Comments on: Religion as the ground of culture?

By: George Michalopulos

George Michalopulos — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 02:54:58 +0000

In reply to Fr. John. Your words got my mind to thinking about the first scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where a monolith suddenly appears and wreaks havoc with the brains of the proto-hominids, causing them to make the evolutionary leap to mankind. Interestingly, James Watson, one of the discoverers of the DNA molecule believed that life on earth was "seeded" from extraterrestrial sources. My question: if "seeded," then why not "guided." Anyway, that's a little off topic but this monument in Turkey does set the mind to wonder.

By: Fr. John

Fr. John — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:36:50 +0000

In reply to George Michalopulos.

I read the Smithsonian articles from 2 yrs back and many, many comments on them. This find, and the sculpture found in “Fish pond” (Balikli Gol) in Urfa dating from 13,500 yrs ago, astonishing. I don’t know what to think about the nephilim legend as regards Gobekli Tepe but Conan the Cimmerian would be proud…
So it appears that men put their minds and their backs into some kind of cult long before they settled down long enough to even think of making pots. They buried this thing (when their cult changed?) thousands of years before they even got around to the wheel. One wonders what the motivation for covering it up might have been? IT must have been major for a bunch of hunter-gatherers 8000 yrs ago to go to so much trouble. Again, the mind boggles. THis find ought to become the fount of a whole slew of books I hope Dan Brown steers clear.

By: cynthia curran

cynthia curran — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 05:49:08 +0000

Well, this is a little off topic but talking about church fathers and mythical creatures, Clement wrote about the Phoneix bird and its resurration in first Clement. If a bird can rise from the died, certianly Christ can.

By: cynthia curran

cynthia curran — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 23:27:31 +0000

Well, it seems that they move prior to the Dorians and Achaeans according to one book I have on Early European history. I need to do some further study.

By: George Michalopulos

George Michalopulos — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 03:30:39 +0000

Cynthia, I’ve always wondered why the Philistines left the Aegean, was it because they were evicted by the incoming Achaeans and Dorians (two of the stock peoples that became the Hellenes)? What do you think?

I remember reading a commentary on the Dead Sea Scrolls in which some of the writers thought that Goliath and certain other Philistines represented the remnant of a primordial race of giants which subsequently became extinct, most probably by the domination of their land by the Israelite invaders. In other words, the flood of Noah didn’t really complete the job of wiping out all of the human-divine hybrids. The essay was titled “When the Sons of God Cavorted with the Daughters of Men,” (by Ronald Hendel; Understanding the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. Hershel Shanks). Fascinating.

By: cynthia curran

cynthia curran — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:10:54 +0000

George as you know the Philstines were apart of the sea peoples that probably came from Crete or one of the Greek Islands to anicent Cannan. Golaith was a giant. So, his ancestry is from the Greek areas of the Bronze age that went to Cannan.

By: George Michalopulos

George Michalopulos — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:21:50 +0000

If memory serves, Tolkien in one of his letters wrote that mystery religions were formed at the places on earth where fallen angels had manifested themselves to primitive humans, who thereupon built up altars at those spots. Like I said, if memory serves. I may be wrong on the citation. However, a cursory reading of some of the Church Fathers shows much the same thing in that they believed that the nephelim of Genesis 6 and their hybrid divine-human offspring ("the giants and men of renown") were the basis for the elder gods of the various mythologies (Titans among the Greeks and the Frost-giants of the Norse eddas). Some modern folklorists have suggested that the weird hybrids of ancient Greece (such as the centaurs, the minotaur, etc.) were the results of grotesque human-animal cloning experiments. Anyway, in The Epic of Gilgamesh the gods feel that they must destroy the earth to purify its genetic line and later rabbinic writers take off on this and suggest that only Noah and his wife (and their three sons and daughters) are likewise unpolluted genetically, hence their salvation in the Ark. (This human remnant was not in itself without sin, Noah grew fermented wine, got drunk and naked and Ham apparently did something horrible to him.)

By: Fr. Johannes Jacobse

Fr. Johannes Jacobse — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 02:37:22 +0000

Flesh this out for us, John.

By: John Panos

John Panos — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:33:23 +0000

This may also indicate the importance not only of “architecture” but of sacred space – not in influencing society and culture – but determining it.

By: cynthia curran

cynthia curran — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:54:10 +0000

Just as the bible stated that religion is older than civilization. What these people worshipped will remain unknown since this is a long time before written languages.