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Comment by xaedes | Hacker News Reader

I read a passage (Revelation 8) that could very well describe a nature catastrophe instead of godly will. Also other stuff like Job 26:10 ("He has inscribed a circle on the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness.") which describes day/night boundary on earth quite well.

That made me think. What if there is other stuff that could actually be related to secular events and knowledge.

And so I started to read from the beginning. Genesis is very interesting actually. I noticed it is mostly inspired by earlier literature, like Arthasis, Gilgamesh and the like. Now I am totally into reading mesopotamia literature and origin stories all over the world. Maybe someday I am done with that and I can backtrack to advance further than Genesis in the bible. Time will tell.

So far it has certainly enlightened my view on early mankind.

edit: typo

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Myth is science. It's how people transferred knowledge from generation to generation, and it's always based on observations of the world. Thing is though, in the ancient times they didn't have the access we started to have in the last centuries into the structure of things, so all they could do was to interpret that which they saw and that which they learned through earlier myths. Dismissing religion and myths as fairy tales because they are not relevant anymore is wrong, for one even fairy tales are, or were, tools for sharing knowledge along generations. Yes, we have better means of knowledge today, but we wouldn't have came here without religion and myths, they have been an important step in cognitive evolution of humankind. And still today important as part of our history and also a still-comtemporary sociological phaenomenon that directly affects us in every way.

Equating myth and science will focus discussion on that statement. But the important part comes after that first statement:

Myth and religion are the giants that todays science is standing on.

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants." -- Newton

Todays universities where born out of the church. I will just gonna quote wikipedia[1] here: "These universities evolved from much older Christian cathedral schools and monastic schools, and it is difficult to define the exact date at which they became true universities, although the lists of studia generalia for higher education in Europe held by the Vatican are a useful guide."

Dismissing our past is certainly not the way to go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_university

Myth is certainly not science. Transmission of belief occurs through myths, not knowledge.

And belief is not necessarily orthogonal to knowledge. You can belief in something and it can still be knowledge.

eh, i sure as hell will dismiss a 8-bit processor for general computing nowadays though, despite it being state of the art not that long ago.

just because something had value before doesnt mean it still does.

Neither does it mean that it has no value anymore.

Taking your example "8-bit processors": it still has value. Even if it is only for learning purposes.

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