Posted on 11/24/2014 1:07:14 PM PST by NYer
literal interpretation of the Genesis STORIES - plural? That covers a lot of ground. I would be interested in which stories you believe never happened.
A reasonable reading of Genesis 1:26 suggests that Adam and Eve were not the first humans created. Adam and Eve were the humans created to live in the Garden of Eden, but the Bible never claims they were the only humans at the time.
If other humans existed elsewhere, that would explain Genesis 4:14. If there were no other humans besides the first four, what exactly was Cain afraid of? That would also explain where Cain got his wife.
Did the author really exist?
May I suggest you read Genesis again more carefully, and perhaps a better translation. Genesis does not teach that the earth is flat!
Isaih 40 :21Have ye not known? have ye not heard? hath it not been told you from the beginning? have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth?
22It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in:
The Hebrew word for circle means sphere, globe or ball. The Douay Reims Bible uses the term “globe”!
So much for your “flat earth” version of the Bible!
Posted to you by mistake...sorry...I asked the mods to remove post 42!
That there was a "Mitochondrial Eve" doesn't mean that that woman didn't have sisters, aunts and cousins, only that none of those women's descendants survived until today. And it certainly doesn't mean that she was the first woman-- she is the last female common ancestor of modern humans.
Perhaps you are thinking of Lot? The incestuous relationship between Lot and his daughters occurred more than 400 years before Noah was given the law, including the laws forbidding incest and polygamy. The only real sin that took place was that Lot failed to provide the opportunity for his daughters to marry.
(If Genesis is to be believed, then we all sprang from incestuous relationships, the children of Adam and Eve had to marry and mate one another.)
People really spend time thinking about this?
At this point, as the saying goes, what difference does it make?
Isaac Asimov was a Catholic?
Frankly, it doesn’t really matter.
So Clarence Darrow was right? Somebody was having another Creation over in the next county?
My favorite piece of “religious” thinking is that God allowed Satan to plant fossils all over the place, create geological strata, place galaxies (apparently) millions of light-years away,” etc., etc., in order to tempt us to believe that Creation occurred more than 6,000 years ago—and thus test our faith.
If it contained all the detail, you couldn't read it in your lifetime.
Excuse me? We don’t?
Yes.
mark
There actually wasn't much religious objection to it. Staunch Christian resistance to cosmological theories has been greatly exaggerated in modern times.
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