Funny. I take it then that you cannot produce legitimate stories where people arrived at the truths contained in the first four commandments without the assistance of oral tradition, the Bible, or missionaries.
It's not funny. Abraham was a heathen. God communicated with him without any reference to the Bible. He was as much a heathen as any of the stories I'm mentioning. Now if God could communicate with the heathen Abraham, why couldn't He do so with other heathens?
# The Davis Indians of Guyana (overwhelmingly SDA), and their messenger, Akura. I couldn't find any reputable information on this story. The story seems to have originated with Bob Norton, an SDA mission pilot in Venezuela.
Why do you consider Bob Norton to be disreputable? In the 1932 edition of Origins and Progress of the Seventh-day Adventists Elder Olsen chronicles O.E Davis mission and martyrdom there in 1911. This is long before Bob Norton, whom you for some unknown reason apparently consider disreputable.
http://www.tagnet.org/gma/frontlin/davisdia.htmIf not, what does this tell us about instinctive and the first half of the law of God?
That you're barking up the wrong tree?
Seriously, I don't know what your point is here. All the commandments involve a combination of instinct and learning, regardless of which book they're in. Human beings learn what's right and wrong, and learn behavior. A person may have a general concept that it's wrong to take the life of another human being, but he may think there are exceptions. The law certainly treats cases differently depending on the circumstances. But a person's understanding of what constitutes murder is very nuanced and develops over a lifetime. Similarly a person knows something of God's existence. How do we even know God exists? God had to have created an innate capacity for us to know Him, otherwise we wouldn't know of Him. But just as our positions of murder are highly nuanced and develop over our lifetime, so does our understanding of God develop.
What I'm not seeing is any reason why you make a distinction between the first four commandments and the last six. This seems to be entirely arbitrary. For example, you asserted that no sin of ignorance involves the last six commandments. It's easy to see this can't be true. First of all, I've cited you several examples of this, such as polygamy and living together without being married.
Secondly, consider any sin, such as murder. When is killing someone justifiable and when is it not? A person's conception of this changes over time. A person could easily kill someone at one point in his life thinking it was justifiable and then later on change his mind, and come to believe that it wasn't. Assuming his latter position is correct, then when he took the person's life he was committing a sin of ignorance.
A thousand examples of this could be given. Here are a couple. A person may go to war, believing that he is doing right in fighting for his country, and then later on come to conclusion that the killing he did during the war was not justifiable. At the time of the war, his was a sin of ignorance.
Another example would be killing someone in self-defense.
Another example would be killing someone to protect a person in danger.
