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.

  • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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    11 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.