The 10 blogs that I commented on were by the following people:
1. Georgenna Blake
2. Krystal Cansler
3. Asya Hayes
4. Thao Hoang
5. Corneleius Kennedy
6. Ashley Reeves
7. Sandra Brown
8. Terin Lewis
9. Pilar Hamilton
10. Dominique Tomlinson

The creation myths that we have read class have had many things in common. They were all produced in order to validate present social and political order. Many of the creation myths came about as curiosity amongst humans as to where their origins may lie. All of the creation stories used the power of a higher being as deciding who, what, when, where and how a species of people were created. The stories all began with the creation of the heavens and the earth and from this a higher being was able to produce the first human.
Enuma Elish dates back to the time of Hammurabi the Great. It parallels to the bible by the fact that the author states that humans were made in the image of God. This can be found also in Genesis. Also, in the Bible, Yahweh slays a dragon that is causing chaos within the world. This occurs in Enumma Elish by the fact that Tiamat, is described as a sea creature of some sort, and she must be killed because she is not avenging her husbands death.
Atum and Genesis 1 have the commonality that they both came about by thought. In Genesis 1, God says “Let there be ….”. He merely thought of what he wanted and eventually it was created. This is also the case with the creation story of Atum.
The creation story that I found most interesting is that of Enuma Elish. I enjoyed this story because, it involves action and a little suspense. In the tale, Apsu consults with his counselor and comes up with the idea of killing all of the children to rid the town of noise. He confronts his wife, Tiamat, and tells her of his plans. While informing his wife, Ea over hears his plan and he plots to kill his dad and capture Mummu; he accomplishes this goal. After Ea kills Apsu, the Gods are still unable to sleep due to Tiamat not avenging her husband’s death. Tiamat remarries a guy by the name of Kingu. Tiamat engages in a fight with Marduk. Marduk captures Tiamat in a net and sends her before the monarchy. They open up her mouth to fill her with air, he then shoots her in the belly with an arrow, that in turn divides her body in half and the two halves of her body create the heaven and the earth. Her husband, Kingu, is found guilty at trial. Ea cuts his Kingu’s arteries and his blood is used to create the first humans.
Tiglath-Pileser was an Assyrian king who described himself to be a natural philosopher, because as he killed and captured towns, he would bring back their botanicals. Tiglath-Pileser recorded all of victories onto copper plates. But, he had a tendency to exaggerate what really happened. On the plates, Tiglath-Pileser recorded that he killed 20,000 soldiers and 5 kings, but in actuality it may have been more like 100 soldiers and 1 king or no king at all. This deals with biblical studies by the fact that although the Bible is supposed to be a true account, no one can ever be certain that everything in the Bible is true. We can only speculate about what is true and what we should divide by Dr. Homan’s bullshit factor of four.
The Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh have numerous aspects in common. For one, they both describe a flood and how it came about. In both books, the floods came about due to God’s anger with humanity. He felt the need to start over and wipe out all of the humans except for a chosen few, that being Gilgamesh and Noah. They both contain a snake that caused a chain reaction of misfortune. In the tale of Adam and Eve, a snake convinced Eve that eating from the tree of knowledge would not do anything o them and that God wanted the tree to himself. This caused them to be evicted from the Garden of Eden. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, a snake eats the plant that Gilgamesh is told would grant him immortality this forces him to remain mortal.
Three etiologies of Genesis is pain in child birth, why snakes crawl on their bellies and the reason why farming is hard work.
My etiology why students at Xavier University have to take s theology course is because Xavier is historical Catholic university, with Catholic being the keyword. Catholics have a strong belief system that involves a close connection with God. Therefore, Xavier is determined to help its student gain a closer connection to God spiritually, regardless of religion.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 at 12:29 am and is filed under Class Comments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.