Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Ya-ta Boy]

Just so people don't get the wrong idea and think I'm a total bigot who can't at least appreciate the other point of view, here are a few lines from "The Story of the Old Ram" (Twain):

[The Widder Billings] oldest child, Maria, married a missionary and died in grace--et up by the savages. They et him too, poor feller--biled him. It warn't the custom, so they say, but they explained to friends of his'n that went down there to bring away his things that they'd tried missionaries every other way and never could get any good out of 'em--and so it annoyed all his relations to find out that that man's life was fooled away just out of a dern'd experiment, so to speak. But mind you there ain't anything ever reely lost; everything that people can't understand and don't see the reason of does good if you only hold on and give it a fair shake; Prov'dence don't fire no blank ca'tridges, boys. That there missionary's substance, unbeknowns to himself, actu'ly converted every last one of them heathens that took a chance at that barbecue. Nothing ever fetched them but that. Don't tell me it was an accident that he was biled. There ain't no such thing as an accident. When my Uncle Lem was leaning up agin a scaffolding once, sick, or drunk, or suthin, an Irishman with a hod full of bricks fell on him out of the third story and broke the old man's back in two places. People said it was an accident. Much accident there was about that. He didn't know what he was there for, but he was there for a good object. If he hadn't been there the Irishman would have been killed. Nobody can ever make me believe anything different from that. Uncle Lem's dog was there. Why didn't the Irishman fall on the dog? Becuz the dog would 'a' seen him a-coming and stood from under. That's the reason the dog warn't app'inted. A dog can't be depended on to carry out a special prov'dence. Mark my words, it was a put-up thing. Accidents don't happen, boys.


Because of this story I have always wondered if Einstein was a plagiarist. It seems to me that "God doesn't play dice with the universe" and "Prov'dence don't fire no blank ca'tridges, boys" are saying pretty much the same thing with pretty much the same words.

[Gopher]

Eisnstein is also supposed to have said that the secret of creativity is knowing how to hide one's sources...

And I think that Hawkins has come down on the side that it looks like God does indeed role the dice quite a bit.

[Rteacher]

Hey, I never admitted to taking "brown acid" at Woodstock...though I do vaguely remember mystically glancing at a light-brown goddess from Buffalo, N.Y. and ... FLASHBACK! - we were teleported back in space-time, ... riding a beautifully colored and patterned magic carpet launched from Asia (or Africa)...As we approached North America I wasn't sure of the exact date so I gazed at my (anachronistic) calendar watch and it kalaidoscopically projected a hologram with the date 40,000 B.C....

[Hans Blix]

[Rteacher]

But on a more serious note (and getting back on topic...) I saw some of the Rolling Stones tour in North America about 40,000 years ago, and Keith Richards looked fairly young back then! (Sorry - just thinking about Woodstock again polluted my consciousness and has more-or-less intoxicated me...)

[Gopher]

[Ya-ta Boy]

[Gopher]

Well, there is the evidence of the original Battlestar Galactica series...

"There are those who believe that life here
began out there."

But that's just rephrasing the Chariots of the Gods thesis, which I never really bought into. On this kind of speculation, did you ever read Julian Jaynes The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind?

I don't say these things aren't possible, just that there's no evidence to say they really happened.

[Ya-ta Boy]

I remember when HBO or somebody made a TV thing about Chariots. I swear, every 16 year old in the State of Iowa watched it and became an instant expert on ancient history. It was painful being a history teacher. However, it did lead to one of my greatest moments in teaching.

There was one particular kid who was absolutely adamant that space ships had visited Earth because of the lines at Nazca. (It's amazingly difficult to persuade a teenager that 'could have' is not at all the same as 'did'.) I decided to play along with him for a bit. Yeah, pre-industrial peoples really are pretty stupid. They run around with almost no clothes. Don't have refrigerators or wheels. Couldn't possibly make a long, straight line in the sand.

All the time I'm unwinding a ball of string I happened to have in my drawer. I gave him one end of the string and at the end I pulled on the other end. Boing! A long straight line. I just looked at him. He looked at me. He looked at the string. His neighbor turned to him and said, "You lose."

I read Breakdown years and years ago. I know I thought it was interesting. Never got around to reading a critique by someone who knows more about psychology than me.

[Gopher]

Yale did award him a doctorate in psychology based on the book alone...which is a masterpiece in the art of informed speculation.

[Rteacher]

Don't worry...I'll get around to critiquing it sooner-or-later. - And what could possibly motivate tribespeople to make those type of straight lines in the sand? - (moru gessumnida)

[Gopher]

Just because the answer is: we don't know, doesn't prove that aliens did it.

We have our own wierd architecture in various cities. What motivated us to do that?

[Rteacher]

Well, when the evidentiary bar was set high - beyond a reasonable doubt - we couldn't legally prove that OJ killed his wife either, but I dare say most people think they know he did. And when the bar was lowered to "preponderance of the evidence" in the civil case he was found guilty. (Not surprisingly, one tabloid reported that aliens killed Nicole and her boy friend...) I presume that with ancient archeological evidence there will always remain unanswered questions regarding motivations and circumstances...leaving us to be guided either by our gut feelings based on faith - or dry speculation.

Actually, there are many accounts of alien sightings and visitations in the Vedas and other ancient literatures. Of more recent occurence were the extraordinary events in Fatima (1917) including freaky solar phenomena witnessed by 70,000 people and correctly predicted in the three childrens' vision. ( www.pdtsigns.com/fatima.html ) Was it a "miracle of the sun" or a mass hallucination - or a UFO encounter involving an angelic type of "alien" (in this case the Virgin Mary)? Skeptics and doubters look to material scientists for answers, people of avowed faith look to religious authorities...Can there be a synthesis of science and religion - but perhaps only at a higher level of consciousness?

[Gopher]

[Ya-ta Boy]