mistermack

It's not impossible, if you're willing to look at what evidence you have, and take a guess at what happened. So long as you make it clear that you're guessing. Cross out distillate, and replace it with "guess at" and I'd be with you on that. But as I've said numerous times, I don't think historians are taking into account enough, the willingness of people to lie and invent and twist stories, to make them say what they would LIKE them to say, in the field of religion. I don't think you can do religious history in the same way as you do political history. The willingness to lie and invent is on a different scale.

What is wrong, is the inference that these sources are the only sources. I'm sure that there were sources around those dates, but there's no way of knowing what happened in the interval between them being penned, and what we have now becoming finalised. The original gospels are no more. What we have are copies of later documents, that might or might not be similar to what was originally written. And when it only takes one word to completely change the meaning of a piece, it's totally misleading to claim that the gospels that we have now date from the late first century. They might, they might not. And they are somebody's preferred selection anyway, not an original collection.

The interaction between plants and their seed dispersers can seemingly get really complicated. The deadly nightshade plant is one of the most poisonous you will find in northern Europe, but it's fruit is described as sweet. As an allotment keeper, I've noticed it growing where it definitely wasn't growing the year before, so something is distributing the seeds, and I'm guessing it's birds. The whole plant is poisonous, and even the honey carries the poison, if bees have been visiting a lot of it. Some animals have no immunity to it, but obviously others can eat it no problem. Wikipedia says that cattle and rabbits can apparently eat it without problems. I would say that some birds must also be able to eat the berries. They must have evolved that capability, through lots of animals dying from poisoning, before the immunity was achieved. So the plant was obviously better off remaining toxic, even though animals were getting sick and dying from eating the berries. So you have a plant that's very very toxic, but has attractive looking berries with a sweet taste. It's full of contradictions, but it's survived and flourished.

Eight years ago I was fully convinced that there was a real Jesus at the root of the Christian religion. I just had a look at the Talpiot Tomb thread on another site, and I was arguing from a conviction that there was a real Jesus person, and that the Talpiot Tomb probably was his final resting place. I was going on the fairly natural assumption that it's not very likely to invent a Jesus out of nothing. And that the apostle Paul's epistles were a recent enough record to be a reliable guide. What's changed my mind is actually reading a good lump of Paul's epistles, rather than relying on what other people said about them. And becoming aware of the sheer mass of invention that was happening in the early centuries, and of finding out the dates of the physical bits of paper that the gospels and epistles are based on. I'd fallen for the bullshit dating of gospels which are routinely quoted, of around the years seventy to ninety for some of them. It's hardly ever mentioned that these are just guesses, and that the earliest bits of them that actually exist are hundreds of years more recent. On the subject of "would they just invent a Jesus out of thin air?" I would say that that's not how it happens. It's like a fire, it starts with a tiny insignificant spark, and most of them just get extinguished, but one in a thousand sets off a chain of additions to the story, that ends up as a fully fledged myth that people will follow. But in any case, ten years later, I'm happy to say, "yes, it's perfectly possible that they would invent a new Jesus to match an old story". It's hard to imagine the thinking 2,000 years ago, but the more you read, the more you get a picture of it. It's shaking off the 21st century attitudes which is most difficult.

I don't think it's to do with competition for pollinators. There are fewer pollinators about in the spring, so that would probably balance out the lack of competition for the plant. It could be to do with the possibility of frost. A spring flower might gain an advantage, by going through the process quicker, in an interval between frosts, whereas a slower one might get nipped in the bud.

In any case, he still hasn't got the point. Even IF history was changed, it still wouldn't imply a purpose. You can change history by tossing a coin to make a decision. There's no purpose to which way the coin falls. Same with evolution. Evolution give an ILLUSION of a purpose. Just by the nature of the process. Some organisms survive long enough to breed, some don't, and they reproduce copies that are very similar, but not exactly so. That's all you need for evolution, and it just continues, blindly, unthinkingly. There is no purpose, to evolve "higher" or "fitter" examples of life. It's just that the blind unthinking process has an inbuilt tendency to roll along in that direction, by it's very nature. And it shouldn't take a genius to recognise that. But if you are determined to block off the obvious, and go searching for meaning, you just turn yourself into a self-made fool. I got evolution the very first time it was outlined to me, at the age of about twelve. And I'm no mega-brain. All it takes is an open mind.

We humans have a longer and thinner neck than other apes. And because of our upright stance, the throat is more visible and more vulnerable to attack. So maybe the beard is a visible disguise, and a physical protection, to a very vulnerable part of the body. Adult males need to defend themselves from others, and also fight off any predators that try an attack. The beard might also help a little in making the males look more intimidating from a distance, like a lion's mane. The reason that juvenile males don't have beards and pubic and chest hair might be that they would invite aggression from mature males, before they were strong enough to defend themselves, or quick enough to escape.

It wouldn't be good evidence for the vast majority. Such a tomb was found, in Talpiot. It has one ossuary that is marked "Jesus son of Joseph" , another Marked "Maria" which was Mary at the time, and another marked "Mariamne" which is the greek version of Mary at the time. ( Mary Magdalene was supposedly a native greek speaker, so she would have been known by that version ). These were common names at the time, and on ossuaries, the name "Jesus son of Joseph " crops up on one in every 190. Maria is incredibly common, one in four women were Maria. And Mariamne is quite common, at one in 160. But if you combine the odds, for all the names appearing together purely by chance, it's one in 121600. You would think that something like that would have set the Christian world alight, but hardly anyone got to hear of it. It didn't match the narrative, of Jesus rising from the dead. So it was quietly poo poohed, and sealed up and re-buried. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talpiot_Tomb From a statistical point of view, it's actually very impressive evidence.

From an evolutionary point of view, you have to ignore all the cultivated varieties, and find out what benefit the plant gets from it's fruit. As the only one I can think of is seed dispersal, you need to know what animals are eating the fruit, and what kind of dispersal they get from it. An elephant is likely to have different tastes to a bird, and scatter seeds in a different way. So from the plant's point of view, it wants it's seeds to survive being eaten, and be attractive to some efficient transporter. It can get highly specific, like with hummingbirds and some flowers. A plant responds to a client animal, and the animal responds to the plant. Some animals rely on the fruit for energy, like the hummingbird and nectar. Others get more subtle benefits as well, like us humans, and our five a day requirement. So the difference in fruit from region to region is likely to be related to the animals that are eating it. Or were eating it, in the case of extinct animals.

Bacteria don't think. But they still turn the milk sour. So it doesn't work in reverse. And of course, I have no firm evidence that Descartes existed. The evidence I do have could have been planted in my brain at birth, designed to gradually unfold. And that goes for you lot too. The odds are heavily against it, but someone always wins the lottery, so unlikely things can happen.

I like fully ripe fruit. I can't eat Tesco bananas. I have to leave them out in a bowl till they get brown spots on the skin, or buy the special bargain ones that have supposedly "gone over". What the hell are sloes about though? They're technically a wild plum, but have you ever bitten one? It takes half an hour to get the creases out of your face. I can't imagine what function they serve. I think the stones have arsenic in them as well. They can't have evolved just to go in gin.

In the tropics you get more monkeys and apes that are specialist fruit eaters. Maybe our order of mammals have sweeter preferences than animals that evolved in more temperate zones. I remember reading some time ago that apes had their purple patch about 20 to 40 million years ago, and have been in decline ever since, losing out to monkeys, because monkeys can tolerate more bitter fruit, at a less ripe stage. So they get there first, and clean up, and the apes find the fruit gone, by the time they would have been able to eat it. So a lot of the tropical fruits might have evolved to attract apes that are now extinct.

Elementary my dear Watson ! The books can be misleading, as well as enlightening. I remember years ago reading Elaine Morgan's book the aquatic ape, and I was well and truly sucked in at the time. It took a while to unravel all the special pleading. She was a very persuasive writer and did a great job on it. But it was absolute B****s. Sucked me in for a while though. If I'd gone on youtube, and seen the rebuttals as well, I wouldn't have fallen for it, like I did from the book. Youtube is great for that. You can get balance with a click.

Bad example Watson. It was Watson that always went for the bleedin obvious, while Holmes worked out what really happened.

Firstly, that's an amazing conclusion, based on your assessment of what someone would do, 2,000 years ago, without knowing his pressures and environment, including what rival stories were saying. And secondly, even today, you can go wildly wrong by using the argument, "why would he say this". It's the easiest trick in the book for a liar or story teller, to throw in the odd illogical element, to make it look authentic. People who invent, lie and make up stories, don't think like you and me. Sometimes they lie for no logical reason whatsoever. And then normal people think it must be true, because THEY wouldn't do it like that. Example : I have a friend who I knew years ago at school. I hadn't seen him for years, and met him at a car auction. We talked computers for some reason, and I mentioned that I needed a certain part (kind of graphics card) and he said that he had loads of them the week before, but had binned them, as they were just gathering dust. I was really disappointed. Later the same day, I was talking to another friend who knew him, and mentioned it. He said, "don't believe it, he says that to everyone!" and told me that he'd said the same thing to him on a number of occasions. I was sucked in, because there was no logical reason for him to lie. (I tested him out the next time I saw him, told him I wanted a particular sound card, and sure enough, he had just thrown out a bunch of them !!) I felt an idiot for believing him the first time, but he's a good liar, and now I know, I see he's lying all the time, he can't help it. There are people out there who lie and lie. In Ireland in the old days, before tv, people used to lie for entertainment, and liars were in demand as the life and soul of the party. They used to gather in a house with some booze and put up the biggest liar. A bit like the origin of stand up comedy. Dawkins is all over youtube. So is Bart Ehrman. Checkmate !!

I haven't heard his reasoning. Why should he know any more than me? And if he does, I want to hear it. Youtube is full of "scientists" trying to wriggle round the carbon dating of the Turin Shroud. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=turin+shroud+new+evidence

That's not really in line with the upwellings info that I linked. These natural upwellings are not managed in any way, but produce 25 percent of the global fish catch, with no additional feed of any sort. Of course they are on a huge scale, but it does prove the concept works, if not the economics. Of course, these natural upwellings only temporarily add nutrient to the surface. It will gradually settle out, which was the point of the plastic sheet suggestion. My own design for an experimental unit would be a circular 100m diameter sheet for the base, supported by floats and sunken with weights, with a vertical wall around it of similar plastic. You guess at a suitable depth to sink the floor to initially, and adjust by trial and error over time to get the best compromise. Then do something similar with the pumped sediment, and measure the resulting production of plankton. Like everything, the process would get better and more efficient over time. I think adding feed would defeat the objective of producing food from the resources in situ. It would be less intensive than existing methods, but ideally covering a much bigger area. This gif is interesting. It illustrates how surface wave action need not damage a sunken sheet :

There's no logic to that post at all. If costs became exponentially higher with size, (which I doubt) you would just expand by adding separate units of the ideal size. And you would obviously investigate the area before you started, so you would know if nutrients were available on the ocean floor. The economics of pumping are an unknown. But from an energy point of view, it's friction in the pipe that is the main cost. The water is effectively nearly weightless, apart from a slight difference in density due to colder temperature deep down. So a wide pipe would be the most energy efficient. You could possibly use wind or solar to drive the pump, or even use the ocean current, if it was significant.

You're talking about open systems though. If the system is closed, you could try adding ground limestone for example to replace compounds removed by shellfish in the shells. I was surprised that the stations producing oyster seed in the linked video didn't adjust the ph when they found that incoming water was acidified. Weather might indeed be a problem, but presumably you would have some means of adjusting the depth of the plastic sheet so that it was not badly affected. Some weather could be helpful, in keeping the water agitated, and nutrients circulating.

It's valid to not take the word of anybody at face value, when religion is involved. The Shroud of Turin is relevant. They did a carbon dating. It came back with a date of around 1300 to 1400 (from memory). Normally, that would settle the matter. But since then, lots of committed Christian so-called scientists have been performing cartwheels to try to nullify that unbiased test. When it comes to religion, even some scientists are prepared to lie and bend the truth, to make it match what they would LIKE to be true.

That's correct. Why would I post a suggestion to employ typical ocean aquaculture? That's obvious from the OP. That's like saying "what size farm could you have?" If it makes money, there's no limit. If it doesn't, then it wouldn't happen. With pumps. You don't seem to have even read the OP, or understood it. The open oceans are generally nutrient poor at the surface. So there's no point in having the system open. There's very little plankton, like there is in rich coastal waters, so what would be the point of an open system? This is a repeat from the OP : The point is that in the open ocean, the surface is generally nutrient poor, and the ocean floor has plenty. If it was economic to pump up nutrient rich water, the surface could be made to produce. As happens where there are natural upwellings. Quote from Wikipedia on their "upwellings" page : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upwelling "Approximately 25% of the total global marine fish catches come from five upwellings that occupy only 5% of the total ocean area."

So, is the Shroud of Turin fake or original, or what about the blessed foreskin of Jesus, and all the bits of the cross around the world? There's supposedly enough wood from the cross to build a church, if you gathered it all up. There are plenty of "experts" who think the Turin shroud is genuine. I'm not going to just take their word for it. I want to see proper proof, not somebody just saying so.

If you go by Ehrman, then Moses didn't exist. The consensus among scholars is now that he didn't exist as a person. So the argument that Jesus most probably existed, because of all the stories about him, is contradicted by the Moses situation. Like I said earlier, religion and storytelling go hand in hand. Or they did 2,000 years ago. The environment has changed, but people are judging what happened 2,000 years ago by 2018 standards. You have to put yourself in their shoes. A flash of lightning is most likely a god showing his power. Thunder is him stamping his feet. An earthquake is him shaking the Earth because you have sinned. Healthy people get sick and die for no reason. Devils possess people, and talk gibberish through their mouths. That's the kind of environment in which people make up these stories. Plus the fact that they have been told wild superstitions since birth. And yet even today, there are suggestible people who will believe in modern miracles. On the tv you hear people thanking god for not dying in earthquakes and fires. Luck doesn't come into it. They'd rather believe in the invisible guardian. Some people go further. They invent "messages" from god, telling them not to travel, the day the aeroplane went down. Storytelling is still alive, but it's only a pale shadow of what it was.

Producing food in this way would reduce both prices and the pressure on land to take more and more wild land into farming, so it would be a good thing, even IF hunger was decreasing. Nutrient dispersion would be prevented by the sunken plastic sheet, as mentioned in the OP. Nutrient levels could easily by monitored and maintained at desired levels, by pumping more in or out, so runaway blooms could be avoided. And you can hardly have it both ways. Algae being dispersed and eaten, and also creating a dead zone due to sinking in vast quantities. Hopefully, most of the Algae WOULD be converted into fish or shellfish, and eaten on land by humans, so neither would arise. Growing oysters and mussels on ropes or in sacks is a great way to fix carbon, if a suitable environment could be maintained for them.

The reason why deserves it's own thread. But if people didn't invent, there wouldn't be any gods at all. You only have to look up Mormonism, or Waco, or Koran, or Gospels, or Branch Davidian or Hinduism etc to get an idea of the sheer quantity of invention that went on, and is still going on.