posted on Nov, 15 2002 @ 09:12 PM
..if there will be sides in this"
Will it? To whom? Is this the customary sense of "interesting"?
Let us remember that the account of Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel is common to Judaism, Islam and Christianity with little significant variation (change of
name in Islam etc.). That�s, say, half the world�s population with about 3,000 years available for question-and-answer sessions.
If anything could be added, it would have been added, by now. Do we imagine that the rabbis, the Church Fathers didn�t see a possible source of
controversy in this? That Augustine, Jerome, Irenaeus or for that matter Martin Luther somehow missed what the eagle-eyed F-M has suddenly spotted.
It�s old, old, old hat. There can be no reason to post it other than to annoy � it�s in there with �Was Mary a Virgin?�, �How could the Ark hold all
the animals?�, �How could God tell the days before he made the sun and moon?�� irrelevant for centuries to non-believers: acceptable to a greater or
lesser degree to believers.
Little wonder that T-C�s ire has been aroused (�pseudo-bigot� a splendid neologism by the way for a deliberate �stirrer�)
Books of Faith are not reference works, historical texts, scientific treatises: that�s why they�re books of Faith to believers and somewhat
unreliable to non-believers. To attempt to arouse controversy because the literal numbers don�t add up is about as useful an exercise as criticising a
telephone directory for its lack of spiritual content.
One can:
(1)believe it literally� Thomas has given the case for this (one sometimes finds people straying into other areas e.g. that �genes� then were
"uncorrupted� so �incest� was not harmful �TC has spared us this). The literal belief uses the other assertions in Genesis concerning age, Seth and
the rest, and will usually say that Cain will have married a half-sister. The account of Sarah, Abimelech and Abraham in Genesis 20 supports this to
an extent.
(2) believe it �symbolically� � plainly less solid as one runs the risk of believing that one�s own ideas are in some sense �gospel�. It can then be
an account of the Fall of the First Man and leads pretty logically to Christ as the second Adam, the new Man.
(3) not believe it but see it as very significant cultural and anthropological material
(4) not believe it, turn one�s back on the Foundation (for better or worse) of Western culture and watch Beavis and Butthead.
Why, O why, would anyone think this old tosh was worth posting in the first place and once T-C had given the case for (the case against would be
obvious to a publicly-educated juvenile) would anyone then go on?