What's up with creationism?

[Catholic_Lady]

I don't know, you'd have to ask the people who wrote it. Perhaps just for the sake of telling a story rather than just saying "God created everything. The end." After all, that was the style of writing back then. A lot of poetry, allegory, metaphor, figurative speech, etc. Yes, the Old Testament was inspired by God but it wasn't written by God. It was written by men from thousands of years ago.

That seems like a pretty inefficient way to get a message across; I don't understand why an omnipotent, omnipresent being would constrain itself to the limitations of bronze age tribals.
If God wanted to communicate a message to people, why, of all the ways he could have done it, did he decide to "inspire" a handful of desert dwelling nomads in an isolated portion of the world to present his message in the form of vague parables and spread it by way of centuries of genocide, ignorance and atrocity? How many indigenous peoples were slaughtered or enslaved so that this message could get across? How many people were subjected to unspeakable torture and atrocity? How many were burned at the stake? How much violence has arisen out of disagreements over these vague texts? How much suffering have people endured simply because God couldn't think of a better way to communicate?

The thing is, how God went about creating the world isn't important in a religious sense. The important part is that we believe, one way or another, He did. The bible isn't meant to be a science book. Also, the story of Genesis needed to be told in a way that people from 6,000 years ago would understand, and in a way that people from 6,000 years ago would write it. Do you think those people would understand anything about science/evolution/the big bang at that time? It needed to be told in a way that could reach people... the priority was getting the point across that God is the creator and that human beings have the free will to choose between good and evil. 

As for the rest of your post, I think people would have killed each other over disagreements regardless of how clearly the bible was written. People have a tendency to fight over the things that are most important to them. At one point, that was religion. Then it was land. Now it's politics (unless you're in the middle east). For the most part, humanity as a whole seems to be becoming more civilized and aren't out for blood all the time like we used to be. I'd like to think things are getting better on a whole.