Adam and Eve

As for sending pregnant girls to a nunnery does anyone know of the magdelene laundry in Ireland? Up until a decade ago pregnant girls or girls suspected by their parents of being sexually active could be sent to the laundry where they would work for years without pay and when they had their baby it was taken away and put up for adoption without the girls consent. The place was a combination sweat shop and prison, some of the girls were never heard from again and there is a graveyard with unmarked graves on site. I guess this caused quite a scandal in Ireland a few years ago.

To get back to the OP, are you trying to tell me that Man was the Beta and Woman is “Man Version 1.0”.

I may need the odd service pack, but I’m way more stable than some version 1s that I know.
Re the Magdelane Laundry, It’s still making a scandal.

There’s a great Irish song about that, although I can’t remember the album or artist. I think it was with the Chieftains, though.

"…most girls come here pregnant
some by their own fathers
Brigit got that belly
By her parish priest
We’re trying to get things white as snow
All of us woe-begotten daughers
In the steaming stains of the Magdalane laundries.

Prostitutes and destitutes
And temptresses like me
Fallen women
Sentenced into dreamless drudgery…"

http://www.geocities.com/~briain/shepherds.htm
“Throughout this century, until as late as 1996, a total of about 30,000 Irish girls were locked up for years in so-called “Magdalene Asylums”. Their crime was to have had an illegitimate baby or to have been in ‘moral danger’ (for example, because of being very pretty). They had to labour in silence - totally unpaid - 52 weeks a year, in laundries where they cleaned the clothes of priests and nuns, symbolically washing away their sins. They had their heads shaved, were forced to wear rough smocks and bind their breasts, were regularly humiliated and beaten, and were sometimes sexually abused; their babies were taken from them forcibly and farmed out for adoption. The girls became an early example of the “disappeared”, often with the connivance of their own families. While other arms of the Church were extracting money from the Irish poor to feed the world’s “little black babies”, politicians turned their backs on home-grown abuses of civil rights. James Joyce’s “old sow” was again eating her own farrow. There was a ‘Good Shepherds’ laundry on the Armagh Road in Newry while I was growing up there; it did not feature in the TV documentary below.”

I’m even less versed in the Bible than the author of the OP. I’m aware of Cain and Abel. Did Adam and Eve have daughters? And if so, how did the progeny continue? If not, how did the progeny continue? This is a serious question.

If you go by the lineages listed in the Bible, you’d conclude that there was a 20-1 or so male-female ratio in those days. Of course, this is just because the women weren’t listed nearly as often in those lineages. For instance, do you really think that it’s plausible that Jacob had twelve sons and no daughters?

I think there was an Aztec god, the creator, called Omeototl, and he was both male and female. Aristophanes the comic playwright of the 5th c BC in Greece told a myth in one of Plato’s dialogues as I remember, which is that humans were what we from our point of view today would call both sexes, joined back to back, thus with four arms and four legs, etc. Zeus was irritated by seeing them doing cartwheels and being pretentious, so he had them all cut in half. Now the original humans were what we would call of 3 types: two males joined together, two females, and a male and a female. Thus ever afterwards their descendants seek their other half. Aristophanes himself, I believe made fun of pederasty, and it was not “accepted,” but mocked, and only occurred in certain “sophisticated” classes, and had almost nothing to do with male-male connections as we view them today. Now we come to the gnostics, I believe the Simonians?, who believed that the original being of each person is male and female. The archons, or planetery deities, who are control-freaks (and who are ruled by the Old Testament God Ialdabaoth) cut each new person in half, and then set them on earth. Thus each person has to seek his or her other half and through many reincarnations. When this happened the two would unite and go on up back into the original Light of the Universe, the Pleroma or Fullness of Being… Simon himself found a prostitute whom he said was Helen of Troy in one of her incarnations, and the original Thought of God, the Light, just as Simon said he himself was that God.Also, it is thought that instead of having an endocrine disease, Akhenaton had female characteristics on some of his statues and pictures because it meant he was everything: thus man AND woman, and since he had a ram-like
face, the theory goes, he was both human AND animal. In other words it was iconography to symbolize he was ALL. As for the Bible, since it doesn’t say that the original Adam was male and female and then there was a second Adam, and since it doesn’t mention a lot of details or explain a lot of things, we are free to stop reading things into it and just take it as it obviously is: it means woman as she is in most societies, has the role of nurturing and supporting and inspiring (and owning); the man is supposed to support and protect. But by taking the overt power from women, the male psyche is obsessed with how women musthave great power (or they wouldn’t have taken it), and that women want back what power the men took. Thus they say behind every great man is a great woman, Hindu gods get their power from their Shakti consorts, the Shekina power is female in Hebrew lore, there are terrifying Hindu, Egyptian, Babylonian, etc. goddesses,
it is the Muses, women, in mythology who inspire, and there are leftover goddesses that hunt, such as Artemis. Eve coming from Adam is a pathetic and irrational attempt on the part of the male subconscious to give men credit for giving birth. Thus also Athena from Zeus’s head, Dionysus from his thigh are born, and some tribes take the neonate from the mother and put it on the father’s lap and say he has given birth to it, in a ritual. As for the two accounts of so many things in the early books of the Old Testament, this is said to be because there were two sets of priests who kept rewriting and editing each other’s writings. There were Aaron descended priests and Moses descended priests. Supposedly God was guiding how it all came out, but evidently he doesn’t feel responsible for all the interpretations.

MadSam:

Gen. 5:4 “After Seth was born, Adam lived 800 years and had other sons and daughters.”

Chronos:

Gen. 30:19, 21 “Leah conceived again and bore Jacob a sixth son. …Some time later she gave birth to a daughter and named her Dinah.”

Yeah, it’s still not very likely that Jacob had 12 sons and only 1 daughter, but don’t take this story too literally. It’s meant to explain the 12 tribes of Israel (i.e., Jacob), not be an actual account of one man’s family.

Gaudere:

Be that as it may, it most likely made less fodder for some proto-Jerry Springer-type.

I’ll grant your point about the ancient Greeks.

What about India, China, Japan? Didn’t these societies, for as far back as we know, have the institution of marriage with an expectation of fidelity?

Chaim Mattis Keller

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Gaudere *
**

I have seen this as well. There is the joke about making a rough draft before you make the final product.:wink: Then there is the story/myth/whatever about Lillith – which adds yet another twist.

But one of the oddest things to me is that if woman was made from man, then why is it now that all human embryos are originally female?

I have also heard reports from researchers that mention that the original texts were ‘modified’ to downplay the importance of women in accordance with the societal roles women were expected to have. It seems odd that in a great many other religions women were given a status of power – and the ‘village wisewoman’ was often summoned for information and healing. In the Old Testament, Saul seeks out a ‘witch’ or ‘wisewoman’ of Endor to help him summon the spirit of a dead ruler.

This is an interesting discussion – I hadn’t thought of the male/female question with animals before.

Gaudere, that Chieftans song was written by Joni Mitchell - it’s not an old Irish song, was done esp. for the Tears of Stone album.

Story of the laundries is very, very sad.

Well, I’ll take Jerry Springer any day of the week over the Magdalane Laundries. :eek: The drawbacks of hiding information seem to far outweigh the drawbacks of too much information, IMHO. I doubt I’ve watched more than a dozen episodes of Jerry (although I do know a couple people who were guests), simply becuase I find him dull. How many midget-Klan-member shows can you watch? Infidelity has been done so often I suspect they’re going to start introducing farm animals in to liven it up. Jerry’s just not high up on my list of evils in this world; he promotes stupid stuff, but you don’t have to watch him, while excessive hush-hushing and hiding of the bare existence and mechanics of premarital sex seems more harmful than he is. I prefer too much information over too little.

::cough:: There’s a reason it’s called “the world’s oldest profession”, Chaim. <grin> Geishas weren’t just for playing pretty music, ya know, though straight prostitutes were a bit lower scale. In Europe in medieval times, “May Day” was a day you were released from the “fidelity” part of marriage vows, even in Christian times. Tons o’ pagan religions thought sex was a sacred act but did not necessarily limit it to wedlock; heck, even their gods ran around on their wives with mortal women! (Say, did the Christian God ever marry Mary?) I believe in nearly all societies–since most have been patriarchial as soon as it was discovered that women didn’t magically make the kids on their own–fidelity within marriage has not been absolutely required of men. It has often been demanded of women, since the women and their sexual favors were considered to be the men’s property. You don’t have sex with another man’s wife–wasn’t that the original defintion of adultery, not “sex outside of wedlock”? Men might marry many wives and keep concubines, yet it was still acceptable to have sex with women that were not the property of other men. The most important consideration for a man was to ensure the children born in wedlock were really his since he had to support them. Marriage seemed to be have as its primary goal the raising of the man’s children; with a wife you could know they were yours, while a woman who was not legally bound to you might sleep around, particularly since there was no great censure for having sex with unmarried women. Even today, a woman who sleeps around is often called a “slut” while a man is a “stud”. I think the most we can say about the unique emotional bond between mated human partners is that well, sometimes society expects fidelity, sometimes it doesn’t, most likely it doesn’t try too hard to achieve fidelity from men, and some people are going to have sex without an emotional bond regardless of whether it’s currently promoted or censured by the society. The allure of the forbidden may be an attraction in a censorious society, while in a society accepting of infidelity it may be a matter of course.

It may not be of much interest to you, given your beliefs, but the size of monkey testicles is indicative of their reproductive habits. Small testicles indicate a monogamous or exclusive harem-based species where the male’s sperm does not have to compete with other sperm. Large testicles indicate a species that mates indiscriminantly, since a great deal of semen is more effective than a small amount when there is competition between the male’s sperm. How do human testicles rank? Roughly between the two. :wink: Of course biology is not destiny, and I’ll be doing my own bit o’ natural selection to attempt to get a male that is inclined towards the monogamous. (No, I won’t check his testicles to find out how he ranks on the monkey-scale. :smiley: )

Li’l support for my statements:
http://www.visi.com/~contra_m/cm/features/cm07_leithart.html

Thanks; I have the CD, but couldn’t recall it. And I just said it was an Irish song, not that it was old. CMA. :wink:

[Edited by Gaudere on 10-20-2000 at 12:22 AM]

I still am waiting for an answer to my reply above: If Adam and Eve were the first 2 people on earth and they bore Cain and Abel, did they produce other children? If so was incest practiced to enable future generations to develop? And if they only had Cain and Abel and no other children, how did the progeny continue?

You’re not supposed to take these stories literally. They speak only to the point they are making and aren’t interested in the fact that future generations will start asking questions that arise from the stories but that those who wrote them weren’t concerned with. That story is just supposed to illustrate things about how jealousy works, how it would have been better to live the nomadic life of herdspeople, and fratricide, not in where wives come from.
Do we ask what kind of hammer was used to bang Zeus’s head so he could give birth to Athena? Do we ask how much it hurt? Were Mercury’s flying shoes jet powered or did they have propellers? When Jesus said cut off your hand if it offends you, do we cut off our hands when they offend us?
Does Atlas get tired? Does the ancient Egyptian goddess Nut get tired from stretching over the earth, poised on her hands and feet all the time? Do either of them get bored?
When Izanagi washed his left eye and that gave rise to Amertarasu the sun, was it the eyewash itself that became the sun or did he lose his eye? When Ra sent out his Eye on journeys, could he still see? A set of skills is required to read myth and every other different kind of literature. Did Moby Dick really hate Ahab? Why didn’t somebody warn Caesar? When Lot’s wife turned to stone, didn’t they give her a decent burial? Since Elijah, Enoch, Mary, Jesus, and Empedocles were all taken up bodily into heaven, isn’t their existence precarious up there, and how do they interact with the spirits, since they are on a different wavelength? Nothing bears close examination; everything is full of holes if you want to look at everything that way.

Don Willard: I think your trying to tell me I should not be so analytical when it comes to this subject. I got the message. Thanks.

And how about our beloved Adam & Steve? Weren’t they part of God’s plan too? Or was Steve Cain’s unmentioned sister?

It is recorded that Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt, actually, not stone.

Just FYI.

bwk

Actually, incest is practiced a bit in the old testament… Lot’s daughters both got him drunk and slept with him after they had all escaped to a remote location. The did so for the reason mentioned above. The resulting sons were the fathers of the Moabites and the Ammonites. I suppose no one had said anything yet about not sleeping with family members.

As far as Adam and Eve, they had 3 sons, and Cain kills Abel, so that leaves two. But it says later in Genesis that Adam had other sons and daughters. I imagine Eve was involved in that somewhere. Also, many studies will admit that these sons and daughters likely married each other.

Gaudere:

Okay, I’ve got to admit, I’d forgotten about the prostitution issue. I was thinking of casual sex as the term is used in Western society today…a personal relationship including sex that does not include some form of ceremonialized bond…and somehow, the issue of prostitution (temple prostitutes included) completely slipped my mind.

Chaim Mattis Keller