Biff the unclean

Please take a look at the story again. The talking snake never deceives, he never lies. In fact he points out that God was the one lying when He told A&E they would die the very day that they ate the fruit. Adam lived into his 900's

Fortuna

If I may answer, one possible explanation is that the author did not consider that the act of disobeying the command not to eat from the forbidden tree to be equivalent to the idea of sin, or more specifically, the achieving "knowledge of good and evil".

In the beginning , the god only tells them that ; G3.3B "God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. "
The serpent describes the consequences to Eve as ; G3.5B "then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil".

When god discovers that A & E have eaten from the tree, he only says ;
"Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?" and to Adam ; "Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: ... <familiar punishments> ".

I notice that god never seems to literally refer to their actions as "sin" or "knowledge of good and evil" , but disobedience. Certainly WE would equate disobedience with sin, as we understand the definition, but perhaps we ought not to assume that this author understood the word in that way.

An apologist may merely say that this was a sin of disobedience, the first sin, that of making the wrong choice due to the freewill choice of disobeying god.


One problem with Enoch in comparison to Milton's is the timing of the stories. Enoch begins with Genesis 6 (see G6.1-2), and in it Enoch (the man) speaks with the angels and acts as a negotiator/messenger between they and god. God is apparently angry with these angels because they have taken human wives and given mankind skills. But the story from Milton claims to start sometime prior to the serpent incident in Gen 3.

There are some general similiarites, these angels are punished as I remember ( It's been a while since I've read Enoch) , they survive the flood and become demons who inhabit the earth, perhaps immortally. I will have to review it or find my old notes on it.

I had up till now believed it plausible that the popular fallen angels story was based on themes from Enoch, John's Apocalypse and perhaps other sources.

Have any scholars addressed tis story that anyone is aware of ? It would be interesting to read what they have discovered of its origins.

Chili

Hi Diogenese, I am a Catholic and we kind of learned that too. I am glad to see you write that 'mankind' fell from grace and not 'human-kind' because the human condition is the direct result of the fall of man. IOW, there is no such thing as human-kind but the human condition is the fallen nature of mankind.

We were told that Adam and Eve were the consequence of the fall and not the cause of it because they, Adam and Eve, did not come into existence until just 'after' man and woman ate from the apple. See the difference? To show this in a different way, man and woman were naked to wit and had no shame because they were naked to wit as per Gen.2:25. Then, in Gen.3, the Tree of Knowledge was engaged and they immediately felt shame because they were no longer naked to wit, obviously . . . or they would not have felt shame. This idea of shame caused a second identity to exist even if only in the mind of man and woman. This second identity was called Adam . . . wherefore the Lord (not God) said "Adam, where are you" etc.. This "Adam where are you" introduced Adam as this second identity (as if only a figment in the imagination of man and nothing else). This second identity, however, was the apple in the eye of woman who saw that it would be good for gaining wisdom, food and beauty. Notice that the word Adam is not/should not appear until Gen.3:9 (I think).

That is what we learned and we were also told to honor and respect woman 'from here to eternity' because that alone was the best thing that ever happened to mankind. It was the woman who saw that that which has become know as sin was a good thing, and was a very good thing since the Lord had already prepared a way to salvation in Gen.2:10-14. So sin is good and the only negative side is that we would know that we would die because we will remember that our friends died. The implication that 'we would never die' is not made here but only the fact that we will 'know that we would die' is stated as a possible 'negative.'

The 'plus' is to know about good and evil, food, beauty, and wisdom and that certainly is and has been very, very good to all of us. Without putting the cart before the horse let me suggest that the woman was like a serpent since she had been taken from man and never actually had a created identity of her own. This leaves woman without a backbone of her own to be a very suitable partner for man and perhaps flexible enough to be all things to her man and was therefore on the lookout from the TOL and saw a 'serpent' of her own likeness in the TOK (TOL is subconscious mind and TOK is conscious mind with Adam being the guy who 'thinks' that he is somebody).

Some detail of this idea is given in the curse to the serpent: "She will strike at your head and you will strike at his heel." Here we see that the [lessor] serpent is motivated by the strikes of the [greater] serpent and in her turn strikes at the heel of Adam to motivate him outside of Eden. It should be noted here that the greater serpent (also called woman or later Mary) never left Eden and never will/should leave Eden.Humanity is the result of sin. The -ity suggests that it is a condition of being that tells us something about the being (Aristotle's also deals with this in his Categories). Our humanity is good, it allows us to evaluate our actions and take good care of 'our selves' (notice the duality here). It is like being two personalities that are in charge of one body.

Man was naked and without shame . . . and also without pride for shame cannot be conceived to exist without pride. We can say that woman was bored with her [old] man and wanted to charm a snake of her own (for sport maybe).

Our sin nature is good and is very good. The only thing wrong is the negative ideas that Christians have attached to it because they can not seem to overcome it and are forced to die with it in the unresolved saved-sinner paradox. Jehovah was Lord God and he was in cahoots with the woman since the woman was the blueprint of the man from whom she had been taken.

It is called sin if it kills us, and is called a blessing if it becomes our riches in heaven (adapted from Rev.14:13).

Nothing has changed since our own soul is our blueprint in the TOL and our TOK still is the apple of our eye.

Dean Anderson

That's by no means the only difference between the story as written and the way Christians interpret it.

Here is the story as written, rather than as retrofitted into Christian theology (yes, I've posted something like this before repeatedly - but this is a modified version)...

God plants a garden. Gen 2:8

He needs a slave to look after it for him, since weeding is just too much like hard work. Gen 2:5, Gen 2:15

So he creates a toy man (Adam) and puts him to work. Gen 2:7, Gen 2:8, Gen 2:15

Adam is allowed to eat anything he wants, providing he doesn't touch God's special magical tree of wisdom. Gen 2:15, Gen 2:16

God lies to Adam, telling him that if he eats from the magical tree he will die that very day, as a way of scaring him away from the tree of wisdom. Gen 2:17

There is too much work for Adam to do, so God makes him some animal helpers. Gen 2:18, Gen 2:19

God makes Adam think up names for the animals. Gen 2:19, Gen 2:20

Unfortunately, the other animals turn out to be not much help with the gardening after all.Gen 2:20

God decides that all this creating of animals is not the answer, so he clones Adam instead, making him a twin sister - Eve. Gen 2:21, Gen 2:22

Adam is pleased with his new helper, and declares that because she was once part of him, children should leave their parents and get married to other people. (As an aside, we should note that this means that, by Biblical theology, the definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman is an invention of Adam - that well known rebel and sinner - rather than an invention of God as claimed by homophobic Christians who oppose homosexual marriage.)Gen 2:23, Gen 2:24

Adam and Eve are both naked, but no-one cares. Gen 2:25

The talking snake asks Eve whether she can eat all the stuff in the garden. She replies that God said to leave the magical tree alone because if she eats it she will die the same day. Gen 3:1 - Gen 3:3

The talking snake points out that God was lying about them dying, and the real reason he doesn't want them to eat from the magical tree is that they will know right from wrong - and realise that being gardening-slaves is wrong. Gen 3:5

Adam and Eve eat the magical fruit, and realise that although there is nothing wrong with them seeing each other naked because they are a "married" couple, God's watching them bend over to do weeding in the nude was wrong of him - so they make themselves some clothes to stop him perving. Gen 3:7

God turns up and Adam who puts his new-found wisdom to good use and immediately blames Eve, who similarly passes the buck to the talking snake. Gen 3:9 - Gen 3:13

God realises that his lies about the fruit killing people have been exposed and that his slaves will no longer be dumb enough work for him (especially not in the nude). Gen 3:22

God pulls the legs off the snake (and invokes Lamarckian evolution so that its offspring will also be legless), curses Eve with childbirth, creates a few new types of plant just to make Adam's gardening more difficult, and kills a few random animals to make Adam and Eve some nice fur coats out of them. Gen 3:16 - Gen 3:21

Finally, he kicks them out of the garden. Gen 3:24 so that they wouldn't eat from his other magical tree and become immortal like him as well as wise like him. Gen 3:22

Sensei Meela

The man and woman definitely knew "good" before eating of the fruit, since they were able to deem it "good to eat."

Whether God or the serpent lied about it's effects is debatable for, IIRC, God's prohibition -- "on that day thou shalt surely die" -- is something of an idiom meaning 'you will be sentenced to death.'

It seems clear, though, that the serpent was not simply 'doing it's job,' for he gets punished for his deed. As I understand early Hebrew mythology, 'Satan' is not an adversary but an agent of God with a dirty job, so the identification with Satan is not justifiable under that system. Even were the Revelation account to hold true, where Satan is identified as the serpent, it would seem unreasonable for God to punish the real McCoy (actual snakes/serpents) for the actions of an imposter.

DiogenesofSinoppe

When God confronted A&E about their miscreant behaviour, this is what Eve said in explanation:

3 : 13?*?*?* And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

The serpent beguiled her.

Earlier in Genesis, it states that God's creation was "very good." From this Catholic doctrine has determined that in those early days, the Garden of Eden (hence, the world) was free of sin. They base this on the following logic: that God is a perfect being and a perfect being cannot create that which is less than perfect. Sin is less than perfect. Sin, furthermore, is not good. Therefore, God did not create sin, but mankind did allow for sin to exist when mankind disobeyed God by acting on the free will that God bestowed upon man. As a consequent, all of humanity was henceforth condemned for the behaviours of two persons.

Reading the first four chapters of Genesis, one can see in the language employed that the capacity for sin was certainly there. God issued one simple command to the two inhabitants of the Garden--to avoid eating from or touching one certain tree. The result was death, should the two disobey God's order. Since death was possible in a "perfect" Garden before the order was disobeyed, the biblical story is contradictory. Worlds in which death is a possibility is a world that is less than perfect (whether or not A&E really would have died after eating from the tree in question).

Along comes a serpent, described as one of the more "subtle" beasts that God created. It does not say that this serpent was the Devil, Satan, Beelzebub or Mephistopheles, it simply says that it was a creature in the Garden of Eden and that the creature was subtle.

The creature planted the idea in Eve's head that the command God issued to her and Adam was poppycock, that Adam and Eve could violate this order whenever they chose to do so.

With that said, one or two things is evident:
1. God did lie to A&E, telling them that eating from the certain tree would result in death, thus God is not omnibenevolent and capable of sinning.
2. The serpent was up to no good, but this would contradict earlier chapters (and by extension Catholic understanding of the Creation story) of Genesis in which it explains that God's creation was "very good." Thus God's creation was not perfect.

In either circumstance, it is this God who is totally at fault for the existence of sin in the world. God either sinned when lying to A&E (or to just Adam, had he not been cloned at the time the order was issued) or the serpent sinned in its "beguile"-ment of Eve. In either circumstance, God created a world in which sin exists, a world that was less perfect than the Catholics insist. Sin was certainly a possibility in this Garden and that would be contrary to the idea of "perfection" or all-good. There was some element of evil in this Garden before Eve ate from the tree.

So that right there is the sticking point. By God's mandate to avoid a certain tree, the deity set up its creation to fail. Simply due to the circumstances, eat from tree X and disobey God, certainly shows that sin did exist before mankind committed an act of sin. Simply by the possibility of A&E disobeying God's orders, some element of evil or at least "wrong action" was present in a so-called perfect paradise.

Even when I was a Christian, I felt the Bible was 99% metaphor and that there were hidden meanings to all of the terms and the stories in Genesis. Nonetheless, the Catholics have really failed at correctly reasoning on this one and thus set up a less-than-cogent doctrine.

So regardless of what the Fall from Grace story in Genesis really means or was intended to mean, it is religious doctrine that fails, particularly the idea that it was mankind who brought sin into God's creation. Judging from the literal meanings of the terms in Genesis, along with the way the story plays out, one has to conclude that religious tradition did not set up its doctrines in accord with scripture.

I reiterate, it is Christian theology that fails to adequately explain this one and Christian theologists have extrapolated a ridiculous concept (Original Sin) from a continual misunderstanding of scripture. There was no original sin, not by human beings anyway. And the whole point is, who would want to worship a God that is responsible for such trickery and sets up people to fail? Why do Christians claim that God is perfect and all-good when this story clearly shows that the Genesis God is not good, but really mean and cruel.

Thus, Christian religion is a creation of mankind, therefore imperfect and destined for failure.

I appreciate everyone's input on this thread.

Anat

I wonder about this animal fur clothing. Humans weren't permited to eat meat until after the flood (who knows how many animal species went extict before Noah and family realised they had better wait for the animals to reproduce enough). So were Adam and Eve the only ones to wear fur prior to the flood, or did people kill animals for their fur and waste the meat? or maybe the fur came from sacrificial animals?

seven8s

I would suggest that the snake is a person, a conscious/subconscious. Notice it talks and has it's appendages ripped off.

I would think that to understand the story from the perspective of the religion that it derives from, one must look to the origin of Hebrew language, since it is a Hebrew story.

From there I would look to each individual word in the story because in Hebrew an individual word tells a story in and of itself. Genesis 1 is all about the name of things, good. It is the story about one man, who is made male and female (conscious and subconscious) Genesis 2 is also about the name of things. I looked at the particular name of persons, following those names to their root.

I suggest that this one man is Moses, or any man for that matter. Just as the snake (aaron) is one man or any man. In Hebrew, Arron means light. An in Jewish custon, tradition it is Arron who raised the cane, which slithered like a snake. Arron and Miriam are brother/sister.

From that I have reasonable determined in my mind that the story of Adam, Eve, and Lord God is just another telling of the story of Aaron, Miriam, And Moses (Arron representing the dual nature of Moses). Equally, Eve, Cain, and Able is the same story. With Seth replacing, Able. Notice that in NT the story revolves around Jesus (singular man), Mary (mother) and Mary Magdalyn (two women, one corrupted, or a corrupted sub-conscious). Jesus sorts out these two women. Or it could be said the story restores one of these women (the immaculate conception), because they are both the same women, Miriam & Eve.

Notice also that the OT asks a pertinent question, Am I my brothers keeper�, while the NT turns that question inside out and ask, “Who is my mother, my brother�.

Equally important to all this is that Moses strikes a rock in an effort to obtain water. Water is necessary to maintain life (Eve). Miriam, who is a prophetess (insight, sub-conscious)) means stubborn. Moses doesn’t trust himself (insight) and strikes the rock twice, splitting the rock (Miriam-Eve) (Mother Mary- Mary Magdalyn)
Perhaps most interesting of all is “female� taken from Genesis 1. Search down it’s meaning and it has 2 definitions; 1. hbqn, meaning woman, female child............which is derived from bgn, which means to: peirce, bore, proforate, appoint, designate, be specified. And/or interestingly, to curse, blaspheme.

It is an intirguing story if one takes the time to understand it. To do that one must understand how stories, literature is written. The key to this story, piece of literature, and as well the NT is that one must understand the concepts of literature. This story is written in:

Third person Omniscient Narration: teller assumes an all lnowing perspective
Hermeneutic & Proairetic Codes: suspence buitl into the story through an unanswered question, which leads to the anticipation of resolution.
Medias Res: Epic convention of beginning in the middle
Diegesis: A narratives time-space continuum. An important event effects all other events in the franchise.

jonesg

Just set the religion aside and try a common sense approach.
Its all metaphor, original sin refers to our defects of character, such as selfishness and dishonesty. Everyone is born with ego, if ego takes control those defects will manifest .
The serpent is temptation.

The tree is of knowledge of GOOD and EVIL.
We cannot mix good and evil thoughts or evil will entice and seduce thought into action.

Much of Genesis looks like it came from Sumatran myth, it is an attempt to make sense of who we are and why we are. Given the resources available back then, its not a half bad attempt.

A baby is born innocent, but from baby to child ego grows, if a person fails to make the transition from child to adult their ego will still be in control and not much good will come of that state.
Jails are full of people who failed puberty in their own way, I know , I was there.

K!D

ah! so the world was bad though it was created good, man was born pure and was corrupted by the world. i love metaphor that kind of works much better than the Xian version.

so the 'tree of life' would that be a metaphor for our way back to paradise?