"The divinity of Jesus is made a convenient cover for absurdity. Nowhere in the Gospels do we find a precept for Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Doctrines, and whole cartloads of other foolish trumpery that we find in Christianity."


John Adams-Second President of the United States of America

I'm a evolutionist myself. I think that you all are thing about this a little to hard. The stories in the bible are just that, a story. A story that is there to inspire people to do the right thing. Not to be taken serious.

Yep, Seamonster its not only the Ark story that was plagerized but also The Tree of Knowledge. Here is that. Also a Sumerian king has a suspisciously similar beginnig as a certain Moses character. Both were floated down rivers in baskets to be saved by Princesses. The bible is a rip off!

Look here:

ENKI AND NINHURSAG
How Enki surrendered to the Earth Mother and Queen

‘Enki and Ninhursag’ is perhaps one of the most difficult Mesopotamian myth for Judeo-Christian Westerners to understand, because it stands as the opposite of the myth of Adam and Eve in Paradise found in the Old Testament Bible. Indeed, ‘ the literature created by the Sumerians left its deep imprint on the Hebrews, and one of the thrilling aspects of reconstructing and translating Sumerian belles-lettres consists in tracing resemblances and parallels between Sumerian and Biblical motifs.

To be sure, Sumerians could not have influenced the Hebrews directly, for they had ceased to exist long before the Hebrew people came into existence. But there is little doubt that the Sumerians deeply influenced the Canaanites, who preceded the Hebrews in the land later known as Palestine’. Some comparisons with the Bible paradise story: 1) the idea of a divine paradise, the garden of gods, is of Sumerian origin, and it was Dilmun, the land of immortals situated in southwestern Persia. It is the same Dilmun that, later, the Babylonians, the Semitic people who conquered the Sumerians, located their home of the immortals. There is a good indication that the Biblical paradise, which is described as a garden planted eastward in Eden, from whose waters flow the four world rivers including the Tigris and the Euphrates, may have been originally identical with Dilmun;

2) the watering of Dilmun by Enki and the Sun god Utu with fresh water brought up from the earth is suggestive of the Biblical ‘ But there went up a mist from the earth and watered the whole face of the ground’ (Genesis 2:6);

3) the birth of goddesses without pain or travail illuminates the background of the curse against Eve that it shall be her lot to conceive and bear children in sorrow;

4) Enki’s greed to eat the eight sacred plants which gave birth to the Vegetal World resonates the eating of the Forbidden Fruit by Adam and Eve, and

5) most remarkably, this myth provides an explanation for one of the most puzzling motifs in the Biblical paradise story - the famous passage describing the fashioning of Eve, the mother of all living, from the rib of Adam. Why a rib instead of another organ to fashion the woman whose name Eve means according to the Bible, ‘she who makes live’? If we look at the Sumerian myth, we see that when Enki gets ill, cursed by Ninhursag, one of his body parts that start dying is the rib. The Sumerian word for rib is ‘ti’ . To heal each o Enki’s dying body parts, Ninhursag gives birth to eight goddesses. The goddess created for the healing of Enki’s rib is called ‘Nin-ti’, ‘the lady of the rib’. But the Sumerian word ‘ti’ also means ‘to make live’. The name ‘Nin-ti’ may therefore mean ‘the lady who makes live’ as well as ‘the lady of the rib’. Thus, a very ancient literary pun was carried over and perpetuated in the Bible, but without its original meaning, because the Hebrew word for ‘rib’ and that for ‘who makes live’ have nothing in common. Moreover, it is Ninhursag who gives her life essence to heal Enki, who is then reborn from her

I think that the plagarism is the other way around, but it's your story, so you can tell it any way you like. Because most of the ancient stories are like that, makes you wonder, where did they all originate. There had to have been truth somewhere. It didn't come from the Bible either, they came from ancient times passed down from the very beginning, and each nation applied the original facts to their own situation. To me, it proves the Bible correct, as the original story from the beginning.

I just want a fundamentalist to explain the Chinese to me in relation to the Great Flood. The Chinese culture existed back to 6500 BC-writtend record back to 4500BC and there is NO recorded flood.

Remember the Egyptians and it started that big argument? Now you are going to do it again with the Chinese?



The truth of the matter is that NONE of those cultures showed any sign of interruption. They recorded nothing to indicate that a massive flood took place and these were highly literate people. They wrote down everything.

The Catholics are much more permissive and they even accept evolutionary biology in most cases. Im sure not all of them do but many. I actually have very little to object to as far as the Catholics are concerned accept when they insist on taking that hard line approach to birth control, abortion, a woman's health and right to choose and I also disagree with their stance on suicide.

Paul's teachings in general you could skip.

Your beliefs are more in line with Mainline/Liberal Protestants, so are mine.

That is very correct. Man has taken what God set up and changed and added to it to make it what they wanted. God also said those that did would one day be punished. We all have to look at things and decide for ourselves what God says to us, not take it for face value what others tell us it says.

Don't you think that for something to inspire others to do the right thing need to be based on truth and facts, not just fairy tales. Why would people want to follow after something if it meant nothing more than the stories that we read our children. I have never read something or heard something and said, "Oh, what a nice story, I want to do that because it sounds nice," Even you believe in something for a reason. Does being an evolutionist teach or inspire you to do right? Do you believe because of things that you have heard? Based on "facts" or stories that others have told you? And you would have to take something serious in order to decide to be inspired by it.

Don't you think that for something to inspire others to do the right thing need to be based on truth and facts, not just fairy tales. Why would people want to follow after something if it meant nothing more than the stories that we read our children. I have never read something or heard something and said, "Oh, what a nice story, I want to do that because it sounds nice," Even you believe in something for a reason. Does being an evolutionist teach or inspire you to do right? Do you believe because of things that you have heard? Based on "facts" or stories that others have told you? And you would have to take something serious in order to decide to be inspired by it.

I just want a fundamentalist to explain the Chinese to me in relation to the Great Flood. The Chinese culture existed back to 6500 BC-writtend record back to 4500BC and there is NO recorded flood.

Did these 8 people take care of all of these animals? What about all of the crap? They would have been defecating everywhere. What about all of their varying diets? What about all of the water for the animals and humans to drink? Some of these animals would have been nocturnal. There is no way.

Right. In that case it would behoove the evangelical Christian community not to go around spouting a bunch of crap and attempting to tell us that this "nation was built on Christian values."

Pftt.

That is exactly right, and they have no answer for it.
They think that it's best to ignore facts such as these because then they can just go on believing what they want.
But no matter how much you ignore it it still does not go away.

I would even take that a step further and make the claim that Christians historically have not been very nice folks and have had somewhat self serving agendas. Even your "end of days" claims that you will all be safe while the non believers are swept away off the face of the earth. Not exactly a prophecy steeped in warm concern for your fellow man or heartfelt humanitarianism.

I have always had a problem with that Noah's Ark story myself. I am too much of a realist.

So this is where you hang out seamonster.