Dan McClellan
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The Joe Rogan Experience · #2562 - Dan McClellan
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Why Does Alan Watts's Anxiety Book Sound Like Now?
Alan Watts wrote a book in 1952 about the age of anxiety, and the description of how much the world was changing sounds like 2026. The movement is two steps up and one step back, then three steps up and two steps back.
Pinker's work suggests the long change is generally for the better, while the middle of it feels helpless and scattered. Boomers often picture the 1950s as a time when a man, a woman, a job, and kids all made sense, yet Alan Watts was already calling 1952 the age of anxiety.
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How Did First Enoch and Jubilees Stay in the Ethiopian Bible?
The Garma Gospels date to between the fourth and the sixth centuries CE. The Ethiopian Bible probably descends from a Septuagint brought to the kingdom of Aksum in the late third or early fourth century CE, around the Council of Nicaea.
The collection looked similar to Codex Sinaiticus and included First Enoch, Jubilees, and other apocryphal and pseudepigraphical texts. Ethiopia ignored the canon debates in Constantinople and kept transmitting the texts it already had. Rome was part of the same northern argument.
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Why Do Some Scholars Think an Early Genesis Had No Flood Story?
The Epic of Gilgamesh sends a traveler to find Utnapishtim, who survived the flood, so the flood has already happened in that epic. Atrahasis is another version of the flood story. Sumerian king lists predate the introduction of a flood story.
Genesis was circulating in a version that had no flood story until someone put one in, probably around the sixth to fifth century BCE. Noah is a horticulturist in the oldest tales. Genesis four names progenitors of people who live in tents, play the lyre and the harp, and work in metals. The writer does not know the lines are supposed to all die.
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Did Arad's Temple Altars Hold Cannabis?
Arad, in the southern Negev, is a desert place in the south of Judea. A Bronze Age village sat on a tell there, and the top holds the remains of a fortress from the eighth century BCE with an Israelite temple in the corner.
The temple has a courtyard, a broad room, and a devir, the Holy of Holies, plus a standing stone and inscriptions about the house of Adonai. Israel is the god the standing stone represented. Incense altars stood on the steps. Tests of the burnt residue found three different kinds of cannabis on one altar. Israel included cannabis in worship practices. Another temple was found at Tel Motsah, ten to fifteen years ago, just outside Jerusalem. Deuteronomy is read by many sch
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Why Did Modern New Testaments Drop King James Verses?
King James Version verses are missing from modern translations of the New Testament, including the New International Version, sometimes joked about as the Not Inspired Version. More than a dozen verses are gone.
Hundreds more manuscripts have been found since the translation, and some passages were added later by someone other than the author. Matthew 17 skips verse 21, with a footnote saying some ancient manuscripts add the verse. About 16 passages in the New Testament have been taken out.
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Where Does the Hebrew Bible Mention Adam and Eve After Genesis?
Adam shows up at the start of a big genealogy in Chronicles. Eve does not appear again anywhere in the Hebrew Bible. The New Testament is the next place either name comes up.
Eden is a mountain in one tradition. Ezekiel 28 names the mountain. Genesis 2 and 3 contain no mountain, so the passages come from different traditions. Genesis two and three are not the whole of what the writers knew.
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How Small Did Toba Leave the Human Population?
Numerous enormous natural disasters have already hit. The Toba volcano knocked the human population down to a few thousand people, seventy plus thousand years ago, and the same kind of crash has happened a ton of times.
A later disaster could leave zero people, and survivors would have to start from scratch. A crash on the scale of Toba is super possible.
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How Much Bigger Was the Homo Juluensis Brain?
The latest find from China is being called Homo Juluensis, and the brain capacity is larger by twenty plus percent than ours.
Empathy, culture, language, and oral tradition are open questions. Only bones survive, so the remains do not show what the society was like.
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How Did a Drawing of a House Become the Letter B in the Alphabet?
Inscriptions in the Sinai from around 1700 to 1900 BCE take signs that look like Egyptian hieroglyphs and make each sign stand for a single sound, the first sound of the word the symbol represents.
A drawing of a house stood for the word bait and for the b sound. An alphabet of 22 to 30 letters is easier to memorize than the hundreds of signs needed for ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, or Akkadian. The script was taken to Phoenicia, and apart from Hangul, the Korean script, virtually every other alphabet is descended from the Phoenician.
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Why Do the Oldest Sumerian King Lists Skip the Flood?
The oldest Sumerian lists have no flood story yet, even though several versions of Enuma Elish are known. The lists talk about kings who reigned for ten thousand years at a time.
The older rulers are the ones who live forever and have enormous lifespans. The lists read as political traditions from when writing was just getting started.
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Why Do Scholars Doubt Paul Wrote Timothy and Titus?
Paul did not write every letter later collected under his name. Scholars are in widespread agreement that several of the texts were written decades after his death.
The pastoral epistles are First Timothy and Second Timothy. Titus belongs with them. The letters date toward the end of the first century or the beginning of the second century, maybe thirty years after the death or more. Colossians, Second Thessalonians, and Ephesians are more debated, and a solid core of scholars argue the debated letters were not from the same author.
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How Long After Jesus Were the Gospels Written?
Jesus was already dead when the Gospels were written. Mark was probably written sixty-nine, seventy, or seventy-one-ish CE. Matthew probably came five or ten years after Mark. Luke probably came five or ten years or more after Matthew. John came a little after the others.
A following was already developing, and the writers wanted the Gospels to speak to the experiences of people who were already followers, as well as to a literary audience.
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How Does a Pithos Inscription From About 800 Name Jehovah of Samaria and His Asherah?
A large jar called a pithos, dated to about 800 BCE and found down near the Sinai Peninsula, carries an inscription over a drawing of a male deity and a female deity.
The inscription asks for or thanks somebody for blessings by Adonai of Shomron, or Jehovah of Samaria, and his Asherah. Israel's god is the male figure in the drawing, and Asherah is God's wife. Bes supplies the bovine look. Beset is the other Egyptian deity whose motifs the drawing uses.
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Why Does Data Over Dogma Emphasize Data Rather Than Ideologies?
Allowing data to inform reconstruction prevents reducing everything to ideology or dogma. Data Over Dogma is the podcast focused on ensuring data sets the terms for discussion rather than ideologies or dogmas brought to the subject.
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Why Does Cognitive Science Distinguish Decoupling From Rationalization?
Cognitive science refers to decoupling and rationalization when intuitive cognition conflicts with reflective cognition. Decoupling occurs when reflective cognition overrules the intuitive so a bang at night leads to realizing the furnace is kicking on and going back to bed. Rationalization occurs when reflective cognition defends and rationalizes the intuitive cognition even though it may be entirely wrong.
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Why Does the Cornsweet Illusion Change the Same Gray?
Intuitive cognition governs perception by altering sensory input. The mind thinks it looks at an object in space. Objects in space look lighter in the sun and darker in the shade after a whole lifetime of experience. The Cornsweet illusion uses the exact same shade of gray for both so the brain changes what one sees to match expectations.
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How Does First Enoch Contradict Itself?
First Enoch contradicts itself because the stories about angels coming down get repeated a couple of different times as it is a collection of five different books. The Book of the Watchers, the Parables of Enoch, and the Animal Apocalypse tell overlapping stories in ways that do not align perfectly so First Enoch is internally inconsistent.
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Why Does a Bodleian Tablet Fingerprint Feel Like Someone?
A fingerprint on a tablet at the Bodleian libraries at University of Oxford creates a sense of presence because the fingerprint serves as a clear cue to human involvement from thousands of years ago.
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Why Does Shanidar 1 Qualify as the Oldest Human?
Shanidar 1's skull shows deformities that indicate profound deafness, probable blindness, and other disabilities. The skull aged to pretty old age for a Neanderthal. Survival to old age was only possible with social support group providing care. Sacrificing own efforts, time, resources to care for someone who cannot care for themselves defines humanity. Shanidar 1 is the oldest human because the society took on that burden.
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Why Are There So Many References to Dragons?
Ancient people were conscious of the ever-present threat of chaos, particularly on the waters. The land was safe but the waters were dangerous. Chaos became personified as a dragon because sea monsters live there. God tames the monster to show power over chaos and bring order to chaos. Order allows civilization to develop.
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Why Does Nobody Speak Ancient Hebrew?
Nobody speaks ancient Hebrew because ancient Hebrew is not a spoken language. Obviously modern Hebrew is spoken but ancient Hebrew is not a language that anyone would ever grow up learning by speaking with their mother.
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Why Does Paul Advise Married People to Avoid Sex?
Paul suggests even married folks should avoid sex because the higher law is to be celibate. Jesus was coming back so soon having a kid would be a waste of time. Paul says if you cannot hack it then go ahead and have occasional sex with your spouse but it should be basically for keeping down the urges because the risk of sexual immorality is so great you need to have a little valve to keep down the urges.
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How Do Scholars Figure Out What Bible Texts Were for?
Scholars go to great lengths to situate the composition of texts in the Hebrew Bible or in the New Testament within whatever historical period makes the most sense. Some texts function as propaganda or to place one person struggling for power over another person. Other texts help people feel better about why bad things happen to good people and good things do not happen to bad people.