I Must Confess

Ok, so if anyone read the post about the Progressive Adventist Culture before I caught this, I am totally 'fessing up. I was wiki-ing religious leaders and somehow mixed up the Adventists and the Mormons when I made the comment about Joseph Smith that I changed to Ellen G. White. Yeeeesh. Just admitting that is like fingernails on a blackboard to me. Cringe.

Granted, they are both relatively modern Christian derivatives based on dubious revelations from their modern day prophets and prophetesses, but that is no excuse. Golden tablets from angels do not equal a rock to the head. A badly researched reference is a badly researched reference. My apologies to all Mormons and Adventists I may have unintentionally offended. As for the ones I may have intentionally offended, well, I have no excuse for that at all.

In other news, I learned something cool today while watching the History Channel at the gym: the ancient Greeks discovered tons of dinosaur fossils, some of which were stashed as offerings at the temples, even at the Acropolis (where I have actually been). They found so many that most of them were just tossed. What is so cool about this is that it was very probably the basis for their mythological creatures. In some cases, seismic activity had scrambled the skeletons so much that it was probably pretty common to find the front half of something mixed up with the back half of something else. Why not half man half horse? A triceratops looks a lot like a great big something with a long tail-- maybe a lion-- with the head of a bird, because of the beak. Voila, the griffin! This was the factual evidence they were finding, and they interpreted it to the best of their ability at the time.

I always just assumed that those fantastical animals were inventions of creative imaginations. I had never heard that there was a connection between the Greek myths and dinosaurs. It is really no different from, though not as technologically enabled as, our current imaginings of dinosaurs. When I heard that, something delightful just snapped into place. A fundamental bit of knowledge about mankind and the history of the creatures on earth was put in like a little puzzle piece.

Which reminds me, have you heard about the exhibit that puts dinosaurs in Noah's Ark? Yeah, I'm not kidding.