Pajiba

Well, if they go with the Miltonic version in "Paradise Lost," there's all kinds of meat, there, visually and in terms of narrative/length.

But that would entail the mental midgets at Walden reading and understanding Milton--and then doing right by the poem. So: I'm not holding my breath.

So, where do Cain & Abel and either a) invisible girls from somewhere else on the brand new planet; b) incest with good ol' mom, or; c) monkey fuckin' come into the picture?

Cause.....where the hell did everyone ELSE come from?

Will there be a lot of begetting? My Catholic school pretty much skimmed over the Old Testament because it was considered irrelevant, but if I remember, Adam has to figure out what his penis is for and then where it goes in Eve and after that it's a big begetting party.

I'll hijack this, because the Walden media project just sounds stupid and won't appeal to anyone here, to make a recommendation that any of you who might be interested check out R. Crumb's graphic novel interpretation of the book of Genesis.

No easy satire or cheap mockery, Crumb gets literal with it and paints the epic, violent, powerful tales that anchor the Old Testament like Greek Myths where powerful and divine forces smash into so many human meat puppets. He stays absolutely faithful to the source material and you will learn a lot about the Bible stories of Genesis no matter what previous level of experience you have, because you have never seen them like this.

Nevermind the religion, it's a great story. If your local library is cool enough to have a copy and you're cool enough to want to read it, check it out.

...which will be rendered in glorious and rapturous 3D.

Watch out! Adam's fig leaf is coming right for us!

@ PaddyDog: "but if I remember, Adam has to figure out what his penis is for and then where it goes in Eve and after that it's a big begetting party."

There's also this weird part about how God, who appears to be new, parades animals before Adam in the hopes of finding him "an help meet." "What about this?" God asks. "No, that's a koala." "What about this?" "No, that's another koala." "I bet you'll get a kick out of this!" "That's the same koala from before." And on and on until God finally knocks Adam out and creates Eve out of Adam's rib.

When I don't think of the story literally; when I think of it as Jewish poetry; I think there's much of the Genesis story that reads beautifully. God walking in his garden in the cool of the day; that intimate sense of creation where God breathes life from his own breath into Adam; the phrase "bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh."

It's when one tries to tie it literally to what the world is actually like that we start to run into trouble. (And then we just keep running.)

superasente:

We do know that all humans are descended from one single woman (the Eve theory) based on the fact that we can trace mitochondrial DNA which is contained in a part of the sperm that falls away from the sperm before it makes contact with an egg; therefore, we can see the lineage, but we don't have the same evidence for one single man, do we?

According to the fellows in the lab over at Wikiepdia, there's someone called Y-Chromosome Adam who fits that bill.

@ Jay: "Thus we're not inbred?"

I think superasente was pointing you in the right direction towards inbreeding with this part of his comment:

"You have a mother and father (2). Both of them have a mother and father (4), and all of them had mothers and fathers as well (8). Each generation that goes back, the number of ancestors doubles. After a thousand or so years of this, the number becomes so great, that the earth couldn't possibly host the populace of your ancestors. It would be thousands of times greater than the population of the earth TODAY, which we know beyond doubt has been steadily growing since humans developed a culture of totalitarian agriculture and animal husbandry."

It's a bit of inference that makes logical sense. And inbreeding only really becomes a problem when you rely on it as your only means of progeneration. (Cf Hapsburgs, the; also, why Spain has that lisp.)

PaddyDog, as I understand it, mitochondrial DNA is only useful in tracing human geneology back through generations of women. You can tell who a woman's mother and grandmother were -- and on back. This same test doesn't work for men.

There is a separate, unrelated test on the Y-chomosome that can trace the lineage of men in much the same way. Adam has been identified, but thousands of years apart from Eve and in a different region of Africa.

Dammitjanet--let me add (D) to your list, which would be bononos of female persuasion. Human-monkey hybrids are not biologically possible, but given how genetically close we are to bononos, "homonos" are possible.

You know, I would love to call someone a "homono" but it would so go badly....

branded:

Love it. This brings me back to the early days of Pajiba when Alex the Odd would give us tutorials on organic chemistry while commenting on a Tyler Perry movie. Good times.

So--who would play God? A random white guy with long beard? If He is portrayed as a ray of light (or a ball of fire or some other non-human object), who would do God's voice? I vote for James Earl Jones. I think it would be cool if God spoke with Vader's voice (not to mention explain a whole lot of questions).

But then Christians never lay down wrath on those who offend them.

EricD -- Fair point. But then again nobody's trying to sell the Koran or the Torah with a pair of 3D glasses.

touche', Jay, touche'

Not to say that Hammer Of The God(s) filmmaking isn't entertaining. Look at "The Ten Commandments". But "in the old days, God was vengeful and hot-tempered" is probably not what'll come out of this. More's the pity.

Can they just come out and call this Adam and Eve movie, "There Will Be Tits"?

@Prisco - I'd actually have a lot of respect for the studio that did try to make a movie based on the Koran. That would take some serious brass balls. Also, I would argue that adhering to the apocalyptic view of global warming is as much a belief system as the Old Testament and no one bats an eye at the two movies per year cramming that down our throat. And who are we kidding, if Hollywood thought they could make a buck selling the story of Buddha or Confucius or who ever the top guy in Shinto is, they would. And if one of those movies were announced everyone reading this knows they would be treated as scholarly and serious works. I just think it's incredibly hypocritical for a group that claims to be open minded and tolerant to be ready to blast this one religion at every turn.

Necessarily so, I think; it's pretty complicated stuff.

Agreed that it needs to be simplified a bit but the "we know for a fact" is actually not a fact at all. There's a healthy amount of debate about mitchondrial ancestry.

Wasn't there a movie on Muhammad's life called "The Message" (directed by Mustapha Akkad)? And I don't know what's new there's in the Koran. The same stories that you are going to find in the Old and New Testaments, you're going to find in the Koran.

Ah, the story of Adam and Eve. Never mind that, according to Jewish myths, Adam was a divorcee from his first wife Lilith. Lilith wasn't too keen on being bossed around by a man and is the first example of woman who refused to take it in the pooper (c'mon, you know Adam had to try it at least once).

Hence we get Eve. Now I'm all for Dominate/Submissive relationships, but one's that are created by an invisible space daddy is kinda fucked up. Apparently Eve's only two purposes in the Garden were to, in order: 1. Fuck Adam, and 2. Give him the fruit.

Honestly, after reading Genesis, you have to wonder something: How stupid and gullible were people that they fell for this story in the first place?