QUESTIONING GENESIS, THE FOUNDATION OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION
The story of Genesis was affirmed by Jesus as true and it laid out how man needs woman and they must unite in monogamous marriage which even divorce cannot end it. The story supposedly promises a saviour, Jesus, speaks of the tempter, Satan, and speaks of how the first man and woman wrecked God's creation by making it go astray. They drove God out by sin. This is how the idea of all of us being tainted by sin and needing Jesus to die for our sins to make us right with God came about.
So if Genesis is wrong the whole Christian scheme collapses.
There are contradictions in Genesis. Big ones. The Christians know they must be
dissolved and thus the contradictions are followed by outlandish and speculative
and outrageous attempts to reconcile them.
Haley in Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible says that Genesis is right to say
that light existed before the making of the sun and the stars (422). He says
that light energy or the action that causes light was made before light began to
shine. So, the author of Genesis using his word for light meaning something that
shines did not mean that which shines! The author used a word that meant shining
light for nobody knew of any other kind of light and there is a man trying to
tell us that words don’t mean what they mean! The author of Genesis was like the
pagan writers who made blunders as bad and sometimes worse. Why would God make
light before he makes the sun and the stars? Logic says you make the sun and the
stars first and then light them up.
Genesis 1 and 2 contain different creation stories. They obviously contradict
one another but Haley says they do not (page 408). Genesis 1 says man and woman
were made last but the next story claims that the man was made first. Haley’s
solution is that Genesis 2 is not chronological. A book is more perfect if it is
chronological so this would be sufficient proof that Genesis was not inspired.
Christian evidence for Genesis 2 not being chronological is that the two stories
would not have been in if they did not agree. But this assumes that the authors
meant to be writing infallible scripture. It is more likely that they did not
know which story to listen to and put the two in. To blame neglect of chronology
is to make it possible to reconcile any contradiction that people make
whatsoever. Genesis 2 is chronological for it says man was made before plants
and trees were so there could have been no animals either. These chapters would
have been read by very few before the exile so the contradictions might not have
been noticed or perhaps they didn’t think and assumed there would have to be a
solution.
Page 360 says that the Bible writers sometimes did not write chronologically
where things make little sense if interpreted chronologically. If true then
there is a natural reason why there may be no contradictions in the Bible if
there are none. This means that there is no evidence that it is from God.
Science opposes the Genesis notion that once there was only one man and one woman. Christians argue that it does not say that but it clearly does. They pretend that the statement that Adam was made from dust is vague so he could have been made indirectly from dust in the following sense. Life evolved from dust and some creature over a long time evolved into a man. They are presupposing that God wrote all that and had it in mind. But it is obvious the author of Genesis would, like most believers over the centuries, have imagined Adam being directly made from dirt.
The story has Adam being on his own and needing woman to be created. It is clear enough that the Christians are liars. If Adam had evolved so would Eve. The story has woman being made from Adam's rib. Some insist that rib is a misinterpretation. Eve was built from Adam's bone but the bone it has in mind is his baculum (penis "bone"). Eve was essentially Adam's clone that got a sex change for a clone should have the same sex as the originating person. She was his daughter in the sense that we seem to have a metaphor for a man's seed growing by itself into a woman. So Eve is another Adam, she is a transexual and his partner in incest. The selfishness of a man who could only love another version of himself shows that God is to blame for original sin, it is exists, not Adam and that original sin did not create selfishness for it was already there.
In Genesis we read that God made Adam and Eve and warned them not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and that they would die the day they do it. A snake told them to eat for they would not die and they did and God rejected them as sinners. Page 393. Haley says that God did not tell Adam and Eve that they would die physically that day if they sinned for he meant they would spiritually die. Haley just says that because they failed to die that day. Adam lived for several hundred years after and Eve did not die that day either. The snake told Adam and Eve that they would not die. They did not want to eat the forbidden fruit at first in case they would die. Now, if sin causes spiritual death – alienation from God – they would not have been so reluctant about dying because it would only take a bit of repentance to repair the damage. The death they were afraid of was physical death and that was what they feared and so they understood God to have meant physical death and so he did mean it for he knew if they were misinterpreting. Clearly then, God broke his promise to kill Adam and Eve if they ate the fruit.
It is important as well that if you take the story as being about a break
with God, part of Adam's break with God was his blaming God for his own sin for
he said to God it was the woman GOD GAVE HIM that got him to sin so it was
really more God's fault. This is a slap against anybody who says there is
no God for there is evil and innocent suffering. It is blaming God for
evil and saying then that a truly good or real God must be a fiction. The
spirit and moral message of Genesis is that man blamed God for woman inspiring
him to sin and that does not fit any evolution timeline. Liberals who say
the moral message and the science can be separated are talking rubbish. They are
intertwined. They are fused.
It is much much later in the Bible before we read about spiritual separation
from God being symbolised as death. The Law of Moses never stated that there was
a life after death and saw doing wrong in terms of doing damage in this world
and making God angry rather than in terms of death. The Christians habitually
read later stuff back into the old stuff to give the whole Bible the appearance
of being consistent divine revelation.
So the Christians pretend that the death threatened on Adam and Eve was
spiritual death. The serpent told them that they would not die and this meant
physical death. Assume it meant spiritual death only. Adam and Eve would have
sinned not when they took the fruit but when they decided to take it so the sin
would have preceded the eating. If sin causes spiritual death, how could Adam
and Eve have believed the serpent long enough to reach for the fruit for they
would have spiritually died the moment they decided to touch the tree and the
moment they thought they should sin and they would have seen that he was a liar?
Only holding that the serpent meant physical death makes sense of the story.
The serpent must have meant physical death for Adam and Eve would have believed
that spiritual death was easily corrected by repentance and would have been more
scared of physical death believing that it was the end forever. And if they were
more scared of spiritual death then they would already have been spiritually
dead for they loved life more than God. They loved being right with God more
than God who wants all our love. God did tell them that they would physically
die the minute they touched the forbidden fruit when that was how he was
understood.
Page 420. The Bible says that God’s name Yahweh was not known until it was
revealed to Moses in Exodus 6:3. And yet the name pops up in Genesis. It appears
in Genesis 4:1 where Eve uses it. So people were using the name before Exodus
says so. Haley tries to make us believe that in those cases, Moses just put the
name in even though they did not know it for it was Yahweh they meant or that
Moses just translates their word for God as Yahweh, the new word. This is
outrageous. He is just saying that the lie of saying somebody knew somebody’s
name is not a lie. And then he says that if this reconciliation is wrong then
the attributes of God represented in the name were not known so the true meaning
of the name was not known. This claims that the name was known from the time of
Genesis but the meaning of the name wasn’t revealed until the time stated in the
Book of Exodus. But Exodus says that God’s name not just its meaning was hidden
from the world. Yahweh means I am who am. This is supposed to say that God needs
nothing to exist. But Eve knew this for she could not have sinned unless she
believed that God was supreme. God could not have imputed sin to her unless she
knew that he was the only boss and was right. She and Adam knew God better than
anybody else for they were sinless for a time and talked face to face with God.
Genesis contradicts itself concerning when people started to worship God (4:3,4;
4:26). It says that Cain and Abel worshipped God and then that this was not
true. Haley says that the so-called denial infers that organised public worship
of God did not happen until later (4:27). But the verse says that men began to
call on God and that does not sound like it means they started holding services.
There is a huge difference between people praying and them having services.
Organised religion is a relatively recent invention. Each pagan village
had a wild medley of different spiritualties and rituals.
He even says that men could have begun to adore God with their voices at that
time while before they just worshipped in silence! This is implausible for the
Bible says that primitive humanity was not mute.
By the way, page 345 of Haley’s hollow book says when God told Israel that he
would bring him out of Egypt though he was to die before that that it was his
descendants who were meant. But the whole context commands us to believe that
Israel personally was meant. Read it and see. Haley is covering up for the
Bible God being a false prophet.
God is not reliable so why trust his Genesis? It cannot even manage to trust itself either!
APPENDIX
“Is the creation account in Genesis 1 and 2 in the mythic, poetical style of most 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? All speech of all literary types will include some, if not many, forms of figurative language. 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 of substance of myth...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 and 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 certain appears to be claiming to record actual events in the stream of happenings in our kind of space-time world” (Hard Sayings of the Bible, Intervarsity Press, 1996).
