I FOUND INFO ON THAT TRIBE, THEY'RE CALLED THE DOGON!! (yeah, how good am I!)

Now, I messed up a few times, it's 60 years not 75 years and...other, um, stuff too. HERE is the actual info-stufff-thing...ahem, just read.

(THERE IS A LOT!!!)

“Did amphibious beings from the star Sirius visit the earth 5,000 or more years ago and leave advanced astronomical knowledge that is still possessed by a remote African tribe called the Dogon? This astonishing claim was put forward in 1976 by Robert Temple in his "ancient astronaut" book, The Sirius Mystery. An astronomer, familiar with the Sirius system, would say no, because astronomical theory virtually precludes the possibility that Sirius is a suitable parent star for life or that it could have habitable planets. But most of Robert Temple's readers would not know enough astronomy to judge the matter for themselves. Neither would they find the relevant astronomical information in Temple's book, most of which consists of brain-numbing excursions into Egyptology. (Isaac Asimov has been quoted by Temple as having said that he found no mistakes in the book; but Temple did not know that the reason for this, according to Asimov, was that he had found the book too impenetrable to read!*) Even the BBC-TV Horizon investigation on ancient astronauts (broadcast as part of the PBS "Nova" series in the United States), which did an otherwise excellent demolition job on the more extreme fantasies of Erich von Däniken, left the Sirius problem unanswered because of its extreme complexity. Yet an answer is needed, because the Dogon legends about a companion to Sirius are claimed to originate before any terrestrial astronomer could have known of the existence of Sirius B, let alone its 50-year orbit or its nature as a tiny, condensed white dwarf star, all of which the Dogon allegedly knew. So what is the truth about the Dogon and Sirius? Does astronomical and anthropological information omitted by Temple help us to resolve this most baffling of all ancient astronaut cases?
First, let's recap Temple's story. At the center of the mystery are the Dogon people living near Bandiagara, about 300 kilometers south of Timbuktu, Mali, in western Africa. Knowledge of their customs and beliefs comes from the French anthropologists Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who worked among the Dogon from 1931 to 1952. Between 1946 and 1950 the Dogon head tribesmen unfolded to Griaule and Dieterlen the innermost secrets of their knowledge of astronomy. Much of this secret lore is complex and obscure, as befits ancient legends, but certain specific facts stand out, particularly those concerning the star Sirius, with which their religion and culture is deeply concerned. In the information imparted to the French anthropologists, the Dogon referred to a small and super-dense companion of Sirius, made of matter heavier than anything on Earth, and moving in a 50-year elliptical orbit around its parent star. The white dwarf companion of Sirius which answers to this description was not seen until 1862, when the American optician Alvan Graham Clark spotted it while testing a new telescope; the superdense nature of white dwarfs was not realized until the 1920s. But the Dogon Sirius traditions are at least centuries old. How can we account for the remarkable accord between ancient Dogon legends and modern astronomical fact?
Temple's answer, since espoused by Erich von Däniken (of course!), was that the Dogon were told by extraterrestrial visitors. A Dogon legend, similar to many other tales by primitive people of visits from the sky, speaks of an "ark" descending to the ground amid a great wind. Robert Temple interprets this as the landing of a rocket-powered spacecraft bringing beings from the star Sirius. According to Dogon legend, the descent of the ark brought to Earth an amphibious being, or group of beings, known as the Nommo. "Nommo is the collective name for the great culture-hero and founder of civilization who came from the Sirius system to set up society on the Earth," Temple explains in his book. The Nommo were amphibious, he presumes, because water would keep them cool and absorb short-wavelength radiation from the hot star Sirius.
Much of Temple's book is devoted to establishing that the Dogon share common roots with Mediterranean peoples. This explains the central place occupied by Sirius in Dogon beliefs, because the ancient Egyptians, in particular, were also preoccupied with Sirius, basing their calendar on its yearly motion. But is there any explanation of the apparent Dogon belief in life in the Sirius system?
First, let's look at what astronomers know about Sirius to see if it is at least theoretically plausible that advanced life might have arisen in its vicinity. Sirius A, the brightest star in the night sky as seen from Earth, has a mass 2.35 times that of the sun. Its white dwarf companion, Sirius B, has a mass of 0.99 suns. Stellar evolutionary theory tells us that the most massive stars burn out the quickest, so that originally Sirius B must have been the more massive of the two, before burning out to become a white dwarf. Probably Sirius B spilled over some of its gas onto Sirius A during its aging process, so that the original masses of the two stars were approximately the reverse of what we see today.
A star with twice the sun's mass, as Sirius B probably had, can live for no more than about 1,000 million years before swelling up into a red giant; this does not seem long enough for advanced life to develop. But had life evolved, it would have disappeared during the red giant stage of Sirius B, when any nearby planet would have been roasted by the star's increased energy output, followed by a stellar gale for at least 100,000 years as hot gas streamed from Sirius B to Sirius A. During this mass transfer the two stars would have moved apart, thereby destabilizing the orbits of any planets in the system. According to observations of Sirius B as analyzed by H. L. Shipman of the University of Delaware, Sirius B has been a cooling-down white dwarf for at least 30 million years. Sirius B is now emitting soft x-rays, so that life in the region of Sirius would not be very pleasant today. But in any case, Robert S. Harrington of the U.S. Naval Observatory has recently shown that planetary orbits in the "habitable" zone around Sirius, defined as the region in which water would be liquid, are unstable. So there are unlikely to be any amphibious beings living on planets in the Sirius system today, if indeed any such beings ever lived there.
Temple offers one prediction which allows a test of his theory. In his book he says: "What if this is proven by our detecting on our radio telescopes actual traces of local radio communications?" To help in my investigation of the Sirius mystery, I asked radio astronomers Paul Feldman at the Algonquin radio observatory, Canada, and Robert S. Dixon at the Ohio State University radio observatory, both of whom are carrying out searches for extraterrestrial signals, to listen to Sirius. They would normally have paid the star no attention, because of the extreme unlikelihood of its supporting life. In April 1977 both radio astronomers listened to Sirius on different wavelengths, without detecting any artificial signals.
With this information in mind, let's look more skeptically at the Dogon legend. Immediately, we encounter a surprise: the Dogon maintain that Sirius has two companions, not one. These companions have male and female attributes, respectively. It seems that they are not to be interpreted literally as stars, but as fertility symbols. Nowhere is this better shown than in a Dogon sand diagram of the complete Sirius system, shown in the illustration redrawn here from a paper by Griaule and Dieterlen. Its description, given in the caption from information by Griaule and Dieterlen, is clearly symbolic; Temple chooses to interpret it literally. On pages 23 and 25 of his book he gives his own modified version of this diagram, retaining the symbol for Sirius, one of the positions of Sirius B, and the surrounding oval; all else is omitted. He then interprets the surrounding oval meant to represent "the egg of the world," as the elliptical orbit of Sirius B around Sirius A, even though the symbol equated with Sirius B is drawn as lying within the oval, not on it. This is Temple's basis for saying that the Dogon "know" Sirius B orbits Sirius A in an ellipse.
The Dogon are also supposed to know that Sirius B orbits every 50 years. But what do they actually say? Griaule and Dieterlen put it as follows: "The period of the orbit is counted double, that is, one hundred years, because the Siguis are convened in pairs of 'twins,' so as to insist on the basic principle of twinness." The Sigui ceremony referred to is a ceremony of the renovation of the world that is celebrated every 60 years (not 50). And the "twinness" referred to here is an important Dogon concept which explains why they believe Sirius must have two companions.
Is there any astronomical evidence that Sirius has more than one companion star? Some astronomers in the 1920s and 1930s thought they had glimpsed a third member of the Sirius system, but new and more accurate observations reported in 1973 by Irving W. Lindenblad of the U.S. Naval Observatory, Washington, D.C., showed no evidence of a close companion to either Sirius A or Sirius B.
The whole Dogon legend of Sirius and its companions is riddled with ambiguities, contradictions, and downright errors, at least if we try to interpret it literally. But what can we make of the Dogon statement that Sirius B is the smallest and heaviest star, consisting of a heavy metal known as sagala? Sirius B was certainly the smallest and heaviest star known in the 1920s, when the super-dense nature of white dwarfs was becoming understood; the material of which white dwarfs are made is indeed compressed more densely than metal. Now, though, hundreds of white dwarfs are known, not to mention neutron stars, which are far smaller and denser. Any visiting spaceman would certainly have known about these, as well as black holes.
Dogon sand drawing of the complete Sirius system, after Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen. A, Sirius; B, po tolo, the object equated with Sirius B, shown in two positions; C, emme ya, the sun of women, equated with Sirius C; D, the Nommo; E, the Yourougou, a mythical male figure destined to pursue his female twin; F, the star of women, a satellite of emma ya; G, the sign of women; H, the sex of women, represented by a womb shape. The whole system is enclosed in an oval, representing the egg of the world.
Perhaps one would forgive Robert Temple for believing that the Dogon had been visited by men from Sirius if their legend specifically stated so. But it does not! Nowhere in his 290-page book does Temple offer one specific statement from the Dogon to substantiate his ancient astronauts claim. The best he does is on page 217, where he reports that the Dogon say: "Po tolo [Sirius B] and Sirius were once where the Sun now is." Of this ambiguous statement, Temple comments: "That seems as good a way as any to describe coming to our solar system from the Sirius system, and leaving those stars for our star, the Sun." But this cannot conceal the fact that the whole Sirius "mystery" is based on Temple's own unwarranted assumption.
The parts of Dogon knowledge that are admittedly both ancient and profound, particularly the story of Nommo and the concept of twinning, are the parts that bear least relation to the true facts about Sirius. The parts that bear at least superficial resemblance to astronomical fact are most likely trimmings added in this century. Indeed, in view of the Dogon fixation with Sirius it would surely be more surprising if they had not grafted on to their existing legend some new astronomical information gained from Europeans, picking what fitted their purpose and ignoring the rest.
Carl Sagan has underlined how easily information gained from Westerners can be absorbed into native culture. He recounts the true case of the physician Carleton Gajdusek in New Guinea, who was approached by a scientific colleague who had found that some local natives believed that a certain disease was transmitted in the form of an invisible spirit that entered the skin of a patient. The native informant had sketched with a stick in the sand a circle outside which, he explained, was black, and inside which was light. Within the circle the informant drew a squiggly line to represent the appearance of these invisible malevolent spirits. How did the natives get such an astounding insight into the transmission of disease by microbes? Years earlier, Gajdusek himself had shown the natives the appearance of a disease-causing germ through his microscope, and the sand drawing was simply the natives' recollection of this deeply impressive sight.
It is all too easy for Westerners to think of African tribes as isolated, uneducated, and ignorant. But the Dogon are not isolated. They live near an overland trade route, as well as close to the banks of the Niger River, an important channel of trade. Any number of travelers could have come into their midst, or Dogon tribesmen could have journeyed to the coast, where they might have met astronomically informed seamen. The Dogon have been in contact with Europeans since at least the late nineteenth century.
Nor are they uneducated and ignorant. Peter and Roland Pesch of the Warner and Swasey Observatory in Ohio have pointed out that French schools have existed in the Dogon area since 1907. Dogon tribesmen wishing to pursue their education have been able to do so in nearby towns. Then there are missionaries, who would naturally be interested in the legends of the natives. Missionaries from the White Fathers made contact with the Dogon in the 1920s. It is tempting to speculate that certain of the more specific details about Sirius B were grafted onto the existing Sirius legend at that time, because it was in the 1920s that astronomers were discovering the true nature of Sirius B as a tiny, super-dense star, and white dwarfs were being accorded the same kind of publicity as attends black holes today. Alas, there is no mention in the missionaries' summary reports of their activities that they discussed Sirius with the Dogon; if more detailed notes were published, these might throw more light on the origin and antiquity of Dogon myths.
The point is that there are any number of channels by which the Dogon could have received Western knowledge long before they were visited by Griaule and Dieterlen. We may never be able to reconstruct the exact route by which the Dogon received their current knowledge, but out of the confusion at least one thing is clear: they were not told by beings from the star Sirius.”
http://www.csicop.org/si/7809/sirius.html

NEW WEBSITE

“In Mali, West Africa, lives a tribe of people called the Dogon. The Dogon are believed to be of Egyptian decent and their astronomical lore goes back thousands of years to 3200 BC. According to their traditions, the star Sirius has a companion star which is invisible to the human eye. This companion star has a 50 year elliptical orbit around the visible Sirius and is extremely heavy. It also rotates on its axis.

This legend might be of little interest to anybody but the two French anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germain Dieterlen, who recorded it from four Dogon priests in the 1930's. Of little interest except that it is exactly true. How did a people who lacked any kind of astronomical devices know so much about an invisible star? The star, which scientists call Sirius B, wasn't even photographed until it was done by a large telescope in 1970.

The Dogon stories explain that also. According to their oral traditions, a race people from the Sirius system called the Nommos visited Earth thousands of years ago. The Nommos were ugly, amphibious beings that resembled mermen and mermaids. They also appear in Babylonian, Accadian, and Sumerian myths. The Egyptian Goddess Isis, who is sometimes depicted as a mermaid, is also linked with the star Sirius.

The Nommos, according to the Dogon legend, lived on a planet that orbits another star in the Sirius system. They landed on Earth in an "ark" that made a spinning decent to the ground with great noise and wind. It was the Nommos that gave the Dogon the knowledge about Sirius B.

The legend goes on to say the Nommos also furnished the Dogon's with some interesting information about our own solar system: That the planet Jupiter has four major moons, that Saturn has rings and that the planets orbit the sun. These were all facts discovered by Westerners only after Galileo invented the telescope.

The story of the Dogon and their legend was first brought to popular attention by Robert K.G. Temple in a book published in 1977 called The Sirius Mystery. Science writer Ian Ridpath and astronomer Carl Sagan made a reply to Temple's book, suggesting that this modern knowledge about Sirius must have come from Westerners who discussed astronomy with the Dogon priests. The priests then included this new information into the older traditions. This, in turn, mislead the anthropologists.

This is a possibility considering Sirius B's existence was suspected as early as 1844 and seen was through a telescope in 1862. It doesn't seem to explain a 400-year old Dogon artifact that apparently depicts the Sirius configuration nor the ceremonies held by the Dogon since the 13th century to celebrate the cycle of Sirius A and B. It also doesn't explain how the Dogons knew about the super-density of Sirius B, a fact only discovered a few years before the anthropologists recorded the Dogon stories.

It is also important to remember that although many parts of the Dogon legends seem to ring true, other portions are clearly mistaken. One of the Dogon's beliefs is that Sirius B occupied the place where our Sun is now. Physics clearly prohibits this. Also, if the Dogon believe that Sirius B orbits Sirius A every 50 years, why do they hold their celebrations every 60 years?

Sirius A is the brightest star in our sky and can easily be seen in the winter months in the northern hemisphere. Look for the constellation Orion. Orion's belt are the three bright stars in a row. Follow an imaginary line through the three stars to Sirius which is just above the horizon. It is bluish in color.

Sirius is only 8.6 light years from Earth. Astronomer W.Bessel was the first to suspect that Sirius had an invisible companion when he observed that the path of the star wobbled. In the 1920's it was determined that Sirius B, the companion of Sirius, was a "white dwarf" star. The pull of its gravity caused Sirius's wavy movement.

White dwarfs are small, dense stars that burn dimly. Sirius B is, in fact, smaller than the planet Earth. One teaspoon of Sirius B is so dense that it weighs 5 tons.

So did alien fish-men pay a visit to ancient Earth and give the Dogon their knowledge? Or was the Dogon's culture contaminated by western visitors? Or could the Dogon's have had ancient technical or non-technical means to find this information out? Or is the whole thing just a matter of coincidence?

The question maybe settled as larger and more powerful telescopes take a look at the Sirius system. According to the legend there is a third star: Sirius C, and it is around Sirius C that the home planet of the Nommos orbits. Most scientists do not consider any part of the Sirius system a prime candidate for life, though.

When Temple first issued his book in the 1970's there was no solid evidence of a Sirius C. In 1995, however, two French researchers, Daniel Benest and J.L. Duvent, authored an article in the prestigious journal Astronomy and Astrophysics with the title Is Sirius a Triple Star? and suggested (based on observations of motions in the Sirius system) there is a small third star there. They thought the star was probably of a type known as a "red dwarf" and only had about .05 the mass of Sirius B.

So has the home star of the Nommos been discovered? Or is this just another strange coincidence?”
http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc118.htm

NEW WEBSITE
“Temple transcribed Griaule and Dieterlen's article called "A Sudanese Sirius System". It describes the Sigui ceremony which occurs every 60 years. Below is a sample:
"More consistent evidence of the celebration of the Sigui is provided by the large wooden mask, whose carving is one of the major concrete purposes of the ceremony. This mask -usually of considerable size - is seldom used and is kept in some shelter or hideaway in the rocks, along with those which have been carved at previous ceremonies. The care with which these masks are treated - for in some ways they are the village archives - means that it is not uncommon to come across series of three or four of them, the oldest of which date back, respectively ***to 1780 and 1720***, give or take a year or two. In exceptional cases, when the shelter has been well selected and under constant surveillance, the series may be longer still; thus at Ibi, in 1931, nine poles were counted, and these must have succeeded three more which had been reduced to a few fragments and piles of dust and were still visible; as were the special places earmarked for them at the back of the shelter, all perfectly protected from damp, vermin and animals. The oldest in the series of nine, which showed a continuous progression of ageing in the course of time, thus date from the beginning of the ***fifteenth century***; and if the three others are taken into account, the remnants of the earliest would date back to the first half of the ***thirteenth century.***" The Sirius Mystery pg.37-39”
http://skepdic.com/comments/dogoncom.html

NEW WEBSITE
“Sirius (A) is known by astronomers to be the brightest star seen from planet Earth. It is part of the constellation Canis Major. It is about 8.7 light-years from Earth and is visible in the Northern hemisphere evening sky from about November through April. Sirius is over 20 times brighter than our Sun.
From 1834 to 1844 some irregularities were noticed in the movement of Sirius by F.W. Bessel. It was supposed that Sirius must be affected by a second star, and in 1862 a faint companion star was finally detected by Alvan Clark, and it was named Sirius B. It is a white dwarf that, although small and faint (about 10,000 times dimmer than Sirius A) is is extremely dense and heavy enough to exert influence on Sirius A. In 1915 the first spectrum op Sirius B was obtained by W.Adams at Mt. Wilson, which is 'all that would have been needed to classify it as a white dwarf (very small, yet very massive : one teaspoon of Sirius B is so dense that it weighs 5 tons! Only in 1970 the first photograph could be taken of Sirius B by Dr. Irving W. Lendenblad of the US Naval Observatory. The picture looks like this: (Sirius A in the middle and Sirius B in the lower-right corner)


In 1995 two French researchers (Daniel Benest and J.L. Duvent) published an article in Astronomy and Astrophysics with the title Is Sirius a Triple Star?. They suggest that there might be a third star, a Sirius C. Here's an abstract of the article:
Abstract (from http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/): Sirius has been discovered as double more than 130 years ago. From the beginning of our century up to now, observational as well as physical and dynamical indications lead to the hypothesis of the existence of a third body in the system. In this paper, we present recent orbital analysis of the binary Sirius A-B which, helped by numerical simulation of triple systems, strengthens the idea for the triplicity of Sirius: a tiny star could revolve in about 6 years around Sirius A. Finally, we discuss the possibility of direct detection for this suspected Sirius C.

Two French anthropologists in the 1930's
Somewhere in the 1930's two French anthropologists (Marcel Griaule and Germain Dieterlen) were able to win the confidence of four Dogon priests of the Dogon people who live in the Homburi mountains near Timbuktu in Mali, West-Africa. The things they told these researchers are quite out of the ordinary. That is, at the center of their religious teachings is knowledge about a star that is invisible to the eye, which they call Po Tolo (Po=smallest seed known to the Dogon; Tolo=star). The priests said that 'Po Tolo' has an elliptical orbit around Sirius (A) and that the orbital period is 50 years (the actual figure is 50.04 +/- 0.09 years). Po Tolo was said to rotate on its own axis (it does). The Dogon also describe a third star in the Sirius system, called Emme Ya ("Sorghum Female"). On top of this knowledge their world-view was heliocentric and they knew about four moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. How could they have known all this?
They claim that the knowledge was given to them by a race people from the Sirius system called the Nommos ("to make one drink") who visited Earth thousands of years ago. They are said to have come from a planet orbiting Sirius C. The Nommos were ugly, amphibious beings that resembled mermen and mermaids. These Nommos are said to also occur in Babylonian, Accadian, and Sumerian myths (the Sumerian's god 'Oannes' is said to be very similar to the Dogon description of Nommos). According to the Dogon legend, the Nammos lived on a planet that orbits another star in the Sirius system. They landed on Earth in an 'ark' that made a spinning descend to the ground with great noise and wind.
The Dogons have celebrated their customs for hundreds and hundreds of years which can be determined by numbering the ornate customs and relics that their leaders prepared for their great festival held once every 60 years. With several extant masks in various stages of decay, researchers have determined Dogon traditions to be well over a thousand years old.
Criticism
Although the Dogon-story is mind-boggling when it is true. Some critics strongly doubt the validity of it all. In response to a book ('The Sirius Mystery') written by Robert K.G. Temple in 1977 (with a more recent version, responding to the possible trinary nature of Sirius) astronomer Carl Sagan said that modern knowledge of Sirius must have come from westerners who must have talked to the Dogon priests before the anthropologists arrived. The priests probably incorporated these facts into their traditions.
This, however, does not explain a 400-year old Dogon artifact that apparently depicts the Sirius configuration nor the ceremonies held by the Dogon since the 13th century to celebrate the cycle of Sirius A en B. It also doesn't explain how the Dogons knew about the super-density of Sirius B, a fact only discovered a few years before the anthropologists recorded the Dogon stories.
In 1992 Walter van Beek, a Dutch Professor from the University of Utrecht, published an article in Current Anthropology named 'Dogon Restudied'. He studied the Dogon and could not find any evidence that they knew Sirius was a double star. Another source (Jay Ingram) says that van Beek found that the vast majority of these people knew nothing about Sirius having an invisible companion. According to Thomas Bullard, van Beek speculates that Griaule (the French anthropologist) wished to affirm the complexity of African religions and questioned his informants in such a forceful leading manner that they created new myths by confabulation.
The festivities mentioned above which take place every sixty years are not in compliance with the 50 years periode of Sirius B around Sirius A.
Playfair & Hill
In 'The Cycles of Heaven' by Guy Playfair and Scott Hill (1978) we can read about the Dogon as well. In addition to the information already presented above they say that the Dogon have long known about the circulation of the blood: they have known that there is 'red and white blood'. They have compared the bloodstream with the Milky Way. The Dogon claim that life on Earth descends from amphibious creatures from the Sirius system who came here in spacecraft. These include descriptions of a third star in the Sirius system, larger than Sirius B, with an orbital period of 32 years, and also a planet. (p.247)
While reading the 'Pleiadean Agenda', from which I took the quote on top of the page, I first encountered the Dogon tribe. Curious to see what is known about the possible links between these African people and Sirius I started to look on the Internet and I collected information from various sources. I intend to photocopy the two scientific articles mentioned in the articles-section, so I can have a first-hand look at these sources.
I tend to think that the Dogon-people (at least in the 1930's) knew about Sirius B, Sirius C, four moons of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn, not from Western scientists, but from another source. It is rather strange to think of beings from a Sirian C planet to have come to Earth to instruct both the Dogon and the Egyptians, probably somewhere around 3600 B.C., in pre-dynastic Egypt (in an article by Jasmine Courneya I read that the Sirius information was possessed by the Egyptians in pre-dynastic times before 3200 B.C.). This periode strongly reminds me of something I came across in this Pleiadean agenda concerning the Nibiru-planet. For those who are interested in the possibility that the Nommos are actualy beings from Nibiru, try to delve into Nibiruan texts and the interesting Sumerian stories on Enki and Enlil. The work of the scholar Sir Laurence Gardner on the Sumerian texts and the Bible has some ground in common with this possible link with the Nibiruan Annunaki who are supposed to have come from Sirius as well. In order to clarify the links between Earth, Nibiru and the Siriusstars I have provided the interested reader with a Digitaria page. I still don't know what to think really.”
http://home-2.worldonline.nl/~gibbon/dogon.htm

“Sirius and the Dogon people
From Wikipedia
Dogon mythology seems to describe Sirius B, which is not visible without the use of a telescope. Some of the information given by Dogon natives on the Sirius system was recorded before it was discovered by Western science.
“They call Sirius B Po Tolo. This star was the seed of the Milky Way galaxy and 'navel' of the entire universe, according to the Dogon mythological explanation of the universe. They describe the universe as "infinite, but measurable", and filled with many yalu ulo, or spiral star systems, including the one with our own sun.
According to the Dogon perception of the universe, most of the universe is part of the "external" star system, while nearer to Earth is the "internal" star system. The stars in the "internal" system include many that they claim affect the lives of people of Earth and play a part in human history, including not only the Sirius binary/ternary system, but also Orion, Pleiades and others.
The tribe neighbouring the Dogon, the Bozo, have a similar mythology about Sirius in the sky and refer to it as the "Eye Star."
According to some, the Dogons came in contact with an amphibious alien race, the Nommos, about 5000 years ago. The Nommos came from a planet orbiting Sirius and passed on information regarding the star system.”

I don't have time really to do things like sort through this much information. I have heaps of schoolwork. A test tomorrow, prodjects due, pages of math etc. All of that kind of stuff! ... dumb teachers...hmmmm

Maybe all of that stress is what made me go....CRAZY (but not insane) ...Who! HA! (ninja stule voice sounds)

i will cease my protests against the teaching of the teaching of religious creation stories in the classroom if they give all the religions a fair hearing. add the indic (hindu/buddhist/jain), zoroastrian, and tribal creation myths alongside the western one, and label them as "religious myths regarding the origin of existence," and there's not much to argue about.

of course, they have nothing to do with scientific theories of the origin of life/existence (evolution) and would be taught apart from them. the canon of religious mythology satisfies needs apart from those of the canon of scientific literature (traditional values/cultural myths and humanity's exploration into the nature of the universe.) science has two goals: end the troubles that have plagued humanity since time immemorial (disease, scarcity, war, and injustice) and understand the nature of the universe. religion has one goal: comfort people in the wake of the unavoidable sufferings of life (death, poverty, injustice). you needn't worry about poverty or inevitable death because God will give you unfathomable wealth and eternal life after you die. don't worry about the injustices inflicted upon you: they will reap the fruit of the misery they cause you when they die.

I am glad to live in the great country of Australia. At least this ID stupidity has not taken off yet (as far as I know or have heard). The most pathetic thing is all these people who believe in ID are posting threads on a science website.

Obviously all you people who believe in creationism have doubt that there really is a "super being." otherwise you would be contempt with the fact that you do not need to learn or read anything about science. As all observations and theories point to the Big Bang. You do not want to believe when you die, you die. END OF STORY

Just wanted to have my two cents about this topic.

new guy



You misquote, rationalize, twist and turn the scripture any way you wish,but you will still be wrong in your understanding of Jesus, your understanding of humanity and your complete lack of knowledge of what science is and what it tells us about the universe. To live in ignorance amidst such a bounty of wonder is sad, and, according to most peoples understanding, contrary to the principles of your religion(I know you will say that all you need to know is the Bible, but you would be wrong). The reasons I have misgivings about using scripture to support my positions are that, due to the many contradictions in the current translation, anyone can support any position with quotes, everyone has a right to their own understanding(Baptist, remember), it is a misuse of scripture to use it to cause harm to others(as a weapon), I certainly do not accept it as inerrant and without error(though there is wisdom there) and I reject all supernatural claims therein as the ignorant superstitions of ignorant men and the nefarious ambitions of a clerical elite set on control of the masses and reward in this world(while preaching pie in the sky)(never listen to a fat preacher,priest,pastor etc., especially if he drives a caddy)

So it is distasteful to me to use scripture as you do for self aggrandizement, you should stand on your own two feet, use your own brain and your own logic in your posts, if you cannot your efforts are wasted here, you won't gain converts, your threats mean nothing, proving you are accurate in your statements with such a flawed text in this forum is an exercise in futility, your infantile name calling belittles yourself and your poisonous brand of superstition will be exposed for the fertilizer(in polite terms) that it is.

I could care less who you are, your logic and behavior are all I see. So far neither has left a favorable impression(a nearly universal assessment). I have never seen a street preacher(which you remind me of) make a single convert(any claims of such are suspect). If you truly wish to save anyone you must modify your methods, starting with that sick website(remember, sugar not vinegar) that hides the good news behind a cloud of evil.

Do I expect change in your behavior? No, I'm not sure you are capable of it. Besides, it's a free country, behave as you wish. You are certainly free to ignore my advice, just as I am then free to ignore your blather. But we can always hope.

PS Lose the excess quote marks and bold letters, overuse bleeds the effectiveness out of both, makes you posts a pain to read and call into question your intelligence and wit.(also a near universal opinion)

Grumpy

Grumpy: Apparently your "universe" consists mainly of this forum, hence your repeated use of the term "nearly universal". You really should "get out" more often...possibly when someone accidentally leaves your cage door open. I "fit in" quite nicely with multitudes of people on this planet..."people", not self-professed "animals", being the operative word there. Have a nice day at the zoo.