on actually plundered artefacts, hate-motivated lawsuits, political candidates.
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Yeah, I get the legal argument (as much as I get ANY legal argument). My point was that corporations don’t spontaneously decide to commit crimes, humans do. Name and shame.
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Well, “proof” is in the eye of the beholder. Not every Hobby Lobby-style fundamentalist is a young-earth creationist, or even what you’d call a Biblical literalist. And those who are still aren’t obliged to accept that this artifact invalidates their timeline. (The famous 4004 BCE Ussher chronology is just one of several competing very-young-earth reckonings, and they can also quibble over when this thing is from if need be to preserve their scriptural calculations.) Besides, flood myths among the heathens are evidence for the catastrophism that “biblical geology” rests on.
And then there are the sort of meta-justifications. The history and anthropology of the ancient Near East are legitimately fascinating, and you don’t have to have orthodox academic beliefs to be sucked into it enough to want to own something that connects you to it. And layered on top of that is probably a very, very substantial dollop of colonialism. Gotta get these precious artifacts out of the hands of those savages who wouldn’t appreciate them anyway.
I mean, ultimately nothing that anyone that rich does with their money will ever make a ton of sense, morally or otherwise. (There might have been a first-century CE rabbi with more to say on the subject.) But I’m not surprised.
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Of course its not good to see their millions ending up in the coffers of terrorists.
Their Museum of the Bible should have numerous plaques saying
“This exhibit was brought to you by ISIS”
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A couple of things.
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Biblical Literalism is never actually literal nor a sincere belief. It is simply a rhetorical effort to browbeat people into accepting their version of Protestant Christianity. Really just their personal views.
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Creationists are not interested in facts, evidence or arguments against their view. So rational/scientific/evidence based arguments have no effect on them.
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A religious fundamentalist is not interested in fundamental ideas of their given religion. Religion is simply a tool to promote sociopathic behavior towards others. Quote mining scripture to justify whatever they want to do against others.
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Hobby Lobby is more interested in being in the public eye, exerting power and publicity. Anything remotely related to religious belief is merely a means to an end.
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I’m not defending Hobby Lobby (duh!) but speaking as an atheist and historian, I disagree with 1-3 and don’t have any information about 4. Or in any event the situation comprising all “literalists” or “fundamentalists” or “creationists” is way, way, waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay more complicated than what you’re saying here, and that complexity matters if we’re not just doing an “Other tribe bad” thing.
Not trying to pick the umpteen billionth version of this internet argument; just stating where I fall on it.
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Artifacts were also stolen by US soldiers, others were looted by regular thieves using the chaos of war. While it has gotten less attention large parts of modern Iraqi history was destroyed in the US invasion, when soldiers actively encourage destruction and looting of ministries and archives. Only the oil ministery was properly guarded.
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hobby trojan horse shit
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I wish the press release said whether the auction house or London coin dealer are getting off scott-free.
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There’s more than a few billion people across the world with numerous and varied beliefs who are going to massively disagree with that statement.
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Right? I’m not sure that the Quakers for example use their faith to promote sociopathic behavior towards others, given that many regularly join protest movements against oppression among many other social goods. I’m a big fan of judging people’s action as it impacts others rather than just writing off billions of people as “delusional” without really know who they are and what they do in this world.
Religion, like anything else is a tool of social organization that can be and has been used in positive and negative ways. And if may paraphrase Malcolm X, I’ll join with anyone … as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.
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That is not fair. You took me out of context. I was referring to how religion is used by fundamentalists. The sentence before and after that quote referred to how they look at it.
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I loved Snow Crash, but I had to roll my eyes at all the Sumerian/BIOS crap.
At least in part, that appears to have been based on Julian Jayne’s bicameralism theory The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Jayne argues that true consciousness did not appear until roughly 3000 years ago. Before that people’s minds were in what he called a bicameral state in which the right hemisphere of the brain sent information to the left in the form of hallucinations in a way that Jayne compared to schizophrenia.
Getting back to the topic, earlier versions of the Epic of Gilgamesh than the Akkadian version stolen by Hobby Lobby are actually used as an argument against bicameralism, as versions of it appear in Sumerian before Jayne’s proposed transition from bicameralism to the conscious state we’re supposedly in now. See the Criticism section in the wikipedia article.
It’s been a long, long time since I read it, but I believe Jayne based at least part of his argument on early Sumerian. The issue there, though, is that we still don’t even understand Sumerian that well. Sure, we can read it, but a lot of our knowledge of the language comes from tablets preserved from Akkadian scribal schools long after the language died out. It’s also a language isolate, unlike Akkadian (in the Semitic family with languages like Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic), so we don’t get the benefit of comparison to other languages in the same family.
(Anybody still awake there? I can hear you snoring.)
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I know. I was just saying that I don’t take the claims of “sincere beliefs” by fundamentalists seriously. Mostly this comes from dealing with them. They are dishonest AF and self serving in virtually everything they do. It looks complicated if you are taking them at face value. But you can’t.
People who take fundy claims seriously might scratch their heads at their support of raging immoral types like Trump. But if you frame their beliefs as just warmed over tribalism, its easy to see. They are nothing but “This is our tribe, nobody else matters”. There really isn’t much need to go much further than that. There is no consistent belief, morality, ethical considerations beyond, “This is us and this is what we want from you”
As for Creationism, the proponents lie way too much and a culture of dishonesty/deception is too ingrained to take it as a sincere belief. They will say anything to promote their view, no matter how goofy. Its simply a matter of demanding to be taken seriously and to browbeat others.
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And ancient history!
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If it is real then it belongs to the US government as much as it belongs to Hobby Lobby, which is not at all.
Considering the actual number of Sumerian cuneiform tablets that exist, I would say that it is indeed real and therefore belongs to the people of Iraq.
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Well, yeah.
That’s kinda why the US government is appropriating it. To repatriate it.
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Came for the nam-shub of enki; wasn’t disappointed.
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I’ll bet dollars to donuts that Stephenson would say the same thing about the theory; doesn’t change the fact that it makes a great hook. “What if this crap theory / Lemuria / magic system / whatever were true?” is the foundation of almost all fantasy and science fiction (merely my hypothesis of course). “Hard” science fiction is maybe the only sub-genre that cares about the plausibility of such things.
That being said, I myself have put down books where the premise was something I just found too annoying. Other times I just yell at the book and keep reading because I want to find out how it ends.
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