Darwinism in schools?

[rossum]

That would put the geneology of Jesus in jeopardy which is the foundation of his messiah status.

Why? The point of Jesus was that He had a human mother and God was His father. The rest of His genealogy is pretty much irrelevant after that.

There are enough problems with the genealogies of Jesus given in the Bible already. There are three of them there, and no two of them match.

A lot of people ignore one of the three: Matthew 1:1 “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham”

That is enough to show that Biblical genealogies are not always complete.

rossum

 

[mytruepower2]

Why? The point of Jesus was that He had a human mother and God was His father. The rest of His genealogy is pretty much irrelevant after that.

There are enough problems with the genealogies of Jesus given in the Bible already. There are three of them there, and no two of them match.

A lot of people ignore one of the three: Matthew 1:1 “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham”

That is enough to show that Biblical genealogies are not always complete.

rossum

No, it’s not enough to show that Jesus merely “had a human mother.” You also need to show that Jesus was born of the line of both David and Abraham, because God made very specific promises to both of them to that effect.

 

[mytruepower2]

You are taking me far too literally. It is more than just the people that I was talking about. Why do you think that we cannot find a waterproof firmament, with windows? That too is not to be taken literally.

Because Jesus was wise, and taught the people around Him in terms they cound understand. How many would have followed Him if he had talked about quarks and Deoxyribonucleic acid? He talked in terms that the people then could understand. You are trying to limit science to what those people understood.

rossum

If you can prove that Adam doesn’t exist, you can also prove that God doesn’t exist. How? Simple.

God, by definition, is infinitely-perfect. He can never take any evil action, nor can he be responsible for evil. Free will, logically, therefore, is responsible for evil, if God is to exist. Either our own free will or the free will of angels.

Now, the basic premise behind ancient Judaism is simply that man was given a chance to live a sinless life; a life in which sin was neither widely-available, nor compulsive (as it clearly is in modern man.) However, it’s perfectly obvious that man -is- compulsively drawn to sin. Even if man were deposited in a perfect garden with only one other person, it wouldn’t take him long to commit some kind of sin, and it wouldn’t be the kind that Adam committed.

Church tradition maintains that Adam and Eve were perfect, but that they also had free will. They had no inner desire to sin, but because they chose to sin anyway, the desire materialized, and has continued in the blood of every man to this day. This is the logical extension of God’s existence, since it’s the only possible explanation for what Saint Paul called “the law of sin in my members.”

Now the clincher…

If Adam didn’t exist, then there was no fall from grace. If there was no fall from grace, then man was never in a sinless state, with no appetite for sin. If man was never in a sinless state, with no appetite for sin, then God made him that way. If God made him that way, then God is responsible for the institution of slavery, and the nazi death camps, and every war that’s ever taken place, because he forsaw it, and took action deliberately to bring it about, without giving man the chance to avoid it by an act of their free will.

However, it’s impossible for God to be responsible for evil things.

Therefore, if Adam did not exist, neither did God.

However, God -does- exist. Therefore, Adam also existed.

---

Additionally, on the subject of taking the bible literally, I suggest that this is merely a strawman argument. No one takes every verse of the bible completely literally, nor should they, since one of the major hallmarks of the Hebrew language is its beautiful symbolism.

When 1 Chronicles 16:32 says “Let the sea roar, and all that fills it, let the field exult, and everything in it,” this is not some divine mandate to use chemistry, botany or crystal formations to cause water, dirt and plants to give off noise. If you want to know which verses of the bible are to be taken literally, you need to look at what the biblical writers meant by what they wrote, not merely dismiss things on an arbitrary basis.

 

[rossum]

No, it’s not enough to show that Jesus merely “had a human mother.” You also need to show that Jesus was born of the line of both David and Abraham, because God made very specific promises to both of them to that effect.

All Jews were descended from Abraham and Jesus was Jewish. God is descended from neither Abraham nor David. There is no genealogy of Mary in the Bible, so we do not know if Mary was descended form David. Given that David had many wives (eight, I think) and a number of children, it is probable that a large proportion of the Jewish population in Palestine was descended from him. Mary could well have been descended from David.

Remember, that my local Rabbi will be able to quote a number of prophecies about the Messiah, which show that Jesus was not the promised Messiah.

rossum

 

[mytruepower2]

All Jews were descended from Abraham and Jesus was Jewish. God is descended from neither Abraham nor David. There is no genealogy of Mary in the Bible, so we do not know if Mary was descended form David. Given that David had many wives (eight, I think) and a number of children, it is probable that a large proportion of the Jewish population in Palestine was descended from him. Mary could well have been descended from David.

Remember, that my local Rabbi will be able to quote a number of prophecies about the Messiah, which show that Jesus was not the promised Messiah.

rossum

Joseph was descended from David, and according to Jewish law, to be adopted by someone made you a son by inheritance. You didn’t need to be a son by blood in order to be considered an heir.

As for your local Rabbi, I’m sure he does have quite a number of arguments, but unless they can be presented for individual study, citing him as a source is not a strong argument in itself; particularly since the modern Jewish religion -defines itself- by its rejection of Christ.

 

[johnnyjones]

Why? The point of Jesus was that He had a human mother and God was His father. The rest of His genealogy is pretty much irrelevant after that.

There are enough problems with the genealogies of Jesus given in the Bible already. There are three of them there, and no two of them match.

A lot of people ignore one of the three: Matthew 1:1 “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham”

That is enough to show that Biblical genealogies are not always complete.

rossum

So are you now arguing incompleteness or fictitious people in the genealogies?
And NO, the point was not that Jesus just had a human mother and father, it was that the blood line (of his father) needed to be accurate and from a royal pedigree. He was from the seed of David. This shows God knew what he was doing with REAL people that are a in lineages in scripture as ABEL was in another type of lineage.

Jesus accepted the term “son of David” (Matt 21 :9) which means the people of his genealogies must be REAL. . Jesus fullfilled the requirement to be from the root or seed of David that was prophesisied. Abel was real, Jesus sited him in a bloodline, not a story.

One lineage account differing is simply a different account.One lineage account does not say over another that a person can not be in the lineage. The Gospels have different accounts of the same story. When that it questioned, the answer of course, is given that they are taken from different vantage points. That happens with a car accident. Same eyewitnesses, outcome of events shaped differently.

 

[rossum]

Joseph was descended from David, and according to Jewish law, to be adopted by someone made you a son by inheritance. You didn’t need to be a son by blood in order to be considered an heir.

Where is this stated in the Bible, or is it just some fallible human academic’s opinion? You will also note that the two genealogies of Joseph do not match.

As for your local Rabbi, I’m sure he does have quite a number of arguments, but unless they can be presented for individual study, citing him as a source is not a strong argument in itself; particularly since the modern Jewish religion -defines itself- by its rejection of Christ.

My point is that Jesus is not accepted as the Messiah be many people who accept the Old Testament/Tanakh as scripture.

rossum

 

[johnnyjones]

All Jews were descended from Abraham and Jesus was Jewish. God is descended from neither Abraham nor David. There is no genealogy of Mary in the Bible, so we do not know if Mary was descended form David. Given that David had many wives (eight, I think) and a number of children, it is probable that a large proportion of the Jewish population in Palestine was descended from him. Mary could well have been descended from David.

Remember, that my local Rabbi will be able to quote a number of prophecies about the Messiah, which show that Jesus was not the promised Messiah.

rossum

The genealogy of the father was relevant because it was entirely human. Mary as the scriptures indicate was impregnated by God (the Holy Spirit). Marys lineage did not have to be from David. The prophesy was “seed of David” which refers to a man, and that had to be fulfilled, and was.

 

[johnnyjones]

Where is this stated in the Bible, or is it just some fallible human academic’s opinion? You will also note that the two genealogies of Joseph do not match.

My point is that Jesus is not accepted as the Messiah be many people who accept the Old Testament/Tanakh as scripture.

rossum

Joseph a DESCENDANT of DAVID (Luke 1:27)

 

[buffalo]

The Genealogy from Adam to Jesus Christ - shows Mary’s and Joseph’s lineage

 

[mytruepower2]

Where is this stated in the Bible, or is it just some fallible human academic’s opinion? You will also note that the two genealogies of Joseph do not match.

My point is that Jesus is not accepted as the Messiah be many people who accept the Old Testament/Tanakh as scripture.

rossum

1. The statement of Joseph’s descent from David is clear in both of the genealogies of Jesus. Both agree on this point, and many others.
2. The two genealogies (Matthew and Luke) do not, in fact, contradict, if you know how to read ancient Hebrew genealogies. Luke is a careful historian in this matter, and is more accurate in a western, helenistic sense, in that he includes every last generation (of which he is aware) in this list, all the way back to Adam and God.

Matthew is not writing to a large community of believers across many helenistically-influenced nations as Luke was. He was writing to the Jews, and the Hebrew language, by its nature, does not stress single, precise meanings. You will notice that when Matthew gives his genealogy, he lists it in terms of “x beget x,” and “x was the father of x.”

Now, in comparing the two genealogies, some generations are left out. For example, a grandfather is sometimes listed as a father, but this is -not- an inaccuracy, as some suppose. You see, the hebrew word “father” doesn’t mean exclusively “my immediate male parent,” as is painfully obvious in Acts 7:2, when Saint Steven not only refers to Abraham as the “father” of everyone there, but refers to many of those gathered as “fathers.” Does this mean that he had more than one father? Well, obviously not.

Matthew’s genealogy is an abbreviation of the full genealogy of Jesus, and furthermore, this sort of abbreviation is just the sort of the thing that the ancient jews would have understood.

1. If your point is merely that Jesus is not accepted by many people, then your point proves nothing. At best, it’s a distraction from the actual evidence, at worst, an argument ad populum.

However, I think I should warn you that the Tanakh is not the Old Testament. It’s something called the Masoretic Text, which was compiled by jews who had already rejected Christ over a thousand years after Christianity began. Furthermore, some would say that it is a defacing of the scriptures, since not only is it missing large sections of the Old Testament, but many passages in it are translated completely differently, seemingly with the intention of removing prophetic references to Christ.

 

[Farsight001]

From 1912 to 1953 this was the proof of the missing link in human ebvolution; certified by the reputation of serious and dedicated scientists…
Well, this is the science by agreement…

*The Piltdown Man was a hoax in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human. These fragments consisted of parts of a skull and jawbone, said to have been collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, East Sussex, England. The Latin name Eoanthropus dawsoni (“Dawson’s dawn-man”, after the collector Charles Dawson) was given to the specimen. The significance of the specimen remained the subject of controversy until it was exposed in 1953 as a forgery, consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan that had been deliberately combined with the skull of a fully developed modern human.

The Piltdown hoax is perhaps the most famous paleontological hoax ever. It has been prominent for two reasons: the attention paid to the issue of human evolution, and the length of time (more than 40 years) that elapsed from its discovery to its full exposure as a forgery.*

It was most certainly NEVER certified except by those who perpetuated the hoax. It’s interesting that this is offered as proof of evolutionist dishonesty when evolutionists knew, on sight, that something fishy was up because it did not fit anywhere in the human evolutionary chain. They expressed their immediate doubt, and when finally allowed to get a close look at it (it’s perpetrators were trying to keep others away from it), concluded immediately that it was a fake.

Creationists - always telling you exactly the right amount of story to help their cause, and nothing else.

 

[Baelor]

Buffalo, please provide a definition of “kind” as I have asked, politely and repeatedly.

 

[edwest2]

There’s a reason that when a pope says something positive about evolution it’s all anybody needs and when he says something negative, he is labeled incorrect. When a pope says 2+2=4, that’s all anybody needs. When he starts telling people 2+2=22, people object. And yes, that is an appropriate analogy because evolution is as clear and definite as 2+2=4, despite your adamancy otherwise.

You did read what the Pope said, right? I didn’t say it.

Peace,
Ed

 

[edwest2]

I didn’t say Genesis was mere legend. I said the Church does not teach that Genesis is to be interpreted literally as regards the science. And the quotes that you posted above do not contradict that. There is a big difference between scientific literalism and “mere legend”. Just because one avoids taking the science literally that does not mean he dismisses Genesis as “mere legend”. Genesis is true regarding what it was intended to teach, which is that God is the source of all of creation. Genesis was never intended to be a history or science text in the way that we mean them today. It was written in a style of the time in which accuracy in those areas was not the point. The quote you posted reaffirms that understanding.

You are simply dodging the issue.

Eve was created by God from Adam’s side.

Genesis contains real history - things God actually did.

Original Sin was caused by the disobedience of our first parents and passed on to all.

All interpretations of the Bible begin with the literal sense.

Peace,
Ed

 

[edwest2]

Decisions decision…If I presume you wrote what you mean I give one answer, if I instead presume you are not as precise with language as I would hope it is another, what shall I do?

The 'idea" as you call it comes from Holy Mother Church. One need a basic understanding of theology, history, science, and Scripture. Evolution is a fact, ergo not a matter of Faith and Morals. God is the Creator, ergo God created evolution. (I hate syllogisms)

See, rule one of the RCC, we do not know everything. Rule two is alot like it, Science tells us what God wants us to know, God reveals what we believe. Hence, the reasonable inferences of Aquinas. Thus, if you deny evolution, you deny God. (He made it)

Evolution is now in the realm of 2+2=4, it is no longer open for discussion. Darwin was the first and like Aquinas, had incomplete information. Darwinism is OLD. That God created is the Dogma…How He created is immaterial to faith.

It’s not scientifically proven and it’s impossible to conduct experiments in a controlled environment in order to verify or disprove the theory. I can post the words from Pope Benedict again.

Your last sentence ignores Divine Revelation which is a source of true knowledge.

Peace,
Ed

 

[edwest2]

Wow, straw man and ad absurdum fallacies. What would Jesus do is now, and has always been an exercise in silly. Scripture contains the Revealed Truth of God does not mean every word as translated to and understood in English is accurate and factual. FYI ADAM means person. There are three traditions in the OT Y T and E. Every book is redacted. They are based on a previously existing oral tradition.

Adam was an individual man.

Peace,
Ed

 

[edwest2]

You will notice that the quote that you referenced from Pope Leo was not on evolution. It was on Christian Marriage. And the reference to the creation of Eve was to reinforce that concept. It was not part of a refutation of evolution. This understanding is confirmed by other writings in the Church. But if you want to pick and choose only the writings that work against evolution, those writings will probably not impress you. The poetic language of Pope Leo’s encyclical is evident by his use of the word “slime”. The Bible tells us God created Adam from the dust of the earth - not the slime. These are two very different things scientifically, but they are not very different in view of the intent of the encyclical.

Nice try, but you’re wrong. The creation of Eve by God is a fact.

Peace,
Ed

 

[edwest2]

I thought this was a Catholic forum, not fundamentalist. The Christ stands opposed to fundamentalism.

Please recognize what the Church teaches.

Peace,
Ed

 

[edwest2]

In which case not taking Genesis totally literally is permissible.

It is clearly not permissable. Quotes on request.

Peace,
Ed