In the Beginning...

This blog will be my first of many to come as I attempt to read the entire bible.  So at this point we've made it through the first page.  It is now 'Day Six'.  God has decided to leave all the most important necessities for a civilization beyond the basic natural environment for his last day of work.  The clear hierarchy of living things determined by a cattle-and-crops relying sedentary civilization reflect a classically human, ego driven perception of an elitist self.  But it is how the bible describes God creating man that struck me as cleverly leaving a loophole for those loving Christians prone to sexism.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

 God goes on to tell them to have sex a lot and take over the earth essentially; a principle of every evolved species on the planet.  But it is the whole 'man created in the image of God' thing that bothers me.  Could one argue that the bible states God created "him" in the image of God, but not necessarily 'her"?  It continues to say that God created male and female, but at the mention of anything feminine, the 'in his image' description is absent.  A discrepancy in translation to modern English perhaps, but it seems that if the message of humans being created in God's image is intended to apply to both men and women, this passage would be worded a little differently... So much for the word of God... this is clearly the work of imperfect human beings.

God goes on to create the garden of Eden and plants Adam right in the middle of it.  I find it a little ironic that Eve is created from Adam's rib.

And Adam said, "This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man".

If the bible read, "he was taken out of woman", that would actually sound a little more natural like birth.  Instead, the creation of the first woman is uniquely inhuman and arguably only an afterthought of God's after he had made his precious masterpiece; man.  Eve is apparently only an addition to supplement man on his journey through life.

Now I will admit I have been rather critical of the first pages of Genesis so far, but despite the bible's sometimes blatant sexism,  I find the story of original sin to suggest an interesting psychological shift in Adam and Eve.  Once they eat the apple from the tree of knowledge, they immediately become self-conscious and try to cover themselves.  Genesis implies that will knowledge comes self-awareness, the very core of the ego complex.  An elegant element of these first few pages, a classically egocentric author has just explained the origin of his tendencies, unraveling along with a sense of purpose and free will as God punishes humanity to a life of hard work tending to crops to survive and an eventual and ominous return to dust.  This so called "punishment" ought to be looked at from God's perspective.  If I were God and I had created Adam and Eve, a pair living untested and unconcerned in a plentiful garden, I would not be able to resist in testing their maturity.  Like innocent children, Adam and Eve initially exist in sublime ignorance.  God has dangled the temptation of 'infinite possibility' in front of Adam and Eve.  Once one of them finally gains a little independence and confidence (ironically Eve), God grants us the adventurous test of life.  It reminds me of when parents push their kids to get out of the house and get a job.  Eve is given an even greater punishment, to live subserviently to man along with the horror of childbirth.  Or perhaps it is simply the more mature and independent of the Eden dwellers that God decides to give an even greater test.  Maybe God is trying to push the potential of those he has created, like a proud parent.

Then Eve produces Cain and Abel.  Perhaps Cain and Abel are the evil and good of the tree of knowledge.  Eve consumed the knowledge and produced both good and evil with it. 

Geneisis continues to catalog some of the descendants of Cain and then tells of the birth of Seth to Adam and Eve.  Then suddenly Genesis repeats the story of the birth of a son, Seth, to Adam.  Worded and repeated as if written by two different authors, the history of the source of this book bleeds through the text.

I'm going to continue now to read the rest of Genesis, but these were my first remarks.

My First Blog Post

This is my first blog post.  I'm looking forward to an interesting class and a good year!