Why 7 days for Creation?

Yesterday's magic is today's science. It is presumptuous to say certain things are now magic. They may turn out to be tomorrow's science.

Hey Io--if you think fm's stupid you're going to need your dictionary and your thesaurus to describe ros.

There is no magic. There never has been.

Of course. That's why there is no magic.

I guess you are agreeing with me

So there is no religion, no psychology, no arts, no society...it is all science or nothing. Where did the word come from if it doesnt exist ?

Religion isn't magic, psychology isn't magic, art isn't magic, society isn't magic. All those things are real aspects of human thought or society.

So is the concept of magic.

Which is magic with only the beast to start with. And a vast range of the buggers.

Art isn't magic!!!! Ye Gods. Keep ros away from kids. He's even confused himself.

The concept of magic is real, but magic itself isn't.

Try telling that to the ladies who come over a bit funny-like listening to a performance of Mahler's Song of the Earth.

It is quite obvious, indeed it is well known, that a strict scientific approach exterminates artistic sensibility. It happened to Sir Charles Darwin himself. Perhaps envy motivates the scientific types to try to exterminate artistic sensibility so that they won't seem such boring dryasdusts if everyone else can be brought to their own state of mind.

Fortunately it is not only a very forlorn hope they entertain but completely unscientific. That architectural sounds, colours, shapes, movements and shadows can engage the affections is played out on TV screens the world over.

Such magic is very real.

re spendius: "architectural sounds"? "architectural...movements"? No, I guarantee you that if your house is moaning and swaying in the breeze, it's not "magic", it's far too much at the pub last night.

You see--a demonstration. Jack's prose architecture has magically created a blank stare with a low whistle involuntarily escaping from reflexly pursed lips.

accepted that the flood part was/could be far older. why i was skeptical about Gilgamesh being taken from another source, is that Gilgamesh was the king of the earliest known settlement/city - Uruk. So which ever people (most likely the sumerians themselves b4 they started living in cities) wrote the earlier version was not a urbanized lot. Yes the flood myth is common to almost all ancient cultures.

very interesting about the basis of the 7 days. i knew the sumerians introduced the 360 day calendar and also the 360 degrees in a circle, but did not know that the 7 days came from their observation of 7 entities of the solar system. But is that is true, then they have had an even greater influence on the hebrew bible, for much of the bible and even the very history of the jews is based on 7's or a multiple thereof.

that's all i was trying to say - that the bible version of 10 commandments came from the book of Ani ("egyptian book of the dead"). it is entirely possible that the said book itself was taken from another proto-egyptian source, just as you say the Gilgamesh epic was. But even monotheism was not an original concept of the jews - the first known monotheistic religion was Aten-ism - again an egyptian construct.

that could well be true about the concept of paradise - that they had something similar going. none the less the particular concept of Paradiese in its present form comes from the persians. Many parts of the babylonian talmud as well.


So in summary, it cannot be denied that the jews incorporated some religious beliefs of 3 civilizations (sumerian, egyptians, persians) that they came in contact with back to back and never really acknowledged the source and almost got away with passing them as their own original stuff. For example til the scrolls of the Enuma Elish were discovered the possibility of the 6/7 days creation story being a "lifted" one was never contemplated. btw, please read the enuma elish if possible - how marduk made the world.

One of the PBS shows . . . not certain whether it was Nova or Secrets of the Dead . . . did an interesting documentary on what could possibly have been the real event that inspired the Flood stories . .. will look for it.

I tend to think these days that flood myths were a literary conceit in the service of drawing a discreet veil over what went on before which was generally deemed something to be ashamed of in the new era of enlightened thinking which is built in to the idea of Progress. The Dark Ages being a more sophisticated version.

I mean to say. Have you stood in front a monkey cage recently?

Genealogy is a bit similar. People look for a famous ancestor which then disconnects them from all the other silly sods who have had an equal share in their genetic composition.

The elaborations are to provide scientific credibility.

Here is a link to PBS's show on sources for the Bible, the Flood:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/bible/flood.html

What I found was a link to a British show that was probably the source of the PBS program;

http://www.bbcprograms.com/pbs/catalog/noah/noahmain.htm

I'm gonna have to link this thread to the "How much of Christianity is based on Paganism" thread: http://able2know.org/topic/127411-1

Is the root genesis for all ancient religions going to turn out to be based on natural sights (like stars) and events (like floods)?

I think the one true genesis for all ancient religions if terrible fear.... vulnerable people worried about what the future would bring and what events in their present signified.

In that sense we could argue that all emotion was the root genesis for beliefs. The sense of awe probably birthed a few gods as well.