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In Search of Ancient Gods by Erich Von
Daniken Some might think of Von Daniken as a bit of a crack-pot, and I can't help but not take everything too seriously when every other ancient picture of 'a being' with pointy things on it's head is an alien with antennae, but how else can such imagery be interpreted. There are also plenty of further images on the internet to back up the belief. Daniken also talks briefly about the pyramids of Egypt which I am personally interested in and echoes some of what Sitchin later said in his book The End of Days (see below). There is a review here of the book. This is an interesting extract (although widely quoted with no further, easy to find information): "In the Bodleiean Library, Oxford, England, is a manuscript by the Coptic Scribe, Abu’l Hassen Ma'sudi, catalogued as the Akbar-Ezzeman, M.S. And in it we read:----'Surid, a king of Egypt, before the flood (of Noah's time) had two pyramids built. He ordered his priests to deposit inside of them all the wisdom and knowledge of the scientists then available. In the Great pyramid they also placed information about the heavenly spheres and figures that represented the stars and planets, their positions, and cycles. But also the foundations of mathematics and geometry. He did this so that they would be preserved forever for those descendants who could read the signs." For me, this sounds like Freemasonry. p.83 Von Daniken "asked several philologists where the word god comes from" and as I have read before, he was told "that in the very earliest writings the singular 'god' did not exist. The first mythological traditions spoke exclusively in the plural of 'the gods', and this primordial concept was roughly translatable as 'those circling in the clouds'. Von Daniken takes this to mean "temporary visitors from other stars", but as I have read elsewhere, I take it to mean the planets. p.88 I had not before heard about the Codex Fresdensis, the Paris Codex or the Madrid Codex, also known as Tro-Cortesianus. "The date for the start of [the Mayan] chronology was a day in the year 3113 BC... [this] has no connection with the actual history of the Maya, but has a purely 'symbolic' value... A great deal has been written about the Maya calendar. One fact is that it operated with cycles of years that were only supposed to have repeated themselves every 374,000 years." p.109 Referring to a large stone Aztec calendar, Von Daniken says that "The calendar relates that in the dim past jaguars came and destroyed the prehistoric animals, after which storms carried men away. In the third age there was rain of fire and a global flood. Oh yes, and the present age, called '4 Olin', is going to be wiped out by an earthquake." There is a bit more on this in part three of this web page. |
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Critical Mass by Philip Ball - how one thing leads to another
Notes: p.56 "The crucial point about this explanation of the Second Law is that it shows how the irreversibility of time can come about through the operation of mechanical laws which have no preferred direction in time. Picture a movie of two billiard balls coming together, colliding, and moving apart. Played in reverse, the movie would not look at all odd... But the coalescence of a droplet of ink [does]..." p.68 Ball quotes the precocious mathematical genius a few times and I find reading these interesting: "Condorcet was aware that population growth could eventually overwhelm available resources and threaten the stability of civilization, and he had a simple remedy - birth control. Malthus did not think it would be so easy. He reckoned that the 'passions of mankind' put population outside the control of governments, whether they sought either to encourage or to limit its rise. It was, he believed, a 'law of nature' that the populace would multiply exponentially, while society could not increase the means of feeding itself at the same rate. Thus nations must succumb sooner or later to overcrowding, misery, poor health and social unrest." p.70 Thomas Jefferson who wrote the American Declaration of Independence, "his vision of a free and happy nation was that of a man in love Newtonian mechanics and the ideals of the Enlightenment, one who believed that humans are compelled towards happiness just as apples are pulled by gravity towards the earth." I think that sums up my outlook! p.78 Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874) a Belgian astronomer, is also talked about. His "social physics became founded on the concept of the 'average man' (l'homme moyen), whose dimensions and physical features and also moral and aesthetic attributes represented a perfect mean to which all should aspire. To be great was to be average ...an individual who epitomized in himself, at a given time, all the qualities of the average man, would represent at once all the greatness, beauty and goodness of that being." Ball describes this as a "disturbing worship of uniformity" and Quetelet goes on to say that "deviations more or less great from the mean have constituted ... ugliness in body as well as vice in morals and a state of sickness with regard to the constitution." I think we all thrive to be different but at the same time try and conform to a uniformity within society, we don't want to stand out... and thus we become sheep. p.80 "Awareness of Quetelet's work was promoted in Britain by one of the most avid proponents of a law-bound social physics, Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-62). Like many adherents of Comte's positivist philosophy, Buckle wanted to fortify the world of human affairs against the meddling influence of governments... like Adam Smith, he argued actively... for the need for people to be allowed to govern themselves." I wonder if our country was not overpopulated that this would be viable - I certainly believe that because of over-population it would not be possible to just scrap the current law and bureaucratic system that keeps society in check. Even though we all know the difference between right and wrong, we still do things for our own gain, even if that leads to the suffering of others. I believe overpopulation is a cause of this. Looking at the history of England and the Roman empire (from how I visualised it after reading The Roman World by Martin Goodman) and how the governing a society came about, it was for the benefit of the government - charge people taxes so they can fund the government and its schemes (from simply providing those who had put themselves in charge with a lavish lifestyle to funding wars which were themselves used to expand an empire and thus impose their tax system to a wider 'audience'. In the world of Robin Hood (at least how it has been portrayed on screen) those in charge (the Sheriff of Nottingham) would bully those living in his county "pay me taxes, keep me happy and I wont attack your village", playground bullying tactics of "give me your lunch money" which can include some other form of incentive such as "I'll protect you from your next worse enemy". p.106/7 Back to particle physics and Ball explains that an individual particle can be either part of a solid, liquid or gas, but only in its collective form will its state be revealed. Throughout the book these physical situations are related to society, so the same is try of people - you need to look at society as a whole to understand what's going, pulling one person off the street to understand them will not tell you much about the world. p.119 Another key topic of the book is phase transitions. What's happening when a solid object turns into a liquid or a liquid into a gas. These phase transitions happen in society too, such as when moving traffic on a busy motorway suddenly jams. Ball states also that the beginning of the universe was a phase transition... and "a phase transition is a sudden, global change in behaviour arising from the interactions of many constituent particles. Typically these interactions are short-range, local ones." p.184 Back to the topic of overpopulation within society "disturbed by the grotesque overcrowding within and around the city walls [of London], Elizabeth I prohibit 'any new buildings of any house or tenement within three miles from any of the gates of the said city of London'. Did this stem the city's outward sprawl, a process accretion that had long since burst the bounds of the encircling stone walls? You might as soon try to contain a wildfire." "In 1787 Henry Kett compared the expansion of London to an epidemic". But wasn't it what I call 'the powers that be' that caused the overcrowding? Overpopulation is caused by births outweighing deaths. People are encouraged to procreate - through the mass-media advertising, TV programs, films, musical topics and the world of celebrities - having sex is promoted and encouraged, we are brainwashed to think think this and thus it becomes engrained into our subconscious "this is normal" and we struggle to base our lives on anything else. Governments want to be seen to be doing the right thing and make a token gesture of promoting better education and the concept of "safe sex". I believe promoting the concept of "no sex" would be a step in the right direction. This bias from 'the powers that be' is because they don't want population growth to plateau or decline. p.189 Looking at two cities with different planning laws, the urban sprawl is very similar, thus "planning seems to have no effect on [the] law of growth" A further concern to this is that the Green Belt policy implemented in the 1960s. "Gene Stanley [argues] 'that the lawmakers do what they want to do, but people will live where they want to live." Just because an 'imposed law' tells us to live a certain way/defines what is acceptable, would removing that law have any effect? Although, obviously, laws or their punishments of nonconformity do provide an incentive to a point. "Get caught carrying a knife and you risk having a criminal record which could affect your ability to get a job"... but surely the incentive for not carrying a knife should be promoted as "carry a knife and you might find yourself using it and taking someone's life... value all life". p.191 "The US economist Herbert Simon points out that an absence of central planning does not necessarily mean that all cities are poorly 'designed'. On the contrary, they are (or at any rate, they once were [became overpopulated and urban planning waved its dictatorship] often remarkably effective..." "'To my students a pattern implied a planner in whose mind it had been conceived and by whose hand it had been implemented. The idea that a city could acquire its pattern as naturally as a snowflake was foreign to them. They reacted to it as many Christian fundamentalists responded to Darwin: no design without a Designer!'" I do website design and contrary to how other designers build a website I prefer to let a website develop, starting off simple and gradually amending the design and layout to incorporate new pages and sections, pages and sections that cant be foreseen at the birth of a website. p.193 "Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone. - Rudyard Kipling (1890)" p.197 "James Lighthill (1924-98), one of the great twentieth-century experts on the physics of fluid flow... was anything but average in his driving habits. He was a persistent speeding offender, but would explain in court that as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge (the chair once occupied by Newton) he was fully aware both of the laws of mechanics and of his social duty not to waste energy. As a result, he told the hapless judges, he felt obliged to desist from breaking when going downhill. It seems that this defence was occasionally successful." If I get done for speeding I am so going to use this point! p.218 More on driving and "Helbing and Huberman say that their model [on traffic] also reveals how American lane rules, which allow drivers to travel at any speed in any lane, can make roads more efficient that European rules, under which the lanes are graded from slow to fast... reducing the capacity of the [motorway] by up to 25 per cent." p.220 "If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion - George Bernard Shaw" p.288 Adam Smith (1723-90) "pointed out, profits are always being eroded: by rising wages, and by the force of competition, which pulls the market price of goods down towards the cost of producing them. The only way a company can maintain a profit is by expanding." It would seem that the expansion of an empire (geographically or in population numbers) works towards the same end. Marx said of the companies must then "constantly bid for additional labour. This increase in demand of labour means that workers can ask for higher wages, which bites back into the capitalists' profit margins. To escape this cycle, Marx assumed the factory owners would do what he saw them doing all about him: introduce labour-saving machinery." "But here's the catch... workers can produce goods worth more than a subsistence wage. This 'surplus labour' is the source of the capitalists' profits. Machines, however, do not offer surplus labour - in a competitive market, industrialists will have to buy them at a cost equal to the value of the goods they can generate. So mechanisation renders workers unemployed..." "The result is an economic recession: wages are low and unemployment is rife." Exactly what we see today - thus the recession, while many blame it on the bank's tactics, was in fact inevitable and caused by mechanisation (because wages can't go any lower than the inflicted minimum wage). Further to this minimum wage, I believe it provides a means for people to compare there self-worth. No one wants to think of themselves as only being worth the lowest value (that of the minimum wage) so they refuse to take such jobs... and even prefer to claim unemployment benefit, especially if they were previously employed in a job that paid higher than minimum wage. Even young people who have only finished high school education and have no previous employment experience have this inbuilt principle (maybe picking it up from their parents). For some reason it seems to pay the government to provide its society an unemployment benefit rather then make job for those out of work in the public sector... even cutting positions during the recession. I also believe unemployment adds to overpopulation, not just because those that are unemployed aren't giving anything back financially, but because couples who are at home with nothing else better to do other than procreate. p.275 "...it is sheer folly to imagine that the market can be engineered to iron out blips on timescales of days or weeks, or perhaps even longer. Yet many governments continue to believe that this kind of manipulation is both possible and desirable. Most probably it is wasteful of resources, if not positively harmful to the economy." I believe the same is the case the the governments meddling with society and further to a waste of resources this is going to be the outcome of the governments efforts to end the recession. This is because efforts to end the recession early are futile - the recession is the natural occurrence, a natural cycle that the economy is going through due to the way it operates. Money should not be thrown at the recession, it would be better to ignore that it is happening and instead use this downturn as a stop-gap to change the way the economy operates and encourage it to operate greener. Jobs should be provided to all so that everyone has a purpose, how much these jobs pay in money should be made immaterial. "Keynes feared that, left to itself, the economic system might spiral into a decline which would ultimately leave it frozen, unable to bounce back through the normal business cycle." But it was the normal business cycle that was the case in our recession, thus it should not be encourage to return to how it was, it should be guided to a new path. p.326 "What makes [people] happy? That depends on the [person]. Each of them pursues two goals: money and leisure. Unfortunately, in Axtell's world one can't have both at the same time, because money is made only through hard work. Money and leisure are conflicting demands... some settle for low wages if it means they can do a lot of lounging about." p.335 "The piece-rate systems of car factories were abandoned because they destroyed social relationships in the workplace... and established a working environment in which no one cared about the quality of the product."
p.383 "...many psychologists and
sociologists have exercised themselves over how we make decisions,
society is geared largely towards removing that need. Many social norms
exist simply so that we no longer have to think about other options
[(like shaking hands with out right hand)].... [some agreements are]
endorsed by law, of course; in general, though, laws simply consecrate
pre-existing social norms." |
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The Roman World by Martin Goodman - 44BC - AD180 I figured, with the books I've read recently I should really make an effort to further my knowledge of the Roman world. What I found most fascinating was how western society, particularly here in the UK, is similar in many ways to the Roman world. Notes: p.83 The Roman empire was controlled by terror instilled by its rulers, a terror of an invasion/war (similar I find to today) although "usually, it did no good to the rulers or to the ruled... none the less, the effect of a massive army loyal to the emperor, to whom they swore an oath, and whose image was placed with their standards, was clear enough... But why so many troops? [because what one ruler] could do, others might attempt." p.104 "The accumulation of revenues did not require any new conquests beyond the huge area already under Roman control in 31 BC, but two factors encourage continuing expansion. One was the simple fact that a huge army was anyway permanently in commission, and might as well be used, especially since emperors needed the prestige of victories to justify its retention. The second was the Roman method of defence by instilling terror." p.106 An area of interest for me is prehistoric Britain. Evidence for how people lived in pre-Roman-invaded Britain is biased by the Romans no less "...the Roman senate and people... received the surrender of eleven kinds of Britain conquered without any reverse and because he was the first to subject to the sovereignty of the Roman people barbarian tribes across the ocean." This was not the first move though, an earlier account on page 53 tells of how when Gaius "drew up his army in battle array facing the Channel and moved the arrow-casting machines and other artillery into position as though he intended to bring the campaign to a close. No one had the least notion what was in his mind when, suddenly, he gave the order: 'Gather seashells!'" "...emperors campaigned when prestige was needed and didn't when it was not. In some areas on the edge of Roman influence, visible signs of Roman power were erected, of which the most notorious is Hadrian's wall..." Plus, it was erected because that was as far as the troops could get, erected as a sign of might... it was never an effective barrier (p.107)
p.139 "During the first century
AD...privileges were granted to the rich simply on the grounds of their
wealth. Such privileges were enshrined in law... the empire was in
effect ruled by a wealth-defined elite... unified in their determination
to keep power out of the hands of the poor... Council membership was
open only to the rich." Sound familiar!?. |
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Atheist Manifesto by Michel Onfray - The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam And that's how it reads - an attack on Christianity. The author tells how the bible is full of contradictions and the reader can choose to live by one set of rules or another. So to blame the religion for the society it creates is misplaced - a reader of the bible can base his/her life of one interpretation or another, thus their chosen path is decided upon from within. Do away with religion and those same decisions have to be made - let our conscience be our guide, so to speak. The Koran as portrayed by the author is a different matter though because moral paths are not so equally balanced - there is a strong "anti-everyone else" theme, with only the occasional "love thy neighbour" contradiction, although I have heard views that oppose this view and that not every Islamist shares the views of the Taliban. One concept that I did find interesting was that one cannot be a self-proclaimed atheist. The term is used by someone or a religion to describe others that are unbelievers, or traditionally (and politically) anyone that believes differently to them (not specifically someone that doesn't believe in God).
Notes: p.16 "'Atheism' is thus a product of verbal creation by the manufacturers of gods." p.129 "Jesus was thus a concept" His whole reality resides in that definition. Certainly he existed, but not as a historical figure..." I believe he did exist as a historical figure and the stories in the bible began with that as a basis, but the scribes ran with it and what we now read is far removed from who Jesus was. p.181 I found this part interesting about the people having to pay taxes to Caesar thus "accepting the burden of financing the imperial forces, and submitting to the laws of the empire." very much like what some people feel in the modern west regarding wars carried out in their name. p.208 "Muslim theocracy - like any other - presupposes an end to the separation between private belief and public practice. The believer emerges from the private center of his being to take over every single area of the community's life. We no longer enjoy a direct relationship with God, based on a mystical intimacy touching us alone, but an indirect relationship mediated by the political community and regulated by somebody else."
p.215 De-Christianisation comes about
"through the injection of reason into human conscience." |
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The Jesus Dynasty by James D. Tabor - The real-life inspiration behind Kathy Reichs' bestselling Cross Bones - Stunning New Evidence About the Hidden History of Jesus I was half expecting to have this book bog me down with biblical references but that hasn't been the case. I'm finding this book pretty interesting and the way the author compares writings in the New Testament is easy to digest and it's all giving me a greater understanding about Jesus as a Jew and the 'Jewish way' as a whole which I've never really read about before. Chapter 5, The Lost Years sites the Infancy Gospel of Thomas and gave me the picture of Jesus, a young boy, as being a bit of a prankster, or a young magician if you will, seemingly bringing clay birds to life and stretching a piece of wood - an angle I am aware is covered in more depth by other authors and may be a further area of reading for myself. Notes: ch.16 revealed why I find the bible, or rather Christianity hard to digest. It was Paul, the self-proclaimed 13th Apostle, who created Christianity in his own view, causing people at the time to convert from Judaism. His ideas and preaching's (letters that made their way into the New Testament) were born out of his premonitions - he claimed Jesus came to him in spirit and told him how things should be. He must have had some social power in order to have the effect he did, an effect that has lasted for almost two thousand years, and people still buy it. Looking at it with an open and logical mind, based on how Tabor has revealed the Jewish life Jesus was born in to and lead, for me Paul should have been put on some medication and led on his way, for one the breaking of bread to symbolise the body of Christ and the drinking of wine to symbolise his blood is totally anti-Jewish and inconceivable by the followers of Jesus. p.246 goes on to say "[Christianity] was based upon [Paul's] mystical experiences. [He] never met Jesus... [and] the New Testament itself is primarily a literary legacy of the Apostle Paul... author or thirteen out of twenty-seven 'books'." p.247 "[Mark] is a primary carrier of the message that Paul preached... Matthew and Luke... use Mark as their main narrative source. The gospel of John... also reflects Paul's essential understanding of Jesus... the letter of James... is the only original voice." p.253 "Paul regularly uses the expressions 'Jesus Christ' and 'the Lord Jesus Christ' as if the term 'Christ,' which was a Greek term for the Messiah or anointed Davidic King, were a proper name rather than a designated title." p.257 "Zaddik" means 'the righteous one' or 'just one' as in James the Just. p.275 Towards the end of the last chapter Tabor mentions the Ebionites (meaning "poor ones" in Hebrew) who I found interesting. They were considered to be heretics by Eusebius in contrast to the Christian orthodoxy. Eusebius charged that they made Jesus a plain and ordinary man... and further stated that they insisted on observance of the Jewish Law or Torah. They also rejected the letters of the apostle Paul. Their views to me make total sense as I hear them echoed throughout the book. p.319 Did you know there is an ancient Jewish system called Gematria that is just like numerology. Nero Caesar = 666. |
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From Atlantis to the Sphinx by Colin
Wilson If you've already read books about the Sphinx and Atlantis like me then the first half of this book will simply echo what other authors have said before - Wilson quotes the likes of Hancock and Bauval often. Get passed this point and eventually the book turns more down the route of how the human mind works, how it has evolved and how we have changed from right-brainers to left-brainers. Notes: p.129 some baffling notes about the precise layout and design of both the Great Pyramid and Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan. "...why did the builders of the Sun Pyramid want to install a layer of mica? The same applies to a building known as the Mica Temple... under its floor are two enormous sheets of mica, 90 feet square... the chemistry of the mica reveals that it is not local mica, but that it came [two thousand miles away] from Brazil.... why was it placed under the floor? What purpose did it serve there? Graham Hancock points out that mica is used as an insulator in condensers, and that it can be used to slow down nuclear reactions." I have read before now that traces of radiation have been detected in the Great Pyramid and Alan F. Alford in Gods of the New Millennium raised his idea that the pyramid was some kind of power generator or hydrogen fuel cell. p.143 on the topic of human population (which I think about in the relation to climate change) Wilson says even Charles "Darwin recognised the truth that if every couple of animals or birds or fishes produce more than two offspring, and those offspring also produce more than two offspring, the resulting population explosion would cover every habitable inch of the earth in a few generations." Nature is acts as the Earth's birth control but as humans we have bypassed that too and now shouldn't we take responsibility and control our births more actively? p.215 in our change from being right-brainers to left-brainers we have become less sensitive to nature but "even the most sceptical scientist acknowledges the influence of the moon on mental patients." "Our Cro-Magnon ancestors [were more] sensitive to the sun, moon and other natural forces (like earth magnetism) as a mental patient is to the full moon." The author talks more about astrology for our ancestors were obviously astrologers/astronomers as is obvious with places like Stonehenge. But it's not actually the positioning of the constellations (as the author tells us) at the time of our birth, but the position in the Sun's cycle at the time of our conception that affects us and gives us our star sign traits. In relation to this topic I think about such people that are termed at electro-sensitives - people who are sensitive to electrical equipment - for electro-magnetism is one and the same. This also reaffirms my ideas about about the standing stones erected by our ancestors and the leylines they mark/harness/create/disrupt... and my conspiracy theory shared by the likes of David Icke that the powers that be recognise these forces and disrupt them by building nuclear power stations in such areas (Anglesey). |
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The Only Planet of Choice Compiled by
Phyllis V. Schlemmer & Palden Jenkins - Essential Briefings from Deep Space This book has the potential to change ones life or at least make one think about where we came from and how we should treat others and our planet. That is, providing you don't get put off by the whole "this book was written by aliens" thing (or the Nine as they are called). This wasn't a problem for me, I felt I could either accept or look past it - the message was still there and just as effective in my mind. What I found harder to digest was the many references to the Bible (something that causes me a problem with other books), and if the messages are really communicated from alien beings, why are their view points largely that of a typical westerner? Looking through this list of books I've read, you may see that I read books on certain topics and this book seemed to bring together many of these topics and things that make me stop and think. Topics including the ancient Chinese, free energy and our use/abuse of fossil fuels, the Church and our blind faith in God, crashed flying saucers and visits from aliens (good and bad), standing stones, ley lines, Atlantis, ancient Egypt and Dolphins. This last one is something I've not really read into but I have to admit I have a soft spot when it comes to these beautiful creatures and I actually get a little emotional about them. A beautiful concept this book revealed to me is that we all chose to be here. |
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Because some of my reviews on books have increasingly included vast notes and quotations, I would like to point out that I do recognise that these books are protected by the Copyright act. I put my views online to share with other internet browsers in the hope that little snippets of information may be useful and my views interesting. I have always included links to the online retailer Amazon and encourage anyone that finds any title particularly interesting (thanks to what I have to say) to either buy a copy or borrow one from their local library. |
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