Episode Details

In this Based Camp Tract, Malcolm and Simone Collins tackle one of their most provocative religious questions: What does it actually mean to be “human” in God’s view?

They dig into classic Genesis puzzles—Cain’s fear of being killed, the sudden appearance of his wife, the city of Enoch, and the strange language of Romans 5:12-14—and argue that the Bible may not treat every Homo sapiens as a full moral agent. Drawing on a techno-puritan reading, they place the Adam and Eve story at the dawn of moral accountability and civilization roughly 10,000 years ago near the Tigris-Euphrates, link it to the sudden explosion of human development, and explore what this means for death, the Tree of Life, pre-Adamite populations, and the difference between biological humans and those God holds accountable.

Along the way they examine traditional explanations (incest, rapid population growth, pure allegory), Isaac La Peyrère’s pre-Adamite theory, Genesis 1 vs. Genesis 2, early urban death rituals, God’s treatment of groups like the Egyptians and Canaanites, and modern implications—including NPCs, civilizational decline, and fertility collapse as a kinder “second flood.”

A spicy, wide-ranging conversation about moral agency, civilization, and what the Bible might be saying about who counts as fully human.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Malcolm Collins: Simone, I’m excited to be here with you today. Today we might be doing one of our most offensive religious episodes, because it’s a thought that came to me so for people who like sort of Bible mysteries one of the ones that most people are broadly aware of as like a fun little rabbit hole to go into is it appears from the perspective of Genesis that there were other humans around at the time of Cain and Abel.

[00:00:31] Mm-hmm. So four lines that suggest this. Genesis 4:14, “Whoever finds me will kill me.” If only Adam’s immediate family existed, who would pose a threat to Cain afterwards? ‘Cause he’s saying this to God. Cain’s wife she appears, but isn’t given a genealogy. Yeah. In, in the Bible, you’re not supposed to sleep with your sister.

[00:00:52] This is, like, one of the rules that God sets up. And it’s never put out that there’s, like, an exception here. Mm-hmm. Now, he was doing this before that law was set out, but that law still would have applied to all of the sons of Ad- kids of Adam and specifically Romans 5:12-14, no matter how you interpret it means it would apply.

[00:01:13] The the city in Genesis 4:17 it mentions Cain building a city, the city of Enoch. Now the word used for city here in ancient Hebrew can mean, like, a fortified collection of dwellings, but it still requires, you know, some people, more people than we are aware of at this time.

[00:01:33] Simone Collins: Yeah.

[00:01:34] Malcolm Collins: Then, and this is not as seen by people, but we’ll go into it, because then it is actually interesting.

[00:01:38] Some read Genesis 1:26-27, humanity created male and female, as a different event from Genesis 2:7, Adam formed from the dust, and then Eve formed from a rib, right? Then there is Romans 5:12-14. So this isn’t just in the Old Testament where you find this weird stuff. If you go to Romans 5:12-14 and note here I’m also gonna go through all the traditional explanations to try to get around this.

[00:02:04] But the correct explanation I think is so - spicy and I am so excited to drop it, because it makes so many other things make sense.

[00:02:14] Simone Collins: Yeah.

[00:02:14] As soon as you said this to me I was like, “Ah, of course.” ‘Cause I’m reading Genesis again, or I just read Genesis again and was so confused. Just was like, wait, ‘cause y- all these descendants, you know, so and so and then they had this kid, but then, and then they married so and- like, wait, where did they come from?

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