On the origin of life

No, I just feel sorry for you all because you've fallen for the Big Lie. I expect the world to contradict scripture, scripture tells me that it will and why, although I must admit I'm surprised at how insistently it is contradicted. By now you'd think I'd no longer be surprised by it.

I think you got something wrong here. The physical world, which I guess you are calling reality, can't contradict scripture. What contradicts scripture is the thinking of fallen humanity, which of course includes fallen thinking about the physical world.ABE: Ah yes, now I get it. To you the "world" is the physical world. I should have been clearer what I meant. "The world" in scripture usually refers to the world of fallen humanity, not to the physical world. Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

The lie is the fallen human denial of God the Creator with the substitution of the idea of great ages and evolution that can explain everything as an automatic natural process that doesn't require God. More than that it's ALL of fallen humanity's efforts to understand the world (in the sense of everything that exists) in a-theistic human-oriented terms and get rid of God altogether. It's just how the human fallen mind works since we lost our spiritual connection with God due to the Fall. The motivation I suppose comes down to the ancient desire "to be as God" which the serpent proposed would be the result of eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

You choose to believe the serpent; I choose to believe God. There's really nothing more to any of this than that. Whatever the reason God didn't want us to have "the knowledge of good and evil" it was not a good thing for us or God would not have forbidden it and punished us for it. I know this because I know that God is good and means good to us; I know this from experience and I know it from the whole context of scripture. Whatever the knowledge of good and evil means it most likely doesn't mean the simplistic things so many make of it. You either believe God means good to us or not. Obvious you believe the latter, you believe the serpent, and I believe the former.I don't fully understand why the knowledge of good and evil was bad for us but I know from the context and the results that it was. There are lots of explanations online including different understandings of what the knowledge of good and evil means, but I don't find any of them completely convincing probably because I don't think the meaning of that phrase is clear. I am certain, however, that your understanding of it is completely wrong. I figure I'll eventually understand it and that's all I need to know for now.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

What did I say that you think missed the point? He believed the serpent, I believe God, and I know the story, so what did I miss?Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

There is no "god character" in the Bible, there is only God Himself. God cannot lie but obviously you can. There is only one Flood in the Bible. Your two floods are just two different accounts of the same Flood.

The accord between God and Satan is superficial. What Satan didn't say is that by disobeying we would all lose our connection with God, the first stage of death which is what God said would happen, which Satan denied; so being "like God" turns out to be an evil thing that is bad for us even if literally it is true.

They did die the same day, you just don't know what it means. They died spiritually. If it hadn't been true that they would die then they wouldn't have died physically a thousand years later either, but they did. The commentators know what they are talking about; obviously you don't understand any of it.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

As with many things in the Bible, we are to learn from its use of the word "die" that it is not limited to the meaning we ordinarily attach to it. If of course you insist on that meaning you cannot learn anything from the Bible, in this case that the word applies to many shades of death. Not only total physical death where the organism stops breathing and its body returns to dust, which didn't happen to Adam and Eve and most of their progeny for almost a thousand years, but every kind of physical infirmity also entered the world at the Fall, disease being a form of death. Any kind of infirmity or deformity is a form of death because Creation started out absolutely perfect, free of any kind of sickness or imperfection.You can also learn from the Bible that the first thing that happened at the Fall was that Adam and Eve hid from God whereas they used to "walk with" God in the Garden, having intimate communion with Him. This is one of the signs of the spiritual death that was the beginning of the fulfillment of the prophecy that they would die.There are lots of ways our spiritual death is apparent throughout the history of fallen humanity since all the tribes became prey to the sins promoted by Satan and followed religions designed by him, most of us even losing the memory of the true God.The main clue to our spiritual death is probably that Jesus came to "quicken" us, or bring us back to life from our normal condition of death, being "dead in sins." He is said to be a living spirit who rectifies what we lost at the Fall. When He sent the Holy Spirit to His disciples they became emboldened to preach the good news of this great redemption from the dead. It was through one man Adam that death came into the world, and through the one man Jesus that life is restored to us. That may be a bad paraphrase but I think it's close enough.ABE: Hint: You can't really understand the Bible unless you have received the restoration of spiritual ife through Jesus, otherwise known as being "born again," or regenerated or "quickened." Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

It's the Bible that dictates how the word "die" is used. Other uses I didn't mention are Jesus' telling us we must "die to self," and "die to sin." And "put to death the sins of the body" is another phrase found in the Bible. There are probably others but I used up most of them in the earlier post.

Oh dear, I'm getting to the point of tearing out my hair again, although I'd much prefer to tear out hair from some other heads that are determined to make hash out of reasonable arguments.Pressie, the context is what the Bible says; therefore the Bible defines how the word is being used.But since you are going to go on and say something even more ridiculous this is my last post on the subject here.How about you go back to the YEC-OEC thread and grapple with the fact that so many there think it possible to find oil without any knowledge of ancient dating.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

As I already said, I think the quintessential example of spiritual death is Adam and Eve's hiding from God (even in sin one should seek God in contrition for forgiveness). But there is nobody in the OT who doesn't exhibit spiritual death, except God Himself and the preincarnate Jesus (abe: and God's own holy angels of course; and I guess there are some holy men who could be mentioned, such as Daniel in particular who was fallen too of course but acted with amazing wisdom throughout his life. And Joseph. Others acted with wisdom but acknowledged their errors so I don't include them even though that too is great wisdom/abe).Spiritual death is essentially sinfulness, disobedience of God, being out of touch with God, living for self instead of for God and for others, which is true of all of us. All of us suffer from spiritual death in this life, even those who have been regenerated by faith in Christ. We won't be free of it until we are with Him for eternity.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.