Today we had a guest preacher speak. It's been decided by the church board to add another pastor and so we are evaluating candidates (so far only one).
He started out with a real doozy. Genesis chapter 6. For those who aren't familiar with Genesis, Chapters 6, 7 and 8 are the big Noah's Ark thing. Needless to say these folks believe it really happened just as the Bible says, or as he put it, "we believe that the Bible is inspired and inerrant in the original autographs." Psst--I've got news for you. Those "original manuscripts" have long since decayed into papyrus dust. They are about as accessible as Joseph Smith's golden plates on which the Book of Mormon was written. At least we know where those are--they are in Heaven. Moroni came and got them once the work of translation had been completed.
But that's a triviality. Now Chapter 6 opens with a very interesting statement. It seems that the "sons of God" (sons? I thought He only had ONE?) have been fooling around with mortal women and producing hybrid babies. This is a big no-no. Of course, being of a biological mind I immediately latched onto this. How was this accomplished? If the "sons of God" were spirit beings then what kind of genetics were involved? This is even bigger than the Virgin Conception. If no actual sex was involved and the women became pregnant the way Vulcans reproduced in "Star Trek", then how do we know that this couldn't happen today? Or isn't happening today? I mean this is pretty serious stuff. I certainly don't want a half-human half-spirit baby--I don't even want a 100% human baby and the fact that I've gone through the change of life doesn't mean anything Biblically speaking because there's quite a few examples of women getting pregnant long after they thought they were all done with that sort of thing.
But of course he didn't think to address that issue which leads me to believe it probably isn't happening today, after all, as I said in another blog, demons certainly aren't what they used to be. He did admit it was a pretty embarrassing part of Scripture and one that one of his unbelieving professors used to bring up all the time. And one no doubt he was not prepared to address either then or now.
But the big thing with the human-spirit interbreeding is that it is interbreeding which is a big Biblical no-no. He made much of the fact that the Bible talks about Noah taking the animals into the ark "each according to its kind" and all the laws that were given later on about not mixing different kinds of animals and even people. They're in Deuteronomy and Leviticus if you want to look them up. He said something very ambiguous about skin color (when I questioned him afterwards he said that he was not against interracial marriage and I said then you should have made that very clear and not given aid and comfort to the bigots who use such verses to condemn interracial relationships). But it got me thinking. If cross-breeding species is against God's word, then what about our current agricultural practices that rely very heavily on hybridization and now genetic modification. I mean right down the road from this church is a place that has transgenic animals--animals with human genes! What would the Biblical writers have said about that?
You see the Bible is right when it talks about an invisible world around us--it just has got the nature of that world wrong. Instead of spirits think viruses, bacteria, microbes. There's a whole amazing microscopic and submicroscopic world out there. It is also known now that there were other species of humans on the earth living at the same time as our species but they all died out. Neanderthals lived in the Holy Land. There's evidence that they interbred with Cro-Magnons (us). Could this be what the writers were referring to when they talked about human-spirit crossbreds, that there was some lingering memory that there were others like us but not like us who all died out and maybe that got mixed into the flood story?
But he didn't talk about such things. Instead he spent much of his sermon attacking another popular preacher (not Rob Bell though Bell got his share too) over whether or not Noah was righteous. Well, you know considering how some of these "righteous" folk behaved, I'd hate to see the ones God thought were unrighteous! And of course we are back to the idea that the ones who died in the flood had it coming to them because they were so wicked. Doesn't that just make your day?
He started out with a real doozy. Genesis chapter 6. For those who aren't familiar with Genesis, Chapters 6, 7 and 8 are the big Noah's Ark thing. Needless to say these folks believe it really happened just as the Bible says, or as he put it, "we believe that the Bible is inspired and inerrant in the original autographs." Psst--I've got news for you. Those "original manuscripts" have long since decayed into papyrus dust. They are about as accessible as Joseph Smith's golden plates on which the Book of Mormon was written. At least we know where those are--they are in Heaven. Moroni came and got them once the work of translation had been completed.
But that's a triviality. Now Chapter 6 opens with a very interesting statement. It seems that the "sons of God" (sons? I thought He only had ONE?) have been fooling around with mortal women and producing hybrid babies. This is a big no-no. Of course, being of a biological mind I immediately latched onto this. How was this accomplished? If the "sons of God" were spirit beings then what kind of genetics were involved? This is even bigger than the Virgin Conception. If no actual sex was involved and the women became pregnant the way Vulcans reproduced in "Star Trek", then how do we know that this couldn't happen today? Or isn't happening today? I mean this is pretty serious stuff. I certainly don't want a half-human half-spirit baby--I don't even want a 100% human baby and the fact that I've gone through the change of life doesn't mean anything Biblically speaking because there's quite a few examples of women getting pregnant long after they thought they were all done with that sort of thing.
But of course he didn't think to address that issue which leads me to believe it probably isn't happening today, after all, as I said in another blog, demons certainly aren't what they used to be. He did admit it was a pretty embarrassing part of Scripture and one that one of his unbelieving professors used to bring up all the time. And one no doubt he was not prepared to address either then or now.
But the big thing with the human-spirit interbreeding is that it is interbreeding which is a big Biblical no-no. He made much of the fact that the Bible talks about Noah taking the animals into the ark "each according to its kind" and all the laws that were given later on about not mixing different kinds of animals and even people. They're in Deuteronomy and Leviticus if you want to look them up. He said something very ambiguous about skin color (when I questioned him afterwards he said that he was not against interracial marriage and I said then you should have made that very clear and not given aid and comfort to the bigots who use such verses to condemn interracial relationships). But it got me thinking. If cross-breeding species is against God's word, then what about our current agricultural practices that rely very heavily on hybridization and now genetic modification. I mean right down the road from this church is a place that has transgenic animals--animals with human genes! What would the Biblical writers have said about that?
You see the Bible is right when it talks about an invisible world around us--it just has got the nature of that world wrong. Instead of spirits think viruses, bacteria, microbes. There's a whole amazing microscopic and submicroscopic world out there. It is also known now that there were other species of humans on the earth living at the same time as our species but they all died out. Neanderthals lived in the Holy Land. There's evidence that they interbred with Cro-Magnons (us). Could this be what the writers were referring to when they talked about human-spirit crossbreds, that there was some lingering memory that there were others like us but not like us who all died out and maybe that got mixed into the flood story?
But he didn't talk about such things. Instead he spent much of his sermon attacking another popular preacher (not Rob Bell though Bell got his share too) over whether or not Noah was righteous. Well, you know considering how some of these "righteous" folk behaved, I'd hate to see the ones God thought were unrighteous! And of course we are back to the idea that the ones who died in the flood had it coming to them because they were so wicked. Doesn't that just make your day?
