leaking pen wrote: > My thought has always been, if god created man in "his" own image, and > man is inherently sinful...
No, no, you don't have that right. God created the angels, the Nephilim, and the human race, but His track record, which is documented in the Bible along with various supporting documents, makes it clear that God just wasn't very good at this creation thing. In fact it's not at all clear that evil was in the world before humans were created, as I will explain: He/She/It/They started by creating the angels, or so it would appear, as far as we can tell from the fragments of time-lines we have on hand. Unfortunately God created the angels with the capacity for *envy*. By itself this is not evil, but there's a bad bit of alchemy which played on this capacity, which God certainly should have foreseen. (As long as we're assuming God isn't evil, of course, we must assume God didn't foresee the mess this would produce...) To get the full story, see either the Testament of Moses or the Book of Adam and Eve. God made Adam, like, sub-lord over all, *despite* having made Adam "just a little lower than the angels". One angel in particular was seriously galled by the fact that God had actually placed Adam *above* the angels in rank order, despite Adam's manifest inferiority vis a vis those angels. That angel was, of course, Lucifer, and the worm of envy ate away at Lucifer and that is the source of (much of the) evil in the world. Thus, we can see that, if Lucifer hadn't had the capacity for *envy*, the world would be in much better shape today. Now, I said God wasn't real great at this creation thing; it wasn't just this mess-up with Lucifer which leads to that conclusion. Consider the Nephilim. They were, as far as one can tell, an early experiment in creation and they went seriously wrong. This is alluded to in Genesis, but to get the full scoop you really need to read the (misplaced) book of Enoch. (I say "misplaced" because it was quite literally misplaced for quite a few centuries, and only found again relatively recently. Note well: Enoch is quoted by Jude, so if we take the zero-error approach to the Bible we must include Enoch by reference, since Jude surely wouldn't have quoted Enoch if Enoch weren't also perfect ... right? The fact that Enoch was never really lost supports this view, too, as all the "true books" must ultimately be indestructible, as a moment's reflection will surely convince you.) But it wasn't just the Nephilim -- in fact one can also blame the Nephilim on some rather wayward angels, according to at least one version of the story. (But again, it appears that the angels in question were envious and covetous and that comes right back to the flawed angelic recipe God used to start with.) There's something even worse buried here: It took God multiple tries to get Adam's wife "right". The first attempt, who was named Lilith, was just a walking disaster. The second time around, when God created Eve, things went a lot better. Incidentally, if God used one of Adam's ribs to create Eve, then he may have done the same for Lilith, and this would explain why men have equal numbers of ribs on both sides -- obviously God took one from one side for Eve, and one from the other side for Lilith. (So, which one was the left-winger? Not sure...) Anyhow we have here a very sorry record of creationism. Lucifer was obviously flawed from the get-go, the Nephilim were just a terrible mistake, and Lilith, who apparently got away rather than being wiped from the page of time, has caused who-knows-how much trouble over the millenia. Whatever, if the lot of you are going to pursue this silly subject, at least try to get the references right, and don't just *ignore* the ones you don't like. (BTW the Bible actually looks a lot more consistent if we (a) abandon the zero-error approach and (b) attempt to throw out all the obviously bogus books. The New Testament, in particular, gets reduced to the book of Mark and a few Pauline letters, with relatively few inconsistencies and sillinesses and some reasonably good philosophical advice.)
