rosy tetra

I think the analogy of creator=Mom and Adam & Eve=her kids is an interesting one. In such a case the children will have mixed feelings about whether Mom is all good and all powerful or not. And these feelings are perfectly justified because obviously Mom is not all good and all powerful. So a decision to disobey Mom will in some cases be perfectly reasonable, and she will have no basis for saying they made the wrong choice because absolute obedience to Mom is the only good.

A different analogy would be creator=laws/forces of nature. In this case, laws of nature (gravity, genetics, etc.) are all-powerful in the sense of being unbreakable, immutable, but you can’t really call them “good� unless you mean in the sense of “orderly� and “that which caused life to come about.� Maybe in that sense they are all-good.

So to fit this analogy in the Adam and Eve story, A&E thought maybe they could get around the laws of nature and become greater than their physical limitations. They made a choice to try to live outside a harmony with nature (or tried to exceed their limitations and control nature?) and found the results brought pain and frustration, along with an inability to go back and live in harmony again.

As a side note, I think it’s a bad idea to teach kids that they must obey Mom and Dad. Even at a young age, it’s best to teach why something is good or bad to do based on how the world works, laws of nature.

John A. Broussard

Just for the sake of argument, let us assume two possibilities:

1. The Adam and Eve myth as described in the Bible, where God plants the tree, gives the couple free will, they make the wrong choice (which he knows they will make) and they are then condemned to suffering, death and so on for countless generations (which he knew was going to happen).

or

2. The Adam and Eve myth with no tree, no choice, and they live in blissful immortality.

Now, you are a benevolent, all seeing, all knowing, all powerful, all perfect God. Which possibility will you put in place?

rosy tetra

IasimisI has not answered my question about where he said,

I wasn’t raised Catholic, so I don’t know the technical meaning of “sanctifying grace� or why we would inherit a lack of it. I tried to read up a bit on it last night but got overwhelmed by the technical detail.

I was assuming there was no ignorance. If Adam and Eve were ignorant of the nature of the creator, did not know that the creator was all powerful and all good, then their choice was not at all stupid, but ignorant and understandable.

Professor

I'll take a stab at this. God told Adam that eating the fruit would cause him to die that very day, but the serpent told eve that it wouldn't kill them and that it would make them more like gods. God lied and the serpent told the truth as Yahweh admits in Genesis 3:22.

But Yahweh is a jealous God. In fact he says that his name literally means jealousy, and in magical systems of thought the name is the thing itself. Thus Yahweh is the embodiment of jealousy, in the same way that Ares is war and Venus is love. Being a jealous god, he is upset that Adam and Eve chose the serpent's truth over his lie. The "sin" is that they made God feel unloved.

Skip to the arrival of Yeshua. God tells him that he is the messiah and that if he submits to crucifixion he will become the saviour of the world. Meanwhile he sends Satan to offer legitimate power. Yeshua believed God's lies over Satan's truth (up until the very end at least), and this made poor little jealous Yahweh feel loved again. Not to mention that a good bloodletting always makes him happy.

Evoken

Free will includes both the possibility of reasoning correctly and incorrectly, it is up to the individual to do one or the other.

That is exactly what I meant, they had the ability to make the decision and of evaluating the choices. But they choose to listen to the serpent instead of obeying God's commandment.

If they would have been designed to be easily deluded, they would not have objected to the serpent and would have eaten right away.

Evoken

Yes it is based in choosing good over evil. The thing is that once you start thinking about doing something evil, you are already disobeying. Like Jesus said : "If a man has lustful thoughts about a woman in his heart he has already committed adultery". Which lead us back to the original state of holiness in which Adam and Eve were created: "And they were naked and where not ashamed". Not easy I admit, but that's the way it is.

I contend that they knew that disobeying God was not a good thing but went ahead and did it anyway. Remember Eve's objection to the serpent, it clearly show that they are aware that dying was not a good thing, but they decided to trust the serpent who convinced them that they would not die by eating from the tree.

Original Sin is lack of sanctifying grace, which is what baptism gives. So when a baby dies without baptism, that is, without sanctifying grace, he goes either to heaven or hell judged on his foreseen sins.

Evoken

Here is a very simple definition from the Catechism:

"The grace which heals our human nature wounded by sin by giving us a sgare in the divine life of the Trinity(being incorporated into the Church by baptism). It is a habitual, supernatural gift which continues the work of sanctifying us, making us "perfect", holy and Christlike (by doing good works, grace increases, just like by going ot Mass, praying, etc)."

But man is not only deprived of sanctifiying grace only but also of all that this implies. I'll pause here as to not further derail the tread, but if you have any question about it let me know and I'll see how I can answer them.

Evoken

No, God didn't lie. In the first place both Adam and Eve were endowed with the gift of immortality both for them and for their posterity(not to be taken as an impossibility of dying), something which they lost right after they ate from the fruit.

Also if you continue to read the subsequent chapters of Genesis, you will notice how after each generation, the lifespan of humans starts to decrease, from Adam living around 900 years to getting humans to live no more than 120 years, which is what God said would happen. So, yes, they did die.

God describes himself as a jealous God, his name, Yahweh means "HE WHO IS" or "I AM" as he told to Moses in Exodus. God expects his creatures to obey him and to keep his commandments, which is quite natural, since it is to him that they own their existence.

I think this goes away from the topic under discussion.

Evoken

Avatar,

You are judging a book by it's cover, so to speak. You can't use the first three chapters of Genesis to judge God like that, you can't ignore the rest (which includes God's work of redemption on the cross and final judgment) and start saying that God is evil and all that.

God could have created a world in which we had never eaten from the fruit, he could have created any perfect world that you could imagine, in fact he could have not created anything at all. But He did, and He wanted to create a world in which we could all love him freely, without depending on gifts or anything of the sort for loving him (like the book of Job points out) and He must have his reasons for that which are obviously unknown to us, and I believe that God is good and that his reasons for creating this world of ours which is not a bad world (in spite of the spiritual war in which it is in) is a good and not an evil one.

It is very easy to get full of pride and be ungrateful about what we have and what has been given to us(and with this I am referring to the universe). Wether we like to admit it or not, this world is a gift, us being alive considering the odds is also a gift and should, instead of driving us to criticize and find flaws, drive us into looking for ways on how we can best glorify God.

John A. Broussard

Quote from IAsimisI "He (God) must have his reasons for that which are obviously unknown to us"

That statement puts an end to this argument, since no matter what "flaw" we may see in God's actions, there has to be a reason for it we don't understand.

Can't fight that.