Genesis Movie Quotes

I especially loved the Old Testament. Even as a kid I had a sense of it being slightly illicit. As though someone had slipped an R-rated action movie into a pile of Disney DVDs. For starters Adam and Eve were naked on the first page. I was fascinated by Eve's ability to always stand in the Garden of Eden so that a tree branch or leaf was covering her private areas like some kind of organic bakini. But it was the Bible's murder and mayhem that really got my attention. When I started reading the real Bible I spent most of my time in Genesis Exodus 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. Talk about violent. Cain killed Abel. The Egyptians fed babies to alligators. Moses killed an Egyptian. God killed thousands of Egyptians in the Red Sea. David killed Goliath and won a girl by bringing a bag of two hundred Philistine foreskins to his future father-in-law. I couldn't believe that Mom was so happy about my spending time each morning reading about gruesome battles prostitutes fratricide murder and adultery. What a way to have a "quiet time." While I grew up with a fairly solid grasp of Bible stories I didn't have a clear idea of how the Bible fit together or what it was all about. I certainly didn't understand how the exciting stories of the Old Testament connected to the rather less-exciting New Testament and the story of Jesus. This concept of the Bible as a bunch of disconnected stories sprinkled with wise advice and capped off with the inspirational life of Jesus seems fairly common among Christians. That is so unfortunate because to see the Bible as one book with one author and all about one main character is to see it in its breathtaking beauty.

The consummation of a revelation is always dependent upon its genesis.

Why do people attend the movies and go dancing? Because [327] they are empty. They do not have God as their joy. The reason I do not attend the movies is not because the church has a regulation against it. The church does not have a list of commandments against such things. However, although there is no such prohibition, I would not attend a movie even if you paid me thousands of dollars to do it. I have something better. I am filled with Christ and I have no capacity for anything else.

The genesis of virtually all of Blockbuster’s difficulties came from its lack of intellectual curiosity, the ultimate example of which was the inept mismanagement of its massive movie viewing database. They never developed this goldmine of information that would have given them an incomparable base of knowledge with which to lead, instead of always following. When being biggest was not enough, Blockbuster lacked the business intelligence to know what to do next.

Eli: Write everything exactly as I say it. The first book of Moses, called Genesis. Chapter 1, verse 1. In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. Eli: Verse 2. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Eli: Verse 3. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.

Methuselah, being raised by a godly parent, Enoch (who walked with God and was translated to heaven without death), was surely righteous as well (Hebrews 11:53). His death surely preceded the Flood unlike what is portrayed in the unbiblical movie Noah with Russell Crowe and Darren Aronofsky. Some have suggested that Methuselah died immediately before the Flood and hence a seven-day mourning period was in order. This possibly makes sense of why Noah was given seven days until the Flood came (e.g., Genesis 7:44

Dart initially echoed Darwin’s theory that bipedalism freed the hands of early hominins to make and use hunting tools, which in turn selected for big brains, hence better hunting abilities. Then, in a famous 1953 paper, clearly influenced by his war experiences, Dart proposed that the first humans were not just hunters but also murderous predators.18 Dart’s words are so astonishing, you have to read them: The loathsome cruelty of mankind to man forms one of his inescapable characteristics and differentiative features; and it is explicable only in terms of his carnivorous, and cannibalistic origin. The blood-bespattered, slaughter-gutted archives of human history from the earliest Egyptian and Sumerian records to the most recent atrocities of the Second World War accord with early universal cannibalism, with animal and human sacrificial practices of their substitutes in formalized religions and with the world-wide scalping, head-hunting, body-mutilating and necrophilic practices of mankind in proclaiming this common bloodlust differentiator, this predaceous habit, this mark of Cain that separates man dietetically from his anthropoidal relatives and allies him rather with the deadliest of Carnivora. Dart’s killer-ape hypothesis, as it came to be known, was popularized by the journalist Robert Ardrey in a best-selling book, African Genesis, that found a ready audience in a generation disillusioned by two world wars, the Cold War, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, political assassinations, and widespread political unrest.19 The killer-ape hypothesis left an indelible stamp on popular culture including movies like Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange. But the Rousseauians weren’t dead yet. Reanalyses of bones in the limestone pits from which fossils like the Taung Baby came showed they were killed by leopards, not early humans.20 Further studies revealed these early hominins were mostly vegetarians. And as a reaction to decades of bellicosity, many scientists in the 1970s embraced evidence for humans’ nicer side, especially gathering, food sharing, and women’s roles. The most widely discussed and audacious hypothesis, proposed by Owen Lovejoy, was that the first hominins were selected to become bipeds to be more cooperative and less aggressive.21 According to Lovejoy, early hominin females favored males who were better at walking upright and thus better able to carry food with which to provision them. To entice these tottering males to keep coming back with food, females encouraged exclusive long-term monogamous relationships by concealing their menstrual cycles and having permanently large breasts (female chimps advertise when they ovulate with eye-catching swellings, and their breasts shrink when they are not nursing). Put crudely, females selected for cooperative males by exchanging sex for food. If so, then selection against reactive aggression and frequent fighting is as old as the hominin lineage.22

Few of the great figures in the Old Testament are worthy of much respect based upon their own virtues. From Genesis onward we see lies, drunkenness, sexual failures, prostitution, idolatry, and more. The impulse to whitewash these characters is misguided, based on a moralistic way of thinking about what it means to be a Christian. They were failures, messy men and women whose lives matter eternally because they inherited God’s promises, not because they lived lives of unbending faithfulness. If we try to frame them all as moral heroes, we end up projecting that expectation onto ordinary Christians, and we lose an important core fact of the gospel: it’s an announcement that frees sinners from the bondage of their failure and the tyranny of a standard they can never live up to.

EACH INCREMENT OF THE ARTIST'S JOURNEY IS A HERO'S JOURNEY We experience our life as dull and ordinary. But beneath the surface, something powerful and transformative is brewing. Suddenly the light bulb goes off. We've got a new idea! An idea for a novel, a movie, a startup . . . Except immediately we perceive the downside. We become daunted. Our idea is too risky, we fear. We're afraid we can't pull it off. We hesitate, until . . . We're having coffee with a friend. We tell her our idea. "I love it," she says. "You've gotta do it." Fortified, we rally. We commit. We begin. This is the pattern for the genesis of any creative work. It's also, in Joseph Campbell terms, "the Ordinary World," "The Call," "Refusal of the Call," "Meeting with the Mentor," and "Crossing the Threshold." In other words, the first five stages of the hero's journey. Keep going. As you progress on your project, you'll hit every other Campbellian beat, right down to the finish and release/publication, i.e., "The Return," bearing a "Gift for the People." This pattern will hold true for the rest of your life, through every novel, movie, dance, drama, work of architecture, etc. you produce. Every work is its own hero's journey.