It was always striking that you read all that miraculous creation of Man stuff and just a few lines later someone is traipsing off to Nod. The people presenting the bibble to me at that time always just kind of skipped over Nod (HAHAHA didnt even give it a nod HAHA)

Yes, so taking the bible literally may be your first problem here. Your second problem...reading the bible.

Incest, like so many “morals” eventually has circumstantial mitigating considerations.

For example, what if a people are simply geographically isolated and can only choose family members for mating or they will simply DIE OFF!?

I’m sure humans have been forced into such a dilemma many times. Especially not knowing if any other humans even DO exist!

Like when traveling groups are forced into cannibalism or isolated groups of people who have to murder or lock up individuals without “due process” - like a wife who has to kill an abusive husband or a group may have to do with any other deranged individual.

There’s always an excuse!

Why doesn't god stop hunger he could easily make more food? Does he enjoy watching children starve?

Why doesn't god prevent murders? Is he cruel?

Why doesn't god prevent disease? Is he uncaring?

Okay, I could go on, but the truth is god doesn't do any of those things, but not because he enjoys watching kids starve, because he's cruel, or not even because he's uncaring. God doesn't do shit because he's not real.

Excuse me, dear, but you read this once, know it is bullshit and never consider it again. Life is complex enough.

Why didn't God figure it out? It sure looks like God didn't mind incest, since he created so many situations that would necessitate it.

My mom always cites the women from Nod when she says how she became skeptical. I think the women from nod were aliens lol

This question, for me at least, is kind of in "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin" territory. I see no need to reconcile the logical contradictions and inconsistencies of someone else's holy book. Let those who believe it worry about such things.

As for incest ... I think any sexual relationship requires informed consent from both parties, as well as a reasonably good power balance between them. What springs to mind when the word "incest" is uttered is a close adult relative having relations with a young child -- which clearly violates both of those concerns: a child cannot give informed consent (too immature) and the power balance is way off the scale. To top it off, the societal taboo against sex with children simply recognizes that healthy interpersonal boundaries must be maintained in order for close family relations to work properly, and the child especially can't maintain those boundaries for themselves; that's why adults are responsible to do it for them.

On the other hand, "kissin' cousins" or siblings, if they are not minors, could conceivably meet those two tests.

It's my understanding that offspring of incestuous relations don't have a higher odds of birth defects, they have a higher probability of epigenetic expression of defects, but only if those genes are present in one or both partners to begin with. So the actual risk is no more than stuff most of us seem to ignore in other kinds of relationships, let's say, a couple of little people having children together, some of which may also be afflicted with dwarfism.

Not that I am advocating for incest -- I'm more pointing out that actual harmful incest (which is the vast majority of it in practice) can be prohibited on a more general basis than some subjective "yuck factor". The vast majority of the time it's objectively wrong for reasons that have nothing to do with the happenstance that the parties to a relationship happen to be closely related. In the handful of edge cases where it might be up to the parties to decide for themselves, we don't need to concern ourselves with it.

Prof Christina Hayes talks about this at length. Basically what she says is the OT is a set of books with a group of stories about flawed, damaged and basically normal for the time. Incest was not unknown (still isn't). Depends how close but certainly first cousins marry in UK. This isn't a particular problem until you get inter-generational first cousin partnerships over several generations. The point of the OT is that it is veiwed as a morality lesson which it isn't. If you see it as what it is, a group of stories about a group of rather tawdry people, it makes a lot more sense.
As for Lot's daughters. If you review the story, the daughters believed they were never going to see anyone again ever. They believed they were locked in with their father as the only possible sperm donor. Its very yuck, lets be honest but so is a lot of historical literature.

God doesn't really exist, so he didn't make any of it.

The Bible doesn't say that Adam and Eve were the only ones in existence. There is room to assume that others were created (such as in Nod), which would cause no contradiction in the Bible and no need for incest.

On the other hand, the tale of Noah's Ark reduces the entire population down to eight people, and no matter how you pair them up, their offsprings are going to be related to each other. Those would also be the only candidates for mating. I'm no biologist, but I understand that breeding first cousins is not as degenerative as breeding siblings. Someone would have to confirm that for me with actual science.

I know this wasn't quite the point you were trying to make, but humans are actually super inbred. Some of the higher estimates for our effective population size put us at only about 10,000 individuals!