Oh dear, Runner. Do get that education, won't you?

Which scriptures? Yours? Hubbards? Mahommed? Jewish? Mumbo-Jumbo god of the Congo? The hindu ones?

Go take on people who have wasted decades studying scripture, *they* will tell you you are ignorant.

Reality does not support your position either.

You are not qualified or experienced to judge the work of your clear betters, and I suggest a respectful silence if you are ever privileged to tour my workplace.

Your parody of the worst of christianity is very effective at discrediting fundies. Keep it up!

Rusty

John Ryan <"If you believe the Bible as either History,or anything factual,you may as well believe that Hans Christian Anderson wrote the definitive history of Scandinavia.">

Whether referring to Biblical text or to Hans Christian Anderson, literal meaning is one thing and spiritual meaning another. Like, The Emperor's New Clothes and The Ugly Duckling are readable stories just as they are. They also have another level of meaning and value that we don't dismiss just because we can't find any evidence that some dignitary somewhere was a flasher. We can't know for a FACT that some swan egg got mixed up with a duck's.

In Biblical times the mass of people were illiterate; stories passed down from one generation to another had to be memorable so that they could be told and retold and the essential message of the time passed on.

Rather than dismiss the Bible because this and that fact don't fit neatly (although I think that aspect also lends it authenticity - like the different reports that can be gather, I think there is more value in having a general understanding of the historical context while remaining open to spiritual understanding.

Edit:

My apologies. Don't know how I managed to delete some of the last para.

Rather than dismiss the Bible because this and that fact don't fit neatly (although I think that aspect also lends it authenticity - like the different reports that can be gathered from six different witnesses of a minor car collision), I think there is more value in having a general understanding of the historical context while remaining open to spiritual understanding, than in dismissing the whole lot.

So, runner -

You believe that God made Eve from Adam's rib, and all of us are descended from them, yes?

I just want to read you saying it.

"I came upon this possible Sumerian background for the explanation of the Biblical "rib" story quite independently in 1945, but it had already been suggested thirty years earlier by the eminent French cuneiformist Pere Scheil, as the American Orientalist William Albright, who edited my publication, pointed out to me - which makes it all the more likely to be true."
Congratulations DF on your antiquity and precocious learning; assuming you were not a child prodigy, you're around 90.
I happen to be reading Derrida, whose concept of "citation" seems apt. Why does Scheil's endorsement make "it all the more likely to be true"? Was your (and his) scholarship somehow more objective, that is independent of the discourses then at play, than other popular versions? Is there really any debate about the validity of the traditional account? Parabolic nonsense surely?
Your version of events is surely no more than one of several popular discourses on an ancient myth. It has the flavour of nostalgia about it, which should always be savoured, but what is your point, apart from that ancient logic is for pedants and passe?

A fascinating article. It only goes further to prove the theory that the Bible, at best, is a collection of old wive's tales, ancient stories and superstitions passed down and embellished through the ages.

I wonder why woman was not said to have been 'made' first? Could it be that all the authors of this rubbish were men? After all, aren't women the givers of life?

By the many and varied authors claiming that it is all the word of their God, one wonders why this God decided to speak only to them, after our world, and we humans, had already been in existence for so many thousands of years?

How did all their ancestors live in such a Godless world before the apparent son of God came among us and saved the Christian souls?

Oh yes, that's right. All those that lived before the Bible's times must now be burning in the fires of hell.....right?