it's easy to trick the mind into thinking it belongs to an external body
I'll go ahead and read this as "consciousness is designed to remain functional with the associated body being arbitrary".
Sounds like direct intentional design of a functional, physically-reassignable (hence "resurrectable") soul to me.
Someone enlighten me on why this, being merely a "trick", would have evolutionary advantage such that all the neurological complexity required to remap perceptions to arbitrary point in space would naturally "emerge".
Or, more overtly on the topic, the lesser-known "Hammer to Fall"...
For we who grew up tall and proud
In the shadow of the mushroom cloud
Convinced our voices can't be heard
We just wanna scream it louder and louder
What the hell we fighting for?
Just surrender and it won't hurt at all
You just got time to say your prayers
While you're waiting for the hammer to fall
Your interpretations are willfully false, because, quite simply, you have the void of intellectual honesty that leads you to suggest we use the least-likely interpretation you can find toward the goal of evaluating the text. You say as much yourself by your "justification" that the "bible is a work of fiction".
I don't know if this is because you still don't know what a Straw Man fallacy is, or because you're persisting in being as irrational as you have evidenced so far.
Nonetheless, you are a complete waste of time both in knowledge and methodology. It is -possible- you might become other than so, if you make the effort to correct your systematically-disingenuous approach to the topic. Until then, you could be nothing but worthless, for anything and to anyone.
Given that fact, I leave you to your deliberately-wrong, and admittedly deliberately-wrong, interpretation of the text.
And no, I don't hate the bible. As you might guess, this statement just means you are the idiot you persist in aspiring to continue being.
Oops. Guess that last wasn't the most Christian way to put it. Oh well. DIAF.
Again, wrong (leaving aside using "man" in a nuanced sense you aren't even close to understanding), and for the same reasons as before.
1. Entire cities existed at the time of Cain, Adam's immediate descendant. The bible says this directly. How would that have happened?
2. The statement of "male and female created He them" is contemporaneous in terms of the "day". So was the creation of Adam and Eve, on a different "day".
3. The directive "be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth and subdue it" would be an impossible command to fulfill if this was said to Adam, who was intended to stay in a garden, and only expelled as a consequence of sin, contrary to God's initial stated intent. God does not give impossible commands. It was not said to Adam. It was said to his human predecessors.
4. Propagation of the species would have been impossible if Adam and Eve were the first people without incest. Incest is directly forbidden by God. God does not start people off with impossible dilemmas.
None of this has the slightest thing to do with "delusions", however, except in your irrational mind. Were my interpretation wrong, my interpretation would be wrong, nothing more. Your flights of fanciful nonsense about what that would mean regarding my mental state notwithstanding.
Every statement of yours has been fully and sufficiently refuted. Nothing was ignored, if there was anything not responded to, it was because I did not see it.
I need no defense mechanisms, and have no delusions. You, however, clearly need some basic understanding of what a "delusion" is. A belief that the majority of the world believes, cannot, by definition, be a delusion. Beliefs consonant with one's culture, even without proof, are never properly characterized as a delusion. Since you have no actual qualifications in this area, and no real intellectual skills extending beyond being a parrot of Dawkins' misused terminology, I understand you being wrong in your usage of it. You being wrong is understandable. However, by now it's manifestly clear you are simply lying in your use of the term. There is not simply no evidence it applies to me, but rather the exact antithesis--you've been refuted on every single point. Given that, if anyone is "delusional", it is clearly, and demonstratedly, you.
We know *nothing* about an invisible man that floats in the sky that controls the universe.
True enough that we know nothing about an invisible man that floats in the sky.
However, "we" (namely, me, in this context) know a significant amount about God. Some of it, I know from direct experience as fully sufficient evidence. More can be determined from the standard scriptural references. As is always the case for any topic, that you don't know something does not mean no one else does either.
Note that it is -never- the case that you can say what "we" -don't- know, about anything, validly. Your mind does not encompass the minds of all others on Earth, as the only way you could validly make this exclusionary claim.
Note also that it is never necessary for evidence to be presented to you, for it to be evidence. You may have the fully-sufficient evidence of your own eyes regarding many events in your life. Convincing me of it is entirely unnecessary for it to be evidence.
You aren't even capable of anything other than entirely making up what evidence says and what others' mental status is, and asserting these on the basis of absolutely nothing, are you?
You're wrong because you're mentally ill. As evidence for the fact you're mentally ill, I submit the fact you're wrong. Nyah nyah.
I won't even bother to inform you as to what a tautological argument is, or the basic definition of "evidence" as -never- meaning only one possible interpretation exists for it to be evidence. You're too deep into your willful irrationality to be helped.
Basic instruction on how to construct the beginnings of a worthwhile counterargument, rather than pointless empty characterizations, will have to wait. A Philosophy 101 from your local community college might help you in the alternative.
Science has a lot to say about what really happens, but much less to say about what could happen in someone's imagination.
False dichotomy. We know nothing about Dark Matter, essentially. There will be conjecture as to what it may contain, some of which will be plausible long before testability, much less strong scientific validation. Until such validation, it will be purely "in someone's imagination"--but then you knew your statement was more about smarminess than science already, correct?
By a sky fairy? no. It's one of the least plausible things I've ever heard.
And, par for the course, if you had any intellectual honesty, you'd have no reason not to use standard terminology here. There is no reason to resort to "sky fairy" other than your wish to present the concept of an intelligent, powerful being with creative powers disingenuously. You are proposing they are the same, for purposes of inference, and not the same, for purposes of your insult's hoped rhetorical effect, simultaneously. There is nothing in the least logically valid about this. Characterization is not an argument.
If it's describing reality, then science allows us to conclude that it's nonsense.
No, in fact actual science (that is, hard physics of the quantum variety) says anything at all can happen as a question of probability. Therefore it in no way allows you to conclude this. That would be, if your category-shifting away from the suggestion that it is overall allegory had any validity or honesty to it in the first place.
This assertion is most definitely testable, for well-understood definitions of the terms. I'm not sure you even know what the scientific method is.
Present your specific method to determine this then, by means of scientific method. Doubt away, or rather, lie again in pretending to doubt. I know quite well what scientific method is, and that's why I'm calling you on this.
"Present trend" - are you complaining about Popper? because if you prefer the older inductive trend, I'd say that's even better at identifying bullshit in the creation stories.
No, Popper knew better, and worked toward delineating "science", not toward nonsense claims that it was synonymous with the totality of reality. He certainly wouldn't offer anything as empty and ineffectual as this or your follow-on insults. Don't feel bad about the limitation, though--however many posts you get, you'll maintain the same net value of nothing.
Someday, learn to present something more in your arguments than unbacked assertions and empty characterizations.
It is of no value.
You can't contribute to "progress" (even in your own terms--where you and every single person you know will unquestionably be dead and irrelevant in 150 years, and entropy if nothing else will finish off the rest some time after that, as your future to "progress" to), if you can't even manage that.
There's no meaning of "progress" that you are even close to being able to help with in any way.
For that matter there aren't any scientific reasons to believe anything Genesis says.
Okay, predict the upper-bound age of a man for the next 2500 years. Play a nomad and no looking up anything on the internet to make your guess. If you get it dead-on, would there be a reason to believe things you say? Genesis has in fact done this, accurate over all all that time over billions of future data points, to the significant digits specified. Hypothesis: "If a transcendently-intelligent being exists, he would be able to predict the future and communicate this to an individual, who otherwise would be unable to successfully make such a prediction." Test: Refer to history. Results of test: 2500-year prediction validated. I'll await your alternate hypothesis. Your method should succeed on the first an only try.
But we're talking about the in-story world, in which it's pretty clear that Adam was the first man and there is no mention of any pre-existing society.
Yes, of course there is. Cain married someone unknown from the context of Adam and Eve and went off where there were already established cities. For the rest of the evidence I have provided (which I in fact have, that just isn't the same as "I haven't read it"), review the rest of the thread in its entirety. I don't feel the need to retype everything for everyone who makes this claim, individually.
I am not making a scientific assertion here, I am stating that his claim needs to be backed if he is making it a statement of fact.
Science has nothing to say for or against it. It is eminently plausible that a person could have been taken out of a human population and put into a garden.
It is also the case that, religion aside, it is never the case that "not scientific" is equivalent to "not real". You can start with the assertion that "Mozart was (or was not) a great composer" if this is unclear. One of these assertions is true. Neither is determinable via scientific method.
The present trend to try to collapse all the branches of philosophy and epistemology into "scientific, or unreal" simply leads to inanity.
Flying teapot fallacy.
There is no such thing. You've made a claim. Back it.
The reason they do not flow is because they are distinct accounts which happen to have been pasted one after the other. There's enough evidence of this from literary-critical analysis. You are presenting an occasionally still heard and refuted theory about the two creation stories.
There is never enough evidence for something false, and you are suggesting that the entirety of Judaism failed to notice text that invalidated their religion a few paragraphs apart. This is absurd. Perhaps, instead, your willfully-incorrect interpretation is what needs to be adjusted here, rather than handwaving claims about literary analysis you don't cite much less defend, and will only reference as important in the effort to establish none of it is important? Again, basic intellectual honesty. Work on it.
What I am presenting you have never heard, and it has never been refuted. Stop lying.
2) ignore the other stuff about aaaallll the beasts and plants being re-created
Trust me, there is nothing I ignore about this.
Thanks for playing, but you're like somebody arguing arithmetic, without having a clue about what Godel knows about the subject, with someone who does know. It's amusing briefly, but little more. See you (or a proxy) later.
No, this is never true about anything. Not true about any written work, of any type. One can intermix factual and metaphorical statements at will, in any book. It is impossible that you didn't know this as you were claiming otherwise. Why'd you claim it anyway?
And no, the second chapter in no way says Adam predated plants. It says he predated the plants in his garden. See the other post, or ask anyone with a modicum of analytical capability or common-sense.
Interesting. There is literally not a single logically-valid argument here.
"Caught lying"... did no such thing, no such thing is logically derivable. I made an argument about Adam and Eve, and you responded with "that argument can't be true unless all the other arguments I can associate with it should be argued in the same way". Nothing valid in any way in your thinking here.
"Adam and Eve didn't exist"... sheer empty assertion. Formally, a Bare Assertion Fallacy if you like. Show your proof they didn't exist.
There is nothing "twisting" about my interpretation. You are "twisting" it to claim it says what it does not, because you utterly lack intellectual honesty either in your statements or in your standard method of mental processing which produces them.
The basic issue here is that you would need at some point to be able to differentiate man(1) from man(2).
You will almost certainly make no effort to do so before you get Naturally Deselected, though.
For reasons that will be obscure to you specifically because you can't differentiate man(1) from man(2), I have absolutely no problem with this sequence of events.
Genesis 5:3
He created them male and female and blessed them. And he named them "Mankind" when they were created.
Genesis 1:27
27 So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground."
Humanity per se created, and given rather Darwinian directives incompatible with staying in a garden.
Genesis 1:31
31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning--the sixth day.
Sixth "day" ends.
Genesis 2:5
5 Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth[a] and no plant had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground, 6 but streams[b] came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. 7 Then the Lord God formed a man[c] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
As noted in the footnote, "earth" is alternately (and accurately) translated as "land", and not incompatibly that this particular land had not been rained upon, nor had plants grown here. My model is quite literally that of a garden on the surface of the Earth, taking up a subset of the Earth's surface, as common sense and science would naturally dictate, though not dictated by your effort to interpret as whatever is -least- likely.
Genesis 6:21
22 Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib[h] he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
And with this act suggestive of genetic engineering from a DNA source, which you will mock as written here and would immediately assent to if you read this exact same thing as a broad description of a modern-day cloning procedure, let your futile mockery resume.
On your other points:
2) Learn how sets work.
3) It unquestionably symbolizes a great many things. Your incredulity on the matter doesn't override actual scholarship and the text itself.
4) Yes, it is.
Well, the context isn't "unspoken", it's directly written, and it in no way is a fairytale, but rather allegory, but...
Just one word of advice, don't read George Orwell's Animal Farm.
You won't be able to hear people explaining it was political insights you were supposed to be taking away from it, over the sound of your head exploding about the symbolism.
Well, yeah, I understand you won't start lying about being unable to understand it isn't about talking pigs, unless Orwell started impeding your personal behavioral whims in some way, but still...
Slashdot Mirror
it's easy to trick the mind into thinking it belongs to an external body
I'll go ahead and read this as "consciousness is designed to remain functional with the associated body being arbitrary".
Sounds like direct intentional design of a functional, physically-reassignable (hence "resurrectable") soul to me.
Someone enlighten me on why this, being merely a "trick", would have evolutionary advantage such that all the neurological complexity required to remap perceptions to arbitrary point in space would naturally "emerge".
Or, more overtly on the topic, the lesser-known "Hammer to Fall"...
For we who grew up tall and proud
In the shadow of the mushroom cloud
Convinced our voices can't be heard
We just wanna scream it louder and louder
What the hell we fighting for?
Just surrender and it won't hurt at all
You just got time to say your prayers
While you're waiting for the hammer to fall
As in Regular Science (TM), light predates all stars and planets.
There's even a convenient name for when it was most prominent, the Photon Epoch, starting per physics 3 minutes after the Big Bang.
Your interpretations are willfully false, because, quite simply, you have the void of intellectual honesty that leads you to suggest we use the least-likely interpretation you can find toward the goal of evaluating the text. You say as much yourself by your "justification" that the "bible is a work of fiction".
I don't know if this is because you still don't know what a Straw Man fallacy is, or because you're persisting in being as irrational as you have evidenced so far.
Nonetheless, you are a complete waste of time both in knowledge and methodology. It is -possible- you might become other than so, if you make the effort to correct your systematically-disingenuous approach to the topic. Until then, you could be nothing but worthless, for anything and to anyone.
Given that fact, I leave you to your deliberately-wrong, and admittedly deliberately-wrong, interpretation of the text.
And no, I don't hate the bible. As you might guess, this statement just means you are the idiot you persist in aspiring to continue being.
Oops. Guess that last wasn't the most Christian way to put it. Oh well. DIAF.
The Bible was clear. Adam was the first man.
Again, wrong (leaving aside using "man" in a nuanced sense you aren't even close to understanding), and for the same reasons as before.
1. Entire cities existed at the time of Cain, Adam's immediate descendant. The bible says this directly. How would that have happened?
2. The statement of "male and female created He them" is contemporaneous in terms of the "day". So was the creation of Adam and Eve, on a different "day".
3. The directive "be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth and subdue it" would be an impossible command to fulfill if this was said to Adam, who was intended to stay in a garden, and only expelled as a consequence of sin, contrary to God's initial stated intent. God does not give impossible commands. It was not said to Adam. It was said to his human predecessors.
4. Propagation of the species would have been impossible if Adam and Eve were the first people without incest. Incest is directly forbidden by God. God does not start people off with impossible dilemmas.
None of this has the slightest thing to do with "delusions", however, except in your irrational mind. Were my interpretation wrong, my interpretation would be wrong, nothing more. Your flights of fanciful nonsense about what that would mean regarding my mental state notwithstanding.
Every statement of yours has been fully and sufficiently refuted. Nothing was ignored, if there was anything not responded to, it was because I did not see it.
I need no defense mechanisms, and have no delusions. You, however, clearly need some basic understanding of what a "delusion" is. A belief that the majority of the world believes, cannot, by definition, be a delusion. Beliefs consonant with one's culture, even without proof, are never properly characterized as a delusion. Since you have no actual qualifications in this area, and no real intellectual skills extending beyond being a parrot of Dawkins' misused terminology, I understand you being wrong in your usage of it. You being wrong is understandable. However, by now it's manifestly clear you are simply lying in your use of the term. There is not simply no evidence it applies to me, but rather the exact antithesis--you've been refuted on every single point. Given that, if anyone is "delusional", it is clearly, and demonstratedly, you.
We know *nothing* about an invisible man that floats in the sky that controls the universe.
True enough that we know nothing about an invisible man that floats in the sky.
However, "we" (namely, me, in this context) know a significant amount about God. Some of it, I know from direct experience as fully sufficient evidence. More can be determined from the standard scriptural references. As is always the case for any topic, that you don't know something does not mean no one else does either.
Note that it is -never- the case that you can say what "we" -don't- know, about anything, validly. Your mind does not encompass the minds of all others on Earth, as the only way you could validly make this exclusionary claim.
Note also that it is never necessary for evidence to be presented to you, for it to be evidence. You may have the fully-sufficient evidence of your own eyes regarding many events in your life. Convincing me of it is entirely unnecessary for it to be evidence.
You aren't even capable of anything other than entirely making up what evidence says and what others' mental status is, and asserting these on the basis of absolutely nothing, are you?
You're wrong because you're mentally ill. As evidence for the fact you're mentally ill, I submit the fact you're wrong. Nyah nyah.
I won't even bother to inform you as to what a tautological argument is, or the basic definition of "evidence" as -never- meaning only one possible interpretation exists for it to be evidence. You're too deep into your willful irrationality to be helped.
Yawn.
Just to be nice, here's something peer-reviewed for you to look at while I'm yawning.
Basic instruction on how to construct the beginnings of a worthwhile counterargument, rather than pointless empty characterizations, will have to wait. A Philosophy 101 from your local community college might help you in the alternative.
Science has a lot to say about what really happens, but much less to say about what could happen in someone's imagination.
False dichotomy. We know nothing about Dark Matter, essentially. There will be conjecture as to what it may contain, some of which will be plausible long before testability, much less strong scientific validation. Until such validation, it will be purely "in someone's imagination"--but then you knew your statement was more about smarminess than science already, correct?
By a sky fairy? no. It's one of the least plausible things I've ever heard.
And, par for the course, if you had any intellectual honesty, you'd have no reason not to use standard terminology here. There is no reason to resort to "sky fairy" other than your wish to present the concept of an intelligent, powerful being with creative powers disingenuously. You are proposing they are the same, for purposes of inference, and not the same, for purposes of your insult's hoped rhetorical effect, simultaneously. There is nothing in the least logically valid about this. Characterization is not an argument.
If it's describing reality, then science allows us to conclude that it's nonsense.
No, in fact actual science (that is, hard physics of the quantum variety) says anything at all can happen as a question of probability. Therefore it in no way allows you to conclude this. That would be, if your category-shifting away from the suggestion that it is overall allegory had any validity or honesty to it in the first place.
This assertion is most definitely testable, for well-understood definitions of the terms. I'm not sure you even know what the scientific method is.
Present your specific method to determine this then, by means of scientific method. Doubt away, or rather, lie again in pretending to doubt. I know quite well what scientific method is, and that's why I'm calling you on this.
"Present trend" - are you complaining about Popper? because if you prefer the older inductive trend, I'd say that's even better at identifying bullshit in the creation stories.
No, Popper knew better, and worked toward delineating "science", not toward nonsense claims that it was synonymous with the totality of reality. He certainly wouldn't offer anything as empty and ineffectual as this or your follow-on insults. Don't feel bad about the limitation, though--however many posts you get, you'll maintain the same net value of nothing.
Someday, learn to present something more in your arguments than unbacked assertions and empty characterizations.
It is of no value.
You can't contribute to "progress" (even in your own terms--where you and every single person you know will unquestionably be dead and irrelevant in 150 years, and entropy if nothing else will finish off the rest some time after that, as your future to "progress" to), if you can't even manage that.
There's no meaning of "progress" that you are even close to being able to help with in any way.
For that matter there aren't any scientific reasons to believe anything Genesis says.
Okay, predict the upper-bound age of a man for the next 2500 years. Play a nomad and no looking up anything on the internet to make your guess. If you get it dead-on, would there be a reason to believe things you say? Genesis has in fact done this, accurate over all all that time over billions of future data points, to the significant digits specified. Hypothesis: "If a transcendently-intelligent being exists, he would be able to predict the future and communicate this to an individual, who otherwise would be unable to successfully make such a prediction." Test: Refer to history. Results of test: 2500-year prediction validated. I'll await your alternate hypothesis. Your method should succeed on the first an only try.
But we're talking about the in-story world, in which it's pretty clear that Adam was the first man and there is no mention of any pre-existing society.
Yes, of course there is. Cain married someone unknown from the context of Adam and Eve and went off where there were already established cities. For the rest of the evidence I have provided (which I in fact have, that just isn't the same as "I haven't read it"), review the rest of the thread in its entirety. I don't feel the need to retype everything for everyone who makes this claim, individually.
I am not making a scientific assertion here, I am stating that his claim needs to be backed if he is making it a statement of fact.
Science has nothing to say for or against it. It is eminently plausible that a person could have been taken out of a human population and put into a garden.
It is also the case that, religion aside, it is never the case that "not scientific" is equivalent to "not real". You can start with the assertion that "Mozart was (or was not) a great composer" if this is unclear. One of these assertions is true. Neither is determinable via scientific method.
The present trend to try to collapse all the branches of philosophy and epistemology into "scientific, or unreal" simply leads to inanity.
Logic is applicable everywhere.
Yes, and you are consistently failing at it.
Flying teapot fallacy.
There is no such thing. You've made a claim. Back it.
The reason they do not flow is because they are distinct accounts which happen to have been pasted one after the other. There's enough evidence of this from literary-critical analysis. You are presenting an occasionally still heard and refuted theory about the two creation stories.
There is never enough evidence for something false, and you are suggesting that the entirety of Judaism failed to notice text that invalidated their religion a few paragraphs apart. This is absurd. Perhaps, instead, your willfully-incorrect interpretation is what needs to be adjusted here, rather than handwaving claims about literary analysis you don't cite much less defend, and will only reference as important in the effort to establish none of it is important? Again, basic intellectual honesty. Work on it.
What I am presenting you have never heard, and it has never been refuted. Stop lying.
Now if only you could believe that as you're saying it.
Point of fact, though, I've actually been "on a site like this", that is, this one, longer than he has.
And I'll be the only one of us leaving with a meaningful take-away from the time.
2) ignore the other stuff about aaaallll the beasts and plants being re-created
Trust me, there is nothing I ignore about this.
Thanks for playing, but you're like somebody arguing arithmetic, without having a clue about what Godel knows about the subject, with someone who does know. It's amusing briefly, but little more. See you (or a proxy) later.
Discussion with you is clearly pointless. My points are made, and they are valid interpretation as given. I'll let time handle you from here.
It's either all literal or all allegorical.
No, this is never true about anything. Not true about any written work, of any type. One can intermix factual and metaphorical statements at will, in any book. It is impossible that you didn't know this as you were claiming otherwise. Why'd you claim it anyway?
And no, the second chapter in no way says Adam predated plants. It says he predated the plants in his garden. See the other post, or ask anyone with a modicum of analytical capability or common-sense.
Interesting. There is literally not a single logically-valid argument here.
"Caught lying"... did no such thing, no such thing is logically derivable. I made an argument about Adam and Eve, and you responded with "that argument can't be true unless all the other arguments I can associate with it should be argued in the same way". Nothing valid in any way in your thinking here.
"Adam and Eve didn't exist"... sheer empty assertion. Formally, a Bare Assertion Fallacy if you like. Show your proof they didn't exist.
There is nothing "twisting" about my interpretation. You are "twisting" it to claim it says what it does not, because you utterly lack intellectual honesty either in your statements or in your standard method of mental processing which produces them.
The basic issue here is that you would need at some point to be able to differentiate man(1) from man(2).
You will almost certainly make no effort to do so before you get Naturally Deselected, though.
For reasons that will be obscure to you specifically because you can't differentiate man(1) from man(2), I have absolutely no problem with this sequence of events.
Genesis 5:3
He created them male and female and blessed them. And he named them "Mankind" when they were created.
Genesis 1:27
27 So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
28 God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground."
Humanity per se created, and given rather Darwinian directives incompatible with staying in a garden.
Genesis 1:31
31 God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning--the sixth day.
Sixth "day" ends.
Genesis 2:5
5 Now no shrub had yet appeared on the earth[a] and no plant had yet sprung up, for the Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground, 6 but streams[b] came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. 7 Then the Lord God formed a man[c] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
As noted in the footnote, "earth" is alternately (and accurately) translated as "land", and not incompatibly that this particular land had not been rained upon, nor had plants grown here. My model is quite literally that of a garden on the surface of the Earth, taking up a subset of the Earth's surface, as common sense and science would naturally dictate, though not dictated by your effort to interpret as whatever is -least- likely.
Genesis 6:21
22 Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib[h] he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
And with this act suggestive of genetic engineering from a DNA source, which you will mock as written here and would immediately assent to if you read this exact same thing as a broad description of a modern-day cloning procedure, let your futile mockery resume.
On your other points:
2) Learn how sets work.
3) It unquestionably symbolizes a great many things. Your incredulity on the matter doesn't override actual scholarship and the text itself.
4) Yes, it is.
You are forcing a particular chronological narrative on the overall allegorical presentation. You are in so doing off the topic of my point.
My stance is that humans existed before Adam and Eve. I have provided scientific and scriptural reasons for this stance.
You are then asserting other things about my supposed stance I never said. Quite seriously, what is your objective here?
Or, alternately, you have a remarkably limited understanding of what "image" can imply.
Don't be ridiculous. Any effect your childish troll might have had wore out over the last hundred people who parroted the exact same thing.
Well, the context isn't "unspoken", it's directly written, and it in no way is a fairytale, but rather allegory, but...
Just one word of advice, don't read George Orwell's Animal Farm.
You won't be able to hear people explaining it was political insights you were supposed to be taking away from it, over the sound of your head exploding about the symbolism.
Well, yeah, I understand you won't start lying about being unable to understand it isn't about talking pigs, unless Orwell started impeding your personal behavioral whims in some way, but still...