TrashcanMan79 wrote:bcspace wrote:Many myths with similarities could be evidence for a kernal of truth behind them.
Wonder what the kernel of truth behind vagina dentata might be....
(Sorry. Been waiting for an opening to bring it up ever since I learned about it last week. Thanks BC!)
bcspace wrote:Do pre-Adamites have a spirit?
Yes. But it's not a spirit child of God. <snip>
Let us begin with a parable. It is a parable developed from a tale told by John Wisdom in his haunting and revolutionary article "Gods."[1] Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the clearing were growing many flowers and many weeds. One explorer says, "Some gardener must tend this plot." The other disagrees, "There is no gardener." So they pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. "But perhaps he is an invisible gardener." So they set up a barbed-wire fence. They electrify it. They patrol with bloodhounds. (For they remember how H. G. Well's The Invisible Man could be both smelt and touched though he could not be seen.) But no shrieks ever suggest that some intruder has received a shock. No movements of the wire ever betray an invisible climber. The bloodhounds never give cry. Yet still the Believer is not convinced. "But there is a gardener, invisible, intangible, insensible, to electric shocks, a gardener who has no scent and makes no sound, a gardener who comes secretly to look after the garden which he loves." At last the Sceptic despairs, "But what remains of your original assertion? Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?"
In this parable we can see how what starts as an assertion, that something exist or that there is some analogy between certain complexes of phenomena, may be reduced step by step to an altogether different status, to an expression perhaps of a "picture preference."[2] The Sceptic says there is no gardener. The Believer says there is a gardener (but invisible, etc.). One man talks about sexual behavior. Another man prefers to talk of Aphrodite (but knows that there is not really a superhuman person additional to, and somehow responsible for, all sexual phenomena).[3] The process of qualification may be checked at any point before the original assertion is completely withdrawn and something of that first assertion will remain (Tautology). Mr. Wells' invisible man could not, admittedly, be seen, but in all other respects he was a man like the rest of us. But though the process of qualification may be and of course usually is, checked in time, it is not always judicially so halted. Someone may dissipate his assertion completely without noticing that he has done so. A fine brash hypothesis may thus be killed by inches, the death by a thousand qualifications.
And in this, it seems to me, lies the peculiar danger, the endemic evil, of theological utterance. Take such utterances as "God has a plan," "God created the world," "God loves us as a father loves his children." They look at first sight very much like assertions, vast cosmological assertions. Of course, this is no sure sign that they either are, or are intended to be, assertions. But let us confine ourselves to the cases where those who utter such sentences intended them to express assertions. (Merely remarking parenthetically that those who intend or interpret such utterances as crypto-commands, expressions of wishes, disguised ejaculations, concealed ethics, or as anything else but assertions, are unlikely to succeed in making them either properly orthodox or practically effective).
Now to assert that such and such is the case is necessarily equivalent to denying that such and such is not the case.[4] Suppose then that we are in doubt as to what someone who gives vent to an utterance is asserting, or suppose that, more radically, we are sceptical as to whether he is really asserting anything at all, one way of trying to understand (or perhaps to expose) his utterance is to attempt to find what he would regard as counting against, or as being incompatible with, its truth. For if the utterance is indeed an assertion, it will necessarily be equivalent to a denial of the negation of the assertion. And anything which would count against the assertion, or which would induce the speaker to withdraw it and to admit that it had been mistaken, must be part of (or the whole of) the meaning of the negation of that assertion. And to know the meaning of the negation of an assertion, is as near as makes no matter, to know the meaning of that assertion.[5] And if there is nothing which a putative assertion denies then there is nothing which it asserts either: and so it is not really an assertion. When the Sceptic in the parable asked the Believer, "Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?" he was suggesting that the Believer's earlier statement had been so eroded by qualification that it was no longer an assertion at all.
Now it often seems to people who are not religious as if there was no conceivable event or series of events the occurrence of which would be admitted by sophisticated religious people to be a sufficient reason for conceding "there wasn't a God after all" or "God does not really love us then." Someone tells us that God loves us as a father loves his children. We are reassured. But then we see a child dying of inoperable cancer of the throat. His earthly father is driven frantic in his efforts to help, but his Heavenly Father reveals no obvious sign of concern. Some qualification is made — God's love is "not merely human love" or it is "an inscrutable love," perhaps — and we realize that such suffering are quite compatible with the truth of the assertion that "God loves us as a father (but of course…)." We are reassured again. But then perhaps we ask: what is this assurance of God's (appropriately qualified) love worth, what is this apparent guarantee really a guarantee against? Just what would have to happen not merely (morally and wrongly) to tempt but also (logically and rightly) to entitle us to say "God does not love us" or even "God does not exist"? I therefore put to the succeeding symposiasts the simple central questions, "What would have to occur or to have occurred to constitute for you a disproof of the love of, or the existence of, God?"
The Nehor wrote:SatanWasSetUp wrote:Wouldn't pre-Admites also be post-Adamites as well as "during"-Adamites? I don't think there was a massive plague that wiped them all off the Earth before Adam came along. They were around before Adam, during Adam, and after Adam, and I'm pretty sure they would still exist today. Pre-Adamites creates more problems than it solves.
Then can you suggest an alternate explanation that does not conflict with the spiritual witness I've received?
Sethbag wrote:Oh, and actually I do have a chink in your pet theory. You use 2 Nephi 2:22 as your loophole by arguing that it allows for a "creative period" to exist where all bets are off, and the whole immortality and no death and whatnot thing only has to apply when the creative period is over ("... after they were created").
The problem is that the same verse also says that this applies to all things, or more fully, all things that were created. You're stuck either having to assert a very ideosyncratic definition of "all things" that actually excludes probably 99.999% of all living things that ever have lived on the Earth, or you have to assert a very ideosyncratic definition of "created" that actually excludes as "non-created" 99.999% of all living things that ever have lived on the Earth, up to and including all these presumed "pre-Adamites".
The whole thing is exceedingly dubious right from the start, because even if one allows for your own ideosyncratic word redefinitions, you're still faced with the fact that the LDS Prophets, Seers, and Revelators don't appear ever to have believed what you assert in your theory, and if you can get past that one, you're still faced with Cinepro's point, which is that your theory offers nothing whatsoever of any real intellectual or explanatory substance, other than giving you and perhaps a few like-minded individuals a way to justify continued belief in the scriptures as well as the theory of evolution.
But hey, nothing I say can stop you from believing what you want. But everyone sees through the charade, BC. There's absolutely no substance to your theory. It's a mind game you are playing against yourself.
