Continuing from my last post, I have not totally thought through the “why” of the ultimate observer doing no action but, taking that as an assumption to be “proven” later, I think there are two answers to “Who, then, created?”
First, as some spiritual traditions suggest (and I can’t, at the moment, recall which one(s)) it was a demiurge who did the creating. The Old Testament God, Jehovah, was not the ultimate observer but a “lesser” god, more akin to a child with his fits of rage, anger, jealousy, &c., and it was this god who created. It reminds me of that Star Trek episode (the “real” Star Trek with Captain James T. Kirk) where the Enterprise crew is trapped on this planet by a “god” which turns out to be a child playing. The child’s parents come in at the end and save everyone from annihilation and apology for their child’s behavior.
Second, there is no creation — it’s all a dream, maya, an illusion. This fits in with Eastern tradition, especially Vedanta and Hinduism.
Vedanta has an aphorism which states: “I do nothing at all.” Our true “I,” our true Self, is the ultimate observer and does not act. If our true Self were, itself, observed, then it would be the object to another’s subject. That other subject would then be the ultimate observer (unless, of course, it was observed by yet another subject). To break the infinite chain, there must be an ultimate observer which is not observed by any other subject. This ultimate observer is “God” and our true “Self.” This is the “I” in the above aphorism. However, if “I” do nothing, i.e. “God” does nothing, then who/what created the world that we see, feel, hear, taste, and smell?
ticks, lice, tapeworms, fleas, hookworms, E. coli, Giardia, mites, chiggers, bed bugs, mosquitoes
Are you freakin’ kidding me?
I thought I knew the creation story in the Bible. Now, I couldn’t tell you what was created on what day but I knew the basic order and knew when man and woman were created. It’s been a LONG time since I’ve read it but I thought I knew it.
Not so!
I reread it today and several things jumped out at me that I had never noticed.
First, in Genesis 1:31 God pronounced everything to be “very good” yet in Genesis 2:18 he says that something is “not good,” specifically, man’s being alone. What happened here? God says that it’s all good and then realizes something is a tad askew? He made two of every animal but only the human male and it took him a minute to realize he should have made a female human as well? That doesn’t seem very omniscient of him.
But there’s more. Look at Genesis 1:27 and here it sounds like God made male and female together, at the same time and in the same way. Both were made in the image of God. But that’s not the impression I get from Eve’s being created from Adam’s rib.
Now, I do not recall ever hearing a sermon on this and I do not know what the “party line” is but here is an explanation that makes sense to me. God did create man and woman together, in the same way and at the same time, just as with all the other animals. This is what he pronounced as “very good.” Then something happened that left Adam alone, which was “not good,” and so God created Eve.
Hmmmm. Does the name Lilith ring any bells?
Anyway, it seems that God’s first choice of creation method for woman did not work out so well so he chose an alternate method the second go round. If you look at how God addresses man and woman in Genesis 1 they seem to be equals — he says the same things to both. But apparently someone couldn’t handle all this equality and so Eve was made from Adam’s rib.
Things were pretty much perfect in the ol’ Garden of Eden before the whole “apple” incident, right? And God created everything and said (and I quote) “That’s frickin’ Good!” So, were there ticks and mosquitos and fleas and tapeworms and hookworms in the Garden? And if so, what was their relationship to humans and animals? Were mosquitoes “nice” blood suckers who didn’t inject poison into their victim to make an itchy, red welt? Did fleas bite but not cause disease and itching? Did Adam have tapeworms but they caused no ill side-effects?
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