Answers to various questions in this thread:

(1) Since Adam & Eve were the first man and woman and Cain was their son, Cain's wife had to be either one of his sisters or a niece.

(2) People lived 700-900 years back then and had a long productive life. Eve probably had hundreds of kids.

(3) Adam and Eve had perfect chromosomes, so incest was not wrong. Their chromosomes stayed pretty much damage free due to the hydrosphere. This was a layer of clear water like our ozone layer, except that it protected people much better from the sun's harmful rays.

(4) It was only after the flood that mutations crept into our genome. During the flood the hydrosphere came down and covered the earth. Also a lot of water came from below the land. Remember, there were no oceans before the flood. The earth was all one land mass. Because people had hundreds of children, the earth filled up, which is why we have lots of oil (dead fauna) and coal (dead flora).

(5) After the flood, the human genome became more and more corrupted due to the rays of the sun and God had to outlaw incest.

(6) Each of us has 2 copies of each gene. If one is bad, the good one will keep us alive, usually. Brother and sister often have bad copies of the same gene. So, if the have a child, the child has a 50% chance of getting the bad copy from the mom and a 50% chance of getting a bad copy from the dad. This gives the child a 25% chance of getting 2 bad copies of a crucial gene. With no good copy, it dies or is deformed, or sickly. So, incest is outlawed. This was not true in the pre-flood era when everyone had only good copies of each gene and there was no possibility of getting a bad copy.

 

"I will lead you into the pit, laughing!" from Karl Marx's black mass, "Eulanem."

A hydrosphere (Greek hydro means "water&quot in physical geography describes the collective mass of water found on, under, and over the surface of a planet.

Basically, the theory is that the pre-flood earth was surrounded by a layer of water, kinda like a ballon of water or vapor canopy, and that is partly where God all that water to submerge the entire planet. As to where all that water went after the flood, i have no idea. I remember reading about it, but i forgot the details or where i read it from.

Because of this protective layer, people lived longer than they do now.

Prior to the flood the earth apparently enjoyed a uniform sub-tropical climate everywhere. There were apparently no storms (hence no rainbows, Gen. 9:13), no wind (Gen. 8:1b), no snow, ice, floods. Water from springs prior to the flood was evidently abundant (Gen. 1:10) and a generous nightly mist, or very heavy dew watered the ground (Gen. 2:5). Fossils of tropical plants can be found in Alaska today, great coal beds have been discovered in Antarctica, and hundreds thousands of suddenly quick-frozen warm-weather mammoth elephants in Siberia. The surface of the earth has been drastically altered as a result of the flood. The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River was evidently the result of a sudden catastrophic draining of a huge inland lake, etc. (http://www.ldolphin.org/flood.shtml)

Personally i think God intervined genetics wise in the procreation of the first humans. Scientific studies lately revealed that we all came from one "Eve", so its logical that we all came from one set of parents. God kept them from having birth or genetic defects, then after enough time and after the population has grown large enough to sustain itself, God no longer intervined and made it law not to marry among siblings.

That's what i think anyway.

Basically, the theory is that the pre-flood earth was surrounded by a layer of water, kinda like a ballon of water or vapor canopy, and that is partly where God all that water to submerge the entire planet. As to where all that water went after the flood, i have no idea. I remember reading about it, but i forgot the details or where i read it from.

Because of this protective layer, people lived longer than they do now.

Prior to the flood the earth apparently enjoyed a uniform sub-tropical climate everywhere. There were apparently no storms (hence no rainbows, Gen. 9:13), no wind (Gen. 8:1b), no snow, ice, floods. Water from springs prior to the flood was evidently abundant (Gen. 1:10) and a generous nightly mist, or very heavy dew watered the ground (Gen. 2:5). Fossils of tropical plants can be found in Alaska today, great coal beds have been discovered in Antarctica, and hundreds thousands of suddenly quick-frozen warm-weather mammoth elephants in Siberia. The surface of the earth has been drastically altered as a result of the flood.

The Grand Canyon of the Colorado River was evidently the result of a sudden catastrophic draining of a huge inland lake, etc. (http://www.ldolphin.org/flood.shtml)

Personally i think God intervined genetics wise in the procreation of the first humans. Scientific studies lately revealed that we all came from one "Eve", so its logical that we all came from one set of parents. God kept them from having birth or genetic defects, then after enough time and after the population has grown large enough to sustain itself, God no longer intervined and made it law not to marry among siblings.

vbn

A genuinely interesting and engaging question, I'll answer to the best of my ability.

However, I think it first has to be established that there is no way to make an ontological claim without telling a story, a narrative upon which all other things are based.

This story is pre-science, but tells a story about how science knows things. Objective truths, universal access to knowledge, potentially unbiased investigation, the autonomy of nature etc.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for science, it simply needs to be seen that the rejection of the transcendental in creation, the idea that everything is not contained within a creator God, is a story that is pre-scientific. And that a positivist conception has to be challenged.

For the Vedas, I have talked with some Hindu persons, but it doesn't seem to be true. I'm not talking about some purely internal "feeling", but the conception of needing to leave behind all pleasures of the body, including love, seems to me to be devaluating life.

I don't know the "sigfried epics", and wouldn't speak on a Wikipedia version anyhow. I'll try to find something.

As for Alice in Wonderland, it's not clear to me it's either claiming truth, validity or an ontological perspective, but simply an investigation meant to be indicative of the "human condition".

I could be wrong, I haven't read it, but that's my initial impression. In this regard it can be perfectly valid under another overarching narrative, or many.

Cool, lemme rephrase some things to be sure we're on the same page. By narrative I simply meant unsupported ontological claims. Not like "Moses saw a burning bush", but "there is no such thing as the transcendental" coupled with "there is a physical existence" and "senses accurately relay data", or the converse, just to name a few.

And I would agree that stories aren't valid in and of themselves but have to enter into dialogue with the way things are, the existence they are trying to explain.

I think this speaks to the error of composition, but the point is valid, which is why I believe you can't cut and pase holy texts, part of the claim is their unity. Yeah, think thats it. r

Now for my critiques. There's nothing else I can base my assumption on for the body mind duality.I mean I'm drawing from a philosophical tradition, not only Christian, but Greek and modern into the post-modern.

900 million Hindus disagree, 2 billion(ish) Christians agree, it's big numbers, but in the end comes down to investigation and coherency of course.

Now why the Bible hasn't collapsed into a mere literary text, you may find some disonnance between me and other Christians. I believe it's because there is a tradition tracking back to an event, namely the crucfiixion, and that the validity of the story is the best explanation for the resulting pheonomenon. Namely mass conversions in hostile territory.