Creation Stories

When people first started to think about how the Earth was created, there were many different theories and stories that varied greatly from place to place. The Native American Tribes, for example, all had very different views and opinions on how everything began. The Onondaga Tribe was a polytheistic group located in present-day central New York State, and they had very different views compared to the Christians, who have a monotheistic religion. The Christian religion was centered mostly in Europe, where it had a large amount of followers. The Native Americans and the Europeans lived a great distance from each other and didn’t even know of each other’s existence until the late 1400s. Though the two have

Who made who? Did God create humans or did humans create god? At first thought one

Understanding the bible, both in its inspiration and authority, shapes how we decipher the stories in the bible and how we receive messages and revelations from God. Fundamentalists and Contextualists have profoundly different assumptions and perspectives when reading bible stories which impacts the messages they receive. In this essay I will address the point of views taken from a Fundamentalists and Contextualist in regards to the world and the human creation accounts, the miracle stories told in the Gospel writings and the story of Mary near the cross at Jesus’ crucifixion.

There was only water and bare, empty land. In the center of this nothingness was a great mountain. This mountain stood tall and proud and it reached all the way into the heavens. At the very top of this mountain lived a pair of every kind of animal. In the center of this heaven grew a tree. This tree was not just any tree, it was the sacred tree of life, and it was not to be harmed in any way.

For thousands of years, scientists have tried to interpret the concept of creation. However, before people had access to modern scientific equipment, they told creations stories. A creation story is a myth that explains how and why the earth was made. A few cultures with differing opinions on creation are Europeans, Cherokee Indians, West Africans, and Hawaiians. Europeans tell the story of Genesis and God creating the earth in seven days and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Cherokee Indians believe that the earth was created by a water beetle. In West African culture, they teach the Golden Chain story, and Hawaiians have the Kumulipo story to explain their beliefs on creation. Although each story follows a basic guideline, they all have distinct disparities.

It is important to believe in something. There are many fascinating, mysterious aspects of life which cannot be revealed scientifically. Creation stories help us explain the unexplainable. There’s a big variety of them , different societies and different beliefs. Every culture provides its own narration of the creation of the world, each unique but containing themes that are universal to many civilizations. Genesis is the Hebrew people’s idea of how it all began, how humans came to be. Popol Vuh sums up the Mayan people’s theory of the Earth’s birth. Even though all that the gods in both of the stories want is obedience, their attitude toward the people contrasts one another, which leads to the idea that the Hebrew society values honesty

One of the fundamental questions that religions seek to answer is that of origin. How was man put on earth? Why and from what was he created? Who created him? What does his creation imply about the status of human beings? Some or all of these questions are answered by a religion’s creation stories. Every religion’s creation myths attempt to give solutions to problems present to that religious society. Because of this, each religion may have one or more creation stories, each of those different from one another in the questions they ask and the answers they give.

By Faith we believe that God created the Natural World that He is the creator of all things. He is the source of all that live, and spoke the world into existence. The Bible begins with “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genisis1:1) In Romans 1:20 (NLT) Paul tells us “For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, they can clearly see his invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature. So they have no excuse for not knowing God.” God took a blank canvas and used his brush to paint a masterpiece called planet Earth. With us in mind, he painted magnificent sunrises and sunsets, mountains, animals, the stars, moon and the sky. “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” (Psalm 19:1 NIV) Sadly man set to out to invalidate creation and to take the glory away from God. Man had become wicked and began to follow after their own desires. “They exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creation

They trust their faith because “The Bible Tells Me So.” The books of each religion explain why everything is the way it is and each religion teaches at very young ages, so how could it be wrong? It has “always been” so it must be the truth. When I was younger I would come home from school complaining to my mom about science class. “Why don’t they leave everything alone and just say it is that way because God made it that way? The grass is green because God wanted it to be.

Studies have shown that people who are the most religious believe more in magic and superstitious. “If we are so focused on a powerful “God” who controls our destiny, why do we not wonder who created?” questions like this come from those who have the strongest; belief in God himself (Carter 4). 70 percent of church goers do not fully believe in the back of their religion, or believe or what is supposed to happen after their death (Carter 5). With religious belief, there is no true religion. The more known religions is how an individual is born and raised into maturity. There are big differences in religion based on the theme of the nation. Most people who are born into a certain religion, there really is no changing it (Carter 6). In various parts of the world, mankind in based on superstition is the high advent of technology will slowly but surely distinigrate. Religion as it is, very few people will try and hold onto what they

The Christian world view tells us in Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (ESV). This is the basis for our real story of how the world begun. The world on the other hand has many different stories, some believe we evolved from apes after a cosmic big bang created the universe, some believe in their own deity who created the world. As Bartholomew and Goheen point out, in today’s world there is a commitment to pluralism. They state that this world believes that we “should not even look for any such overarching story, one that could be true for all people, all communities, all nations – for to find such a thing would imply that not all stories are equally valid” (Bartholomew & Goheen, 2009, p. 12).

We now see these theories as inaccurate, due to the fact that they have been replaced by newer scientific models. In a modern light, it can be stated that creation myths describe not the origin of our cosmos but rather these myths allow us to gain a broader understanding of ancient theories and beliefs. During the time of their invention however, these myths were precisely an honest interpretation of the outer world, and therefore they served the exact purpose which is stated in their title, to explain the process of creation.

We probably all believe that we got here either, by accident, being created by a superior being or both. The Jews and Christians both believe that they were created by a superior being named: God. The Judeo-Christian tradition is that God created the earth over the course of six days and that He rested on the seventh day. Genesis 1 also states that He made man in His own image, this is something that I agree with as a Christian. However how do others believe we got here? They either believe that we arrived here by accident, or by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, that is mentioned in his book The Origin of Species by Natural Selection. These ideas have been around for more than 250 years and people have seemed to side with either the Judeo-Christian tradition or Darwin’s theory of creation.

A creation story is a supernatural story or explanation that describes the beginnings of humanity, earth, life, and the universe. Religion plays a significant role in the establishment of Creation for both the Native Americans and the Puritans. “The people known collectively as the Iroquois were made up of the Mohawk, Seneca, Oneida, Onondaga, and Cayuga nations.” (Cusick 21) “The Iroquois creation myth exists in some twenty-five versions.” (Cusick 22). However, there was no concrete indication from a Native American that coincides with the Iroquois’s belief as of how and when the creation of the world began until David Cusick, transcribed and translated an Iroquois cosmogonic myth in the nineteenth century. David Cusick became the first Native American to record on Atotarho. Grounded in nature the Iroquois religion portrays the natural foundations of the world and continue to believe that all things/people should live in harmony. The Iroquois believes that The Great Spirit would indirectly guide the lives of ordinary people and opposed that The Great Spirit and other forces of good were Evil Spirit and other lesser spirits responsible for disease and other misfortune. Corn, beans, and squash were referred to as the three sisters and thought of as deities or spiritual beings. The Iroquois believed that ordinary humans could not communicate directly with Great Spirit but could do so indirectly by burning tobacco, which carried their prayers to the lesser spirits

How were human beings created? How has life come to be? How was the earth created? These are some very important questions that humans have tried to answer for ages. In an attempt to answer these questions, different cultures around the world developed different beliefs. Some believe that they are many gods watching over them, while others believe that there is only one supreme God. Some believe that humans were created by an explosion while others believed that a God or gods created them. Today, I will be analyzing two different creation stories, Genesis, the Christian creation story and “The Creation and Emergence” story by the Jicarilla Apaches. While some differences between the two are evident, the similarities are noticeable.