How Did Adam & Eve’s Kids Have Kids?

Ok, that was weird. So far as I know, the Catholic church accepts evolution, and has retreated to the position that at some point God inserted souls. (Maybe that’s Adam and Eve?) Anyway, if the Adam and Eve story is taken at face value, then saying we don’t know is kind of nuts. I mean, it obviously had to be brother and sister going at it, or Adamn and daughter or Eve and son… ok, maybe you don’t know which icky option it was, but it was one of them, right? So say so, if that’s what you believe, instead of making a ridiculous attempt to commit suicide by embarassment.

Actually it doesn’t rule out sisters since the Bible also says Adam and Eve had other children. “The days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were eight hundred years; and he had other sons and daughters.”

The Christian interpretations I’ve heard range from the story being pure metaphor for humans in general. In other words Adam and Eve are us and eating of the fruit means us becoming aware as we grow up of our actions and thoughts and being ashamed of some (Cain in this case is metaphor for the human tendency to disclaim responsibility for our actions). Another is Adam and Eve stand for the point in evolutionary history where humans gained souls and then started questioning and being aware (in this case ‘death’ means spiritual death because biological death already existed). Those who insist on a single Adam and Eve in this scenario might say the children married other humans who did not have full fledged souls (but the children of the mixed marriages would). The literalists generally say Cain and Seth married their sisters.

And in response to the comment above mine, I am a little curious what you mean by

Adam and Eve stand for the point in evolutionary history where humans gained souls and then started questioning and being aware

Nowhere have I ever heard any biologist or other scientist talk about the point in time when human beings gained souls, or even of the existence of souls.

Cain in this case is metaphor for the human tendency to disclaim responsibility for our actions)

The human tendency to disclaim responsibility for our actions? Please explain to me what asking forgiveness is then? A murderer can kill 100 innocent people, and then ask god for forgiveness, and his slate is wiped clean? How is that for disclaiming responsibility for our own actions.

‘Ancient legends aren’t required to make literal sense, they’re just good stories.’ There. Why can’t all educated Christians accept that? Are they so scared that the whole thing is a house of cards and will be knocked down by a slight breeze of truth?

The even bigger irony is that there is an official Catholic answer these days: That Genesis is not literal, but rather is a metaphor for humanity’s sinful state.

Of course, this introduces new problems: Why would there be original sin if there was no original sin? If there is no original sin, why would Jesus’ sacrifice be needed?

Still, it’s embarrassing that he took Genesis more or less literally in 2009 as an official representative of an organization that does not.

Top tip: Don’t ask a Catholic Priest any questions to do with reproduction.

I’m sure that many of us remember the opening theme song for “Mystery Science Theater”:

If you’re wondering how he eats and breathes
and other science facts (la-la-la),
Just repeat to yourself, “It’s just a show,
I should really just relax…”
for Mystery Science Theater 3000!”

This attitude probably applies to the Bible as well.

The Bible not a movie — but it does appear to be a collection of “fan fiction” written, collected, and edited over many hundreds of years where familiar characters like “God,” “Adam,” “Eve,” etc are used by the story creators to comment on life.

I don’t know how “literal” the original story creators were with the Bible, but the move towards Biblical literalism appears to a relatively recent development in Christianity.

A recent Newsweek article discusses the connection between Biblical literalism and slavery in the US:

Is it mere coincidence that the Bible Belt is also the Black Belt? Why has biblical literalism held sway so powerfully in the region of the nation that used to practice and suffer under slavery on a large scale?

Martin Marty of the University of Chicago recalls a fellow historian once noting that the white southern Protestant clergy prior to the Civil War “came across as moral, devout, pastoral, learned, caring, informed, and generous preachers. And also to a person they defended human slavery, claiming that it was a response to divine mandates and divine will, biblically authorized.”

It is a most noteworthy–yet largely unnoted–fact that the embrace of biblical literalism by whites in the American South in the mid-19th Century sprang from the common (and expedient) belief that the Bible provided a justification for slavery, a practice which undeniably is sanctioned on many of its pages.

***

The legacy of slavery continues to weigh down this part of the nation in many ways. The most obvious of those deleterious effects, racism, is in remission, insofar as it is no longer explicitly practiced by the South’s institutions and is fading on the personal level. But other toxic residues of the peculiar institution, such as stubborn and harmful resistance to change and the section’s persistent poverty, especially but not exclusively among blacks, continue to harm the region.

Source:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2008/10/unbuckling_the_bible_belt_from.html

Didn’t he watch the final episode of BSG? They mated with Cylons.

Actually, at least some scientistdid write about humans getting souls at some point in our evolutionay history, Carl Sagan in The Dragons of Eden. Of course, Sagan was being metaphorical, he did not believe that we at some point acquired magic soul-stuff. The main theme of Dragons is that moral and existential problems addressed in The Bible are better understood through biology and evolutionary history. It’s a good read, though a little dated.

As for the fundies, they usually say incest was not wrong until God said it was wrong in the Law. Nor was there much reason for incest to be wrong as the perfect genes of Adam, Eve, and the first few generations of humans made there be no risk of birth defects. Only later generations faced this risk. Of course this does not explain why Leviticus forbids step-incest with such vigor, though it does make sense that in a polygynous society stepsibling and stepmother/stepson (no squicks,they could be the same age) could really mess with the power dynamics.

Being a priest does not ensure that you are well-read in all theological/scientific issues. The question is addressed quite well here: http://biologos.org/questions/evolution-and-the-fall/

My mother has told me before that incest was not considered wrong until after Noah’s time. The gist is that until we started living sinful lives, we all lived to be hundreds of years old, and could marry our siblings because there was no disease. This also somehow relates to the Bible recommending a low-fat diet. What? I have no idea.

So… Lot and his daughters isn’t weird, for some reason.

Can the Catholic Church not just admit that the ‘Adam and Eve’ story is just a sweet mythical story about the creation of life. Perhaps if it was accepted as a metaphor for humanity, people wouldn’t think of it as such a joke. And then there wouldn’t have to be answers to stupid questions such as “Did Adam have a bellybutton”.

Surely this amiable looking young man in a dog collar represents a hugely credulous and semi-literate portion of the electorate. WTF does it matter if Cain and Able were dead/unable to have children, whatever? This is, IMHO the whole rotten thing about futile fundamentalist religion. A whole lot of sagas, just like the Nordic sagas, were written down by scribes for groups of wandering and illiterate shepherds. They enjoyed the stories of great and powerful leaders, adulterous women and a magic god with an implacable mien.
The great crime committed by the people who mindlessly follow these arcane beliefs is the fact that they want to impose a moral code onto the rest of humanity based on a book which is over THREE THOUSAND years old. And despite the amazing truths being revealed by scientists, biologists, zoologists, anthropologists and every other sphere of discovery these people are dismissed as being heretics. The thuggish behaviour of people such as the pope and all his princes and cardinals, never cease to demand their followers to believe in a world which is five thousand years old. So stupid are the people who follow this and every other religion which hangs onto the past-to delay the present- they are able to look at a TV program and see a creature which could be a link between primates with tails and human beings which existed forty-seven million years ago.
Which is the greater miracle? This creature or the clown who would deny its existence?

Perhaps Father Jonathan simply doesn’t understand how anybody has kids? As a good Catholic priest, he must be a virgin, right?

And I apologize for my few typos but that’s what happens when the crummy editor can’t keep up with someone who can touch-type.

Also, why is the question being asked from the standpoint of judging God, where the truth is exactly opposite : God is judging.

Why ?

Does Fox take these questions from members of the public? :evil grin: ’cause if they do then, you know, I can think of one or two questions that might make Father Morris look like an idiot…more of an idiot.

Haha, why do they ask a catholic priest this? When it comes to sex, they only know how to molest kids..

Seriously though, the whole Adam&Eve story is hogwash, utter nonsense, like Noah’s Ark. Come on… Can’t take these religious people seriously.

Genesis clearly states that Cain’s wife was not a daughter of Adam and Eve. Cain left home, and traveled to a very far away land, which the Bible cites as “the Land of Nod,” which the Bible states was located east of Eden.

Cain was Adam’s son, but his wife was not Adam’s daughter. In fact, the Bible is abundantly clear in stating that she was not only unrelated, but that she was from a foreign land.

Only those who are very ignorant of what the Bible actually says would ever take the position that Adam’s sons committed incest.