Gen 5:2 says, "Male and female created he them; and blessed them, and called their name Adam, in the day when they were created." The idea is supposed to be that blessed humans are cisgender man and woman in a heterosexual relationship and created exclusively by God, whereas anyone who claims to be transgender, or is gay, must have been created by Satan.
Well, yeah. You've seen those signs held by Christian protesters about God hating effeminate men, idolators, and Pokemon, right? I figure it's the same kind of people in this church.
Given that logic we need to know exactly how adam and eve were because any variation from that would mean god did not intend for you to be that way. Are we all white people who live for a thousand years? If you accept that humans have become different over time because of god's will unless otherwise stated, you cannot use that to declare trans people wrong. But these are also the same people who think jesus loves the military, their guns, death of brown people, the republican party, and child raping priests. Perhaps we should just tell the religious right to STFU at this point because they have so totally corrupted their own faith that it is all bullshit.
I have it on good logic god hates pokemon too. Think about it, he made them to be dominated and fight for the amusement of children who collect them in little balls. Also, I am pretty sure even the god of pokemon has called out this bullshit in the movies. This is cock fighting for children, and that shows a rather malicious regard for the lives of the cocks. Just sayin, god hates pokemon is true if there is a god.
agree - at what point does it say Satan made non-hetero people? Granted other parts of the bible do indeed address the subject, but not in this example.
Even more confusing to me is when Cain kills Abel. God or Adam (if memory serves) puts a mark on his head so when he goes from town-to-town people will know he is a murderer. BACK THAT TRAIN UP! What fucking towns? At this point in time there are only a handful of people on the entire planet. How can there be multiple population centers? Side note: right after Noah's Ark found dry land Santa Claus would have had an early night on that first Christmas - amIright?
If I remember the story correctly, Cain was condemned to wander the Earth for all time, so the mark was that no-one would ever kill him and everyone would know he was a murderer, for as long as there were people.
You're remembering incorrectly. Here is the most literal English translation (side note, the NASB can be slightly awkward because of its strict adherence to its translation style). Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is Abel your brother?” And he said, “I do not know. Am I my brother’s keeper?” Then He said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying out to Me from the ground. Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you cultivate the ground, it will no longer yield its strength to you; you will be a wanderer and a drifter on the earth.” Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is too great to endure! Behold, You have driven me this day from the face of the ground; and I will be hidden from Your face, and I will be a wanderer and a drifter on the earth, and whoever finds me will kill me.” So the Lord said to him, “Therefore whoever kills Cain, vengeance will be taken on him seven times as much.” And the Lord placed a mark on Cain, so that no one finding him would kill him. Then Cain left the presence of the Lord, and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. - Gen 4:9-16 This, in particular, is a touchy subject for me. I've studied it at great length because there was a not-insignificant number of Christian preachers in the US in the 19th Century that preached that the "mark of Cain" was being black. It was the justification they used to rationalize chattel slavery against the black man.
Given the modern evangelical american church, are we sure this isn't just them being honest about their joy in harming people? Hasn't Trump shown us they are sick and tired of pretending to be moral and compassionate? I am thinking PoC hanging from trees, jews in ovens, and GLBT people tied to fences is the republican christian church selling point now.
Why would he assume there are any actual human beings on the planet considering the people around were not technically the humans we see today according to the lore. The people around seemed to be closer to elven peoples than actual humans. They lived for about a thousand years, practiced weird mahgical ceremonies where they talked to the spirits and god, and seemed to have some super human abilities. It is clear that the people who wrote the bible were mixing in a bunch of other lore from the times. It is really like how confusing it would be if 2000 years from now thre was a religion based on the MCU and people were trying to take that as fact. Why is there no evidence of this huge battle in NYC where hordes of giant sky worms were reigning down minions and destroying buildings? Thor repeatedly visited our planet and we know this because we have video evidence of him defending us. They are just stories. I can still get the heroism and nobility of Tony Stark realizing that WMDs are wrong without believing he walked the earth. Jesus makes a great super hero we can look up to, but we do not have to think he was actually here.
It is my understanding that when Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden of Eden, they were the only two humans. Then they had two kids: Cain and Abel. Four humans. Cain kills Abel, three human. Cain is banished, suddenly tons of humans. I see two ways this works: 1: Adam and Eve had many, many children before Cain and Abel came along, and they all broke away to form incest cities. 2: God created more people after creating Adam and Eve, which seems like it may complicate the whole "original sin" thing.
That contains a major fallacy, which is usually stated as: absence of affirmation is not affirmation of absence. IOW, it is not because something is not mentioned explicitly that it does not exist, or should be assumed not to exist. That goes for people, too. If you take the opening chapters of Genesis more or less literally (and if you don't, the question of Cain killing Abel doesn't mean much, because it's just fiction), it seems that Eve considered Seth as a sort of "replacement" for Abel. And the text states that Adam was 135 years old when Seth was born. 135 years, with no contraception and plenty of room, is long enough not only to produce lots of children, but for them to produce plenty of their own. By then, there could be third or fourth generation people, without any problem. Contrary to what some people here have claimed, the Bible doesn't talk about Cain going "from town to town". The very first mention of a town is something that Cain did later on in life. But there could easily have been a population of hundreds of people by then, not all of whom would know Cain by sight. This "there were only four people and one of them got killed" interpretation is not only childish, it has no support whatsoever in the text.
The fact that two people cannot produce a viable species is a little bit more of a plot hole than the actual population of the Earth when Cain killed Abel.
Another question is why did God reject Cain’s offering. Just a few pages into the text and God comes across as an elitist snob who only wants blood sacrifice. What a clown.
One of God's bestest creations is Donald Trump. He is really quite excellent. Truly the best in God's eyes, according to the christians. Evidently god is pretty fucked up judgment wise according to the christians.
Well, it looks like that's an Anglican church, and they're generally not nearly as bad as the white evangelical denominations when it comes to reveling in cruelty.
And yet it's hard to get around that, whether you believe the Bible or not, when you know that mitochondrian DNA shows that the entire human race is descended from one single female. So call it a "plot hole" as much as you want, but that doesn't avoid the problem.
Another major though unfortunately common fallacy. I am amazed by the number of people who like to criticize the Bible and then immediately show they don't know much about it at all. The text never says that Cain's offering was rejected because it wasn't a "blood sacrifice". You are either making that up, or mindlessly repeating what "someone told you" like a fundamentalist who believes things because "my pastor said so". Leviticus 2 is entirely about grain offerings, which are more than just "acceptable". They are required, and are even in the highest category of holiness. A better question is: "Why in the world should God have to accept the offering of someone whose heart is so twisted, and whose religion in so obviously superficial and concerned only with getting the best for himself?" If you don't want your axe-murdering neighbor to babysit your kids, but would rather let the gentle grandmother across the street do it, does that make you an "elistist snob" and a "clown"?
That’s not at all what that means. It just means that after a certain point, only her mitochondrial DNA was that which got passed down. About 70K years ago, humanity nearly became extinct. The population was possibly below 1K people at that time. This greatly reduced the genetic diversity of our species and it’s likely that this is when her mitochondrial DNA became dominant.
That is what is assumed. All that is actually known is that all human beings have a common female ancestor. The difference between "assumed" and "known" is important in science.
I'm not sure about the bottleneck part, but the existence of mitochondrial Eve most definitely does not mean mEve was the only human female alive at the time (and as I recall the mAdam was almost certainly not alive at the same time either). There's just no scientific defense of Creationism. Even if you could muster one up, you'd then have to find a scientific defense for the story of a worldwide Flood...and no. People may get some details wrong about the book of Genesis, but the fact it's taken seriously by ANYONE as a factual record of events is far more absurd. It's likely more a mishmash of folk stories from a number of ancient cultures than a single story passed down intact through multiple generations and translations. Believe what you like, but correcting others on Biblical events isn't much different than correcting someone on Star Trek canon. Both are equally fictional.