• themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      You don’t need to use the term loosely. All Christians are in the same boat. Some might be on one side of the boat or another. The people at the bow may hate the people at the stern, and they might tell you that they are on your side. But while they might be closer to you than the stern, they’re still in their boat and you’re not.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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        5 months ago

        It’s a ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy and a lot of people make it in order to defend the part of the religious group they like. If you worship Christ, you’re a Christian. That’s what the word means. It doesn’t matter if the Christ you worship has no resemblance to the Christ in the Bible since both of them are fictions even if there was a “real” Jesus in the first century.

        I don’t even understand it. If you believe there are good Christians, just call them good Christians and the others bad Christians.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        All Christians are in the same boat.

        There’s plenty of Cafeteria Catholics and Unitarians and Lutherans the like who are just in the religious game for the social community. The scriptures and rituals are merely pastiche around a generic call to do “good”, with that goodness boiling down to basic compassion and charity and good humor.

        they’re still in their boat and you’re not

        This is a New Atheist style pitch. But when you get down to where a guy like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris stands on public policy, they all to often fall into the same camp as the Bush Era conservative reactionaries of the late 20th and early 21st century.

        I’m sorry, but I’ll take a Liberation Theologist over an Objectivist any day. If one’s opinions are touched by a bit of magical realism, at least their heart is in the right place. The folks who use godlessness as an excuse to feed their neighbors into a meat grinder are only ever in my boat when they’re trying to loot it and throw me overboard.

  • a lil bee 🐝@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    The Bible takes place almost entirely in the middle east and I would guess this guy’s mental reel of it looks like an Imagine Dragons concert.

      • Jilanico@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Are mecca and medina even in that circle? Yemen definitely isn’t. Image is definitely false.

          • StaySquared@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Wat. I think you’re talking about the two different names for the same location… Mecca is in its correct location. Where the Kaaba is.

            • girlfreddy@lemmy.ca
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              5 months ago

              Did you read the link I posted, cause if you had you would have found out there is little to no archeological evidence that Mecca’s current location matches its historical one.

              • Jilanico@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                The article you mentioned tries to be balanced with point and counterpoint. There are some sweeping assumptions being made in that article as well.

                I will say that if Mecca was Petra, many historical events occurring between mecca and medina become impossible. Battle of Badr, Uhud, etc. The tribes involved in the above events also didn’t reside in Petra.

                It comes across as an outsider’s fun little thought experiment. Very orientalist in its approach.

            • mildlyusedbrain@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              Do you know why there are sources discussing that it isn’t? Admittedly can’t really even find something reliable worth citing but see some historical Islam groups discussing Makka and Bakka as mentioned in the Quran and attributes to modern Mecca. But this doesn’t seem to be in any mainstream articles or easily found academic paper

              I’m not really familiar with the subject but curious what’s the nuance I’m missing since it feels like there’s a weird historical debate here I’d like to read up on

              • Jilanico@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                I’m not sure. It’s the first I’ve ever heard of it. The Western academic approach to Islamic studies is historically rooted in refuting Islam’s credibility instead of objectively studying it, so you’ll hear all sorts of wild assertions and conclusions that would make a five year old Muslim laugh. It may be improving these days, but I don’t keep current with this stuff. Anyways, Mecca is literally in the Arabic text of the Quran, so it’s not some translator filling in the gaps with interpretation:

      • Klear@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        My headcanon is that the Old Testament was a god specifically of the Jews and some upstart god took over (possibly after murdering him) in the New Testament days and then proceeded to spread his influence to non-jewish people while aggressively eliminating any opposition. Wherease in the old days people believed in various gods, this one started of campaign of montheism, depriving the rest of them of faith and eliminating them one by one. Nowadays he’s kicking and screaming because the rise of atheism in many parts of the world which used to be his strongold is depriving him of energy and thus he finally faces annihilation.

          • Klear@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Indeed. The headcanon part is the whole hijacking part.

            Truth be told, it makes perfect sense for religions as a whole following some type of evolutionary path and that a religion that actively tries to eliminate other faith would be one to eventually gain dominance. I’m more surprised that it seems to have happened fairly late and perhaps just once? There’s probably others similar to the judeo-christian tradition that ended up falling short of their conquest, but still.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          The Old Testament doesn’t even get to proper Jews until Genesis 32:22-31 when Jacob wrestles an angel to win God’s eternal blessing for his offspring.

  • Auli@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    I like hi ow they know where the wheel was invented when nobody really does. And it was probably invented multiple times independently of each other. But nobody knows since it was so long ago.

    • conditional_soup@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      It was. There’s at least some evidence that the Inca invented the wheel independently, but its application was largely limited to children’s toys IIRC.

      • Skua@kbin.earth
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        5 months ago

        Wheels are generally only an improvement over carrying stuff (including with pack animals) when you need to move across fairly flat and solid surfaces. The mountains of Peru, being extremely not flat, turned out to be a poor environment for early wheels (slight error here, see FlyingSquid below)

        Same reason West Africa adopted and then abandoned the wheel. Turns out that in a lot of the environments there, camels did the job better once we figured out how to domesticate them

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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          5 months ago

          What I think is interesting is that those civilizations also didn’t develop pottery wheels mill wheels, which makes me wonder if the wheel as transport is necessary to develop those technologies.

          Also interesting to me is that the wheelbarrow was invented thousands of years after the wheel. You do need to invent an axle for a wheelbarrow to exist, but you would still think they would have been obvious technology. Nope, it was invented in first century BCE China.

          That said, the person you replied to was slightly off. It wasn’t the Incas, it was Mesoamericans. People like the Mayans. You were still correct though, it had no utility as transport in a jungle environment either.

          • Skua@kbin.earth
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            5 months ago

            Ahh thank you, I actually also misremembered which bit of the Americas that story was from. I think I had the Inca road network in mind.

    • Riskable@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      Depends on your definition of “wheel”. For example, any ancient perfectly round pottery was made using a pottery wheel (primitive or not). Otherwise, how would you do it?

      That’s how we know the ancient Sumerians were using pottery wheels as early as 3250 BCE (because we found perfectly round pottery that’s that old):

      https://www.colorado.edu/classics/2018/06/15/potters-wheel#:~:text=The potter’s wheel is an,(2).

    • stoly@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      To say that it was invented in such place and time only means that we have evidence that a wheel was invented in that place and time. It doesn’t mean that it wasn’t invented elsewhere independently.

  • manucode@infosec.pub
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    5 months ago

    IIRC the bible tells us that Abraham came from Mesopotamia. I guess he must have used a sleigh or something to transport his stuff to Canaan.

  • Glowstick@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I can’t figure out the comment threading here. Who is responding to who? And which comment are we agreeing with here at lemmy and which are we deriding?

    • edric@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      Reason #937 why the twitter/microblogging format is terrible for conversations and discussions.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      5 months ago

      People are in generally only responding to the OP, but the person who posted it in the bad archaeology group split it up into like 10 images and that was the only way I could easily assemble them. They just sort of line up by coincidence.

  • gmtom@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    If people just ignored these obvious trolls the itbernet would be a lot better, but everyone needs to win their stupid internet argument.

    • cRazi_man@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      Remember people: the thoughts in someone else’s head can’t hurt you

        • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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          5 months ago

          and most people are allowed to vote, so the thoughts in their head can directly put people into government that want to kill you :)

          it’s real easy to say that other people don’t matter when you’re not part of a marginalized group that’s actively under threat in many western countries even.