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.

  • yeehaw@lemmy.ca
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    11 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.

    • prole@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      Yup. And having a quarter in a pocket is a perfectly reasonable thing that is not only possible, but happens all the time. And even then, there’s no real reason to believe it.

      Now do the same thing for a claim of the supernatural.

    • SpezBroughtMeHere@lemmy.world
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      11 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?