"Let There Be Light"

You keep forgetting that I am a Deist, not a Christian, although I tend to side with the Christians and Jews against the Muslims because the Muslims are still stoning people to death, while the Christians and Jews haven't done anything like that for a long time.

I don't believe that the Bible was written by God, it was written by people who may have believed they were being inspired by God. The Creation story is mythology at its finest. Since there were no eyewitnesses to the Creation, we can assume that it is a made up story. As with most mythology, it probably wasn't made up by a single person pulling an all-nighter in his college dorm. It's more likely that the story evolved over centuries of telling and retelling long before it was written down. It's possible that it was never intended to be believed literally, its value being largely allegorical. The reason I'm interested in this story, and mythology in general, is that it tells me something about the mindset of the people who told it and heard it told so long ago.

Some of the other creation stories of the era have their gods fabricating the world and its inhabitants out of salvaged parts left over from some cataclysmic event like a war or natural disaster. Others have them using basic raw materials like mud or clay. There are actually two creation stories in Genesis, three if you count the one where the sons of God interbred with the daughters of men, fathering a race of giants or heroes. In one version, God does indeed make man out of mud or clay, but most of the other stuff was created by verbal command: "And God said, 'Let there be light', and there was light."
Here we have a god who commands things into existence. Then He makes man "in His own image", and gives him dominion over all the other creatures, which indicates that He thinks we are something special. Instead of being chained to the Wheel of Life, which runs us over with every revolution, our destiny is to invent the wheel, then the axle, then the wagon, then hitch up a couple of oxen and train them to pull the wagon for us.

Does art imitate life, or does life imitate art? Maybe a little of both, and the same can be said for mythology.