Creationism has been something I have been irritated with of late.
I read that in 2005 53% of people polled believed that we came from “Adam and Eve.”
And according to “creationism” it all began only 400 years BC.
And don't even get me started on Intelligent Design.
Adam and Eve and gardens and talking snakes... snow white and dopey and singing and dancing mice and puppets that become real live boys and and and...
HOW can people actually believe this?
A higher power? Yes. I believe in a higher power. I don't know what it actually is. I can feel it at times. A bearded caucasian man? Only if that is what you want to see him as. We all can have our own vision and I like it that way. This higher power GAVE us an imagination to allow us to deal with things that we don't actually know about, but FEEL and in order to put it into a framework we can understand, we attach an image to it. I mean scan the globe and see all the many versions of this higher power in the form of Buddha and that really cool Hindu multi armed elephant. Now THAT is imagination being put to good use.
Going back to Adam and Eve... I want to say to people, “so, let me get this straight... we are unable to access all sorts of information from zillions of years ago, so much of it all a huge mystery... YET we just so happen to know the names of the first two people on earth.
Oh and Noah... let's wrap our intelligence around THAT one. There are lots of Flood stories and interestingly, they spread across many cultures. Even native Americans had THEIR own story passed down through the ages. Whether or not there WAS a guy named Noah and that he actually managed to get ALL the animals (two by two) onto this state of the art vessel is where the storytime aspect takes hold.
I mean, think about it. Stories are told with a lot of imagery. Before TV you listened to the radio and had no choice but to envision what was being told to you. YOU had that creative license. Back in ancient times, stories told around campfires (or whatever) would get rather dull unless the storyteller added extra stuff to the story to beef it up. You know, the whole, “Hey! Listen to ME tell the story... mine has talking snakes!” As soon as these stories at whatever level they had reached via word of mouth became WRITTEN... that is when they sort of “died ” in a way. Now they had a permanance in whatever form they were in when written. The written word is very powerful. When people see something written there is this universal first notion that it is true. If it is written it is true. But that is not the case.
Not everything you read is true.
In a way, it is almost like tabloids... write whatever will sell the paper.
Write whatever will sell the book. Write whatever will get people to pay attention and scare them so you can control them.
Let ME decide how I see it. And let's not take it so literally.
The minute something has happened, your memory of it will distort. Depending, a few years will go by and the event that you remember will morph into something beyond whatever it originally was. But it is possible to remember the feeling you had and the more you think of it, the more fond you become of it and those heartfelt feelings can play wonderous tricks on your mind and memory. We turn many of our past experiences into their own little fairy tales.
Once upon a time... in the beginning... two households both alike in dignity... it was the best of times, it was the worst of times... Dorothy lived in the midst of the great Kansas prairies...
THE END?