Freethought Nation

More on this in National Geographic June 2011 issue: The Birth of Religion.

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Here's the latest from National Geographic: Natgeotv "Cradle of the Gods"

Be sure to watch "Cradle of the Gods" on the National Geographic channel;

Saturday, 3 March 8:30pm
Sunday, 4 March 12:30pm
Monday, 5 March 9:30am

"The 11,500 year old Göbekli Tepe temple complex, unearthed by a team of scientists in Turkey, could be the spark of civilisation that led mankind towards farming, urban life and all that followed."

trailer

You'll want to watch it, especially at the end. Spoiler alert ... the scholars working on Gobekli Tepe admit that the spiritual traditions found at Gobekli Tepe resemble Christianity in very significant ways such as the death and resurrection motif.

P.S. Don't forget that the cover image for the 2011 Astrotheology Calendar is of Gobekli Tepe. All of the calendars (2010, 11 & 12) are still available, by the way, at least for now.

Here's the 2011 astrotheology calendar thread.

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2013 Astrotheology Calendar
The Mythicist Position
Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection
Stellar House Publishing at Youtube

I sincerely doubt whether Gobekli Tepe is the FIRST temple complex in the world. It's far too large and elaborate for it to be the absolute earliest such structure. The most we can say is that it is currently the oldest of which we know.

I think it's very likely that other and older ones will be found.

To me, the important thing here seems to be that Gobekli Tepe overturns, at a single and unanswerable stroke, the historical chronologies we've been given so far by mainstream scholarship. This gigantic collection of stones can't be ignored, and now have to be factored into any guesses or theories made from this point on.

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That's right, isisishtar, they should stop making claims like that at every find. It's quite sensationalist. They should always add something like: "the oldest known thus far."

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2013 Astrotheology Calendar
The Mythicist Position
Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection
Stellar House Publishing at Youtube

Let me point out a problem with calling this a temple. One does not bury temples which all the evidence says happened here. Call it a place of statues/idols and use that to redefine/vastly broaden what is meant by temple. I have no problem with calling it a temple IF and ONLY IF the definition of temple in use at the time it was built is included.

As soon as you say temple without qualification you are bringing in all the semantic baggage of temple we have today. What we have today is 11,000+ years of development and evolution after this site. In the western ancient world temples were places where the priests did things for the people and which the people were not welcome to enter. They were not like temple Beth-El nor like a church or cathedral.

Try this for Gobekli Tepe. There was a huge famine. These gods screwed us by letting us starve. We bury them. We condemn them to the underworld.

I am not arguing for that but rather showing alternate explanations are possible. I point out creating just to bury does not make a lick of sense if called a temple. It is sort of like discovering Notre Dame under a huge pile of dirt.

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http://www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html

You mean like this?

By under a huge pile of dirt I do not mean pyramid as nothing separate is buried in them. They have a clear ancestry and evolution as tombs. The kings built the biggest tombs which we know as pyramids. They went out of fashion else someone would be digging Ptolemy's pyramid.

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http://www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html

The word "temple" is perfectly useful when describing an ancient building ostensibly utilized for religious purposes. We are speaking English here, in order to convey ideas quickly and easily. Even if we could discover an ancient word from Gobekli Tepe that means "temple," we would still need to define it using the word "temple."

Let us not be too pedantic, as we will never be able to communicate with such "standards."

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Why suffer from Egyptoparallelophobia, when you can read Christ in Egypt? Try it - you'll like it:

There is no intention to be pedantic. Gobekli Tepe is open air, no surrounding building. So is Stonehenge. Is Stonehenge a temple? The difference is carved images on the stones. Does that make it a temple?
And then from what I have found it was built to be buried. How does that match any semantics of temple that we know and use?
There is no sign of ritual use at Gobekli Tepe. How does that make it a temple? What does temple mean if there is no sign of worship? No sign of use?
What does "temple" mean without use, without worship and buried as soon as finished so it can never be used? Something built and then buried so it can never be used is a temple in our sense? If it is I missed that sense of the word.
They did something very expensive, something very labor intensive and then expended the labor to bury it so it could never be used and in fact be lost to human memory. What meaning of temple encompasses that?
To me and I presume most everyone temple means a place of worship. Gobekli Tepe was never a place of worship nor is there any indication it was ever intended to be a place of worship.

Why should it be called a temple when it does not satisfy any definition of the word temple? So far as I am aware nothing like the statues of the "gods" or whatever have been found any place else. So we do not even know if they were intended to be gods or animal spirits or whatever.

This gets back to another observation on east/west buildings and the drying in the middle east. Your observation that east-facing means temple has been so commonly adopted that any large building with that orientation is called a temple based solely upon the orientation. When you are too successful you risk circular reasoning.

However there are other reasons for that orientation therefore more than that one criteria should be applied. That is, factors other than orientation should be required such as surrounding buildings not having that orientation. Construction prior to the eastern Med drying are more indicative that afterwards.

You want to track the spread of the gods just as you want to trace Dec 25 as a god birth date because it should be Dec 21 or occasionally the 20th. The 21st is the solstice. The 25th is nothing.

Were I guessing I would suggest the 25th is based upon some moon cycle related to the solstice. Or the sun is its own diameter higher than it was on the 21st. There is something shifting the date four days. Find the origin of that and find the first solar god.

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http://www.giwersworld.org/made-in-alexandria/index.html

_________________
2013 Astrotheology Calendar
The Mythicist Position
Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection
Stellar House Publishing at Youtube

Dec 25th isn't "nothing," in fact it's the date following 'after' the winter solstice, that is, following 'after' the sun appears to stand still by rising in the same most southerly location for 3 days before moving it's rising point 1 degree back to the north again, which, brings the winter solstice (stand still) to an 'end' and marks out the return of longer days and spring and summer coming ahead.

Good time for a seasonal celebration, eh?

It's the mythological 'birth of the sun god' going into the new solar cycle.

The very point is that it's after the winter solstice and celebrated as the end of the winter solstice, not celebrated as the beginning of the winter solstice of course. So I'm not sure where you're trying to go with the above quotation?


No guessing needed though, the answer is plainly clear as I've already stated above.

Ta da!!!

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The Jesus Mythicist Creed:
The "Jesus Christ" of the New Testament is a fictional composite of characters, real and mythical. A composite of multiple "people" is no one.

The celestial Origins of Religious Belief
ZG Part 1
Jesus: Hebrew Human or Mythical Messiah?

Andrew Collins, one of my favourite contemporary authors, has a superb new short article arguing that the alignment of the Gobekli Tepe temples matches to the precession of the star Deneb in Cygnus.

Well worth a read http://www.andrewcollins.com/page/articles/Gobekli.htm

The entire month of December, along with a couple of weeks in November and January, have been viewed since antiquity by numerous cultures globally to represent the "birth of light" in some fashion or another. This focus on December 21st or 22nd represents pendantry based on a lack of knowledge about the numerous light festivals.

Please see the page from my 2010 Astrotheology Calendar.



As has been pointed out, December 25th was struck upon because the sun was perceived not to move for three days before it begins its northerly approach - all from a geocentric perspective, of course. Hence, if the sun stops moving at midnight on December 21st, three days later, at midnight on December 24th, it is "born again" or "resurrected." It's that simple, and that's the reason why we have this date.

In any event, as we can see from the above, winter solstice festivals have been held on many days during the winter months. In India, the winter solstice or Makar Sankrati is still celebrated around January 13-15th. In previous eras, January 5th, 6th and 7th were solstice days, which is why the Eastern Orthodox Church continues to celebrate Jesus's birth on January 6th. This same day was celebrated in Egypt as one of Osiris's birthdays as well.

We will continue to discuss "December 25th" as the winter solstice, as well as to employ the perfectly useful word "temple" when describing buildings from antiquity that likely were constructed for religious purposes.

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Why suffer from Egyptoparallelophobia, when you can read Christ in Egypt? Try it - you'll like it: