[Vision2020] Re: Two creation stories

[Ralph Nielsen]

>
> RALPH (to Joshua)
> So what in your opinion is what you label as the Fourth Commandment? I 
> can't read your mind.

> As for the rest of what you write about, please reread what I wrote in 
> my previous reply to Douglas. I have already told you what the Bible 
> says about life after death and God's "justice and mercy."

> Life on earth began about 4 1/2 billion years ago. But according to 
> the Bible life begins with the first breath of life at birth. And it 
> ends with the last breath when you die. Then you cease to exist and 
> you return to the dust from which you were made. Don't you believe > God?
>
> From: Scott Dredge <sdredge@yahoo.com>
> Date: Wed Sep 24, 2003  2:14:57 PM US/Pacific
> To: vision2020@moscow.com
> Subject: Re: [Vision2020] Life and morality in the Bible
>
> Christian creation
>
> For Christianity, the stories of the Creation are
> found in the first two chapters of the book of Genesis
> in the Bible. They show how God created the world in
> six days and rested on the seventh.
>
> This account says that God created the world ex nihilo
> (from nothing):
> In the beginning God created the heavens and the
> earth.
> Genesis 1:1
>
> After creating the earth, the sky, the seas and
> plants, God made birds and fish on the fifth day and
> animals and humans on the sixth day.
> So God created man in his own image, in the image of
> God he created him; male and female he created them.
> Genesis 1:27
>
> Some Christians take this account very literally and
> believe that this is exactly how the world was
> created. In the 17th century, Bishop James Ussher
> calculated from the Bible that God began creating the
> world at 9am on October 26, 4004BC.
>

RALPH
I'm sorry, but I fail to see the relevance of your post, Scott. But I 
will discuss it.

Your reference to Ussher is not quite correct. He claimed the date was 
October 23rd, not the 26th.
Your creation story is more accurately called Hebrew rather than 
Christian.

In the first story both male and female were created last, at the same 
time and ex nihilo (out of nothing). There is another creation story in 
Genesis 2, written in a totally different style. In Genesis 2, 
beginning with verse 4b we have Yahweh, God, forming a man out of the 
dust of the ground. He is alone and we read "Now YHWH, God, said, It is 
not good for the human to be alone, I will make a helper corresponding 
to him. So YHWH, God, formed from the soil every living-thing of the 
field and every fowl of the heavens and brought each to the human, to 
see what he would call it... but for the human, there could be found no 
helper corresponding to him" (Genesis 2:18-19 Everett Fox translation). 
So Yahweh God made a woman out of the man's rib to be his helper. In 
this creation story the man was was made first and the woman last. The 
two accounts come from two different traditions; that is why they are 
not the same. But they both come from an ancient, pre-scientific era, 
when myths were the only "explanations" possible. Today we have much 
grander and more plausible explanations from secular scientific 
research in recent centuries.