At his blog, John posts this Slate quote (which I C&P without shame) analyzing Genesis Ch. 2:
The Lord — not so good at follow-through. In Chapter 2, He is clear as He can be: He commands man not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and bad: "for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die." No wiggle room there. You shall die. But then when Eve and Adam eat the fruit of the tree a few verses later, do they die? Nope. God punishes Eve with "most severe … pangs in childbearing" and curses Adam by making the soil barren. Any parent knows you have to follow through on your threats, or your children will take advantage of you. God makes a vow He can't keep—or if He did, He would undo all his good work. So, He settles instead for a half-hearted punishment that just encourages His children to misbehave again. Is it any surprise that we sin again? And again? And again? All the way down to the present day. You can call this "original sin," but maybe it's just lax parenting.
This is one topic I keep hearing in debates with some of my hard-core Christian friends, as well as a few others... and I couldn't answer it in a comment on John's site, because, well, it's rude to take up so much space in somebody else's little blog house.
Like John, my father had been a seminarian before he discovered science. Or, as I like to say, Dad was going to be a minister until just about the time I was born, when he had a sudden and absolute collapse of Faith. He claims there was no connection, but...
Nevertheless (or perhaps as a result of this), I have been a dyed-in-the-wool agnostic my entire life. I question. I have no answers, and often have no clue how to ask the question which would get me an answer. I ask questions nonetheless.
So. I especially like talking with people of faith, and most of all, with people who have a deep learning to go along with that faith. I truly enjoyed my life in Chicago, a decade ago, because I lived in an apartment plunked directly on the campus of a seminary, and some of my neighbors occasionally talked shop. We got around to this question fairly early, over a bottle of fairly good Scotch (I didn't buy, I didn't ask if anybody else was old enough. I just broke out the good glasses).
The answer most had was that the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the source of impurity. Not only spiritual impurity, but physical, as well. We are born, we feel pain, we suffer, and we die because we invited into ourselves, as a species, a specific flaw. We ate the virus, as it were. And, no matter how hard we try to apologize for the error of our forebears, we're still going to die at the end of three-score-and-ten (give or take a decade or so).
But one of my friends looked at it as much more, much darker:
We were created with many aspects of God (in the image of God created He him), one of which included a sense of power. This is reflected in the repeat of actions, if you will: And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. His word is the power. And, in Gen. 2:19, Adam is given the power of the word: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.
Adam was given the gift of words, and therefore, of dominion. He was Godlike.
So long as he was pure and without evil, without awareness of evil, he remained capable of a very Godlike whole and unabashed deep love, as well. Without awareness of evil, he had no reason to hold anything but trust in his heart.
Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil did not cause him and Eve to be struck down instantly. The fruit was a slow, harsh poison, not of the body, but of the spirit and mind.
In fact, the death was of innocence -- and an absolutely miserable death it was. It was the erosion of trust.
Beyond the discovery that the Santa you saw at the mall was some gin-soaked perv in his off-hours, this was the awakening of the awareness and capability of human savagery. It wasn't native to the mind of Adam or Eve, but fed into their son, Cain, and therefore into all generations to follow.
Worse than the mere discovery of savagery, it thus brought about the loss of trust in ourselves, and cost humanity our understanding of our role in God's universe. Without this understanding, we tend to lose faith, and too easily lose hope.
And the demise of hope is the ultimate death.
It is why, as we page through the Bible, we keep reading that God loves, that he forgives, that there is reason to hope...
I often wish I had maintained contact with my friend after I moved. She always had a way of making me see things in a different light. If she is correct about the rest of our discussions, though, I shouldn't worry. We will meet again, someday.
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