Transient

If it is mythology then there was no mark of Cain.
If we take the stories as real then i cannot see how there could have been enuf people around to worry about needing a mark.
Maybe we need to assume that when Cain killed Abel that they were both about 800 years old - then maybe there might be a few more people around but still I cannot see that they would not be fairly close-knit still and not need a mark.

It's just a story written to reinforce the control of the priestly class over the people just like the rest of the bible.
Every now and then there may be some things that are facts - such as "Egypt did exist" but that is the same with a lot of fiction.

LoungeHead

Love too. I think I'll introduce a chimp or midget into the story. Give the whole genesis thing a bit of class.

Sheshbazzar

Strange how people so blithely take this tale of a mark, and a curse that YHWH pronounced upon that -one- particular individual, Cain, and turn it into being a "mark" that was placed upon entire nations and races.
In the Patriarchal narrative Cain, the individual, was expected to live for many hundreds of years more and even build a city.
Nothing is is mentioned anywhere in The Bible about any of his descendants having any kind of collective of mark or curse placed upon them.
This is simply an abuse of the text that has been employed for millinia as a convenient excuse to rationalise the marginalization and mistreatment of entire ethnic groups, it is not, and never has been a "Scriptural" teaching, but only a purely human dogma and doctrine founded upon the perverting and stretching of The Scriptures to justify the continuing of unequal and unjust treatment and enslavement of these allegedly "marked" and "inferior" societies and ethnic groups.

Transient

I guess it's hard to know whether people have such twisted logic in their brains as they accept some parts of the bible as true but reject the rest that doesn't suit them or whether they don't really believe any of it but just pretend to so they can use it on the masses of peasants.
I think it is the latter.
I doubt that many people in high positions, religious or political, actually believe the bible is true.
I doubt that the pope believes it really, and from my experience a hell of a lot of ministers or pastors don't really believe either (or at least they have no more reason to believe than I do).
There is a lot of brainwashing in children (hell even I took all my children to sunday school and put them thru christian colleges - pentecostal ones at that) and a lot of social pressure, for those that make contact with churches, to accept belief systems.
In a way religious experience is like a stock market or housing bubble.

premjan

If there was a real sensible interpretation of this story we wouldn't have to guess what it meant.

Citsonga

Well, they may be the minority, but there are definitely a lot more than a few people who take the myths literally. I know a lot who believe these old stories are literal and true (I used to for years myself). Not that they actually understand all the details and can present them believably, but they still hold to the stories as literal and true.

In my experience, those other passages are still claimed to be true, but also claimed to not be understood properly. All of the Bible is supposedly true, but the stuff that doesn't jive together or with their beliefs are supposedly evidence of our misunderstanding, not the Bible being flawed.

As a former devout Christian myself, after going through the very painful process of realizing that all my life I had been brainwashed with nonsense, I also have to wonder how many ministers and theologians have realized that the whole thing is BS but feel the need to pretend that it's true simply because their careers are on the line.

Yeah, I'm not too fond of the brainwashing either. I was so thoroughly brainwashed with religion as a child that it took me several years as a Christian adult before I started questioning my beliefs.

Granted, a lot of those doing the brainwashing (Sunday school teachers, parents, relatives, etc) aren't intentionally misleading the children, since they themselves believe it to be true. However, despite my wife's good intentions, it really bothers me that she takes our children to church and feeds them religion, but I don't want to start a fight about it.

Analyst

Just tell them other myths from other lands?

Transient

Well I would still like it all to be true. I would still like there to be a loving, kind God who cares for me. I don't mind the rules, "rules are cool" as Buzby would say. I have just had too good a look at the foundations of the church - I should never have looked at them. I really wish I hadn't.

Some people think that agnostics or athiests are nasty people who don't want to obey God's rules or that they don't really want to know a loving and kind God but this is certainly not always the case. I think that christians are so caught up in what they believe is true that they cannot understand others at all really. Their religion is a very exclusive religion, whereas it should be inclusive.

Citsonga

That is generally the view presented by the Church. Before I became a skeptic, I was always taught that those who didn't believe in Jesus just did not want to serve God. They were painted as dishonest for the sake of self-indulgent sinfulness.

Now that I have become a skeptic (more accurately a firm disbeliever) myself, I know fully well that such is not the case. There are people who have genuine and well-thought-out reasons for rejecting the faith, despite what many Christians claim.

Sure, there undoubtedly are some who left the church for the sake of things the church labels as "sin," still believing the brainwashing they'd received but not being able to live by the religious codes. However, it's quite ridiculous for Christians to broad-brush all skeptics on the basis of those individuals.

Sheshbazzar

Transient, I spent over 50 years thinking that I would like it all to be true, then I became aware that what the Bible stories actually propose is nightmarish. and worse, destructive to any genuine human initiative to make the real world that we live in a better place.
Because at heart, both the Old, and The New Testament's, are books of doom and gloom, with an integral perspective that the only solution to mankind's problems is a God caused worldwide and wholesale destruction of humanity.
I am not such a sick minded misanthrope that I would even want to survive while 99.9% of the worlds population gets destroyed under "Gods wrath".
Having finally shook off those old and ignorant religious superstitions, I am at long last enjoying my life in the real universe as it is.
And I see myself as now being a much better citizen, and a more ethical person, than I was ever able to be as a believer, I no longer have "defend" the Bibles ridiculous fairy tales, or even attempt to rationalise away why BibleGods ordering the murder of innocent children and infants was moral.
I can converse with, and help my fellow man without need to judge his religion or nationality, or feel compelled to preach or engage in any subtle religious indoctrination or conversion efforts. That evil wedge that religion is, no longer splits me off from genuine concern others.
Once I got rid of the idea that I was "saved" or was going to be "saved" one of these days, I no longer thought my self so "special", or better than others who were not of my own religion, no one else is any more "saved" or "lost" than myself, we are all of us like the leaves, we live, we die, and we return to the elements.
No one "needs" a god, we need each other, and to care for each other, and for all men everywhere with impartiality.

I am glad that I looked at the church's foundations, as I finally was able to grow-up and put away those old fairy tales and childish things.
And also those things that were unsavory and divisive, things inimical to a sound mind and to mental health.
I cannot be optimistic about a wrathful god ultimately destroying the earth, if that is real, then life is of no value and not worth living.
Truth that is true, is worth living and dying for, and part of that truth is the fact that the god of the Bible is only a fabrication of men.