Nexilist Notebook

One of the problems that I have in understanding many religious traditions is that such a great gulf of time separates their origins from our present time. The people who witnessed the birth of an ancient religion saw the world very differently than we do. It is difficult for us to understand how they might have experienced the events that have come down to us through the centuries.

The idea that Jesus served as the scapegoat for the whole human race is the center piece of Christianity. What did this mean to the Jewish people of the 1st century?

The scapegoat was a Jewish tradition where they symbolically put the sins of the community on a young and innocent goat or lamb. Then they sacrificed the animal and offered the blood to Yahweh to wash away their sins. The story told in the Christian bible is that Jesus voluntarily went to the cross in sacrifice so his blood would atone for our sins.

In the early part of the 4th century CE, Arius, a presbyter from Alexandria promoted the idea that Jesus was human and was inhabited by the spirit of God. The spirit of God left him as he hung on the cross and he died as a man to atone for our sins. One of the things that Jesus is reported to have said on the cross is “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani” which is Aramaic for “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me.” This makes sense in the context of the scapegoat.

Arianism Read the rest of this entry »

We hear a lot these days about the fabulous growth of China, booming, bustling, shipping products to the world and building up a huge trade imbalance with the US. We see images of skyscrapers, factories, stock exchanges, restaurants, theaters, a vital middle class. We are told that they are beating us as our own game of manufacture and trade so we have to work harder, take wage cuts, etc. They are hosting the Olympics in 2008 and Beijing is getting a face lift for the occasion. We are warned that they are building their military machine and will be challenging our status as the only superpower soon.

What is not being so loudly trumpeted in the media is the downside of the Chinese Miracle. 17 out of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China. They are building coal fired power plants at the rate of two a week and the pollutions sometimes reaches all the way to our West Coast. Hundreds of thousands of people are dying each year because of pollution.

For every Chinese rising to the middle class there are tens of thousands still mired in poverty. In one recent year, millions of people took part in 80,000 protests, many of which turned violent. Money which should have gone to villagers in the countryside for rice is being diverted by the provincial governors for development projects, many of which drive the peasants off the land. People are being enslaved in the countryside to work in the mines. Corruption is rampant in the government and the people are well aware of it.

The infanticide of female babies because of the one child per family law has led to an imbalance in the birth rates of male and female children resulting in tens of thousands of poor men who have no hope of a wife and family. The teeming millions working the factories have little to no protection from job hazards, abuse, and exploitation.

The air pollution in Beijing is terrible and even shutting down manufacture and most transportation in Beijing for the Olympics may not do much to reduce it. One million peasants have been brought in to clean up Beijing for the Olympics and their working conditions are terrible.

The recent earthquake that devastated China brought demonstrations by distraught parents bitter about the substandard building practices that had contributed to the deaths of many children. And many of the dams that are damaged and threatening to burst were built over objections that they were sited in a seismically active area. The government is under heavy and much deserved criticism for these failures to protect the welfare of the people.

Mao came to power because he promised the peasants that they would have enough to eat and would be treated fairly. The current rulers of China could care less about ideology and they have broken Mao’s pledge to the peasants. China is going to have to pay some very heavy dues before they because a stable and prosperous society.

There have a been a lot of stories lately from Ted Haggard to Eliot Spitzer that beg the question of why some very smart and capable people do some very stupid things. I have been thinking about this and I decided that some of my recent research on psychology can shed light on this question.

Then all that is left is for the fulfillment of our hidden desires to become public knowledge. And people are left shaking their heads and saying “How could he be that stupid?” The answer lies in the way the human mind deals with “I should” and “I want”.

Those pesky economic bubbles just seem to keep popping up. Then they pop. Things are calm for a little while and then another bubble comes along. There is all this money that wants a home and a “good” rate of return. Now commodities like foods and oil are bubbling.

There is a government commission called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) that is supposed to regulate investment in commodities so that speculators who neither produce nor consume don’t come along and make the prices go crazy. From the US Commodity Exchange Act (CEA)– “Excessive speculation in any commodity under contrasts of sale of such commodities for future deliver…causing sudden or unreasonable fluctuations or unwarranted changes in the prices of such commodity, is an undue and unnecessary burden on interstate commerce in such commodity.” The CEA directs the CFTC to establish such trading limits “as the Commission finds are necessary to diminish, eliminate, or prevent such burden.” Obviously they are not doing their job.
Unfortunately, this commission is a little too friendly with the industry it is supposed to be regulating.

The explosion of “over the counter” futures investment vehicles and trading methods has left any serious regulation far behind. They are exempt from CFTC by a provision insert into legislation by Enron and other large energy companies. (Gone but not forgotten!)

In addition to oil, basic foods such as rice, wheat and corn are being hammered by price increases of up to 100% in the last year driven by rampant speculation.. People can’t eat and commerce is grinding to halt while the speculators are having a ball (and making a lot of money!)

Now food riots are breaking out all over the world. When a family in the third world is spending half their income on food and the food prices double, there is no money left for fuel, medicine, rent, etc. Unless the US and other governments steps in and reasserts regulation of the commodities markets, this mess could bring down the world economy. Worse yet, a lot of people will suffer and some will die to feed the greed of these speculators.

Modern Western intellectual tradition tends to discount the technological capabilities of ancient societies. One of the reasons for this is the fact that very little in the way of hardware or documentation has survived down thru the centuries. Sometimes knowledge was deliberately hidden or destroyed. But every now and then, we stumble across evidence of amazing technical sophistication from long ago.

Batteries in Ancient Baghdad

Jars with copper cylinders and corroded iron rods were discovered in 1936 near Baghdad, Iraq in ruins over 1750 years old. When they were rebuilt and filled with wine, they generated a voltage.

Museums contain copper vessels with a thin coating of silver that appears to have been electroplated. The batteries could have accomplished this.

There are old Egyptian papyri that show a man stepping into a pool with fish that generated a weak electrical current which relieved pain. The batteries may have been used produce pain relief similar to the fish.

Baghdad batteries

Computers in Ancient Greece

About 100 years ago, a few coral encrusted lumps were brought up by sponge divers from a 1st century BC ship wreck in near Crete in the Mediterranean Sea. X-rays revealed that one of the lumps contained 32 gears.

When a detail examination was performed and the function of the geared mechanism simulated, it turned out to be a clever astronomical calculator that could display the phase of the moon and the position of the sun in the Zodiac. It may also have displayed the motion of the planets. It was far beyond the technical abilities that the makers were thought to have possessed.

Kythera

Moving Blocks in Ancient Lebanon

There is a Roman temple at Baalbek, Lebanon that was built on the ruins of a far older structure of colossal stone blocks. These blocks were 14’ by 14’ by 68’ and may weigh up to 2,000 tons. Given all of our modern technology, it would be extremely difficult for us to move that piece of rock today. We have no idea of who carved them or how they moved them from the quarry to the temple location.

Baalbek Stones

Ancient Optics

There is plenty of evidence in museums that indicates many previous civilizations knew about the optical properties of glass lenses. There are ancient writings that have been very hard to translate because the archeologists refused to believe that older cultures which worked glass thousands of years ago could never have noticed how light passing thru glass can magnify the appearance of objects. Ancient records of planets and moon were written before modern astronomy that could only have been known through the use of telescopes. Tiny engravings were done that would have required magnification. Mention is made of devices that must have been primitive glasses to correct vision defects.

Telescopes

Steam Engines in Ancient Egypt

Hero of Alexandria created a crude steam turbine around 130 B.C. It was used to open temple doors. However, the ancients had plenty of slave labor so such devices never became serious energy sources. He also invented a water organ, a wind powered organ, a fire engine and a coin-operated device.

Egyptian Steam Engines

What is easily seen in the historical record if one pays attention begs the question of what other great technological capabilities the ancients had that we have lost knowledge of.