Most reputable scholars today will admit that several of those documents are the precursors of seminal documents that later went to form the foundations of the JudeoChristian tradition, in particular the Book of Genesis which is central to understanding the estimate of the female in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Genesis is an immensely profound work despite having been turned on its head all too often by well meaning preachers. These worthy gentlemen have apparently convinced themselves that it is no more dif cult to read and understand a three thousand year old text from a culture as remote from ours as is possible to imagine, than it is to read the morning newspaper. Genesis wrestles with an age-old issue that must at some stage come to perplex every living person. If we persist in thinking of God and God's relation to the world, in the homely ways to which we have so long grown accustomed, then we are left with an insoluble problem, which is what the opening chapters of Genesis wrestles with. The world as we know it is replete with more than its fair share of su ering, disease, old age, in rmity, natural disasters, frailty, disappointment, betrayal and ultimately death. That kind of world cannot have come from the hand of a good God, so either God did not create the world or something went wrong. Those indeed are the only two options we have in the mindset I have labeled the Hamburger Universe.
What is a Hamburger Universe? http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=ZPohpsN9n-o&feature=related
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Photo by Robert Leon