I’m intrigued by the balance between God often being portrayed as omnipotent and omniscient, yet will also display human-like flaws, emotions, and shortcomings. This leads to an interest in the internal methods in which people reconcile these double standards with the non-faith side of their intellect. In the Pima creation story, The Creator tries to make something, like ants, but it turns out that they don’t accomplish the purpose he put them there for. The same thing happens when he tries to make people, his recipe went wrong and all they want to do is smoke.

So he scraps the idea like a balled up piece of paper. Does God get writers block? “Bah, that’s no good at all!” The omnipotent God is more deeply associated with the Christian God, but there are plenty of examples when he behaves in a way that’s humanly passive aggressive, or at least it makes me think: really, you couldn’t have figured out a better way to accomplish this or send your message? In the Sodom and Gomorrah story, there are people in the cities that don’t obey God’s lifestyle laws, so he kills the whole city with fire, including all the God fearing residents. Was there no other way to teach the deserving people a lesson with the unlimited creativity and resources that God is famed to have?

It’s possible that the Pima people actually register their creation story’s imperfection and acknowledge it as a quality inherent in the world… even God himself isn’t perfect? – which I think leads to a healthier, more realistic expectation and perception of the world, and especially the environment, that the world wasn’t designed as an infinitely self-restocking country club. When there’s less of an image of ‘perfection’ being drilled into your head, you’re less likely to want to escape reality… or live only for the afterlife. Arrested Development is a music group that wrote a song called Fishin 4 Religion, part of the lyrics go … “Pastor tells the lady it’ll be alright, just pray so you can see the pearly gates so white… But the word cope and the word change is directly opposite, not the same… She should’ve been trying to change her woes, but the pastor said ‘pray to cope with those’”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKyuZgseyQ4 .

But I think embedded in the Christian tradition is a sense that even though humans were given dominion in Genesis, God has ALL this control over nature and he can do absolutely anything he wants, like engulf a wicked city in flame, or chop down a mountain with the side of his hand like a voodoo child, or make a mountain instead! This was before geological sciences revealed fault lines though. So as technology built on itself, and the potential to steer toward a more cautious and inquisitive path was there, it was blanketed by the constant narrative to turn away from eco-centric thinking, rooted in the idea that we control God’s land, but God controls what happens to it.