>>"Cain went into the land of Nod. And Cain knew his wife. Where did SHE come from?"
>>"Who?"
>>"Mrs. Cain. Cain's Wife...... Do you think God went and pulled off another creation in a different county?"
>>
>>Either Cain married his sister, or there was another set of people created somewhere else.
>>
>>What else?
>>
>>I don't know.......and nobody else does either. I don't denigrate the moral lessons to be drawn from the Bible but, with so much left out, forgive me for not accepting it as
>the sole source of truth and enlightenment.
>
>Yes, there is much that is not included. A full and complete recording of history would be a little too big to carry around in one's briefcase. Besides, that is not the point of the Bible. The purpose of the Bible is to present God to man and to point man to Christ for salvation. Everything you need for that is found within the Bible.

How complete does it need to be? How many people were there on Earth at the time? Five thousand? Five billion? Or just two, with their children. Now if other children aren't important enough for the story, how come other personae dramatis are so important to have their genealogies written to twentieth ancestor? And by that, omitting the female side thereof? "Male1 begat Male2, Male2 begat Male3...". Boy, were these guys weird. Or blind. Or willfully blind.

Just omitting women from the picture is enough for me to never wish to read that book. Such sexism simply can't pass by me. "Does not say"... but then it's supposed to be the source of the truth? It wouldn't pass small claims court nowadays. If it doesn't mention female children of the first generation (and possible lesser male ones), what else does it omit? Dinosaurs, maybe?

Ergo, I repeat: credo quia absurdum est is such a victory over Reason, that I must laud the winning side for its bravery. But there's no way I'd be on their side. I simply have this soft spot for rooting for the righteous even when they're losing.

>You do not need my forgiveness for not accepting the Bible - you need God's. You can obtain that by trusting in the work of Jesus Christ.

I trust that the work did happen, most probably. He must have been a remarkable person for his time; now what happened to his story later, and what sort of PR was spun out of it is maybe one of greatest achievements of the I to III century. They have created an institution which has outlived whole civilisations, by way of defying logic, reason, people's will (for the part where they couldn't bend that will their way) and whatnot. It is also a perfect semi-logical system, which plays with logic, pretending to use it for a while, and then pulls a trump card out of its slee... book, and bingo! anything you want can be proven or disproven.

Despite the respect I may have for such a system of thought, for its sheer audacity and level of sophistry, I can't trust it to be a source of any truth. Historical value, yes. It's a human accomplishment and will be a part of history forever. But truth... I prefer the things which work even if you don't believe in them.