I don’t want to over-state this use of the term “blood”. My point was merely to draw attention to the fact that in ancient days one could intelligently speak of being of “royal blood” for generations and generations … which, as you know, is not something we can do with genetic elements, since we have a rather limited number of genes.
Further, if we were to compare “Federal Headship” to anything, it would be to the notion of “bloodlines”, rather than to genetic inheritance.
But they would NOT have been intelligently speaking about genetics!
No… they would have been more correctly speaking in GENEALOGICAL TERMS (aka, blood lines!) … which recognizes the difference between relatedness “by descent” versus relatedness “by marriage”!!!
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gbrooks9
(George Brooks, TE (E.volutionary T.heist OR P.rovidentialist))
122
This is an excellent point. It makes it VERY clear that Adam and Eve were not - - by their nature - - immortal, but only immortal because of their access to the Tree of Life !!!
Genesis, in its first ten chapters and ten verses, i.e. up to and including the Tower of Babel, disagrees flagrantly with the Creation we inhabit":
Days Two and Four make it impossible for Earth to orbit the nearest star, or for the moon to orbit Earth.
Day Three makes it impossible for Earth to exist as a ball with a thin crust of continents surrounded by films of water (seas.)
Verses 1 and 3 declare that God created time, space, matter, and light all at one go. Over the past quarter millennium (250 or so years) astonished admiration and study into the finest details of what God created have given a name to the act of Creation that gave us a universe: the big bang.
The universe explains itself coyly - we must apply great diligence and smarts to tease out layers of secrets. We understand the mechanism of evolution, and are half-way to understanding abiogenesis.
The above are hard fact; rationalizations based on poorly understood “sciencey facts” fall flat. Creation does not lie and, if you pay close attention, does not mislead. Conspiracy theories about Satan fooling scientists, or science being a collection of atheist cabals, also fall flat. Many scientists have realized that the universe had to have been Created.
Hide-bound connections between Genesis and Fact fall apart in light of the above. Genesis is theology. It describes a holy, pure, caring, intentional, and all-Creating God. It introduces Creation via two chapters, which alas conflict with each other if both are required to be fact. What is understood about Creation today would require a thousand scrolls loaded with arcane PhD level terminology, and if that were really there - “Just the facts, Ma’am,” as yourself about the important description of God, the theology mentioned above, - how would illiterate people even know it was there?
The length required to provide all the facts would take sufficient scrolls to encapsulate the gist of what Creation has managed to teach us in the past 250 years or so. Rather, the thumbnails in the first two chapters [[ which disagree with each other ]] manage to assert theological truth: God, holy and righteous and caring and intentional, created this Universe. The two chapter version manages to do that whereas the Library of Congress version would hide any hope of theology behind a blizzard of PhD level abstractions.
The Spirit inspired the text. Should we doubt that? And if we do not doubt, then prophecy regarding future events is clearly appropriate.
To be historical Genesis requires that Earth not orbit the nearest star and earth not have the form of a globe with a thin crust of continents surrounded by films of water (oceans.)
Making a shibboleth of a historical Genesis betrays its purpose as theology. It describes the Creator, while short-handing Creation itself. Full facts? How about major sections of the Library of Congress to deal with the universe as it has revealed it self to us. It is Created hence does not lie and will not mislead if you pay close attention. Science is built on doing exactly that.
Just over one-hundred passages in the New Testament quote Genesis.
Every one of them adduces a theological point.
Start there,
It’s more accurate to say that quite often the nuances can’t be translated without increasing the word count immensely. Jerome’s Vulgate shows examples of this issue just going from Greek to Latin; more than once he renders a verse in Greek that may have a dozen words with twenty or more in Latin, a favorite example being with “the fruit of the spirit” in Galatians: the Greek has nine items, but Jerome uses as I recall fifteen – he didn’t add anything, he just used two Latin words sometimes to get the sense of one Greek word.
Hebrew to English is far more difficult, and that right from the start: there is no way at all to actually translate the Bible’s very first verse because English just can’t do what the Hebrew does – English doesn’t have the right structures to actually represent what is happening with the Hebrew. The traditional rendition of “In the beginning God created…” falls incredibly far short of what the Hebrew expresses – and there is no way to fix it apart from perhaps listing three or four attempts to translate it and pointing out that none is correct, that they have to be understood together all at once.
A comparison: at the Passover, Jews remember that their ancestors came out of Egypt. But we know from history and scripture that this is not true of all Jews; more than once others joined Israel via the men being circumcised, so there were and are Jews whose ancestors never lived in Egypt. Nevertheless the Passover applies to them as well as to those whose lineage goes back to the Exodus. On top of that, according to Exodus there were many people who weren’t even descendants of Jacob who came out of Egypt with the Hebrews, yet Israel is still considered to all be descendants of his twelve sons.
So while @gbrooks9’ math is interesting, it’s a bit of a silly operation because it’s clear from scripture than blood descent is not necessary to be included in a theological category, and that extends to who is one of God’s people. This appears also in the New Testament: all the Jews considered themselves children of Abraham, but we know from the above that they all didn’t start out that way; they were, to use the Apostle Paul’s language, grafted in.
And indeed Paul expounds on the concept as regards Abraham: it isn’t the descendants of Abraham that are his offspring, it is those of faith. We tend to think of this as an entirely new thing, but it isn’t, as seen above: those who decided to trust Yahweh and so joined the covenant via circumcision were children of Abraham. This is something that started right at the beginning, since it wasn’t just Abraham who was circumcised, it was all his household at a time when he had only Ishmael as offspring, and God clearly told him that people bought from foreigners were to be circumcised – or at least their male children – which made them part of God’s people.
So since blood descent isn’t necessary for anyone to be considered part of God’s people even in the old covenant, why should we think that blood descent is necessary to be considered “sons of Adam and daughters of Eve”?
But that doesn’t fit with the way membership in a theological group is treated either in the Old Testament writings or by Paul. By the time of Jesus there were thousands of Jews who had “great-great-greats” other than Jacob/Israel, yet they were still “children of Israel”.
That’s what was claimed by Jews to Jesus’ – yet they darned well knew, and Paul later expounded, that it wasn’t having the right blood that makes one children of Abraham – faith and circumcision counted. It’s worth noting that Exodus tells us that “a mixed multitude” left Egypt with the Hebrews, but by the time the whole group got to Sinai everyone present is regarded as children of Israel – not because of blood but because they were all “sons of the covenant”.
They were counted as having the ‘right’ blood even though everyone knew they didn’t!
Especially since “made of dust” was an ancient near eastern way of saying “mortal”.
It is also possible that they recognized that one could be adopted into a blood line, especially as that had been the case in the Old Testament period.
I am reminded of a recent defense of the idea that the two creation stories are about the same thing – the assertion was that the second story was “flexible” about the order of things . . . a very dangerous proposition if you want an inerrant scripture!
Just the math for what is known today would overflow those thousand scrolls.
The demise of the dinosaurs is fixed in the geological history of Planet Earth - a meteor the size of Manhattan did so much damage that a huge majority of all species vanished, all within the span of much less than a decade. Only the smallest survived, including the ancestors of birds. They are the current set of dinosaurian descendants.
Other than that, the quoted assertions are wholly contrary to fact
I have read that the meteorite was some kind of final nail to the coffin. What I read claimed that various causes had put dinosaurs to a decline and many species had already died - I do not know if the rate of extinction had really elevated much from the ‘normal’ rate. Anyhow, it seems evident that the space stone was the blow that exterminated a huge amount of dinosaur species, probably through the disappearance of food (famine).
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SkovandOfMitaze
(Intellectually Atheist Emotionally Christian )
131
This is from the Common Descent Podcast. It’s about the K-T/K-Pg extinction.
Seems that there was several different impacts over a very long time that led to the decline of dinosaurs. It’s a good podcast by two scientists sometimes often brings on guests. They do like 30-60mins of scientific news followed by 30-90 minutes of the topic for most episodes.
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SkovandOfMitaze
(Intellectually Atheist Emotionally Christian )
132
On a side note. Much of the prophecies were probably added in later after the fact. It would be like if I wrote a history on America, and created a God and made that god responsible for the wars we won against others and then created prophets and interwoven them into that story and claimed in 1950 the prophet said if we don’t change our ways two jets in less than 70’years will hit the towers. But I wrote this story in 2024.
The only basis for that claim is the idea that prophecy is improbable or impossible. Textually, there is no reason to think that the prophecies are not original to the text, which by other measures dates before 65 A.D.
I’m liking it, especially the light-hearted banter illustrating some items. The one that really caught my attention was the comparison of the Chicxulub impactor to Mount Everest and the comment that if it had just sat on the sea floor it would have been an island. I’ve read the figures about size and mass before but they were “just figures”, never really hit me, but those comparisons made me sit up and take note!
Loved the discussion of the Deccan Traps in India, though I have to disagree with the description “slow and continuous”, since most of what erupted was flood basalt like what comes out of Kilauea in Hawaii, nor was it continuous any more than the Bonneville flood basalts in Oregon and Washington were – it just kept erupting frequently (geologically speaking; there was enough time between eruptions for thin soil to develop once the most recent eruption cooled.
I hoped they would mention a suggestion made decades ago that the Deccan eruptions were the result of the Chicxulub impact, the waves of energy propagating through the Earth focusing on the far side of the planet – a fun hypothesis while it lasted, it turned out that the geometry at the time wasn’t right, and that the energy shouldn’t have been enough to set off such massive eruptions anyway – though as they noted, it could have been enough to trigger something ready to happen anyway, so it turns out they did get to that!
Part of the problem, pointed out by Signor & Lipps, is that as not everything is fossilized, the last known fossil of a particular group will be somewhat before the actual end. How much of a gap will depend on sampling, preservation potential, etc. Thus, an actual abrupt extinction of dinosaurs will look somewhat like longer-term dwindling in the fossil record. One can get at the problem with modeling, but it is a challenge. However, given the enormous sample size, extinction of microfossils is likely to be much better dated.
To be precise, Kilauea and other Hawai’ian basalts aren’t flood basalts - flood basalt is when the eruptions cover a huge area forming a basalt plateau rather than building up an individual volcano. Very small-scale flood eruptions happened in Iceland in the 1700’s, but that’s the most recent example.
The Deccan eruptions began noticeably before the end-Cretaceous, and dinosaurs were still doing fine in India after the first eruptions. There was an increase in the volume of activity near the boundary, however.
If individuals are going to take the view that prophecies are not in fact “predictions”, then the bible loses its divine inspiration and even its legitimacy. If prophets cannot predict the future under divine inspiration (instruction actually), then the gospel claim that Christ death provides us with an avenue to salvation and eternal life is bollocks. Out the window goes Christianity,and God. We cant just pick and choose which ones to believe and which ones not to believe. Consistency tells us all pophecy must predict a real life future event because “God”…!
I found this interesting and many of the speakers of which there are many express sentiments I’ve heard expressed here by members whose thinking I respect. NT Wright begins speaking about 8:18 but Walton and Enns and those who made the title page also address the topic. Is this a well known video? It is 12 years old.
I’d be interested in gettin Adam’s take on it and see if he finds any speakers who he respects here.
Yeah–burrowing through layers laid down over long periods of time. Same as polystrate fossils. There are fossilized trees that are preserved throughout layers supposedly laid down over hundreds of thousands or millions of years. The better explanation of the evidence is that the layers were laid down rapidly. How could a tree last thousands or millions of years waiting to become fossilized?
