In my long journey through Christianity (about 40 years), I was a member of about 6 different Christian denominations. Each one promised that they were the ONE true church and I would find a home there and all of my questions would be answered and all of my wishes would come true. They weren’t and they didn’t.
But I did discover that they each interpreted the Bible in their own way and then expected you to believe their interpretation.
One example was the story of Adam and Eve. When I was 9, I was old enough to understand that men and women got married and had babies. At that church, we were taught that Adam and Eve only had two sons… Cain and Abel. I got into trouble by asking where the women came from who married Cain and Abel so they could have babies too… I mean without that, the family line pretty much died. My Sunday School teacher either was unwilling or unable to tell me and just demanded that I go and read my Bible, which I did. Still no answers, but even more questions.
The next church taught that Adam and Eve had three sons, Cain, Abel and Seth, but still no answers as to where their wives came from.
A while later at yet another church, we learned that Adam and Eve had Cain, Abel and Seth and many many sons and daughters. Okay, at this point, I was a teenager and all I could imagine was that the boys were having sex with their sisters, and if that was so Biblical, why was it now a taboo in society? Again, no answers.
It wasn’t until I left the church and started studying comparative religions when I learned this:
There were other people in the world, but God was unhappy with them. So he created the Garden of Eden and was going to create a new race of people who would glorify him the way they should. God created Adam. And then God created Lilith, but Lilith refused to submit to Adam as an inferior, so she was banished from the Garden. Then God created Eve, and she was perfect until that pesky serpent came along, and then Eve wasn’t quite as obedient as she was suppose to be. So Adam and Eve had Cain, Abel, Seth and many sons and daughter. The spouses for these children came from the “others”, those outside of the Garden of Eden. Suddenly the others didn’t seem as bad as they have before.
Of course, I’ve long stopped being that anything in the Bible was true, especially in the old testament. Science has shown more than enough evidence for that… started with the first chapter of Genesis.
Yet, there are still people who believe this is literally the gospel truth to the point that they think men have one less rib than women because the Bible says that a rib was taken out of Adam to create Eve. But they can’t explain why men have nipples.
Moondance Pages 