God's Secret Law In Eden.

September 2, 2014

I suppose my only question is:

Why would those in authority hoping to "win souls for christ" (or whatever they called it back then) not see the fallacy of logic in this "account" of A&E when they want the reader to take this to heart as God's ultimate heartbreak? What purpose would it serve to include a story that could so easily pull the rug out from under the very God it claims we should worship? And then, how would the scholars, pharisees, sadducees and many other men who set out to create the 'perfect' one true God not see this?

Or an easier way to ask would be: Why include this story in the bible if it can be so easily deconstructed?

September 2, 2014

I suppose my only question is:

Why would those in authority hoping to "win souls for christ" (or whatever they called it back then) not see the fallacy of logic in this "account" of A&E when they want the reader to take this to heart as God's ultimate heartbreak? What purpose would it serve to include a story that could so easily pull the rug out from under the very God it claims we should worship? And then, how would the scholars, pharisees, sadducees and many other men who set out to create the 'perfect' one true God not see this?

Or an easier way to ask would be: Why include this story in the bible if it can be so easily deconstructed?

[... So, we're talking about humans under the "God delusion," not liberated minds. And since God is a product of the human psyche, all we have to do is psyche God out, out of our minds, as Eve did.]

This brings up another question: What about those not under the God delusion at the time early converters were spreading the gospel? Surely they'd have heard this story and called BS. In fact, a lot of them DID and persecuted these Christians. Still can't wrap my head around how it spread if it's so easy to see the inconsistencies now when it was even easier back then before the whole indoctrination aspect came into play.

September 2, 2014

I wanted to add some things for consideration to this already lovely thread.

Leo's Trickster God Thread -- Myself, Leo, and Human have been talking about some related topics. Thought that perhaps the lurky turkeys and assorted others might want to read some of the discussion there as well.
The Great Forgetting -- An essay by the author of some very unusual and philosophical books, Daniel Quinn. It is actually composed of excerpts from his book "The Story of B" which I haven't read, along with a Q&A and a speech that he gave. The essay directly addresses the Fall and deals with some of the things discussed here and in the Trickster God Thread.

-------

Some Things That Caught My Eye In The Aforementioned Essay, all emphasis mine:

"In the absence of any other theory, it seemed reasonable (even inescapable) to suppose that the human race must have begun with a single human couple, an original man and woman. There was nothing inherently irrational or improbable about such a supposition. The existence of an original man and woman didn’t argue for or against an act of divine creation. Maybe that’s just the way things start. Maybe at the beginning of the world there was one man and one woman, one bull and one cow, one horse and one mare, one hen and one cock, and so on. Who at this point knew any better? Our cultural ancestors knew nothing about any agricultural “revolution.” As far as they knew, humans had come into existence farming, just the way deer had come into existence browsing. As they saw it, agriculture and civilization were just as innately human as thought or speech. Our hunting-gathering past was not just forgotten, it was unimaginable.

The Great Forgetting was woven into the fabric of our intellectual life from its very beginning. This early weaving was accomplished by the nameless scribes of ancient Egypt, Sumer, Assyria, Babylon, India, and China, then, later, by Moses, Samuel, and Elijah of Israel, by Fabius Pictor and Cato the Elder of Rome, by Ssu-ma T’an and his son Ssu-ma Ch’ien in China, and, later still, by Hellanicus, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon of Greece. (Although Anaximander conjectured that everything evolved from formless material - what he called “the boundless” - and that Man arose from fishlike ancestors, he was as unaware of the Great Forgetting as any of the others.) These ancients were the teachers of Isaiah and Jeremiah, Lao-tzu and Gautama Buddha, Thales and Heraclitus - and these were the teachers of John the Baptist and Jesus, Confucius and Socrates, Plato and Aristotle - and these were the teachers of Muhammad and Aquinas and Bacon and Galileo and Newton and Descartes - and every single one of them unwittingly embodied and ratified the Great Forgetting in their works, so that every text in history, philosophy, and theology from the origins of literacy to almost the present moment incorporated it as an integral and unquestioned assumption."

"Before attempting to articulate the good news I bring, let me first make crystal clear the bad news people are always prepared to hear.

“Man is the scourge of the planet, and he was BORN a scourge, just a few thousand years ago.”

Believe me, I can win applause all over the world by pronouncing these words. But the news I’m here to bring you is much different:

Man was NOT born a few thousand years ago and he was NOT born a scourge.

And it’s for this news that I’m condemned.

Man was born MILLIONS of years ago, and he was no more a scourge than hawks or lions or squids. He lived AT PEACE with the world … for MILLIONS of years.

This doesn’t mean he was a saint. This doesn’t mean he walked the earth like a Buddha. It means he lived as harmlessly as a hyena or a shark or a rattlesnake.

It’s not MAN who is the scourge of the world, it’s a single culture. One culture out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. OUR culture.

And here is the best of the news I have to bring:

We don’t have to change HUMANKIND in order to survive. We only have to change a single culture.

I don’t mean to suggest that this is an easy task. But at least it’s not an impossible one."

And lastly, this:

"Q. Are you identifying what religionists call the Fall with the birth of our culture?

A. That’s precisely what I’m doing. The points of similarity between these two events have long been noted, of course - the fact that both are associated with the birth of agriculture and both occurred in the same part of the world. But the difficulty in identifying them **[the advent of agriculture and the Spiritual Falling events of the various faiths, in our case Christianity] as a single event has been that the Fall is perceived as a spiritual event whereas the birth of our culture is perceived as a technological event. I fear I shall have to come here another time to explore with you the profound spiritual ramifications of this technological event, however."

*All quoted excerpts are taken from the essay "The Great Forgetting", linked to above.

**Clarification added by me.

September 3, 2014

Yay! Thank you BAA, this is my main problem with Xianity and I sing your praises for putting it so well!

September 3, 2014

That certainly is a logical explanation. I understand it and realize that its probably very true for most Christians. Thanks for pointing that out.

I made an interesting comment in my last post, which was this:

"If only Eve had sinned and Adam had been able to resist the temptation, what would have happened then? I think it is certainly clear in the bible that Eve's transgression was not equal to Adam's transgression. Could this be more a result of Eve being deceived and that Adam apparently chose to take despite the fact that he knew it was wrong? So, god gave Eve a slight break, but Cursed the whole entirety of humanity because of Adam's act of willful disobedience."

Upon thinking about this more, I find it very peculiar that the bible only makes a passing statement about Adam's eating of the fruit. Genesis 3:6-7 says the following:

"So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings."

Doesn't it seem odd that the author goes into detail about Eve's temptation and her "decision making process" (if you want to call it that), but only makes a simple statement that she gave him the fruit and he ate it. There is so much information that is left out.

What if he really didn't know that it was the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? What if she just brought a bunch of apples and gave him one that he assumed was an approved piece of fruit? The bible makes no mention of the specifics of that event. It only says she gave it to him and he ate it.

This might be the most lame story I have ever read. And to think that the fate of humankind rests on the premise of this story. You would think that there would have been more to the story to explain why our world exists as it does. There is no explanation as to why Adam chose to eat the fruit. No light is shed on any conversation that may have occurred between Adam and Eve. Did Adam willfully choose to eat or was he conned by his wife?

Looking further down in the passage in verse 17, you see that when God is cursing Adam and Eve, he makes the following statement:

"Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’:..."

This appears to imply that Eve told him he could eat it. Or at the least, that they discussed it. So I suspect that there was a willfulness on Adam's part to eat the fruit.

It just seems very weak and deceptive to make the story of the fall of mankind be so simple and trivial. Where is the struggle that Adam dealt with when faced with the decision to disobey god, but having to take into account being pressured by his wife as well? Why not include this in the story? Or maybe it wasn't a struggle at all. Maybe Adam just didn't comprehend the entirety of the situation and as you explained in the OP, he was incapable of following this law and he was destined to fail from the start. Too much is left out of this story to make it even remotely plausible ,in my opinion.

The potential for me to rot and burn in hell for eternity is based entirely on a story that could have been written by a 7 year old.

I notice later that after god curses them both, he goes back to being the "good parent" and makes them clothes out of skin. This may be an indication that death existed pre fall. While it is understood that the fall happened, why would god all of the sudden kill some animals so that Adam and Eve could wear clothes? Suspicious if you ask me.

Its been fun dissecting this story. I have learned a great deal just in this exercise.

Thanks, BAA, for sharing this and helping me, and I am sure others, see the craziness that is christianity.

If only Eve had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, but Adam had not eaten, then either God would've punished Eve alone but not Adam -- and therefore not the entire human race -- or, God would've instructed Adam to apply some sort of punishment to Eve.

It does seem that Adam did not think for himself. He merely did what Even requested of him: eat the fruit.

I read the more recent posts where people were reasoning through why Adam was held responsible. I learned this many years ago in bible college. But I enjoyed watching other people reason through it here and see the faults of biblical Christianity (the latter, of course, was not taught to us in bible college and graduate school).

In brief, Eve was blamed but Adam was both blamed and held responsible as the husband, being the head of his wife.

I still need to go back and read some of the earlier posts about God's deception, but I'll comment here as to what my current view is.

First, about the Tree of Life. As it's been pointed out in the posts, A&E had life as long as they had access to the Tree of Life. Their expulsion from the paradise of Eden cut them off from the access to life. Afterward, they were subject to mortality. In Eden, because of the Tree of Life, A&E had immortal life, but not eternal life. As was pointed out, only God had eternal life. Later, that same divine eternal life was granted through Christ and applied by the indwelling of the holy spirit. That's the NT teaching. Jesus introduced it primarily in John's gospel, and the apostles elaborated on it in their epistles, Paul most of all. Eternal life is not only everlasting in duration, but also absolute in quality.

In the New Creation, the New Jerusalem is the spiritual community of the faithful. Humanity has access once again to the Tree of Life. They may eat its fruit year round (i.e., continuously) and have immortal life. But because Christ is also there upon the throne, they have eternal life as well. (The Tree of Life is actually a symbol of Christ. This alludes to references made in the gospel.)

Back to Eden. Did Yahweh want A&E to disobey, eat the forbidden fruit, and be cast out of paradise? If so, why? For a benevolent or a malevolent purpose? Mormonism teaches that A&E fell upwards, toward eventual godhood. Their existence in the garden was static. They needed a push forward, out of the garden, to work their way to perfection. But I don't think that's what Genesis is teaching.

Many thanks for the kind words, Human!

To answer your question...

I've only thought as deeply as this about these matters...

since ...I deconverted from Christianity.

While I was a Christian I put the Biblical contradictions,

inconsistencies and many unspeakable acts of evil by a

supposedly 'good' God down to my flawed and un-spiritual

understanding of the scriptures. I now see that by

transferring the fault to myself, I was excusing God and

His holy book from what is now plainly apparent to me.

That the Bible is the flawed and faulty words of flawed and

faulty men - not the perfect and inerrant word of an

equally perfect and flawless God.

.

.

.

I'm now looking forward to your comments H, whenever

you'd like to make them.

Thanks again,

BAA.

These are my current thoughts, looking at the subject as mythology, and as a portrayal of human psychological drama.

I don't think it's accurate to ascribe some paradoxically good intention to God's demands and commands. There is no reverse psychology that God is playing on humanity. God is not trying to get A&E to break his law for their own good.

Contrast this to Mormon theology which regards A&E's fall from grace as a "falling upward" toward eventual potential godhood status of their own. But even in Mormon theology, humans have to work their way -- through an intricate and tedious process of commandments, laws, and ordinances -- out of jeopardy of eternal damnation and to godhood. So, the Mormon God is treating humans no better than the Judeo-Christian God is. The only difference is the interpretation of purpose for God's prohibition.

The consequence is real, leading ultimately to damnation and eternal punishment. Therefore, God's motives are clear. And his nature is totally antagonistic toward Humanity, which he allegedly created or to which he is superior (at least positionally). God is being sinister and sadistic.

However, if A&E do not disobey, they remain in a subservient state, ignorant, and basically static in their nature. They would forever be automatons or zombies, or at best, God's pets or toys. To become anything more, anything greater, they must incur God's wrath and punishment. They must take the risk. But how would they even know to do so, being naïve as they were?

They must pay the price of losing their innocence and becoming self-aware. That is Yahweh's greatest fear, which he masks with tyranny and wrath -- the threat of death, and in Christian mythology, the threat of eternal damnation. If the humans eat from the Tree of Knowledge will become as God, knowing good and evil. And in that state, if they also continue to eat from the Tree of Life, they will live forever as gods. They will have the power of divine knowledge and will no longer need God.

From the same source as the knowledge of good and evil comes the knowledge of the truth. And the truth is that Humanity does not need God, need not fear God, and can do away with God. How could Humanity achieve this?

Enter the Serpent. I view the conversation between Eve and the Serpent to be her own inner dialogue, her conscience being her guide. She is reasoning through God's deception, questioning both the logic of God's laws, and God's motives and character. The Serpent is the Human will, the Adversary of God.

Is the Serpent a trickster? Perhaps so. How else would Eve's own mind free itself from God's twisted psychopathological deception and oppression? The Serpent is wise and cunning. The Serpent can even outsmart God. In his fear, God condemns the Serpent. God condemns human will and human wisdom. God condemns Humanity.

However, in the newly gained knowledge, Humanity can and will eventually outsmart and cast out God.

God's dictate to A&E was, "Don't eat from that tree, or you will die." He kept them ignorant of the meanings and implications. The Secret Law of God harbored another secret: God knew he could not ultimately control Humanity. He feared they would eventually find him out. And when they did, they would overthrow him and regain their autonomy (or win it for the first time). God would become obsolete, meaningless, defeated.

Had A&E understood God's Secret Law, they would have willingly violated it, to get the knowledge and the power. That's why God kept it a secret. God's only real weapon is fear. And that's what he used against A&E to try to keep them docile and submissive. But the Serpent intervened. Eve woke up to her authentic Humanity, and apparently she woke Adam up as well. Human will, wisdom, and reason sabotaged God's plan, his stagnant order.

Great post, Human. It reminded me of one of my favorite book trilogies. I don't mean to derail BAA's thread, especially a quality one like this. However, you may be interested in Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy. It's marketed as a "new Narnia for a new generation" but it is really quite good. Most of the plot centers around sin, God, human will, freedom, religious oppression, and the afterlife. Really excellent series.

Back to our regularly scheduled programming.

A quick quote about the main character, Lyra

Lyra, the protagonist of the trilogy, is the second Eve. To Pullman, the original Eve depicted in Genesis was not the cause of all sin, but the source of all knowledge and awareness. In the universe of the novels, when Eve ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, she became the mother of humanity and introduced Dust into the worlds. If Eve hadn’t eaten the fruit, humans would have remained forever in a childlike state of ignorance in the Garden of Eden.

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/hisdarkmaterials/canalysis.html

September 3, 2014

That certainly is a logical explanation. I understand it and realize that its probably very true for most Christians. Thanks for pointing that out.

I made an interesting comment in my last post, which was this:

"If only Eve had sinned and Adam had been able to resist the temptation, what would have happened then? I think it is certainly clear in the bible that Eve's transgression was not equal to Adam's transgression. Could this be more a result of Eve being deceived and that Adam apparently chose to take despite the fact that he knew it was wrong? So, god gave Eve a slight break, but Cursed the whole entirety of humanity because of Adam's act of willful disobedience."

Upon thinking about this more, I find it very peculiar that the bible only makes a passing statement about Adam's eating of the fruit. Genesis 3:6-7 says the following:

"So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings."

Doesn't it seem odd that the author goes into detail about Eve's temptation and her "decision making process" (if you want to call it that), but only makes a simple statement that she gave him the fruit and he ate it. There is so much information that is left out.

Agree. Especially since so much is at stake.

What if he really didn't know that it was the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? What if she just brought a bunch of apples and gave him one that he assumed was an approved piece of fruit? The bible makes no mention of the specifics of that event. It only says she gave it to him and he ate it.

This might be the most lame story I have ever read. And to think that the fate of humankind rests on the premise of this story. You would think that there would have been more to the story to explain why our world exists as it does. There is no explanation as to why Adam chose to eat the fruit. No light is shed on any conversation that may have occurred between Adam and Eve. Did Adam willfully choose to eat or was he conned by his wife?

Looking further down in the passage in verse 17, you see that when God is cursing Adam and Eve, he makes the following statement:

"Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’:..."

This appears to imply that Eve told him he could eat it. Or at the least, that they discussed it. So I suspect that there was a willfulness on Adam's part to eat the fruit.

It just seems very weak and deceptive to make the story of the fall of mankind be so simple and trivial. Where is the struggle that Adam dealt with when faced with the decision to disobey god, but having to take into account being pressured by his wife as well? Why not include this in the story? Or maybe it wasn't a struggle at all. Maybe Adam just didn't comprehend the entirety of the situation and as you explained in the OP, he was incapable of following this law and he was destined to fail from the start. Too much is left out of this story to make it even remotely plausible ,in my opinion.

The potential for me to rot and burn in hell for eternity is based entirely on a story that could have been written by a 7 year old.

I notice later that after god curses them both, he goes back to being the "good parent" and makes them clothes out of skin. This may be an indication that death existed pre fall. While it is understood that the fall happened, why would god all of the sudden kill some animals so that Adam and Eve could wear clothes? Suspicious if you ask me.

Its been fun dissecting this story. I have learned a great deal just in this exercise.

Thanks, BAA, for sharing this and helping me, and I am sure others, see the craziness that is christianity.

Not a problem, Storm.

Thanks for participating.

September 3, 2014

That certainly is a logical explanation. I understand it and realize that its probably very true for most Christians. Thanks for pointing that out.

I made an interesting comment in my last post, which was this:

"If only Eve had sinned and Adam had been able to resist the temptation, what would have happened then? I think it is certainly clear in the bible that Eve's transgression was not equal to Adam's transgression. Could this be more a result of Eve being deceived and that Adam apparently chose to take despite the fact that he knew it was wrong? So, god gave Eve a slight break, but Cursed the whole entirety of humanity because of Adam's act of willful disobedience."

Upon thinking about this more, I find it very peculiar that the bible only makes a passing statement about Adam's eating of the fruit. Genesis 3:6-7 says the following:

"So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings."

Doesn't it seem odd that the author goes into detail about Eve's temptation and her "decision making process" (if you want to call it that), but only makes a simple statement that she gave him the fruit and he ate it. There is so much information that is left out.

What if he really didn't know that it was the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? What if she just brought a bunch of apples and gave him one that he assumed was an approved piece of fruit? The bible makes no mention of the specifics of that event. It only says she gave it to him and he ate it.

This might be the most lame story I have ever read. And to think that the fate of humankind rests on the premise of this story. You would think that there would have been more to the story to explain why our world exists as it does. There is no explanation as to why Adam chose to eat the fruit. No light is shed on any conversation that may have occurred between Adam and Eve. Did Adam willfully choose to eat or was he conned by his wife?

Looking further down in the passage in verse 17, you see that when God is cursing Adam and Eve, he makes the following statement:

"Then to Adam He said, “Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, ‘You shall not eat of it’:..."

This appears to imply that Eve told him he could eat it. Or at the least, that they discussed it. So I suspect that there was a willfulness on Adam's part to eat the fruit.

It just seems very weak and deceptive to make the story of the fall of mankind be so simple and trivial. Where is the struggle that Adam dealt with when faced with the decision to disobey god, but having to take into account being pressured by his wife as well? Why not include this in the story? Or maybe it wasn't a struggle at all. Maybe Adam just didn't comprehend the entirety of the situation and as you explained in the OP, he was incapable of following this law and he was destined to fail from the start. Too much is left out of this story to make it even remotely plausible ,in my opinion.

The potential for me to rot and burn in hell for eternity is based entirely on a story that could have been written by a 7 year old.

I notice later that after god curses them both, he goes back to being the "good parent" and makes them clothes out of skin. This may be an indication that death existed pre fall. While it is understood that the fall happened, why would god all of the sudden kill some animals so that Adam and Eve could wear clothes? Suspicious if you ask me.

Its been fun dissecting this story. I have learned a great deal just in this exercise.

Thanks, BAA, for sharing this and helping me, and I am sure others, see the craziness that is christianity.

If only Eve had eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, but Adam had not eaten, then either God would've punished Eve alone but not Adam -- and therefore not the entire human race -- or, God would've instructed Adam to apply some sort of punishment to Eve.

It does seem that Adam did not think for himself. He merely did what Even requested of him: eat the fruit.

I read the more recent posts where people were reasoning through why Adam was held responsible. I learned this many years ago in bible college. But I enjoyed watching other people reason through it here and see the faults of biblical Christianity (the latter, of course, was not taught to us in bible college and graduate school).

In brief, Eve was blamed but Adam was both blamed and held responsible as the husband, being the head of his wife.

I still need to go back and read some of the earlier posts about God's deception, but I'll comment here as to what my current view is.

First, about the Tree of Life. As it's been pointed out in the posts, A&E had life as long as they had access to the Tree of Life. Their expulsion from the paradise of Eden cut them off from the access to life. Afterward, they were subject to mortality. In Eden, because of the Tree of Life, A&E had immortal life, but not eternal life. As was pointed out, only God had eternal life. Later, that same divine eternal life was granted through Christ and applied by the indwelling of the holy spirit. That's the NT teaching. Jesus introduced it primarily in John's gospel, and the apostles elaborated on it in their epistles, Paul most of all. Eternal life is not only everlasting in duration, but also absolute in quality.

This is pretty much my take too.

In the New Creation, the New Jerusalem is the spiritual community of the faithful. Humanity has access once again to the Tree of Life. They may eat its fruit year round (i.e., continuously) and have immortal life. But because Christ is also there upon the throne, they have eternal life as well. (The Tree of Life is actually a symbol of Christ. This alludes to references made in the gospel.)

Agree.

Back to Eden. Did Yahweh want A&E to disobey, eat the forbidden fruit, and be cast out of paradise? If so, why? For a benevolent or a malevolent purpose? Mormonism teaches that A&E fell upwards, toward eventual godhood. Their existence in the garden was static. They needed a push forward, out of the garden, to work their way to perfection. But I don't think that's what Genesis is teaching.

Many thanks for the kind words, Human!

To answer your question...

I've only thought as deeply as this about these matters...

since ...I deconverted from Christianity.

While I was a Christian I put the Biblical contradictions,

inconsistencies and many unspeakable acts of evil by a

supposedly 'good' God down to my flawed and un-spiritual

understanding of the scriptures. I now see that by

transferring the fault to myself, I was excusing God and

His holy book from what is now plainly apparent to me.

That the Bible is the flawed and faulty words of flawed and

faulty men - not the perfect and inerrant word of an

equally perfect and flawless God.

.

.

.

I'm now looking forward to your comments H, whenever

you'd like to make them.

Thanks again,

BAA.

These are my current thoughts, looking at the subject as mythology, and as a portrayal of human psychological drama.

I don't think it's accurate to ascribe some paradoxically good intention to God's demands and commands. There is no reverse psychology that God is playing on humanity. God is not trying to get A&E to break his law for their own good.

Contrast this to Mormon theology which regards A&E's fall from grace as a "falling upward" toward eventual potential godhood status of their own. But even in Mormon theology, humans have to work their way -- through an intricate and tedious process of commandments, laws, and ordinances -- out of jeopardy of eternal damnation and to godhood. So, the Mormon God is treating humans no better than the Judeo-Christian God is. The only difference is the interpretation of purpose for God's prohibition.

The consequence is real, leading ultimately to damnation and eternal punishment. Therefore, God's motives are clear. And his nature is totally antagonistic toward Humanity, which he allegedly created or to which he is superior (at least positionally). God is being sinister and sadistic.

Imho, a reading of Romans 9 will reinforce this conclusion.

However, if A&E do not disobey, they remain in a subservient state, ignorant, and basically static in their nature. They would forever be automatons or zombies, or at best, God's pets or toys. To become anything more, anything greater, they must incur God's wrath and punishment. They must take the risk. But how would they even know to do so, being naïve as they were?

They must pay the price of losing their innocence and becoming self-aware. That is Yahweh's greatest fear, which he masks with tyranny and wrath -- the threat of death, and in Christian mythology, the threat of eternal damnation. If the humans eat from the Tree of Knowledge will become as God, knowing good and evil. And in that state, if they also continue to eat from the Tree of Life, they will live forever as gods. They will have the power of divine knowledge and will no longer need God.

From the same source as the knowledge of good and evil comes the knowledge of the truth. And the truth is that Humanity does not need God, need not fear God, and can do away with God. How could Humanity achieve this?

Enter the Serpent. I view the conversation between Eve and the Serpent to be her own inner dialogue, her conscience being her guide. She is reasoning through God's deception, questioning both the logic of God's laws, and God's motives and character. The Serpent is the Human will, the Adversary of God.

Is the Serpent a trickster? Perhaps so. How else would Eve's own mind free itself from God's twisted psychopathological deception and oppression? The Serpent is wise and cunning. The Serpent can even outsmart God. In his fear, God condemns the Serpent. God condemns human will and human wisdom. God condemns Humanity.

However, in the newly gained knowledge, Humanity can and will eventually outsmart and cast out God.

God's dictate to A&E was, "Don't eat from that tree, or you will die." He kept them ignorant of the meanings and implications. The Secret Law of God harbored another secret: God knew he could not ultimately control Humanity. He feared they would eventually find him out. And when they did, they would overthrow him and regain their autonomy (or win it for the first time). God would become obsolete, meaningless, defeated.

Had A&E understood God's Secret Law, they would have willingly violated it, to get the knowledge and the power. That's why God kept it a secret. God's only real weapon is fear. And that's what he used against A&E to try to keep them docile and submissive. But the Serpent intervened. Eve woke up to her authentic Humanity, and apparently she woke Adam up as well. Human will, wisdom, and reason sabotaged God's plan, his stagnant order.

Human,

The portion of your post I've highlighted in green is indeed...intriguing.

But I can't claim to view it as anything more than a line of interesting speculation. Sorry, but that's what I think about it right now. I currently view the Genesis narrative as a multi-layered mish-mash of different stories, fables and musings about the meaning of life, the universe and everything. Hence it's disjointed and often contradictory structure. I suspect (but cannot prove) that it was probably pulled together from various sources in an ad hoc fashion, before being crudely synthesized into the form that the ancient Hebrews adopted and enshrined as their Creation myth.

My contention (that God kept vital things about His law/commandment hidden from Adam and Eve) is derived from what I hope is a clear-sighted reading of the text. I really don't want to go much beyond that contention and speculate about the possible motives, feelings and aims of the players in this drama.

I hope you can understand my caution.

Thanks for your outstanding contributions.

BAA

September 3, 2014

I suppose my only question is:

Why would those in authority hoping to "win souls for christ" (or whatever they called it back then) not see the fallacy of logic in this "account" of A&E when they want the reader to take this to heart as God's ultimate heartbreak? What purpose would it serve to include a story that could so easily pull the rug out from under the very God it claims we should worship? And then, how would the scholars, pharisees, sadducees and many other men who set out to create the 'perfect' one true God not see this?

Or an easier way to ask would be: Why include this story in the bible if it can be so easily deconstructed?

Excellent questions, littlewanderer!

One possibility that occurs to me is that certain nations and peoples cultivate the skills of critical thinking, while others do not.

The scholars and Pharisees of Israel were no doubt highly intelligent men. But it seems that there was no 'culture' of critical thinking about the natural world in their society. Unlike say, the ancient Greeks, they had no motivation to observe and analyze the world around them. For them, Yahweh was the source of everything, so why bother thinking critically about the created world, when it's more important to think deeply about the Creator?

I reckon that the following examples help to make my case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_of_Alexandria

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

Could it be that the one culture (the Israelites) suppressed critical thinking, while another (the Greeks) embraced it?

That's my (incomplete) thinking about the issue, so far. What I haven't got a handle on is why the Greeks were motivated to think critically, as they clearly did?

Thanks,

BAA

September 3, 2014

Yay! Thank you BAA, this is my main problem with Xianity and I sing your praises for putting it so well!

Aww gee... shucks.

September 3, 2014

To BrotherJosh and seven77.

Many thanks for your quality input guys.

I really don't think that the material from Pullman, Quinn and Leo in way detracts or derails this thread. If anything, it enhances it.

One of my prime aims in starting it up was to promote deep and clear-minded thought about the Genesis narrative - not just by other members, but also by the lurkers. Since ALL of Christianity rests upon the foundation of what ( supposedly) happened in Eden, a careful examination of this tale throws up many pertinent questions that can't simply be brushed under the rug of blind faith.

Thanks again,

BAA.

September 4, 2014

I want to go back to what was said earlier about god practically ignoring Eve and instead focusing on Adam. It seems to me that if this myth had actually ever happened, Eve was less culpable than Adam. Why? Because Eve was deceived and Adam was not deceived. If someone does a wrongful act based upon a lie that he was told by another, where if the lie were true the former would be justified in his act, then he couldn't be convicted if his belief was "reasonable". For example, if the serpent told Eve that she would not die if she ate the forbidden fruit and she reasonably believed it, and since god had told Adam (not Eve) not to eat the fruit, how is she culpable? If what she believed to be true was in fact true, she would not be violating god's command, at least in her mind. God told Adam, not Eve that he should not eat of the tree of knowledge, else he would die. So Adam had to be the one who told Eve of the prohibition.

But Eve knew only what Adam told her about the tree of knowledge. The serpent said it wasn't true. Who should Eve believe, the serpent or Adam? Since it is specified that Eve was deceived by the serpent, did she think god deceived Adam or or did she think Adam deceived her? Since we know that Eve was deceived she had to believe one or the other had lied. The text does not specify. A good argument could be made that Eve thought Adam, not god, misinformed her that the fruit would kill her. After all god had made everything that existed and surely he didn't lie. If anyone lied it must have been Adam. who (she believed) wanted to control her.

If Eve was fooled as described here, but Adam was not fooled, then he deliberately defied god's command. Which means what? That Adam ate the fruit knowing he would die as a result of it? That's stupid. But it was she who deliberately violated god's command. Apparently, Adam wanted to die. Or he didn't know what death was and couldn't appreciate the consequence of his decision. (This really is a stupid story, isn't it?) You must figure out for yourselves whether this post was done with tongue cheek or not. bill

September 4, 2014

I actually heard a sermon preached on this topic recently and what little I can remember of the dissection was something like this:

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”

Notice how the serpent uses manipulative language to goad Eve into seeing that something was being withheld from her? He doesn't ask "...you must not eat from THAT tree" he says "any tree". Like telling someone not to think about a pink elephant....

...

8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”

10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”

11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”

12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”

13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”

The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

14 So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

“Cursed are you above all livestock
    and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
    and you will eat dust
    all the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring[a] and hers;
he will crush[b] your head,
    and you will strike his heel.”

Pretty genius blame shifting going on here. They really are like children. Two things stick out to me in this passage: Why/how is God walking around in the Garden asking "where are you?", and also v15 is constantly cited as the first prophesy for Jesus. The thing that I get stuck on is wondering why on earth if the story is made up the authors/book-put-together-ers would be so vague and cryptic about these "prophesies". Is it possible "He will crush your head and you will strike his heel" refers to mankind triumphing in the end, or are we really supposed to buy that this is about Jesus? If you're a regular power hungry dude trying to organize one religion and you're re-writing everything like crazy to fit it all together, why wouldn't you say instead "I will send my perfect son and he will crush you to atone for this"? This is exactly the kind of thing some Christians use to validate their claims. "If people made it up, they'd have been more succinct to prove their point!" So what gives?

...

21 The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.

I was told to interpret this as the first sacrifice God made for humanity, atoning for their "sin" by covering their shame with the life of something innocent. And it's all suppose to be God's plan to prepare us for the big reveal: Jesus. The ultimate sacrifice. The ultimate covering.

As a cap on the sermon, the speaker basically boiled this down to being God's plan all along. He handed us the whole of Eden except for this one little thing, and we ignored all that he'd given us and focused only on what he forbade (for our own good of course). If he hadn't put the tree in the garden, we'd never have had the will to choose to disobey him. That was the line of thought anyway. I think the punishment is a little severe...And then drawing it out all that time just to get to Jesus? Man, talk about your hard knocks. Where were the ten commandments in the days when Cain was killing Abel?

September 4, 2014

woah sorry. I just got way off topic...

September 4, 2014

Pretty genius blame shifting going on here. They really are like children. Two things stick out to me in this passage: Why/how is God walking around in the Garden asking "where are you?", and also v15 is constantly cited as the first prophesy for Jesus. The thing that I get stuck on is wondering why on earth if the story is made up the authors/book-put-together-ers would be so vague and cryptic about these "prophesies". Is it possible "He will crush your head and you will strike his heel" refers to mankind triumphing in the end, or are we really supposed to buy that this is about Jesus? If you're a regular power hungry dude trying to organize one religion and you're re-writing everything like crazy to fit it all together, why wouldn't you say instead "I will send my perfect son and he will crush you to atone for this"? This is exactly the kind of thing some Christians use to validate their claims. "If people made it up, they'd have been more succinct to prove their point!" So what gives?

...

The phrase may be an idiom familiar to the ancient Hebrews (bruise your heel..) and the meaning is now lost. In other words, it wasn't vague to them. It probably means something very ordinary. Christians are really reaching to look at this as a prophecy of Jesus, when all of it, whatever it means, is clearly about A&E and spoken to A&E. They look at the Bible the way other people find shapes in clouds.

September 4, 2014

I wanted to elaborate on some things I posted the other day. Namely, Daniel Quinn's Adam and Eve theory. I couldn't find the excerpt from his book "Ishmael" that I read recently posted online. Scanning the pages seems to be bad form, copyrights, etc so I will be working from Wiki's summary of it below. His interpretation/theory of the A&E narrative in Genesis is probably the best one I've read. It makes sense, at least, which is far more than any of the apologetic drivel I was fed in the church.

From Wiki, emphasis mine:

"Ishmael proposes that the story of Genesis was written by the Semites and later adapted to work within Hebrew and Christian belief structures. He proposes that Abel's extinction metaphorically represents the nomadic Semites' losing in their conflict with agriculturalists. As they were driven further into the Arabian peninsula, the Semites became isolated from other herding cultures and, according to Ishmael, illustrated their plight through oral history, which was later adopted into the Hebrew book of Genesis.

Ishmael denies that the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was forbidden to humans simply to test humans' self-control. Instead, he proposes that eating of the Tree would not actually give humans divine knowledge but would only make humans believe they had been given it, and that the Tree represents the choice to bear the responsibility of deciding which species live and which die. This is a decision agricultural peoples (i.e. Takers) make when deciding which organisms to cultivate, which to displace, and which to kill in protection of the first.

Ishmael explains that the Fall of Adam represents the Semitic belief that, once mankind usurps this responsibility - historically decided through natural ecology (i.e. food chains) - that mankind will perish. He cites as fulfillment of this prophecy contemporary environmental crises such as endangered or extinct species, global warming, and modern mental illnesses."

*Note: The Cain and Abel theory is interesting too, but that's for another time.

Quinn suggests that the eating of the fruit was really man fooling himself into thinking that he had some sort of power of his circumstances. He thumbed his nose at the garden, and struck off on his own, choosing to provide for himself rather to rely upon the gods. Only that was a lie, one that the tellers of the original story saw clearly and they just could not wrap their minds around why their neighbors had fallen for it.

I think that the snake was a narrative device, an invented alarm to warn A&E of what was to come. Only A&E didn't care. They wanted the fruit, the "freedom", to be like gods, to be above nature. There was something tantalizing about the new future, of being above the rest of the animal kingdom. Adam means "man" and from the moment he ate the fruit, Man thought himself to be the superior animal, the king of the jungle. Man was God, the Lord of all that was below him. The animals were his to keep, to care for, along with the garden. Man names the animals, but not before God forbids him to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Then came Eve (whose name means "Life"). She was made to be Man's partner. Man and Life, together in the garden. The woman encounters the snake right out of the gate in Genesis 3.

Gen 3:1-3:6, ESV

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?”

And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden,

but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’”

But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die.

For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise,fn she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.

The snake didn't lie. The snake merely said "You will not surely die." Her eyes were opened and it was then that she realized that she (Life) and Adam (Man) could control the world, so to speak. She saw in the moment that they didn't have to stay in the garden, obeying natural laws. No, they could build the world to suit them, manipulate and kill and destroy whatever got in their way. The story isn't about invisible sin or disobeying an invisible sky daddy. It is about the violation of natural law.

It is not natural to manipulate the land for one's own benefit. It is not natural to kill off the predators and to murder your competition. Their nakedness, realized in the verses that follow the above, was not about shame. It was the first act of manipulation, the first instance of violating the natural law. They were attempting to subvert nature by covering themselves and hiding from it. They made clothes and perhaps they had built some sort of shelter that hid them from plain sight. When they were called before God, the woman told the first lie "The serpent deceived me..." (Gen 3:13, ESV).

It was then that they had to go. God sent them away before they could partake of the Tree of Life (which was not immortality, but was instead the power to make new forms of life, imho). The curses that were given were not actually curses. They were interpreted as such by the ancestors of the Hebrews because they just couldn't grok why their neighbors would willingly choose to till and toil when nature provided. To them, Adam's working in the fields looked like a joyless existence of hard labor, a punishment doled out by a pissed off God.

Eve's curse is a bit more problematic, but I think (and this purely my personal conjecture and nothing more) that those telling the story couldn't believe that the women of the agricultural societies were having so many kids. They knew that birth was painful, very much so, and that it was also risky. In nature, females die giving birth and give birth to dead children on occasion. Plus some babies will die shortly after due to the mother not being able to feed them or due to other conditions that make them unable to thrive.

In Genesis 3:16, "God" says:

To the woman he said,
“I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children.
Your desire shall be for your husband,
and he shall rule over you.”

God is not cursing the woman with pain in birth, for that is the nature of things, for all creatures. He is MULTIPLYING her pains. So now that they have eaten the fruit and chosen to provide for themselves through agriculture, the woman will now have to bear MORE children. The fields need hands to harvest crops. Fathers need sons to pass down their accumulated wealth. Men need multiple wives to make more child-stock, so to speak. The woman desires her husband, loves him, but no longer are they equals as they were in the garden. Adam (Man) now rules over Eve (Life).

Let me repeat: Man now rules over Life. <<<<That is the true state of affairs. The story of A&E in the Bible is not a story of ascent, although many of us would like to be. The snake is truthful, but Life wanted to be free and Man wanted to rule, so they ate of the fruit and we left paradise (decided to violate natural law). The rest of the Bible is a bunch of tales about what happens after Man and Life choose the hard road. Agricultural man and pastoral man forge an alliance of sorts and kill off those who refuse to submit to their rule. Men must die to kill off the resistant tribal lineage, making for a more docile and easily absorbed population. After a few thousand years of this, society is easily split into kingdoms. The dominant authoritarians seize control and wage war against other tribes and kingdoms over and over and over and over a-fucking-gain until you fall asleep and faceplant somewhere in the OT.

Prophets come forth, proclaiming messages of woe, followed by messages of triumph once they start receiving death threats. Most of the prophets seem to be speaking a message of "we can turn back! we can make it right with God!" until the king subjugates them and turns them into a loyal servant or something of the sort. Eventually, the prophets start sounding like fairy tales and their prophecies are left intentionally vague, because the kings weren't about to give up what they had gained. In the eyes of Man, he earned by conquering. Gold, grain, and the right to reproduce were his blessings.

Then you get the NT and by then, it's all downward spiraling clusterfuck of nonsense. People know that something is wrong, that the gods/God are unhappy, that civilization, taxation, war, kingdoms, agriculture, are profoundly fucked up and inefficient. Cue the Jesuses and they start spouting some bullshit that sounds pretty good.

From Daniel Quinn's book, Ishmael

“Far and away the most futile admonition Christ ever offered was when he said, ‘Have no care for tomorrow. Don’t worry about whether you’re going to have something to eat. Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, but God takes perfect care of them. Don’t you think he’ll do the same for you?’ In our culture the overwhelming answer to that question is, ‘Hell no!’ Even the most dedicated monastics saw to their sowing and reaping and gathering into barns.”

Jesus' words sound good, but they are fucking meaningless and have led to countless apologetic gymnastics routines over the following millennia. We know that this sort of stuff is too good to be true, based on our experiences within the system. Man rules over Life. That is the foundational principle on which all of our societies are built. God (nature) doesn't provide for you. Little kids hear the tale of The Ant and the Grasshopper and that shit is scary. The Grasshopper had a lot of fun, but in the winter he fucking starves. The dutiful ant works hard and piles up his food and in the winter he has plenty. Work hard and don't go hungry! Be lazy and you'll have to humble yourself to begging or starve in your pride!

Even Jesus was a failure according to the system. He merely advocated humility and begging, and starving in one's pride over hard work and provision. He wasn't bucking the system in the slightest. I think that this is why (and remains a primary reason why) some just don't buy into his message. He wasn't a prophet with vision and cajones. He was a parasitic loafer who preyed upon widows, orphans and the disabled. Jesus wasn't a symbol of liberation from the system; he was the embodiment. Jesus was the Son of Man!

A son, who didn't have the mother, Life. Jesus was only attempting to thwart the systems that held Man in place. He wasn't there for women, although he had no trouble hanging out with them. He was a shortsighted messiah who sold a false bill of goods backed by nothing, like any modern televangelist worth his salt, so to say. Any attempt to hang one's hat upon the cross is an exercise in mental trampolining in a weightless vacuum. Saint Paul's great vision (and it was one of the greatest visions of all time, I think) was to make the cross a stable platform. Paul laid down the law, and sold Jesus as a cure-all to a sick people.

Paul was advocating on behalf of the system and made the faith more palatable to those in power. Jesus may have been a loafing sugar-titting hippie who spouted empty platitudes, but he was one hell of a symbol. His death was made into legend, a powerful demonstration of what would happen to those who resisted the king, of those who dared to stand against. Jesus' message was worked into one of liberation through obedience and suffering. Glory, glory...

-----------------

That is all.

~seven77

September 5, 2014

Holy fucking shit. I think I love you.

Can we dissect your post even further by pulling God out of the picture completely and replacing him with evolutionary consciousness? I'd really like to see how that looks but I couldn't even begin....

Excellent post, seven77. Great read.

September 5, 2014

Can we dissect your post even further by pulling God out of the picture completely and replacing him with evolutionary consciousness? I'd really like to see how that looks but I couldn't even begin....

These are not my theories; they are based upon the works of Daniel Quinn.

"Ishmael" is a pretty fascinating read. I'd recommend that you read the book to really get a solid feel of what he is saying. I've not read "The Story of B", which expands further upon the theories presented in "Ishmael".

I suppose that you could replace God/gods with evolutionary consciousness. My opinion is that Quinn used the term "God" or the term "gods" in his works to make the narratives easier to decipher for the Western audience.

If one looks back to the world before agriculturalists took over and even in the early days of the agriculture, one finds that Mother Goddess, Mother Earth, or Great Mother were the primary divine beings. The Mother gave birth (controlling Life), yet she also brought death. She was dualistic in nature, 2 in 1, a double sided coin with awesome powers. As agriculture spread, wars were waged and over time, the roles of the Mother goddesses began to erode. They were replaced by male warrior gods, such as Yahweh and Zeus.

Mother is Nature, hence our term "Mother Nature", at least by the paradigm of those who live/lived according to natural law. It was only when we usurped natural law via the Fall that the new "law" took effect. Man now ruled over Life. Eve (Life, the Mother) gave up her power, surrendered it to Adam (Man, the Father). Nature was no longer paramount. Man ruled, and still does to this very day.

It really makes no difference if one calls Nature/the natural law "God" or "gods" or "spirits". The essence of Quinn's interpretation (as I see it) is that in the beginning, there was Nature (natural law). To go deeper than that would potentially be beyond the scope of this thread.

Man and Life broke the Law. God is Nature and somehow Nature spoke, obfuscating the meaning of its words, twisting them in such a way as to cover their own asses. They failed to communicate the truth about the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, by only giving the words to Man and not to Life. Life ate of the tree and Man went along with her. The Serpent was the only one who spoke the truth. The Serpent was the "conscience" of the situation, the only one who gave a warning. Perhaps the Serpent is Satan and perhaps it is not. Perhaps the truest symbol in the story is the Serpent, for Serpent was the one who first violated Nature (natural law) in the story by communicating with the woman. Snakes don't talk and unless Eve was speaking Parseltongue, her communication with the snake was the first sign that something was amiss. Yet she stayed true in her course of action, committed until the end, with far more courage than the simpering Adam.

Brave, yet foolish. Willingly to lie. Willing to pay the price. Full of pride as they were cast out (clearly this is not the victor's tale!). Whomever first told this tale was on the outside looking in, poking fun at the people who turned their backs on Nature. They were clearly idiots, after all. You traded the provisions of Nature (God) for a life behind the plow? You traded equality and compassion from your companion for the endless suffering of pregnancy and childbirth? What dunderheads, the onlookers said as they chuckled around the campfire.

Little did they know, the Fallen would come for them, kill their men, take their land, rape their women and turn their children into slaves. And then take their tale and spin it into a fabulous yarn that would be used to subjugate untold numbers of people in the distant future.

September 5, 2014

Indeed, a great read.

I'm finding it challenging seeing A&E's departure from Eden as forsaking the natural order, if that natural order is ruled by the Yahweh figure. So, I need to see what Yahweh's role of prohibition and repression means.

In terms of evolutionary consciousness, Humanity needs to evolve beyond deities, here represented by Yahweh. And that's interesting since the god in Eden is actually Yahweh Elohim, one of a plurality of deities. The deities represent the conglomerate of prohibitions, inhibitions, taboos, fears -- all in the depths of the psyche. Humans must face and overcome all that, in order to evolve, both collectively and individually. Yahweh's restriction is Humanity's self-restriction. The human mind must trick (beguile) itself, psyche god out of itself, and thus remove the barriers to progress, evolution, and self-actualization.

Maybe leaving the garden appears to be regression, but it is nevertheless the road to ultimate progress. Maybe it's the rite of passage into autonomy and enlightenment, and civilization.

Or does Quinn view civilization negatively and as the antagonist to the natural order?

Leaving the Garden is the price of gaining knowledge and making progress. Perhaps at the conclusion of the process, at the end of the journey, is a return to Paradise, but a better one than the first.

Yahweh is not the God/gods of Quinn's narratives. I think that in his POV, the divine powers are simply there, existing alongside the creation. Perhaps a grand projection or simply a collective name for all that is Nature. I've only read "Ishmael" in its entirety. I found a copy at a used book sale a few weeks ago. His other works expand on the themes in "Ishmael" considerably.

In Quinn's perspective as presented in "Ishmael" there are two forms of civilization. One that conforms to natural law (Leavers) and one that doesn't (Takers). Our civilization based on agriculture and herding are the Takers. We created war as a side effect of our need/desire to have more. So we started taking more, fighting one another for more. We created war gods like Yahweh to justify our warmongering bloodlust and the ugly inhumane practices that went along with it. That is what I took from the book and essays of his that I have read.

Perhaps A&E and their Fall are not only stolen tales from an outside culture but have been reworked as well. Yahweh was inserted into the story by his followers...or something like that. At any rate, the language used in the first 3 chapters of Genesis ie "We created Man in OUR image." implies that there is more than one god. The idea of God being another name for Nature fits well here. The Natural Law actually consists of multiple laws, as expressed in modern science. So perhaps the "gods" are just the multiple facets of the Natural Laws that govern nature as perceived by Man?

September 5, 2014

Yeah, I'm trying to see how the male god Yahweh fits in this scenario. So, I view Yahweh as a usurper, just as patriarchal religion gradually supplanted matriarchal religion, or the divine feminine.

The Tree of Knowledge was also part of the Garden, part of Nature. Maybe it has something to do with knowledge of the divine feminine.

I wrote some thoughts recently (not all of which did I post) about the connection between The Serpent and Ha Satan. (I may have mentioned it on the Trickster thread.) I believe that Satan was originally female as was The Serpent. The gradual demonization of Satan is patriarchal Judeo-Christian religion's way of suppressing and subjugating the feminine. Satan has progressively been Human will asserting itself against God. In Genesis, Human will appeared as The Serpent, a personification of woman's consciousness and conscience.

When A&E left Eden, Humanity exited the Garden. Did they turn their backs on the Garden, or did they instead begin to view reality, their world, differently? There is some saying (probably Buddhist) that as soon as you understand the Universe/Reality, it disappears and is replaced by something else as much or more mysterious.

Human consciousness awakened. Human conscience rejected Yahweh's prohibition, suppression, threat, and fear. Human will asserted itself, and the humans ate from the Tree of Knowledge. Their eyes were opened, and they saw Reality for what it was: they were no longer in the Garden. Maybe this was their rite of passage that began their long hero's journey.

Human

I am not too knowledgeable when it comes to Buddhism. Perhaps I will learn more as I read this month's book club selection, .

I do not believe that Yahweh was repressing humanity. I view the Fall as Man and Life leaving the garden of their own free will (that ugly concept!). They chose to leave, to hoard resources, to embark on the path of civilization. Perhaps it was a hero's journey, but I do not find it heroic in the least. That is obviously a matter of interpretation and personal preference.

Quinn asserts that A&E merely believed that they possessed the knowledge of the gods, but didn't actually possess it. If we take his POV, then the eating of the fruit was what created the Ego. Psychology is not my strong suit, so I will leave that idea to roll around in your thoughtspace, Human. See what you make of it.

It was at the moment of Ego creation that Man and Life became Man and Of-Man (Woman); humanity, the first true humans. Without their decision, we would have not humanism. We would still be animistic, living as man the animal instead of Man, the Human being. Without the Ego, there is nothing but being. Existing in the moment, being in Nature, with Nature. Perhaps Buddhism is the eternal search for this sort of being. Abandon the Ego, give up your humanity.

In Matthew 22, Jesus speaks to this ideal in his own weird Jesus way:

The Great Commandment
³⁴But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. ³⁵And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ³⁶“Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” ³⁷And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. ³⁸This is the great and first commandment. ³⁹And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. ⁴⁰On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

The Great Commandment is to love God with all your soul and mind and heart. That is, to surrender Ego and just "be" with God. The second, love your neighbor (other selves) as you love yourself. That is, value the Ego of others just as much as you value your own. Respect the "beingness" of others.

However, the Son of Man is merely running on hot air here, I think. When confronted with the Law of the Jews, he points his finger at them and tells them that they need to look beyond themselves. They need to just "be". He isn't tossing their version of Man's created nature usurping "Law" out of the window. Nor is he embracing it. He pushes them to transcend the Fall, but not completely. He merely advocates abolishing the right to self, the governing Ego. As I stated before, he works within the system. Without the counterpart of Life, he cannot go any further than that, imho.

--------

I would like to read more about this female Ha Satan and your theories there. Perhaps you should start a thread or write a blog entry on the topic? I can see what you are saying, but not clearly enough to hazard a guess through the darkness, lol.

Women have gotten a bad rap, imo. We were once goddesses; we gave that up for what exactly? So much of today's feminism can be traced back to Eve and her choice. Or so the narrative would have it. Personally, I do not think there was anything inherently evil about A&E and what went down the garden. They made choices, they violated laws, but if there was a god or gods involved and they sat idly by until it was too late, then we must realize that the decisions of A&E were merely the flipside (if you will) of the situation, of the "plan". This obeys Newton's Third Law of Motion in a way, which states:

For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction

Even in breaking the Law of Nature (*the laws of competition, more specifically) as Quinn asserts, A&E were still conforming a principle of scientific law in a way. In choosing to eat the fruit (action), they provoked a reaction (being booted from the garden. In choosing to assume the responsibility to provide for themselves (action), they had to break the Laws of Nature (population constraints, *laws of competition). In choosing to become agriculturalists and herders in order to provide for themselves (action), they had to pool their resources and live in organized societies/villages (reaction). In choosing to come together in cities (action), they unknowingly enabled the spread of diseases (reaction). And so on and on down the line, until the prophets, and then Jesus and then Paul and onward into modern times, all warning at first, then simply giving up or shifting focus. The Prophets cried "go back!" or "submit to God's will/rulers!". Jesus cried "Give up your Ego and follow me!", then "Why have you forsaken me?" when he realized that he had not transcended the Ego and was still at odds with God, still subject his humanity. Paul cried "Give up your right to self!" and "Glory be to the suffering!", bland remixes of Jesus' core message mixed with legalistic pablum to appease his Roman overlords.

Modern day prophets don't even bother with the sacrifice of Ego. They can't, because most of them are nothing but cults of personality, built around the adoration of the ironic Ego, Self, of a dead Jew called Jesus. The body of sheeple submits, the pastor(s) herd, and he who dies with the most toys wins.

*The laws of competition are not laws by definition. I am using Quinn's interpretation of the principle of competition as being a law. A minor technicality but one worth nothing, I believe.

September 5, 2014

Can we dissect your post even further by pulling God out of the picture completely and replacing him with evolutionary consciousness? I'd really like to see how that looks but I couldn't even begin....

These are not my theories; they are based upon the works of Daniel Quinn.

"Ishmael" is a pretty fascinating read. I'd recommend that you read the book to really get a solid feel of what he is saying. I've not read "The Story of B", which expands further upon the theories presented in "Ishmael".

I suppose that you could replace God/gods with evolutionary consciousness. My opinion is that Quinn used the term "God" or the term "gods" in his works to make the narratives easier to decipher for the Western audience.

If one looks back to the world before agriculturalists took over and even in the early days of the agriculture, one finds that Mother Goddess, Mother Earth, or Great Mother were the primary divine beings. The Mother gave birth (controlling Life), yet she also brought death. She was dualistic in nature, 2 in 1, a double sided coin with awesome powers. As agriculture spread, wars were waged and over time, the roles of the Mother goddesses began to erode. They were replaced by male warrior gods, such as Yahweh and Zeus.

Mother is Nature, hence our term "Mother Nature", at least by the paradigm of those who live/lived according to natural law. It was only when we usurped natural law via the Fall that the new "law" took effect. Man now ruled over Life. Eve (Life, the Mother) gave up her power, surrendered it to Adam (Man, the Father). Nature was no longer paramount. Man ruled, and still does to this very day.

It really makes no difference if one calls Nature/the natural law "God" or "gods" or "spirits". The essence of Quinn's interpretation (as I see it) is that in the beginning, there was Nature (natural law). To go deeper than that would potentially be beyond the scope of this thread.

Man and Life broke the Law. God is Nature and somehow Nature spoke, obfuscating the meaning of its words, twisting them in such a way as to cover their own asses. They failed to communicate the truth about the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, by only giving the words to Man and not to Life. Life ate of the tree and Man went along with her. The Serpent was the only one who spoke the truth. The Serpent was the "conscience" of the situation, the only one who gave a warning. Perhaps the Serpent is Satan and perhaps it is not. Perhaps the truest symbol in the story is the Serpent, for Serpent was the one who first violated Nature (natural law) in the story by communicating with the woman. Snakes don't talk and unless Eve was speaking Parseltongue, her communication with the snake was the first sign that something was amiss. Yet she stayed true in her course of action, committed until the end, with far more courage than the simpering Adam.

Brave, yet foolish. Willingly to lie. Willing to pay the price. Full of pride as they were cast out (clearly this is not the victor's tale!). Whomever first told this tale was on the outside looking in, poking fun at the people who turned their backs on Nature. They were clearly idiots, after all. You traded the provisions of Nature (God) for a life behind the plow? You traded equality and compassion from your companion for the endless suffering of pregnancy and childbirth? What dunderheads, the onlookers said as they chuckled around the campfire.

Little did they know, the Fallen would come for them, kill their men, take their land, rape their women and turn their children into slaves. And then take their tale and spin it into a fabulous yarn that would be used to subjugate untold numbers of people in the distant future.

Reminds me of Chief Seattle... good stuff, again. I like the way you think. I'll have to check out the books.

September 5, 2014

Indeed, a great read.

I'm finding it challenging seeing A&E's departure from Eden as forsaking the natural order, if that natural order is ruled by the Yahweh figure. So, I need to see what Yahweh's role of prohibition and repression means.

In terms of evolutionary consciousness, Humanity needs to evolve beyond deities, here represented by Yahweh. And that's interesting since the god in Eden is actually Yahweh Elohim, one of a plurality of deities. The deities represent the conglomerate of prohibitions, inhibitions, taboos, fears -- all in the depths of the psyche. Humans must face and overcome all that, in order to evolve, both collectively and individually. Yahweh's restriction is Humanity's self-restriction. The human mind must trick (beguile) itself, psyche god out of itself, and thus remove the barriers to progress, evolution, and self-actualization.

Maybe leaving the garden appears to be regression, but it is nevertheless the road to ultimate progress. Maybe it's the rite of passage into autonomy and enlightenment, and civilization.

Or does Quinn view civilization negatively and as the antagonist to the natural order?

Leaving the Garden is the price of gaining knowledge and making progress. Perhaps at the conclusion of the process, at the end of the journey, is a return to Paradise, but a better one than the first.

littlewanderer, do you mean to substitute or replace God with evolutionary consciousness? Then do we view God (Yahweh in the biblical narrative) as being a personification of the human consciousness, the human psyche?

Do you see anything in the idea of Process Theology that might illustrate God as a personification of human evolutionary consciousness? And that might explain "God's Secret Law" (a self-imposed prohibition that must be overcome) as a function of the human psyche, especially collectively? Can we see a symbiotic, a co-dependent, relationship between the human psyche and God?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_theology

I considered process theology several years ago. Now I'm looking at process psychology as a way of explaining God, and viewing God as a representation of the psychological process.

Human

I will need to read on Process Theology as this is a brand new concept to me. I've never heard of it. But my own inclination has always tended to lean toward the thought that God is a construct of early psychology in the sense that when we say "God" we don't necessarily mean a real, living, spirit-being which has the omnipotence to permeate everything, but is actually a blanket name given to what we now know as morality or ethics. I don't know enough, unfortunately, about the theory of evolution to make an assumption, but if I use my basic knowledge of the idea to prop up the idea that the first human beings to experience remorse or regret would have not been able to interpret this emotional anguish the same way they did physical pain (i.e. being caused by something outside of themselves) I wonder if it is likely that they'd not have been self aware enough to know it came from their own minds and instead define it as an invisible "evil" force causing them internal suffering? I think it's possible at least. I'd like to know if there are any anthropological studies on early human psychology and religion. I always thought some of the "Demons" Jesus supposedly exorcised were really mental conditions or seizure disorders. But before modern medicine or psychology we blamed invisible hell angels.

I also like the idea of the law of competition that seven77 brings up via Quinn. Survival of the fittest trying to coagulate via evolution with morality and compassion. Human consciousness transcending. It's an interesting thought. I'll need to do some more reading...

**EDIT**

Turns out, there are studies on the anthropology of religion. Here's a site I just found, might be worth digging into:

http://www.anpere.net/eng/

September 5, 2014

Indeed, a great read.

I'm finding it challenging seeing A&E's departure from Eden as forsaking the natural order, if that natural order is ruled by the Yahweh figure. So, I need to see what Yahweh's role of prohibition and repression means.

In terms of evolutionary consciousness, Humanity needs to evolve beyond deities, here represented by Yahweh. And that's interesting since the god in Eden is actually Yahweh Elohim, one of a plurality of deities. The deities represent the conglomerate of prohibitions, inhibitions, taboos, fears -- all in the depths of the psyche. Humans must face and overcome all that, in order to evolve, both collectively and individually. Yahweh's restriction is Humanity's self-restriction. The human mind must trick (beguile) itself, psyche god out of itself, and thus remove the barriers to progress, evolution, and self-actualization.

Maybe leaving the garden appears to be regression, but it is nevertheless the road to ultimate progress. Maybe it's the rite of passage into autonomy and enlightenment, and civilization.

Or does Quinn view civilization negatively and as the antagonist to the natural order?

Leaving the Garden is the price of gaining knowledge and making progress. Perhaps at the conclusion of the process, at the end of the journey, is a return to Paradise, but a better one than the first.

littlewanderer, do you mean to substitute or replace God with evolutionary consciousness? Then do we view God (Yahweh in the biblical narrative) as being a personification of the human consciousness, the human psyche?

Do you see anything in the idea of Process Theology that might illustrate God as a personification of human evolutionary consciousness? And that might explain "God's Secret Law" (a self-imposed prohibition that must be overcome) as a function of the human psyche, especially collectively? Can we see a symbiotic, a co-dependent, relationship between the human psyche and God?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_theology

I considered process theology several years ago. Now I'm looking at process psychology as a way of explaining God, and viewing God as a representation of the psychological process.

Human

I will need to read on Process Theology as this is a brand new concept to me. I've never heard of it. But my own inclination has always tended to lean toward the thought that God is a construct of early psychology in the sense that when we say "God" we don't necessarily mean a real, living, spirit-being which has the omnipotence to permeate everything, but is actually a blanket name given to what we now know as morality or ethics. I don't know enough, unfortunately, about the theory of evolution to make an assumption, but if I use my basic knowledge of the idea to prop up the idea that the first human beings to experience remorse or regret would have not been able to interpret this emotional anguish the same way they did physical pain (i.e. being caused by something outside of themselves) I wonder if it is likely that they'd not have been self aware enough to know it came from their own minds and instead define it as an invisible "evil" force causing them internal suffering? I think it's possible at least. I'd like to know if there are any anthropological studies on early human psychology and religion. I always thought some of the "Demons" Jesus supposedly exorcised were really mental conditions or seizure disorders. But before modern medicine or psychology we blamed invisible hell angels.

I also like the idea of the law of competition that seven77 brings up via Quinn. Survival of the fittest trying to coagulate via evolution with morality and compassion. Human consciousness transcending. It's an interesting thought. I'll need to do some more reading...

**EDIT**

Turns out, there are studies on the anthropology of religion. Here's a site I just found, might be worth digging into:

http://www.anpere.net/eng/

Yes, there are many studies of the anthropology of religion, starting with Emile Durkheim's "Elementary Forms of Religious Life". The main point of that classic book is that religions arise from the interaction and needs of the social group.

September 5, 2014

I'm starting to think I should go back to college!

Now I'm Struggling to understand how I could have ever thought I'd reached a conclusion about anything before I started all this searching on my own. I didn't even know comparative religion was a thing before last week. I love discussions like this, but I feel like my head is DROWNING in trying to collect and process all of this new, highly logical information. I've always been a "feel-y" type but only recently did I start hungering for knowledge about these things. I was too busy trying to have fun!

so many books to read now. so. many. books.

September 6, 2014

My thanks to everyone who's contributed to this thread and I'm glad it's been of interest too.

As of tomorrow, my partner Maureen and I are off (by road and rail) to a vacation in Cape Cod.

When we get back (the end of the month) shall I post some additional material about Eden to this thread?

That is, would anyone be interested in seeing some stuff that I considered putting in to the opening post, but which didn't make the final cut?

If so, please leave a reply here and I'll see it when I get back.

Thanks,

BAA.

September 7, 2014

I would be interested in seeing it, BAA. No hurries though.

God's Secret Law In Eden.

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