Bread and Blogs: Creation and the Creator

"Habalo..." It's Sim-language for "Hello." A person creates a person to live in an artificial world, with an artificial job, doing artificial things (with built in masks to cover nekkidity.) Anyone old enough to remember Bonanza will shake their head and groan, not understanding the metaphysical needs behind being endlessly addicted to a game like The Sims. Honestly, it never really did anything for me, as I found it to be too restrictive. Why only simulate part of your life, when you can live your life to the fullest in the real world? Course, that is rhetorical. I fell much more in love with Spore, where I could build creatures from the cellular level. See my blogs: Spore Blog 1 and Spore Blog 2 for the reviews on that game. Actually, I'll wait while you read those, because they are central to my line of thought. Go ahead...

Anyway, if we go back to Genesis, to the sixth day, God created us in his own image. I wonder how far that goes, how exactly like God we actually are? And to a further extent, how much is God like us? (cue Joan Osborne). He must have known (actually He did know) that Adam would have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge (and Eve, too), and thus become cast out. He must have known that our curiosity about everything would propel us to evolving into what we are today, and even farther. It seems ironic, but if you think it, God created us in His own image, but made us flawed. Of course, the reason being, since He made us with self-awareness and free will (in His image), we have the ability to freely err from perfection. If we didn't have this, and we stayed perfectly in Paradise this whole time, there wouldn't be anything for God to be proud of. He would have a whole army of Robots, without any thoughts of greatness or progression. It's simply not the way things go.

So, as we are created in God's image, we become ourselves, Creators. The basic drive for raising families, raising cats, building houses and writing books. The need to create is a powerful emotion, one that overshadows the Devil's need to destroy (but more on that later). We have the same basic desire to be proud of what we create, living or non living. Just as God would be proud of us.

It's this emotion that drives us, in our daily rituals at the computer, to devote so much time to the characters we have online. We build up an elf on World of Warcraft, level after level, adorning him or her with ornate armor, magnificent weapons, and adept skills, only to have it sit on some server for all eternity while we try out the latest edition of Everquest. It seems useless, that we would spend so much of our lives on creating a character that is not real, but as we slay the dragon in the deepest dungeon of WOW, we experience the pride that God would feel about His followers. It matters little how transitory the pride or the character is. It is, of course, a shadow of God's emotions, but, as Plato would point out, we are but shadows of the real thing.