General Chat

Is sc talking about global warming?
Alternative facts?

what about ..............

Nostradamus

Mother Shipton

Edgar Cayce

et al


all people who made predictions about the future, that's if you can decipher what they said :-D


Mother Shipton lived in a cave in Knaresborough .............. a great tourist attraction at one time :-D . I remember going with my parents sometime in the 1950s

Accepted SC

I wasn't referring to you David, so please accept my apologies if you thought I was.

I was talking about countless academics who are given huge sums of research money in order to try and prove something that cannot be proven.

My last posting on this and the previous was certainly not to earn one second of fame SC. I was merely pointing out something I'd noticed and wished to share.

As an atheist (although raised C of E) nobody could believe that any of the 'stories' were written contemporaneously.

With regards to hidden codes, you look hard enough in any book you'll find something, however obscure, to claim your 15 minutes of fame.

Enough David! I wouldn't waste my time pondering over anything such as that while life passed me by.

Some people just have a book to sell or a programme or film to push. Others may see pictures in a slice of bread - it's crazy.

Read Sylvia's post of 17 Feb at 19:22 - it's worth a second read as so much of it is right in my opinion.

Then, when you've read it, go and be nice to your nearest and dearest, it'll make them happy and give you a good feeling.

However, if you're training for ordination, you may wish to pick holes in all the theories yourself. :-0

How about this to ponder over. In the OT a man wrestled all night with an angel.
The angel put his hip out.

Two men would be exhausted wrestling all night, but a man and an angle ?
The angle would possess strength to destroy its opponent immediately. All it does is put his hip out.

Imagine a couple of anagrams for angel and hip. Angle and Phi.
Another anagram for night would be thing (or thought)
Phi is the Divine Proportion.

Thank you for your contributions
Any real or perceived Bible Code would be of no use to those that penned it as it seems to relate to hundreds of years in advance. It would only reveal itself to those that had a Bible, the inclination to read it, mostly historic, and the ability to find something encoded beyond the literal.

Come a long way from a name revealed to one man to an ineffable name to a name that is used often by proselytes knocking on your door.

Did you know that if you go to the Holy Land, and visit sites mentioned in the Bible, and stand there, then go home and say "I have seen where Jesus walked, and I have seen what he saw, and what is said in the Bible" ......... you have done no such thing for a very large number of sites?


I know a man who has made a hobby of determining the truth of such sites as now believed.

He has worked closely with the Israeli department that governs such things, and they have accepted everything that he tells them, because he has evidence.


For example, he will go to a hilltop where the bible and every tourist book says Jesus stood and saw such and such a thing in the distance. He looks and looks and can see no such thing, nor anything that indicates that such a thing could have been seen 2000 years ago.

These sites are often described in the archaeology world as "according to tradition". This means that there is no true historical evidence to prove that the location is a valid biblical site.

Much of the controversy about biblical sites is based on the actions of the so-called St Helen, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great , who visited Palestine during the 4th century. ........ ie, at least 300 years after the events happened.

She would declare a place to be the location of a key Bible event. She had the power and money to not only establish her word as fact in the religious world, but to order a church built on that site.

She claimed to find Jesus' cross and even the nails from it, a piece of His tunic and pieces of the rope that were used to tie Him to the cross. Was she indeed credibly educated to make such important decisions?

The man I know looks around very carefully, and sees a similar hill a few metres or kms away, goes to that one, stands on the top ............. and can see exactly what is described

He has done this for dozens of sites, and there is apparently a small book or booklet been published although I have never seen it and cannot tell you what it is called.


This is just one small example of how things have changed through oral history.



I know many scientists who are also religious, just as I know many who are not and who may find it impossible to defend the bible because of the lack of tangible evidence.

I'm not religious although I went to a CofE school from the age of 4 to 11, and also had the usual religious education common in all schools in the UK in the 1950s, so had a very good indoctrination at an early age.

I used to find it very hard to accept that God created the world in 6 days and then rested on the seventh, hence why Sunday is the "day of rest" in the Christian church.

One explanation to help explain this is to think of a "day" as being thousands or millions or years, in other words an eon. Most people were uneducated until about 200 years ago, and even educated people knew little about time spans.

So it was easier for the story teller to use a word that would be understood by everyone .................. hence a day.

None of us like to have our theories contradicted do we?

I believe there was friction between Darwin and the very devout captain of the Beagle but I don't think you are quite right about Darwin holding back from publishing. As I understand it, and I am happy to be put right if I have got it wrong, Darwin wrote a long summary of his theory in 1842 but did nothing with it until 1858. What pushed him into action was that Alfred Russel Wallace sent Darwin a paper for his comments and it turned out that Wallace had arrived at the same conclusions quite independently. Both Darwin and Wallace's papers were read to the Linnean Society and both men were given equal credit. Darwin then quickly got his Origin of Species book written and it was published in 1859, some 23 years before his death.

Poor old Wallace is all but forgotten now.

We've moved a bit away from the OP but an interesting thread nonetheless.

I read Darwin didn't have his "theory" published until after his death, so as not to offend then believers.

The incumbent Pope was less than pleased when the astronomers of the day basis the earth revolved around the sun

Religion or faith lacking ? sadly at times in my case it's both.

You might enjoy Dan Brown's books and the movies based on them such as the da Vinci code. Back in the C19 one my ancestors was a cofe bishop. He most def. Did not take a literal view of the Bible and supported Darwin.

If yr faith in a religion is so weak as to need talismans and obscure messages than either the faith or the religion is badly wanting.
God forbid both.

The Church of England did not splinter into Protestant and Presbyterian. Protestants started in Germany several years before Henry VIII (not V111) split from Rome. Presbyterianism started in Scotland (outside Henry's jurisdiction).

Most of the main protestant denominations in the UK use the King James Bible in conjunction with modern translations and do not have their own versions.

Many millions many of whom cannot read or write treat The Bible as "Gospel"

Perhaps there are in recent decades as many books written, published and sold attempting to "explain" the Bible than the Bible itself.

Since Henry V111 created the Church of England for his own ends, a divorce, the C of E has splintered into Protestant, Methodist, Presbyterian, Salvation Army, Jehovah's Witnesses' etc all with their own version.
Judaism and Catholicism seem relatively stable.

David, I am not very knowledgable either but my feeling is that most Christians believe the Bible to be the word of God but as interpreted and reinterpreted by man. This doesn't mean that it is fiction but that you need to look for the truth within the stories.

Do you have a family "legend" that has been passed down the generations? If so, and you can now research it, you will probably find that there is a germ of truth there but over the years the story has got changed. As an example, I learnt from my mother, who got it from her mother, and so on, that someone in our family had been on the stage and had actually died on stage. The assumption was that he was a Music Hall artist.

When my brother and I got interested in family history we found this chap. He turned out to be a closer relative than we thought - a direct line ancestor - and earlier than expected (1801-47). He didn't die on stage but he did collapse just after coming off stage, was taken back to his lodgings and died shortly afterwards. So it was a basically true tale but the details had got changed because it hadn't been written down at the time.

Also, remember that until universal education most people couldn't read so God's word had to be presented to them in a form that made sense to them i.e spoken stories, pictures etc.

Excuse my ignorance, I'm now old enough to know I'm ignorant on many subjects, if that is so, does that mean the book of books we call the Holy Bible is for want of a better word fiction, or maybe fantasy would better suffice ?

David .............


that's what we've been saying!


Both the OT and NT are based on oral stories and nothing was written down for hundreds of years.

I've recently been looking elsewhere on this subject. I got to wondering who wrote the four gospels and when. I'd the idea that they would have to be like biographers and write it all down while it was fresh in their memory.

To my surprise I found a site that said the weren't until 200AD long after Mathew Mark, Luke and John were dead. :-S

I found someone else's discovery's to be very surprising given that they were written in three languages, and are decoded as alleged in English several centuries later.