Random Evil Guy

bare with me, these are just my very superficial observations, but i still find them strange at best:

-why create everything in 7 days? why not just poof everything at the same time? very irrational behaviour...

-why say for example 'let there be light', why not just 'do it'. who is he talking to?

-more of an amusing observation:
"And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness."
there is pride in your work and then there is arrogance(stolen from ricky gervais)

-why create adam out of dirt? why not just poof him into existance as well?

-ok, so he created adam out of dust, so naturally, one would assume he'd create eve out of dust as well, but nooo. this time, he uses one adam's ribs. why? to mix it up a bit?


-assuming god was all knowing, why put the snake and/or the tree in the garden? basically the whole free will thingy. god knew adam and eve would disobey him the moment he created them, so isn't he then ultimately responsible for the betrayel?

these are just a few of the things that make the bible so absurd to me.

WishboneDawn

This was likely written by somebody with some specific theological ideas to communicate to his audience. A good guide would help you understand it more.

This is pretty common in ancient myths, the sense that man was created from the earth.

1) maybe to establish a women's lesser stature.

2) the original sense of the passage is not that she was created from a rib but more from a 'side' or half of Adam. So to establish the deep connection bewteen man and woman?

3) He's been trying to create a partner for Adam but kept getting it wrong and so created the animals. Finally he maybe just decided the only way to o it right was create the partner from Adam. Make a copy instead of trying to make it from scratch.

A lot of ancient myths have inconsistencies like that. that's why you get tied up in knots with a literal reading. The serpent is there because the storytellers put him there to make a point. That's it.

You could make it less absurd by reading it from a different perspective.

judge

Our modern explanations of things would probably seem equally absurd to someone from the time genesis was first elucidated.

ynquirer

I'd say that the perception of time is proof of wisdom rather than ridiculous. Instant creation of everything as said of this world would probably involve formal contradiction.

The gospel of John 1:1: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

How might it have been otherwise?

OK, see below.

That is an interesting question. As soon as light is divided from the darkness, dirt is the most shadowy edge of light. It means that man's origin is base.

Woman's stuff is of a higher quality than man's.

God wished to create a being, the human, that could rise from near-darkness to bright light through trial and error. Genesis simply depicts a first error. The message is quite simple: Pride and arrogance, not for human beings - see above.

Ridiculous? I don't think so.

llDayo

Well, REG, you could also think of it this way. It took God a few days to create the earth and everything in it but He was able to poof the rest of the universe in one. Something doesn't make sense about that, or else it was because the story was written by ancients who didn't understand how large and complex the universe actually is.

patchy

The way they wrote Genesis doesn't exactly sidestep the problems of "formal contradictions" either, though.

For instance:

God supposedly differentiates between day and night on the first day but doesn't create the things which differentiate between day and night (the sun, and, ridiculously enough, the stars) until the fourth day.

1:3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
1:4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

(wait for it...)

1:14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
1:15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.
1:17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, "1:18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
1:19 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Genesis also has plants appearing on day three, before there was a sun to drive photosynthesis. Hmm, wonder if that's because the Bronze Age intellect didn't yet know about photosynthesis.

An instant poofing of the world comes with some problems, yes. But so does the gradual 7-day version told by Genesis. Here's the problem in a nutshell:

Any attempt by people, especially scientifically ignorant and almost wholly illiterate people, to formulate an origin story other than the real one, is doomed to fail. Because it'll never stand up to the real one, which is actually supported by empirical evidence and not just printed words on a page that reflect the oral campfire stories of primitives. Simple.







Trouble is, that's just gibberish. Like a lot of the Bible.




"Dirt is the most shadowy edge of light" is nonsensical. It doesn't mean anything. In what way, and be very precise, is dirt the most shadowy edge of light?

Dirt is dirt. In broad daylight, it appears lightly colored. At night, it appears darkly colored. (The color obviously doesn't really change, only the ambient reflective light does.)



If the bible really wanted to convey this, why does the entire rest of the bible go out of its way to treat women like shit?

You have read this book...have you not?

davidbach

REG, I think you are expecting too much.

Genesis and other material from ancient times is not ridiculous, it is primitive. In fact, given the limited knowledge and perceptions of the era, it is rather a good theory. I am interested, even somewhat awed, by the intellectual capabilities of our ancestors. I think the ancients deserve respect for the attempt to describe nature and how it began. It is the essence of the difference between man and beast, and it is quite understandable that something so difficult to grasp was attributed to divine intervention. I venture to say that we do not fully understand our intellectual powers to this day.

What is ridiculous is to treat the theories and musings of that era as relevant to today's life and science. To do so is as irrelevant as applying the Phlogiston Theory to an internal combustion engine.

It is we (rather the biblicists among us) that are ridiculous.:redface:

WishboneDawn

nice post david.

Anat

The creation stories in Genesis were not necessarily intended to explain how exactly the natural universe was formed, but to make poetical and theological statements about it. Hence the use of repetitive formulae in the first story about everything being good upon creation and the whole universe being very good upon its completion. Hence the parallel between light/darkness and sun/moon+stars; upper vs lower waters and water animals; land with plants and land animals, all summarised with a seventh day to ponder and celebrate it all. Who knows if the author actually believed this was the order of creation? But it was a poetical way to describe the main aspects of the natural world from the author's POV.

The second creation story tells more about the nature of the human life cycle. About coming of age morally and physically with the internal and inter-personal conflicts this involves. Again, there is no necessity that the author believed that literally humans were made of dust, but it made poetical sense considering humans made a living by tilling the soil and ended up buried in it and becoming part of it.

davidbach

Why, Thanks, WishboneDawn.

Thanks also to Anat. Your position is possibly also supported by the existence of two versions, both, to the ancients, equally "true". I had not much appreciated the tendency to duality, a sort of ying-yang. Rather clever, really, suggesting a strong desire for order and symmetry even in these early writings. That tends to make more sense of the "waters above the firmament" also.

Going back to the OP, in a similar way, seven days must have seemed a familiar cycle. Nothing natural happens instantaneously, so this concept was not available to the sages of old.

David.