life in the garden of Eden was idyllic and wonderful, with no conception of sin or death. upon eating of the tree of knowledge, they sinned and were banished from the garden.
how could god hold them accountable for their sin if they had no idea what sin was? not being contrary; this popped into my head a few minutes ago. i’m sure that the talmud would have addressed this topic by now. haven’t heard any discussion of it in catholic circles. anybody?
grang! the antecendentless pronouns in the above question are to refoer to adam and eve. upon editing and rewriting I took out a sentence that had a lot of important info.
jb
It is pretty complicated I think. Did God kick them out of the garden for disobeying his orders? Perhaps. When they ate the fruit they gained knowledge of good and evil. They were no longer the innocent creatures they had been and could not stay in paradise. If I recall correctly Adam and Eve put clothes on before God kicked them out. But I’m years behind my Sunday school lessons so maybe I’m mistaken.
Another point is that Eve didn’t seduce or trick Adam into eating the fruit. She asked and he said “Sure, looks yummy” or something like that. She’s gotten a bad rap over the years.
Personally I don’t know what Adam and Eve were before eating the apple. They weren’t human that’s for sure. More like robots.
Marc
When you were a kid and your parents said “don’t touch that”, what happened if you did? You probably got in trouble. Same here. God told then DO NOT eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Eve was deceived by the serpent. Adam came along and just said o.k. At this time they knew what sin was. All of a sudden they “knew they were naked”, and covered themselves.
Incedently, where does it say that it was an apple tree?
JB I hold you responsible for not using capitalization when writing, even though you apparently never received instruction in the rules of the English language. Or maybe you were told to capitalize and you said “no one can tell me what to do.”
See, JB, God held Adam and Eve responsible for violating his rule. Just as simple as that. If I had the power to punish you for not using capitals, I would do so. If you worked for me, for instance, and submitted a report written with no capital letters, I would return it with a demand that it be rewritten. If you refused to do so, I would fire you.
God had the power to punish Adam and Eve so he did just that.
And why would you remove a sentence that had “a lot of important info”?
Wait a minute, how did they come to the conclusion their nudeness was sinful? Not that I want to turn this a naturism thread, but if it were sinful to be naked, surely God would’ve created A&E complete with a set of longjohns, or provided them with knowledge on how to secure a fig leaf to one’s person. Unless you’re suggesting when God created man and woman, he created an inherently corrupt and sinful being.
Anyway God seems to have gone soft on A&E, given that when warning them not to eat the fruit from the tree, he said they would surely die (which apparently they did not).
**
I’m an atheist so I believe man created God not vice versa. That is I think he exist the same way any other fictional character exist.
A&E when placed in paradise were like children. All of their needs were provided for and they had no concept of right or wrong. Children don’t seem to have a problem running around nude. After eating the apple, or whatever fruit it was, they gained knowledge of right, wrong, and such concepts as modesty. Really it is almost a metaphor for growing from childhood to adulthood. When expelled from heaven their needs are no longer automatically provided for. Man must now “make bread by the sweat of his own brow.” Just like us adults.
**
While in the garden they didn’t know pain, death, or much of anything else apparantly. But then again this is an atheist interpretation of the story of creation. So what do I know?
Marc
well, technically they did die. if they hadn’t, i’m sure they would have been on daytime tv or a lecture circut by now…
the problem is one of knowledge. a&e couldn’t understand the concepts of sin or death, much like a child can’t understand what burn means until he touches the stove. learning is painful, but necessary. i think that if the little kid didn’t touch the stove, he’d never understand the danger. similarly, until gaining knowledge of death, a&e would never understand why they had to fear it–nor would they understand its permanance.
it still seems sort of mean and tricky to me. on the part of the deity in question, that is. they probably wouldn’t have noticed the tree/fruit if it hadn’t been pointed out, and probably wouldn’t have been curious if it hadn’t been forbidden.
and i think that both eve and the serpent get a bad rap here. who put the fruit in the garden in the first place, huh?
My understanding of the issue is that prior to eating of the forbidden fruit, they did not have a concept of good and evil inherent in actions. However, they were expected to obey G-d’s orders out of a love for him and a sense of gratitude for their creation and the beautiful world they lived in.
Having displayed that lack of love and gratitude by disobeying the order, the fruit then instilled in them the notion of good actions vs. evil actions, of love for reward and fear of punishment.
At least, I think that’s how it’s explained…
I asked a similar question a while back:
Was eve right to eat the apple?
and Hunsecker asked it before me:
Fall of Man
Like a hurried lover, a religious debate comes and goes…
You’re a baker? Or a farmer?
God had little other choice but to punish them. God set them up with free will – which, by definition, requires the option to make a choice against God. In this case the choice was “knowledge” (what if man does not do God’s will?) over God’s will.
Adam and Eve had been in the Garden for a long, long time. And God’s only other option was to let them, then and there, eat the Tree of Life. Which is hardly a good life lesson – reward for disobedience: you get to be Gods. And not just Gods – but new Gods perhaps superior to the Original.
(one wonders if God wasn’t familiar with what happened to the Titans after they made Gods – got their heads beat in by the upstarts.)
Now eventually, God did devise a set of rules by which man could return to the Garden and eat the fruit of the Tree of Life. But that as they say, is another story.
From what I’ve read of the KJV Bible it was a fig,not an apple. But from what I remember of Genesis from reading it in Hebrew School Adam is completely to blame and Eve is innocent. It went like this:
God creates Adam and warns him, eat what you want but don’t
eat from the tree of knowledge or you’ll die.
Adam complains about how he’s lonely and God gives him Eve.
Adam tells Eve if you so much as touch the tree of knowledge, then you’ll die.
The serpent shoves Eve against the tree, and when she realizes that she didn’t die, then she is willing to listen to him and eat the fruit of the tree.
Then after eating it she convinces Adam to as well.
I liked Smullyan’s interpretation in “Is God a Taoist?” which was that the fruit was poisonous and the pain and death was not punishment, but a necessary consequence of the fruit.
I also find it amusing that the story is to a certain extent true. Because humans have such big brains childbirth is far more painful and dangerous than it is for other animals. But I still prefer the story of Prometheus.
but the god that i was raised with was a god of fairness and compassion. sure, i may not believe that that god exists, but i still hold some value in the stories. adam and eve were as equal to all of the other creatures at the time of the garden. then, without any knowledge of what sin was, or the consequences of their action would be, they ate from the tree (i don’t care if it’s apples or figs or mangos) and were expelled from the garden. they couldn’t have com[rehended the results of their actions until they ate from the tree, so how could they be held responsible for their actions? that does not seem to be a just god to me.
so my point in posting is not “Ha HA! Your god is illogical and therefore STUPID!! And so he must not exist and you are stupid for believing in him!”, but rather, this must have come up before in the last few thousand years; how has it been dealt with?
Not equal, better. God created Adam and Eve in his own image, remember.
God told them if they eat of this tree they will die. So we can say that they did know the consequences,whether they knew sin or not.
That’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it? It’s been long debated in religious circles as to what exactly happened here. There are a lot of theodicies on it. (if you think that it requires one) I’m not saying I agree with them all, but they have been offered by many people.
It’s just a story and shouldn’t be taken out of context. This is the story of how we got into the world. Why people die. Why snakes have no legs. etc. It’s merely a tool to expalin a situation.
God allowed such a thing to happen as to grant a greater good through mankind achieving things on their own. What good is life if you can’t struggle for it?
It’s part of God’s greater plan that we can’t understand.
The fruit in fact did not give us the knowledge of good and evil, merely the presence of mind to think we know what good and evil is. When we ate of the fruit we created our own version of good and evil. *personally while I don’t agree with this completely, it does pose some very interesting ideas on the nature of right and wrong. And it does one hell of a job at explaining our relativistic attitude towards morality today.
What I always wondered was, why did he make the damn tree to begin with?!
Being God surely he’d know what was going to happen wouldn’t he? Following the children analogy, would you put the cookie jar in the playpen and then tell them not to eat the cookies?
You would if you wanted to give your kids a chance to exercise their free will. =]
My own personal interpation of this particular passage is that God allowed it to happen so that man might stand upon his own, much like God.
It’s a totatly vain interpation. But I honestly belive that God gave man the chance to create a good that is apart from God (though still somthign good).
To be blunt.
Yes, I belive in God.
And, yes I belive that via the freewill God gave man, we have the chance to bulid a good as well, that doesn’t have to be guided by God.
This view unfortenatly tends to piss off atheists and christans alike =]
Seems to me that one of the explanations given to me by a Sunday school teacher about some of the Old Testament stories is that they were parables or allegories to make a certain point while other of the stories were actual histories. Perhaps way back then, people knew which were which and did not bother to note this when writing them down.
I believe the Adam and Eve story to be one of those parables.
well sure i believe that it’s a parable. actually, mythology fits a bit better. but the thing is, this is a story which has been the basis for the greatest influence western civ has seen (non-secularly). this is the first story in the book of genesis, the opening of the good book. so, although it is a parable or a legend, it behooves us to try and understand it.
also, what is the purpose of such a story? to teach. and how does the learning occur? by understanding what all the pieces mean, how they fit together. that necessitates figuring out motives and consequences, and doing one’s best to weave all the threads into one cogent mindquilt (this is damned near impossible, i might add).
i’m just doing my best to understand this crazy little thing we call existence, through religious texts, and calling on some friends to aid the process.
If you want to get technical about it, it is the second story. There are two creation stories. The first whre he creates the world in six days, and the second one that’s refered to here. There is a lot of repeating of stories in the bible, mostly becasue books tend to come from four sources… I wish I could recal if this one was the priestly, or the judaic source though…
Maybe, but prehaps that’s only if you’re trying to be hermenutical about it and still apply it to todays world. I think there’s too much confusion as a whole about the past (much less the problem of releating it to the present) to effectively do somthing such as this.
What people can do, have done, and in fact do now, is to use the bible as a progressive tool. They can do what you’re trying to do now, and rework it into a modern context. The story you bring up certinaly isn’t the toughest to deal with either… there are plenty of other passages that make God look like a regular demon, such as in kings when he sends two bears to maul 40 children or so because they taunted Elisha.
The bible clearly states that God had warned Adam and
Eve not to eat from the fruit of this particular tree. What does Eve do? Well… you all know the rest.
A powerful yet elegant metaphor on how some rules or commandments in life are meant to be adhered to, otherwise: beware of unpleasant circumstances!