Church of the Rock: Genesis

My wife first thought up the idea for this piece as "The Church of the Rock" in 1995. We had been discussing the global warming issue and were in a rather pessimistic frame of mind. My wife’s rough first draft followed the biblical genesis story and established the dark humored satirical approach. My own feelings at the time were mixed. On the one hand, I believed that Homo sapiens were flawed as a species and were unlikely to be able to overcome their flaw to escape their ultimate fatal destiny. On the other hand, believing free will to be an aspect of reality, I maintained a slim hope the somehow humans might find a way to change our collective behavior and thereby avoid catastrophe.

In 1996 I completed what I thought of as a final version of the piece that expressed via the satire my mixed feelings. In this version I had set up a seven era structure to imitate the seven days of biblical creation, and I had removed God entirely. I then made an effort to find a publisher for the piece, but come up empty.

In 2001 My daughter introduced me to the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. Reading this and other Quinn writings (click here for the web site) improved my hopes somewhat for a while. Especially influential was the idea that our fatal destiny is not due to a species flaw, but instead is only a culturally based flaw. Unfortunately, I have been unable to maintain this higher level of hope.

When I was preparing this piece for the Buzz’s Place web page, I made two changes. First, I put God back into the piece to provide a context for mentioning one of Quinn’s ideas which I think is very relevant to the message. Second, I discovered that the "Church of the Rock" was already in use as the name of quite a few actual churches around the world. Since I have in the back of my mind the remote possibility that someday I might actually found a church based on the ideas of this piece, I decided to change the title.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE This document is copyright © 2003 by Buzz Bloom. All rights reserved.
It may be freely copied, reproduced, forwarded, and/or distributed in electronic form for personal and educational purposes provided you copy, reproduce, forward, and/or distribute it in its entirety. This means that all copies must include the following: the copy permission statement, this copyright notice, the Buzz's Place website title, and the full text of the document including the title, the author's name, and the date.

This document may not be distributed for profit or reproduced in printed form or in any edited form without the author's consent. A document may be distributed with a clearly distinct and separated appendix with notes and comments where the appendix has a clearly separate attribution of authorship.
You may contact the author using the comment space on the home page of the Buzz's Place website:
http://users.rcn.com/bbloom/

HOME