Silouan

Amma Theodora said, “There was a monk, who, because of the great number of his temptations said, ‘I will go away from here.’

“As he was putting on his sandals he saw another man who was also putting on his sandals, and this monk said to him, ‘Is it on my account that you are going away? Because I go before you wherever you are going.’”

— from the Desert Fathers

Original Article

The Internet said so.

This Christian Denomination Selector seems to have got me figured out. These tests usually tell me I should be an “Orthodox Quaker” first; Nice to see one that agrees with me :-)

Your Christian Denomination Selector Results:
Link: Christian Denomination Selector

		Eastern Orthodox Church
		Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod
		Evangelical Lutheran Church
		Roman Catholic Church
		Episcopal/Anglican Church
		Methodist/Wesleyan Church
		Church of Christ
		Mennonite Brethren
		Assemblies of God
		Free Will Baptist
		International Church of Christ
		Orthodox Quakerism
		Seventh-Day Adventist
		Presbyterian Church in America/Orthodox Presbyterian Church
		Reformed Churches
		Southern Baptist
		United Pentecostal Church
		Presbyterian Church USA
		Mormonism
		Reformed Baptist
		Jehovah’s Witness
		Liberal Quakerism
		Unitarian Universalism
		Unity Church

Original Article

She would have to be another descendant of Adam’s - a sister or cousin to Cain.

Incest? So it seems.

We should ask, though: Is incest sin because it reinforces accumulated genetic defects, causing much more likely birth defects?

Or is it sin because God says so in Leviticus 18?

That matters — because (if we choose to Genesis as history) Adam and Eve were created fresh with no genetic defects. It would have taken many, many generations for genetic drift to have got to a place where siblings or cousins risk deformed children when they marry. And the Law forbidding incest doesn’t come along until thousands of years later, in Moses’ time.

So if it’s a genetic issue, no problem; by the time Cain marries, Adam and Eve and all their descendants have been happily reproducing without birth defects for decades or centuries.

And if it’s a legalistic issue, still no problem, because that law doesn’t exist yet in Genesis.

Original Article

Here’s an intriguing thought by SF/fantasy writer Tim Powers:

The world, before the first sentient man left the garden of Paradise and looked at it, had not yet been defined by attention — it had been a spectrum of worlds-in-potential that had not yet included humanity, an infinity of possible prehuman histories; but by the time Adam stepped out and turned his attention on it, he had sinned mortally, and so the history that came to the fore as the actual one was a history of undeserved suffering and death. When Adam’s foot touched the soil, when his eyes took in the landscape, it stopped being many potentials and became one actual: a landscape that had been a savage killing ground for millennia.

Light turns out to be particles if you measure for particles; waves if you measure for waves. Adam had helplessly measured for misery. What sort of world would a sinless first man have found pre-existent out there? Animals that had never starved, cats that had never killed?

From a short story called “Through and Through” in the anthology Strange Intineraries.

Original Article

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Original Article