There’s a bit of discussion going around concerning the ontological status of Adam and Eve — is the story literally true, useful metaphor, not really true but based somehow in reality, or what? For me, it would be hard to think of a less interesting question. But I do have a serious issue with the A&E story, which I rarely see discussed: it’s a terrible lesson on which to found a system of belief.
The story is told in Genesis, chapter two and chapter three. God sets up Adam in the Garden of Eden, and soon takes one of his ribs and makes Eve. For the most part the Garden is a pleasant place, and there doesn’t seem to have been any duties more onerous than coming up with names for the different animals. But for reasons that are not explained, God placed in the Garden something called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and commanded that Adam and Eve not eat from it. (Translational difficulties being what they are, there is a school of thought that argues that “good and evil” should be understood as simply meaning “all things, both good and evil.”) Eventually, of course, they take a bite, with a little urging from a crafty serpent. God gets angry, curses them, and casts them out of the Garden forever — the Fall of Man, as Christians would have it.
The choice given to Adam and Eve was a simple one: (1) obey, or (2) attain knowledge, in particular of good and evil. If those are my two choices, I’m choosing “knowledge” every day. Count me on Team Eve on this one. As far as I’m concerned, this wasn’t the Original Sin, it was the Original Heroic Act.
I want to see a religion founded on exhortations to disobey authority and seek the truth at any cost.
August 18th, 2011 at 10:55 am
Sean,
I’m not sure what you meant, but “knowledge” in this story isn’t supposed to be literal. The story is about the sin of pride:
http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_32genesis3.html
August 18th, 2011 at 11:08 am
“I want to see a religion founded on exhortations to disobey authority and seek the truth at any cost.”
Whether it qualifies as a “real” religion or not, religious naturalism incorporates empiricism as a guiding value. A recent expression of this relatively new tradition is Unitarian Universalist minister William R. Murry’s book Reason and Reverence, in which he extends religious humanism using the resources of science-based naturalism, arriving at a humanistic religious naturalism, http://www.naturalism.org/murry.htm
August 18th, 2011 at 11:09 am
Ah, I see: if you reinterpret the word “wisdom” so it means a completely different word, then it all works out! Indeed, though the word is apparently used the same way everywhere else in the Bible, it means something different there, so that the story will work out the way you want it to.
Even with that transparent rationalization, it still doesn’t work. That is, the story states that certain kinds of knowledge are bad, and you should blindly obey those who tell you which is which without questioning.
You can say it’s about the sin of pride, but pride led them to seek this knowledge, and that knowledge becomes their punishment.
Knowledge = bad things happening.
August 18th, 2011 at 11:14 am
Here is a quote from Sagan’s Dragons of Eden (a wonderful book) that looks at the story of Eden and the casting out of Adam and Eve.
One perhaps can see how over the long development of human consciousness this metaphor became associated to some degree with the acquisition of “knowledge” and painful childbirth:
“So far as I know, childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings. This must be a consequence of the recent and continuing increase in cranial volume. Modern men and women have braincases twice the volume of Homo habilis’. Childbirth is painful because the evolution of the human skull has been spectacularly fast and recent. The American anatomist C. Judson Herrick described the development of the neocortex in the following terms: “Its explosive growth late in phylogeny is one of the most dramatic cases of evolutionary transformation known to comparative anatomy.” The incomplete closure of the skull at birth, the fontanelle, is very likely an imperfect accommodation to this recent brain evolution. The connection between the evolution of intelligence and the pain of childbirth seems unexpectedly to be made in the Book of Genesis. In punishment for eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God says to Eve, “In pain shalt thou bring forth children” (Genesis 3:16). It is interesting that it is not the getting of any sort of knowledge that God has forbidden, but, specifically, the knowledge of the difference between good and evil-that is, abstract and moral judgments, which, if they reside anywhere, reside in the neocortex. Even at the time that the Eden story was written, the development of cognitive skills was seen as endowing man with godlike powers and awesome responsibilities.”
August 18th, 2011 at 11:45 am
This all just goes back to Prometheus. Zeus gave the task of creating men and animals to the titans Prometheus and Epimetheus. Prometheus created men out of clay, in the image of gods. It took him some serious time, and when he finished, stupid Epimetheus had already given all possible gifts to animals. Damn, the only gift left in the world was the gift of fire (aka “knowledge”). But Zeus would not let Prometheus give it to men, who he thought did not deserve it yet. Never mind, Prometheus just waited for his chance, defied Zeus, and stole a branch to give men fire. Big up to Prometheus, but this enraged Zeus and Prometheus did not have a nice ending, with the eagle etc. Poor Prometheus. Well, dont worry, Heracles rescued him later on. In this story, the problem is not fire (or knowledge) but deserving fire (or deserving knowledge). Once men got it in the greek myth, they started using it to kill each other and to destroy nature, and to almost destroy themselves… Zeus finally had to send them Hermes to bring them “justice”, which is a different concept from knowledge. As often discussed here, knowing everything about QFT in curved spacetime doesnt give any clue to a concept like “justice”, so the issue Zeus had in the greek myth was that men got knowledge before moral principles, while they should just have been more patient, learn moral principles such as “justice” first, and acquire knowledge afterwards, with wisdom and patience. I bet the Christian story has (at least partly) the same symbolic meaning.
August 18th, 2011 at 11:54 am
Heres some advice from Jesus: Follow the Truth and the Truth shall set you free.
Were you alive in the Garden of Eden?? I diden’t think so. Do you know what really happened there??
There had to be more to the store as we see hundreds of years covered in words that thake mere seconds to read(Genesis 1-5).
John 21:25 sums it up good.
August 18th, 2011 at 11:54 am
You want Gnosticism; its very name is from the same root as “knowledge”. Gnosticism teaches that we can attain union with god through direct experience and knowledge, without relying on doctrine or intercessors. To Gnostics, the serpent is the hero in Genesis.
August 18th, 2011 at 11:57 am
The only correct translation from the Jewish philosophy perspective [ the source of this, you know]
is ” approach to knowledge as good or bad, (as opposed to true or false)”.
Carefully read Maimonides , Guide for the Perplexed I chapters 1 & 2 .
Of course it’s a metaphor .
Maimonides wants all ideas evaluated as true or false . All falsehood is discarded. Truth is determined by proof or direct sensation .
August 18th, 2011 at 12:00 pm
Sean: “As far as I’m concerned, this wasn’t the Original Sin, it was the Original Heroic Act.”
If so, then Adam and Eve also learned the Original Aphorism: No good deed goes unpunished.
August 18th, 2011 at 12:15 pm
Looking at that picture of A&E, I just wonder who has been shaving Eve’s armpits
August 18th, 2011 at 12:24 pm
“I want to see a religion founded on exhortations to disobey authority and seek the truth at any cost.”
You could dabble in a bit of Luciferianism as well I think. I think it’s kind of the cleverer big brother of Satanism, presenting Lucifer/the snake as a humanist hero helping man stand up to God’s authoritarian demands for ignorance. Anti-authoritarian, pro-knowledge. I don’t know whether you have to get up to any funny business with chickens and whatnot.
#8 @nachumj: Really? Jewish philosophy is the _source_ of Genesis? I’m afraid it was written long before any systematic Jewish philosophy. Maimonides is simply one of a number of commentators 1500 years or so after the composition, albeit a highly influential one.
#8 + #1 @Phil: It is a great fortune bordering on suspiciously convenient that those parts of scripture which make truth claims that are disprovable by modern science, patently ridiculous to modern common sense, or whose literal implications are offensive to modern sensibilities intersect perfectly with those parts of scripture that are obviously (“of course”) to be interpreted metaphorically. One wonders whether, as man’s knowledge grows and his values mature, one day we find that all scripture is only to be interpreted as a metaphor?
August 18th, 2011 at 12:26 pm
I’m with ya. Adam and Eve, the serpent, Icarus, Prometheus, all more deserving of acclamation than a god who would lock you in a garden with those two choices.
August 18th, 2011 at 12:26 pm
I contend that this story is really “about” distinguishing monotheistic Jahwism from the broader polytheistic Semitic paganism. AFAWK, in ancient Semitic pagan tradition, Yahweh was a “demiurge,” a creator god only, and the serpent is the hero of the Genesis story. And Yahweh is the one cast out of the garden, not the other way around.
In order to turn Semitic polytheists into Semitic monotheists, you’ve got to rewrite the mythology to put Yahweh at the center of the story. Which is why so much of it makes no sense to people unfamiliar with the earlier versions.
(Of course, very little real knowledge of Semitic polytheism has survived three millennia of iconoclasm; most of what we do know comes from Phoenician/Canaanite archeology and the study of minority Semitic religions like Yazidi. So it’s mostly speculative. But it works for me.)
August 18th, 2011 at 12:44 pm
But Sean, if you were inventing a religion to control people, wouldn’t you also discourage them from seeking knowledge? Informed subjects are more likely to defy authority. You want them to think knowledge is evil and that the safest thing to do is to keep their heads down and toil. Of course, you have to imagine yourself not as a theoretical physicist but as a tribal leader who wishes to live off the labor of gullible people.
August 18th, 2011 at 1:02 pm
A couple details of the story commonly overlooked:
God lied to Adam:
Gen 2:16-17 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
The serpent told the truth to Eve:
Gen 3:4-5: And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
They ate the fruit, and they did not die that day, in fact they lived several hundred more years, and they knew good and evil.
August 18th, 2011 at 1:24 pm
Templar,
“Were you alive in the Garden of Eden?? I didn’t think so. Do you know what really happened there??”
No, but neither were you.
I’ve never been to the center of the Sun either, but our best explanations tell us to a high degree of precision what the temperature is.
I prefer to rely on our best explanations for how knowledge comes about — and not on fiction and miracles, which can be invoked to explain everything and nothing.
August 18th, 2011 at 1:31 pm
I especially like how Templar 7 attempts to verify what the bible says with something else the bible says.
August 18th, 2011 at 1:44 pm
“I want to see a religion founded on exhortations to disobey authority and seek the truth at any cost.”
Buddhism. Or, I don’t know if there is a religion based on Jesus rather than on followers of Jesus, but that would work too. I like to say that I’m Buddhist because it’s what Jesus would’ve wanted.
August 18th, 2011 at 2:19 pm
I always had a problem with the A&E story but on a different avenue. Say I am a designer and I design object “X” Then obect “X” does not perform the way you thought you designed it for, so who do you blame yourself for the faulty design or object “Z”? Most humans would go back and see where the design was wrong but not GOD he blames the object.
August 18th, 2011 at 2:58 pm
Phil O, I’m not sure what version of the greek myth you’re referencing, but the versions I am familiar with has nothing about “waiting” to get fire later, after anything. Prometheus gave man fire because man was freezing to death, and man needed something to defend himself from the animals, and all the nifty gifts, like teeth and claws and speed and size and power, that Epimetheus gave them. Fire was man’s salvation – without it man was about to die a mass, grisly death. Fire in the greek myth doesn’t directly represent knowledge or wisdom, it represented technology.
And Zeus said no. Not “not right now,” and not “No, but we’ll give man something else to protect him from the elements and the wild animals that is safer for him”, but “No. Not now. Not ever. Fire is MINE and I’m not sharing. Ever.”
August 18th, 2011 at 2:59 pm
And this is how religions that believe in Genesis should teach it– mine does. I don’t believe we could have true joy without both the fall and the savior. It was all part of God’s plan all along. I like that phrase, “Original Heroic Act.”
August 18th, 2011 at 4:18 pm
I, on the other hand, think that it is a *great* way to find a belief system, if your goal of a belief system is to enable it to survive for a long time. I mean, what can be better than to declare from the get go “Stop seeking knowledge, and start listening to me.”
August 18th, 2011 at 4:27 pm
A religion based on disobeying authority will be popular among teenagers everywhere. At least, until they grow up.
August 18th, 2011 at 4:40 pm
@10. Felix,
Going out on a limb here, but it might be theologically consistent that body hair was one of the punishments for disobeying. Or maybe the artist equated innocence with youth (or thought that the audience would), and therefore wanted to portray Adam and Eve as physically youthful.
What I want to know is what condition causes leaves to shelter the groin??
August 18th, 2011 at 4:49 pm
The story of Adam and Eve is clearly fiction, but does give us an interesting probe into the human intellect of several thousands of years ago. What stands out is that our ancestors recognized the significant difference between man and animal. It tells us that they could identify our similarities with beasts, but could not explain the intellectual gulf between us and everything else.
Remember, the recordation of stories like adam and ever occured several thousands of years after the bottlenecking of the gene pool. Modern man had existed for tens of thousands of years with nearly the intellectual capacity as we have today. Some two to three thousand generations passed from the population that spawned our most human ancestors to the one that wrote adam and eve. Whether adam and eve is a recordation of a traumatic event in the evolution of man is a very tantalizing thought.
August 18th, 2011 at 6:03 pm
Sorry, I haven’t followed the whole conversation here, but did read a comment that needs correcting.
Reginald, you completely missed the point. Any competent theologian will tell you that the story of the fall is one of spiritual, not physical (biological), death. If you’re going to point out “points” that religious people “should have noticed”, at least make them good ones.
J
August 18th, 2011 at 7:01 pm
I’m not sure about it’s history or tenets, but you gotta love Theosophy’s motto: There is no religion higher than truth.
All religions should have a cool motto, but the Theosophists need to give their emblem a makeover. It contains both a swastika and a serpent. Maybe we should flood their e-mail with suggested replacements.
August 18th, 2011 at 7:18 pm
J – the story is not for theologians but for the folk. So Reginald’s comment is completely in place. As a matter of fact I remember distinctly reading this in my catechism class and thinking how stupid was the fact that God was lying and the serpent was obviously right and helpful.
Adam and Eve were not dead physically and spiritually (please don’t bring the original sin and Jesus into it), they ate the fruit and poor serpent deserves a lot of credit for getting humans out of that Nazi-style Eden. We should feed him a mouse rather than step on his head.
You know, to make childbirth painful for such a minor transgression, Yahve is a psycho. Thank Serpent for the c-section!
August 18th, 2011 at 7:36 pm
Forget Adam & Eve … how about the story of Abraham willing to sacrifice his son Isaac at the supposed request of God? In what alternate reality is that an admirable quality?
August 18th, 2011 at 7:59 pm
And then there’s the concept of Hell and eternal damnation with no hope for parole. Guess that’s why I agree with the minimalist philosophy that the only worthy lesson from the Bible is to “Do unto others …”
August 18th, 2011 at 8:22 pm
@ 14. You must be a GWB 43 Republican!
August 18th, 2011 at 8:57 pm
There *are* different meanings of the word knowledge, and the intended use in the story is *not* knowledge gained through skeptical inquiry. Life experience is different than the results of scientific experimentation. Whether you learn about rattlesnake venom by studying its affects on mice in a laboratory or by getting bitten while hiking in the woods matters a great deal, and I hope you would agree that while the former can indeed yield valuable knowledge, the latter should be carefully avoided no matter how much one would learn about the subject. Adam and Eve’s choices were not to study venom in a lab, but to get bitten.
Considering another example, one may learn about crack by studying all of the physiological, financial, social, and legal troubles that come from using it, and then one may learn about crack by undertaking the experience of using it and becoming an addict.
One learns more about what is right and wrong by thinking about what makes an action right or wrong, not by doing what one knows is wrong. If Adam and Eve wanted knowledge of good and evil, they could have philosophized about ethics. If they wanted knowledge about the fruit, they could have cut it apart and examined it.
The tree wasn’t called “of the knowledge of good and evil” because eating its fruit would magically give a person knowledge of some subject that happened to be good and evil. Maybe some have interpreted it as such, but that’s unnecessarily complicating a simple story. Eating the tree’s fruit was itself an evil act, having been forbidden. One who ate it would know evil by experience, and would know good from the outside.
Adam and Eve knew eating the forbidden fruit would be wrong and did it anyway, not to learn more about good and evil, but to gain more power – to “be like God” as the serpent promised. Then, having done evil, they knew more about good and evil. They felt shame. The choice wasn’t obedience or knowledge, it was obedience or betrayal.
The serpent is only the hero if crack dealers are heroes. They offer first-hand experience that gives a person a certain type of knowledge that cannot be gained any other way. It’s hardly wise to take them up on it, though.
August 18th, 2011 at 9:07 pm
#29 @Ray: You should read Kirkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. The inexplicable perversity of the request and Abraham’s willingness to carry it out is the whole premise of the book. He finds from it (eventually) a religiously positive conclusion: that of the ‘leap of faith.’ But even for the enlightened godless who cannot agree with his conclusion, it’s a great book.
August 18th, 2011 at 9:20 pm
Adam – wow, you’re really displaying your ignorance of theology.
Theologians don’t just dismiss it as a “story for the folk”, but try to make sense of it within the context of the rest of the Judeo Christian belief system. You can’t just say “don’t bring in original sin” or “spiritual death” because of what you or I believe about it. If you’re going to bring up criticisms of any system of thought, religious or not, criticize something actually in it. Instead, you’ve made up something that is easy to criticize and isn’t true of the system of thought, just so you can sling mud one something you already don’t like. You and Reginald are committing the same intellectual sin as proponents of “intelligent design”.
August 18th, 2011 at 10:47 pm
“I want to see a religion founded on exhortations to disobey authority and seek the truth at any cost.”
That’s what Creationists and climate change denialists think they’re doing all the time… disobeying the imposed authority of the educated intellectuals and scientific elites and seeking that there “real truth”.
The irony of this whole thing is that the origin of this Creation story actually has the connotations you’re talking about, Sean, but it’s not apparent without the social context. Joseph Campbell actually makes a big deal of this in his comparative mythology works, but manages somehow to interpret it wrongly.
Basically, the image of a woman and a snake and a tree is not exclusive to Judaism. In fact, it appears as a common image throughout ancient Mesopotamia with positive associations of fertility and wisdom… Pretty close to the meanings you ascribe to it. Campbell notes the frequency of this image and says that it was adopted and coopted by Judaism, tying it somehow or other to the conquest of Canaan. I suspect that he interprets it this way because he never seems particularly disposed towards Judeo-Christian ways of thinking and tends to try and find harmonious resonance between mythologies. It never quite enters into his mode of thinking that one group might be deliberately subverting the mythology of another.
If one examines the relationship of ancient Hebrews to the empires of Mesopotamia – the ones upholding this image of women and snakes and trees dispensing wisdom – there is one thing that becomes painfully apparent. These same empires were always conquering and carting off the Hebrews into slavery. Its during their tenures as slaves that they picked up the stories that were subverted in Genesis. After all, none of the Hebrew Scriptures were written before the exile in Babylon. As an example, the first Creation story of an orderly activity by a benevolent Creator is in stark contrast to Babylonian myths of the cosmos being created out of the entrails of the violently slain dragon Tiamat. Also, a myth about the building a giant Babylonian Ziggurat, at the top of which were temples, becomes a meditation on the “language barrier” between the oppressors designing the society and the oppressed who have to build it.
Likewise, Hebrews took this image of a woman and a snake and a tree and subverted it. They are critiquing the mythology of their oppressors by saying that it did indeed bring knowledge of good and evil, and along with that it brought the suffering of imperialism, warfare and slavery. Of course there are a lot of layers in each of the myths in Genesis, but the preference of God’s lifegiving morality (i.e.: don’t kill people, jerk) against adhereing to the commands of flawed and oppressive societies built on selfish human judgement (i.e.: kill people because the government tells you to!) is a major theme. None of the Old Testament… not a word of it… can be read or interpreted in a reasonable way that does not account for the fact that the “primal event” of Judaism, the whole interpretive framework of the religion, is liberation from slavery.
In conclusion, what you’re actually railing against here, Sean, is that these uppity Jewish slaves don’t like being slaves and are challenging the imposed authority of their imperial masters. It’s the exact opposite of what you’re claiming to support.
August 18th, 2011 at 11:46 pm
Actually, the story sets up quite nicely for the rest of christian theology. Gaining knowledge of good and evil, mankind must now make their own choices. To gain access to heaven after you die, you must make the right choices. This is why it is called the original sin: without this act, all of mankind would be without sin by default, in a state of blissful ignorance. It is not(IMO) a judgment on the morality of the act in this case.
Edit: Or come to think of it, if morality is to maximize happiness(whatever that is), then an act which removes humans from a blissful trance is in fact morally wrong
Considering how there was no concept of happiness back when the bible was written and how Christian morality does not seem to be about maximizing happiness at all, this of course makes no sense.
August 19th, 2011 at 12:36 am
“I want to see a religion founded on exhortations to disobey authority and seek the truth at any cost.”
Wouldn’t be much of a religion then, would it?
August 19th, 2011 at 1:54 am
Sean says “I want to see a religion founded on exhortations to disobey authority and seek the truth at any cost.”
Sadly such a comment only highlights your awareness of (or lack thereof) Biblical and Church history. What do you make of the Old Testament narratives, the New Testament description of a man who disobeyed authority and paid the ultimate price, of his disciples who followed him even unto death, of the hordes of martyrs? What do you make of the Church that is even prepared to be counter cultural and unpopular to hold onto and protect the truth?
One wonders if you’d even recognize the truth even if it stood on a hill with his arms outstretched.
August 19th, 2011 at 2:51 am
Brilliant reflection. When you think about it, that explains a lot why some Chrisitans dislike the idea of a secular society. A secular society figures out as it goes along what is good and what is evil, establishing laws to protect its citizen from evil and declaring rights to spread out what is good. It attains knowledge of good and evil through observation and critical thinking. Policies are eventually re-evaluated based on how they perform, irrespective of (ideally) any ideology. A secular society not only bites in the forbidden fruit, it tries to eat it all. And yes, in the process, you discover that religious ideologies possess far from the best definitions of good and evil. If you taste the forbidden fruit, it is you who banish of God, not God who banishes you. This, and all that follows, is where the Bible went wrong
August 19th, 2011 at 4:09 am
#33@Stuart: Since God eventually stops Abe; wouldn’t the conclusion be that following a “Leap of Faith” is the wrong action?
August 19th, 2011 at 5:29 am
“is the story literally true, useful metaphor, not really true but based somehow in reality, or what?”
Pure fiction.
August 19th, 2011 at 5:51 am
J, that sounds an awful lot like “God lied to Adam, but theologians didn’t like that answer and decided it was all a metaphor.” Even if God really meant “spiritual death” (whatever that is), would Adam have interpreted it that way? No, surely when he heard “Don’t eat the fruit or you’ll die” he would have thought God meant he’d actually *die*. So it seems the story makes God ought to be deliberately deceptive.
August 19th, 2011 at 5:52 am
I believe that God was warning us that a man who listens to a woman who disobeys God because she in turn hs listened to another person who is disobedient will bare the consequences of a life of pain. It is important to listen to God directly and not to be influenced by others who are disobedient.
Many biblical stories are warnings about the pitfalls of life of not walking a straight line. We need to put obedience first on our list of priorities and secondly we should avoid being influenced by others who are disobedient. Bible stories reflect our everyday lives and it is the best reference book on what not to do and what to do with our lives. Stories are often the best method of getting a message across to humans without hurting or humilating them.
August 19th, 2011 at 5:53 am
@Ray Gedaly: No, Abraham was supposed to follow until God revealed it was all a sadistic test. If God had punished Abraham for listening to him, *then* the lesson would be not to make the leap, or more specifically “Don’t follow people who tell you to kill your kids, no matter what kind of authority they have.” (Which would be a better lesson, in my opinion.)
August 19th, 2011 at 6:06 am
#40@Ray: well, firstly, I rather like Wilfred Owen’s take on that aspect of the story, especially as set in Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem where it sits perfectly alongside the corresponding part of the mass.
In Fear and Trembling the focus is upon the psychology of doing the deed (as representative of the psychology of belief in general), not the meaning of the event per se. This is why it is an interesting read even for atheists: although the final conclusion is a pro-religious one, the investigation is a real trek through (C19th view of) human motivations, and reaches some pretty nihilist interim conclusions (not for nothing is Kierkegaard known as the father of existentialism).
The Leap of Faith is Abraham’s willingness to do as instructed _despite_ the fact that the sacrifice seems to lack any kind of reason. Kierkegaard admits that we have no rational reason to believe. But as Kierkegaard can only see nihilism and despair without the consolations of religion, he concludes that we must knowingly and willingly cast aside reason and adopt religion, just as Abe knowingly and willingly trusses up Ike.
The book genuinely is interesting, partly because it is quite a sophisticated analysis, and also because it helps me to think about one of the Big Questions of religion: why it is that otherwise apparently extremely intelligent and rational people can still hold religious beliefs. (I don’t subscribe to the school who just throw mud at these people.)
August 19th, 2011 at 6:19 am
J #26: Reginald, you completely missed the point.
So there’s only one point, and you are in sole possession of it? How convenient.
Any competent theologian will tell you that the story of the fall is one of spiritual, not physical (biological), death.
Drop the word “competent,” that’s your easy escape clause. Clearly any theologian who disagrees with you is incompetent. I understand the ego people like you have. What exactly does competency in theology require?
My point is that even the most literal Bible believers are willing to deviate from literality when it is convenient in preserving their faith. Gen. 2&3 says nothing at all about a “spiritual fall.” And you, any competent theologian, any incompetent theologian, or anyone else who prattles on about a “spiritual fall” is deviating from a literal interpretation of the text. Even the most ardent Young Earth Creationist who believes that Noah boarded dinosaurs on the ark will overlook the clear implications of Gen 2&3 that Yahweh lied.
August 19th, 2011 at 6:26 am
J #34: Adam – wow, you’re really displaying your ignorance of theology.
And you’re displaying an impressive mixture of arrogant condescension and thickitude. Get over yourself.
Theologians don’t just dismiss it as a “story for the folk”, but try to make sense of it within the context of the rest of the Judeo Christian belief system. You can’t just say “don’t bring in original sin” or “spiritual death” because of what you or I believe about it.
Oh then, what is the justification for bringing in “spiritual death”? It is merely because they don’t like the implication that Yahweh lied, while the Serpent told the truth.
If you’re going to bring up criticisms of any system of thought, religious or not, criticize something actually in it.
Done and done. Selectivity in literalism is clearly on display, and I criticise it.
Instead, you’ve made up something that is easy to criticize and isn’t true of the system of thought, just so you can sling mud one something you already don’t like. You and Reginald are committing the same intellectual sin as proponents of “intelligent design”.
You are wrong. Selectivity in literalism is clearly a property of Judeo-Christian theology; example already provided. Now go @#$% yourself.
August 19th, 2011 at 7:04 am
@44, TimG:
There is actually a school of Midrashic thought which suggests that Abraham failed the test because God had to intervene. Of the Mesopotamian religions of the time, Judaism was the only one not to sacrifice children, so there was a reasonable question as to why. Supposedly it goes back to Abraham not sacrificing Isaac. This school of thought I mentioned suggests that Abraham was supposed to have refused, but was too enculturated (he was from Babylon, after all) so God had to stop him. It’s also fairly consistent with the overarching Biblical narrative, which is that major figures tended to learn more and move closer to God through their mistakes.
——————————————-
I will also point out, in general, something that I should have before. Original Sin is not the same thing as the Fall. Those tend to get thrown around interchangably, but they describe two different things. The Fall is the narrative event of that first disobeyal of God (and I admittedly find it amusing that so many people are quick to call God a liar because He was merciful). “Original Sin” describes the current state of humanity, which is that no matter how good of a person you are you will inevitably do something to hurt somebody somehow, even through inactivity. Every now and then I get people proudly telling me that they don’t believe in Original Sin, to which my snarky, sarcastic reply is “Well you’re entitled to disbelieve in it all you want, but that doesn’t stop wars from happening.”
August 19th, 2011 at 9:06 am
When we place a treat on a dog’s nose and command him to sit there and not eat it, we are most like God.
August 19th, 2011 at 9:32 am
(and I admittedly find it amusing that so many people are quick to call God a liar because He was merciful
Now there’s an example of what “J” calls “something that is easy to criticize and isn’t true of the system of thought.” We call Yahweh a liar because he lied. You are instead making up a different argument and pretending that we said it because you prefer to argue against that instead.
August 19th, 2011 at 9:56 am
I don’t know if there is an English translation, but this book sheds light on ~1500 creation stories collected world wide, and compares common themes.
Besides knowledge is also interesting to see how many stories eventually blame females for the problems of men. In most stories the ‘Eve’ is responsible for the fall, not the ‘Adam’. Even in non Christian stories it’s most often the woman that creates the final problem (also imagine a woman cutting too much from the sky-god to eat in one meal, forcing the sky-god to retreat from the Earth, and from that time on there is hunger. Congo, Africa)
Mineke Schipper
In het begin was er niemand – hoe het komt dat er mensen zijn
ISBN 978 90 351 3558 1
August 19th, 2011 at 12:22 pm
Among all other attributes, God (for the believers) is Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and OMNISCIENT. In other word he/she is what we now would call the ultimate “know-it-all.” God’s omniscience is his/her knowledge of all things including actual and possible, past, present, and future (foreknowledge). Therefore, he/she knew the “punch line” before it even happened in A&E’s time frame, that is to say they were going to choose knowledge over ignorance. So, why did God even bother with this charade?
August 19th, 2011 at 1:21 pm
Sean, I thought you believed we couldn’t derive ought from is, but here you want knowledge of ought.
August 19th, 2011 at 2:17 pm
Among all other attributes, God (for the believers) is Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and OMNISCIENT.
Be careful. You are offering the definition of the omni-god of Western philosophy. This should not be confused with Yahweh, the tribal god of the Jews, or the mysterious Elohim who also appears in Genesis.
August 19th, 2011 at 2:57 pm
@50, Reginald:
“We call Yahweh a liar because he lied. You are instead making up a different argument and pretending that we said it because you prefer to argue against that instead.”
I did nothing of the sort. I am well aware of what your argument is. You say God lied. I’m sure that an alternative interpretation – that God was merciful – didn’t cross your mind, and that’s fair enough.
Of course, there is a more straightforward interpretation that one could invoke beyond the one I did. That more straightforward interpretation is to simply read what it says.
Gen. 2:17: 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. 3: 3-4: but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die;
God was absolutely correct here: on the day that fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was eaten, death became part of human reality. Before that, it was not. The Serpent was lying, since death did enter human reality. And Eve didn’t know what the Hell she was talking about because she wasn’t even there to begin with: God did not say that no one shall touch the tree. Your interpretation derives from the assumption that “in the day that you eat of it you shall die” means “you’ll die RIGHT NOW”, but that’s not what it says. It says that people who would not die before they ate the fruit will die after they eat it.
And as another amusing aside, the very first things that Sean’s Original Heroic Act accomplish are shame and the irresponsible assignation of blame on others. Furthermore, God’s “punishment” for eating the fruit has far more of the character of natural consequences of one’s actions (there are two main schools of thought on sin: that one is punished for them and that one is punished by them): the man-over-woman/humanity-over-nature heirarchy is actually a consequence of the knowledge of good and evil. This is part of the Hebraic critique of master morality implicit to the story: knowledge of good and evil does not mean that people will choose good.
————————————-
@52, Tintin:
To an extent Reginald is actually right this. The conception of God with which the story was written is not necessarily the same as our post-Christian one. However, if you are going to back-interpret, there are some things to consider.
The first is that, in reality, the story didn’t happen. There was no charade to consider unless you’re a Biblical literalist (which, granted, many atheists are).
The second is that, despite all the railing here about how oppressive God is supposedly being in this story, He is providing a choice. God, in all His omniasticalness, did not necessarily have to provide a choice. But He did, for reasons that I think are intrinsic both to Himself and to what He wants us to be. There is a world of difference between God saying “It’s probably best for you if you don’t eat that… (even though I know you’re going to anyways, you stupid hairless apes)” and God just not giving us the option.
So I guess it’s now a question to throw back at you: why do you think God would give us a choice?
August 19th, 2011 at 7:01 pm
Reginald,
I’m sorry, it’s just not a good argument. There are good arguments. This is not one of them. Make a good one, if you wish to argue and tell me to $*#% myself. If you want to call my calling you out on this “arrogant condescension”, feel free – I’m just sick and tired of seeing mediocre arguments made against issues of faith on this blog, puppeted as if they’re good arguments. (Though some are good, I will rightfully admit!)
To respond to your statement: competent theologians aren’t ones who agree with me, just as competent art scholars aren’t necessarily ones who agree with me. Competent theologians are ones who are competent. There are standards in most fields (including theology) by which one can be designated “competent,” and it usually involves knowing a good deal of background information in the field and in related fields and studying some subject in depth. Then it involves making decisions, statements, and judgement calls (and ultimately publishing research) based on the thorough background obtained on the subject, as well as the in depth detailed study. Within a given subfield, people competent on the relevant issues generically reach some sort of consensus, though details may vary.
The point is this: the consensus reached by competent practitioners in the field is that it is not a literal death, period. From what I gather, you don’t have a serious enough background in this field to challenge a consensus. (If you yourself are a professional theologian, feel free to correct me, and I’ll listen to a more in depth argument that spells out in better detail what you mean!)
It’s like crackpot physicists who propose something that upset all the laws of nature, casually ignoring everything that has been learned (theoretically and experimentally) in the last 50 years. It’s not necessarily their fault – they’re often honest and interested. They’re just ignorant and don’t know the necessary background.
Also, regarding selective literalism. Though many practicing Jews and Christians will tell you their book is to be taken 100% literally, the books clearly aren’t. There are a vast array of stories / poems / recorded historical events / supposed miracles written for all different audiences and sometimes no audience at all. When, in the often poetic prophets, scripture says things to the effect of “and then God lifted Israel up with his right hand”, are you arguing that I’m employing selective literalism in saying that it doesn’t mean “God took his human hand, which he has, first off, and then used it to fight gravity and lift up towards the sky the entire nation of people known as Israel”. No, that’s absolutely ludicrous! I’m not taking it literally because the context of the rest of scripture (and also some degree of obviousness) implies that it’s a metaphor. In fact, it gains more significant and consistent meaning when taken as a metaphor. (Also true of the spiritual vs. literal)
Context, context, context. And context (as expounded by competent theologians) given by the rest of scripture clearly implies it’s not a literal death that God is talking about in Genesis 1.
I’m not arguing against the side you’re taking – I have no problem with you on this. I’m arguing against your bad argument. Which it is
J
August 19th, 2011 at 8:21 pm
Adam and Eve is a great story in as much as it gives Artists a nice chance to paint apples and nudes ! (…albeit with fig leaves )
I have thought the story of Abraham and Isaac is about ending human sacrifice – where God finally says – Stop – enough – “It is your life I want not your death.”
August 20th, 2011 at 9:14 am
@55, Cory Gross
Very nice answer. However, wouldn’t it have been much clearer for God then to have said, “In that day your flesh will cease to be immortal”? Should not one ethically be as clear as possible when presenting a choice? Of course, as Reginald points out, Yahweh was not the most ethical of gods.
In any case, it still seems an heroic act to me to give up physical immortality for the option of obtaining knowledge – speaking mythically. As we all know, if death did not exist, evolution would have invented it since it is a requirement for improvements in the adaptation of a population.
August 20th, 2011 at 10:45 am
@58, JimV:
I think it’s also worth considering that the original was written in Hebrew (which, amongst other things, includes no punctation or spaces) and our current translations (I used the NRSV) are weighted under past translations of Latin and King James English. If for absolutely no other reason, I would still read “in the day you eat of it you shall die” as “as of the day you eat of it you shall die” simply for the fact that, over 2,600 years, I’m sure someone would have said “waitasecond” if it meant otherwise. I don’t subscribe to the school of thought that atheist critics are just SO super bright that they’re pointing out things in the Bible to us that just no one happened to notice for millennia.
Mythically, I think we might want to be particular about what we’re talking about as well. Adam and Eve didn’t give up immortality for knowledge, period. They gave it up for knowledge of good and evil, which is a more specific form of knowledge. Within the narrative world of the story, there would have been nothing expressly stopping the two from accumulating scientific knowledge (in fact, they already were, if one looks at the systematizing of animal life by naming them in that manner). Even within the context of the story, having the capacity to make moral judgements is not in-itself a bad thing. It’s described as God-like. The problem is that humans, not being God, have the capacity for using that moral judgement to commit immoral actions. As I noted, the very first things that happened were that Adam and Eve felt shame and proceded to blame each other and the snake for their actions instead of taking personal responsibility.
I also think that “life” in the context of the story means more than just immortality. It also means “the things which make for abundant life”, to use the terminology from the New Testament. That is, an intimate relationship with God and a harmonious relationship amongst the Creation and humanity (again, it’s significant to look at what happens immediately after they eat: they hide from God for fear of punishment, they clothe themselves out of shame before one another, they blame each other, enmity is put between humanity and nature, toil and labour os prescribed for survival, and a man-over-woman social heirarchy is created). If one wants to give an overarching theme of the 66 books and 40+ authors whose work comprised the Protestant canon, I think one of them would be the struggle to use our “morality” to find our way back towards “life”.
I should probably have put “back” in quotes as well, since part of the whole subtext of the Creation stories is not trying to explain an event in the past but articulate the problems being faced in the present. Hense the critique of master morality. As I said, Original Sin isn’t the event of the Fall, but the “nature of humanity” gained through what we are and how we evolved. Because of this inescapability of the human condition, Scripture’s big answer to this dilemma is that we can’t really find our way to life through morals, because you can’t fix the problem with the same thinking that “created” the problem (which is the irony of conservative Evangelicals trying to legislate morality… no, that is the PROBLEM). It’s only God, as the principle of life itself, who can do that.
August 20th, 2011 at 10:54 am
For me the tree represents a singularity. In a typical space-time there will be singularities, so it is more likely that in this specific one, called heaven, there will be a singularity. The massage is very clear ‘stay away from it or you world line will end in finite proper time’. Apparently it was a wormhole that took them to this universe.
August 20th, 2011 at 12:58 pm
@55, Corry Gross
I really don’t know where you are going. First, what is “post-Christian” like in “our post-Christian one (conception)?” As far as I know, we are still in the Christian era. Second, I had to look up “omniasticalness,” but it does not appear in any of the dictionaries I have consulted.
Anyway, to your final question. God (you seem pretty sure it is a “he”) did not have to provide a choice, because he/she knew beforehand the results. He/she did it anyway because maybe when he/she was a kid, he/she enjoyed pulling wings off flies. As God “grew-up.” he/she thought of better things to do with his/her time: torture people, his/her own creation. If these Adam and Eve were his/her prototypes, and found to be weak in the flesh, why didn’t God go back to drawing board and fix the problem? Even GM would do a recall to fix any problem in any of its defective products. So, the answer to your question is: because God wanted us to be miserable, which is what sadists do.
August 20th, 2011 at 4:21 pm
@61, Tintin:
“Post-Christian” as in our conception of religion in the West is still primarily informed by a Christian perspective, whether or not the specific individual talking about it is a Christian. The idea that God is defined as omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent and omnibenevolent is a Christian one that has, in turn, informed most Western people’s conception of what a god should be and is the de facto definition they take for granted.
“Omniasticalness” is a Buffyism I made up in reference to the “omni” qualities of God.
On the gender of God, I use male and female pronouns interchangably. You happened to catch one of the times I didn’t do so equally.
Regarding God scrapping humanity and starting over, you seem to be objecting to the idea that God created intelligent beings with self-directed will and the opportunity for choice. You essentially described our capacity for making reasoned choices as a “defect.” I’m not sure which option you think would be better: to make humans unintelligent and without will, or to give them no opportunity for choice. Considering your argument that God should have made us perpetually infantile or should be more fascistic, I would argue that you’re thinking in far too shallow a manner about what God might want us around for.
So let me ask you again, and this time try to consider the question without so much feet-stamping and posturing as an angry, sarcastic sort of person: why do you think God might WANT intelligent beings capable of making mature and rational choices around? Why do you think God might NOT consider humanity irredemably defective, as you apparently do?
August 20th, 2011 at 8:16 pm
Actually, you can read the whole “tree of knowledge” story in a different way:
Choosing knowledge and disobeying authority is great, but it also leads to suffering, to indecision, to having to find the right answers for yourself and accepting the consequences of being wrong. For some, the life of a slave could be tempting. Disobeying authority and seeking truth is part of who we (most of us) are, but there is a price to pay.
What happened after man made their choice was not punishment, it was simply a consequence which God warned us about. The choice is still correct, in that it is part of what makes us human.
August 21st, 2011 at 8:46 am
@62, Corry Gross
“[W]hy do you think God might WANT intelligent beings capable of making mature and rational choices around? Why do you think God might NOT consider humanity irredemably defective, as you apparently do?”
Since, in my opinion, God is a figment of the human imagination, it would be hard for me to answer what an imaginary character thinks or wants.
August 21st, 2011 at 11:25 am
@Cory Gross: Thanks for your reply about the school of thought that says Abraham failed the test. That’s interesting to hear.
In your other comment in that reply, you refer to original sin as causing wars. I’m not a Christian and maybe I’m not up on the terminology, but it seems like you’re lumping *all* sin under “original sin”. My understanding was that original sin was the idea that everyone was already a sinner from the moment of birth. My impression was that it was supposedly due to inherited sin from Adam and Eve (which makes no sense unless everyone is responsible for all the misdeeds of their ancestors, which seems like an awful idea).
But maybe what you’re saying is they’re a sinner because they’re *going* to do something bad eventually. What about the baby with an illness that kills them in the first month of life? How are they a sinner? Are you saying that they’re a sinner because in some counterfactual reality, where circumstances were different, they would have eventually sinned? So people are responsible not just for what they do, but for what they would have done in an alternate world where the course of their life was drastically different?
Sorry if I’m totally misinterpreting you and arguing against something you aren’t even saying. By all means, please clarify it.
August 21st, 2011 at 2:56 pm
Cory Gross #55: God was absolutely correct here: on the day that fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was eaten, death became part of human reality.
According to Genesis 2, Yahweh did not say, “On the day you eat it, death shall become part of human reality.” This is your remarkable hubris in action, replacing the words of Yahweh with your own words.
Your interpretation derives from the assumption that “in the day that you eat of it you shall die” means “you’ll die RIGHT NOW”, but that’s not what it says. It says that people who would not die before they ate the fruit will die after they eat it.
Waffle waffle waffle. Now you’re making stuff up and pretending that I said it. Yahweh never said, and I never said, “RIGHT NOW.” That was you, making stuff up. Own it. What Yahweh said, in the original King James English, and which I transcribed accurately, was “for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. So we have “in the day, ” said by Yahweh, vs. “RIGHT NOW,” said by Cory Gross.
J #56: Competent theologians are ones who are competent.
I don’t get it yet, please beg the question a bit more.
From what I gather, you don’t have a serious enough background in this field to challenge a consensus.
You are correct, of course. I do not have enough practice nor proficiency at lying and waffling. Continue with your argument from authority.
<blah blah blah
Ignored.
And context (as expounded by competent theologians) given by the rest of scripture clearly implies it’s not a literal death that God is talking about in Genesis 1.
If that were true, you would be able to relate this “context” that all the competent theologians invoke. You can’t because it is rather an argument from consequences. They prefer not to admit that Yahweh is a liar.
Cory Gross #59: I don’t subscribe to the school of thought that atheist critics are just SO super bright that they’re pointing out things in the Bible to us that just no one happened to notice for millennia.
I don’t claim to have discovered anything new. Most of the arguments made by Bart Ehrman, for example, were made over 100 years ago. Why such criticism is not widely known amongst the Christian laity is a question for them and their clergy, not for me.
I also think that “life” in the context of the story means more than just immortality.
You are perfectly entitled to your opinions. You are not entitled to go counterfactual as to the actual contents of the Genesis text.
Tintin #61: God (you seem pretty sure it is a “he”)
Several people here have been sloppy in confusing God with Yahweh. It gets even more complicated when Elohim make their appearance.
August 21st, 2011 at 4:45 pm
@64, Tintin:
I can only assume that you were absolutely terrible in your high school English literature classes. If you can’t be bothered to examine a text or an idea well enough to arrive at some thoughtful conclusions about it, what are you even discussing this topic for?
———-
@65, TimG:
“Original Sin” is basically Christianese for “human nature” in the sense that people use “human nature” as an excuse whenever someone does something bad. It describes the inherent inevitability of people towards selfish and destructive behaviour.
It is not meant to accuse of any particular sin nor ascribe guilt for any sin of which a person may or may not be guilty. This is a critical distinction to make when people bring up “sinless” children. The argument is that children can’t be guilty since they haven’t done anything yet. But we’re not talking about guilt: we’re talking about human nature.
Children are a good example of what I’m talking about, actually. We are born “biocentric”, centered wholly on our own needs without any sense of a self-identity let alone anyone else’s independent identity. By one or two we transition to an egocentric consciousness that recognizes our own selfhood but doesn’t really have a grasp of anyone else’s. An amusing indicator of a child’s mental development is their capacity to lie, but that ability means that they can recognize that other people are separate individuals who do not share knowledge with them (it also dovetails nicely with what I said about the Fall and the first outcomes of it… we often test our abilities by violating others with them). At every stage of psychological development thereafter, we’re basically pushing the boundaries of our selfhood and displacing ourselves from the figurative “centre of the universe”.
This egocentrism, this sense of entitlement and self as the centre of the universe is the origin of those particular sinful acts of which we are guilty as individuals. In the parlance of my native Lutheranism, it’s the nature of being “turned in on self”. I don’t share Calvin’s view that human nature is entirely reprobate – we’re also intrinsically capable of incredible acts of compassion and charity – but it all comes in this mixed up bag of nature and nurture and circumstance and motivations and complexities and whatever it means to be human.
Did that clarify anything? Since this thread is getting long and nearing its expiry date, if you would like more clarifcation, feel free to e-mail me via the blog linked to my name.
—————-
@66, Reginald:
“This is your remarkable hubris in action, replacing the words of Yahweh with your own words.”
So basically, you’re making the argument that any act of interpretation is “putting words in YHWH’s mouth”… except for YOUR interpretations, of course. Like a true Christian Fundamentalist, YOUR interpretation is indistinguishable from the words of the Bible themselves.
No wait! Because…
“Now you’re making stuff up and pretending that I said it. Yahweh never said, and I never said, “RIGHT NOW.” That was you, making stuff up. Own it.”
Oh, you’re so hard done by. Everyone is just being so unfair to you and making things up. Of course YOU can be beligerent, condescending, insulting and a textbook study in making bad faith arguments, but if anyone besides YOU engages in the basic act of interpreting text, you’re right there on top of them to imperiously command what they should “own”.
And by the way, it’s YHWH, not “Yahweh”. There are no vowels. Get it right.
“What Yahweh said, in the original King James English,”
*blinks* Genesis wasn’t written in King James English.
“was “for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. So we have “in the day, ” said by Yahweh, vs. “RIGHT NOW,” said by Cory Gross.”
*blinks again* Yeesssss…. You’re trying to make it sound like you’re saying something here, but you’re not. “In the day” are the words, translated from Hebrew into English, and you apparently take that to mean “this same day” (which, if your reading comprehension is faulty, is synonymous with what I framed as “right now”) and accuse YHWH of being liar on those grounds. If that is not what you meant, say so clearly. Otherwise, follow your own advice and own it.
“Why such criticism is not widely known amongst the Christian laity is a question for them and their clergy, not for me.”
*blinks a third time* Actually most laity HAVE heard complaints like yours before (and been called the names you like to call people too). I guess you’re not really that familiar with common trends in mainline Christian theology. Colour me unsurprised.
“You are not entitled to go counterfactual as to the actual contents of the Genesis text.”
You are welcome to demonstrate how my interpretation is inconsistent with the text and theological/interpretive traditions regarding it. If you have no actual counterargument beyond “IS NOT, POOHEAD!!” and implicit assertions that your interpretation of “the original King James English” (*snicker*) is indistinguishable from the words themselves, then I guess my argument stands unrefuted.
August 22nd, 2011 at 12:10 am
Sean, you say “I want to see a religion founded on exhortations to disobey authority and seek the truth at any cost.”
I see a religion founded on exhortations to help the suffering and the unfortunate.
Just a block down from where I live, the destitute are starting to gather this morning, outside a church where they will be given boxes of food and groceries. A little further away another church in my locality will be organising a soup kitchen. Later this morning I drive to a nearby town to visit a home for the mentally handicapped, also supported by the church in that town. And in another nearby town a school for autistic children will be busy on the premises of the local Catholic Church.
And so it goes on in town after town after town. Wherever I look I find these quiet, unsung heroes, ordinary people motivated by an extraordinary idea, that good exists, that it should be given expression in love, support and help for the unfortunate. Each person, in his own small way, doing what he can to make the world a better place.
While you carp about about allegories there is a world of suffering out there. We need more people to address this, we don’t need the obsessive attacks of the Fundamentalist Atheists.
August 22nd, 2011 at 6:15 am
So basically, you’re making the argument that any act of interpretation is “putting words in YHWH’s mouth”… except for YOUR interpretations, of course.
As I have said repeatedly (so that you must be quite thick to have missed the message), you are entitled to your own opinions and interpretations. Where you run into trouble is that you confuse your interpretation with the original text, abundant examples already cited.
And by the way, it’s YHWH, not “Yahweh”. There are no vowels. Get it right.
In HBRW it’s YHWH. We are not speaking HBRW today, we are speaking NGLSH.
*blinks* Genesis wasn’t written in King James English.
Not only are you a wnkr, you’re a humour-impaired wnkr.
“this same day” (which, if your reading comprehension is faulty, is synonymous with what I framed as “right now”)
I’d be willing to grant Yahweh 24 hours to fulfill his prophecy, thus avoiding debate as to whether “day” starts at sunrise, sundown, or some other time.
You are welcome to demonstrate how my interpretation is inconsistent with the text and theological/interpretive traditions regarding it.
The text has already been presented, and I care not a whit about the theological/interpretative distortions of you or anyone else. I should think that would be clear to you by now. Your problem seems to be in maintaining a distinction between the text and interpretations.
I presume you’ll want to get back to your wnkng, so I’ll leave you to it. Goodbye.
August 22nd, 2011 at 10:39 am
@69, Reginald:
“Not only are you a wnkr, you’re a humour-impaired wnkr”
OH! This whole angry, insulting Internet tough-guy shtick is SUPPOSED to be funny. That explains much. My apologies.
August 22nd, 2011 at 11:01 am
Protect what truth? All I see is a Church protecting itself.
August 22nd, 2011 at 11:21 am
Death became “part of the human reality” that day only after God found out and cursed A&E with it. Death was not inevitably connected with the eating of the fruit. God had to make a deliberate act after the fact to make it so.
Note also God’s reasoning – “now that they have knowledge of good and evil, they’ll know about the Tree of Life, and if they eat that they’ll be immortal, and then they’ll be just like me being immortal and knowing morality, and that just won’t do! Out of the Garden with you!”
Parse that for a moment. This means, that contrary to apologist claims, A&E weren’t immortal when first made, and since God never told them about the Tree of Life, at all, there’s no indication that he ever wanted them to eat from it. In which case, they were going to die, eventually, whether they ate the fruit of knowledge or not. They just wouldn’t have known what it would mean if they hadn’t eaten the fruit of knowledge. There’s no “death entering the human reality” here. Death was there all along. Humans just wouldn’t have recognized it.
Alternately, the statement is a legal one. Transgression-punishment. “Eat not of this fruit, lest ye die” then means “I command you not to eat this, and if you disobey the punishment is that I will make you die”. Contemplate the divinity giving such a command to innocents with no knowledge of good and evil, and thus no knowledge of law, no conception of transgression, no understanding of obedience, and no comprehension of punishment, and tell me why said divinity is something that is worthy of anyone’s worship?
The most generous interpretation I know of is that it wasn’t a command, but a statement of fact, a choice-consequence thing. If you eat the fruit, then you will die. The choice is eternity in child-like innocence, never changing, or knowledge and the opportunity to grow, but with attendant suffering, and God wanted A&E to make that choice freely for themselves. The statement was made to sound like a command because Free Will itself was part of the choice. Because Free Will has to include the freedom to disobey God, or else it isn’t free will at all. Thus the choice is also the choice to accept the gift of Free Will, and all that it implies, or to reject that gift in favor of eternal blind obedience to God.
August 23rd, 2011 at 10:17 am
On the contrary, it is a wonderful “lesson on which to found a system of belief” because its flexibility of interpretation demonstrates to any with eyes to see the vacuity of the entire concept of a “system of belief”.
In fact, the religion you want – and just about anything else anyone else might want as well – is a legitimate interpretation of judaeo-christian mythology. So long as you don’t confuse the search for truth with the claim to have found it, then what you want is not in conflict with the idea of the “forbidden fruit” being “knowledge of good and evil”. The only justified claimant to such knowledge is identified as “God” (who probably does not exist), and to claim his authority, ie to “take his name in vain”, is not only presented as the fundamental source of human suffering, but is also explicitly forbidden in another of the Hebrew books and is also a recurring theme in the Aramic/Greek books where “Jesus” frequently rails against religious “authority” and proclaims “judge not lest ye be judged”.
August 23rd, 2011 at 12:13 pm
[...] Carroll of the Cosmic Variance blog at Discover Magazine claims that the “Fall” of Adam and Eve is “a terrible [...]
August 28th, 2011 at 12:21 am
I was just reading genesis a couple of weeks ago and pondering why god would put such a tree in the garden of eden, if he didn’t want Adam to eat the fruit from it. There seem to be so many gaps and ambiguities in the bible, I guess it makes it easier to “interpret” it to fit your own beliefs! Interesting discussion in the comments.
August 30th, 2011 at 12:14 am
Mormons have a lot to say about this particular topic. Just thought I’d weigh in.
http://lds.org/ensign/1990/01/the-fall-of-man-and-his-redemption
August 31st, 2011 at 1:41 am
sometimes atheists are really ennervating, and this is a good example. yeah, of course eating the apple is almost obvious – heck, this is the definition of what it means to be human. told as a metaphor, see?
Nietsche said that the cow is happily grazing because it doesn’t know stuff. would it know that it is genetically modified to give maximum milk and for generations enslaved by us humans (who have no quibbs killing it in the millions for some fear of a strange disease), it wouln’t be quite as happy in its own eden’s garden – now, would it?
so this Adam and Eve story is just an allegory that our knowledge makes us human.
September 3rd, 2011 at 2:13 am
@Sean
suggested reading for the redemption of eve: http://www.mormonmonastery.org/PDF/TheRedemptionofEve.pdf
incredible work, really.
September 5th, 2011 at 11:21 am
The choice given Adam and Eve was not imposed upon them. God, according to Genesis, offered them a choice – Key word: OFFERED – Which clearly attests to the Almighty’s restraint in exercising absolute power over this man and woman. He could have been dictatorial, an absolute godly Stalin or Po Pot; but some people do not see it that way because of their abstract views of an unseen Higher Intelligence; putting Him on the playing level of imperfect human beings.
Anyway, Adam and Eve had to decide if God had the right to govern them or if they desire autonomy. Simple as that. By taking the FRUIT – By the way, the fruit is not identified in the Holy Writ – from the Tree of Knowledge, their actions implicated they chose the latter: Independence. Their actions also determined that they rather take on all the responsibilities that comes with knowledge – Being like God, knowing good and bad; even being falsely accused as God is; all the negatives. And so, as history reveals, perhaps Adam and Eve should have permitted their Creator to govern them.
Throughout the ages, mankind has exercised his right to reign independently from God. Wars, violence, crime, among other disappointments. Was God holding something back from them? Yes, the pain and anguish of living imperfect as we do today. Suppose they chose not to eat the fruit that the envious serpent coaxed them to eat; would God still allowed them to exercise their freedom? Let’s see; God decreed: “From ALL the trees you may eat to satisfaction….” The only one tree God held out on was the one that caused the most pain.
Is there anything wrong with God protecting them from harm? Are we to say that the serpent really was a smart informer? Because look what eating from this forbidden fruit resulted. Now if this is a metaphoric story, well it’s a darn good one. Mankind has been steering his own ship for a long, long time. A Higher Power must intercede before mankind destroys himself.
Examine the principles of this story before writing it off as nothing but a fable.
September 7th, 2011 at 9:28 am
It’s just a metaphor for the rise of our self-awareness and all the complications and neuroses that followed.
More specifically, it could just be a metaphor for the dawn of agriculture, which one could cite as the beginning of our destructive, virus-like spread across the Earth. It’s not some kind of nefariously planned mind control memo. We are only just starting to break out of our old ways of thinking, but must keep in mind the good things the ancients taught us (either explicitly or symbolically) and apply them to a just and free society.
September 7th, 2011 at 3:45 pm
Is Saint Augustine’s exegesis for the 2nd and 3rd chapters of Genesis correct? Do a search: First Scandal.