Ethical Atheist vs believer in God

[juantoo3]

Written records.

I see.

Selective application of "evidence?" When it suits, religious texts are lies. When it suits, religious texts are proof. Seems to me in the case of the cave paintings, the writing is on the wall.

 

[juantoo3]

Here are two entire books on the subject:

BTW, thanks c0de. You saved me a bit of homework.

Happy Holidays!

 

[juantoo3]

there is absolutely no evidence at all to infer on them any ritual meaning. They could easily be just graffiti or art or markers.

These are "just graffiti, or art, or markers?"

It is the overwhelming influence of religion in modern society that pushes people to assign them significance they are familiar with. There is no evidence to support it. It is all conjecture. Now if you had ever bothered to read on the subject, as opposed to quoting names, you would know that.

Conjecture? You mean in the same way various questionable points of evolution, or astronomy, or quantum physics, or string theory are conjecture? A little educated conjecture is sufficient to throw the baby out with the bathwater?

I too have read, a fair bit, on the home sites for all of these images that I pulled: Lascaux, Cosquer, Niaux, La Chappell, Fumane, etc, etc, etc. And by far the vast majority reach the same conclusions...from which I gather my position.

It appears you stand in defiance of all of them, in the face of overwhelming research?

 

[juantoo3]

Map of Chauvet cave

Map of Altamira cave

Map of Lascaux cave

Map of Cosquer cave

Something that should make itself evident, is that the paintings are not (with few exceptions) near the entrances to the caves, and anybody who has studied our cave dwelling ancestors knows that the communal areas where the people lived were typically (95% +) very close to the entrance. If these are for decoration, why are they painted in the back of the caves where the people couldn't go without carrying light with them?

Yet, using Jungian "ancestral memory" and archetypal imagery, as I have read at least one of these researchers to say, going back into the depths of the cave carried the symbolic meaning of going into the birth canal, symbolically re-entering the womb. Considering Joseph Campbell's ideas about the need for male transition into manhood, it seems to make sense that this initiatory ritual of re-entering the womb for a rebirth from childhood into manhood is the most plausible explanation considering the context.

Symbolic initiatory ritual...sounds rather religious to me, in a good way.

The skinny is, our ancient ancestors were not atheists (in the strictest sense). Religion already existed by the time of the earliest cave paintings, conservatively estimated at 30 thousand years ago. I have strenuously contended that religion would not exist if there were no associated reality to go with it. I would further contend that we have generally lost connection with that part of reality except for a few brave souls on the periphery of "normal civilization," but that the reality still exists and the capability to reconnect is still there, evidenced by the connection still within indigenous tribes around the world. Which would account for a variety of "mystical" experiences from clairvoyance to spiritual communion to prescient dreams, all across humanity. Before civilization, these would seem to be more widespread and common, but civilization (and the institutionalizing of religion) created a disconnect. That disconnect is most pronounced in the modern atheist movement philosophy of "no G-d" for the sake of no religion, the natural conclusion of where the disconnect should go when carried forward into modern times.

I've probably been way too clumsy in my presentation, but that is pretty much what I have been trying to say for many years.

Thank you for an excuse to bring some of my collected images out into daylight on the boards.

 

[Tao_Equus]

I see.

Selective application of "evidence?" When it suits, religious texts are lies. When it suits, religious texts are proof. Seems to me in the case of the cave paintings, the writing is on the wall.

Juan,

I used to enjoy a debate with you. I used always to find you fair and open minded and willing where we could not agree to disagree amicably. But most of all you never used to use irrational arguments. These past few months you have changed and incrementally been losing my respect. Your above statement is simply crass. Did the palaeolithic or neolithic people leave us written texts of their rituals? No they did not. Is it possible that cave art had no ritual significance? Yes it is. It is that simple.

It is, as I seem to have to keep repeating in vain, the overwhelming religious dimension of modern thinking that infers the same meaning on the past. Yet there is no evidence at all. Paints may well have first been used as camouflage and a scent masks for the hunt. A particularly creative teenager may have simply started painting because he or she was bored during the long dark nights of winter. You have no way to disprove that just as you have no way to prove they had religious meaning. You can put forward religious meaning as a theory, as many have, but it is pure conjecture, nothing else. Even if it was it was a form of early animism that did not infer deity but simple homage and respect for an actual extant animal. Not religion....just respect for a dangerous animal.


c0de,

Since you rarely if ever produce anything other than your own soiled underwear for evidence, continually use the device of flaming for distraction from your lack of substance and are on the whole an arrogant a55hole I have made the decision to block you entirely. And can I say that in your case I hope your god exists. You deserve each other.

 

[c0de]

JUAN + TAO




@ Juan

BTW, thanks c0de. You saved me a bit of homework.

Happy Holidays!

np




@ Tao

c0de,

Since you rarely if ever produce anything other than your own soiled underwear for evidence, continually use the device of flaming for distraction from your lack of substance and are on the whole an arrogant a55hole I have made the decision to block you entirely. And can I say that in your case I hope your god exists. You deserve each other.

If only you ever put this much effort into developing an argument
instead of crafting useless personal attacks, you might actually get somewhere...
... actually, on second thought, you probably still wouldn't..... so keep it up.

 

[juantoo3]

Your above statement is simply crass.

Yes, it is. It is crass for a reason, think about it.

Did the palaeolithic or neolithic people leave us written texts of their rituals? No they did not.

Isn't that overlooking another obvious point of fact?; the paintings among other things were precursors to writing and written language. Every alphabet began with symbols that trace back to organic forms. We explored that long ago too, and there are residual evidences even today particularly among the Oriental written languages.

http://www.interfaith.org/forum/and-the-whole-earth-was-1610.html

particularly:

http://www.ethiopianhistory.com/Prehistoric_Cultural_Development

Is it possible that cave art had no ritual significance? Yes it is. It is that simple.

But Tao, it is also *possible* that one day pigs will evolve to fly. The reason the researchers come to the conclusions they do is by placing everything into context. You are trying to ignore the context in order to support your thesis. That's not good scholarship, and I think you are quite aware of what you are doing and why.

It is, as I seem to have to keep repeating in vain, the overwhelming religious dimension of modern thinking that infers the same meaning on the past.

You mean like how the overwhelming atheist dimension that runs rampant through the sciences tries to ignore and subvert anything to do with the spiritual experiences of humanity old and new?

Yet there is no evidence at all.

Sure there is. I've only scratched the surface. It is circumstantial evidence, but the weight of it is overwhelming.

Paints may well have first been used as camouflage and a scent masks for the hunt. A particularly creative teenager may have simply started painting because he or she was bored during the long dark nights of winter. You have no way to disprove that just as you have no way to prove they had religious meaning.

I have two illustrations for you:

#1: Is a modern military general dressed in full regalia with all medals and accoutrements just decorated for visual enjoyment?

#2: With that in mind, why are only certain bodies in cave gravesites decorated with red ochre? Why was red ochre even used at all? Why are there "reverse" handprints done by blowing powdered red ochre (some are also done in black, perhaps soot?, I forget). Ochre seemed contextually then very much like gold ornamentation to us today, and used in similar manners to evoke a sense of importance (whether that is status, or some other form of social stratification must be determined by context).

So sure, the *very first* efforts with paint may have been no more than slathering blood all over oneself, aeons ago. But by the time of the painted caves painting had become much more refined than you imply.

You can put forward religious meaning as a theory, as many have, but it is pure conjecture, nothing else.

I deserve this critique. I really do. I know I have called many others on relying soley on conjecture. I do see a difference though. First, it is not my conjecture, certainly not mine alone. It is shared across many many digs by many scholars in the field. Second, it is not *pure* conjecture if it is supported by circumstantial evidence.

The placement of the paintings in the caves (some are 12 feet or so high up on the walls!, some on ceilings!, both of which imply a deliberate manner and attitude that casual doodling would not elicit), the lighting situation, the proximity to carnivore relics and fire pits that strongly suggest a "teaching" or "training" area (I still hold to that training as inherently religious), finds of musical instruments and trinket artifacts such as the Venus figures, the realism of the animal renderings compared with the cartoonish or grotesque depictions of humans, basic human psychology per Freud and Jung, basic mythology per Campbell, latent animism in aboriginal tribes around the world that share elements in common with what is found in the painted caves, etc., etc., etc.

You are right of course...no Roman, Greek or Egyptian wrote that the caves were painted for religious purposes. So I guess that means all the other incidental and circumstantial evidences are just BS...how silly of me to think otherwise.

Hey, if it helps any, think of the challenge the realization of the religious significance is to my own Christianity...

Because frankly, if I really did have an agenda on this, I would be just as dismissive as you because it poses some real challenges to my own faith.

Even if it was it was a form of early animism that did not infer deity but simple homage and respect for an actual extant animal. Not religion....just respect for a dangerous animal.

I really do like you Tao, but I must ask how familiar you are with animism? Because this is nothing more than trying to turn a blind eye to the facts.

Tell you what, get Path of One in on this to get her opinion. Not only is she a dyed in the wool credentialed anthropologist, she is probably also the closest thing to an animist among us all here. If that is not acceptable, how about looking into the various Native American, South American aboriginals, Australian aboriginals, South Pacific islanders, Lapplanders, Ainu, and Kalahari Bushmen. Then try to tell me these animist peoples are not religious and that their decorations are *only* aesthetic with a straight face.

 

[juantoo3]

Red hand from Cosquer.

Red hand from Chauvet

 

[juantoo3]

Lascaux Hall of Bulls. Notice they are painted on the ceiling, too high for an average man to reach.

 

[juantoo3]

Arcy Sur Cure map, forgot I had it in my album

 

[juantoo3]

Venus of Willendorf

Lowenmensch, also called Lionlady

 

[Tao_Equus]

The Lascaux cave art comes from a time when that part of France had the climate you would find in modern Siberia or Alaska. Tribes of people would have spent as much as 6 months a year holed up in them, dreaming of the taste of their favourite fresh meat, schooling young men on the finer points of organised hunting and dreaming up other activities to keep boredom at bay.

Nowhere in Lascaux is there any suggestion that the art found there had ritual significance. Indeed the dots that surround many of them have been identified as constellations in the night sky and may well infer the direction in which to go looking for these animals in the spring thaw. This would make these paintings simply a teaching aid with no ritual meaning what so ever.

The vast majority of the depictions are of prey animals that would have taken team effort to hunt, which further supports the school hypothesis. So there is a very real and credible alternative to the ritual theory.

It is true if we look about that in the societies that we know of that probably most closely resembled those cave dwellers, most notably Amerindian and Australian aboriginal cultures, that there is a rich and diverse concept of spirit. Indeed in both it is not only animals that are assigned spirit but everything. Yet we see no painting of significant inanimate objects. And the hight at which some were painted and the immense size of others also holds no clue to their original context.

Also, and I would love Kims comment, I contend that early animism very likely holds no relationship what so ever to modern ideas on spirituality. Early animism was shaped not by metaphysical notions of deity but was an early attempt at understanding the habits of prey animals for practical purposes. It was completely unrelated to modern concepts of belief that have completely anthropocentrised deity.

The Horse, the most prolifically painted animal in these caves, is a case in point having survived as a primary source of hunters prestige well into near modern pagan societies. The hunting, capture and slaughter of horses, there are even accounts of having sex with them, is more to do with the status of a living individual as an adept hunter than any worship of the animal outside of respect for the difficulty of catching it.


The hand images are meaningless. Inferring on them any ritual significance is akin to calling a kindergarten painting hour a class on advanced iconography. Similarly the figurines could be child's toys or early form of pornography carved by some longing lover stranded far from home. I am not saying they were, but they may have been. We simply do not know and there is in every instance an alternative hypothesis to ritual meaning. Which has been my point all along.

Artistically developed artefacts have been found in Neanderthal sites too. Neanderthals were not human, (the entire mDNA sequence has been completed now). If you are going to infer spirituality on Neanderthals too then it blows the Abrahamic concept of creation being made for Man right out of the water. This is fundamental to the ideology of all 3 Abrahamics and proves them all an utter load of nonsense.

As for the study of linguistics I have long been an avid follower of Noam Chomsky and realise the obvious, around 35,000 years ago we all spoke the same language. But the ability to be 'artful' is far older than that. Indeed it is at least a million years old, possibly 2, when one looks at the skillfull rendering of stone into tools where many are rejected as not being perfect for the job. This can be seen in tool making sites where large numbers of unfinished tools are found.

I cannot be certain, it is only an idea, but from what I see there is no evidence what so ever to support the idea that ritual of a religious type nature is an ancient type of behaviour. Indeed early animism is as far removed from modern concepts of religion as atheism is from Islam. Doubtlessly as soon as language started to develop people started dreaming up fantastical superstitions that became weaved into the cultural heritage of the day. But there is nothing at all to conclusively assert that they were represented in cave art. It is perfectly acceptable to hypothesise that they were but there is simply no evidence to support it and my personal feeling is that most of them held no ritual significance at all.

 

[c0de]

@ Tao

Your entire argument depends on this statement:

Indeed early animism is as far removed from modern concepts of religion as atheism is from Islam.

First of all, why are you applying "modern concepts of religion"
in a discussion about the history of religion to begin with?

Second of all, the first topic in the study of the history of religion is animism.
Therefore your argument fails because this statement is false to begin with.

 

[Tao_Equus]

@ Tao

Your entire argument depends on this statement:



First of all, why are you applying "modern concepts of religion"
in a discussion about the history of religion to begin with?

Second of all, the first topic in the study of the history of religion is animism.
Therefore your argument fails because this statement is false to begin with.

And your entire argument, as usual, depends on you being too thick to read what I write and trying to manipulate, again as usual, my words to how you would have them defined.

 

[c0de]

And your entire argument, as usual, depends on you being too thick to read what I write and trying to manipulate, again as usual, my words to how you would have them defined.

Care to explain how I manipulated your words?

 

[Tao_Equus]

Care to explain how I manipulated your words?

That sentence contained the context of the assertion but, yet again, you prove yourself incapable of reading.

 

[greymare]

I would just like to comment on this....
These accounts of ancient peoples are entirely based on theory. (an intellectuals interpretation of symbols, paintings and carvings etc.)
The key word here is interpretation. Now, before you start getting on your high horse.. Stop, take a moment and consider this....... (an exercise one of my high school teachers told us to do many moons ago...)
Consider you are an archeologist from the future...
and you are digging away and you discover this piece of history.... It is an heavy item, for its size about under a foot long but strangely shaped. Most of the "dwellings" you have uncovered have one of these.. because of its weight and a pointy end on one side and its perished but definate strap attatchment on the other end, you consider it might be a weapon of some sort. Considering that because of its popularity you might conclude that this indeed was a violent nation. Or it might be a religious item, considering also its popularity, and how it could have stood upright (on an altar?) for worship?. ....The "great minds" of your time, might agree that it is a weapong as it has a hand attatchment, like a shield .... Probably many months of study of this relic wouldnt be anywhere close to its real use...
The humble Iron.
My point is,,,,,, if you specualte, and others agree with you, it doesnt make you correct.
Just my two bobs worth..

 

[c0de]

That sentence contained the context of the assertion but, yet again, you prove yourself incapable of reading.

So if the context was contained within the sentence I quoted,
how could I have manipulated its meaning?

 

[Tao_Equus]

I would just like to comment on this....
These accounts of ancient peoples are entirely based on theory. (an intellectuals interpretation of symbols, paintings and carvings etc.)
The key word here is interpretation. Now, before you start getting on your high horse.. Stop, take a moment and consider this....... (an exercise one of my high school teachers told us to do many moons ago...)
Consider you are an archeologist from the future...
and you are digging away and you discover this piece of history.... It is an heavy item, for its size about under a foot long but strangely shaped. Most of the "dwellings" you have uncovered have one of these.. because of its weight and a pointy end on one side and its perished but definate strap attatchment on the other end, you consider it might be a weapon of some sort. Considering that because of its popularity you might conclude that this indeed was a violent nation. Or it might be a religious item, considering also its popularity, and how it could have stood upright (on an altar?) for worship?. ....The "great minds" of your time, might agree that it is a weapong as it has a hand attatchment, like a shield .... Probably many months of study of this relic wouldnt be anywhere close to its real use...
The humble Iron.
My point is,,,,,, if you specualte, and others agree with you, it doesnt make you correct.
Just my two bobs worth..

Thank you Grey I am so happy someone understands

 

[greymare]

I wasnt actually, agreeing not disagreeing, i was merely pointing out that "things" can be misinterpreted,,,, even with the best of intentions and the most intelligent minds of the time.( but, yay, cool a smart fella agrees with me. cool. )