further responses to comments and "arguments" agai
To all:
One has to wonder if there is some kind of a siren call to the unreasonable that makes the weak-minded pursue it, or whether sheer ill will and callous manner causes some to maintain a discredited concept.
Yet again, JerryB mouths the "explanation" for ley lines that they are formed by "trackways (which in open countryside tend to follow straight, shortest point to point A to point B lines)". Straight ley lines connect important sites, nay-sayers insist, because "a stragiht line is the shortest distance between two points, and, if people wanted to travel the shortest way to important places, they would site them all on a straight line path"! A straight line may be the shortest path between two points, but, as I've demonstrated several times - and the nay-sayers seem to insist on determinedly ignoring! - a straight line is not the most efficient plan for siting a number of significant spots! As I showed, if you have ten spots, along a straight line path, all one mile from the next spot, to travel from the first to the last, then back home, would be a distance of 20 miles or more! If they were placed in a circle of about 3.2 miles diameter, traveling between points would take up far less time! Deliberate siting of points - or even happenstance placement, to facilitate travel from existing spots - would never lead to a straight line placement!
It would be interesting to see what kind of "justifications" might be provided for "explanations" of straight line siting, that run counter to this reasoning! It would be interesting to see if anyone would try to argue that a 20 mile round trip could be easier than walking in a circle, and ending up back where you started after only 10 miles! If no legitimate explanation can be provided, then it would be hard to see if anything other than dim-witted inability to understand what was being said, or out-and-out malingering, could be at the root of continuing to insist that it is "natural" for peoples to lay out their important places in a straight line!
The conniving often try to gull the unwary by invoking professorially a technical fact, then proceed to misuse or misinterpret it! The unjustified extending of the "shortest distance between two points" characterization to more than two points appears a patent demonstration of just that! So much does it appear that way that it seems it should be established, right now, that any repetition of the "shortest distance between two points" statement, to "explain" ley lines, should be automatically viewed as a likely attempt to obfuscate the truth, by misleading the unwitting!
At this point, separate salient features should also be brought in.
JerryB asserts, too, that: "Things like pertrol [sic] stations, hospitals, libraries, etc. or pratically [sic] anything could possibly line up. This doesn't mean that there's any esoteric connection bewteen [sic] such sites." To be sure, in a densely populated area, it is possible to construct straight lines connecting any number of individual structures. But those JeeyB mentions cover a wide range of functions! The sites connected by ley lines constitute churches, shrines, birthplaces of saints, and so on! They all perform only the one, spiritual, function! Too, when the places sited along ley lines were built, the land was not as densely populated as JerryB posits in their "demonstration"! Finding ten points out of twenty thousand that lie along a line is not so difficult: finding ten points in a population of thirty that lie along a straight line is not so simple! Unless something was causing them to line up!
An important, but also apparently desperately ignored, point needs to be invoked here, as well.
Central to the "argument" of the nay-sayers, that important points naturally fall on straight lines, because those are the pathways people would naturally take, to go from one to the other, is that, in general, the pathways connecting points on ley lines are not straight lines! Many meander around hills, and divert deliberately to cross ancient bridges, or take advantage of natural fords! In fact, many of the sites that lie on ley lines aren't even connected directly by roads at all! When these sites were first constructed, road building was not as advanced as today, with immense earth movers to gouge out the land! Even today, in Chaco Canyon, Anasazi roads travel with geometric exactness, while modern day highways curve through the desert! Taking the path of least resistance!
And, in, for example, issue 111 of Science Frontiers, on
http://www.science-frontiers.com, it is revealed that the sites of Casas Grandes, Chaco Canyon, and a site of Aztec ruins in northern New Mexico all lie within one kilometer of the longitude line 107º 57’! The three sites cover a distance of 450 miles, yet lie very closely on the same straight line! There is no reason to assume that roads were constructed deliberately straightly, in those days, over this long a distance! But, more than that, JerryB’s and FraterLibre’s suggestion would be that, starting at one site - say, northern New Mexico - and moving on, the ancient peoples decided to populate as apparently barren a place as Chaco Canyon, simply because it was on the straight line path south!
Which also invokes another aspect of the nay-sayer “point of view”, which completely denies the human part of siting along ley lines! Namely, the fact that, generally, spiritually significant places are placed along these lines! The “arguments” for “shortest distance between two points” discuss paths “logical” in terms of trade and travel. But many of the spiritual sites do not conform to trade meccas! And people did not, apparently, construct a shrine, then walk a straight distance in a direction, then declare that they’re feeling spiritual again, and decide to construct another site! Too, many of the devoted, in any faith, do not value ease of travel in making pilgrimages! In many cases, they treasure the ability to undergo great privations, and travel hard roads, to reach a holy place! They would not be inclined to deliberately make the roads straight or short! In many ways, opposition to the consideration of the existence of ley lines evidently constitutes a denial of the spiritual side of human nature altogether!
The suggestion that important sites lie on straight lines because "the people traveling from one to the other naturally tended to take a short straight line path" seems little more than calculated fraud! Those who genuinely wish to pursue the understanding of the phenomenon will abandon this line of "reasoning", because it is not a valid line of "reasoning"! Pursuing this "explanation" also cannot easily be interpreted to be anything other than deliberate, and contemptuous, obstruction!
Taking yet another tack favored by those intending to oppose understanding, namely adopting an authoritarian attitude toward valid protestations, FraterLibre addresses my points in a previous post, saying: "yoiur [sic] attempted dismissal of valid scientific investigations is piffle"! Where, exactly, did I engage in "attempted dismissal of valid scientific investigations"? And this is more than a question. I insist that FraterLibre point out where I did that, or admit that they were lying about me! Deceit, in the service of preventing the truth, is rampant, and has to be opposed!
"Unless and until some actual "energy" or other physically-based reason for the supposed ley lines to be where they are said to be", FraterLibre asserts agrammatically, "then we're left only with human pattern-finding, as you say." Their "reasoning" is that, if you have not proved every single aspect of your assertion, then it must be completely abandoned as worthless and void! Yet, throughout the history of "traditional science", numerous subjects, even those FraterLibre has not been shown to "critique", have proceeded, even been accepted and recommended, without the fundamentals being proved! Darwin, for example, posted the handing down of characteristics by a potentially mutable medium, yet he and his adherents knew nothing of genes! Even today, "continental drift" is determinedly defended, yet geologists still do not profess to know what makes the land masses move! They make nebulous references to "conduction columns" in the mantle, but still do not state categorically that that is the cause! Indeed, no physicist even claims to know how photons and gravitons really work, or why mechanical mass should be the same entity as "gravitational charge", but that doesn't discredit relativity or electromagnetism, in the eyes of "traditional scientists"! And what if the influence that causes ley lines to be built upon is not one that is measurable by any instruments, not just the ones presently available? Does the fact that no devices can measure the force behind ley lines make them cease to exist? We are told that, for thousands of years, the equipment to measure magnetic force was not in existence, but magnetism existed, nonetheless!
To be sure, the nay-sayers may try to counter that humans can detect the influence behind ley lines, why else would they build along them? Use humans to measure the influence and prove it, they might recommend! Yet the nay-sayers also insist that the perception of ley line influence is also an “optical illusion”, in those “devices” suggested to measure the influence! The only “device” that, supposedly, can detect the influence behind ley lines is, thus, “disqualified” by nay-sayers! “Invalidating” precisely the means that can prove a point they don’t want others to know about is another tactic of those who seek to obstruct the truth!
Completely answering every question is not accepted as the litmus test for a legitimate theory, or even hypothesis! More recommended is the ability of a theory or hypothesis to predict occurrences! Specifically, even evolution has not satisfied that criterion, since not one occurrence of observed speciation has ever been predicted to occur! While the exact orientation of ley lines is not predicted in theory, yet, the fact that all places of spiritual import seem to fall on straight lines connecting them with more than one other such site is, apparently, confirmed!
Overall, there is no valid disclaimer that has been mounted against the basic proposition that spiritual sites conform to straight lines totally unrelated to routes of travel between them!
Julian Penrod
I think it tends to boil down to believing something about the Tor, rather than having anything tangible to focus on.
