Why did I decide to blog this book “Columbus and the Holy Cross” one post at a time? I knew that I would essentially be writing a first draft while allowing the public to view the results, warts and all. Since you can go back and delete or edit published posts, however, I thought, “What the hell (yes, innocent babes do curse), just press on, try to monetize your website, grow your readership, and keep your head down until you finish the book. Then you can do a major revision before either searching for a literary agent or self-publishing.”
Little did I know that during the intense research phase, I would discover the shocking fact that only a third of American adults believe in scientific evolution; this contrasts with 80% of the European public who do believe in evolution. The rest of the public believes in Divine Creation or its apologetic sister, Intelligent Design, or they are thoughtless Americans who have no opinion one way or the other. Since Christianity plays such a huge role in the clash of cultures between the invading Europeans of Columbus and the indigenous natives of the Caribbean, this forced me to ponder the underlying Christian beliefs that would ultimately lead to the genocide of the native people, the Tainos.
What underlying beliefs? Divine Creation as told in the first book of the Old Testament, Genesis. Christian fundamentalists who believe the Bible is the literal word of God proclaim the earth is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old. I wrote a blog post about this, entitled, “The Myth of Divine Creation”. God created Adam from “the dust of the ground”. Then He put Adam into a deep sleep, removed one of his ribs, and from that rib he created Eve. Moreover, “out of the ground, the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air”… And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” (King James Bible, Genesis: Chapter 1, Verse 26)
So there it is, the Biblical attitude that mankind has dominion over all of nature is what separates the invading Christians from the Native Americans– Natives who believed that all creatures share the earth with no being claiming dominion over all the others. It’s bad enough that a sizable portion of the American public believes the earth is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old or believe that our species was created from dust, but the idea that we are Lord and Master over all creation is what puts me over the edge. It leads me to conclude that we Americans don’t know who we are or where we came from. Impulsively, I felt that I had to address these issues first.
I had originally planned to start my book with the Bering Land Bridge crossings into the Americas and then proceed to pre-Columbian America and Europe in the setup to the Columbus arrival in the “New World”. Nevertheless, I ignored my book outline and plunged ahead into the latest research and discoveries of evolutionary science, which resulted in the first two unplanned chapters of this book-in-progress. I felt compelled to illuminate evolution for American readers who are open-minded enough to view the overwhelming evidence. Unfortunately, the first two chapters seem only distantly related to the book’s title, “Columbus and the Holy Cross.”
Bottom line, I’m now forced to hit the PAUSE button as I redesign the book’s outline. I’m writing a new introduction and will also reappear with a new book title, one more in line with the book’s actual beginning. The new book title is “Unraveling Eve”.
See you again with a new stream of posts after a week or two off, while I revise my book. (Told you that blogging a book is the act of writing the first draft in public view, warts and all.) As to monetizing a blog and attracting new readers, those challenges require a long agonizing post that is beyond the scope of this simple explanation. To say that I was naïve would be an understatement. I feel more like an innocent babe toiling away in a dark world. Okay, a naïve man writing in the Void to a small but hopefully growing audience. And now for this… BRIEF PAUSE