neologist wrote:I'm embarrassed, alright. But that's just because you made me spill my coffee with your distorting the meanings blather.
It's not blather. The area around Babylon was a desert, although not a wasteland, except in so far as it was carefully irrigated on a schedule established by the Semitic priesthoods of the temple societies before your boy Abraham even appears on the scene. As long as the irrigation system was maintained, which is to say that as long as Babylon remained the center of a temple society, the desert were fields. Babylon was only abandoned gradually, as the political realities of the Medean, then Persian, then Greco-Macedonian "empires" and petty kingdoms played themselves out.
But calling a desert a "wasteland" only applies insofar as someone fails to recognize that deserts have many lives of their own, whether or not attractive to settled agriculturalists. It is a gross distortion to refer to the area where Babylon once stood as a "wasteland" just because some of it (and by no means all) has returned to the desert from which it was originally taken.
It is also a distortion of history to say that Babylon was destroyed. It faded away, it was a case of Elliot's "not with a bang but a whimper." Predicting the decline of any city is not a great act of prophecy--wait around long enough and all of them will be gone. If you have bigotry partial to an idiotic contention that your imaginary friend off in the sky somewhere wants all the earth to be farmed, and any land which is not farmed to be considered barren ground, it is easy to pervert abandonment into a description of "wasteland."
Allegations of prophecy are just about the most hilarious, and pathetic, "proofs" to be found in the quiver of the religionists. They only hit the target on their slow, erratic flights because the religionists frantically move the target around until it's in front of the arrow.
