John Henry

Assumptions:

1) God is not stupid.
2) God wants us to believe and understand His word.
3) God can do whatever He wants.
4) The Bible is His word.
5) God is good.


Observations:

1) Genesis states that the world was made in 7 days.
2) The world seems to have taken a bit longer than that to form.

The observations here do not appear to fit our assumptions. We do not expect God to lie to us and if He wanted it to believe His word literally, He would not have made the universe seem so clearly to have taken longer than seven days to form.

So we are led to the conclusion that He was using a crude metaphor. Why, if it would cause misunderstanding? Surely if He had not meant 'day', when He said day, He would have added "By the way, I don't really mean 'day'" for clarity.

Keeping it simple for the primitive tribes? Then why not cut out the days altogether. "First I did this, then I did that... and, boy did it take a long time". Now I just thought of that myself and I'm pretty stupid compared to God. Couldn't he have thought of it too?

Also, if you're going to pick and choose which bits of the Bible you take literally and which you don't, you may as well chuck the whole thing out and start again. After all, who's to say He really meant "Thou shalt not"?

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"No one was behaving from very Buddhist motives. Then, thought Pigsy, he was hardly a Buddha, nor was he a monkey. Presently, he was a pig spirit changed into a little girl pretending to be a little boy to be offered to a water monster. It was all very simple to a pig spirit."