Provenance, preservation and selected resurrection

The Earlier City of Dis

Before cosmicism acquired its present architecture, City of Dis existed inside Computational Demonology: an older, stranger collection of theology, polemic, definitions, software, fiction and digital sediment.

City of Dis did not begin with the present site.

Its earlier incarnation survives within Computational Demonology, where Dante, Hell, atheism, Christian doctrine, creationism, witch trials, arguments for God and assorted remains of the old internet occupy the same structure as the King James Bible, software, book notes, game images and utilities that have wandered in from entirely different weather systems.

The collection is a record of intellectual development and web history. It is not a modern catalogue. Some pages are substantial. Some are notes. Some declare themselves under construction and have been doing so with admirable patience. Some preserve third-party texts. Some require software whose natural habitat was a beige computer beneath a CRT monitor.

The present City of Dis inherits the name, several preoccupations and a refusal to treat divine authority as an exemption from moral examination. It does not inherit every file merely because the files survived.

An archive answers: "What was here?" A publication must still answer: "What is worth reading now?"

Revised from the archive

The following essays have been reconstructed from earlier material. They are not facsimiles. Each has been corrected, resourced and rewritten as a present City of Dis argument.

Revised historical essay

The Witnesses Arrive Late - Jesus Outside the Gospels

Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius and Pliny are assessed according to what they can establish, rather than the doctrinal cargo they are routinely instructed to carry.

View the unfinished legacy source

Revised theological essay

Rapture, Tribulation and the Manufacture of Prophecy

The old definitions of eschatology, millennialism and Tribulation become an account of how scattered texts were assembled into a modern timetable.

View the legacy definitions

Revised science essay

Radiometric Dating and the Creationist Complaint

The earlier technical survey has been corrected and expanded around calibration, isochrons, closure, concordance and the heat problem created by accelerated decay.

View the legacy technical page

Arguments absorbed into the present site

Several older subjects already have stronger homes. Creating parallel versions would produce a theological echo chamber with canonical-tag problems.

Consolidated

Arguments for God

The old First Cause, Five Ways, design, cosmological, ontological and degrees-of-perfection material belongs within the present apologetics essays and Lexicon rather than as a second suite of pages.

Browse Social Media Apologetics

Consolidated

Scripture and inerrancy

The legacy definitions now point toward the site's essays on biblical authority, genre and interpretive discipline.

The Bible is Not A Magic Hyperlink

Consolidated

Atonement and inherited guilt

The compact notes on sin, original sin and theories of atonement feed the current moral critique of vicarious sacrifice. A separate inherited-guilt essay remains a possible later migration.

The Foundational Injustice of Vicarious Sacrifice

Consolidated

Creationism and Genesis

General notes on creationism, evolution and biblical literalism now belong within the modern creationism section, where each claim receives a more focused reply.

Genesis, Genre and Wooden Literalism

Preserved, but not promoted

Other pages retain historical interest without qualifying as current essays. The Dante material explains the name. The Salem and other witch-trial pages record older lines of research. The Newton and Einstein pages belong to a familiar argument about famous scientists and borrowed religious authority. The Invisible Pink Unicorn and old Usenet material preserve a distinct period of online atheism, when arguments arrived by newsgroup and every participant appeared to own a copy of the same FAQ.

These remain discoverable through the alphabetical legacy index. Their presence there records that they existed. It does not assert that every reference, judgement or external link remains current.

Not part of the migration

The complete King James Bible, third-party literary texts, book transcriptions, software, Windows executables, Shockwave material, ISO images, large archives, energy-monitor utilities, finance pages and unrelated personal records are not being incorporated into City of Dis.

Some are public domain. Some may carry rights questions. Some are technically obsolete. Most are simply about something else. Cosmicism is broad enough to contemplate an indifferent universe without becoming responsible for every ZIP file found within it.

How revision is handled

A migrated essay receives a new City of Dis canonical URL, current references, a provenance statement and internal links appropriate to the present site. It is entered into the Catalogue only when it has become a substantive current work. The original page remains linked for comparison until its long-term redirect or archival status is decided.

Where the new essay replaces the same search intent, the preferred end state is a redirect or cross-domain canonical from the legacy URL. Where the old page remains valuable as a historical object, it should remain visibly old and point to the revised work. Two independently indexed copies would preserve neither history nor search clarity. They would merely teach Google that the household cannot agree which child is canonical.

The purpose of this page is therefore modest. It acknowledges ancestry, points readers towards revisions and leaves a lamp burning beside the older index. It does not pretend that the archive has been purified into a seamless intellectual biography.

There was an earlier City of Dis.

Its machinery remains audible through the walls.

The present site has simply become more selective about which doors it opens.