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 Mary's child, a fairy tale first published 1812

Near a great forest there lived a woodcutter with his wife. He had but one child, a three-year old girl. Now they were so poor that they no longer had their daily bread, and they did not know how they were to feed her.

One morning the woodcutter, filled with sorrow, went out to his work in the woods. While he was chopping wood suddenly there stood before him a beautiful tall woman with a crown of shining stars on her head.

She said to him, "I am the Virgin Mary, mother of the Baby Jesus. You are poor and needy. Bring your child to me. I will take her with me and be her mother and care for her."    CONTINUE

 Who created whom? 

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.  Sogod left God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

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 Why we believe

  Our beliefs are an accident of where we were born.  A Christian holds his beliefs because he was not born in Saudi Arabia. The Muslim holds his beliefs because he was not born on a kibbutz in Israel. A Jew holds his beliefs because he was not born in India. These beliefs are impressed like tattoos on the minds of children by their parents who were given their beliefs the same way.

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How many gods are there?

     The estimate for the number of gods that exist can be any number from none if you are an atheist to the same number as there are people in the world if you believe that each person has a slightly different opinion of exactly what God is. Of course, a very popular estimate is that there is one God, a belief common to the religions derived from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Even here the water is slightly confusing when you hear some of the explanations as to why the Christian Trinity consisting of the father, the Son and the Holy Ghost is not three gods but one God. There are other variations that are also possible.  Current estimates are that there are about 32,000 Christian religions at the present time, each one of which believes the others to be wrong. CONTINUEcommens

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How old is man?

Trying to decide when man first appeared on earth requires us to decide exactly what we consider a man. There is no doubt that man is a primate. Our current knowledge of DNA shows that we have more in common with chimpanzees, apes, baboons and all the monkeys then we have with other mammals. Science recognized the fact that we are primates even before the discovery of DNA by such similarities between us and other primates as the presence of hands and feet, very dexterous hands, 3-D vision and the bone structure of the face. Current scientific knowledge indicates that primates began evolving on a different branch of evolution from other mammals about 65 million years ago.

Primates that began to look like humans began to appear about 8 million years ago. The genus Homo, to which we as Homo sapiens belong appeared about 2.5 million years ago. CONTINUErelitious symbolscommens