Genuine question for any Christians out here.

"Rainbow" (rainbeaux) 12/26/2018 at 16:31 • Filed to: None

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I don’t want this to come off as me being a nitpicky asshole, but I just had a thought and I’m curious if there’s an actual answer to it.

So, Eve was created after God noticed that Adam was lonely, right? And then they had babies. Which means that Adam was fertile and had a fully functioning reproductive system. So... why? Why was Adam created with the ability to have sex and reproduce if there was originally no intention for him to do those things?

I mean, I’m sure this is one of the stories that aren’t meant to be taken literally, but it’s still an interesting sort of plot hole, I guess.

ranwhenparked > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 16:42

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Most Christians don’t take Genesis literally, its a creation myth inherited from the ancient  Hebrews (and shared, in similar forms, with a number of other ancient cultures from the Middle East).

The general point of it is that God created the universe and everything in it. The mechanism by which that was done isn’t really important, but had to be put in language that ancient peoples could understand without the benefit of modern science.

Herr Quattro - Has a 4-motion > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 16:43

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The Bible can be a little weird on this- for example the only 2 listed sons of Adam & Eve is Able and Cain, and Cain killed Able.

Soo that leaves Eve. Which- uh- yeah. Apparently they also had 73 soemthing other children or some stuff, but honestly, to my knowledge, the Bible doesn’t explicitly mention anything on that or your question. Adam was made in Gods image, so that would mean that God has a functioning junk anyway.

Which would make the whole Virgin Mary thing a bit more weird when you think about it.

*Not a hardcore Christian, just had questions on the Bible when I was a bit younger

Nibby > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 16:44

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dude don’t you know how reproduction works? Adam inserts his semen into Eve’s neck by biting. The teeth secrete the semen into her veins and then the blood takes the sperm into the placenta where a babby forms.

KingT- 60% of the time, it works every time > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 16:46

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How dare you suggest Non-Christians cannot answer this question!

Aremmes > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 16:47

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You think that’s weird? Wait ‘til you get to the part with the talking snake. And that’s just in the first book!

FWIW, the bible says that God created man in his image, which implies that God has a fully functioning reproductive system as well. But, why would a god, THE God, even, need a fully functioning naughty bits? I wish not to delve deeply into this particular rabbit hole as I’m sure I’ll get very lost .

Danimalk - Drives a Slow Car Fast > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 16:47

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My issue with this story is how did they get passed a second generation? Who did Adam Jr. fuck to fill out the population?

Are we all just supposed to be incest children??

Religion and Science are not the best of friends. 

Mercedes Streeter > Nibby 12/26/2018 at 16:47

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Feel like there's a Rule 34 about this somewhere.

farscythe - makin da cawfee! > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 16:48

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*hisses* do not question... do not think

just follow the good book and go to heaven

(i was raised christian.. i dont have a problem with it... but yeah... its not a thing you should take word by word... more of a live by the general idea of it all kinda thing)

(im agnostic tho... i figures theres a bazzillion religions claiming to be the true one...why would i pick a side before im dead and find out)

Chuckles > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 16:49

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I’m not one who takes the bible literally, but doesn’t it say in there that God made Adam in his own image? That would mean that Adam has that anatomy because God does. So I guess the better question is why does God have a reproductive system?

Again, I don’t believe in that stuff. The bible is  just a book of stories written by people, not God.

Dr. Zoidberg - RIP Oppo > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 16:53

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I don’t think that’s how the story goes. I think they both had to be cast out of the garden before they had reproductive abilities/knowledge, or perhaps that was linked with unlocking the knowledge of the forbidden fruit prior to be outcasted.

I think the typical version is that man is made in God’s image, so perhaps God does — or did — have similar physiology that allowed for reproductive abilities. The idea that Adam had that originally is possible, as is even the possibility that Adam acquired said anatomy at some other point.

Why not? He’s God. He does stuff like make people so he can tempt them for his amusement. Or perhaps it was the plan all along. Or perhaps the spooky verbiage of the Old Testament doesn’t accurately recount the creation of humans. Maybe the fruit is a metaphor for turning your back on your creator, or succumbing to carnal urges, earthly temptations.

Anyway: Celica.

Funktheduck > Mercedes Streeter 12/26/2018 at 16:54

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You’re familiar with my work?

DipodomysDeserti > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 16:57

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This is a much better question for any religious Jews out there. They have a much better handle on the minutiae of the Torah than Christians (obviously). Reading and speaking Hebrew helps.

Religious Jews actually strive to understand the Torah, as there’s no need to explain away inconsistencies like there is in Christianity. If you have a shul near you, send the rabbi an email. They’ve love explaining the Torah.

Keep in mind that in some Jewish mystic  traditions, Adam had a wife before Eve, who voluntarily left Eden after Adam refused to fuck her properly.

boredalways > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 16:58

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Sorry, bu t I have chosen to not answer this question because no matter how sincere my answer would be, it has the high potential of derailing this entire post.

- Mgmt

GoodIdeaAtTheTime > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 17:06

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I had a misspent youth sooooooooo “takes lon g Ace Ventura style breath”

In th e beginnin g God created the “ light, ” or knowledge, or a being made self aware. This was Adam. He woke from a drunken stupor one morning and has the smarts. There where bunches of other races and beings at this time, like neanderthals and such. Interbreeding was rampant. Eve was not Adam’s fir st mate, but his first what we would call “ wife.” She had the smarts, only because she was taken from Adam. You see, she was his daughter. Christians do not like incest, soooooo yeah. Being Adam;s daughter she shared the trait of being self aware, or intelligence. Being a primitive people Adam saw the benefit of a stronger mind to mate with. Their offspring would be supreme. Only being incest, they were slightly defective. Took a few trie s to get it right. There were some deaths, some oversight. But in the end it all worked out. Your here. Know what I mean.

I was going to be a biblical scholar before the church incident happened....

Long_Voyager, Now With More Caravanny Goodness > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 17:11

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Me playing antagonist: Who says Christians are even following the correct book?

Nibby > Mercedes Streeter 12/26/2018 at 17:11

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i wouldn;t know

Svend > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 17:17

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In some texts there was Lilith before Eve. Adam’s first wife who wouldn’t do as he said. Eve is said to of been created from one of Adam’s ribs.

You’ll notice that on some paintings of Adam, he has a navel. Why?

Urambo Tauro > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 17:21

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I just want to know if they had belly buttons.

diplodicus forgot his password > DipodomysDeserti 12/26/2018 at 17:25

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Damn that last sentence is intriguing. I feel like you could make a feautere film length porn around this premise. She leaves Eden in search of good dick but will she ever find the fuck she's looking for.

My bird IS the word > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 17:25

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There's one spooky part of genesis where god creates the heavens, then the earth, then the fish in the sea, then the birds in the air (dinosaurs?) Then everything that crawls on land. That order could just be total coincidence though.

haveacarortwoorthree2 > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 17:28

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The story of Santa Claus is more realistic and has fewer holes in it than the fictional story of a superbeing that created everything. 

Wacko > Mercedes Streeter 12/26/2018 at 17:30

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You don’t want to see his search history 

WilliamsSW > Mercedes Streeter 12/26/2018 at 17:33

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I’m not going to Google it because I’m afraid of what I’ll find, but I bet you’re right .

FatherMcKenzie > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 17:35

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The Christian God is omnipresent, he’s everywhere in time-space at the same time, which means he already knows everything that will happen and therefore knows how every single one of his tortuous plans will end. So he knew Adam would get lonely and he knew he was going to create Eve and that they would get kicked out of heaven and bone and have kids and that their kids would kil l each other and yadda, yadda, yadda. That way people don’t have to think about plot holes because after all, “God works in mysterious ways”.

Wobbles the Mind > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 17:39

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Adam and Eve were always intended to reproduce just like every other animal created, Eve was n’t an accident. In fact, she was a unique creation in that she was NOT created from the dust like Adam, terrestrial animals, and birds (Genesis 2:19).

H ere is Genesis 2 and you can start at verse 7 which will help clarify things. Hope that helps out!

https://www.biblestudytools.com/genesis/2.html

jimz > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 18:01

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I grew up notionally Catholic, and while I don’t know all of the particulars of official RCC doctrine, we were taught that very much of the early books of the OT were allegorical and/or symbolic in nature. such as “no, god didn’t create everything in 144 earth hours and then rest for 24, it’s just how the story was told to fit around the 7 day cycles many cultures had at the time.” And it’s interesting to me that the RCC has been the one to state that evolution and creation are not incompatible with each other (unlike the funamentalist/evangelical Protestants .) Kind of like GoodIdeaAtTheTime says elsewhere in these comments, the “light” god supposedly bestowed upon everything was actually us evolving in his image and becoming aware of his presence.

That said, 9 years of Catholic education taught me to think critically so I’m not religious. I do believe the people mentioned in the Bible actually existed (whatever their real names were back then.) I can believe Noah and his contemporaries believed God was flooding the entire world, because the “world” to them was what, a few thousand square miles in the middle east? I can believe Moses spoke to god through the burning bush, after eating the wrong type of mushrooms. I believe the man we call Jesus Christ did exist, people did believe he was the son of god, and he genuinely did preach “don’t be a dick” as his gospel. and- unlike the shining, lily-white, fair-haired depictions in Renaissance art- he probably looked a lot more like this:

But just like the phrase “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” I believe that the miracles described throughout the Bible are a mix of 1) people seeing phenomena they’d never seen before, 2) people hallucinating, and 3) people just plain making stuff up.

SilentButNotReallyDeadly...killed by G/O Media > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 18:16

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I’d be inclined to not take the story quite so literally. Most of this type of story are morality tales in a pretty dress. The important part is the message rather than the potentially tasty carrier pigeon.

BoxerFanatic, troublesome iconoclast. > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 18:25

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Most Christians, like most other religions and historians, and anthropologists, tend to take creation stories as allegorical, in the fact that they were pre-historic oral traditions that were eventually written down for early ancient civilizations at the beginnings of written language and historical records, for ancient peoples with a world view very foreign to what we would think of now, due to the discoveries about the natural world that have been made in the thousands of years since.

Adam and Eve is an ancient hebrew historical tradition to pass on the concepts of an omniscient creator who established humanity, and specifically the concept of human perpetuation via sexual reproduction, because sexual reproduction is the obvious and observed methodology for human reproduction, as well as most of the rest of the animal kingdom, and several other biological classifications of living organisms, as well.

Whether you believe that it is a human-generated allegory, or a devinely-inspired allegory to teach God’s created people about the nature of God’s creation, including themselves, in language and concepts that ancient humans could easily grasp and teach to their children as an oral or written tradition, the explanation has to fit the facts it serves to explain.

A growing population of plants, animals, and all sorts of created life, presumably would also need a growing population of caretakers, and even a perfect Adam and Eve would presumably create progeny in the same manner as the rest of creation, each replicating it’s own type.

One could argue it was also a very primitive cultural understanding, at a surface level, of the intelligent design of the natural world... that it wasn’t just happenstance that offspring shared traits of their parents... that the creator-God designed it that way.

A human desire for more than mere mortality also drives them to ascribe significance to procreation, but also a concept of individual spiritual afterlife, (or some cultural traditions to corporeal re-incarnation), which also forms a construct that a non-physically-bound creator-God can also facilitate.

There is a distinction to be made here:

Religion is a human construct, where aspects of belief are assembled to serve the people’s need to answer questions, and have a methodology to interact with the implications of those assumed answers. Humans screw that up every time they try, and have for the entirety of recorded history, as well as before that.

I am a Lutheran sort of Christian, and I know that... the Hebrew/Jewish tradition that Christ came from, screwed it up frequently, from Adam and Eve, to Cain and Able, to Abram, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Moses, the 12 tribes of Israel, several bouts with kings, judges, occupations, conquering, exile, return, and even dealing with Christ himself, and being decimated and scattered by the Romans shortly after that...

The Christians as well, with the persecution of the early Christians, and the martyrdom of all but one of the Apostles by the Romans, before being adopted as the official roman religion, splitting between the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, the good and bad parts of the Crusades, the inquisitions, the indulgences, secret societies, the devine right of Kings, the persecution of Galileo and other scientists who actually performed science under the purview of the church, until the church disagreed with something they discovered...

the Protestant Reformation even had it’s bits of truth and honesty, intermixed with a lot of drama, zealotry, and mis-interpretation, over-reaction, puritanism...

Not only that but non-religious cultural changes in any and all of the countries that the Judeo-Christian tradition has touched, have influenced Judaism, and Christianity, and been influenced by both for the better and the worse.

The aspect of Judeo-Christianity that rings true through the entire tradition, also referred to in the creation story, is the fallen nature of humanity, and it’s struggle against it’s own imperfection.

Adam and Eve were created perfect as companions, in the creator-God’s perfect image, and procreation wasn’t required for perfect eternal beings, whose physicality was matched to their eternal spiritual nature, and death was not part of the equation.

Knowledge of Good and Evil, represented as the only forbidden fruit in the garden, became the temptation and the original sin, for which the wages of sinfulness is necessarily death, which introduced disobedience and evil into human nature, and separated humanity from a perfectly just and sinless creator-God, yet the aspect of our capacity for good, and moments of reflected goodness and godliness are still present in our created human nature.

It is sort of an origin story for human nature’s warring duality, both warring internally against ourselves, and warring externally with each other, individually, and in groups. Religion, as a human construct is not immune from that.

Spirituality and faith, however, is different from Religion or “Religiosity”.

Instead of human-created belief to fit an existential need for God, Spirituality and faith let observed truth and both physical (scientifically observable) and meta-physical patterns inform a system of belief in a larger truth than we can explain or understand.

It is the difference between accepting something as believable without complete understanding (spirituality or faith, a gift from God), rather than creating an opinion out of limited understanding as something expedient to believe (Religiosity, a construct of humanity)

There are plenty of piously “religious” people who commit truly destructive and completely contradictory acts to the Grace of God in the name of their mis-understanding of religion... and it undermines the concepts of religion, but also spirituality, faith, hope, and truth by extension.

There are faithful and spiritual people of all sorts who gain insight into aspects of truth through that spirituality, apart from which religion they practice, or any at all, although it is hard to reconcile both vehemently vilifying God and finding existential truth through spirituality, because it is impossible to find a solid benchmark based on very fallible and deception-prone human reason.

Throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition, however, sexual reproduction is prevalent, and even encouraged... within the construct of “Family”, which is also established in the creation story... the offspring of two balanced but different parents contributing half-genetic parts, inherent in what we now more thoroughly understand as sexual procreation and genetics, but also balanced but differing contributions to nurturing children, beyond their genetic nature, and raising successive generations of quality adults, despite an imperfect, fallen, and sinful nature, from innocent children born with a spiritual quality and unique identity, that are also each a gift of God.

Prohibitions on sexual behaviors coming out of religious traditions, gets into a whole other aspect of natural survival and disease prevention, procreation, civilizational survival, Judaism and Christianity at times were both in danger of extinction without civilizational understandings of procreation and generational perseverance, as well as avoiding pagan-cultural sexual practices that tended to be predatory and what most would consider evil.

Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed due to the predatory bloodlust of the people of the town, even after Lot offered his own family members up to the ravenous mob, in leu of the Angelic guests he was harboring as messengers from God, and Lot’s family was spared for being the only ones offering that protection, aside from his wife who looked back on it.

There is a lot more to some of those stories, as well as cultural influences, both into, and out from the religious traditions.

wkiernan > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 18:41

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Credibile est, quia ineptum est; certum est, quia impossibile.

random001 > ranwhenparked 12/26/2018 at 18:42

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“most”....

Ha.

Haha.

Hahahahahahahahaha.

*Tears*

BoxerFanatic, troublesome iconoclast. > Danimalk - Drives a Slow Car Fast 12/26/2018 at 18:53

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Humans have set their religion and science at odds, because BOTH are human constructs of various stages of belief, understanding, and mis-understanding, one could probably throw the nebulous concept of magic in there, too, to round out the trifecta of trying to explain what is not yet understood, until it is understood. (and don’t kid yourself into thinking that everything ascribed to “science” is understood yet, some of it is people trying to peddle beliefs as unfounded certainty by misusing vocabulary.)

n either religion, science , nor are are equivalent to spiritual faith in what lies beyond our capability to understand.

And in Genesis, Adam and Eve had many children, not just Cain and Abel.

Noah had children, as well.. not to mention a single parental pair of the animals spared from the flood.

Keep in mind, these are stories told by, and for ancient peoples.

Humans can’t even get a game of “telephone” to pass a verbal message around a group of people in the same room , at the same time with 100% accuracy...

And people quibble about the details of historical and religious tradition that likely pre-date written linguistics, and have traversed the entire globe for millennia .

ranwhenparked > random001 12/26/2018 at 19:22

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Sure, the Catholic Church represents 50% of all Christians, and has advocated a less than literal interpretation of Genesis and support for evolution, Big Bang, etc. for decades. All you need to do is add one more Protestant denomination to get a majority (eg. “most”), and there’s certainly more than one that falls in there. Basically, all the main line ones - Lutheran, Episcopal, Presbyterian, etc. Its just the evangelical ones that might have issues, but those are a very small minority worldwide, they're just highly geographically concentrated so they seem larger. 

Danimalk - Drives a Slow Car Fast > BoxerFanatic, troublesome iconoclast. 12/26/2018 at 19:34

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I agree, just commenting on the OP using modern science (reproductive system, logic) to try to find sense in a religious story. Not to mention a religious story that already defies scientific logic in so many ways.

And maybe I should have specified Religion and Scientific METHOD are not the best of friends.  

Demon-Xanth knows how to operate a street. > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 19:54

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My take: the story of Genesis is a rough concept on the order of what needs to come first, Adam and Eve is a long version of the statement “Ignorance is bliss.”

This is coming from someone who was trained to be an altar boy. No, I did not have sexual relations with a clergyman.

random001 > ranwhenparked 12/26/2018 at 20:01

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You assume, first, that 100% of Catholics follow the advocated views, which I don't buy, and also Trump got elected by a wave of hypocricy in those same "Christians".

ranwhenparked > random001 12/26/2018 at 20:05

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I’m really not going down this road right now, I deal with enough of this with my atheist brother. 

random001 > ranwhenparked 12/26/2018 at 21:32

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Sorry.  I have to deal with a large number of very loud zealots at work.  It's infuriating.  I apologize for bringing it home.

ranwhenparked > random001 12/26/2018 at 21:47

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Nah, I just tend to tiptoe away from controversy. I can handle either politics or religion, but when the two start getting mixed, I’m out. Rather be friends, I  have enough enemies already.

BoxerFanatic, troublesome iconoclast. > Danimalk - Drives a Slow Car Fast 12/26/2018 at 21:48

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The creation story, as well as Noah, and other biblical stories may take liberties with timelines and may simplify metaphysical topics to understandable levels, but in the purpose of being teachable allegories for natural phenomena, metaphysics, and morality, they don’t directly contradict what has been later more thoroughly understood through a certain amount of belief in the principles of microbiology and organic chemistry, which is difficult to directly observe.

Much of western civilization, including scientific discovery out of the dark ages and since the Renaissance and until post-modernism, science, scientists themselves like Kepler, Galileo, and many others, and most universities and academics   were sponsored and supported b y the church... some of which found their discoveries putting them at odds when belief didn’t change as quickly as discovery was made.

For all of the religious traditionalists that changed too slowly, there are many academics that have been too quick to dismiss religion, or more accurately, spirituality beyond the scientific scope. Science can only observe, describe, and discover aspects of the natural universe. It metaphysics is still a philosophy, and spirituality is still a matter of faith and belief beyond the natural world, where science has no purview.

And Science continually shows patterns and intricacies that are too complex and interdependent in such specific and det ermined ways to be statistically possible to occur at random. Science continually grasps at straws and has to extend timelines to incredible orders of magnitude to try and explain complexity coming from simplicity or nothingness, when entropy suggests the opposite force causing complexity to decay into more elemental forms.

Humans can’t create, and can barely even observe and describe such patterns, yet they exist, and have pre-existed human capability to observe them, and patterns and organization of the universe suggest intelligence on a level beyond the universe itself.

In a wholistic view, spirituality, philosophy, and scientific methodology are each human endeavors into understanding the universe in which we exist, in different ways. Scientific methods, philosophical  and religious expressions are the efforts humans make in those regards, and they need not be at odds, if they are practiced by humans in a balanced and concerted manner.

random001 > ranwhenparked 12/26/2018 at 22:12

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Dammit, man, I’m groveling at your feet. Why can’t you just accept it?! Why?!?!

=0P

Shane Moore > Rainbow 12/26/2018 at 22:50

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It is a thoughtful question with most answers so far that don’t seem as sincere... first you have to fully believe that God had a plan from the beginning without any mistakes. One argument for God knowing/planning to make woman from man is in Genesis 2:18-20, God brings all the animals before Adam to name (not sure fully literal) but He also uses this as a lesson to Adam to show him that in creation so far, there is nothing suitable to be his mate. Which should make him appreciate the balance a woman would bring to his strengths and weaknesses. He then creates eve out of Adam to sho they are a unique species. Also the comments about created in Our image meaning God having reproductive systems is misplaced . Any time spent studying the Bible would come to the conclusion that the image would be the spiritual side that only Human creation has. Spoiler: Not all dogs go to Heaven.

The last stock SC 5speed > Rainbow 12/27/2018 at 11:18

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We don’t know. One thought is that they had a ton of sex in the garden but weren’t playing with live ammo because they didn’t need to reproduce since they had eternal life. It’s not until after they sin that God says Eve will bear kids in pain while Adam will scratch around in the dirt all day to feed them and then they will die.

This makes sense if you consider that God created sex and made good it for whole lot more than just replacing ourselves.

As for Adam being born complete, well, since God doesn’t make mistakes He knew all along Adam would get a mate. Wether the exact wording of Genesis is right and Adam was a free man for a while because God waited for some reason until Adam had a desire or if that part is legend I don’t know. It does seem obvious that male AND female were part of the plan from the beginning. (For the record that statement is aimed at the question of eve’s creation and is not an lgbt reference). For one thing it Is hard to believe that the Guy who willed everything into existence needed a man that was a few days old to point out a design flaw and then be like “fuck me...you’re right” before proceeding to badge engineer Eve from the parts bin.

Like I said, literal vs legend, I don’t know. We’ll find out in the end. Either “hell yes I made all that in 7 literal 24 hr days and I caused the story to be recorded so you’d know” or “no dude I don’t where the extra stuff came from. The important thing is I made you for a purpose and created a way for us to be reconciled even though you screwed up”