Holland doubles down on Adam and Eve... Hey BC!?

[Guest]

dup

[_canpakes]

Did he not say he didn't know what happened on Earth before the fall, except there was no human death?

Your pre-adamite theory just took an ecclesiastical hit.

How so? I've always said there was no death before the Fall.

But you don't really buy it, by your own admission. You have to rationalize it down to a period of very limited time (days? weeks?) and then cannot explain how Adam could be eating anything during that time.

viewtopic.php?p=859982#p859982

[_ludwigm]

BC Space is the authority on official doctrine. If Holland contradicted BC Space, then Holland is wrong.

But is Holland wrong as a man or an Apostle of the Lord® ?

Wait a minute...
Or at least wait until bcspace reaches 74 as Holland.

To outlive, or not to outlive, that is the question—
Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer

Holland vs bcspace?
Packer vs Perry?

Time solves all problems.

[_I have a question]

I think the explanation is that the humanoid pre-adamites weren't "human". They had animal spirits that looked "human", but they weren't spirit children of God. So Adam was the first "human" with a real human spirit.

It's simply wonderful and wonderfully simple.

That's the apologetic, but it's not the doctrinal explanation. That is that Adam fell circa 4,000 BCE and that there was no death on the earth prior to that. The tangible record which makes that position intellectually untenable causes problems for people like Holland and BC and the Church in rationalising that against what they have explicitly taught and believed for a long time. The repose is always some consulates mental contortions or 'I don't know, but I have faith so I'll stick it on my shelf".

I wonder why the answer the Apostles give isn't "Sorry, I don't know. It looks to contradict what we have taught but I'll ask Christ for the answer next time I'm speaking with Him and come back to you"

[_Chap]

I love Mormonism. One can simply throw out all of the ridiculous crap that former "prophets" taught as absolute truth and make up whatever you want to justify doing so. The built on sand analogy comes to mind here with full force.

Me too. It's why I keep reading this board.

Ultimately, any religion has to do something like this if it wants to survive in a post-Enlightenment world without the power to scare people into silence.

Mormonism is just the most extreme example I know: truly weird foundational claims, ramshackle doctrines put together on the fly by someone who may be politely called a religious entrepreneur, and all done in early modern America in the presence of many non-committed witnesses and a free press (well, as free as it could be when Joseph Smith could not have the press physically smashed). And now the internet ... with a nice cohesive core community in Utah, plus a church with lots of investments, to make sure that the train wreck is slow enough for every fascinating detail to be savored to the full.

I couldn't have asked for anything better.

[_Tator]

I love Mormonism. One can simply throw out all of the ridiculous crap that former "prophets" taught as absolute truth and make up whatever you want to justify doing so. The built on sand analogy comes to mind here with full force.

Me too. It's why I keep reading this board.

Ultimately, any religion has to do something like this if it wants to survive in a post-Enlightenment world without the power to scare people into silence.

Mormonism is just the most extreme example I know: truly weird foundational claims, ramshackle doctrines put together on the fly by someone who may be politely called a religious entrepreneur, and all done in early modern America in the presence of many non-committed witnesses and a free press (well, as free as it could be when Joseph Smith could not have the press physically smashed). And now the internet ... with a nice cohesive core community in Utah, plus a church with lots of investments, to make sure that the train wreck is slow enough for every fascinating detail to be savored to the full.

I couldn't have asked for anything better.

It is purely entertainment for me, too!!

[_sock puppet]

I love Mormonism. One can simply throw out all of the ridiculous crap that former "prophets" taught as absolute truth and make up whatever you want to justify doing so. The built on sand analogy comes to mind here with full force.

Me too. It's why I keep reading this board.

Ultimately, any religion has to do something like this if it wants to survive in a post-Enlightenment world without the power to scare people into silence.

Mormonism is just the most extreme example I know: truly weird foundational claims, ramshackle doctrines put together on the fly by someone who may be politely called a religious entrepreneur, and all done in early modern America in the presence of many non-committed witnesses and a free press (well, as free as it could be when Joseph Smith could not have the press physically smashed). And now the internet ... with a nice cohesive core community in Utah, plus a church with lots of investments, to make sure that the train wreck is slow enough for every fascinating detail to be savored to the full.

I couldn't have asked for anything better.

It is purely entertainment for me, too!!

As long as people keep believing the Mormon absurdities, it will continue to be entertaining. (Glad your back, Tator. We need to do lunch again and you can tell me if you had that beer rendezvous.)

[_honorentheos]

I think the explanation is that the humanoid pre-adamites weren't "human". They had animal spirits that looked "human", but they weren't spirit children of God. So Adam was the first "human" with a real human spirit.

It's simply wonderful and wonderfully simple.

There's so much emphasis in Genesis 2-3 about the knowledge of good and evil, that my personal opinion is that Adam and Eve were the first two humans who really understood the difference between good and evil; before them all humans (or near-humans) were innocent, in the same way that children younger than eight are innocent. So, yes, the humans before Adam and Eve would look human; in many ways they were human, but they hadn't advanced to the point of understanding the difference between good and evil.

So God finds two people who have the potential of understanding the difference between good and evil, and puts them in a garden, and gives them immortality until they partake of the fruit of the tree, at which point God takes their immortality away from them? That's a possibility, I guess. Although, unlike Holland, I don't really see the need for there to have been the immortality in the first place. I respect Holland, so if he tells me there was immortality I'll try to believe that, but like I said, I don't really see the need.

I enjoy Daniel Quinn's interpretation of the Adam and Eve myth he presented in his novel Ishmael:

(from Wikipedia, which offers a reasonable synopsis)

Ishmael's life, which began in the African wilderness, was spent mostly in a zoo and a menagerie, and since had been spent in the gazebo of a man that extricated him from physical captivity. He tells his student that it was at the menagerie that he learned about human language and culture and began to think about things that he never would have pondered in the wild. Subsequently, Ishmael tells his student that the subject for this learning experience will be captivity, primarily the captivity of man under a distorted civilizational system. The narrator claims to Ishmael that he has a vague notion of living in some sort of cultural captivity and being lied to in some way but he can not explain his feelings.

Before proceeding Ishmael lays some ground definitions for his student. He defines:

*Takers as people often referred to as "civilized." Particularly, the culture born in an Agricultural Revolution that began about 10,000 years ago in the Near East; this is the culture of Ishmael's pupil and, presumably, the reader.
*Leavers as people of all other cultures; often derogatorily referred to by Takers as "primitive."
*A story as an interrelation between the gods, man, and the earth, with a beginning, middle, and end.
*To enact is to strive to make a story come true.
*A culture is a people who are enacting a story.

Ishmael proceeds to tease from his pupil the premises of the story (i.e. myth) being enacted by the Takers: that they are the pinnacle of evolution, that the world was made for man, and that man is here to conquer and rule the world. This rule is meant to bring about a paradise, as man increases his mastery of the world, however, he is always failing because he is flawed. Man doesn't know how to live and never will because that knowledge is unobtainable. So, however hard he labors to save the world, he is just going to go on defiling and spoiling it.

Ishmael points out to his student that when the Takers decided there is something fundamentally wrong with humans, they took as evidence only their own culture's history- "They were looking at a half of one-percent of the evidence taken from a single culture-- Not a reasonable sample on which to base such a sweeping conclusion."

Ishmael says:

There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will act as the lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.

Ishmael goes on to help his student discover that, contrary to what the Takers think, there are immutable laws that life is subject to and it is possible to discern them by studying the biological community. Together, Ishmael and his student identify one set of survival strategies which appear to be evolutionarily stable for all species (later dubbed the "Law of Limited Competition"): In short, "you may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war." All species inevitably follow this law, or as a consequence go extinct. The Takers believe themselves to be exempt from this Law and flout it at every point.

Fall of Man

He explains how the Takers rendered themselves above the laws governing life, using the story of The Fall of Man as an example. Ishmael's version of why the fruit was forbidden to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is: eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil provides the gods with the knowledge of who shall live and who shall die—knowledge which they need to rule the world. The fruit nourishes only the gods, though. If Adam ("man") were to eat from this tree, he might think that he gained the gods' wisdom (without this actually happening) and consequently destroy the world and himself through his arrogance. "And so they said to him, you may eat of every tree in the garden, save the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, for on the day you eat of that tree, you will certainly die."

Ishmael makes the point that this story of the Fall of Man, which the Takers have adopted as their own, was in fact developed by Leavers to explain the origin of the Takers. If it were of Taker origin, the story would be of liberating ascent instead of a sinful fall.

Ishmael and his student go on to discuss how, for the ancient Semitic herders among whom the tale originated, the story of Cain killing Abel symbolizes the Leaver being killed off and their lands taken so that it could be put under cultivation. These ancient herders realized that the Takers were acting as if they were gods themselves, with all the wisdom of what is good and evil and how to rule the world. And as a result the gods banished these people from the Garden and they were brought from a life of bounty in the hands of the gods to one of being the accursed tillers of the soil.

To begin discerning the Leavers' story, Ishmael proposes to his student a hypothesis: the Takers' Agricultural Revolution was a revolution against the Leavers' story.

The Leavers take what they need from the world and leave the rest alone. Living in this manner ("in the hands of the gods"), Leavers thrive in times of abundance and dwindle in times of scarcity. The Takers however, practicing their uniquely envisioned form of agriculture (dubbed by Quinn "totalitarian agriculture" in a later book) produce enormous food surpluses, which allows them to thwart the gods when they decide it's the Takers' time to go hungry. "When you have more food than you need, then the gods have no power over you." Thus, Ishmael points out that the Takers revolution was not just a technological change, but also serves a mythological function.

So we have a new pair of names for you: The Takers are 'those who know good and evil' and the Leavers are 'those who live in the hands of the gods'.

Ishmael goes on to point out that by living in the hands of the gods, man is subject to the conditions under which evolution takes place. Australopithecus became Homo by living in the hands of the gods—Man became man by living in the hands of the gods-- "by living the way the bushmen of Africa live; by living the way the Krenakarore of Brazil live... Not the way the Chicagoans live, not the way Londoners live." "In the hands of the gods is where evolution happens." According to the Takers' story, creation came to an end with man. "In order to make their story come true, the Takers have to put an end to creation itself-- and they're doing a damn good job of it!"

Ishmael brings together his synopsis on human culture by examining the story enacted by Leaver cultures, which provides a model of how to live—an alternative story for the Takers to enact.

The premise of the Takers' story is 'The world belongs to man.' ...The premise of the Leavers' story is 'Man belongs to the world.'

For three million years, man belonged to the world and because he belonged to the world, he grew and developed and became brighter and more dexterous until one day, he was so bright and so dexterous that we had to call him Homo sapiens sapiens-- which means he was us.

The Leavers' story is 'the gods made man for the world, the same way they made salmon and sparrows for the world. This seems to have worked well so far so we can take it easy and leave the running of the world to the gods'.

[_Tator]

As long as people keep believing the Mormon absurdities, it will continue to be entertaining. (Glad your back, Tator. We need to do lunch again and you can tell me if you had that beer rendezvous.)

Came back to this dry air and caught a cold but getting better. Lunch sounds great but I think I need to travel north for change....I'll get back with you soon.

[_bcspace]

But you don't really buy it, by your own admission.
http://mormondiscussions.com/phpBB3/vie ... 82#p859982

Sure I do.

Official publication in what? An anonymously authored student manual 'replaces' D&C 77 as spoken by Joseph Smith?

That's the Church interpreting it's own scriptures, not me.

Regardless, the unfortunate problem remains that Whitney wrote a bit more than the muddy and meaningless mishmash that you are selectively including above. Please go to the source (Saturday Night Thoughts) and read the full passages.

No need. The Church included the part it considered doctrinal in it's explanation of D&C 77.

Whitney's claims do not match what modern science accepts as accurate regarding a 7 thousand year 'temporal existence' window for the Earth and the state of humanity on it from that time, nor does much of anything else penned by the author.

Meaningless. The Church used the Whitney quote to express it's doctrine that the various dispensations together do not represent the actual age of the earth. In other words, the Church is consistent with it's other statement in the Old Testament manual; that to ascribe a specific age of the Earth to the Church is not accurately representing the Church's doctrine.

End result: Science - 1, LDS Church, -0-

There is no conflict between the Church and Science.

True enough about those bugs and plants, which would be the least of points to make. That's why the claim, 'No Death Before The Fall' is pretty nonsensical, given that we seem to have much evidence of all sorts of things dying for millions of years before 'The Fall', whenever that was supposed to be. You now seem to be coming around to this realization.

Here you are ignoring the timeline AND the fact that a state of no death that lasts even as long as human lifetime is not likely to be discoverable by science.

And about that Global Flood... heck, even you cannot abide by that one.

Not a problem. I don't see any specific modern revelation about the Flood, just references to it, which means human prophets could merely be connecting their own understanding to the context of actual revelation.

I have no problem with the Church adopting Christian tradition and Ussher's chronology to areas where there is no specific revelation. The overriding principle is going to be the Church's own doctrine on Science, which is to learn it and apply it. D&C (88:78-79).

So yes, I think science will change some of the traditions that are brought over. But so far, there is no hint of important doctrines being changed. The Atonement is safe. The Creation is safe. The Fall is safe. Et. al.