Today I was listening to the radio and the host was interviewing an author on "the search for the authentic", and why that is so popular for our times. The author was Andrew Potter and the host and the author were discussing why people want more "authentic" expressions (read items) and lifestyles. The return to nature is a big deal now adays. Can't give up your city loft?, that's Okay, you can eat a 100 mile diet, know the farmer who grows your chicken dinners, and buy organic hemp clothing or vintage (aka second hand) coats. This is done, partly, to get in touch with our roots.
Roots? As in agricultural roots?
Just a second, didn't agriculture and cities sort of develop together? I mean, perhaps a few centuries apart, but evolutionarily that is not enough time for our genes to develop a strong preference for one type of living over another. The percentage of a population living rurally (agriculturally) vs. urbanly (in cities or towns) may have shifted over time, but farmers living in the volatile Ancient Middle East couldn't have lived too far from town. Marauding armies and bands of thugs meant easy sprinting distance to the city gates was a necessity. So, are our neolithic roots any more agricultural than urban?
A truly authentic experience would be to take up hunting, spear-fishing and camping. Something that is hard to do while maintaining a city-loft lifestyle. Stanley Park, in Vancouver, may get a few more homeless as soon as people realize this is a truly authentic way to get back to your roots. Wild berry picking is hard when everyone else is keeps picking your dinner.
I get it, it's too hard. Try going to a stone age society - Brazilian tourism can let you know which group is giving tours of the amazon basin groups. It might make you nostalgic for your warm shower, air conditioning and veggies (fruit and monkey's brains get a little boring after a week or two).
I guess all those red necks are living the truly authentic lifestyle so sought after by the urban masses!
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Monday, April 19, 2010
Did other middle eastern cultures have Adam and Eve stories?
Many Christians are well aware of the Gilgemesh epic and its flood story. Less known is that the Gilgemesh epic also contains a story rather similar to Adam and Eve, but it is not a first couple account.
This portion of the Gilgemesh epic parallels the Adam and Eve story - with a few changes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noiblvbWHcM&feature=related
about the parallels here:
http://www.mailstar.net/adam-and-eve.html
and
http://www.angelfire.com/nt/theology/Appx08.html
This portion of the Gilgemesh epic parallels the Adam and Eve story - with a few changes.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noiblvbWHcM&feature=related
about the parallels here:
http://www.mailstar.net/adam-and-eve.html
and
http://www.angelfire.com/nt/theology/Appx08.html
It is too strange, is Eden real?
I read this part of the creation story over and over and never really paid attention to it. I read this many times, but never really understood it, so I assumed it made sense to someone. Well, it would take a lot of manipulation to make this place real in a literal reading.
Genesis Chapter 2 verses 10 - 13
10 A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. 11 The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. 12 (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) 13 The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. 14 The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. (NI*V)
This place exists? Headwaters (let's assume the Bible is accurate for this argument) mean the river's source, usually the headwaters are lakes or glaciers or snow capped peaks, Eden is none of these. In ancient summerian, Edin meant wilderness or desert, in the Bible, Eden is the place where God puts his garden. So out in the desert, somewhere, there are headwaters? Okay, let us suppose this is ture (or Eden is way up a mountain somewhere). Two of the rivers begin close to each other, in Turkey. One of the rivers is in Saudi Arabia and the last one is in Africa (Sudan). Hmmm, and they all share a headwater source, which originates in the land of Eden and flows through the garden. Some river, covering three continents (we'll keep Turkey in Europe for Geographical reasons), all with different drainage basins. This doesen't exist. Even if we switched 'headwaters' for the river's ends. If Eden doesn't exist, am I expected to take this chapter literally?
It is interesting to read what people do to make this place real:
Here is an account that insists we can use the Red Sea as a river:
http://www.kjvbible.org/rivers_of_the_garden_of_eden.html
This one says we can use the Persian Gulf as a river's source:
http://ldolphin.org/eden/
Wikipedia says we really don't know, but it does follow Sumerian creation myths:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden
Here is an interesting Youtube video on the subject and possible location - it deals with the "fall of Man" but has some maps that would place it SE of Ur.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRMyzBZbS1Q&feature=related
If we allow Eden to be a Mesopotamian place, remember, Edin means the wild step in the Sumerian language, it may well refer to the lands around Mesopotamia.
Genesis Chapter 2 verses 10 - 13
10 A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. 11 The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. 12 (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) 13 The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. 14 The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. (NI*V)
This place exists? Headwaters (let's assume the Bible is accurate for this argument) mean the river's source, usually the headwaters are lakes or glaciers or snow capped peaks, Eden is none of these. In ancient summerian, Edin meant wilderness or desert, in the Bible, Eden is the place where God puts his garden. So out in the desert, somewhere, there are headwaters? Okay, let us suppose this is ture (or Eden is way up a mountain somewhere). Two of the rivers begin close to each other, in Turkey. One of the rivers is in Saudi Arabia and the last one is in Africa (Sudan). Hmmm, and they all share a headwater source, which originates in the land of Eden and flows through the garden. Some river, covering three continents (we'll keep Turkey in Europe for Geographical reasons), all with different drainage basins. This doesen't exist. Even if we switched 'headwaters' for the river's ends. If Eden doesn't exist, am I expected to take this chapter literally?
It is interesting to read what people do to make this place real:
Here is an account that insists we can use the Red Sea as a river:
http://www.kjvbible.org/rivers_of_the_garden_of_eden.html
This one says we can use the Persian Gulf as a river's source:
http://ldolphin.org/eden/
Wikipedia says we really don't know, but it does follow Sumerian creation myths:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_of_Eden
Here is an interesting Youtube video on the subject and possible location - it deals with the "fall of Man" but has some maps that would place it SE of Ur.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRMyzBZbS1Q&feature=related
If we allow Eden to be a Mesopotamian place, remember, Edin means the wild step in the Sumerian language, it may well refer to the lands around Mesopotamia.
Friday, April 9, 2010
It is too strange
I first allowed evolution to be a reality by holding onto a Biblicaly literal Adam and Eve story. There was a mitochondrial 'Eve" about 150 - 200 thousand years ago. That means we can all trace our mitochondrial DNA lines back to her, but she was not the only person around. We inherit our mitochondria (that little power-house in our cells with its own DNA) from our mothers, so this doesn't help us with an Adam. The males have a "Y" factor in their chromosomes which can also be linked back, the common male ancestor is about 90 thousand years old, so a Noah maybe? I don't think the scientists named that guy, but they did name that woman we share mitochondria with "Eve". Here's the catch. Lines break. Mitochondrial Eve is the woman who managed to produce daughters, granddaughters etc, straight up till today. If one generation of her descendants had not had any daughters, her DNA line would have been broken and another woman, further back in time, would have been the mitochondrial Eve. This is more about a statistic than a person.
But Mitochondrial Eve and her husband "Adam"would have lived back in the Middle Paleolithic era. The Middle Paleolithic peoples were Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals. The Neanderthal DNA has just been sequenced and it looks like we avoided them genetically.* No trysts in the forrest between the two groups. "Eve" would have had a basic understanding of religion (art is developed and so is burying the dead). This is, however, way, way, way before writing or agriculture. Eden is a garden and Adam is expected to do his own gardening (farming) once he is kicked out of Paradise onto the cursed land. The first couple may have lived a long time, but this setting is over 100,000 years before agriculture even begins, even Adam wasn't that old. Let's remember nothing is written down, there is no record left for future reference here, only oral tradition would be a possible means to pass the story along.
Try this: If I asked what your grandmother's name was, most of us would know, what about your great-grandma? Yep. Okay her mom - your great-great grandma? And what about your great-grandma's grandma (your great-great-great grandma)? Lost you yet? I haven't a clue. Unless you are an aristocrat, you probably lose track of this at some point. Even if you have a family tree, do you know anything other than their name and birthdate/place? We don't even know much about our own Grandparent's grandparents, let alone relatives living a millenium ago.
National heros may stick in a population's memory for a time, but for how long? If we didn't use anyone mentioned in the Bible, how many thousand years can we go back? Alexander the Great, just over 2 thousand years ago, King Ashoka less, Gutama Buddha about 2500 - I can't think of an historical, non-bibical figure beyond Buddha. I don't think Gilgamesh truly counts but he was supposedly king of the Akkadians about 4700 years ago. Do you know why I don't count Gilgamesh? It is because he hasn't been a consistent historical figure. Sure he has epics widely written about his feats, he survived the worldwide flood, he battled demon gods and Sea Leviathans and did all sorts of legendary stuff. But despite his obvious popularity back 5,000 years ago, he fell out of human consciousness for at least 2500 years. In the 1800s some British Archeologists found the Babylonian/Mesopotamian stella, and could now translate ancient Mesopotamian texts, including a heap of Gilgamesh stories. But it was not oral tradition that gave us Gilgamesh as an historical figure, it was written tradition.
Let's place "Eve" at 150,000 years ago. What legend or tale could let her memory live on for that long? I can't get beyond Gilgamesh (4700 years ago) in historical figures, keeping in mind that historical means written. Could Adam and Eve really get passed down orally form the Middle Paleolithic period - they have so many Summerian characteristics about them. It is doubtful the Summerians' would have told oral legends about people as far removed as mitochondrial Eve.
For those who haven't read their Bible in, oh, forever, Genesis Chapter two also mentions where Eden is, an important piece of info for it to be historical. Or, does it? I leave you to grab a map and your copy of Genesis and try to figure out where the river that feeds the headwaters could be, don't ask google where Bibical scholars place Eden, just have fun trying to figure it out yourself. I will continue the strangeness of Genesis next post.
UPDATE*
Okay, here is my first lesson about blogging new scientific discoveries. The scientist is excited and shares a little, not complete picture, of what is know with a reporter before the full report is released, the reporter is excited and shares the incomplete picture, as a complete picture, with the radio announcer, TV anchorperson etc. Pretty soon the incomplete picture is fact. Oops. I was wrong, we did mingle our genes with the Neanderthals. We do share 4% of our DNA with Neanderthals (well not everyone, only those who have non-subsaharan ancestors) if you are a 'pure' human, you have not only never mingled your DNA with a Neanderthal, but you also avoided any human who left the African continent about 150 thousand years ago (eg. anyone of non-African heritage) don't you love genetics, it turns old assumptions on their heads.
But Mitochondrial Eve and her husband "Adam"would have lived back in the Middle Paleolithic era. The Middle Paleolithic peoples were Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals. The Neanderthal DNA has just been sequenced and it looks like we avoided them genetically.* No trysts in the forrest between the two groups. "Eve" would have had a basic understanding of religion (art is developed and so is burying the dead). This is, however, way, way, way before writing or agriculture. Eden is a garden and Adam is expected to do his own gardening (farming) once he is kicked out of Paradise onto the cursed land. The first couple may have lived a long time, but this setting is over 100,000 years before agriculture even begins, even Adam wasn't that old. Let's remember nothing is written down, there is no record left for future reference here, only oral tradition would be a possible means to pass the story along.
Try this: If I asked what your grandmother's name was, most of us would know, what about your great-grandma? Yep. Okay her mom - your great-great grandma? And what about your great-grandma's grandma (your great-great-great grandma)? Lost you yet? I haven't a clue. Unless you are an aristocrat, you probably lose track of this at some point. Even if you have a family tree, do you know anything other than their name and birthdate/place? We don't even know much about our own Grandparent's grandparents, let alone relatives living a millenium ago.
National heros may stick in a population's memory for a time, but for how long? If we didn't use anyone mentioned in the Bible, how many thousand years can we go back? Alexander the Great, just over 2 thousand years ago, King Ashoka less, Gutama Buddha about 2500 - I can't think of an historical, non-bibical figure beyond Buddha. I don't think Gilgamesh truly counts but he was supposedly king of the Akkadians about 4700 years ago. Do you know why I don't count Gilgamesh? It is because he hasn't been a consistent historical figure. Sure he has epics widely written about his feats, he survived the worldwide flood, he battled demon gods and Sea Leviathans and did all sorts of legendary stuff. But despite his obvious popularity back 5,000 years ago, he fell out of human consciousness for at least 2500 years. In the 1800s some British Archeologists found the Babylonian/Mesopotamian stella, and could now translate ancient Mesopotamian texts, including a heap of Gilgamesh stories. But it was not oral tradition that gave us Gilgamesh as an historical figure, it was written tradition.
Let's place "Eve" at 150,000 years ago. What legend or tale could let her memory live on for that long? I can't get beyond Gilgamesh (4700 years ago) in historical figures, keeping in mind that historical means written. Could Adam and Eve really get passed down orally form the Middle Paleolithic period - they have so many Summerian characteristics about them. It is doubtful the Summerians' would have told oral legends about people as far removed as mitochondrial Eve.
For those who haven't read their Bible in, oh, forever, Genesis Chapter two also mentions where Eden is, an important piece of info for it to be historical. Or, does it? I leave you to grab a map and your copy of Genesis and try to figure out where the river that feeds the headwaters could be, don't ask google where Bibical scholars place Eden, just have fun trying to figure it out yourself. I will continue the strangeness of Genesis next post.
UPDATE*
Okay, here is my first lesson about blogging new scientific discoveries. The scientist is excited and shares a little, not complete picture, of what is know with a reporter before the full report is released, the reporter is excited and shares the incomplete picture, as a complete picture, with the radio announcer, TV anchorperson etc. Pretty soon the incomplete picture is fact. Oops. I was wrong, we did mingle our genes with the Neanderthals. We do share 4% of our DNA with Neanderthals (well not everyone, only those who have non-subsaharan ancestors) if you are a 'pure' human, you have not only never mingled your DNA with a Neanderthal, but you also avoided any human who left the African continent about 150 thousand years ago (eg. anyone of non-African heritage) don't you love genetics, it turns old assumptions on their heads.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
My difficulties with Genesis Chapter 2
I got my head around the evolution of all species, My Husband explained how it worked - it made sense and fit. I knew and loved horses from my earliest memories. I rode, learned about them and and the difference between horses and mules. Most people don't, so I will briefly explain it. Horses are a different species than donkeys (duh) but closely related. So closely, in fact, that a mare (female horse) and a male donkey (I am sure there is some name for him, but I am a horse gal, donkeys didn't factor) can breed and have a ... horse? no, a donkey? no, a new species? No! a Mule, yep. Mules are born infertile. The only way to get yourself a mule farm is to own a few mares and at least one male donkey. Mules aren't a species, they can't make baby mules (as of this post, who knows what some wacky scientist will do in a lab next). My Husband explained that this was because horses and donkeys were genetically very similar, but not similar enough to reproduce as members of the same species can (eg. make a population from 2 of that species).
When it came to humans, I started to take Adam and Eve literally - a God miracle, plunked down on an evolved earth. I felt evolution was OKay (disclaimer: I knew nothing of human genetics at this time, just that I wanted Adam and Eve to be different, unique and specially made). Why couldn't God just decide to make a ruler over his creation ( a creation he brought up by evolution)? Then, once he had Adam, he obviously needed to make a helper for him too, so he could have formed Eve from Adam's rib - I mean, who could make this stuff up and get anyone to believe it, Moses must have believed it in order to write it.
I questioned my husband, discovered a mitochondrial Eve, decided she was the real Eve and asked how they figured out who our ancient mom was and why they didn't have an ancesteral dad to go with her (my Adam). Then, I began to sense my husband doubted Adam and Eve. That upset me. Old earth and Evolution were fine, but Adam and Eve could not be tampered with without serious faith implications. I need to explain that up until this point, I had never read or heard about other views on Genesis.
The Genetic problem with God-made, instant ancesteral parents of us all is the lingering ruins of bygone genetic material lingering in our genome. I won't go back to India this post, I will go to Europe. Well, England at least, on a visit with my grade 12 class one rainy October/November. We took a short detour from our city to city train stops. Boarding a train for some out-of-the-way line to deepest, darkest (actually one of the sunniest days of our trip) Wales. Our teacher had to tell the train driver where to stop! Once we disembarked from the train, we had to walk, in the pitch dark, on a winding country road to the hostel. The next morning we were told we would not be boarding at the same train stop, but traveling on foot to the next town. Off we went through sheep fields, being silly, as teenagers do. At some point we slithered down a hill, probably to get ahead of classmates and in the little valley there was an old abandoned stone cottage. Our teacher figured it was hundreds of years old, the stones kept the shape, but the roof and door were long gone. It was cute, I took a picture and off we went. I remember it because I still have the photo, it still looks like a cottage. ( I don't have a decent scanner, so I can't post it) That same trip we visited York, Yorkshire on Halloween night, and went on a Ghost Walk. Very beautiful and the perfect setting for a Ghosty movie (note to Twilight producers). We walked around the two city walls, one, older, more weathered and built around 600 AD, but still a wall, the second was larger, newer and had places to walk on it, but neither wall was complete, both showed up, then disappeared. Both were walls, but non-functioning walls.
No, this post is not about ruins in England, I won't bother with my Black Forest trip to Germany either (visits to non-functioning castles, yet definitely castles). There was a point to this. The point is, to a geneticist, our genomes (I guess that is what all of our own genes seen at once are) have functional parts, making all our body parts, including our eye colour, blood type and sex, and the "ruins". The ruins are the genes that we can tell used to do things, such as a Vitamin C making gene, there, visible, but mutated in us (and Chimps) but not in Fido - yeah, I don't need to give my dog orange juice to prevent scurvy in him, he'll just make Vit. C from his dry dog food.
Then there was this specific ruin. It is what made me discard my literal Eve (who I felt might have been especially made from an evolved Adam's rib - really, who are more Ape-like, men or women?). The egg-yolk gene. It is funny how one small rudder can turn the huge ship around. We are mammals, I learned that we were specifically placental mammals. Kangaroos, Koalas and apparently all mammals in Australia pre-Euro Eco-Terrorists (who dared to bring horses and sheep amongst other non-native species) were not placental. Kangas and Koalas have pouches, so they are called Marsupials and those Duck-billed Platypuses and along with a few other mammals lay eggs, they are Monotremes. In evolution, Mammals started as Monotremes, later they evolved into Marsupials, before becoming Placental Mammals. Placental Mammals out-competed the Marsupials (except for a few pockets in South America), but never got to Australia, the Marsupials in Australia managed to diversify, so there are marsupial mice, wild dogs, kangas, koalas and Tasmanian Devils, but no native Placental Mammals in Australia. Yet, and this is what got me, we have the ruins of egg yolk genes in us.
I know, if you, like me, aren't a biologist that it seems possible, we do (us females) have eggs. But the yolk is what grows to feed the egg. Humans, and other Placental Mammals grow a Placenta to feed our young in-utero. We never grow yolk. We do grow a yolk sac for our week-old fetus*, but it never fills with yolk, an umbilical cord to the placenta forms and feeds the fetus instead. Cool. Oh, um, we have a yolk making gene lying around? Now, I am all for conspiracy theories, one just shouldn't trust the experts too much (they brought us WMD in Iraq and other wonders), but it is a little hard to fudge these facts. Ruins of genes from bygone eras littering our genome. There are thousands of these defunct, but clearly identifiable gene "ruins" left in us and other species. Actually, the ruins look similar in closely related species, but different in less related species. And these aren't the signature marks of one creator for all species either, the genes that are ruins in one species are not in other species and in others they still function. Yolk genes are not in bacteria, nor any species that is pre-egg yolk making, but they are in post yolk-making mammals (all this was discovered in the past 10 years or so, just driving another nail in the creationist's theory).
After I learned about the egg yolk ruin, I was left with wishing I could believe in a literal Adam and Eve, made especially by the direct hand of God, and the reality that we were just part of a long evolutionary chain of events was unsettling. This would have been fine if the Bible had let me know previously. It hadn't, as far as I could tell, so I felt a little suspicious of the book in general.
* I have no clue if the fetus is a week or a day or a month old at this point, I am just taking poetic license here.
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Well, maybe circumstances got God out of the Box...
Here I am, dealing with the fact that my husband is now an evolutionist, not an intelligent design proponent, but a theistic evolutionist, whatever that means, and I am wondering what to do with most of Genesis chapter one. Allegory? about what? Made up story to appease ancient people - wouldn't; "I created the Heavens and the Earth." do? Why add more detail? Like the six days then a rest? If it was an old earth, but his original audience believed in an insta-earth, why did he need to play it up and add that on the seventh day he rested (very tiring making a world in six days, eh?).
I had, in another lifetime (life before marriage and kids), gone off on missions and travel in India and Nepal - another story for another blog. India (the part I lived in, and the home I lived in) and Nepal were Hindu. I had a lot of book knowledge about Hinduism, but book knowledge is a sanitized arms-length look at something. Try living in a Hindu household, in a Hindu town, in a Hindu country and you will begin to feel as though you are traveling back in time (or perhaps out of time). Hinduism's roots lie in agriculture, more than Jesus' parables to his followers do. Everything in Hinduism has its place and time. The moon cycles, the constellations cycle, the season's cycle, the mother Ganga (Ganges river) cycles too, as do people from young to adult to old, occasionally to pilgrims, then re-birthed anew. These cycles . High on the rooftop at night, we could see houses lit up by 'Christmas' lights. They were houses having/ hosting a wedding - a huge multi-day affair, some nights we could hear music playing, other nights we just sat on our high rooftop (we had the highest) and enjoyed the sights and sounds of wedding season, every 2nd or 3rd month, more lights, more music. Why? It was an auspicious time to get married, the astrologists said so. Wednesdays were an unauspicous day to begin a journey (they became very auspicious for me, I could get train tickets more easily on Wednesdays -and accordingly planned my trip). On Tuesdays the shops closed. Why? It was their god's day - they had to fast, go pray, they needed luck, wealth, good fortune. Each caste, each profession, each person prayed to a variety of gods, according to their needs - career or personal needs. The god they were praying for dictated which day of the week they prayed, fasted and visited the temple - on their way to work. Sundays were a day off, a vestige of the British era. No one could pick a holy day of the week for Hindus, all days had their gods to worship, auspicious days were dictated by the ever changing constellations as much as by the calendar saying it was Wednesday.
Back to this lifetime - if God isn't saying he literally created the world in six days, then rested, what exactly is the point of Genesis 1? My husband had told me that it was actually a hardship for the Jews to take a day off work in an agricultural society, crops needed harvesting whether or not it was the Sabbath. It was a hardship for most in India too, the servants were too poor to take a day off a week, so they looked after the children in the home 24/7. There was no law mandating a day off, agriculturally based cultures don't do that, they work - hard. If each day of the week belonged to different gods and goddesses in Hinduism, it would be impossible to choose one day to dedicate to all the god/desses, it might anger the other gods - that would be bad, then you would need the rest of the week off to appease the rest, work would cease.
It just clicked for me. If God was talking to a polytheistic culture, he would have to show them how each day belonged to only one God, and, since he created everything, all they needed to do was to have one day of the week dedicated to Him, the rest they could save for working. I suspect, although I can't find any evidence, that the first day (where God creates Darkness and Light) belonged to gods who were considered controllers of darkness and light, and each day following would be dedicated to another god credited with creating that thing(s) the bible says is created on that particular day of the week.
I did find an interesting parallel between the ancient babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish and Genesis chapter one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enuma_Elish
I figured if Genesis one was a myth, so be it, but Genesis two must be the start of the literal Bible. It didn't seem to be that connected to Genesis one, it wasn't debunking any gods or creation myths that I could remember. The setting was a little strange (Eden has a river that waters the headwaters of four rivers, on three continents, that don't begin anywhere near each other), but I really didn't think much about it, wasn't it alluding to something that the original audience knew that was lost on us now? Adam hadn't been made, so there was no farmer to plant and harvest the farm fields, but obviously all the wild plants God created were there. I didn't get the animals coming along after Adam, but maybe those were special garden animals. The rest just sort of wafted by, I didn't get it, but I figured we must all be descended from Adam and Eve, that much was clear.
So, how did circumstances get God out of my literal box? Living in India gave me a different perspective for Genesis chapter 1 (realized many years later), I just needed to be honest with chapter 2, so I got honest. Really, if I quit fearing my faith would crumble knowing God didn't create Adam and Eve, at least not in the way the story states, then I could accept it as myth, and trust that their was a point to Genesis chapter 2, as well as chapter 1.
I had, in another lifetime (life before marriage and kids), gone off on missions and travel in India and Nepal - another story for another blog. India (the part I lived in, and the home I lived in) and Nepal were Hindu. I had a lot of book knowledge about Hinduism, but book knowledge is a sanitized arms-length look at something. Try living in a Hindu household, in a Hindu town, in a Hindu country and you will begin to feel as though you are traveling back in time (or perhaps out of time). Hinduism's roots lie in agriculture, more than Jesus' parables to his followers do. Everything in Hinduism has its place and time. The moon cycles, the constellations cycle, the season's cycle, the mother Ganga (Ganges river) cycles too, as do people from young to adult to old, occasionally to pilgrims, then re-birthed anew. These cycles . High on the rooftop at night, we could see houses lit up by 'Christmas' lights. They were houses having/ hosting a wedding - a huge multi-day affair, some nights we could hear music playing, other nights we just sat on our high rooftop (we had the highest) and enjoyed the sights and sounds of wedding season, every 2nd or 3rd month, more lights, more music. Why? It was an auspicious time to get married, the astrologists said so. Wednesdays were an unauspicous day to begin a journey (they became very auspicious for me, I could get train tickets more easily on Wednesdays -and accordingly planned my trip). On Tuesdays the shops closed. Why? It was their god's day - they had to fast, go pray, they needed luck, wealth, good fortune. Each caste, each profession, each person prayed to a variety of gods, according to their needs - career or personal needs. The god they were praying for dictated which day of the week they prayed, fasted and visited the temple - on their way to work. Sundays were a day off, a vestige of the British era. No one could pick a holy day of the week for Hindus, all days had their gods to worship, auspicious days were dictated by the ever changing constellations as much as by the calendar saying it was Wednesday.
Back to this lifetime - if God isn't saying he literally created the world in six days, then rested, what exactly is the point of Genesis 1? My husband had told me that it was actually a hardship for the Jews to take a day off work in an agricultural society, crops needed harvesting whether or not it was the Sabbath. It was a hardship for most in India too, the servants were too poor to take a day off a week, so they looked after the children in the home 24/7. There was no law mandating a day off, agriculturally based cultures don't do that, they work - hard. If each day of the week belonged to different gods and goddesses in Hinduism, it would be impossible to choose one day to dedicate to all the god/desses, it might anger the other gods - that would be bad, then you would need the rest of the week off to appease the rest, work would cease.
It just clicked for me. If God was talking to a polytheistic culture, he would have to show them how each day belonged to only one God, and, since he created everything, all they needed to do was to have one day of the week dedicated to Him, the rest they could save for working. I suspect, although I can't find any evidence, that the first day (where God creates Darkness and Light) belonged to gods who were considered controllers of darkness and light, and each day following would be dedicated to another god credited with creating that thing(s) the bible says is created on that particular day of the week.
I did find an interesting parallel between the ancient babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish and Genesis chapter one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enuma_Elish
I figured if Genesis one was a myth, so be it, but Genesis two must be the start of the literal Bible. It didn't seem to be that connected to Genesis one, it wasn't debunking any gods or creation myths that I could remember. The setting was a little strange (Eden has a river that waters the headwaters of four rivers, on three continents, that don't begin anywhere near each other), but I really didn't think much about it, wasn't it alluding to something that the original audience knew that was lost on us now? Adam hadn't been made, so there was no farmer to plant and harvest the farm fields, but obviously all the wild plants God created were there. I didn't get the animals coming along after Adam, but maybe those were special garden animals. The rest just sort of wafted by, I didn't get it, but I figured we must all be descended from Adam and Eve, that much was clear.
So, how did circumstances get God out of my literal box? Living in India gave me a different perspective for Genesis chapter 1 (realized many years later), I just needed to be honest with chapter 2, so I got honest. Really, if I quit fearing my faith would crumble knowing God didn't create Adam and Eve, at least not in the way the story states, then I could accept it as myth, and trust that their was a point to Genesis chapter 2, as well as chapter 1.
Getting God out of the box...
So the expression "Don't put God in a box" often comes too late, God is already in a box, and it takes a while for us to get our heads around a God that isn't what we thought he was. The first place we go to is the Bible - is this possible? Would God really have done this? Why was it done this way? For many life events, a "reworking" of God is really a reworking of our understanding of Him, his Bible and our interpretations.
For the first few Chapters of Genesis this can be tough. First, I need to go back to a general, lay-person understanding of the Bible. Without knowing it, Christians constantly weigh scripture and declare it literal or figurative. In the Old Testament (OT), people didn't know about round-spherical earths that orbited the Sun, so references to corners of the earth, and the sun going around the earth were what ancient people observed, not literal, scientific explanations of space, just don't tell the Church Officials who tried Galileo for doubting earth's universal centrality. This non-literal reading is fine for eyewitness accounts such as, Psalmists writing songs/poems about God's wonderful world, Joshua extending the day. The writers observed the sun cross the sky, the flat land stretching away from a mountaintop viewpoint and wrote about it, the point of these stories or psalms is not about geographical accuracy, it is about God's interactions with people, the geo-descriptions are just background information.
Literal interpretations of the bible are generally reserved for accounts of what people did in various situations. It is historically impossible to verify weather Jezebel was, indeed, the most wicked woman ever, weather Elijah was scared of her, or David really was taken by Abigail's beauty. History rarely leaves us clues so detailed. Christians have no reason to doubt these are accurate stories, not just because they are entirely possible, but because the writers were inspired by God to write these details down. Any Christian will notice that bible stories are very bereft of details. Stories are given a little detail, but almost no background. Turning a biblical story into a movie or book requires a lot of imaginative detail to fill out the biblical narrative. This often gives me, and others, the impression that what few details do show up are important to the inspired biblical narrative, and must have been important for the original audience to hear, and by extension, due to God's inspiration, for us also.
The problem with Genesis 2 is that the story of Adam and Eve is not written by eyewitnesses scribbling down what they saw and thought. Genesis is attributed to Moses, a great and godly man who would not make stories about God up. Therefore, you can't just say "well, that is what they thought about how people got onto the earth back then," because that would make Moses is a storyteller, not a God-inspired writer. Why would Moses add talking reptiles, trees that have the power to give knowledge and Eve popping out of Adam's rib? He couldn't have been there and thought he saw these things happening, in the same fashion as the Psalmist, who sees the sun circle the earth.
Yet I never really thought about other ancient near eastern culture's creation stories. What did the Egyptians, Babylonians and Canaanites believe about humans? I had taken Ancient Mesopotamian courses in university, I knew Sumerian literature had some big complicated story about gods and goddesses wanting helpers to do all sorts of work, but it didn't remotely remind me of Adam or Eve, and they made a bunch of humans all at once. Nothing really sounded close to the Hebrew Adam and Eve, unlike the flood stories, which seemed to be a running theme throughout ancient Asia literature. But this is what I thought: if all the ancient cultures had a flood story, that just proved the Bible right. There must have been a world-wide flood. If Genesis was right about a world-wide flood, surely then, the Adam Eve story was true as well. Besides, didn't the New Testament writer (practically author) Paul bring up Adam and Eve as if they were literal figures?
God was in my box of literalism. If His book (the Bible) was going to write about Adam and Eve, then have a (the) New Testament writer bring it up as if they existed, then they must be real and we must be their descendants. Remove that, and the whole old and new testaments would collapse into a pit of human myths, tales and superstitions.
For the first few Chapters of Genesis this can be tough. First, I need to go back to a general, lay-person understanding of the Bible. Without knowing it, Christians constantly weigh scripture and declare it literal or figurative. In the Old Testament (OT), people didn't know about round-spherical earths that orbited the Sun, so references to corners of the earth, and the sun going around the earth were what ancient people observed, not literal, scientific explanations of space, just don't tell the Church Officials who tried Galileo for doubting earth's universal centrality. This non-literal reading is fine for eyewitness accounts such as, Psalmists writing songs/poems about God's wonderful world, Joshua extending the day. The writers observed the sun cross the sky, the flat land stretching away from a mountaintop viewpoint and wrote about it, the point of these stories or psalms is not about geographical accuracy, it is about God's interactions with people, the geo-descriptions are just background information.
Literal interpretations of the bible are generally reserved for accounts of what people did in various situations. It is historically impossible to verify weather Jezebel was, indeed, the most wicked woman ever, weather Elijah was scared of her, or David really was taken by Abigail's beauty. History rarely leaves us clues so detailed. Christians have no reason to doubt these are accurate stories, not just because they are entirely possible, but because the writers were inspired by God to write these details down. Any Christian will notice that bible stories are very bereft of details. Stories are given a little detail, but almost no background. Turning a biblical story into a movie or book requires a lot of imaginative detail to fill out the biblical narrative. This often gives me, and others, the impression that what few details do show up are important to the inspired biblical narrative, and must have been important for the original audience to hear, and by extension, due to God's inspiration, for us also.
The problem with Genesis 2 is that the story of Adam and Eve is not written by eyewitnesses scribbling down what they saw and thought. Genesis is attributed to Moses, a great and godly man who would not make stories about God up. Therefore, you can't just say "well, that is what they thought about how people got onto the earth back then," because that would make Moses is a storyteller, not a God-inspired writer. Why would Moses add talking reptiles, trees that have the power to give knowledge and Eve popping out of Adam's rib? He couldn't have been there and thought he saw these things happening, in the same fashion as the Psalmist, who sees the sun circle the earth.
Yet I never really thought about other ancient near eastern culture's creation stories. What did the Egyptians, Babylonians and Canaanites believe about humans? I had taken Ancient Mesopotamian courses in university, I knew Sumerian literature had some big complicated story about gods and goddesses wanting helpers to do all sorts of work, but it didn't remotely remind me of Adam or Eve, and they made a bunch of humans all at once. Nothing really sounded close to the Hebrew Adam and Eve, unlike the flood stories, which seemed to be a running theme throughout ancient Asia literature. But this is what I thought: if all the ancient cultures had a flood story, that just proved the Bible right. There must have been a world-wide flood. If Genesis was right about a world-wide flood, surely then, the Adam Eve story was true as well. Besides, didn't the New Testament writer (practically author) Paul bring up Adam and Eve as if they were literal figures?
God was in my box of literalism. If His book (the Bible) was going to write about Adam and Eve, then have a (the) New Testament writer bring it up as if they existed, then they must be real and we must be their descendants. Remove that, and the whole old and new testaments would collapse into a pit of human myths, tales and superstitions.
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Putting God in Box without realizing it
I became an Evangelical Christian when I was 12, through a friend's church and subsequent summer camp experiences. It was a Baptist church in my hometown, and I don't think I heard the word "Born Again" used, but that would be what some Christians would call it. My family was nominally Anglican, with Church going grandparents and uncles. Previous to this, I attended church in the summers with my grandparents, and had been taken to Sunday school in the past, but the evangelical experience demanded much more, a heartfelt belief that had been absent in the Anglican sermons.
I liked church, the community and the youth group, I began reading the bible, enjoying the stories, and loved the history behind them (I still love history). I remember a meal in the basement after church showed me how different evangelical christianity was from my former Anglican church experience. We were eating and talking about creation. I mentioned evolution and my friends said it wasn't true. The pastor, who was also our youth leader, sat down and I asked him. He said evolution was a "bunch of garbage". I was mildly surprised and knew this would not be appreciated in my house, religious ideas that were not mainstream were viewed as superstition.
I don't really know how I dealt with Evolution in the years following, I remember my science teacher having us write a paper on how the Universe began. I was somewhat of a keener and spent a long time on the paper. We presented our papers to, a less than stellar, science teacher. One of my Sunday School/Public School classmates said he believed God created the Heavens and the Earth - the teacher said that was fine, he respected his beliefs. I was ticked off, why had I bothered to do the work? I could have done that too. If I did think about Evolution vs. Creation, it was in a very dualistic way. If I was in church, out with Christian friends etc., I just agreed that God did it "like the Bible said", but if I talked with Christians who were scientists, or otherwise well educated who explained that God could have used Evolution, that 6 God days were not 6 earth days etc. I was fine with that too. If I was talking to a non-christian, though, I suddenly felt compelled to point out all the problems with evolution, as if that would help them believe in Christ.
University brought out the dualist in me. I sympathized with science majors who had to write exams on Evolution, feeling that the professors must be very anti-christian, but also agreed with other students, who insisted that Christians shouldn't insist on belief in Creationism, it was driving decent science types away from God, Christianity, etc. I didn't major in Science, rather Fine Art and History (with a minor in English). Evolution was not a major topic for my classes, and myself and many Christians who went through with me, avoided Evolution classes and remained firm in the belief that Creation was the (or a valid) way.
Around this time, My University Church's Young Adult group began to shift from an evangelical form of Christianity to a more Charismatic style. Our leaders travelled to Charismatic conferences, and the focus of our bible studies shifted more to the Charismatic (Gifts of the Spirit, Biblical Prophecy, and so on). I finished up my University, and moved to a town where many of the conferences we had attended were held. I boarded with a family from the Church we had often visited and began teaching in that town. The Charismatic church was quite different in focus from the Evangelical churches I had attended before. Many people had become Christians as adults, some very recently, emphasis on knowing and reading the bible was not as strong as in evangelical churches, Spiritual gifts, prayer and worship were far more sought after. The church had many great musicians, very connected in Christian music - we had Delirious come to our church youth conference before they were known in North America. Prayer meetings would go in for hours, with everyone prophesying over each person at the meeting, even the teenagers loved this. Pastors preached from the Old Testament as often (or more) as the New Testament. From all this, the Bible was viewed to hold certain messages that were not explicit in the first reading. For example, Song of Solomon was not just about a King's love for his bride, but a message about Jesus' love for his church, or any follower of him. This would later help me look at the Bible in a less literal way.
I moved on, later meeting my Husband, who was doing his PhD. in Biology, when I returned to another University to get an additional education degree. I didn't think much about Evolution, life was busy, I had two kids, worked and went to church in a much larger city, evolution was not a main topic. Once my husband finished his PhD. he got a teaching job out in one of the city's suburbs. We moved out there and attended the Charismatic denomination I had attended in town of my first teaching job, but that church was on a lifeline and soon folded. We then went to the church down the street from us. It is Evangelical and I had not been to an Evangelical Church in over 15 years. Evolution is a big deal, or, at least, a deal at all.
This would have been completely lost on me, however, my PhD. husband got asked to write a book about Christian faith and Science, a geneticist by training, he had been doing most of his work on fly genes, teaching stuff to his students like immunology, genetics etc. I don't know what he had said about evolution, but it didn't come up much at home. This book chapter changed things. He had to look at Evolution and Intelligent Design. Evolution looked good, ID not so much. That started a little schism between us. Not much, just a little. I had gone through the gamut, from a young evolutionist (product of Public Education), to creationist (product of Evangelical literalism) to a non opinionated, but deeply suspicious of all things evolution, Christian (product of too much bickering in on the web, and serious doubts about it's usefulness in the first place). I was comfortable not knowing. I mean, did it even matter? it wasn't like we were going to evolve into something else in my lifetime and human would be raptured or cast away long before anything else got around to replacing us.
The post's title is: Putting God in a Box without realizing it. Although I explained that I was very dualistic in my approach to science and faith, at certain regular intervals I secretly believed that if God said he made man and women, at some point, from the dust, then science, which always changes, would one day reveal this. I also took it as a badge of true faith to believe that God could have created the world in 6 days, if he wanted to and that trying to square science up with faith was a waste of time, either we didn't understand what the bible meant (Read the rest of Genesis chapters one to eleven, and the world gets ever weirder) or science hadn't turned over the magic fossil, archeologists had yet to unearth the magic, tell-tale grave - and all would be made clear at a future date. Somehow the Bible would be justified, the rest was a distraction.
It never occurred to me that the first 11 chapters of Genesis could be a myth, and still be from God. I guess the prevalent attitude in Evangelical circles is that a literal interpretation of Adam and Eve is necessary to understand our fallen sinful state. Tampering with the validity of this, would cause a Christian to question everything else and become a wishy-washy pseudo-believer (insert non-evangelical protestant denomination of choice). My God, was safely and securely in an Evangelical literal-reading-of-Genesis box - take him out and watch your faith unravel at your own risk, but don't bring that stuff up around here.
Then my husband began to lift Genesis chapters 1-3 out of this box.
I liked church, the community and the youth group, I began reading the bible, enjoying the stories, and loved the history behind them (I still love history). I remember a meal in the basement after church showed me how different evangelical christianity was from my former Anglican church experience. We were eating and talking about creation. I mentioned evolution and my friends said it wasn't true. The pastor, who was also our youth leader, sat down and I asked him. He said evolution was a "bunch of garbage". I was mildly surprised and knew this would not be appreciated in my house, religious ideas that were not mainstream were viewed as superstition.
I don't really know how I dealt with Evolution in the years following, I remember my science teacher having us write a paper on how the Universe began. I was somewhat of a keener and spent a long time on the paper. We presented our papers to, a less than stellar, science teacher. One of my Sunday School/Public School classmates said he believed God created the Heavens and the Earth - the teacher said that was fine, he respected his beliefs. I was ticked off, why had I bothered to do the work? I could have done that too. If I did think about Evolution vs. Creation, it was in a very dualistic way. If I was in church, out with Christian friends etc., I just agreed that God did it "like the Bible said", but if I talked with Christians who were scientists, or otherwise well educated who explained that God could have used Evolution, that 6 God days were not 6 earth days etc. I was fine with that too. If I was talking to a non-christian, though, I suddenly felt compelled to point out all the problems with evolution, as if that would help them believe in Christ.
University brought out the dualist in me. I sympathized with science majors who had to write exams on Evolution, feeling that the professors must be very anti-christian, but also agreed with other students, who insisted that Christians shouldn't insist on belief in Creationism, it was driving decent science types away from God, Christianity, etc. I didn't major in Science, rather Fine Art and History (with a minor in English). Evolution was not a major topic for my classes, and myself and many Christians who went through with me, avoided Evolution classes and remained firm in the belief that Creation was the (or a valid) way.
Around this time, My University Church's Young Adult group began to shift from an evangelical form of Christianity to a more Charismatic style. Our leaders travelled to Charismatic conferences, and the focus of our bible studies shifted more to the Charismatic (Gifts of the Spirit, Biblical Prophecy, and so on). I finished up my University, and moved to a town where many of the conferences we had attended were held. I boarded with a family from the Church we had often visited and began teaching in that town. The Charismatic church was quite different in focus from the Evangelical churches I had attended before. Many people had become Christians as adults, some very recently, emphasis on knowing and reading the bible was not as strong as in evangelical churches, Spiritual gifts, prayer and worship were far more sought after. The church had many great musicians, very connected in Christian music - we had Delirious come to our church youth conference before they were known in North America. Prayer meetings would go in for hours, with everyone prophesying over each person at the meeting, even the teenagers loved this. Pastors preached from the Old Testament as often (or more) as the New Testament. From all this, the Bible was viewed to hold certain messages that were not explicit in the first reading. For example, Song of Solomon was not just about a King's love for his bride, but a message about Jesus' love for his church, or any follower of him. This would later help me look at the Bible in a less literal way.
I moved on, later meeting my Husband, who was doing his PhD. in Biology, when I returned to another University to get an additional education degree. I didn't think much about Evolution, life was busy, I had two kids, worked and went to church in a much larger city, evolution was not a main topic. Once my husband finished his PhD. he got a teaching job out in one of the city's suburbs. We moved out there and attended the Charismatic denomination I had attended in town of my first teaching job, but that church was on a lifeline and soon folded. We then went to the church down the street from us. It is Evangelical and I had not been to an Evangelical Church in over 15 years. Evolution is a big deal, or, at least, a deal at all.
This would have been completely lost on me, however, my PhD. husband got asked to write a book about Christian faith and Science, a geneticist by training, he had been doing most of his work on fly genes, teaching stuff to his students like immunology, genetics etc. I don't know what he had said about evolution, but it didn't come up much at home. This book chapter changed things. He had to look at Evolution and Intelligent Design. Evolution looked good, ID not so much. That started a little schism between us. Not much, just a little. I had gone through the gamut, from a young evolutionist (product of Public Education), to creationist (product of Evangelical literalism) to a non opinionated, but deeply suspicious of all things evolution, Christian (product of too much bickering in on the web, and serious doubts about it's usefulness in the first place). I was comfortable not knowing. I mean, did it even matter? it wasn't like we were going to evolve into something else in my lifetime and human would be raptured or cast away long before anything else got around to replacing us.
The post's title is: Putting God in a Box without realizing it. Although I explained that I was very dualistic in my approach to science and faith, at certain regular intervals I secretly believed that if God said he made man and women, at some point, from the dust, then science, which always changes, would one day reveal this. I also took it as a badge of true faith to believe that God could have created the world in 6 days, if he wanted to and that trying to square science up with faith was a waste of time, either we didn't understand what the bible meant (Read the rest of Genesis chapters one to eleven, and the world gets ever weirder) or science hadn't turned over the magic fossil, archeologists had yet to unearth the magic, tell-tale grave - and all would be made clear at a future date. Somehow the Bible would be justified, the rest was a distraction.
It never occurred to me that the first 11 chapters of Genesis could be a myth, and still be from God. I guess the prevalent attitude in Evangelical circles is that a literal interpretation of Adam and Eve is necessary to understand our fallen sinful state. Tampering with the validity of this, would cause a Christian to question everything else and become a wishy-washy pseudo-believer (insert non-evangelical protestant denomination of choice). My God, was safely and securely in an Evangelical literal-reading-of-Genesis box - take him out and watch your faith unravel at your own risk, but don't bring that stuff up around here.
Then my husband began to lift Genesis chapters 1-3 out of this box.
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