The link to a new PuffHo piece by (Formerly Uncle) Karl Giberson,”Fundamentalists think that science is atheism,” came from reader Alan, who commented: “[Karl’s] still trying to deal with Adam & Eve, poor guy.” And indeed, besides flogging Giberson’s new book, Saving the Original Sinner: How Christians Have Used the Bible’s First Man to Oppress, Inspire, and Make Sense of the World, the article bemoans the Christian insistence that Adam and Eve were real folks.
First, the book, published June 9 by Beacon Press. Here’s its Amazon blurb:
In Saving the Original Sinner, Giberson tells the story of the evolution of the idea of Adam and explores how, over the centuries, we have created Adam in our own image to explain and justify our behavior. Giberson shows how the narrative of the Fall has influenced Western ideas about sexuality, gender, and race, and he argues that ongoing attempts to preserve the biblical story of creation in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary is contributing to the intellectual isolation of many Christians, particularly evangelicals—even as they continue to wield significant political power in the United States.
And we all know the problem—or you would if you read pp. 124-131 of FvF. In brief, population genetics tells us that, over the last million years or so, the “effective” size of the human species (an underestimate of the true census size) was on the order of 12,500 individuals, with about 10,000 of those remaining in Africa and the other 2500 bravely venturing out of that continent, their descendants eventually populating the Earth. I need not point out that 12,500 does not equal two, so Adam and Eve couldn’t be the ancestors of all humanity. Nor could the eight people on Noah’s Ark.
This disparity has caused considerable theological kerfuffle, and I detail the various solutions—none of them satisfactory—in my book. Let me just say that the official position of the Vatican is that Adam and Eve really were the historical ancestors of all living humans, so the Catholic Church, on this issue as on many others, is resolutely opposed to science.
Before Giberson mentions this issue, though, he takes a lick at atheists:
Equating science with atheism is one of the most dangerous byproducts of America’s culture wars. This strange polarization portends disaster, as the country divides into factions that cannot find common ground on the way the world operates. And it goes without saying that there will be no agreement on what should be done when scientifically significant issues need political action.
It’s not a strange polarization at all, for atheism—at least the refusal to accept gods for which there’s no evidence—is a logical outgrowth of science, and explains (at least to me) why, compared to Americans as a whole, scientists are so much more atheistic. If your career depends on establishing your confidence in a phenomenon proportional to the degree of evidence supporting it, then God is a no-go. The climate of doubt that is endemic—and essential—to the scientific enterprise is a true disaster for religion. Religious people know this, and that largely explains the many ways they attack science.
At any rate, Giberson then recognizes the Big Problem: if Adam and Eve weren’t real, then neither was Original Sin, and if that’s the case then Jesus died for nothing—or for some obscure metaphor! Christians know this, and thus aren’t buying the view that Adam and Eve were simply—as Giberson’s former BioLogos pal Peter Enns claims—a Metaphorical Couple. Karl’s Lament:
Many Christians, unfortunately believe their faith requires a “first man” who sinned and brought trouble on the world (feminists can thank two millennia of patriarchy for getting the “first woman” off the hook). The central Christian theme is “Creation-Fall-Redemption”: God creates a perfect world; Adam “falls” by sinning, wrecks everything, and God curses the creation with death and suffering; and Christ redeems the world. In this picture Adam and Christ function as symmetrical “bookends”: Adam breaks everything and Christ fixes it.
. . .The conclusion is clear: The couple described in the opening pages of the Bible never existed — and thus could not have precipitated the disaster known as “The Fall.”
Without Adam, the traditional formula that has long defined Christianity must be reinvented and many Christians are convinced that this is impossible. Millions of Americans would prefer to reject science, rather than bid farewell to the first man: “The denial of an historical Adam and Eve as the first parents of all humanity and the solitary first human pair,” warns the influential and widely followed Southern Baptist theologian Al Mohler, “severs the link between Adam and Christ which is so crucial to the Gospel.”
Is there a solution? I don’t see one, for the redemptive effect of Jesus is a non-negotiable tenet of many Christians’ beliefs. Karl is also pessimistic, though he falsely imputes the problem to atheism:
But the sad reality is that this view runs through much of evangelical Christianity in America. It has taken up residence in the GOP, where denying various sciences — evolution, geology, climate science — has become a de facto requirement for election. Many evangelical colleges have it in their faith statement. Public school teachers find themselves embroiled in controversy simply teaching the material in the Biology text. Ken Ham’s entire Answers in Genesis project is based on it. The starting point for so many Christian has become the absolute truth of a particular interpretation of the Genesis creation story. And any alternative viewpoint is now understood to be a “compromise with atheists.”
Sorry, Karl, but it’s not a “compromise with atheists,” but a compromise with fact. Even if all scientists were believers, that wouldn’t make evangelical Christians accept the mythological status of Adam and Eve one whit more. And so the evangelicals will reject the science (after all, 64% of Americans averred that they’d reject a scientific fact if it contravened their faith, something that has nothing to do with atheism), while the Sophisticated Theologians™, like Enns, will continue to confect compromises that their evangelical brethren reject out of hand.
Come on, Karl—come over to the Dark Side. All you have to do is abandon One Myth More. After all, Jesus’s resurrection and virgin birth also contravene the laws of physics and biology.
“Equating science with atheism is one of the most dangerous byproducts of America’s culture wars. This strange polarization portends disaster, as the country divides into factions that cannot find common ground…
Well now, how would common ground have worked in the civil rights struggle? Black people could sit at the lunch counter or sit in the seat of their choice on a bus, on Tuesdays and Thursdays?
Precisely my thoughts. Finding “common ground” is not the answer to every problem.
I agree completely with you both.
He’s doing what all those politicians who really accept evolution but have to waffle on the subject to be accepted by the GOP base do – oiling the squeaky wheel while ignoring the broken one. It is not atheists who are the problem here, it is those who put faith before fact.
To paraphrase RD: Sometimes the answer is not halfway between 2 options, one of them could be just wrong….
Finding common ground is that people are alike all over regardless of surface differences like color, eye shape, size etc.
However common ground between Science and Superstition seems illogical. What from Religion will be traded for scientific proofs?
What tenets of Science will be compromised for the Faith of the unseen, unproven in Religion?
I am one of those Atheists that see little in common between Faith and Science unlike Dr. Zaius in the Planet of the Apes who when Science contradicted Faith, Science was destroyed and covered up to keep Faith in the story intact.
PZ’s “halfway to crazy town” is the best way I’ve seen this expressed.
“If your career depends on establishing your confidence in a phenomenon proportional to the degree of evidence supporting it, then God is a no-go.” i haven’t come across a better (or better expressed) reason for why most scientists are atheists.
….
I’m not sure the that “…resurrection and virgin birth [ ]contravene the laws of physics and biology.”
Even now people come alive long after a medical examination pronounced them dead. Imagine how many similar cases there must have been before the era of modern medicine.
Many organisms give birth from unfertilised eggs. Admittedly, their offspring are always female; but bearded ladies who wear sandals are not unknown.
I see it this way:
“But Jesus was born of a virgin”.
“So?”
“But Jesus was resurrected.”
“So?
But these are all “borderline” cases where the argument over whether such people are “dead” comes down to an imprecise definition of death. When the cells of your vital organs die, you’re dead. Medical examiners make (now) rare mistakes because measurements and observations usually correlated with cell death aren’t so correlated in rare cases (most dramatically in terms of time span, in cases of drowning in very cold water).
Until someone “resurrects” a person after being dead for 3-days, I’ll stick to reality.
Until a virgin mammal gives birth, I’ll stick to reality.
Scroll down to ‘ mammals‘, although these are admittedly not the same as parthenogenesis seen elsewhere in the animal kingdom.
Like you, I feel no urge to tear up my Atheist card.
Where does this “three days” thing come from anyway? He was declared dead at 3pm on Friday, and Mary Magdalene found the grave empty early on Sunday morning, before sunrise. I make that about 1½ days. Since he could have left the cave at any time from when he was first laid there, he might have recovered conciousness within a day of being declared “dead”.
Always assuming that he even existed in the first place.
Yes. It was “the third day”, not “three days”.
There’s some sort of prophecy involved, or such is the story.
Why bother trying to rationalize how the virgin birth and resurrection could actually have happened when it seems much more sensible to assume that they didn’t? Those stories, especially concerning the birth of Jesus, were probably made up during the early years of Christianity to help it compete with other religions.
Indeed. I would have added as a postscript to this…
Intelligent people who cling desperately and convolutedly to mythology must be suffering from a deep, pathologically bent, desire not to displease their parent. Whether that parent is actual or part of the myth itself.
I don’t think so. They’re unaware of any contradictions and just regard it as a perfectly normal and rational belief. There’s no need to psychoanalyse them.
Well, maybe. But why, when they are trained in rational thinking and given the same information we have do they spend so much effort confabulating complex, convoluted rationalizations?
It is even easier in animals, as it is final when the brain dies – which is the sole definition of death around where I live. (You can get hooked up to an artificial heart and later get a transplant, say.)
In practice a vegetative state can be difficult to tell from coma, but brain death isn’t difficult to diagnose (I hear).
Ok, I’ll give you the coming back to life after being pronounced dead part. Now, how many people do this and then get lifted up to Heaven (wherever the hell that is) in a cloud?
My running count is two: Hey-Zeus and the Perpetual Virgin Marry — three if you include Big Mo making the trip on a winged horse.
And lest anyone try to claim that this has historically been held as metaphor, let’s look at the dogma.
This is a grave violation of the Laws of Physics and Biology. Where is Heaven? How does a body go there? Under what mechanism did Mary exit the atmosphere without first running out of oxygen, and then being bombarded by intense heat and radiation in space? She’s at most 2000 light years away now, so Heaven has to be around here somewhere; I’ll go get my telescope.
Come to think of it, she also seems to turn up fairly frequently, so right now she’s at least somewhere in the neighborhood of Alpha Centauri.
She must not be too close since her guest spots at places like Guadalupe, Lourdes, and Fátima seem pretty sporadic.
Well you know how it is. The Oort cloud isn’t well signed, you hang a left a couple hundred yards too soon and Earth is nowhere to be seen.
O course there was a star ship nearby, hiding in that cloud of course. Using a form of tractor beam to lift her up to the vessel. You know how primitives understand tech as prodigies of Nature or holy powers given.
Virgin Births or Parthenogenesis is real. However the children are natural clones of the mother. There is a malfunction as a means of producing false males so one can speculate.
There have been other attempts to salvage Adam and Eve without squeezing the population bottleneck down to two individuals. One I have seen argued is that Adam ad Eve were the first two people with souls, but there were other homo genus individuals around – the second generations wives came from somewhere, right? And we are all descendants of Adam and Eve, maybe, so we have souls too. Depending how the souled trait is inherited – cytoplasmic, like mitochondrial DNA, maybe?
No, that wouldn’t work, you’d inherit soulless from the wives, must be dominant or or … (lots of handwaving) … or something.
Like debugging software, eventually you generate a bug for every bug you try to fix. One problem for this theological handwaving is the possibility for the existence of people who have no Eden Genetics and therefore soulless people. As souls are undetectable by any scientific or theological process, it is much more parsimonious to provisionally state that souls don’t exist. Which is a deal killer for all mainstream religions.
Souls aren’t inherited. According the Catholic dogma I was taught as a child, God ensouls each of us individually.
On the other hand, original sin is heritable from Adam.
In the version of the argument I saw, the _ability_ to have a soul was inherited from Adam and Eve. Heritable crust, god-granted filling in the complex pie that is a person, I guess.
Given that there is no obvious fitness advantage to having a soul, and taking into account modern theories of neutral selection, it is possible that some or all of humanity is currently both soulless and not subject to the burden of original sin, even if people were in the past. Assuming one buys the argument, of course. Perhaps someone should apply for a Templeton grant.
There are two versions of how a child gets a soul: traducianism and creationism. The former holds that the parents create the soul as well as the body, the latter that the parents create the body but God creates the soul.
So… how many thousands died in the traducianism-creationsm wars?
One interesting question introduced by this lame attempt to salvage the Adam-and-Eve story is “what were the differences?” That is, here you have only two human beings on earth who have souls — and they’re apparently living amongst a larger population of otherwise similar human beings who all lack souls.
So how are they different? What are the images believers are imagining in their heads?
My guess is that whatever they would describe will be the boiled-down essence of what they think only God can explain. The soul-less humans are mean, cruel, selfish, and incapable of appreciating art, poetry, or beauty. The ancient relatives who are not ‘formed in the image of God’ will be composed of dull, morose brutes mucking around in the mud hitting each other on the head with large chunks of wood — while Adam and Eve will be dancing in the sunlight, laughing and playing with the little woodland creatures as they sing out praise and gratitude to the Creator of their enlightened souls.
Sort of when they think of what it must be like to be an atheist.
“…while Adam and Eve will be dancing in the sunlight, laughing and playing with the little woodland creatures as they sing out…”
Adam and Eve were Disney princesses!
Naked Disney prince(sse)s!
Or they just view them as philosophical zombies, as they presumably would view another animal.
Yes. This may be one reason why it’s so reasonable to dismiss, despise, or kill the godless. It’s not as if they can feel things that much.
The problem with insisting that everyone has an invisible, untestable soul which makes them worthy of dignity and respect is that it’s too damn easy to point to anyone you don’t like and claim that their soul isn’t operational.
It also makes it easy to justify treating people badly by claiming that such treatment is just what their soul needs to flourish in the (invisible, untestable) afterlife.
“you generate a bug for every bug you try to fix”
That’s called a feature.
I can’t wait for them to produce experiments showing that biology also has a non-material energetic component to it. Especially with humans. But they aren’t into applied science to support their dogma. Just for their wars of conquest.
sub
I don’t see where this is a lick at atheists so much as a lick at evangelicals. Likewise when you claim that “he falsely imputes the problem to atheism.” Obviously, Giberson isn’t going to praise atheists, but nothing quoted here seems very negative.
Maybe I’m being too generous, waiting as I am for Karl to come out.
The problem for Science is that most people have wrong ideas or no ideas on it and how it works and why it works.
That and equating secular as another world for atheism since both operate without religious input. Going the easiest way is to lump them into one and condemn the two would would not exist if they had their way and controlled this country overtly like the, as yet, still fictional Republic of Gilead from “The Handmaid’s Tale”.
That and equating secular as another word for atheism since both operate without religious input.
A Christian could dispense with Adam and Eve altogether if they ditched original sin and the substitution theory of the atonement.
Neither are believed in by Eastern Orthodox- they simply think Adam and Eve released evil into the world like Pandora and her box- (an environmental rather than genetic fall), and they generally regard Jesus death as acting like a shock absorber for evil, but not as God punishing Jesus as a replacement for punishing us. (Essentially, it’s the only branch of Christianity in which one is dependent on God’s gratuitous grace, but there is no Fall.)
Some Eastern Orthodox are moving in this direction. See http://www.greekorthodox.org.au/general/resources/publications/articledetails.php?page=177&article_id=13
(Seems to be offline right now, but Cached in Google.)
Now if only they would accept gays, ordain women, ditch the Nicene Creed, and say something meaningful about God’s genocide in Genesis, etc. etc.
I think the swedish church sect (when it was a state church) adopted something similar. E.g. the metaphorical solution so derided by Jerry was the nom de jour (or nom de chat perhaps). Belief in ‘Jesus’ was optional.
Essentially, if you asked a sect priest, he/she could try to make you feel comfortable at best but had no helpful answers on religion.
From my own personal experience, it’s pretty easy to remain Christian and not believe in a literal Adam and Eve or a Fall. All people are sinful by nature, and nobody’s worthy of Heaven. Christ’s death didn’t forgive Original Sin, it forgave all of humanity’s many sins. I even remember reciting the Agnus Dei in mass, where we said, ‘you take away the sins of the world’, not singular Original Sin.
Thee are plenty of other issues to convince people Christianity is false, but the lack of original sin is an easy one for a believer to accommodate.
From my experience, I disagree. If man is simply sinful by nature – there was no Fall – then God created us sinful. If so, how is it our fault and why do we need redemption? I think people can only accommodate this line of thought if they don’t really think about the implications.
And don’t forget that The Fall also made the world into what is. (Had to lead to that or the stories would be openly ridiculed.) But since Judaism isn’t the only religion, there are so many, not everyone believes it. Such a flaw by an all encompassing magical deity.
Yes, I noticed that too. I thought the conventional Christian wisdom was that it was Eve’s fault for listening to the serpent and seducing Adam into eating the forbidden fruit, thus creating the original sin and bringing about the downfall of humankind, and therefore that women shouldn’t be allowed to do anything important without a male permission and/or supervision.
According to the Dutch Statenvertaling (1634, the Dutch equivalent of the King James if you want) it was Eve who first ate from the forbidden fruit and only then she passed it on to Adam. See Genesis 3:6 (for those of you who want to read some 17th century Dutch: “En de vrouw zag, dat die boom goed was tot spijze, en dat hij een lust was voor de ogen, ja, een boom, die begeerlijk was om verstandig te maken; en zij nam van zijn vrucht en at; en zij gaf ook haar man met haar, en hij at.”)
Curious detail: until this moment Eve did not have a personal name, she was ‘the woman’ or strangely enough ‘female man’ (Genesis 2:23). Only when God told Adam that he had to look for a job to eat did she get her name: Adam called his wife Eve (Genesis 3:20).
…I know! My mind has yet to stop boggling. Apparently Karl doesn’t know too much about the christianity he supposedly believes in.
Clearly the woman is to blame but at the same time she is far too inconsequential to be responsible. Oh no. Only a man has the power to doom us all to living misery and ultimate death. It’s have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too-misogyny. ::sigh::
Now how did I know that you would comment on that? 🙂
+ 4
😀
And for this, “the man” gave up a perfectly functional rib?
Not sure if Eve and women ever got off the hook — but some of ’em are definitely off da hook.
As I recall Women are Damned Twice.
1. to give painful birth.
2. to be blamed for the Fall.
I don’t see that as being “off the hook” either by a galaxy wide stretch.
I think the thing that really pisses me off with this expression of deep concern is that it’s just a given that people all think of atheism with horror and revulsion — and will and should continue to think of atheism with horror and revulsion.
It’s hopeless. In Gilberson’s mind there seems to be exactly zero possibility that the majority of the population would ever consider the issue of God rationally and rethink their views because … atheism. OMG!! It’s unthinkable. It’s dangerous. It’s divisive! It’s an unmitigated disaster which makes people run and scream. Atheism’s neither a reasonable position nor a justified conclusion: it’s everyone’s worst nightmare.
And it’s going to stay that way. So hey, he’s just being practical. Whether linking science with atheism is the fault of the evangelicals or the atheists, either way it’s just going to doom science. Atheism is simply too repulsive to ever risk being promoted as a respectable scientifically-supported stance. So let’s keep it on the fringes and continue to concentrate on asking to be tolerated because — right or wrong — atheism is always a losing proposition.
And it must be so frustrating to poor Karl Giberson to see so many atheists balking at that clear and obvious fact.
Well, you’ve got to admit they have a point. After all, look what ideal societies France, Sweden, and Denmark had when religion ruled. And now look at how miserable those same countries are now that they are mostly atheist–no more 30 Years War, no more witch burnings, no more auto-da-fés…
However, import of some people too deep into religion somewhat corrected this boring situation and led to cartoonist shooting.
Yes, it’s a well-known fact that Europe is a godless hell-hole that would make George Orwell have an aneurysm. Going into Scandinavia is basically practice for going to Hell.
Only if you go to Norway.
I’ve seen where the former Silvio Dante fetched up on Netflix in “Lilyhammer.” If that’s what hell is like, have the devil give me a call; I’m ready to cut a Faust-type deal right now.
LOL
I was all excited about Lillyhammer, loved Silvio, but found this new series pretty dull after the first episode. Maybe he needed the rug…
“(feminists can thank two millennia of patriarchy for getting the “first woman” off the hook)”
For a start there have been a lot more than two millennia of patriarchy, and further there is no way Xtians see women as having got off the hook. We are generally held wholly to blame for the fall! I wish they’d stop just making it up as they go.
The Adam and Eve thing was a big part of my ultimate rejection of Christianity. Jesus and Paul (the man that most Christians really follow) both seemed to believe in a literal Adam, as far as I could tell. If Genesis was just a metaphor, why didn’t *they* say so? Why compare a real Jesus to a metaphorical Adam? Is Jesus just a metaphor too? Sure you can perform some mental gymnastics to bend your way around the core message of Christianity no longer making sense but, without a literal “Fall”, you also lose all the usual cop-outs for suffering/evil in the world etc. It’s just makes so much more sense if it was all made up. (Or God’s a total jerk, which is an idea that I entertained for a while.)
(Even if Genesis is real, it’s still easy to conclude that God’s a total jerk!)
Absolutely. BTW, I don’t remember Jesus referring to Adam and Eve.
You’re right. I think that’s an inference from things he allegedly said (e.g. https://answersingenesis.org/days-of-creation/did-jesus-say-he-created-in-six-literal-days/) rather than a direct quote. He implies belief in the Creation story when referring to marriage and the Sabbath, but does not directly mention Adam or the Creation myth. It’s mostly from Paul’s teachings, I think. (I have often thought that the world would be a much better place if Christians followed the teachings attributed to Jesus rather than Paul.)
Definitely Paul. Jesus was said to be a descendant of David in Romans and Acts. He’s also explicitly compared to Adam in 1 Corinthians, too, especially 1 Corinthians 15.
Yeah, the New Testament is loaded with “retcon.”
On a somewhat related now, I’ve been contemplating pedagogy.
You see, in our elementary schools, we teach English because, of course, we want all Americans to speak the English language so as to be able to communicate with each other. And we teach American history because we want all kids to have knowledge of the country of which they are citizens, to instill them with some combination of pride and responsibility for this nation. Both of those subjects are offered in order to facilitate “fitting in,” which is considered a virtue. But when it comes to biology and the earth sciences, we teach them without any reference to civic virtues. What if, instead, we taught biology with an eye toward this knowledge better facilitating your existence on this planet? What if we taught biology in terms of a “common heritage” with all other life that we know? Might we be able to avoid some of those pitfalls of “science lacks virtue” if we teach science in a way that presses those same civic buttons?
Now, on an actual related note, there is a recent book, From Eve to Evolution, documenting how early feminists embraced Darwin’s view of life precisely because it offered a way around the biblical narratives with all their implications for gender roles. I have a review of it in the latest issue of American Studies: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/american_studies/v054/54.1.lancaster.html.
That sounds intriguing.
That would yet be another first class example of the incompatibility of religion and science.
Honorary WEIT uncles are becoming an endangered species…
😉
The problem for Mr. (née Uncle Karl) Giberson is that scripture contains no autochthonous guide for distinguishing the allegorical from the literal, such that once that ball starts to unravel, no stop-loss firewall is apparent. (That sentence, I believe, represents a “personal best” for me in mixing metaphors.)
Well I, for one, was impressed, nay awe-struck. Next time I need a metaphor mixed, you are my go to guy!
Thanks, I’ve let my service know to put you through immediately should any of your mixing-and-mangling-metaphor needs arise on an emergency basis.
LOL
Karl would have been né, rather than née, unless s/he’s transgender…
As long as he’s not a Knight who says “Ni”.
Ninininini
Thanks for the heads-up. I’ve never done né/née with a guy before.
The Christian cosmogony was “borrowed” from Judaism. Does anyone know the attitude of Judaism to the Adam & Eve story? I searched, but all I found was that Judaism has no concept of “original sin” comparable to that of Christianity.
“…God creates a perfect world; Adam “falls” by sinning, wrecks everything, and God curses the creation with death and suffering; and Christ redeems the world…”
An excellently succinct description. Only two small questions: why do we still have suffering and death? How do you know – were you there?
Once religionists, and apologists, go down the rabbit hole of theological invention they can come out anywhere.
An excellently succinct description. Only two small questions: why do we still have suffering and death? How do you know – were you there?
The Holy Book says so. Have you forgotten all that stuff about Armageddon and Final Battle?
That is all we have to go with. So do the Christians in their reasoning. We use science, logic, rhetoric, history, mythology, etcetera to think about it.
Adam and Eve are just a metaphorical way of talking about the first modern humans and their incredibly big brains. Original sin is our human mental capacity, our pervasive self-awareness and complex symbol use. The Bible is not talking about how evil came into the world, but merely about how people gained the knowledge of good and evil.
The solution to this problem of knowledge is religion, which is a very effective way of stopping people from thinking. Religion stuns the brain and removes a person’s higher mental capacities. Religion makes its followers like sheep – docile, dumb and innocent.
Now if only we could get religious people to agree and embrace this frank interpretation!
I think your interpretation is correct. Adam and Eve is just another take on humanities need to explain itself. It’s a just-so story. It has the unfortunate effect of deflecting natural curiosity that would lead to a truer explanation.
Reblogged this on milanioliva/ olivera kovacevic jankovic.