Coincidence, I Think Not

[Guest]

Young earth creationists will tell us that the earth is within 6,000 to 10,000 years of age. They get this number from adding up all the "begats" in the bible untill they get the date of 4004 BCE for the date of creation. I wasn't taught this in church as a "fact", but many people in my classes would imply that this number is most likely correct, because, of course we all know scientific dating methods are all wrong.

 

Then the bell would ring, and I would go to my social studies and world history classes, and in there I learned that man developed agriculture at least 3 times, begining about 10,000 years ago. I'm a little foggy on the exact numbers, but I seem to remember the oldest objects of written language can be dated to around 8,000 years ago.

 

Apparently, when I made the observation that agriculture and religion seem to have been born around the same time, my idea was brushed under the rug rather quickly. Have no other xtians made this connection? Is it so hard to see? We domesticate animals to eat and help with the new technology of farming, and now only a few people need to grow food, and others can go into "specialties". One of those "specialties" was religious institutions. It was then that tribal medicine men and Shamans invented "offerings" so they did not even need to trade anything in order to get food from the rest of the community.

 

THIS is why the bible points to the begining of the world at 6,000 to 10,000 years ago. Because that's when human learned to write, not because some god created us and our planet with an appearence of age!

[Manta]

Good answer, but then the fact that the bible logic for dating things is to add up ludicrusly long lifespans in an arbitary way (People don't live for 900 years, die AND THEN have a son, it happens at some unspecified point inbetween) then I'd argue that the date of ~5000BC was dreamt up rather than based on anything solid. I feel that it's more of a co-incidence.

[Antlerman]

Good answer, but then the fact that the bible logic for dating things is to add up ludicrusly long lifespans in an arbitary way (People don't live for 900 years, die AND THEN have a son, it happens at some unspecified point inbetween) then I'd argue that the date of ~5000BC was dreamt up rather than based on anything solid. I feel that it's more of a co-incidence.

They had already laid out all the names then discoved the dates didn't add up. A logistical problem easily remedied by changing the characters life spans. Early coporate accountants creatively stretching the numbers to fit. Again, proof positive the Bible is a work of human design.

[Guest]

Could these numbers be merely coincidence? Sure, I don't see why not. But it seems a bit too close to say it was. Nobody is saying the bible points to creation 20,000 years ago, or 40,000. They always say 10,000 as the upper limit of age. That's just too close to the birth of modern civilization for me to think it is a coincidence.

 

And it's a given the ages of OT people were enlarged, but why? How could they fudge the ages of all those people and just happen to come up with an age close to the dawn of agriculture? We know many primitive tribes carry their history orally, and the writers of the OT were most likely writing down their versions of oral early history near the invention of writing.

 

If these people fudged the ages at a later time, what was their motive? We didn't know the dates of agriculture untill somewhat recently, so what benifit would they have of changing ages that also just happen to comply with agriculture?

[white_raven23]

If these people fudged the ages at a later time, what was their motive? We didn't know the dates of agriculture untill somewhat recently, so what benifit would they have of changing ages that also just happen to comply with agriculture?

 

 

Genesis 3:15 is about man's relationship with a creature he probably didn't used to come across that often....until agriculture.

 

The Christians have to extrapolate big time to make that verse about Jesus. As there is NO evidence anywhere else in Genesis that that verse is about a coming messiah.

 

So, I do think you've got something here.

 

I posted about Genesis 3:15 here recently:

http://www.ex-christian.net/index.php?showtopic=8723&st=20

[Ouroboros]

Yup. When the skill of writing and communicating more advanced ideas evolved, that's when the human consciousness evolved to a level that we could think of the "what-if" and "cause-and-effect" things. I see the Adam&Eve story as the allegory of how the hunting-gathering humans moved into agriculture.

[HuaiDan]

Pleas also note that that it was during the rise of agricultural societies that we see the first accumulation and massing of wealth and the resulting diparity of wealth occurring at the same time , ie., society splitting into the very very rich and the very very poor. Fuedalism could only exist in an agricultural society.

Indeed, the evidence suggests such a disparity, with early agricultural settlements displaying few large, ornate , with the majority being cruder dwellings. With wealth comes entitlement, with entitlement power...and religion seems just the thing to support a power structure, doesn't it?

Of course, religion predates agriculture. Maybe just used for different reasons afterward.

[Guest]

 

I see the Adam&Eve story as the allegory of how the hunting-gathering humans moved into agriculture.

 

Yea, I always equated the A&E story with self-awareness comming online. I remember in high school sitting on the beach with my girlfriend tripping our minds out on acid, and the idea came to me that the forbidden fruit was the mushroom, because it holds all the knowledge of the universe within it, and can show it to you if you seek it out. I later then equated the hats from the church and the towers of Islam to be mushroom caps, and was even happy when I saw someone else had written this in a book years after that!

 

Out of any idea of where religion first came from, eating mushrooms seems to me to be a very plausable idea. I can just imagine what I would have dreamed up if I had lived in the time before agriculture, let alone science!

[Ouroboros]

That's very true.

 

The religion during the hunting-gathering period was more of the nature/pagan kind. Simplier, and less guilt inducing. The gods where there to be asked for victory in the hunt or to be pleaded to with offerings if the weather was bad.

 

But with agriculture the organized religion and politics started to grow instead. Both in the purpose to control the people and make them feel guilty for not acting according to the laws. Instead of having a police, religion is makeing people self policing. To steal will anger the gods, so people got scared of doing it. It only works as far as a person believe in the religion.

[scitsofreaky]

It seems to me that religion has always had the same basic purpose (whether conscous or not): uniting people. I don't mean uniting in the damn hippy sense of the word, but it allowed larger and larger groups of people to live together. Hunter-gatherer religions allowed small bands to have a set of laws that had divine authority which had to be obeyed. Religion was not only the early law, it was the early government. Many of the high priests were the heads of their territory, and many were considered divine themselves.

I don't think much has changed in this last respect, but instead of being divine themselves, many religious leaders are pseudo-prophets, that is, they don't claim to be prophets, but they claim to get messages from God ("God told is probably going to be storms along the coast of the US").

I see the Adam&Eve story as the allegory of how the hunting-gathering humans moved into agriculture.

One could certainly interpret it that way, but I'm not so sure that it was written that way. But could be.

[godlessgrrl]

"Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age" by Rudgley has some interesting ideas about what humanity was like on the verge of the agricultural revolution. So does anything by Marija Gimbutas. Riane Eisler offers an overview in "The Chalice and the Blade"; Merlin Stone's "When God Was a Woman" gets a bit more specific with the same information.

 

The gist of their arguments (Gimbutas' and Rudgley's in particular) is that civilization didn't start with large-scale agriculture, it actually started considerably earlier; and for a good long time, there were essentially 2 models of human power-sharing: egalitarian vs. totalitarian. Religions from each model supported and reinforced the model. OT religion, which later became Xianity, comes from the totalitarian model, and hence has the particular flavor that it does.

 

It doesn't surprise me either that YEC's place the start date for earth at about the same time as large-scale agriculture began. I've always seen the Adam & Eve story as being about the changeover from the egalitarian model to the totalitarian one, and I think agriculture did indeed play a role: large fields of food, and the resources civilization attracted by way of trade, offered the possibility that one's people wouldn't starve, and could enjoy a degree of luxury if they happened to get in on the right part of the game - something I would imagine that greedy, power-over types then and now find hard to resist. Why share the food when you can control it all, and thus control the lives of everyone in your community?

 

My first degree was in history and if you go strictly by historical record, it does sure look like civilization exploded out of nowhere. But stuff like that doesn't happen with humans - things take time to develop. I now feel that archaeology provides a greater continuity in the outlining of the human story, especially for the time before obvious writing.

 

Anyway. Just rambling. Just some thoughts. Thanks for reading.

[Friendly Misanthrope]

It seems to me that religion has always had the same basic purpose (whether conscous or not): uniting people. I don't mean uniting in the damn hippy sense of the word, but it allowed larger and larger groups of people to live together. Hunter-gatherer religions allowed small bands to have a set of laws that had divine authority which had to be obeyed. Religion was not only the early law, it was the early government. Many of the high priests were the heads of their territory, and many were considered divine themselves.

 

This is similar to what I learned in Anthropology 101. The hypothesis goes as such:

 

In order for people to live in one place required social organisation beyond that of their nomadic forbearers. Religion served as an impetus to force obeyance of workers, in that if they did what they were told by priests, the gods would be happy, and all was well. If they disobeyed, there would be hell to pay, literally.