GENESIS 1, or, "You Gotta Start Somewhere"

God creates everything in six days, laughs in the face of Big Bang theorists.

Already, I can see that a literal reading of the Bible will be problematic for me. A quick Wikipedia search has informed me that scientists believe that the Big Bang created the universe 13.7 billion years ago, and Earth came about 9 billion years later, emerging out of the solar nebula left over from the creation of our sun. This is a pretty different story from the one Genesis 1 tells us. Why I'm more inclined to believe the scientific facts of Wikipedia (a site that can be edited by anyone, experts or not) over the Bible is a long discussion I'll have to write more about later.

In Buddhism, enlightenment can't be explained, so it is compared to a hand pointing to the moon. If you only focus on the hand, you never see what it's trying to direct your attention to.

I think the Bible can be seen the same way. Too much focus on whether or not the universe was created in six actual days diverts our attention away from the bigger picture. For example, if taken figuratively, one could read into Genesis 1 close parallels with how the scientific community views creation. God creating light and separating it from the darkness could be a poetic way of describing the Big Bang. God creating earth, then animals, then man roughly follows the same timeline Wikipedia lays out for our planet.

On a smaller note, I already caught one contradiction within the text. In Genesis 1, God tells man "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it." This is obviously not true, because in the next chapter, man will be punished for eating the fruit of a certain tree in the Garden of Eden.

Pop References to Gen 1: The song "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters" by Moby is, I assume, a reference to Gen 1:2 - "Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters."