Kent Hovind

I can't believe that I got back to this thread so late...




Oh that's just great. So if my brother goes out tomorrow and kills someone, I'll be punished too?



So why does it say in the bible that anyone can be forgiven their sins? Is there a proviso that all sins EXCEPT non-belief will be forgiven? How do you know that all those people did what the bible says? How do you know that they deserved to die?!?

This presents one picture only of the Christian god - that he is petty enough to wipe out anyone who doesn't believe in him, as well as a significant portion of life on Earth. Talk about freaking overkill.



Than the Christian god portrayed in the bible? Yes, I am.



It was some kind of fruit. Let's say it was an apple for convenience.

They didn't know it was wrong. Arikay and others have already covered this. Anyway, they were supposedly given free will, so I'd say that god should have been expecting something to happen. As well as that, he's supposed to be all-knowing - so he would have known from they start what they were going to do.

It ends up going like this:

God creates Adam and Eve. He makes them perfect, because obviously he couldn't make anything imperfect. He knows that they will eat from the Tree and gain the knowledge of good and evil because the snake will tell them to. He tells them not to eat from the Tree, then goes away, leaving it easily within their grasp and leaving them to their own devices.
The snake (who was also perfect, seeing as he was created by god) talks to Eve, and tells her that it's ok to eat from the Tree. Eve doesn't know that it's wrong, and she's been given permission to eat by the snake. She eats, and gets Adam to have some too.
God returns, and manages to act surprised despite the fact that he already knew that they would do it and who would tell them to do it. Instead of punishing the snake, he kicks Adam and Eve out of Paradise and curses them in such a way that their 'sin' was passed down to all their children and children's children and so on, even though they had nothing to do with the original transgression.

An analogy: A mother leaves a very special cookie on a table in full view of her young child. She tells him not to eat the cookie, despite the fact that she knows his brother will tell him it's ok to eat it and he will eat it, then leaves. His older brother comes by, and tells him that it's ok to eat the cookie. So the child does. The mother returns and acts surprised that she was disobeyed, and instead of punishing the brother, she disowns her young child and shoves him outside to fend for himself.

It's exactly the same in either case - if you don't know that what you're doing is wrong, you can't commit a sin. You have to choose to be selfish - and in order to choose you have to know what being selfish is, which Adam and Eve didn't know because it was before they ate from the Tree.