Why would Pluto matter at all to people long ago? Nobody knew it definitely existed before 1930!
That's why it's ridiculous to retcon these silly stories using currently-known planets and concepts. Ancient people had no idea that Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, or the asteroids existed. They didn't understand what comets and meteors are.
How do you know? They left us evidence of their cosmological beliefs, they even left us pictures of our solar system.
Use an image-hosting site or attach them from your computer. Just don't hotlink anything that the original site doesn't allow, or you'll be stealing their bandwidth.
Thanks
Explain how Democritus, or anyone else, could have known about unseen/invisible planets, given that the telescope wouldn't be invented for another ~2000 years.
You'll have to ask him, but he did travel to Egypt and Mesopotamia and report back there are more worlds than what can be seen. You have to explain why he believed in only those planets he could see when he clearly believed in unseen planets too.
The five planets known to the ancients are all in the ecliptic plane. They're visible in Greece, Mesopotamia, and even where I live. Mind you, while I've seen Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, I haven't seen Mercury - too much in the way of the horizon here.
Then why doesn't the #5 play an important role in ancient cosmology?
Please tell us you're not insisting that the ancients knew about the asteroid belt, Uranus, and Neptune. It takes a telescope to see those.
Maybe somebody had a telescope. But their description of "Heaven" - rakia, the spread out firmament, the hammered out bracelet - is an apt description of the asteroid belt.
^This is stuff I do not have a sense of humor about. I've got zero patience with mythology masquerading as science.
Do you have the patience to debate the science and mythology? The mythology says the world was covered in water and darkness before the creation of land and life. The science not only supports the mythology, the science says our water came from the asteroid belt. That means we came from there too and thats where Heaven is located.
Why would our opinion of Neptune or Uranus? You're being arbitrary and unscientific.
To everyone before the introduction of modern astronomy, the definition of "planet" was "something that looks like a star but does not have a fixed position relative to the sky". "Planet" literally means wanderer. Which means there clearly are only five planets.
Then why doesn't the #5 play a more significant role in our ancient cosmologies? The Sumerians gave us a system based on 12 and their creation myth identifies 9 great gods and Marduk was clothed with the halo of 10 gods. They even gave us a picture of their cosmology, VA 243 shows a star surrounded by 11 orbs roughly matching the planets in size scaled down to fit on a cylinder seal.
Defining planet as any large object orbiting the sun already is "our opinion", which you admit yourself should not matter here. We just recently refined that definition again, big deal.
Are you saying that a bunch of ancient cultures correctly predicted that people considered there to be nine planets in the eighty years period from 1930 until recently?
Our opinion of Pluto is irrelevant to people long ago - they didn't write their story of creation based on how we would one day classify Pluto.
So legendary, in fact, that Dante does not bother to mention them in his magnum opus, despite listing the Sun, the Moon and the visible planets.
What was the subject? His Inferno incorporates 9 circles of hell and 9 spheres of Heaven and 7 ledges of purgatory.
Funnily enough, I could have sworn that you used to count Pluto as one of the nine, because that's what Sitchen and his acolytes did before 2005.
Pluto/Gaga appears in the story after the original great gods. I linked and quoted the Enuma Elish, didn't you read it? Pluto was sent by Anshar to proclaim Marduk's supremacy upon accepting the challenge to battle Tiamat.
Besides which, if you're trying to connect the nine worlds of the Norse into this group, that's not going to work, as the Sun and the Moon were people, not places - Mani, the Moon-youth, and Sol, the Sun-maiden, who were both perpetually pursued by monstrous wolves.
The "gods" were associated with celestial counterparts. The Moon had a moon god that ancient peoples believed interacted with humanity.
On day one light was created, not the light sources. We se on day four that is when the sun, moon and stars.
The light sources already existed, they dont appear in Earth's sky until the 4th Day because the Earth doesn't appear until the 3rd Day. You cant have lights in the Earth's sky without the Earth. Thats why its important to pay very close attention to the terminology, the Sun and Moon were made to rule over the day and night. It doesn't say the Sun and Moon were created on the 4th Day.
The title assumes that the Genesis story is a myth. Mocking Genesis is the entire point of the discussion.
I dont share your negative opinion of mythology, if you had read my posts you'd see I'm arguing the science supports Genesis and other creation myths. But since you seem to think myth should be mocked, aren't you doing the same thing to other peoples who gave us these myths? Here's your argument: Genesis is not myth! Stop mocking the Bible. Now those other stories that say the same thing as Genesis are myths so mock them instead.
Did the Flood cover the whole earth, or just Mesopotamia? At the time, Mesopotamia was the whole of civilization -- at least all of the known civilizations. There was a massive flood of the Black Sea (the Mediterranean poured into it) about the right time period. But there are Great Flood myths in the New World too. Hmm...
The Black Sea has been flooded many times, during the ice ages massive glacial lakes formed in Asia as ice sheets blocked rivers running north to the Arctic Sea. As these lakes eventually burst through to the south they emptied first into the Caspian and then westward into the Black Sea.
But I dont believe the Flood covered the world, not enough water and where did it go? The Mesopotamian flood myths suggest it came from the south followed by torrents of rain. I think the Persian Gulf was a river valley at the base of the 4 biblical rivers of Paradise.
When seas rose with the melting ice coastal peoples around the world had to seek higher ground and many would have died from floods as rising seas breached natural dams like the ones that gave way when the Black Sea was repeatedly flooded. Maybe a comet or asteroid struck the Indian Ocean and sent massive tsunamis onto coastal regions, or maybe something hit the northern ice sheet. Researchers believe the releases of the glacial Lake Agassiz may have triggered the Younger Dryas and other climate disasters with as much as 10ft of sea rise. If you're living in S Florida or the Sunda Shelf and seas rose 10 ft within a few days, you'd be dead unless you had a boat handy.
So your using the Alinsky rules. 
