Go, Cain!!

YHWH wanted Cain to admit to his crime by questioning him. But Cain tried to lie instead. Far from an eye for an eye, YHWH allowed him to live and take a wife (one of his sisters). He even got a mark of protection which is puzzling for that time b/c there were only 3 people in the entire world so what "other people" would seek to kill him? Future generations of his own family? Anyway, the Bible says he went off and founded a city... which is even more perplexing even with the breeding of the human race moving forward and people living hundreds of years. At that time all were the same race and spoke the same language. The gene pool was clean enough to marry family back then until the effects of disease and sin started to have an impact and after Babel there were many races and tongues scattered all over the globe from ONE general location somewhere in the ME. Eden had the Tigris and Euphrates as 2 of the 4 rivers.

he he

Cain and Abel get all the press, but the Biblical account's pretty clear that Adam and Eve went on to have a lot more kids of either sex and they each went on to have lots of kids of their own, so Cain was justifiably afraid that several of his dozens of brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces might just decide to rid their burgeoning family of its black sheep once and for all. When it says Cain founded a city, what it really means is that he invented the very concept of a city in the first place; might explain why cities ever since have had such high murder rates...

Wow, this one really drew out the religious lunatic fringe. You did some really imaginative things with the linebreaks here. 'The gene pool was clean' back then. ROFL. The irony is that if it weren't for the inquiring minds of the people who turned away from the bible and sought to discover the secrets of life's origins elsewhere (like in reality), religionists would not even know genes existed. Isn't it ridiculous how such people just take from science the bits that fit with their blind faith?

But then what would you expect from someone who speaks of talking snakes and all the world's species in a boat as if they were real, and then appeals to people's 'common sense' when it comes to liberal gun control laws?

Lifeliver: didn't you know that Genesis is a documentary? Three thousand years of Chinese whispers before anything was written down have only honed the story to a more precise telling of what exactly happened.(Incididentally, the chap who did the experiments which laid the foundations for modern genetics was most definitely a Christian)

..but I know what you mean: we have a local preacher who is a firm believer in science when his misunderstanding of it doesn't flat out contradict the creation story, but still manages to assert with absolute confidence that any scientific observation which in any way disagrees with the Genesis story is wrong, and that anything which looks at historical events and can't have experiments done on it therefore isn't even science. He's got a single word he can disagree with, even though he doesn't understand what the implications of it would be: "uniformitarianism" - the concept that the natural laws we can see/measure/depend upon now were somehow different a few thousand years ago.

Yes, of course you're right - Mendel was a monk, wasn't he? Darwin was a Christian; Newton spent more time trying to unlock the secrets of the bible than he did on math and physics. But an educated European non-Christian was unthinkable until at least the late 19th-century and Thomas Huxley's post-Darwin generation. In fact I think it was he who coined the term 'atheist'. I'm just going from memory here, should look it up I suppose. But thanks for catching my drift anyway.

It's not entirely relevant but an interesting point came up on Stephen Fry's QI about America's 'founding fathers'. It's popularly believed they made the dangerous transatlantic journey to escape religions intolerance. It could easily be argued they did it to find a place where they could practise it, and were escaping from a perception of too much tolerance in Europe. There is at least one documented case where one of their number was hanged for being a Quaker!

I think I saw that QI - the suggestion that it wasn't so much intolerance of their religion but not being willing to tolerate their intolerance of others' - which would be entirely unsurprising given what passes for Christianity over there at the moment :-)