God shows mercy here. Eating of the tree of life to live forever in a state of death (spiritual) and alienation is very bad (eternal torture).
Um, what mercy is being shown? This eternal torture in hell according to the Bible is the fate of the vast majority of humanity is it not?
And you are again using silly logic. God didn't want man "to know good and evil" and "take also" of the tree of life (by the reasoning above).
He didn't? Than why put it there in the first place? This is equivalent of putting a box of matches in front of a toddler and saying do not touch and walking out of the room and returning to find the house burnt down and then punishing the child (if they survive). Where is God's moral responsibility in this act? Is he not the more culpible moral agent in this story not the freshly minted and inexperience persona's of Adam and Eve?
Baseless assertions with no proof makes arguments a total waste of time.
And you, yourself do not provide evidence that falsifies this statement as well. So your statment commenting that Brians statements are baseless, are themselves baseless as well. If you want to back up your statement, than you should start a new topic and provide evidence supporting your statements. BTW, if you do I will provide evidence supporting Brian's assertions as well.
If God lied in Genesis where the book of Genesis is just a made up myth then it is clear that it makes no sense for author to contradict his self (due to a lack of intelligence) when it clear that he had a sufficient amount of intelligence in order to write Genesis in the first place.
Um, I think Brian was saying that the God (Yahweh, Elohim, El-Shaddai, whatever) of the Bible is a mytholical figure and thus it makes no difference what his actions in the Bible are anyways not that there is a real God and that he actually lied in the book of Genesis.
BTW, there are many other religious books that have some very profound theology and philosophical musings which could be considered on par if not surpass the "intelligence" of the events in the book of Genesis i.e. try reading the Buddhist or Hindu Sutras concerning creation:
Aggaa Sutta writes:
There comes a time, Vasettha, when, after the lapse of a long, long period, this world died. And when this happens, beings have mostly been reborn into the Realm of Radiance [as devas]; and there they dwell, made of mind, feeding on rapture, self-luminous, traversing the air, continuing in glory; and thus they remain for a long, long period of time. There comes also a time, Vasettha, when sooner or later this world begins to re-evolve. When this happens, beings who had deceased from the World of Radiance usually come to life as humans...now at that time, all had become one world of water, dark, and of darkness that maketh blind. No moon nor sun appeared, no stars were seen, nor constellations, neither was night manifest nor day, neither months nor half-months, neither years nor seasons, neither female nor male. Beings were reckoned just as beings only. And to those beings, Vasettha, sooner or later after a long time, earth with its savours was spread out in the waters, even as a scum forms on the surface of boiled milky rice that is cooling, so did the earth appear.
How is this for being unintilligent?
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.Dr. Carl Sagan
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