Bone picking bone-picking

So, I’ve got some qualms with the Old Testament (who doesn’t? The Old Testament even has problems with itself, lest we forget that embarrassing Ark incident where God was so frustrated with his Earth Etch-A-Sketch that he shook it clean). Now, I understand that way-back when the population wasn’t as diverse, it might have been advantageous for to kill some of your relatives here and there to prevent in-breeding and easy to use that old “divine intervention” gag to cover for your deeds. But there are a few things I just can’t accept:

First, I’m a little confused as to why God made the day of rest holy. I guess this kind of makes sense until you consider what God accomplished on all the preceding days: namely, creating the heaven, earth, day, night, the sky, water, fauna, all cosmic bodies, living organisms, unspecific “creeping things,” humans, etc. And although at the end, God may have wiped his hands and shrugged his shoulders in that modest “all in a week’s work” type of way, I’m sure he didn’t create all the matter in the universe just to pass the time before lunch. Yet, we’re not supposed to give him a gold star or nominate him for a “Creator of the Year”award for all this hard work; we’re to pat him on the back for the day he kicked up his feet on the Lazyboy and watched golf. But I suppose in a Robert Stack-sort-of -way some mysteries will always remain unsolved. Besides,I’m still trying to figure how God's retinas adjusted too all that light after sulking like an emo kid in the dark since the dawn of time.

But a more troublesome issue I wish God would have shed a little light on (haha get it?) is this whole creation thing. To start, the Bible hesitantly looks down at its feet and shuffles back and forth in its shoes about the issue by offering two versions of creation in Genesis. In the first, the Bible has very shaky camera work; Adam and Eve just appear like silent movie apparitions in a blip between the scenes of Genesis 1:30 and 1:31. Maybe that would have fooled those “The Great Train Robbery” viewers, but we’ve got those new-fangled talkies these days! I think what this story needs is way more Spiderman-like special FX. Adam needs to come swinging on a 3-d vine into the garden on Eden, strike a valiant pose strategically flattering his fig-leaf-censored body, and declare he’s arrived to save the day. Maybe if Adam had gotten that sort of publicity instead, he wouldn’t have been so vulnerable to all that evil-apple business later.

But the first story is just the Cliff’s Notes of the remake,which took several liberties in interpreting the original. Although both versions agree that before God got around to making humans ‘n stuff, the whole earth was just a barren wasteland. But the two disagree upon the main event: thecreation of man. In the second, God makes Adam “out of the clay of the ground.”(Although I’m thrilled to see the Bible finally took a page out of Spiderman’scomic book, it seems to have taken the whole screenplay, as this is clearly blatant plagiarism of the Sandman). Secondly, in this story, Eve appears after Adam and was made not out of quicksand; instead God pluck one of Adam’s bones to make her – a rib to be exact. That’s right, a rib. I mean, c’mon, ribs break easily. Couldn’t God have made her out of a more durable bone, a patella, perhaps? At the very least he might have considered using a clavicle. I am outraged at this story, not because it contradicts clear evidence of evolution, but because it sounds like someone’s gross retelling of the true tale at the end of a game of “Telephone.” Although I can’t outright prove it, I’m sure somewhere hidden in the depths of the Vatican, shoved between a couple of shrouds, is a yellowing scroll outlining the real truth about Eve’s creation, and it goes a little something like this…

One fall day during the beginning of time, God and Adam were celebrating Thanksgiving together. After making pumpkin pie (reportedly, God got the idea for farming after he saw Adam gut a pumpkin, become disgusted with the gooeymess, shake his messy hands while saying “ewww, its sticky, get it off of me, get it off of me!” thus scattering the pumpkin seeds all over the earth) and constructing pilgrim hats out of old editions of “The Heavenly Observer” (With a readership of two, it was admittedly not the best-selling news magazine in history, more like a mom-and-pop operation. Or rather, just “pop”-eration, as Eve had yet to enterthe picture. If she had been around before, the newspaper’s logo definitely wouldn’t have been a large lion attacking a gazelle to assert its manliness) God wanted to traditionally split the wishbone. However, since God is invisible, he certainly couldn’t catch game, and as Adam had not perfected his turkey-calling skills, they didn’t have a bone. So, God conveniently decided to announce a recall on all the ribs ever manufactured in heaven, which at that time, Adam was monopolizing and of course did not want to return.
So, that night after Adam had fallen into a deep-I-ate-too-much-stuffing-induced sleep, God hunched over Adam and cut out one of his ribs, kind of like that girl in Saw 2. Reassurringly, God, after leaving an IOU sticky note in place of the rib, sewed up the wound with flesh. Frankly, it would have added a much more unique feature of the human race had God just put a quiltpatch over the hole, but to each his own.
Anyways, God now had his wishbone. But the holiday was winding down, and the novelty of cracking a wishbone lost its appeal as he found himself standing alone amid the palling dinnercandlelight and half-eaten plates of green-been casserole. So, blame it on loneliness or an effort to promote recycling, but during the wee witching hours of Thanksgiving Day Eve, God created Eve out of the now-useless rib. We won’t give too many specifics about this as to create an air of mystery for fallible church leaders to exploit later, but the general theory is that God stole more ribs and stacked them like Lincoln Logs into a human form, waved his Gringots wand around his creation, and voila! such was Eve. God won’t admit it, he had gotten a little bored with Adam after a while, and his declaration “It is not good for man to be alone, I will make a suitable partner for him,” besides sounding like a terrible arranged marriage, was really a cry for attention. He regretted this decision immediately afterwards, not because of his sexist beliefs, but because afterwards man helplessly “clung to his wife, and the two of them become one body." This unintended consequence made God the awkward third wheel in Eden, which among other things, meant he always had to ride roller coasters in a car by himself when they took their annual vacation to 6-Flags Over Barren Wasteland. Thus, in frustration, God shunned the couple from Eden and made them commit original sin – wearing leather (Genesis 3:21)....

So, I just don’t know if I can trust God as an editor. I know the Bible’s authors are supposed to have been possessed by the Holy Spirit, walking around like zombies with their eyes glazed over and speaking the word of God in animatronic voices, but God just seems like a lazy supervisor of his own best-selling chronicle, relying on quarterly sales than just the facts, man, to construct the Bible’s content. I just find many of the Bible’s stories a bit too anecdotal to be the basis of divine truth. Admittedly, a lot of this mentality has to do with my ongoing passage through many science books. I’ve been reading all sorts of fascinating literature about evolution, astronomy,and the like, and I’ve loved it all. I’m now like Ruth on Golden Girls, who relates everything back to one particular thing, except, my thread is evolutionary psychology, not St. Olaf, Minnesota.

And, even though by all standards, I am the run-away, I feel a little abandoned by God. Suddenly, he’s disappeared from the mysticism of the mass into the cold, calculating mathematics of the Big Bang. He seems less like the vengeful terrorist of the Old Testament who smites people left and right with the flick of a wrist (or is that Draco Malfoy?) and more akin to the disengaged entity deists like Ben Franklin believed exists, the kind of guy who left the world in a cosmic microwave like a defrosting chicken, waiting for the buzzer to go off, in the mean time checking the score of the big game and clipping his toenails. Most religions asserts that God is everywhere at once, but now I find myself actively searching for him, like a Where’s Waldo picture. Oh, there he is! Peeping out from behind double-helixes and through the cracks of continental drift. Or, no,wait, is that just his red-stripped shirt doppelganger? So, I suppose any the irreverence is just part of this larger search for what, if anything is attributed to some paranormal force and how much is just a tasty cocktail of my neurological brain juice. I don’t mean to belittle the Bible or what it represents to many people, I just think that good ol’ Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and their cronies should’ve lightened up a bit when writing this little number. I understand they didn’t have Youtube or Facebook to entertain them while scratching away at their stone tablets, but really, they didn’t need to get their palms leaves into such a bundle over some of this stuff.

But who knows, I’m only on Genesis. I’d like to think that bythe ending credits I’ll be a believer again; however, given that the ending scene involves, among a myriad of other plagues, locusts with crowned human heads, seas turning to blood, angels killing a third of the human race, and man who swallows a scroll whole (say that tens times fast!), seemingly during a game oftruth-or-dare, I’m not to optimistic. But what do I know, I just like romantic comedies.