That the Christian Trinity doctrine was instituted to maintain the worship of Yaldaboth via Jesus as a proxy.

I am not your SO, but I too dismantle the Oreos and just eat the cookies. At least I used to. At Aldi they have them without the sugar paste stuff, and they’re delicious.

Frozen human embryos are still considered property and are traded under regular contract law. Slavery, and the people who support it, are still around.

Violence. Drug abuse. Fundamentalist Christianity. States rights as the cause of the Civil War. Obesity.

There were 8,000,000 mummified dogs at Saqqara.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/found-8-million-dog-mummies-180955679/

Which is about $2 million against an annual revenue of $36 million. Pennies add up.

The only reason it’s not is logistics. Bananas are notoriously quick to spoil in transit and fast transit is expensive. The banana trains in the US are still the fastest long haul freight method and they have priority over any other train on the tracks.

Since you can fit more bananas without their stalks it’s vastly more economical than wasting a bunch of space with non-edible material.

What nobody talks about is how stalked bananas are shipped LTL (less than truck load) and their carbon footprint is 20x+ that of bulk bunches.

Lived to see his prediction remaining valid. He’ll be positively incorrigible in the afterlife.

They ship fully grown fighting cocks too. Also, bees. All my bees come USPS.

That’s why I call it the moon sickness.

He was very wise in the ways of science.

Westinghouse was famous in his own time. Which, importantly, ended 30 years earlier than Tesla’s. It’s not really a very fair comparison.

I thought it was an ass in a thong with Shaun the Sheep going in deep.

It tastes exactly like SpaghettiOs Goldfish.

Indeed. The presence of the impure could act like a gateway of sorts and the vengeful spirits/demons could enter the world and cause all sorts of problems. I think it’s supporting evidence of the belief that normal people in general were capable of derailing magic by their mere presence.

Much like someone who has the power of invisibility, but it only works when no one is looking. Which I think is what Palaephatus is getting at.

I don’t have any references handy, but I have anecdotal evidence that supports the idea of the super mundane being affected by the viewer.

Essentially all of the non-divinatory mysticism of the Near East, Europe and Northern Africa requires the practitioner to be ritually clean; physically, mentally, and spiritually. A key element in achieving that state is often isolation from the mundane world, with the duration of that isolation being directly proportional to the power of the magical working being performed. If the intent is to directly communicate with or control a super mundane entity the requirements for isolation can get pretty extreme; spending 40 days in the wilderness with extended periods of fasting and stuff like that.

In addition to isolation during preparation, secrecy during the working is explicitly required. I can’t think of any examples where multiple people are prohibited from participating in a working. But the requirements for achieving the necessary level of purity often prohibit speech and combined with the other requirements it would be extremely problematic to involve multiple people.

Problematic ranging from the magic simply not working to the summoned being obliterating or possessing the practitioner. So the stakes are pretty high to get it right. The overall implication is that if you want to summon angels or demons or bend the very fabric of existence it’s not a party trick. It’s something done by an individual, in isolation.

There are plenty of less esoteric mystic examples of super mundane practices requiring isolation. In Judaism only the High Priest could enter the Holy of Holies and speak to G-d on the Mercy Seat of the Ark of the Covenant. Elijah carried the dead body of Zarephath’s son upstairs, apart from the others, and brought him back to life. Elisha did something similar in Shunem where he laid on top of a dead boy and after some time apart from the others he took the now living boy to his mother. Peter did the same with Tabitha in Joppa where he explicitly cleared the room and brought her back to life.

Conversely, there are many examples of public displays of super mundane acts in the Bible. The feeding of the 5,000, resurrections, casting out of evil spirits and all kinds of things In Exodus. The Rod of Aaron turning into a snake and eating the snake conjured by Pharaoh’s magi. These public events are treated specially because they were witnessed by regular people and demonstrate that they were of divine origin. The super mundane that didn’t have to be practiced in private to witness the results (magic was accepted as real, it was the fact these events were public that made them notable).

I used a lot of Biblical examples because there’s little separation between the mystical practices of Sumerian inspired Babylonians, the Jews, Egyptians, Greeks and Islam. The deities, beings, spirits and creatures vary, but the actual practices involved are not very different. All demand privacy and secrecy. Only certain individuals could engage in these practices and the public are prohibited from even knowing about what goes on.

The implication being that the involvement of, and even the presence of, the uninitiated and unclean will prevent the super mundane/paranormal from being actualized. It cannot manifest except in the presence of the pure, the believer. The exceptions to this invariably involve the direct intervention of a deity (Achilles, Hercules, Moses, Gilgamesh, etc… all had direct involvement with deities).

It does suck. But they could have simply thrown the whole thing away and we’d have nothing.

In the book Jiminy Cricket comes back as a ghost to haunt Pinocchio.

Jiminy Cricket had it coming.

My point was that not being able to find the former site of a wealthy temple is the kind of thing Graham Hancock fans like to hold up as evidence that history is really just a coverup and “they” don’t want us to know the truth because academia would have to rewrite all the textbooks.

Apparently my point was not well made.

History conspiracy theorists go nuts over stuff like this.

I give Saturnalia greeting cards to everyone for Christmas. That way I don’t have to worry about getting anyone’s holiday wrong, because I get them wrong for everybody.

My granny called it bull milk.

Clorox is also Burt’s Bees. Chemicals is chemicals and everything is made of chemicals so a chemical company making chemicals seems pretty normal.

What would be weird is if Kotex made marinara sauce. Or Agtech cattle insemination corp made mayonnaise.

The swords also sucked. Their effectiveness came from the training of the soldiers and allowed them to make what are, essentially, the original Pakistani steel. Because they did have a military industrial complex they were big into recycling broken weapons, further reducing the need for high quality products. The standard issue Chinese Jian style sword was the same kind of thing. All about volume production.There were weapons for the wealthy and powerful of much high quality than the Legionaries (and Chinese) infantry used, but they were not the standard.

Popular history gets things kind of muddled because the price of steel weapons skyrocketed as the Western Roman Empire crumbled. During the Middle Ages steel weapons were quite uncommon and served as a mark of wealth that often passed through multiple generations of a family, sometimes reaching near legendary status. That concept was retroactively, and incorrectly, applied to Roman weapons.