There are no answers in Genesis

[Anomalocaris]

Mealy mouthed bullshit.  First we insist it was always this way, then we hedge our bets because we're starting to realize that other people know more about magic book..and say it doesn't matter if what we just finished saying was actually true.  Not only was genesis taken to be literally true, because the ot repeatedly affirms it as history - the story of christ depends on it being true, and it was still taken to be explicitly and literally true by the authors of the nt.

That the faithful have, in every age, had to grapple with the fact that their magic book is fantasy, has never stopped them from coming up with similar mealy mouthed bullshit reasserting it as fact.

When I first became a Christian I read the NT, and then the OT.  It was clear to me as a new "believer" that the biblical story must be false unless The Fall was something real.  I could see the creation as 7 days as being story, the garden as being allegory, but if The Fall and the corruption of the world didn't happen, then Jesus makes no sense.

Jesus was the second Adam.  By becoming heirs of Jesus through faith, we break the curse of death that being heirs of Adam gave us.  The World is a mistake, and it was always meant to be perfect.  God will do a reset.

This is literally the message of Christianity, as laid out in the bible.  One cannot take Genesis as no-true and be a biblical Christian.  Fundamentalists and Evangelicals have it right -- you either believe the whole thing, or throw it all away.  You can't believe a few nice things about a heavenly paradise, and not-believe the entire story that leads up to it.  If the "revelation" that created the rest of the story isn't real, then the heavenly paradise part isn't either.  (Well, there could be an afterlife - it just wouldn't be a Christian one).

It seems to me a underlying reason of the vociferous defense of the bible and christian theologians by those who are forced to admit the the untenability of biblical literalism or inerrancy is a deep sympathy with profoundly misanthropic world view embodied by the text of bible,  as well as sympathy with the overweening attitude of the theologians, their distrust of humanity’s ability to profit from the truth as embodies by studied assessment of facts, and their exultation of their own ability to bullshit as convenient for the purpose deceiving humanity to achieve what may well be, in their own minds, a better world.     The latter being examplified by Belaqua’s ridiculous and nauseating lament about the displacement by Copernicus revolution of his treasured make belief world of transcendent lies and falsehoods.