Cable television, and now the internet of course. A wasteland of diamonds. The content of crap. And some things worthwhile. So there's a show, content, canceled and revived, resurrected, zombified, about ghost hunters. Some tubular enthusiast with a tight teeshirt so we can see his big guns, going through abandoned death rows and insane asylums and, uh, abortion clinics at night, with geiger counters and light meters and cardiovasculo-spectorographs and thromdimbulators and infra red -- no, cuz it's green -- night-vision cameras.
"Oh!" he enthuses, peering intently at a screen, "did you SEE THAT TOO!?! It was a GHOST!! Clearly a dancing sphere of light on the screen, and a sharp echo!!! You saw it too! It was astounding!!! Are you HERE, spirit!/!!?? Are you trying to tell us a message about your existence??!e;?!?!> ? wuz ur deth paynfulLl!!?!!!EI??"
So we can consign Ghost Search! or Spook Quest or Spectre Seekers or Shade Surveyor ... Wraith Watchers Spirit Spiers Apparition Apprehenders … to the crap factory.
Then there's stuff that's light, but not shameful. Something about Jack the Ripper -- made a fair case for a suspect.
But looking around, for similar or recommended content, why, here's something about ... wait for it ... Atlantis!!! About scientists I guess divers, exploring the old news about the "Bimini Road", and some rectangular "storage buildings" that would have been ten feet above the 10,000 BC Caribbean coastline, but now 100 feet below water. The Ice Age, don't you know. Long story short, carbon dating, somehow, on the beach rock of the "road" gives a date of about 3000 BC, or maybe 1600 BC -- I forget. I, I'm sorry. Radiocarbon dating is not for rocks.
But these rocks were somehow 7000 years or more too young to be the artifacts of *hyperventilate* the Lost Continent of Atlantis.
Again, the "scientists" slash "explorers" were filmed, as is always the case, staring at and commenting upon the sonar and video images of their efforts. "See that?!? It is clearly a right angle, a perfect right angle, indicating carved rocks of human construction proving Atlantis of course. And notice how regularly spaced these storage structures are! It's such a shame they are utterly covered by 10,000 years worth of coral overgrowth, which law forbids us from removing, but the sharp angles of these humanly carved blocks have nevertheless survived 12,000 years of eroding strong currents that threaten us in our dives to sweep us out into the miles-deep ocean." I think I'm quoting. Maybe not. Whatever.
I, an objective viewer, did not see right angles. I saw random formations of rocky outcroppings or displaced boulders. Hard to say which. As for the "road", it is indeed an interesting "archaeological" or geological phenomenon. Analogous to natural formations found on, say, dry lake beds. Highly ordered and regular geometric shapes. Who can say. But where does the "road" go? Has its course been mapped? I've known about it since the mid 70s, and in the ensuing 5 decades years we would expect this elementary question to have been pursued. How long is it, this road? How wide? Does sonar or other testing reveal a network or a pattern? Has any "flagstone" ever been retrieved and studied? Perhaps there are answers, but the show did not give them. Nor has any other such show, over the decades. Questions that remain unanswered due to sloppiness and dishonest -- it's not about some mystery. Scams and cults.
The show concluded that perhaps this too-young lost civilization, if it is one, was of the descendants of the Atlantians. Sure. They survived the 9000 years of utter silence, in Bimini.
Atlantis is crap. Absolute garbage, archaeologically speaking. Neato myth, from Plato, used as a codicil to his utopian Republic, told in Crito and Timaeus, but useless as history. Nearly 2000 years followed Plato, with nothing new about Atlantis. Then Thomas Moore wrote another work about another Utopia, an island, and Francis Bacon wrote his New Atlantis, placed in America.
It's not even a theory. Theories are for testing. These were literary myths. No problem with that, but fools later tried to make it history.
Atlantis was the Minoan Civilization of Crete. It is a certainty. I don't have easy access to my old, pre-internet notes, for the second volume of my reconstruction of ancient history, the first volume of which, Most Ancient Days, is partially available here online. Because I'm so generous. I may never write the second volume. But it would deal with, in part, the Minoans and Mycenaeans. Hittites and Kassites and Assyrians and Carians and Hurrians and Mitanni and Uratuans and New Kingdom Egyptians and Dorians -- well, it goes on. I'm getting a little distracted thinking about how cool it is.
But the point is, the island of Thera, Santorini, was the cultic center of the Minoan religion, and it blew up volcanically about 1600 BC, leaving a caldera, ring-shaped island. The consequent tidal wave crippled the Minoan civilization on Crete, 70 miles away. We find the signs of the waves. The Cretans rebuilt, a pathetic shadow, that lasted a few hundred years more, then got wiped out again in another disaster.
Plato tells us Atlantis lay beyond the Gates of Hercules. Gibraltar, right? No. There was another strait by that name, in the Aegean. Beyond which lay Crete. Plato says 9000 years. 900 years before Plato wrote, that second destruction of Crete occurred. Plato says Atlantis was a series of concentric islands and harbors. Thera survived as a ring-shaped island. Get it?
We can find the correctable errors. I like that. As for the UFO pyramids on Mars dudes, I get a little impatient with them. I love mysteries. I like their solutions to be rational, and to answer the evidence in the simplest way possible. You know, parsimony. Occam's Razor.
When we are young we love to speculate, but we generally have only a little actual knowledge, so we may be led to all sorts of pleasing but incorrect solutions. With maturity should come probity. We must be skeptical of even our cherished ideas. The Bimini swimmers needed someone on board who had a capacity for critical thinking.
As for the Phantom Phinder hosts ... well, I looked them up. One may have graduated high school; the other seems to have gone to junior college. In itself, that's as it may be. As is the fact that their day job is as plumbers. It's a good job. And yet, the quality of their thinking. They need to open a stripper bar and do their reality show about that, instead of "science."
Look. I think the world is 6000 years old, and UFO aliens are fallen angels, and demons are the shades of a hybrid cross between fallen angels and the daughters of mankind. I think there was a literal world Flood, survived by a single human family in an ark that contained the entire genome of all land-based vertebrates.
I believe many ridiculous and disreputable things. Understanding that dignified things can be ridiculed, and disrepute is a fashion, not an inherent quality. Like, the Bible as history rather than merely as metaphor. Like Jesus on a cross, dying and actually redeeming the sins of mankind. Ridiculous things, that some people honor. Jesus on the cross was ridiculous. We know it, becuas ehe was ridiculed. Thats what mockery is.
There are the great questions that are interesting, fascinating, but secondary. Maybe Evolution is the true religion. Maybe space aliens seeded the cosmos with panspermia. Maybe there are giant faces on Mars, and a hollow moon, . I could be wrong. It's important to remember what's important. But regardless of whether we're right, let's not be right only by coincidence. Let's analyze the evidence methodically, instead of being wishful-thinking clowns.
It's just embarrassing, is all, and annoying. I don't consider being annoyed to be a form of entertainment.
J
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