Tag: dinosaurs

I Don’t Want to Believe

First, let me get one thing clear: I don’t know anything.

When I wrote about “Two people who couldn’t possibly be real” there are a number of possibilities to account for my perception of them as uncanny or unnatural. I posited that the younger of the two, a teenager of ethereal beauty but possessing no physical or sexual attraction seemed to be completely fey and detached. The older woman spoke to her in language that seemed to be without structure, syntax, and no repetition of words or sounds. When she became aware that I was in range of her voice, she switched quickly to English, but that was weird. She pointed at the Corner restaurant which had “Baltimore’s Best Ribs” on window canopies, and I was stricken with the intuition that it was an obvious thing to say, but that she had never eaten there. A lie, a diversion, and far too obvious.

I don’t want to believe in faeries, no more than I want to believe in leprechauns, extraterrestrials or a precursor race called “The Annunaki.”

I don’t want to believe in “Planet X” or “Nibiru,” either.

This is all folk myths and pseudoscience, and although entertaining and sometimes scary, it’s utter crap.

God created us, not Akkadian, Sumerian or Babylonian sky gods. The persistent need to put a face to God gives rise to these things. We can’t understand God in any way that pleases us, making him and his laws terrifying. So humans create their own. The most historical pantheon divided God into many lesser gods with specialized powers. These were the Greco-Roman gods of centuries past, including the offspring of the Titans: Zeus, Hermes, Hera, Aphrodite.

The ruins of their temples still remain in many places in Greece, Rome and around the Mediterranean. But they weren’t real.

From ages past, the damage of these fictions are readily visible around us. The results are very frightening to me.

“History” is a cable and streaming host of everything but history, and according to experts, capitalizes on the credulity of improperly or unschooled people who find “Ancient Aliens” believable. What’s scary is that these people in turn demand evidence from their government, evidence they say has been covered up in many conspiracies.

This has caused me to hate conspiracy theories more than any other genre on YouTube, websites and TV. Oh, and books, which, sadly, include Time-Life, Reader’s Digest and more. Even “Christian” authors have published such garbage. And those are not Christians.

You can’t fit mythology that suits you into the text of the Bible. You can try to, but someone will always come forward and present a meticulous debunking of every word you’ve said or written.

Take giants for example. You’ve seen photographs online of graves carefully dug around to reveal an incredibly huge skeleton. But those kinds of hoaxes have been around for a century, and one such perpetrator was P.T. Barnum himself. Yeah, the guy who sewed a fish’s tail to a monkey’s torso and sold tickets to see a mermaid. I don’t know how convinced people were, but he made money. If he really claimed “There’s a sucker born every minute,” and this quote is disputed, he was right. People will believe almost anything, and there are always people around willing to capitalize on their gullible ignorance.

In the linked video, you’re going to see a very honest man talking about how buried skeletons are mis-measured, and I doubt that anyone like myself would make such mistakes because they’re so obvious as to be glaring.

As flesh decomposes, bones disarticulate. They spread out with the intrusion of soil, water and other things so that measuring a seemingly intact skeleton is never going to give an actual height.

Ancient bones or fossils of mammoths were once thought, because of their skulls, to be long-dead cyclopidians. One-eyed giants dating to ancient myth. Those kind. Yeah….

People are willing to believe fantastic stories, as proven throughout history. Would-be Messiahs and Antichrists alike have enjoyed the massive followings they gathered with lies and propaganda as tools. How this happened is different yet the same in every case: give people hope or promise revenge.

Therefore it is not difficult to understand that a photograph alone can fool a horde of people.

Two clever fakes from the past that still fool people today. Top: “Civil War soldiers” pose with a recently killed pteranodon. Bottom: a recently killed giant grasshopper. Both are fakes, but for the technology of the times, cleverly done.

Pterosaurs have been reported around the world, chiefly in Texas, USA, and New Guinea. Josh Gates tried hunting them in the latter, but due to the arduous journey and hostile terrain, had to abort the quest.

In the Congo River Basin, there were reports of living sauropods, or dinosaurs like the apatosaurus, formerly known as brontosaurus. The tales were told by the local tribes, and what Professor Roy Makal never guessed was that these locals had a sense of humor. He never found a dinosaur of any species. He found a ton of mosquitoes, though.

As far as extraterrestrials flying UFOs are concerned, there’s no credible evidence to support the notion that beings from across light years of space have ever been here. If there were, we would know. No possible cover-up could conceal it; someone with creds would talk. Of the ones who have, their accounts are unprovable. I don’t doubt that people see things they can’t account for, but I refuse to believe that they are aliens and UFOs.

Jesus did warn his apostles, though, that before he returned, there would be fearful signs in the heavens. This is from Luke 21, and it says that there will be earthquakes in divers (sic) places, and famines and pestilence (plagues) and terrifying signs from Heaven.

I don’t know what this means, because different versions place a comma in different parts of the dialogue. This is a sign of interpretation, something we are free to do, but not if it changes contextual meaning.

Interpretation of scripture and what is and isn’t in the canon is hotly debated. The dialogue in Luke 21 isn’t, but it does show how men have taken liberties with the original texts.

The idea of a worldwide flood may not be so fanciful as one might think. There is evidence for and against it, and I’m not in a position to enter any arguments about it. If the flood account is true, I believe it took place so far back from antediluvian times that we’ll never find evidence of it. And again, predating humanity, at any stage of evolution, we find no geological evidence of such a great event.

That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. It may just mean that some things were hidden from us because faith isn’t supposed to be dependent on evidence. I keep reading click bait headlines about the tomb of Christ being found, or some other sensational find.

I’m cautious of what I read, watch or buy into, because the false paths are too numerous for me to navigate. I want to believe God. Not some AI headline made for clicks.

I’ve encountered many strange things in my life, including true, pure, evil. My best comfort is with God. Not a pill, not a drink, and certainly not in the words of others who want to use Jesus as a weapon.

Believe. Have the faith of a child, knowing that you know very little. That’s what faith is, not looking for evidence of giants,  empty tombs or alien races which genetically engineered us.

One last thing. I know that there are those whose prejudices deny what humans have accomplished. They don’t believe that men could have built pyramids. Or Stonehenge. I know that people believe in weird creatures, the great Smithsonian cover-up, and more.

You’re free to examine these stories, but remember that God can make anything. With him, all things are possible. In the end, I don’t know what was giving me the weird vibes of those two women. Or if faeries are real.

I just don’t believe, and I don’t want to.

And that’s okay.

So, You Want to Travel Through Time

Ah, the unanswered and universal question: is time travel possible?

Come on, you’ve had the odd fantasy or two about it, haven’t you? Novels like Michael Crichton’s Timeline have been around forever (little pun there).

H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine long before Crichton’s Timeline, but the cinematic translations are all, bar none, terrible. So was Timeline.

Except for the castle and Trebuchet setup at the end of the Paul Walker vehicle, which was exactly as I had imagined it, most are dull. And like every film from Crichton’s ingenious books, they get so butchered that the end result never makes much sense. In the movie, the Green Knight doesn’t appear. Read it; he’s quite the, um, character.

Even the one that passed muster, Jurassic Park, still managed to leave out what I considered some of the best parts, like the river ride and the aviary accidents. We see both in later films, especially the Jurassic World trilogy, but by then. Crichton had passed on. It’s a shame that he didn’t get to see those last three films (JW I and II were the best). And with a reboot on the horizon, I just hope nobody will mess up a good thing.

More than a few films have gone back to the time of the dinosaurs, but few were notable. In fact, the formula for good dino-and-monster movies has always been to have the creatures appearing in the modern world. In the film Jurassic Park The Lost World, the movie would be terrible except for the T-Rex running loose in San Diego scenes. Now that was cool. I loved it when she destroyed a Blockbuster store.

That’s not to say that any of the six films is unwatchable; they’ve each had good and bad wrapped together in a popcorn-munching orgy. Of course, each has also had outraged critics ready to pounce the moment the first trailers were released. But oddly enough, some turned out to be scientists.

It wasn’t long at all before cries of “foul!” were heard.

“Dilophosaurus didn’t spit,” they said. “Dinosaurs like raptors had feathers!” they yelled. Then came the inevitable, “Hey! You have animals from every period of the Mesozoic Era in the same films? You’ve gone too far!”

And it’s true. The Mesozoic Era started with the Triassic period, followed by the Jurassic, then the Cretaceous periods. So much time was involved that, sure, some species would have been seeing each other for the first time. Except, the critics forgot that the first JP movie established that. They were hybrids, taken from the DNA of an unknown species, with the gaps filled in with frog DNA using Cray supercomputers for sequencing.

As for the lack of feathers, Dr. Wu and John Hammond alluded to the fact that they didn’t want feathers. The classic concept of a dinosaur was what they wanted. So, no feathers. Whatever made them create the spitting Dilophosaurus doesn’t matter; it was so gratifying to see one get Dennis Nedry. Still, in the last film, JW Dominion, there shouldn’t have been any Dimetrodons; those were lizards. But fans wanted them. Hey, they used to come in our plastic dinosaurs sets, right?

And by the way, Velociraptors were about the size of a large bird, like your Christmas goose. But they wanted it bigger. So it was bigger. It could never have opened a door, but Spielberg wanted them to. Crichton wanted them to. So they could. It’s just for movie fans, okay?

The franchise has worked because of the outstanding special effects and star power. The cast was perfect except in JP III (I was just hoping that Tea Leoni would be painfully ripped apart by something stupid like Cretaceous sea turtles or something).

And picking Grant’s phone out of what Ian Malcolm once called “Dino-droppings? Droppings? Did you say droppings?” was an unnecessary bit unless they’d found Tea Leoni’s head in there, and it was still talking. Naturally.

Nah, I’m just having a bit of fun.

But wait, time travel is possible. Well, kind of. Please watch the video I’ve brought along. I think it’s important, because there’s only one place where you can see the past, present and the future: the Holy Bible.

This presentation puts a perspective on the protestant canon that I found fascinating and motivating. It’s only a forty-five minute lesson, but it held my attention, and a few things that never made sense to me now make so much sense that I am going to start my studies over.

If you can, get screenshots of the pastor’s charts. They will help you understand the order of the Old Testament and who wrote it.

A lot of people have told me over the years that the Septuagint is ghastly fiction, horror stories full of lies and fairytales. I agreed because I didn’t know any better. But I do now. I’ve known since Easter weekend.

But now I also know why people find it appalling. It’s because they have read but not understood. Same as I. Once you see that the flow through time and events line up and you know the writers and recorded history, you’ll see that it is a resource for understanding and gaining knowledge and conviction about the word of God.

My book, which I have previously called “the cursed novel,” was written in a house dating back to 1900. It was always evident that spirits inhabited the house, but most of my novel was written there, and I wrote things that I’m not good enough to write. My imagination is good, but I don’t know where all the Satanic and demonic things came from. I had never dared type such things before. And people believe me when I tell them these details.

Why, then, if it’s easy to believe that I was given demons as ghost writers, can so many rationalize not believing in God and the idea that Moses and the prophets had divine inspiration to write and form the canonical Septuagint?

The Bible gives us a look back and a look at what’s in store for humanity. But before you can understand the future, you must first look back.

God bless you all. Please watch the full video below and enjoy!