Bennie, A bellybutton is needed on a man for the umbiblical cord to feed from in the womb, but a man does not need nipples.

This would indicate that male sexuality is simply added on over the predominately female feotus. As I stated before it has been noticed in the laboratory that you can damage the Male Y chromosone and the feotus can still go on to be a perfectly normal female but if you damage the female X chromosone there is always some handicap or abnormality when the child is born. No matter how male scribes have chosen to write religious texts, scientifically it is obviously the female who came first.

A fact that should make big headlines and news stories around the world but strangely is hardly ever pointed out by a male dominated media.

ELLSWORTH- I have never been convinced that the whole of mankind originated from Africa. We've seen science make claims before that they have later had to rethink when something else has come to light and I believe that will be the case here. It all fits in too nicely with the political correctness we've had coming from left wing academia land in recent times.
God could just as easily be a floating vapour for that matter.

Just my (probably irrelevant) two cents worth ...

Of all the Biblical stories, the Garden of Eden is the one that seems to have pre-occupied the Western psyche by far the most. I think this is partly because of the loss of the West's own Garden of Eden - i.e. Old Europe. The Bible did not naturally evolve out of Western history and pre-history. The Bible was actually an import from the East.

Pre-Roman Old Europe – which lasted for tens of thousands of years – was a culture that was essentially non-hierarchical, gender balanced, democratic (chieftains were elected), non-urban, semi-migratory and pantheistic. This Old European culture continued on well into the Common Era and only broke down as a result of either Roman conquest or political or military-backed Christian conversion.

By contrast, the Middle Eastern/Roman/Greek perspective contained in the Bible arose out of a culture that had been strongly urbanised for up to 6 millennia. Along with this urbanisation came a social structure that was hierarchical, non-democratic, misogynist, slave-based, military and imperialistic – and it was out of this social structure that the Old and New Testament mythologies evolved.

Understandably, the gods of their religious pantheons were aggressive, mostly male ‘sky’ gods – which reflected the social structure that had evolved there over the previous millennia. And it was these gods that were grafted onto Old Europe after its conquest by Rome.

I believe that the Western psyche has never really come to terms with the fact that its own Old European egalitarian, nature-based religious pantheon was brutally overthrown by Roman/Christian aggression, along with Old Europe’s egalitarian social structure.

Unlike most non-Western civilizations - like say, China and India - the West’s continuity with the wisdom of its own ancients was brutally severed. I think this is why the West so desperately clings to the Holy Lands to this day.

In the deep recesses of the Western psyche, we have transferred the loss of the ancient wisdom of Old Europe to the imported Biblical myth of the Garden of Eden

Dear SJF,

An intersting post to which I shall give some thought.

Regards theism the Eygptians, the Greeks and the Roman Republic and the early Roman Empire (until cire 200 CE) were accepting of various pantheons. Often times, Gods were syncreted... My gods are is your gods by other names.

With the nomadic peoples there was lean towards agressive war gods such as the Hebrew war god, Yahweh.

City-states are more cosmopolitan than tribes/clans. Herein, the need to be more flexible/understanding with regards others

Oliver

Yes, pre-Christian Rome was incredibly tolerant about religious practice – but I believe this was more because of its polytheism rather than its urbanisation.

It was the rise of monotheism – with the forced conversion to Christianity – that gave way to Rome’s religious intolerance. After all, when you’ve only got one god to share around, people are bound to become spiritually territorial, especially the authoritarian personalities amongst us.

Rome’s earlier persecution of the Christians (not as extensive as we are led to believe) was not because of what Christians worshipped, but because their monotheism could not recognise the Emperor as a god. Thus, the Christians’ were guilty of treason, not heresy.

Re nomads and aggression …this depends a lot on the environment of the nomads. If the nomads are under constant threat, e.g. a harsh climate or terrain making hunter/gathering difficult, or a dense population competing for resources, they would probably develop an aggressive social structure, and thus an aggressive spiritual pantheon.

Hi SJF and Oliver
Interesting speculation on the reasons way Genesis has pre-occupied the Western psyche.
I have used Genesis in this article because it is well known and makes a useful framework for something I have been working on for many years.
My inquiry has been into the reasons the human race continually messes up and is there something in our psyche that causes it?
My complete hypothesis was put in three articles presented in reverse order starting with the easiest, The age of Reason, then the middle article The Hiroshima Principle, and finally this the third article.
The hypothesis begins with the existence of the soul and the ego. Sperry, Gazinega and others in the area of split brain theory have convinced me at that we have two entities in our brain. These are commonly called the soul and the ego.
Much of the work on the workings of the human brain I agree with as being the way it works, but nobody asks if this is the way it is supposed to work. It is like having a car that has run on 7 cylinders so long that we have forgotten it is supposed to run on 8 cylinders.
By 'back engineering' I looked at the possibility that the soul and the ego are supposed to be identical, not at odds with each other. My conclusion was that such a situation would give us an internal mirror to produce peaceful internal consciousness instead of internal conflict.
If this is correct what causes the break down of the 'twin soul' concept? Judgment.
The Hiroshima Principle then explored the properties of judgment that would cause the breakdown. These properties being finding in the negative solely because we cannot prove the positive and finding in the positive solely because we cannot prove the negative.
Finally the results of these forms of judgment are cognitive dissonance and blind adherence to dogma was explores in The age of Reason.
Your speculations may well be the reasons why I find Genesis so useful as a framework for my enquiries.