Catholic Cardinal Says Adam and Eve Didn’t Exist

[Ian David]

Catholic Cardinal Says Adam and Eve Didn’t Exist

(Yahoo News) In comments that may shock some staunch Catholics, Cardinal George Pell has described the biblical story of Adam and Eve as a myth.

He appeared alongside renowned evolutionary biologist and atheist, Professor Richard Dawkins, on the ABC’s Q&A program last night.

Cardinal Pell said the existence of Adam and Eve was not a matter of science but rather a mythological account.

“It’s a very sophisticated mythology to try to explain the evil and the suffering in the world,” he said.

“It’s a religious story told for religious purposes.”


Cardinal George Pell

More:
http://consciouslifenews.com/catholic-cardinal-adam-eve-didnt-exist/1127457/

[Cleita]

1. Actually, that was what I was taught in Catholic school.

Pretty much a lot of the other biblical characters were just stories to teach lessons according to my teachers, like Noah, Lot, etc..

[HockeyMom]

3. Exactly

You can also forget that the world was created in 7 days and the Bible "science" stuff also.

[customerserviceguy]

19. Hey, it was six, remember

The Big Guy took off Sundays, so he could free up his schedule to help Tim Tebow win football games, doncha know? He was really that all-seeing!

Seriously, Catholics, laity and hierarchy, know a lot of their religion is bullshit, but they defend it as 'tradition', so it needs to go on for its own sake.

[cbayer]

4. True for me as well. It was the stories and lessons that were important

and I was never told that they were literally true.

[TexasProgresive]

5. Yeah, I don't know what caused so many Catholics to become Biblical literalist.

I attended a Catholic High School and there was no problem with evolution. It seems that a bunch of wackos Protestant fundamentalist converted and are destroying my church.

[dmallind]

2. a) myths are not necessarily false.

b) I don't think the audience who tune in to Dawkins is te one that needs to absorb this information by and large.

c)74% of Protestant pastors disagree with the red hat guy.

[Cleita]

6. Well, this one is. There was no first man and woman, anymore than there was

a first male and female of anything, whether fish, horse or bird.

[dmallind]

7. Oh I agree - but you don't get to be a cardinal of the church

without being extremely adept in the semantic niceties of expressing such things. There is built-in equivocation here, be that from conscious venality or subconscious tapdancing.

[ZombieHorde]

42. Yet there is a first lady.

(a little political humor)

[edhopper]

8. Sophisticated!?!

If Adam and Eve did not know good and evil, how could they be punished for doing something wrong since they did not know eating the fruit was wrong until AFTER they ate the fruit. And so God decides to punish not only them for this terrible crime of eating a piece of fruit, but ALL there descendants to the end of time?
That is why there is suffering in the World?
WTF?

[rug]

10. Good questions.

Since Pius XII issued Humani Generis in 1950, the Catholic Church has been re-examining the theology of polygenism in light of scientic advances in evolutionary understanding.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_and_the_Roman_Catholic_Church#Catholic_teaching_and_evolution

[LTX]

11. I agree with you.

Your little cartoon version of Genesis is indeed unsophisticated.

[kiri]

12. talking snakes?

For many years I did not believe in talking snakes. But then Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin came along.

[LTX]

13. Metaphor is an interesting device. Quite often employed.

You should try becoming familiar with it.

[edhopper]

18. So what is the "sophisticated" interpretation on why God

brings so much suffering to the world?

My cartoon version is because genesis is a cartoon. Or at least an old myth to indoctrinate a primitive people.

[LTX]

28. (1) What do you think Genesis "indoctrinated" people to?

(2) Why do you suppose suffering was a product of the acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil (a discriminatory capacity that, from all appearances, evolved in man alone, or, as in the Genesis accounts, was imbued in man alone)?

(3) And, perhaps most apropos to a discussion of the Genesis accounts, does God suffer?

[LTX]

29. I'll add one more question to those above.

I was reluctant to add it initially, because it is the purest heresy to traditional Christian thinking, and it is reflexively viewed as the ultimate in hubris. But what the heck;

Why, in the Genesis accounts, is there the overt suggestion that we are, in fact, an integral piece of God, and indeed, an equal to God? In short, are we God?

[edhopper]

30. Well,

since we did create God in the first place.....

[LTX]

35. Precisely.

And we created him/her/it rather early on. The Genesis accounts don't exactly contradict this either. They are surpassingly, and wonderfully, weird.

[AlbertCat]

16. Your little cartoon version of Genesis is indeed unsophisticated.

Well, Grimm fairytales have more sophisticated imagery and lessons that the Adam and Eve fairytale. Indeed, Greek Mythology makes for a more "adult" read.

[LTX]

25. Although you are apparently unaware of it,

Grimm's Fairy Tales is itself steeped in Biblical allusion, and the Bible, in particular Genesis, is itself an amalgam of mythologies, with significant contributions by Greek mythology. Indeed, an enormous proportion of what you undoubtedly consider "adult" reads in canonical literature are dependent upon Biblical allusion, including your erstwhile "unsophisticated" Genesis accounts.

I find it rather sad that the Christan fundamentalist coloring-book version of the Bible's creation accounts has so embedded itself in modern discourse that the actual words and actual subtleties of Genesis are, apparently, no longer even considered by a large percentage of the population. I also find it sad that Genesis as a core book of the Torah is so completely ignored in discourse here. This is perhaps understandable, since the common "enemy" here is the conservative Christian fundamentalist. But when it results in the kind of snarky dismissal of truly thought provoking and beautiful literature like the Genesis accounts, I think there is something lost that warrants recovery.

[AlbertCat]

36. I am aware of it

and the imagery in Grimm beats the Adam & Eve tale by a country mile. Much more imagination. And Greek myths are just more interesting. Adam & Eve's story is as clever as paint. Not thought provoking at all. Spelled out simply, with little description besides the plot. Hell, the creation of the friggin' universe is just "god did this then this and then this and then took a nap." No motivation or purpose or even descriptions. "Arthur" is better Christian mythology.

[LTX]

37. Ah well. Nobody can make you actually read it, I suppose.

Still, I think its a shame that literary sources are now subject to derision in the name of political point scoring.

[AlbertCat]

40. Nobody can make you actually read it, I suppose.

I have read it, you jerk!

and I am not talking politics.


You sure make a lot of assumptions based on nothing. Such a trend doesn't inspire confidence in your chip-on-shoulder utterances.

[LTX]

43. Ok. I concede.

No turtles, and an insufficient adjective count, I guess. Just a poetic rendering of the order of the world as understood and perceived by an ancient civilization. Nothing very interesting about that.

But by the by (in no particular order), in this simply spelled out story that is as clever as paint and not thought provoking at all, why do you suppose God had to call out to Adam to locate him? What did God mean when he said "man is become as one of us"? And who the heck is "us"? Why did God curse the land, but not Adam? Why would the toil of the henceforth agrarian life be a source of sorrow, as opposed to the previous gathering life? Anything to do with the actual contemporaneous decline of hunter/gatherers and the actual contemporaneous ascendancy of agrarian life, with it seasonal deprivations and boom/bust food supply? Was this shift to agrarian life all bad in the story, or were there any benefits? If it was an unalloyed detriment, and if God was only punishing Adam and Eve, why did he clothe them? And was what the serpent said actually a lie? After all, Adam and Eve did not die, as God threatened. Is deception as much a part of good as it is a part of evil? And why is a knowledge of good and evil both an attribute sufficient to make man "as one of us," but also a source of grief to man? Does God share this duality? In other words, does God suffer?

These questions, and numerous others, aren't very thought provoking though, so I don't expect you to answer.

[eqfan592]

17. What exaclty did you mean by "cartoon version of Gensis" exactly? I saw no cartoon...(nt)

[LTX]

26. What is set out above is the modern distillation of the Christian re-write

of a highly inconvenient book of the Torah. Christians have always been uncomfortable with the Genesis accounts. They do not explicitly invoke the concept of "original sin" (I would say that they do not even implicitly invoke that concept), and the descriptions of God and autonomous man, the commencement of the relationship between God and man, and the realities of the relationship between man and nature that are found there simply do not fit with the overriding themes of Christian theology.

Hence, Christians set about re-interpreting the Genesis accounts early on, and this re-interpretation involved editing into non-existence the inconveniences of the book. You can think of this editing of the Genesis accounts as part and parcel of a kind of Christian Talmud, an interpretive gloss that, in this instance, utterly supplanted the original text.

Modern day "biblical literalists" have taken this re-writing to an extreme of over-simplification. And this over-simplified (and I would say grotesque) cartoon version of the Genesis accounts has taken hold as a broadly accepted rendition of what Genesis actually says. The text itself, in other words, has simply disappeared, along with all of its beauty and all of its finely wrought metaphorical interactions.

[Angry Dragon]

20. They were told not to eat before they ate

but the bigger question is if the Bible was inspired by god
does the god of the Bible really exist??
Trying to decide what is real and not real in the Bible is just quess work

[edhopper]

23. But they did not know right from wrong before they ate.

So they only knew it was wrong to disobey AFTER they ate. God told them one thing, Satan another, how did they do something wrong if they did not have the knowledge BEFORE they ate. Or is it simply that God must be obeyed without question?
The story may be a metaphor, but a metaphor for what?

[Angry Dragon]

31. good point, I had not thought of that

[struggle4progress]

9. Not exactly "news" to most of us here, whether we're inside the church or outside it

[HowHasItComeToThis]

14. IT IS ALL MYTHS AND FAIRY TALES DESIGNED THE SUBJUGATE AND CONTROL THE MESSES

[AlbertCat]

15. I'm watching this program now...

... I'm not all the way thru it...about 4/5ths...

http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3469101.htm

And I must say, the Cardinal comes across as confused. He brushes aside difficult concepts with semantics and doesn't know his basic science very well, confidently saying things that even I as a layperson know are not true.

Dawkins IMHO does not come across as arrogant. As usual, he wants to know what the Cardinal means. And not in a gotcha question type of way, but he wants answers that are not vague. He also doesn't present notions of theology that are wrong.

Indeed, there's a smugness to the Cardinal, not Dawkins.

[Thats my opinion]

21. The traditional church, Catholic and Protestant,

have always known that these were stories.

[trotsky]

22. To make your statement true, it needs to be put as follows:

Many of the traditional churches, Catholic and Protestant, have accepted for about a hundred years that some of the narratives in the bible are just stories.

[Goblinmonger]

24. So there are no Protestant literalists? n/t

[Rob H.]

27. That may be, but I live in Tennessee and I can tell you from personal experience

that plenty of people down here in the American South take the Bible literally. There are Southern Baptist churches that preach that the cosmos being created in six 24-hour days is literally true, the Earth is between 6,000 and 10,000 years old, and not only were Adam and Eve real people, they were the progenitors of the entire human race.

Before you dismiss them as a fringe group of crackpots, realize that the Southern Baptist Convention is also the second-largest religious group in the US after Catholics and--at least in Tennessee--they're trying hard to shoehorn their regressive, backwards beliefs into state law. Tennessee's "Don't Say Gay Bill" just passed a House committee and will likely become law soon, and the "Monkey Bill" just became law. Thanks to the success of religious fundamentalist nitwits making headway on Tennesse's "Don't Say Gay Bill," now legislators in Missouri are advancing their own version of the law, too.

[Dorian Gray]

32. Is this news?

I'll be (ahem) 41 this summer, and I'm a product of a Catholic upbringing and a Jesuit University education. And as far as I know, Adam and Eve were always accepted as being allegorical and not literal.

Maybe it's the word "myth" that seems surprising?

[trotsky]

33. Well, not *always*.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_evolution

To the Catholic Church's credit, at least on this issue, they moved fairly quickly to incorporate it into the dogma, finding some wiggle room to believe that their god set everything up "in the beginning" to produce human beings through evolution, but then at some point stepped in and provided them with souls.

[Dorian Gray]

44. Did I saw always?

Oops. I meant always as in my own 40 years of existence, always. Not always, always.

[edhopper]

34. Actually the cardinal has it wrong

in that the Catholic Church manly uses this story to show how sex is very, very bad. Original sin and all that.

The obsession of the Catholic Church with sex is rather self evident.

[moobu2]

38. Without Adam and Eve Jesus wouldn't even be necessary.

Jesus allegedly existed because Adam and Eve existed. It's all built upon the original sin thing.

[LTX]

41. Actually, the "original sin thing" has been superimposed on the Genesis Accounts

by the necessities of Christian theology. Remember, Genesis is the first book in the Torah, and original sin is not a part of Judaic theology.

Original sin is a product of the New Testament. The now default interpretation of the Genesis accounts as descriptive of "original sin" is, to put it mildly, a ham-fisted re-write of the text that simply edits out inconveniences.

Indeed, I've had Christian adherents actually tell me that the self-evidently metaphoric tree of the knowledge of good and evil is not only a literal tree and not metaphoric at all, but also that the "knowledge of good and evil" part is just meaningless filler. The only important part is the disobedience (hence the original sin imposition), and what the disobedience actually was doesn't matter. Could just as easily have been on order from God not to mix the lime with the coconuts. Fairly remarkable for so-called "biblical literalists."

[trotsky]

45. So say some theologians.

When you get them all to agree, or at least form a decent consensus, we'll have something to go on.

[LTX]

46. Huh?

So you're telling me that my own religious traditions don't mean anything because they aren't in agreement with Christian fundamentalists? And, I suppose, Genesis is not really the first book of the Torah, the Torah did not pre-exist the New Testament, Christians did not in fact superimpose their own, contrary interpretation on a seminal Jewish text, and that original sin actually is a part of Judaic theology?

Frankly, I've never encountered anything like this comment. I don't know what to make of it. I guess for my traditions to mean anything at all, I now have to abandon them and reach a "consensus" with the biblical literalists of the fundamentalist Christian ilk because, I suppose, the atheists have authoritatively announced that Judaism is just a weird outlier in a pantheon of conflicting theologies.

[trotsky]

47. Sure, that's exactly what I said.

You have your religious traditions. Christians have theirs. You think they're wrong. They think you're wrong. And different camps within your own religious think all the other camps are wrong. This is not an attack on you or religion, though it appears you'd really like to think that it is.

[LTX]

48. Oh. Ok. I'll shut the hell up now.

Don't want to make the "sky daddy" mad. Or the reductionists.

[trotsky]

49. And that, too, is exactly what I said.

[LTX]

50. Well, we're all the same, you know.

A bunch of superstitious morons fighting over whose moronic superstition is the right one. Thank goodness we have supercilious reductionists like you to set us straight. No "sky daddies" in your pantheon. No sirree. Or at least none that you'll admit to.

[trotsky]

51. LMAO

Keep it coming, this is great stuff! What else do I believe?

[LTX]

52. Why don't you tell me.

After all, you're the one who's laughing his ass off. For some cryptic reason. But being cryptic is, I suppose, a really good way to announce "I smart, you dumb."

[trotsky]

55. LOL, wut?

No, clearly, you've already decided you know what I believe and think. I am just standing back and laughing while you continue to get more vicious in your attacks. Clearly I am completely wrong about religion being a force for intolerance, judgmentalism, and nastiness in the world, as evidenced by your openness and willingness to dialog instead of attack. *snort*

Sorry, couldn't keep a straight face typing that.

[LTX]

56. And you had me pegged right from the start, didn't you?

Clearly you had already decided you know what I believe and think.

Set both assumptions aside. Do you have any beliefs of your own?

[trotsky]

57. At the start, you made a claim. A claim of certainty, even.

I asked you to at least show theological consensus to back up your claim.

You launched into attacking me.

I doubt you are really interested in knowing what I believe, because you have already decided what it is.

[LTX]

58. What claim do you think I made?

It may be that you misinterpreted me, and I in turn misinterpreted you. Perhaps starting with the claim that you think I made would help.

[trotsky]

59. Post #41.

The statement that started in the subject and was finished in the body.

[LTX]

60. I'm perplexed.

Are you saying that you want a "theological consensus" to back up the claim that Genesis is the first book of the Torah? Or that the concept of original sin is a product of the New Testament? Or that as a consequence of the theological need for synthesizing the old and new testaments, Christians re-interpreted a Jewish text to incorporate the concept of original sin?

This seems like asking for a "philosophical consensus" to back up the claim that Blaise Pascal had an influence on Kierkegaard. Rather a non-sequitur.

And I interpreted your post 45 (wrongly, I now imagine) as suggesting that the original Jewish readings of the Genesis accounts have no independent legitimacy absent a theological consensus with the subsequent Christian readings.

[trotsky]

61. Christians do not agree with your claim.

They of course don't think they "superimposed" anything on your Torah. In fact, more than a few Christians would be highly insulted by you saying that. The Torah/OT set up and flows into the NT. Jesus fulfilled the prophesies, etc. They didn't have a "theological need" to synthesize the two.

(Actually, I agree with you that they did - I'm just pointing out that the vast majority of Christians would fight you tooth and nail on the suggestion.)

[LTX]

62. Be that as it may,

when x event precedes y event, it's just a matter of historical chronology. I'm simply pointing out that the Torah, and the Jewish interpretation of the Torah, were around a rather long time before Christ or the new testament even existed. And that the pre-existing text from the Torah was then adopted by Christians, and the pre-existing interpretation of that pre-existing text was then changed by Christians. Temporal reality. And rather hard to argue with.

[trotsky]

63. Not when you throw the idea of prophesy into the mix. n/t

[LTX]

64. I'm actually not aware of any prophesy

that the original readings of the Genesis accounts would change. Nor am I aware of any prophesy that the coming of Christ would include adoption of the concept of original sin. Indeed, I'm not aware that hindsight "prophesies" of that nature are even part of Christian theology today. Those just kind of happened as part of the political construction of the Christian church, and the inconvenient existence of them is just skipped over by modern Christianity like Russian names in a novel.

[trotsky]

65. I suggest you engage some Christian theologians about this.

Suffice it to say, they will correct you.

[LTX]

66. It would be interesting.

But as I said, I'm not aware of any who actually acknowledge it, much less discuss it in detail. I've tried to engage the topic informally, and it has to date elicted either silence, or a simple pronouncement that no conflict exists. End of discussion. To tell you the truth, it's kind of weird.

[cleanhippie]

53. You just may be on to something here. Please, tell us more.

"Well, we're all the same, you know. A bunch of superstitious morons fighting over whose moronic superstition is the right one."

You said it. Those are your words. No one can ever take that away from you.

[LTX]

54. Oh my. I guess you have me there.

And your point, of course, is that that statement really does represent your view. Kind of telling. I guess all that business about disrespecting (or mocking, take your choice) the idea but not the person was, how to put this, bullshit?

[cleanhippie]

67. Much like your responses to trotsky, you intentionally misinterpret responses to claim persecution

Friend, I'm not mocking you, I'm mocking your ridiculous posts. Just quit with the persecution complex nonsense, it really is quite unflattering.

[LTX]

68. I misinterpreted Trotsky.

I think we came to an understanding. You, on the other hand -- well, let it go at that.

[cleanhippie]

69. Yeah, you should just do that.

[brooklynite]

39. But apparently that stuff in Leviticus? 100% true...