THE SMASHED FOUNDATION STONE: THE NONSENSE OF GENESIS
Now that we have clarified that the commonest interpretations of Genesis are lies and rubbish and intended to cover up that it is nonsense we can show how it is nonsense.
The start of the Bible is vitally important to Christianity. Christianity's foundation is the doctrine that God made all things from nothing and it thinks it finds that doctrine of creation in Genesis. And that despite the fact that Genesis cares more about in what order and why God different things and designed them. It only says God made all things but made and creation are not necessarily the same thing. God could make all things without making them from nothing.
The other reason why early Genesis matters so much is that it is the bedrock of Christian teaching that man and woman are to be united in marriage for life and marriage is to be monogamous.
Being created by God is no good if we are meant to be in a relationship with him and we are not. The Christians say that Adam and Eve in their name and ours broke with God by eating a forbidden fruit and thus sinned and brought great evil on all of us. So this doctrine of the fall in which suffering and evil marred God's lovely universe is of extreme importance to the Christian faith. At that point, God said he would send a saviour. The Church says that Jesus was the one who fixed the damage by dying on the cross.
If Genesis is full of errors and contradictions then the Church is just a pile of nonsense. And it is! It would be blasphemy to say that man-made writings with errors in them are in any sense the word of God.
Those who should know better read Genesis as meaning to be symbolic. But those who say it means what it says are the ones to heed.
QUOTE: From Hard Sayings of the Bible
Is the creation account in Genesis 1 and 2 in the mythic, poetical style of most ancient Near Eastern stories of the origin of the world, or is it of some other type of literary genre? What are we to make of the repetitious nature of a number of its phrases and of what appears to be a certain stereotyped form to each of the creative acts of God? What is more, look at the way God is depicted with hands, nostrils and the like. Isn't that enough to convince any thinking person that this is not a straightforward natural account of what happened in the creation?
There can be no debate on the fact that there are a large number of figures of speech in these chapters. In fact, one major work, Figures of Speech in the Bible by E. W. Bullinger, lists over 150 examples of such in Genesis 1:1–11:32. That is not the issue, for all speech of all literary types will include some, if not many, forms of figurative language. Speaking of God as having human body parts is just one such figure of speech, anthropomorphism.
But the issue of literary types is a separate matter. To declare that since
figurative language is present we can assume that the material of Genesis 1–3 is
less than a straightforward presentation of real events is to jump to
conclusions. Certain other categories can, however, be ruled out because they
fail to meet the fairly uniform criteria that are normative in such
decisions.
First of all, the biblical account of creation does not exhibit the forms or substance of myth. All attempts to see an allusion to the goddess Tiamat in the Hebrew word tƒhôm, "the deep" (Gen 1:2) were marked with failure from the beginning since such an equation violated the rules of morphology and equivalency in cognate languages. No reputable scholar today appeals to this as evidence that the Bible once was in the form of a myth. Neither is the reference to the Spirit of God "hovering over the waters" in that same verse seen as being a covert allusion to the Phoenician myth of the world being hatched from some type of cosmic egg. In short, nothing has been found in the biblical narrative of creation to tie it to the mythical ancient Near Eastern cosmogonies.
Neither can we say that Genesis 1 or 2 is poetic in form. The Hebrew form of the verb is exactly the same as is routinely used for Hebrew narratives. Furthermore, Hebrew poetry seldom if ever uses the Hebrew indicator for the direct object, whereas Genesis 1 and 2 do. There are additional grammatical and syntactical forms in Genesis 1 and 2 that can only be found in prose literary genre, not in poetry. Thus these accounts may not be listed under poetry.
What we do find, however, is a carefully and closely reasoned narration of events that in Genesis 1 are set in almost a dry didactic form. Emphasis is laid on definition, naming, evaluating and a general ordering of events. As such, the accounts have more in common with narrative prose than anything else.
While the Genesis narrative cannot be called "historical" in the usual sense of the word, in that most use the term to indicate facts independently verifiable by two or more sources or witnesses, it certainly appears to be claiming to record actual events in the stream of happenings in our kind of space-time world.
End of quote.
Creation
In Genesis 1:1 we are told God created the heavens and the earth in the beginning. Bara in Genesis 1:1 is translated as create as in make from nothing. It can also mean choose. Thus that tells us that creation is essentially the divine choice. Things come into existence for God chooses them to. That is a good way of describing creation from nothing. A man who chooses to hunt from his dinner has less choice than one who makes the dinner come into existence from nothing. Bara can mean divide. But probability is that it means create. The account speaks of God dividing land from sky but that is later. That is covered so it is not part of the context for working out what bara means.
Creation from nothing is a trick doctrine. It tells you there was absolutely nothing and then things came into being. Then it says God was there so there was no nothing after all! The view that Genesis only says God organised matter but did not create it means that matter is a God in its own right! It is just contradictions either way!
The contradictions
The core of Genesis is not creation or marriage but the events involved in producing the world and its inhabitants and how the world was ruined. Creation too is mentioned in passing if mentioned at all. It is an attempt at history.
Contradictions are how Genesis 2 has Adam and Eve being made after animals. Genesis 1 says the opposite.
If Genesis 1 is not an attempt at science then why does it make so much effort in a time when writing was so difficult to lay out out this was made that day and that was made this day? Christians are lying that it was never meant to be history or science simply because science has proven it wrong.
For a model of marriage, Genesis gets it badly wrong. Eve is made from Adam's flesh and sex-changed. So his wife is his identical twin sister. This is an extreme affirmation of incest. It is not surprising having being composed in an age where incest was seen as sacred and a way to keep royal bloodlines divine and intact.
God does not realise that when Adam needed a companion that an animal would be no good. But he brings animals along and Adam cannot click with them. Did those animals include Neanderthals? The story has led to a form of racism among believers who say they did.
God threatens death if a tree is touched. Eve eats from it and nothing happens. Then Adam comes along and she asks him to eat too. No wonder. He saw no difference in her. God doesn't notice either until they let it slip. None of this gives us a remotely competent God.
