Timetospend

If this argument is used, I would think that a counter argument could be made from these verses:
1 Tim 2:14
Adam was not deceived,
NRSV

Rom 5:12
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned —
NRSV

Thanks,

Doug Shaver

Nothing wrong with that, but as Wedge noted, you're trying to make sense out of a concept that is inherently incoherent.

If you want to see how Christians try to make sense of it, you'd be better off posting in one of their forums.

Chili

That might be so but bible does not say that. It says that "the woman ate from the apple and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it." It was the moment they consumed from the TOK that their eyes were opened and that is when they first realized that they were naked.

The nakedness itself was not a sin because they were both naked in Gen.2:25 and felt no shame, so the sin was the realization 'that' they were naked and no longer are naked to wit. The shame part makes reference to a self awareness or ego consciousness wherein we can live beside ourselves and this is the image that is called Adam, which in all humans is our second nature that is earthly instead of heavenly (hu- is from humi = earthly).

So now we can say that 'man is heavenly' and 'human is earthly' for which the human condition is only a condition of being wherein man is rational and so became known as the 'rational animal man.'There is nothing wrong with nakedness until our [illusory] ego tells us that it is wrong.Put that on a slippery slope and rational activity is always sin . . . wherefore the ego must die. No, we can do things by intuition there called "walking on water."It tells us that the woman ate first and she gave some to her husband. The woman decided because she saw that the TOK was good for gaining power, wealth and beauty. Not exactly, God said not to eat the fruit or even touch it lest you die, which only means that you will know that you will die.Not disobedience but a choice given to become knowlegeable or not.But sin is good. Religion just hung a negative connotation on sin to use it as bait in effort to catch and retrieve the sin nature of humans.Realization was the sin and that did not happen until their eyes were opened, to say that we look with our eyes and see with our mind.Sin cannot be conceived to exist without the faculty of reason, so before the TOK was employed sin could not be conceived to exist.The story was written for those who come full circle in life to say that without a beginning there can be no end where we meet the beginning and know it as if for the first time.

Chili

The question: "who told you that you were naked" is a dead give-away that God was pointing at the ego identity when he asked "Adam where are you" and that Adam repsonded confirmed that the ego was formed because this passage is the first time that man was actually called Adam.

A red flag should go up in your mind when you realize that Adam was banned from Eden while the woman was not and was never banned from Eden while Adam took Eve to be his wife and left Eden with her. The answer here is that Eve was obviously not the woman who gave man the apple so now we have two identities that are created by conjecture inside the conscious mind of man where Eve serves the ego with something like blowjobs that never bear fruit but just make Adam feel good according to the pleasure-pain principle for which their eyes were opened to judge . . . while the woman gathered the fruits of their labor in the form of wisdom, beauty and truth.

Jubal_DiGriz

I've actually used this argument myself, with some hard-core fundies and a priest responding. What I observed was an inability to approach the contradiction, instead going off to the side.

Apologetics are used to the same arguments, and quite often invite new, illogical arguments just so they can refute them. This particular question is never addressed in apologetics that I'm aware of, so the average question will say "I don't know. God is mysterious, I'll ask my priest, and it doesn't matter anyways because Jesus loves me", and the fundie will talk in circles. My group kept insisting that since Adam and Eve were made with free will, then they choice to eat it really was sin. When I kept saying there is no free will without the ability to choose/knowledge of sin, they repeated the same thing again.

I recall one saying "If you don't accept God into your heart, you'll never understand". In short, if they got hardcore faith there isn't anything you can say, ever. Have fun trying, though. Always have to try.

Jayrok

Something else to consider... Christians will tell you God doesn't want robots, so he gives man free will to choose right from wrong. A&E didn't know the difference between right and wrong until they ate the fruit (i.e. disobeyed God).

So in order for God's plan for man to have absolute free will to choose good or evil, it was necessary for man to disobey God and fall into sin. Man's sin was the facilitator of God's plan and will for man -- Free Will.

Why is man punished for carrying out God's plan for the introduction of free will?

Chili

Fact is that only in Eden is there free will. You just think you have it.

Carl LaFong

John Steinbeck’s short story The Pearl has a scene like this where a town doctor purposely makes the baby Coyotito sick, then “cures” him later (in order to get closer to the pearl to try and steal it). I always wondered if he was thinking of Christianity creating “sin” when he wrote that.

Chili

The aim of religion is to facilitate metamorphosis in humans so the disease was there long before religion began using the concept sin to snare the big one.

Clouseau

One might ask, "Who is Adam, and where is this garden?" The word 'adam' in Hebrew means a man's name; a man, any man; and also mankind, just as 'man' does in English. The garden was, perhaps is, a place of innocence. So perhaps each of us is born as Adam, or Eve, and each of us loses innocence on the first occasion that we do as we should not.

Genesis does not actually say that. It says, in effect, that there will be loss of innocence after disobedience. This is less a command not to disobey than a warning of the consequences of disobedience. It is not that eating the fruit introduces sin, but that sinning introduces death- spiritual death, not physical death as the zany YEC cultists allege.

'The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. And the Lord God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because on the day you eat of it you will surely die."'

Or, to put it another way, after disobedience, i.e. sin, the conscience will be compromised. This is denoted symbolically by the new consciousness of nakedness, which the author takes the trouble to inform did not exist before. Note that the conscience, when laden with guilt for the first time, not only leads to death, but death 'on the day' that one commits sin- i.e. spiritual death. There is a degree of timelessness about the conscience. (Adam and Eve did not die physically on the same day that they ate the fruit, which in itself makes a literalist position untenable.)

It is the achievement of a clear conscience that the Bible is thereafter concerned with.