Willow :
Your problem is you see and hear what you want to see and hear not what is actually there. You have made accusations concerning my beliefs that you have no basis for making. I understand that you are quoting Genesis as though it is to be taken word for word as absolutely the word of God.
First - Consider that NO where in Genesis is there any statement that this is the word of God. The story appears to originate thousands of years before Moses supposedly wrote it down. In that passage of time stories get distorted and when finally written down tend to take on a fairy tale quality reflecting the ignorance of the real world in that remote age. The key to understanding is to try to determine what it was that the original story was about.
Example : The Flood of Noah
Literalist have it that the ark contained animals from all over the world. They never stop to explain how animals managed to make it to the Old World from the New World or Australia. Answer - the only animals that ever went on the ark are those that were local.
Literalist have it that Noah made a massive wooden ship, the largest ever built until the 1800's AD. Try to visualize how you would make such a massive ship. First you would need immense amounts of sawn timber. OK! What kind of saw are you going to use? Steel or iron? Forget it. You are in the Bronze Age. OK! Go to a metal shop and secure a sheet of bronze the thickness of a saw blade and have a saw filer cut teeth in the sheet of bronze and mount it on a saw handle. Now get a piece of 2" x 4" and try cutting it in two. OH, you hardly got through the cut and the saw is so dull it won't cut. My My, I guess we can say Noah is going to have a tough time building a wooden ark. If you understand the story you would come to the conclusion that he used only a flake of Obsidian. To understand that you have to go back to the text and ask a few questions; the answers are there if you look closely. As for the world covered in water? Take a cruise and once a hundred miles to sea look around 360 degrees. Do you get the errie feeling that the "entire world is covered in water"? Noah did. And the flood? The Mediterranean Sea bursting through and flooding the Black Sea with a flow 200 times that of Niagra Falls. It happened in 5,350 BC.
Conclusion: The story of the flood is not a fairy tales just an event that through time has been distorted. Literalist have managed to turn it in to an unbelieveable fairy tale by their incompetent interpretation just like they have made a mess of other events in the Bible.
The God you seem to discribe is incompetent, ignorant and vain. The real God has none of these qualities and certainly doesn't send people to Hell simple because they don't believe in him, or never heard his message.
Science and Evolution are not the enemies of the Bible. They explain how things happened, they do not confirm or deny the existence of God; on that question they are neutral, It is the literalist fundamentalists that simple can't stand that. They posit that if you fail to involve God you are false. Utter nonsense. When you examine the Bible, as a detective would, one finds strong evidence that the story of Genesis is about Evolution. Seems unreal but that scenario eliminates all of the promblems we have argued about. Is it ture; well if it makes for a rational story, rather than the problem plagued fundamentalist version then I would say yes.
As I earlier mentioned. Leave the Old Testament to the Rabbis, you will have your hands full concentrating only on the words of Jesus.
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