| Subject: Re: God created the middle east 7000 years ago |
Author:
N/A
|
[
Next Thread |
Previous Thread |
Next Message |
Previous Message
]
Date Posted: 13:26:41 09/27/05 Tue
In reply to:
N/A
's message, "God created the middle east 7000 years ago" on 20:05:28 09/26/05 Mon
I was curious, so I did a bit of research. My question was: What was the extent of the "Biblical World", how much of the Earth's surface did it occupy?
First, how big is the Earth?
Land: 148,429,000 sq km - 29.1%
Water: 361,637,000 sq km - 70.9%
Total: Approx 510,000,000 sq km (197,000,000 square miles)
The habitable land surface of the globe (i.e. excluding Antarctica) extends over roughly 136,433,400 sq km (52,677,000 sq mi)
Since the boundaries of the biblical world seem a little unclear, here's some examples to suggest a starting point for some reasonable guesses:
When the Roman Empire was at its greatest extent, in the early 2nd century of the Common Era (when Trajan briefly annexed Mesopotamia), it occupied 05,698,000 sq. km. (2,200,000 sq. mi)
The Early Caliphate was a vast stretch of territory spanning Spain, North Africa, the Middle East, Iran, and much of Central Asia in the late 7th century of the Common Era, occupying 13,209,000 sq km (5,100,000 sq. mi)
The "Modern" Middle East, consists of: Bahrain, Cyprus, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, “Palestine”, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, U. Arab Emir., and Yemen; it occupies 7,200,000 sq km (2,780,000 sq mi)
In all probability, the biblical world occupied only 6,000,000 to 7,000,000 sq km.
If given every possible benefit of the doubt, the biblical world could be expanded to occupy 13,000,000 sq km, or about 10% of the habitable surface of the planet.
That would make bible land somewhere between about 1% and 2.5% of the Earth's surface.
This means, while the authors of the various middle eastern "scriptures" were smugly writing a comprehensive history of humanity and our planet, they were omitting the existence of at least 97.5% of the planet.
According to the devout types, since evolution wasn’t mentioned in the bible, it doesn’t exist. Since the bible doesn’t make reference to a human population that clearly existed at least 20,000 years before genesis, these humans didn’t exist. (We’ll quietly ignore the 160,000-year-old fossils of the oldest ever Homo sapiens excavated in a remote region of Ethiopia, or the most famous remains found in Ethiopia, Lucy a three and a half million-year-old complete skeleton that was discovered in 1974.) Since the bible doesn’t mention at least 4 of the 7 continents, they don’t exist. And last but not least, according to the bible, I was born on one of these non-existent continents, therefore, I don’t exist.
See, if you read your bible, all the confusing stuff that just doesn’t seem to fit into the world-view of various ancient goatherds just goes away...It ceases to exist. Pass the collection plate, amen.
[
Next Thread |
Previous Thread |
Next Message |
Previous Message
]
| |
Feedback: 