ecclesiastes

I always have thought the earth is very old and I think this part of the bible says so. People who claim the earth is only around 6000 years old are silly in my opinion. Most people who read the Bible only take the parts they want. To me, this explains the sphinx,
Gobekli tepe, and all the other ancient monuments that we have forgotten. Generations that have come before us have been forgotten and one day we will be gone and forgotten.

Bible > NIV > Ecclesiastes 1

◄ Ecclesiastes 1 ►
New International Version
Everything Is Meaningless

1The words of the Teacher,a son of David, king in Jerusalem:

2“Meaningless! Meaningless!”
says the Teacher.
“Utterly meaningless!
Everything is meaningless.”
3What do people gain from all their labors
at which they toil under the sun?
4Generations come and generations go,
but the earth remains forever.
5The sun rises and the sun sets,
and hurries back to where it rises.
6The wind blows to the south
and turns to the north;
round and round it goes,
ever returning on its course.
7All streams flow into the sea,
yet the sea is never full.
To the place the streams come from,
there they return again.
8All things are wearisome,
more than one can say.
The eye never has enough of seeing,
nor the ear its fill of hearing.
9What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun.
10Is there anything of which one can say,
“Look! This is something new”?
It was here already, long ago;
it was here before our time.
11No one remembers the former generations,
and even those yet to come
will not be remembered
by those who follow them.
Wisdom Is Meaningless

12I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. 13I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens. What a heavy burden God has laid on mankind! 14I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

15What is crooked cannot be straightened;
what is lacking cannot be counted.
16I said to myself, “Look, I have increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me; I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge.” 17Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind.

18For with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief.

a reply to: Toolman18

You are right, we will be dead and gone with precious little to remind those who follow us as to who we were.

However, when you look to find wisdom in something like Eccesliastes etc and you think about what it says,

"All streams grow into the sea and yet it is never full" it is stupid, simply because the sea is not contained within a vessel, it simply expands over land as its levels rise. Also not all streams flow into the sea, they can flow into land-locked lakes.

Its because people don't seem to think objectively about what they read from religious books. Subjective thinking takes over, which for many who have been whispered in to their subconscious from early childhood, accept willingly.



"

a reply to: Shiloh7

Have you ever heard of this thing called "poetry"?

Or do you just see anything Bible-related and reflexively crap all over it like a trained monkey?

For all Atheists like to talk about believers being programmed... holy s#.

Of course the Earth is far, far older than 6,000 years. Anyone who claims otherwise isn't firing on all cylinders. As far as the quoted Biblical passage, it would have been written sometime between 900 and 1,000 B.C., since it was supposedly written by Solomon, who is purported to have died around 931 B.C. The sphinx was already a couple thousand years old by that point, AMD Gobekli Tepe was significantly older, so I suppose you could twist it to say that it somehow "explains" such sites. Really, though, I don't think it's anything more than poetic musings by a man contemplating the fleetingness of his own existence...

originally posted by: NthOther
a reply to: Shiloh7

Have you ever heard of this thing called "poetry"?

Or do you just see anything Bible-related and reflexively crap all over it like a trained monkey?

For all Atheists like to talk about believers being programmed... holy s#.

LOL! I was thinking something similar. They don't call it poetic license for no reason.

Easy on the ALL atheists, though. I'm an atheist, and I agree with you on this one.

a reply to: Toolman18

if wisdom is meaningless as the good king says, we can kindly disregard his proposition accordingly.

Does this ever remind me of


Commerce - Law of the Sea

All about etymology.

Took some notes on the wonderful research Chiron Last did:

20:12: The Italian 'vento' also means also means "wind", while the French Law word "vente" gives us "a sale, contract of sale"

20:23: Of course, this is about selling us into slavery through the womb, which is shown in the English and Latin 'venter' which means "womb."

And the related Latin masculine noun 'venus' translates as "sale, purchase." Since Venus represents the clams, money, bucks, used during our purchase.

20:44: Venus is the Roman Goddess of Sexual Love and Generation and the term Venter is cognate with "vendor."

20:54 Humans are sold into commercial slavery....Venal means someone who is purchasable or bribable."
While the Latin "venalici" translates as "slave dealer."
We are hunted in the chase during each "pure chase." ....where they make a "clean kill." To "clean you out." To "take you to the cleaners."...In esoteric terms it means your mind...will be erased.

21:32: The 'cahce'/cash of your "hard-drive" (mind) will be deleted and then you will have a "clean slate."

---22:01: We have been "double crossed" as shown by a final relation that will be proven out with the Italian 'venti,' Portuguese 'vinte' and French 'vingt' all translated as "twenty." The number twenty (20) in Roman numerals is written as XX. We have been "double crossed" and sold into this system.

Then at 22: 25 shows the doulbe cross of the Knights Templar symbol. The double cross of the UK flag. The double cross of St. Peter's Square a teh VATI-Can.

The 'double cross' of Freemasonry.

(I keep thinking of Planet X, and the reset to 0, no one understand what it really means and how it relates to Saturn --my own).

Exellent post friend, though humbling to the chasing mind..

There's nothing new under the sun, and this us true. Science will only measure what nature is, has always been, and always will be. It will try to overcome nature only to humanities demise, as all things come to an end, but nature's order and cycle will always be, such is the creation of source, the playground of souls...

Cheers my friend

originally posted by: LesMisanthrope
a reply to: Toolman18

if wisdom is meaningless as the good king says, we can kindly disregard his proposition accordingly.

As well as yours.

Chasing time and trying to comprehend the universal structure, will lead to old age, and one to be forgotten in the sands of time. ..

Internal is eternal, and will forever be, the essence of animating matter to give consciousness, to experience the grand creation.

No mind, or single consciousness, will ever master the external reality, it is all temporary, all things must end, as all things have began.

Evaluate individually, your position in a world amongst infinite worlds, come to terms with how you are aware and experiencing, and find the source of that, the source of self, not matter.

" what is lacking can never be measured" always spoke to me. We just can't see the "thing" that ties all of this together

a reply to: Toolman18

Never let it be said that some parts of scripture don't
bother me. This is a good example that some parts do.
Seems so brutally negative.

a reply to: Toolman18
There is meaning only in the moment, the moment can be milliseconds long or some moments can stretch for an eternity, but once the moment is gone, its gone forever. Everything is transient, knowledge and wisdom are not immune to that, far from it.

a reply to: Unity_99
Oh the things people create and entrap themselfs into. Its said the things you own eventually end up owning you. It's pretty much the same of all these constructs or corporeal entities people create. Relinquishing there free will to the constructs they have created were they then there by become a cog in it creating a corporeal entity.

The practice of worshiping gods has not left mankind in more technological age, it has to merely evolved and been streamlined to new and greater heights.

Whats that saying "Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive" Even all our mistakes and whims will come back to haunt us, with a stroke of a pen on paper and invisible make believe ideas one has entrapped themselfs for an eternity.

a reply to: randyvs

Yet where you find 'negativity', other Christians have perceived truth and wisdom: a meditation on the vanity of all worldly striving and the hypocrisy of ostentatious devotion. Some may read Ecclesiastes as an elaboration of the doctrine of Justification by Faith; others, as a testament that only divine Grace can confer meaning and value on our lives and deeds.

If any religion is to endure, its holy books must be mysterious and contain many contradictions (which its priests and theologians will try fruitlessly to reconcile). This is because a mass religion must contain elements that appeal to very different knids of people. Ecclesiastes is not in the Bible by accident.

*

The Vision of Christ that thou dost See
Is my Vision's greatest Enemy.
Thine has a great hook nose like thine.
Mine has a snub nose like to mine.
Thine is a friend of All Mankind,
Mine speaks in Parables to the Blind.
Thine loves the same world that mine hates,
Thy Heaven doors are my Hell Gates.
Socrates taught what Meletus
Loathd as a Nation's bitterest Curse
And Caiaphas was in his own Mind
A benefactor to Mankind.
Both read the Bible day & night
But thou readst black where I read White.

-- William Blake, The Everlasting Gospel

a reply to: Shiloh7

"All streams grow into the sea and yet it is never full" it is stupid, simply because the sea is not contained within a vessel, it simply expands over land as its levels rise. Also not all streams flow into the sea, they can flow into land-locked lakes.

Poetic license.

Yes the sea is not in a vessel, though its level can and does change. However, In a poets lifetime experience, its 'nominal' level changes very little despite the manifest huge amounts of water pouring into it from rivers. Furthermore, you example of streams flowing into land-locked lakes is fully covered by the poets original thought - they never 'fill up' either.

Ignoring the fixed volume 'problem', we know that the oceans are never 'full' because evaporation returns the water to the atmosphere and thence to the land and that lakes do indeed have exits even if it is ground seepage.

One doesn't have to consider the ancient thinkers 'stupider' than us just because they didn't have our scientific and technological knowledge. Their intelligence was just as high as ours, their dreams were like ours, their lives very much like ours - they wanted to feed themselves, clothe themselves, shelter themselves and they wanted a better life for their children than they had. The difference between us and the poet(s) of Ecclesiastes is just a few millenias worth of each generation improving life for their children - and that is all. True, visible change in our way of life now takes a few decades rather than a few generations, that just means that today we are less likely to make a poetic assertion that 'there is nothing new under the sun', because we now see new things under the sun all the time. Never-the-less, the pattern of life continues.

The recognition of continual the cycle of life, constant renewal through birth, life, death and rebirth was a constant theme through all early religions, and remains so today even the Christian religion - again we see that we are no different in outlook to our ancestors.

The point of the story in Ecclesiastes not a scientific treatise on why the oceans don't 'fill' - it is an observation that life continues pretty much as it always has - people are born, people die, and in between they do pretty much the same thing that people have always done. During the time of Ecclesiastes, something new for an individual might have been to visit a village 3 days walk away, but that would have been done by others before. Something really new might have been a visit to China I suppose. Now-a-days something new would be a trip to another celestial object - but that has now been done too. 'Something new under the sun' is indeed very rare and the ennui caused by that realization is very real even today when we think we see new things all the time.

The understanding that the poet(s) of Ecclesiastes recognized that same feeling gives us a connection to our ancestors that is a powerful reminder of our own position in the chain of existence, just one link in the continuum from the first life and forward into the future.

I see this passage in Ecclesiastes not as a cry of frustration and impotency, but a challenge: what can you, as an individual, do to bring something genuinely new to the world. People do do that, in every generation. Whether that person is Abraham, or Jesus, or Galileo, or Newton, or Einstein, or Gandhi or Henry Ford or Steve Jobs, or your local green grocer or neighborhood garden organizer. What will YOU do?

Religious thinkers who see it as a call to keep things locked in bronze age stasis "simply because it is in the Bible" and knee-jerk critics of anything Bible related "simply because it is in the Bible" are both, in my opinion, completely missing the opportunity our ancestors have passed to us - the wisdom that we stand on the shoulders of those who go before us and it is our responsibility to respect their achievements by adding our achievements to theirs for the benefit of those who follow us.

EDIT: nothing in my post should be taken as either support for or denial of religion. Any religion. Nor does it support either theism or atheism. My concern is wholly with the wisdom contained in the passage and what it suggests for humanity. That it occurs in a religious text gives it neither more or less credence.

what is lacking cannot be counted?

Evidently this was not written in the 2000s. They now judge the value of a corporation by future profit potential. Our government owes over sixteen trillion dollars and says everything is going good.

But evidently we are living in the end times under the great deceivers rule so I guess that doesn't apply anymore.

a reply to: Astyanax

Indeed, a most profound post Astyanax.

a reply to: galadofwarthethird

Yes I believe they get trapped in the very pits they dig for others. Because everything has to do with what we see in something, even the bible. What we intend, our definitions. But since that came across my path to research, there isn't a movie, a title of a movie, passages like this in the bible, that don't sound like the same. Its suddenly all around. Thankfully with this passage you can see it easily a different way, and take a different meaning out of it.

a reply to: Unity_99
Like giving life to Frankenstein eh! Or the jewish practice of imbuing life into there golem, or golden calfs. The power to bring something to life by pure technicalities in the magical world of human thought systems and make believe anything from religion to that whole paper money trades system believe. And so in roundabout ways all of that became a reality.

Ah give it a few thousand years and those constructs and corporeal entities will do more then change the laws to favor them, after all its even written in congress that corporations are real people and in fact above individual people and there wants or needs. If only they had the actual technology to back it all up and turn into a real boy, just like Pinocchio.

So much for human intuition and free will. The things you own and the things you create will end up owning you, we still have people arguing in courts all over the world on technical misnomers. And in time they may not even be allowed to do that much after all it says so on a piece of paper.

a reply to: Elementalist

As well as yours.

Chasing time and trying to comprehend the universal structure, will lead to old age, and one to be forgotten in the sands of time. ..

Internal is eternal, and will forever be, the essence of animating matter to give consciousness, to experience the grand creation.

No mind, or single consciousness, will ever master the external reality, it is all temporary, all things must end, as all things have began.

Evaluate individually, your position in a world amongst infinite worlds, come to terms with how you are aware and experiencing, and find the source of that, the source of self, not matter.

A series of vacuous sentences. I am unable to even imagine what you're trying to convey here. But you'll be happy to know I gave it a shot.