Two answers come to mind, neither of which pictures GOD as “anti-babies and mothers.”

ONE: Unholy lives are bad enough; we all live unholy lives. But those dedicated to overt and deliberate rejection of GOD are a stench in GOD’s nostrils. Why should GOD endure this stench? Since we’re all going to die anyway, shortening a wretched life (wretched in the eye of a Holy GOD) is worth making the case. Just being vulnerable is insufficient to forestall impending horror.

Your mileage may vary; but you didn’t create the universe for the purpose of generating souls to love. You don’t own every molecule there is. You don’t have the ability to create souls in the first place. And no, making a baby isn’t the same as making a soul.

TWO: While GOD perfuses the Old Testament, Genesis is merely an origin story and has as much bearing on fact and science as any other origin story. GOD’s fingerprints are all over the Old Testament, and become clearer once we reach the prophetic books, e.g. Isaiah. But Jewish Scripture starts with the wholly fanciful origin story which a) is a Deed of Title, GOD made the universe, and b) a liturgy celebrating that in terms designed to affect people of that era. Genesis 1:3 is good science: “And GOD said, ‘Let there be light.’” The New Testament goes into a little more detail: John 1:3 “all things that were made were made by the WORD.” So when the WORD took human flesh to operate as a human life (Jesus) that was the same WORD that made all galaxies, stars, planets, and so on.

Thus the spirit of ancient times, which was as “red in tooth and claw” as tigers and their prey. The stories people told used self-exculpatory references such as “GOD told me to do it.” Comedian Flip Wilson, a regular on the Tonight Show for a few years in the last part of the 20th Century, had a character he named Geraldine, who would say, “The Devil made me do it.” Back then it was never a “devil” – their gods had a blood lust would curdle modern sensibilities. Moloch in particular had a bronze fireplace-shaped idol, standing erect with outstretched arms, and a hole where his abdomen would have been. Inside was a hot blaze. The hands stretched out were very very hot. First-time parents were required to lay their newborn on those hands as an offering, to persuade Moloch to bless the local crops in the coming year. I’m not making this up. In such times as those, these same people told stories that used GOD to justify genocide.

And for that matter we observed genocide up close and personal in the first half of the 1940’s. Not to put too fine a point on it, in 1948 once Jewish guerrillas had chased Britain out of Palestine, the entire surrounding Arab world rose up to finish the task; they failed, too. Many Muslim hearts in the areas around Israel still regret that failure, and dream of a re-do.

One who is “first” here in life seldom exhibits behaviors and attitudes commanded by GOD. Right here in the US we have a prime example. Those who are content with modest behavior and who suppress self-seeking impulses often wind up “last.” The parable of placement at table illustrates this: a man comes early to a banquet and awards himself one of the choicer empty seats. Much later when all but a few, very lesser seats are full, a guest arrives whom the host intended to place in that high seat. The current occupant must move to one which is still open hence much humbler, i.e. not chosen by any other attendee. This is the way Jesus illustrates the idea that self-seeking is often unwise, especially if it involves arrogance or presumption. He gives a second part of the parable: a man arrives early and takes a very low seat; later the host may invite him to take a higher seat than he chose for himself, because the host knows the ‘worth’ of every invited guest.

Generalizing, those who exhibit modesty, who demand no special favors from the world at large, will find greater glory in heaven. Actually, glory in heaven is a tough concept, since GOD alone has glory. But if you want to imagine having a 3-D location that is “closer” to GOD, then think of the parable that way.

I would say that “inerrancy” of Scripture is a cop-out. YES God said, “Let there be light.” That’s verse 3 of Genesis. But the first part of Genesis 1 is liturgy not history. The idea that GOD gave us a TED talk about how he created the universe (or at least home base, planet earth) doesn’t survive the simplest sniff test. No one I know has ever given a cogent answer as to why anyone in the modern world would endorse one origin story (Abraham’s) as rock when all other origin stories, if put in a lineup alongside Abraham’s, would cover it the way leaves cover other leaves on your lawn in the fall.

The one primary difference is that GOD perfuses HIMself into the Jewish Scripture then lays everything out in full 20–20 focus in the New Testament. The Old Testament GOD is patient, forgiving, full of love for HIS wayward children, and bears as many signs of a vein of gold (in the forms of predictions, prefigurings, preparations of ideas like mercy) such that when Jesus did come it became a 20–20 hindsight; HE had been written into the Old Testament from the beginning.

Just not the beginning we think of when reading Genesis. Rather, John 1:3 tells us that the word (Jesus, during his human life on earth) made all things that were made. Clue here, we are supposed to look into the heavens to see GOD’s signs and wonders, but a caveat is missing, the one that says, “Don’t look too close lest you become confused.” The advances in astronomy since the early 20th Century have given us a very close look; and we understand that GOD spoke the WORD more than a dozen billion years ago, i.e. more than two million times a mere six thousand years. The universe contains how many stars? We don’t have time to count that high in a hundred lifetimes, yet the WORD, if you believe John, did all of that before HE humbled HIMself to live as Jesus.

Who are we to quibble time and method with GOD? What is any length of time to a GOD for whom “a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day” —? Who are we to quibble over evolution, as though GOD would never stoop to something like that. What adult mind in the modern era is going to elect Genesis as his truth if he hasn’t been raised in a Christian household?

The case for GOD is everywhere you look; the case for Genesis being inerrant, on the other hand, is like rawhide hogtying the advance of Christ.

A Chinese doctor publicly announced two human births where, presumably at the once-cell stage and prior to placement in a donor mother’s womb, he had done a CRISPR modification to enhance resistance to (something – I forget what.)

He was in the news for a while, but now has disappeared, maybe to a bad place and possibly to a gene lab where he will try to improve the offspring of high party officials. Your guess is better than mine, because I don’t care.

But the use of the term Mutant is about as rational as saying the moon is green cheese. EVERY SINGLE HUMAN EVER BORN has a tiny handful of miscopies which make his/her three billion DNA codons dissimilar to his 1.5 billion from mother and 1.5 billion from father.

((NOTE: ironically, with boys the Y chromosome has way fewer codons than the X, which means among other things that mom’s DNA is 51% to dad’s 49% when the child is male. Girls get 50-50 since dad give them an X. OH I FORGOT!!! Mom’s mitochondrial DNA is there, too. There are tales of some male mitochondrions hitch-hiking inside the sperm, but if it’s real it’s also rare. And even then, they came from his mother not his father.))

Gene editing is terrifying and fraught with ethical issues. But its first applications will be to eradicate Tay-Sachs disease, and a boatload of other genetic “problems” which end a child’s life early. And that’s just the first wave.

And, “Right” to reproduce? Let me introduce you to #metoo, NARAL, ACLU, and surely a couple dozen other groups which defend a woman’s right to end her pregnancy and also defend her right to achieve one. Please don’t pretend that someone must climb to heaven then sit on GOD’s throne to ride herd on the subject. Of course it deserves attention – – but only on the doers, not the done-to.

Every ‘old’ or ‘aboriginal’ culture which the modern world has uncovered has its own, unique origin story. None of these stories are remotely possible in any scientific sense. One of these is Sumerian (before Abraham, but in what would become the Holy Land) – and a thousand years later Abraham had a very similar version which wound up in the book of Genesis.

It wasn’t one whit more realizable, in view of what we know today about wind, weather, and physics world any of the others. BUT I agree wholeheartedly with conservative Christians that it is GOD’s word.

How? All things are possible with GOD, but ask yourself why HE would describe the origins of the universe in a way that would actually break through to someone living in that Sumerian-descendant culture. Ask yourself what terms would make sense. Why would GOD choose to break so much from the culture in place then?

Rather, to me “Inspired Word of GOD” means that GOD breathed HIMself into the teaching and rules of the Jewish Scripture. Once actual history began to accumulate, how much of it resembles King Arthur? Joseph is a good approximation. Does it matter to me whether Joseph and his twelve sons are fact or embellished fact or something lesser still?

Not one whit.

Does it matter to me that the Jewish history of Joshua’s conquest of Canaan accurately record Israel’s failure to faithfully execute GOD’s commanded genocide of the people of Canaan who weren’t Israeli?

Not one whit. I know that GOD loves; it’s why HE made the universe in the first place. Does GOD’s infusing of HIMself into the Jewish religious writings invalidate its ability to contain their lame excuses for mass killing?

Not one whit. GOD is love, and HIS children are sinful. On a good day. Just like me and everyone else who has ever lived, save for Jesus Christ.

Once we reach the birth of Jesus, the Scripture gets down to historical reality. I personally refuse to comment on Paul’s attack on homosexuals, by the way – None of the gospels mention the idea, Jesus never condemned it, and the few places in the Abrahamic legends are a) condemnation of ritual humiliation of a stranger passing through (Sodom and Gomorrah) and one among a series of instructions which also proscribe e.g. mixing materials (cotton with wool?) when weaving. Polyester blend, anyone?

In short, the conservative Christian’s abhorrence of homosexuality looks from here like a case needing a dose of “Pluck the log from your own eye before assisting your neighbor in plucking the mote from his own eye.” Christians have perverted GOD’s love to an impulse to hate, condemn, despise, an drive out people whose innate, wired-in sexual response is to their own gender.

t’s not a choice. I’ve run across two step-nephews, a daughter, and a college sweetheart all of whom had to deal with an inner and utter inability to find pleasure with their opposite gender. My own experience counts for nothing except for this: I know four homosexuals, all family members (well, I was engaged to one) and none of them signed up to be singled out for their poor choice of wiring.

Back to topic: No, Genesis is in no possible way historical. For that matter, potsherds in the ground date and define cultural changes. Those found in the Holy Land provide zero evidence for an influx of foreigners, whether or not around the time attributed to Moses. That evidence is just is not there.

Rather, one explanation I’ve encountered, and regard as a “what-if,” is that the poor agricultural underclass found that the urban elites of that era, and yes there were such, had overspent their credit. The peasants rose up and burned down every major town. Over time, that excess was, supposedly, hushed up, perhaps shrouded in “God made us do that” language.

The above conjecture offers no insight into the flourishing twelve-tribes story, the clear delineation of one tribe for religious service and the other eleven given specific homelands within greater Israel. BUT the fact that I can’t come up with one is hardly proof that there was no such root material for the twelve tribes, and the fact that they did have specific areas in Israel, and that one of them was in charge of all religious rites and materials.

In short, requiring someone from modern era to take at face value the other-than-possible legends from the earliest part of the Old Testament is tantamount to slamming the door to faith in the face of anyone who can read.

Let’s establish scope. If the mutation occurs after conception it affects only that one cell and whatever other cells descend from it. In that case, pain is hard to imagine in the general sense.

If the mutation occurs in the egg or sperm prior to fertilization then it can have full effect. There is, for example, a genetic condition which makes pain a non-event. People with this condition wind up not noticing major damage – a broken leg doesn’t hurt, but it messes up your walk a lot.

Going from there back to ‘normal’ is the real blessing, since pain is a great teacher. That’s not a whimsical statement; the world is full of harms, most of which are easy to avoid. Pain teaches you what those are.

On the other hand there 24,000 – ish total genes in each human cell. They get used and reused in baffling combinations. Superficially, mess up one and you have 23,999 other good ones to prop you up. But of course the interdependencies among our genes are overwhelming. There is just no way at present to write a three-page paper 24,000 times to support a study into what might result from a given one of the many possible changes per gene, times 24,000.

And of course a relative handful of the supposed quarter-million to half-million “gene changes” – these numbers are completely made up – will actually improve you. As of now we are like the infinite number of monkeys smacking typewriter keys – one of them WILL write faithful copies of all of Shakespeare! – in our understanding of this fabulous typewriter called DNA.

I find a clue (for me) in “the 5 prayers.” Are you, by chance, Muslim? That’s the only faith I know which has a ‘five’ associated with prayers: Muslims are commanded to pray five times a day; Muslim cities have minarets from which the call is sung. If I recall correctly, the prayers must be recited verbatim, without personal requests.

Even if that is not the case, GOD created the world out of love. And us, the tiny chemical beings who crowd this single planet, circling one of roughly two hundred sextillion stars in the universe. GOD spoke it into being a long time ago and told us to look into the heavens to see HIS signs and wonders; but HE never said, “Don’t look too close!”

In the past 150 years or so we have become able to look very very close, so close that we can form an educated guess about how many stars the observable universe holds, and the point at which GOD invented time, which was 13.78 billion years ago.

We also know that GOD cares about us. The gulf between GOD, Who spoke the universe into being so long ago we can’t hold the idea in our minds, and WHO made the universe so large that we can’t hold that idea in our minds, either, could only care one fig about us IF HE loved us. We are less than single celled protozoa in the face of GOD, yet HE tells us that HE created us. That can only mean love.

GOD knows that his children here on earth are a sorry lot. Think of every single human being there ever has been as so ordinary that his primary aid to the environment is (I’m being humorous here) to convert food into fertilizer to grow more food.

The most righteous ordinary man or woman there ever has been is, if held next to GOD’s purity and holiness, what we politely call a hot mess. Are you? OF COURSE, and so am I. GOD is beyond our ability to guess at, so whether or not you suspect that GOD isn’t happy with you, HE is.

Unless you perform some act which rejects HIM; then you might suspect that HE isn’t happy, perhaps in an unchangeable way. So, don’t reject HIM, and HE won’t reject you.

And that’s a fact.

(PS Sometime’s a person’s mood falls into a hole; words won’t pull that person out, but professionals exist who treat what is called ‘depression.’ No matter what, trust that GOD loves you, cherishes you, because you are unique. How often do you think GOD would discard something HE made that is unique?)

The real question appears to be, when and how will conservative Christians understand that every primitive tribal culture has its unique Origin Story – and Abraham’s is found all over the Pentateuch. To say in defiance, “Our Origin Story is ROCK,” is to belittle GOD.

We are told to look into the heavens to see His signs and wonders, but we did not get the memo saying “Don’t look too close.” In the past century or so we have been able to look very very close. We see GOD’s wonders not in a six thousand year old world but in one that is over two million times that age.

Current astronomy (I’m told) estimates that the observable universe contains two hundred sextillion stars – that’s a 2 followed by twenty-three 0’s. In the beginning GOD said, “Let there be light.” – the third verse of Genesis. This is the first hint that GOD perfuses Abraham’s origin story.

The Jewish Scripture’s moral basis, instruction, depiction of human nature, etc. are half of what convinces me that GOD perfuses that Scripture the way salt perfuses the ocean. The other ‘half’ is the broad scattering of promises and prophecies that foretell the Savior Jesus.

Separating the “origin story events” such as Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Methuselah, and Noah, also the Flood and the Tower of Bab El, from GOD’s presence in with and under that text, can be a terrifying leap for someone whose faith rests on the ROCK mentioned above. In my own mind I do not find fault with anyone for whom that is a show-stopper.

A very early Church Father said, “In the essentials unity, in the non-essentials charity, and in all things love.” Some count the six thousand year age of earth as essential; I ask them for charity where we differ, and offer my own.

For those whose “essentials” include rejection of Christ as divine savior, I invite them to view the DVD “Star of Bethlehem.” It does a superb job of connecting modern astronomy with Old Testament prophecy. Suspend just enough disbelief to watch and listen with an open mind. I had to view it a third time before I felt confident that I had the whole picture.

The picture it paints is awesome. It does so using a 21st Century program that shows what’s in the skies 24×7 and goes well before the time of Christ. For me it is the ‘Rosetta stone’ that bridges billions of years and trillions of galaxies with the WORD come down to earth to endure the human life an death we know as Jesus, and Jesus’ resurrection.

The DVD connects every dot.

What would persuade me to believe that such ownership is invalid?

First, we need to discard the entire idea of ownership; if I improve, tend, and live on a piece of ground that has been in the habit of thinking of me as its owner, is that enough? OK ground doesn’t think, so next question – who does think? And when they think about the ground I care for and live on, exactly what might they think? Since the idea of ownership is moot, we can venture into anarchy in which, since no one owns anything, anyone can take and use anything since ownership doesn’t exist.

That doesn’t sound practical. Do we get to look at this as a moral issue, or merely a practical one? I ask this because the question of whether nor not ownership is a valid concept usually arises in a moral context not a practical one.

But if we stipulate that some variety of morality is in play, who can provide a viable definition?

IMHO the ownership question must sit on the table until that larger issue finds a definition satisfactory to all. I’m prepared for a significant delay in reaching that point.

Meanwhile, questions of morality etc. which arrive naked of even a working definition will have to defer to the practical side. Systems which deny the validity of individual ownership tend to be chaotic, since in the end “the people” own everything, and “the people’s designated representatives” discover that they live on Animal Farm (George Orwell).

I am a believing Christian, but have realized something about Genesis.

It’s what we call an “origin story,” and every culture emerging from the stone age has had one. Abraham’s origin story is similar to one from a thousand years before, in the same area of the world.

Here’s an observation: When GOD said to look into the heavens to see HIS signs and wonders, there was no caveat saying, “Don’t look too close.” In the last 150 years or so we have been getting better and better at looking close. What we see is that GOD said “Let there be light” over 13 billion years ago. Further, that the WORD, who made all things that were made, has created around two hundred sextillion stars – these are what we can see in the observable universe.

So when we declare that every single other origin story there ever has been is made-up, whimsical, and absolutely unrelated to the actual world around us, then take Abraham’s (which is ditto) and call it rock – “Our origin story is ROCK!” we wind up denigrating the glory the GOD has made.

Do you quail before a 13 billion year universe, as opposed to six thousand? What you’ve done is down-scale GOD by a factor of two million.

Do you recall the story of Job? What happened when he decided to quibble with GOD? What might happen if you have the chance, and ask GOD to confine HIMself to a six thousand year span?

The WORD confined himself into the limitations of a human life, the one we know as Jesus. GOD the Father perfused himself into the Abrahamic Scripture, such that it both provides a perfect guide to obedience, faith, and moral behavior, as well as drips with prophecies of the coming Messiah.

Requiring yourself to believe only in a GOD with a six thousand year span is about as reverent as to change over and pick up some other primitive origin story and love that one instead – you’ve squandered he chance GOD gave you to understand the glory that you worship.