It did seem harsh didn't it?

Well that's what to expect after a few lifetimes in monasteries messing others up espousing faith and belief over reason, then bouncing on the opposite side of the coin and living several others with the rack and the screw for "education" when defying existing organized religion. There still does exists some imbalance there and is why I even felt compelled to answer on this thread at all. I've been down the paths Johannes, REB and SDF are traveling. I know the reason for the reactionary-ism found in many both for and against religion.

Genesis has based deep within it tiny kernals of truth, if you know what to look for, and I explained them once a long time ago in a post to an English poster back on the MSNBC space boards. A number of religions were based on kernals of scientific truth that had been dropped along the way by travelers/teachers who spoke the vernacular of the time.

I'll reiterate them here:

God created the earth in 6 days and on the 7th day rested
The 7 day bit is really a reference to the cycle of the precessional. The cycle is the precession of the equinoxes and takes 25,862 or so years to complete. This cycle is a RETROGRADE motion of the earth as it orbits the sun. These are the "7 days" or more properly "7 CYCLES of the earth past the sun" which was misinterpreted by the minds of the time to mean seven days. Since they were unaware the earth was a sphere, or anything else, they had no way of envisioning what 7 solar cycles meant.

The original dispensers of this wisdom were Egyptian and they obviously got it from a sophisticated "traveler" of Earth, who had the astrophysical knowledge of the earths oblated shape, its 23.5 degree tilt and the 181,000 odd years it may have initially taken for the Earth's volcanism to cease, an become habitable for life and mankind. He/she/they may have took it upon themselves to try and educate some Egyptian folks and then depart. This cycle became known as to the Egyptians as the "Divine year" and was divided into 12 different 2,150 year periods which Earths history could be predicted. This was based upon this positioning of the earth in relationship to the sun.

It's as good as any evidence for supposition that earth has either had more sophisticated technological civilizations that have been lost to history or that earth has been visited by outsiders or folks from the future. At the very least it illustrates that some folks were beyond any measure of genius for their time periods.

Derivatives and astrology all got their start from this bit of astronomical movement.

By the time Genesis and Abraham got to this stuff it was dumbed down past the point of relevance or any real meaning.

The Garden of Eden
This story is an analogy for new souls and the introduction of positive and negative via bias Adam and Eve arrive on Earth, an uninhabited world save for animals. The snake is the sine wave or energy in its simplest form. The apple was really a pomengrate with the many seeds and is an analogy for reproduction and participation in life. By participating in life one MUST experience negative, but at the same time the positive side exists to balance it. So humanity is born in "sin" because it is impossible to exist and not experience negative and do negative things. Wisdom is "redemption" and the balancing of "sin". It is really just an energy analogy for positive and negative biased waveforms. Whomever originally explained the concept of the waveform and negative bias either converted it to a snake themselves or the primitives who saw the sine wave immediately assumed it was a snake. So in Genesis we have a snake that talks and by sponsoring action, creates "sin". Snake cults, snake worship all grew from some primitive minds failing to understand a lecture on energy and polarity several thousand years ago.

The male/female aspect was the duality of the sine wave. Adam needed his polarity and so "God" takes a rib from adam to create Eve. This again was a misunderstanding of the concept of polarity in all things. Someone explained that male/female positive/negative are two sides of the same thing but merely with a different polarity. This over time became the rib analogy.

The rest, Cain and Abel, et al, are some local dysfunctional history that Abraham added and embellished with God's so-called reaction to "sins" - complete with "floods" etcetera. He had taken existing creation stories that had already existed in Babylonia and Sumeria, some other tales, and then added his own story to them to empower himself and take away power from other faiths.

Looking for cosmological truth in Genesis is like looking for depth in a Will Ferrell film.

;-)