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laforzadimente t1_iyejuvw wrote

Reply to comment by Sinhika in 'Mind control' by parasites influences wolf-pack dynamics in Yellowstone National Park | CNN by irkli

I mean, this sounds more enlightened at face value, but does it even mesh with Biblical Christian lore? At what point is man created in God's image during his development? At what point is a homosapien ancestor considered an animal that doesn't need salvation vs a man that does? How do Adam and Eve and the birth of sin fit in with man developing gradually from other species? If it's just a fanciful allegory or one of the things that got lost in the game of telephone, then why take anything the book says seriously?

This meeting in the middle just seems like an admission that the older views aren't supported by evidence paired with an unwillingness to walk away completely. The things once attributed to be in the direct control of God have now been relegated to be what he's indirectly in control of. Seems to me God is just the ever-shrinking bubble of ignorance we slowly chip away at.

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TucuReborn t1_iyf0582 wrote

The way I've seen most describe it is a divine intent. That, instead of outright making mankind in a moment, the divine intent was for mankind to come to being through a selected path.

Kind of like when you build a character in an RPG. When you start out in a game, you may decide you want to be an archer. So you pick perks, talents, items, whatever that compliment becoming an archer. Over time, you may realize some of those choices were mistakes and redo them(a species dying out) or add in new things to help(Evolution or hybridizing). Eventually, though, you reach the end build and are now an archer.

So basically, God had a plan for humans to exist, and so set down a path for them to exist.

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laforzadimente t1_iyf7byt wrote

Yeah, I get the concept, like I said though, once you think about it for a bit it's an idea that doesn't mesh with other parts of the story, whether it's a modern interpretation of it or not.

If the creation days aren't days but are instead eons capable of letting evolution take place. Then creating plants eons before the sun makes no sense. If we came from aquatic life, but humans and land animals were created either days or eons after aquatic life, that doesn't make sense. If things were getting tweaked along the way and the ability to directly intervene exists or is needed then there's little point in waiting on the long process in the first place and indirectly defining the laws of physics to do their thing. It also raises questions about being all-knowing or all-powerful. And if the answers to these are based on problems with how the Genesis story is told, why trust the rest of the book?

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TucuReborn t1_iyfaq4p wrote

So lets take a moment to step back a bit.

A lot of modern Christians take the first few books as mostly being creation myth. As in it's a story made thousands of years ago to explain things, not hard and fast truth. Stories meant to inspire and make the world easy to understand.

Most Christians consider the parts afterwards to be more factually based, though even then it depends on the church and individual which parts and how much so.

The part to also remember, and in fact related to your last sentence, is that the books were written by differing authors sometimes hundreds of years apart. The bible is basically an anthology of related works from people who believed in the the same god(and to some degree, potentially intermarrying similar religions in the area). They all believed in the same god, and combined the literature into a single book. So, really, it's not one book. It's dozens, written by different authors for different purposes aimed at different people/cultures.

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