Yeah that sounds horrific for sure and a gruesome application of religion. But my point was, the creation story was always mythological. It was only pious Christian scientists circa C16th that applied literalism to it, and 'worked out' the age of the world which you still see today in Bible belt US. Their fuck up doesn't change the meaning of the original text.
....."I’m an atheist and my genuine belief is that the way people practice Islam (and the religion itself) is so backwards it genuinely makes me angry......" Interesting. I'm an agnostic but leaning toward believing there is some type of higher spiritual power but not sure what it is, but sure as hell ('scuse the pun) it's not that stupid fucking Jewish god and fraudulent 'died on a cross raised from the dead savior' nonsense. And yes, christianity and judeasim are backward, but so are most religions. The only saving grace of religions is community spirit, cohession, education and attempting to improve themselves. Where it falls apart imo, is scapegoating / devil / pray your fucking prayers and your sins are wiped away, rinse and repeat. Also most religions treat women as 2nd class citizens, chattels, slaves. That has been terrible imo. Yup, and christianity pisses me off no end, it's so full of bullshit, but when you are in it, you genuinely cannot see the bullshit. With no exageration, when I finally pulled pin attending stupid fucking church, THIS HUGE WEIGHT LIFTED OFF ME.
When two people get married within the same church (encouraged by the church) it's a type incest. Backwards step. Two people married and like minded in the same delusion. They're kind of hamstrung in tandem stupidity and makes even more difficult to escape the vice grip.
"I'm an agnostic but leaning toward believing there is some type of higher spiritual power" ...To what degree do you consider yourself "spiritual but not religious"? Or does that concept apply to you at all; or even make any sense in your experience?
Hehehe, "what degree?"....god only knows what degree! "Spiritual?" What is spiritual? Everything is spiritual! Seriously, everything is spiritual. A bloody rock is spiritual, a piece of toast can be spiritual if you want it to be. How can toast be spiritual? It's creation, People laboured with love to build a bread factory, trucks drove the bread to shop, shop keeper sold bread, people got fed and enjoyed the experience. People got paid, children didn't go hungry, crumbs fed the birds. That piece of toast, if you follow the trail back created a lot of joy for a lot of people. But really if you appreciate life and thankful, if you attempt to help others, that is spiritual. Look at the earth and stars, creation, it's all fantastic, mind blowingly fantastic. I can't imagine this happened by chance or accident or evolution without a mind. But 'mans' attempts to explain it is futile imo. All we can do is enjoy it. Religion with it's many stupid rules, regulations, stipulations, conformances, traditions, is not about being free, it's about bondage. "Ye shalt trade my way or go to hell" nonsense. Religion is human dogma wrapped up in 'My human concepts is God's message'.
Someone told me once that "religion is made by man, for man. Assuming there is a higher spiritual power with a head to shake in sorrow or utter disbelief at some of what happens in the name of religion... If God has anything to do with it... it is only out of mercy or grace on his/her part." On the other hand, appreciate life, be thankful, help others... oh yes...
100% Spirituality/God is only a law or a set of laws. Electricity can help you. It can also kill you if you're doing the wrong thing. Electricity doesnt decide if it will kil you or help you, humans decide that themselves according to how they manage it. Your thoughts can help you, they can also harm you. Religion, a set of human beliefs are detrimental imo, they bind you up in nonsense.
Adam & Eve myth shattered. Noah's Arc and animals clambering aboard a wooden tub also will be mythological. Just amazing how adults can still believe Santa Clauz stories coming from the nonsense bible. But I can relate, once upon a time I too was sucked into this goodie goodie two shoes christian bs movement. Early Humans Left Africa Much Earlier Than Previously Thought Scientists have found evidence of several waves of migration by looking at the genetic signatures of human interbreeding with Neanderthals. Extracting fossilized Neanderthal bone for genetic sequencing at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, in 2008.Credit...Volker Steger/Science Source By Carl Zimmer July 11, 2024 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/science/humans-neanderthals-out-of-africa.html Hundreds of thousands of years ago, our species arose in Africa. Research on the DNA of living people has indicated that early Homo sapiens stayed on the continent for a long while, with a small group leaving just 50,000 years ago to populate the rest of the world. But those findings have raised a puzzling question: Why did our species take so long to move beyond Africa? Several new studies, including one published on Thursday, argue that the timeline was wrong. According to new data, several waves of modern humans began leaving the continent about 250,000 years ago. “It wasn’t a single out-of-Africa migration,” said Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania. “There have been lots of migrations out of Africa at different time periods.” Those earlier migrations went largely overlooked until now, Dr. Tishkoff said, because the people who moved did not leave a clear fossil record of their existence, nor did living people inherit their DNA. But scientists are now discovering hints of those early waves in the DNA of Neanderthals. The Neanderthal lineage most likely began in Africa about 600,000 years ago before moving into Europe and Asia. In 2010, Svante Paabo, a Swedish geneticist, and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, published the first draft of a Neanderthal genome, reconstructed from 40,000-year-old fossils found in Croatia. Dr. Paabo’s team also discovered that living, non-African people carry fragments of Neanderthal DNA, a signature of interbreeding from long ago. In May, a team of researchers estimated that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred during a short period of time, between 47,000 and 40,000 years ago. But some Neanderthal DNA does not fit into this neat picture. The Neanderthal Y chromosome, for example, is more similar to the Y chromosome found in living humans than it is to the rest of the Neanderthal genome. In 2020, researchers offered an explanation: Neanderthal males inherited a new Y chromosome from humans between 370,000 and 100,000 years ago. But that would have made sense only if a wave of Africans had expanded out of the continent much earlier than scientists had thought. evidence for such an early wave in the genomes of living Africans. Dr. Tishkoff and her colleagues compared the genome of a 122,000-year-old Neanderthal fossil with the genomes of 180 people from 12 populations across Africa. Previous studies had found no sign of Neanderthal DNA in African genomes. But Dr. Tishkoff’s group detected tiny pieces of Neanderthal-like DNA scattered across all 12 of the populations they studied. When they examined the size and sequence of those genetic fragments, they concluded that Neanderthals inherited them from early Africans. That meant an early wave of Africans expanded into Europe or Asia about 250,000 years ago and interbred with Neanderthals. Another group of researchers — led by Joshua Akey, a professor of genomics at Princeton University — tackled the same question with its own statistical method. After comparing the genomes of 2,000 people from across the world with three Neanderthal genomes, they reached the same conclusion. As Dr. Akey and his colleagues reported on Thursday, modern humans expanded out of Africa and interbred with Neanderthals between 200,000 and 250,000 years ago. But Dr. Akey’s team also found evidence for yet another early wave. By comparing the genomes of young and old Neanderthal fossils, they concluded that another group of people migrated from Africa between 120,000 and 100,000 years ago. Katerina Harvati, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tübingen who was not involved in the new studies, said that some mysterious human fossils from Europe and the Middle East might belong to these early waves. “We’re starting to see this more complicated reality in the fossil record,” she said. In 2019, Dr. Harvati and her colleagues described a skull fragment from Greece dating back over 210,000 years that bears some hallmarks of modern human anatomy. The second wave of Africans might have reached Israel, Dr. Akey and his colleagues say. Paleoanthropologists have found modern-looking fossils and stone tools in Israeli caves that are estimated to be 100,000 to 130,000 years old. Dr. Akey said the findings hinted that there are other waves of human migration left to be discovered. “It suggests that there were repeated African dispersals for much of human history,” he said. But why do the early migrations out of Africa seem to have fizzled away? Was there something different about the people in the last wave? “The short answer is, Yes, there has to be something different,” said John Hawks, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Wisconsin. It’s possible, he said, that African populations built up cultural knowledge that led them to make new inventions, like arrows, and adapt to new places more successfully. Dr. Harvati also raised the possibility that early waves of humans might have struggled to compete with Neanderthals for land and food. But studies by Dr. Akey’s team and others suggest that Neanderthal populations were shrinking when the last wave emerged. Perhaps that decline gave humans an edge.
AFAIK, Christians follow the New Testament, not the old one. All your stats are from the Torah, which is not what Christians use as their baseline. Theirs start at the first 4 Gospels of the New Testament, after the Council of Constantinople cleared it. Remember, Jesus was totally AGAINST his parents' jew-shit, so he rebelled, and that is why they killed him. That is not reflected in the old testament, because well, Christ was the NEW covenant!
Not true. If that were the case, why have the OT in the bible. Christian sermons frequently talk about Abraham, the miracles of the OT, David, Solomon, Isaiah, Psalms, the whole shooting box. Where they don't follow (nor do jews) is sacrifices, eg burnt offerings and killing animals for the altar. But the OT is frequently referred to by christians as a front running to Jesus.