Showing posts with label polygenism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label polygenism. Show all posts

Thursday, June 2, 2016

Were Adam and Eve Chinese? If Only.


Well, I thought it was funny.

Of course, it's a cartoon. Adam and Eve were Semitic. How do I know this? Well, because the real Adam and Eve didn't eat the snake...

Looked at objectively, Adam and Eve did the worst thing that anyone in human history has ever done and could ever do. But they are now in Heaven. There's a lesson in that.

And no, it's not some vacuous Pope Francis lesson.

Indeed, it's almost certain Francis doesn't believe Adam and Eve ever really existed. Media bishop Robert Barron doesn't believe they existed. Indeed, most Catholics have been told it's all just a metaphor or some such.

Which of course would make the Doctrine of Original Sin incoherent.

But rejection of a literal Adam and Eve is a heresy. Or at least it is a subset of one. It's called polygenism, and it was rejected in, among other places, Humani Generis,* promulgated by Pope Pius XII in 1950. 

You can't be a good Catholic and believe it. Sorry, Catholic wannabe polygenists.

Can you believe Adam and Eve were Chinese? Sure. But then why didn't they eat the snake?



*37. When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty [to believe it]. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains that either after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parent of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled with that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the Teaching Authority of the Church propose with regard to original sin, which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam and which, through generation, is passed on to all and is in everyone as his own.