Adam and Eve story logic hole

[Nova]

You know that beside the evolution theory there is the religious adam and eve story in which some people actually believe we originate from.

But there us one logic hole in this.

Biologically we would all be incests if the adam and eve story would be true and we all know what fucked deformations that can cause.

Well lets discuss.

Please try to be in a nice manner.

DONT TRIGGER EACH OTHER.

[Mikazuki Marazhu]

The bible is just one huge story book. People take it waaaaay too seriously.

[Saxon]

I looked up the biblical family tree. Cain, the first man to be born, married his sister Awan. Seth, the third man to be born, also married his sister, Azura.

Following Seth's lineage, Cainan appears to have been a particular party player. It looks like he was the the great grandson of Adam, and married the great granddaughter of Noah, who was great great great great grandson of Cainan himself. ???

In Cain's lineage they eventually begin marrying people from other tribes after a few generations...but where did the other tribes come from if everybody is meant to be from Adam and Eve?

[Rukh Whitefang]

4 hours ago, Nova said:

You know that beside the evolution theory there is the religious adam and eve story in which some people actually believe we originate from.

But there us one logic hole in this.

Biologically we would all be incests if the adam and eve story would be true and we all know what fucked deformations that can cause.

 

Before Noah, and the Flood deformities from having offspring from siblings didn't really exist. The reason for that Man was closer to his original design (less tainted by sin). Hence it wasn't until the time of Moses that the Law laid down that incest was a sin. So did incest happen in the beginning? Yes, was it a sin? No, not at that time.

 

4 hours ago, Saxon said:

 

Following Seth's lineage, Cainan appears to have been a particular party player. It looks like he was the the great grandson of Adam, and married the great granddaughter of Noah, who was great great great great grandson of Cainan himself. ???

Your forgetting how long lived people were. Adam lived around 900 years, most people then lived a very, very long time then. Thats plenty of time to have kids, a lot of kids.

[Feelwell]

Maybe we are deformed, and don't know it.

I mean, I don't know about you people, but when I look at the human body for long enough, it looks weird.

And surprisingly I'm not talking about only myself when I said weird looking.

 

[Vaer]

Everyone knows that Adam and Eve were part of a bioengineered race of hybrids made for manual labor, by the Annunaki, here on earth. 

When the labor was no longer necessary, the hybrid species were cast out of the facility and fated to roam the lands and mingle with the fauna that were born there. 

They mated with Ancestral humans/hominids and over time, the modern Homosapiens Sapiens was born.

So no. We aren't incestuous. 

 

:v

[GarthTheWereWolf]

[Victor-933]

I've heard that at one point there was an ice age that reduced <relevant_prehistoric_humanoid> to about 40 breeding pairs globally, so.. yeah, we are all a bunch of inbred retards.

*muffled Deliverance banjos in the distance*

I've also heard that the "rib" in the Adam and Eve story may be a mistranslation and that it is actually referring to the baculum (a bone found in the penises of many mammals but absent in humans)... make of that what you will.

[FlynnCoyote]

The Adam and Eve story has been genetically disproved. It simply isn't possible.

Which means there is no original sin. And no need for salvation or Jesus. So it's all good.

[Faust]

The entirety of Genesis is decidedly suspect, to the point that a lot of modern theologians consider it to be purely alegorical. The contents of the 'Adam and Eve' story is most likely of Babylonian origin; they had a very similar story - not to mention a prayer that is suspiciously similar to 'the Lord's Prayer' written in honour of a lady goddess. All religions bleed into one another over time with just minor changes.

Examine also the Greek legend regarding the Apples of the Hespirides, and the Apple of Discord. It's not unlikely that the reason we think of the 'forbidden fruit' as an apple comes from Greek myth, not Christian. The fruit is not explicitly named in the Bible, and according to Jewish tradition is actually a fig.

Besides, inbreeding is only an issue in the (relatively) short term. Dog and cat breeders use in-breeding as a means of 'setting' desirable traits. If a puppy exhibits an unusual and desirable trait, it is raised and bred with one of its barents to 'set' the gene. Sure the new breed will be a weak POS with zero immune system for a bunch of generations, but given enough time it will stabilise.

If you want to talk about biblical impossibilities, tell me about how you get two of every animal on earth (and seven of certain animals) into a boat 20 x 40 x 20 cubits in size with enough space left over for 40 days' provisions, AND keep them all from eating each other?

[Saxon]

5 hours ago, Rukh Whitefang said:

Before Noah, and the Flood deformities from having offspring from siblings didn't really exist. The reason for that Man was closer to his original design (less tainted by sin). Hence it wasn't until the time of Moses that the Law laid down that incest was a sin. So did incest happen in the beginning? Yes, was it a sin? No, not at that time.

 

Your forgetting how long lived people were. Adam lived around 900 years, most people then lived a very, very long time then. Thats plenty of time to have kids, a lot of kids.

I wonder whether an original mythological genealogy has been poorly translated at some point and that the subsequent generation of people reading it accepted that people lived for hundreds of years because there's all sorts of other magical phenomena in the text.

Also on the whole subject of life before the flood, if you talk to people with a sincere belief in that world you get into some crazy claims, for example I've previously come across people trying to convince me that Adam and Eve lived alongside vegetarian tyrannosaurs.

Which is sort of like claiming that in the Viking age Cnut the great frolicked with trilobites.

 

[Jtrekkie]

Deformities due to incest occur when recessive mutations become dominant. If the genotype is relatively clean, you may incest away with no ill effects. This is how we have things like collies, malamutes, other "pure" breeds which were created and maintained by incest. We also have rodents populations that have been bred to be virtual clones, &c., and the effect is seen naturally among isolated populations. If you wished, you could argue that every species is either the product of incest or a mule.

 

This question comes up every five hundred years or so, so you can find it being asked and answered over the years by people a lot smarter than anyone here. Usually it's asked by Jews and Christians,  though.

[Faust]

43 minutes ago, Saxon said:

I wonder whether an original mythological genealogy has been poorly translated at some point and that the subsequent generation of people reading it accepted that people lived for hundreds of years because there's all sorts of other magical phenomena in the text.

That or deliberately. Look at the way the gospels bend over backward to link Jesus with King David via the lineage of Joseph of Aramathea - two almost completely different family trees are given for the man in different gospels. Of course this only matters because of the supposed Roman census that required everyone to return to the towns of their ancestors, which is bloody crazy. The Romans took many censuses, but there's no historical evidence for this one. They were just trying to fulfil old testament prophesies.

[Saxon]

18 minutes ago, Faust said:

That or deliberately. Look at the way the gospels bend over backward to link Jesus with King David via the lineage of Joseph of Aramathea - two almost completely different family trees are given for the man in different gospels. Of course this only matters because of the supposed Roman census that required everyone to return to the towns of their ancestors, which is bloody crazy. The Romans took many censuses, but there's no historical evidence for this one. They were just trying to fulfil old testament prophesies.

To be honest I find the whole notion that virtue is connoted by ancestry pretty shallow anyway, but this is a theme that is central to the entire bible because of the axiom of origin sin. :\

 

Deformities due to incest occur when recessive mutations become dominant. If the genotype is relatively clean, you may incest away with no ill effects. This is how we have things like collies, malamutes, other "pure" breeds which were created and maintained by incest. We also have rodents populations that have been bred to be virtual clones, &c., and the effect is seen naturally among isolated populations. If you wished, you could argue that every species is either the product of incest or a mule.

 

This question comes up every five hundred years or so, so you can find it being asked and answered over the years by people a lot smarter than anyone here. Usually it's asked by Jews and Christians,  though.

I am not sure that dog breeds are a good example of inbred creatures that do not suffer the deleterious effects of inbreeding, because many pure bred dogs suffer from esoteric breed-specific hereditary diseases and biologists have demonstrated that cross-breeding pure breeds can result in dogs with longer life expectancy and faster maximum speeds than either parent.

So if anything domestic dogs are an example of the bad effects of inbreeding.

The rest of my post is a ramble.

Your idea that incest will not be harmful if a population doesn't contain deleterious recessive alleles has me thinking though. Deleterious recessive alleles have to come from somewhere to begin with, otherwise they would not exist in the population at all, because natural selection would penalise them until they disappeared. So they must either be introduced by mutation at a rate high enough to maintain their prevalence, or they must connote superior fitness to heterozygotes, (or when possessed in combination with a characteristic suite of other genes)
This leaves me with the impression that it's actually impossible to have a natural population without deleterious recessive alleles and that if you made a synthetic species of animal, which didn't possess such genes, it would rapidly evolve them.

The only habitual incestuous animals I know of are groups like termites and wasps. They have special haplo-diploid genomes, where males only have half the number of chromosomes as females, soany deleterious recessive alleles will manifest before they get an opportunity to breed, which means that the risk of producing unfit offspring from inbreeding is significantly lower than in creatures like us, where both males and females are diploid.

 

[Faust]

28 minutes ago, Saxon said:

To be honest I find the whole notion that virtue is connoted by ancestry pretty shallow anyway, but this is a theme that is central to the entire bible because of the axiom of origin sin. :\

Well, to be absolutely fair, it's a New Testament thing, most likely introduced to validate Jesus' status as 'Saviour'. There had to be some concept of sin from the moment of birth in order to persuade parents to baptise at an early age. It all comes back to the old maxim 'Give me the child and I'll give you the man'. Early indoctrination is fundamental to the propagation of religion because kids believe what their parents tell them almost unconditionally. If a newborn child is by definition innocent of sin, and presumably remains so until the point where it is capable of committing something sinful (I don't think crying and shitting your pants really counts) then there's no pressing need for forging that early link with religion. The church wanted the parent's commitment, via solemn oath during the ritual of baptism, to continue the cycle of indoctrination.

[Saxon]

17 minutes ago, Faust said:

Well, to be absolutely fair, it's a New Testament thing, most likely introduced to validate Jesus' status as 'Saviour'. There had to be some concept of sin from the moment of birth in order to persuade parents to baptise at an early age. It all comes back to the old maxim 'Give me the child and I'll give you the man'. Early indoctrination is fundamental to the propagation of religion because kids believe what their parents tell them almost unconditionally. If a newborn child is by definition innocent of sin, and presumably remains so until the point where it is capable of committing something sinful (I don't think crying and shitting your pants really counts) then there's no pressing need for forging that early link with religion. The church wanted the parent's commitment, via solemn oath during the ritual of baptism, to continue the cycle of indoctrination.

People are regularly punished for their ancestor's sin in Greek mythology and the Hebrew bible, so I'm not sure ancestral sin is a novelty of the new testament.

In Leviticus it is stated that the birth of a child has to be followed by the slaughter of a lamb and the burning of its flesh on the alter, to atone for the sin of 'uncleanliness' and the sacrifice of a turtle dove to atone for the mother's doubt that she will want to bear children again, because it is a 'flutter of the heart' and can only be assuaged by the death of a 'fluttering animal'. O_o

I am not sure whether the death of the lamb is required because the baby is deemed to bring original sin with it into the world, and contaminate its mother, or whether it is required because birth usually involves bleeding, which is itself viewed as unclean and sinful for some unfathomable reason.

[Faust]

Oh I see what you're getting at there. I thought you were talking specifically about 'Original Sin' as in 'the Sin of Adam' (which if memory serves is a fairly late addition to the faith.)

[Snagged]

If humans are deformed due to continuous incest, it's no wonder I keep loosing faith in humanity if bible is to believed 

If science is to be believed, we are still apes, albeit without a thick layer of fur and with a somewhat more advanced ability to use brain

[DrDingo]

4 hours ago, Snagged Cub said:

 

If science is to be believed, we are still apes, albeit without a thick layer of fur and with a somewhat more advanced ability to use brain

We're advanced enough to use our noggins to look back at the universe and ask the most important questions in life

Like "Do monkeys actually have fur, or is it hair?"

woooaahh

[Saxon]

2 hours ago, DrDingo said:

"Do monkeys actually have fur, or is it hair?"

woooaahh

 

This will be the question to trouble philosophers for the next thousand years.

[Strongbob]

Do monkeys have fur? > Did Adam and Eve exist?

[FlynnCoyote]

It's good to see that this thread has evolved into a more important topic.

Checkmate, theists.

[Endless/Nameless]

whoa I was reading and then there were words everywhere i didn't know what was happening I was scared 

[Conker]

Nevermind. Getting PTSD flashbacks from 2008 and FAF