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How can you be a True Christian™ if you don't take the Eden story literally?

Brickjectivity

Brickjectivity

Veteran Member
Staff member
Premium Member
sun rise said:
I'm not a Christian but find a certain truth here. It's the kind of truth that symbolizes reality in a form that can be taken literally but is really a teaching story. The truth I see is: at a time in the evolution leading to people, the first fully conscious humans are separated from animal ignorance by developing the sense of good and evil. Thus they departed from the easy existence of animal innocence. In this sense they "left the garden".

I take Paul here to mean: if people are fully aligned with the Divine, they know no sin, no good/evil, because their hearts are pure and their actions are also. As a round I know puts it, they "dance to the rhythm of God".
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The first part I understand. I'll have to think about your second comment on a day when I am not working, as it has not occurred to me. I keep a conversation with threads to review, so I'll pop this in there.
 
Viker

Viker

Your beloved eccentric Auntie Cristal
I don't see how the fall in Eden not being taken literally is relevant to being True™, so long as the message that there was a falling from grace that is taken and that there is a solution to this to consider.
 
Subduction Zone

Subduction Zone

Veteran Member
F1fan said:
Then all the drama of Adam and Eve goes away. It’s only fun because humans get duped and fall.

Well many of our fundamentalist Christian friends must be dead wrong. Dang.
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The authors of the Genesis myths appear to come from two related but different schools too so one wonders how much of it that even they believed. Parallel reading of Genesis I and II show clear differences on what was made on what day. The Noah's Ark myth has two interwoven stories that tend to make more sense if one almost reads every other verse. The Genesis stories are so bad between their bad morals and self contradictions that drama cannot totally go away when reading them.

As to fundamentalists being wrong . . . Yep
 
idea

idea

Question Everything
Wandering Monk said:
So Jesus had to die because mankind fell? Who made that rule?
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For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. 1 cor 15. A life for a life.

Because Adam fell. It's in the Bible, difficult for Christians to escape literalism
 
F

F1fan

Veteran Member
Subduction Zone said:
The authors of the Genesis myths appear to come from two related but different schools too so one wonders how much of it that even they believed. Parallel reading of Genesis I and II show clear differences on what was made on what day. The Noah's Ark myth has two interwoven stories that tend to make more sense if one almost reads every other verse. The Genesis stories are so bad between their bad morals and self contradictions that drama cannot totally go away when reading them.

As to fundamentalists being wrong . . . Yep
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In a way I can't blame fundamentalists for taking the stories literally, as what is the moral of the Noah Flood, don't let your father drink too much after survivng a flood? OK, might be good advice.

We have to admit Christian doctrines are pretty dubious no matter how Genesis is interpreted.
 
CG Didymus

CG Didymus

Veteran Member
ChristineM said:
Not all, but a considerable number of christians only accept the NT and Christ. The 85% of the bible that is the OT is irrelevant to them and may as well not be there.
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Yes, pretty much all religions that build off of another religion only use a few things from the older religion to tie in their new religion... Then invent ways to reinterpret the parts that don't fit to make them fit. Like making a talking serpent Satan. And making stories about the King and Prince of Tyre about Satan.

Even with the Fundy Christians that say they take the Bible literally, yet they don't follow the commandment to obey the Sabbath or most of the Laws either.
 
K

Kfox

Well-Known Member
For those who do believe in the Adam and Eve story, did Adam and Eve have sex organs? Did all of the animals have sex organs? It is my understanding before the fall, nobody or nothing died so if humans and animals are reproducing, yet nobody dies, how long before the Earth becomes over populated? Unless they were meant to fail anyway.
 
InChrist

InChrist

Free4ever
F1fan said:
Apparently it was Yahweh. The sacrifice was offered to Yahweh to atone for the sins of mankind. Did it work? Jesus came back to life, so was there any actual salvation? Was it a theological bounced check?
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No, not a bounced check. Jesus came back to life to offer eternal life.
 
Ella S.

Ella S.

Well-Known Member
F1fan said:
In a way I can't blame fundamentalists for taking the stories literally, as what is the moral of the Noah Flood, don't let your father drink too much after survivng a flood? OK, might be good advice.

We have to admit Christian doctrines are pretty dubious no matter how Genesis is interpreted.
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To be fair, there isn't necessarily supposed to be a moral. The idea that there's a moral to Noah's Flood might be a more modern exegesis. Potentially, it could have just been a folk tale made more for entertainment or cultural reasons.

In my non-expert opinion, it was probably started as a politically motivated retelling of an older flood myth in order to affirm the centrality of the local tutelary deity. That seems to be the position that the Assyriologists I've read on the topic tend towards, but for all I know that could be a highly contentious minority opinion.
 
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