Let's see, what's more reasonable, a being did something that it is impossible for it to do, or he stated that if they ate the fruit, they would die. As in if they didn't eat the fruit, the would live. Why would adam and eve need to ever die if the kingdom of heaven was bonded with the garden of eden in grace?

Also note, that the scholar's opinion is once again on my side, at least in the case of vermes, can't speak for spong on this one, or the other non-literalists.

Precisely, the doctrine of original sin is one of the most illogical aspects of the bible.

OH SCHNAP, fact check pwnage. I bow before you oh detector of inflated numbers.

Eh? How? If we didn't have the knowledge, we would have never fallen from grace, hence there would be no sin, cain wouldn't have killed abel, it would be pretty much like heaven.

Unless god made ANOTHER test for humanity for some reason.

 WHAT? That was one of the most important elements of the story, to have faith and trust in your father (representing parents and the heavenly father). It is not a matter of right or wrong, it is about love. The point for most of the duration of the old and new testament is that grace transcends emotions or moralities. If you have god's love then nothing can go wrong by default. And by finding that, we can discover ourselves, hence why the tree of knowledge was unnecessary.

It was eve's desire for more then this, her greed and her curiosity, plus the temptations of evil, that led her to eating the fruit.

Now what you should have said is "god put the snake there in the first place" which raises a much more interesting question.

I partially disagree, as I think on the whole it's quite interesting and layered by comparison to other texts or religious scriptures of the time. That said, a lot of the parts were stupid, and didn't make sense, like adam simply taking eve as a wife, and eve being such a bimbette, and curiousity being frowned upon and later praised in songs of solomon.

Well, I'm not necessarily saying that no time actually elapsed in the narrative, although there is a certain briskness to the account IMO, but rather that the context of that time is missing from the narrative, there's nothing to be said about it which must not first be assumed.

Absolutely, and there is nothing especially mature about having those skills. Maturity, as is implied by the word in modern experience, would be demonstrated in the extent to which a person utilises those skills well, maturity implies breadth and depth of knowledge as opposed to a "sum total", I would say, wouldn't you?

I've already conceded this much, Eve could communicate sufficiently.

The sum of Eve's depicted experience in wisdom is God. And God is good, so no dazzling powers of deduction are required. Wise=God, Eve doesn't need to have a concept of wisdom, she has an exemplar.

Nup. Seriously, Fishpaste, this story predates and moreover was an original means of establishing virtually all of those social mores and graces you seem to be taking for granted as "innate" in "first people". Why would the storytellers bother upholding these traditional means of establishing social statutes if they already existed, if "God" put them in wholesale at creation? Makes no sense.

See that's where the trouble is, the woman can't possibly be very bright, we may not be given in the story any insight into her competence, but a specific line at the end of the chapter is reserved to be sure we are informed of her naivete. She is given rules to follow but no education, and then, what education can she possibly have been given anyway in a world with no history and no intellectual challenges, in a world where, essentially, the only knowledge that exists is God's and he has made it quite clear that it's not for sharing.

This, clearly not possibly mature or self reliant in any sense that we might recognise, woman meets in her life precisely two figures who claim knowledge that she doesn't have and one of them is almighty God - so what precisely is she left to reckon the other one might be?

Much thought to the issue of the Original Sin and Eve and the apple. From my point of view it has always seemed pretty much the silliest way of trying to explain how it is that social animal like a human would have a conscience that allowed them to establish what was right or wrong in the context of the group in which they were living. No one can argue that right and wrong have cultural imperatives and that they evolve over time. In the middle ages people cheered as 'witches' were burned - I can't imagine that happening now.

But breaking the possibilities for Eve down like this is revealing. Eve can't have had any appreciation of what she was about to unleash on the world and if she had done, I can't imagine she'd have snacked on that stupid apple in the first place. An apple from the tree of knowledge! What a fucking joke.

Going sideways I personally don't think Eve or any other human actually had/has free will. If you consider everything we don't know about genetics, the impact of environment (including religious instruction) and physiological elements like sex drive, the idea humans are sent out on a level playing field to do good or evil is laughable. None of this even considers the fact god cheerily gave satan dominion of the earth and he's running around pulling the wool over all our eyes.

I think the last sentence of Mellestad's post puts it in a box for me. 'An informed, mature adult with a pure soul'.  It's pretty obvious Eve acted like a naughty ten year old boy or girl who jumped the fence and pinched an apple from father maggot's crop.

There is nothing but conjecture and bald assumption to support that option, and if it was the case then it is still directly God's fault for creating an idiot and damning humanity as a result of his horribly flawed creation.  It still flies against the "free will" theory.

What would the theistic response be?  God created a moron that doomed us all through her God given lack of intellectual capacity, but it is still somehow her fault?  The atheist response is going to be that God should understand human behavior well enough to predict such a simple situation when he created Eve, so he is still at fault.  If option 3 is 'correct' then he *wanted* man to fall and he rigged the game to make it happen.

Aside from the all this speculation of what the writer(s) had in mind when they put together the allegory of the G of E, just what does that last statement mean, and how does it relate to the question about dinosaurs, etc, put in the OP?

"the Bible is a logical one" - a logical what? In terms of what logical argument? 

A "simple answer" to what? The OP?, or something to do with the G of E story?

Dinosaurs helped shape our ecosystem that we have today. Without them the ecosystem that provides our basic needs would not exist.

Spence, surely you understand that if they dinosaurs did not exist, we would not exist, right?

Only in the sense that if the environment was unsuitable for such things as dinosaurs, it probably would have also been unsuitable for us.

But seriously, mammals evolved before the dinosaurs, and it has been argued that their domination of the ecosystem kept mammals from becoming common. Then when the dinos died out, mammals emerged to take over.

It is just as arguable, if not more so, that if the dinosaurs had taken longer to establish their dominant position, mammals may have become dominant much earlier.

What is your justification for your position? A link perhaps?

quote=BobSpence1]

Only in the sense that if the environment was unsuitable for such things as dinosaurs, it probably would have also been unsuitable for us.

But seriously, mammals evolved before the dinosaurs, and it has been argued that their domination of the ecosystem kept mammals from becoming common. Then when the dinos died out, mammals emerged to take over.

It is just as arguable, if not more so, that if the dinosaurs had taken longer to establish their dominant position, mammals may have become dominant much earlier.

What is your justification for your position? A link perhaps?