Our own civilization is in deep, deep trouble. While our ruling class does everything it can think of to poison the culture, President *Batteries Not Included and his secretary of state, John “Scarecrow” Kerry, urged on by the notion of “a deal at any price,” are putting all the world at risk by arranging for Iran to acquire nuclear weapons and touch off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East–the most unstable powder-keg on earth. They’re all like toddlers playing with loaded guns.
Against this background, scientists, only since the late 1990s, are discovering a mind-bogglingly ancient civilization in coastal Peru, the Norte Chico (or Caral-Supe) civilization. Fully formed and in business by around 3200 B.C., and fading out around 1800 B.C., the Norte Chico people built cities characterized by monumental architecture.
They seem to have had plenty of music (various instruments have been found in the ruins), but no visual arts–although painting may simply not have been preserved over such a long period of time. They invented quipu, a system of record-keeping with knotted cords, which was still in use by the Incas thousands of years later.
We don’t know the name of a single person who lived in any of those cities. We don’t know what gods they worshiped, what jokes they told, what language they spoke, or anything much else.
What we do know is something hauntingly strange.
At roughly the same time in history, in parts of the world widely separated geographically, true civilizations (with cities and record-keeping) seem to have arisen independently–in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, Northern China… and Peru. Norte Chico is so far away from any of the others, it doesn’t seem at all possible that any other civilization might have influenced its development. And unlike the others, Norte Chico was not centered around a major river system.
Five civilizations arise in five different places, at about the same time–how could that have happened?
In the Book of Genesis, civilization suffers two destructions–by the Flood, and by God’s action at the Tower of Babel. I think this suggests the possibility that survivors of those calamities would have tried to rebuild, wherever they happened to be. Reputable Bible scholars who don’t believe the Bible will scoff at this; but they can’t laugh the cradles of civilization out of existence.
Why did they come at around the same time, in different places far apart?
And what will scholars be saying about our modern Western civilization, centuries from now, when they pick over our ruins and try to decide which of our famous names were real and which belonged to legend?
Or will we, like the Norte Chico and the Indus Valley people, leave behind no famous names at all?
Have always wondered about these types of ruins and what happened to the people, but now, we have something sinister going on in the contemporary world. Wait until I send you an article I just found.
I hope it doesn’t upset me too much.
I hope it doesn’t upset you too much either, but as believers, it is an urgent call to prayer.
Seems pretty obvious that when a country no longer loves itself and loses it’s moral compass it’s headed toward destruction.
The book of Genesis is a history of ancient civilizations. The Babel dispersal was a major event. Almost immediately thereafter, Abram was given a promise that his seed would be blessed and would play a significant role in the salvation of all mankind. That formed the basis of a lasting civilization which was organized around acknowledgment and worship of the One True God. Sadly, much of our modern world has chosen a different course.
Reputable Bible scholars who scoff Scripture accounts are not real Bible scholars. The Bible version of everything is the true version. Unlike evolutionists’ theory, man from the beginning has been intelligent, so of course after Babel’s dispersion man built other great cities.
An aside: the first scientist to propose the continental drift theory was centuries ago and he based it on the Flood. Enlightenment era scientists mocked the theory because it was based on the Flood. Yet in the 1950’s scientists have come around to believe the continental drift hypothesis because of new knowledge of tectonic plates. The Bible will always win out!
I have another bone to pick with Reputable Bible Scholars Inc., but I’ll save it for tomorrow.
When someone claims Bible scholarship, then parses what they believe from the Bible and what they do t believe from the Bible, they are not students of the Bible so much as they are students of their own opinions.
I’ve spoken to people that will tell you that the Bible does not condemn fornication, when it obviously does. Pick the issue, and there will be someone teaching that it doesn’t matter. Ultimately, these are the ultimate “verse checkers”, whom select verses out of context to support their opinions, and simply ignore verses which go against their opinions.
Just as bad are people that use the Bible as a weapon and select verses to condemn others, without preserving the mercy and understanding which permeates the Bible. The Bible account is filled with examples of sin, sometimes by persons God approved of. That does not mean that he approved of the sins they committed, but shows us that God is patient with all, just as we should be towards our fellow man. We can judge our actions against the standards of God’s word, but we should never use God’s word to presume to judge the standing of our fellow man before God.
The Continental Drift idea is fascinating. There seems to be ample evidence of Tectonic motion, so why not? The account of the Flood doesn’t go into great detail; we know that it rained and we know that the “vast watery deeps” were opened. What we don’t know, at least to a certainty, is just what those vast watery deeps actually were. The best explanation I’ve hears is that there was a layer of water which served to cushion the earth’s surface from seismic activity below that layer, but that’s highly speculative.
What I find at least as interesting is that the Bible mentions earthquakes as playing a prominent role in the outworking of the Last Days. I have read that there have been numerous earthquakes throughout the “Ring of Fire” in the last week or so. This certainly fits with Christ’s description of the time just before The Kingdom is established.