it’s intriguing to imagine the myths you could tell an Iron Age tribe that would actually be correct as well as sounding awesome, like:
humans and apes share a common ancestor, and further back share an ancestor with all mammals, bird, reptiles, fish, and ultimately all living things.
the Earth is over four billion years old.
each of the fixed stars in the sky is another sun like our own.
This is actually something I think about periodically. If religion is true, why doesn’t it contain some scientific fact that couldn’t be proved for another 1,000-2,000 years? Why push only the faith element so hard in a world where spiritual experiences aren’t limited to your religion?
I think that’s yet another unanswerable objection to religion - it would be very simple for anyone in the ancient world who was actually omniscient to demonstrate that they knew things that couldn’t possibly be known by people of that time and place, and since they are already trying to provide direct proof of the supernatural to a limited audience with miracles it doesn’t really make sense for them not to do it in an effective way that’d silence the skeptics everywhere.
Imagine if Muhammad had carved a map of the dark side of the Moon into the Kaaba
Imagine if we sequenced the human genome and discovered that what we thought was junk DNA was actually the text of the Book of Mormon
Actually what if both of those things happened would that be fucked up or what
Ancient people: “I’ll believe in your god if you can show me the miracles.”
Modern people: “If we had evidence, it wouldn’t be true faith.”
muhammad supposedly did do a bunch of stuff like that, and you occasionally see muslim articles like ‘look at all these scientific miracles in the qur’an that we didn’t know about til recently!‘ or prophecies etc.
when you look into it it turns almost always turns out either it WAS known by people at the time, or it’s not true, but a lot of people just believe it without looking into it.
(e.g. muhammad supposedly split the moon and reattached it at one point, and theres a thing going ‘when they went to the moon they found a massive crack running through it’ or stuff about stages of fetal development).
Lots of people in the Christian world believe that women have one more rib than men.
i believed that for ages even after i stopped believing. i assumed people had noticed women have an extra rib and included that in the creation story as an explanation way back when, rather than just ‘no one bothered to check and count the number of ribs in x thousand years’. it’s not like rib counting technology is super advanced.
Does it even explicitly say in the Bible that all men since Adam have one fewer rib?
I don’t really know one way or the other. Just that it says God took one of Adam’s ribs to create Eve. Unless you believe in Lamarckian inheritance, I’m not sure why that implies all his descendants have one fewer as well.
I wonder where that belief originated…
The story I saw on here about that a while back was that what gets translated as ‘rib’ actually is a euphemism for baculum (penis bone!) and that bit of Genesis is a just-so story explaining why humans don’t have one, unlike the herd animals Bronze Age shepherds would be familiar with, who were created male and female to begin with
Oh, spare me the argumentum ad baculum!
Reblogged for Crom’s comments and also “Actually what if both of those things happened would that be fucked up or what”
