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No, Matthew doesn't call Adam 'son of God'.Matthew calls Adam "son of God". We're talking about the gospel of Matthew.
Everyone at the time the story first circulated would have known. Paul is 1500 years later. Paul wants to make a point about the subservience of women. So he rationalizes with the Adam and Eve story. Interestingly, Jesus in Mark 10 and Matthew 14 uses part of the story to justify the equality of men and women and correct a blatant inequality and injustice toward women.
So, are women subservient to men? C'mon, in Genesis 1 God creates men and women together equally. Paul is misusing scripture here as rationalization for his own misogyny.
And yes, lots of people for the last 2,000 years insist on taking the stories literally. However, there have always been Christians telling them they were wrong to do so. As just a few examples over the centuries, we have St. Augustine in the early 400s, John Calvin in the early 1500s, and Francis Bacon in the early 1600s. That people persist in error when they are being told the truth is not "didn't know".
Here you have the premise that "the NT is to be taken literally". Notice the "If" in front of that. That "If" denotes you are making a premise. That premise is in error. Not all the NT is to be taken literally. Nor is everything Paul states supposed to be taken as "gospel" and without error.
For instance, Paul in 1 Thessalonians states that women should not have leadership positions in church. My denomination (and many others) has decided that should not be taken as any type of truth, literal or non-literal. I am arguing that the same applies with Paul trying to make women "subservient". Paul was a great preacher. It doesn't mean that everything he uttered is theologically true.
The point is that the phrase is unnecessary to the point the author is making. Take the phrase out and Jude's point stands, doesn't it? The author may have believed it, but the phrase has no bearing on the theological truth the author is trying to convey.
That's it, the non-literal truth. Let's face it, having Adam created before Eve does not mean that women should be subservient to men. The order of creation doesn't confer subservience. What's more, Paul knew very well that in Genesis 1 men and women are created together. So Paul is using a well-known story as his rationalization that women should be subservient to men. As I discuss in more detail below, you can argue that Paul's conclusion is faulty and contrary to God's intention. That Paul uses what turns out to be a "false" creation story is actually beneficial for God, isn't it?
I think that is significant. It looks like God is preventing the authors from any important theological message being dependent upon a literal Adam. In fact, it's the opposite. In your example, only a faulty theological message is tied to a literal Adam and Eve. In Paul's argument, the conclusion is faulty, isn't it? God didn't really intend for women to be subservient to men. What better way to correct Paul's mistake than to have Paul's argument based upon a faulty premise?
Other species also do environmental damage. I grant that humans are better at it because of their technology, but beavers destroy the environment of a field when them dam a stream. Locusts and army ant swarms destroy the environments of the areas they infest, overpopulation of deer will destroy the environment of a forest, etc.
Are you sure you can say that? Remember, for us to evaluate "superior intellect" we do 2 things: 1. look at technology and 2. communicate with them. If a species does not have tool making ability, we never consider "intellect". Also, a species (dolphins, for example) could have equal or superior intellect to humans but we can't communicate with them to find out.
You can't say that because we can't have a discussion about morals with any other species. We know what our morals are because we communicate them with each other. But a "moral sense"? Not so much.
Are you sure? Perhaps a lot of our "advanced human reasoning" is based on the ability to extrapolate consequences of behavior. Certainly scientific reasoning is based on the ability to extrapolate consequences of hypotheses.
Are you sure about that "basic morality"? I would say that we teach our offspring very early what is "basic morality". We provide painful consequences for "bad" behavior to our children, do we not? Infants beat on each other regularly; we enforce that "basic morality" by punishing them.
Male lions are solitary. It is one adult male and a harem of females. So, killing an invading male is self-defense. Killing the kittens of the previous male allows the females to ovulate and get pregnant by the current male lion.
I
First, felines are not social animals.
I agree; dictionaries are required to define everything in a few words. This may work for definitions of words like "hat" or "cat", but with something like "morality" a meaningful definition necessarily involves wrangling with philosophical arguments at length.You're right, we've been talking past each other because I only mean knowing the difference between right and wrong in the way that it matters to animals in practice and defining morality using a dictionary.
For the purposes of this thread, this branch of the discussion began when I said that morality began at some point in the evolutionary process and that I couldn't pinpoint the exact moment when it started.
I do not know the answer to these questions. I instead approach the issue of immortal souls and original sin in this way. We humans can look at our closest neighbors on the evolutionary tree: chimpanzees and gorillas and the like. We can see that they are purely animals. They have no ability to think and no moral sense, and hence it would be meaningless to praise or blame them for anything that they do. Humans beings, and the other hand, can think and have a moral sense, so one can rationally praise of human for ding something right and blame a human for doing something wrong. If we find that all human beings (except small children) do things which are morally wrong, then that is original sin. G. K. Chesterton gave an alternate phrasing of the idea
Well, sin is a transgression against God. One would need to know what going against God means to commit a sin. So whoever the first human was that God spoke to and gave instructions would be the first capable of sinning.
However, if you want that idea in a form that doesn't use circular reasoning, here:
A. We should not expect allegorical/fictional stories to explicitly state they're allegorical/fictional, as this would ruin their narratives.
B. The stories in the Bible that we happen to be able to scientifically investigate have been proven to be allegorical/fictional.
C. The scientifically unverifiable stories in the Bible are allegorical/fictional as well.
That doesn't make any sense. You were saying the only difference between the geneologies was Heli. Instead, there are no congruences between the geneologies of Matthew and Luke.I haven't even seen the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew and have only been talking about the one in Luke this whole time.
Only in the loosest metaphorical sense. In precise terms, a robot engineer is the "maker" or "inventor" or "manufacturer" of the robot. But you weren't talking in the metaphorical sense, as this paragraph made clear.You seem to be suggesting that I am positing that the God of the Bible had sex with a woman in order to make Adam. I'm not saying that. You said something like "God is not the father of Adam, is He?" I merely said that I infer that since, in the Genealogy in Luke, Adam is called the son of God, that God is Adam's father. God being Adam's father doesn't have to involve a woman. In a sense, a robotic engineer (if male) can be the "father" of a robot without involving a woman, no?
My apologies for not noticing your faith icon.Also, you were completely wrong that I "would have done better to post this" in the Theology section. As a non-Christian I'm not even allowed to post up there
1. The verse is 2 Timothy 3:16. It says that the Bible is inspired (which is what "God-breathed" means) and that is is useful for a very limited number of tasks. You should look that verse up.I understand that "Bible" means a collection of books. If one individual author of one individual book says something, then to me, "The Bible" says it. Doesn't the Bible say anything about "all scripture" being "God breathed" or something? Isn't it the "Word of God".
Because it is Luke who is saying that. The Bible represents the different experiences of different people with God over at least 1500 years. Luke portrays Jesus differently than Matthew, for instance. Matthew is writing for a Jewish audience and, for instance, his birth narrative consciously tries to make Jesus similar to Moses, so that it will be easier for the Jewish people to accept.Why do I have to say "Luke says " for example? I prefer to say "The Bible says (or reads) ..such and such".
Thank you for reinforcing my point. Jesus is NOT the son of Joseph, but the geneologies continue as tho he were -- as the verse shows. This verse gives Heli as the father of Joseph, but Joseph is not the father of Jesus.No.
Luke 3:23 And Jesus himself began to be about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph, which was the son of Heli,
I keep asking this question but I can't get a straight answer. How is a "faulty premise" a "non-literal truth"?
I can see how it's a non-literal UNTRUTH but not a non-literal TRUTH of the type you originally described
Similarly, if it is untrue that women should be subservient to men, Paul was not evoking the non-literal truth of the Adam and Eve story, but rather the non-literal untruth of the story. Correct?
Paul was evoking a non-sequitor. To counter Paul's claim, you must look at the non-literal truth of the story. And that truth is the supposed order of creation has nothing to do with relative ranks. Instead, the truth in the story is that Eve is created as an equal companion and "helpmeet" for Adam, not to be subservient.
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