OT: Tinfoil Hat moment for Friday...mess-o-potamia!

[PherrousWeal]

Some silliness...From the Jerusalem post:
"Koran scholar: US will cease to exist in 2007"

<There is soo much inaccuracy in this article it makes it silly...for instance:>

"The study, which has caught the attention of millions of Muslims worldwide, is based on in-depth interpretations of various verses in the Koran. It predicts that the US will be hit by a tsunami larger than that which recently struck southeast Asia...A great sin will cause a huge flood in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans."

<Boy, these people need a hero. When will they learn that angry desert gods are short on compassion?>

"Silwadi said his study of the Koran showed that the US would perish mainly because of its great sins against mankind, including the Native Americans and blacks. "As soon as the Europeans started arriving in the new world discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492, they declared a war on the so-called Red Indians, the legitimate owners of the land," he wrote. "Then they began enslaving and humiliating Africans after kidnapping them from their countries and bringing them to America."

<Now, being the historian I am, and having a good African History base as well, I wonder why they left off the big 'slave takers' like the Portuguese-the most prolific and brutal of slave traders. They certainly fail to mention Islam's forced conversion and enslavement of the Moors in 600-800ad, Africans used as slaves for work and war by the muslims...Note that the muslims were taking slaves out of Africa about 1000 years before Europeans were enslaving Africans.
Oh, and don't get me started on any of C.C's 'discoveries'..If I had my way, his ships would be burnt on the shores by a combined native/viking explorer-trader contingent, inless the traders taxed them for beach space...same for DeLeon and Cortez--no offense to the Spanish folks here--perdoname, lo siento!>

"Silwadi pointed out that the US continued to commit war crimes and "ethnic cleansing" against humanity..."

:yawn: <Well if this ain't the pot calling the kettle black, I dunno what is. Mohammad was a mid-east warlord who beat out dozens of other 'tribal armies' who had their own exclusivist desert gods. Thus, Muhammad forced all others to worship his one desert god, ALLAH. the rest of the folks were exterminated or forced to convert.>

""International law penalizes such crimes," he said. "If these laws were not applied then, they are certainly implemented in heaven..."

:footinmou <So, I guess the US is acting as Allah's agent on earth to cull the radical muslim herd, due to their injustices to humanity, especially their own folks?>

"...Silwadi noted that the US has often been compared to a tree that grows very quickly and bears fruit, but has no roots."

<Oh, ya mean like Islam, the youngest and most upstart of the desert religions, barely 1400 years old? Face it, Islam brought the "Dark Ages" to mideast, and continues to do so. Pre-muslim, the resion was know for its knowledge of art, science, medecine, agriculture, mathematics, you name it. Now, those folks can't even have male OBGyns due to religious 'prudence', they denounce innovation as evil, distrust science, and are generally intolerant.>

The rest of the silliness...
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1111980180248

Me, I don't hold up much for prophesies from the middle east, especially any written in the last 2500 years.

 

[Ad Astra]

Outlandish stuff, and thanks.


"Explaining his theory about the approaching extinction of the US, the scholar went on to analyze many numbers and letters mentioned in the Koran. He said a careful reading and analysis of words appearing in the Opening and Yusuf suras show that the US will exist for only 231 years.

How did he reach that number? Silwadi said that by combing a number of suras hinting at US sins he reached the numbers 1776 (the year the US achieved independence) and 231. He added the two numbers and the result was 2007, the year when the US is expected to disappear."

Imagined hints are worth studying, "scholar"? Go pick some Lotto numbers, ya mook.

The joke is that these people actually waste their time looking for shapes in the clouds, pointing them out to others, and believing the shapes they have seen are real, and mean something.

UNLESS... it's an April Fool's joke...

You KNOW what a sense of humor they have in the Middle East...


Ad Astra :footinmou :footinmou :footinmou :footinmou :footinmou

 

[hollowdweller]

And the Mayan calendar says 2012 right?

And several folks Gordon Michael Scallion? Edgar Cayce predicted a huge flood in the US in the late 90's.

Here's my take on the whole prediction thing:

Time is only a relative thing that we make use of to interpret the ever present now.

Really everything that ever happened is happening now but we use time to make sense of it.

Great prophets and people can occasionally transcend our need to have things ordered and perceive stuff but often this flood of information is so colored by their egos, and cultural filters that it is virtually useless.

 

[PherrousWeal]

"And the Mayan calendar says 2012 right?"
Certain other interpretations place it between 2012-2027.

HD you make some excellent points, buddy.

"Time is only a relative thing that we make use of to interpret the ever present now"
-->Totally. I think we're dwellers in the 4th dimension, since the 3rd does not account for time-space but we do. Our memory allows us to move in the 4th dimension and see relative changes in the third dimension that aren't really happening. If you walk by a bookcase, it appears to rotate away from you as you walk by. yet, it did not change its physical appearance or coordinates, we did. and the memory of each relative view of the thing is melded seamlessy into our view/awareness by the brain, most likely the subconscious.

"Really everything that ever happened is happening now but we use time to make sense of it."
-->Oh, yes. Enter Quantum Physics.

"Great prophets and people can occasionally transcend our need to have things ordered and perceive stuff but often this flood of information is so colored by their egos, and cultural filters that it is virtually useless."
-->Totally. This happens all the time with historian too, when ego overrides the need to actually understand a culture, and all the baggage that goes with it. And so, Archaeologist and Historians continue to miss the point, or to fudge facts, or make self-fulfilling prophesies. Sad, really. Are they that afraid of themselves?

Keith

 

[Steely_Gunz]

From Tsunamis to Quantum physics in 3 posts. I love this forum
Speaking of the 2012 end of the world. Anyone here about that little mission that NASA is doing to blow up part of a commet or meteor to study it's insides? Does that sound like target practice to anyone else? Then of course you have those bible codes if you believe in that stuff. I've heard the place of impact is going to be Ohio of all places...Sorry Nasty et al. of course i've also heard that it was going to hit the atlantic. who knows. 7 years is a long way off really. Heck, i could walk out in front of a bus by then

Jake

 

[raghorn]

It's April Fool's day, guys.

 

[Kismet]

raghorn It's April Fool's day, guys.

Only if you accept the concept of counting time with Norse names instead of string vibrations like the rest of the universe (except the Braxianites, of course, who insist on tracking the accumulation of the combined solar flux, but they are pedants.)


Chaim Potok is/was a favored author (i.e., the Chosen, etc), and introduced me to the ultra-conservative branch of judaism, which in some instances, uses the numerical equivalent of letters to come up with a sum a word would have which would then imply or indicate a particular message or truth. Mystical indeed.

Great book(s) by the way. Wonderful stories with beautifully detailed characters and very real human behaviors.


On Being Proud of Uniqueness


Everybody grows up inside a particular, almost invariably small world. Everybody, without exception. Very early in our lives we learn the "banking system" of that world: family, small town, neighborhood, church, community. At the same time, ideas begin to come to us from outside this small particular world. These ideas are often alien to those values we are being taught in our particular world. We learn to behave and act in a certain way from our fathers, mothers, grandmothers, aunts and uncles. We learn if we behave incorrectly, certain things follow from that incorrect behavior. We turn on the television set and someone is behaving incorrectly. Nothing happens as a result. It's a joke. It's a laugh. It's accepted. When we experience this sort of thing in an ongoing way, we develop a certain method of handling this constant clash of values.

What I'm trying to explore in my books is one kind of such confrontation of ideas. Of cultures in tension with one another. A kind of tension that I experienced as I grew up and made my way into this world. All of us have one kind or another of ongoing culture confrontation almost every day of our lives. We don't think about it often because by the time we're out of our teens we learn to handle these confrontations almost in the same way as we walk and breathe. It's a kind of choreography that we develop without thinking about it too much. Then along comes the novelist and looks at it, opening it up so that we can more or less see what it is we are really doing without thinking about it. The novelist forces us, if we read the novels, to look at what it is we are doing and urges us to think about it, to see if something can be learned or understood about ourselves and our species by observing this confrontation.

One of the things we are taught very early is that each of us is a unique creature. We need that sense of uniqueness to take us through the travail of existence. We are taught that we count as individuals, that the group we belong to is a unique group, and that this group counts in the spectrum of the broader community in which all of us live. That uniqueness is then challenged by ideas that inevitably impinge upon us from other kinds of uniqueness.

When individuals are brought up in the heart of such a community or culture, they learn and commit themselves to its values. They usually understand the problems inside that community and are willing to cope with those problems. They see the world through the systems of values of that unique community. At the same time however, they experience important ideas or values that come to them from the general world outside their community. These ideas come to them from the core, the heart of that general world. When a person finds his or her own inherited values to be in conflict with those of the general culture, he or she experiences what I have come to call "core-core culture confrontation." All of my books are an attempt to explore the dimensions of this kind of confrontation.



Be well and safe.