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New early hominid fossil...
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laconicstudent
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I don't care. Frankly, my faith isn't as anal-retentive as yours when it comes to inconsequential details
No. Christian faith is defined as acknowledging man's sinfulness, and the redeeming power of Christ's blood and grace. Who told you that you were going to hell for your beliefs either way?
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Willtor
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For me, it was his teachings, his works, and the empty tomb. Whether God made us in a moment or whether we evolved over billions of years didn't really enter into it. I'm afraid I'm not very good with understanding or interpreting feelings (though, I do try). My wife is much better at that. But if it helps you to reflect on your feelings, do it. At any rate, I would say that a particular interpretation of Genesis is a bad place to put faith.
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Willtor
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Incidentally, I don't take Genesis as a metaphor. I don't think there is a one-to-one correspondence between elements of the story and historical facts.
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Evidence is not inconsequential.
You dont care if the 1st part of the bible is just completely untrue? - im extrapolating - I know those arent your exact words.
If the genesis account isnt right, what else isnt right? Maybe the story of Jesus isnt right either. Maybe it is right.
The point is If 1 important part of the bible is wrong, I cannot help but doubt other parts of it too. If i cannot bring myself to believe in Jesus and God even if i want to I am supposed to be eternally tortured - which doesnt make sense from a just, loving God.
I want to believe it just isnt adding up lately
You dont care if the 1st part of the bible is just completely untrue? - im extrapolating - I know those arent your exact words.
If the genesis account isnt right, what else isnt right? Maybe the story of Jesus isnt right either. Maybe it is right.
The point is If 1 important part of the bible is wrong, I cannot help but doubt other parts of it too. If i cannot bring myself to believe in Jesus and God even if i want to I am supposed to be eternally tortured - which doesnt make sense from a just, loving God.
I want to believe it just isnt adding up lately
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Willtor
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Don't misunderstand -- I definitely think the Genesis account is _right_. I just don't think it means what it has been made to mean in the last hundred years or so.
The story of the fall, for example, is just that. It's a story of the fall. The fall really happened, and the story is meant to communicate that to us, but the story is not reporting the facts a la "The First World War" by John Keegan.
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laconicstudent
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What are you babbling about? I don't see the slightest correspondence to anything anyone else has said.
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Willtor
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Take it easy. I get the impression that evolution was a smoke-screen for something else. This may not have been the right place to air it, but it's here, now.
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laconicstudent
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Ok, I was just irritated that his post related to nothing that had been said thus far.
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Willtor
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My priest gave me an interesting quote about a year ago: (paraphrasing) "If I were given the choice between loving Jesus or loving the truth, I would choose to love the truth -- being certain that in loving the truth I would fall into the arms of Christ because he _is_ the truth. I have seen far too many Christians who love Jesus but not the truth." (I think he said it was Simone Weil's quote)
Want the truth. Love the truth. Don't want something because you are being made afraid.
My favorite book is an allegory about a boy who, in childhood, is always threatened that there is a "good, kind Landlord" who will surely throw him into the "black hole with snakes and scorpions as big as lobsters." He doesn't spend very long there.
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Polycarp1
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To deal with this issue, start by answering the question, "Where did the first chapter of Genesis come from?" Unless you believe in verbatim dictation by God, which some good people do but most do not, then it was written by Moses, or by someone else and assembled into the Torah along with the other early records of the Hebrew people by Moses or a later editor working with his teachings. In any case, it was inspired.
Now we get to a point where you need to draw the difference between technical language and popular language. (E.g., a "criminal" at law is not someone who's been arrested for a crime, but someone who's been convicted -- even though everyday usage tags anyone arrested as a criminal.) And the word is myth. Everyday usage means "made-up story, something not to be believed" by it. But the scholarly meaning is "story by which a culture understands the world it lives in." It will usually contain truth as that culture understands it -- and, like parables, it does not depend on accurate detail but on what the story is intended to convey. Listen to the creation story with the ears of a child -- it's told in a repetitive style, driving home some vital porints -- God created everything, He did it by His Word, He did it in a sequential fashion, He called it all good -- by repeating phrases like "On the Nth day God said, "Let there be X and Y" and there was X and Y. And God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the Nth day." (This is not mocking the story but summarizing the style in which it's written, by showing the format that's used with varying text for each day.)
Now, the point to all this is that Genesis chapter one was written for a specific purpose -- to contradict the pagan creation myths, by telling in myth form, how the real God really created. There are all knds of subtle references to the Babylonian creation myth in there, things we miss but which to the Jews of the time would be, "Your god fights monsters, our Gpd created the monsters. Your gods are subject to the heavenly bodies; our God made them." We don't notice those pieces, because we're not familiar with the old Babylonian stories, but they would have been obvious -- God held up as higher, stronger, more in control than the false gods -- to the original hearers.
But the key point to this understanding is that it was not a literal scientifically accurate account nor was it intended to be. It's literal in the sense it tells what God did, but not in the sense that it's supposed to report specifically when he created, for example, vultures and crows, or oaks and sequoias. It does not matter to the story when God created, for example, horses or corn -- that's not the point why it was told.
And the six-day bit? A small part of this is to show God creating things in ordered sequence. But a far more important part is something we Western Christians tend to ignore. Creation took seven days; the seventh is detailed at the beginning of the next chapter, before it goes into the details of the Adam and Eve story. On the seventh day, God created the Sabbath. The day of rest sanctified to Him is shown as an integral part of creation. This is a vitally important point to a Jew. One of the rabbis said there were six things that were created eternal -- and on that list was Torah and Sabbath.
The story is not about what God created or when He created them -- the focus is on the fact that it was God eho created all things, and called them good.
There is no contradiction between the Creation account and scientific theory -- where the contradiction comes in is when we take what was a true creation myth, and try to turn it into a newspaper factual account where detail needs to be precise. The human author was not focused on what was created when, nor was the Holy Spirit. That's a modern tendency to try to nail down details. His focus was to show the caring power of God at work in creation. It would be much like someone writing on God's work among men hurriedly attributing "The healing prayer of a just man avails much" to Paul, and someone else rejecting it when it's proven Paul did not write it (it was James, and was inspired by the same Spirit). The details are not the point. If we make them the point, we miss the big picture, what God and the human author wanted us to see.
Now we get to a point where you need to draw the difference between technical language and popular language. (E.g., a "criminal" at law is not someone who's been arrested for a crime, but someone who's been convicted -- even though everyday usage tags anyone arrested as a criminal.) And the word is myth. Everyday usage means "made-up story, something not to be believed" by it. But the scholarly meaning is "story by which a culture understands the world it lives in." It will usually contain truth as that culture understands it -- and, like parables, it does not depend on accurate detail but on what the story is intended to convey. Listen to the creation story with the ears of a child -- it's told in a repetitive style, driving home some vital porints -- God created everything, He did it by His Word, He did it in a sequential fashion, He called it all good -- by repeating phrases like "On the Nth day God said, "Let there be X and Y" and there was X and Y. And God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the Nth day." (This is not mocking the story but summarizing the style in which it's written, by showing the format that's used with varying text for each day.)
Now, the point to all this is that Genesis chapter one was written for a specific purpose -- to contradict the pagan creation myths, by telling in myth form, how the real God really created. There are all knds of subtle references to the Babylonian creation myth in there, things we miss but which to the Jews of the time would be, "Your god fights monsters, our Gpd created the monsters. Your gods are subject to the heavenly bodies; our God made them." We don't notice those pieces, because we're not familiar with the old Babylonian stories, but they would have been obvious -- God held up as higher, stronger, more in control than the false gods -- to the original hearers.
But the key point to this understanding is that it was not a literal scientifically accurate account nor was it intended to be. It's literal in the sense it tells what God did, but not in the sense that it's supposed to report specifically when he created, for example, vultures and crows, or oaks and sequoias. It does not matter to the story when God created, for example, horses or corn -- that's not the point why it was told.
And the six-day bit? A small part of this is to show God creating things in ordered sequence. But a far more important part is something we Western Christians tend to ignore. Creation took seven days; the seventh is detailed at the beginning of the next chapter, before it goes into the details of the Adam and Eve story. On the seventh day, God created the Sabbath. The day of rest sanctified to Him is shown as an integral part of creation. This is a vitally important point to a Jew. One of the rabbis said there were six things that were created eternal -- and on that list was Torah and Sabbath.
The story is not about what God created or when He created them -- the focus is on the fact that it was God eho created all things, and called them good.
There is no contradiction between the Creation account and scientific theory -- where the contradiction comes in is when we take what was a true creation myth, and try to turn it into a newspaper factual account where detail needs to be precise. The human author was not focused on what was created when, nor was the Holy Spirit. That's a modern tendency to try to nail down details. His focus was to show the caring power of God at work in creation. It would be much like someone writing on God's work among men hurriedly attributing "The healing prayer of a just man avails much" to Paul, and someone else rejecting it when it's proven Paul did not write it (it was James, and was inspired by the same Spirit). The details are not the point. If we make them the point, we miss the big picture, what God and the human author wanted us to see.
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So basically, It doesn't matter what God says in Genesis because we can interpret it any way we want to, to fit what we know today?
@Willtor, I dont understand what you're saying in relation to my post.
@Willtor, I dont understand what you're saying in relation to my post.
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laconicstudent
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So long as it covers the fact that Humanity lived in harmony with God, then fell through the original sin and lost that intimacy with God.
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In that case, if we cannot understand the word of God to any certainty in Genesis, why can we assume that we can understand the word of God with any level of specificity anywhere?
What if your general conclusions dont match up with my general conclusions? How can we say who is right?
What if your general conclusions dont match up with my general conclusions? How can we say who is right?
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Truth is my brother if you take Genesis as either literal or allegorical you get the same outcome.
God's awe (his power to create EVERYTHING), Man's disobedience (the fall, 1st sin of man), and Man's obedience (Noah & Abraham, & etc.).
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If you take Genesis as literal, it conflicts with evolution. If you try to take the story as an allegory for evolution - well what's the allegory that lines up creation with evolution?
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