April 16, 2010

Mount Sinai Revisted, And It's About Time

My friend and fellow artist Mark Dixon wrote the following in response to my Orange Embers post with regard to the accuracy in the Bible of the historical event involving our friend Moses:

As Moses climbed down the mountain with the first set of tablets (and it sounds like he hadn't had time to read them yet), he saw his people acting like fools and smashed the tablets in anger. So he had to
climb back up and ask God for another set. I've always wondered...what if the replacements didn't say the same thing as the originals?

Imagine for a moment you're God. Moses took off climbing down the mountain. You're relaxing with a bite size Three Musketeers and chuckling quietly to yourself about what a brilliant idea it was to
create candy. Then there's this little trudge-trudge-trudge sound and Moses's head pops up over the mountainside. He's back, but without the tablets. You raise an eyebrow and hide the candy wrapper because Moses is like 8th century BC and he's not supposed to know about that yet. Moses walks over to you and gives you this lame story about getting angry at his people and smashing the tablets. Great.

Are you gonna take the time to re-write all the secrets of the universe (you know, like the physical world is a hologram, you can never receive more than you give, all living creatures respond to
light, time travel is possible but perpetual motion is not, life on earth exists in a delicate balance that is easily fucked up, you will never create a situation that you can't learn from, we are all created
to live in duality with another, one earthrise as viewed from the moon will tell you everything you need to know about time, etc., etc., the usual secrets of the universe stuff) or are you gonna just jot down ten basic rules for dummies (don't kill, don't steal, don't lie) and send him back?

4 comments:

Ed Pilolla said...

why do i feel like i want to understand more about the ways of the universe as you have laid them out, while i can remember hearing about the 10 commandments way back when and thinking, how basic is that??

the answers are inside us, not in some book they've handed to us and told us we must believe in totally and completely.

Tori MacLennan said...

I love this!

Ed Pilolla said...

your humor gets lost in the big ideas. i've been chuckling myself all day at this: 'Imagine for a moment you're God. Moses took off climbing down the mountain. You're relaxing with a bite size Three Musketeers and chuckling quietly to yourself about what a brilliant idea it was to
create candy.'

thinkingtoohard said...

"you will never create a situation you can't learn from."
omg - give me a bag of bite-sized three musketeers so i can ponder that one line for a few days.