Re: Making money from Java

"Alistair" <alistair@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Judson McClendon wrote:
>> Let's assume for the sake of argument that the Bible is true,
>> and that God is as the Bible describes Him, and take a look at those two
>> questions of yours in that contaxt, to see if the Biblical scenario makes
>> sense. Please bear with me, I can't say this in two or three sentences.
>> :-)
>>
>> Initially God created Adam and Eve, and the Bible says God walked and
>> talked with Adam in the Garden of Eden, apparently every afternoon.
>> Because
>> Adam and Eve were completely without sin originally, they could be in
>> God's
>> presence without being destroyed. So how did our original parents respond
>> to
>> God's clear and regular presence? They waited until (from Adam and Eve's
>> perspective) God was not immediately present, then they both disobeyed
>> God's
>> one and only rule, and ate the forbidden fruit. Okay, so God ran them out
>> of
>> Eden....
>
> 004:016 And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in
> the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.
>
> 004:017 And Cain knew his wife; and she conceived, and bare Enoch: and
> he builded a city, and called the name of the city, after the
> name of his son, Enoch.
>
> Your starter for ten: If the Bible is correct (as you postulated) then
> where did Cain's wife come from? And, as land is defined by its'
> occupiers - who created Nod?

His sister, of course, or perhaps a neice. Adam lived 930 years, and the
Bible does not record how many children Adam and Eve had. The Bible covers
only the part of history that God wanted to relate to us for His purposes,
not the totality of history, even early history. With no birth control, no
physical defects, and a healthy sex drive, there is no telling how many
children Adam and Eve had, or their children. Within a couple of hundred
years, there would have been lots of people. If people lived almost a
thousand years, who cares if your spouse is 50 years younger or older than
you? They may have kept youthful until near the ends of their lives, for all
we know. We do know that Abraham married his half sister Sarah. Adam and Eve
were created with no physical flaws, including no genetic flaws. But over
time the effects of sin (e.g. drug use) and genetic damage caused by
radiation after the flood, when the protective covering over the earth was
destroyed (lot of background info here, another discussion), made marrying
close relatives more likely to produce genetic defects in children. Social
and legal injunctions against marrying siblings and close cousins are
relatively recent.

The word "nod" means "wandering". That it was a specific land named after
someone is an assumption, though it may be true. As I pointed out above,
there was time for many descendents of Adam and Eve to spread over the land
and name places. The Bible simply doesn't give us these details.

> I also have a problem with the Biblical location for Eden somewhere
> between four rivers, one being the Nile (called Gihon) and others
> including the Euphrates. Is this a description of Egypt and it's
> conquored territories?

I don't know. We can only guess at the antediluvian geology, and we have no
way of knowing how place names translated from before the flood. Noah's
descendents may have been presented with a very different geography, or
wound up far from home after being afloat for a year. Remember, there were
only eight of them. They may have named different features with old familiar
names. There's plenty of precedence for that; I live in Birmingham, Alabama,
which was clearly named after Birmingham, England. There are many such names
here in the U.S. Before the flood, the floor of the Mediterranean sea may
have been above water. This is speculation, but there is some evidence that
this may have been the case. But we know there are fossils of sea creatures
even on mountain tops. The Noah Flood did not happen simply by lots of rain,
there were almost certainly geological shifts involved. Genesis 7:11 says
"all the fountains of the great deep were broken up", and in some Bible
translations Psalm 104:5 seems to speak of the mountains being lifted up and
the valleys being lowered after the flood. I speculate that the geography
before the Great Flood may have been much flatter than today, and during the
flood the floors of the oceans lifted, lowering the continents, and this may
be what was meant by "all the fountains of the great deep were broken up".
After the flood, the continents and mountains were lifted up, and the water
mostly ran off. If you examine the Grand Canyon, and compare it to
Engineer's Canyon created by Mt. St. Helens in only a few days, the
resemblance of the erosion features is striking. You also see soil layering
in Engineer's Canyon, just as in the Grand Canyon, on a smaller scale. The
layering was created by laminar flow (air flow in Engineer's Canyon,
probably water flow in the Grand Canyon). I have driven around the Hoover
Dam area, and the geological features there are clearly those you would
expect from rapid erosion on a massive scale, such as piles of huge rocks in
waves that go for miles. Try this: half fill a large box with sand and
gravel, level it, fill the box with water, then knock a hole in the side,
and you see the exact same patterns formed on a smaller scale as the water
runs off. One of the questions in geology is "why are there so many
fossils?" Fossils don't form under normal circumstances. Animals die or are
killed, and scavengers scatter the bones. For a fossil to form, the remains
must be covered almost immediately. Then why do we see millions of fossils
in some local areas? If you imagine a Great Flood where the ocean floors
rapidly rise, there would be incredibly huge waves flooding over the
continents, sweeping everything in their path up against hills and
mountains, and into valley floors. This process would leave vast piles of
vegetation and animal remains, which would be rapidly covered with silt. The
pressure, combined with heat from geological fissures, could form crude oil
in a short time. The idea that it takes millions of years to form crude oil
is false. In the 1970's the U.S. Department of Energy did a demonstration
where they placed compost and water in a drum, applied pressure and heat,
and then extracted crude oil in 40 minutes. It just costs more to make crude
oil this way than it costs from wells. We routinely manufacture clear,
artificial diamonds using similar processes. In 1990, only 10 years after
Mt. St. Helens eruption, the millions of trees blown into Spirit Lake by the
blast were already beginning to petrify. My point here is that the actual
evidence we see can be interpreted as consistent with the Bible without
doing damage to more than man's theories.
--
Judson McClendon judmc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (remove zero)
Sun Valley Systems http://sunvaley.com
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."


.

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