Neanderpundit

Can’t wait. Hope it’s easy to install, winter is headed in with a vengeance

Dawned on me that I hadn’t shopped around at all, and I had a moment of buyer’s remorse thinking, with my luck, this was half the price elsewhere… truth was, I bought it at the lowest price it’s being sold at anywhere.

The public library system has a copy of Velikovsky’s ‘Worlds in collision” which Pascal and others reccomend to me.

I have sort of wanted to read it for a long time, at least partly because it espouses a theory that has always fascinated me; the idea that Natural Law can be changed.

A good number of folks have poo-pooed V. because his stuff is so “Obviously” wrong. Certainly, based on what we know about celestial mechanics, his conjectures don’t work; I know that pencilnecked geek Carl Sagan made a big point of pointing out he was wrong, but Sagan utterly missed the point, I think.

When most people think of”God” they think of- well, I don’t know. Hairy thunderer or cosmic muffin?

I think of God as the Ultimate Scientist. The Creator of the Universe. The architect of life. The Author of Natural Law. When people think about how wonderful Jesus was, I say, sure, he was great. Listen, have you ever even tried to imagine the incomprehensible complexity that takes you from the vacuum of nothing to the simplicity of the atom, let alone the remarkable diversity of life?

If the Creator of the Universe is the Author of Natural Law, he can just as readily scratch out passages in that book, and write new laws, at his will. I think Velikovsky merely looked at the occurrence of biblical/historical events and theorized that they occurred because of the Creator making revisions or at least temporary modifications in Natural Law; anti-theists will discount this out of hand because it relies on the possibility of a supreme being with ultimate control, which they cannot of course abide.

I have ordered the book, it will be pulled from the main branch and delivered to my local library which is walking distance away. I expect it to be dry and hard to read, but I’ve been down that road before, I’m not a stranger to complex shit.

What I need to understand is, is Velikovsky a reasonable but misunderstood man, or is he Erich von Däniken?

While I think the days when I could tie knots in an eyelash are behind me, I just tied a knot in a mustache hair, which was about an inch long. Pretty good for a guy who couldn’t feel a taut bowstring in my hand six months ago.