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Permalink Reply by doone on Jun. 21, 2012
Only two bodies in the Solar System are known to have persistent surface liquid: Earth and Saturn’s moon Titan. Unlike Earth, Titan’s liquid is methane rather than water, and most of the methane is in the moon’s thick atmosphere instead of on the surface.
Permalink Reply by archaeopteryx on Speaking of Mayans, and we were, I ran across an interesting little tidbit which should be a close fit for atheistuniverse --
Once upon a time, the Mayans had a god, Hunab-Ku. Hunab Ku was described as, “the supreme god.” In fact, the very name, Hunab-Ku, translates as “Sole God” or “Only God.” The name appears in the 16th century Diccionario de Motul, where “Hunab-ku” is identified as “...the only living and true god, also the greatest of the gods of the people of Yucatan." He had no form because they said that he could not be represented as he was incorporeal.
There was only one teensy little problem - the Maya never heard of him.
His mention in the Diccionario de Motul in the 16th century - after the invasion of the "one-god" Spanish - was the earliest mention of him anywhere. Though he also received a write-up in the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel, written after the Spanish Conquest, he is unknown in any pre-Conquest inscriptions in Maya writing.
Hunab-Ku was closely associated with an indigenous creator god, Itzamna, and the fact that the deity is described only in a few late sources, heavily influenced by Christianity, has caused some scholars to suspect that the deity was not an actual Mayan deity but was rather invented by Franciscan friars to ease the transition from the traditional polytheist Mayan religion to strict Christian monotheism.
Why, they wouldn't do that, would they? To those simple, trusting people? Why that would be like, like, telling Sun worshipers who celebrated the Winter Solstice's beginning of the return of the sun, that the real reason for the season was the birth of their god's kid!
Oh wait - they did that too, didn't they?
Permalink Reply by archaeopteryx on 
Permalink Reply by Davy on I liked the poem Genesis----the last chapter.
How true it is!
My mum always said the world will end with a whimper not a bang.
Permalink Reply by doone on From the editors of n + 1:
According to many on the American left, the “elitist” is a right-wing bogeyman sustained by the mendacious organs of the actual elite — the moneyed one — and by the reactionary reflexes of an anti-intellectual public. Working-class whites, we’re told, vote in the interests of billionaires on the mistaken assumption that culture, not economics, is the main political battlefield, and that godless eggheads, not greedy businessmen, are their true class enemies. The 1-percenters bankrolling the Tea Party thereby deflect the attention of “bitter clingers” away from the wealthy and toward the clubby arrogance of the other 1 percent — the fraction of American students who graduate each year from the top tier of colleges.
The eggheads make sensible targets. Over the last thirty years, the university has replaced the labor union as the most important institution, after the corporation, in American political and economic life. As union jobs have disappeared, participation in the labor force, the political system, and cultural affairs is increasingly regulated by professional guilds that require their members to spend the best years of life paying exorbitant tolls and kissing patrician rings. Whatever modest benefits accreditation offers in signaling attainment of skills, as a ranking mechanism it’s zero-sum: the result is to enrich the accreditors and to discredit those who lack equivalent credentials.
More here.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 05:45 AM | Permalink
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