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Just before 9.30am on Sunday 11 November, a series of unusual seismic pulses rippled around the world almost undetected.
The waves rang for over 20 minutes, emanating about 15 miles off the shores of Mayotte - a tiny island in the Indian Ocean between Madagascar and Africa.
From here, they reverberated across Africa, setting off geological sensors in Zambia, Kenya, and Ethiopia.
They crossed the Atlantic, and were picked up in Chile, New Zealand, Canada, and even Hawaii nearly 11,000 miles away, the National Geographic reports.
Despite their huge range, the waves were apparently not felt by anybody. However, one person monitoring the US Geological Survey's live stream of seismogram displays did notice the unusual waveform and posted it to Twitter, sparking the interest of other geologists and earthquake enthusiasts.
[...] The bizarre waveform is what scientists call "monochromatic". Earthquakes normally produce waves of so many different frequencies, the wave readings appear more jumbled.
But the mystery waveform from Mayotte was a crisp zigzag, which repeated after steady 17-second intervals.
"They're too nice. They're too perfect to be nature," joked the University of Glasgow's Helen Robinson, who is study[ing] for a PhD in applied volcanology.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday December 05 2018, @02:49PM (5 children)
What NotSanguine said. They all spring from the same diseased root. If this Yahweh character is real in any sense, he's a blaspheming demon, as he claims to be God but clearly does not meet the qualifications.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by DeVilla on Friday December 07 2018, @05:08PM (4 children)
Wait. Did you just "No true Scotsman ..." a deity?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday December 07 2018, @05:57PM (3 children)
No. I compare the traditional list of what apologists call "great-making properties" to Yyahweh's actual behavior and attributes, and make that judgment. Leaving aside the unsoundness of the entire class of ontological arguments (they hinge on the false assumption that existence is itself a property), Yahweh as described in the scriptures of all three Abrahamic faiths does not meet the definition of what it means to be God, i.e., he does not possess all the great-making properties to the maximal extent. I can imagine many, technically infinitely many, beings who possess at least one of the great-making properties to a greater extent than Yahweh, as described.
Furthermore, the very existence of anything EXCEPT Yahweh shows that he cannot be God, if he exists. The reasoning is simple: According to the Abrahamic corpus, at some point in causality ("causality" because time would not have been invented yet), there was a state of affairs such that Yahweh and ONLY Yahweh existed. We may refer to this state as "God-world." We can also deduce certain things about God-world: it is the one possible state of maximal perfection, goodness, righteousness, etc., because since nothing but Yahweh existed, the sum of existence would have been all perfection. God lacks nothing, wants nothing, cannot be added to or improved, is contingent on nothing ("divine aseity"), and is completely perfect and self-sufficient in and of himself.
This being the case, *there is in the most profound and literal sense of the phrase no reason for God to create anything." And there is *no* way out of this. Apologists attempt to slime their way out by saying things like "love is gratuitous," but that falls flat on its face off the starting blocks because love itself is still a desire--in this case, desire for the well-being of other beings. Not that I trust any Abrahamic death-cultist to know love from his own asshole of course. What this means is that the very fact that anything other than Yahweh exists is deductive proof that Yahweh, if *he* exists, is not God.
By his supposed directly-inspired scripture, Yahweh is full of desires and wants, and seems not to actually be able to tell the future of his own actions ("it repenteth Me that I have made man upon the Earth" and similar). A perfect being does not have an enemy (Lucifer), much less one he must plan to fight a war with, not least because such a being would never have created such a thing to begin with. A perfect being does not demand worship--in fact, any being that does demand worship is by definition unworthy of it. ANY state of affairs that includes ANYTHING other than God is by definition less perfect than God-world, and may arguably involve a diminishment of God in some sense, which itself is a blasphemous notion. A perfect being does not create imperfection, either; at most, the only thing a perfect being could create, and the word "create" might not be appropriate here, is multiple aspects of itself.
Study of ancient Near-Eastern religions sheds much light on Yahweh. To me it is fairly obvious he's just another tribal ANE deity who's become the driving force behind most of the world's ills through sheer historical accident and human evil (and it could as easily have been Zeus or Indra).
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by DeVilla on Friday December 07 2018, @06:20PM (2 children)
Wow! You've got it all figured out. You should start a religion. I bet it wouldn't be long before you have enough followers to buy you a nice pair of Doc's.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Friday December 07 2018, @10:24PM (1 child)
Sorry, was that too much to take in at once? I've been studying these things for something like 13 years now, so I may come on a bit intense when doing an infodump like that...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by DeVilla on Saturday December 08 2018, @01:00AM
It's fun to talk to someone who actually has a bit of breadth on the topic. But I don't actually care enough to argue it.