Why set up a test at all if you’re an omniscient being who knows everything that’s going to happen?
It’s like carefully building a Hot Wheels track so the end points off a cliff, and then placing the blame on the little car when it plunges to its destruction. It just makes no sense.
That was a pretty bare-bones explanation I gave, not wanting to turn this into an “argue with the Mormon” thread. To expand a bit, we believe that Adam could walk and talk with God before the Fall, but spiritual death meant that that was no longer possible. Um, I guess I would say that a being that is ‘one with God’ will not want to sin, and one that is not subject to mortality won’t do so. Those who live with God, I think (and this is just IMO), don’t really have a lot of room to sin in a minor way; there’s obedience and unity, and then there’s outright rebellion. So, that’s why we get sent down to earth and mortality and all the messiness and sinning that goes with that–so we can freely choose, without someone right over our shoulder, what we want to do. We can choose to become like God, or to go another direction, away from Him. Then, if we choose, we can go back and live with Him again, which is what the Atonement is for.
A short explanation of LDS ideas about the Fall:
Dallin H. Oaks Note that we do not call the Fall a sin, nor blame Eve for her choice.
Then I don’t get the difference between A & E and children. Children know academically right from wrong in many cases. That doesn’t stop them from being overcome by curiosity, bad influences, or just plain perverseness. If you’ve never experienced evil, then you cannot be said to understand the consequences. A & E didn’t know what death was, not really, nor did they know what it was like to be separated from God. They were children, and God was a very bad parent. It’s like leaving a chocolate cake out, telling the kids if they eat it they’ll die, having another adult say, “Your dad was just messing with you-- you can eat it”, then leaving it out on the table with fork with the kids alone in the house. Yes, it’s very bad that they ate the cake, but really, expecting them not to is unrealistic and rather cruel; forcing them and all their progeny to live short, painful lives is really an enormous punishment for such an act.
The Talmud can say that all it wants, but I have my own opinion. What does an omniscient being need with a test? Doesn’t he know how it’s going to turn out already? Why did he make us such fuck-ups, then?
This is a bad analogy, because A & E did derive benefit from what they did. Why wasn’t God straight up with them?
Is there any evidence that the snake knew what A & E’s disobedience would entail? If so, why did he tempt A & E in the first place, knowing what would happen to him?
Well, it could be said to be lying when you tell a pair of kids “eat this and you DIE!” when in fact, they would only die because God was punishing them, not because of eating the fruit. Here’s the issue: the way God phrased it in Gen 2:17, “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” makes it sound like the act of eating the fruit will kill them, as poison would. What he was really saying was, “Disobey me and the consequence will be death,” not “this fruit will kill you.” Are we sure that Adam and Eve knew that God was being metaphorical? My feeling from their overall naivete is no. No way of knowing if the snake knew, but my guess also is no.
Nope, God said “that day,” which doesn’t mean “become mortal” to me. Explanations like that one smack of rationalization to me–making excuses for God’s bad behavior.
re: the snake’s motivation
[quote]
[list=1][li]Intent matters. Was the snake acting strictly as G-d’s agent, or was he trying to tempt them for his own selfish purposes? [/li][/quote]
And what were his purposes? To ruin God’s plan? If God is omniscient and omnipotent, this shouldn’t be possible, should it?
[quote]
[li]Did he exceed his mandate? A “devil’s advocate” should do his job as well as he can, arguing for the opposing side with all of the rhetorical skills he can muster, but we expect him to stick to the facts.[/li][/quote]
Why should he play by the rules when God doesn’t? God didn’t accurately represent the effect that eating the fruit would have; he lied by omission too when he neglected to mention that it would not, in fact, kill them that day, and the fact that they would gain the God-like understanding of good and evil. Did the snake mispresent worse than that? I think not.
Thanks again, RedNaxela. Even if the traffic on this thread has dwindled by the time you get back, please do reply. You are educating me!
Not directly related - but remember the snake lost his legs, and now crawls in the dust.
Of course, but that is so boring. Your interpretation would have at least some religions punishing wisdom - works for me.
You forget Seth. There must have been more, since usually only the eldest is named in Genesis. Adam named the animals in the second creation story before Eve got created, I think, so that isn’t relevent. The Christians say incest was okay because they were more perfect in those days. The was a SD science advisor board story on Cain’s wife, I believe. (I’m too lazy to search for it.) That part is easy - the tricky question was who lived in the city that Cain founded, and who would be so mad at him that a mark was required. Everyone on Earth then was a very close cousin!
I don’t think people appreciated the difference when the legend was written down. I was just giving a sligthly different allegory, after all.
I always wondered why they didn’t eat the Tree of Life FIRST, then the other.
Yeah, why are there two trees anyway?
Also, has anybody noticed the difference between the relationship of Adam and Eve before they eat the fruit and afterward? It seems to me like the are more equal before, and less so afterward.
But this is going about it all wrong, looking at the state of Adam and Eve before the fall and wondering why it had to happen that way.
The myth only make sense when you look at our fallen state today and wonder how we got here. And a standard explanation of this is that waaaaaay back when everything was perfect. But there was just ooooooone little problem. And that screwed everything up forever.
I don’t think the ancient Hebrews sat around wondering why Adam and Eve had to screw up such a good thing and why God was so mean about it, any more that ancient Greeks wished Zeus hadn’t given Pandora the golden box. We have troubles in this world, and those were just post hoc explanations. And they didn’t bother to make sure that God’s motives were entirely comprehensible either, since when the stories were first created the concept of an omnipotent omniscient omnibenevolent diety hadn’t taken hold yet. There was no problem with God not knowing what Adam was going to do, or God not creating Adam perfectly to begin with, or God being a bit of a jerk about the whole incident, since they wouldn’t have insisted that God must have those properties anyway.
My interpretation is that the “forbidden fruit” is conciousness itself - what makes us human.
After all “knowledge of good and evil” is a reasonable definition of conciousness.
The “punishment” is not actually a punishment; simply an awareness of things. Being aware of things expells us from the “Eden” of unawareness, in which there is no pain or suffering because there is no ability to understand pain or suffering.
In effect, by disobeying, humans gained the seperation from the creator necessary to become concious beings. Which the creator had planned for us all along - a being which is not seperate cannot know love, any more than a fingernail can love and be loved by a finger.
At least, that’s how I would interpret the story if I believed in a transcendental deity. 
Speaking as an agnostic/pagan [I dont believe any religion is wrong, though I wonder at satanists…] I don’t happen to feel like I am fallen.
I try to live according to the golden rule, and follow most laws [ok, i like to drive a bit fast, and I rip the tags off my pillows …] and don’t consider myself fallen. I am simply a mark 1 mod 0 human, female type. I am married, we have property and a couple of cats. husband works, i am job hunting. We are pretty much a statistical norm. I refuse to start ‘in a hole’ because of something that I didn’t even do…nor did any of my direct ancesters [and I have assorted family trees going back about 800 odd years.] If I have done any bad acts in my life, it is MY fault and not some possibly/probaby mythic couple before the dawn of written history. I try to make amends as best I can for any bad acts I have done, and THAT is THAT. i am not going to ‘atone’ for something I didn’t do as I didn’t do it. I was born innocent, and not because of some ephemeral possibly mythic messiah who may or may have not died to wash away my sins. If he died to wash away my sins, then why do I have to give birth in pain, hmmmmmmmmmm?
I agree with aruvqan. By any objective standard, and taken in general, human life today is as good as or better than it’s ever been.
First, re the childbirth angle: Assuming that initial absence of any pain is interpretive addition to the Eden story, then, yes, the childbirth angle works out fine. (Otherwise pain in general would have to be part of the punishment.)
But, now, secondly, re the work-and-maintain angle:
This gets a little bit more complcated. Eden was supposed to be idyllic. Assuming it stays essentially that way, no one would have to work for basic needs. Even if the basic picture changes substantially we would tend to have, at least for the short term, two adults and a few children, living in a lush, fruit-bearing environment. Under the circumstances, I’m not sure Eve would really have needed Adam, bearing child after child as she may have been. How hard would it have been to get food for everyone?
Of course there is some indication that the local laws of nature changed, and evertything was more difficult. But this is largely interpretive to the story and your angle is that everything is a natural consequence within the story.
Also, childbirth is inherently painful, and not subsequently cursed to be painful, would it not follow that the Boss intended Adam and Eve to remain childless?
True Blue Jack
I like your point about Adam naming all the animals. Assuming “all” simply meant ALL and not some special subset for the garden he’s prolly still be at it. Heh heh.
But here’s where I take exception. Cain and Abel would not have been the only children. I believe there is some tradition that there were 72 children or 72 pairs of children; something like that. But that’s somewhat beside the point. Anyone can add a later tradition to make a story make more sense. The real point is that later we read that Adam had “sons and daughters.” The only thing is that this blurb is disconnected and spoken in conjuction with the end of his life. But that’s how the Hebrew probably typically presented things: surely the author didn’t mean to imply that several children were sired with adam’s dying breath. It’s all part of the same story, although I suppose it could have been edited at some point. (JEDP reasoning is that Genesis was redacted from 4 sources, but I seem to recall that the entire segment in question was Jahwist, so that’s not key here. I’m saying, thjough, that it’s possible that even a single "original source " could have been fiddled with, if only by the same author.)
One of the sisters was supposed to have become Cain’s wife, but Martin Gardner points out that it could have been a niece or great-niece. Anyway you look at it, though, there would have been an incestuous foundation to the human race. And genetic viability would have required at least one miracle.
For many such reasons, even many churchmen agree that the story should be taken as allegory.
True Blue Jack
Remember that they got expelled from Eden as part of the punishment. If they had been allowed to stay then you are correct, taking care of Eve would not have been difficult. But the expulsion and the work go hand in hand.
One wonders if there would have been children without the fall. Would they have experimented and discovered sinless sex? In that case, would childbirth have been painless? Ah, it is easy to embellish a myth.
First and foremost, what you’re describing (story of serpent, Adam, Eve) is not undifferentiated “Bible” or undifferentiated “Genesis” – it’s the J Document at a minimum.
J has to be understood in context. The God of J is neither particularly “almighty” nor particularly “infallible” either in the moral or in the truth-discerning sense. The God who said “Let there be light” (…and there was light) was not the God of J.
J’s God was a petty tyrant, protective of his Godly perquisites (such as living forever), inclined towards gentle mercy when moved but equally inclined towards vindictiveness when provoked – and capable of being swayed by smooth-tongued humans who could catch his ear.
The Ophitics, a brand of Gnostics, rejected at least the creation portion of the J Document, declaring it heresy, stating that in the story as it stands the divine personage is the serpent, not God. It is right and noble that the primeval persons, Adam and Eve, should seek the knowledge of good and evil, and should not accept the proclamations of the limited God of the J Document that doing so is evil.
The J Document is very old, enough so as to have been established and accepted before the priesthood got into the serious business of culling sources for the Torah, so it could not easily have been deleted or declared heretical, but its tone and attitude towards God is neither awestruck nor reverent – more akin to the attitude of an employee of a bombastic and charismatic CEO with ordinary foibles and weaknesses and blind spots.
Some people celebrate the J Document for making God personal and accessible. J’s God would take a cup of coffee in your den and argue with you, and you might even win the argument. But J’s God is also petty and temperamental and ultimately not worshipable.