To Christians who aren't creationists

[The Grand Nudger]

I see a fairy tale that speaks to what the authors felt to be an idyllic life before the sweat and toil of their own became a reality. A paradisical garden from which they hailed, (and to which they can never return, as it is lost to them), early expressions of the notions of a "golden age" which in each and every generation has been invoked as a thing of the past, the domain of the waning or long dead generations of men. I see the perceived virtues of living a life in which the land provides of it's own accord, and later, in which the shepherd upon those lands is favored over those that would toil against the "will" of their environment, proudly and vainly attempting to create for themselves a new garden, a new land. The notion that some things, once done or known cannot be undone, unknown. The consequences of our decisions. The regrets of the people who felt party to those decisions.

That, to me, seems richer and more useful than any invocations of magical beasties and the life they are said to have lain out for us.

I also see a very common (mis)understanding of the cosmos, borrowed from those peoples whom the authors clearly had great respect for in this regard at least. I also see the ethnocentric tendencies of a tribe when explaining their own origins as that of being special or favored by some divine providence, their positive value judgements of their own way of life over that of those people who lived around them. I see the pragmatism of supernatural explanations in that these people did not require an explanation for the things which the stories invoke, only how those things related to themselves. I also see a people who were completely and wholly ignorant of their actual origins, of the factual reality of the cosmos and how and when they (and it) came to be what it was.

There isn't anything more to genesis than ourselves. There is no god in it's pages, there are no origins in it's explanations. It isn't a story about how we've been led astray from any cosmic being, but how the authors felt that they had led themselves astray from what they perceived to be an idyllic existence.