The Origin of the Human

[_skippy the dead]

Think of it this way. Trying to explain how Adam and Eve, and their Fall from the Garden of Eden, work scientifically, is like Trekkies writing books explaining how warp drives, phasers, transporters, and plasma torpedos work using the language of actual science.

Actually, I think the latter is more probable and believable than the former.

[_The Dude]

Just because Adam and Even were the first humans in a spiritual sense, it does not follow that they were the first in the most strict biological sense.

Exactly! It's the principle of adoption. Every time a Mormon leader made a pronouncement about blood, he was just talking about spiritual senses and not biological.

First human = spiritual, not biological
Tribe (as in patriarchal blessing) = spiritual, not biological
Lamanite = spiritual, not biological

Any others?

[_moksha]

Apparently eyes can be both spiritual and biological.

[_The Dude]

Apparently eyes can be both spiritual and biological.

Oh moksha! :rolleyes:

[_bcspace]

I am interested in hearing the apologetic take on the fact that humans originated from Africa and how this fits with their belief and LDS doctrine of Adam and Eve being Caucasians from Missouri.

Some possibilities.....

1. It's considered a fact only now (Not long ago, it used to be considered a fact that the city of Troy was a mythological city).

2. Physical bodies not yet inhabited by human spirits (evolution).

3. Temporal existence (ala D&C 77 in combo with 2 Corinthians 4). Simply the time frame referred to. Previous states and times frames have no bearing on the now in the religious sense.

[_Sethbag]

I am interested in hearing the apologetic take on the fact that humans originated from Africa and how this fits with their belief and LDS doctrine of Adam and Eve being Caucasians from Missouri.

Some possibilities.....

1. It's considered a fact only now (Not long ago, it used to be considered a fact that the city of Troy was a mythological city).

Hold the faith, brotha. Kinda funny actually, you guys get more mileage out of the discovery of the city of Troy than probably the guys who found it. As long as people once thought Troy was mythical, and then it was found, you can justify any whacky belief of Mormonism. Hey, they found Troy, didn't they, so who says 2 + 2 will never be anything but 4?

2. Physical bodies not yet inhabited by human spirits (evolution).

You never answered my questions about pre-Adamites. What happened to them at the time of the Fall? If they were still around before, during, and after the Fall, were their offspring "real" humans, ie: with real human spirits? If not, what's the state of their descendants today? How do you explain the moves to the earliest systems of writing, the agricultural revolution, and early proto-civilizations before the time of Adam? All this was done by homo sapiens bodies devoid of human spirits? So they were kinda like really smart dogs with opposable thumbs?

3. Temporal existence (ala D&C 77 in combo with 2 Corinthians 4). Simply the time frame referred to. Previous states and times frames have no bearing on the now in the religious sense.

The religious sense? What exactly is the religious sense? I understand it to mean "the fictional sense". If you don't, then you must think it's actually something real. So, what exactly is this "religious sense" in which the earth existed, homo sapiens existed, writing was being developed, humans had migrated to almost every habitable place on Earth, some of them were speaking languages which are in fact ancient ancestors of quite a few still-existing languages, early civilizations had already sprung up, plants had been domesticated and farming taken up as a move away from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and yet it all has no bearing on us today, in this "religious sense" that you hand-wave up for us?

Are you going all Nibley on us? Is this just BCSpace's version of "their world is not our world", where we just assume we've got nothing to do with all of our homo sapiens ancestors before a few thousand years ago simply because they don't easily fit into our religious virtual reality?

BCSpace, you're a pretty smart guy. You don't owe this absurd belief system any allegiance. You're free to believe whatever you want to. Why voluntarily maintain the chains of an absurd and fiction-based belief system? Are you really so sure that your "spiritual witness" was accurate and reliable enough that "the church is true" that you voluntarily submit your brain to having to defend outright bronze-age mythology against a hostile reality? Do you not realize how "kicking against the pricks" this is? Reality will eventually win. And it will not be the reality imagined by LDS. Sure, the lifestyle suits some, and you could do a lot worse than emphasizing a happy family, but in the end, the LDS promise of an eternal reward in a Celestial Kingdom, as a God, is just a fantasy. It's a wisp. A figment of Joseph Smith's and others' (probably Swedenborgs or someone like that) imagination. It's no more real than the Kingdom of Gondor, Narnia, or Hogwarts Academy.

[_beastie]

Oh moksha! :rolleyes:

Was that a spiritual or biological eye roll?

[_skippy the dead]

Oh moksha! :rolleyes:

Was that a spiritual or biological eye roll?

LOL

[_Brackite]

Branching off from the "God is Black," thread (which is really about our fabulous cats... smile)...

I am interested in hearing the apologetic take on the fact that humans originated from Africa and how this fits with their belief and LDS doctrine of Adam and Eve being Caucasians from Missouri.


~dancer~

Hi There truth dancer,

Some LDS Apologists and Scientists (Internet Mormons) have tried to reconcile the fact that humans originated from Africa, and the LDS belief that Adam and Eve originated from Missouri. However, I don't believe that these two contrasting theories can be reconcile to each other. Please Check out the Article Titled, ' EVOLUTION COMPATIBLE WITH Mormon DOCTRINE?', Written By LDS Apologist Michael T. Griffith, By Clicking on the Hyperlink Here:
IS EVOLUTION COMPATIBLE WITH Mormon DOCTRINE?

[_Sethbag]

Brackite, thanks for that link. I agree with him right up until he's done spelling out some of the reasons evolution isn't compatible with LDS teaching and belief. Of course, he's approaching it from the LDS believer side, so he rejects evolution. I obviously disagree with him on that, and think his anti-evolution arguments are crap. But he does show quite a few arguments about why evolution isn't compatible.

I believe there are more such arguments, including some that he didn't touch on. I think one of the biggest, as yet untapped arguments against LDS belief and evolution being compatible is the pre-Adamites. We've got so much evidence of people having existed all over the world by the Biblical time of Adam that Adam would have been, literally, just one drop in the vast bucket of existing humanity. Or at least in the vast bucket of homo sapiens. Assuming that Adam was the "first man" in the sense that he was the first homo sapiens body to receive a fully-human spirit, one needs to find a way to account for the already-existing probably millions of people already living on the American continent, all over Asia, Europe, Africa, and Australia. These people could not have been the offspring of Adam, and it would have taken at least thousands of years before enough of Adam's actual offspring to have moved around enough of the world to have lent people at least a distant tie-in to the lineage of Adam.

And, of course, there's no evidence that this ever happened, particularly with isolated peoples like the Aborigine. So to be compatible with LDS belief, LDS belief would somehow have to make room for millions of non-human homo sapiens living around the world, for potentially thousands of years after Adam. It's absurd, and of course completely untouched by Mormon beliefs. Except for BCSpace, that is. BCSpace, some Mormon guy on the Internet somewhere, has it all figured out where the Apostles, and Prophets, Seers and Revelators haven't had a clue.

It's not enough to just say that there might have been pre-Adamites. You have to understand the ramifications of that statement, and have intelligent ideas and proposals for reconciling those ramifications with the LDS worldview.