GENESIS FOR BEGINNERS

By Peter Fredson

Deconstructed from the “Authorized by God. King James Version,” of the Book that God wrote before there were typewriters or computers nor spell-checkers. 

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

What is meant by ‘in the beginning?” Was there nothing before there was something? Was the nothing like a vacuum?  Where was this God located if there was nothing? Is this God some kind of super-nothing? Was there an existence before there was existence?  If this God was eternal, infinite, bounded yet unbounded, infinitely unchanging, then what prompted the statis, the eternal nothingness, to be changed?  Was this God of nothingness impatient with the situation? If there was nothing, no light, no nothing, then what WAS there besides a somebody or a something who, or what, was actually nothing?

Was “heaven” a monolithic something, somewhere, while the earth didn’t have any shape, extension, surface, but is a something somewhere. Were there then only 2 somethings..the monolithic heaven and an earth that didn’t exist as a form, or had no substance. Or was God a something? What was “the deep?” Was it heaven, or a part of a divisible heaven?

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
And God had a Spirit which “moved” on some water that had not yet been mentioned as having been created.  Are there then two somethings…a God and a Spirit? Where were the “waters?” Were they previously created by this God or did he float around on them? There were only 2 somethings…heaven and earth…so where were the waters…on the earth without form and void?  Or was “the face of the waters” floating in space somewhere, separate from earth? Or were the waters someplace on or in the other something called “heaven?”

3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
Word magic is introduced here along with some divine anatomical property…the magical quality of speech.  If you say something, it happens. “I want a lollipop”, and alla-kazam I get a lollipop.  Napoleon Chagnon told us of an Indian tribe, the Yanomamo, where it was forbidden to say the name of a dead person, or they would magically reappear. Many other peoples have taboo words that, if you say them, they will come to pass. In order to say something God must have had vocal cords, with glottis, epiglottis and the rest of vocal apparatus, and must have had lungs, etc., in order to make the vocal cords vibrate and work their word magic on something.  If there was nothing, on what did the words act? 

4 And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.
So, we have light and we have darkness, but they were mixed…like oil and water, and by speaking “let there be Light” he created light, and then he said, “Now eject the darkness out of the light and put it someplace where it won’t mix with light.” Like, mix the hydrogen with the oxygen and let’s call it water, or separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen? You certainly don’t want to get the universe wet and sticky, nor does a God want to become wet and sticky, so it’s better to separate the water and put it where it won’t get things wet.

5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
So, around the mixture of something which he separated from some other something, he created some kind of boundary to make two separate somethings?. On one side of the magical fence there was light and on the other side there was darkness?

What Bible translators mean is that God, in English, called one something “light”, and the separated out something was called “night” but that really he never said either light or dark but something in Hebrew? Or Egyptian? Or was it in Sumerian? Hindu? Mandarin Chinese? Or didn’t it make any difference, in speaking, what the name was for something because God knew what he meant and his Ally-Kazam worked its magic on nothing, to separate nothing into two perfect somethings.

6 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
It is certainly wonderful word magic, to divide waters from waters by inserting a something called a firmament, like a big fence, to keep the split somethings apart.

7 And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And it was wonderful to make a firmament, called Heaven, and put some waters above Heaven, and equally wonderful to put the other waters under Heaven, so Heaven floated on some waters but had to worry about getting wet from the rest of the waters up above.

8 And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
If there was not yet a sun or moon, or lights, but just water and firmament, then how was a day reckoned? Was Time created then? Was there a time before Time? Was it a 24-hour day, or like some societies having different lengths of hours, days, months? Remember that this is an English translation and it is not certain that the firmament with the waters above and below it was actually called Heaven. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, right? If God at one time favored the Egyptians, as their long reign would indicate, then they surely didn’t call the firmament “Heaven.”

9 And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
Then scooping up the water under the firmament, he held it in his hand, while he said, “Ally-kazam, put some dry land here too.” Then he dropped the water in a nice depression that he made with his thumb. And it was so. No question about it. You just have to look at the situation today… There is Earth, and also there is the water, separated from the Earth, except when God sends Tsunamis to teach some kind of lesson. You see?

10 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
So this God make a small planet, distinct from billions of other astral bodies, and put some water on it, then said, “Hey, that’s pretty good.” Or, to put it another way, he favored only Earth, and left the rest of astral bodies without water. That this story is true is shown by the fact that we haven’t found water on any other astral body. See?  Well, maybe Mars had some water in the time before time, or before God got around to making a separate Earth, but anyway he didn’t intend for the “lights” to shine for the benefit of Mars.  The Bible plainly says it was for the benefit of Earth….not for any second class hunk of rock..

11 And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
12 And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
13 And the evening and the morning were the third day.
Then God made vegetation before he made the sun. There was no need to mow the grass, because it wouldn’t grow anyway without sunlight or chlorophyll.

14 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:
15 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.
And the reason there are stars is to give light to the earth. That’s the reason the sun was made— to give light in the day, and the moon to give a little bit lesser light at night. And behold, there is indeed a sun up there, and unless it’s very cloudy you can see a moon up there too. And it is so.

16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

And god said, Let there be a sun, and let there also be a moon, and it was so. Then then he made all of the billions of other lights as an afterthought..ally kazam, and it was so. He made all of the galaxies, star clusters, black holes, meteorites.. everything. And you can still see many of them with the naked eye, and a lot more with the modern invention of the telescope. And it is so.

17 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,
18 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.
And that’s the reason there is a sun and a moon and water and a firmament.  To give light upon the earth and to make sure that pesky darkness is separated from that light. Yes, the whole shebang was made to surround earth, to shed light upon it, with vegetation to feed the critters that God made, and that’s a good thing.