Tag: Earth
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A Fresh Look at Genesis One
In the beginning, the Bible had no chapters and verses. The creation of biblical chapters took place around the year 1227; of verses in the Hebrew Bible around 1448; and of verses in the New Testament around 1555. In other words, these internal divisions are neither original nor ‘authoritative’, though now more or less universally…
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The things that you’re liable to read in the Bible …
Apparently, there are still some people who believe that the Earth is flat and, presumably, at least some of them are not joking. Equally unreal (at least to me) is that there are also people who believe the entire Bible to be literally true and historically accurate, all without errors of any kind. It’s unquestionably…
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Voices in the Wilderness of Time and Space?
“Welcome to planet Earth – a place of blue nitrogen skies, oceans of liquid water, cool forests and soft meadows, a world positively rippling with life. In the cosmic perspective it is poignantly beautiful and rare; but it is also, for the moment, unique. In all our journeying through space and time, it is, so…
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The ‘Sober’ Truth about the Solstice
The English word ‘solstice’ comes from the Latin ‘solstitium’, meaning the ‘Sun standing still’. Around the 20th/21st December, the Sun slumps down to lie at its lowest point above the horizon. It needs a few days to ‘chill out’ before beginning, so slowly at first, to clamber its long way back to higher things, with…
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“Here comes the Sun”
WE’RE inclined to forget that the Sun, which we so enjoy when it’s shining on us (but not too fiercely), and which we so much miss when the days are short-lived and freezing, is a furiously raging nuclear furnace. It’s turning hydrogen into helium, and releasing the resultant energy in everything from blistering surface bubbles…
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Genesis One – Us, Images, and Subduing
“God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness, so they may rule … over all the earth … and subdue it.’ Firstly, to whom is God referring when he uses the plural “us” and “our” in relation to “image” and “likeness”? The answer is to be found in the literary and…
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Poem on his Birthday (part iii) – Dylan Thomas
Stanza 9. The struggle between belief in God and undermining doubt continues from stanza 8, where Thomas ‘prays .. faithlessly to Him‘. The ‘young Heaven’s fold‘ of stanza 7 is now ‘old and air shaped‘ like a blown up balloon, thin-skinned and liable to burst, especially if threatened by ‘souls‘, like Thomas’s, ever disposed to…
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In Country Heaven (Dylan Thomas)
This poem was left unfinished at the time of Thomas’s death in 1953. There was an early draft of 43 lines, and this later re-written section of 16 lines. It’s a poem that arose from a harrowing vision Thomas had of the Earth’s destruction, the atomic bombing of Japan having made such a possibility terrifyingly…
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Genesis 1: A Critique (i)
GENESIS 1, a mythical account of the ‘creation’ of the world, is an impressive piece of work. We have a self-confident and authoritative God, unseen but heard, whose mere word, like a verbal snap of the fingers, creates order, structure and life, from what was originally chaotic, barren and inert. The six daily stages of…
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