Like the Zoroastrians, the Yezidis believe that the world will be perfected at the end of time following a final struggle, after
which it will be "smooth like an egg," with neither mountains nor sea
If water was one of the things that existed before God made the heavens and the earth, why is it being got rid of at the end times, and why did the xians plagiarise a Zarathustran idea?
"We cannot slaughter each other out of the human impasse"
Like the Zoroastrians, the Yezidis believe that the world will be perfected at the end of time following a final struggle, after
which it will be "smooth like an egg," with neither mountains nor sea
If water was one of the things that existed before God made the heavens and the earth, why is it being got rid of at the end times, and why did the xians plagiarise a Zarathustran idea?
Sea = primeval chaos (Babylonian Tiamat). Yahweh treading upon the waves (Job 9.8) = Yahweh conquering chaos. The heavens are stretched out, but the sea is trampled; and the deep (תְּ֭הוֹם, tehom) has to be rebuked (Psalm 104.6-7). A final world with a sea still resisting Yahweh is, on such views, little different than a final world with demons still plaguing humankind.
Agree with Ben. Revelation is referring to the cosmic sea that surrounds the earth and heaven.
The Zoroastrian theology is quite different. They saw the eschaton as returning things to the primeval unity that preceded the Lying Spirit and the differentiation of plants, animals, languages, etc.
Ditto. The sea is chaos, danger, threatening, death. It's either everyone will be given the ability to walk on it or else turn it into terra firma. The more firma the less terra. Mountains are also less than hospitable. The beautiful reign of God will see them all all metaphorically leveled to plains -- mountains, like beasts, are symbolic of great human powers/kingdoms. Only one kingdom will fill the whole earth in that day, we read in Daniel.
vridar.orgMusings on biblical studies, politics, religion, ethics, human nature, tidbits from science
Chaos theory is a field of study in mathematics which studies the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions—a response popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for such dynamical systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general.[1] This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behavior is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved.[2] In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable.[3][4] This behavior is known as deterministic chaos, or simply chaos. The theory was summarized by Edward Lorenz as:[5]
Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.
Chaotic behavior can be observed in many natural systems, such as weather and climate.[6][7] This behavior can be studied through analysis of a chaotic mathematical model, or through analytical techniques such as recurrence plots and Poincaré maps. Chaos theory has applications in several disciplines, including meteorology, sociology, physics, engineering, economics, biology, and philosophy.
These various theologies with their structures of the universe and predictive elements do feel quite impressively proto scientific!
The first creative science, practiced by possibly some of the earliest members of Homo sapiens who had modern brains and intellects, may have been the tracking of game animals. Tracking is a science that fundamentally requires the same intellectual abilities as a modern science like physics (5).
