as i was traveling the internet... i bumped into something interesting...

DISCLAIMER: i haven't read through all of this yet... but just found it interesting...

Mahabharata

"...a single projectile charged with all the power of the universe. An incandescent column of smoke and flame as bright as ten thousand suns rose in all its splendor......it was an unknown weapon, an iron thunderbolt, a gigantic messenger of death, which reduced to ashes the entire race of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas....the corpses were so burned as to be unrecognizable. Their hair and nails fell out; pottery broke without apparent cause, and the birds turned white. After a few hours all foodstuffs were infected......To escape from this fire. The soldiers threw themselves in streams to wash themselves and their equipment..."

from what i read... the date of this seems to be very old... (2450 b.c.)...
i'm just wondering how this would affect your current belief system if this were verified as true...

mostly i wonder this because people make the claims that ancient cultures weren't as intelligent as we are... that's why they use God to explain things...
if this turns out to be true... how does it change your argument about ancient cultures using God in place of understanding?

and how exactly did they come upon the knowledge of what seems to be a nuclear weapon?

source: http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig6/case8.html
more reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahabharata

That is interesting. But the article is suggesting there was nuclear war in 2500 BCE. I just find that unlikely in any sense.

I read somewhere that the Vedics contain stories like that. They are very ancient texts. Some people believe there was a nuclear war in ancient times based on those stories. They believe they mention flying machines also. They even believe they found evidence to support the belief there was an ancient nuclear war. They claim some place in India shows sign of having been hit by a nuclear weapon in the past. I don't know if any of it is true. I don't even know if they are interpretting the Vedics correctly.

I'm not sure if it's true.. but it's very interesting none the less Great topic!

Phantum have you ever considered that the gods/goddesses of the ancients were metaphorical? Kind of the way wicca works today.. that they used those gods to represent certain things like nature and other powers.. in a pantheistic sense?

To me that's what god is, not a being capable of making decisions.. but a great power or energy that is the creator of everything.. some kind of undefinable matter. it's within us, animals, nature, planets, space.. the elements.

By the way, the Vedics are ancient Indian religious texts. They were written in sanscrit, an ancient language.

Here is a site that tells some stuff from the Vedics, if you're interested.

http://deoxy.org/hs_veda.htm

The site doesn't mention that story that sounds like a nuclear attack.

This site gives more information on the ancient nuclear war theory.

http://www.zenzibar.com/news/article.asp?id=1768

Here is another ancient nuclear war theory site. They think there was a nuclear war in North America.

http://www.inquiring-mines.com/ancient_war...n_n_america.htm

Here is a story about that place in India I told you about, the one that showed evidence of having been hit by a nuclear weapon.

http://www.rense.com/general3/8000.htm

nope never considered it for a second... because if you do that... you have to toss out major parts of their beliefs...

angels/gods/goddesses...

if they were metaphores... we have a major problem, because all over the world... people claim that these beings came down and got women pregnant...
not only that... they produced weird supernatural offsrping...

then we have cultures who claimed they built pyramids and other structures...

there were also wars between the beings and their offsrping...

personally i'm having a hard time seening a metaphore doing any of that...

i don't think acient people were stupid... i think they new the difference between something normal and something coming down out of the sky and having sex with women...
too many stories from around the world to be conincidence or for people to have developed the same metaphor...

just thought about something...

it only took us about the last 200 years to come up with almost all the technology we have now...
what if they had a nuclear war back then that pretty much made humanity start over?

i'm not all that trusting of the museums and science... because they have tried to cover up archeological finds... like giants and the like...
so i'm pretty sure they would cover up any definitive proof...

Interesting topic.

I don't have the time to look in to it at the moment though I will in the morning.



I've never come across any credible accounts of giants before. All of the giant skeletons I've seen have been proven fake multiple times from multiple sources...

I don't think the ancient people were less intelligent than us for a second.. in fact I believe that they were more intelligent "spiritually" than the human race as a whole are today.

I see what you're saying about some of the mythology and stories.. but what if all these stories have been edited a bit over time, and all (or at least some) of them have their basis in more ancient religions, or if not religion then belief systems, maybe ones that we have no knowledge of today.. that were metaphorical in sense. Maybe some of the stories in religion we have today were just that- stories.. that have become known as being true. We all know how stories and urban legends can grow and spread over time. Maybe religions we have today are a mix of pantheism and known (at the time) fiction. I'm not saying I believe it to be correct but it's something to think about.

i agree...



based on my experience... most stories... even some urban legends have some reality behind them...
but at the same time... when you get the same thing from cultures all over the world at the same time... it sort of transcends myth or allegory...

i understand what you are saying about stories changing over time... but i really don't think they changed that much... i'm sure their memory was a lot better than ours... the more technology we get... the worse off mankind is...

our memory is down because we don't have to use it... we have paper and computers
people on average are getting larger because we are lazy...
who the hell needs an automatic stapler... lol... that is the worst invention of all time in my opinion... how lazy do you have to be to refuse to pick your hand up and drop it down... LMAO

but back on topic... i've thought about it... and too many of the stories add up to just write them off as metaphore or fiction...

Well, to say that they were as advanced as ourselves would bring about the nature of other technologies as well, communication in particular. The metaphors beings similiar across the world at the same time could simply be the integration of worldwide cultures and global comminication, something were seeing right now. And as far as the metaphors go, they could've been a highly spiritual people as StoneAgeQueen said, and used such titles for every day things. It may have simply been a way of life to assign allegorical and metaphorical aspects to things, especially ones of great importance such as a nuke.

At the same time, it could have been a ruling technique. A dictatorship that rules through ignorance and indoctrination are standard. Assigning such "religious" lables to high technology would've have been a simple way to explain them and allow the public to benefit from them, whilst allowing the government to hold the major knowledge of what it really was. This would also explain the major collpase of that society, as the remaining survivors had little to go on to rebuild their former greatness.

About your comment with technology making mankind worse, I'd have to disagree. Technology, like any other resource at humankinds disposal can be used for good and bad. Whilst it has caused mental/physical laziness, information technology has amazing potential for improving humanity as never before. Widespread transferring and storing of ideas over the entire globe...thus is the true beauty of the net. Resorting to oral storytelling and such is proven to lose information. And if the family line dies off the information is lost forever. Put it in a book, write it on a cave wall, store it on a disk, and a wanderer can recieve benifits from their knowledge even after their death.

It only took us 200 years? Sorry, man has been around longer than 200 years.

You have to remember that ancient people also had multiple gods to explain things they didn't understand. For all we know, this "nuclear war" could have been a volcano. It's absurd to jump to that conclusion. Ancient stories wrote about lots of strange things, like cyclops and giant squids and other monsters, do you believe that because the texts are real the stories they tell are true, or are even meant to be true?

Except that a volcano can hardly be identified as a projectile.



Difference being, these particular stories describe things that we have in the modern world. If cyclops did exist, and we found ancient stories describing a one eyed being, would it not be logical to assume that the story was refering to cyclops?