Next Frontiers for Christian Research

A) Iron and the iron age

I) Here is what wikipedia has to say about the Iron age:

Although meteoritic iron has been used for millennia in many regions, the beginning of the Iron Age is defined locally around the world by archaeological convention when the production of smelted iron (especially steel tools and weapons) replaces their bronze equivalents in common use.[2]

In Anatolia and the Caucasus, or Southeast Europe, the Iron Age began during the late 2nd millennium BC (c. 1300 BC).[3] In the Ancient Near East, this transition occurred simultaneously with the Bronze Age collapse, during the 12th century BC (1200–1100 BC).,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Age

II) Here are the first five mentions of iron in the Bible:

Sella also brought forth Tubalcain, who was a hammerer and artificer in every work of brass and iron. And the sister of Tubalcain was Noema.
[Genesis 4:22]

And I will break the pride of your stubbornness, and I will make to you the heaven above as iron, and the earth as brass:
[Leviticus 26:19]

Gold, and silver, and brass, and iron, and lead, and tin,
[Numbers 31:22]

If any man strike with iron, and he die that was struck: he shall be guilty of murder, and he himself shall die.
[Numbers 35:16]

For only Og king of Basan remained of the race of the giants. His bed of iron is shewn, which is in Rabbath of the children of Ammon, being nine cubits long, and four broad after the measure of the cubit of a man's hand.
[Deuteronomy 3:11]

And, not many decades after Og of Basan, we have Judges 1:19, here is the Catholic Douay Rheims translation:

And the Lord was with Juda, and he possessed the hill country: but was not able to destroy the inhabitants of the valley, because they had many chariots armed with scythes.

Here is the King James Version:

And the Lord was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.

Even earlier than Judges, you have Joshua, and here even Douay Rheims has:

But thou shalt pass to the mountain, and shalt cut down the wood, and make thyself room to dwell in: and mayst proceed farther, when thou hast destroyed the Chanaanites, who as thou sayest have iron chariots, and are very strong.
[Josue (Joshua) 17:18]

III) Here is the date of the Exodus, in the Roman martyrology, the liturgical martyrology reading for Christmas day says Christ is born in

a Moyse et egressu populi Israel de Aegypto, anno millesimo quingentesimo decimo

So, if Christ is born 1 BC (most of the year was before His birth and the beginning of it even before His conception) and in 1510 after Exodus, that means the Exodus took place in 1511 BC.

Let's confer the Syncellus chronology, used by Orthodox when saying what year after creation it is, on September 1st every year.

Creation 5510 BC - Flood 2242 after Creation = Flood in 3268 BC
Flood in 3268 BC - Abraham born 1070 after Flood = Abraham born 2198 BC
Abraham born 2198 BC - Exodus 505 after Birth of Abraham* = Exodus in 1693 BC (I think I recall seeing 1683 BC, as well).

So, Exodus in 1511 or 1693 BC => Conquest in 1471 or 1653 BC. That's some time before the Bronze Age collapse, 12th C. BC.

IV) Resuming the problem, and solutions to propose:

Iron chariots, iron bed of Og, iron objects in the law. Mentioned before the archaeologically apparent Iron Age.

Speaking of which, this shows the folly of excluding a Middle Kingdom Exodus, just because archaeologists claim the Egyptians had no chariots prior to the New Kingdom.

Iron in Genesis 4, as being pre-Flood, is not a problem. If we haven't found iron objects from Nod, yet, so, we also haven't found Henoch in Nod yet in the first place.

Here are a few solutions:

a) The iron chariots and the iron objects mentioned in the law could simply be things that are sharp. The chariots could be armed with scythes as the Douay Rheims translation suggests, and the iron objects in the law could be sharp objects. Og's bed could be a very isolated item in meteoric iron.

The reason this would work is, barzel does not just mean "iron" the metal, it means also "sharp object" more specially "axe" ....

On this theory too, "bikli barzel" in Numbers 35 would be better translated as "sharp objects" or "sharp tools" than as objects or tools actually made of iron, and a bronze or stone knife would be a more probable itemization than an iron bar.

b) But it could be that meteoric iron had actually been used on the chariots too. They could have had a fright of meteoric iron as endowed with mysterious properties, or they could have had the sun reflected more glaringly in a surface of meteoric iron than in bronze, so the men of Juda were blinded by sunlight.

c) Or, archaeologists are wrong on when iron became a commonly used metal.

Given that lots of what is preserved to us, what they dig up, comes from graves. It was arranged in certain ways to escape normal processes of entropy. Bronze would have been more likely to put in a grave than iron which one could still use.

B) Horses and horseriding

Except, that seems by now to be a fixed problem:

somewhere else: Inerrancy of OT: Riding in King David's Day!
https://notontimsblogroundhere.blogspot.com/2024/09/inerrancy-of-ot-riding-in-king-davids.html

C) Haven't thought of it yet ...

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Bertin, Abbot
5.IX.2024

* Catholics and Orthodox in these chronologies count on a short soujourn, Exodus 430 years from when Abraham got the promise = when he was 75, 75 + 430 = 505.

Who's Afraid of the Squortlebleep?

Barry Goldberg, author of the "Common Sense Atheism" series of books, on Thursday 18.VII.2024 answered:

How can atheists deny that God exists, when the ability to even wonder about it , to even have a concept of God, proves beyond doubt that He does exist?
https://www.quora.com/How-can-atheists-deny-that-God-exists-when-the-ability-to-even-wonder-about-it-to-even-have-a-concept-of-God-proves-beyond-doubt-that-He-does-exist/answer/Barry-Goldberg-1

From his answer:

If you really want to go down that path, however, then you must then let me define Squortlebleep (the magical and invisible winged ferret) as “that which keeps our planet’s atmosphere from flying off into space” and then I can logically assert that the very fact that our planet’s atmosphere hasn’t flown off into space therefore proves beyond doubt that Squortlebleep exists.

In philosophical circles, btw, this is known as the “fallacy of equivocation,” which is when you use two different meanings of a particular word in the same argument and treat them as if they were the same. With regard to Squortlebleep, the fallacy occurs when I define him both as “a magical and invisible winged ferret” and as “that which keeps our planet’s atmosphere from flying off into space” and insist that if there is proof of the second meaning then there must also be proof of the first meaning.

Have I ever heard the fallacy of equivocation from Atheists?

Me

How could an explosion of compressed matter result in formation of atoms and star systems?

Sci teacher

It must have, otherwise we wouldn't be here.

Me

How could chemicals that weren't "alive" (that weren't parts of biology) come together to form life?

Sci teacher

If they couldn't have, we wouldn't be here.

Me

How could one life form develop into a radically different one?

Sci teacher

If it couldn't we wouldn't have the variety we have.

Not sure if all the examples I gave are genuine or if one is my addition.

I would say he was equivocating when defining "Big Bang" as both "rapid expansion from a highly condensed state" and as "actual origin of the universe."

I would say he was also equivocating when defining "Abiogenesis" as both "chemical reactions in the primitive atmosphere leading to amino acids further combining into primitive life" and as "actual origin of biological life."

And, if the last one isn't a parallel, false memory, he was defining "Evolution" as both "the interplay of mutations and natural selection" and as "actual origin of the diversity of life" ... in very different life forms with not just different but even incompatible solutions for diverse needs of biological life.

I have a hunch that Barry Goldberg would share the fallacies of equivocation with my Sci teacher. Most Atheist do ...

Seriously, a fallacy of equivocation doesn't exist just because so and so is identifying two concepts that many others do not identify. It only exists if the one doing so is unwilling to argue why he should do that.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Bertin, Abbot
5.IX.2024

Inerrancy of OT: Riding in King David's Day!

When was horseback riding invented?

For the Ancient Middle East, I have heard the date 800 BC, when Assyrians came to master riding.

As Biblical material about King David involved riding, this could potentially have been a stumbling block about the credibility of the Bible.

This screenshot involves an old rider carbon dated to 4300 BC, and a few more ones, the youngest carbon dated to 2623 BC:

How do we know he was a rider? Well, if someone has a tennis arm, he probably plays tennis. Riding also leaves traces in the human body.

2080 av. J.-Chr.

75,723 pcm, donc daté à 4380 av. J.-Chr.

2063 av. J.-Chr.

76,553 pcm, donc daté à 4263 av. J.-Chr.

...

1700 av. J.-Chr.

87,575 pcm, donc daté à 2800 av. J.-Chr.

1678 av. J.-Chr.

89,4653 pcm, donc daté à 2598 av. J.-Chr.

The real dates for these riders would be younger than 2080 BC (65 years before Abraham was born) and older than 1678 (88 years before Moses was born). The passages would still present some problem as to why horseback riding was available in Old Israel 200 years before it was so in Assyria, and why we haven't seen that, but the problem is on the level of a quibble, not (at least not to the Christian), not an actual doubt./HGL

PS, Ebla archives involve Indo-European names. Carbon dated 2300 BC, i e during the Soujourn in Egypt (1725 to 1510 BC, carbon dated as between 2800 and possibly precisely 1609 BC). Mentioned later on, by 29:38, as also the fact that horsewhips had been offered as merchandise to people with such names./HGL

Sources:

The video I screenshotted (at 19:31) is:

David Anthony and Dorcas R. Brown: The Yamnaya Origins and the Expansion of Late PIE Languages
HUN-REN Bölcsészettudományi Kutatóközpont | 20 June 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wg77kPvDmqQ

And the article that the video features is:

Science Advances | Research Article 2023 Anthropology
First bioanthropological evidence for Yamnaya horsemanship
Martin Trautmann et al
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ade2451

For Jewish Readers

Wesley Huff is kind of clueless so far about where Protestants get the Bible from (unless he changes his mind), but he's definitely not bad about the Jewish expectation of the Messiah:

The Jewish Messiah described by the Dead Sea Scrolls
January 22, 2023 | Wesley Huff
https://www.wesleyhuff.com/blog/2023/1/22/the-jewish-messiah-described-by-the-dead-sea-scrolls

It's 4Q521 compared to Luke 7:22./HGL

Israelites at the Exodus

Ibn Khaldun, a Neglected Source of Antichristianity or Attacks on the Bible · Responding to Tim Zeak on Exodus, part I · More on Exodus, not on Tim Zeak, for now · Some Have Claimed Ezra Wrote Moses · Israelites at the Exodus

First of all, like the traditional Christian chronographers and, as I believe, in agreement with the words of St. Stephen Proto-Martyr in Acts, or St. Paul's words in Galatians, I hold to a short soujourn.

The Exodus happened 430 years after God's promise to Abraham. Meaning 215 years after Jacob arrived in Egypt.

The statement "430 years in Egypt" in the text of Exodus look like this in Douey Rheims:

And the abode of the children of Israel that they made in Egypt, was four hundred and thirty years.
[Exodus 12:40]

Ellopos site has LXX Greek and an English translation side by side:

And the sojourning of the children of Israel, while they sojourned in the land of Egypt and the land of Chanaan, [was] four hundred and thirty years.

This obviously means that "the children of Israel" start out with Abraham, who was not a child of Jacob, but his grandfather. But that's no problem, since it is a continuity, this family that becomes a people is named "children of Israel" from a bit before half of the 430 years, but what precedes is actually identical.

GotQuestions wrongly assumed a long soujourn. But they sum up a nice little problem:

How many Israelites left Egypt in the exodus?
https://www.gotquestions.org/Israelites-exodus.html

What can I answer?

Exodus 12:37, Numbers 1:46, and Numbers 2:32 all describe Israel’s population of men, not including women and children. Numbers 1:21–43 gives an account from each tribe, using Hebrew words, not symbols, to represent quantities. Adding these up, one arrives at the figure given in Numbers 1:46. This phrasing is traditionally interpreted to mean just over 600,000 adult men, implying a total population about four times that size, or 2.4 million.

I agree with tradition.

What is the major problem? Feeding them in the desert is a miracle. There was space for the mannah, but God had to give it. Another problem is, the armies of back then are, apart from the Israelites, considered as numerically smaller than 600 000 men. Why would they react as if facing supreme odds if they were in fact the bigger army?

One possibility is, their impression of facing supreme odds are overblown. It says more about their fears than about the real odds. But there are two more possibilities which complete each other and match God's words in Deuteronomy 7 better:

• armies back then were in fact bigger than archaeologists estimate, as well as populations;
• other peoples had well trained élite armies, Israel just a makeshift militia, consisting of men who had other things to do, and who therefore are not the best well trained soldiers. Case in point, the Temple Guard is what caught Jesus, in Gethsemani, and they were so inefficient that Petrus could cut off a man's ear and survive that. That would never have happened with the Romans doing the arrest. Picture other nations as having well trained professional armies, except Moab, and then the odds are what they would seem to be according to Deuteronomy 7.

Now, there is another problem — how did they grow from a population of 70 to a population of 2.4 million or whatever, in 215 years?

70 * 1.05²¹⁵ = 2 516 502, pretty exactly the 2.4 million described.

A further possibility is, after the 40 years, the Israelites in the Desert had actually become fewer, not more numerous, than just after the Exodus.

Other problem, third one:

When Israel conducted their census of the Levites and the firstborn from the rest of the tribes (Numbers 3:39, 46), the number of firstborn males is recorded as just over twenty thousand. Using the traditional interpretation of 600,000 adult males implies that firstborns made up only 1 out of every 30 men. If that were the case, the average Israelite family would have about 60 children, boys and girls combined. This reckoning seems unreasonable.

Here is a tentative solution:

39 All the Levites, that Moses and Aaron numbered according to the precept of the Lord, by their families, of the male kind from one month and upward, were twenty-two thousand. 40 And the Lord said to Moses: Number the firstborn of the male sex of the children of Israel, from one month and upward, and thou shalt take the sum of them.

41 And thou shalt take the Levites to me for all the firstborn of the children of Israel, I am the Lord: and their cattle for all the firstborn of the cattle of the children of Israel: 42 Moses reckoned up, as the Lord had commanded, the firstborn of the children of Israel: 43 And the males by their names, from one month and upward, were twenty-two thousand two hundred and seventy-three.

I think the solution is, they were only counting first born who were still children, not adolescents or people serving in the militia. The first-born children of the other tribes correspond roughly speaking to the total of males in the Levite tribe. If someone was an adolescent or fully adult before the Exodus, before the law was given, the sacrifice did not apply. So, no, the text would not suggest families of 60 children per couple, unless the population were trimmed downward.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Dominica in Albis
7.IV.2024

Xtra 3 Have You Seen a Resurrection Lately?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

No. I also have not seen a peace treaty observed lately, either between Russia and Ukraine or between Israel and Gaza.

I still believe there was an armistice on St. Martin's Day in 1918.

I also haven't seen the area from Flanders to mid-France covered in water. Shall I conclude the fossil shell fish found in the Paris basin came there because of the French habit of eating shell fish? When no shell fish eating tool has been found along these fossil shell fish?

No, Uniformitarian Geologists and Flood Geologists agree on a thing. This area actually was covered with water. And that's where the fossil shell fish came from, when they were then covered in mud.

Similarily, I give a rough and ready belief to the stories that the participants and their communities took as historic, and exclude exotic interpretations of what they experienced because they don't work. The disciples claimed to have seen their master risen, that's as sure as an armistice in 1918. It was on the third day from a crucifixion in mid-Nisan, that's as sure as it was on 11.XI. And it was not an illusion, that's as sure as French gastronomy not bringing the fossil shell fish into the Paris basin./HGL

Xtra 2 Was Jesus a Schizophrenic?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

The idea being, "if he thought he was God, he was mad" ...

That's a bit short for "if He thought He was God, He either was God, or he was mad" ... you'd have to dismiss all signs He gave of being divine, including the Resurrection.

And by the way, no, a Schizophrenic madman would not have been very good at either hypnotising people to get triggered to see him as resurrected or participate in an intrigue to replace the "crucified twin" and even less at getting complicities from Roman soldiers or people acting under their supervision, into a purely faked crucifixion.

And would not have been any thing like capable of securing loyal followers which He organised beautifully.

And would not have been able to convince anyone He was doing miracles. He would neither have done any, nor been competent at faking them.

So, no./HGL

Xtra 1 Was the Resurrection Real or an Illusion?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

Cliffe Knechtle just got asked that on a video, I stopped it, so I haven't heard his answer.

Illusions usually do not involve the false identification of a person. If a girl is seen as sawn into two, she is correctly identified as the same girl when identified as alive. It's the sawing into two which is an illusion.

So, the "Copperfield" theory would not involve a false identification of the Resurrection appearances, but rather an illusory crucifixion.

To be fair to Romans, it would not have been easy to fake getting crucified while they or Jews acting as their delegates were doing crucifixions.

I'm not sure either Copperfield or Houdini could come up with a solution, and if they could it would probably involve modern technology, but even more probably, complicity of those doing the crucifixion, something definitely not to be counted on. So ... no, the Crucifixion was not an illusion.

Two versions more could make the resurrection or crucifixion of Jesus an illusion.

a) There was a homozygotic twin, and either the unknown twin got crucified, or the unknown twin did the appearances.

Dude! Homozygotic twins feel for each other. If your homozygotic twin had just a few days ago died on a cross after hours of agony, would you be in a mood to pretend to be he (if Jesus was the one crucified) or to pretend to have been crucified (if the twin was the one crucified)? Na, me neither.

b) While group hallucinations are usually impossible, one precise setting would make them possible, namely hypnosis, a group trance.

Sure, but who was the hypnotist?

If you were a hypnotist, could you hypnotise your subjects (and disciples) so that they would all be triggered by the crucifixion to experience your resurrection as if it were real, and why would you do that?

Or if the hypnotist was still alive during these "sessions" ... who could be that without being the new visible leader, i e Peter?

But why would you first hypnotise people into believing what you knew to be a lie, and then yourself die for that lie (at least by staying in office long enough to get targetted more than once and then some more until you were actually executed)?

Me neither. Corrolary, the Resurrection was real./HGL

Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

Since it involves a kind of questionnaire, or a challenge with arguments given by others, before she answers each, I feel an itch to answer them independently of her first, before even reading a sample.

Meanwhile, here are the 12 questions:

1 Aren't We Better Off without Religion?
2 Doesn't Christianity Crush Diversity?
3 How Can You Say There's Only One True Faith?
4 Doesn't Religion Hinder Morality?
5 Doesn't Religion Cause Violence?
6 How Can You Take the Bible Literally?
[follow up: Contra Craig]
7 Hasn't Science Disproved Christianity?
8 Doesn't Christianity Denigrate Women?
9 Isn't Christianity Homophobic?
10 Doesn't the Bible Condone Slavery?
11 How Could a Loving God Allow So Much Suffering?
12 How Could a Loving God Send People to Hell?

Here is her book:

Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion
Rebecca McLaughlin
https://www.amazon.com/Confronting-Christianity-Questions-Largest-Religion/dp/1433564238/

Here are some Xtras not found in that list of 12 QQ.

Xtra 1 Was the Resurrection Real or an Illusion?
Xtra 2 Was Jesus a Schizophrenic?
Xtra 3 Have You Seen a Resurrection Lately?

1 Aren't We Better Off without Religion?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

In the Middle Ages a certain geographic fairly large area known as Christendom:

• allowed people to marry young
• forced no one to stay in school even if parents wanted to take them out
• drove no one to mass shootings like those of Columbine High School in 1998

In a secularised time, in 1998, the US:

• made pretty sure Klebold and Harris could not marry nor study without being with girls
• made sure they could not cease studying
• which certainly contributed to their deed in 1998
• as did the fact they had been encouraged to think of human life as a byproduct of evolution.

2 Doesn't Christianity Crush Diversity?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

Catholic Christianity most certainly doesn't.

Calvinism isn't Christianity anyway.

In Catholicism, you are free to marry or not. You are only obliged to stick to choices you have hallowed with a promise. Note, marrying without a marriage promise is not possible.

Homosexual acts are forbidden, not from a will to make all men extreme machos (btw, we make no exceptions in favour of ultra-macho homos), nor from a will to make all women extremely feminine (a lolita dyke doesn't get a free pass for being kawaii). Homosexual acts are forbidden, like all other contraceptive behaviour (i e simultaneous choice of physical infertility and sex), because they mean fewer babies.

Part of the problem with fewer babies is an aging society, but another part is less diversity.

Latin America has been far better in preserving a diversity both culturally and ethnically between descendants of Spaniards and indigenous peoples, than the former English colonies in US or Canada have been.

Algonquian languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquian_languages
Cree language Native speakers 96,000, 27% of ethnic population (2016 census) Ojibwe language Native speakers (50,000 cited 1990–2016 censuses) Mi'kmaq language Native speakers 7,140, 4% of ethnic population (2016 census) Blackfoot language Native speakers 2,900 (2016) Arapaho language Native speakers 1,100 (2015) Fox language Native speakers 700: 250 Sauk and Fox and 400 Kickapoo in the US (2007–2015) 60 Kickapoo in Mexico (2020 census) Maliseet-Passamaquoddy language Native speakers 355 in Canada (2016 census) 100 in the United States (2007)		Cheyenne language Native speakers 380 (2020) Shawnee language Native speakers 260 and decreasing (2015) Menominee language Native speakers 35 (2007) + 25 L2 speakers (no date) Massachusett language evival Revitalization from 1993. As of 2014, 5 children are native speakers, 15 are proficient second-language speakers and 500 are adult second-language learners. Abenaki language Native speakers 14 Western Abenaki (2007–2012) Last fluent speaker of Eastern Abenaki died in 1993. Munsee language Native speakers 2 (2018)
Some languages of the Latin Americas
Quechuan languages Native speakers 7.2 million Guarani language Native speakers 6.5 million (2020) Aymara language Native speakers 1.7 million (2007–2014)		Nahuatl Native speakers 1.7 million in Mexico (2020 census) Kʼicheʼ language Native speakers 1.1 million (2019 census) Yaqui language Native speakers 20,000 in Mexico (2020 census) 640 in the USA (2015 census)

And within a single people and a single language, Catholicism keeps diversity of times into the present. Late Antiquity Benedictines and Latin Liturgy. Somewhat earlier liturgy in Byzantine rite. Crusader era Cistercians. Late Crusader era Franciscans and Dominicans. Renaissance Jesuits. All present into the present time, and their clothing provokes some Calvinist scoffers to speak of "cross dressing" not because they acctually dress in female clothes, but because their male garments are not those of the present day.

3 How Can You Say There's Only One True Faith?

Index post : Rebecca McLaughlin Wrote a Book

Because religions really and truly contradict.

In some cases it is obvious because of splits.

Samaritans, Jews and Christians represent two splits in the times after those of Solomon and of Jesus Christ.

Catholics, Non-Chalcedonians, Orthodox, Protestants, this represents splits around Third and Fourth Ecumenical council, two splits, and in the 11th C leading up to the councils of Pisa and Florence, and in the 16th C. (mainly) leading up to the Council of Trent, on the Catholic side.

If both sides of a split cannot be right, then these people cannot all be right.

One could argue they are all wrong, but the question was, about why one could say there is ONLY one true faith, not why there is even as many as one.

And note, the main alternative over the last 200 years in the Western World, namely Secularism (sometimes in the guise of Freemasonry) is also another split, if not in all its doctrines, at least in its main culture.

If you want to confer with Japan, it is true some people there manage to be both Shinto and Buddhist — but this is in a compromise where the two religions take part of different aspects of life. You marry Shinto, you usually get buried Buddhist. It could be because of kind of a make-believe : you take the religion which is most optimistic for the occasion. When it comes to a third belief system in Japan, Scientism, one of the aspects of secularism over here, Michio Kaku has shown he takes it more seriously, but that might be because he is living in the US, not in Japan.

Catholicism, as well as its alternatives, like Fundie Calvinism or Orthodox Lutheranism, have a very obvious knack of combining the areas of life which a Japanese would outsource between different religions. Marriage? We have the Catholic sacrament of matrimony. Funerals? We have Masses for the dead, and for some very good people, masses for gratitude for God granting them holy lives. Science? We have scholasticism.

The alternative to Catholicism being true would be some other combination on all areas being true — even if it were outsourcing the areas to different origins, like the Japanese tend to do. But if Catholicism is true, this means Christ rose from the dead and founded the Catholic Church. Therefore Catholicism + some other is not a real option. That includes Catholicism + Santería and also Catholicism + Deep Time + Deep Space + Big Bang + Evolution. Not real options.