Greetings And A Question (Eve and the tree of knowledge)
Offline Hello Everyone,
I've been reading for awhile and love the site. Many thanks to all of the wonderful people here.
I haven't seen a thread on this topic so I wanted to start up a discussion on it. If this has already been covered somewhere let me know.
In the story of Adam and Eve (in a nutshell), God instructs them to not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because they will surely die. The snake then tells Eve that when she eats from the tree she won't die, but have knowledge of good and evil (go figure, right). Following the eating of the apple we know how the rest of the story goes.
My question is, how can Eve be expected to know that disobeying God is wrong if she doesn't even possess the concept of wrong and neither does Adam?
There are many other things wrong with this story, I just wanted to discuss this one particular point. It seems kinda fishy.
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Offline I've always interperated that story as being a lesson that blind unquestioning obedience must be given, and going by the behaviour of most theists it is a lesson well learnt. Not surprising at all that it is the first story in the bible after the scene is set.
Ditto. The threatening wording is "you shall surely die"; Adam and Eve wouldn't need to know good from evil to know that life is better than death, in the thinking of the author of that portion of Genesis. Animals attempt to avoid death too, after all.
"The whole conception of God is a conception derived from ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men."
--Bertrand Russell
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Offline I enjoy pointing out that Yahweh lied, and the snake told the truth...
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Offline I suppose that, on one level, it's a lesson to the theist on how to act. Perhaps the reason why they are so opposed to what they call "moral relativity," and what we call "morality."
The basic idea is that understanding is not important, only blind obedience; before Adam & Eve ate the fruit they had no understanding of good or evil, or that disobedience was a bad thing, all they had to go on was the word of god and when the snake disputed that word, well, why question the snake? They didn't understand the concept of lies back then.
Of course, they eat the fruit and are banished, etc, now they understand why it was foolish of them to disobey but it's too late (oh damn!)
So, yeah, the lesson obviously is obedience is what's important, understanding less so. Trust god and ignore whatever anyone says to the contrary because they are EVIL.
That, I assume, is why so many theists swallow the story without raising an eyebrow, and if they find their eyebrows are still raising... well, they don't have to understand, just to obey.
There are some that believe it's pure historical documentation of course, but they're idiots.
Athywren, unable to spell his own screen name since 1986.
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Offline I enjoy pointing out that Yahweh lied, and the snake told the truth...
After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him.
The moral: When you're full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
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Well, you can't really expect the story to make sense, since it is a badly mangled amalgamation of various Mesopotamian myths. The original sin is stupidity, namely a god that is so stupid as to think that someone without knowledge of right and wrong can comprehend that it is wrong to disobey him. As it stands literally, it makes as much sense as telling an infant not to drink a glass of chocolate milk, then throwing the kid out on the street for drinking it.
But getting back to the genesis of Genesis, try to figure out how these people ever managed to cobble together a major religion using nothing but tales they plagiarized from their neighbors.
First up, Adam is a pun that relates to the Canaanite fertility religion. Adam ( man ) is created from Adamah ( earth ). It serves to tie man to the soil in the fertility cult that later morphed into Judaism. This is also why the word seed appears some 50 times in Genesis.
The tree is also borrowed from the Canaanite cult, and is linked to Asherah whose epithet in the Ugaritic myths was tree of life. She was also called Lady Wisdom, alluded to in the Bible as ' Wisdom is a tree of Life ', but that is another story.
The snake was seen in the near east as immortal because they thought that it renewed itself as it shed its skin. We find the snake therefore stealing eternal life from man in the Bible just as a snake stole immortality from Gilgamesh in a much earlier story.
The garden itself is taken from the Mesopotamian golden age paradise island of Dilmun.
Of course the lead-up to the story, creation, was taken from the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish. The word deep from Genesis 1:2 is Tehom, a variant of Tiamat. Tiamat represented the chaos waters whose corpse Marduk created the earth with.
It takes a village to raise an idiot.
Save a tree, eat a vegetarian.
Sometimes " The Majority " only means that all the fools are on the same side.
Hi. Welcome to RRS.
This topic, that the fall of man is an internally inconsistent argument, has definitely been discussed before. The Bible makes it very clear that eating the fruit gave Adam and Eve a sense of morality and that before eating the fruit, Adam and Eve had no sense of right and wrong. If this is true, then it is logically absurd for God to punish Adam and Eve for disobeying Him, for they wouldn't have known that disobeying God was wrong. In more ironic terms, God punished them for not possessing a characteristic that He never gave them.
Try this article.
http://www.rationalresponders.com/the_fall_commits_an_internal_contradiction
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
Thanks for the reply Desdenova.
I suppose I should have stated that I was looking for a Christian response to this. I understand the origin of the story, I just don't understand how this particular point seems to be overlooked by people that take it as truth.
Precisely what I was looking for
Thanks butterbattle
Have you ever done shrooms? If not, do some. Then it'll make sense.
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I imagine that a mind that could make sense out it is a far stranger place than shrooms can take you. It must be the ultimate trip.
Ah, have you tried a Christian forum?
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, | As I foretold you, were all spirits, and | Are melted into air, into thin air; | And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, | The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, | The solemn temples, the great globe itself, - Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, | And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, | Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff | As dreams are made on, and our little life | Is rounded with a sleep. - Shakespeare
To further refine what I should have said, sorry, is that I wanted to learn what the common Christian response was and how it has been refuted. This is a good place for that
Based on what you're looking for, this really should be put in the atheist vs theist section. I'm transferring it to that forum.
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I've always interperated that story as being a lesson that blind unquestioning obedience must be given, and going by the behaviour of most theists it is a lesson well learnt. Not surprising at all that it is the first story in the bible after the scene is set.
Organised religion is the ultimate form of blasphemy.
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Thanks butterbattle
Funniest combination of english words. Ever.