Eden

This is just a cluster of questions I've had for a while. It's unrelated to the news, except that in a very tenous way, I was reminded of it by Lakoff's discussion of the "strict father" model.

I've always been puzzled by the notion of Original Sin, and not just the odd question of transmission of sin by genetics. My puzzlement is more along the general lines of logic, and probably is best directed at those people who think that Genesis is not just a metaphor.

The general setup is pretty well known. The first man and woman are created innocent, free of the knowledge of good and evil. God tells them not to eat of one particular fruit in the Garden of Eden, the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, on pain of death. Then God goes away. Then they eat the fruit. Then God come back, chews them out, and exiles them as punishment.

So here are my questions (well, some of them).

How were they supposed to know that it was wrong to eat the fruit if they had no knowledge of good and evil? How were they supposed to know what death was, these two people who had never seen it? How were they supposed to know that it was evil to disobey God? If they couldn't know that they were acting wrongly, why was it fair to punish them so severely?

Is the lesson just that one must always submit to apparent authority, or else?

Thoughts welcome.

Comments

[Shaula Evans]

I trust you won't be using this as a childrearing model...or a business management model, for that matter.

You're such a gentleman, paperwight, to gloss over the fact that the apple incident is reputed to be all Eve's fault--a little grudge the bible thumpers have used to justify discrimination against women and institutionalized misogyny for hundreds upon hundreds of years.

Remember, the Old Testament god is Deus Irae, a god of wrath--he kicks ass, asks no questions, takes no prisoners. The touchy feely god of mercy stuff didn't catch on until the New Testament. And, if you get into the textual studies, there are amazingly sensical cultural and historic reasons for this, going back to what was going on when and where the texts were originally composed, orally transmitted, and finally written down.

In the meantime, as a woman, I do my best to stay away from the OT crowd.

[Mr. Buttons]

It's all about Faith. The idea is that they did know they were acting wrongly because they disobeyed the will of God, their creator, their father, their protector. They didn't need to be aware of Good and Evil to know that they ought to have faith in what God told them.

So to me, the bigger question has always been: Why did God create such faulty beings in the first place?

And no, the lesson is not one must always submit to apparent authority, or else, it's that one must always submit to the will of the LORD or suffer an enternity of damnation.

If you believe in this sort of thing...

[coturnix]

Nice blog! Glad to see someone else using Lakoff in analysis.
I'll be back to check your blog regularly.
http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/

[Édouard]

As something of an intellectual counterpoint to the "crime" of disobeying Yahweh and eating the apple and the resultant "original sin" I propose Oscar Wilde's remark — "Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion" (from The Soul of Man under Socialism). Can't say I think Wilde's wrong, however annoying it may be to the religious, authoritarians and patronizing paternalists amongst us.

[iocaste]

Someone once told me about a story they read. In the story, God does the same thing on a number of planets: create a garden, create Adam and Eve, apple, etc. On each planet, the same thing happens -- they eat the apple, God evicts them from Eden, and they cower and try to atone for their sins.

Finally, on one planet, when God punishes them for disobedience, Adam and Eve stand up and accuse God of being unfair -- He gave them curiosity, and He put the tree in the Garden, and He never explained why they were not permitted to eat the fruit.

God responded something like, "On many planets, I have created worshippers. Today, I have found my children."

[Osama Been Forgotten]

In My View of this story, Adam and Eve are actually not guilty of the crime of disobedience.

It was the coverup that was the problem.

If you read carefully;
God's first three words to them are "YOU ARE FREE.. . " (with conditions).
This is always as it is with Freedom. Freedom without limits or conditions is Anarchy. It is Nihilism. Eventual self-destruction.
Freedom with responsibility to self-limit is the consequence of a being with free will, self-determination. That Freedom was bestowed on man directly by God - before limits were set, is the important thing. The limits were broken, as God knew they would be (being omnicient and all). I don't think that God's Punishment necessarily follows from the disobedience.

So, again, if you read the passages that follow very carefully, it describes how God would stop by in the evenings, and chit-chat with Adam (and presumably, Eve) and ask him how his day was, stuff like that. But after stealing the apple, Adam HID from God. He covered himself up with clothing. They were afraid. It wasn't the disobedience. It was the loss of innocence. (as Nixon found out, it was the coverup). The loss of the relationship. Man was not kicked out of the Garden so much as he left of his own shame and guilt. Sure there's some fiery rhetoric about punishments, and being subject to death, and angels with flaming swords - but that's all secondary to the lesson that; if you assume God's will, try to lie to Him, or flee in terror from Him, you've pretty much set the tone for the rest of your existence.

Read further on, about the situation with Cain and Abel. It's the same thing. God puts His punishment on Cain for Murder - but Cain's REAL crime was thinking that he could get away with it. Hiding from God. God forgives us for not following His Law. But He lets us punish ourselves when we hide from Him.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Original sin is one of the worst memes to come out of organized religion. I've yet to hear a satisfying answer as to why Adam and Eve deserved to be punished for doing something they did before they had knowledge of good and evil, or why an omniscient god would set them up like that, or why their unborn children should suffer as a result of any of this.

[roger]

I'm not sure that the supposition behind your question --How were they supposed to know that it was wrong to eat the fruit if they had no knowledge of good and evil?-- works. Are all prohibitions built around the notion of good and evil? When I housetrain a dog, is the dog getting information about good and evil -- or about the acceptable and the non-acceptable? You seem to be supposing that those two are equivalent moral 'sets'.

Doesn't the story, however, which posits a prohibition on knowing about one system of prohibitions, point to something special about that system?

If the latter is true -- than it seems to me that the story is making a psychologically just point about guilt, which often results not from the act itself, but from reflection about the act.

As for the "original sin' part -- that is a theological point, not contained in the Bible itself. Even Paul, who comes closest to having the all have fallen doctrine, doesn't come close to it. And there's nothing in the gospels that even hints that Jesus would have recognized it. I believe you can attribute it, primarily, to St. Augustine.