Creation Stories That End With A Bang!

I love Ricky Gervais. Ricky Gervais has hosted the Golden Globes the last couple years. He’s been refreshingly irreverent. Ricky Gervais is the creator of the British “Office” which became the American “Office.” Ricky Gervais created “Extras,” which is a British comedy. If you haven’t seen it, you should get it.

A year or so ago Ricky Gervais made a movie, “The Invention of Lying.” He played a guy who lives in a time and place where nobody lies. Nobody ever heard of lying; nobody knows what lying is. Then Ricky Gervais owes rent money, but he doesn’t have the money. So he goes to the bank and the teller says, “You don’t have any money.” He says, “Yes, I have lots of money in there.” Of course, the teller believed him because nobody has ever lied. So he gets a lot of money out of the bank. Then his mother is dying in the hospital. She’s frightened. She’s wondering what’s going to happen after her life ends. Is this all there is? Ricky Gervais tells her no, after you die you go to a place of peace and serenity – heaven. Then she passes on in comfort. Hospital workers overheard him say this to his mother and of course they believed him, because everybody tells the truth, nobody lies. So then he becomes a prophet, speaking on behalf of the sky god and they believe everything he says.

In real life Ricky Gervais is an atheist. I think at the end of the Golden Globes a couple of years ago he said, “I want to thank God for making me an atheist.” I imagine that Ricky Gervais believes that stories that religions tell are lies. Like creation stories. I imagine he believes those are lies. But are they? Are they lies? If my wife and I are driving along and we see a car, empty by the side of the road and I say, “I imagine the car ran out of gas and the driver has gone to buy a gallon of gas to get it going.” Then she says, “No, I’ll bet that the driver was kidnapped and is in danger.” Now neither one of us knows the truth, but are we lying or are we just guessing? Are writers of different religions’ creation stories lying or are they just guessing?

Joseph Campbell, as you probably know, is an expert on comparative religions and religious myths. Joseph Campbell said once, “Follow your bliss.” He was interviewed several years ago by Bill Moyers for the PBS program, “The Story of Myth.” Joseph Campbell said, “All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds are inside us. They are magnified dreams.” Are religions that tell creation stories lying, are they guessing, or are they telling magnified dreams? What they hope happened, what they think happened, their best guess at what happened, maybe their poetic way of saying it, their imaginative words.

Now religious people have a problem with the word “myth.” They don’t like that word, it has a negative connotation. “Maybe your religions’ creation stories are myths, but my religion’s creation stories are true. They’re truth.” Many religious people have a problem calling creation stories and other spiritual stories “myths.” But what else can we call them?

Native peoples believe that the North American continent rests upon a big, gigantic turtle. I’ve also heard that there are those who believe that the earth itself rests on a stack of turtles. And I’ve heard the question asked, “Well, what’s underneath the bottom turtle of that stack?” And of course the answer is: another turtle.

Now some might call those silly stories. Some might call them lies. Some might call them myths. Some might call them magnified dreams. But they are, I think, told mainly so children and adults can understand, and can visualize, what nobody really knows for sure, or nobody knew for sure when the story was made up.

Ancient Africans believed that people were made out of clay and these clay people travelled the globe. Some went north, where there isn’t as much sun. Some went south, where there’s more sun. So the clay people that went north have light colored clay and the people who went south have dark colored clay. Some might say that’s a silly story, a myth, perhaps told so children, inquiring as to what goes on, would have some kind of explanation, perhaps explaining why we have different skin color, a poetic way of telling that story. It’s poetic, it’s imaginative, it’s a story. But I don’t think it’s a lie. It’s just a way of trying to explain why we have different skin colors.

Long ago, Greeks believed that a big bird laid a golden egg and the bird sat upon the egg for a long time. Then the egg hatched and part of the eggshell went up and became the sky and the other part became the earth. A silly story, some might say. A creative creation story. I would say not necessarily a lie. A myth. Nobody really knows for sure. And remember, hundreds of years ago, people all over the world thought the earth was flat! Unfortunately some people still believe that. In fact, they also believe that humankind never set foot on the moon – that it all happened at some studio at NBC.

Christians and Jews share a creation story – Genesis 1. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved across the waters and God said, “Let there be light. And there was light. And God saw that it was good. And God separated the light from the darkness. And the light God called day and the darkness God called night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”

Now I like that story. Maybe because that’s what I grew up with. But it seems to me it’s very poetical, it’s very creative, it’s very imaginative. It’s not true, it’s a myth, but it’s got nice words. It’s a nice description of what might have been true to people a couple thousand years ago who had no idea how the world began.

Some people, unfortunately many Christians, take those words as literal truth. I did a Bible study at my first church. Now, you have to understand, this was a church in a denomination that’s said to be the most liberal Christian denomination there is. And we read that first story of Genesis and I said afterwards, “Now what did you all think of that? I mean we know that the Bible is not a scientific textbook, and that this is just a poetical story and later on, when it talks about how Adam and Eve were created, that’s not to be taken literally, we know that we are the product of evolution. The moderator of that church, who was in the Bible study, the highest elected official in that church, said, “Oh, well, I don’t believe in evolution. I believe in creationism.” Oy vey! My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?

I know people, otherwise intelligent, rational people, who got A’s all through school, even in science classes, who believe that the earth is 6,000 years old, who believe in what they call a “young earth,” who believe that God planted dinosaur bones in the earth to confuse people. Some people just can’t handle myth. They can understand that Jesus told parables that weren’t true, but those were parables and that was Jesus so it’s OK. But they’d have you believe that Jonah really spent three days in the belly of the whale or their whole belief system crumbles.

Now let’s turn to what scientists say. Scientists tell us their best guess is that the universe began, as you know, with the Big Bang Theory. That 14 billion years ago or so, there was a burst of energy. What happened before that, we’re not sure. What happened a moment before that, they don’t know. They’ve got to say that probably it wasn’t a bang, sort of like the old philosophical question, “If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well, of course it does, but they say that this didn’t make a bang, they say it made more of a “whoosh.” But anyway, the Big Bang Theory is science, not superstition. And scientists are such that, if there is a better theory that comes along, they’ll go along with that, they won’t cling to the Big Bang Theory forever, because they’re interested in the truth, not holding on to some superstition. Now I’ve pretty much expended all that I know about the Big Bang Theory. Science is not my forte, although you might be surprised by that because every week I do watch, “The Big Bang Theory.”

Spiritual mystics tell us what happened a long time ago doesn’t matter. And what’s going to happen in the future doesn’t matter. The only thing that we should be concerned with is now, because what happened in the past is long gone and what’s going to happen in the future has not yet come along. The only thing that matters is now. So the question is: Are we now going to argue over whose creation story is more correct? Or are we going to try to save creation? Are we going to work towards ending global warming? Are we going to work towards ending air, water, and soil pollution? Are we going to work towards ending wars and killing humans and animals? Are we going to work towards ending, what seems to be coming closer every day, the possibility of nuclear annihilation?

I always get a kick out of people who, and it’s usually Americans, talk about a fear of the first use of nuclear weapons. Actually it would be the third use of nuclear weapons, because as we know, America was the one to use nuclear weapons first and second in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So the question, it seems to me, is: Are we going to argue over creation stories or are we going to try to protect creation, the earth, humans and animals?