A: Breaking the incest taboo, (okay, I suppose God might not have gotten around to banning it at the time)

or

B: Inbreeding, and all the resultant genetic deficiencies?

I mean, if you've ever seen the results of too much "relative closeness," especially over several generations, you know that what you get are NOT generally healthy kids who are adapted to making coherent speech, much less surviving in the wilderness. And they certainly don't live several hundred years.

Does this mean that God was constantly tampering with the genetic makeup of Adam and Eve's kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, just making sure nothing goes wrong?

And if THAT'S true... why'd He stop?

There's no way to know about the genetics problem. For all we know, God created wives for all of Adam and Eve's sons from their ribs. Maybe there was a problem, and it was just never mentioned. Adam and Eve's genes had to be special in some way, to contain all the genetic information we have today. All the genes for skin, hair, and eye color, height, metabolism, and everything else was there to begin with. I've always wondered what an analasys of Adam and Eve's genetic structure would be like. Or, even better, compare Jesus' to Mary's.

Of course, the above supposition implies that "perfect" people can make bad choices. Hmmm... that part doesn't contradict my experience in the least.

--Baloo

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I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe.
www.geocities.com/Area51/Shire/8641/

Adam said, "Give me the good news first."

The Lord explained, "I've created two new organs for you. One is called a brain. It will allow you to create new things, solve problems, and have intelligent conversations with Eve. The other organ I have for you is called a penis. It will give you great physical pleasure and allow you to reproduce and populate this planet. Eve will be very happy that you now have this organ to give her children."

Adam, very excited, exclaimed, "These are great gifts you have given to me. What could possibly be bad news after such great tidings?"

The Lord looked upon Adam and said with great sorrow, "You will never be able to use these two gifts at the same time."

From "The Door: The World's Pretty Much Only Religious Satire Magazine."

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"There comes a time in every woman's life when the only thing that helps is a glass of champagne."

That does bring up a salient point, though.. if Adam and Eve were created perfect, how could they have done such a stupid thing as eat the "apple?"

(Of course, Lucifer was perfect to start with, too...)

Apparently perfect means something different now. "perfect" to most folks would include not erring, not making incorrect decisions, and certainly not gullible enough to listen to some stupid serpent rather than your boss.

Of course, if God is perfect, Adam and Eve could NOT be perfect, since they were vastly different. Especially in the fact that Adam and Eve weren't all-knowing. (Most likely, they were fairly ignorant.)

BTW, I put the apple in quotes because nobody REALLY knows what the fruit was. Personally, I think it was passionfruit. Yum.

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"When we turn our back on our principles, we stop being human." -- Janeway, "Equinox"

Yum!

In any case, I think I've met loads of people who expect too much from God and too little of themselves (the guy I see in the mirror when I shave belongs in that category sometimes).

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It's perfectly logical. Except for this little bit right here.
www.geocities.com/Area51/Shire/8641/

The Catholic church disagreed with the realignment of the calender, placing New Years some months off of where it was, because they believed that the world was created at the beginning of one of our new years, even if you change calenders, and that the fruit was an apple. Since apples aren't ripe in January, Adam and Eve couldn't have eaten one then, thus January couldn't be the start of the new year. The Catholic church's belief that the fruit of the TotKoGaE was an apple also lead to decreased apple sales during the dark ages, leading apple farmers to create the phrase "An apple a day keeps the doctor away".

This has been another "Useless Fact".

Baloo: I expect a great deal of myself, and am rarely disappointed. Of course, I am frequently disappointed when other humans fail to live up to the standards that I set for myself, because I know they're all capable of at least that, if I am. Unlike the standards of a half-divine or totally divine being. (As the man said, 'it's easy to resist temptation when you're GOD.')

What is unreasonable to expect of an all-powerful being?

(whup, I can answer that myself. It is unreasonable to expect that an all-powerful being, maker, shaper and ruler of all the universes, desires the saccharine adoration of a insignificant bipedial primate on a tiny world in a corner of the universe, can be swayed by supplication, and becomes petulant if it does not receive this flattery.)

Also, it is unlikely that combining genetic characteristics from closely related beings will result in the diversity of features required to create "races." More likely, you will be left with homogeniety. (That is, everybody will look the same, not different.)

I'd still like to here the creationist explanation for different races.

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"Well, I guess we're an Ovaltine family."
"MORE OVALTINE PLEASE!"
-American Radio Ads... *gag*... one more reason I'm glad to be above the 49th.

Another method is natural selection. Take Africans. A person with light skin has a lower chance of surviving near the equator, as they'd be suceptable to several skin conditions. Thus they'd have less of a chance of survival than someone with darker skin. Eventually, people with light skin would disappear. A similar thing would happen in the higher latitudes. Higher levels of pigment in skin would prevent sunlight from assisting with the creation of vitamin D3, thus causing rickets. Of course, the Inuit are an obvious exception, as they eat fish-liver oils, which are high in D3.

Then there's preference. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. People tend to be attracted to others who have similar traits to those they were brought up around. A white goose brought up by parents who were painted pink will prefer other geese that have been painted pink. Thus if half the people in a village had light skin, and half had slightly darker skin, a person with dark-skinned parents will probably marry a person with dark skin.

As for the "retarded and sterile" bit. That particular royal family was constantly marrying close relatives for a couple of centuries. The people after the flood would only have to do that for a couple of genrations. After that, the people could have started marying their third or fourth cousins instead of their sisters and first cousins. Marrying your sixth cousin twice removed doesn't have nearly as much chance of causing problems as marrying your first cousin. So, while the chances of causing retardation and sterility are slim, the physical traits remain within the group.