[DrJ]

as for the "who created God" question, Life as we know it is a time line... linear. Without this linearness, causality would not exist either. Therefore, God, which transcends time and is eternal, is not bound by causality. God is and was and will always be... all at the same time. there was not before God because there is not "before" and "after" when in the realm in which God resides.

speedball1 disagrees: All this hinges on belief and, unfortunately, belief is not knowledge.

The absence of causality in such a state is not a belief but knowledge. Without a time line, when all things are in existence infinitley, causality (cause and effect) does not take place.

The comment in relation to God, is a belief... I apologize, I wasn't attempted to make it sounds as fact; however, it was in response to the direct question "then who created God?" Assuming, hypothetically, there is a God, I responded... and left out the supposedly's and the would-be's :cool: :D

[talaniman]

DRJIZZLE

Believing in Adam & Eve does not mean believing in incest. Just because Adam & Eve were the first to be created by God, doesn't mean they were the ONLY to be created by God

.
Very logical statement and it works for me!

[Cassie]

True! In the DaVinco Code, didnt it say that Jesus had a relationship with Mary Magdelene?




Starman, u dont know alot, you are well educated with all of this.
But remember religion is all down to faith. Its not faced with facts and the obvious as u state

Sorry, did not mean to agree. The Davinci code is fiction, so quoting it has no importance.

[Krs]

Sorry, did not mean to agree. The Davinci code is fiction, so quoting it has no importance.

How do we know!
No one knows the truth.
Based on the story if its true or not no one knows.

You chose not to believe it as your choice, but you can't call it fiction like I can't call it the truth.

[NeedKarma]

The absense of causality in such a state is not a belief but knowledge.

Nope, not knowledge, actually it's our ignorance. In other words it's the absence of the knowledge of causality.

[Cassie]

How do we know!
No one knows the truth.
Based on the story if its true or not no one knows.

You chose not to believe it as your choice, but you can't call it fiction like i can't call it the truth.

It is not my belief. The author says it is fiction. That is enough for me.

[flower81]

Would u even consider that maybe its told to be fiction to save lots of questioning and wondering and riots?

[Cassie]

Would u even consider that maybe its told to be fiction to save lots of questioning and wondering and riots?

No, I don't think it would cause riots or even questions. I am amazed at how many people believe it to be a non fiction book and have really bought into it and there does not seem to be much ado about it. There was a program on TV about it. He even got a lot of information from another book that was fiction and they were interviewing the other author. The name escapes me. Too early in the morning, I will try to remember.

[DrJ]

Nope, not knowledge, actually it's our ignorance. In other words it's the absence of the knowledge of causality.

Point taken... until I exist in such a timeless state, I cannot KNOW whether the law of causality would exist there.

[Starman]

I once heard a theory (not sure from where) that the descendents of Cain are the African people. But if one believes in the flood, then that can't be true, because all of his descendents would have been wiped out in that case. Or am I missing something?

Genesis 6:10
And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

The Messiah would come through Shem.


KJV


The descendants of Ham, one of Noah's three sons is the progenitor of what is called the black race. These include descendants of Cush, Mizraim and Put who settled in Africa immediately after the confusion of languages in Mesopotamia and Caanan who settled in what is today called Palestine


Genesis 10:6
And the sons of Ham; Cush, and Mizraim, and Phut, and Canaan.KJV


I don't say "African" because there are white people and Arabs living in Africa today and in ancient times as well. Arabs are descendant of Abraham through Ishamael a son Abraham had by means of his Egyptian concubine Agar. Making them also descendants of Shem another of Noah's sons.

The Phoenicians were a Caananite people who founded Carthage on the African Mediterranean coast after Alexander destroyed their capital city of Tyre. These were also descendants of Ham but are not considered to be of the black race.

The descendants of Cain did not pass the deluge. The descendants of Seth who took the place of Abel did.

Genesis 4:25
And Adam knew his wife again; and she bare a son, and called his name Seth: For God, said she, hath appointed me another seed instead of Abel, whom Cain slew. KJV


Noah was a direct descendant of Seth: Here is the genealogy. I will highlight the key people in bold.


Genesis 5 (King James Version)

Genesis 5
1This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him;

2Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created.

3And Adam lived an hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, and after his image; and called his name Seth:

4And the days of Adam after he had begotten Seth were eight hundred years: and he begat sons and daughters:

5And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years: and he died.

6And Seth lived an hundred and five years, and begat Enos:

7And Seth lived after he begat Enos eight hundred and seven years, and begat sons and daughters:

8And all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years: and he died.

9And Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan:

10And Enos lived after he begat Cainan eight hundred and fifteen years, and begat sons and daughters:

11And all the days of Enos were nine hundred and five years: and he died.

12And Cainan lived seventy years and begat Mahalaleel:

13And Cainan lived after he begat Mahalaleel eight hundred and forty years, and begat sons and daughters:

14And all the days of Cainan were nine hundred and ten years: and he died.

15And Mahalaleel lived sixty and five years, and begat Jared:

16And Mahalaleel lived after he begat Jared eight hundred and thirty years, and begat sons and daughters:

17And all the days of Mahalaleel were eight hundred ninety and five years: and he died.

18And Jared lived an hundred sixty and two years, and he begat Enoch:

19And Jared lived after he begat Enoch eight hundred years, and begat sons and daughters:

20And all the days of Jared were nine hundred sixty and two years: and he died.

21And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah:

22And Enoch walked with God after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and begat sons and daughters:

23And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years:

24And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him.

25And Methuselah lived an hundred eighty and seven years, and begat Lamech.

26And Methuselah lived after he begat Lamech seven hundred eighty and two years, and begat sons and daughters:

27And all the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years: and he died.

28And Lamech lived an hundred eighty and two years, and begat a son:

29And he called his name Noah, saying, This same shall comfort us concerning our work and toil of our hands, because of the ground which the LORD hath cursed.

30And Lamech lived after he begat Noah five hundred ninety and five years, and begat sons and daughters:

31And all the days of Lamech were seven hundred seventy and seven years: and he died.

32And Noah was five hundred years old: and Noah begat Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

Genesis 10:1
Now these are the generations of the sons of Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth: and unto them were sons born after the flood. KJV


BTW
Jesus is traced back to Adam and from Adam to God via Bible Genealogy

[Morganite]

It has long been held that Cain's descendants came through the Hamitic line by way of Ham's wife. In the 18 and 19 centurries it was much spoken of, but seems to have fallen into misuse.


M:)RGANITE

That is also another point that was recently my msn name!

If you believe in adam and eve, you also belive in incest.

Hold up there old hoss! Believing in Adam and Eve as the first parents of the whole human race, as per Gensis, means only that the first or first few generations of Adam's children would marry their siblings. It does not mean that those who believe the sory "believe in incest." They believe that incest was divinely approved - what else? - in the special circumstances surrounding the initial populating of the earth. That is a far cry from 'believing in incest' and I trust you can make the differentiation.

Historically you could ask yourself why there was a taboo on incest and when it was founded and by whom, etc.

The economy of heaven is dark and the best we can do in understanding it is the best we can do. There are not answers available to all questions, especiallty not to those questions that are repeatedly trotted out to discomfit believers - not that I suggest for one moment that this is what you have set out to do - but there are some that will.

We are safe in concluding, however, that unless God had a plan that he has no shared with us about how the earth was to be populated, then we are sure in assuming that the course the children of Adam undertook to fulfill their charge was in accordance with the mind and will of God.




M:)RGANITE

[talaniman]

Sorry This story is so illogical and I cannot accept it literally, I do think that God created many Adams and many Eves across the world ,that makes logical sense, but what did ancient man in the persian gulf know of the rest of the world. I guess he had to come up with something.

[Morganite]

I [...] believe the Bible to be without error [...].

The Bible does contain errors, although it is more than likely that it did not when the original monographs left the hands of the originators. The rabbis were the first to notice the errors that have crept in due to scribal incompetence, enfolding of gloses into the body of the text, changes made to mauintain a hedge around ha-shem, and deliberate changes made for changing theological positions.

Knowing this does not alter what the Bible is, but it does enable us to see it exactly for what it is and not as somehting that it does not claim for itself. Various camps of the Bible-believing world have engaged in the struggle over the issue of biblical inerrancy and infallibility. The Bible offers no justification for the fundamentalist tenets of infallibility and inerrancy. The Bible makes no claim to either. One cannot fairly say that they are biblical doctrines.

In 1976 Harold Lindsell, a founding faculty member of the Evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, published his now famous book The Battle for the Bible. Lindsell's book chronicled the battle for the doctrine of inerrancy of the Bible within the Southern Baptist Convention, the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod, and the Fuller Theological Seminary itself, where moderately liberal Bible scholars were teaching by the 1970s.

While Lindsell's book is still a favorite among American fundamentalists, Lindsell himself made clear that it would be inaccurate to reduce the large variety of Protestant positions on the Bible to two camps only—liberal and fundamentalist—since, in fact, dozens of different positions between the two extremes seem to exist.fn Scholarly studies on Protestant fundamentalism, not to mention the study of fundamentalism as a broader category not necessarily confined to the Protestant world, have boomed in the last two decades.

Since the publication of the movement's manifesto, The Fundamentals, between 1910 and 1915, fundamentalism was often represented as a reaction against science. Recent scholarship, on the other hand, has suggested an alternative explanation, seeing fundamentalism as an attempt to secure for biblical truth the same certainty that science enjoyed according to the Newtonian and positivist paradigm.Evangelicalism and fundamentalism had, according to George M. Marsden, "a love affair with Enlightenment science" and hailed "objective scientific thought ... as the best friend of the Christian faith and of Christian culture generally."

As there was only one "true" science (needless to say, not including evolution theories), so—the fundamentalists reasoned—there could be only one objective "truth" about the Bible: that it was the inerrant, infallible Word of God. Marsden has proved that hostility to science was originally foreign to fundamentalism and emerged as a later development, when science started to be secularized and to change its own paradigm.fn Fundamentalism, as a consequence, has been particularly hostile to late modernist and postmodernist assumptions that there is no "one science," but that science could be a collection of conflicting points of view, often selected for practical purposes without necessarily implying that one is more "true" than the other.

Paradoxically, fundamentalism maintained the objectivity of "scientific truth" when this claim was no longer made by mainline science itself.

It is to be hoped that you are aware that the Bible has come down to us through many translations and that it has been copied many times; moreover that there is no original manuscript of any of the books of the Bible. The scribes in the beginning and through the years had to write every word by hand. Moreover, the original Hebrew manuscripts were not written as we write today with separate words but in uncials, that is to say, the words ran together in this fashion and there were no written vowels sthttbcmvrydffclttdscvrthcrrctmnng, and errors crept in.

No Bible student today believes that the Bible has come down to us in its perfect and original appearance in the manuscripts. Scribes left out words and phrases, just as we do at times in typing, missing one whole line and thus changing the meaning. Moreover, the scribes added or interpreted according to their own opinions at times. These things are quite generally understood. Therefore we still find errors and contradictions in the Bible, and we have to deal with them honestly. That is our task as Bible believers.



M:)RGANITE

Sorry This story is so illogical and I cannot accept it literaly, I do think that God created many Adams and many Eves across the world ,that makes logical sense, but what did ancient man in the persian gulf know of the rest of the world. I guess he had to come up with something.

What has logic to do with religion?




M:)RGANITE

That Thomas Aquinas quote simply points back to the "who created god then?" question. Since that cannot be proven or explained then both sides are at standstill it would seem.

He seems to say in 50 words what one could say in 10, overly verbose for me.

That is because you stand in a different tradition than he. Horses for course, horses for his time and horses for our own, academic horses, and lay horses. The language of each is different. Thomas would be as hard on today's minimalism as you are on his fuilness.

M:)RGANITE

Would u even consider that maybe its told to be fiction to save lots of questioning and wondering and riots?

It is fictional because it is ahistoric and many of his supposed academic and historic references are just as fictional as his plot.

Will you riot? I will not!


M:)RGANITE

[Starman]

It has long been held that Cain's descendants came through the Hamitic line by way of Ham's wife. in the 18 and 19 centurries it was much spoken of, but seems to have fallen into misuse.


M:)RGANITE

In view of the genealogical record in Genesis which shows that Noah and his sons Japeth, Shem, and Ham came through Seth and no mention is made of Ham's wife's genealogy, how did they ever get that Idea?

[Morganite]

In view of the geneological record in Genesis which shows that Noah and his sons Japeth, Shem, and Ham came through Seth and no mention is made of Ham's wife's geneology, how did they ever get that Idea?

There were black people before the flood and there were black people after the flood, so a means of perpetuity must have been established. Ham is an adjective in Egyptian for black, and the hamitic people are believed to be descended from that son of Noah.

Was the wife of Ham a descendant of Cain who was cursed for murdering his brother? Was it by Ham marrying her, and she being saved from the flood in the ark, that the black race was perpetuated?

Early interpretations of the Bible led many Western scholars to believe that all of humanity was descended from Noah. Chapters 9 and 10 of the Book of Genesis deal with the branching off and splitting up of Noah's sons into the world, this is open to interpretation, but the name of Cush, Ham's eldest son, means 'black' in Hebrew. Noah curses Ham and Canaan, Cush's brother, saying that he and his descendants would be a "servant of servants". Hebrew scholars used this passage to justify the Israelite subjugation of Canaan. These scholars, worked around the 6th century AD.

The question of the origins of races is still very much a live issue within academia. The division of humanity into distinct "races" can be traced as far back as the Ancient Egyptian sacred text the Book of Gates, which identifies four categories that are now conventionally labelled "Egyptians", "Asiatics", "Libyans", and "Nubians". However, such distinctions tended to merge differences defined by features such as skin color, with tribal and national identity. Classical civilizations from Rome to China tended to invest much more importance in family or tribal affiliations than in physical appearance (Dikötter 1992; Goldenberg 2003). Ancient Greek and Roman authors also attempted to explain and categorize visible biological differences between peoples known to them.

Such categories often also included fantastical human-like beings that were supposed to exist in far-away lands. Some Roman writers adhered to an environmental determinism in which climate could affect the appearance and character of groups (Isaac 2004). But in many ancient civilizations, individuals with widely varying physical appearances could become full members of a society by growing up within that society or by adopting the society's cultural norms (Snowden 1983; Lewis 1990).

Medieval models of race mixed Classical ideas with the notion that humanity as a whole was descended from Shem, Ham and Japheth, the three sons of Noah, producing distinct Semitic (Asian), Hamitic (African), and Japhetic (European) peoples.

The word race entered the English language in the 16th century, from French race "race, breed, lineage" (which in turn was probably a loan from Italian razza). Meanings of the term in the 16th century included "wines with a characteristic flavour", "people with common occupation", and "generation". The meaning "tribe" or "nation" emerged in the 17th century. The modern meaning, "one of the major divisions of mankind", dates to the late 18th century, but it never became exclusive. The ultimate origin of the word is unknown; suggestions include Arabic ra'is meaning "head", but also "beginning" or "origin".

The English word "race", along with many of the ideas now associated with the term, were products of the European era of exploration (Smedley 1999). As Europeans encountered people from different parts of the world, they speculated about the physical, social, and cultural differences between human groups. The rise of the African slave trade, which gradually displaced an earlier trade in slaves from throughout the world, created a further incentive to categorize human groups to justify the barbarous treatment of African slaves (Meltzer 1993).

Drawing on classical sources and on their own internal interactions—for example, the hostility between the English and Irish was a powerful influence on early thinking about the differences between people (Takaki 1993)—Europeans began to sort themselves and others into groups associated with physical appearance and with deeply ingrained behaviors and capacities. A set of "folk beliefs" took hold that linked inherited physical differences between groups to inherited intellectual, behavioral, and moral qualities (Banton 1977). Although similar ideas can be found in other cultures (Lewis 1990; Dikötter 1992), they appear not to have had as much influence on social structures as they did in Europe and the parts of the world colonized by Europeans.

There could well be singfificant social and economic reasons for assigning black peoples to the family of Cain through Ham and Ham's wife. (see: http://www.experiencefestival.com etc.)



M:)RGANITE

"there is the problem of how two people, and only two people procreate without side effects.

I assure you that my wife and I - who are two people and only two people - have procreated very successfully on several occasion without side effects. If we can do it, then Adam and Eve could do it.





M:)RGANITE

[ndx]

I think you should actually read the contest of what was being said morganite =]

Two people, and only two people, if you read it properly, it was in the context of the ONLY two people on the planet, (as we are talking about adam and eve, the supposed first and only humans on the planet, and where all other humans came from), and normally the problems with incest means unhealthy children, which would have been the problem.


And I'm glad your penis works. :)

And I can differentiate. Ta.

- Chris.

[talaniman]

If you want a modern day example of modern day inbreeding check out the Amish and the problems they are having.

[Starman]

I think you should actually read the contest of what was being said morganite =]

Two people, and only two people, if you read it properly, it was in the context of the ONLY two people on the planet, (as we are talking about adam and eve, the supposed first and only humans on the planet, and where all other humans came from), and normally the problems with incest means unhealthy children, which would of been the problem.


And im glad your penis works. :)

And i can differentiate. Ta.

- Chris.

Those genetic problems would not arise because God blessed them.


Genesis 1:28
And God blessed them. And God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

Adam and Eve were created specifically for that purpose.

[Jonegy]

Once more returning to the original post...

Nope!

Nope!

( I have been interested in the incest theory though - especially when you look at some of the nutters running this world ) :D

[Curlyben]

Unbiased-thinker and Galveston, your commets have been moved to the correct thread right HERE.
This thread is now closed as it continually moves away from KRS' original point.
ANy probelsm/comments PM me