This is not an idle question about Genesis.?
351650
God choses His words very carefully.  We can not "substitue" a word God uses for another, but what we can do is to compare spritual things with spirtial.  \nFor example:  I am (Jesus - the Great I AM) the resurrection (Jesus - salvation) and the life (Jesus - salvation.) Jn 11:25.\nAlthough we might worship The Resurrection (Jesus), we do not perse worship resurrection, but as Christians can believe in it in that Christ was the first born from the dead.
502549
MEIGHAN2006,\n\nIt is interesting that God created the whole universe and all the animals and plants, etc. by just speaking a word. When He made man, He got down in the dirt and planted a garden and then formed Adam from the dirt and breathed life – the eternal part – into him. Then He made Eve from one of Adam’s ribs.\n\nIt is amazing that God was able to make man and woman with a word, yet He showed love from the very beginning as He served His creation by planting a garden and then fashioning them similar to Himself. He has a heart to love and to serve and His rules for us are the same as the way He lives. He wants us to love and serve each other.\n\nIt is also interesting that He made water originate in the garden. The water didn’t flow through the garden, but came up from the ground in the garden and then formed 4 rivers leaving the garden. The garden was probably similar to heaven where there is water that flows from under His throne.\n\nIn my humble opinion, the living water in us is figurative of this water that flows from God’s throne. When we put ourselves on the throne, the flow is restricted or the water becomes stagnant. When God is enthroned in our hearts – when Jesus is our Lord, the living water flows freely. That is the abundant life.\n\nGod bless.
828742
everybody is coming up with the same stupid stuff on creation again and again. instead of thousand years why cant you make it 1 billion years. so that your problem is solved. bible is happy and the scientists are also happy. because it is closer to thier estimate of the age of this universe.\n\nthe calculations mentioned in bible are taken literally out of the "book of Dzyan". ofcourse with a little changes to suit to thier tastes so that it looks very different. going by the events in history all biblical characters were of recent origin, 3000 BCE. this has been confirmed many times. firstly by believers of bible initially and later on by scientific evidence. on that count there is no difference of opinion.\n\nneither during early days of genesis nor till recently anybody was bothered about the age of universe. everything revolved around what is written in genesis. genesis has a strong basis to believe that thier world was created about 6000 years ago. that is true. that part of the world, around israel, middle east there were lot of geological changs happened. lot of people displaced and when the new race came into the land they needed a fiction. so it fits perfectly well with genesis. no doubt genesis is correct on the accuracy of begining of human settlement in israel and surrounding middle east areas around 3800-3600 BCE. when a new faith is started,  it needs a new look, its just old wine in new bottle with a little changes while serving it.\n\nthe cosmos has seven rounds/phase to reach the pinnacle, so whoever wrote genesis just took it for seven days. infact we are in the four round/phase where the human beings evolved. by seventh everything will be returned back to god and the next cycle/round/phase will start again. currently we are in the middle of the cycle. around  4-5 billion years. the cosmos keeps expanding and new things & beings will evolve over time. then the contraction & collapse will be much faster. only to expand again. doesnt it looks like a play? yes, god loves to play. he enjoys the play and so he plays it.\n\nnow your question: how long does it take for god to create in our time. nothing. my answer is NOTHING. because he did not create. he was evolving himself into all kinds of beings.  he is everywhere, in everything. that is the beauty of god. he keeps churning everything. cosmos is so vast. we human beings are not able to understand what the earth properly. so thinking in cosmic proprtion is difficult for many. yes, there are human beings who have achieved this cosmic alingment with god. god just attracts everything like a magnet, some attract much faster than other. we have to be intune with nature, god.\n\ncreation/evolution are not different. they are two sides of the same coin. religions unnecessarily created this one sided theory and scientists continue to hold on to thiers.\n\ni do not find anything difficult in understanding this cosmos. with or without god. because everything is divine, godly.
363489
As a Catholic I do not have to believe everything in the Bible and as for God creating the Earth in seven days - I suppose that was to help people 2000 years ago to understand creation.  Of course evolution took place and I have no problem with my religion or other theories.
984321
Ever read Genesis 1-3?** \n\n1. Genesis 1-26"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."\n.....\nGenesis 1-28And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. \n\n\never think it is odd how true this is even today? How did they know that there was not some thing more "evoled" then them on the Earth?\n\n2.  Genesis 1-27"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. "\nWhe did God not tell us we "evolved"? is his word not true? \n\n3. Genesis 1-11 "And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so."\n\n"...and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself" Why did God tell us this? We know this to be true anyone can just look as see this. Do you think God may have put it this way for us today?  This done not tell us that God will make a fruit tree in to a pine tree overtime.\n\n4.God is the God of DNA.... if God mad DNA why not reuse some of the same DNA? This dose mean that we "evolved" \n\n5. Why can the people who say we "evolved" not find ALL the bones to back it up? If ech. step was 10,000,000+- or so should we not be diging up bones all over?
958340
Maybe Adam and eve were not the only people. Outside of garden eden there were other people. Dont forget alot of the ancient information was taken out of bible, so maybe we are missing information.
248214
Genesis......."I Can't Dance"
1049863
Someone posted a question trying to justify incest with his daughters using the OT example of Lot as an example. I spent quite a time answering this, only to find the next morning that the question had been removed. Just in case anybody else has problems with the passage, here's my answer anyway.\n\nLot and his Daughters\n\nThank you for raising this question, it's caused me to get my Bible out and read the story again for myself. If anybody is actually interested in understanding it properly, they need to go back to Genesis 11 and start from the beginning.\n\nAn old pagan called Abram is worshipping one day at the local ziggurat in Ur of the Chaldees and Yahweh comes and reveals Himself to him. The Bible doesn't tell us that Abram did anything special to earn or merit this revelation, just that God, for His own reasons, chose to reveal Himself to him. This really upset the religious locals, who followed a mixture of astrology and Babylonian mystery religions. Abram was rejecting their pantheon of Gods and going round telling people there was only one true God. Talk about upsetting the neighbours. And you should have heard the gossip!\n\nAbram leaves Ur with his father Terah, his nephew Lot and their households. They passed through the Euphrates (a type of baptism) and arrived at Harran, where they got too comfortable and stayed until Terah dies. At this point Yahweh gives Abram a kick up the backside and points him towards the Promised Land.\n\nSome time after they arrive in Caanan there is a famine, and what happens next has a direct bearing on Genesis 19 as cited.\n\nAbram, taking Sarai his wife and Lot with him, goes down into Egypt (always a type for the world). Here they encounter all the corruption of Pharaoh’s court and the fleshpots of the most advanced nation on earth. After moving back to Caanan, Lot sits round the campfire and dreams of the forbidden things he has seen. If you carefully read the start of chapter 13, you will see that when Lot separated from Abram, he looked to the east, towards Sodom, and chose that because it reminded him of Egypt and the forbidden pleasures that he had been dreaming of.\n\nFast forward now to chapter 19 and Lot has given up farming on the plains outside of Sodom and has allowed the lure of sin to draw him inside the city. Lot had abandoned his God to the extent that he was prepared to allow his daughters to marry those that God called detestable, but even so, God did not abandon him.\n\nWe know what happened next, but if you really think that God condoned the sin you have to be crazy. The offspring of those illicit unions went on to form the Moabites and the Ammonites, two of the most cursed tribes in history.\n\nThis is a classic morality tale of reaping that which you have sown and is recorded not only as historical truth, but as an admonition to all of us. Genuine queries on any of this are welcome.
707815
While I don't place any stock in the Biblical creation story, it is silly to say that Adam belonged to any religion whatsoever. There were no religions at the time stated in the Bible. Even Judaism didn't start until Abraham.
1166369
Knowledgeable people are well aware that Genesis 1 through 11 is NOT scientific or historical but largely mythical, metaphorical, poetic, theological, and moral. All people are not knowledgeable, however. Recent Gallup surveys reveal that 50 percent of adult Americans believe that Adam and Eve existed, 44 percent believe the earth was created directly by God only ten thousand years ago, and 40 percent believe that the Bible is inerrant. No doubt an equally high percentage believe in Noah's ark.
785053
And how are you any different from us? Do you have access to information that did not come from mortal men? And what might that information be?\n\nTry this hypothesis on for size: the Bible is just a book, written by mortal men, who lived at a time when written language was only recently acquired. Their culture was still based in oral tradition. The books they wrote that became the books of the Bible were just those oral traditions. The God of Abraham is just a very successful camp fire story. The Bible is a collection of myths.\n\nNow consider your theistic hypothesis. The God of the Hebrew Bible is the real God who created the universe, as described in Genesis. Every word of the Bible is his word.\n\nFinally, consider the evidence you have directly available to you, aided by all knowledge that mankind has been able to accumulate by working together, making observations about the natural world, creating hypotheses to explain those observations, creating experiments to test those hypotheses, and publishing their results so that other people can independently verify their results.\n\nYour task is to take the two hypotheses above (the Bible is myth vs. the Bible is the true word of a real God) and see which hypothesis makes more sense.\n\nI was raised Christian. I've studied religion, and I've studied many branches of science.  To me, the Bible is myth hypothesis is much more consistent with the evidence.
995960
The stories in the bible are meant to be taken out of context in my opinion. The story of Genesis goes something like this. Adam and Eve were man and woman... Both knew no evil. They enjoyed the light from each others souls. Each of thier thoughts helped the other to grow and prosper. One day a "serpent", or a cheat,  someone that didn't believe in the way god saw things. Came forward and while adam was away playing the serpent convinced Eve that she should do the exact thing that both adam and God told her not to do. She was run by her emotions and the facts of her life had meaning that she couldn't understand. She was convinced/baited into eating things of which she had no knowledge. When adam came back he saw that she was changed. He was curious and his lack of wisdom in his judgements caused him to eat of the knowledge of good and evil. They both gained knowledge but at the cost of living in paradise. The suffering that arised was not from Satan but what Satan knew would happen. They would see each other for what each other were. And that would escalate into more and more questions. When the fact is that they both had all the answers that they needed. It was people's greed and curiousity that allowed this to happen. Naivety can sometimes seem evil to someone that doesn't understand things on a bigger scale. If such a paradise existed in the meaning of the garden of eden then knowledge and understanding were the things that brought it crumbling down. Knowledge is power, power corrupts, so knowledge is the root of all evil. Eve was just a scapegoat. She was blamed for her naivety to believe in someone other than god himself. As for child birth, we are all sinners, it is suffering that we must go through to continue to survive. If we saw an end to child birth then we would see an and to humanity. Please also take into note that women have, since the days of homo-erectus, been the bearers of children and the protecters of the home. The men of that age were the hunters and gatherers. We have come a long, long way from that nomadic life. But the pain of child birth still remains something to be winced at. Women were never known to be what they are today. Intelligent contributing members to society. Why even 50 years ago they couldn't even vote. Women still have no rights around the world today. Men blame them for being weak back then and still blame them for it today. Women will never get thier share of the fair slive of the pie until they become the dominant ones. But men train thier boys to be dominant and thier girls to be subservient. Women train thier boys to be caring and thier girls to fight strong. So it's a matter of who's lessons are being learned and who's are being dismissed. I know I looked to my father for the real answers and my mother for the emotion ones. Because even as a child I knew thier strengths and weaknesses. If I had asked my mother for her strength and my father for his emotions then I would be gay or a complete idiot. Yes that does sound condescening but I know that to be the truth of the matter. \nWell to sum it up, I would have to say that women have always suffered the wrath of men. We just have to wait for the natural order of things to fall into place before women will be able to become the dominant species. Think about the amazon culture. (the fairy tale version) And some of us see the reality of what could be. I would reccomend reading Genesis and taking in the subtler nuances. Take all the stories from the bible and apply them to your own life. You may find that alot more of the stories make sense. But you may also find that the very knowledge you seek will hold you back from finding your eden. We all suffer the pains of knowing the truth. Those of us that don't, already live in eden and, merely wonder why everyone else left. I hope this answers some of your questions and helps to ease the sight of the suffering you witness. Bathe in the light of y
56894
If you buy into Judeo-Christian mythology, God is the author of free will.  Satan is not a creator, but a perverter, and thus could not give to Adam and Eve an inherent quality that they did not already possess.
208668
I've always felt that if you do believe in the Bible (I do not), it is not necessary to believe in every word as it is written.  Much of the Bible is written as images and dreams and prophecy.  No one was there to document Adam and Eve's daily activities, so why is Genesis taken literally?\n\nRevelations is set forth figuratively.  I see Genesis the same way.  There does not need to be two individuals that were magically created and everyone spawned from them.  Instead, see Genesis as the birth of man, not literally, but figuratively.  No "Adam" and no "Eve," but the first man and woman to be truly "human".  No fall from a "Garden of Eden", but instead the first human realization of self-awareness and individual thought - something beyond animal - which removed humans from the sight of "God."\n\nIf Genesis is read figuratively, it can sync with science, without destroying God.
795095
How about the fact that the entire scientific community accepts the age of the earth to be 4.6 billion years old?\n\nI have no idea what sources you're reading from or even if you just made all that up, but science is in no way "proving" the Bible. If anything, it's proving that the Biblical creation story is even LESS likely to actually have happened than we originally thought.\n\nAdam & Eve? Mainstream scientists laugh at that, man.
1111436
Book Of Genesis\n\nGarden of Eden. Satan v God
654006
The dinosaurs fit right in. What I don't get is how more people don't see how it fits but let me give you my humble opinion. This is not doctrine, this is one man's opinion. This is what I believe. On things of God we have a couple a sacred texts or scripture, in the oldest book about God written by the hands of prophets on stone, papyrii and what not we have accounts of the creation, in Genesis the first of even the pentetauch we are given such as slim or incomplete description that it is possible that 1 billion years could pass by as we read in a matter of one stanza. It has been said that 1 day in God's time is 1000 of our years in our reckoning. So lets take the first 6 days of the creation, or in particuliar the the 5th day after he had made some grass and light and stuff. In Gen 1:20 it say that He said" Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. 21. And God created great whales, and every living vreature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 22 And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and Multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. 32. And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. 24 And God said, let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind; and it was so. " So that 5th day was very busy and at 1000yr /day reckoning its possible that it took 365,000 years to complete but cant know precisely yet . The beast of the earth that is referred to, also the great whales that are referred to, also refences to unicorns and all manner of beasts now extinct, isn't it possible that although not specifically mentioned that and on the 5th day about the 6th and 1/2 hour God made the T-rex and he blessed them and saw that they were ferocious. No . We only have this small wordage to assemble together the whole of creation. I dont see a problem with 17 billion year universe age and putting it into Gods plan at all. Bless you and have a pleasant tomorrow.