Thursday, September 11, 2008

Two Accounts of Creation

OK, so like there are two accounts of creation, and they differ, and they are right next to one another, right in the beginning of the book; right next to each other, not even separated by a few pages or nothing. So either the cat that wrote Genesis is really really stupid OR realized that cover pages often get lost and this was better and less likely to be ignored than a disclaimer that said "WARNING! THIS IS NOT A SCIENCE TEXT - for worship and religious purposes only!" And that should really have been that, start the book with two distinct poetic renditions of creation and people will get the joke that what is contained withing is a lot more important than science or history or any type of "hard" knowledge. But this doesn't happen, instead you get people trying to reconcile the two and arguing about what kind of weapon Cain used to off Able and what the heck is gopher wood and how did all those animals fit in the ark, where did the water come from and where did it go and why was God afraid the the tower builders in Babel would succeed when He knew there was no place for them to go and a tower would collapse if it were just a couple of miles high regardless of what it was made of? And they actually come up with answers! Sometimes conflicting answers, and they argue and fight and start wars about the which answer it right.

Maybe we need a new translation, like a "Bible for Idiots" that has hints that this is a religious tome and not history or science or any of that stuff. We could change just a few things like change "there lived a man named Abram" to "there was once this guy, let's call him Abram, for example" and sprinkle a lot of "yeah, that's the ticket" and "no man, really forty flippin' days!" around and then maybe people would get the joke. Or they could just tell the stories around the camp fire for about 3000 years before anybody wrote it down, just like the folklore of every other religion in human history. Nah, that wouldn't work, they already tried that one. I guess they should stick with starting the book with two different poetic renditions of the same story that say different things (I admit the second story isn't quite as poetic).

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