Freethought & Rationalism Archive

LoungeHead · 11-01-2006, 09:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Malachi151

3) God creates humans as perfect, and gives them "free will"
4) God tells the naked humans not to obtain knowledge, but due to trickery and free will, they disobey God and bring a curse on themselves, creating the flaws of humans and gaining knowledge through disobedience.

God didn't give humans free-will. The tree of knowledge gave them free-will.

In order to have free-will, a person needs to be able to understand the consequences of choices, which require value judgments. Positive and negative values are based on principles or standards of good or right. In other words morality.

Only the The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil could give humans that knowledge. Therefore God did not give humans free-will because they would have known it was bad to eat from the tree. God had commanded Adam and Eve to not eat fruit from the tree, but the obedience to a command is not equivalent to understanding the value of the command. For example, your computer understands a command prompt and can perform it within software parameters, but does not have the ability to choose whether to obey the command prompt. It obeys or disobeys in relation to compliancy of the command. In the case of Adam and Eve an alternative command from a puppet sock complied with their ability to perform the act of eating forbidden fruit. :devil:

Loomis · 11-01-2006, 11:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Malachi151

Making sense so far?

You’re doing pretty good except …

Quote:

1) God is not of the earth,

and …

Quote:

"Eden" is the wilderness

If you look into this a little more you might come to agree that Yahweh was of the earth - just like the Sumerian roots. At least as far as the Garden of Eden narrative in Genesis 2-3 is concerned.

Yahweh lived on Mount Zion, and the temple on Mount Zion was the equivalent of the Garden of Eden. Zion was the “mountain of the gods.”

Ezekiel 28:13~14

You were in Eden, the garden of the gods.
Every precious stone was your covering,
the ruby, topaz, and emerald,
the chrysolite, onyx, and jasper,
the sapphire, turquoise, and beryl;
your settings and mounts were made of gold.
On the day you were created they were prepared.

I placed you there with a winged guardian cherub;
you were on the holy mountain of the gods;
you walked about amidst fiery stones.

See?

Eden was covered by a thousand gems including rubys, topaz, diamond, chrysolite, onyx, jasper, sapphire, carbuncle, emerald, gold, etc. It was guarded by a cherub.

Not a wilderness. It was a garden in the gods’ back yards - next to the tennis courts - high atop a mountain.

FYI, there are other verses that suggest that Yahweh lived on earth. For example Psalm 89:6 asks:

Who in the skies can compare to Yahweh?

Quote:

God, also, in the Hebrew story, grants a day of rest, while in the Sumerian there is no day of rest.

If you read it carefully you can tell that the “day of rest” was added later. Genesis 1 uses a literary formula to delineate each of the seven days of creation. At the end of each day's activities, except for the second and seventh days, God reviewed what he did and declared, "it was good."

See for yourself. The phrase "it was good" occurs seven times.

Gen 1:4 - first day
Gen 1:10 - third day (first instance)
Gen 1:12 - third day (second instance)
Gen 1:18 - fourth day
Gen 1:21 - fifth day
Gen 1:25 - sixth day (first instance)
Gen 1:31 - sixth day (second instance)

The days are all fucked up (the delineations are out of whack) because someone rearranged the events so that they could squeeze in the “day of rest.”

Am I making sense?

LoungeHead · 11-02-2006, 01:04 AM

Out of curiosity, can you refresh of what happened on the days he didn't think were good? It was the animals wasn't it, that weren't good.

Roach Clips · 11-02-2006, 02:07 AM

"To say that "you will surely die" when you eat from the tree of knowledge implies that you will not die if you do not take and eat the fruit."

But that's not all that was said, your purposely leaving out the rest of the passage. God said "for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." He's not implying that Adam will never die or that he is immortal but saying he will die on the day he ate of the Tree of Knowledge.

"The second death comes later in the story but is contingent upon the formation of the ego consciousness in the tree of knowledge wherein we will consciously know that we will surely die."

I don't understand. When did the first death happen? What is the second death?

So Adam and Eve didn't know what death was until after they ate of the Tree of Knowledge? If so, how could God threaten them with death?

Malachi151 · 11-02-2006, 05:33 AM

Thanks Loomis, good info!

xaxxat · 11-02-2006, 06:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hatsoff

I've always read it kind of like this:

God makes man, gives him eternal life, a sexy girlfriend, a really cool place to live and regular communication with his maker. He asks but one thing in return: "Let me keep this secret; I know that sounds weird, but you'll just have to trust me. Don't eat the fruit from that one tree. That's my only rule. In the mean time, eat anything else you want, frolick in your Garden and if you ever get bored just give me a buzz. Oh, and you can thank me later for your curvy companion."

Adam thumbs his nose, eats the fruit, and then tries to lie about it. God gets pissed off (who wouldn't?) and says, "Holy cow, did you really need to do that? Didn't you know it would piss me off? Okay, well here's what we'll do about it: You can still keep your eternal life and paradise pad, but now you're going to have to spend about 75 years dealing with pain and suffering, first. Oh, and if you piss me off again by, say, not believing I exist, then I'm just not going to deal with you at all."

Why bother having the tree there in the first place? Can you say SETUP?...

hinduwoman · 11-02-2006, 06:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Malachi151

This is where we get back to the Sumerian roots.

The Genesis story is just a derivation of the earlier story, so parts of it don't make sense if you don't know that context, which is what we have done today, and thus we have fabricated ideas into the story which were never really in the minds of the writers.

The story as presented by the Hebrews isn't really all that bad, in some ways its a positive retelling of the existing Sumerian and Babylonian stories, but in others its not.

The twists are this:

Sumerian/Babylonian:

1) The gods exist on earth and create naked humans to do their work for them.
2) The gods keep knowledge from the humans so that they will continue to work for them.
3) The flaws of humans are created by the gods.
4) The gods eventually grant knowledge to the humans, and invite them to "become like them".
5) The city is depicted as good, and "edin" is depicted as bad. "Edin" is the wilderness, and the city is civilization, where the gods live.
6) The naked humans leave edin to enter the the city after the gods give them knowledge.

Making sense so far?

Hebrew:

1) God is not of the earth, he creates everything.
2) God creates humans as his favorite beings, and sets them to work in the wilderness. (Why are they working? No reason, its just a hold over from the Sumerian story)
3) God creates humans as perfect, and gives them "free will"
4) God tells the naked humans not to obtain knowledge, but due to trickery and free will, they disobey God and bring a curse on themselves, creating the flaws of humans and gaining knowledge through disobedience.
5) God says "they have become like us" (another hold over from the Sumerian story) - so we have become "like God", against his will in this case.
6) "Eden" is good, and the city is bad. When the humans get knowledge they are expelled from the wilderness, and Cain, the "bad one" is the first to go to the city. The city and civilization represent "bad", and the preexisting naked condition in the wilderness represents "the good".

God, also, in the Hebrew story, grants a day of rest, while in the Sumerian there is no day of rest.

So, the Hebrew story came about some 1,000+ years after the Sumerian story originated andit puts a different spin on basically the same story.

Why these specific changes? I'm not sure. Perhaps the Hebrews were of a more privative people, who lived outside the cities, and they viewed cities and city dwellers as bad and corrupt, and thus they idealized rural/nomadic life. So, it seems to be a story about how the rural/nomadic people are God's people and the city dwellers are bad people, which would pretty much fit with other elements of early Hebrew mythology.

Perhaps there were conflicts between Sumerians and Hebrews in the far past? So citydwellers are bad but shepherds are good! :grin:

Jack the Bodiless · 11-02-2006, 09:38 AM

The repetition of "death" is indeed a form of emphasis. "Surely die" is a reasonable translation: "doomed to die" is not. Exactly the same repetition emphasis is used in the previous verse, Genesis 2:16, to describe eating: hence "certainly eat", or "surely eat", or "freely eat". But who translates that as "doomed to eat"?

Toto · 11-02-2006, 11:41 AM

A few posts have been split out here: Chili digression

driver8 · 11-02-2006, 03:54 PM

From:

http://cc.usu.edu/~fath6/contents-bible.htm

An Anthropologist Looks at the Judeo-Christian Scriptures

and this section:

http://cc.usu.edu/~fath6/worldview.html

The Creation: The Ancient Semitic Cosmology

Quote:

Eden and Its Garden
Like Dilmun, the ancient paradise of Sumer, the Hebrews envisioned a paradisical garden [Hebrew, gan] that lay somewhere in the east of Eden. In Hebrew, eden had come to mean "paradise" as well as "delight, luxury, and pleasure". The origin of the word is uncertain, but might be have originally meant "plain" (as in the flat lands between the two great rivers of Mesopotamia) as did the cognate Akkadian edinu. This Semitic word might actually have originally been borrowed from the language of the original civilization of Sumer, in which the word E.DIN has the same meaning. As in Dilmun, the garden was watered by a mist that arose from the ground. Its inhabitants did not age, and its animals lived in harmony.
Sumerian mythology had a number of motifs that survived down into Hebrew times. They referred to the paradisical garden that the gods inhabited as Dilmun. One of the stories that was set in Dilmun deals with punishment for eating a sacred plant and the creation of a goddess called the Lady of the Rib:

In Dilmun the raven utters no cry,
The ittidu-bird utters not the cry of the ittidu-bird,
The lion kills not,
The wolf snatches not the lamb,
Unknown is the kid-devouring wild dog,
Unknown is the grain-devouring . . ,
Unknown is the widow,
The bird on high . .s not his . . ,
The dove droops not the head,
The sick-eyed says not "I am sick-eyed,"
The sick-headed says not "I am sick-headed,"
Its [Dilmun's] old woman says not "I am an old woman,"
Its old man says not "I am an old man,"
Unbathed is the maid, no sparkling water is pourined in the city,
Who crosses the river [of death?} utters no . . ,
The wailing priests walk not round about him,
The singer utters no wail,
By the side of the city he utters no lament.

In other words, Dilmun was a true paradise in which there were no nuisances, carnivores did not present a threat to the herbevores, and there was no sickness, old age, or death. Another section tells that there was no pain in pregnancy or childbirth. But a problem arose. The Great Mother goddess, Ninhursag, had created eight sacred plants, and shortly thereafter Enki, the god of wisdom, came upon them and ate them one by one. Ninhursag was not pleased:

Thereupon Ninhursag cursed the name of Enki:
"Until he is dead I shall not look upon him with the eye of life."

Thereupon, Ninhursag departs and Enki languishes, suffering from eight illnesses. Eventually, Ninhursag is convinced by a fox to return and remove her curse. To do this, she creates eight goddesses, each of whom is endowed with the power to cure one of Enki's eight illnesses. One of the goddesses was named Nin-ti, who had the power to cure the illness of Enki's rib. Her name was an interesting play on words in the Sumerian language: Nin-ti means both "Lady [Nin] of the Rib [ti]" and "Lady of Life". This play on words was lost in Hebrew, although it did preserve the story of death entering the world because the first couple ate a forbidden plant and of a woman created from a rib, whose name Eve meant, according to Hebrew folk etymology, "Life".

The Four Rivers of Eden

The Yahwist text portrays the garden as set in an environment that conformed to the delta lands of Sumer where civilization first flourished, and identified great rivers that flowed through this region from four different highland watersheds. These four great rivers are described as coming together like branches of a single great river in Eden and then flowing out of Eden into the garden. The four are identified as the Gihon, the Pishon, the Tigris, and the Euphrates.

.........

Sumer, the Garden Watered by Four Rivers
From this description of the four rivers of Genesis, it can be seen that the biblical story of Eden corresponds with the lands of ancient Sumer, the world's earliest civiliation. Sumer arose in southern Mesopotamia about 3500 BCE in the form of a series of city-states that were linked to one another by trade and to regions to the north and west by land and south by sea as well. By their own accounts, the earliest of these Sumerian city-states was the city of Eridu, which like the later Sumerian cities of Ur and Erech was founded on the banks of the Euphrates River. The ruins of these ancient cities now lie about 400 miles upstream from where the Euphrates enters the Persian Gulf, but in that day the Gulf extended all the way to where these cities of commerce were founded. Their agriculture flourished in the rich delta soils deposited by the Euphrates and Tigris River, a process that gradually filled the northern reaches of the Gulf with silt, gradually moving the coast over the millenia toward the south to its present location. At the writing of the Genesis account around 1000 BCE, the silting process had moved the coast far enough south, that instead of flowing directly into the Gulf itself, as they had done in earlier times, the Gihon (which no longer flowed regularly) and the Pishon flowed directly into the Euphrates south of where it is joined by the Tigris, the configuration described in the Genesis account. Thus, the Eden of the Genesis story can be identified as the great flood plain of the Euphrates south of the ancient cities of Sumer.

I've tried to condense it a bit. The whole page is worth a read, as is the entire website.

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11-02-2006, 01:04 AM	#23
LoungeHead Banned Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Aotearoa Posts: 3,483	Out of curiosity, can you refresh of what happened on the days he didn't think were good? It was the animals wasn't it, that weren't good.

11-02-2006, 02:07 AM	#24
Roach Clips Regular Member Join Date: Oct 2005 Location: Winnipeg Manitoba Posts: 309	"To say that "you will surely die" when you eat from the tree of knowledge implies that you will not die if you do not take and eat the fruit." But that's not all that was said, your purposely leaving out the rest of the passage. God said "for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die." He's not implying that Adam will never die or that he is immortal but saying he will die on the day he ate of the Tree of Knowledge. "The second death comes later in the story but is contingent upon the formation of the ego consciousness in the tree of knowledge wherein we will consciously know that we will surely die." I don't understand. When did the first death happen? What is the second death? So Adam and Eve didn't know what death was until after they ate of the Tree of Knowledge? If so, how could God threaten them with death?

11-02-2006, 05:33 AM	#25
Malachi151 Veteran Member Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Colorado Posts: 8,674	Thanks Loomis, good info!

11-02-2006, 09:38 AM	#28
Jack the Bodiless Veteran Member Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: UK Posts: 5,815	The repetition of "death" is indeed a form of emphasis. "Surely die" is a reasonable translation: "doomed to die" is not. Exactly the same repetition emphasis is used in the previous verse, Genesis 2:16, to describe eating: hence "certainly eat", or "surely eat", or "freely eat". But who translates that as "doomed to eat"?

11-02-2006, 11:41 AM	#29
Toto Contributor Join Date: Jun 2000 Location: Los Angeles area Posts: 40,549	A few posts have been split out here: Chili digression

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