(September 16, 2015 at 5:51 pm)TheRocketSurgeon Wrote:(September 16, 2015 at 5:29 pm)Wyrd of Gawd Wrote: The biblical creation story is a jumbled mess of competing ideas. The primary idea is that it's about the progenitors of the Israelites/Hebrews/Jews. After all, the Bible is not about all of humanity but only about one small slice of it. That's why thinking that the Adam & Eve story is about all of humanity is completely wrong. Assyria, Persia, Arabia, and Ethiopia were just down the road from the Garden of Eden where Adam & Eve were running around naked.
There is no God creature in this solar system.
I've always found the "racial origins" stuff in Genesis to be the most laughable, in terms of it being obviously based on no more than the info available to the Hebrews in the ancient Near East. They describe three races (Ham, Shem, and Japheth), the ones which were in range of knowledge of those writers... but somehow God didn't "inspire" them to know about the Chinese/Japanese/SE Asians, or the Native Americans, or the Indians/Dravidians, or the Polynesians, or the Aboriginal Australians. Funny how "God" never knows about things beyond the realm of the human authors of the book, while they're being "divinely inspired" to write this stuff down.
I'm sure it sounded reasonable to the ancient Hebrews, but that anyone could think this is more than a Bronze Age mythology today simply astounds me.
That's very true. Most people are reduced to one of two choices: the ethnocentric Middle Eastern Jewish religious fairy tale or the ethnocentric Middle Eastern Arabian religious fairy tale. They are the perfect examples of how billions of people can be brainwashed with pure BS and swear that it's all true just because some unknown guys said that it actually happened.
