They found the Garden of Eden?....
 

Anyways, most of you probably already know that the Bible basically steals lots of stories and such from other religions and cultures. I am not going to get into all that unless you want me to, but I did find it interesting that they actually traced back Eden using a satellite.

It says in the Bible that Eden is located at the source of four different rivers, the Tigris, the Euphrates, the Karkun, and the Pishon rivers. The problem is, that these rivers do not connect, and the Karkun and the Pishon rivers do not exist.

They used the satellite to make a 3D composite of the surrounding area, and discovered that two large rivers existed running into the Persian Gulf. Around the time of the last ice age, the Persian Gulf was much lower, possibly didn't even exist, and all four rivers connected at a single delta.

Anyways, TONS of ancient stories are now being fully explained because of this. For instance, man was naked in the garden of eden and gathered plentiful food. We can assume that these were nomadic people who were now able to settle down because there was so much food they didn't need to gather anymore. Staying in one spot, they eventually discovered that the food they ate could grow back. With this knowledge, they considered themselves to be like gods, or equal to God, eating from the tree of knowledge. As punishment God cast them from the garden of Eden. It is known that around this time, the glaciers had melted, and that the ocean in the area actually collapsed in on itself due it rising above a mountain range. In the Bible it says that God punished Adam and Eve, and the people of Noah's time, for sinning. To people who use gods to explain the world around them, this must have been quite a sight. Supposedly for months it was 500x the amount of water that Niagara Falls moves going down the mountains flooding the garden. This created the story of Noahs ark and the great flood as well. All of these stories were passed along from Mesopotamia and eventually made their way into the Bible.

It is kool as hell that these stories weren't actually made up, but described actual cataclysmic events in our ancient past that our ancestors recorded. We even get a minds eye into the transition from "caveman" to "civilization", that occurred much longer ago than ever originally thought, passed down through word of mouth.

Wow that's pretty interesting. Where'd you hear all this?

I must say that is really intense.

http://www.ldolphin.org/eden/
http://www.ldolphin.org/flood.shtml

They're lengthy reads but very, very interesting.

The history channel

What I think is most interesting is just where the Bible came from, and where all the stories, transitions, and myths in the Bible have evolved from. For instance, the story of the garden of Eden is now believed to be the oldest tale in history; it essentially describes cavemen evolving into civilized people, and the people themselves describing what happened.

The story of the making of the Bible is much deeper than that, Egyptians controlled Israel/Judae around the time the Bible began to take its infancy. The ruler of Egypt at the time transitioned their religion into type of monotheistic religion, with the sun god being the "creator". It is known that the Israelites first called God by the name "El", and he was simply a superior god.

Here is the key part, no where in the beginning of Genesis does it say that light is good, but later it does. This is a direct correspondence with the sun god, because the sun god was the creator of life. And after the Egyptian rulers death, they went back to ruling many gods and Israel became independent in their own right.

The idea is the idea of monotheism was started in Egypt, carried over into Israel, and then evolved to incorporate a single God. The name "El" appears in the bible many times with references to other gods, for instance the worshipping of Bael the bull god to the north of Israel. The rest of the Bible incorporates songs and customs from the ancient world that have evolved and been expanded upon.

One example that the history channel described was the mentioning of God creating man twice. Once in his image...where he made man and women. And once using the sand. It is known that the first acts of worship were to gods that were animal like, and eventually transitioned into human like forms. This is a direct representation of that.

As for God making man twice, he also made women twice. The whole account was lost around that time, but a reference to it was in the Zorath, that Adam actually had a second wife! His first wife's name was Lilith, she got pissed at him because he always wanted to be on top when having sex, and she wanted to be on top. She ran off, became a demon, and was believed to be responsible for killing children.

Lullaby comes from the Latin words which mean "Lilith be gone", so our ancestors knew about this woman and it broke off and became a completely different story. Its just amazing, almost all the stories in the world have come from a single source.

Yeah it's really interesting. I'm not religious at all but I love history and this is pretty neat stuff.

I saw parts of the history channel thing on the garden of eden, but I was playing BF2 and kinda just listening and watching between matches. I am going to have to watch it some time when I can actually pay attention. Maybe it is the devil trying to trick us out of believeing so we all go to hell. I say f () < |{ the devil in his fiery @$$.

that's a lie, The snake in my apple tree told me that the garden of eden is in my backyard.