I thought this was rather clever...

My brother began to dictate in his best oratorical style, the one which has the tribes hanging on his words.

"In the beginning," he said, "exactly fifteen point two billion years ago, there was a big bang and the Universe--"

But I had stopped writing. "Fifteen billion years ago?" I said incredulously.

"Absolutely," he said. "I'm inspired."

"I don't question your inspiration," I said. (I had better not. He's three years younger than I am, but I don't try questioning his inspiration. Neither does anyone else or there's hell to pay.) "But are you going to tell the story of the Creation over a period of fifteen billion years?"

"I have to," said my brother. "That's how long it took. I have it all in here," he tapped his forehead, "and it's on the very highest authority."

By now I had put down my stylus. "Do you know the price of papyrus?" I said.

"What?" (He may be inspired but I frequently noticed that the inspiration didn't include such sordid matters as the price of papyrus.)

I said, "Suppose you describe one million years of events to each roll of papyrus. That means you'll have to fill fifteen thousand rolls. You'll have to talk long enough to fill them and you know that you begin to stammer after a while. I'll have to write enough to fill them and my fingers will fall off. And even if we can afford all that papyrus and you have the voice and I have the strength, who's going to copy it? We've got to have a guarantee of a hundred copies before we can publish and without that where will we get royalties from?"

My brother thought awhile. He said, "You think I ought to cut it down?"
"Way down," I said, "if you expect to reach the public.
"
"How about a hundred years?" he said.

"How about six days?" I said.

He said horrified, "You can't squeeze Creation into six days."

I said, "This is all the papyrus I have. What do you think?"

"Oh, well," he said, and began to dictate again, "In the beginning-- Does it have to be six days, Aaron?"

I said, firmly, "Six days, Moses."

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"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." - Galileo

I like it.

And I think it came out pretty well! :0)

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In matters that are obscure and far beyond our vision, even in such as we may find treated in Holy Scripture, different Interpretations are sometimes possible without prejudice to the faith we have received. - St. Augustine, in his analysis of Genesis.

Cute story; however, it isn't what GOD did.

LOL
tagging thread

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Funny thing about tracking.

Most would fear seeing this ->
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than seeing this ->
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Easy to make up. Hard to prove.

I am not sure of the intent, either. Is it to suggest that Genesis is best explained by corrupt human processes? That is, not that the content has miraculously survived by the Holy Spirit, but that the content in the first place was the product of people being cheap, or otherwise frivolous about the content?

This is what many expect of evolutionary theology: these types of conclusions. I hope someone will clear this up and show that these prejudices are in error.

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(as it is written, "I have made you a father of many nations")
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in the presence of Him whom he believed--God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did;

What a great story scenario! Lol. Pretty funny.

Then think about the first audience of the book of Genesis. Do you really think they'd be up to hearing about the Big Bang Theory, abiogenesis, the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution, punctuated equilibrium etc etc? They were however familiar with lots of different stories full of exciting gods and goddesses and heroes and heroines doing exciting things.

The first audience had no maths, no literacy to speak of, no scientific method to check the story with. They did however have imaginations. Why is it so difficult to imagine that God used the imaginations of ancient writers to stimulate the imaginations of their audience in order for them to follow the true God, rather than a lot of false ones?

Is the imagination so dangerous, God isn't allowed to use it?

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"Call some place paradise/Kiss it goodbye"
The Eagles, the Last Resort
Liberal Christians do it in context

"Literalism is the first line of defense of a mind that wants to put itself to sleep." Walter A Davis

Excuse me, I would appreciate some clarity here.

For evolutionists it may be all well and good to take lack of sophistication and muddle it together with casual disregard for the truth. It may be. I am tending to think it is so, since no evolutionist will answer the bell on this question. Your post certainly suggests that mistake. You do understand the difference, I hope, though you have written otherwise.

I keep hearing from evolutionists that they exalt the Word of God as much as creationists. I keep hearing that they revere it and regard the Word as communicating the truth. If you think the laziness of an author really could have had such a substantial impact on Biblical content, I think we find some clarity on how "exalted" scripture really is within this view. Elsewhere maybe you do a wonderful job. The confusion exhibited here, however, is appalling.

Understand what has been said here. This is not Shakespeare axing half a scene of MacBeth, a character already well drawn and rich in content. This is the subject and character of the work, namely creation, being informed mostly by laziness, if not mere chance, in an author's habits.

Nothing in what we know of the scribal traditions supports that view, first of all. These were about the most disciplined human beings that one could imagine. So, the freakin' assumption made in the OP is so much elephant feces thrown at the Madonna upon the assumption that if anything sticks, it deserves a healthy NEA grant. The OP is not art, but whim. There is no historical basis for it.

Further, there are several deliberate choices from which the author retreats. That retreat is not into a better, more aristic and concise rendering. The mythical author simply descends into obfuscation out of convenience. Hello?

Wake up and smell the coffee.

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in the presence of Him whom he believed--God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did;

The OP is actually an Isaac Asimov short story. So I would guess that the intent was to write something a magazine editor would be willing to buy, and nothing more than that.

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It was there right before our eyes, we were blind not to realise
In the rush to be globalised we signed away our freedom
We forgot how to criticise, we were scared to be demonised
As the truth was neutralised we lost the art of reason