In the beginning was the introduction

Greetings - and welcome to my unremarkable guide to the Bible.
The Bible is a really quite remarkable book, it has been the top selling book since, well, forever. It was the first book published using movable type. It has been translated into more languages and dialects than any other book. People have been imprisoned for even owning a copy, executed for translating it.
The Bible is packed with famous stories and has been enjoyed, despised, banned, burned and smuggled, copied and printed, but I find in the western world very rarely read.

Just to clarify a couple of points  -

1                     I am an engineer by profession and not a priest or theologian

2                     I am a practicing Christian – though I am happy to admit that I need lots more practice as I often fail miserably.

3                     I find the bible boring, exciting, obvious, surprising, and outrageous and conformist – sometimes I find these all at once!

4                     I don’t have all (or indeed any) answers, and if it does not make sense to me hopefully I’ll be honest enough to say. Though I will pass my opinions.

The following are my thoughts on reading the Christian bible from Genesis chapter 1 to Revelation chapter 22. I plan to read this at the rate of about 1 chapter per day and keep this “diary” of my thoughts.

Hopefully some of the thoughts will make you go “hmm”, others will make you go “D’oh” and some you may have to decide that I am talking blatant rubbish and ignore. This is fine by me.

I don’t plan to go through a verse by verse commentary – there are hundreds of these, but rather give what strikes me in the chapter.

So without further ado – here we go “in the beginning”

Genesis Chapter 1

Whole books have been written on the subject of science and religion particularly where this chapter of the Bible is concerned. I don’t think I can avoid giving my view on this topic and keep both by Christian and Engineering/scientific credentials, so here goes.

In the BBC adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel “The lost world” one change the scriptwriters did was to introduce a religious nutter (played by Peter Falk) who argues with Professor Summerlee (Played by Edward Fox) about the Bible and Science (A deliberate ploy on the part of the writers) Summerlee says “You cannot use the Bible as a science textbook” To which he replies “No indeed, it is the word of God”

My thought on this is that to treat Genesis 1 as scientific history or absolutely accurate in modern scientific terms in the New International version of the bible is to miss the point – there are a couple of points on which this chapter and Science can agree

In the beginning – according to science the universe is about 13.77 Billion years old. So time and space begin at the moment of the big bang.

A repeating theme in every day (nearly) is God saw it and it was good.

Also note the first commandment in the entire Bible is not a “Don’t do that, stop that, it’s disgusting” but be fruitful and multiply.

More of mankind later – the first appearance has happened but no action – yet.