A Brief History of Tomorrow, page-1089

  1. 2,291 Posts.
    Hi Wotsup,
    Thanks for your comprehensive reply. I think I understand most of it

    The Bible is very confusing and difficult to interpret and I think part of the problem is that it was written for people far less developed than we are today.

    Eg. Genesis 38:9-10 and Leviticus 15 were probably important when God was trying to increase the human population, but maybe not so now with over-population becoming a major issue.
    What a hassle for poor old Onan, who thought he was doing the right thing by masturbating instead of copulating, but God snuffed him anyway.
    I wonder how many teenagers have suffered unnecessary frustration and embarrassment over the years because of fears of masturbation and wet dreams.
    Keep the damned stuff in and you’ll suffer a nocturnal emission and have to go through the rigmarole in Leviticus 15, but let it out manually and God will snuff you!
    I reckon it was probably all designed to encourage males to go forth and multiply and increase the size of the congregation/tribe ... but that’s now become a major problem in some parts of the world.

    “That which is born of flesh is flesh and that which is born of spirit is spirit” ... is easy enough to understand if you are talking about fleshly humans versus spiritual souls.

    “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” ... not so easy to understand if you imagine God taking a quantity of dust from the ground and ... “poof” ... suddenly a fully developed Adam appears, and then God puffs on his face and Adam opens his eyes and says, “Hey Dude, wotsup?”

    But ... quite conceivable if you imagine God creating a living cell from basic “dust” components, “breathing” the magic life force into it, and then steering its development to Adam along evolutionary lines.
    However, to explain that to the ancients would mean Genesis 1 alone would have to be the size of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and nobody in those days would have understood it anyway.

    “Jesus is born of the Spirit and not of earthly, dust” ... I see Jesus as being some sort of hybrid.
    He came from the womb and had flesh so he was part “earthly dust”, as we all are, otherwise why would God have needed him to be born and grow in the conventional way?
    Why didn’t Jesus just materialize as a fully formed adult?
    But he was created inside Mary by The Holy Spirit, so in that respect he was part spirit.

    The ancients would have understood that new life comes from seeds, so if a man copulates with a woman, his “seed” is implanted in her and produces a new human. But would they have known anything about the woman’s eggs? Probably not.

    The Book of Enoch mentions the Nephilim ... I wonder ...!
    If The Holy Spirit can create Jesus, then why not?
    If they did ever exist, it would be easy enough for God to destroy all traces of them, hence no fossil evidence existing today.

    It’s interesting to get other’s thoughts, and the learning is ongoing, but whatever the truth is, it doesn’t really matter and my personal belief is that Jesus was a real and very special person, and he was God’s only son, and I think that’s the main issue, and exactly how it all happened we can only speculate about.

    We all have to try and make sense of the Bible as best we can within our own frames of reference, and since frames of reference vary from person to person, I think therein probably lies the reason for so much disagreement ... IMHO.
 
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