Ask a Catholic

[Minimalist]

You have no field of expertise.

[Randy Carson]

You have no field of expertise.

You may be right.

It's Saturday evening, Min...remember going to confession with your folks when you were little?

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned..."

[pocaracas]

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I don't get it...
Can you explain this with a bit more verbosity?

Ah, but those had influences of other polytheist religions within their lifetimes and experiences.
I'm talking about how did those others pop up in the first place?


Dude, you're going the wrong way!
Noah to Moses. I asked for a result in generations because of the potential notions that those persons lived for a long time.

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Sorry, my bad.

I'm afraid I can't be of much more assistance; this is not my field of expertise.

Awww... buggers!

Anyway... the point I wanted to drive home was that there probably weren't enough generations to account for all those peoples... and all the disparity in beliefs.
I say "probably", because we're left without an answer as to how many generations there were.
And if that is so, then either the OT is way off... or Luke was way off...
But Luke researched everything he wrote thoroughly, right? So he couldn't be wrong...


We can always broaden the scope of this question.
Considering all we know about human evolution and history; knowledge acquired through archaeology, linguistics, biology, anthropology, etc...; as is accepted by the catholic church, and considering the tales in the OT are fiction and mainly for rough guidance, then - if there has ever only been one single god, how did people come up with polytheism far before monotheism?
Not to mention that they came up with shamanism well before polytheism ("The earliest known undisputed burial of a shaman (and by extension the earliest undisputed evidence of shamans and shamanic practices) dates back to the early Upper Paleolithic era (c. 30,000 BP) in what is now the Czech Republic", in wiki)

I guess what I'm asking is more - how come mankind had to invent tons of entities, before the actual real one deity deigned itself to confirm its existence to a few select chosen people in a particularly theologically active time and region of the globe?

So much so that there had to be a commandment to prevent people from worshiping those other gods.... that didn't work.

[abaris]

It's Saturday evening, Min...remember going to confession with your folks when you were little?

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned..."

Since you mention that - that was one of the first steps on my way to total atheism. The thought of, that's none of your business when on my way to confession. I turned around and never looked back.

[Salacious B. Crumb]

Only nine generations from Adam to Noah assuming Luke didn't skip anyone. And remember, these folks lived a really long time.

By, a really long time, I hope you mean about 25 years old.

[Randy Carson]

It's Saturday evening, Min...remember going to confession with your folks when you were little?

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned..."

Since you mention that - that was one of the first steps on my way to total atheism. The thought of, that's none of your business when on my way to confession. I turned around and never looked back.

You were wrong, of course, since your sins ARE God's business, and confession was established by Jesus as the normative means for forgiveness of serious sins. Venial sins do not require confession.

How old were you at the time?

[Randy Carson]

Only nine generations from Adam to Noah assuming Luke didn't skip anyone. And remember, these folks lived a really long time.

By, a really long time, I hope you mean about 25 years old.

That depends on how years are defined in the relevant texts, I suppose.

[abaris]

You were wrong, of course, since your sins ARE God's business, and confession was established by Jesus as the normative means for forgiveness of serious sins. Venial sins do not require confession.

How old were you at the time?

Even when I was a believer I never saw priests as anything but nosy humans and not as god's ground crew. I was pretty little back then. Maybe 9 or 10. And still being a believer I thought that god knew anyway. So why go through all the bother, since I also knew that I would lie to them anyway.

I always valued my privacy.

[Salacious B. Crumb]

By, a really long time, I hope you mean about 25 years old.

That depends on how years are defined in the relevant texts, I suppose.

You're sort of dodging that. You said that they lived for a really long time back then, soooo one would have to assume that was much longer than we are living today. It sounds a lot like that you believe that Shem died at 600 and Methuselah died at the age of 969.

If you believed that a year wasn't measured like it was today, then you probably wouldn't have said that, so I have to assume that you do believe that people lived to a few hundred + years old, when ALL evidence heavily contradicts that.

[Iroscato]

That depends on how years are defined in the relevant texts, I suppose.

You're sort of dodging that. You said that they lived for a really long time back then, soooo one would have to assume that was much longer than we are living today. It sounds a lot like that you believe that Shem died at 600 and Methuselah died at the age of 969.

If you believed that a year wasn't measured like it was today, then you probably wouldn't have said that, so I have to assume that you do believe that people lived to a few hundred + years old, when ALL evidence heavily contradicts that.

Typical mental gymnastics from someone who doesn't sincerely believe his own holy horseshit. That's why he's such a virulent poster, because the only one he's trying to convince is himself. Kinda like how the most vocal gay-bashers turn out to have a love for The Sausage themnselves.