Genesis 2; it begins again...

Yaay I finished! Man that was knackering... even for an omnipotent being... think I'll take a rest.

Already, within the first two chapters, now we begin to get some contradictions. Impressive stuff, and surely pretty daunting if you're determined to take the entire thing as the literal truth... In chapter two, the earth does not bring forth grass before man is created, for there is no man to till the ground (an obvious essential for plant growth) and it hasn't rained yet.

Then man was formed, and a garden was planted to the east of something... man, supposedly. Now this is the sort of inescapably specific detail that people taking the tale metaphorically have to just disregard. Even more so the subsequent river description, with the lands all specifically named.

Man gets put into Eden, and then the animals are formed AFTER them. But they were formed BEFORE him/them just a page before. How can this possibly not be a contradiction?? Even if chapter 1 was just a summery of events, it still stated the order (with helpful days just to emphasize the chronological order of events), and then the order of events is changed on the very next page!! Seriously, people, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU???

Man was formed from dust, apparently. Not, as is suggested by the world, evolved over hundreds of millions of years from the same primordial cells that all other life on the planet also evolved from. Evolutionary evidence is so overwhelmingly convincing that I cannot take this sentence or two as anything but poetic imagery if I want to take it seriously...

Now this tree. Or is it two trees? It's a bit confusing at this point, but God makes a magic tree of life and one of knowledge of good and evil. Are these the same tree? it is not clear at this point... but I think we might come back to this later.

Then God splits a river and names some countries for no apparent reason. And then, unexpectedly, the meaning of life is thrust upon us! We are put here to tend and keep the garden of eden! Because nature gets a bit messy when we aren't around... just look at Brazil! Everyone, join Greenpeace. It is why you're here! Actually, the sentiment here is quite nice... you could definitely do worse than take care of nature as your life's work. Woo environmentalist Bible!

Don't eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, or you will die that day! And yet... 930 years? Adam lives a pretty long day.

Then God sees Adam is lonely. God, of course, being omniscient saw this coming... then why did he not make a companion straight away? Or why didn't he make a being not capable of loneliness? And why didn't he hit on the solution first try, rather than waste what must have taken years and years, i.e. making all of the animals and making Adam name every single one! To give you an idea of the scale of this, 10,000 insects are discovered every year. Surely not a realistic event? Never mind... Also... is it me, or did God just walk Adam through all the animals seeing if he took a fancy to any of them? Hmm.

Then woman was made for man from one of Adam's own ribs. Back in the day, there was a great deal of controversy when it was discovered that both sexes have the same number of ribs! Amazing... you would have thought people would actually check something like that before believing completely that man has one less rib than woman... anyway, this twist is contrary to chapter 1 again, which implies that they were created at the same time (and a bit more equally), and has profound social connotations. Woman was created for man. Which seems a bit... rubbish really. Definitely a clear and fundamental root of sexist attitudes.

Then there's a nice bit about them being a devoted and proudly nudist couple, and the chapter ends.

It's been a while... I was contemplating deleting this, and I still might. The Bible is clearly such a complicated series of documents, impossible to see much of it in any great detail as regards when, where and by whom it was actually written, what the writes intended to convey, and what has been lost or added in translation. I guess my objective here is to take what direct meaning I can from it, which many many thousands, millions even, of scholars and historians far more qualified than me have already done. 3 Next! Talking of 3... this is just weird.

Genesis In the beginning...

The first sentence makes itself quite clear about what happened here. No ambiguity, no wriggle room; God created the heaven and the earth according to the Bible. But the account is very strange, and takes a fundamentally inaccurate view of the universe. It implies a starting point of a flat featureless ocean (1:2 and 1:6), whereupon light is added without a source (1:3), suggesting a lack of knowledge as to where the light comes from; how could there be an evening and a morning without the sun?

Then there's the firmament business (1:6). What the hell is that? Or rather what in heavens name is that? Well it is in fact an implication of a solid sky, a bowl displaying the stars about which the celestial spheres traveled; an geocentric universe. Actually no, a universe in layers. Which is quite simply wrong. If you doubt this interpretation, then it is even easier from the Hebrew, which was the word used for a metal dome beaten out of a metal sheet.

Then the water is gathered together into one place and land appears... rather than the land rising above the water, in accordance with the laws of physics. Then the plants come along, which I guess is accurate apart from the grass bit, which wasn't around for a long time... ferns came first and were the dominant plant species through much of the dinosaur era... I mean c'mon guys, you're trying to take this stuff literally! Then the stars and the sun were made AFTER the grass... no photosynthesis for you!! And they're all *set* in the firmament (inescapably inaccurate) in order to give light to earth... despite the fact that a desperately, stupidly, unimaginably small fraction of stars in the universe are visible from Earth. Then the waters bring forth their creatures and the fowl (though the fowl come from the earth in 2:19) which can be said to be accurate, broadly speaking, but then the earth separately brings forth cattle etc. and ruins it all.

Then He makes man in his own image. This is the beginning of a very human view of the universe, the "own image" milarky being the most obvious symptom. This is to me indicative of man placing himself at the center of the universe rather than the universes creator. How incredibly self-centered is this view, in this day and age, when we have a more accurate perception of the true form and scale of reality. This view, I'm afraid, only makes historical sense in terms of the society that generated it.

Then there's a lot of man has dominion stuff, eat everything! Even the poisonous stuff, see what happens... oh and the drugs. And all animals were herbivores, apparently. Even tapeworms, mosquitoes, tigers... never mind.

According to Karen Armstrong and her excellent book, this chapter was in fact written after Genesis 2, and was written to portray the unity of nature and all humans, with everything being good and harmonious, and all man created equal. Lovely. If only it were all like this... poetic, and meaningful as a metaphor (if you believe in God).

Well that's chapter one... I did warn you! for further reading about the ancient view of the universe portrayed in Genesis, I found Is Heaven the Sky?. Pretty well-stated :) anyway, next chapter is next! Funnily enough...

Manifesto Shmanifesto

OK so basically I've started this blog once already... but it died. I forgot the password... and the username... and the name of the blog... but I remember the idea!

The idea was simple. And complicated. Right. I'm an atheist, trying desperately to undersand Christianity. Specifically fundemental creationist weirdness that... doesn't appear to make any sense at all. But it must do SOMEHOW. I have a friend, a physicist friend, who still finds room in her mind for the possibility that the earth is 6000 years old. Now in order for her to do this, she has to be able to believe that God created the universe in such a way that all evidence pointed to it being billions of years old. For some mysterious reason. Now there has to be a bloody good reason for someone to do that, no?

So the idea is to do what they want me to do... read the Bible. Gospel by Gospel. Investigating each as I go, looking at the history, responding on here. Now I have to warn you, I like the truth. So if something is bullshit, I get annoyed. You know, blasphemy is still technically a crime in my country (UK) which is pretty stupid in one of the most secular places on the planet. So yea anyway, I may stray into those areas. So if you have sensitive beliefs that you don't want challenged, don't read on. Idiot. What?? I told you not to read on...

OK so that's that :) there will be other stuff too probably, if I get that bored. And it may become fairly infrequent, as I'm also working and playing at uni... but I'll try and follow through with this one.

First of all let me define something. The term atheist. It means that I don't believe in God. Now some people subtley misunderstand this; it's not quite the same thing as "I believe that there is no God". At certain levels, the question becomes meaningless... for example the deist God that is outside the universe, who set it going and now cannot interract with it. This is a possibility that can never be answered either by science or people who make up stories. Exactly the same as the possibility that ouside our universe (but again unable to interract with it) a 2D old couple are making an army out of beans, and can't understand why the enemy find them so tasty. I lack belief in a God rather than believe that there isn't one. Think about the difference :)

Next time: Genesis begins!