Did God encourage incest?

[smoothy]

:wacko This idea should create some comments. Since the condemnation of incest, that is sex between family members, originated with religious groups, I thought that I would check the Bible. If you read the account of creation in Genesis you see where God created the universe, the earth, the animals and plants. Then He created a man from the "dust of the earth." When Adam decided he was lonely, God created a companion for him. Now God could have created another man for Adam to be buddies with but instead He created a female companion that would be sexually compatible with the male. So God intended for them to have sex. If God had created Eve from the dust of the earth as He did Adam she would have been a separate individual. Instead, He created Eve from a rib He removed from Adam. That means that Eve was genetically identical to Adam, making her either Adam's sister or daughter. Adam and Eve were naked and unashamed in the Garden of Eden, presumably having sex whenever they felt like it. When they disobeyed God they were kicked out of the Garden, told to go out and live off the land and be fruitful and multiply. In other words have as many children as they could.
Adam and Eve had many children and their children had children, with each other ,because there was nobody else around. If you look at it that way the human race was founded by incest, and that was the way God allowed it to happen. He could have populated the earth with created humans but chose to let the two humans He created, who were genetically related, to be the founders of the human race.
So without loving sexual relations between Adam and Eve's family members, we wouldn't exist.

[muffdiver]

Something must be going on Smoothy. I just had this thought this past weekend and was going to post something simular to this thread myself. Adam and eve had two sons, Cain and Able. Cain slew Able and was banned from the family of Adam and Eve.
Let's suppose that Cain went off somewhere else to live his life. Who did Cain procreate with, himself? Of course not, he procreated with the other female children that Adam and Eve had, and that can be the only answer to that question. If that was the case, then he committed incest with a family member, who was his sister. Think about it! Another thought about incest would be the family of Noah after the flood.

Thanks for getting us to think, Smoothy


Muff

Somewhere in Texas, a village is missing an idiot.

[Chucky]

For those that believe in the myth of creation there are some things you may have missed in Genisis. Cain was banished to the land of Nod where there were already people living. That was a land east of eden. Where did these people come from? Read Genisis again and you will see God created everything twice. The first time he created woman and that was good. The second time he cloned her from one of Adam's ribs.

[nyar]

The basic medical problem with incest is the narrowing of the genotype it causes through the generations. Bringing out negative recessives such as idiocy, hemophilia, and deformities. Easily corrected if the gene lines are rigorously tracked and outsiders are occasionally brought into the gene pool. All the other objections are social and religious in nature. Especially, the way it compromises the authority of the father in a family. Something about the shift of power in groups. JudeoChristian beliefs proscribe it as a 'sin', but... there's that little thing about Lot's daughters, getting him drunk and 'lying with him'. It seems that creative sex is still the Mother Goddess of invention!

The high degree of inbreeding in European royalty caused Kaiser Willhelm to have a shriveled arm and the Czar's son to have hemophelia. The Kaiser's arm caused him to act belligerantly to compensate, and Niki Jr's blood problem caused his mom to hire Rasputin to 'faith heal' him. Some have therefore blamed incest on WW I and it's tragic aftermath.

But is incest to blame or is it simply stupid, arrogant people misusing power they should never have been granted in the first place? :disco

[Breeze]

stupid, arrogant people misusing power they should never have been granted in the first place?

Breeze

[Breeze]

The Bible is a really great book if you take the time to read it. It has action, romance, sex, violence and deep insight into human nature.

Breeze

[nyar]

Or as Mark Twain would say:

You have noticed that the human being is a curiosity. In times past he has had (and worn out and flung away) hundreds and hundreds of religions; today he has hundreds and hundreds of religions, and launches not fewer than three new ones every year. I could enlarge that number and still be within the facts.

One of his principle religions is called the Christian. A sketch of it will interest you. It sets forth in detail in a book containing two million words, called the Old and New Testaments. Also it has another name -- The Word of God. For the Christian thinks every word of it was dictated by God -- the one I have been speaking of.

It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.

This Bible is built mainly out of the fragments of older Bibles that had their day and crumbled to ruin. So it noticeably lacks in originality, necessarily. Its three or four most imposing and impressive events all happened in earlier Bibles; all its best precepts and rules of conduct came also from those Bibles; there are only two new things in it: hell, for one, and that singular heaven I have told you about.

What shall we do? If we believe, with these people, that their God invented these cruel things, we slander him; if we believe that these people invented them themselves, we slander them. It is an unpleasant dilemma in either case, for neither of these parties has done us any harm.

For the sake of tranquility, let us take a side. Let us join forces with the people and put the whole ungracious burden upon him -- heaven, hell, Bible and all. It does not seem right, it does not seem fair; and yet when you consider that heaven, and how crushingly charged it is with everything that is repulsive to a human being, how can we believe a human being invented it? And when I come to tell you about hell, the stain will be greater still, and you will be likely to say, No, a man would not provide that place, for either himself or anybody else; he simply couldn't.

[smoothy]

:pissed Well, well, it seems that I got some people thinking and talking. For the record, incest that causes inbreeding and all the medical problems that follow could never be a good thing. Diversity is what keeps the human race different from animals that always stay within their own herd. It is also what should keep us more tolerant, although we all know how well that has gone.

My idea was that, from the beginning, it does not seem that God was against sexual activity within a loving family relationship. I think we would see less teenage pregnancies and STD's if parents could give their children some real lessons on sex and love and not leave it to the public schools and their "sex-education" classes. Lessons from text books and outdated films only leave our children more curious than before, but if a parent were to try to give their teenaged "child", who is hormonally an adult, real-life sexual information they are arrested for abuse. We have it backwards. We can't send a teenager out to drive without giving them driving lessons and passing a test yet we expect them to handle their sex drive with little or no information or supervised experience.

We are so hung up about sex that we have ruined something that was created to be beautiful. Humans are the only creatures that have a drive for sex simply for pleasure and not just for procreation. We need to keep it beautiful.

[Chucky]

Actualy polphins do it for pleasure too.

[nyar]

As do BonobosChimps And Bonobos:


Though very close in genetic relationship and virtually next-door neighbors, chimpanzees and a less-well-known species called bonobos in Zaire are socially poles apart. Only identified as a species separate from chimps in 1929, bonobos intrigue biologists with their easygoing ways, sexual equality, female bonding, and zeal for recreational sex.

How did bonobos, which live in humid forests south of the Zaire River, evolve such a different social structure from chimpanzees since the two species split about 2 million years ago? Male dominance plays a big role in chimp society. Disputes are often resolved by threatening displays or by fighting. Female chimps lead a life much more solitary than that their bonobo cousins, and are sometimes harassed by the much larger males. Sex is strictly about reproduction, and reproductive tactics can include infanticide -- the killing of offspring unrelated to a male chimp. Infanticidal individuals remove potential competitors to their own offspring, and the mother, without an infant to care for, will become available for mating again much sooner.

In contrast, bonobo society is marked by the strong bonds that develop between unrelated females and by almost constant sexual activity amongst all members of a group. Bonobos apparently use sex to reinforce bonds within the group and to resolve conflict. What evolutionary advantages do these behaviors offer?

Seeking the answer to that question, researchers noted that infanticide is almost unknown among bonobos. Their constant sexual activity obscures paternity, removing the incentive for infanticide, and the pervasive bonding of female bonobos, who form coalitions for mutual support and protection, removes the opportunity. Preventing infanticide is a huge evolutionary advantage for bonobo females, because more of their offspring will survive.

Why, then, have chimps not evolved this social structure? The answer may lie in the history of the habitats they occupy. Both species of primates live in tropical forests along the Zaire River -- chimps north of the river, bonobos to the south. Their environments seem to be quite similar today. But about 2.5 million years ago, there seems to have been a lengthy drought in southern Zaire that wiped out the preferred food plants of gorillas and sent the primates packing. After the drought ended, the forests returned, but the gorillas did not.

Chimpanzees in this environment south of the river had the forest to themselves, and could exploit the fiber foods that had previously been eaten by gorillas -- foods that are still eaten by gorillas to the north. With this additional food to tide them over between fruit trees, they could travel in larger, more stable parties, and form strong social bonds. They became bonobos.

On the north side of the river, the chimps had to share their niche with gorillas, which eat the fiber foods. The chimps have to compete for fruit, and occasionally meat, food resources that tend to be widely scattered. Female chimps disperse into the forest with their infants to find enough to eat, and cannot spend time together to forge strong bonds. The changes in social behavior that occurred in response to this environmental factor may be what led chimps down a different evolutionary path, toward a society more prone to violence.

A subtle difference in environment, it appears, had profound implications for their evolution.

[Hells Angel]

shakes his head.......god now we talkin bibles.apes etc......i NEED a BEER.......