Adam and Eve: a thought-exercise.

I noted that I wanted to blog on this awhile back.  As a pleasant break from absorbing the nuances of white collar crimes, I think I’ll check this one off my list.

I’m pretty divided on this one, and as irrelevant as it seems, I would say that it touches on how liable God is with regards to human failing.

POV #1: Generally, I’ve always considered it incredibly unfair, this whole Adam and Eve thing.  No, not just because it’s the woman who first went “chomp” on that fateful fruit (though it is pretty unfair, I bet Adam would have done the same if he’d been tempted first).  Let me first give the Scriptural passage from Genesis.

Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.  And the Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground- trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food.  In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil…The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.  And the Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.’

…Now the serpent was more crafty that any of the wild animals the Lord God had made.  He said to the woman, ‘Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?’  The woman said to the serpent, ‘We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.”

‘You will not surely die,’ the serpent said to the woman.  ‘For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’…

So gist of it is, God put the tree in the middle of the Garden (tempting), Eve is tempted by the snake (he doesn’t actually lie…she made the first mistake. “…you must not touch it” was not God’s word so when snake says ‘you will not surely die’, he’s kind of telling the truth), Eve chomps, gives to Adam, Adam chomps and it’s downhill, out the Garden to pain and labor.  They do get knowledge and break free of naïveté, however.

My complaint is that it’s entirely contrived, I mean, Man is simply fated to fall.  If it wasn’t Adam and Eve, it’d be Cain or Abel or Seth or Enoch or Methuselah or Enoch etc. etc. etc.  So better it be Adam and Eve than anyone else!  Elsewise, how utterly unfair would that be.  Adam and Eve’s descendants romp around in Garden of Eden and Cain’s kids get shunted to the desert simply because they are the children of Cain.  And maybe down the line, one of Isaac’s kids takes a bite out of the fruit and out he and all his offspring go as well.  And so on.  In this view, thank goodness Eve took that fruit.

POV #2: First of all, the tree had to be there because otherwise, there would be no free choice.  Without Tree, it’d be like tending sheep who just eat, drink, and make merry.  Wait, bad analogy seeing how God is often compared to a shepherd and believers his flock…huh.  Anyhow, I won’t go off on a tangent.  So Tree is there.  But God also creates animals and rivers and streams and other tasty fruit trees.  One might argue that he did all he could to divert their attentions away from the Tree of Knowledge and he clearly laid out the consequences, in fact he made the consequences sound quite dire.  You’ll die, he says.  Regardless though, tree planted, they eat and are kicked out.

I could digress and talk about whether they’re created good or evil or neutral.  I’d lean towards neutral.  And what the original problem is (curiosity?) but then white collar crime would never get done.  Back to the original question, how liable?  Set them up for failure or did what he could to forestall the failing?  Lol of course it’s rather silly and irrelevant, but a fun thought-exercise nonetheless, which I find religious discussions often are.  I must say though, for fairness sake, thank goodness Eve chomped.  With that, I conclude, as I feel like I’m bordering on blasphemy, heh.