Adam Goes to Hell in a BMW

Crazy, isn’t it. Elliot Rodger, 22, killing a bunch of people and then himself, because, he says, “a beautiful environment can be the darkest hell if you have to experience it all alone.” Girls weren’t attracted to him, he says, and he can’t figure out why. Clearly impressed with Elliot’s life, Jon Swartz, who wrote the USA Today news article, mentions Rodger’s BMW five times.

Elliot in fact did not have to experience it all alone. One wonders (1) why Elliot didn’t just get in his BMW and drive across town looking where the girls are, girls are all over the alphabet place and millions of girls would have gotten into the BMW even with a creep like Elliot; (2) why Elliot and suicidally, murderously angry people like him are driven to kill innocent people, why they don’t just shoot themselves and be done with it; (3) whether Elliot was, objectively, a creep: some people just creep you out; and (4) why these creeps are always male.

This is Sunday, so there needs to be something religious here this morning. OK, here’s a theological contemplation and proposition. Adam is the enemy. Why, then, when he was speaking Genesis 1, didn’t God say only “woman”? Why, after he had created the garden in Genesis 2, didn’t God just scoop up dirt, make Adama and let the Holy Spirit come upon her? Why, by the time Noah came along when God was so displeased with us, didn’t God begin again with a Truly New Creation, drown the lot of us and start over as Satan suggests in The Bible according to Mark Twain?

This wasn’t my intended trail when I swung my feet out of bed onto the floor this morning, but it’s one more bit of evidence that I don’t take the trail, the trail takes me. Upon arising, I thought to ponder why, being willing to examine, revise, update and rebuild everything around us, we aren’t willing to have another go at the Nicene Creed. Instead of a bunch of frustrated old male bishops obsessed with sex and power and BMWs, a Council of Grandmothers could work it out. It wouldn’t be incomprehensible this time around. And before adjourning, they could call upon the Holy Spirit and write us males out of Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 altogether, and let Adam go to hell.  

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