Recently, I embarked on the exciting, educational quest of reading the Bible from start to finish As of right now, I’m still on the Genesis-read, no further than page fifteen, and already I feel a rant coming on, which is presumably just the first of many that I‘ll feel the urge to write while reading the Bible. Basically, the first major things that both bugged me, intrigued me, and didn’t seem to add up was the incest factor. Without further ado, I present Bible rants, part one!
Incest. Sure it is a different time period and stuff, but really, has it EVER been acceptable to marry and reproduce with your own sister? (Not to even MENTION the anti-feminist themes, beginning with the fact that women are almost never mentioned by name, and are treated like possessions).
Granted, it’s not like it specifically SAID that Cain’s [Cain=Son of Adam and Eve] wife was his sister, but given the fact that Adam and Eve were the only two people on earth to start with, who else could it have been? And of course, the writer glosses over that little fact, presumably to try and make it look as though they weren't promoting the worst kind of incest. Even after more people were born, people would still have been marrying their brothers, sisters, and cousins, and of course even though it may seem slightly better to mate with your cousin that with your sibling, it would be pretty much the same thing, seeing as you and your cousin would have been born to parents who were siblings and…..okay, I’ll stop that rant.
Anyways, ew. Good thing it isn’t common practice to live just like they do in the Bible nowadays.
But to me though, all that incest brought up another interesting point. These days, from what I’ve heard, because of genetics and such, if people who are closely related have kids, the kids are likely/almost definitely going to have some sort of birth defects, mental issues, etc. Apparently the further back you and your spouse’s common ancestor was, the less likely your kid is to be born with anything wrong with them. So anyways, why wasn’t the world back then filled with a bunch of deformed, mentally handicapped people? If people were going so far as to sleep with their own siblings to reproduce, then naturally they should have had extremely handicapped children, and if you’ve got a whole society full of handicapped and/or deformed people, wouldn’t the society either:
a. Die out after a few generations?
or
b. Lead to more and more generations of crippled, handicapped people due to incest, and therefore today’s society should be a world of mentally ill people with defects?
That is, if the Bible is pure fact.
But of course I seem to have forgotten the fact that God was there. Of course if any kids were born with defects, God would have been there to fix it all up, right? And that’s so totally obvious that they aren’t going to mention it at all in the Bible, of course.
So God would have swooped in to save the day on any potentially handicapped or defected newborns, presumably, yet was unable to make more people on the earth that weren’t related to just end the whole problem before it started, right?
Then of course, another possible explanation would be that since God made people out of dirt, genetics weren’t a problem back then. Heck, if you don’t have any DNA or genes, no problem to sleep with your sister, huh? Doesn’t make it any less gross though, at least in my opinion……
So therefore if today, it’s been proven that humans DO in fact have DNA and genes, yet were made from dirt, (or in women’s case, ribs) in the beginning, apparently sometime along the way we magically acquired the complex internal workings of our bodies. Though that does seem somewhat contradicted by the fact that Adam and Eve would have needed at least some basic body functions to even produce Children in the first place, and we know that Adam at least had ribs, since Eve was made out of them, so either they were like incomplete human prototypes that had some bodily functions but not others, or they DID have DNA and genes, which of course brings back the whole incest thing.
Okay, I’ll conclude this particular rant now. Please feel free to debate this, argue, or correct me on any facts or information that I may have gotten wrong.
Incest. Sure it is a different time period and stuff, but really, has it EVER been acceptable to marry and reproduce with your own sister? (Not to even MENTION the anti-feminist themes, beginning with the fact that women are almost never mentioned by name, and are treated like possessions).
Granted, it’s not like it specifically SAID that Cain’s [Cain=Son of Adam and Eve] wife was his sister, but given the fact that Adam and Eve were the only two people on earth to start with, who else could it have been? And of course, the writer glosses over that little fact, presumably to try and make it look as though they weren't promoting the worst kind of incest. Even after more people were born, people would still have been marrying their brothers, sisters, and cousins, and of course even though it may seem slightly better to mate with your cousin that with your sibling, it would be pretty much the same thing, seeing as you and your cousin would have been born to parents who were siblings and…..okay, I’ll stop that rant.
Anyways, ew. Good thing it isn’t common practice to live just like they do in the Bible nowadays.
But to me though, all that incest brought up another interesting point. These days, from what I’ve heard, because of genetics and such, if people who are closely related have kids, the kids are likely/almost definitely going to have some sort of birth defects, mental issues, etc. Apparently the further back you and your spouse’s common ancestor was, the less likely your kid is to be born with anything wrong with them. So anyways, why wasn’t the world back then filled with a bunch of deformed, mentally handicapped people? If people were going so far as to sleep with their own siblings to reproduce, then naturally they should have had extremely handicapped children, and if you’ve got a whole society full of handicapped and/or deformed people, wouldn’t the society either:
a. Die out after a few generations?
or
b. Lead to more and more generations of crippled, handicapped people due to incest, and therefore today’s society should be a world of mentally ill people with defects?
That is, if the Bible is pure fact.
But of course I seem to have forgotten the fact that God was there. Of course if any kids were born with defects, God would have been there to fix it all up, right? And that’s so totally obvious that they aren’t going to mention it at all in the Bible, of course.
So God would have swooped in to save the day on any potentially handicapped or defected newborns, presumably, yet was unable to make more people on the earth that weren’t related to just end the whole problem before it started, right?
Then of course, another possible explanation would be that since God made people out of dirt, genetics weren’t a problem back then. Heck, if you don’t have any DNA or genes, no problem to sleep with your sister, huh? Doesn’t make it any less gross though, at least in my opinion……
So therefore if today, it’s been proven that humans DO in fact have DNA and genes, yet were made from dirt, (or in women’s case, ribs) in the beginning, apparently sometime along the way we magically acquired the complex internal workings of our bodies. Though that does seem somewhat contradicted by the fact that Adam and Eve would have needed at least some basic body functions to even produce Children in the first place, and we know that Adam at least had ribs, since Eve was made out of them, so either they were like incomplete human prototypes that had some bodily functions but not others, or they DID have DNA and genes, which of course brings back the whole incest thing.
Okay, I’ll conclude this particular rant now. Please feel free to debate this, argue, or correct me on any facts or information that I may have gotten wrong.