BigJim

The land of Nod, east of Eden.

BALDUCCI

OK, in the great monty python spirit in which this debate has been conducted, if God had no intention of Adam and Eve ever procreating, why did he give them sexual organs ? Did he realise that his scheme was nuts and there was a requirement for contingencies ? Why didnt he ensure that Eve would be afraid of snakes ?

Do we have any more serious theological speculations ?

Toto

This forum is not for theology - many people here regard theology on a par with astrology as far as intellectual value. If you want to discuss political theory, there is another forum for that.

BALDUCCI

It really is not possible to exclude political considerations from an appreciation of theology. The two intersect continually. Just as it is not possible to exclude theology from a forum on political theory

Amedeo

In this message,

you affirmed what is actually a controversial point.
Did Yahweh fashion Adam and then, as a companion, Eve, thus concluding the work of creation?

If you equate El and Yahweh -- which I don't for many reasons -- then God bade man to grow and multiply, which means that He made humans suitable for procreation, and Cain's wife may be an unnamed sister of his. In ancient times, sometimes royal brothers married sisters; anyway, the Bible narrator did not feel the need to explain where Cain's wife came from.

If we consider only the Yahwehite account of creation (where Adam is named and dealt with extensively), the sin or disbedience committed by Eve and Adam is of utmost importance for many reasons. The narrator teaches that the wages of that sin are death, toil, and suffering. (Socially, this idea lasted until recently, when the use of some anaesthesia on delivering women was condemned as a deliberate avoidance of the divine punishment -- according to the Hebrew idea that the guilt of the fathers is inherited by the sons and, therefore, the decreed punishment is, too.)

If mortality is a consequence of Adam and Eve's sin, the implication is that there would have been no death (or suffering, or need of toil) for them and their possible offsprings. Adam and Eve could have begotten children, but without suffering; the Biblical implication is NOT they would not have had intercourse and a family, if they had not sinned. In addition, some Medieval theologians thought that the procreative intercourse would have been pleasureless, like that of placing a spoon in one's mouth. Both pain and pleasure seem to be consequences of sin. But why is pleasure so? Why is pleasurelessness the natural condition of innocent man?

We know the psalmist who begged God for forgiveness for our having been conceived in sin! It seems that this means: intercourse as such is sinful because of the fact that it is pleasurable: those who engage in intercourse commit sin. But if this is so, then I would identify the original sin of Adam and Eve as consisting of pleasurable intercourse, and that the Medieval interpretation is wrong: it is they, the theologians, that rejected sexual pleasure and did so on the basis of Paul's elevation of the chaste state (like Christ's, he thought), and of the psalmist's personal rejection, too.

Be as it may, the stated wages of sin (death, especially) imply that, had they not sinned, they, and the possible offsprings, would have been immortal.

In various ancient mythologies, men were understood as they are, mortal, in contradistinction to the gods who, by definition, are immortal (even though they can be generated by other gods). However, some deserving humans were granted immortality, which meams that they lived perennially as corporeal being. In the Biblical text, the humans were granted immortality to begin with, yet they had to earn it. They failed to earn in the very first test of allegiance to the great Lord.

The ancients understood that two things are possible at the same time: A human body which is active, can generate, and needs food, and that it is not subject to death. We think, since Aristotle, in terms of the changeability of a human body and, therefore, of is vulnerability, which may result in death. The ancients, Yahweh included, thought of death as being brought about by extraneaous causes, such as internal evil spirits (deseases) or external injuring causes. At the same time, the ancient lived in "moral universe" where things happenned intentionally with respect to this or that man, or this or that people. So, a God could choose to do nothing against a man and to protect from anybody doing anything to him that would result in death. So, for Yah to make man immortal meant, not the man was made a god, but that man would be protected from anything lethal: the breath of life which He installed into the clay statue would remain there perenially under His protection.

We, today, who have extra-Biblical knowledge, can clearly see that the whole scene of the garden the original sin is mythical: it cannot be true, precisely because the conditions of death are inherent in our corporeality and there are no agents, divine or non-divine, which magically prevent extraneous forces from operating on our bodies. When Yah or his spokesman condemned Adam and Eve to death, He had no true knowledge of human nature or of the causes of death, or, for that matter, what makes something a living thing rather than a non-living thing. They had Neolithic/Agricultural Wisdom; we have Humanistic/Scientific wisdom, and the twain can never meet.

(I always said that the Bible is a great source for ethnological studies. From it, we get to know what certain people knew, what theories of reality and history they made, whether their theories were internally coherent or not, what they believed, how they lived, what they considered right or wrong, and so forth. From our vantage people, we can determine what tenets of their, which they stated as facts, were true or false or fallacious.)

Clivedurdle

Been to the Tate Modern where there is a fascinating exhibition about Dali and Film.

In 1975 he made a film that was shown on BBC that in many ways is a very impressive psychedilic piece of work, but one of the ideas he puts forward is that the invention of good and evil and their separation into god and the devil, the pre and post fall humanity and heaven and hell are at the root of all the problems we have!

He very cleverly starts by looking at an idyllic pastoral scene, zooming into a dark corner then whilst turning the angle zooming out into the face of Hitler!

http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibi...m/default.shtm

http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/?p=118

Clivedurdle

What the second creation story does is explains consciousness as arising from the sin of eating the fruit. Before that Adam and Eve were not conscious they were nude. (But how you can choose without being conscious feels like a loose thread in the story but never mind.)

And we have based all our judicial systems and governmental systems on what might be a misunderstanding of how our brains work and what leads to us acting in harmful or helpful ways to each other.