I brought this up first, and my point was that while religion can well say that much of the Bible is allegory, some things are vital and must be literally true. No matter if the name were Adam or Ugg, if God did not directly give a command that was disobeyed, the story fails. If we are not all descended from Ugg, the story fails because we would not be tarred with the sin. Clearly the story can be allegorical, which is what I learned, but then Original Sin can’t be a central tenet of your religion.
I’m not sure how many other religions collapse if some historical assertion were disproved. I’m not sure Buudhism and Hinduism do. Islam, probably, and if Abraham were a mythical ancestor, there can be no Covenant and prehaps Judaism does also. But I suspect Reform could get around that also.
Would that be the Boston Uggs, or the Long Island Uggs?
Exactement, as the French would say. Without Original Sin being literally true, and Jesus being a direct descendent of Adam/Ugg (even though JC was not part of the bloodline, since he was conceived by the Holy Spirit), you would have no need for a Saviour, hence me need for JC. In fact, you would nullify both Christianity and Judaism. Probably Islam too, the third great Abrahamic religion.
Without Sin being true, you’d have no need of a Savior; but I don’t think that depends on any specific account of how sin originated.
As did Shakespeare. Isn’t this how the bible should be properly treated though, as literature? Where would you rank it compared to Shakespeare’s works, Aesop’s fables, the Iliad, Odyssey and other works?
Billions of years ago our earliest ancestors were bacterialike. Homo sapiens date back a few hundred thousands years of which we are the only extant species. There are a good dozen or so hominid species, some think 20 identified thus far, future discoveries could raise it higher. Most of us probably have a small percentage of Neanderthal DNA in us. For a true believer, none of this matters, religious texts are fluid enough not to be grounded in any factual truths, it can go from literal, to symbolic, allegoric, and other things to be classified as spiritual truths.
There’s plenty that bible believers should ponder, with the main point that has been made by many on this board, and that’s what to do with original sin if Adam and Eve are allegorical figures. What purpose was the genealogies going back to Adam and Eve, if the message wasn’t to convey they were real people? What does it say about Jesus’ teachings? Does he give any indications the people in the OT were not historical? How much credence should Jesus be given on anything, particularly on promises of an afterlife, when he knew so little about this one?
It’s pretty poorly written. Too many sentences start with “And.” But the stories themselves have stood the test of time, so there’s that.
Or, it’s a literary device.
And it is good to know there’s a name for it. And it still strikes me as a weak kind of writing. And so it is written, and so it shall be done.
And who shall I say is calling?
And I see what you did there. And it was good.
The Genesis story, interpreted as allegory, has a gaping logical flaw. Jehovallah told Adam and Eve that they were not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. They were innocent and not vested with that understanding. The serpent convinced Eve that it would be OK, and Eve convinced Adam to taste it. But being ignorant of that knowledge prior to lunch, they could not have “sinned”, because they did not understand the concept.
Jehovallah told them, “this stuff is poison”, the serpent told them, “that guy is so full of shit”. They had existed for a very short time. How would they know who to trust? (And, ultimately, it turned out that the Big Guy was in fact lying to them.)
Then, of course, Eve chowed down and should have immediately realized therewith that it would be wrong to corrupt Adam with the fruit, but she went ahead and did it anyway. What should we make of that? Does it not strongly imply that women are the reason that men sin?
No matter how you edit it, the story falls flat. It persisted for centuries as the guiding myth because there was one bible, maybe two, in every town, and many followers rarely ever saw the book or could even read it. Told verbally, the clerics could get away with bullshitting their way through it, but, upon closer examination, the entire text just falls apart.
The Boston Uggs speak only to the Lodges, and the Lodges speak only to God.
As I said, the Adam and Eve story is not that important in Judaism. When I used to go to Yom Kippur services, I prayed for forgiveness of my since (directly to God) not for forgiveness of Adam and Eve’s sins. I don’t know about Islam.
If God made us with sin inherent in us, and then sends us to hell for being sinful, unless we bow down to Jesus, God is being a real shit. Not to mention the problem of why we can’t pray directly to God, like in Judaism, but have to go through a midele man I mean deity. I understand that there are some things that it is logically impossible to ask God to do, but this isn’t one of them.
The idea is that original sin contaminated the human bloodline, so that you can’t help but do bad things.
So God withheld the “cure” for thousands of years because…?
So we are born sick by god’s own hand, and then, on pain of eternal punishment, commanded to be well. (~ C.H.)
ISTR reading somewhere that the Catholic teaching is that Mary, mother of Jesus was somehow born untainted by original sin. Not sure if I read correctly or how that would actually work.
God waved his “magic wand”…pretty much the same way she got pregnant.