Reply to Was Adam the First Person to get to Heaven?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Adam and Eve is a hypothetical story, not factual. There are 2 creation stories and they are not combined.
The story is meant to be hypothetical and it is. 
[/quote]

+1. Exactly[/quote]

The minister in me has to bite my tongue all the time about the Bible.  I’m an Interfaith Hospice Chaplain so I work with people from all faith paths.  And none.  I get quizzed about this shi7 several times a month by family members.  I stay professional and respectful, but the fear these poor people have grown up with causes so much pain.  Especially when they are facing their death or the death of a loved one.

An early poster asked which parts of the Bible should be taken literally.  My answer is almost none of it.  (I want to emphasize this is my belief.) Scripture was written thousands of years ago in languages that we don’t even fully understand.  And it’s been translated and retranslated over and over again, mostly by men with a vested interest in the outcome of the translation. We have no evidence that Jesus ever wrote anything at all.  Scripture is important.  I love it! By studying sacred texts, we learn a lot about the people, the politics, the religious beliefs, history, and most importantly, ourselves and our Creator.  But it was never meant to be a science or a history text.

Jesus spoke in parables all the time.  Do you think he was really suggesting we shove a camel through the eye of a needle?  Or, was he explaining how important it is for us to guard against greed?  Do you really believe Jesus fed thousands with five loaves of bread and two fish?  Or was he teaching compassion, sacrifice, service, empathy, and love?

The writers of biblical scripture (and we can’t even prove definitively who they were) were using simple stories to explain complex spiritual truths.  They are scared stories.  We should read them and try to understand them.  But they are stories.  A more modern example is “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”.  No one believes a child was gobbled by a wolf.  But the story illustrates the Importance of honesty. And it does so powerfully because it is so simple. [/quote]

What bible do you recommend a lay person start with?[/quote]

NP. Try the message. (MSG). When you’re studying deeper, cross reference King James or an original Hebrew origination of the word for more context.

https://www.bible.com/bible/97/EPH.4.msg

For what it’s worth, things seeming incomprehensible in concept can and do exist in a physical sense — in another realm. Props to NASA for the proof. Listening to a science show today, I heard an astrophysicist explain how gravity and water is what sets us apart and allows life here — but I see so many parallels to the Bible as I truly listen. Maybe a camel can fit through a needle but Jesus didn’t have time to break it down. Maybe a black hole is the pupil of a soul - and a star is born on the other end. Who knows? But the things we are learning —  like if we took the mass of a piece of some other planet into the size of a sugar cube and dropped it into earth, it would plummet right through it and into the universe. My mind finds that difficult to comprehend, but science and the revelation of more and more truth behind time surprises us every day with examples of astonishing and wonderful things. Now we know in part; then we will know fully as we are fully known. Now we see as in a looking glass, a reflection (always a delay with time), then we see face to face (alpha and omega, not alpha or omega; rather a timeless existence - heaven. Also our heavenly bodies aren’t the same according to scripture, we will have a new form. I learned today that we are all made of star dust, little pieces of the universe literally in our biology and the physical world around us.

The word is living, like science, and you should never fear testing the truth. Faith is faith, but truth is truth. It will never lie or stand down, just further prove itself.
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