“Beauty Happens hypothesis.” It starts with animals developing random preferences—for colors, songs, displays, and more—which they use in choosing their mates. Their offspring inherit not only those sexy traits, but also the preference for them. By choosing what they like, choosers transform both the form and the objects of their desires.
Natural Selection and Evolution
When discussing natural selection as a possible mechanism for evolution, it is important to define both terms. Evolutionists and biblical creationists view these terms differently, but it comes down to how we interpret the evidence in light of our foundation. Do we view natural selection using God’s Word as our foundation, or do we use man’s truth as our foundation?
Animism (from the Latin: animus or anima, meaning mind or soul) refers to a belief in numerous personalized, supernatural beings endowed with reason, intelligence and/or volition, that inhabit both objects and living beings and govern their existences. More simply, it is the belief that "everything is conscious" or that "everything has a soul." The term has been further extended to refer to a belief that the natural world is a community of living personas, only some of whom are human. As a term, "animism" has also been used in academic circles to refer to the types of cultures in which these animists live.
Animism recognizes that the universe is alive with spirits and that humans are interrelated with them. In animistic thought, the human spirit or soul is often identified with the shadow or the breath. In Latin, breath is spiritus, in Greek pneuma, in Hebrew ruach, and in Sanskrit prana, all words which also have spiritual connotations.
As the soul is often understood as a metaphysical, indwelling presence, it is not surprising that, for many animist cultures, unconsciousness is explained as being due to the absence of the soul.
According to Scientist, early men were hunter-gatherers who prayed to trees, the river, the sun, the moon, etc. — or what we call animism in anthropology of religion and psychology of religion but according to Abrahamic faiths, Adam was not just the first human but the first Prophet of God as well. In other words, Adam was God’s messenger who was given the task of bringing the message of God to humankind, which did not exist yet at that time until he and Eve started having children and their children had sex with one another to bless Adam and Eve with grandchildren.
“O Mankind fear your Lord, Who created you from a single person, and from him He created his mate and from the twain He spread abroad many men and women.”
So that means Adam and his family had a religion back then. And their religion was the true religion of God. From there, the descendants of Adam and Eve migrated all over the world until the great flood when they were then all wiped out because they had sinned They no longer followed the true religion of God.
According to a belief Adam is said to be of a certain religion, but God decided to wipe out humankind and start all over again with Noah and his immediate family and a pair of each of the animals in existence. Then the great migration started yet again with the descendants of Noah populating the earth.
According to what the Holy Books tell us, all the animals of this world plus the handful of people from Noah’s family assembled in one place. After the flood had subsided, they then went back to where they were originally from. And that is why we do not find the same animals in every country but different animals in different countries.
Human Evolution
Are humans simply the by-product of evolution from an ape-like ancestor or were they lovingly fashioned by God in His own image?
CHANGES...
We shared the years
We shared each day
In love together
We found a way
But soon the world
Had its evil way
My heart was blinded
Love went astray
I'm going through changes...
A Wipeout of Mankind: Story of Prophet Noah & The Great Flood.
God decided He had made a mistake by creating humankind and He was greatly troubled by this so He decided to repent and wipe out humankind except for one family, Noah’s family. Noah, who died at age 950 (Genesis 9:29), was over 500 years old when God ordered him to build an ark. The length of the ark was 300 cubits, the width was 50 cubits, and the height was 30 cubits. It was to be of three levels with a door at the side and with one window (Genesis 6:14-17). So the ark was 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high.
Then Noah was ordered to load the ark with his entire family plus seven of each clean animal and two of each unclean animal. The estimated number of each species of living things on earth are 6.5 million living on land and 2.2 million living in the water. Hence this would come to an estimated total of about 20 million living things altogether.
Noah was then ordered to load fresh food and fresh water to keep these 20 million or so living things alive over the one year that they will all be living in the ark. The Bible tells us that it rained for 40 days, the water remained for another 150 days, and it took another 150 days for the water to recede, a total of 340 days or almost a year. All these 20 million humans and other living things remained trapped in this fully enclosed ark, except for just one window, for an entire year with only one window for ventilation.
The Qur’an does not offer us the details like the Bible does but the Qur’an more or less, in not so many words, confirms that the incident did happen.
Genesis 6
6. And the Lord repented that He had made man on the earth, and it grieved Him in His heart.
7. And the Lord said, “I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, and the creeping thing and the fowls of the air, for I repent that I have made them.”
Genesis 7
1. And the Lord said unto Noah, “Come thou and all thy house into the ark, for thee have I seen righteous before Me in this generation.
2. Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female; and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.
3. Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female, to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.
4. For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights, and every living substance that I have made will I destroy from off the face of the earth.”
5. And Noah did according unto all that the Lord commanded him.
6. And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth.
7. And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him into the ark, because of the waters of the flood.
8. Of clean beasts, and of beasts that are not clean, and of fowls and of every thing that creepeth upon the earth,
9. There went in two by two unto Noah into the ark, the male and the female as God had commanded Noah.
10. And it came to pass after seven days that the waters of the flood were upon the earth.
11. In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, that same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
12. And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.
13. In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem and Ham and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark—
14. They, and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort.
15. And they went in unto Noah into the ark, two by two of all flesh wherein is the breath of life.
16. And they that went in, went in male and female of all flesh, as God had commanded him; and the Lord shut him in.
17. And the flood was forty days upon the earth, and the waters increased and bore up the ark, and it was lifted up above the earth.
18. And the waters prevailed and were increased greatly upon the earth, and the ark went upon the face of the waters.
19. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth, and all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered.
20. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail, and the mountains were covered.
21. And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl and of cattle and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:
22. All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, all that was on the dry land, died.
23. And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man and cattle, and the creeping things and the fowl of the heaven, and they were destroyed from the earth. And Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.
24. And the waters prevailed upon the earth a hundred and fifty days.
To conduct a study on the history of religion and a study on comparative religion, you cannot avoid the question of whether God created humankind or humankind created God. This would in particular be very apparent if you study the early religions of humankind.
Humankind was supposed to already have known God from the beginning of time. But early men were hunter-gatherers who prayed to trees, the river, the sun, the moon, etc. — or what we call animism in anthropology of religion and psychology of religion.
Does this mean after receiving an education regarding religion and God, humankind forgot what it had learned and eventually deviated from the true religion of God?
The history of religion, according to the Gospels, if compared to what the anthropologists have to say, deviates drastically. There is a large gap in the history of humankind, which the Gospels do not explain. We start with one family and from this one family and one religion many nations emerge. All these nations are then wiped out in a great flood and humankind starts all over again with just one family and one religion.
Today, we again see humankind divided under so many nations and so many religions plus so many sects of the same religion. Were we really one and then became divided (twice) or were we never one in the first place.
Religion says we were once one and then we became divided. Anthropologists, historians and archaeologist say we were never one in the first place, as the scientific evidence seems to show.
Scientific evidence and religious evidence are not of the same view regarding the origin of the species, in particular how religion came about.
But religionists appear very confident that they know the truth although this truth is based on faith and not evidence.
And they will kill and die to defend this truth.Nevertheless, one fact still remains the same — and that is either religion is right or science is right, which means the other must be wrong.
Life Of Creation...
According to Archbishop James Ussher, the world was created (Day 1) just over 6,000 years ago on 23rd October 4004 BC.
One of Ussher’s many projects was to write a complete history of the world in Latin, covering every major event from the time of creation to AD 70. He published this 1,600-page volume in 1650. An English translation entitled The Annals of the World was first published in 1658, two years after his death.
In preparing this work, Ussher first made the assumption that the Bible is the only reliable source of chronological information for the time periods covered therein. In fact, before the Persian Empire (approximately the sixth to third centuries BC) very little is known from any source about Greek, Roman and Egyptian history or the history of other nations; much rests on speculation and myths. Dates in secular history become more certain with the founding of the Medo-Persian Empire.
For events before this time, Ussher relied solely on data from the Bible to erect his historical framework. He chose the death of King Nebuchadnezzar as a reliable date upon which to anchor all the earlier biblical dates. Working meticulously backward from there, he ended up with his date for creation of 23rd October 4004 BC.
According to Genesis, as what some people believe, God started building the universe just over 6,000 years ago. Islam does not have any theory on this while Hinduism places the date much earlier. Scientists, anthropologists and archaeologists say we are talking about 4.5 billion years.
Evolution & Survival of the Beautiful Species...
Courage, pugnacity, perseverance, strength and size of body, weapons of all kinds, musical organs, both vocal and instrumental, bright colors and ornamental appendages, have all been indirectly gained by the one sex or the other, through the exertion of choice, the influence of love and jealousy, and the appreciation of the beautiful...
Charles Darwin, 1871, The Descent of Man
Do animals truly appreciate beauty? Darwin believed that other animals have a keen sense for beauty, as the opening quote shows. Many of today’s biologists would take a different view. David Rothenberg argues in his book Survival of the Beautiful that they do indeed and that a movement toward beauty is important at many different levels in the animal kingdom.
In The Descent of Man, Darwin put forward an explicitly aesthetic view of sexual selection, in which animal beauty evolves because it’s pleasurable to the animals themselves. And despite the book’s title, Darwin spent many of its pages focusing on the choices of females, casting them as agents of their own evolution and arguing that their preferences were a powerful force behind nature’s diversity.
Darwin’s contemporaries were having none of it. They believed that animals didn’t have rich subjective worlds, lacking the mental abilities that had been divinely endowed to humans. And the idea of female animals making fine-grained choices seemed doubly preposterous to the Victorian patriarchy. One scientist wrote that female whims were so fickle that they could never act as a consistent source of selection. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of evolutionary theory, also rejected Darwin’s ideas, insisting that beauty must be the result of adaptation, and that sexual selection is just another form of natural selection. In a feat of sheer chutzpah, he even claimed that his view was more Darwinian than Darwin’s in a book called Darwinism. “I can still remember wanting to throw Wallace around the room when I read that,” says Prum, who accuses the man of turning sexual selection into an ‘intellectually impoverished theory.’”
That legacy still infects evolutionary biology today. Consider orgasms, which Prum does at length in a later chapter. “There’s an entire field on the evolution of orgasm that’s devoid of any discussion of pleasure,” he says. “It’s stunningly bad science, and once more, it places male quality at the causal center.” For example, some researchers suggested that contractions produced during female orgasm are adaptations that allow women to better “upsuck”—no, really—the sperm of the best males. Others theorists suggested that female orgasm is the equivalent of male nipples—an inconsequential byproduct of natural selection acting on the opposite sex. Both ideas trivialize the sexual agency of women, Prum says, and completely fail to engage with the thing they’re actually trying to explain--women’s subjective experiences of sexual pleasure.
For Beauty Rules!!!
In 2005, a woman named Patricia Brennan joined Prum’s lab with an interest in animal genitals—and in ducks. Most birds don’t have penises, but male ducks have huge, corkscrew-shaped ones that they extrude into females at high speed. But Brennan showed that female ducks have equally convoluted vaginas, which spiral in the opposite direction and include several dead-end pockets. Why?
Duck sex is intense and violent. Several males will often try to force themselves onto a female, and they use their ballistic penises to deposit sperm as far inside their mates as possible. But Brennan, by getting drakes to launch their penises into variously shaped glass tubes, showed that a female’s counter-spiraling vagina can stop the progress of her partner’s phallus. If she actually wants to mate, she can change her posture and relax the walls of her genital tract to offer a male easy passage. As a result, even in species where 40 percent of sexual encounters are forced, more than 95 percent of chicks are actually sired by a female’s chosen partner.
I wrote about Brennan’s work back in 2009, and I’ve since heard it repeatedly called “that duck penis study.” But really, it’s a duck vagina story. It’s a story of females asserting their agency, even in the face of persistent violence. “And when females get sexual autonomy, what do they do with it?” says Prum. “They make aesthetic choices, and the result is this aesthetic explosion over time.” By retaining their capacity to choose, female ducks force male plumage, displays and songs to continually evolve to court those choices. Sexual autonomy is an evolutionary engine of beauty.“That research was transformative for me,” says Prum. It’s one of several reasons why The Evolution of Beauty is an explicitly feminist book. It’s disdainful about the male biases that characterize much of evolutionary psychology. Instead, it consistently centers female choice and repeatedly draws on feminist scholarship.
“If you say anything about a feminist science, you get a lot of negative blowback immediately,” says Prum. “But this isn’t a science that accommodates itself to feminist principles. It’s about the discovery of feminist concepts in biology itself.” By his reckoning, freedom of choice isn’t a matter of ideology. It arises from evolution, and it shapes subsequent evolution—and it’s about time that biologists recognized that.
“It’s a sad thing that, given the promise of evolutionary biology, we’ve really failed to lead culture in any meaningful way, whether in thinking about racism, sexism, or economic disparity,” says Prum. “We’re just hanging at the rear end. And there’s a real prospect for that to change because of all the power of evolutionary theory to be relevant to people and people’s lives.”
A Pricetag of Beauties...
Based on God's teachings, a religious leaders (mufti) of a certain state has condemned men who allow their wives to become the breadwinner of the family while they, the husbands, stay home as househusbands. According to him, the accepted order of nature is that the wives should stay home as housewives while the men should go out to earn the money to support their families. If a man allows his wife to become the breadwinner of the family while he stays home to look after the children and do the housework then the marriage is not blessed, argued this religious leader, the head honcho of religion in that state.
Anything that God does not bless would certainly be headed for doom and only no good would come out of it. In a survey, it was found that many professional women do not want to get married because of the problem of finding husbands at par with them. If a woman is highly qualified and is earning a sizeable salary, then she would have to seek a husband even higher qualified and in an income bracket above her.
But how many men in this category are available and eligible for marriage? Those of this station in life would most likely already be married with children as well. The only unattached men available for marriage would be those younger than the woman. But then they would be juniors and in the lower rung of their careers. It would be very difficult to find one of the bosses who is still unmarried unless of course he is divorced, which means then he would be ‘second-hand’. Most men would feel intimidated of marrying above their station anyway and very few would want a wife who is more qualified than him and is the main breadwinner of the family — while he brings in pittance that hardly supports him, let alone his entire family.
Career women would not want to marry too early in life, especially if their career comes first and they would like to focus on their career and not get bogged down by a family just yet. But once they are finished building up their career and are ready to settle down, they would have gained some years and most of those within their age group would already be married. They would then have to lower the age group to find available bachelors, but in terms of career they would all be her juniors and earning a fraction of what she is.
The option therefore would be to become somebody’s second wife, look for a divorcee or widower, marry a younger man who is beneath her station, or stay single and never get married. Not much of a choice is it?
We must remember that if the woman is a professional while her husband has no qualifications, it would be better for the woman to work while the man stays home rather than vice versa. What he earns is probably just double the cost of the maid they need to employ if both go out to work. Then there is the cost for him to go to work, which takes away the balance of his salary. In short, after paying the cost of the maid and his cost to go to work, there is no real take home pay to speak about. He spends what he earns just to earn it, with no spare. It is better he just stays home and let the wife earn the salary. At least one parent is looking after the kids and sending them to school instead of transferring this task to the maid and school bus. And one never really knows how well the maid is going to raise those kids anyway.
Unbelievable: Don’t always believe what you believe
Religionists believe what they believe. Those who believe in God is term as theists and who do not believe in God is term as an atheists. Polytheists are those who believe in many gods. And the reason for the term religionists and not theists is because religionists are more focused on religion than in God in their beliefs.
You have a belief and you think that this belief is correct. You believe you are right about your beliefs. Hence you believe what you believe. But are you absolutely sure that what you believe is correct even if you may believe so? You believe that what you believe is right. But how do you know that you are not wrong about what you believe?
You don’t, really, because what you believe is what you have been told and there is no way of knowing that what you have been told is the truth.
Muslims believe in Prophets of the other religions as also Prophets of Islam. And from the beginning of time there were supposed to be 124,000 Prophets in all, according to the Muslim belief. And EVERY community has a Prophet; sometimes some communities have more than one Prophet at one time. But only 25 Prophets are mentioned by name in the Quran. This means 123,975 more Prophets are unknown. Could Buddha be one of them? Could be, who knows, since there are no names mentioned for 123,975 of the Prophets.
Amongst Muslims believes there are major disagreements as to which Hadith are authentic and which are fakes. There are supposed to be 700,000 Hadith in all. Some Muslims accept only 7,000 of them. Others accept only 5,000. And there are some who accept only 500. Then we have those who reject the entire 700,000 and will not accept even one as authentic.
Muslims need to re-evaluate their beliefs. Not all are correct and much has been twisted over more than 1,000 years to suit various political agendas through the ages. Even the 700,000 Hadith have been whittled down to less than 7,000. That comes to less than 1%. Even then, if you consider the overlaps or repeats, you will end up with less than 5,000 Hadith or just 0.7%. And some Islamic sects accept only 500 or reject all totally.
It is believed that much of the Hadith were created by ‘spin-doctors’ during the time of the Muslim divide and civil wars. Hence many are suspect. And the Hadith is very important because while the Muslims may be united when it comes to the Quran, it is the Hadith that divides them. And it is the Hadith that makes Muslims do what the Quran forbids them from doing.
There are this believe that is made compulsory to believe in the Hadith (or accept the Hadith) or else one would not be able to understand the Quran because the Hadith explains the Quran.
First of all, are they saying that the Quran is an incomprehensible book? In that case, the claim by the Quran itself that it is a complete book would become disputable.
Secondly, the Hadith explains only 28 of the 114 chapters of the Quran — or just 25%. And even then not the entire chapter but just a portion of the chapter. Hence if we need the Hadith to be able to comprehend the Quran that would mean a large portion of the Quran would remain incomprehensible.
Some Muslims believe that you must never touch the Qur’an unless you first take your ablution (wuduk). It is haram to touch a Quran when you have not been purified by your ablution (some call it prayer water or air sembahyang). Ask ten Malay-Muslims and probably nine will say that this is true. This is what they have been taught and surely their ustaz (religious teacher) is not wrong. Invariably, this means, therefore, that non-Muslims cannot touch a Qur’an. It is taboo for them to touch a Qur’an since they are not Muslims and, therefore, would not be purified with ablution.
Was Jesus a Buddhist Monk???
The BBC made a documentary entitled “Jesus Was A Buddhist Monk, ” and it looks at the theory that Jesus was not crucified and when he was in his 30s he went back to the place he loved.
The documentary said that Jesus escaped death and went to stay in Afghanistan with Jewish settlers. Local people were said to have confirmed the fact that Jesus had spent many years in the Kashmir Valley and had remained there until he passed away at the age of 80 years. If Jesus did spend 16 years when he was a youth in the region, along with the last 45 years of his life, he would have spent around 61 years in total in India, Tibet, and regions close-by. There are locals who believe that Jesus was in fact laid to rest at the Roza Bal shrine in Srinagar in Kashmir.
Document Revealing Story Of Jesus Found In Buddhist Monastery
A Russian doctor by the name of Nicolas Notovitch was traveling through India, Tibet, and Afghanistan during the 19th century and it was said that he spent time at a monastery in Tibet with the name of the Tibetan Buddhist Monastery, which was in Hemis, in Leh in India. He is said to have translated a document that tells the story of Jesus, aka Issa, which means son of God. The story said that he had been born during the first century into a family who was poor in Israel.
The tutors in the monastery called him the son of God from aged 13 to 29. It was said that Notovitch went on to translate 200 of the verses out of the 224 that were in the document.
A Lama explained to Notovitch the scope, along with the level of enlightenment, which Jesus had managed to achieve during his time at the monastery and this was said to be an extreme level. The Lama said that Jesus was a great prophet and had been the first following twenty-two Buddha’s. He went on to say that he was greater than all of the Dalai Lamas as he constituted the spirituality of the Lord.
Jesus’ Lost Years May Finally Have Been Found
What’s that? You didn’t know Jesus was missing?
The New Testament has a Black Hole from the ages 12 to 30 of Jesus’ life. In the world of film we call that sort of omission a “jump cut.” In Fundamentalism, they call it a part of Jesus’ life that God doesn’t think you need to know about, or God would have made sure it was included in the Bible. On one page of the Gospel of Luke Jesus is 12 years old in the Temple in Jerusalem and then... nothing... nothing for 18 years until Jesus shows up at the River Jordan to be baptized by John the Baptist.
Never heard Jesus called Saint Issa? It’s how they refer to him in the Muslim and Hindu worlds, and even the Buddhists are said to conceal a very ancient manuscript in a monastery high in the Himalayas called “The Life of Saint Issa, the Best of the Sons of Men.” The story of the existence of that manuscript, that fills in the missing years of Christ and describes his travels as a young man in India — and even has Jesus exhorting the Hindus to stop worshiping idols and give up the caste system — has been resoundingly debunked in much of the Christian world for nearly a century. It’s long overdue that the debunking stop. Our journey to India, following the trail of those who saw and translated the manuscript several times, gives a very convincing case that the manuscript does exist, and that it dovetails neatly with a long list of other kinds of evidence that put Jesus in India during that period of his life. If true, that journey of Jesus to the East was conveniently omitted from the New Testament. You don’t think Jesus could have reached India during his years as a young man? If he had remained in Judea, wouldn’t he have been married off at age thirteen, the age all Jewish boys attain manhood? The silk road to India and beyond was much-traveled. There were caravans of merchants. And if there were three Wise Men (the Magi) from the East who were present at Jesus’ birth, doesn’t it imply (as Indian sage Paramahansa Yogananda claimed) that a tug from the Orient was present in Jesus’ life from the beginning? Then why would the Lord not return the visit? Especially since the oldest temples in the world, belonging to the oldest religions, were in India.
And why did Jesus send Saint Thomas to India to preach the Gospel there after the crucifixion, if Jesus never knew the importance of India? Doubting Thomas preached in India for twenty years and died there. It’s a well-supported fact. Take a look at Jesus in India and you’ll begin to see what may have happened in those missing years of Jesus’ life, and what may have been omitted (deliberately... or just lost?) from the story you’ve been told again and again since childhood.
Ahmadi Muslims hold the unique belief that Jesus (peace be upon him) survived the crucifixion and travelled towards India to continue his ministry among the Lost Tribes of Israel. Furthermore, they claim that his tomb, containing his body, has been recently re-discovered in India where it can be seen to this day. Ahmadi Muslims also assert that this belief is not only upheld by the Holy Quran and the Sayings of Muhammad sa, but even by the Holy Bible itself.
“Sometimes Christians have had to rethink the priorities of the Gospel in the light of experience,”
(The Huffington Post UK, 30 May 2013) – A senior bishop has likened opponents of gay marriage to Christians who used the Bible to support slavery.
The Anglican Bishop of Salisbury, the Rt Rev Nicholas Holtam, suggested it was time to ‘rethink’ attitudes towards allowing same-sex couples to marry, as Christians did with slavery and apartheid.
In a letter to the Telegraph he argued that attitudes towards homosexuality have changed “considerably” over the last fifty years and that the development of gay marriage would be a “very strong endorsement of the institution of marriage”.
“Sometimes Christians have had to rethink the priorities of the Gospel in the light of experience,” he wrote.
“Before Wilberforce, Christians saw slavery as Biblical and part of the God-given ordering of creation. Similarly in South Africa the Dutch Reformed Church supported apartheid because it was Biblical and part of the God-given order of creation.
“No one now supports either slavery or apartheid. The Biblical texts have not changed; our interpretation has.”
Legalisation of gay marriage was approved by MPs last week after surviving a Tory backbench bid to derail it.
The Bill will have to overcome more resistance when it comes before the House of Lords next week.
Bishop Holtam, who was appointed to the role in 2011, is the first clergyman married to a divorcee to be made a bishop.
Does stories change over time?
A professor once did an experiment to find out if stories does change over time. He got 10 students to sit in a line and he whispered a story into the ear of the first student. The first student then repeated the story to the second student and so on until the story reached the end of the line. The last student was then asked to repeat the story and the story this student related varied from the story the professor had whispered into the ear of the first student.
It is apparent that stories change over time. Ten students who passed the story down the line could not keep the story consistent even within mere minutes of the story being related.
Can you imagine what would happen if the story was thousands of years old and was recorded, say, more than 100 years to 300 years after the event and was passed down by mere word of mouth over six or ten generations?
Then we have the problem of the interpretation of the story.
What was said is one thing — which itself has changed over time — the meaning and implications of what was said would be subject to your perception of things.
And this, basically, is what has happened to religion. Religion is based on what happened thousands of years ago and is based on stories handed down over many generations through word of mouth and eventually recorded hundreds of years later by those who are recipients of drastically modified stories and who interpret these stories based on how they perceive things. The value system, standards, customs, traditions, norms, prejudices, preferences, and so on, of that later time would heavily influence the thinking of those interpreting those events and who never witnessed those events and are basing their opinions on how they perceive things and based also on what they heard.
Bishop Nicholas Holtam’s comment in the news item above “sometimes Christians have had to rethink the priorities of the Gospel in the light of experience” and “the Biblical texts have not changed; our interpretation has” are very interesting comments. No doubt the Bishop was talking about the Anglican Church but it could easily apply to the Catholic Church or even to Islam.I know that Catholics and Muslims are what I would describe as ‘people resistant to change’ and they believe that what was ‘revealed’ 2,000 years or 1,400 years ago is ‘complete’ and is absolutely 100% accurate without an iota of distortion. But time has proven that most of what was done back in time was based on interpretation at that point of time and, looking at it from this day and age, were absolutely wrong and not in the least correct.
My Ohh My!!! Adam & Eve vs. Adam & Steve...
France and England have passed new laws legalising same-sex marriages. This, of course, is being opposed by the ‘fundamentalists’ and the resistance is because the holy books say it is wrong. But there are many things that are right which the holy books say is wrong and things that are wrong which the holy books say is right.
For example, if based on the holy books, then slavery and marriages between 11-year-old or 13-year-old children is also right — plus many other things which society would today frown upon.
The question is: what is right and what is wrong? And who are these trustees of the truth who decide on what is right and what is wrong?
Shocking Truth!!!
Shocked U.N. Delegates as PLO Abuses Exposed by Palestinian Hero