On Intelligent Design
(Edited to Add this aside: a very nice soundtrack for reading, thinking about, and participating in this discussion (yes, the main post plus comments) can be had by going to Grooveshark, putting "Rapoon" into the search, then selecting "see all," from the albums list, then selecting Easterly 6 or 7 from that list, and then selecting "play all
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Your response also brings up a recent movie I watched which, if you're in the film mood, might be a fun watch on an idle occasion.
I was sick a couple weeks back, and I needed something to focus on to take my mind off the bad cold.
The Man from Earth is an interesting dialog-driven exploration of what would happen if someone lived for many ages. I'm pretty sure the main conflict of the story revolves around whether the protagonist can convince the others to accept his fantastical story.
They start the film off with the protagonist trying to leave his cabin in the woods, but he's stopped by fellow professors who are surprised not only that he's leaving, but that he tried to leave without so much as a farewell for his colleagues.
So they bring some food and drink into his place, and the protagonist starts to tell them the tale ... of how he's 14,000 years old.
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From the movie, and in line with what I wrote above, is the difficulty that a person would face with respect to knowledge if he or she could live a longer life: a person can barley keep up (or perhaps even can't keep up) with the cutting edge of his or her own field of specialization, let alone try to keep up with several areas of knowledge. Like John in the movie, sure, if we lived hundreds (or like him, thousands) of years, we could study several different areas of knowledge, but we would never be able to maintain expertise in any more than a few.
We are simply too limited, I feel, to come to any great understanding of things. We are, no doubt, living in The Cave, with little hope of seeing the sun.
And this goes to humans as a collective as well. Like you point out above, we do face problems surrounding the "preservation of knowledge," but, I feel, it goes beyond the mere fact of cataclysm or man-made devastation. And the film touches on an aspect of this as well: revisionist histories. And it's that and more!
The keepers, discoverers, and maintainers of knowledge are not without agendas. Some group may have knowledge that no one else has, and they're not telling, for example. And what happens when, like you say, something final happens to that group? Then their knowledge is gone along with them. And how often has this happened through out history? Likely often. And this is only one variant on the multitude of examples that could fall into this category of, let's call it, "selective dispersion of knowledge".
Moreover, I wonder at the simple aspect of a chain of knowledge: information passed along from generation to generation, say. Ever played telephone?
Back to the movie, and off topic of the above: I liked the way time was explained! (a paraphrase or maybe close to quote from memory) "We can't see it, can't hear it, can't weight it, can't measure it in a lab...clocks measure themselves: the objective referent of a clock is another clock."
Also, I liked the asserted cross over between Buddhism and Xtianity! I recall learning that in Buddhism it said that the Buddha bid people to "not do to others what you would not have done to yourself," and, of course, in Xtianity, there's the converse of that: "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." I was always struck by the parallel there, and it can not be stressed enough that in those two simple sentences is all the morality the world needs.
There was also a bit in the movie that is something I used to say quite often to people a decade or so ago: there's no such thing as the "supernatural" because everything that happens, happens in nature. So I was quite tickled when they rolled that one out in passing.
Well, that covers what i took notes about from the movie to write into this post. Again, thanks for the recommendation: it has easily earned a place in in my favourites.
Can you imagine the following line up of movies for a marathon: I Heart Huckabees, The Man From Earth, The Holy Mountain, and Waking Life. Brains would melt right out of peoples heads, like in that other great movie: Raiders of the Lost Ark (oh wait, that was eyeballs)!
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I had never heard of the Allegory of the Cave until you mentioned it. I liked it. The shadows on the wall definitely are not accurate representations of the objects themselves. I can totally visualize the prisoner's predicament.
There was a 'documentary' (I put that loosely because it felt like the film was grasping at a few straws here and there) called Zeitgeist that was pretty interesting for the idea that there had been plenty of Christ-like figures in previous religions.
I had suspected that a lot of the religions were grounded in similar fables and morals, and I also knew before I watched that film that the Christian holidays were specifically set up to coincide with older pagan holidays to allow for easier recruitment. After all, if it's familiar enough, the differences will seem minor.
Another interesting series was The Power of Myth with Joseph Campbell. He's one of those guys who influenced George Lucas. I haven't finished the series (friend has it, we only watched a couple chapters), but he did some great work collecting common myths and fables from various cultures.
In The Man from Earth, I was also taken by the idea of never being able to stay on top of expertise and knowledge. The idea that the protagonist put forth, the one about having the time to learn multiple degrees but always falling behind due to the faster pace of the advancement of the fields, that was something else.
And you're welcome. TMFE really hit the spot when I needed it, and I'm glad you saw it and appreciated it.
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I'm somewhat familiar with Zeitgeist, although I've only watched the first part of it, and that was only recently. When it first came out there were several people I knew (IRL or over the intertubes) who were all abuzz about it...I keep meaning to watch the whole thing...perhaps sometime I will, heh.
Certainly there is repetition, iteration, and similarity in myths, and, yeah, the Christ myth is no exception. If I recall correctly, there are some scholars who figure that "Jesus" was never a real person, but an amalgamation of several people. Whether or not he was a single actual person or the combination of several people, it's hard not to see that a certain amount of his mythology is similar to other myths that were around then and previously.
Of course, it is hard to see if we are not aware of other mythologies, and this leads back into the idea that knowledge--and the control of knowledge--is often tied to an agenda.
Ever heard the Five Steps by William S. Burroughs (re: "the Christian holidays were specifically set up to coincide with older pagan holidays to allow for easier recruitment")?
The DJ Spooky/Scanner/Fuse Mix ("neutralize alien gods" via co-opting them, for example).
I'm not sure if I've seen The Power of Myth series--I think maybe some parts of it here and there, but I've read the book and a couple of his other works. I quite like Joseph Campbell: I think he does a good job at comparative mythology/religion, and bringing focus on Carl Jung's work with archetypes as iterative structures in the collective un/consciousness (I don't know if he actually puts that forward verbatim: I merely recall getting that out of reading his stuff).
Back to the movie: I think that if I lived for 14, 000 years I'd be exceptionally bitter and misanthropic--way more so than I am now, lol. I mean, especially if I was the guy who started Christianity and got to live to see all the ways it's been twisted and abused, misinterpreted and intentionally perverted (again, the control of knowledge...), especially with regards to the agendas of those in control (over a given time/place/populace). I think if I was 14, 000 years old, I might be tempted to become a hermit and live totally removed from people or perhaps go into biochemistry and engineer something that would wipe most of them out--like maybe zombies!
Actually, I was thinking the other night (and would have to do some research and documentation/referencing to actually present this more fully), for example, of the twisting of Christianity with regards to the Capitalistic society we find ourselves in: I feel that the two are not fundamentally compatible. I mean, think of Jesus smashing the money changers in the temple, for example. So, it's interesting that many people claim to be Christian, but yet they accept Capitalistic notions like loans that need to be paid back with interest.
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