Adam. The 'first man'?

[nomadictheist]

It used to be at the beginning - before the fall of man.

It wasn't God who made the mistake, it was man.

"The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. 16 And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17 but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat[d] of it you shall surely die.”"

The difference is before the fall, man didn't need money to motivate him to work because the sin nature was not yet in him.

Like every other ideal, "socialism" only works in a perfect world, which this is not. That is why, throughout the course of history, you see socialism in its various forms fail time and again.

Capitalism, on the other hand, is a system built to work in a real world, where power corrupts and people in power will take advantage of power. One does not have to be motivated by greed to succeed in a capitalistic society. If your motivation is to serve your employer, or your customer if you are the employer, as you would God, you will be successful in capitalistic society - and often even more than somebody whose primary motivation is money.

 

[nomadictheist]

Since the first time I read the Bible, it was clear to me that the 'story' that the 'churches' tell is not the same 'story' that the Bible tells.

In the first chapter of Genesis, on the sixth day it states that God created 'man'. But not only man, but man and woman. And they were told to be fruitful and multiply. It also states that God had given them every herb and every tree that bears fruit 'on the face of the earth' to be for food.

Then in the second chapter it says that "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them".

This is a pretty profound statement. It states that God was 'done' with the 'days of creation' and on the seventh day He rested.

Then the Bible states that:

5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground.

Note that it does not say 'before there were any plants'. It states clearly 'of the field'. A 'field' is a 'prepared parcel of land'. Something 'created' for cultivation.

And the Bible does 'not' say that there were 'no men'. It states clearly that there was 'not a man to TILL' the earth.

We know for a 'fact' that in the beginning, (even according to the Bible), that men were nomadic gatherers long before they learned to cultivate plants for food. They simply went out and hunted and picked and dug whatever food grew wild.

It took perhaps tens of thousands of years before men learned to actually 'grow' their own food. No need to learn to grow food if it grew plentiful in nature. You simply gather until you have to go too far from your home and then simply pack up what little you own and move to a new clean water source with plenty of 'wild food'.

If we take this into consideration, the obviousness is that there were 'two separate' creations of men.

The first were created and told to be fruitful and multiply. This obviously wasn't told to Adam and Eve for they didn't even know they were naked when they were created. If they didn't understand the concept of nakedness, it is unlikely that they would have known anything about sex or procreation.

And it states that the first creation was given access to every tree bearing fruit upon the face of the earth to be for food.

Yet when God created Adam, he was placed in a garden and commanded that there was 'a' tree he was forbidden to partake.

That means that if Adam were the first man, the offering of ALL trees on the face of the Earth could not be true. For God told Adam that there was 'one tree' he was forbidden to eat from. Contradiction? Only if you believe that Adam was the first man. For the first men were 'not' given any such commandment.

And note that there is a difference in the story of the 'first creation' verses Adam.

When God created Adam the Bible states that God breathed into Adam the 'breath of life' and Adam became a 'living soul'. The Bible states no such thing concerning the 'first creation'.

Then Adam and Eve had two children. NO mention of any 'other children'. Just two male children: Cain and Abel. Not one mention of 'any' other children.

Cain killed his brother. God confronted Cain. He placed a mark upon Cain so that any that would 'see him' would know what he had done. Really? Since there were only three people on the planet according to the 'churches', 'who' would see Cain that didn't already 'know' what he had done????? And then Cain says that everyone that sees the mark will want to kill him. 'Who'? If the only other three people on the planet already know what he has done, how could a mark make them want to kill him? So who is Cain concerned with seeing his mark? Obviously even Adam, Eve and Cain already 'knew' there were 'other people'. For Cain would have nothing to fear if there were 'no other people' on the planet except for his parents and siblings.

Continued.

This argument is all from the notion that everything described in Cain's story happened before the story of Adam's line resumes in vs. 25. This assumption shows an ignorance of Hebrew storytelling as well as disregarding the rest of the text. By your way of accounting for this story, we have 6 generations of men born to Cain before Seth is born.

A simple reading of the text is this:
The author tells the story of the fall. He then goes on to tell the story of Adam and Eve as they have their first two children - both men. (There could have been other daughters born during this time as well, as the Hebrew genealogies account only for the firstborn male heir and would not include a daughter born before that time). The author then goes on to tell the story of Cain, the father of the worldly generations. Once he has told the story of Cain as far as Lamech, he then returns to the line that would be reckoned through Adam, that is, Seth.

The fact that Cain and Abel do not appear in the subsequent genealogy is evidence that Cain's sin of murdering his brother disinherited him from the family. We can only speculate when and how he obtained a wife for himself, being an outcast, but there is no doubt that his wife must have come from Adam's line. As women are not accounted for in genealogies until after the first male heir is born, it's very possible that a daughter of Adam and Eve was sympathetic to Cain and went willingly with him. It's also possible that Cain did not immediately marry, but waited many years after his punishment was pronounced.

 

[nomadictheist]

What I believe is that Adam was the first 'Spiritual' man. Perhaps the inbreeding between that which was purely 'flesh' and that which was 'spirit' may very well be the 'reason' that men's hearts became evil continually.

I don't need to reinterpret anything. I believe what the Bible offers is clear. And after the destruction of the time of Noah, God decided that He would 'put up' with man's flesh for a 'time' in the hopes of obtaining those that remain Spiritual.

You know, it's hard to conceive of certain things until one's mind can 'get around it'. There are still people that don't believe we've been to the moon. But I believe that the majority of mankind accepts the 'fact'.

Science has 'proven' that there were once two distinct forms of human on this planet. I can't deny the obvious evidence.

So where do we go from there?

Some insist that the days of creation were literal. Yet in the NT it states that to God a day can be like a thousand years or a thousand years as a day. Doesn't that offer indication that the 'days' of creation weren't literal? That time to God is non existent in that He is not confined by time.

So the use of the term 'day' is nothing more than a 'symbolic' use of a term that defines a 'beginning' and an 'end' to a 'time period'. Something that Moses could understand.

If God had stated that: "For the first twenty million years.................". As far as we know these numbers were impossible for Moses to even grasp. The important issue was that creation was formed in 'order' and over 'time'. It's ludicrous to think that all that was accomplished was done so in six days. Regardless of the use of the term 'day'.

Back then, it makes sense that men believed it was literal days. But we have come a long way in understanding since Moses. We have explored and discovered many things pertaining to God's creation. Should we ignore what we have learned for the sake of 'fairy tales'? Or do we see how what we have learned 'fits' with God's Word? I choose understanding over 'blind faith' or 'fairy tales'.

Blessings,

MEC

This is perhaps one of the most ludicrous claims that has gained popularity in the church today: the idea that, somehow, our increasing intelligence has caused us to be able to accept truths that the dumb cave men (I use this phrase facetiously) God first created couldn't grasp.

The reality is that people were, most likely, much more intelligent when they were first created than we are now. Like everything else in creation, our intellect and ability to reason has depreciated over the years rather than appreciated. This is what makes the idea so ludicrous, because really the converse is true. A realistic concept would look more like this:

It's taken thousands of years for humans to become collectively stupid enough for most mainstream scientists to actually believe the world created itself and life evolved itself.

 

[timewerx]

Like every other ideal, "socialism" only works in a perfect world, which this is not. That is why, throughout the course of history, you see socialism in its various forms fail time and again.

We may have no choice this time as automation becomes the norm which already begun in China due to the rising cost of labor there. While automation is *initially* a good investment, in the long run, it is suicidal. It will push unemployment rates to record highs and which will kill the economy with lack of customers who could afford to buy things.

Everyone will take the hit in this scenario. No one will be spared, rich or poor.....

 

[mmksparbud]

This is perhaps one of the most ludicrous claims that has gained popularity in the church today: the idea that, somehow, our increasing intelligence has caused us to be able to accept truths that the dumb cave men (I use this phrase facetiously) God first created couldn't grasp.

The reality is that people were, most likely, much more intelligent when they were first created than we are now. Like everything else in creation, our intellect and ability to reason has depreciated over the years rather than appreciated. This is what makes the idea so ludicrous, because really the converse is true. A realistic concept would look more like this:

It's taken thousands of years for humans to become collectively stupid enough for most mainstream scientists to actually believe the world created itself and life evolved itself.

Yah---God created Adam and Eve with an IQ of 20 ---they sat around the carcass of their latest kill and ate the thing raw until they finally got around to figuring out fire made this stuff taste better---they grunted and pointed to communicate---2 grunts for elephant, 1 for an ant--that's how Adam named the animals, followed by a grunt and a gesture when they ran out of grunts. Moses didn't know how to write the grunts so he just made up the concept of speech before they actually had figured it out just to make it easier for us.

To far a stretch to think that these people had a perfectly functioning brain and that they used all of it. We only live to about 80 now--the last few years are a gradual decline and most have a productive working life of from around 15 to 60, In that short time people have become masters of art, music, dance, metal working, architecture, agriculture, the whole clothing concept and so on. If you can master something in such s short period of time, and you have another several hundred years to perfect that art---why do people think they remained ignorant and stupid? They didn't spend all their time working to produce food like they did after the flood---they had time to learn and investigate and God didn't create Adam with the brain of an infant and wait for him to go to college before He had Adam name the animals. I don't think we have any idea of the abilities these people had. In brain capabilities, I believe they were complete savants----with no idiot part. A savant can memorize entire phone books---play complicated music, produce amazing art--what these people could do we are just getting around to doing. And we are getting to the point they were at when God had to destroy them.

Jabal: he was the father of such as dwell in tents, and of such as have cattle.
Jubal: he was the father of all such as handle the harp and organ.
Tubalcain, an instructer of every artificer in brass and iron: