wow, great day for those who let television define their reality (me) yesterday! Andries Knevel, who’s a host and sort of human ‘flag ship’ for Dutch evangelical television network ‘EO’, came out of the biblical closet and claimed he felt uncomfortable with broadcasts (especially in the seventies) in which Darwin’s theory of evolution (natural selection meets genetic drift) is ridiculed or at least is being portrayed as a stupid, senseless theory for everyone who loves the lord knows he created this planet in just six days (he worked day and night), added a seventh or resting day and created ‘the week’. Now, loads of Christians nowadays believe that God was there to initiate life on earth millions of years ago and then nature went its own way. It makes sense, maybe that’s what ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega’ means; ‘since I’m the start of it, I am the whole of it’. These new school softliners believe these six days are merely put down in a figure of speech, as a metaphore for ‘a while’. You gotta admit ‘six days’ might not be such a good metaphore for ‘millions of years’, but hey… at least it’s the bible’s way of saying ‘since we’re starting of by saying millions of years may be written down as six days in this book, maybe you shouldn’t take the rest of it as literally as… well people who take everything literally.’ right?
You can only imagine what happened next. All the other left wing god free networks were licking their lips. The EO’s director of staff was invited to be interviewed on the ‘most important’ dutch TV show, pretty old people in the dutch bible belt were asked about their opinion on this heathen charade and of course the C-EO was ashamed to admit his own view on how-it-all-started, afraid to losing even more members from his community. YES! finally, the shift had begun. We’re all experts on how muslims shouldn’t interpret the Koran like people did a thousand years ago, but when it comes to the good ol’ bible it’s ‘hands off the word of God!’.
Anyway, I experienced my own Christian renaissance only a month or so ago. In a bright moment I dicovered I never really experienced duality in my feelings for the God of Abraham and Moses, I just thought my thoughts on the after life and the love of God were incompatible. God, to me, is the greatest symbol of love humans just had to invent in order to keep themselves sane and in order to come up with some sort of ‘universal’ law. Now, the afterlife is the reward… I guess some really smart, yet stupid people reckoned ‘people aren’t going to just be good out of love, we gotta promise ’em something majestic, besides once they fall for it we can pretty much make ’em do anything we want to.’ Now I don’t believe in the afterlife anymore (but I gotta admit I had my doubts on that one before, hi hi), but I do believe that you should be as just as you can to others (people and animals). In other words, I believe that men should be as Godly as humanly possible because of –let’s call it– Karma, or because we’re in this together. I also believe that the first people who came up with ‘religion’ had not thought of the possibility that generations after them might not be aware of the human origin of their religion. They may have hoped for it, but they certainly wouldn’t have thought it would become such a major and powerful thing in our society. In a way it must have been like with those who first discovered fire… Hense: Ἃγιον Φῶς.
