Genesis and Other Creation Myths

[Borachio]

Well... I dunno.

But I thought this was moderately interesting:


Link to video.

According to this guy, Genesis isn't, and never was intended to be, a scientific explanation for the Universe. Instead, it's theology, plain and simple.

 

[Arakhor]

Which is pretty obvious to anyone who isn't a literalist or Sitchenite.

 

[civvver]

I just have to say robert barron is pretty awesome and a super refreshing take on all things spiritual, especially when it comes to science. He doesn't see science and faith at odds like so many people in society do today and the way he explains this makes sense. I have been taking courses to be confirmed as a catholic (already a christian and baptized but my wife is catholic and I cannot take communion until confirmed which is like 6 months of courses) and I was really surprised to hear how much of the bible they understand is figurative or theology. So many baptists think everything is literal, my mom used to take me to young earth conferences when I was in grade school about how the earth was only 10,000 years old and adam interacted with dinosaurs and the flood killed them all. Just to highlight a couple oh wow moments:
-The story of the forbidden fruit in the garden is an allegory
-So is the devil as a snake. Catholics simply believe man rejected god on some level, just like satan did, but it has nothing to do with literal fruit.
-Jesus miracles were not factual events. Something like them probably happened but the stories passed down were probably embellished or at the very least the exact names and dates changed.
-Hell is real, as jesus references it often, but we don't know what it is, if it's a place or state of being or what
-We do not know if anyone actually goes to hell. This was one of the most fascinating points to me, they actually believe that Christ's death on the cross was a redeeming act for all of mankind, whether you are even aware of this act or not. They think it's philosophically possible for one to reject god and end up in hell, but whether it actually happens they don't know. Seems a far cry from anti gay ralliers and pro lifers who have all those burn in hell signs. I've always kind of thought that way myself, they it's possible god saves everyone but I was shocked to see a church feel the same.

So anyway, genesis is probably a ton of myth but not necessarily in conflit with actual origins of the universe.

A little off topic, I recently watched exodus gods and kings and was reading articles on that and that probably didn't even happen. I was shocked to find out. It's more likely the exodus was a small group of slaves who left exgypt and were reunited with the main nation back in canaan, not an entire race of people enslaved who built the pyramids and then roamed the desert for 40 years. The pyramid builders were actually well paid skilled craftsmen for the most part.

 

[Arakhor]

Or off-duty farmers and the like, as construction would have boomed around the time of the inundation, when the farmers literally could not work the land.

 

[Berzerker]

Back then, if you couldn't see a world, you didn't know it existed. So the mythmakers just imagined these worlds. They're not real, and never were.

Back then as opposed to now? Those worlds do exist, we found them. Did mapmakers just imagine Antarctica before it was discovered? The mythmakers left us a map too, the same cosmology appears in many cultures. When it comes to the sky certain numbers prevail. If 5 visible planets were so important, and someone suggested maybe they didn't care much about the planets, why didn't that number become part of our cosmologies?

Marduk was clothed with the halo of 10 gods.... That was before Pluto and the Moon join the story to make 12 main players in the creation. But the original gods, the Great Gods, numbered 9 in the Enuma Elish. The Sun and its companion Mercury, Tiamat at the asteroid belt with Venus and Mars between them, followed by 2 pairs beyond Tiamat - the 4 gas giants.

The difference between Democritus and me is that there are approximately 2000 years' worth of astronomical observations that have gone on. Democritus didn't have a telescope. I own two.

He could believe there were as many planets as he wanted. Who actually saw these planets?

I have to correct myself, Democritus believed there were countless worlds, the stars were like our sun and had their own planets. And he came up with the idea of atoms too, or learned it from someone else.

But I'm looking around for what he said specifically about unseen planets in our solar system and all I get are quotations from Seneca and Hippolytus claiming unseen planets exist and sometimes perish in collisions. If ancient peoples depicted more than 5 planets in their cosmologies - artistically and written - then who am I to deny them that knowledge?

Now Comets, it must be premised, appear in all quarters of the sky. Whatever
the divisions of them made by the Greeks, they are all of one origin. Some of the ancients thought they were due to the union of two planets ........ 283

http://naturalesquaestiones.blogspot.com/2009/08/preface-tr-john-clarke.html

If they're right, the Oort Cloud isn't the source of our comets and may not even exist.

So Earth is not Earth?

Earth is the dry land revealed on the 3rd Day when the water receded into Seas, it is not this planet according to Genesis, nor is Heaven the universe. It appears on the 2nd Day and there is a "firmness" about it, a spread out firmament (rakia). The Mesopotamian hammered out bracelet.

The 1st Day saw the "light" of creation when Tehom/Tiamat was struck by God's wind(s) and given a new spin thereby separating Day and Night. Before the 1st Day the Earth was under the deep water and in darkness. I interpret that to mean a more distant orbit where water was plentiful but sunlight wasn't.

Just admit that this is Chariots of the Gods and Velikovsky-inspired nonsense. The only reaction I can muster is this:

Sitchin

Check out the artist impression of the water covered Earth

Your artist made a mistake, our oldest "rock" formed in water. And so did most meteorites and they're even older.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141030-starstruck-earth-water-origin-vesta-science/

They think we've always been wet, even when the planet was forming. And they've matched both our water and rock to the asteroid belt.

So it is interpretation. I'm asking for evidence, you're just going on applying your theory to another source. Not convincing.

Of course its an interpretation, one that jives with the creation story in the Enuma Elish that describes more planets than the visible ones. Marduk passed by 5 planets to battle Tiamat, that means Tiamat was the 6th planet. After its destruction part of it was spread out to form the Heaven (the hammered bracelet) and the Earth was pushed to a new location. The Earth became the 7th planet and was symbolized by the number 7 - be it a 7 pointed star or 7 dots. Thats where I get my interpretation of the Days in Genesis. Well, its Sitchin's theory...

Greek mythology is far more diverse than the classical 12 god pantheon.

So?

That is quite the claim. How did they know. Where is the evidence that they knew this or even speculated about that.

I've already posted the evidence

Indeed. It was only the Classical Greeks who had the tidy pantheon of twelve gods.

I said the Greeks had a pantheon of 12 gods, the rebuttal was the Greeks have many gods. Yes, and they had a pantheon of 12 gods.

So, in other words, you're basically conceding the issue that the ancients had no idea of unseen planets, thus rendering your 'proof' utterly meaningless.

No, in the same words, astrologers and observational astronomers are not concerned with unseen planets. The people responsible for creation myths are if they played some significant role in creation.

Nevertheless, astrology is based on 12 just like Mesopotamian cosmology. And the cylinder seal VA 243 shows us why - 11 planets around a star matching the description of celestial gods appearing in their creation myth.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Back then as opposed to now? Those worlds do exist, we found them. Did mapmakers just imagine Antarctica before it was discovered? The mythmakers left us a map too, the same cosmology appears in many cultures. When it comes to the sky certain numbers prevail. If 5 visible planets were so important, and someone suggested maybe they didn't care much about the planets, why didn't that number become part of our cosmologies?

This is as ridiculous as that thread where somebody kept doing a lot of word-pretzel twisting to "prove" the Noah's Ark story was scientifically valid.

What part of "you need a telescope to see these 'unseen worlds' and therefore couldn't have known about them prior to the first decade of the 1600s" is difficult to understand?

How many days of the week do we have? Seven. That number appears in many mythologies and tales. Five planets, plus the Sun and Moon, add up to seven. You can't claim Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto because nobody knew about them. Nobody knew about the asteroids. Nobody understood comets or meteors. As recently as 1910, quack salesmen were selling "comet pills" to gullible people who were afraid that Halley's Comet would poison them.

Marduk was clothed with the halo of 10 gods.... That was before Pluto and the Moon join the story to make 12 main players in the creation. But the original gods, the Great Gods, numbered 9 in the Enuma Elish. The Sun and its companion Mercury, Tiamat at the asteroid belt with Venus and Mars between them, followed by 2 pairs beyond Tiamat - the 4 gas giants.

At the time that the Marduk story was invented, nobody knew of the existence of Uranus and Neptune. The ancient Babylonians died out a long time before 1781, when Uranus was discovered.

http://naturalesquaestiones.blogspot.com/2009/08/preface-tr-john-clarke.html

If they're right, the Oort Cloud isn't the source of our comets and may not even exist.

You're taking the word of a bunch of ancient philosophers with no telescopes over the word of planetary scientists who have sent out probes?

 

[Leoreth]

Of course its an interpretation, one that jives with the creation story in the Enuma Elish that describes more planets than the visible ones. Marduk passed by 5 planets to battle Tiamat, that means Tiamat was the 6th planet. After its destruction part of it was spread out to form the Heaven (the hammered bracelet) and the Earth was pushed to a new location. The Earth became the 7th planet and was symbolized by the number 7 - be it a 7 pointed star or 7 dots. Thats where I get my interpretation of the Days in Genesis. Well, its Sitchin's theory...

So?

I've already posted the evidence

Yeah, that's your problem. What you are doing is taking is assuming your theory is correct and then applying it to an example to see if it fits. That's not very scientific, and I don't even mean that in the hard sciences sense.

It's really easy to do, see: if the US government was hiding aliens, they would restrict access to Area 51. Access to Area 51 is restricted, so that proves my theory!

I said the Greeks had a pantheon of 12 gods, the rebuttal was the Greeks have many gods. Yes, and they had a pantheon of 12 gods.

How awfully convenient, because that allows you to choose whatever numbers fit your claims.

 

[Ziggy Stardust]

Your artist made a mistake, our oldest "rock" formed in water. And so did most meteorites and they're even older.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141030-starstruck-earth-water-origin-vesta-science/

They think we've always been wet, even when the planet was forming. And they've matched both our water and rock to the asteroid belt.

From the article: "The planet formed as a wet planet with water on the surface."

You seem to interpret this as: with water covering the entire surface. This is your mistake. The above quote is just as true if there's a puddle somewhere.

We're still just as stuck as we were all those years ago when you were making these claims. Show me evidence of a water covered Earth, around 4.6 billion years ago, from which dry land appears. Not just the presence of water. I hope you understand that the leap from: "there was water" to "water covered the Earth, dry land appeared, yay Genesis", is too big a leap.

 

[Arakhor]

I said the Greeks had a pantheon of 12 gods, the rebuttal was the Greeks have many gods. Yes, and they had a pantheon of 12 gods.

No, the rebuttal was that not only did they explicitly not have just twelve gods, as they also had countless nature spirits and an entire cast of greater and lesser Titans, in pre-Classical Greece, the idea that there were just twelve Olympians doesn't exist either!

I have to correct myself, Democritus believed there were countless worlds, the stars were like our sun and had their own planets. And he came up with the idea of atoms too, or learned it from someone else.

The ancient philosophers thought about lots of bizarre things as thought constructs. Democritus actually being right about one or two of them doesn't mean that he knew what he was talking about. Besides which, why does none other than Ptolemy of Alexandria, possibly the most influential pre-Renaissance astronomer of all time, suggest that the planets and Sun revolve around the Earth, if Democritus was party to secret alien knowledge about the true layout of our solar system?

No, in the same words, astrologers and observational astronomers are not concerned with unseen planets. The people responsible for creation myths are if they played some significant role in creation.

No ancient figure ever sat down to write a discrete creation myth, as that's just barmy. What's more, you're completely running on conjecture fumes right now, without even a single stroke of evidence.

Nevertheless, astrology is based on 12 just like Mesopotamian cosmology. And the cylinder seal VA 243 shows us why - 11 planets around a star matching the description of celestial gods appearing in their creation myth.

If that was so, you'd be able to quote the number twelve running through the body of texts and not just in this specific reference. You'd also have to explain why we only have seven days in the week (a purely arbitrary number, as I already said).

 

[bhavv]

The conclusion I draw from the genesis is that Christians believe that light and darkness have nothing to do with the sun and stars. In other words they are as wrong as the flat earth theory.

 

[Senethro]

Its cute when the goalposts come pre-mounted on castors.

 

[Daw]

In other words they are as wrong as the flat earth theory.

No, they are not as wrong as that. Flat Earth theory is just one misconception. Christians have many. Which makes them more wrong.

Edit: Before I am introduced to the "cleansing by fire" concept practicing, I have to say that I do appreciate the cultural impact in the form of music and architecture associated with Christianity. And I also admire the highest ethics standards some of them adhere.

 

[Arakhor]

Please stop using "Christians" to mean creationists, as there are likely upwards of a billion Christians who do not interpret the Genesis story literally.

 

[warpus]

Genesisians doesn't sound as catchy and literalists sounds silly. Genesisists sounds too much like Geneticists. Creationists sounds good, but there are Muslim and Buddhist creationists too.

 

[Leoreth]

The conclusion I draw from the genesis is that Christians believe that light and darkness have nothing to do with the sun and stars. In other words they are as wrong as the flat earth theory.

But light can exist without sun and stars?

Genesisians doesn't sound as catchy and literalists sounds silly. Genesisists sounds too much like Geneticists. Creationists sounds good, but there are Muslim and Buddhist creationists too.

Genesissies.

It's not entirely unfitting considering how sensitive they tend to become as soon as their view is "mocked" by subjecting it to skepticism and facts.

 

[onejayhawk]

But light can exist without sun and stars?

Easily. Everything radiates.

Genesissies.

It's not entirely unfitting considering how sensitive they tend to become as soon as their view is "mocked" by subjecting it to skepticism and facts.

I thought this was not supposed to be about mocking a religion.

J

 

[bhavv]

But can light exist on the level to create daylight to a whole planet without a star, or prior to the creation of stars?

 

[warpus]

As if God's glorious lighthole can't be as bright as he wants it to be.

 

[Arakhor]

I thought this was not supposed to be about mocking a religion.

The Scientific Method isn't usually accused of mocking its subjects.

 

[JollyRoger]

The story of creation was not intelligently designed, but it has evolved.