The book that I have just finished that I will review for you today, was written on or about the year 397 AD. Originally titled and meant to be read out loud such as Homer’s Iliad, ‘Confessions in 13 books’, later to be known as ‘Confessions by Saint Augustine’, gives the reader or listener, a wonderful insight into the teachings and what went into the teachings of Saint Augustine.
Saint Augustine wrote his confessions around 397 A.D. Back then, most people would sit and listen while it was read to them.
It may be important to remind everyone, that this historic work, was not written at the end of St Augustine’s life. Rather, It Was written while he was in his forties.
This work deep in words and in meaning, covers the time of St Augustine’s early childhood youth and a time where he was a fervent believer in astrology, and covers his slow migration to the Christian faith.
For me some of the philosophical insights, covered in this masterful work, were how sins of youth, or of ambition, or of the need for societal inclusion, do not define us. Rather, the pursuit of God’s love and understanding is much more important in everlasting life, than focusing on times where we have come up short from God’s best.
We can be manipulated by the masses. When people look at our faults and hold that against us; well God loves us, forgives us, and wants the best for us.
SUMMARY
I found St Augustine’s writings on time, to be very interesting, as he goes a long way in solving the paradoxical dilemma; what about the time before there was God? What what was before God created the heavens and the Earth?
Briefly put, by definition; before there was time there still had to be time. It is much as we look at things as human beings today. As time is quickly passing by, but thinking that time was moving slowly when you were in the moment.
Time is both fluid and stagnant and can’t be both, but different at the same moment.
This is a slow read that causes the reader to sit, meditate and contemplate.
St. Augustine also gives a very clear message. It is where one can hold onto their beliefs, but respect with all earnest reference to somebody else’s different beliefs.
This book is free to read in the public record.
I hope you find my book reviews informative and enjoyable. Please private message me if you would like a list of the books I have reviewed so far this year.
Written By: Darren Redmond
UNIVERSAL DIGEST is pleased to be a conduit for our contributing authors. We do not claim credit; we simply want to make it more available to the general public. And, the opinions of the authors are not necessarily the opinion or stance of this website.
Written in 1645, ‘The Book of Five Rings’ is written by Master Swordsman, Miyamato Musashi.
REDMOND’S REVIEW this week is ‘The Book of Five Rings’.
It is a very brief nugget of a engaging approach to techniques that can help a person focus on themselves; rather than on those things that may be distracting them from obtaining a sense of wellness. A warning though; one must read this book through metaphorical glasses. You see, most of us are not swordsmen.
Also ‘the enemy’ which is the main focus of the book, is those things that keep us from being the best version of ourselves. The realization is, that an enemy is not just somebody looking to do us harm, but rather it can be from our own lack of focus.
LONG SWORD AND COMPANION SWORD
From a business perspective I would advocate reading this book prior to reading Sun Tzus’s classic ‘The Art of War’.
For example, I would like to share as to how one can use what is written here in your everyday life, is this example. It is given about how a warrior always carries a long-sword and a companion sword. The long sword is used of course for distance fighting and the companion sword for fighting in close.
Can we not use this as a reminder that in all things we do, we should have a long-term, as well as, short-term goals?
This book is free to read in the public domain.
In this week’s review, Darren Redmond delivers a synopsis of ‘The Book of Five Rings’.
Written By: Darren Redmond
UNIVERSAL DIGEST is pleased to be a conduit for our contributing authors. We do not claim credit; we simply want to make it more available to the general public. And, the opinions of the authors are not necessarily the opinion or stance of this website.
What were these handbags or purses depicted in glyph carved in stone and other materials in ancient history?
Handbags or purses were depicted numerous times in ancient history.
What were these handbags or purses depicted in glyph carved in stone and other materials in ancient history?
This isn’t about a UFOs in ancient history but it is related by connection of the Anunnaki.
Sample handbag on display with a paperclip to gauge the size.
Sample handbag that was not one, yet was carried by the Anunnaki.
Sample image of a handbag with a ‘hinged’ handle.
I’m sure a lot of you have seen numerous images of the ancient divine deities and other beings carrying peculiar ‘handbags’ also known as ‘purses’ in their hands and have wondered what they were. Why were there so many identical or very similar bags or purses in various historical epochs on different continents?
Unfortunately, neither legends nor myths contain specific information about them.
I’ve pondered on and off for years over these mysterious bags. I’ve read other people’s theories of what they could have been; a basket for carrying water, fruit, gold, etc., but those ideas are impossible. It’s impossible because these so called bags are made of solid stone. They cannot carry anything.
Statue of a ‘god’ carrying a handbag.
I finally came upon an article that makes the most sense to me and thought I’d share the information. For sure, it’s a clear impression that the ancients were far from being only savage hunters and gatherers as mainstream historians impose on us. The ancients obviously had totally different priorities in their life, which enabled them to see a completely different picture of the world.
Anyways, author and historian, Sviatoslav Sergeyev drew a parallel between the symbolism of such ‘handbags’ and the times when Primordial Knowledge was brought into the world. A graphic example is the Vulture Stone in Göbekli Tepe. In the world of archaeology there are such artifacts as ‘handbags’ not attached to any figure/being/deity or other item.
So, what did Gods carry in their ‘handbags’? They carried spiritual knowledge. I ‘think’ the handbags, aka purses are the individuals temple which they believed carried knowledge. Kind of like how some Christians wear a cross, believing it carries faith.
Sample glyph of an Anunnaki carrying a handbag.
Here’s some references to important quotes regarding the bags:
We might interpret the Göbekli Tepe site as having also served as an instructional sanctuary, where (if we believe the statements of later cultures) civilizing skills might have been intentionally introduced to humanity. We find this same outlook expressed in myths that survive in some cultures. For example, among the Maori of New Zealand, one mythic storyline tells of how a deified ancestor named Tane ascended to a place where the gods lived and returned with three baskets filled with knowledge. Within the context of this type of myth, the notion of a basket comes to be associated symbolically with instructed knowledge.
An Egyptian term for ‘basket’ hetep is a homonym for other features we also find at Göbekli Tepe. It can refer to ‘a place of peace or propitiation’, ‘the shrine of a god’, to a ‘slab of stone’ (written with a glyph shaped like the Göbekli Tepe pillars), and to a ‘graving tool, stylus, chisel’. The term is formed from the same phonetic root het/get/chet that can imply the concept of a temple or sanctuary in various ancient languages.
Both the shape and temple/shrine symbolism of the handbag images is also reflected in later cultures such as ancient Egypt. In his book Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, Barry Kemp of the University of Cambridge in England discusses the attributes of a type of pre-dynastic portable shrine called a ‘seh’ that, in his view, became the prototype for temple architecture and symbolism in dynastic Egypt. He characterizes the seh as an early ‘tent’ shrine, built from poles and cloth or animal skins. The lower part of the shrine was squared, much like a modern dining room cabinet, while the poles of the upper part were bent into the shape of a domed arch, creating a covered shelf. The overall shape is a match for the Göbekli Tepe figures, and presents a good physical and conceptual correlate to the handbag symbols. In his Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary, Sir E.A. Wallace Budge defines a phonetically-similar word sa as ‘a shrine or sanctuary in which a god or goddess was housed’.
When French anthropologist Marcel Griaule met with a Dogon priest named Ogotemmeli to discuss attributes of a Dogon shrine (a counterpart to a Buddhist stupa) that serves as the defining symbol of their cosmology, the blind teacher reached around the inside of his hut, searching with his hands until he found a woven basket to use as a physical prop to illustrate the symbolic attributes of the shrine…
Written By: Heidi H Ley
UNIVERSAL DIGEST is pleased to be a conduit for our contributing authors. This article was produced being mostly unedited. We do not claim credit, we simply want to make it more available to the general public. The opinions of the authors are not necessarily the opinion or stance of this website.
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Great Flood and the Lack of Human Remains is a mystery. Why?
Arabian Giant Man
One day, I was pondering on the ‘giants’ mentioned in Genesis 6:4, which is a mind-blowing topic. It’s been written hundreds of times that nephilim skeletons have been discovered but the remains are hidden from the public. Is this plausible? If you do a little research on the ancient Egyptian’s background giants are portrayed throughout their history in their sacred writings, sculptures and paintings. They painted so well to tell us who they were, how they looked and their way of life (rituals, ceremonies, wars etc.) So, it’s conceivable.
So, I was sitting and thinking; In reality, not all remains could have been found, and most of all, not all people were grand in size before the great flood. That circumstance brought up another question; Where are all the pre-flood human skeletons? Even the ones that were, per our terms, normal in size?
According to Scripture, there were Antediluvian civilizations, which are civilizations that existed before the great flood with patriarchs that reached ten times our current life span and had large families. So, where are their fossils? If there were millions of people populating the world at the time of the flood as they suggest, wouldn’t they be buried in the flood strata? Why haven’t they been found?
We have found marine creatures, such as clams, corals and trilobites. As well as plants and land animals. This encompasses reptiles, including dinosaurs, amphibians, mammals and birds. Among lost creatures, exquisite carvings with recorded life and detailed paintings have survived at sites like that of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. So, where are the human remains?
A 1992 ICR article wrote seven responses to the perplexing question:
1) Land animals and humans have a low fossilization potential. We would expect few fossils from them.
2) If the Flood buried a multitude of people and distributed their bodies among the world’s sedimentary rocks, finding even one human fossil in such a vast area would be unlikely.
3) Underwater mudflows during the Flood would have ground human bones to powder.
4) Flood-waters receding off continents might have likewise pulverized them.
5) Catastrophic geological processes may have buried ancient continents in their entirety, virtually erasing all evidence of people.
6) Whoever discovers a pre-flood human bone or bone fragment might not identify it as such, since that finding would not fit evolutionary expectations.
7) The pre-flood population might have been quite small, considering Genesis 6:13’s statement that “the earth was filled with violence.”
The seven responses can explain for masses of missing remains, but does it explain for the entirety of man-kind before our present days? That’s hard to digest, especially knowing they have found hundreds of underground and high-ground cities where people could have survived the great deluge. According to the Sumerian Tablets, countless people did survive the disaster.
Let’s do some research:
Low fossilization potential refers to the rarity of fossil formation because unique conditions are needed to preserve fragile remains. And, guess what? The flood waters from 4,365 years ago, or 2,348 BC supplied those exact conditions to conserve easily broken, or petrified forms. Per paleontologists, small land animal bones are typically weaker than a humans and there are plenty of smaller animal fossils that have been recovered, like that of birds.
Flood fossils form in specific layers and earth strata’s where slow moving sediments transport plant and animal wreckage to a complete stop. It’s known where to find them, and as of this date, only two skeletons have been found that date to the Antediluvian time period.
It’s remarkable that only two have been unearthed. It happened in June of 1971, an amateur geologist and archaeologist named Lin Ottinger, made the fascinating discovery in Moab, Utah. In a copper mine he found the remains in a Cretaceous age sandstone that aged more than 65 million years old. The bones were still joined together naturally and stained green with copper carbonate. Mine metallurgist Keith Barrett of the Big Indian Copper Mine that owned the discovery site recalled that the rock and soil that had been removed by dozier had been solid with no visible caves or crevices. The Stratum was at least 100 million years old. This is good evidence that these skeletons buried under Jurassic sandstone were Antediluvian.
Very few stories exist on findings of pre-flood human remains, but when fragments are found and presented to authorities, these authorities immediately reject the findings by deeming them invalid due to their wrong placement in the preconceived picture of evolution based on archeology, geology and related sciences. Basically, a final outcome doesn’t exist.
Stone doll found.
Another stunning find is from Idaho. During an 1889 well drilling operation, a stone doll dubbed Nampa was found. The doll came from a 300 foot level of a well boring. The records show that the drillers penetrated about fifty feet of soil, then fifteen feet of basalt, and afterwards, passed through alternate beds of clay and quicksand down to a depth of about three hundred feet, into the level named Plio-Pleistocene which is dated two million years old. It should be noted that the well log shows that the stone doll was found on a bed of sandstone far below a fifteen foot lava layer, which laid down during a flood period. No human remains were found around the stone doll.
Are we to believe what the Bible tells us? That when God announced “I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made and man has made, I will destroy from off the face of the earth.” The seventh chapter of the Book of Genesis describes how God caused it to rain in order to submerge the earth and annihilate all who lived in sin and everything else. Only virtuous Noah, who received God’s warning, was able to survive along with his family and specimens of all living creatures by building an ark. If this is to be believed, the facts tell otherwise, because there are an abundance of artifacts, approximately two dozen civilization sites, even remnants of an ancient technology, and on top, there were survivors; more than likely, thousands of them.
According to current research, there are more than 250 great flood accounts that have been assembled from cultures all over the world. The tales are generally the same; the great deluge was sent by a deity or a group of deities, a flood transpired as an act of divine retribution for the end of mankind. The Bible is the only record showing it rained for forty days and forty nights. The majority accounts from around the world state it rained for only seven days and seven nights, as well as nine days and nine nights. Additionally, the flood materialized during a variety of time periods from different sources; rain, tsunamis and generally from the great ice sheets.
Interestingly, in ancient Mesopotamia, the Sumerian King List is divided into those who ruled before the flood, and after the flood. In fact, the city of Sumer emerged immediately after the deluge with said hundreds of patriarchs, which is recorded in particular detail.
One flood story, coming from Mesopotamia, the Atrahasis version, the flood is only a river flood. While the story itself concerns a great flood, most scholars recognize that it was inspired by a local event; most likely caused by the Tigris and Euphrates overflowing their banks.
Excavations in Iraq, where it began, have revealed evidence of only localized flooding at Shuruppak and various other Sumerian cities radiocarbon dated to about 2,900 BC. Other sites, such as Ur, Kish and Uruk present evidence of flooding as well. However, this comes from a different time period. In Israel, there is no such evidence of a widespread flood. Approximately 1,630 BC to 1,600 BC, there was a natural tsunami that hit the South Aegean Sea and Crete but didn’t affect the mainland cities of Greece. That deluge is that regions only flood.
The world-wide deluge, per scholars and scientists, are in agreement that an earth-encircling flood could not have possibly taken place, being incompatible with modern scientific understanding of natural history, geology and paleontology.
Is it possible that the great flood story wasn’t as catastrophic as its been written in the American bible? The other culture’s scriptures are varied and not so apocalyptic. Is it possible the tale was told and re-told and had been embellished, and that most people living on earth then remained alive? If that were to be true, that would definitely sum up why there is a total lack of human remains.
Written By: Heidi Ley
UNIVERSAL DIGEST is pleased to be a conduit for our contributing authors. This article was produced being mostly unedited. We do not claim credit, we simply want to make it more available to the general public. The opinions of the authors are not necessarily the opinion or stance of this website.
