Stephen T-B

That's an interesting idea, Starboy, but I can’t be completely convinced by it.
I really wonder (and of course we’ll never know, so the argument can never be settled) whether Man ever felt bad about killing animals to eat. His self-awareness might have made him conscious of the special nature of Life, as it manifested itself in his own kind, but since we have found no evidence of burial chambers (and attendant burial rites) for the bones of meat animals, I doubt the idea was extended to non-humans which had been deliberately killed.
But I’m sure you are right that the notion of our being innately flawed in some crucial way comes from way back when. Guilt, after all, lies so deep that we share it with other social species, completely unrelated to us - as any dog owner will attest.
Perhaps with our heightened mental powers, we developed a heightened sense of it, so could feel guilty when we hadn’t even done anything wrong.
Perhaps, as you suggest, the story of Adam, Eve and the Fall expresses a communal guilt. Perhaps the reason it has endured for so long and with such powerful effects is because it zooms right in and hits our own personal Guilt buttons.
I doubt whether the mass of humankind will ever settle for the idea that we are not innately sinful but are merely Human, so religions whose doctrines embody Guilt and its expiation are unlikely to become redundant so long as our species survives.
.

MrDarwin

I think that Stephen is on the right track (although I'm not sure I agree that guilt is shared with other species). Adam and Eve are completely unnecessary because our morality and ideas about right and wrong are tied to both the social structure of our species and our self-awareness.

"Original sin" arose from our fallibility in conjunction with our species' self-awareness: that is, humans are imperfect and fallible creatures, prone to error and poor judgment, and this is inherent in being human--so in a sense it is genetic, in that it is something that we have inherited from our ancestors. (Looking at it in an evolutionary sense, the imperfection of genetic replication is precisely the thing that allows evolution to occur.)

Bingo.

Starboy

Stephen T-B, McDarwin,

You both make good points, and I will freely admit that I am doing nothing more than speculation, but try this on for size. Even in this day and age, life can be short and mean. Several thousand years ago it must have been an awful struggle. I can't help but think that many thought then as they do today, "Why me?” The guilt angle came into play, "I must have done something wrong.". The question remains, "What did I do wrong?” Many may have thought as they do today, "I didn't do anything wrong.” So it would be easy to come to the conclusion that someone else did it. Perhaps "life killing life" is not the sin but the punishment, since "life killing life" is how more life comes to be it might appear to some to be a great cosmic joke as well as a punishment. Eating from the tree of good and evil and being cast out from Eden was probably not originally seen as a punishment but a consequence of the new knowledge. What could the knowledge be? In a place like Eden I suspect the forbidden knowledge was that "life kills life". Once mankind learned the forbidden knowledge humanity and all other life on the planet began. This interpretation is also elegant because god is not required to punish anyone; the new knowledge was punishment enough.

Trying to think mythically is new to me so please excuse any obviously stupid conclusions.

Starboy

Stephen T-B

I like this: “Even in this day and age, life can be short and mean. Several thousand years ago it must have been an awful struggle. I can't help but think that many thought then as they do today, ‘Why me?’ The guilt angle came into play, ‘I must have done something wrong.’ The question remains, ‘What did I do wrong?’ Many may have thought as they do today, ‘I didn't do anything wrong.’ So it would be easy to come to the conclusion that someone else did it.”
I’m not sure, however, about this: “...god is not required to punish anyone; the new knowledge was punishment enough.”
I think the idea behind the Adam, Eve and Fall myth is that the acquisition of knowledge itself is the sin, for which all mankind is subsequently punished.
But I’m in the same boat as you - just trying to work things out.

Starboy

Stephen T-B, again I am speculating. I am pretty sure the A&E myth didn't originate with the Jews. But I think the Jews adopted it and added to it. What they added is something that is particularly Jewish, and that is guilt. Everybody is guilty. This also ties into what I have read about the original concept of sin as understood by Jews. It was a way of explaining why bad things happened to supposedly good people. In order to make it work they had to make all sorts of ordinary actions sinful, such as making love with the woman on top, cutting meat on the counter used for dairy and so forth.

Starboy

Shake

God put the tree in the garden for when he was strolling through and got hungry, or started to lose some of his knowledge. He must have been slipping when he allowed the talking snake into the garden!

From the other thread: someone said something about how God had to prove his love for us. Why? What does he owe us that he needs to prove it? He's God, right? Why not just implant the thought in all of our brains: - hey, I'm God and I love you guys! There! No need for proof. And anyway, who's to say he didn't make up the whole son-thing? God: "I'll pick some human, tell him he's my son and I've got to have him killed so that all of the other humans will believe I love them. I'll give him some special powers, and when he dies, he'll have a luxury suite here in Heaven ®. Then I'll just make up some saying about it that people can quote at major sporting events!"

Stephen T-B

Thank you, Shake, for clarifying that.

Starboy wrote: “I am pretty sure the A&E myth didn't originate with the Jews.”

Well, that's not something I’ve thought of before, but it makes good sense to me.

Why did the Jews put it into their religion?
Possibly for political purposes. Much of the OT (I gather) was assembled and written at a time of great crisis for Judaea - around 650 BC when the Assyrians were the Bullies on the Block and had already messed up Israel, the other Jewish kingdom. Unifying and giving the somewhat disparate bunch of goat herders of Judaea a sense of national identity was done by giving them their own god - and not any old god but the One True God which had favoured their race above all others. It had chosen them and given them the land they inhabited (so no damn Assyrians had the right to take it away).
Their unique status was marked by the fact that their God made specific demands on them in the form of numerous and complex laws which he handed down via his servant Moses and which He obliged them to observe.
This “God-given” code distinguished them from their neighbours, and in order that they be encouraged to observe them, the Adam and Eve myth was recruited so as to give God the justification for punishing them should they fail to observe them.
(Or perhaps the myth tells them that they are already doomed; only by observing God’s laws can they hope to attain everlasting life)
Whatever the case, it proved to be such a brilliant psychological tactic that it’s been terrifying people into “obedience” ever since - and thanks to Christianity, its influence has spread all over the world.

How about that for some wild speculation!

Starboy

I prefer a more prosaic explanation. As you point out, at the time the original Jewish sacred texts were concocted they were intended to unify the Jews as a people. Why did they need unifying? I suspect because they were being fragmented religiously. So like many other religions both recent and long gone, they appropriated myths as their own and synthesized the rest. And also like other religions they reinterpreted those myths that they adopted.

Starboy

Stephen T-B

I'd not be at all surprised to be told by scholars that religious fragmentation was occurring at that time.
But historically, religion and politics have been so closely intertwined that I'd guess the agenda here was both religious and political.

Mageth

A speculative option to the "life killing life" origin, perhaps, was the knowledge that bad things happen to people, and the quest for a reason why. People get sick, get killed by animals, tribes get attacked by other tribes, droughts and other natural disasters happen, etc. Back in the dawn of civilization, an explanation for these bad things was sought. Someone came up with the idea that, well, we must be making something unhappy. Let's blame it on the sun-god, the rain-god, etc. From this, the idea that the gods can be appeased to hopefully bring better fortune arose. The guilt we felt was then associated with these gods: if the gods are not happy, then we must be guilty of something. From this, the Jewish/Genesis association of sin/guilt with rebellion against god was born. "I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other gods before me!" Someone in the past (A&E) must have rebelled against god, angering him so that he cursed all of us; that's where our life of suffering, of childbirth, of tilling the ground with the sweat of our brow originated.