Letters to the Editor
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Saint James Version, Richard?
King James has been canonized? When did that happen? Surely that's a first for a Protestant?
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"I'm smarter than all the other posters on Salon. As usual."
No just the dumb ones, the zealots and the children. I get it really. I mean this is Salon. Religion evil. Gotcha. No need to repeat yourselves so much.
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@Saintzak
>On what day... did He create Elvis?<
You mispelled James Brown...;)
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No need to repeat yourselves so much.
Likewise.
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Both Sides Are True...
The Genesis story has great spiritual, mythic, and poetic truth. It even has a little scientific truth.
The scientific story (obviously) has great scientific truth, plus, as many posters already have pointed out, it has spiritual magnificence as well.
This is a paradox, maybe. Many of us have learned to accept paradoxes as high wisdom. But the christianists do not understand. They insist on a single unparadoxical, unambiguous, murderous truth.
They are dangerous, and they are impossible to deal with. In the past, they were a tiny minority. Now, they are a substantial minority. We need to worry about them.
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Nope.
The Religious Right and other fundies are fighting an uphill battle here. They're at an extreme disadvantage and will eventually lose for exactly one reason:
The facts are against them. They are, in fact, wrong.
Ultimately there is no way they can hope to overcome such a disadvantage. The Catholic Church could not, and they had centuries to fight these battles, which were all eventually lost.
Reason is their enemy, however they try to co-opt it. But they cannot win against it. The best they can do is to lie, as loud as they can. And lying in the service of religion is blasphemy.
"Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God."
- Martin Luther
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Dear Anonymous and Galael
Thanks for the responses. I'm fully aware at the start that I'm in the wrong library aisle. But Salon.com is a professional looking site and has some good stuff.
In answer I'd say that that is exactly the context I'm talking about. I don't make any rules here.
As regards Galileo, and Copernicus, the church is not the Holy Bible. Certainly the modern Christian community is not. As the butler Norris said in 'The Big Sleep' "...I make many mistakes, sir".
I offer up the much maligned Star Trek episode 'Spock's Brain'. If the Holy Bible got something wrong, then it's pure bullshit front to back. But sometimes things that seem incomprehensible become crystal clear when they are finally understood. The Book of Enoch in the Apochrophy states that angels get up each morning and run the gears for the sun and the moon, just like a union. It also says that the moon reflects the sun's light to the tune of 1/7.
I strongly disagree with several posters who lambast Salon.com for posting the article in a non-satirical sense. Look at the response. It's all going to come down to this if it hasn't already. And I put my money on God's Word.
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Size matters.
"Since I first realized that fundamentalists actually existed among us in our modern western culture, I've always been amazed how small they make the God they glorify."
-- Typesbad
Even so:
"Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child."
- Lazarus Long, Time Enough for Love
It's like this.
If God exists and is benevolent, then he'll forgive me for not having believed in myths invented by ignorant shepherds 3000 years ago.
If God doesn't exist, or is not benevolent, then it wouldn't matter anyway.
'Nuff said.
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Who Adam & Eve's kids married
I have always wondered about that, and have never gotten a satisfactory answer.
Well, Genesis 6:1-4 talks about the "sons of God" marrying human women, and producing a race called the Nephilim, who were "the heroes of days gone by, men of renown" (quote courtesy of the New Jerusalem Bible, Reader's Edition published in 1990). Granted that's all post-Cain and Abel, so who Cain and Abel themselves married is kind of up in the air.
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How they know it wasn't an apple
If they regard the Bible as gospel, how do they know it wasn't
Because the word for "apple" does not appear in Genesis. T.he word used is merely "fruit".
And as stated previously, apples are not native to Iraq.
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To enter this temple of knowledge...
will cost you $19.95. And, funnily enough, they don't offer a student discount.
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Whom They Married (@Kitchengirl)
Adam and Eve's kids married each other. In the next generation, some naughty angels seduced some of the grand children.
That's what you are referencing.
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How to make the world a better place
If all these Fundies died tomorrow, via rapture or capture, the earth would be restored to is pristine state. Get them out of here.
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Witty, Smitty.
"To enter this temple of knowledge . . . will cost you $19.95. And, funnily enough, they don't offer a student discount."
-- Mr. Smitty
It's an expensive operation with an expensive facility and expensive exhibits. Maintenance will therefore also be expensive. So will personnel expenses, even if they don't keep the armed guards and the concertina wire. It's not like it's actually going to make any money, so it'll get dowdy and fewer will come every year.
In a couple of years the organizers' Unchangeable Beliefs will get revamped, and they'll quietly remove the bristling canines from the carnivore models, the ones strangely purported to be vegetarians, just to quiet the contradiction. They'll be sure to downplay this absurdity eventually, just as the religious have downplayed numerous of their other absurdities over the centuries.
They always do.
Remarkably, fundies insist the bible is exactly true - even though they can't even agree on exactly what it says.
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@kdwmson
It's the version penned in the Infirmary :-)
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bad idea
This is borrowed from a German philosopher but very apt: if forty million people stand behind a bad idea, it is still a bad idea.
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Incest in the Garden
As to whom Adam and eve's children married, the answer obviously is other humans.
The problem with a literal reading of Genesis is that there is quite a bit of Ambiguity through out it.
The very notion of how many humans were created in Eden is not immedeatly clear. It is accepted that God created adequate breeding stocks of the other creatures of the land sea and air, and there is not a clear implication that only two humans were created.
The story of Adam and Eve is a seperate story within Genesis describing the fall from grace for humanity, but exactly when that happened is not immedeatly clear by a literal interpretation of the words on the page.
It is entirely probable that multiple humans were understood to have been created and that the fall from grace was a collective punishment for humans despite the fact that some would not have been the direct descendents. The Bible has numerous instances of collective punishment, so this interpretation is not necessarily out of line.
In the end, this museam is not a literal reading of the story of Genesis, it is an interpretation based on hundreds of years of presumptive scholarship, and bad reasoning.
When this museam's notions are presented to actual bible scholars they find it as laughable and natural scientists.
Also, with regards to the fruit. The Apple legend derives from a later verse in the bible (memory fales as to which book) which references the idea that one mother first laid down beneath an apple tree. As poor scholars had thought sex was the original sin (as Cain and Able were not born until after the fall) however that overlooks the original be fruitfull and multiply commandment.
The modern creationists have recognized that one bit of bad scholarship, and it took only a hundred years. Perhaps in another hundred years they will get rid of the rest of the poor scholarship.