Peterkin

Sorry if i gave you a hard time. Ethology is sort of my pit-bull subject.

Wasn't that clear? I thought I explained it early on. There were any number of rebellious cells, small insurgencies and political foments during the Roman occupation. There were also religious reformers and self-proclaimed prophets aplenty, each with a loyal following. From time to time, when one of these insurgents got uppity, or collected too large a following, the Romans would crucify him or a whole group of them, for sedition. There was not one Yehoshua stand-in; there were a dozen or more. Hence: distillation. Of course. All legends contain some truth. There is zero doubt about crucifixion as a means of punishing disobedient subject peoples (rarely used on Roman citizens, but slaves like Spartacus got it) There is zero doubt about the political dissent, Judean nationalism or the existence of religious reform movements. There is zero doubt that somebody, somewhere came up with the kernel of Christian doctrine, because the cult was already established, its churches in several far-flung places were already established when Paul joined up as a self-proclaimed apostle. Christianity exists. It can be rejected, but it can't be denied.

I assumed that was implicit in "religious". Some gods, some demigods - but that's the embellishment part. The Jesus part is the leader, rebel, preacher, teacher, example-setter, trend-maker, martyr; the divine embellishments are the Christ part. Some forms of Jesus did exist; the myths were tacked onto his memory, only after he was killed, then raised to godhood by and authority that could impose its will on the religion of its times.

No. James Bond is as real as all the best secret agents in the field: he's a distillation of a many examples of a real thing, with wish-fulfillment embellishments added. Harry Potter is an adult's interpretation of a child's fantasy-life: his exploits are the embellishments on a distillation of smart, decent, competent boys. Jesus is a distillation of political activists in an age when religion was an identifying aspect of nationalism, with foreign religious embellishments added later. The starting point, or template, is one or more actual humans who lived and worked toward something and died.

Exactly my point. If the odd trait doesn't have a distinct advantage for the first very few possessors of it, how does it become the norm for an entire species? But as to the categorization thingie - I think it's the wrong way around. I think all sentient life-forms categorize, beginning with the paramecium differentiating inside from outside of it its membrane. You work up from there to more complex differentiations, and recognizable concept-chains according to the value system of the animal. Humans are able to verbalize their thinking process, because humans are predominantly visual perceivers and verbal communicators. They suck at high frequency sound and are hopeless on smell. The Atlantic article has a man - the one in the picture - at the center of it. He's a survivor. The second is a report on a scientific study of children who are not named.

I find speculation more interesting than hard science, precisely because it allows a wider-ranging discussion, and more facets to be examined. In this instance, I have one - and just the one - problem with the hypothesis. I can't envision the very specific mutation that enables this one sudden jump in brain function, nor the complex animal environment that didn't require conceptual chains of categories. I'm missing the uniqueness.

Agreed. Although an American and a Chinese baby could probably understand each other quite well through sound, and both mothers could understand the other's baby, once articulated language has been acquired, it's no longer interchangeable, but specialized by culture. The children of deaf-mute parents learn signing as a first language. Yes, like the Romanian orphans. (this one is a personal story, for interest.) Actually, there is more to abandonment in infancy than lack of language. The people who would lock an infant in an attic, are doing a lot more harm than just not talking to it. The emotional and social development, often also the physical development, is severely hampered. Neural connections that are supposed to form during the most intense growing phase of the brain lack the input they require. Much of that early growth, if missed, can never be compensated. I don't think it's possible to tell (without an unconscionably cruel experiment) whether a baby who had adequate stimulation and affection, medical attention and nourishment, who lacked only language, would have difficulty learning it later in life. Many of those severely neglected, deprived, malnourished and abused children have recovered physically, have gained linguistic and other forms of self-expression, but none seem fully to recover emotionally. Okay. Brain got bigger, more convoluted, more segmented, with more storage space for data and connections. That was never in doubt. What I question is whether the tree-structure of conceptual categorization is unique to humans, or just more readily expressed in human language. A horse-cart-horse situation, if you will.

best candidate: Luke - possibly the only person Paul really loved. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2008/dec/22/christianity-acts-apostles-luke He is consistently referred to as a physician, which means he studied somewhere, probably Antioch where he's supposedly from, which was cosmopolitan, with a strong Greek contingent. So was Tarsus a trade and naval center, with multi-ethnic population and variety of cultural influence. Very little is known about his personal life before the evangelical career, but there is no wide-spread doubt of the existence of either Paul or Luke - or, indeed, any of the apostles. Well, somebody real had to start this big, hungry religion!

I think his biggest problem was my father - a very demanding, impatient, punitive man, who issued a lot of ambiguous commands and administered arbitrary punishments. He confused and scared the hell out of his kids - never mind a sensitive dog who had been used to an indulgent family. Point still being, of course, that not only are dogs not limited to their native canine language, but that language is not static and fixed, but they can also learn one or more human languages, howbeit with a limited vocabulary (like news copy writers). Moreover, they can master quite abstruse communications, like "Here is a shirt to sniff. Go find its owner under all that rubble." and, not but

No, it's still the other way around. The Jesus cult must have been going strong enough for the Pharisees to be afraid of it That had to be set off by somebody - as each wave of heretical belief or rebellion always is. Remember, the Jews had a very stable, well established, strict national religion. They wouldn't just go off worshipping any old mythical figure without a compelling instigator to lead them. There was no shortage of candidates! It's that one charismatic instigator we associate with the legendary Jesus. Under Roman occupation, sometimes inept governors and an unpopular local government, there was always an element of incipient revolt, so the breakaway sects were closely watched and quickly suppressed. (In fact, the movie Life of Brian is not that far off the mark - barring the spaceship incident, of course). Open rebellion didn't actually break out until 66CE, by when Paul was dead. In his time, Jews were free to move about the empire and practice their religion, so there were many Jewish communities in Syria, Galatia, and Rome itself, all quite insular, with their own synagogues. Many of the 'mythical' aspects of the Jesus figure were undoubtedly added later, under the Roman church, as were the dates of his birth and death, to correspond with the pagan feasts of midwinter and spring. Bethlehem was important only to the Jewish followers who wanted their guy to be the promised "rod from the root of Jesse" who would lead the Jews out of Roman bondage, but the story resonated with the meek everywhere - and made Mary central, for those subjects who wanted their femle deities back, so it was kept in. As for the empty crypt - it just makes a ripping good tale. (It might originate in the practice of unceremonious mass burials, or leaving the corpses of political activists to rot on the crucifix as an example to unruly subjects. If they got permission, or could afford a bribe, the family would claim the body to bury according to their own customs.) Particularly telling is that he doesn't rise up at the crypt or anywhere near: the 'angel' says "seek him in Galilee" (huh?) and then: a whole bunch of sightings all over the place. Not unlike Elvis. What better reason to spirit away a messy, broken corpse than a desire to keep the legend alive? Nope. Paul wasn't a loving kind of guy; he was bossy kind of guy. The message had never stopped him persecuting christians before. I think he saw the cracks in the colonial system; knew trouble was coming and Pharisee rule ending. I think he caught the most promising religious train out of Judea. (But the afterlife belief, which the Pharisees also held strongly, he did share with the christians already. That might be the key.) Except, he went to see Peter and James in Jerusalem, where they were nobodies. That was much later, in Rome that Peter became leader of the sect. Paul was never 'part of' Peter's ministry in Rome. He only got there in 58CE, spent two years in jail, got out, left Rome, came back in time to be martyred in one of Nero's purges, in 64CE . He doesn't have to. No legend had to exist in real life. If you just like the story and the message, that's fine; nobody will give you an argument. But if you claim something as literal truth, with the power to drive civil legislation, you'd better be able to back it up, or face a lot of opposition.

Why would he have started preaching about a mythical figure? Where did he get the mythical figure? Why would have started preaching at all? The Jesus cult was already going strong - though it wasn't very big, the believers were zealous - and a threat to the establishment. At one pivotal moment, he converted. Why? We can't know. My guess is, he suddenly realized that they were his ticket to the future - not the future of the Jews, who were very small potatoes, but the Roman Empire, which was a very big, very warm potato. He knew that somebody who started all that fuss had existed until a very few years before, because he deliberately went to Jerusalem to talk to the guy's brother and best friend. Interesting. What purpose does it then serve to talk to Peter, who also attested to the reality of the man he followed? Lots of people knew Peter. While Paul might have fudged the relationship of James to his fabled half-brother, he couldn't very well lie to the Christian churches about Peter while Peter was Bishop of Rome. Is there a flood - or even a tickle - of detail about anybody? It's all I-me-myself and you-ought-to's. Like I said, the Jesus - whatever the real name of the most recent cult-starting minor prophet was - was a vehicle for him to make the religion he wanted to lead. He wasn't interested in the dead guy; he was interested in the franchise. Most of the mythical stuff was brought in later, by other drivers of the same bandwagon. Roman scribes had access to the religious traditions of two dozen conquered nations, and most of them had some kind of spring rebirth myth with godling at the center of it; all of them had some forms of blood sacrifice... It's not that big a stretch to cast the obscure, yet oddly popular little Jewish prophet in the role of resurrected sacrificial demigod.

I don't think that necessarily says anything about Jesus, while it says a great deal about Paul. He was running his own church, his own way. The reputation of Jesus (whichever of those minor prophets was the brother of James and leader of Peter's crew) was a vehicle. https://coldcasechristianity.com/writings/good-reasons-to-believe-peter-is-the-source-of-marks-gospel/ This makes sense, actually. Peter was a real person, an ex-fisherman who probably couldn't write, so he may have have dictated his recollections to a more erudite youngster, Mark. He does seem to have been loyal to the Jesu/Joshua/Jehoshua/whoever was executed on that hill - and a great preacher by all accounts. Paul had his own agenda and an ego the size of Greenland. It was Peter who later gave in. He had that serendipitous vision about the animals that used to be unclean before he moved to Rome - where it's better to do as they do, 'cos they won't change their diet for just anybody.

Where have I said that? There many concurrent versions, some archaic versions, and 3000+ translations. No, it's definitely a compilation - i.e. collected from various sources and included in a single volume. Which is attributed to a specific person who actually existed and was quite prominent (Saint Jerome) and not at all obscure, at a known, not obscure date. Of course, not all of the original documents were included in that volume - there is a compilation of apocryphal books also - the texts that were not included in the official bible. (I've read some and it's pretty obvious why an editor would reject them!) Each version is also interpreted many different ways, according to the convictions and requirements of each congregation. That doesn't make the bible any more obscure than, say, the US Constitution. Any text from one era, written by people of one culture will need a lot of 'interpreting' to be useful in another era, by different people. A book of moral behaviour even more than most. Sometimes the interpretation is the exact opposite of what's actually written on the page.

I'm not aware of any. One of my earliest points of doubt was Nazareth itself, and it's distance from Bethlehem. Okay, Nazareth is where Jesus is supposed to come from. So why in the name of all that's unRomanlike and inefficient would the emperor collect a tax that wouldn't even be imposed for another 100 years or so, in a place distant from the taxpayer's residence? (Because he had to be seen as a descendant of David, to match the prophesy of Isaiah: 11: 1-9 which is the one Christians, starting with Luke, I believe, take as the sign that they have the right saviour.) They do. The believers are certain that it's exactly as the Bible says; the disbelievers are equally sure that there is no evidence; any historians have compiled circumstantial evidence pro and cone; a lot of theologians and archeologists are still searching and arguing. Lots of churches spend a lot of cleric-hours writing refutations and confirmations of whatever new paper is published on the subject. Okay. The library of Alexandria contained a huge amount of older literature. The documents to which they gained access, and probably caches of other scrolls hidden in caves, etc. ,most of which predate the translators by centuries, all contributed to the books as we know them. One estimate I've heard : going back to 1800 BCE, of which I'm not convinced, unless it includes folklore and legend. The Hebrew religious scholars did keep both holy books ad historical records from the establishment of the Temple in Jerusalem in 957 BCE. So, they're pretty old. I'm letting the typos ride this time

Pretty much all of the OT. It wasn't made available to the rank and file of Catholics, but clerics would read and draw sermons from it, and Bible stories for children were drawn from it. There was later extensive - I mean, extensive - commentary on those books, to tell the reader what he should be understanding instead of what's written there. No women. The men who wrote the various books may have been obscure, but the final product is neither: Saint Jerome is credited with the Vulgate (Latin) text of the compilation of both testaments in 400AD.

Why would you need to? Concepts do not precede experience; they proceed from experience. Why? I think the fact of categorization is near universal, right down to the earthworm that prefers loam to clay. The individual, as well as species, refine the categories according to their own needs, mores, habits and desires. Exactly! All languages, not just the human ones. You've never had a dog come and nag you about having missed dinner-time by a whole seven minutes? Or that he really, really needs to go outside, or else? Or run around in ecstatic circles when you start packing the camping gear? Or ask plaintively when Sally's coming back? And they - dogs more readily than cats, because they're more emotionally connected - learn to communicate with humans and each other and with other pets and livestock. They originally make noises, just like human babies: sad noises for discomfort, happy ones for comfort. The mother responds, and talks to them. They learn her language, just as human babies do. Later in life, they learn to communicate with other living things they encounter with whom they need to exchange information - with their own kind, or whatever other animals are in their environment. https://www.rover.com/blog/animals-think-theyre-dogs/ Humans can't grow up without others. You leave a human baby alone, it dies, just like any other warm-blooded baby. It's cared-for by another animal, it learns the language of that animal. https://www.treehugger.com/children-who-were-raised-by-animals-4869172 Again, what makes you think so? We had a German Shepherd once adopted from a home where they spoke only Greek, and he had to re-learn all the commands and signals, as well as how to communicate with two other dogs brought up in our home. He was fluent in six months. I think this is not a difference of kind but of degree. Yes, humans affect vast changes in their own environment, and the environments of other species in relative short time-spans, so our language has to adapt quickly to new applications. Since we have a bigger vocabulary than any of the other species we know enough about to compare, it' also more flexible. For the same reason, we also make a lot more mistakes in the use of our languages. For about 6000 years, it was a generally accepted tenet of faith that we are a whole different kind of creature, at least half divine. That's a convenient belief when you destroy, torture and exploit others - just as we've done with others of our own species. I see quite a lot of hopeful signs in the approach to scientific study of non-humans now, as compared to 50 years ago. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/guide-to-ethology-exploring-the-study-of-animal-behavior

Because he was/they were Greek scholars hired by Roman bishops, and didn't know Aramaic. They had access to older parchments from the region, written or translated under the Greek occupation. Contemporary Latin would have been obviously fake, so they did the next best thing for authenticity. For the sake of historical verisimilitude, they kept the old Hebrew texts -- which was either a grave theological error or a shrewd religious underpinning for militarism.

That's because they were commissioned by a committee. The only NT book of which we have a reasonably reliable source is the epistles of Paul, and he probably did collect local folk tales and hearsay in his travels as a tax collector, as well as later, as a purveyor of the Christian startup. You have to admit, though, the franchise became phenomenally successful. There must have been something charismatic about the central figure to appeal to a wide range of cultural background. It's just universal enough to correspond to many ancient myths and just unique enough to be greeted as a novelty.

When our concept of the world was smaller, so were our gods. Religion didn't begin with a huge, remote creator of the universe type god, but with ancestors, nature spirits, demons and the the guiding totem of individual tribes. Such small and familiar deities were very much more hands-on managers of human affairs; they and humans didn't just intermarry; they argued, gambled, made deals and played tricks on one another. It's only after the great conquests of the Roman Empire that a meta-god was required to subsume the individual gods of the pagan subject peoples. Since the Jews already had a single deity, rather than a pantheon, and since that aggressively proselytizing Christian sect was already converting many Romans and their subjects, it was handy god to promote. I would say, rather, a composite figure. Israel was a prolific incubator of prophets, ech of whom would have collected followers and many would have started little cults. All the occupied Roman territories bred rebels, and so there was plenty of occasion for crucifixions, which was the standard form of deterrent. There were probably hundreds of stories floating around about guys named Jeshu, Jehoshua, Josiah who effected miracles on a small scale - hence, one barrel of wine, one leper cured, one dead man brought back to life, one stroll across the lake, one picnic lunch for a multitude --- no encores, no command performances. That's typical of the whole Bible - an all legends. Each story may well have originated in some actual event, but it's been embellished and altered to suit later generations. Even the religious people who claim to take the Bible literally as the words of their god have to be very, very selective of the bits they refer to.

I'm not clear on how that works. Experience is continuous, whether you choose to segment and label it or not, but that continuity is naturally segmented into significant events that stand out from the mundane (which is why we recall them). It's the same for dogs and cats and so presumably for other animals. This selection is not arbitrary; the events are remembered for a reason: they taught us something valuable. We narrowly escaped a bad consequence, or we learned something useful, or we met someone important or won a victory. In the same way, crows learn to recognize a rifle in a man's hand, as horses recognize a carrot or a rope - because something once happened to make these items significant through a human's action. Before humans were invented, crows had to know the difference between a hawk and woodpecker and horses had to distinguish wolves from shrubbery. The experiences of perilous life on this planet are not arbitrary. the long version : https://www.etymonline.com/word/shadow That's an excellent resource for matters linguistic. See also https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/story-of-english/ an outstanding documentary series. But that's BTW. English is not the first language - not by a long chalk. It's made up of fragments of at least six previous, fully developed languages. That's why it has so many words, including several for the same concept, because it's retained both the Norman French and the Celtic, both the Latin derivation and the Germanic. If you want to study the origin and evolution of human language, you'd have to start with something as nearly pure as possible - Icelandic, say, or Tamil - one that has the fewest possible foreign influences. Ideally, you should find an isolated tribe in the Andes or on some island, but I doubt there are many left. Some of the North American native languages could be useful, though they have, of course, influenced one another as well as European occupation. I'm curious what led you to this conjecture. Why do you think we alone have language? Why do you think a caribou doesn't categorize such concepts as 'rival', 'foal' 'predator' 'water' and respond to the perception of these items appropriately, it doesn't retain abstract ideas like 'spring - northward' 'my territory - defend' and 'wolf scent - danger'. Me, I don't believe there is anything unique in the human body - no radical departure from the mammalian standard, just adaptation, specialization and complexity on top of complexity. (That's also what happened to make English so easy to sell and difficult to spell.) The concept of 'digital' is a very new one. Even human civilization is very young. What you see now in human behaviour is not how humans evolved - it's a veneer of artifice overlaid on a core of advanced ape nature. Every now and then, it crack and shatters and the trapped, frustrated animal beneath runs amok.

If y6ou were my history teacher, I'd hit the books. History books contain many words, but I don't mind. I don't know who "we" are that have a common history and can't begin to guess how many words it takes to convey the essence of that history to whom. If you understand it, fine. But if you can't prove through words and/or tick-box answers that you understand it, nobody can certify that you have learned and retained the lessons. I was attempting to illustrate that you can write an essay - or any kind of verbal communication - if you organize the task to fit your work style.

pedantry OK But, you know, the thread was about plagiarism, of common or uncommon knowledge equally.

What and where is "the human value system"? Who or what is taxed with reforming it? How is this task to be executed?

There was nothing wrong with the metaphor, except your negation of it. There was nothing wrong with the metaphor when Newton used it as metaphor and didn't claim it as literal truth. There is nothing wrong with quoting the metaphor, if you acknowledge its source in some way and do not claim it as your own. There is nothing with a metaphor in a public speech, in a work of fiction, in a letter or in a poem. If you use a metaphor in a scientific paper, it had better illustrate something either factual or theoretical, and you have to specify a. that it is a metaphorical or symbolic representation of a concept and not the actual concept and b. the reason you're using it. If someone else had used it before and that person's work is one of your sources, you have to give credit: person's name and published document in which the cited metaphor was used. Symbolic or factual. in science, a symbol stands in for something: a compound, a quantity, an operation, a relationship - something. A symbol cannot be factual: it is a tool in the representation of facts. In fact, x is nothing but a letter of the alphabet. Symbolically, it can represent literally anything you want to substitute it for in an equation, an illustration, a narrative, a riddle or a joke. Words matter. Accuracy in their use matters. Okay, I'm an old pedant ... Eppure importa.

None of the above applies. We are not literally standing on any shoulders, and there is literally no scientific evidence for the existence of giants, or the proposition that if they did exist, they would allow billions of people to climb up on them.