Re: Living and dying with Inaccurate History (was:NTSE Report #1 (fwd))

Glenn Morton (grmorton@psyberlink.net)
Sat, 01 Mar 1997 19:35:06 -0600

At 02:07 PM 3/1/97, dunnirb4@wfu.edu wrote:
>On Sat, 1 Mar 1997, Glenn Morton wrote:
>
>> At 07:40 AM 3/1/97 -0500, Murphy wrote:
>
>> > Since you are going to point out what I didn't respond to in my
>> >last post, let me point out that you don't seem to want to address my
>> >last question here concerning the assumption about the character of
>> >texts.
>>
>> I thought I had answered that one in a previous post where I pointed out
>> that the text of Genesis 4-12, gives all the journalistic type of features,
>> who, what, when where why and how.
>
>Pardon me for butting in on this thread, but doesn't ANY story that
>involves people, actions, dates, places, and motives answer these
>questions? I can't think of a single story that doesn't.
>

I have collected several books and a CD on creation stories. One of the
amazing things, to me is that almost none of them give any place names.
They also do not give a name to the individuals. There is Pea pod man of
the eskimos, or the people were fleas on the body of a dead god in one
chinese story. The Gods are given names but not the people. While adam
means man, Cain, Abel ...Terah Abram are names applied to individuals.

Most of the creation stories involve sex in one form or another. The Hebrew
account doesn't. One aboriginal story involves the activity that cause
Jocelyn Elders to be fired. others have Father sky and Mother Earth making
love. Others like Eurynome fall from the sky and dance on the earth
eventually creating a snake, and she then gives birth to an egg which gives
rise to the people.

The scripture gives a location and a name for the place that man was
created. east in Eden, (I know that Eden means park) but 4 rivers are also
named. This is relatively unique among creation stories. Besides that, the
post creation events are written with names for everybody, actions for
everybody and they are not the "mythical" type of actions which seem to fill
the other creation stories. The murder of Abel is as relevant as today's
newspaper.

glenn

Foundation, Fall and Flood
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm