Religion In Ancient Cultures

First of all -and to make things clear- I DO NOT oppose religion, although I myself am absolutely not religious.
What I DO oppose is ORGANIZED religion.

If someone on a blue monday decides to follow this or that religion, hey, who am I to be against that.  If, on the other hand, you have someone who stands up and claim they are the keepers of the truth and that they're going to show you in what to believe -and in what not- how to believe and when to believe, then something's not right.

If on top of that, those "keepers of the truth" are known to have altered quite a lot of stories -including, YES!, the bible- to fit their own agenda and that they have knowingly tried to disguise wrongdoings on a global scale, then you unequivocaly know that you're dealing with charlatans who's only goal it is, and always has been, to stay in power, to have power over the people, over "their flock".

As a consequence, 90% of the people who claim that they are religious, are in fact not religious at all.  They are followers of the dogmas and doctrines of a CHURCH, dogmas and doctrines written by men whose sole purpose it was to get a grasp on the common people.  Don't forget that the RC church was started around AD325 out of POLITICAL reasons, namely to try and keep a crumbling Roman Empire together without the use of military force...

But let's get back to the purpose of this epistle, namely the shedding of some personal light on religion in Ancient Times.

As a matter of fact, I think that the term "religion" is totally unfitting for a lot of things ancient civilizations did.  With ancient civilizations, I mean the pre-dynasty Egyptians, the Azteks, Mayas, Incas, Olmeks, Tolteks, Sumer and other nations.

First of all you have to know that those civilizations had many gods.  Mostly they had a god for almost any variety of known activity.  Why would that be?  Could it be that these "gods" were originally "masters" in some or other craft; a craft that they passed on to lesser instructed civilizations?

I'm not claiming that these gods were extra-terrestrials.  Although this is of course a possibility, seeing how ancient tales from different civilizations all have these "beings" descending from the sky, often in a cloud of smoke with roaring thunder and fire to boot.

Okay, so let's for a second -even longer if you like- say that these "gods" (aliens or not) were indeed each specialized in some or other craft or technology.  Sounds kinda logical when -in the case of space farers- you go places where you could use a decent amount of scientists and experts in every field imaginable.  Also, seeing you read in different ancient texts that these "gods" taught all kinds of stuff to a primitive but intelligent local populace.  Stuff like writing, agriculture, mathematics, geography, etc. .

Once these gods departed to wherever they went (or came from), we all of a sudden see how "religions" cropped up; religions that -according to us- venerated these magical star beings.  And what do we see popping up as well?  Priests.  Plenty of them.  Teaching what this or that deity left behind.  By the way, maybe in a distant future, people will find "proof" of the veneration of a "god" named Jimi Hendrix who had millions of followers and who taught his flock how to play a weird musical instrument called the "Fender Stratocaster".  The name of the instrument being an indication this Hendrix god spent some time in a layer of the sky, high above the Earth...

Now, to me this sounds more like ancient religious temples were akin to houses of knowledge, where the "priest" was instead a specialist who was a "master" in a certain field and who passed on, to a select chosen few, what had been taught to her/him before.

That "religion" among ancient civilizations wasn't like we know religion today is pretty clear to me.  Today you have church leaders who keep spitting vaguenesses at us, coming up with abstract "knowledge" about even more abstract places like "heaven" or "hell".

In ancient times, priests had a knowledge that was far from abstract.  Priests were people of wisdom, people who knew stuff and to which you went when wanting to know something.

You had "priests" specialized in healing, others specialized in crops and weather forcasts, still others led temples of matters of the heart and maternity and so on and so forth.

The thing is that it is US, today, who call these diciplines "religion" and the masters of those diciplines "priests" in a religious context.  The main reason for this is that most discoveries of ancient civilizations were done by religious folk, or have been researches under the wings of this or that religious institution.

One thing religious people are good at is to explain things in ways that are most favourable to their own religion and the point of view of their masters to whom they pledged allegiance.  Is what has been happening for almost 1800 years now.  To the point that we in fact have two paralel histories: one as things REALLY happened, and one adapted and rewritten by "the church" (guess which one).

At a certain point, things came so far that even science -which in my opinion should be devoid of any kind of religious influences- often started taking contemporary religious conclusions as their basis to build their own conclusions upon.

Normally, when starting from this -rather crooked- foundation, it should be so that after years of research and finding evidence that things weren't exactly as this church had been claiming for all this time, that scientific views would shift and that scientists would constantly adapt their basis as new stuff was revealed.

This is of course what baffles me, that science does NOT adapt their starting pont to their findings, but have been doing -and still do- exactly the opposite: they adapt their findings to their foundation!!

Excuse me for saying so, but this is flabbergasting and, quite frankly, wrong.  I mean, it's like saying that the lowest number one can count to is minus 4000 and that, whatever means of calculus you use, anything that comes out below minus 4000 is impossible because it was established that minus 4000 is the limit.  This strongly reminds me of the "experts" who claimed the Earth was flat and that any hint at our planet being a globe was answered with a bale of hay and a match under yer arse.  Or other experts and scientists claiming the speed of sound could never be attained, let alone breached.

By the way, I find it extremely strange that a lot of these so-called experts, are in fact not at all experts.  They think they are because they spent several decades in the field.  But, it takes more than staying in "the field" for decades to become an expert.  I mean, how can spending time studying artefacts give you the nomination of an expert when all you did was try to fit your findings into a pre-established timeline, a timeline which was done by holding glyphs next to wrongly translated bible texts and oracling that everything fits neatly while in reality nothing fits at all?

The only expertise I can discern is that of fiddling with the facts in order to be able to maintain a self established truth.

To me, it is a fact that ancient religions weren't religions, but sciences.  Priests weren't such as seen in our religious context; they were scientists.  Not mumbling weirdos wearing dresses selling incomprehensible paragraphs of mumbo-jumbo as a certain thruth with a hithertho not yet clarified meaning, but people of knowledge who were instructed to pass on that knowledge to a select few.

Why a select few?  Simply for reasons of making things not too complicated.  Writing things down exactly as they should was a long process -an expertise all by itself.  More students meant more books had to be written.  Also more books would be read and lent out with a risk of losing valuable books and writings.

This is also one of the things that get me cranky: the explanation by some of our modern day scientists and experts that writers from the past like Homeros or Plato would keep themselves occupied with writing fiction.

Wake up folks!  Before the invention of the printing press, writing wasn't done for pleasure!  People only wrote down what was extremely important to them, important enough to write down for future reference.

Anyway, a rather long piece to say so little.  Just that I feel religion wasn't religion at all in ancient times, at least, not as we live our "modern" day religions.  Simply because first of all, "gods" were part of people's daily lives.  Not some entities one needed to go worship on Sunday.  No, they were part of people's lives because the gods all had a meaning to the different practices in ancient societies.  Gods of wine, gods of war, gods of plants and trees, gods of prosperity, gods of fertility, gods of beauty, gods of this, gods of that...

Today, you have a god which doesn't even have a name in christian belief.  Jaweh or Jehovah are the most common names in Judaism, but for some reason the christians don't have a name for their god...

Speaking of Jehova... this reminds me that "god" was not the only one and that christianity (just like Judaism) isn't a monotheistic religion, as the RC church has been claming right from the start in AD325, but that's for another blog, one of these...

JJ

AsRock Z77 Extreme 11 Motherboard

This is a bit of a continuation of my "Seagate Constellation" post from 22 June 2013, in which I mentioned my predisposition to squander money on a new mainboard.

Well, I finally did, a couple of months back.  And to make things worse, I also bought  new CPU, an Intel Ivy Bridge i7 3770K.

Initially, that AsRock Extreme 11 mainboard would have set me back around 450 Euro, but by the time I had gathered the money, I found one on eBay for 286 Euro.  Since my keen eye stumbled across the Intel i7 3770K processor earlier, for the nice price of 220 Euro, I decided to get both.

Okay, so that's just over 500 Euro, but it's only 50 Euro over what I would have paid for the mainboard alone, so, hey, sue me...

Mainboard works like a charm, too.  Except that it's a bit slower when booting-up.  Has to do with the tests the SAS chip performs when looking for attached SAS hard drives.

Also, after some two months of use, the small 40mm cooler which sits atop the SAS chip, started making annoying noises.  Those noses quickly turned into some serious howling, akin to what is expected of a werewolf with a severe tooth-ache.

So, I decided to buy a new cooler.  Found one on eBay, ordered and paid for it and got it 36hrs later... to find out it doesn't fit...

Buggers at AsRock made it so that regular 40mm fans don't go on the board by making their own type of fan which has only three mounting screws, closer to the center of the fan, instead of the regular four at the corners of the fan's armature...

Ah well...  Since the noise was meanwhile of a variety that makes your average PC user end up in the loony bin after longer periods of exposure, I decided to simply disconnect the fannus lupus.

Kept a worried eye on the temperatures, to only come to the conclusion that the fan does exactly... nothing.  With or without this fan, the temps on the chip stay the same.  Beats me why they added a fan, then.

In any case, I'm going to send an email to AsRock with a complaint about the board's fan in order for them to send me a new one, since the board is still under warranty for another 18 months.

Or I might try and find a way to dismount the cooling block from the mainboard (which again is mounted in such a way you can't reach one of the screws) and add a cooling block with fan of my own.

There's also the possibility to add a watercooling block for both the SAS chipset and the capacitators to the left of the CPU socket, but the set costs 115 pounds.  Since I'll also have to buy a watercooling set -radiator, water pump, radiator fans, etc.- the lot would cost way too much.

Okay, so taking the risk of operating the board without the cooler is also nuts maybe, but since I never saw any changes in temps, I'll see what happens...

JJ

Time ain't on our side

Crikey, another year has passed in which I didn't write anything at all -at least, here on my blogspot...

Not much has happened in the meantime, really.  I guess time went too fast for anything meaningful to happen.  Or maybe some meaningful stuff DID happen but I'll only notice it in a few years from now.

One of the reasons I've been away is because I took up gaming again and also did a lot of reading.  Especially on my favoutite subjects, which are science-fiction and ancient alien/ancient advaced civilizations.

Regarding the possibility of more advanced civilizations having existed in our past, I wonder why people are so adamant against the idea.

I mean... I know that we've been indoctrinated for centuries about our history, especially under the influence of religion.  The buggers have, after all, kind of rewritten our history for us.  This revised history is also what the "established" excavators and so-called scientists seem to cling to, regardless of the obvious proof that a lot of what they tell us is bogus.

You only have to turn your keen eye to Egypt and especially the Giza plateau and the pyramid of Cheops/Khufu to be confronted with literally tons of anomalies.  Anomalies which can only be explained to satisfaction when one takes into account the possibility of power tools.

Now, of course, the mentioning of power tools being used in a time at least 2500 years before zero has many people raising their eyebrows and look at you with "tin-foil-hat alert" all over their face, but when considering the facts (yes, FACTS) there simply is no other possible explanation.

The fairytale that 300-plus tons granite blocks have been transported across 750km of desert sand and dunes by means of wooden rollers has had its moment in the spotlight, but by now every child should know that such a feat is impossible.  Yet, that is exactly what "experts" still claim happened.

But I'm not in the mood right now to go deeper into the subject.  I'll do that on a later date.  maybe in a year from now, who knows...

JJ

Sinners

We, Humans, are supposed to be sinners.  The lot of us.  That is, according to religious folk.

But me being me, I have thought things over a touch and came to the conclusion that we, Humans, can never be sinners, at least, not in the religious sense.

Because there's only two possibilities.

One, god, with his ability of foresight in combination with his greater plan, has measured out our lives, for every single person which was ever born and for every person that still has to be born: all our lives are written in stone because that's what god has planned.

So, if god has planned our lives for us, how on earth can we sin? Since whatever we do was in god's plan?

Two, god's plan includes free will for each and everyone of us.  Thus, god has no control over most of what we do.  If we, in our capacity of free-willed beings, should do something which religious folk call a sin, then they should blame god since he gave us a free will.  When using our free will we fulfill god's wish and thus cannot sin.

So, you see, religious people should do their homework and stop calling everybody who doesn't think along their lines a sinner, because, guess what, we are unable to sin, since however you look at it, whatever we do, it's god's will.

But, while we're at it, let's also have a look at those so-called religious people.  When we take a real close look, we must conclude that they are not religious at all.  No siree.  Because, 99.9% of religious people are mistaking church for religion.

That's right.  There are no religious people.  Only folks who are part of a church and follow the dogmas of that church.  Since those people lost the ability to think for themselves, they let their church leaders do the thinking.  And those church leaders have only one thing in mind and that is to further their private non god-inspired agenda and keep on fooling their flock into thinking that the church holds the truth and nothing but the truth, amen.

Thou shalt not falter is one of the cherished retorts from the church.  Why?  Because when people veer from the path, the church loses its grip and there's a big chance the people start thinking for themselves again.  The church --whatever church-- can't have that.  That's tantamount to blasphemy, treason even.  No, no, you *have* to keep the faith.  Otherwise the church would lose its reason of existence...

Because, in the end, the church has but one goal and that goal is to secure it's own existence, its own future.

And that, to finish with a contradicto in terminis, is a real sin.

JJ

Seagate Constellation

A recently ordered package from AlleKabels (literally meaning All Cables) has finally arrived from Holland. It contains a few cables -a 20m HDMI cable and -important!- a 22-pins SATA SAS cable for a nifty Seagate 4TB Constellation hard disk that I bought on ebay for a very nice price.  Constellation disks are quite a bit more expensive than "regular" disks (read, double to almost thrice the price) because the former are made much more sturdy for use in servers, since in servers disks are constantly severely in use 24-hours a day, seven days a week...

Problem is that this Constellation disks appears to be of the SAS variety. SAS is a variation on the SATA connection (PATA was Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment and had a 4-pins molex for power and a 40-pins flat-cable for data; SATA is Serial Advanced Technology and has a 15-pins power cable and a 7-pins data cable)

PATA and SATA (as well as SAS) are protocols used to communicate between mainboard/operating system and the hard drive.

SAS (which stands for Serial Attached SCSI) has the possibility to attach more than one hard drive to the same mainboard connection, while SATA is always one-on-one.  Normally, the difference is the kind of cable: instead of a one-on-one cable, you have, for example a one (for the mainboard) on four cable (for four SAS hard drives).

But that isn't the problem.  Where the shoe wrings in my case, is that SAS hard drives have two sets of connections: the regular 15- plus 7-pins and a 22-pins.  Now, the amount of pins and their purpose are the same, but with regular SATA and/or SAS, you have the pins on the hard drive sitting under an L-shaped ledge, with the short end of the "L" sitting left for the data cable and right for thepower cable.

The second type of SAS is just one connector with one long, straight ledge on the drive.  Which means there's no way you can fit the regular L-shaped plugs on the drive.  That's why I had to order this 22-pins cable...

Second slight inconvenience is that my mainboard doesn't have the SAS protocol.  That means of course that, even with the right connector now in my possession, I won't be able to use the Constellation hard drive since the latter can't communicate with the operating system -and vice versa- because the mainboard lacks the needed hard- and software.

Only thing I can do -besides reselling the drive- is to buy a new mainboard.  Since I already wanted to buy a new mainboard because of having run out on SATA connectors (got ten connectors on the current AsRock P67 Fatal1ty Pro board and have eight hard drives and two burners).

But the baord I was going to get would normally have been a so-called socket 2011 board.  The socket (also called LGA -Land Grid Array) is the space where the CPU (Central Processing Unit) is sitting and is mentioned by way of the amount of copper connections it has on the bottom.  For the "Pentium IV" it was first 416 and later 478 copper pins or Socket 478.  For the Pentium D and then the Core Duo processors, it was 775 contacts (they did away with the pins because sometimes, when swapping a processor, the CPU got stuck on the back of the cooling block through the cooling paste you have to apply in order to get smooth, overall cooling, and when removing said block you pulled the CPU out of its socket before you could shift the handle that blocks the CPU in its place, sometimes resulting in one or more CPU pins breaking off and you could throw away the CPU).

For the i7 generation it was first the socket 1366 (X58 chipset, running on triple-channel DDR3 RAM) and later the socket 1156 (P55 chipset, running on dual-channel DDR3 RAM). For the LGA1156, new i5 and i3 processors where developed.
Then came the i7 Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge which have a socket 1155 or 2011 and the latest are the socket 1150 boards...

So, back to the socket 2011 board I wanted to buy, the AsRock X79 Extreme 11.  This a board would entice that I also buy a new processor, since I own an Intel i7 Sandy Bridge 2600K CPU.  The thing is that the three processors in the socket 2011 range are either the same price as my 2600K and perform the same too, or are much more expensive and don't give enough of an advantage over my 2600K to warrant the exessive investment.

Problem was that this socket 2011 board was the only one that had more than ten SATA connectors (14, to be exact).  But AsRock came to my rescue when releasing that Extreme 11 mainboard for the socket 1155.  Which means I don't have to buy a new processor.

To complete my joy, the AsRock Z77 Extreme 11 has fourteen! SATA connectors, of which four support the aformentioned SAS protocol.  It is (was?) also the only board which had the SATA controller under one Intel driver, as to where before the Intel driver supported only part of the SATA connectors and an other part was supported by Marvell.

I must add that I experienced problems with both drivers from Intel and Marvell when all 10 connectors are occupied.  After reading a round-up of the Extreme 11 board on Tom's Hardware, I was pleased to learn that the sole Intel driver was more than capable of steering all 14 connectors, which is exactly what I need.

Now, I'll probably have to find some kind of sponsorship -or go down to the pub and sing for a few pop a song- as that AsRock Z77 Extreme 11 motherboard costs over 400 euro...

Wish me luck.
JJ

Pioneer VSX 422K Surround Receiver

Got this little bugger on ebay from a German retailer, brand new in the box, for a hundred and ten Euro less than what I would have paid in Belgium: €186 (plus €20 for p&p) against €300 (plus €15 for p&p).

I had the 422K in my sights for a while, although I would have liked its bigger brother more, but that one (the VSX 922K) is priced at €550 -almost twice the amount for the VSX 422k.

Once I had the 422K set- and hooked-up, I remembered why I would rather have bought the 922K.  First off, the 422K -like the 922K- has an on-screen display with a menu, except that with the 922K this menu is sent through the HDMI cable, but with my receiver it's not.  You have to hang the receiver to the TV with a yellow-red-white cable (of which the yellow is the important one, since that's the one providing the picture) and plug the yellow cable into the "monitor" inlet of the receiver.

There's no problem with that -luckily- since my Samsung 46" LED TV has a whole bunch of possible connections, the y-r-w connection being one of them.  The inconvenience is that you need the remote of the tv to switch incoming sources to see the display of the receiver -and more importantly, find the needed cable first.

Normally, one doesn't need the receiver's on-screen display, except for the annoying announcement which keeps scrolling across the receiver's display, telling you about some automatic sound set-up called MCACC or Multi-Channel ACoustic Calibration (something like Technic's "Pink-Noise", years ago).  This announcement can only gotten rid of after having disabled it through the receiver's menu, for which of course you first must look for that damned y-r-w cable and wring yerself behind the TV and receiver to make the connection.

Normally I never use such nifty gadgets because usually they don't amount to much.  But I read some good things about this auto-calibration thing when informing myself on the net about the 422K and decided to have a go.

What you do is, get the microphone which comes with the receiver, plug it into the VSX 422K -mini-jack is conveniently placed at the front- and then sit in the chair you usually use for watching TV and place the microphone as close to your ears as possible -I placed it on top of my head- and start the self-diagnostic sequences.

All the receiver does is first test the room for environmental noises (it even tells you it stops the test when there's too much background noise and even advises to reduce the noise for the receiver to be able to restart testing) then it sends a white noise to all the available channels (six) to determine how many speakers are connected.

After this first test, the receiver's MCACC tests the acoustics of the room, determines where the speakers are situated in regard to where the microphone -and thus you- sits and on that basis it sets the noise levels for the different speakers as well as adapting the settings for the built-in equalizer and it's pre-sets.

I must confess that there's a huge difference in sound quality with the settings after the auto-calibration.  I fiddled around with the manual settings for the speakers -the latter sadly overruns the auto-calibration settings- and had a go at some sweet tunes (Iced Earth's three-piece "Gettysburg 1864" suite on the bonus disc for their 2004 album "The Glorious Burden"), then I re-calibrated with the receiver's MCACC and was blown away with the difference in sound (speaking of sound: don't do the calibrating at night, like I did the first time around, because the test noises grow seriously in decibels along the way, making unsuspecting neighbours unhappy).

It's really the difference between day and night.  I mean, the receiver sounds pretty good for such a low priced, entry level apparatus, but after the auto-calibration, the VSX 422K sounds like a million bucks.

Okay, so I've been out of the hifi-loop for a while. Bar my Logitech Z5500 5.1 surround system, the last stand-alone receiver I had was the Pioneer VSX 809.  A 4.1 receiver bought in 1994 which sounded okay-ish.

Compared to the VSX 422K, that older Pioneer sounds like a mid-sixties handheld AM radio.  Sure, there's almost 20 years between them, but the difference in sound quality is mind boggling.

But back to my gripes with the 422K.  So, like I said, the on-screen display can only be seen with the right cable.  Another letdown is that the VSX 422K doesn't have a J45 network connection.  Not really necessary, but mighty handy for upgrading the software for the receiver.

Third inconvenience is that there's no USB connection either.  Furthermore, there's only one set of stereo speakers that can be hooked up.  My VSX 809 had, besides the surround channels, an extra pair of speaker connectors.  Usually both sets are marked as "A" and "B".  Such a second set can be handy when wanting to use speakers in a different room other than where the main speakers are situated, like in the kitchen or even a bedroom: it keeps you from having to buy a second amp/receiver.  Simply switch from speaker set A to speaker set B and yer done.

Last inconvenience -and the most important to me- is the tiny buttons on the remote.  With my deteriorating eyesight, I need a flashlight to shine over the buttons to be able to see what's written underneath the lot.  If there's even something written underneath.  Most buttons have some little sign for which you need the manual in order to decipher what the meaning of those glyphs is.  But, there's no paper manual with the receiver.  So, you need the disc that came with the 422K and a computer nearby to be able to read the manual...

To help you out with the result of some button pushing, there's markings on the front of the receiver, underneath some ill-fed LEDs.  Problem is that the explanatory text is so small that you need to kneel in front of the receiver and stick yer nose against it -preferably armed with aformentioned flashlight- to again be able to make out what exactly is being communicated here.

To make a long story short: the Pioneer VSX 422K has a great sound for its price, but it seriously lacks in the user-friendly department.  But do I care?  Not really, no.  Which makes this slab of text rather pointless, now doesn't it...

JJ

New place, old me...

Well, I'm finally starting to settle in my new place.  It's quite fun to be needing something and not knowing where you've actually put it.

New appartment is about three times the space I used to live and still I seem to lack room.  Okay, so I bought an extra cupboard and put my dinner table with it's six chairs together -something I couldn't do in the "old" place- and I've also bought that four-doors wardrobe.  The latter is sitting in the bedroom (no kidding) which is spacious enough to hold the wardrobe and the matching double bed plus an extra small linen cupboard.

It's the living area which seems to get cramped.  Maybe because I divided it in two with a self-made two meters by two meters loose CD-storage (or what this "wall" was originally used for): one side holds the dining table and the chairs -plus two cupboards- and the other side has my Samsung 46" TV on a new, small table and three Ikea easy chairs plus two telescopic tripods for the rear speakers of my JBL XTi20 surround system.

For the latter I found a half-decent surround receiver, the Pioneer VSX-422, which got its place underneath the TV set, with my Samsung BluRay player on top of the receiver and the JBL center speaker on the floor underneath the receiver.

Must say that the JBL speakers give a really nice sound but are lacking in the bass department.  Mainly because there was no subwoofer included in the set, but also because the Pioneer receiver hasn't got that much bass to play with.  Instead of a knob on the receiver, it's a button on the remote which can go "six" up and/or down from the standard "zero" level.  Since the surround set is mainly going to be used for watching movies, the lack in lower levels isn't that much of a problem.

For music, I use my computer with a Logitech Z5500 5.1 surround set anyway, hooked-up to a Creative Fatality XFi Titanium soundcard.  Plus, should I really want to, I could always sell the Pioneer/JBL combo on ebay and use my second Logitech Z5500 set for the TV.  I bought that second set on ebay for "spare parts" should I run into trouble with my original Z5500, since the latter isn't manufactured any longer and was replaced by the Z906 of which the build quality of the electronic components is rather dubious in my opinion.

But I seriously doubt I would sell the JBL speakers.  They give an impressively crisp sound, even on that "cheapish" Pioneer and without a subwoofer.  I have always been satisfied with the Logitech Z5500's sound -especially the subwoofer is tremendous- until I started using those JBL XTi20 speakers.  That is to say, I am still satisfied with the Z5500 set, but those JBL's are so much nicer to the ears.  Well, to mine anyway...

I'll be back,
JJ