Letters to the Editor
Paul in KY
Published Letters: 662 Editor's Choice: 13
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BS Logic, thy name is Hypatia
[Read the article: The reason we haven't noticed American Muslims condemning terrorism]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Hypatia in one of her? screeds above said: 'Keebear, what an unbelievably stupid thing to say. Where in the Gospels do you find Jesus practicing serial rape and saying God authorized him and his followers to do it? Where does he run raids against farming communities, mass-murdering the men and enslaving the women and children? When did he extort money, order the assassination of critics (including one nursing mother), and order the beating of women? And when he died, did he die screaming threats and curses?'
You know damned good & well that when Christian entities have used the Bible as justification for crusades, pogroms, wars against their enemies (be they Moslem, Other-kind-of-Christian, Same-kind-of-Christian, Pagan, etc.) all they have to do is look in the Old Testament to find examples of atrocities just as vile as those you mentioned (I'm surprised Mel Gibson hasn't made the Book of Joshua into a movie yet).
Go to any Southern Baptist, Assembly of God, Church of God or another one of those enablers of the nutwads now in charge & you'll hear all kinds of biblical preaching, (IMO) almost all from the Old Testament. This, of course, is because the true believers in those sects really think Jesus is a wimp. They don't cotton to all his love they neighbor, harder for a rich person to attain the kingdom of God than a camel to pass thru the eye of a needle, liberal hooey.
That's why I'm calling you on this, Hypatia, cause I'm pretty sure you know that the Old Testament has all the cool rapes & murders & selling your siblings into slavery stuff that gives you the vapors when you read accounts on LGF about what's in the Koran (and I will admit that since I have not read the Koran, that stuff could be in there, just like in the Old Testament).
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Who Killed the Smilodon
[Read the article: Rain forests, they come, they go]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Steven Gibson quote above: 'Climate change at the end of the last ice age undoubtedly had an effect as well -- perhaps a dominant one.'
Although I agreed with almost all of Mr. Gibson's comments above, I excerpted a quote of his relating to climate change being a culprit in the mass extinctions of the American megafauna which began approx 50,000 years ago.
Mr. Gibson may not realize that the 'last ice age' is merely the last one we've had since humans began the Neolithic era. There have been many ice ages during the past 2.5 million years & climatologists forcast that we'll have another one (or would have had, prior to Global Warming) in another 20,000 or so years. During each of those past ice ages (except the last one) the American megafauna managed to weather the climatic changes. What, one might say, would be the difference between this last Ice Age & the 10 or so that preceded it?
Cynics, such as myself, would say that the diference was the new species of predator that entered the American continents through the land bridge temporarily connecting Asia with North America. I'm sure we all know who I mean. Many laypeople have the idea of the paleolithic hunter as a caveman version of Grizzly Adams, relentlessly tracking his quarry & attacking in small groups with some form of javalin or spear.
IMO, this is a falacious archtype that causes people to wonder 'how could these small bands of wandering nomads have killed all those Mammoths, Mastadons, Ground Sloths, Giant Bisons, Giant Cammels, Glyptodonts, Smilodons, American Lions, Dire Wolves, Homotheriums and Short Faced Bears?'. The answer is that these first hunters did not hunt in the way that many people assume they did.
These people were killing for sustenence in a very hostile environment & could afford no sporting nature or desire to give the quarry a fair fight. IMO, they hunted in large part by stampeding the animals over cliffs & when possible setting fires to kill prey. This way of hunting is unfortunately very wasteful of the prey & since the American megafauna, by virtue of being near the top of the food chain, was not very plentiful to begin with, such hunting tactics had an affect on those prey species all out of proportion to the numbers of those doing the hunting. Another contributing factor was that unlike other prey species who almost always attack the old, weak, & sick of a species, early American hunters would take the largest & fittest as well when they employed the tactics I outlined above.
Bottom line, I believe the American megafauna's disappearance is totally due to predation by man & that the time when you see the megafauna beginning their decline (approx 50,000 years ago) is when Homo Sapiens Sapiens hit the scene.