155 Don,

You said:

I agree that each account is given in a sequential order, but the items in each account are in a different order.

I have no idea what you are talking about. Please be specific. What is it that I have not explained?

all I wished was affirmation that faithful people can interpret these passages differently and that remains my wish.

I am not questioning whether “people” are faithful. I am just doing what scripture requires of me and I am testing the interpretations and trying to get a handle on why one believes as they do. I then take each alternative on its own merit and see it there is any validity. It is unreasonable to say that each account is “sequential” and then reject that accounts as not the same. This would leave Adam as being created more than once. Your contention that “formed” is not “created” is not valid. I have already shown you that “formed” is a subset of “created” and you have not shown an refutation of this.

If there are others who see the sequential events of the accounts as long periods of time but without seeing them as “poetry” and contradictions between the accounts, then I can give them credit for trying hard to be faithful to the word as it is written. The issue is still were animals created after Adam and how does one deal with this with the view of an extended period of time between the creation of the first animals and the creation of their complements?

However I have a great deal of trouble with dismissing history and calling it “poetry” as if the term means you can make the passage mean whatever one “feels”. I have seen this in too many people who have left Christianity to follow their “feelings”. When we set our interpretation up as valid without any second witness to verify the validity it becomes a problem. This is not the way that God does things. He has given words to us that have meaning. He has given a second or third witness to everything command and he has repeated important matters and made a big deal about history and genealogies to merely dismiss them. I can only speak for myself, but I have no agenda that would cause me to dismiss the text as it is written. I see not even one contradiction and if there is one, I would like to be informed of the contradiction. I think that is a fair request.