{"id":608,"date":"2012-01-04T17:01:35","date_gmt":"2012-01-04T17:01:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/carol.bennette.org\/feeders\/?p=608"},"modified":"2012-02-18T22:48:18","modified_gmt":"2012-02-18T22:48:18","slug":"ancient-aliens-and-modern-beliefs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carol.bennette.org\/feeders\/ancient-aliens-and-modern-beliefs","title":{"rendered":"Ancient Aliens and Modern Beliefs"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Cave<\/a>

Painting is sometimes as good as words when describing something you don't understand.<\/p><\/div>\n

I have been watching the TV series “Ancient Aliens,” which I find fascinating. One episode considered how early man viewed Gods as super-humans. They witnessed things far beyond their capabilities and perhaps beyond their imagination and needed some kind of justification for what they experienced. How do you justify that which you don’t understand? They did the best they could with what they had.<\/p>\n

I can imagine why what they witnessed could fill them with both fear and wonder – I think we would probably behave the same way today given the same understandings about the universe. Today, however, we have much greater understanding, yet we are still filled with wonder and awe at the universe – and many misconceptions! Further, we immediately believe that any creature capable of space travel must be light-years ahead of us technologically – perhaps an unwarranted assumption based solely on our limited frame of reference (our biases and beliefs).<\/p>\n

Our ancient ancestors probably came face-to-face with things that were incongruent with what their senses were trained to accept as reality. Such events must have been so terrifying that they had to record their experiences in the best way they knew how, through a primitive form of art (the first language). But what if the art on the cave walls was done by extraterrestrials rather than by humans? What if symbolic lithography was introduced by aliens? What then?<\/p>\n

How do paintings show up deep in caves where no carbon is detected on any of the walls of the cave? I’ve been deep in caves – they’re very dark! So dark I can’t see anything at all – much less paint on a cave wall by any means. Add a torch to light the cave walls and they get “dirty” with carbon (smoke residue) – that lasts forever, locked into the structure of the limestone. But by using a flashlight, I can do something that approaches what some would consider artwork on those walls – without smoke residue. But wait! There were no flashlights thousands of years ago… unless…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our ancient ancestors probably came face-to-face with things that were incongruent with what their senses were trained to accept as reality. Such events must have been so terrifying that they had to record their experiences in the best way they knew how, through a primitive form of art (the first language). But what if the art on the cave walls was done by extraterrestrials rather than by humans? What if symbolic lithography was introduced by aliens? What then? Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-608","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carol.bennette.org\/feeders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carol.bennette.org\/feeders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carol.bennette.org\/feeders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carol.bennette.org\/feeders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carol.bennette.org\/feeders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=608"}],"version-history":[{"count":32,"href":"https:\/\/carol.bennette.org\/feeders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1122,"href":"https:\/\/carol.bennette.org\/feeders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608\/revisions\/1122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carol.bennette.org\/feeders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carol.bennette.org\/feeders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carol.bennette.org\/feeders\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}