I can smell Ararat

No-one has the right to take another human life. Why do governments feel that they are above this? Why does a government, and each one of those indivuals who occupy a government, think that they are entitled to sanction one human being to go ahead and kill another human being?  So why do we just accept it as normal when leaders of the state make the decision to kill 'foreign' human beings?

Something's up. Something's afoot. Iraq was bad. This new shit in Georgia stinks. I'm starting to question whether the need to dominate oil markets is even the real answer to why the West is in the Middle East. Maybe the stakes are much higher than we all imagine. Maybe the mess we are making in the world is reaching Biblical proportions. It all appears to be centred on, and around, the very cradle of human civilisation, and depending on just how biblical you want to get, the very same area where Noah emerged from the Ark on Mount Ararat. For those more figurative amongst us, this is well worth a look.... http://www.666soon.com/search_for_noah.htm

Ararat also appears as the name of a kingdom in Jeremiah 51:27, mentioned together with the kingdoms of Minni and Aschenaz. Noah had three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Japheth fathered Gomer, who in turn was father of Ashkenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah. Ashkenaz is the medieval Hebrew name for Germany. Riphath is a possible ancestor of the Paphlagonia, an ancient area on the Black Sea. Togarmah had several sons, two of whom, Haik and Kartlos, tradionally fathered the Armenian and Georgian nations respectively. These are not merely the names of men, these ancestors of Noah, but tribes and developing nations, and it would appear that Georgia was one of the earliest.

Scholars believe that Uratu is an Akkadian variation of Ararat of the Old testament. The Assyrian King Shalmaneser I, 13th century BC, refers to Urartu as not simply being a kingdom but a geographical region. In the Noah story, the Bible does not refer to a summit called Ararat, but to the "mountains of Ararat", a geographic region. The Sumerians share a similar flood story(as do many cultures from all over the world) in their Epic of Gilgamesh, and it too hints at a region where a 'boat' landed, rather than one specific mountain. The Sumerians themselves are known to have migrated south into Mesopotamia, and built the first city Eridu around 5400 BC, but considered the Armenian Highlands their ancestral home. http://www.armeniapedia.org

I've always found it a bit silly to think of Noah running all over the planet with a butterfly net, trying to collect the pairs of every living animal. Can you imagine the scale of trying to catalogue it, yet alone catch it? Maybe the Bible is trying to show us that we all spring from an earlier civilisation, one which survived a deluge that destroyed all that which came before it, and that its humble beginnings were centred in an area around Armenia. Why is it now that the focus of the world is back at this same spot with bombs being dropped on it?