As the Genesis story teaches, knowledge cannot save us from ourselves. If we know more than before, it means only that we have greater scope to enact our fantasies. But – as the Genesis myth also teaches – there is no way we can rid ourselves of what we know. If we try to regain a state of innocence, the result can only be a worse madness. The message of Genesis is that in the most vital areas of human life there can be no progress, only an unending struggle with our own nature.

The passage from Genesis points to a mystery greater still. It says that we came from farther away than space and longer ago than time. It says that evolution and genetics and environment explain a lot about us but they don’t explain all about us or even the most important thing about us. It says that though we live in the world, we can never really be at home in the world. It says in short not only that we were created by God but also that we were created in God’s image and likeness. We have something of God within us the way we have something of the stars.

Alone of all the animals, man’s actions are not predicated by his membership in a species. In the spirit of Judeo-Christian monotheism, it is thus necessary that he could have “acted” differently. In short, Yahweh would have preferred that man had not emerged from “nature.” This is the meaning of the story told in the first chapters of Genesis. As long as the “first men” were only “natural beings,” as long as their humanization had not truly been achieved, they could not fully display their creative powers. They could not set themselves up as rivals of Yahweh.

The cosmology of the ancient world was telling you about the nature of life here and now. Genesis is not about the origins of life. There were many other creation stories current in Israel at that time and no one was required to believe in that one.

Either the first eleven chapters of Genesis . . . are true, or the whole fabrick of our national religion is false, a conclusion which none of us, I trust, would wish to be drawn.

The world's rulers got their position by following the philosophy of the Old Testament, which uses allegory, parable, myth and legend in an historical setting to show how a people must live in relationship to nature's laws if they wish to survive. It teaches ruthless removal or extermination of others in order to establish exclusive territories. It teaches fertility. It teaches war, plunder, sex and living within the reality of this life on this earth in the present. It teaches an exclusive God and the "chosenness" of one's own people. All this is necessary for racial survival. On the other hand, those to be conquered and enslaved are taught 180° the opposite, the New Testament, to be exact. Despite a few transparent efforts to tie the Testaments together, their fundamental philosophies are as opposed as master to slave. Imperialism and its whoring cousin Universalism were its reason for birth and its legacy. Submission and slavery are its creed. A hope for afterlife and abandonment of the struggle for life in this reality are its poison. Unearned eternal pleasure is its sweet seduction. The murder of the White race is its effect.

[My father] was always very adamant about one thing - if you can't trust the Book of Genesis as literal history, then you can't trust the rest of the Bible. After all, every single doctrine of biblical theology is founded in the history of Genesis 1-11. My father had not developed his thinking in this area as much as we have today at Answers in Genesis, but he clearly understood that if Adam wasn't created from dust, and that if he didn't fall into sin as Genesis states, then the gospel message of the New Testament can't be true either.

The book of Genesis is a male declaration of independence from the ancient mother-cults. Its challenge to nature, so sexist to modern ears, marks one of the crucial moments in western history. Mind can never be free of matter. Only by mind imagining itself free can culture advance. The mother-cults, by reconciling man to nature, entrapped him in matter. Everything great in western civilization has come from struggling against our origins. Genesis is rigid and unjust, but it gave man hope as a man. It remade the world by male dynasty, canceling the power of mothers.

And this is an amazing thing: the answer is already implicit in Genesis 1: to embody the Image of God — to speak out of chaos the Being that is Good — but to do so consciously, of our own free choice.

I have discovered in the Hebrew Bible teachings of righteousness, humaneness, and human dignity—at the source of my parents' teachings of mentschlichkeit—undreamt of in my prior philosophizing. In the idea that human beings are equally God-like, equally created in the image of the divine, I have seen the core principle of a humanistic and democratic politics, respectful of each and every human being, and a necessary correction to the uninstructed human penchant for worshiping brute nature or venerating mighty or clever men. In the Sabbath injunction to desist regularly from work and the flux of getting and spending, I have discovered an invitation to each human being, no matter how lowly, to step outside of time, in imitatio Dei, to contemplate the beauty of the world and to feel gratitude for its—and our—existence. In the injunction to honor your father and your mother, I have seen the foundation of a dignified family life, for each of us the nursery of our humanization and the first vehicle of cultural transmission. I have satisfied myself that there is no conflict between the Bible, rightly read, and modern science, and that the account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis offers "not words of information but words of appreciation," as Abraham Joshua Heschel put it: "not a description of how the world came into being but a song about the glory of the world's having come into being"—the recognition of which glory, I would add, is ample proof of the text's claim that we human beings stand highest among the creatures. And thanks to my Biblical studies, I have been moved to new attitudes of gratitude, awe, and attention. For just as the world as created is a world summoned into existence under command, so to be a human being in that world—to be a mentsch—is to live in search of our ­summons. It is to recognize that we are here not by choice or on account of merit, but as an undeserved gift from powers not at our disposal. It is to feel the need to justify that gift, to make something out of our indebtedness for the opportunity of existence. It is to stand in the world not only in awe of its and our existence but under an obligation to answer a call to a worthy life, a life that does honor to the special powers and possibilities—the divine-likeness—with which our otherwise animal existence has been, no thanks to us, endowed.

[Old Testament] is mythology combined with many ancient stories of both Aryan design and, as in the case of Esther, Jewish design; the point is the philosophy... Jews followed the philosophy of the Old Testament and conquered the world. It teaches taking power, plunder and taking women. Its rewards and punishments are for the whole tribe and within the reality of this world. See Deuteronomy 28. In accord with natural law its moral absolute is preservation of one's own kind, as demonstrated by all living things. Genesis 19 (especially v. 32) makes it clear that all secondary laws, be they about sex, money, government or anything else, must conform to the first or primal law, the preservation of the seed line. Secondary laws are the invention of men and may change as fits the age or the circumstances, but reproduction and preservation of one's own kind supersedes all else.

Either the first eleven chapters of Genesis, all due allowances being made for a figurative Eastern style, are true, or the whole fabrick of our national religion is false.

The very beginning of Genesis tells us that God created man in order to give him dominion over fish and fowl and all creatures. Of course, Genesis was written by a man, not a horse.