Premises
- Facts/Truths
- Observed: the fossilized remains of what (may be) the earliest known flowering plants were discovered in a slab of stone in Northeast-China and date back to at least 125 million years; additionally 3 types of lotus grew in Egypt (blue, white, and pink). All three lotus are shown in Egyptian art. The pink lotus was featured more in work from the Greeks under reign of Ptolemies.
Premise Modifiers
- Presence
- Time: is talked about in the ancient times (ancient Egypt), Greek mythology, a witting from 1881, and the bible.
- Presumptions
- The normal: based on appearance and growing habits, scientists believe the closest modern day relatives would be the water-lily and the lotus.
Argument Modifiers
- Quasilogical Arguments
- Travesty: points out biblical findings, Book of Job 40:21-22, verses refer to a large creature referred to as "behemoth". "He lies under the lotus trees, In a covert of reeds and marsh. The lotus trees cover him with their shade; The willows by the brook surround him." Trying to say if the bible mentions the lotus, and we think the lotus was man eating, the man eating lotus is real (even though the bible doesn't make the lotus seem man eating).
- Based on the Structure of Reality
- Restraint Bias: claims the lotus tree (from the island Lotophagi in Greek mythology) bore fruit that caused "pleasant" drowsiness. It would make them forget their friends and homes and they would lose their desire to return to their native land in favor of living in idleness on the island.
Not exactly sure where this would fall, but, description of the plant:
- description is using negative words such as "death-shade" (in relation to it's color).
- sickens all vegetation around it and feeds on wild beasts that "seek the thick shelter of its boughs", birds who drink water from its "cups of great waxen flowers", and men who seek its shelter during storms or it's fruit for food.
- fruit looked like golden ovals, honeydrops, pear-shaped.
- foliage "glistens with a strange dew, that all day long drips on to the ground below, nurturing a rank growth of grasses, which shoot up in places so high that their spikes of fierce blood-fed green show far up among the deep-tinted foliage of the terrible tree, and, like a jealous body-guard, keep concealed the fearful secret of the charnel-house within, and draw round the black roots of the murderous plant a decent screen of living green"
Want to check it out?
I like how you had a broad spectrum of things to include in your argument. I would talk a little bit more about what makes this thing real or fake. How many times has this thing been documented, what makes it believable or not believable.
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