Chariots of God (Scripture & Photo Examined)

no, not to believe your cameras. cameras don't really capture reality the way our eyes perceive it. they do things like add distortion, or selectively focus, or blur the background/foreground in ways we don't normally see, and they record a discreet moment in time as a still image -- depending on the length of that moment, things we perceive as sharp become blurred, or things we can't track with our eyes can become sharp.you can't do both at the same time unless there's two exposures -- like an ambient one and a strobe. like this. the details are locked in by a much shorter duration and higher intensity flash of light. otherwise, the whole thing is just a blur.no strobe? no details on the leading edge. just blur.

nope. it's what a fast object does with a slow shutter speed. notice the thing darting around in the beginning of the video, that's obviously an insect (probably the same insect)? it's streaky too.

you know cat, i was actually thinking "i bet someone's going to post that mitch hedberg joke" when i wrote my post.

the opposite is actually true. in a few very notable cases, the government has intentionally allowed rumors of aliens etc to go unchecked, because it's a convincing distraction from what they're actually doing.for instance, shortly after WW2 there was a project codenamed "mogul" that use high altitude balloons to listen (like, with microphones) for soviet nuclear testing. what happens when one of these balloons and microphone assemblies comes down on someone's ranch, and you don't want the soviets to know that you can potentially spy on them from your home soil? it's a flying saucer, no wait it's a weather balloon. well, aliens are a better story than flying microphones.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

yes. SETI is so strapped for funding these days, and have so much data to analyze that they farm analytics out to people on the web:SETI@homethese are literally the people who spend their entire lives actively searching for aliens. finding a signal or any sign of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe would be instant fame, fortune, and a nobel prize for the person or team that found it.you might be able to keep a small cadre of government officials quiet, but you can't keep 3 million independent home users and thousands of scientists who have made their lives work quiet.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

no, that's artifact of motion on a slower shutter speed. your eyes don't have a shutter speed.

i understand how seeing works. you're not seeing spirits, you're hallucinating them, because you are perceiving things that are not congruent with how sight actually works.

i think the explanations tend to be a little more down-to-earth than that, for both aliens and demons. they actually have a lot in common, particularly when you consider sleep paralysis disorder.people used to report waking to find a kind of demon called a succubus (or incubus) sitting on their chest, that they were unable to move. now, people tend to report waking to find themselves paralyzed with an alien in the room. descriptions are pretty similar, too: waxy grey skin, relatively featureless, big eyes. it helps that society is a bit of an echo-chamber: we have this image of aliens in our popular consciousness, so it's what we tend to see.personally speaking, i've seen one. so, come at me, scottrp.i woke one night with one of these demons staring me in the face, and i couldn't move. it had waxy grey skin, was featureless, and utterly terrifying.but, i knew what sleep paralysis is, and i understood that was i only half awake. i found a detail in my surroundings that wasn't congruent with reality (there was a CD playing on my bedside stereo, but i'd left that CD in the car) and focused on that, and forced myself awake. i think aliens probably do exist elsewhere in the universe. i'm skeptical that they have ever visited here (or ever will within the lifespan of humanity as a whole), but i remain open to the possibility of alien contact.i don't think they will look humanoid, or like images our brains are known to produce under certain influences, or while half-awake.

it's well understood to be a product of the human mind, and i certainly made it go away with only the power of my own mind, and not invoking jesus or anything. well, it wasn't exactly. notice i didn't mention the eyes? it didn't have those big, black almond-shaped eyes. though i have seen things with similar features in dreams, but still not exactly the classic graylien. and sleep paralysis is well understood. we know what causes it, and what is going on in the brain at the time. i've actually been in the room and awake with someone having a sleep paralysis episode, and i can promise that the otherworldly apparition she saw wasn't actually there.

it's so well understood as a product of the mind that even you admit it's a dream? i think we both agree on that last point -- my point is that it was not identical to the phenomenon most people report, but had many things in common. if there were some intelligent agency behind it (and not, say, just my own brain), you'd think it'd be a little more consistent. well, no. it's something that happens in the brain, not in a physical space. i think scott may need actual psychiatric attention, and either supernatural explanation here is only going to do him harm.Edited by arachnophilia, : No reason given.

apparently not; you're literally describing a dream.i know exactly what my experience was, and knowing what it was actually was my way out of it.

this says everything we need to know.scott, time to start taking your pills again.

we've literally seen evidence to the contrary in this thread, scott.get checked out, we're worried about you.

so, this is another subject i happen to know a lot about.the bible, on the whole, is extremely unreliable on historical matters. most of the text was written around the babylonian exile, based on internal clues like anachronisms, and the historical content gets a bit more reliable around that time (that is, we can confirm it from other sources and archaeology). prior to that, the narrative actually conflicts with known history and archaeology fairly frequently, and further back we have narratives that are literally impossible given what we know of the origin of the israelites and their relationship to canaanites.for instance, here's a favorite picture to show in these discussions: this is jehu, son of omri, bowing down before shalmanessar 3 as depicted on his black obelisk. it appears that the bible is somewhat correct, and jehu broke the northern canaanite non-aggression pact established by the previous king, ahab, and his marriage to jezebaal, and this resulted in his failure to keep back the invading assyrian army (without the help of the other canaanite city-states).this story, however, is not in the bible. it runs against the ideological bias: when israel when yahweh-only, they were crushed as a direct result. yahweh was bad for israel. in fact, the bible specifically denies that jehu is an omridite king -- i'll even give it the benefit of the doubt there, and assume that shalmanessar just wasn't keeping up with the family tree and assumed this king was from the same house even though he may not have been. but this is literally the only historical record we have of jehu. that's it.every bit of biblical history and archaeology is like this: we'll dig something that confirms some small part, but totally destroys the biblical narrative in the process. so we'll find something phenomenal, like the earliest record of israel, on the merneptah stele, some 200 years before the kingdom is thought to have existed. but then it turns out that they're just listed among canaanites, as a minor tribe:

quote:

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While Ashkelon, Gezer and Yanoam are given the determinative for a city — a throw stick plus three mountains — the hieroglyphs that refer to Israel instead employ the throw stick (the determinative for "foreign") plus a sitting man and woman (the determinative for "people") over three vertical lines (a plural marker):

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According to The Oxford History of the biblical World, this "foreign people" "sign is typically used by the Egyptians to signify nomadic groups or peoples, without a fixed city-state home, thus implying a seminomadic or rural status for 'Israel' at that time."

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Merneptah Stele - Wikipedia

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and worse still, this is within decades of when the exodus was supposed to have occurred -- not only is this event not described in the bible, but the picture it draws of what israel looked like at the time rather conflicts with the biblical picture. well, actually ask some biblical historians. i mean, at an accredited university, not at your local store-front fundie church. actual scholars working in the field of biblical studies, history and archaeology. you will find that the overwhelming consensus is that, no, the bible is not reliable on the whole when it comes to history.

i believe this all happened about two years before you joined, so i don't know if this is an intentional reference. but we've had debates like this before.EvC Forum: A modern object described in ancient texts negates Creation Myth