If you can not read this, it says, “God created the Heavens and the Earth, not no Damn explosion.“ This is written inside of one of the trailers that I load at work. Now I have no problem with work place graffiti. At Garan back in the day, you could hardly walk five feet without seeing Shane or Bruce Lane #23 written on something. I may have even tagged Polivick once. My problems are with the message being sent.
First, when you are making an argument on God’s behalf, do not cuss. You always lose credibility in a discussion when you can not articulate your thoughts without resorting to cussing. Unless of course it is some kind of “Yo Moma” contest. Also cussing in the name of God is not going to help your argument. I am not saying the people who believe in creation do not cuss. This however is not the appropriate time for it.
Second, when making any argument you should always use good grammar. Using bad grammar makes you sound ignorant. A double negative is proof positive that you are an idiot. People will ignore your message if you can not deliver it intelligently.
Third, I do not agree with the message either. The Genesis account of creation has very little detail. The entire universe is created in forty-five sentences with some of those sentences being repeats. “And it was so,” six times. “And God saw that it was good,” five times. In comparison, this blog is twenty-eight sentences long. There is much less happening in this blog than in the creation. Genesis does not explain how the universe was made, but only who made it. God spoke the universe into being. That sounds like a pretty big bang to me. I do not understand why creationist are so quick to dismiss science. God created science just like everything else.
This is an interesting coincidence. I just finished teaching through the creation stuff in my OT classes and I just watched Exit Through the Gift Shop, a documentary about graffiti artists.
ReplyDeleteGrammatically, the sentence is interesting because of its ambiguity. Almost certainly the author is trying to say that God, not an explosion, created the heavens and the earth. However, you could read the message as "God created the heavens and the earth. He did not create an explosion." I find the first sentence to be somewhat banal, but the second reading is theologically rich. God did not simply create chaos or destruction or a meaningless event. This points to God's character. What kind of God when faced with the prospect of creating literally anything chooses to create the heavens and the earth rather than simply a huge explosion. It has ramifications about art too - ones that apparently the postal scribbler missed out on. Orderliness is superior to disorder; construction is superior to deconstruction; patient endurance is superior to a spectacular moment of death. That's a message that I think Western culture with its tendency toward critique and cynicism could benefit from.
P.S. I really appreciate the new layout here. My eyes couldn't handle that yellow background for very long at a time.
Exit Through The Gift Shop is an interesting documentary by Banksy. If you liked Exit Throught The Gift Shop, you should watch Banksy Comes To Dinner Starring Joan Collins.
ReplyDeleteThe creationist's problem is "God created science just like everything else". Since they do not want to believe in God how can they believe He created anything?
Thank you for the interesting thoughts this morning. I know what my Bible Study will be about at lunch today.