The Book of Genesis, part 1: God created

Guardian: The Book of Genesis, part 1: God created Jane Williams

Genesis looks at what the culture around it believes about the nature of the material world, and disagrees with it profoundly.

Genesis 1 and 2 must be among the most hotly debated texts in the Bible. But our obsession with whether and how they can be reconciled with scientific descriptions of the beginning of the universe is distorting our understanding of where these "creation narratives" fit into the wider concerns of the Book of Genesis. In its printed form, Genesis has 50 chapters, only one and a bit of which directly concern the origins of the universe. They are there to set the scene for what follows.

Genesis is, from beginning to end, a theological book. It opens with God, "the beginning", and everything that follows is based on this assumption of the relationship between God and the world. So when we get on to the main action of Genesis, with God's conversations with Abraham and his descendents, we know that what is happening is not just of local significance. The God who calls Abraham is the one we have just seen, making the world, so we know that Abraham's story is one about the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

Genesis isn't the only place in the Bible where God is described as the creator. ...

Comments

[Sue]

But what is the world altogether?

Nobody really knows. Essentially it is an unexplainable mystery. The only way to thus understand IT is to surrender to its Process.

Meanwhile in the now multi-cultural world of 2010 anyone with an internet connection has access to hundreds of "creation" stories from all times and places. ALL of which are now our common inheritance.

What happens to the world when you enter into the state of deep dreamless and formless sleep?

What is the world? It is now common knowledge that what we see "out there" is a brain and nervous system fabricated and projected image or vision. Which is to say that we never ever see the world as it IS in Reality.

To do so one would have to see the world from every possible space-time point of view simultaneously!

What then does the world actually look like prior to point of view?
Remembering that what you see "out there" is a product of your own personal brain-and-nervous-system patterning, which in turn is created or conditioned by the culture in which you live.

[Brad]

The Matrix has you