Nature Worship of the Ancients

[whag]

How long have you lived in Southern California? Are you an illegal from Mexico--the above word I have italicized should read "continents".\?
Nor do you seem to have any grasp even of your OWN theology. It is Fundamentalists LIKE YOU who have believed in the "flood theory of geology", and here you are confessing that you believe in continental drift, which took hundreds of millions of years.
Time to give up on Seventh Day Baptist theology or Primitive Baptist theology and find real Christianity that's believable. (Your statement of faith is incoherent--did you write it yourself--I suppose no one else would have.)

This is racist and mean spirited. You could learn from tabibito, who has a much more even-keeled and gentle approach when it comes to correcting others.

[Adam]

We need to borrow Jewish Theology here. Jews (particularly Haredi) believe that Adam was the first man ("Adam" means "man" anyway) and that all (?--maybe just Hebrews?) subsequent "men" (how about women?) are "sparks" of Adam, that his soul by gilgul animates all (?) of us today. Whether or not this clearly teaches such or not, we can utilize this to understand that all subsequent homo sapiens (males, anyway, maybe female souls are sparks of Eve) after his birth (death?) henceforth were no longer "prehistoric" or hunter-gatherers or whatever, but were grafted in to this new creation.
A possible modification even of my "own" theory here might be that the Adamic soul passes on by dominant heredity to all his physical offspring. Subsequent conquests (winning and losing equally effective for this purpose), inter-breeding, miscegenation would by now have spread the Adamic soul to all the world with the possible exception of African Bushmen, Andaman Islanders, Australian Blackfellows, and possibly some other isolated tribes.
(The character of such possible pre-Adamic races is oddly disparate. I remember studying antropology in 1965 and deciding that Kalahari Kung Bushmen were the nicest people in the world. The very similar same sub-species group in the Andaman Islands kept their purity for millennia by promptly killing all outsiders who landed. I don't know the character of that sub-species representative in Queensland Australia, they were probably the first migrants to Australia 60,000 years ago. The separate sub-species of Australoids (still found to some extent in their native India) came tens of thousands of years later and largely took over the Australian continent and have their own characteristics, most notably the lack of a volume concept. Both these two sub-species still live in Australia as oppressed Aborigines. There may have been even another sub-species of pre-Adamics in Australia, the White tribe of New South Wales that is now extinct (except probably living unrecognized as "White" as indistinguishable from Adamic Whites who took over from England in the 18th Century). Not to mention the Tasmanians--extinct since about 1880--who may have been yet another sub-species, and they clearly never had time to fully interbreed with Adamic races.)
(Parenthetically I hold to the general physical anthropological model of Carleton Coon as in Races of Europe, that there are five sub-species of humans: Caucasoids, Mongoloids, Negroids, Capoid (Bushmen), and Australoid. In my second theological model here, I would suggest the first three as Adamic and that they constitute 99.99% of living humanity)

[Adam]

This is racist and mean spirited. You could learn from tabibito, who has a much more even-keeled and gentle approach when it comes to correcting others.

You think THIS is racist? You should see some of my other stuff!
I can be very gentle. I have read stuff from 37818 here before and see no reason to pull any punches with such as he.

[whag]

You think THIS is racist? You should see some of my other stuff!
I can be very gentle. I have read stuff from 37818 here before and see no reason to pull any punches with such as he.

He was indoctrinated to believe it, so just chill. And accusing him of being fresh off the boat isn't gonna help you change his mind.

[Tassman]

It is a mildly interesting article. ... But the science doesn't preclude Adam and Eve - just makes necessary a dispassionate reexamination (no, not a faith hope and baling wire reinterpretation) of what the record of Genesis actually says. Doing so would very quickly reveal that compatibility or incompatibility with the genealogical and geological records are not the only options.

But even if they were the only options available, which would almost certainly result in an assessment of the first 11 chapters of Genesis as wholly mythological, the claim that the story of Adam and Eve is "a bedrock of Christian faith" simply is incorrect.

As to Babel - "a just so" story is the most likely scenario.

Given that the Atonement is the core of Christianity one needs the disobedience of Adam, whether allegorical or literal, to provide something to atone for. So, in this sense, it’s reasonable to regard the Adam story as "a bedrock of Christian faith".

[Adam]

All you guys are hung up on innovative theology of the past millennium instituted by Anselm. Before Anselm (and again since Bishop Gustav Aulen's Christus Victor)Christians had the Classic Theory of Atonement, that Jesus died to break Satan's illegitimate control over planet Earth. Satan was the Power of this world in full force before that, but Satan has been on borrowed time ever since and his power will soon be broken altogether.

[Tassman]

All you guys are hung up on innovative theology of the past millennium instituted by Anselm. Before Anselm (and again since Bishop Gustav Aulen's Christus Victor)Christians had the Classic Theory of Atonement, that Jesus died to break Satan's illegitimate control over planet Earth. Satan was the Power of this world in full force before that, but Satan has been on borrowed time ever since and his power will soon be broken altogether.

“Just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned…” Romans 5:12-18

The message is clear: Death through the first Adam and life through the last Adam, i.e. Christ.

[tabibito]

I find it difficult to believe that Paul was referring to death of the body in that passage. Possible admittedly, but I think it unlikely for that to have been his intent.

[Adam]

I regard Paul as "Pastoral Theology". Good counseling and preaching material, but not authoritative. (As of the time Luther broke off from the Roman Catholic Church, no official canon of the Bible had been promulgated. That happened two or three decades later at the Council of Trent, but that's only authoritative for Roman Catholics.)

Be that as it may, the passage you (Tassman) quote from Romans is irrelevant to my Post #17, which I recommend you read. Yes, it's long, so maybe the whole point already made in paragraph #1 would not be too burdensome for your intellect. The Jewish concept of gilgul, sparks from Adam.

[Tassman]

I regard Paul as "Pastoral Theology". Good counseling and preaching material, but not authoritative. (As of the time Luther broke off from the Roman Catholic Church, no official canon of the Bible had been promulgated. That happened two or three decades later at the Council of Trent, but that's only authoritative for Roman Catholics.)

Be that as it may, the passage you (Tassman) quote from Romans is irrelevant to my Post #17, which I recommend you read. Yes, it's long, so maybe the whole point already made in paragraph #1 would not be too burdensome for your intellect. The Jewish concept of gilgul, sparks from Adam.

So Paul got it wrong in your view?

[Adam]

Never liked Paul.
However, when I got baptized in the Spirit in 1977 I found that the basics for Charismatic gifts, worship, and preaching is in Paul's writings.
Nevertheless, mainline churches have it right now to view Paul in the context of his times. Here again, however, I have found new appreciation for Paul in that he was right about limiting the authority of women (as a Lutheran I'm in one of the denominations that ordains women as priests but not bishops) and opposing homosexuality. I started noticing twenty years ago (when I was Episcopalian, one of the first denominations to succumb) that "they" were worming in and taking over everything they could. Now they're even using the radical activist judiciary to persecute Christians. So my level of respect for Paul has quite increased.

So I think Paul went too far to forbid women to speak in church, I even let them preach, but still under the authority of male bishops. Women are too touchy-feely for things like New Age or even paganism. They can't be trusted to adhere to proper doctrine. Which brings us right back to the topic of this thread. Fertility cults must be suppressed, we had to graduate out of the religious forms women gravitated to.

[Cornelius]

Here's my take on it. I actually read the whole thread, but I can't remember it all in detail, so I'll respond to the first post:

Given the environment that early human beings lived in and circumstances they endured, isn’t it obvious why they worshiped nature and made fertility statues? The belief that human beings worshiped nature as a rebellious act seems to me implausible in the context of that. If early human beings were in the ineffable presence of God, worshiping fat pregnant statues would’ve literally been retarded. We have good evidence we weren’t literally retarded. Our epistemological curiosity and early subsequent knowledge gains (coordinated cooperative hunting, smelting of ore, etc) would be a good example of that evidence. We weren't so insane that we'd choose statues over a loving and providential God, or were we?

This would be pretty reasonable under a YEC model of ~10,000-20,000 year old Earth, but if we stretch it to something like 200,000 or so years, it's not as hard to believe. It might seem like God is present everywhere in the Bible, but actually the time periods where He did anything can be quite large (so we see in Ruth the statement that it was a long time ago they saw any miracle - the Exodus).

So then you're correct to say that nature worship and fertility cults aren't a direct act of rebellion - it's simply what humans who don't know any better would begin to worship, obviously with an invention by someone here and there, perhaps for personal gain (Romans 1). One can find many parallels such as those islands in the Pacific that started worshipping common WWII objects (after Allied troops had been there).

As for the whole Tower of Babel story, this is my opinion: it was a local event (Semitic languages in mind). The word earth can mean the Levant as it does occasionally. In Genesis 11:2 the people are coming from the east and they already seem to know that people tend to break off and split up (11:4), which can only be the voice of experience. We have an enumeration of the origin of nations prior to this and one of Shem's after this (Shem=Semites). In all, one can conclude this was a local language confusion. The city of Babylon, if implied by Babel, could have been another city with a sort of persher/midrash by the author as to why ultimately there was a city there (Shinar=Southern Mesopotamia) called Babylon.

As for the whole Adam and Eve vs evolution, here are a few interesting things I believe:

1. Diodorus Siculus mentions how in ancient times each month was counted as a year. If you turn the years of all the pre-Abraham/Terah patriarchs into months, you get ages from 48 (Noah) to 78 years (Adam/Methuselah). In that case the genealogies are obviously incomplete. If you notice the ages sharply decrease after the division of the Earth and a different calendar makes much better sense than altered genetics.

The problem with this is that the genealogies give years of something like 35-100 years for the next generation, which is unrealistic month-wise, but this (and the story of Noah), are likely coming from a later time when the calendar changed (hence why we have months in the Noah story and why we have doublets). So the original ages of month-years remained while later information was added in the newer calendar (a similar situation exists with ancient Egypt which had like 2-3 calendars).

2. The names of everyone before Terah (or a little before) are not the actual names of the people but traditional representations of something significant that happened in their life (it must have been a practice to refer to people that way, with names having been forgotten). So for example, as has been pointed out here, Adam means man. Eve it's stated means mother of all living things (colloquially). Peleg - division. Methuselah: "in his days it shall come". Instead of all the parents being prophets (or having access to one), it makes more sense that these are representations, similar to how we designate people with nicknames, especially if their name is unknown. What makes it more interesting is that all the personal names such as Nahor, Terah, Abraham (not sure about Serug), are found in the time period (c.1800 BC) such as in the Mari tablets (1800-1750 BC) and so on.




Humanity could have easily migrated into Africa - I don't see why not. The 125,000 year old migration linked above was for a migration to the Arabian peninsula: it doesn't tell us when a permanent migration took place for the first time out of Africa, if that is the origin. And the "too many genes" for two people theory is just a random speculation: what is the opinion of Tassman about mitochondrial Eve?

Minor Edit: Paul didn't forbid women from speaking universally - it was so in Corinth/Greece just as it was with the long hair for women, short for men comment (Herodotus tells us only the Argives had long hair, whereas the rest of Greece's men had short). Women in his days, as it has been until relatively recent times, didn't have an education. Hence what might seem sexist was entirely practical and cultural - just like the ban on women, except for old widows, to help with ministry (Pastorals).