Also Death is not given as a punishment.
Death is bestowed on man because he is just flesh.
As Genesis 6 says a bit further on:
“My spirit will not dwell in man for all eternity, because he is flesh, his days shall be 120.”
And he didn’t have to put the loaded gun on the table, leaving his kids home with a very untrustworthy babysitter, before going out for a jog. How percentage of the blame for what was almost sure to happen was his?
Sure they did. God warned them some time before the snake talked to Eve. “Don’t eat from this tree, or bad stuff will happen.”
My question is, if it was dangerous or bad for us, why put the tree in the garden in the first place?
As a test of our obedience? Why does an all knowing God need to test us?
Or was it a teaching tool? 
When he told them this, did they know right from wrong? Were they even capable of understanding what “bad stuff will happen” even means?
You are right, it is what you get when you combine several stories and later people start taking out things they don’t like.
You are left with a story that is full of holes, but not plot holes.
All I can assume is that God communicates with A&E, he would do so in ways that they can understand. (He’s supposed to be smart, or sumthin’, after all.) I don’t recall the story providing that level of detail.
I liked the baby/small child analogy used above. You can tell a two year old not to stick stuff into an electrical outlet, or try to climb the Christmas tree. Most people don’t go into electrical theory with the child at this point, or the concept of “center of gravity”. They just expect to be obeyed.
Well, Satan (the serpent) told Eve that eating of the fruit would make her like God. So that really is the fundamental sin even in the Genesis story.
That is exactly the difference between the Jewish and the Christian takes on the story. In Hebrew school I learned that eating the fruit (not apple) was the explanation of why we die, why childbirth is painful, why men work, and why we hate snakes. No particular evil is imputed to Adam and Eve. It is a Just-So story. The Christian view is that this sin spread to all.
For your example it is the difference in viewing the dead baby situation as a tragedy or thinking the baby deserved it for being evil and crawling on the tracks.
No plot hole in the Jewish version, big plot hole in the Christian version (which isn’t actually in Genesis.)
Yeah, but if you’ve ever had a one or two year old you know that you just don’t tell the kid to not stick his finger in the outlet, you put in childproof plugs. It is basically your fault if little kids get hurt in this way.
So God should have created a fence while he was at it.
I know that Genesis never specifies what kind of fruit, but I thought t was pretty clear on the whole serpent thing. What was it, if not a snake?
And what happens when another adult says that it’s okay to stick stuff into the electrical socket? Does the first adult bear any responsibility for childproofing the home and removing bad influences, and do you throw the kids out of the house because they didn’t understand that some adults lie?
But why did God create us in this way? By retconning the Adam and Eve story to make it a choice, not an inherent human characteristic, the Christians dumped the responsibility on us and not on God.
There is a rich regional mythos built around the Serpent
The apple thing is christian and comes from latin “malum” which can both mean “apple” or “bad/evil”
I don’t know if Satan had had his falling out with God yet, or not. This also brings to question “why does God allow Satan to continue to exist?”.
IMO: Yes to the first, No to the second. I already questioned that bible “wisdom” earlier.
I was talking about the serpent, not Satan.
Some cultures in the region had the serpent as a mythical giver of knowledge, c.f. the priestess with snakes or the Asclepios sign.
It is not too strange that the myths of another people in the region, that believed in different god(s), would have contained in their myths something along the lines of “don’t listen to (those of) the serpent, they are lies.”
Just like it says not to follow the worship of the golden calf.
Mooby does alright by me.
Indeed, he puts a big freaking angel with a flaming sword to protect the barn after the horse left.
The more I look at the story, the more I think that Eve was framed. The only way for me to accept the tale is to think that god was solving the curious situation** that he already knew was coming**, sooner or later the kids had to fend on their own, better to make a set up that would instill in them the ultimate guilt trip and prevent eternal questions of the fairness of being cast off paradise, because I do think that just as it was the case in the iron and bronze ages, it is a heck lot more complicated to explain properly to teens why they need to make it on their own.
Indeed, it takes centuries of human development and condenses it into a day or two.
Sorry, not seeing that at all. It is not even obvious that Adam and Eve were spiritual beings, unlike the humans who were created in chapter one (“out of nothing … in god’s likeness and image”). If nothing else, eating of the Tree was the opposite of spiritual death.
Oh, and the OT is decidedly mute on the topic of redemption/salvation, that appears to be a wholly christian invention.
This is nonsensical. There is absolutely no moral imperative associated with the tree of life. Perhaps you should avoid explaining theology, your explanations do not seem to work.
Holy crap, is that how you view morality? Sounds dreadfully subjective to me.