(February 25, 2014 at 5:12 pm)God Is Not Gr8 Wrote: Well if the snake who deceived Eve isn't Satan (who is it then?) did your god created more evil angels or his angels turned against him?It seems to me that the original writer probably intended for it to be a snake, and nothing more. It's not the only talking animal in the Bible, after all. Genesis 3:1 says that "the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field that God had made." And god curses the serpent to a life spent slithering along the ground and "eating dust," which is probably what ancient man assumed snakes ate, having seen them constantly flicking their tongues in and out while moving across the ground.
Christians need for the book to read in a somewhat more sophisticated manner, so the story suddenly becomes 90% metaphor/allegory and nothing is as it seems. But it sure doesn't read as if it's anything other than a talking snake.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
