Randall Carlson: Renaissance Man

We Stoics are philosophers who continue the tradition of the ancients, and in their time ancient philosophers studied everything. Absolutely everything. Every discipline, every science, every piece of literature... "Philosophy" itself means "the love of knowledge." They were generalists. Maybe we should be as well.

Randall Carlson is such a man. He has spent his life as a generalist. According to his website he is an architect, a master builder, a teacher, a geological explorer, and an independent scholar. His public work focuses on the idea that human beings had an advanced culture before a massive global flood wiped it out about 12,000 years ago, and that flood may have been caused by an asteroid strike.

That's strange.

He's also a Free Mason, which for many will place him in the realm of the looney fringe, and they will dismiss him. There's one problem; he has evidence.

Real, scientific evidence.

I'm not saying that you have to accept his ideas, but if you want to approach Mr. Carlson like an adult you certainly have to defeat his arguments, and his arguments are reasonable. He knows what he's talking about. You will have an uphill fight.

What Mr. Carlson really excels at is bringing together seemingly disparate information into a cohesive whole. He has found evidence for his theory in the following disciplines, among others:

History: hundreds of flood stories about throughout human culture, and those stories tend to be set about 12,000 years ago. One ancient Greek philosopher actually dates it to that period.

Geology: Geologists are now finding evidence that there was a massive flood 12,000 years ago. They can see shorelines etched into mountains. Also scientists have found melt glass all over the world. It's 12,000 years old and it's the result of a meteor shower.

Archeology: The Sphinx shows signs of water damage... in a desert. Gobleki Tepe, an ancient civilization discovered in Turkey in 1994, dates to, perhaps, 12,000 years ago, and then it seems to have been buried. That's 6,000 years before Ur. In other words the first city is as far away from Gobleki Tepi as it is from us. That staggers the imagination. Add to that the fact that the Gobleki Tepe site rests in the shadow of Mount Ararat... you get the idea.

Anthropology: Australian Aborigines have passed along stories of flood heroes for at least 10,000 years. In fact many cultures do. Here's a list, courtesy of The Omni Report:

Sumer: King Ziusudra
Babylon: Utnapishtim
Greece: Deucalion
China: Yu
India: Manu
Scandinavia: Bergelmir
Welsh: Dwyfan
East Africa: Tumbainot
Mongolia: Hailibu

Carlson reminds us that we have gone from riding horses to sending rocket ships to other planets in about 4-5 generations. What if we've done it before?

I know, I know, it's bizarre, and I don't accept it whole heartedly. I don't think that we were flying airplanes and using nuclear reactors 20,000 years ago. On the other hand humans made a massive monumental stone structure 6,000 years before they were supposed to. That actually happened. There was a time when most people thought that the idea that Vikings colonized North America was silly. Then we found their long houses. The world can be a surprising place. Listen to the man and form your own conclusions (language warning):

There is a lesson to take from Mr. Carlson beyond his theory: he is a generalist, in the vein of the great scholars of the ancient world and of the Enlightenment. He sees the world as a whole and he glories in all of it. He is a multidisciplinary human of the world, and this allows him to live life on a higher plane than the rest of us. 

I always liked this quote by Robert Heinlein: "A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Socrates was like this. Benjamin Franklin was like this. We could be like this as well.

Check out Mr. Carlson's website here.

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Image of a bull, a fox and a crane from Gobleki Tepe by Teomancimit is, I believe, public domain... please contact me if it is not

If you really want your mind blown, google "100,000 year old South Africa gold mines..."