Originally Posted by driver8

Genesis is a fairy tale not even up to Aesop's standards. It has the sophistication of a child.

Originally Posted by driver8

Even if you choose to believe in a god do yourself a favor and forget the Genesis account. On second thought, forget both the Genesis account and the god concept. Neither is tenable.

Originally Posted by spin

This is certainly not correct. Aesop may have been putting forward sophisticated little moral tales, but the creation of Genesis 1, though of a different genre, is very sophisticated. spin

Originally Posted by spin

Besides being formally quite complex as my table in an earlier post shows, the text does a lot of things. It places humans at the end of creation, as the pinnacle one could say. spin

Originally Posted by spin

It institutes the Sabbath at the beginning of creation, showing the great importance of the Sabbath and how it was god's plan to institute it. spin

Originally Posted by spin

It shows a god who doesn't need to physically intervene to create the world: he merely needs to express his idea and it comes to be. spin

Originally Posted by spin

It also contains a sophisticated, though unreal (to the scientist), view of the cosmos. spin

Originally Posted by spin

As a part of a text tradition, being related to the Enuma Elish from Babylon, it is a vast improvement theologically. The Genesis account is worthy of reading, but not for its scientific or religious value, but because of its literary and philosophical value. How did people confront the world before they had science to give the world coherence? Genesis is an easily accessible example. The result is of high literary value. spin

Originally Posted by spin

One needs to ditch scientific simplicity when attempting to read works like this. They are just not scientific and to expect them to be, as some seem to do, is pretty silly. spin

Originally Posted by spin

You might find more in the text if you ditched the religion.
spin

Originally Posted by driver8

I won't give it sophisticated, perhaps lyrical. The use of the first person in Genesis 1 is certainly creative, perhaps giving a sense of authority. Genesis 2 and thereafter blow it by showing it is after all a regional document describing a regional god. The Zulu would have been pissed to find that the Pishon is the center of creation.



I don't really see this as a complex conception of creation. It appears to be the simplest logic that could be expected given the state of knowledge.



Did you mean man's plan?



And this is problematic, no? We must conclude that the furrowed brow created all of the universe then.



Mithraism was a major improvement on this level of sophistication and far more interesting. All Genesis does is see stars in the sky.



I'm not so sure that this is an improvement philosophically. Literal monotheistic creationism has been very damaging and divisive. I think we were better off when we believed in polytheistic gods who had limited spheres of influence. We certainly hoped our gods were better than our neighbors, but we didn't feel compelled to tout that the god of israel should now be considered the ruler of all gods. In making "our" god better than all others, we gave ourselves license to rebuke those who disagreed.



Agreed. Unfortunately, too many people accept this account in favor of science and reason. I in no way expect this account to be scientific or accurate. I have some idea of how this story developed and what it represents. Certainly it does not represent anything that actually happened, and for people to continue to believe so is an impediment to the progress of humanity. When a lee merrill, who is representative of millions, tries to reconcile genesis literalism with reality we have to realize how far we are from being capable of conducting ourselves with meaning and purpose. Genesis is a sideshow.



I disagree. What I find in the text is the simplistic earth creation story, the creation of man, the story of original sin, unexplainable conflict, and the flood myth as a new start. Man is flawed. Without this basic story line Jesus is unnecessary. Conceptually, its all rather boring. That people believe is compelling.

While it is illuminating to understand this point in the progression of belief, if I ditch the religion in Genesis I get unattributed and uninteresting geneology and "history" for page after page. It is painful reading. If you enjoy it I could provide you with my own family history including tales of speaking with god and the cavorting of barnyard animals.

Originally Posted by lee_merrill

Hi everyone,

This came up in another thread, and I thought it would be best to discuss it here, the question was whether there are good correspondences between science and the Genesis account:

Originally Posted by EarlOfLade

It basically is the reflection of what superstitious goat herders imagined had happened and can not in any way, shape or form be considered scientific.

Originally Posted by spin

But were your ancestors not living in squalor under some rock in some forsaken place with a lot less cultural complexity to lean on than these goat herders?


spin

Originally Posted by EarlOfLade

:huh: What's that got to do with it? There are people today living close to stone age, look deep into the Amazon for one example of such tribes. What has that got to do with what the universe looks like and how it came into being?

I honestly don't understand your point.

Originally Posted by spin

We are too busy judging ancient things from our own modern standards usually without knowing anything about the context in which those ancient things were produced and are thus ignorant about their value.

At the same time you're attacking the people of the bible, isn't it true that they were not the lowest of the low culturally: most ancient ancestors who were not of the major cultures were in fact lower. All this to say, when you ad hominem the people of the book, they probably could laugh at your ancestors' ignorance.

Nothing serious.


spin

Originally Posted by EarlOfLade

But I'm not claiming that my ancestors were gods elected people and all the other nonsense in the bible. We had a good religion with multiple gods who were really people and a great culture writing about these "gods". Nobody, well almost nobody, believe they existed nor do anyone but a few nutcases take it seriously today. At least none of them are trying to tell me what I can or can not do, nor do they function as a litmus test on politicians as they do here.

When you can say the same for the people of the bible, we are even. until then...

Originally Posted by lee_merrill

Genesis 1:29 Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food."

Broccoli and bananas too, I would say!