The One Minion Search Party – back in the saddle again

Now that my hours have altered at work, blogging doesn’t require setting aside the first few hours of my morning (5-8am) for hard core writing sessions. I didn’t mind when I was single because I had no after work life to speak of, aside from the odd Freethinker or Skeptics outing, which I could write about the next day (and should get back into doing that. Update the Freethinker page more often, too). I was fond of early nights and early mornings. The Man’s a bit of a night owl, though, so that’s required me to manually reset my internal clock and remain awake past 10pm. It took some doing, let me tell you.

Anyway, this renewed interest in my blog has got me looking at my search results again. I used to enjoy setting aside a post on Wednesdays to feature one or more of them. A few from the past week, then.

once, just once i’d like to be able to land someplace and say: “behold, i am the archangel gabriel.”

Ah yes, that’s one of my favourite quotes from Star Trek TOS. Good old Bones McCoy. Stargate built its main enemy out of a similar premise. The alien race called the Goa’uld were advanced enough to make ignorant humans think they were gods and take serious advantage of the misunderstanding. Arthur C. Clarke made a good point once, too. “Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.” Near enough, I suppose. Weren’t there tribes in the world wary of cameras because they were convinced a camera could capture a soul? Still wary, apparently. Might have some truth to it, though.. look at how unreal some of those celebrities start to seem. They’re around cameras all the time and of them don’t really seem to be human anymore.. plastic, soulless people with stiletto heels and silicone lips…

was helen keller a satanist

Apparently Keller did dabble in some spiritualism but given the time she was living, she was hardly alone in that. It was the in thing. Christians are torn as to her value. If you believe the Jesus is savior website, she was a devil worshiper. Swedenborg Foundation Press, on the other hand, offers up a documentary featuring her positive reactions to the teachings of the “visionary sage and philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg.” Can’t say I’ve heard of him, but Wikipedia fixes that quickly enough.

Swedenborg had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist. In 1741, at the age of fifty-three, he entered into a spiritual phase[5] in which he eventually began to experience dreams and visions beginning on Easter weekend April 6, 1744. This culminated in a spiritual awakening, whereupon he claimed he was appointed by the Lord to write a heavenly doctrine to reform Christianity. He claimed that the Lord had opened his spiritual eyes, so that from then on he could freely visit heaven and hell, and talk with angels, demons and other spirits.

He said that the Last Judgement had already occurred, in 1757, although only visible in the spiritual world, where he had witnessed it…

So Harold Camping was 254 years too late.

was john lennon a satanist

My blog is third on Google’s list when this question is posed because I pondered this question way back in 2009 and it’s still a hot one.

I don’t get what makes the Beatles so wonderful, but I don’t think I’d ever say the devil’s in the details. Listening to their music today, there’s maybe a couple songs I could say I liked but overall their style doesn’t thrill me. I don’t know if I would have been insane for them had I been a teen in the 1960s. My tastes lean more into motown[sic] and doo-wop.

And time with the Man has altered that impression of Lennon and the rest of them. Hell, I’ve even watched Yellow Submarine now and A Hard Day’s Night. We tried watching Help!, too, but the DVD had some issues. Another time maybe.

doctor who christian review

I top the list for this question, too. Yay me.

how i found the lost atlantis paul schliemann

This is mildly interesting. The grandson of Heinrich Schliemann, excavator of Troy (and scandalous thief of relics), claimed his granddad had bequeathed that his successors do all they could to find proof of Atlantis. In 1912 Paul published an article in the New York American, a precursor to such famous quality newspapers as the National Enquirer and Weekly World News, stating he’d done just that.

this turned out to be a flash-in-the-pan hoax. There was no follow-up book, and Paul Schliemann dropped out of sight as quickly as he emerged. The promised artifacts were never produced, and scholars who worked closely with Heinrich Schliemann confirmed that he had never demonstrated any interest in Atlantis whatsoever.

A close read of this article reveals many howlers that even an armchair archeologist will spot instantly. For instance, “…a collection of objects excavated from Tiahuanaca, in Central America.” He misspells Tiahuanaco, and it’s in South America. Or how about “…engraved with a sentence in Phoenician hieroglyphics”. The Phoenicians used a phonetic writing system, not hieroglyphs. And “the Egyptian and the American pyramids [were] covered with a thick coating of smooth and shining cement”, which is completely untrue. Some of the Egyptian pyramids were originally covered with casing stones; none of the American pyramids were encased, let alone with cement.

People just love to believe Atlantis is still to be found out there somewhere. I get such a kick out of that. Any underwater ruin of a city and people try to sell it as a possible site of Atlantis. Natural catastrophe or hubris? It probably didn’t really exist, so why give a crap!?

I think that will do for this round. I’ll try to remember I rebooted this series and post again next Wednesday.