Where is Adam and Noah

“We do not see the name of Noah or of Adam in any of the ancient dynasties of Egypt; they are not to be found among the Babylonians and Sumerians. We cannot comprehend how the father of all nations has so long been unknown, not until the time when the Jewish books began to be known in Alexandria and were translated into Greek under one of the Ptolemies.

In the natural course of things Adam’s name should have been carried from mouth to mouth to the farthest corners of the earth. I will venture to affirm that it has required a miracle thus to shut the eyes and ears of all nations – to destroy every monument, every memorial of their first father. What would the Roman philosopher and orator, Cicero, have thought, if a poor Jew, while selling him balm, had said, We are all descended from one father, named Adam.

Cicero would doubtless have inquired about the great monuments, the indisputable testimonies which Noah and his children had left of our common father. After your so-called Deluge, he would have said, the whole world would have resounded with the names of Adam and Noah, one the father, the other the restorer of every race.

These names would have been in every mouth as soon as men could speak, on every parchment as soon as they could write, on the door of every house as soon as they could build, on every temple, on every statue. You mean to tell us that you knew so great a secret, yet concealed it from us? Every people has attributed to itself some imaginary origin, yet none has approached the true one.” – Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, entry under Adam….Wilfred A. Elders

http://www.chem.tufts.edu/science/franksteiger/elders-flood-report.htm

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The Power of God

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God and Creation…the early years

Science is nothing more than organized common sense.  Kenneth R. Miller

So God is just having a normal day telling all the Angels and Satan and Archangels, Michael and Gabriel what to do, and suddenly thinks, “I’m going to make a Universe and some planets and maybe some live things to play around with.”

So he gets in his creation mode and conjures up (Ex-Nihilo) gasses, rocks, metals, water, fire, space, time, and any other thing that goes into making up this Universe we happen to live in.  He probably lets it cook for a few billion years and things start to happen as the Universe makes stars and planets and blows up and re-condenses and expands and contracts and generally does it thing, as it has for over 14 billion years now.

Now God apparently decides to make our world personally and he makes the firmament about 4.5 billion years ago, and he hovers to and fro over the waters and divides the land from the water and makes light and then the sun and moon and stars in the sky and animals and grasses and finally after about 4.499999 billion years or so he makes poor ol’ Adam, then pulls a rib from him to make Eve. Now all the while he is doing this creating and starting things in motion, he’s thinking to himself. “How can I make this creating stuff more interesting?”

After thinking for awhile he calls Satan and Michael over and whispers into their ears for about an hour.  Every now and then either Satan or Michael pull back and look at God like he’s crazy, but they go back to the huddle and whisper some more. The other Angels just stand around wondering what’s up with the bosses and why they’re whispering back and forth.

Now we cut to earth, and Adam and Eve, in this perfect garden that God has set up for them. They’re running around naked and all, pruning and watering the garden for a few (8?) years. Then out of nowhere comes Satan and does the apple/fruit of some kind…thing with eve, and then slithers out of sight before God comes.

We all know what happens next…God kicks them out of the garden, gives them pain, etc., etc. Just remember that it wasn’t till a few (4 or so) thousand years later that Paul decided they were part of his theology.

Now they are kicked out of their home with nothing but the God provided skins of some animals on their backs. They have nothing…they finally find a cave to live in and after some further wrangling with God and the Devil they start their family. The family thing didn’t turn out so well…they birthed and raised the first killer and they were left alone, until at the age of 130, they had another son, and then more sons and daughters.  Some say as many as 35 or more children…I really feel sympathy for Eve on this.

Now all this was supposed to have happened 6000 years ago.  God makes these hapless souls and promptly kicks them out of safety and into a world where they were clueless. The world was teeming with deadly diseases, poisonous plants, and killer animals.  They didn’t know a thing about making shelters, finding safe water, finding or making food, when to plant, what to plant, how to plant, how to kill and skin animals for clothing and shelter, how to make the necessary tools an ancient human would need for survival.

They had nothing in the way of knowledge about the ways of natures, how to make things they needed to raise up from the level of animals, how to live safely and comfortably and plan for a future they could not comprehend. They had no medicines, no knowledge of the possibility of medicine and how to treat any of the human ailments that we are all prone to. All they knew was the ‘Garden’ and the care of God.

Somehow they managed to survive and give birth to a race of people that numbered in the 10’s of millions about 1500 to 1600 years later ???

Then the Bible says that God gets really mad at these humans he had created, so he decides to kill them all…well, except for Noah and his family.  God reasons that this will rid the world forever of all these people that dis-respect Him. So somewhere around 2300 or 2400 BCE he floods the world and kills millions and millions of people, but He saves Noah and his sons and all the wives, and then he remakes the whole world to make it look like there was never a flood…just to confuse us later.

A couple hundred years after the flood was over the world was once again covered with humanity…millions and millions of people were spread everywhere on the face of the earth.  God looks down at Babylon and sees the people are now building a city and making really really tall buildings.  For some reason this kinda’ pisses God off, so he lowers himself from the sky, and with magic, he makes them stop speaking Akkadian and start speaking Hebrew, German, Chinese, Ojibwa, Spanish, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Canadian, Egyptian, and Esperanto.

This is when He really starts to mess with modern people’s minds…you see Babylon had already been built, and the towers were there, before He caused the ‘Flood.’  And of course the people then living in those faraway places (Spain, China, Japan, Canada, America, etc., etc.) were speaking their own early versions of their countries language…before the ‘Flood’ even.

So somewhere God kind of messed up when He plotted, and passed on to Moses, this great adventure us humans are part of…He hasn’t keep the lines of evidence in proper order, but possibly this is part of the plot…keep us on our toes, so to speak.

I can’t seem to get out of Genesis.  There are just so many things wrong with that story

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The Internet and Religion

One man’s theology is another man’s belly laugh. -Robert A. Heinlein

I was thinking today (something I studiously try to avoid), and thought back to the mid 90’s when I would occasionally argue with some Christians about God, the Bible, and religion in general.

It was tough at that time, because although I knew what the Christians were pushing was phony and tremendously wrong, I had no ammunition, no information about the depths of the Christian deceit.  All my research on religious matters was tough as I was also trying to make a living and support a pretty big family.  Because of what the subject matter was about, I pretty much did it sporadically, as I didn’t want to cause any commotion at home.

All of that started to change in late 1996 or early1997 when we got Internet access, and I started to find so much relevant information online.  Argument I had never even thought about, information to give support to my position on the silliness of Noah’s flood and the Tower of Babel, and the age of the earth, Adam and Eve, and the beginnings of the Christian faith.  All was suddenly clear…these feelings I had about the wrongness of their concepts and beliefs…I intuitively knew they were wrong, but now I had access to real scientific papers and people that were doing actual research on matters I was interested in.  I could finally know the subjects with some confidence, I could argue from knowledge, not from some vague feeling that their theology was crazy.

I am thinking that the humongous amount of information now available to atheists, agnostics and wavering Christians is slowly turning the tide of religion. The evidence, available to all with a computer and Internet connection, is now so overwhelming that the Bible is wrong.  We can, if we want, disprove just about anything thrown at us by religious fanatics. The thick fog of myth and false magic is slowly dissipating, the more knowledge we accumulate about the ball and chain of religion, the more we know of its falseness.

For latest post go: Here

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Where DID Cain get his wife?

So not to long after Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden they have that long awaited and dreamt about sexual contact…it must have been driving Adam crazy seeing Eve all naked while they were in God’s good graces and keeping the gardening up and all. I wonder how long they were both running around naked? The Book of Jubilees (late 2^nd. Century BCE) says Adam and Eve were kicked out about 8 years after being created. (Jubilees 3:33)

Anyway, after they were kicked out, they had the worlds first human sex and not long after Eve delivered a baby boy …Cain. Then she got pregnant again and had Abel. Now the Bible doesn’t say how long after the great ‘Kick Out’ she gave birth, but it seems like it was shortly after their expulsion.

Now, some time later…again Bible doesn’t say, but it was probably after Abel was at least 16-18 years old, after all he was the chief sheep-herder for the only 4 inhabitants of the earth.

So at some point when Able was young, after all God was visiting them for the first time, Cain got insanely mad at Abel, because he was smarter than Cain, and he killed his younger brother. We all kinda know what happened next. God confronted Cain and Cain asks God if he was his brother’s keeper…and so on. So Cain was kicked out of the clan of Adam and Eve the gardeners.

He leaves Eden (after packing up his other suit and toiletries), and lo and behold, he marries his wife.

Now we have all probably thought of this discrepancy at some point, and there is a whole line of apocryphal texts that have attempted to solve this problem by writing new Scripture, and claiming that he had sisters that were not mentioned at the time. Some have gone so far as to come up with the sisters names. Trouble with these documents is they seem to have all been written looong after the Pentateuch was written or transcribed or redacted (700 to 400BCE). So one should maybe not put to much stock in them.

Three people left on earth; Adam, Eve, and Cain. The official Protestant and Catholic Churches and the many sects, that seems to keep growing in number all the time, deny that the Apocrypha is true. Cain takes a wife.

After Cain and Able; Adam and Eve, the progenitors of the whole human race have no more children until Adam (and I assume Eve) is 130. Then they (Adam and Eve) have Seth. Then they have more sons, and finally…daughters.

While Adam and Eve are waiting until they are 130 years old to have more children…Cain takes a wife, and builds a city.

So to recap; Adam and Eve have Cain and Abel right after leaving Eden, where they had spent 8 years. Cain kills Abel. Only 3 people left on Earth. No more children for about a hundred or so years, but Cain takes a wife and builds a city.

Do you suppose Eve visited her grandchildren before Seth was born? Maybe skinned a few rabbits to provide clothing for the little ones?

Something is missing here. If you are purporting to write the history of the human race, as given to you by divine revelation from God, you really need to have your stories make more sense.

We know that the people of the time were very intelligent, after all the Egyptians had already built a civilization and were contemplating building the Pyramids :-), and the people of Babylonia were building cities (and Plains Indians of the Southwestern US were chasing and killing Mammoths).

You would think the scribes could put together a more believable and internally consistent story. Or, God would know his people were not dummies and tell them the true story.

For latest post go: Here

Adam and Eve and the Beginning

“If the Bible is true, certainly Adam was the first man; consequently, we know, if the sacred volume be true, just how long man has lived and labored and suffered on this earth.

The church cannot and dare not give up the account of the creation of Adam from the dust of the earth, and of Eve from the rib of the man. The church cannot give up the story of the Garden of Eden — the serpent — the fall and the expulsion; these must be defended because they are vital.

Without these absurdities, the system known as Christianity cannot exist. Without the fall, the atonement is a non sequitur. Facts bearing upon these questions were discovered and discussed by the greatest and most thoughtful of men. Lamarek, Humboldt, Haeckel, and above all, Darwin, not only asserted, but demonstrated, that man is not a special creation.

If anything can be established by observation, by reason, then the fact has been established that man is related to all life below him — that he has been slowly produced through countless years — that the story of Eden is a childish myth — that the fall of man is an infinite absurdity.”
The Divided Household of Faith, Robert G. Ingersoll, 1888

Now we know that Adam of the Bible was NOT the first man, or Eve of the Bible was NOT the first woman. We humans know this as well as we know that night follows day. The fact that humans have inhabited this earth for hundreds of thousands of years is established and undeniable by those people who live in the real world.

We know that Proto-humans, or Neanderthals, were walking the earth-long-before we Homo sapiens did. This fact alone disproves Biblical beginnings of man.

We know that the Chinese were predicting eclipses before Moses supposedly wrote Genesis and described creation wrong.

We know that Noah’s flood never happened. NO evidence at all for this story. This fact alone disproves Biblical beginnings.

We know for a fact, that all people living on earth today are NOT descended from the supposed eight survivors of Noah’s flood about 4300 years ago. DNA science has disproved this religious notion.

We know that the ‘Tower of Babel’, as described in the Bible, never happened. Languages were all over the world at the time of the OT Bible story, any many, many years before that.

We know that the Bible and Scripture have been manipulated throughout its history.

We know that prayer is never answered. It’s all statistical anomaly.

We know there are no hard proofs for the existence of any ‘God’ or ‘gods’…none.

There are no hard proofs for Jesus…as described in the Bible.

Religious organizations try their damnest to disprove these facts, but all their arguments inevitably fall back on the rejection of real evidence, and the use of magic.

Despite the total failure of the Hebrew religion to explain our natural world, which it should be able to do if it were the ‘Word of God’, millions of people leave their brains at the door and believe superstitious nonsense and somehow justify it to themselves.

Think of the whole sweep of the history of our earth and ALL of its people. Think of the millions and millions of people that were living everywhere on earth when the Old Testament history was supposedly written. That a real God would pick these non-descript desert dwellers, and embroil Himself in their day-to-day matters and tell them who to kill and steal land from…is ridiculous.

And that anyone would believe these Hebrews wrote down the word-for-word ranting of a God out to kill off Hebrew opponents, and make a religion out of it…is insane.

God is made in the image of man, not vice-versa.

For latest post go: Here

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Original Sin

The idea of Original Sin is based on Paul’s supposition that all humans are born sinful. It is not a theological concept that is brought up or mentioned in the original text of the Old Testament.

In the fifth chapter of Romans, according to Paul, humanity was cursed because Adam and Eve sinned when they ate the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. As Paul puts it:

Wherefore, as by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. Rom. 5:12

…or as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. 1 Cor. 15:22

17 For if, by the trespass of the one man, death reigned through that one man, how much more will those who receive God’s abundant provision of grace and of the gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
18 Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men. 19 For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous. Rom. 5:17-19

Now we have to remember that Paul saw Jesus in a beam of light on the road to Damascus. He never studied with him or listened to him, though he was alive at the same time. And Jesus, when he was alive, was preaching a pro-Hebrew apocalyptic message. Paul saw fit to subtly change the thrust of Jesus’ teaching to what we have now, one-size-fits-all, believe in us or die.

At no point in the OT do we see anything that might qualify as a curse of “Original Sin” to be handed down to all of Adam and Eve’s descendants. Yes, their lives are supposed to become more difficult than they had heretofore experienced; but where is all of that is the “Sin” being passed along?

Perhaps more importantly, there is no indication that this sin must be “redeemed” eventually by Jesus? Christianity is anxious to portray itself as the logical and theological offspring of Judaism, but if Paul simply invents a concept and tacks it on to Jewish stories, it’s hard to see how that makes it true. If I went around claiming that Jesus spoke to me in a ‘beam of light’ and he conveyed new theological concepts to be accepted by all Christianity…how far would I get before being locked up in the funny farm?

In Genesis and all of the way through to the ending of Malachi, there isn’t the slightest hint of there being any sort of Original Sin inherited by all humans through Adam and Eve. There are stories of God getting angry at humanity in general…and at the Jews in particular…offering many opportunities for God to point out how everyone is “sinful” because of Adam and Eve. Yet we find nothing about that.

Also, there is nothing about how everyone who isn’t “right” with God will go to hell and be tormented… another staple of Christian theology connected to Original Sin. You would think that God would have the civility to mention something this important to us.

Not even Jesus is quoted as having been concerned with Adam and Original Sin. Paul’s interpretation is not really warranted by the actual story. This is a big problem. If this interpretation is not right, the whole Christian scheme of salvation falls apart.

Just as the Trinity is made up by later ‘Christians’, so too is ‘Original Sin’.

Christians however, have a uncommon ability to ignore facts.

For latest post go: Here

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Original Sin, Angels, Christians, and Human Suffering

If God is perfect and he created Angels, then all Angels must be perfect…Right? For what earthly reason would a perfect God want his mistakes to run around and torment men/women. Surely he is not following the awful melodrama/ script that humans have made up…Is He?

We are special; we are the people chosen by God/Jesus to live forever, if only we worship Him enough. Christian believers tell me that Satan is jealous and wants earthlings to worship him, instead of God. What is it about Christians and worshiping? Does anybody really believe that God and His creation-Satan, are competing for numbers of worshipers?

Do you really believe that God/Jesus revealed this unreal melodrama to Paul so he (GOD) could be the subject of ever widening human worship? Or is there a possibility that a frail human invented the story and wrote the script. Why would a GOD want or need this kind of adulation, down on the knees worship?

Imagine a human trying to do this to family and friends; what would you think of him/her? Would you want your children to kneel down in prayer and worship to you? No, all you want is a little respect; right? 🙂

In our egotistical, self-centered view of ourselves I don’t think we can ever understand the suffering that people down through the ages have under gone. There is no possibility that a live human can truly understand the terror and bowel loosening fear that people undergo when they are looking unnatural death in the face.

Would you believe the God who created man can feel this; or do you think a God would not care, or does not notice?

If God does notice and can feel this human total terror and fear at facing extinction and still, not only let it happen, but at times cause it, then He is worthy of rejection. If God does not notice what is going on with his worthy creations, when faced with unnatural death, then He is worthy of rejection.

Think of Adam and Eve, kicked out of the Garden with no resources, in prehistoric times. Is that a worthy response from a God for a first time mistake? Not one I would want to recognize.

Think of this mythical story that has been unveiled to humanity by priests, rabbis and ministers….Does it REALLY make any kind of logical sense….would we humans even be privy to it?

A lot of people follow and worship this magical spirit. Well, you know the old saying: “twenty million Frenchmen couldn’t be wrong” (I know, I know, it’s two billion 🙂 I sure would like to see some magic to verify things.
Some think that Demons and the Devil, or Satan, are fallen angels…Imperfect creatures that were created By God. If God created Satan and Satan is evil and allowed by God to run around and torment humanity then what does that say about God? Yea, I know. It’s part of the script.

Does the son really inherit the sins of the father? If a father killed someone and afterwards couldn’t be found; is it OK to kill his son? “Vengeance is mine saith the Lord.” Since when have WASP’s believed that?

I have a new granddaughter. I look at that beautiful little sweetheart, hold her in my arms and I say: No way is she full of sin; that’s just bullshit. Excuse the profanity please. I didn’t say that out loud, but it was fully formed in my brain.