Thread: A Paradox.. Tree of knowledge.. What are your thoughts?

Indeed. Ignorance is not always an excuse.

It doesn't matter if its a parable or intended to be a real depiction.

I see it as a parent putting a kid at a table with an unwrapped candy bar in front of him and saying: "I'm going to go outside and mow the lawn, but DON'T TOUCH THAT CANDY BAR!"

Any parent that doesn't know with 100% certainty that their kid is going to eat the candy bar is stupid. So either a) God is stupid or b) He intended for us to eat the apple knowing what the consequences would be. Not just that he KNEW we'd eat the apple, that he created a situation in which nothing else could ever happen, he effectively arranged an entrapment scenario.

In either case, it doesn't paint a very good picture of God. Force us to eat the apple, and then hold us responsible for doing it later by forcing us to burn in hell forever if we don't do just what he wants. But he tries to frame it as a matter of 'free choice' and 'free will' which is BS if you buy into the garden of eden story framework.

Originally Posted by Disillusioned_1

It doesn't matter if its a parable or intended to be a real depiction.

I see it as a parent putting a kid at a table with an unwrapped candy bar in front of him and saying: "I'm going to go outside and mow the lawn, but DON'T TOUCH THAT CANDY BAR!"

Any parent that doesn't know with 100% certainty that their kid is going to eat the candy bar is stupid. So either a) God is stupid or b) He intended for us to eat the apple knowing what the consequences would be. Not just that he KNEW we'd eat the apple, that he created a situation in which nothing else could ever happen, he effectively arranged an entrapment scenario.

In either case, it doesn't paint a very good picture of God. Force us to eat the apple, and then hold us responsible for doing it later by forcing us to burn in hell forever if we don't do just what he wants.

That analogy doesn't work though. I mean, the kid might not eat the candy bar. In the story of Adam and Eve no one forced them to eat the apple. They each made a choice.

Originally Posted by Sunshine

According to the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve were put in the Garden of Eden to live and they were admonished not to eat from the 'tree of knowledge of good an evil.' They had no knowledge of good an evil until they ate from the tree. Therefore they couldn't have knowingly committed a wrong in disobeying God and eating from the Tree.

But they were still punished and expelled from the Garden for eating from the Tree at a time when they had no knowledge of good and evil. Original sin was incurred upon mankind for Adam and Eve doing something which they could not have known was wrong as they did not know right from wrong until they partook of the tree. So why were they/we punished?

This is kind of a paradox, IMO, and somewhat confounding as to the actions of God.

I've used this same line of reasoning in conversations with Christians. I never got a satisfactory answer as the illogic was obedience was being tested before the knowledge gained of why to obey.

I hope a practicing Christian makes a post here to shed light on your question.

I've always thought that the parable of the Garden of Eden and the Fall is about the transition from pre-civilized to civilized life. The Hebrews, being in a proto-civilized state when their oral traditions were put together (as nomadic herdsmen) and in very early civilization when they were written down, were close to that and conscious of it. Pre-civilized peoples have a "knowledge of good and evil" in a sense, but it's not as jarring as it is for more advanced peoples.

Humans lived in a pre-civilized pattern -- forager/hunter economy, small bands, no formal government, no organized religion -- for somewhere between a hundred thousand and two hundred thousand years. This social pattern came to us unchanged from our predecessors on the hominid line, the species H. erectus, along with fire and stone tools, so the pattern is actually millions of years old. It's in our genes. It's what we were made for by nature. Departure from that pattern feels wrong to us, hence the appeal of anarchism and primitivism.

Look at the penalties imposed by God for the Fall:

16 To the woman he said,

“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”

17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”

(Genesis 3.) Note that the chief changes here were 1) the woman would be subordinate to the man, and 2) the man would grow food "by the sweat of your brow," working hard as a farmer, rather than partaking of the bounty freely given by nature, as he did while in the Garden.

As I said, the Hebrews were no longer pre-civilized when this oral tradition was first composed, but they were not civilized, either. They lived as nomadic herdsmen, although obviously they had some familiarity with farming, too. They would have adopted the new ways, living by growing crops and domesticating animals rather than by hunting and foraging, not all that many generations past. The transition from the natural ways that are in our genes, to the new ways in which women are subjugated by men and it takes beaucoup hard work to feed yourself, was recent enough to be jarring, or to have this oral tradition of its being jarring at least.

Originally Posted by ThorHammer

That analogy doesn't work though. I mean, the kid might not eat the candy bar. In the story of Adam and Eve no one forced them to eat the apple. They each made a choice.

No they didn't. They responded as people respond.

A choice is: "Do you want to work in the yard or clean your room?" or "Do you want meatballs or macaroni and cheese"?

A choice isn't: "Do you want to clean the house and wash the dishes or watch tv and eat candy?"

There's no real choice with that last one. It sounds like a choice but it really isn't. Remember, Adam and Eve weren't modern human adults, they were in a figurative sense children --- innocents. They had no understanding or comprehension of the consequences of their actions.

Originally Posted by John Drake

Actually, illiterate nomads tend to be keen observers and recorders of their environment and rather hardheaded about who should get what. This sounds like a tale spun by priests trying to make everyone feel guilty for being human, thus justifying their getting the best food, women and lodging for doing nothing

I agree with that except for the getting women part.

Originally Posted by Disillusioned_1

No they didn't. They responded as people respond.

A choice is: "Do you want to work in the yard or clean your room?" or "Do you want meatballs or macaroni and cheese"?

A choice isn't: "Do you want to clean the house and wash the dishes or watch tv and eat candy?"

There's no real choice with that last one. It sounds like a choice but it really isn't. Remember, Adam and Eve weren't modern human adults, they were in a figurative sense children --- innocents. They had no understanding or comprehension of the consequences of their actions.

And yet even children are capable of following simple instructions. Still the choice was there and, in the story of Adam and Eve, they chose wrong. Ignorance is no excuse.

Originally Posted by ThorHammer

they chose wrong. Ignorance is no excuse.

I do not think they chose wrong. God created human nature. They acted according to their God given nature - and then the were inexplicably punished for it. Consider this, all knowledge man has acquired is due to the fateful choice of the first. What was that choice? The Christians answer is defied God. That was incidental. The choice Adam and Eve made was to improve themselves.

Had God created a Tree of Death and Unending Pain and told them not to eat of the tree, well, I can see punishing them. Indeed, humans would be punished not for their sins but by their sins. The idea that God would tempt humans with creating a Tree of Knowledge, not merely of say math and science but a Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and then say there is only one rule, don't learn what is good and evil an abomination. They say the Christian God is all knowing. This means it is all his fault and like a bad boss, blaming others for his mistake. Here is a classic from Ayn Rand:

Original Sin: Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.
It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his (man’s) renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic god with some incomprehensible design or any passerby whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him – it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man.
The name of this monstrosity is Original Sin.
A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil: a robot is amoral. To hold, as man’s sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man’s nature as a sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet, that is your code.

Originally Posted by rytis2001

Just watch Fox News Oreilly and "shut up"...

Well I don't watch either of those, and you should be real clear on the fact that I'm not very good at shutting up!

Originally Posted by Andrewl

There is no paradox here. I can tell my kid not to touch the burner on the stove even though he has no knowledge of the excruciating pain that will result. If he goes ahead and disobeys my order and touches the stove i can certainly punish him for disobeying me.

Andrew

It would seem to me that getting burned would be enough punishment. Why would you punish him after he was burned?

Originally Posted by Disillusioned_1

It doesn't matter if its a parable or intended to be a real depiction.

I see it as a parent putting a kid at a table with an unwrapped candy bar in front of him and saying: "I'm going to go outside and mow the lawn, but DON'T TOUCH THAT CANDY BAR!"

Any parent that doesn't know with 100% certainty that their kid is going to eat the candy bar is stupid. So either a) God is stupid or b) He intended for us to eat the apple knowing what the consequences would be. Not just that he KNEW we'd eat the apple, that he created a situation in which nothing else could ever happen, he effectively arranged an entrapment scenario.

In either case, it doesn't paint a very good picture of God. Force us to eat the apple, and then hold us responsible for doing it later by forcing us to burn in hell forever if we don't do just what he wants. But he tries to frame it as a matter of 'free choice' and 'free will' which is BS if you buy into the garden of eden story framework.

Originally Posted by ThorHammer

That analogy doesn't work though. I mean, the kid might not eat the candy bar. In the story of Adam and Eve no one forced them to eat the apple. They each made a choice.

Yes, I agree. Disobedience cannot be assumed in every case. I have a son who would tell the truth regardless the known consequences to him.

Originally Posted by Sadanie

I agree. the Bible is just a "guideline" made by men (not women, mind you!) in their desperate attempts to make sense of life, death, love, hatred. . .in their search for understanding of a higher power.

Because it is a collection of "word of mouth" stories gathered by extremely simple people at a time of very minimal scientific knowledge, it is written in symbols, in images that people could relate to at that time.

Looking at the Bible as a general blue print is probably useful for many, but looking at the Bible as the LITERAL word of God defies any logic!

That isn't correct. There are numerous ancient manuscripts housed in the Vatican and other places. Some of them are probably what some people thought to have been destroyed when the library at Alexandria was destroyed. And there are groups who have passed the meaning of those symbols down so that they mean exactly the same to those who have the knowledge of them in this day and time as they did thousands of years ago. Your not being a member of any of those groups does not mean that do not exist.

Moreover, the Bible was not handed down as 'word of mouth.' The Bible is a transcription of ancient documents. And there have been several of those.
We have the Rosetta Stone, which enabled us to be able to translate hieroglyphics and was, at least according to our Egyptian guides, an invitation to a wedding or party of some sort - not part of the Bible, though. (They could have been pulling our legs, though. I haven't looked it up.) And we have the Dead Sea Scrolls as well, ancient documents found and recovered in the 20th Century.

Women actually did figure quite strongly in the Bible. There's Mary Magdalene who was actually one of Christ's disciples. She and Florence Nightingale of moder times were both screwed over by the male powers that be. There is nothing in the Bible about Mary Magdaline being a prostitute. And Florence Nightingale didn't die of syphilis as the GOBs have declared. Both of those things were intended to keep women from having power.