Private schools run by conservative evangelical Christians – the flavour of faith associated in the United States with fundamentalist and creationist beliefs – are growing in number and prominence in Germany. Some 26,000 students attend about 80 evangelical schools (not to be confused with Germany’s mainstream Evangelisch Protestant churches). Half of these schools are represented by the new Association of Evangelical Schools, which advocates teaching creationism alongside evolution.
”The problem is very much underestimated in Germany,” says Thomas Junker, a professor of history of science at the University of Tübingen. ”In Germany, most scientists and biologists have tried to ignore it … Only now we’re realising that’s not the best way.”
The appalling irony is that Genesis is a stitched-together anthology of older, Mesopotamian tales that probably were concocted as entertainment. An early version of the Noah’s Ark tale may be found in Gilgamesh, for example, and Atrahasis quite likely served as the model for the Creation, Fall, and flood stories in Genesis.
In that tale, there are two ranks of gods. There are the big gods, who rule everything, and the little gods. The little gods get tired of doing all the work, and rebel, and are permitted to create men from the dust of the earth in order to use them as servants. Eventually, the men get noisy and bothersome, and must be punished.
Sound familiar? In Genesis, adapted to Jewish monotheism, God decides he wants a buddy, creates man from the dust of the earth, and puts him to work in his garden. Man rebels, and must be punished.
But there was an editorial slip-up when the tales were combined into Genesis. Notice verse 3:22.
And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
Ummm … us?
Atrahasis precedes the canonical version of Genesis by about 1400-years, though. Atrahasis includes a flood tale (the punishment of bothersome men), too, later incorporated into Gilgamesh and then Genesis.
There is no serious, educated dispute that Genesis is merely a late version of tales that circulated Mesopotamia for more than 1000-years, similar in their essential details but explicitly pagan.
And how did these stories originate? Almost certainly as after dinner entertainment, fantasy to please belabored Sumerian kings who probably sympathized with the little gods who needed workers but were obliged constantly to suppress them.
Today, the entertainments of more than 4000-years ago are undermining education throughout the West.
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