Even the pagans can understand, so why can’t Jensen and his allies?

A friend of mine, who is professionally involved in training people to enter the media or to improve the existing skills of those already in front of the camera, passed onto me a book called The Seven Basic Plots: Why we tell stories?. The book’s really not my cup of tea, except for a section of a chapter dealing with origins.

The author, Christopher Booker, realising just how important this issue is, states in his opening sentence, “One of the deepest human needs met by our faculty for imagining stories is our desire for an explanation and descriptive picture of how the world began and how we came to be in it.”

Of course this runs antithetically to how the SADs see it. It is our experience that SADs seek to downplay the significance the author of the Bible places upon the creation week historiography.

What’s far more interesting, however, is Booker’s clear insight into the absolute difference between the Judeo-Christian account and the other category of origin explanation. (Booker actually says there are two others, but he errs in as much as these are, from a methodological aspect, synonymous.) He stresses that in Genesis 1, personal Mind was internally present, and that this Mind, God, took 6 days to create everything (note, Booker doesn’t call them a symbolic or poetic 6 days!). He calls this account untypical. This once again raises the question, one which many of the Moorites and their followers have assiduously refused to answer, Why do these heretics strive so zealously to compare Genesis 1 with pagan accounts (e.g. Enuma Elish) when it is obvious to the pagan Booker, for example, that they are to be contrasted?

Booker also notes that God in the Genesis 1 account miraculously creates and all life and non-living entities are brought into being fully-formed. In contradistinction to this are the other explanatory stories, “found in almost every other creation myth in the world, [which] give the impression of a process infinitely more laborious, mysterious and long-drawn-out.” He then continues with a further differentiating quality: in the pagan accounts, “the emergence of our recognisable world takes place by what we would call an ‘evolutionary’ process, as each new component develops out of what came before.”

There you have it: a pagan who can read Genesis 1 and understand that the text says that God created quickly and perfectly.

Why then are Moorites and the Sydney Anglican Diocese seeking to remove the unique qualities of the Genesis 1 historical account and by doing so paganise the Christian origin explanation?