TR, all your doubts can be assuaged by just taking a tour through DINOSAUR ADVENTURE PARK in Pensacola FL...Where Creationism Meets Evolution!
http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-11/hovind.html
TR, all your doubts can be assuaged by just taking a tour through DINOSAUR ADVENTURE PARK in Pensacola FL...Where Creationism Meets Evolution!
http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-11/hovind.html
Oh yeah He does...Especially when he's hell-bent on murdering every man, woman and baby on the planet in one fell swoop.
You'd think that an AllPowerfulDeity could just stop everyone's heart in one omnipotent finger wag.
But no....that OldTestament God just has to include Big Big Production Value
I never bought this God/Bible stuff as a kid, as a young adult.... I called myself an "Agnostic". Since about age 30 ( I'm 45 now), I call myself an atheist, so I can be true to what I really believe.
I believe if you had a helicopter 1,000 years ago, you'd be considered to be GOD.
GOD doesn't need my worship, if he existed... I'd be a fly compared to a man, on the evolutionary scale, compared to GOD.
If GOD exists, he is just a more advanced life form.
In the OT the fountains of the deep opened up too, and back in those days the number 40 also meant many.
There is evidence that a comet could have broken up and hit the ocean and caused massive tidal waves and a lot of rain that could have been the basis of the flood stories.
No, as far as I know the Neanderthals are actually not ancestors of the modern man. They were a sort of side-branch in the development from apes to human beings that at some point got extinct with the rise of the modern homo sapiens, so you don't need to worry about hurting someone's feelings. ;-)
You know one thing about the bible and people's view of what they considered the real "world" has to be taken in the context of what people of the time thought.
Even as late as the 15th century, a lot of people believed that Christopher Columbus would fall off the world if he sailed too far west.
With that idea in mind, that changes a LOT about what the context of bible stories such as "Genesis" were "really" about. There are references to other humans in Genesis aside from those in Eden and the surrounding area where Adam and his progeny lived. Where did they come from? Such things as this make interpretation of the bible very subjective and sketchy at best. To take too much literally is contradictory in and of itself. It's a cop out for any reasonable thinking man to say it's just one of those wonderful mysteries about almighty god. Shit. It's just unclear. More data needed.
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I'm reading articles that support both sides of that debate. Some articles I've read state that Neanderthals did mate with Cro-Magnons (our ancestors). One interesting theory is that Neanderthals had a larger brain cavity although they were less intelligent than Cro-Magnons. When the two mated this gave the more intelligent Cro-Magnons more brain room which lead to the evolution of a higher thinking capacity.
Here's another interesting one about how beliefs have morphed into something very strange if taken too literally.
"Back in the day" and I could be just a little off here but not completely, "Gesthena" was the name of a district in an ancient Jewish city (I've forgotten the name) where the city dump was located. As you might imagine, there were piles and piles of burning refuse and waste everywhere and there were also a lot of lowlifers that eeked out a lowly existence rummaging through all the trash. Most of them had been "sinners" and stripped of their worldly posessions along with the downtrodden from many walks of life. -- ie bums, the lowest of the low.
It became a fashionable expression for people to say "Go to Gesthena" roughly translated to mean "go to hell" as there was no other such firey reference at the time. Or, I banish you to the place of flaming burning trash and sulpherous fumes. Damn you. Get the fuck out. In other words, the "idiom" expression "go to Gesthena" (go to that burning place - hell) originated from this.
As it would have been easily understood in those days what that sort of condemnation was meant, it was picked up and used by scribes and others in a position of powerful opinion who influence people's minds and put into "the book" but never meant to be taken literally outside of some type of mind control in a superstitious way. It communicated an idea familiar to people of the day and that's why it was used.
With that idea so deeply engrained into people's minds, it stuck and never evolved past that... until you add it to legend and lore where now a two horned beast running around the place with his own personal pitchfork (not yours) lords over everyone there.
So now go live your life out in the city dump among the burning piles of trash and all the other miserable souls like you and may your bones rot amidst the lowest of the low forever. Simply put, go to hell. That is the reality of it but just look at how superstition and people's imaginations have morphed that concept into something surrealistic, even to the point of polluting their core beliefs and religions. Literally speaking.
(Whew!)
"Back in the day" and I could be just a little off here but not completely, "Gesthena" was the name of a district in an ancient Jewish city (I've forgotten the name) where the city dump was located. As you might imagine, there were piles and piles of burning refuse and waste everywhere and there were also a lot of lowlifers that eeked out a lowly existence rummaging through all the trash. Most of them had been "sinners" and stripped of their worldly posessions along with the downtrodden from many walks of life. -- ie bums, the lowest of the low.
It became a fashionable expression for people to say "Go to Gesthena" roughly translated to mean "go to hell" as there was no other such firey reference at the time. Or, I banish you to the place of flaming burning trash and sulpherous fumes. Damn you. Get the fuck out. In other words, the "idiom" expression "go to Gesthena" (go to that burning place - hell) originated from this.
As it would have been easily understood in those days what that sort of condemnation was meant, it was picked up and used by scribes and others in a position of powerful opinion who influence people's minds and put into "the book" but never meant to be taken literally outside of some type of mind control in a superstitious way. It communicated an idea familiar to people of the day and that's why it was used.
With that idea so deeply engrained into people's minds, it stuck and never evolved past that... until you add it to legend and lore where now a two horned beast running around the place with his own personal pitchfork (not yours) lords over everyone there.
So now go live your life out in the city dump among the burning piles of trash and all the other miserable souls like you and may your bones rot amidst the lowest of the low forever. Simply put, go to hell. That is the reality of it but just look at how superstition and people's imaginations have morphed that concept into something surrealistic, even to the point of polluting their core beliefs and religions. Literally speaking.
(Whew!)
