[littlemanpoet]

Originally Posted by alatar

Not nuts, and nor was the sky different. We looked at what we 'knew' and extrapolated that into 'how the heavens worked.' You looked up at your hut roof, and if you could hang (or even just imagine hanging) a light up there, well then a god, who was pretty much like you but just bigger, older, wiser and with greater powers, hung its lights in its hut called Earth.

How do you know that this is how myths came to be? You see, farflung cultures recorded a Golden Age followed by cataclysms that destroyed the Golden Age. They created rites (sometimes quite gruesome) that recapitulated both Golden Age and the destroying cataclysms so that (1) they would not forget them (2) they might appease the gods and "head off a repetition of the cataclysms" (which by the way always seems to have to do with comets). They intended to remember something that had been lost. If only one culture had done this, we could say that a regional conflagration of some sort occurred. That the same kind of cataclysm is described in farflung cultures, does not merely suggest, but leads a reasonable mind to ask what can be understood from the strange points of agreement from culture to culture.

Originally Posted by alatar

I'm a little intrigued regarding your intended meaning. And not all myths share 'many' features; think that we just interpret them that way.

There is a hermeneutic of comparing myths. One must take the culture's mode of expression as a given, and allow it to say what it says, suspending judgement until comprehension is as complete as it can become. The results, across many different mythologies, are striking in their similarity.

Before we get any further, let me just clarify to the moderators that this bears on Tolkien's legendarium to a great degree in that he picked up on many of these themes, but not all.

Points of similarity:

• a sun god who is the benevolent universal ruler par excellence, who resided at the north pole, and is associated with the planet Saturn
• an anatomically impossible dragon, sometimes bearded, or hairy, flying across the sky, wreaking destruction upon earth
• a comet which is the heart of the dying sun god, which bursts forth into the heavens, and is associated with the planet Venus

These are not the only similarities from culture to culture. Tolkien does not record any comets, but does record the planet Venus, as not having always been in the sky. The universal ruler is in middle earth the evil Morgoth, residing in the northern Angband. What is intruguing to me is that Tolkien turns the "par excellence" of the benevolent deity on its head. Obviously, Tolkien has a number of dragons.

Originally Posted by alatar

Those people way back when did their best to describe what they saw and how it may have worked.

That is a fundamental part of what I'm trying to get across.

Originally Posted by alatar

They might of been completely wrong, but that happens in science today as well.

I'd like to qualify this in this way: they might have been completely wrong that they were gods, but suppose that what they were trying to describe really did occur. There is too much agreement from culture to culture to ignore that something must have happened (except that it is being ignored by and large).

Originally Posted by alatar

While I'm warming up my rant...what really annoys me is when persons want to pick and chose the science they want to believe (which is nuts in itself - believing in the theory of gravity or not does not change the outcome of jumping from a roof). If you think that science today is wrong and the science of 2000-4000 years ago is perfect, well, that's fine with me. Just give up your cell phone and germ theory.

You mis-apprehend what I'm saying. The reason I have a problem with much of modern science is that when confronted with yet more evidence that the paradigm is wrong, our scientists do not question the paradigm; instead they create yet another ad hoc theory that cannot be tested in any lab.

Regarding black holes, according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, a thing cannot exist with an infinite degree of any one aspect of reality, such as gravity. Black holes have, according to theory, infinite gravitational force. So either one or the other is incorrect; yet, modern science is not denying Einstein's theory, nor is it admitting that black holes cannot exist. With good science, either one or the other must be put to rest.