"....but I feel a little like Reggie Jackson. I, tonight, wish I could be "the straw that stirs the drink." Of course I can't be. Forever, I've had trouble w/ Eve being created from Adam's rib. Certainly the virgin birth has also been questionable to me. I totally understand "faith." That is the belief in that which is unprovable. There are so many "religions" each of which has "faith." Which "religion" is right, if any, and which isn't? Obviously I can't purport to know. But each "religion" in it's own "faith" is oh so confident that theirs is the "one" true one. It's simply a matter of "faith." So Darwinism, to those of "faith," is incomprehensible. Science overwhelmingly supports evolution vs. creationism (BTW scientists are "God's creation") while religion abhors such heresy. Education teaches independent thinking, "faith" teaches blind belief. Independent thinking is an enigma, the antithesis, to religious dogma. Like evolution, science overwhelmingly says global warming is real. The "right" disagrees, again believing that science is incorrect. I sure don't know which side is correct but I surely lack the "faith" to believe Adam created Eve from one of his ribs, or that Jesus resulted from a virgin birth. Regardless of whether those w/ "faith" are correct, I can't fathom how their "faith" (whatever religion) condones proselyting or war to further their belief. "Faith" is indeed that strong, that dangerous. And unfortunately here in US, politics today has become religious, voters unable to really objectively think for themselves blindly follow the "spin," the "talking points" of their party (religiously). My Gosh, are American voters all so uneducated, so uninformed, or so lazy to become informed, that they just blindly have "faith" in the political party to which they're registered? Really, politics are not religion - politics are far more important. Politics affect lives today. Religion, who knows an effect, when if ever. Sorry, I'm getting old and am hoping for better for those I leave."

I'll have a shot at your post, if I may.

Seen as history, much that you read in the Bible is difficult for the non-partisan, prudent, scientific and/or sceptical adult reader to tolerate. Celestial bodies are stopped, move backwards and are made to wander in order to accommodate or announce its heroes. People are turned into pillars of salt. Bushes talk while burning. Trumpets reduce walls to rubble. Plagues affect villains and ignore heroes. Peoples are punished collectively for the sins of the few. Genocides are celebrated. Individuals are raised from the dead. History is read as the ascension of faith and a chauvinist kind of virtue and the punishment of curiosity and sin.

Following William of Occam's injunction, a whole bunch of its material is much easier to explain as the prejudice of the writers rather than as vast gaps in nature which the God of the Hebrews fills.

It helps the suspension of disbelief, of course, if a person is brought up in a religion. We absorb magic trustingly as children where we are inclined to see smoke and mirrors as adults. The principles and transparencies and received wisdoms of childhood easily become the unchallengeable core of our beliefs and irrationalities in the years of what we call our maturity.

Talking of the setting for the tale of Eve's rib, the Eden story itself is one of the two main versions of creation in the Bible (the other being Genesis 1-2:4a), each of which fairly obviously contradicts the other in its historical detail. In Genesis 1, the original state of the universe is a watery waste and in the Eden story it is a waterless waste. In Genesis 1, the order of creation begins with light and proceeds in turn through the construction of the firmament, the dry land, vegetation, the heavenly bodies, birds and fishes, animals and - finally - man (male and female together). In the Eden story, the order of creation begins with the moulding of Man from clay and proceeds through the Garden, the origin of trees (including the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge), animals, beasts and birds (with fish omitted) and finally Woman, made out of rib. Different in every way.

It may be otiose to point it out, but neither view is supported by the evidence nature provides. Does God mislead? Or is the book of nature more reliably a record of God's model of creation than an ancient book? If indeed we impute a God into the almanac.

This is an amateur outline of the order of creation as I understand it. Nature begins as a nullity. Around $14bn years ago, an event occurred which created the universe ex nihilo. This big bang event unfolded time and released the energy out of which particles congealed, uncertainly. These particles were made out of the tiniest components that were bonded together electrically. In turn, the particles chemically bonded with one another and these joined-up particles are what we call molecules. Cosmic bodies formed out of the mutual attraction of numberless millions of these swirling, scattered molecules: stars formed from molecular clouds which collapsed into balls of plasma; our own sun formed in one of these stellar nurseries; four billion years ago (or so) the earth, the little planet we know as our home, itself coalesced from the dust and rock rotating in our local solar system. But it was an inhospitable earth that took shape. Comets smashed into it regularly. A giant collision may have created our moon. Volcanoes gushed over a landscape rich in carbon dioxide.

And yet, there was water here in the chaos. And the sun shone, bathing our world in warmth. Microscopic, carbon-based life probably emerged in the acidic, ocean environment. Speciation developed opportunistically as variations in the environment, chemistry and genetic templates of early organisms occurred. Oxygenation of the environment occurred over millions of years as a result of the molecular-stripping processes of certain primitive organisms, such as stromatolytes, which had a use for carbon. Oxygen, which was the excretion of this process, is toxic to many forms of life; but other forms were capable of absorbing and using it. In the early ocean, (amongst other weird types of critter seen in the Burgess Shale) plants, fish and arthropods thrived. Each finally emerged from the saline ocean, flopped on the land and interrogated the air. Over the eons, dynamic changes of form continued on land, with fishy forms gradually extruding arms and legs, and their skin feathers and fur, eventually declaring themselves amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds in the fossil record.

This was not a moral world. It was defined by the random results of contingency. Species continued to vary randomly, as our genes dictate. The variation amongst mammals over the millenia finally led to the origin of hominids (along the ape line of descent), of which homo sapiens is the survivor, a footnote to a dynamic process of genetic drift and by no means the target towards which nature has aimed.

One creature - the one who calls himself wise - pays a price in this tale. Instead of being the centre of the creation story, with a universe made to order, man is merely a minor stop in the journey of genetic dynamism, on a planet occupying a distant place in a universe which is, to all intents and purposes, limitless.

As Darwin put it, "there's a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

Indeed. It is hard to return to the Middle Eatern clay without wondering at the poverty of the Bible's story, against the majesty of the story told to us directly by nature. A story that is without magic, and yet that is full of wonder.

But return we shall.

History and mythology. We have the Bible which tends to view the tale of Israel as if it is unconnected from the countries around about - except in relation to war, pestilence and recidivism. But Israel was not disconnected from foreign influences. The Jewish people were exiled to Egypt and later to Babylon in the heart of Mesopotamia. Babylon was the city in which much of the Bible was compiled by the exiled aristocracy: "oh yeah we wept when we remembered Zion." More was written down on their return to Israel. Indeed, the story of Jonah reveals a fair degree of connectedness between cities during the Assyrian period: he traveled to Jaffa and Tarshish, before journeying to Nineveh as his God demanded. Nineveh was the Assyrian capital. Caravans took merchants' cargoes of apes and frankincense, of myrrh and sapphires, of spices and gold along the ancient King's Highway between Egypt and Mesopotamia, which ran alongside the land of Canaan and the far shore of the Sea of Galilee. The land of Canaan in time became the land of Israel. Stories as well as produce surely travelled easily from one kingdom to another.

The story of God as a potter has a fore-runner in Egyptian mythology, with the God Khnum forming the first man and woman on his wheel. While the God Ea, father of Marduk in Mesopotamian myth, was also described as a potter.

Adam, of course, emerges from Yahweh's divine clay. The legend of Adapa from Mesopotamian mythology tells the tale of Adapa as the first (and the model) man who, in the course of the story, visits the city of the gods. Adapa is tricked into refusing the bread and water of life which would have granted him the gift of immortality, and is sent back to earth with various privileges and disabilities. Adapa is a variation of the name Adam. The Biblical account provides the Yahwist's explanation of mortality.

The idea of a divine Garden Paradise appears in Sumerian poems, that speak of the land of Dilmun as a fertile watering hole, in which the brutal laws of nature are revoked. Visit the British Museum in London and you can see Assyrian reliefs showing a walled garden filled with palm trees and other plants. The word "paradise" - and presumably the concept - itself comes from ancient Persia.

The story of the forbidden fruit is echoed in the Sumerian tale of Enki, in which Enki eats the eight forbidden plants and the mother-goddess Ninhursag pronounces the curse of death upon him for his violation.

Ninhursag's curse results in an assault on eight parts of Enki's body, including his rib. He was cured of this ailment by the so-called "Lady of the Rib", Ninti, whose name also means the "Lady of Life". In the Hebrew myth, Eve was named Hawwah by Adam, meaning "Life" and was made out of Adam's rib.

So the whole tale of Eden and Eve's rib is the currency of Middle Eastern mythology. But it is cast in the bronze of the Jewish salvation myth, in which adherence to the God of the Old Testament moulds the story into a morality play. God has a plan. The plan is that the Jewish people must worship him. When they do so, they are fruitful and multiply. When they do not do so, they are righteously punished.

The New Testament has a different principle. It is intended to show that the Old Testament has reached its moment of climax and to witness the incarnation of the son of God. The old salvation story is used as the backdrop and mined for its useful prophetic meaning.

The same use of mythology is selectively introduced to prove the key principle. Much like many other man-gods of the ancient world, Jesus is born of divine intervention. Hercules was the son of Zeus. The Egyptian Horus was the result of parthenogenesis, and Isis, his mother, shares many traits with Mary, Jesus' mother. In the Akkadian mythology, Marduk was created in the heart of Apsu, and the god Ea was his father. Mithras, the God of Mithraism which was a main competitor of Christianity in its formative years, was called "the light of the world" and the Magi associated with Mithraism denotes a follower of Zoroaster. Vishnu descends into the womb of Devaki and emerges in the avatar of Krishna. The god Surya copulates with Kunti to give birth to Karna, before restoring her virginity. Buddha occupied his mother's womb mindful and self-possessed.

As with the accounts of the creation, the two birth stories contained in Luke and Matthew are significantly different.

So we each get to choose. Do we believe in the magical account in spite of their contradictions, or should we treat these things as mythology and symbolism contextual with their times?

If we choose the latter, which many religious people do, then the kinds of literalist readings of the Bible lose their power to harm. It is, after all, a minority view within religion that evolution is hostile. The Catholic Church, having learnt the lessons of opposition to observation, accepts Darwin's theory as fact, but - as I understand it - sees the agency of God in the direction of genetic drift. Although one might view this as unnecessary as an explanation in science, it isn't harmful either. If God can deliver coherence out of randomness and chaos, all power to him. But I don't see a sign of it in the outcomes the world produces. Nature makes millionaires out of monsters, and starves the innocent.

Belief occurs along a spectrum. Your argument is not with faith. It is with a type of faith. The faith in which the adherents' eyes are closed to everything other than one thing, in which the world is made to conform with the Word, in which faith means a lack of curiosity. This kind of faith offers benefits in certainty and meaning to some people. But I agree with you that it can also be harmful, especially when it gleans power. This is why we should all be happy that we have developed a system which permits religions to thrive without being controlled by them. Fundamentalism is fundamentally incapable of delivering a majority.