OK, so where were we? Oh, that’s right, God had just made the fish and the birds and was patting himself on the back. Again. Crikey – what is it with all the self-congratulation? How annoying does that make God sound? Aside from anything, it shows a distinctly un-Godly lack of humility.
Day 6:
~ And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so.
~ And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
Jesus Christ! There He goes again! With no-one to cast a critical eye over the proceedings, God might have been able to convince Himself that all his handiwork was the bees knees, but if you ask me He could have used a good supervisor. If we were concerned with the Truth, in a proper accounting of things somewhere about here there would be a passage that read something like:
~ And God said, Let the earth bring forth cancer and leprosy, cockroaches and merchant bankers and Scientologists. Let there be abundant flooding and drought, and earthquakes and plagues of mites. Let there be hydrocephalic children, hemophiliacs and fatally conjoined twins. And behold, it was so. And God looked on all that he had done and saw that it truly sucked big time.
Where are the passages like that, eh? Funnily enough, not in Genesis. Or anywhere for that matter. God happily takes credit for all things bright and beautiful, but all things ugly and screwed-up are conveniently ignored or blamed on someone else. ((Satan or humans, typically)) Hands up who amongst us doesn’t recognize that kind of person in the workplace?
And, as I mentioned last episode, it’s here we start to see God’s preoccupation with ‘creeping things’. There’s more:
~ And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
God seems obsessed with creeping things in much the same way as Fundamentalist Christians are fixated on atheists and homosexuals. It’s almost like He made the damned things but can’t quite believe they exist.
You will also notice that in that previous passage ((I’m reproducing all these verses from Genesis in order, with no excisions, lest you think I’m being partisan)) God creates man, bizarrely lapsing into the possessive plural personal pronoun. ‘Let Us make man in Our image’? There’s someone else around? Who the crap is that? Are they the ones responsible for the water, maybe? Or is it, perhaps, that, in the manner of all those who abrogate responsibility, God is just trying to avoid taking the whole blame for making humans?
~ And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
Again with the creeping things. And back into the singular personal pronoun. God is supposed to have created an entire universe and He’s still shit at grammar? It’s obviously a manifestation of ‘omnipotence’ which excludes language skills.
Genesis 1 ends at this point, with the newly-made sun setting on Day 6 (which is really Day 3 if you’re talking about days actually being determined by the Earth’s orbit around the Sun) and we take up Genesis 2 with:
Day 7:
~ And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.
God is so knackered from all that creatin’ that he’s done that he has to put his feet up. But people – HE’S OMNIPOTENT! Why the fuck does He need to REST? Does it occur to anyone else that this is pure unadulterated baloney?
Seriously, you can’t have it both ways – God is either omnipotent and can do anything he likes with no restriction, or HE’S NOT. You can’t be Almighty God and be ‘kind of’ omnipotent. Do Christian people who believe in the Bible never think about these things? ((God demonstrates his lack of omnipotence numerous times in the Old Testament. For instance, a few paragraphs from where we are in Genesis 2, after Adam and Eve have eaten of the Fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, realised that they are naked, and so hidden themselves from God, He walks through the Garden of Eden calling out ‘Where art thou?’ Well, of course he already knows this, obviously, so it’s quite plain that he’s just being a bastard.))
Anyway, Week 2 continues on much as Week 1, with God creating man again (it’s there in writing, I’m not making it up) and straightaway telling him: ‘I’ve made all this stuff, but you can’t play with it unless I say so!’ – quickly assuming a petulant and vindictive tone that doesn’t let up for most of the Old Testament. Oh, He also creates woman too, pretty much as an afterthought, and not until after Adam has named every living creature on the planet (and after He has created them for the second time too):
~ And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
I imagine it to have gone something like this:
God: Hey look at this Adam. Whaddya think?
Adam: It looks like it should be called a ‘rabbit’!
God: Righty-ho! So it shall be! What about this?
Adam: It looks like it should be called a ‘spotted toad’.
God: Brilliant! I would NEVER have thought of that! What about this? I think this is quite good, if I do say so myself. And I do, often.
Adam: I think that should be called a ‘procompsognathus’.
God: Hahaha! Awesome. that should keep the Creationists on their toes! What about this?
Adam: Oh, I dunno. Er, a ‘wallaby’? No, how about a ‘squid’? Look, how long is this going to take? I’m kind of tired. I’m not omnipotent like some people.
God: Chin up, Skipper, we’re just getting started! Look at this! It’s really quite well crafted – I think you should call it a ‘sea cucumber’. But it’s up to you of course! Don’t let me sway you!
Adam: You really need a girlfriend. Come to think of it, so do I.
I don’t think I need to point out to you, faithful Acowlytes, that, as we’re in Week 2 with God still creating stuff, it kind of makes nonsense of the claim that He did it all in seven days. He quite explicitly did not. But for the moment I will leave God and Adam naming the siphonophores and the echinoderms, as we ponder what God has been doing ever since those first couple of enthusiastic weeks.
Mostly making a nuisance of Himself, is my opinion.
