If you believe that Adam and Eve were literal first humans, this contradicts science. If you believe that Adam and Eve are characters in mythology that teach great moral truths, this may be wrong in many ways, but it doesn’t contradict science.

And yet relativity is a scientific term is it not? I like Kierkegaard’s thought here: that without interest and passion, nothing has ever happened in history. while we may have standards for figuring out how “events happened or they did not” the reason for the historical event are 10 times out of 10, irrational. nor can we get at the “reason” for the passion without some element of mythos or subjective experience.

“or I am very hostile to bullshit, and you are projecting a lot of it.” -Aj

Everybody poops, Aj, I just try to be conscious of my stink. I don’t think you are yourself, as you’re acting like you are a being of pure reason. You’re not. You’re also changing definitions and challenging long held anthropological findings without really backing them up. I’d steer ya back to this story i posted in my first comment here.

“Mythologically speaking Adam and Eve were real people.” -Nomad

mythologically speaking, Adam and Eve were characters. you’re going literal in that comment. the point is not whether Adam or Eve was real, the point is what is this story saying about reality? the orthodox position in Christianity has been that this is how sin entered the world and we “fell.” You won’t find this thought in Judaism however… they talk more about how this is how suffering entered, or how this is how the world is supposed to be. Take the Tractate Sanhedrin which states that Genesis describes all mankind as being descended from a single individual in order to teach certain lessons. Among these are:

1. Taking one life is tantamount to destroying the entire world, and saving one life is tantamount to saving the entire world.

2. A person should not say to another that he comes from better stock because we all come from the same ancestor.

3. To teach the greatness of God, for when human beings create a mold every thing that comes out of that mold is identical, while mankind, which comes out of a single mold, is different in that every person is unique.

I detect some hostility, have you been burned by religion? sorry that my comments some how offended, but i ask you to consider the following:

No, thankfully I am one of the fortunates who has lived free of religion. I don’t get offended easily or think that you should feel obliged to care or even acknowledge if I were to be offended. I hope you detect hostility, for I am very hostile to bullshit, and you are projecting a lot of it. You obviously can’t see it, and your first guess for the reason for this hostility is evidence of your tolerance for bullshit. For you, it’s perfectly natural for people to base their beliefs on their emotions and allegiances.

Concerning Poetry: Poetry as teacher is anthropologically backed up. Most histories were written in poetic meter because they wanted ppl to be able to memorize and recite these stories. remember, we haven’t always enjoyed such a high literacy rate through our history. poems were recited around tribal campfires and this is very evident in places like Mongolia and China, even the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh.

A memory device is not teaching. Transference of dogma is not learning. Being able to remember and recite words is not an education. Is reading a book and writing it into an another teaching? Is writing down narration? Transference of information is not necessarily teaching.

Concerning History: i wonder at your perception that i somehow have “wish-thinking and gullible acceptance of claims from authority” when I question the very nature of history? “history is written by the winners” as the saying goes… we see this assumption in our own history books where Manifest Destiny is rarely questioned… colonial thought has affected the First Nations people.. ask them about how “accurate” our histories books are. or even the Zapatista’s for that matter. History isn’t as objective as we’d like to think it is.

You’re a Christian aren’t you? That’s a mixture of appeals to authority and wish-thinking. For this reason you feel inadequate even in the face of the social sciences. You dishonestly question the nature of history by ignoring its methods. History should be accepted or rejected on how well it is supported by evidence. We do not have to accept it on faith, history does not include an official body of knowledge, and is certainly not a set of competing mythological narratives. Historical method includes provisions for objectively analysing evidence.

I don’t want to fall foul of Godwin’s Law but I can think of several cases where history and the point of view of the winner are not mutually exclusive.

History is not a text in the fictive sense of a TV show or a holy book. It isn’t judged by metaphorical accuracy, it is ultimately dependant on reality. Either events happened or they did not.

Go down the relativity route and you might as well chuck science out too.

i don’t view the two as competing. this only happens if one has a literal understanding of the story, which is a recent pheonom, dating only to the late-1800s. it is almost absent in the Eastern circles of religion. same in the Jesuit and liberal circles within Christianity. I find, as well as Robert Krulwich from RadioLab, that science is best served in a story format.

speaking of a literal understanding of things, I believe Aj has just that.

Aj,

I detect some hostility, have you been burned by religion? sorry that my comments some how offended, but i ask you to consider the following:

Concerning Poetry: Poetry as teacher is anthropologically backed up. Most histories were written in poetic meter because they wanted ppl to be able to memorize and recite these stories. remember, we haven’t always enjoyed such a high literacy rate through our history. poems were recited around tribal campfires and this is very evident in places like Mongolia and China, even the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh.

Concerning History: i wonder at your perception that i somehow have “wish-thinking and gullible acceptance of claims from authority” when I question the very nature of history? “history is written by the winners” as the saying goes… we see this assumption in our own history books where Manifest Destiny is rarely questioned… colonial thought has affected the First Nations people.. ask them about how “accurate” our histories books are. or even the Zapatista’s for that matter. History isn’t as objective as we’d like to think it is.

I think that even the immoral passages in the bible can be powerful moral teachings in one way as warnings to humanity about the dangers of absolutism and religious extremism. I think the bible is a more powerful and inspiring book if you look at is as being a collection of practically every human emotion all in one than as a perfect book written by a perfect deity.