And Carl Sagan. I wish I’d read The Demon Haunted World when I was 19.
Don’t say that until you have read the Principia Discordia.
it’s words are as strange to me as the Necronomicon.
Welcome to the SDMB! This is actually a great place for you. You have admitted that you don’t know everything–that is Step One. Stick around and learn!
I may argue a point or 2, but basically you got it right. We were much better off back then, and that will be restored.
Step Two is learning to fake it. I can help you there, Potter.
There’s no question we were better off back then. Well, except perhaps for the near universal subsistence level poverty, illiteracy, slavery, superstition based healthcare, treating women as legal property, extremely high infant mortality rate, magical blessings sought with animal sacrifice, extreme xenophobia, death penalty for non-compliance with arbitrary laws, being almost completely at the mercy of every kind of disease and wild animal, backbreaking labor for not enough food, and the occasional famine and genocide.
[QUOTE=Inner Stickler]
That’s a pretty mouthy response to someone who is correct.
[/quote]
You got a pretty mouth too…
But don’t you see? We were closer to God!
Tells you all you need to know about God in my opinion.
It contains a lot of excellent classic Lit. Authors. C.S. Lewis, William Golding, Jules Verne, Daniel DeFoe, Ernest Hemingway,Kenneth Grahme, Lyyne Ried Banks, and of course Avi. That’s just a few of them. I proudly add Clive Cussler to the list, along with Tom Clancy. Impressive, no?
Since my choice of literature came into question, this thread post gives you a small peek into the contents of my bookshelf.
[Mod note: merged OP from separate thread into this thread.]
It doesn’t need a separate thread.
You’ve never even seen my mouth.
I actually agree with parts of the OP, but I see the Garden of Eden myth as relating to mankind’s transition from primitive non-civilization to early agricultural civilization, rather than from a great civilization to a lesser civilization. I think it is very interesting that we have this myth persisting in modern religion that might have originated when people were having their second doubts about this whole “civilization” thing, because being anti-civilization is such an unpopular position today. I don’t doubt that primitive people had lots of knowledge that is basically lost today, the average domesticated person has very little knowledge of how to survive in the wild.
FWIW I used to view the A&E ‘society’ as a lesser one and today’s one as a greater, with the nagging question why God would want to restore us to that level. But through my life’s journey I have come to conclude that the Garden of Eden was far advanced beyond anything we have imagined. Technology that can blow Star Trek away, medical science that can totally restore anything if needed. But in this garden we would not be the ones discovering it, but the discoveries would be given to us or we would be carefully lead to discover them. We would be as children without worry or care about our needs because all of them would be met.
Well, that sounds pretty horrible. Count me out.
Well, I’m never happy to find one more person suckered in by Dan Brown’s variety of fiction, interspersed with references, (many inaccurate or invented) to lesser known events or groups, then luring in the rubes with claims that (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) “some of this stuff is real.”
If you enjoy his style of writing, that’s fine, but he is just one more knock-off of Irving Wallace who wrote the same sort of stuff but with less pretension that he was revealing any “truths.”
Yes he has. He’s been stalking you. 