The following is a guest post by Thomas Essel

It is a pretty well documented “fact” that Adam and Eve’s son Cain, as he grew up and started to get that tingly feeling “down there”, didn’t have many girls from which to choose a spouse. In fact, his choices were his sisters or his mom. Since mom was already taken, sister it was! This, of course, leads to the joke that we are all a product of incest. Gross – or is it?

Not at all, says Ken Ham’s Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky.

I had the pleasure – for lack of a better term – of going there today (Feb 28, 2015). I plan to write a much longer piece about the museum, but I have 250 pictures to shift through and a whole lot of WTF to sort out first. There is, however, one gem that I just simply could not wait to share with all of you. So I present to you, dear reader, Ken Ham’s justification for Cain getting-it-on with his sister!

In case you can’t read the picture, I typed it up for you:

“The Bible teaches that Adam was the ‘first man’ and that Eve was the ‘mother of all living’ (1 Corinthians 15:45; Genesis 3:20). All humans are descendants of these two people.

Genesis 5:4 teaches that Adam and Eve had sons and daughters. So, originally, brothers had to marry sisters.

Before jumping to conclusions, realize that

All humans are related. So whenever someone gets married, they marry their relative. One of the most honored men of the Bible, Abraham, was married to his half sister. It wasn’t until much later that God instructed the Israelites not to marry close relatives – a principle we follow today. When close relatives marry today, there is an increased likelihood of deformities in the offspring because of the mutations (mistakes) that have accumulated in the human race since Adam’s sin. The closer the relatives, the more likelihood such people will have similar mistakes. If these mutations are inherited in offspring from both parents, then there is an increased probability of major physiological problems. The farther back in history one goes (back towards the Fall of Adam), the less of a problem mutations in the human population would be. At the time of Adam and Eve’s children, there would have been very few mutations in the human genome – thus close relatives could marry, and provided it was one man for one woman (the biblical doctrine of marriage), there was nothing wrong with close relatives marrying in early biblical history. In present usage, the word incest includes both the marriage of close relatives and any sexual activity between close relative who are not married. Sexual activity outside of the bounds of marriage, whether between near relatives or not, has been wrong from the beginning. Marriage between close relatives, however, was not a problem in early biblical history. Since God is the One who defined marriage in the first place, God’s Word is the only standard for defining proper marriage. People who do not accept the Bible as their absolute authority have no basis for condemning someone like Cain for marrying his sister.”

So there you are! It’s totally OK that Cain and his sister got totally freaky with it. There is more to come – so much more – so stay tuned to this blog.

Is there anything you want to know about what I saw or experienced? Leave your questions in the comment section below.

Thomas Essel is an outspoken atheist who lives “behind enemy lines” in the American Bible belt. He has studied anthropology at Palomar College in San Marcos, CA, is a graduate of the Drury University Law Enforcement Academy and is currently an undergraduate student studying American history. His writing interests include religion and politics, especially where the two collide. He currently lives in Springfield, Missouri with his wife, two kids and, most importantly, his cat James Franco.