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johnnyjones
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Cool, I want to be your friend although we disagree on certain matters.
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buffalo
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Then we have this? Not sure what to make of it…
Oldest ‘writing’ found on 60,000-year-old eggshells
COULD these lines etched into 60,000-year-old ostrich eggshells (see photo) be the earliest signs of humans using graphic art to communicate?
Until recently, the first consistent evidence of symbolic communication came from the geometric shapes that appear alongside rock art all over the world, which date to 40,000 years ago , 20 February, p 30)New Scientist. Older finds, like the 75,000-year-old engraved ochre chunks from the Blombos cave in South Africa, have mostly been one-offs and difficult to tell apart from meaningless doodles.
The engraved ostrich eggshells may change that. Since 1999, Pierre-Jean Texier of the University of Bordeaux, France, and his colleagues have uncovered 270 fragments of shell at the Diepkloof Rock Shelter in the Western Cape, South Africa.
more…
Oldest ‘writing’ found on 60,000-year-old eggshells
COULD these lines etched into 60,000-year-old ostrich eggshells (see photo) be the earliest signs of humans using graphic art to communicate?
Until recently, the first consistent evidence of symbolic communication came from the geometric shapes that appear alongside rock art all over the world, which date to 40,000 years ago , 20 February, p 30)New Scientist. Older finds, like the 75,000-year-old engraved ochre chunks from the Blombos cave in South Africa, have mostly been one-offs and difficult to tell apart from meaningless doodles.
The engraved ostrich eggshells may change that. Since 1999, Pierre-Jean Texier of the University of Bordeaux, France, and his colleagues have uncovered 270 fragments of shell at the Diepkloof Rock Shelter in the Western Cape, South Africa.
more…
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triumphguy
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:aok:
It’s hard to gauge people’s responses through pixels.
And people can disagree and get along, and in our Catholic Church there are many mansions. Mansions! Not cupboards or niches!
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grannymh
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I cannot speak for fundamentalists. Catholic doctrines do not describe the second chapter of Genesis as explaining the creation of Mesopotamia.
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grannymh
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Unfortunately, the mt Eve was a member of a large population.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve
Scroll down to “Common Misconceptions”
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patrick457
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As one who has an active interest in South Asia (thanks to all those tacky-yet-devout Bollywood ‘mythologicals’), The thing about the Indus script is that we don’t know what language it was written in - in other words, we don’t know what language the Harappans spoke. When the Indo-Aryans came into the Indian subcontinent about the 1500 BC, they did not inherit the writing system; in fact, the Indo-Aryans apparently did not have any writing system at all. (Most writing systems used in India and surrounding areas today are ultimately derived from the later Brāhmī script, which is now often thought to be a descendant of Aramaic.) This explains why the Vedas were (and still are, to some extent) transmitted by word of mouth using some very complex and scrupulous mnemonic techniques, which ensured that the text would be preserved with a high degree of fidelity. (Another reason for preferring the spoken word over the written word even after writing was invented was due to the highly fragile and flimsy nature of the preferred medium of writing, birch bark or palm leaves.) This system is apparently effective enough that after 3000 years, the text of the Vedas has come down to us with relatively little changes.
BTW, you would notice that the thing which the writing scripts used in many early civilizations like the Harappan, the Chinese, the Mesopotamian, or the Egyptian is that they are all somewhat (originally) pictographic and ideographic, and later logographic in nature and are highly complex - you could have literally hundreds to thousands of symbols.
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buffalo
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patrick457
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We’ve gone through this, didn’t we?
I should remember because there was also a recent thread about it.
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farpinho
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I guess this subject never gets old!!We’ve gone through this, didn’t we?
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farpinho
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That just means the “mitochondrial eve” is much younger than THE “real” Eve (it just means that “modern” people are descendant of that one “mitochondral eve”, which surely had an ancestor… so, yeah, If we go further back, I still see nothing in science against the doctrine that we are still descendants of a single man and a single woman. Furthermore, the theory that the “modern humans” had the origin in Africa is being disputed.
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patrick457
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If you’ve been here for years you’d find that certain topics have a penchant for cropping up over and over again: I mean, just count all those Shroud of Turin or ‘Catholicism is unbiblical’ threads. It can and does get tedious at times, but the good thing about it is that you can get to review what you said the last time.I guess this subject never gets old!!
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grannymh
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In my humble opinion, mitochondrial Eve demonstrates that many, certainly not all, people go according to media hype without thinking through what both Catholicism is teaching and what some interpreters of 21st natural science are denying about the spiritual soul.
With respect for this ban on evolution discussion
forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=7450766&postcount=14
I will point out that the domain of natural science is limited to the physical/material world. The basic domain of the Catholic Church is the spiritual world with the exceptions pertaining to human origin and human nature with its ultimate goal in regard to the Beatific Vision. This is because the single nature of the human person is an unique unification of both the spiritual world and the material world. We are called to share in the divine life of God through knowledge and love, here and after death of our material anatomy.
In my humble opinion, most of the confusion regarding Catholic doctrines flowing from the first three chapters of Genesis could be dismissed by understanding the differences between the spiritual (non-material) and material concepts.
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triumphguy
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(Well the group had a “grandmother” didn’t they, so we are scientifically closer to Eve than before?)
They have a point, because the protestant biblical scholars (like Bultmann) will say that it does not matter to faith if we find the bones of Jesus, because Jesus rose in our hearts, and that the feeding of the 5,000 was the result of those who had much sharing with those who had little (and so it was still a miracle) etc.
I would say we are both/and Church, not an either /or Church: and that I believe in the miracle and resurrection stories as written, since they are a different kind of text playing a different kind of role than Genesis.
And that’s when the Genesis literalists will then ask you to defend your belief Jesus’s miracles and resurrection.
They have a point, because the protestant biblical scholars (like Bultmann) will say that it does not matter to faith if we find the bones of Jesus, because Jesus rose in our hearts, and that the feeding of the 5,000 was the result of those who had much sharing with those who had little (and so it was still a miracle) etc.
I would say we are both/and Church, not an either /or Church: and that I believe in the miracle and resurrection stories as written, since they are a different kind of text playing a different kind of role than Genesis.
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patrick457
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Rudolf Bultmann was pretty much a relic of his time. The only ones who actually try to cling to his legacy today are folks like the Jesus Seminar, which is actually more ‘radical’ than Bultmann has ever been.
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triumphguy
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patrick457
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No, on the contrary I highly expect that they would. The thing about Bultmann is, as you said, that he attempted to solve the problem of how to square the Jesus of history with the Christ of Christian faith by cutting the Christian faith off from the results of history. He did not think that the historical Jesus or the facts about Him is what is important for Christian faith and life - in fact for him it is theologically perverse to base faith on historical studies since historical studies fluctuate. So there’s a sort of dichotomy: the focus of Bultmann’s faith is not the historical figure of Jesus, but the Christ of the early Christian proclamation.Yes…
And so are you saying that Genesis literalists won’t ask that question?
By the way, here’s something JRR Tolkien wrote in a letter (to Christopher Tolkien, dated 30 January 1945):
As for Eden. I think most Christians, except the v. simple and uneducated or those protected in other ways, have been rather bustled and hustled now for some generations by the self-styled scientists, and they’ve sort of tucked Genesis into a lumber-room of their mind as not very fashionable furniture, a bit ashamed to have it about the house, don’t you know, when the bright clever young people called: I mean, of course, even the fideles who did not sell it secondhand or burn it as soon as modern taste began to sneer. In consequence they have indeed (myself as much as any), as you say, forgotten the beauty of the matter even ‘as a story’. Lewis recently wrote a most interesting essay (if published I don’t know) showing of what great value the ‘story-value’ was, as mental nourishment – of the whole Chr. story (NT especially). It was a defence of that kind of attitude which we tend to sneer at: the fainthearted that loses faith, but clings at least to the beauty of ‘the story’ as having some permanent value. His point was that they do still in that way get some nourishment and are not cut off wholly from the sap of life: for the beauty of the story while not necessarily a guarantee of its truth is a concomitant of it, and a fidelis is meant to draw nourishment from the beauty as well as the truth. So that the faintheart ‘admirer’ is really still getting something, which even one of the faithful (stupid, insensitive, shamefaced) may be missing. But partly as a development of my own thought on my lines and work (technical and literary), partly in contact with C.S.L., and in various ways not least the firm guiding hand of Alma Mater Ecclesia, I do not now feel either ashamed or dubious on the Eden ‘myth’. It has not, of course, historicity of the same kind as the NT, which are virtually contemporary documents, while Genesis is separated by we do not know how many sad exiled generations from the Fall, but certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is still soaked with the sense of ‘exile’. If you come to think of it, your (very just) horror at the stupid murder of the hawk, and your obstinate memory of this ‘home’ of yours in an idyllic hour (when often there is an illusion of the stay of time and decay and a sense of gentle peace) – εἴθε γενοίμην, ‘stands the clock at ten to three, and is there honey still for tea’ – are derived from Eden. As far as we can go back the nobler pan of the human mind is filled with the thoughts of sibb, peace and goodwill, and with the thought of its loss. We shall never recover it, for that is not the way of repentance, which works spirally and not in a closed circle; we may recover something like it, but on a higher plane. Just as (to compare a small thing) the convened urban gets more out of the country than the mere yokel, but he cannot become a real landsman, he is both more and in a way less (less truly earthy anyway). Of course, I suppose that, subject to the permission of God, the whole human race (as each individual) is free not to rise again but to go to perdition and carry out the Fall to its bitter bottom (as each individual can singulariter). And at certain periods, the present is notably one, that seems not only a likely event but imminent. Still I think there will be a ‘millenium’, the prophesied thousand-year rule of the Saints, i.e. those who have for all their imperfections never finally bowed heart and will to the world or the evil spirit (in modern but not universal terms: mechanism, ‘scientific’ materialism. Socialism in either of its factions now at war).
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triumphguy
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Tolkein, Lewis and GKC always seem to have something apropos on so many subjects.
It would have been wonderful to have a few pints with them (and Waugh and Belloc too!).
It would have been wonderful to have a few pints with them (and Waugh and Belloc too!).
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minichibi
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What is the conclusion, then? That there is a distinction between the first evolution-produced flesh and bones man and woman and the spiritual Adam and Eve? I don’t get where this discussion is converging to.
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buffalo
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Religion as in “binding oneself to God”?
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johnnyjones
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It must be clear that those Catholics who believe in most of the OT accounts should not always be lumped in with Protestant Fundamentalists (not that you said that but I’m reaching out to quell that perception).Yes…
And so are you saying that Genesis literalists won’t ask that question?
What I see in the NT is the Genesis account being prominently displayed in a realistic way, it is not being shown in a symbolic or allegorical way. That can be reasonably defended, and it makes sense that these accounts be literal. I maintain that I will continue to defend Catholic doctrine using the scriptures. This obviously is not the Fundamentalist view. I will not espouse doctrines that the church opposes to the best of my ability.
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