The creation of the universe
was completed on Sunday evening, October 22, 4004 BC after 6 days of hard work by God.
This fact is proven by the chronologies in the Bible from Adam to Jesus as calculated by James Ussher, the bishop of Armagh. This is the unerring Word of God, after all. You could get burned at the stake for saying otherwise back in James’ day.
Of course how long that first day was nobody really knows, since God had to create the light and the dark for there to be the first day and who knows how long that took, but anyways there was light and there was dark and it was a day. It’s easy to understand and gives people something to believe in. Scientific knowledge is the pridefulness of man. God’s truth endures forever. In the beginning was the Word.
Of course that doesn’t explain how a book made out of paper could exist before there were trees or a planet for them to grow on.
It’s a miracle. Some things you just can’t explain. You have to believe. Close your eyes and imagine, heaven and the angels, God sitting there with Jesus on the right side and the Holy Ghost on the left looking pale and insubstantial. There’s a big hall and you can approach the throne, actually thrones. Kind of medieval actually but lots of light and angels. Probably singing or harping.
The Word was with God and the Word was God. Whichever. Or both I guess. I’m probably missing something. Reverend Hagee could explain it to me. I have imagined having a conversation with Reverend Hagee. He has a lot of auxiliary information.
Reading is dangerous. I pick up books and get infected with all kinds of zany ideas. And write about them. How human beings lived for the 300,000 years of our pre-history, for example.
In the Bible it’s called the Garden of Eden, when humans had simple minds and could talk to the animals and walk with God. Our ‘modern mind’ is about 70,000 years old they figure, from when art started to appear in the archaeological record, but there were humans before that. They prowled the outback looking for food, shelter and adventure. They did not live in cities, they made their own shoes. In many ways they were different from us but they were ‘human’, our familiar emotions, our imagination, our aspirations to make it better. Just because we have put on a veneer of civilization and learned how to talk doesn’t mean we don’t still have those essential traits. Those things that made us human thousands of years ago still make us human.
And how should we live then, and what is comfortable to us? Maybe we are the storytellers around the campfire. Maybe we want to feel the camaraderie and listen to the stories and tell jokes and lounge and take it easy. Maybe that’s what we want to do because maybe that’s who we are.
Maybe we should prioritize having fun instead of putting it at the bottom of the list as an optional activity.
Our human ancestors had fun. They had some whoop ass adventures and lived to tell about it, some of them. Whoop ass adventures were excellent for multiple reasons. You could get bring home a mastodon steak, you could get a great story to tell, hell you’d probably get the girl around the ole campfire snuggling in on a full stomach.
Come to think of it all those old tribal tales and fables and creation stories and genealogies that we collected into books and called ‘scriptures’, it is written we said; they all try to tell the story of humans, of who we are. As if we forget often and go blundering about in our ignorance making tragic mistakes. We want to know how the world was made and by whom and why. We were always curious about that.
And we’re still trying to tell the story. We’re still trying to remember, ‘Er . . . what is it to be human?’.