Creation Series #4: Spitting Image?

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Did you ever take a gander at yourself and think, "Gosh, if God created me in His image, He must have been looking in a funhouse mirror at the time!"

Ever ponder this? What ideal human is the spitting image of God?

I once heard two of my inner city students talking (when they should have been working). One of them said, "What you think God look like?"

And the other one said, "He a white man."

They were both African American girls.

Sometimes it's hard to separate church and state. Because I wanted to ask those two lovely teenagers: "Do you pray to a white man? What's the white man done for you? Not God, I mean, but any white man?"

Of course that could have sparked a discussion that veered into paganism, so I held my tongue.

Michelangelo painted God as a big dude with flowing white hair and a long beard. Sort of what John Brown might have looked like in extreme old age, if he hadn't been hung.

I don't have flowing white hair and a long beard. (I get a few chin hairs now and then. Aren't they gross?) Heck, I can't even anticipate someday having long white hair and a beard.

They say "image is everything." But in the case of God Almighty, I have to think that "image is severely limited by the imagination of a male-dominated desert culture that refused to commit to artwork an image of the god that made them in his image so we can all see what we should look like."

While we're on the Hard Scientific Work, Genesis, I have another minor quibble.

Where's the motive?

In the previous Creation of the World Scientific Theories we've examined, the Celestial Creators had motive. Bumba was lonely. Sky Woman got shoved off her cloud by an angry spouse.

Why did God start slinging stars and planets around, all of a sudden, like you or me would stroll into the corner bar on the spur for a pint?

I wish the Discovery Institute would enlighten me on some of this.

This last is just my opinion. I think God's Celestial Computer malfunctioned when He got around to the image thing. You know how a mouse can be sometimes. You point it and click, but it slides just a tad and you click the wrong item.

God may have meant to click on Bonobos. They're a vastly superior ape species to ourselves. (Actually they're under the bored god Chonganda's jurisdiction.)

















Instead, with one little slip in the techno, boom! We get this upright, hairless, big-brained but unpredictable mammal. What a species. One specimen will sneak into a man's house, rape and murder a six-year-old. Another will fly a plane into a highrise and kill three thousand people. And the next one down the line will run to the burning highrise and try to save perfect strangers caught in the wreckage, and end up dying himself.

As part of her Confirmation, my daughter The Heir had to have a private chat with a Methodist pastor. The pastor was a woman on the verge of retirement. The pastor asked my daughter what word my daughter would use to describe God.

My daughter said, "Temperamental."

My daughter got gently chewed out. She returned to the car saying, "I'm not a very good Christian."

In the ensuing years The Heir has adjusted to her poor showing on the Christian exam. She simply changed her major.

If by creating Man in His image, God meant Man to be temperamental, I'd say God succeeded brilliantly.

And all of this deep scientific scrutiny today was sparked by a special issue of Scientific American, having to do with the origin of our species, with a side trip into the happy world of Bonobos.

We at "The Gods Are Bored" are taking a brief road trip over the weekend to replenish the springwater supply. We'll check in on Monday. If you have any questions about today's post, you can pose them to the Discovery Institute, where nuclear physicists will be standing by to take your call.