[meteorite-list] Wow. Look what I just stumbled across!

From: Sterling K. Webb <sterling_k_webb_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed Oct 25 01:59:31 2006
Message-ID: <007301c6f7fa$b0a18d60$0d384842_at_ATARIENGINE>

Hi,

    In this section, you will find references to the
"hydroplate" theory. You really should back up to
the table of contents and investigate the "hydroplate"
theory, which maintains that there is (or was) a vast
subterranean ocean 10 miles deep under the crust, a
kilometer thick chamber, mounted on pillars, surrounding
the Earth and filled with an ocean.
    This is a delightful throwback! And when I say
"throwback," I mean 'way back. This is the "abyssmal"
ocean of ancient myth. The Sumerian word for it was
"apsu" or "absu" from which the word "abyss" derives
(the only word in English with a Sumerian root).
    But the concept was already old at the time of the
earliest Sumerian culture and can be traced in Ubaid
pottery motifs back to 5300 BC. (This dating would make
the myth older than the world in this fellow's cosmology!)
    The mythological aps? was freshwater: lakes, springs,
rivers, wells, and other sources of fresh water were thought
to draw their water from the aps?. The Sumerian god Enki
(Ea in Akkadian) was believed to have lived in the aps?
since before human beings were created. His wife Damgalnuna,
his mother Nammu, and a variety of creatures also lived in
the aps?. In the city Eridu (predating the Sumericans, an
Ubaid city), Enki's temple was known as E-abzu ("the
abzu temple") and was located at the edge of a swamp,
an aps?. Certain tanks of holy water in Babylonian
and Assyrian temple courtyards were also called aps?
or abzu.
    Of course, it's nicely dressed up in "scientific" gobble-
dity-gook about "supercritical water;" I do like a good
myth-maker! The "Great Fountains of the Deep" make the
ocean trenches, mid-ocean ridges, all strata, all limestone,
blow all the comets and asteroids and meteorites off the
face of the Earth. The Sumerians would be delighted at
how durable their myth is!
    One might suppose the author of this fantasy to be
superficially self-educated, but he is a Ph.D. from MIT,
has taught college courses in physics, mathematics, and
computer science, is a retired full colonel (Air Force), West
Point graduate, and former Army ranger and paratrooper,
former Director of Benet Research, Development, and
Engineering Laboratories in Albany, New York; tenured
associate professor at the U.S. Air Force Academy; and Chief
of Science and Technology Studies at the Air War College
(he says), and only found his way into this particular "pocket
universe" after retirement. (My taxes are contributing to the
military pension that supprts him while he does this nonsense.
I should be miffed or ask for my two cents back.)
    The really fascinating thing is that he "saves" the Biblical
creation and chronology by resort to an ancient mythos not
found in the Bible, one which the Biblical authors would (and
did) regard as thoroughly beyond the pale. They would have
smote him down as an Assyrian apologist... (The Sumerians
being long forgotten by the time the Bible was written.)
    But this is a durable myth; it creeps back into the cosmology
of Cosmas Indicopleustes:
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/awiesner/cosmas.html
although Dr. Brown leaves out the square corners of the
Earth and the pillars that hold up the Heavens (careless
of him).
    Very entertaining piece of Whackology.


Sterling K. Webb
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
----- Original Message -----
From: "Darren Garrison" <cynapse_at_charter.net>
To: "Meteorite List" <meteorite-list_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 24, 2006 11:33 PM
Subject: [meteorite-list] Wow. Look what I just stumbled across!


http://www.creationscience.com/onlinebook/Asteroids2.html

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Received on Wed 25 Oct 2006 01:59:09 AM PDT