muidiri

Been batting this idea around for a bit, and I'd like some feedback (and possible correction if deserved).

My understanding is that Adam and Eve were placed in the Garden of Eden to be happy little critters in blissful ignorance. God told them not to eat the fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden - the fruit contains the knowledge of good and evil. The Devil, in a snake disguise, crept into the garden and convinced Eve that she should eat it anyway, and share it with her "hubby"... and Eve did so. Because of this act of "willful disobedience", god threw them both out of the garden and condemned mankind to a history of suffering and toil. This act of eating the apple is, as I understand it, the root of all of mankind's sins. Prior to the apple being eaten, Adam & consort were without sin.

So... if my summary is correct... why were Adam and Eve punished in the first place? Prior to eating the apple, they had no knowledge of good or evil, and hence no knowledge of right or wrong. They did not know that disobeying god would be bad. They had no way of knowing that their actions were in any way wrong. They had no basis with which to judge whether god would disapprove of their actions. So how is god justified in tossing them out of Eden? God is the one who let the snake in to begin with (unless of course, god was incapable of preventing it, or in some other way didn't know that sneaky old lucifer would give it a go).

My conclusion is that god created a creature which clearly lacked any way to discern right from wrong, forbade them from learning right from wrong, then allowed them to be tempted to a wrong which they didn't even know was wrong. It seems like a set-up to me. God created a situation in which Adam and Eve would surely fail his test... thus giving him reason to punish them.

I'm not really seeing much of an alternative interpretation... so if anyone would care to add... I welcome it. Thanks!

Lucretius

The way I see it the whole "Apple" story is a great way to get people just to accept what others with authority say WITHOUT question.

Here you have a God who says "DON'T EAT IT " without Adam and Eve actually knowing the reasons for this injunction,in effect it is saying that you should never question what those people with power tell you to do,you just have to blindly follow what they say ,because only those with power should have the knowledge to make decisions.

The "Sin" is to believe that you are also capable of being knowledgeable,
and once "ordinary" people start to try and grasp knowledge they are to be punished for trying to usurp their rulers.

In other words here we have God as the first and original fascist dictator.

Plognark

I'm sure that a few of the theists on this board will give you an answer of some sort. I'm also sure that it'll be complete and utter indefensible bullshit.

The whole system, as described, is the ultimate act of evil; an inescapable setup. If true, it means we were doomed to failure from the start.

This also goes to some of my free will issues, which I am **STILL** waiting for some kind of an answer on, besides direct insults or condescending virtual pats on the head :banghead:

If god made this universe, and is omniscient, and knew how this universe would turn out, and still decided to make this universe the way it is, how is there room for free will? How is it not gods direct responsibility for all the evils of the world? How is he not to blame? At least the Calvinists have enough intellectual integrity to accept the logic of this situation, to a degree. I can't say the same for the other Christian Theologians who put the hardest spin job on it that they can to obfuscate the fragile house of logical cards their whole religion rests on.

Of course, some people like to assume that I and those who feel the same as do "hate god" or some other nonesense. In actuality, I really just hate the absolute ignorance and abandoning of logic required to accept such a hateful and silly belief system.

I'll just sit here and wait for the flames to come in now, although this isn't intended to be flamebait at all

CX

The Adam & Eve story is a cosmogonic myth written by a prescienific people. If one applies modern historico-critical methods to it as if it were literal history it doesn't make any sense. Trying to make it fit that framework is the result of post-reformation Protestant apologetics mostly. The same is true of almost any similar myth in a different tradition. It is only because modern protestants who subscribe to sola scriptura and biblical inerrancy insist on treating the Genesis narrative as literal history that such a question even arises in the first place.

CX

Accepting for the sake of argument that that is so, the question becomes "so what?" What would preclude god from doing precisely that?

fr0sty

Assume my biological father was a career criminal and during that career he violated many laws. For simplicity assume those crimes also violated the 10 commandments. I don't believe any mainstream Christians would hold the belief that I am responsible for my father's crimes/sins. Is that a fair assumption?

If so, then why would I be held responsible for the sins of Adam and Eve? If not so, what justification for holding me morally responsible for my father's crimes/sins do they give?

It would seem to me if you are going to hold humanity responsible for the sins of Adam and Eve, the every living person would also bear the burdon of every blood relative between them and Adam/Eve. Logically it would follow that anyone who had a blood relative found guilty of a crime punishable by death should also be put to death at birth...

Haener

I'd like to post a quote from Gene Roddenberry here:

I think this quote captures the thoughts of the OP. The story as it is now is not logical. Either god is not omniscient (i.e. didn't know lucifer was up to it), god is not omnipotent (i.e. couldn't prevent Eve from taking the apple) or god is one sick bastard for blaming Adam and Eve, and everyone else through original sin, for not knowing the difference between right and wrong, even though this was the way god created Adam and Eve in the first place.

Chili

Well Plognark, let me try to convert shit into gold here, which is done for your pleasure only.

Muidiri is wrong to assume that Adam and Eve were placed in the garden because the bible clearly states that man and woman were placed in the garden and, thus, not Adam and Eve. In Gen.2 it says that they were "naked [to wit] and felt no shame" to say that wit is needed to feel shame. Accordingly, they, each of them if you wish, were of one mind and undivided in that mind (I actually hold that man and woman were 'one' with woman being the exact template of man since she had been taken from "her man" but since God created "them" in the plural the same truth still holds for each one of us as well = the living word).

Now go to Gen 3 where after they ate from the Tree of Knowledge they were conscious and could make the distinction between good and evil which is concealed in the metaphor that they realized they were naked and thus no longer naked to wit (the "breezy time" of obscurity). As such could they look at themselves and see that they were naked for which a second identity is needed that was recognized with "where are you, who told you that you were naked." This new identity became known as Adam and it was banned from Eden to say that the creation of our ego identity caused a division in our own mind wherein the conscious mind and subconscious mind are not only twain but often at emnity with each other. Not doomed, but "outside of Eden" where we are practically on our own with our faculty of reason serving us to the best of our ability and our senses to serve as guide. We have virtual guidance by the subconsciuous mind with which the conscious mind is twain but not twin.

Because we are twain and not twin are we not free but since both minds are ours we are accountable and therefore free, or at least we must pretend that we are free until such time that our two minds become one, once again, and that will be the time that we are truly free.

Doomed only means that we are doomed to die but the flip side of this is that we have a life time ahead of us to make Eden a better place to 'be' once we return there. At least, if we return there, we will be able to enjoy our own accumilations in addition to that which was ours when we first started. God did not create the universe but only that which has a sense of existence in the universe.

God is onmiscient and there is nothing wrong with life that allows for sense perception (pleasure and pain/good and evil) in creation. You should see that as a bonus and our expanded faculty of reason gives us the edge over other less sentient beings which became ours as a direct result of the temptation in the garden. Lucky for Adam that he chose the cunning serpent as his wife who taught him to both crawl and walk upright so he could gain dominion in a living world around him.

Plognark

Well said

ROFL :rolling:

That's a lot of text that, no offense, really says little.

I admit that i'm not sure miudiri's point is a strong one regarding good/evil and the recognition that disobeying god is "evil". Haven't thought of it from that angle, but this explanation of yours doesn't make much sense. I don't recall much scriptural support for this theory of yours, but if you want to post the relevant lines, feel free.

You're using the word doomed in the wrong definition here.

You've still not even come close to explaining why god set us up for failure, and then punished us for doing what he not only knew we would do, but what he created us to do.

What?

Edited to add: I seem to recall some lines about him creating light, dark, the stars, the heavens, the fishes, etc, etc.

What exactly is this sentence supposed to mean? It strikes me as more of the generally meaningless obfuscation i'm used to reading. :huh:

I never said there was anything wrong with that...what does this have to do with anything??

I don't suppose you could actually answer my questions. This has no bearing that I can see on them them at all.

All it is is more nonsensical preaching about man's dominion over the earth, blah blah, etc. :banghead:

Plognark

Chili, the scripture doesn't seem to back up your strange interpretation of "man" being separate from "Adam". In context they're used rather interchangably just like what they are: a proper name and a pronoun.

God seems to move along quite well alternating between man/adam well before he had a bite of the apple. There's absolutely no indication that this odd notion of an Adam "identity" came later.

If you've got some support for this notion of yours, i'd love to see it.