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The Torah addresses the true nature of human beings in its opening chapter on the story of Adam's and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden. The salient points of the story are certainly pertinent to our lives and times. Adam and Eve disobey God's commandment and mistakenly substitute the quest for human knowledge, wisdom and opinion for the Divine will. The tendency of humans, even those who deem themselves to be pious and faithful, is to believe somehow that they know better - better than tradition, than experience, better than God Himself. Thus every ideal, policy, analysis created by...

Jun. 18, 2006 0:24 | Updated Jun. 18, 2006 10:4511,000-year-old grain shakes up beliefs on beginnings of agriculture By JUDY SIEGEL-ITZKOVICH Bar-Ilan University researchers have found a cache of 120,000 wild oat and 260,000 wild barley grains at the Gilgal archaeological site near Jericho that date back 11,000 years - providing evidence of cultivation during the Neolithic Period. The research, performed by Drs. Ehud Weiss and Anat Hartmann of BIU's department of Land of Israel studies and Prof. Mordechai Kislev of the faculty of life sciences, appears in the June 16 edition of the prestigious journal Science. It is the...

Where It All Began The very thing which is now called the Christian religion existed among the ancients also, nor was it wanting]rom the inception if the human race until the coming if Christ in the flesh, at which point the true religion which was already in existence began to be called Christian. -ST. AUGUSTINE, Retractiones THIS ASTOUNDING STATEMENT by St. Augustine, one of the most brilliant thinkers in the earliest centuries of the Church, utterly refutes the traditional view that Christianity, though of obvious Jewish roots, virtually fell from the skies as a radically new, unique, all- surpassing religion...