The wonderment of creation myths
September 3rd, 2008 • education
This week’s class focuses on creation myths, specifically the one in the Book of Genesis. Most of us know the story, God creates everything we know in 7 days including the Earth, heavens, and all living creatures. That was the first book. In the second one, basically the order of events is changed slightly but the story remains the same. For an allegory, it’s not bad at all. For literal fact, it’s absurd. But if you take one of the creationist screeds and attempt to work within that framework, it makes slightly more sense. The belief that each of the 7 days it took is roughly 1000 years can make sense except for the reliability of radio carbon dating showing things are much older than 7,000 years. By leaps and bounds. Although, still, if you want to believe wackaloonery that belief is much better than man and dinosaurs and everything lived at the same time and it only took a day to create things like humans, cypress trees, and birds.
But this discussion finally got more people talking in class, it’s always boring hearing the same people talk over and over, myself included — although, I’m beginning to just sit there and keep quiet as to not laugh. The religious folks have some interesting rationale and the wannabe Bible scholars keep floating about as much as they can. I appreciate that there are other people who’ve looked into things like this as I have but when they don’t cite where it came from, I tend to put less credence into it. I wonder what we’ll talk about tomorrow since we’re supposed to watch part of Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth (wikipedia).