aw, thanks very much! i'm glad you enjoyed reading my responses there! that means a lot. :)
and as for the books i offered, it's my pleasure! just please let me know what you thought of whatever you end up downloading and reading. i'm interested in your opinions!

Thanks for the advice Laura. I like bike rides. We have a new trail here in Seymour. It goes from Oneida to Black Creek. Its great, and is only one block from my house.

Hi Laura. I'm just north of you in Seymour. This is a really nice site. I was just told of by my christian brother today. He says he has nothing to do with me if I don't believe our family's religion. Nice loving christian huh?

Wow, a nice response, Laura.

possibly someone named him Yahweh but maybe Yahweh was just the natural translation of the name of an earlier deity that someone added or subtracted some attributes. that's of course the thing about evolution- everything's a transitional form. anyway, we'll almost certainly never know.
but i agree, it is interesting to think about someone sitting around a fire...
lol. that sounds like the start of a joke: ok, so there's this god named Yahweh right? he walks into this bar and says to the bartender... :D

it's interesting to think about that but i think it's probably more like an evolutionary process. natural evolved neuro-cognitive processes>ancestor worship>divination>nature and fertility cults>man/gods>and then Yahweh. i think it's really more like thousands of people who "created" Yahweh rather than just one dude who made something up they never understood would grow to be as important as it is now.

lol. maybe! i have actually read that Shelley was commenting on the responsibility of God, the creator, for the evil and suffering we see in the world. according to this interpretation Dr. Frankenstein is like a god who creates the monster. i've also read that the story is more about loneliness.

lol. El! it IS you!!!!!! :D

oh geez. ugh. that was stupid of me. you should delete that comment of my from your comments.

like Clark Kent or El... lol. does that mean you wear tights and a cape under your clothes just in case? :P
faster than a speeding bullet... more powerful than a locomotive... leaps tall buildings in a single bound! :D

ah, i see! in that case i'd suggest Tim Callahan's The Secret Origins of the Bible. it goes through the Hebrew Bible from stem to stern and shows how the stories are based on earlier mythologies, how the names in the Genesis genealogies are all eponyms of groups of peoples and not historical individuals, and how the narrative is filled with typologies found in earlier mythologies. it's fascinating stuff.

more generally about the Hebrew Bible from a secular historical critical standpoint is Isaac Asimov's Guide to the Bible. that's a larger book, 671 pages, but it goes through the Bible and explains what is historical and what isn't. the book was originally released as two volumes with the second volume covering the New Testament in a similar way and subsequently was released as a huge single volume including both the OT and NT so if you're interested in the NT then check that second volume out too.

unfortunately, i think we can be pretty sure neither of these titles will be available as audiobooks. :( Callahan's book is in my box.net folder but unfortunately it's not a great copy. the scan that produced the pdf frankly wasn't great but it's readable still.

if you want to get into deeper scholarship of Higher Criticism you could go with Hermann Gunkel's, Creation And Chaos in the Primeval Era And the Eschaton, Margaret Barker's, The Older Testament, and Mark S. Smith's, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism- all no less fascinating but because they're scholarly works written for scholars if you're not really into the subject you might find them a bit dry.

as for science, i love science too! my favorites are evolution and cosmology. what subject does your husband teach? let me know if you'd like some suggestions on either evolution or cosmology and i'd be happy to provide those too. :)