Unbelievable that I have to explain this.

In America we pass property to blood relatives. What is a blood relative? They came from your parents. Or your grandparents. Or your great grandparents. Or your great great grandparents. Etc. Until you go back so far you A) have no legal paperwork trail or B) have no indentifiable DNA patterns in common. You have to have one of those to have blood relatives. That is what genetic FAMILY is.

Every child you have gets about 1/2 your DNA. Their children get 1/4. The next generation get 1/8th. And so on. Until autosomal DNA is so diluted it is at noise level. So when we compare individuals we cannot tell if they are genetic blood relatives. You cannot be a blood relative of everybody on earth.

But there is an exception. Y-DNA passes intact from father to son. And so on. All the way back to the first man. Adam.

We can measure the SNPs. We see mutations and they accumulate. Sometimes living people will have the same Y chromosome where the common grandfather is back 10 generations. Or 50 generations.

We can also dig up bones and match them. Even if they are 10,000 years old they will contain the same SNP sequence minus the recent mutations.

The point is, we can trace where our patrilineal blood relatives died. And their ancestors too!

I know where my ancestors were all the way back to pre-history. And I know where my brother in law’s ancestors were too. So no, we are not blood relatives, our ancestors never went anywhere near each other. But, pontificating Answers in Genesis YECs (Young Earth Creationists) at church want to tell the whole church that I am related to my brother in law. Its kind of like saying I am Chinese. This claim of theirs is completely baseless.

Science people will claim that celts came from the eastern Ukraine. Science deniers claim no no no, they came from Noah’s Ark. Which is true? If they came from Noah’s Ark then they would be buried down the road from the Ark, and the next few generations would be buried a bit further down the road, until they got to western Europe. That trail is completely missing. I mean, the skeletons aren’t there.

What I see is that YECs do not evaluate the evidence.

Why Look At This?

Why did I start talking about this? Because of the YEC claim that I am related to my brother in law. No, it didn’t mean “we are all children of Adam”. People tell me “oh, we all have DNA, we must all be family”. No, that is not what they are talking about. They are talking about Moral Obligation to Family. Meaning blood relationships. In the context they used it it meant I have a moral and Christian obligation to let my in-laws continue to abuse me. Because I am related. So I therefore am obligated. And I am a sinner if I by chance just want to get away from it. Move to another state, don’t look back. However, that is not acceptable. Because? Because, as they claim, I am related to my inlaws. WHAT THE HELL? They are talking about blood relatives, not strangers on the street. Not sons of Adam due t all sons of Adam possess DNA. No. It was a statement about close family.

Now, how do I know I am not related to my in-law family? The above explanation on DNA. That’s how. And I had told this to a 12 step group at church. I study the family’s genealogy and DNA. But there is another reason. It is because the leader is a self entitled fundamentalist YEC asshole. So he instantly overrode me and took a vote. He got the group to vote! WHY? Because he says so. Thats it! I thought I would die of a heart attack. I didnt go back to church for months after that. Here I had been deciding to be free of the abuser and they could not live with this. They think their job is to fix people! But we know really only God can fix people.

I put these folks in the category of RAPIST. Fundamentalist rapists. They live in a fantasy world and use the bible to justify themselves. I am not the only victim of the fundamentalists. I saw a lot of victims at that church. People who endure a lot of false religious shaming from fundamentalists.

They had made it very clear they are fundamentalists and follow young earth creationism and believe in a world-wide global flood. And are against Christians studying modern science. Or reading books. You see, books, even Christian books, might make you think, and thinking will lead you astray to the point where you wont take the word of fundamentalists just because “they say so.”

Back to the science. There is a conscept called admixture. It means what percent Scottish are you? Irish? French? African? Etc. Compared to current living populations. I myself don’t put much stock in it, but most people want to know if they are 45% Scottish, for example. That is based on autosomal DNA.

My inlaws come from a patrilinial viking line where we share a grandfather in 44000 BC. So we are cousins that are so far apart that we may as well be Japanese and Black. If you think Japanese and Black people are the same family you are nuts. Stark raving mad. They are not the same family lines. What cousins are we? 400th cousins 400 times removed? The point is IT WAS CAVE MAN DAYS. It doesn’t matter.

OK, OK, I can call my brother in law a cave man, I guess, have it your way. The real point they were making was science denial. That really is the whole point of YEC. Science is at war with God. Why? Because they say it is. And they use morality arguments as a weapon for brainwashing. Which is ministerial abuse.

This is part of why my presbyterian elder neighbor tells me Answers in Genesis is a satanic conspiracy.