Doug Shaver

It depends on whom you ask.

What Tigers said is the usual evangelical Protestant response. Adam and Eve were given an order and they failed to comply with it. In other words, God made a law and they broke the law. From the evangelical perspective, breaking God's law is what sin is all about. To be sinless, you have to follow every order God gives you, and follow it to the letter. Any deviation, however trivial, no matter what your reason, is a sin.

That, as I said, is the evangelical Protestant take on it. Liberal Protestants are all over the place, doctrinally. I'm not sure about Roman Catholic teaching. I know Orthodox teaching is very different, but I don't know the particulars.

Joan of Bark

But did God tell them that disobedience was a sin? Did he even teach them what disobedience is?

2-J

It's a tired point but: if they didn't have knowledge of good and evil, how could they be held responsible for the initial act of disobedience?

bacht

Isn't the story of Adam and Eve an allegory describing the "expulsion" we all experience from the innocence of childhood into the confusion and wickedness of self-aware adulthood?

Nero's Boot

No. It's a Bronze Age Mesopotamian creation myth, just like every other Bronze Age Mesopotamian creation myth.

--sorry NB

Szkeptik

Actually they only obtained knowledge of rigth and wrong after they have eaten the fruit, so there was no way for them to know that going against Gods word is "bad". In other words it was impossible for them to sin up to the point where they have already eaten the fruit. So the original sin is illogical even in biblical context.

bacht

Yes I'm aware of Sumerian etc prototypes for these Genesis stories. I'm not a believer, sorry if I gave that impression.

People have been hanging all kinds of interpretations on this old story for a long time, I was just throwing in another. The Jews themselves pushed this one back in favour of the later version in Genesis 1, which is more theologically sophisticated.

Guenevere

Agreed. Just another 'biblical error', if you don't consider the whole bible as one giant error.

bacht

And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden;
but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die." Gen 2:16-17

Seems unambiguous: take a bite and you're toast

Nero's Boot

I, personally get a kick out of what Genesis' writers says happens next: God realizes that now man has knowledge like him. He gets them out of Eden because, if they keep their immortality, with that understand.....it seems to say God was very nervous about sharing the world with immortal humans with the capacity to learn.

Again, in the myth of the Tower of Babel, God seems very timid about the idea of the tower's success in reaching Heaven, so much so that he comes down to Earth in person to check it out. (So much for omniscience and omnipresence; this is just one of many examples in the Old Testament that flat-out states the Hebrew God had one form, and did not know everything.)

Anyhow, as it goes along, it seems God gets nervous again about intellectually-aware humans being physically near him....as if he was afraid of being injured, overthrown or even killed.

Even his power seems to diminish as times goes on and the peoples of the world grow more sophisticated. He could make an entire world, craft galaxies from nothingness, send fire from the sky and turn people to salt....but he couldn't defeat an invading army using iron chariots of all things.

As the Bible goes on, God's presence gets dimmer and farther away, book by book, until in Roman times, he sent a minion to offer us salvation, then the minion flees back to Heaven. After that, miracles seem to've stopped entirely.

No one talks to God anymore. No one has ever seen God, ever since the "era" of the Book of Genesis. It seems as if the Bible's God was a strawman, basically another human being, but with magic.

--assuming BibleGod is real, I think we scared him off NB