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Is Genesis True?

Is the Myth of the Fall of Man True?

  • Absolutely yes! These were actual historical events that really happened! Why would the Bible lie?

    Votes: 8 17.0%
  • Absolutely not! It's made up. Why should anyone believe it if it can't be validated by science?

    Votes: 8 17.0%
  • Yes, it's symbolically true. This is the nature of mythology. It expresses our human condition well.

    Votes: 15 31.9%
  • Not really. Though I get that it's symbolic, it doesn't really speak truth about our condition.

    Votes: 8 17.0%
  • Partly yes, partly no. Some of it resonates symbolically, but not so much as far as myths go.

    Votes: 2 4.3%
  • Other, please explain.

    Votes: 6 12.8%

  • Total voters
    47

Earthling

David Henson
Because it doesn't make sense based on objectively-derived evidence, plus we do know that the Hebrews were aware of a Babylonian epic that was written about a thousand years prior to Genesis that's somewhat similar but appears to be altered to reflect early Jewish teachings.

Pretty much all societies have done this, btw.

And all societies come from the same place. By the way, the Genesis account was written how long after the events in question? You have the tower of Babel in Summeria and the scattering of people who carried with them the history of the flood, which was also later written by Moses. They are not the same, by the way, you can see the mythology incorporated in the earlier accounts like, one of which, is Gilgamesh.
 

Audie

Veteran Member
I believe your assessment is based on your own biases not on the facts.

I believe the whole Bible is inspired by God but only parts of it contain direct statements by Him.

I believe you may find this difficult to believe but educated people don't know everything and some of the things they think they know are false.

Ah, you and metis both feel that snark will carry the
day?
And if not, bold font and swift colour change may do it.

Anyway, lets look at your first sentence....

I believe your assessment is based on your own biases not on the facts.

And why do you believe that?
Do you have, like a datum point or two,
or is this purely out of your own bias?

See, something like the "flood" has exatly
zero empirical evidence to verify it.

If you believe there is no evidence to show
that it did not and could not have happened,
then you are giving us a dictionary-level
example of an argument from ignorance.

educated people don't know everything and some of the things they think they know are false.

Would you say that when you hear someone
saying that there really is a place called Borneo?
You have not see Borneo maybe they are just saying
things :D

Do you have infallible knowledge that there really was
a flood, and that all evidence to the contrary
is false?

Or is it just educated people who dont know
everything, and some of the things they think
they know are false? :D
 
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David T

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
I know. Which is a bit disconcerting we have "fallen" so far from a symbolic reality into the land of one-dimensional so-called "facts". This from an essay written sometime ago called Biblical Literalism: Constricting the Cosmic Dance, by Conrad Hyers:

But the problem is even more deep-rooted. A literalist imagination -- or lack of imagination -- pervades contemporary culture. One of the more dubious successes of modern science -- and of its attendant spirits technology, historiography and mathematics -- is the suffusion of intellectual life with a prosaic and pedantic mind-set. One may observe this feature in almost any college classroom, not only in religious studies, but within the humanities in general. Students have difficulty in thinking, feeling and expressing themselves symbolically.
....

The problem is, no doubt, further amplified by the obviousness and banality of most of the television programming on which the present generation has been weaned and reared. Not only is imagination a strain; even to imagine what a symbolic world is like is difficult. Poetry is turned into prose, truth into statistics, understanding into facts, education into note-taking, art into criticism, symbols into signs, faith into beliefs. That which cannot be listed, out-lined, dated, keypunched, reduced to a formula, fed into a computer, or sold through commercials cannot be thought or experienced.

Our situation calls to mind a backstage interview with Anna Pavlova, the dancer. Following an illustrious and moving performance, she was asked the meaning of the dance. She replied, “If I could say it, do you think I should have danced it?” To give dance a literal meaning would be to reduce dancing to something else. It would lose its capacity to involve the whole person. And one would miss all the subtle nuances and delicate shadings and rich polyvalences of the dance itself.

The remark has its parallel in religion. The early ethnologist R. R. Marett is noted for his dictum that “religion is not so much thought out as danced out.” But even when thought out, religion is focused in the verbal equivalent of the dance: myth, symbol and metaphor. To insist on assigning to it a literal, one-dimensional meaning is to shrink and stifle and distort the significance. In the words of E. H. W. Meyer- stein, “Myth is my tongue, which means not that I cheat, but stagger in a light too great to bear.” Religious expression trembles with a sense of inexpressible mystery, a mystery which nevertheless addresses us in the totality of our being.

The literal imagination is univocal. Words mean one thing, and one thing only. They don’t bristle with meanings and possibilities; they are bald, clean-shaven. Literal clarity and simplicity, to be sure, offer a kind of security in a world (or Bible) where otherwise issues seem incorrigibly complex, ambiguous and muddy. But it is a false security, a temporary bastion, maintained by dogmatism and misguided loyalty. Literalism pays a high price for the hope of having firm and unbreakable handles attached to reality. The result is to move in the opposite direction from religious symbolism, emptying symbols of their amplitude of meaning and power, reducing the cosmic dance to a calibrated discussion.​

There is much more he wrote in this but this capture it well. Both biblical literalism and scientism share the same source, a lack of symbolic thought.
Wow thats preaching to the choir with me and that is one extremely well articulated truthful rant. I love it. Is it understood? Not by many not really which suddenly places it in the same psychological level of the bible. A very jungian type thing.
 

exchemist

Veteran Member
Make-believe originally passed off
as true, but changing to allegory as
they became unbearably nonsensical
to educated people.
Viewed as allegory from as early as 200AD, by the way, if not before. Ancient people were no more stupid than we are.
 

Earthling

David Henson
Mmmm. Kinda hard to explain levels of awareness in a non-temporal mental universe, even now.

Is it. Lets say I worked the day shift 5 days a week in those days. There I use the term day in 3 different ways. In the Genesis creation account the Hebrew word yohm, translated day, is used in the same three ways. So, was the heavens and earth created in 6 literal days? The seventh day is said to be continuing by David and then Paul, and continues to this day. A literal 24 hours? Plus, the six "day" period describes the making of the already created heavens and earth compatible for human existence, not their creation itself.
 

Earthling

David Henson
Viewed as allegory from as early as 200AD, by the way, if not before. Ancient people were no more stupid than we are.

By whom was it viewed as allegory as early as 200AD and why place any value upon their estimation other than you like it? What was the basis for that thinking then?
 

exchemist

Veteran Member
The first couple chapters of the book of Genesis describe the Fall of man from paradise, a state of unity and eternal life with God, to a state of separation, pain, loss, suffering, and death. While it is obvious to most modern readers, and especially those with any modest degree of valid scientific knowledge that the details of the story are not factual historically nor scientifically, is the story true nonetheless? Is there a real truth to the underlying theme portrayed through these symbolic characters, Adam and Eve, that is captured faithfully in the myth of the Garden of Eden?
Whether it is a real truth or not we cannot be sure but certainly the allegory is a thoughtful commentary on the human condition: the double-edged nature of innocence versus moral knowledge, and of moral responsibility versus human frailty. Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is particularly poignant.

As Christmas will shortly be with us, I commend the following old English carol:

Adam lay ybounden
Bounden in a bond;
Foure thousand witer,
Thought he not too long.

And all was for an apple,
An apple that he tok,
As clerkes finden
Wreten in here book.

Never had the apple,
The apple taken ben,
Ne hadde never our lady,
A ben Hevene Quen.

Blessed be the time
The apple taken was
Therefore we moun singen
Deo gracias
 

Audie

Veteran Member
Viewed as allegory from as early as 200AD, by the way, if not before. Ancient people were no more stupid than we are.

Viewed by who?
And what proportion of the population
would you say understood that POV?

I would be interested to hear what basis
someone would have had, 2000 yrs ago,
for thinking the flood was not an actual event.

Of on what basis one might say that the
author(s) did not believe it to be history.

I bet you'd not want to have said that at the
time of Ferdie and Isabella. :D

I've not presented that people of the past were
stupid.
The distinction is between educated, and, not

No less a luminary than Issac Newton believed
some very ignorant things.
 

Nakosis

Non-Binary Physicalist
Premium Member
The first couple chapters of the book of Genesis describe the Fall of man from paradise, a state of unity and eternal life with God, to a state of separation, pain, loss, suffering, and death. While it is obvious to most modern readers, and especially those with any modest degree of valid scientific knowledge that the details of the story are not factual historically nor scientifically, is the story true nonetheless? Is there a real truth to the underlying theme portrayed through these symbolic characters, Adam and Eve, that is captured faithfully in the myth of the Garden of Eden?

I don't think that man was ever "perfect" or existed as perfect as seen through the eyes of Christianity.

What exactly were we supposed to have fallen from? Is there any evidence of having been better than we currently are? We had a barbarous past. We are certainly better today than the past that we know of.

Maybe Adam and Eve are symbolic of our potential, but I don't believe it is symbolic of our past.
 

Audie

Veteran Member
I don't think that man was ever "perfect" or existed as perfect as seen through the eyes of Christianity.

What exactly were we supposed to have fallen from? Is there any evidence of having been better than we currently are? We had a barbarous past. We are certainly better today than the past that we know of.

Maybe Adam and Eve are symbolic of our potential, but I don't believe it is symbolic of our past.

It would do find as symbolic of an imaginary past.

Most primitive cultures seem to have stories of
how people were stronger, etc in the old days.

And then foolish people came along and messed it
up.
 

Earthling

David Henson
Origen, one of the early Fathers of the Church.

In trying to address his student's philosophical questions Origen encouraged them to "extract from the philosophy of the Greeks what may serve as a course of study or a preparation for Christianity." He based this on "How useful to the children of Israel were the things brought from Egypt, which the Egyptians had not put to a proper use, but which the Hebrews, guided by the wisdom of God, used for God’s service." This allegorical support often led him astray.

For example, in his book On First Principles, he has Jesus as ‘the only-begotten Son, who was born, but without any beginning.’ And he added: ‘His generation is eternal and everlasting. It was not by receiving the breath of life that he is made a Son, by any outward act, but by God’s own nature.’

He should have checked Colossians 1:15, Revelation 3:14 and 1 Corinthians 4:6
 

Sanzbir

Well-Known Member
I'm sorry, I think I may have misunderstood your initial meaning a little bit. If so I apologize (I can only blame my not having had coffee yet this morning). I read your post as saying that Babylon had a mother earth and father sky, but I haven't read anything that leads me to believe that.

Marduk was indeed a storm/sky god, and he did kill Tiamat, using her corpse to finish the creation of the earth that Enki had started. However, Tiamat was the primordial sea goddess of chaos, not of earth. There is also the myth of Ishtar bringing knowledge to the people of Uruk, leading to the rise of civilization, but it's my understanding that Ishtar/Inanna was not a mother or creator goddess (though she was a fertility goddess).

Please correct me if I'm wrong, I am always willing to learn.

Ah, I wasn't necessarily thinking the Sky Father / Earth Mother archetype (but in retrospect, I realize giving examples like Dievs and Mara probably gave that impression), but rather a general trend in ancient religion where the sky based deities (including Sky Father archetypes but also storm gods and the like) tended to be male, and the more terrestrial (including fertility, hearth, and harvest deities) tended to be female.

The Tiamat/Apsu dichotomy is a different thing, I think, probably in reference to the Persian Gulf (where sweet and salt water meet). Even though Tiamat was the goddess of salt water, she still is terrestrial in that Marduk formed the earth from her body, but she's also celestial as Marduk formed the heavens from her as well, so she is not a deity that is found within the Earth/Sky dichotomy but rather is probably the Babylonian version of the Order / Chaos dichotomy being the beginning of creation (Norse Ginnungagap, for another example of that).

I'd think of as Ishtar (as you mentioned governing fertility) and Ninkasi (governing grain and beer) being prime examples of the Female Earth / Male Sky general mythological trend showing itself within the Babylonian sphere.
 

sealchan

Well-Known Member
Viewed as allegory from as early as 200AD, by the way, if not before. Ancient people were no more stupid than we are.

I doubt that the authors believed it literally. The less educated might have taken it as such. Things haven't changed much in that regard.
 
So, you are agreeing with what I said; it was presented as
fact, but some figured out that it is not

You would deny that then there is a choice-dismiss the
story as BS, putting the integrity of the whole "bible"
at peril, or, explaining the phony story away as
"allegory"?

There is a problem with viewing stories developed in oral cultures through a modern perspective of 'fact'.

Myths and stories existed for their benefits in the present, and traditions were fluid as they were not written down and published in mass.

The study of history as an effort in establishing objective truth is not something that has existed for the vast majority of human history. As such, considering ancient myths as being developed in order to represent fact is somewhat of an anachronism (as the label of allegory would be).
 

Twilight Hue

Twilight, not bright nor dark, good nor bad.
The first couple chapters of the book of Genesis describe the Fall of man from paradise, a state of unity and eternal life with God, to a state of separation, pain, loss, suffering, and death. While it is obvious to most modern readers, and especially those with any modest degree of valid scientific knowledge that the details of the story are not factual historically nor scientifically, is the story true nonetheless? Is there a real truth to the underlying theme portrayed through these symbolic characters, Adam and Eve, that is captured faithfully in the myth of the Garden of Eden?
I would like to think most people with a fair degree of discernment , can recognize the obviousness that it is definitely not true.

We don't exactly live in an era of ancient sheepherders and goatherders subservient to their own superstitions anymore.
 

Audie

Veteran Member
What a convenient double-standard, but I do agree responding to your posts is "pointless".

It is certainly pointless for you to attempt
to punch above your weight.

ETA

Can we quit now? I dont really
want to play this game.
 
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