================================================ Subject: The Raven of Texas answers the 9 questions From: "Jackson Crawford" To: Date: Fri 11 May 2001 17:27:20 -0500 ================================================ Well, it seems that everyone's been havin' a go at these 9 questions of Tara's, so I figure that 'tis about time for a good, solid, Corvist opinion, eh? This may get long, but should be damned interesting... Question 1. Most anthropologists agree that men and dinosaurs did not live at the same time; that dinosaurs existed millions of years before man existed. Answer 1. The scientific community at large recognizes the Earth as approximately 4,600,000,000 years in age. Dinosaurs appeared in the midst of the Triassic period of the Mesozoic era, 228,000,000 years ago and went extinct (with the exception of birds, which are now recognized almost unanimously amongst men of science as taxonomically dinosaurian) at the end of the Cretaceous period, the infamous "65,000,000 years ago". Humans, that is to say recognizably genetically pure and modern humans, Homo sapiens sapiens, seem to have first come on to the scene 250,000 years ago in Africa, slowly expanding North and East and finally settling down in to civilizations 5,000 or 6,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, at the end of the Neolithic. No man has ever seen a living dinosaur, how ever I can explain seeming "interaction" with dinosaurs two ways: A) Do you think that we were the first ones to ever see those fossils? Ancient Scythia was crawling with Protoceratops skeletons that were exposed all over the place, these skeletons were the origin of the myth of the gryphon (which, if you trace the legend, goes back to Scythia, where it protects its eggs - Protoceratops are commonly found with fossilized eggs - in nests of gold, and Scythia was famous for its gold deposits) and B) That famous trackway where those human footprints were supposedly conclusively found along with dinosaur footprints? That place is in Texas, you know, I've been there to personally conduct an investigation of the site. Let me tell you what my associates and I found. All of those footprints are "inside" footprints of Acrocanthosauri, "in place of" a particular pad of the foot which looks just like a human footprint, without the toes. The footprints if human would have had to have been of a very tall, 7 1/2 - 8 foot tall man, but it is a known fact that we have grown, not shrunken, from our ancestral height. The man would have also been following exactly in the dinosaur's tracks, which at times took a 20 ft. stride! Question 2. Why would God allow a creature that "ranks first" (ahead of humans) to die out? Answer 2. I don't believe that there was ever a "seniority system" in Creationism, because everything was supposed to have been created at once. But the Bible also indicates that no one race will ever be fully exterminated by God, and we know that thousands if not millions of dinosaurs and many other creatures have gone extinct in the past 4.6 billion years of Earth. Question 3. Why would a God who is "all-forgiving" punish sinners by killing them in a flood? Wouldn't that negate the forgiving aspect of God's nature? Answer 3. Perhaps, as the old dogmatic expression goes, "sinners are most comfortable the furthest from God, and that is hell", but from my readings and old bedtime stories I don't imagine that 'tis much of a comfortable place. Question 4. How (and/or why) would a perfect being make imperfect creations in the first place? Answer 4. To amuse himself? Hell, how should I know, part of what we have to remember is that the religion and the deity were dreamt up by men (don't lynch me for that one, please, that's an opine), and men are far from perfect, so what we conceive of as a perfect being will inherently begin to show fault centuries later as society changes. Question 5. Going back even farther, how or why would God have created a being that would be the starting point of sin and evil (i.e. Satan)? Answer 5. I don't think that Satan was supposed to have originally been evil, but true, why would the "perfect design" be corruptable at all? Question 6. If we're all descendants of the "good people" (Noah's family), why is there still evil in the world? Answer 6. I don't know why you asked this one - morals are not genetic. My family is very strongly Southern Baptist, but I'm a Corvist, atheist bastard, so that throws the idea of "inherited ethics" out the window, except in a psychological sense. Question 7. I could be wrong, but I seem to recall prehistoric human fossils being discovered... does that mean that Noah (and all other people in that time period) were Neanderthals? Meaning, God created people in his own image (the image being prehistoric man), and then people evolved from the way they were created into what we are today? Answer 7. Excellent point! Though by the time that the flood was supposed to have occured, Neanderthals had been wiped out by warfare and interbreeding with their more advanced cousins (as an interesting sidenote, blonde hair is thought to be a Neanderthal trait not originally possessed by modern humans, so theoretically the lighter your hair, the less genetically human you are, no offense to any blondes on the list...lol...but hell, if you're blonde, why are you reading something like this anyway? Just kidding! Any way, back to the point...). It is fascinating to note, however, that every Indo-European culture possesses some form of flood myth. This wouldn't be much, but the original Indo-European civilization is thought by many scholars to have been located in the Mediterranean Sea, which until geologically very recently was dry land! This accounts for a million and a half mysteries - Atlantis for instance, and the relation of all of the Indo-European languages to one another, centered around the Mediterranean...one truly must wonder...stop and think about that one for a few minutes, eh? Question 8. Where are the remains of the "millions or billions" of people killed during the flood? According to the website, all the things not on the ark would have been covered with layers of sediment and fossilized. Answer 8. Well, there are fossils located all over the world, but human fossils don't start showing up in the record till quite late in the Pleistocene, and there is certainly no record of any mass extinction of any species closely related to humans, or, obviously, of humankind itself. And has anyone ever stopped to think of how inbred that we would be if we were all descended from two or a handful of people? We'd have arms in our ears and all sorts of genetic maladies that are present in societies that are descended from a single couple - there are several communities in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas like that (I'm not joking, I have documented evidence from several trusted sources on this). Question 9. According to Christians, how old is the earth? Dinosaur fossils millions of years old have been found... the website states that dinosaurs were alive during and after the flood... but wasn't the flood only about 4,000 years ago according to the Bible? So far as I know, no dinosaur fossils that recent have ever been found. I could be wrong though, anthropology isn't my strong point. Answer 9. I think that the Bible claims the Earth to be 6,000 years old, although there is a specific date that I don't remember right now, mentioned somewhere in it. My only comment here is that the science concerned with fossils is paleontology, not anthropology :) And you're right, though some dinosaurs do seem to have survived the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous (65,000,000 years ago), 'twas only for a few million more years, and consisted as far as we know only of Triceratops and Thescelosaurus, both of which were eventually out-competed by the mammals, and went extinct long, long millions of years before humans or even primates period came on to the scene. Very intelligent, thoughtful questions, though. I've enjoyed pondering them, and I hope that no one's offended by my answers (What am I saying? Those of you that don't automatically delete everything I send by now are still trying to either damn me or convert me...lol...). Anyway, have fun everyone, and rock on! Jackson Wade Crawford - The Raven of Texas/ Corvvs Texanis/ Kruk Teksasu International Director, Corvist Association for the Preservation and Perpetuation of Free Will To unsubscribe or change your preferences for the Creed-Discuss list, visit: http://www.winduplist.com/ls/discuss/form.asp