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I'm looking for the faith-promoting spin on this. Homo sapiens have been around for several hundred thousand years. Religion seems to have evolved gradually, with animal, fertility, and fire gods coming at the forefront perhaps 50,000 years ago. Questions and fear of death seems to have brought about ideas of afterlives and in some cases ancestor worship. Eventually you get these sort of interesting pantheons of gods, usually with a central powerful god and many tribal gods, or many assorted gods responsible for things like ushering souls into hades or pulling the sun across the sky. The stories get more creative over time.

Out of a few of these groups of tribal deities, we get the story of El and the story of Yahweh, who don't look any different from their competitors at the time they were first worshiped, although concepts of this being/these beings have changed radically over time.

That's the short history of religion among the homo sapiens. What's the faith promoting spin on that? Three questions here, really:

1) Assuming you don't worship the bear god or the fertility goddess and you come from a Judeo-Christian tradition, why was your God so late on the scene (roughly 4,000 years ago)?
2) Why did your God so closely resemble what believers would now call the many other competing "pagan gods" at the time your god was first worshiped and written about?
3) Why has the understanding of the attributes/personality of your God is changed so radically from first inception to present?

Anyone?

Ok, I'll put my believers hat on (looks like a dunce cap) and give it the good old college try.

Buffalo wrote:1) Assuming you don't worship the bear god or the fertility goddess and you come from a Judeo-Christian tradition, why was your God so late on the scene (roughly 4,000 years ago)?

He wasn't late on the scene. He was first on the scene. Adam and Eve worshipped Elohim, the one true God, in the name of Jesus, who they knew, through revelation, would come to save them several thousand years later. All of the bear gods, fertility goddesses, and the others in all the pantheons that were imagined to exist by people of old were corruptions of the truth taught to Adam by his offspring who fell away into wickedness.

2) Why did your God so closely resemble what believers would now call the many other competing "pagan gods" at the time your god was first worshiped and written about?

Because all of these "pagan gods" are just corruptions, counterfeits, taught by Satan to the people of old to lead them away from the true God who was known by Adam.

3) Why has the understanding of the attributes/personality of your God is changed so radically from first inception to present?

Adam was a Mormon. So were all the true prophets of old, and the original Twelve Apostles in the New Testament. That this is so is masked by all of the changes, and the plain and precious truths that were taken out of the records these men left, by wicked and adulterous generations who followed.

Basically, it's the Great Apostasy that's to blame. But now we have the same truth that Father Adam once taught, restored to us by Joseph Smith in these, the latter days.

And to your original question about what about all the homo sapiens that may have existed prior to the Biblical timeline of Adam, may I refer you to the famous Hugh Nibley article entitled "Before Adam"? The short answer is: these were not God's people. Whatever they were is not important to us. We belong to the generation of people whom God raised up to fulfill his plans, and to whom he has taught his truths. Whatever people may have existed for hundreds of thousands of years before Adam do not concern us. They are not our people.

Thanks for giving it the old college try, Sethbag. I suppose if an uninformed sort of chapel Mormon were responding, that'd be the response he would give. And of course, hours would be wasted trying to disabuse said chapel Mormon of his fictional ideas about the history of religion. You can lead a flat earther to a globe, but you can't make him look at it.

However, I wonder how an educated believer might respond. One who acknowledges the basic reality of what human beings first worshiped and where and when their god was first worshiped.

Those are pretty good, Sethbag, but you're missing the obvious lazy answer: all the stuff Buff said about the world that was supposed to happen prior to and during biblical times is simply false. We can dismiss it the same way we dismiss all that hocus pocus science stuff, like evolution, plate tectonics, etc. That's just Satan deceiving scientists.

Like George Michael, ya gotta have faith.

Bump

BCs response. Nobody pre Adam was a spirit child of God. Strange that they somehow still figured out how to worship something or another.

Buffalo wrote:I'm looking for the faith-promoting spin on this. Homo sapiens have been around for several hundred thousand years. Religion seems to have evolved gradually, with animal, fertility, and fire gods coming at the forefront perhaps 50,000 years ago. Questions and fear of death seems to have brought about ideas of afterlives and in some cases ancestor worship. Eventually you get these sort of interesting pantheons of gods, usually with a central powerful god and many tribal gods, or many assorted gods responsible for things like ushering souls into hades or pulling the sun across the sky. The stories get more creative over time.

Out of a few of these groups of tribal deities, we get the story of El and the story of Yahweh, who don't look any different from their competitors at the time they were first worshiped, although concepts of this being/these beings have changed radically over time.

That's the short history of religion among the homo sapiens. What's the faith promoting spin on that? Three questions here, really:

1) Assuming you don't worship the bear god or the fertility goddess and you come from a Judeo-Christian tradition, why was your God so late on the scene (roughly 4,000 years ago)?
2) Why did your God so closely resemble what believers would now call the many other competing "pagan gods" at the time your god was first worshiped and written about?
3) Why has the understanding of the attributes/personality of your God is changed so radically from first inception to present?

How do you know what or how people worshiped 50,000 years ago?

BCs response. Nobody pre Adam was a spirit child of God. Strange that they somehow still figured out how to worship something or another.

Never said they weren't intelligent. But you have to also ask yourself why did it take a quarter of a million years or more for homo sapiens to develop civilization?

Jason Bourne wrote:BCs response. Nobody pre Adam was a spirit child of God. Strange that they somehow still figured out how to worship something or another.

Don't forget tossing off his usual lazy accusations like "yellow journalism" and "no one has proven..."