Okay. You mistook “hominins” for “homonyms”. I apologize for laughing, but that’s sorta funny.
All members of the genus Homo are called hominins. The older term “hominids” is now defined as all primates. I’m not talking about same spelling with different meanings.
Momma always said: “If you can’t say anything intelligent, you need to be funny or bring gifts when you visit.” Don’t have any gifts for you, so I tried to be funny. I’m pleased that you laughed.
if the genus is Homo I would consider most of them human.
They are different species. No theological implications for me, but I speak for myself. Some people get hung up on which people have souls. I let God handle that. Then again, white men were concerned about which people could be enslaved in good conscience.
Yes, there are. I realize that I’m taking your comments even farther off topic than you acknowledged yours to be; however, … Slavers and slave owners who were faithful members of Roman Catholicism were bound by teaching that all humans could benefit from the sacraments. Which is why you’ll find slaves receiving the sacraments. As a consequence, slaves could and would undergo Christian marriage and it was common to keep children with their parents, at least until the kids reached their teens.
Protestant slavers and slave owners, on the other hand, commonly viewed slaves (typically non-white) as non-human and incapable of benefiting from sacraments, if any. Slaves were “bred” like farm animals and there was no common effort to keep families together. I hesitate to claim hard and fast slave-treatment practices among Catholics and Protestants. However, as an experienced genealogist, I am well acquainted with the difference between genealogical records for Catholics and for Protestants. Researching Roman Catholic ancestral lines is much easier–as long as they’re Catholic–than researching Protestant ancestral lines.
And yet we we ended up being the dominant specie on this planet?
Not me either. My question would rather be “if there were other human(from God’s perspective)species in coexistence, than wouldn’t that imply we’re a lot less special in God’s eyes than we previously thought?”.
Thanks @Terry_Sampson I didn’t know that.
At first glance Catholics seem to be “nicer” but on the other hand…they were happy to enslave other people. How Christianity and slavery were going hand in hand is something I’m really struggling with.
Also, why does Lyellian relative dating match very well with radiometric dating?
Lyell used the extinction rates of European molluscan faunas to originally define the Cenozoic epochs (a few were added a bit later in the early 1800s, after people found them).
<30% extinct: Pleistocene–radiometric dating gives 1.800-0 Ma
~40% extinct Pliocene–5.333-1.800
~50% extinct: Miocene–23.03±0.05-5.333
~70% extinct: Oligocene–33.9±0.1-23.03±0.05
~90% extinct: Eocene–56.0-33.9
100% extinct: Paleocene–66.0-56.0
Other parts of the world have different rates, here are those for the US East Coast:
<5% extinct: Chibanian-Recent (middle-late Pleistocene and younger) (<700 ka)
15% extinct: early Calabrian (early-middle Pleistocene) (1.6 Ma)
60% extinct: early Gelasian (late Pliocene, under Lyell’s age-definition) (2.4-1.8 Ma)
67% extinct: late Piacenzian (mid-late Pliocene) (3.0-2.6 Ma)
75% extinct: late Zanclean to Piacenzian (early to mid Pliocene) (~4-3.2 Ma)
100% extinct: Tortonian (late Miocene) (~7-~5 Ma)
No, Catholics slavers were not “nicer” than Protestant ones. Read about slavery in Brazil, where a special breed of dog was developed to guard slaves. Read about the building of Georgetown University, where priests kept whole harems of enslaved women.
Catholic Portugal was a major player in the slave trade. Portuguese slavers, after capturing Blacks in Africa, would shackle them and then baptize them before stuffing them into ships for the harrowing voyage to the Americas and other destinations. Ah, the sacrament of baptism. How nice. And the enslaved had no choice in the matter.
I wasn’t at all implying they were, hence the use of inverted commas. I appreciate these nuances can be sometimes lost with just a plane text for communication.
The question would be, could any slave owner ever be nice? Let’s not forget that almost every white person used to be implicated in slave trade one way or another. If you were born at certain times and certain countries, that was normal.
And if you happened to have certain status in society, chances of you owning a slave or two(hundred) were high. So are all these people in hell right now for what they’ve done, even though it was acceptable at the time?
Not in my view.
Not everyone. Look at the Quakers and other abolitionists. The whole Darwin/Wedgwood clan was abolitionist. And slavery was practiced by the Hebrews. And by some Africans and some Indigenous Americans before any contact with whites.
Do all sinners end up in hell?
There were the ones who tried to do the best they could (the sort that the Shelbys in Uncle Tom’s Cabin are based on) still, the system was highly problematic.
I gather that those few of my relations at that time who A. lived in areas where it was legal and B. were wealthy enough to own any, were in that category, given the few stories we have, like that after being voluntarily freed, one of the family slaves would come back every year for new shoes. Even though they were wealthy for my ancestors, they were still in the “own maybe 10, mostly inherited or grew up here” category.
Just the non-Jews and, I suppose, Jewish slave-owners who failed to abide by the Torah. Think “deep-fried”. 
The best you can do is to not own slaves.
I’m more pleased that you meant it as a joke. Sorry I was so slow in getting it.
We managed to cross the threshold and our brains became an asset to survival instead of a danger. So far.
I think there are two ways to look at it. As a parent, God loves all his children, but God has given us the special task of the imago Dei.
Is there any good reason to think that Neanderthals did not bear the image of God?
Better late to a party than never getting to it at all, eh?
'S all good when all are smiling.
In my view all living things are fundamentally made in the image of God – infinite potential to reflect the infinite actuality of God. And yet all living things are not the same, and the human mind makes a huge difference, and I believe that comes from a communication by God with Adam and Eve – an inheritance of ideas which made us His children.
But not only is this image of God defined by potentiality rather than actuality (according to me) but in practice, it is always the potentiality which concerns us more than actual capabilities (consider infants and children). Thus even when God first spoke to Adam and Eve, the potentiality was there in the entire species. Though… by that time Neanderthals and Denisovans were already gone as a distinct groups, absorbed into the homo sapiens expansion out of Africa.
So you must have a date for a literal Adam and Eve?
P.S. I wonder sometimes, when reflecting on different “types of people” that there have been in the past, which–if any–may have been pre-human and which I would consider to have been human. I would think that a little “fact” that I’ve read about would separate the pre-humans from the humans. The fact came to my attention in a paper, “Neurobiology of Sexual Desire” [Source: NeuroQuantology | June 2013 | Volume 11 | Issue 2 | Page 332-359].
Wow! so what makes us human is capacity to commit suicide. Never thought of it like that and never heard anyone say that in public (probably because it is unsayable). But deep down it makes sense. And it puts another spin on the original sin, don’t you think? Perhaps that’s what it actually was. Not only some neanderthal became Human, but also committed one of the worst sins there are at the same time. Mystery solved!
Minor technicality, IMO. Whats makes us human is the Self which originates in the Executive Function regions, “especially in the Bodmann area 10”. With the appearance of a Self, come the human strategies to get through “the future”. The “image of God” that some humans make such a big deal about? A divine gift, along with the capacity to kill one’s Self.
As a rule I don’t engage in Antoine Suarez’ thread.
, but I did briefly quite some time ago. About that time, a rough estimate for when, in the past, pre-humans “got the image of God”. Can’t remember exactly, but I think Atoine conjectured that it was about 40,000 years ago [Don’t quote me; I may have the years wrong.] For more, ask Antoine or some regular participant in that thread for info on Antoine’s guess and rationale for it.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
This is a place for gracious dialogue about science and faith. Please read our FAQ/Guidelines before posting.
