Russia’s science and higher education ministry has dismissed the head of a prestigious genetics institute who sparked controversy by contending that humans once lived for centuries and that the shorter lives of modern humans are due to their ancestors’ sins, state news agency RIA-Novosti said Thursday.

Although the report did not give a reason for the firing of Alexander Kudryavtsev, the influential Russian Orthodox Church called it religious discrimination.

Kudryavtsev, who headed the Russian Academy of Science’s Vavilov Institute of General Genetics, made a presentation at a conference in 2023 in which he said people had lived for some 900 years prior to the era of the Biblical Flood and that “original, ancestral and personal sins” caused genetic diseases that shortened lifespans.

  • FrostKing@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Its definitely not true that science and religion have to contradict each other. Take Christianity—you can easily believe in scientific methods to discover the way the world works, while believing that ‘God’ is the Creator of those things.

    • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      The thing that gets me is this whole god thing has never in hundreds of years shown or done anything of biblical proportions and we are supposed to just believe it? Prove to me it’s real. I love how the defense for this is how you need to believe for it to be real but I’m sorry that’s not how that works. If you tell me you have a quarter in your pocket I’m but never show me it why would I believe you?

      Why should we have to prove nonexistence when they can’t prove existence? If there is no proof, I simply can’t believe it.

      But that’s me.

      • SpezBroughtMeHere@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        So what imperial evidence would answer your questioning without you trying to debunk that? I mean if God literally spoke to you, would you accept that or were you just hallucinating?

        • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          I don’t know. Given that your skydaddy is all knowing shouldn’t it know? Shouldn’t it be sitting in heaven now thinking “oh man this one is searching for me and not finding. Let me do the one thing that would convince him”. You know exactly like the road to Damascus Experience or Thomas putting his hands on Jesus?

          • SpezBroughtMeHere@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Well, I didn’t ask what God would do to prove himself. I asked is there anything that would change your mind or is it made up and there’s nothing that would get you to change your beliefs? I have to ask because I’m not all knowing, I rely on conversation to get info.

            • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              Right but it shouldn’t be up to us. If there is an all knowing being it knows the answer to this question and it chooses otherwise. I assume you are Christian if not I am sorry for my wrong assumption. Why doesn’t the all knowing being of the universe not do whatever it would take to convince people that it exists to save all those billions from hell, when it knows exactly what is required?

              It did it for Paul, it did it for the doubters around Gallie, it did it for Thomas. Why play favorites? Especially as an all knowing being it knows what will happen if it does?

              Almost as if none of this bullshit happened and James was running a cult.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Ok let’s take Christianity.

      We are told a man came back to life violating what we know from biology. We are told the man had to die because original sin which was an event caused in the Garden of Eden, which breaks everything we know about evolution and the history of our world. We are told that 3 = 1 which breaks logic and math. We are told that women are to remain silent and yet the success of a country depends on the degree that women are able to be treated like equals. We are told that anyone who is LGBT+ is a bad person and yet the evidence doesn’t support that at all. We are told that Pontius Pilot decided to put down a revolution by stupidly only killing the leader and then let the rest of the group operate under his nose for decades which breaks what we know about history, Roman culture, and freaken common sense.

      We are told that the followers of Jesus could heal at a touch, that Paul could drift thru jail walls, that the Romans would allow a privileged burial for a criminal, that demons inhibit buddies, that food can magically appear, that water can become wine by prayer, that the mustard seed is the smallest seed, that leprosy can be cured with prayer, that there is another dimension full of human minds without human brains to power them, that two Jewish women would prepare a male body for burial, that a wealthy guy would randomly give away a section of his family estate for burial to a criminal, that the secret police of the Pharisees would break their own rules they had with Rome and have the local king do their dirty work, that 12 people would abandon their families to follow a cult leader just because he asked nicely…

      List goes on and on. Christianity is not compatible with everything we know to be true.