So the Grand Canyon is a hoax? I'm so disappointed! :-(

Hummmmmmmmmmmm ... Looks like a lot of erosion ... Better get the EPA on it ....

actually, no. more like 6000-8000 years. i don't understand where the 4 days thing comes from. that's not Biblically correct at all. ???

Betty, that's a gross generalization that's applicable to only some Christians, fundamentalist, not all.

A prime example of a Christian who had no problem reconciling science and religion was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest, philosopher, paleontologist, geologist and ardent evolutionist who bucked the system and was instrumental in discovering Peking Man, the "missing link" between apelike animals and modern humans.

Generalizations like that just make people look, well, stupid.

seasonal family houses but a striking realization of life's frailty and the difficulty of finding any abiding reality. He recollects:

A memory? My very first! I was five or six. My mother had snipped a few of my curls. I picked one up and held it close to the fire. The hair was burnt up in a fraction of s second. A terrible grief assailed me; I had learnt that I was perishable... What used to grieve me when I was a child? This insecurity of things. And what used I to love? My genie of iron! With a plow hitch I believed myself, at seven years, rich with a treasure incorruptible, everlasting. And then it turned out that what I possessed was just a bit of iron that rusted. At this discovery I threw myself on the lawn and shed the bitterest tears of my existence! (from The Heart of Matter, in Cuenot, p. 3.)

It was but a short step for Teilhard to move from his "gods of iron" to those of stone. Auvergne gave forth a surprising variety of stones amethyst, citrine, and chalcedony just to name a few with which to augment his youthful search for a permanent reality. Undoubtedly his sensitive nature was also nurtured by his mother's steadfast piety. Teilhard's reflections on his mother's influence is striking, he writes:

A spark had to fall upon me, to make the fire blaze out. And, without a doubt, it was through my mother that it came to me, sprung from the stream of Christian mysticism, to light up and kindle my childish soul. It was through that spark that `My universe,' still but half-personalized, was to become amorised, and so achieve its full centration. (The Heart of Matter, in Cuenot, p. 4.)

This early piety was well established, so that when he entered Notre Dame de Mongre near Villefranche-sur-Saone, thirty miles north of Lyons, at twelve years of age, his quiet, diligent nature was already well-formed. During his five years at this boarding school Teilhard exchanged his security in stones for a Christian piety largely influenced by Thomas a Kempis's Imitation of Christ. Near the time of his graduation he wrote his parents indicating that he wanted to become a Jesuit.

Teilhard's training as a Jesuit provided him with the thoughtful stimulation to continue his devotion both to scientific investigation of the earth and to cultivation of a life of prayer. He entered the Jesuit novitiate at Aix-Provence in 1899. Here he further developed the ascetic piety that he had learned in his reading at Mongre. It was also at Aix-en-Provence that he began his friendship with Auguste Valensin who had already studied philosophy with Maurice Blondel. In 1901, due to an anti-clerical movement in the French Republic, the Jesuits and other religious orders were expelled from France. The Aix-en-Provence novitiate that had moved in 1900 to Paris was transferred in 1902 to the English island of Jersey. Prior to the move to Jersey, however, on March 26, 1902 Pierre took his first vows in the Society of Jesus. At this time the security of Teilhard's religious life, apart from the political situation in France, was painfully disturbed by the gradual sickness that incapacitated his younger sister, Marguerite-Marie, and by the sudden illness of his oldest brother, Alberic.

Alberic's death in September, 1902, came as Pierre and his fellow Jesuits were quietly leaving Paris for Jersey. The death of this formerly successful, buoyant brother, followed in 1904 by the death of Louise, his youngest sister, caused Teilhard momentarily to turn away from concern for things of this world. Indeed, he indicates that but for Paul Trossard, his former novice master who encouraged him to follow science as a legitimate way to God, he would have discontinued those studies in favor of theology.

From Jersey Pierre was sent in 1905 to do his teaching internship at the Jesuit college of St. Francis in Cairo, Egypt. For the next three years Teilhard's naturalist inclinations were developed through prolonged forays into the countryside near Cairo studying the existing flora and fauna and also the fossils of Egypt's past. While Teilhard carried on his teaching assignments assiduously he also made time for extensive collecting of fossils and for correspondence with naturalists in Egypt and France. His collected Letters from Egypt reveal a person with keen observational powers. In 1907 Teilhard published his first article, "A Week in Fayoum." He also learned in 1907 that due to his finds of shark teeth in Fayoum and in the quarries around Cairo a new species named Teilhardia and three new varieties of shark had been presented to the Geological Society of France by his French correspondent, Monseur Prieur. From Cairo Pierre returned to England to complete his theological studies at Ore Place in Hastings. During the years 1908 to 1912 Teilhard lived the rigorously disciplined life of a Jesuit scholastic. Yet the close relation he maintained with his family is evident in the depth of feeling expressed at the death in 1911 of his elder sister, Francoise, in China. This sister, who was the only other family member in religious life, had become a Little Sister of the Poor and worked among the impoverished of Shanghai. For Teilhard her death was particularly poignant because of the selfless dedication of her life.

His letters during this period at Hastings indicate that the demands of his theological studies left little time for geological explorations of the chalk cliffs of Hastings or the clay of nearby Weald. Yet his letters also reveal his enthusiasm for both of these types of study. In summary, three different but interrelated developments occurred during this period which significantly affected the future course of Teilhard's life. These are the reading of Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution, the anti-Modernist attack by Pope Pius X, and his discovery of a fossil tooth in the region of Hastings.

In reading Henri Bergson's newly published Creative Evolution Teilhard encountered a thinker who dissolved the Aristotelian dualism of matter and spirit in favor of a movement through time of an evolving universe. Teilhard also found the word evolution in Bergson. He connected the very sound of the word, as he says, "with the extraordinary density and intensity with which the English landscape then appeared to me -especially at sunset - when the Sussex woods seemed to be laden with all the fossil life that I was exploring, from one quarry to another, in the soil of the Weald" (from The Heart of Matter, in Robert Speaight, The Life of Teilhard de Chardin, New York, 1967, p. 45). From Bergson, then, Teilhard received the vision of on-going evolution. For Bergson, evolution was continually expanding, a "Tide of Life" undirected by an ultimate purpose. Teilhard would eventually disagree with Bergson with respect to the direction of the universe. Later he put forward his own interpretation of the evolutionary process based on the intervening years of field work.

In 1903 while Pierre was in Egypt, Pius X succeeded Leo XIII as Pope. The forward-looking momentum of Leo was abandoned by the conservative Italian Curia in favor of retrenchment and attacks on a spectrum of ideas labelled "modernism" in the encyclical Pascendi (1907) and the decrees of Lamentabili (1907). Among the many new works eventually placed on the Index of Forbidden Works was Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution, although it was not yet suspect when Teilhard read it at Hastings. It is in this ecclesiastical milieu that Teilhard endeavored to articulate his emerging vision of the spiritual quality of the universe.

It was also during his years at Hastings that Teilhard and other Jesuits met Charles Dawson, an amateur paleontologist. Because of Pierre's years of collecting in Cairo he had acquired a growing interest in fossils and prehistoric life, but he was not an accomplished paleontologist, nor did his studies allow him the time to develop the skills needed to accurately date or determine pre-historic fossils. In his very limited association with Dawson, Teilhard discovered the fossil tooth in one of the diggings that caused his name to become known to the scientific community. Moreover, Teilhard's enthusiasm for the scientific study of prehistoric human life now crystallized as a possible direction after his ordination in August 1911.

Between 1912 and 1915 Teilhard continued his studies in paleontology. But because of his initiative in meeting Marcellin Boule at the Museum of Natural History and in taking courses at this Paris museum and at the Institute Catholique with Georges Boussac, Teilhard now began to develop that expertise in the geology of the Eocene Period that earned him a doctorate in 1922. In addition, Pierre also joined such accomplished paleontologists as the Abbe Henri Breuil, Father Hugo Obermaier, Jean Boussac and others in their excavations in the Aurignacian period caves of southern France, in the phosporite fossil fields of Belgium and in the fossil rich sands of the French Alps. While Teilhard was developing a promising scientific career he also renewed his acquaintance in Paris with his cousin Marguerite Teilhard Chombon. Through Marguerite, Teilhard entered into a social milieu in which he could exchange ideas and receive critical comment from several perspectives. In these surroundings Teilhard developed his thought until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

When the war came in August, Teilhard returned to Paris to help Boule store museum pieces, to assist Marguerite turn the girl's school she headed into a hospital, and to prepare for his own eventual induction. August was a disastrous month for the French army; the German forces executed the Schlieffen Plan so successfully that by the end of the month they were about thirty miles from Paris. In September the French rallied at the Marne and Parisians breathed easier. Because Teilhard's induction was delayed, Teilhard's Jesuit Superiors decided to send him back to Hastings for his tertianship, the year before final vows. Two months later word came that his younger brother Gonzague had been killed in battle near Soissons. Shortly after this Teilhard received orders to report for duty in a newly forming regiment from Auvergne. After visiting his parents and his invalid sister Guiguite at Sarcenat, he began his assignment as a stretcher bearer with the North African Zouaves in January 1915.

The powerful impact of the war on Teilhard is recorded in his letters to his cousin, Marguerite, now collected in The Making of a Mind. They give us an intimate picture of Teilhard's initial enthusiasm as a "soldier-priest," his humility in bearing a stretcher while others bore arms, his exhaustion after the brutal battles at Ypres and Verdun, his heroism in rescuing his comrades of the Fourth Mixed Regiment, and his unfolding mystical vision centered on seeing the world evolve even in the midst of war. In these letters are many of the seminal ideas that Teilhard would develop in his later years. For example during a break in the fierce fighting at the battle of Verdun in 1916 Teilhard wrote the following to his cousin, Marguerite:

I don't know what sort of monument the country will later put up on Froideterre hill to commemorate the great battle. There's only one that would be appropriate: a great figure of Christ. Only the image of the crucified can sum up, express and relieve all the horror, and beauty, all the hope and deep mystery in such an avalanche of conflict and sorrows. As I looked at this scene of bitter toil, I felt completely overcome by the thought that I had the honour of standing at one of the two or three spots on which, at this very moment, the whole life of the universe surges and ebbs places of pain but it is there that a great future (this I believe more and more) is taking shape." (The Making of a Mind, New York, 1965, pp. 119/20.)

Through these nearly four years of bloody trench fighting Teilhard's regiment fought in some of the most brutal battles at the Marne and Epres in 1915, Nieuport in 1916, Verdun in 1917 and Chateau Thierry in 1918. Teilhard himself was active in every engagement of the regiment for which he was awarded the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur in 1921. Throughout his correspondence he wrote that despite this turmoil he felt there was a purpose and a direction to life more hidden and mysterious than history generally reveals to us. This larger meaning, Teilhard discovered, was often revealed in the heat of battle. In one of several articles written during the war, Pierre expressed the paradoxical wish experienced by soldiers-on-leave for the tension of the front lines. He indicated this article in one of his letters saying:

I'm still in the same quiet billets. Our future continues to be pretty vague, both as to when and what it will be. What the future imposes on our present existence is not exactly a feeling of depression; it's rather a sort of seriousness, of detachment, of a broadening, too, of outlook. This feeling, of course, borders on a sort of sadness (the sadness that accompanies every fundamental change); but it leads also to a sort of higher joy . . . I'd call it `Nostalgia for the Front'. The reasons, I believe, come down to this; the front cannot but attract us because it is, in one way, the extreme boundary between what one is already aware of, and what is still in process of formation. Not only does one see there things that you experience nowhere else, but one also sees emerge from within one an underlying stream of clarity, energy, and freedom that is to be found hardly anywhere else in ordinary life - and the new form that the soul then takes on is that of the individual living the quasi-collective life of all men, fulfilling a function far higher than that of the individual, and becoming fully conscious of this new state. It goes without saying that at the front you no longer look on things in the same way as you do in the rear; if you did, the sights you see and the life you lead would be more than you could bear. This exaltation is accompanied by a certain pain. Nevertheless it is indeed an exaltation. And that's why one likes the front in spite of everything, and misses it." (The Making of a Mind, p. 205.)

Teilhard's powers of articulation are evident in these lines. Moreover, his efforts to express his growing vision of life during the occasional furloughs also brought him a foretaste of the later ecclesiastical reception of his work. For although Teilhard was given permission to take final vows in the Society of Jesus in May 1918, his writings from the battlefield puzzled his Jesuit Superiors especially his rethinking of such topics as evolution and original sin. Gradually Teilhard realized that the great need of the church was, as he says, ". . . to present dogma in a more real, more universal, way -a more 'cosmogonic' way" (The Making of a Mind, pp. 267/8). These realizations often gave Teilhard the sense of "being reckoned with the orthodox and yet feeling for the heterodox" (The Making of a Mind, p. 277). He was convinced that if he had indeed seen something, as he felt he had, then that seeing would shine forth despite obstacles. As he says in a letter of 1919, "What makes me easier in my mind at this juncture, is that the rather hazardous schematic points in my teaching are in fact of only secondary importance to me. It's not nearly so much ideas that I want to propagate as a spirit: and a spirit can animate all external presentations" (The Making of a Mind, p. 281).

After his demobilization on March 10, 1919, Teilhard returned to Jersey for a recuperative period and preparatory studies for concluding his doctoral degree in geology at the Sorbonne, for the Jesuit provincial of Lyon had given his permission for Teilhard to continue his studies in natural science. During this period at Jersey Teilhard wrote his profoundly prayerful piece on "The Spiritual Pfter returning to Paris, Teilhard continued his studies with Marcellin Boule in the phosphorite fossils of the Lower Eocene period in France. Extensive field trips took him to Belgium where he alsoower of Matter."

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began to address student clubs on the significance of evolution in relation to current French theology. By the fall of 1920, Teilhard had secured a post in geology at the Institute Catholique and was lecturing to student audiences who knew him as an active promoter of evolutionary thought.

The conservative reaction in the Catholic Church initiated by the Curia of Pius X had abated at his death in 1914. But the new Pope, Benedict XV renewed the attack on evolution, on "new theology," and on a broad spectrum of perceived errors considered threatening by the Vatican Curia. The climate in ecclesiastical circles towards the type of work that Teilhard was doing gradually convinced him that work in the field would not only help his career but would also quiet the controversy in which he and other French thinkers were involved. The opportunity for field work in China had been open to Teilhard as early as 1919 by an invitation from the Jesuit scientist Emile Licent who had undertaken paleontological work in the environs of Peking. On April 1, 1923, Teilhard set sail from Marseille bound for China. Little did he know that this "short trip" would initiate the many years of travel to follow.

The Years of Travel

Teilhard's first period in China was spent in Tientsin, a coastal city some eighty miles from Peking where Emile Licent had built his museum and housed the fossils he had collected in China since his arrival in 1914. The two French Jesuits were a contrast in types. Licent, a northerner, was unconventional in dress, taciturn and very independent in his work. He was primarily interested in collecting fossils rather than interpreting their significance. Teilhard, on the other hand, was more urbane; he enjoyed conversational society in which he could relate his geological knowledge to a wider scientific and interpretive sphere. Almost immediately after his arrival Teilhard made himself familiar with Licent's collection and, at the latter's urging, gave a report to the Geological Society of China. In June 1923 Teilhard and Licent undertook an expedition into the Ordos desert west of Peking near the border with Inner Mongolia. This expedition, and successive ones during the 1920s with Emile Licent, gave Teilhard invaluable information on Paleolithic remains in China. Teilhard's correspondence during this period gives penetrating observations on Mongolian peoples, landscapes, vegetation, and animals of the region.

Teilhard's major interest during these years of travel was primarily in the natural terrain. Although he interacted with innumerable ethnic groups he rarely entered into their cultures more than was necessary for expediting his business or satisfying a general interest. One of the ironies of his career is that the Confucian tradition and its concern for realization of the cosmic identity of heaven, earth and man remained outside of 'Teilhard's concerns. Similarly tribal peoples and their earth-centered spirituality were regarded by Teilhard as simply an earlier stage in the evolutionary development of the Christian revelation. Teilhard returned to Paris in September 1924 and resumed teaching at the Institute Catholique. But the intellectual climate in European Catholicism had not changed significantly. Pius XI, the new Pope since 1922, had allowed free reign to the conservative factions. It was in this hostile climate that a copy of a paper that Teilhard had delivered in Belgium made its way to Rome. A month after he returned from China Teilhard was ordered to appear before his provincial Superior to sign a statement repudiating his ideas on original sin. Teilhard's old friend Auguste Valensin was teaching theology in Lyon, and Teilhard sought his counsel regarding the statement of repudiation. In a meeting of the three Jesuits, the Superior agreed to send to Rome a revised version of Teilhard's earlier paper and his response to the statement of repudiation.

In the interim before receiving Rome's reply to his revisions, Teilhard continued his classes at the Institute. Those students who recalled the classes remembered the dynamic quality with which the young professor delivered his penetrating analysis of homo faber. According to Teilhard the human as tool-maker and user of fire represents a significant moment in the development of human consciousness or hominization of the species. It is in this period that Teilhard began to use the term of Edward Suess, "biosphere," or earth-layer of living things, in his geological schema. Teilhard then expanded the concept to include the earth-layer of thinking beings which he called the "noosphere" from the Greek word nous meaning "mind." While his lectures were filled to capacity, his influence had so disturbed a bloc of conservative French bishops that they reported him to Vatican officials who in turn put pressure on the Jesuits to silence him.

The Jesuit Superior General of this period was Vladimir Ledochowski, a former Austrian military officer who sided openly with the conservative faction in the Vatican. Thus in 1925 Teilhard was again ordered to sign a statement repudiating his controversial theories and to remove himself from France after the semester's courses.

Teilhard's associates at the museum, Marcellin Boule and Abbe Breuil, recommended that he leave the Je Teilhard came to Rome he stayed at the Jesuit residence in Vatican City. After several meetings with the Jesuit general, Fr. Janssens, Teilhard realized that he would never be allowed to publis

Wow! Way too long. If you can't make your point in a few paragraphs, best not try to make it at all.

Sorry, I didn't mean to include that entire article. I was trying to copy and paste his name, and ended up w/ the whole thing instead.

My apologies.

Christians DO think for themselves. We trust the One who made Heaven and earth. He reveals these things to us through His Word which is for everyone. The problems arise when man elevates himself in his mind above God, and uses his own reason (not worth much) to try to figure out what he chooses not to believe. doesn't make much sense.

More often than not, the problem is when man abdicates using reason, believing instead what other people tell him to believe about god. I don't mind people having faith, and indeed I have some myself. But faith without reason is blind faith, and that leads to fanaticism. And fanaticism is what leads to the worst kinds of atrocities, like crusades/military jihads, inquisitions, witch hunts, etc., etc., etc.

The like of Stalin, Pol Pot and the Kim dynasty (Korea) are all officially atheist, and they were very unpleasant people.

Religion has a lot to answer for, but the power hungry will use any power structure to advance their agenda. Some are drawn to religion, other to business, and still others to government. They will use whatever means at their disposal to rule over others.

Brisaber-why do you feel that having faith only leads fanaticism, then leading to wrongful decisions which as you say, leads to all sorts of atrocities? If this is how you feel, then you are mistaken about your own faith as it is clear you have none. Having faith means to let go of what you think you are in control in and believe that God will provide you with what you need. To be clear, as with a parent to a child, God will provide you with what you need and not necessarily what you want. None of this ever eludes to fanaticism or any of the other problems you mention. Quit watching tv, go read the Bible and get into a nondenominational church and find the Truth and you will eventually understand what I mean.

The UFO drivers aren't from another star, they're from earth a long time ago. Note the skeletal structure of a typical alien with those big black glassy eyes or as I suspect eye glasses. Humanoid, biped, backbone, arms and forearms, skull, mouth, etc. I suspect that early descendants of apes evolved to build advanced technology, but then an ice age came along, wiped out all their cites and they took their whole population to another star system which would take many thousands of years. Now they've come back to discover their home planet is over populated with a related species, hence the genetic experimentation of the "taken." They've come back just in time to see another environmental screw-up.

hey doc, you talk to bullfrogs in the middle of the night?

Guys - let's be adults here. This article is about the Grand Canyon, and about the new data and the new satellite images.

So......... where is your comments about the article itself?

In summary......Hypocrite

ToddC--People on the fringe can believe whatever they want but I'll be damned if I'll let then put that garbage in the public school curriculum and try to teach it to my kids!

I like that date of Archbishop Ussher. It follows that the 6th millennium of that date occurred in October of 1996 or 1997 depending upon the start of the Christian calendar. I celebrated those dates with a rare glass of wine and a night of channel roulette. Not one peep of the anniversary came through the electronic ether to celebrate Ussher's efforts and scholarship, which was rather disappointing. Surely, there must have been others that noted that date, but probably kept their mouth shut.

>Antidisestablishmentarianistic So......... where is your comments about the article itself?
>In summary......Hypocrite

Hi. You are correct, Sir. :) I saw one too many cheap shots at Christians and my 'anti-bullying' mode kicked in and I wanted to stick up for them. But, you are correct, I became part of the noise. My apologies. :)

OH, and for the record, the Vatican doesn't believe in a 6,000 year old Earth anymore either.

So what does the Vatican believe now? Have they thrown the bible out the window? Can they have it both ways?

Athiests believe nothing formed the human spirit and ability to rationalize and gain intelligence. So basically the Athiests believe that nothing came from nothing, except for their own egotistical narrow view. And that compassion, love, kindness, charity, and search for a higher intelligence is a fairy tale from the experences of people that existed on this earth before us. Written in journals for their posterity and abridged into what we call the Holy Bible, to help us learn from the mistakes and successes of our fore fathers. Nothing comes from nothing is the NARROW and EGOTISTICAL veiw of Athiests. And we should not learn from the past, or try to be respectful to one another.

It's called moving the goal posts. The myths have to keep up with science.

I dunno Todd, I was listening to Nutcase Radio, I mean AFR-American Family Radio, the other day and they were saying the great flood was responsible for both the Grand Canyon and Earth's axial tilt.

Yes, BraniacV, that's a silly thing for AFR to claim, and yes, there are fundamentalists out there - but that doesn't automatically mean that ''all Christians, everywhere'' are nutcases that think the world is flat, 6000 years old, and the immovable center of the Universe.

I'm just saying that there really does seem to be lots of bullies (for lack of a better word) that have basically declared open season on Christians, and take a jab at every turn - saying things that wouldn't be tolerated if said about any other group.

For example, Betty posted above that "Christians cannot think for themselves" and "Science has no place in anything according to them" Now think about this for a second, if someone posted ....

- Muslims cannot think for themselves.
- Homosexuals cannot think for themselves.
- Black People cannot think for themselves.
- Buddhists cannot think for themselves.

Those would all be totally inappropriate of course, as would any comment that paints a whole group with a the same broad brush. It might even be considered 'hate speech' if one was to run around and jump into every forum and to interject off-topic ''Homosexuals all think a certain way'' type of comments into random threads. It just feels to me like it's become open season on Christians, and that it's suddenly OK to poke and pick and bully them at every opportunity - and often with inaccurate information.

In any case - I'm not Christian and more importantly, I really, truly don't want to be part of the problem with more background 'noise', so I shouldn't have sidetracked this science article with the religion debate either - so I apologize for that.

who's painting who? Who's trying to convince who? Who's spreading the word and who's not?

Ever seen the Snake River Canyon. Evil Knievel has!

That to me is a good question and I don't have an answer, but most major rivers start in the interior of a land mass and make their way to sea level. The Colorado starts high in the Rockies, while the head waters of the Mississippi/Missouri system begin much lower. I believe the elevation of the great lake region is only about 1000 feet above sea level. The flow rate of the Mississippi is rather leisurely as noted in story and song. Google it.

Jimbo in Limbo

If you use 'Google Earth', and sort of follow along the path of the river, you can get a better appreciation of the forces at play with the Grand Canyon and the interplay of the Colorado River over the eons. The geologic history goes far back, some 6 million years or so. the physics of erosion, floods, and other rivers combined along with land uplift of the region to slowly build this wonder.

A similar, but on a smaller scale, can be seen in Washington State with the Columbia river, and past flooding. East of Spokane, there was what was seen as maybe one, perhaps more, "Glacier Ice dams of a river during the last Ice Age, that allowed a large sea to back up until that ice dam broke, and the resulting cascading massive flood washed through where ever it could move with the least resistance. That created a whole lot of fascinating land configurations, as well as washing out a lot of valuable topsoil.

>Jimbo Was the Colorado the only river in the history of the world able to carve out a canyon?

Hi Jimbo. I think that the St Lawrence River is also thought to be cut by a similar 'ice dam' process, with catastrophic deluge carving much of this 3,000 Km long path. It's not as dramatic looking as the Grand Canyon, partly because it's full of water - but it the process itself would have been similar.

Why isn't there a Mississippi Canyon? Or a canyon associated with any other rivers? Was the Colorado the only river in the history of the world able to carve out a canyon?

It's called Fluid dynamics I think! down hill force, water flows down hill. Are there any killer rapids on the Mississippi?

Forgot to mention. There were no UFOs.

The Grand Canyon IS a UFO! Well, the mark of where it lands everytime it comes back. Kind'a like that hole in AZ.

You were just there (just like when this pic was taken) when 'they' were off cruising around converting more christians to science instead of their mythology.

Just like anything, it'll take 'time' - relatively speaking.

We drove from Las Vegas to San Diego down the Colorado in 2007... and we didn't stop at the Grand Canyon. :( Nor at Barringer Crater. Both were on my list of must-see's, but the schedule has us in Las Vegas in the morning, and we had to be in San Diego that night - so there was no time.

Looking at these new images, I realize yet again how wrong that decision was.

Don't feel bad. You can always turn on Google earth for an enriching experience. They even have backpack cameras coming soon where you can hike to the river and back up to the rim without leaving your computer chair in high def! Now that's what I'm talkin' about!

It took up to 70 million years to form , according to scientists. The fundamentalist Christians claim thet the Earth is only 6000 years old. That is what it has to do with religion.

So, the Grand Canyon is the Bedrock quarry, that Fred Flintstone worked in?

Haha yeah right... the big man in the sky runs everything. Uh huh.

We can agree on one thing - there isn't a single church out there that resembles the religion founded by Jesus. Jesus preached against the trappings of power and the judgement of others. But humanity can't seem to understand that, and so they build churches. Any time you have one person (or a group of people) claiming to have the one true path to god, best to avoid them, in my opinion.

Amen, brother Brisaber.