I’ll Bloganovella tomorrow.
Today I was reviewing some student work and thinking about the concept of Adam and Eve. It got me thinking about how whoever writes the accepted history makes the accepted history and beliefs. We continue to portray Adam and Eve and God in a particular way. We continue to view God as a man, though the idea of a singular creator defies gender and, if it is gender based would likely be female as the female is the one who would produce in our biological stream. Specifically, I kept coming back to the idea of how readily students–religious people in general–accept the idea of Adam and Eve being white. It speaks to a larger belief of white being the ‘first race’ which flies in the face of science and hurts the prospects of science and faith walking hand in hand.
If we are to view the bible as an embellishment of things that happened, following the idea that we can find these religious sites and trace them back to Africa and the Middle East, then Adam and Eve didn’t look like Scandinavians. Jesus didn’t look like a dude from Santa Monica Pier. None of these things fit, which is what I suppose some people call faith. I have a different sense of what faith is personally, and I feel faith is linked less to belief in the specific words than it is in the ideas and beliefs behind the words. That is why I get upset when we speak of the King James Bible as the word of God and forget to mention that it is in fact the King James edit and nobody wants to talk about who that dude was and what he did.
Ideas are contagious. Ideas are viral and spiral down and across the centuries becoming the very fabric of reality in which we dress our daily lives. We don’t look too closely at these things on a daily basis, just as we don’t tend to consider the mundanity of our daily routine, because looking too closely can upset that routine.