Raelism...more Religious Drivel It Would Seem.

[mikey4444]

Never heard of Raelism until I saw it in today's Gaurdian :::

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%C3%ABlism

How can any sane, educated person actually believe this nonsense. It makes Scientology look normal !

[Octavius]

They could be representative of things found in nature, or possibly not as old as they are purported to be, but they could also be the product of vivid and fantastical minds of ancient men and women.

My 4 year old can invent a magical spaceship design or flying car having never seen one in any media. The mind of inventive design is natural to humans from way back oin human development, it is engineering and propulsion that took a little longer.

I'm sorry, its a fascinating topic, but I'm not convinced on ancient aliens as we would think of them.

[naomi24]

Jim, no, it doesn’t represent tangible evidence – but I was asked for an example – and I’ve given a couple which is all I can be bothered to do here. You have no real interest. You already think you know it all and you do exactly what the archaeologists do - it looks like an aircraft, but they didn't exist in those days, so it must be a fish. How ridiculous! And, by the way, your analogy is also ridiculous.

Chris, I think we were talking at cross purposes. I don’t think anyone can produce a spaceship, but ancient drawings, artefacts, and most certainly an abundance of texts clearly indicate that there is something to be investigated here. I don’t see why you think aliens wouldn’t have travelled around on earth in aircraft. When men are exploring the moon they don’t jump in the landing craft to move from place to place – they use a moon buggy – but then our current technology doesn’t allow for an on-board helicopter. Ancient Indian literature describes in detail vast mother ships orbiting the earth – and other craft landing and travelling on earth – and if you know of a supernatural god that needs to arrive in a machine that comes whizzing from an easterly direction, spitting smoke, and making a noise like Niagara in full flow – tell Ezekiel. (Incidentally – this might interest Jim – that particular account of a flying machine was examined in detail by a reputable scientist who concluded that it was indeed a flying machine).

Jim’s statement that // the flaw is that its advocates were interpreting old actions in a modern way.// is flawed in itself, because that’s exactly as we should be looking at it. We’re searching for technology – not fish!

Octavius, //My 4 year old can invent a magical spaceship design or flying car having never seen one in any media.//

I don’t believe your 4 year old has never seen a representation of a spaceship – and he/she has certainly seen an aircraft. No imagination needed there. That’s retained for supernatural gods.

[whiskeryron]

All sounds rather reasonable to me.

WR.

[naomi24]

Me too, Ron.

And Chris, perhaps they have left their mark in megalithic structures, the construction of which cannot be explained. Anyway, I’m not out to convince anyone. I’m curious, I think there’s a lot we don’t know about our past, and I find this a fascinating subject - that’s all.

[Octavius]

You may not believe it, but it certainly comes from imagination since the drawings are representative of the imaginative mind putting two and two together - a car and a bird = flying car. Unless you think a 4 year old is capable of intelligent design principles or carbon copying.

[jim360]

What utter rot! If you are looking for something that you should not expect to find -- technology when it is supposed not to exist -- you absolutely should avoid comparing it to modern technology. First, because by necessity all aliens visiting Earth in the past would have technology that is likely to be different from anything we have today and will probably not look like our own planes and spaceships and moon buggies, etc.

Secondly, I do have real interest so stop telling me what I have and do not have. You don't know -- have no idea -- so find a better argument, and stop making assumptions about me because most of them are false.

As to this point:

"Jim’s statement that // the flaw is that its advocates were interpreting old actions in a modern way.// is flawed in itself, because that’s exactly as we should be looking at it. We’re searching for technology – not fish!"

If you are searching for technology, and not fish, which you are, you need two things: firstly, a very good reason (and texts are, realistically, not enough) to assume that you will find it, and secondly, given what is such an extraordinary claim, you have to rule out all other possibilities.

These gold artifacts are, one way or another, art. Artists often employ a great deal of licence, and what they make doesn't necessarily represent what they saw to exact detail. If we were to take this literally, the Egyptian art is evidence that people's heads were on sideways, which again is nonsense, but the point is that art should not in itself be a guide for what the world was actually like. It merely shows how the people of the time saw it.

As far as I am concerned you are placing too much weight on evidence of ancient texts, written by ancient people whose understanding of the world was limited. I am interested, to an extent, but I need for more evidence than an isolated gold piece that could just as easily be an abstract bird/ fish/ insect as an accurate scale model of an alien aircraft. The onus is on you, and people who believe in this theory, to provide far more physical evidence.

[naomi24]

Octavius, but unlike the people we're talking about, he/she has seen an aircraft - and a car. The child didn't imagine those.

[jomifl]

Before interpreting artifacts in terms of our technology and culure perhaps we should consider what technology and culture existed when they were made.

[Octavius]

But they will have seen a bird and a cart.

[naomi24]

Jim, //As far as I am concerned you are placing too much weight on evidence of ancient texts, written by ancient people whose understanding of the world was limited.//

Which is precisely why they thought what they were seeing were gods – and the ‘magic’ that gods possessed. It’s happened in recent times when jungle tribes have thought aircraft magical and from the gods. They don’t know any different. As for me providing more evidence, I don’t think so. This constant aggression I get from you is unpleasant. You want to know more? Research it yourself.

[vulcan42]

Strange when ancient cave dwellers painted an elephant it looked like an elephant,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:San_Rock_Art_-_Cederberg.jpg
But when later generations sculptured a helicopter it "couldn't possibly be that so it must be a fish/insect, etc".

[naomi24]

Octavius, they would never have seen anything inanimate move under its own steam - but that's what they describe - and in detail.

[naomi24]

Vulcan, indeed. I don't think these people were stupid. They drew and wrote about what they saw in the only way they could.

[jim360]

That's a nice point vulcan, up to the point that it's two different eras of art and doesn't mean anything. Rather like the difference between Henry Moore's sculptures of an abstract human form as compared with the classical Greek tradition. One wonders how those sculptures would be interpreted in the future without some form of explanatory note by the artist.

[naomi24]

But these things do have explanatory notes from the artists - sadly generally ignored.

[Octavius]

Sorry, which bit has the notes?

[jim360]

Not all of them. The hieroglyphs you posted earlier, for example, do not. Of course, because the hieroglyphs are the language themselves.

A more reasonable interpretation than scale models of helicopters etc., exists:

http://www.catchpenny.org/abydos.html

http://members.tripod.com/~A_U_R_A/abydos.html

Similar explanations exist for the gold artifacts earlier. And the stories of Ezekiel, Indian history and so on, while thought-provoking certainly, can only be considered as stories until more physical evidence emerges.

I'm not dismissing this out of hand, I'm really not. It's just that I will need far more evidence than what exists at the moment, evidence that is essentially ancient stories and artifacts interpreted through modern eyes. Evidence including, but not limited to, aliens visiting Earth now or in the immediate future (and not just "abducting" the odd person now and then -- I mean a prominent, visual, universally acceptable visit). Absent such evidence...

[Octavius]

I don't see why they cannot be considered ancient surrealism or abstract expressionism (to use the modern coined words) borne out of fireside stories and imaginative creative minds. Some are instructional or recounting the days events to the tribe - 'here's how we hunted the buffalo' etc., and some are creative stories based on imagination and superstition.

[naomi24]

Look, from my point of view I study these ancient drawings and texts – including the bible – and ask myself what these people were actually talking about. I don’t think they were lying, I don’t think they were delusional, and, in the absence of experience, I don’t think they could possibly have imagined what they described – including the effects of gravity on a space traveller, the extremes of temperature in space, and descriptions of the earth as viewed from space. Now I’m not trying to convince anyone - it matters not a jot to me what you think – carry on believing in supernatural gods and their magic if you think that’s more sensible - but to my mind we are ignoring history simply because we think it couldn’t have happened as those people described it. Rather than consider an alternative possibility, human beings, as a whole, prefer to cling doggedly to the most unlikely explanation of all – God - and in that they are no more advanced than the jungle tribes I spoke about earlier.

[sandyRoe]

'Ello, Him. I can't read that without thinking of it being said by a character from the Goon Show