I take the Bible seriously with a grain of salt and a hearty laugh. Too seriously kills the joy. God uses metaphor quite often, please do not think of the literary form as making something false. Metaphors can say much more than a literal statement.
Jesus did come to restore relationship by giving us access to the Tree of Life. The relationship is our spiritual response to that gift.
Cain was afraid of leaving. He was afraid of the âothers.â He should have been afraid of what would happen when his community found out he killed their friend Abel. People have never respond well in such situations. Cain was in danger sitting at home. God saved Cain twice, by sending him away and by giving him the mark. Add to that⌠Godâs curse blessed Cain. The farmer who could no longer farm had a family, became a leader of men, and built a city. The spirit and knowledge spread.
No.
These were about 150,000 years ago. The oldest cities are around 11,000 years old. By what measure can you possibly say that humanity began to blossom 130,000 years before that? The truth is that human beings lived the same way during that 130,000 years as their ancestors did a million years before that. That reduces anyone from 150,000 years ago to complete insignificance to the development of human civilization.
No this is part of the effort to reduce humanity to nothing more than a biological species and make all our development about evolution, genetics, and nothing else â which is wrong! Evolution and genetics are certainly the foundation of theoretical biology, but they are quite inadequate as a TOE.
Excuse me if I am mistaken, but I thought you were a Muslim. The Quran says that Jesus did not die on the Cross.
Jesus the Person Who knew no sin, died for the sins of us who are sinners. He was executed by the Romans for sedition, because He placed the Kingdom of God before the Roman Empire, just as humans sin by putting self over God. He was executed by the religious leaders of His day because He put God first while they put ourselves first.
Jesus could have fought the Romans aa Godâs Messiah like David or Muhammad, but He did not. His is the way of love, joy, and peace.
Humanity had many ways to blossom before civilization started. They figured out how to speak, make tools, cook, build, weave, build boats, domesticate animals, etc. while they walked across the planet. All that happened long before cities. Some of those may have started before Y-adam and M-eve, but humanity made the art forms.
I am not reducing humanity to nothing. Far from it. We are a biological species with a biological lineage. Genetics proves that belief valid. I believe at some early point, God stepped in to take our ancestors to a level above their animal ancestors. He probably did so in multiple steps to create his image from what he had already created.
The Bible does not reject evolving humans and contains many hints that support it. Traditional beliefs ignore or make up stories to fix those hints because they do not fit the tradition. Take the âothersâ in the Cain story. Insisting they were all Adam and Eveâs children is a massive assumption not supported by the story or any physical evidence, including genetics. Cain did not recognize them as family. They would not recognize him as family. Science says there were others. That agrees with the biblical version but not the tradition. How is agreement wrong?
My assumption (hypothesis) predicted a Bronze Age story that described events that happened 150,000 years earlier. I found several analogous events. The only possible reason for the similarity is that God inspired the story to reflect things that are only now being revealed. That belief contains circumstantial evidence. Yours does not provide any evidence. How does that make mine inadequate?
No idea what a TOE stands for.
Oh I quite agree with all of that. You are preaching to the choir on those points. But the Bible also teaches us that we are quite a bit more than that. You donât have agree with the Bible on that, of course. But I do.
The people Cain was afraid of were not descendants of Adam and Eve. According to the Bible, Cain was the only descendant of A&E at that time. But that only reinforces the time-line I have been explaining. All those people are out there because this has taken place AFTER the migrations which took place 100,000 to 15,000 years ago. Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam have absolutely nothing to do with the Adam and Eve in the Biblical story. We just named the former after the latter out of mere convenience.
Nope none of those come from that time period.
first buildings 1.8 million years ago
first speaking 1.8 million years ago
cooking meat 1 million to 400,000 years ago
first weaving of baskets 13,000 years ago
first domestication of animals 11,000 years ago
first cooking of bread 10,000 years ago
first weaving of cloth 9,000 years ago
first building of boats 8,000 years ago
No. In that 130,000 year period, nothing. They lived the same as they did a million years ago.
Mostly what they were doing 250,000 to 150,000 years ago is dying as they fled the glaciation covering the globe until only a remnant was left in southern Africa. Then as the glaciation receded around 100,000 then they began to repopulate the earth and migrate everywhere again. So there was a population bottleneck of sorts at that time, making it a little more likely that a mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam would come from such a time.
It is only AFTER the migrations that civilization began 10,000 to 15,000 years ago and that is when we began to blossom with all the newer developments you mentioned: baskets, domestication, cities, bread, cloth and boats.
TOE = Theory of Everything. Look. Evolution works and the evidence for it is overwhelming. But making it the one answer for all questions in place of God is going a little overboard.
A biological species is only a part of what we are by numerous measures such as the information we pass to the next generation and how we spend our time in our daily lives. We are creatures of the mind as well as the body, and our inheritance of mind doesnât come to us by DNA. But if you want to speak for yourself and say that the mind and its inheritance is of no significance to you personally you can. There does seem to be people like that.
Where do you get your figures from? What were âweâ doing for 99.5% of the time? Apart from âcookingâ and âspeakingâ and âbuildingâ?
grabbed the wrong number for that one⌠fixed it
That number was for eating meat not cooking it.
And building and speaking?
I donât read any book, the Quran included, without a critical eye.
There are always evil people looking to adversely influence
written works, especially where it stands for Justice.
The Muslim position rejects that Jesus is God or part of God. So the explanation given were that someone else died on the cross, to explain Jesusâs appearances after crucifixion. I think there is enough evidence that Jesus was crucified.
I reject the idea of the resurrection for two main reasons.
crucifixion didnât simply mean being tied to a cross. Before the crucifixion takes place the Roman whipped the people to be crucified with some sort of metal tied to whips, enough to cause them serious problems breathing once on the cross. I will try to find that source. In any case the bodies of the people crucified were damaged seriously before they were crucified. So recovering from crucifixion was not possible.
Jesus being the living Christ is in spirit. Jesus is in the spiritual world. There is no need of any body. It is only in this physical realm that a body is needed.
I agree with your two reasons why Jesus was crucified for sedition. However I donât see how you can say he could have fought against the Romans. Unlike David and Muhammad, Jesus did not have the ability to raise an army that could realistically have fought against the Roman, It would have been plain slaughter of many people if he did and I donât think he would have ever entertained such an idea.
Jesus would have outright rejected the way of people like Gandhi for instance, who sent wave after wave of hundreds and even thousands of people unarmed to be killed instantly, in order to supposedly bring the British to their senses. The British there, were standing for the East India company, in other words for oppression and profit. This is psychopathic and nothing else. IMO Gandhi was a psychopath.
Jesus is the way of love and joy and peace, but I donât believe for one minute that he really said to âlove enemiesâ and âdo good to those that harm youâ because if he did, the Romans would have had no reason to kill him nor would the Jewish High Priests.
I suspect a lot of what Jesus said has been erased from documents or not written up at all. He would have encouraged people to stand against evil and the enemies of Justice. And in doing so, not be afraid to stand their ground. Meaning fighting for their lives if need be, if attacked. If not, then Justice is torn asunder. If we âturned the other cheekâ the world today would be ruled by Nazis. No prophet would stand for that. One needs to fight the enemy, where ever one finds them.
Ah yes clicked on your linksâŚ
There are a lot of different evidence for these
Your first link reports evidence of a hut from 500,000 years ago
My number came from here and it seems to be disputed a bit.
Your link is about a gene traced to 125,000 years ago.
My number came from sites such as this one.
Building and speech developed over a long period of time and involves some evolutionary adaptation to these practices. It is hardly my argument that we had a fully functioning language 1.8 million years ago but only that is when it first began to develop. Indeed I would argue that we only had a language with abstraction and representational capabilities to rival that of DNA much more recently at the beginning of civilization only 10,000 - 20,000 years ago.
In any case the principle point was that mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam have nothing to do with the Adam and Eve of the Biblical story.
Aye, science is hard work. Iâm sure that you are right and that language, toolmaking, shared intentionality began with our hominin ancestors but didnât really reach breakthrough until well in to the evolution of H. sapiens and the emergence of behavioural modernity which seems correlated at least with Forkhead box protein P2 - FOXP2 - gene evolution after some two thirds of our species existence, 125,000 years ago out of 350,000 years. Which is correlated with the beginning of the last ice age maximum. Weâd have had language at least twice as long as civilization, 40,000 years, as we barely survived the last ice age maximum; it got us through that.
Sorry Iâm just now getting back to you, but this sounds like I could have (should have) written it. I donât know if youâve had the time to read the article I linked (itâs long), but I think youâd like it. I sketch out that process in the scientific record. Self-awareness starts with with first-order Theory of Mind, which both human toddlers and chimpanzees possess. Theory of mind is the ability to make inferences about another individualâs beliefs, goals, and intentions. We project our own thoughts into other minds to conceptualize what they might be thinking or experiencing. In his research on childhood language acquisition, Tomasello noted that even â1-year-old infants use their newly emerging skills of intention understanding not only to predict what others will do, but also to learn from them how to do things conventionally in their culture.â The inborn human capacity for understanding what others intend is the basis of human culture and âsocial learning,â which is the process that allows children to absorb such a vast amount of information in such a short time.
âConscienceâ is dependent on higher-order thinking. Conscience only became possible when the mind became capable of true self-reflection, of stepping outside the confines of its own consciousness and viewing itself from an outside perspective. Such sophisticated thought was not possible until protolanguage became language and basic empathy became second- and third-order Theory of Mind. As soon as we conceptualize an ideal, we realize that we fall short of it.
For once, we may be in total agreement. As long as you are agreeing with me ⌠
I never said that our genetic lineage was all we had. Evolution is what made our physical bodies and our capabilities to think. I believe God changed our lineage with the Breath (spirit) and the Knowledge to make his image (Genesis 3:22). Those two things make us different from our ancestors and all of the other animals.
I said humanity blossomed before civilization started. You assumed I meant only at 150,000 years ago. Your list agrees with what I said.
You chose to believe that A&E could not possibly be Y-Adam and M-Eve. Why? Iâm not sure. However, that similarity is too interesting to just dismiss. You mentioned the glaciation causing a bottleneck, which made Y-Adam and M-Eve possible. Catastrophes drive quick evolution. The human lineage changed. Why not add the Breath and Knowledge as part of that change? I accept the connection as evidence of Godâs inspiration, a detail in our lineage that no Bronze Age storyteller could have guessed. And yes, I know the names are a convenience.
Boats were invented long before 8000 years ago or people would not have reached all the islands or Australia. We may not have any physical evidence of structures, but those people had something.
The word âinspirationâ comes from the divine breath and so yes I also believe we were changed when God spoke to Adam and Eve, bringing the human mind to life. Ideas travel much faster and farther than genetics without any need to overcome the resident populations.
Why? Because it would reduce A&E to near insignificance and it doesnât agree with the Biblical account which has Cain and Abel occupied with farming and domestication â not to mention the description of events which followed. The glaciation which came close to wiping out the species would likely have been mentioned.
Incorrect. Y-Adam and M-Eve do not require a population bottleneck, they are only just a little more likely to have come from such a time.
Correct! Small populations on the brink of extinction will accelerate the process of natural selection and following a period of great variation and diversification it would be particularly effective in bringing about change in the genome. That was indeed very likely responsible for the evolution of the modern human â I quite agree with you there.
Yes that was around 50,000 years ago. But many scenarios are possible including temporary bridges of land since it is known that changing sea levels greatly affected the geography in the area and abundant coral reefs in the area. (Just take a look at the maps yourself including ocean depths.) The problem with the idea of boats and rafts is that such things will be a part of the peopleâs culture thereafter and we simply do not see any such thing. Boats (dugout canoes) were quite a novelty when brought to the natives in the 17th century.
Dear me, looks like it @Jay313! Although no chimps, elephants, octopi, crows ever carried a log or equivalent together to some joint purpose. Itâs shared intentionality that shows we are a quantum leap above the rest of creation.
A broader term for this is âintersubjectivityâ â a suite of capacities that require joint action, joint frame of reference, and empathy. For morality to exist, people must agree what constitutes ârightâ or âwrongâ behavior, establishing a joint frame of reference, and they must agree what to do when those standards are violated, which requires joint action. Even the earliest expressions of human morality relied on âshared valuesâ and âjoint action.â
I believe we read the biblical creation stories with Greek viewpoint of connectivity that forces a timeline that does not match an early arrival of Adam because of Cain.
However, the Hebrews, like their neighbors did not describe history like that. I believe the stories are inspired by God to be more. They tell us the truth about our origins. That means Adam and Eve did exist. Cain and Abel did exist. But, they are also representatives of different time points, the important events in our history that influence our spirit. The stories become parables. They incorporate billions of years in the first chapter and a hundreds of thousands in the next couple chapters. The tiny stories describe the inventions that made up civilization. All of that is done in 11 short chapters of small stories. A strict literal reading misses all of the references.
That is a rather vague claim. I think there are many distortions in understanding the Bible due to Greek philosophy but I am ready to back up those claims. Top of the list would be the Greek/Plato notion of the rational soul. But I donât see how any of this relates to the time of Adam and Eve. Everything actually written in the Bible points to a Adam and Eve having existed around 6000 years ago. I think it is possible that this was somewhat earlier like 12,000 years ago but too much earlier doesnât agree with the content of the Bible at all. So while I agree there are distortions coming from Greek philosophy, this is not a blank check to make whatever changes in the text of the Bible that you want.
More than that I think this is the explanation from God about how evil and sin came into the world. But while I think these are historical event I donât think they are meant to be taken completely literal. Even the Bible treats elements of the story as symbolic with references to the serpent and the Tree of life. So no I donât believe we began as golems of dust and bone created by necromancy, and I donât believe in magical fruit or talking animals. So I am certainly not adhering to anything like a strict literal reading of the text. But I do not see the coincidence of using Adam and Eve in terminology for these concepts in genetics to be a good reason for ignoring what the Bible says.
âLet your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.â -Colossians 4:6
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