Saturday, October 17, 2009

saturday night live

Everyone has their favorite SNL clip. My favorite one was when the super heroes were all throwing a birthday party for Lois Lane. Superman and his x-ray vision was blurting out what all the wrapped presents were. The Hulk (John Belushi) came out of the bathroom after abusing it with a hulk like bowel movement. But there was this one charachter played by garrett morris called the Ant Man. And all the other Super heroes were all gathered around a making fun of him, because his super power was being able to shrink himself to the size of an ant, yet still have the power of a human. OOh Uuuh wow, ant man has the power of a human, and they all start laughing. If you can find a clip of this via your computer, it's worth the watch.

This brings me to the difference between God and gods. Did you know that each of the 10 plauges mentioned in Exodus was God's way of dissing all these other so called god's?

Let's start out easy, we all know that Ra was the Egyptian sun god. So God made it dark for 3 days.

The first plague was turning the water from the Nile into blood, the Egyptians worshipped Hapi, god of the Nile.

The 2nd plague was a gazillion frogs all over the place, it just so happened the Egyptians worshipped some god called Heket, who resembled a man with a frog head.

The 4th plague was flies, yeah, you guessed it Kephri was a fly faced god of the Egyptians.

The 5th plague was death of cows, yep, they had a cow head god too. His name was Hathor.

Then there was Isis, the goddess of medicine, so God sent boils and sores on to them.(6th plague)

If you want all the other gods names etc. and where they fit in with the plagues I'll give them to you. But I wont insult your intelligence with any nmore for now. You get the picture.

There is only 1 God, and he desires a relationship with you. Take your pick, Superman or Ant man.

Peace be with you all. feeno

18 comments:

  1. So why only ten out of an ancient Egyptian pantheon of more than 60 deities? That's the thing, there was a god for every animal and every aspect of life. Any plague which actually affected the lives of the Egyptian people or involved animals would link to some god or other.

    Incidentally Khephri wasn't a fly, or a locust for that matter. He was a scarab beetle. Scarabs had a significance to Egyptians over and above other insects, and a rival god intending to mock Egyptian religion wouldn't have picked any other bug.

    So this interpretation doesn't hold up very well if one assumes the ten plagues happened, or even if one considers them a work of fiction by a later Jew trying to write in some poetic justice for the heathens.

    That said, the latter scenario is more likely given that outside the old testament there's no documented (let alone physical) evidence of the plagues, the Exodus, Moses himself or even a large enslaved tribe of Hebrews in Egypt.

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  2. SmartLX: I don't think the plagues really happened, or that Moses really received the Ten Commandments, but respectable historians now suggest that Moses may actually have been a real person. The latest research suggests that the Hebrews weren't slaves, but 'Hibaru' mercenaries in service of the Pharaoh, who lived near the Sinai peninsula, and whose function was to protect the Egyptian Empire against invasions from the north. There was an episode of Battles BC on History Channel that explained the whole thing. Check out the "Moses" episode. http://www.history.com/media.do?mediaType=All&searchTerm=The+Exodus+Decoded&action=search&x=0&y=0&showName=-1

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  3. LX

    Your first question could be answered by understanding numerology in the Bible. The number 10 represents completeness. God could have sent "60" plagues, but 10 meant complete.

    You are right about the scarab. But actually in the original text the word swarm was taken out by translaters and the word flies was put in.
    And we both know how common scarab head gods were to the Egyptians.

    If you really want evidence for the Exodus look at this site. http:www.truthnet.org/biblicalarcheology/s/Exodusarcheology.htm

    I apologize for not knowing how to add links etc. Not very computer savy.

    We do have proof from wall paintings dated around 1000 years bc or so that depict workers gathering materials to form bricks then carrying them away under Egyptian supervision. (Ex. 1:14) Also the bible mentions of how they the Jews were to make the bricks with straw (Ex. 5:6-7)which were found to be consistent with most all Egyptian bricks. (Pyramids and such) Maybe or maybe not depicting "a large enslaved tribe of Hebrews living in Egypt"? But they would have needed a lot of laborers?

    I would have just told you about what the site says, but usually I'm later asked to reveal my source. So I just skipped a step. But it does offer some good evidence, at least food for thought?

    Thanks for coming by. Hope your weekend was good. Later, feeno

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  4. 'Sup Lordship

    Why is it so hard hard to make the leap from mercenary to slaves?

    Shalom, feen

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  5. I had my stag party, Feeno, so yeah, it was a good weekend.

    If the fourth plague was a swarm, how different was it from the ninth plague? Was that one really locusts? Regardless, the Egyptian sacred scarab is a dung beetle and doesn't do a lot of swarming.

    You got that link wrong, here's the real one. I'll have a proper read of it shortly. And here's how I made that link: just substitute angle brackets for the regular ones in the following.

    (a href="http://www.truthnet.org/biblicalarcheology/5/Exodusarcheology.htm")here's(/a)

    Meanwhile, regarding what you said to His Lordship, when the story is all about escaping their masters it makes a lot of difference whether they're helpless slaves or armed mercenaries. In only one of these cases would they need a miracle.

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  6. LX

    Stag Party? Does that mean you got/getting married? Sorry I keep screwing up the http: thingy. Thanks for investigating the correct one and checking it out.

    Late, feeno

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  7. The real problem was that you substituted /s/ for /5/ in the middle. Yes, I'm getting married next Friday.

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  8. Congrats. She's not making you get married in a church is she?

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  9. @feeno
    thx for stopping by my blog and watching the video. Too bad you can't answer the question ;-)

    @SmartLX
    Congratulations! I hope you'll answer feeno's question concerning church! ;)



    Personally I would not mind getting married at a church. I went to a friend's wedding quite recently actually, and he's an atheist too... What I found really ironic is that I remembered most of the prayers we do in group, and my friend who was in front was doing it perfectly as well. At the same time, other young people around were just not paying attention, chatting, looking around... I think I was the only one under 50 to actually participate... lol

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  10. The wedding's in a church, yeah. She's Catholic, but the choice has little to do with religion as evidenced by the fact that we're using a Uniting Church. Quite simply, she's always dreamed of a church wedding.

    I'm comfortable with it; my promises to her during the ceremony will just be a lot more sincere than my promises to God.

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  11. You sound like the making of a good husband. It is after all her day. Maybe I'll pick up Hugo and we'll crash the reception?

    later, feeno

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  12. Think you can be in Brisbane, Australia next week? I doubt it, but you'd be welcome at the ceremony if you could.

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  13. Oy vay, LX is just as irritating here as he/she is on other blogs...

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  14. I have my moments. Things were slow at home base, so I followed Makarios' comment outward.

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  15. Not related, but we talked about it recently feeno. They found another interesting transitional fossils; you know the ones you would claim they found none...

    My post

    cheers

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  16. Hey Feeno, hope all is well.

    I used to think that the Hebrews had been slaves in Egypt, because that's what everybody assumed, but the latest historical and archaeological research, along with a brand new Hebrew translation of Exodus indicates that they were in fact free men. The 'Hibaru' were sea-raiders who tried to invade Egypt, and then they made a deal with the Egyptians, and they were given some land, with the condition that they help defend Egypt's north-eastern border. The fact that some of them may or may not have worked on construction sites doesn't really change this. So then after a few generations, their population had grown, and they wanted to expand into Canaan, but the Pharaoh didn't want them to because that would have meant war with Canaan, so the Hebrews, led by Moses, took matters into their own hands. (Kinda like the England forbidded Americans from expanding west of the Appalachian mountains because they didn't want to start a war with France who owned all the land from Canada all the way to Louisiana). So the Egyptians sent out their chariots to chase after them, but the Hebrews lured them into an ambush in a marsh called the Sea of Reeds, where the chariots got bogged down in the mud and couldn't maneuver, and the Hebrews slaughtered them there ('swallowed in the sea'). From that point on, the Hebrews, now called Israelites, started raiding desert towns, and under the command of Joshua, conquered most of Canaan.

    All this I learned from the TV show Battles BC on the History Channel, and this is what they are teaching cadets at Kingston Military College in Ontario...

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  17. Lordship'

    Yes It's all good, thanks.

    There's a lot of similarities in that story and the book of Exodus. Maybe them cadets could just read what Moses himself wrote about it?

    Peace, feeno

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  18. Sorry it took me so long to get back to this, Feeno.

    The majority of that link of yours is just retelling Moses' story, with bits of actual support interspersed. So what do we have?

    - The Ipuwer Papyrus, containing a poem about death and disaster. There's an ongoing dispute between Biblical archaeologists and Egyptologists over what it actually refers to. The leading non-Biblical candidate is the eruption of Thera. The poem doesn't actually have to refer to anything specific; there's no telling how many different things it might symbolise as opposed to describe directly. It also dates to 1400-1350 BC, at least 45 years after the given Biblical date of the Exodus - 1446 BC. That's more than the average lifespan at the time.

    - The Amarna letters, which mention the Habiru people. Since the Egyptians referred to the Hebrews elsewhere as shasu and the Hebrew word for Hebrew is ivrit, the superficial similarity between "Habiru" and "Hebrew" doesn't count for much. Again, it's been dated far after the Biblical Exodus date, specifically about 1350-1340 BC.

    - Accounts of Seti I and Rameses II encountering the Hapiru in Palestine. As your link says, it's odd that they're not mentioned in the Book of Judges.

    - A parchment with writings about later character Balaam. This has been dated to about 800 BC.

    There's more stuff out there than I thought, I'll give you that, but none of it is terribly conclusive.

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