Abortion and Original Sin

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I am just pointing out the fault in the religious rhetoric not in the pro-life view.
argument about personhood are more compelling and consensus can be reached.
americans are approaching this I think ultimately we will agree on a fixed time I predict 5th month
were a majority agree abortion is ok.
the religious/emotional argument only works if we all joined the same sect.

I am very serious. I have never yet been shownn a good reason to deny personhood to a living human being. That includes the person in the womb, the person just out of the womb, the person with the wrong gender, the person with the wrong ancestors, the person with Alzheimer's, and the person on life support. Among others.

I am not one of those for whom it is convenient to ensure that person is not a short way of saying human being. In many languages, that is all a person is. I do not see that Western Civilization is improved by declaring that corporations are persons and a lot of people are not.

When I am asleep I cannot form judgements and purposes. However, I do not cease to be a person.

I don't look at this so much as a test. But then again, I am not Christian, just as a theist who prescribes to Judaism - so if you are Christian, it might be different for you. There are two schools of thought and both are logically consistent with the text.

1.) God is omniscient and all knowing, including the human future.

2.) God is not Omniscient with everything... God knows the universe because this law giver imposed the laws by which the natural world follows, from the ability of cells to metastasize into cancer to the birth of a child to gravity, etc but he does not know the human future. If God did know about how things would fall out, then I don't know what to make of that because I've never understood it in that way(I was - as are all christians - introduced to the Adam & Eve story throughout my youth but never cared to understand it till I became an adult). But I prescribe to the outlook that God does not know the human future, the only creature on this earth who has awareness, a conscience, a mind, the ability to construct, destruct, and morph its world, and in a sense... Godly amongst all creatures.

We don't know if Adam & Eve actually existed but we do know that they were constructed to showcase original intent and idyllic arrangement. Like I said above, the text supports that God wasn't fully aware of his human creation as we trump every thing else on earth in sophistication. The torah shifts back and forth between speaking prescriptively and descriptively - or in other words: What is human behavior vs. What should be human behavior - so always knowing where the torah stands requires one to know most of it because patterns of what it looks highly or frowns upon help us understand the nature of God and the position of the texts. It was also probably written long after the creation of the first man and woman so given that man were stronger and women were weaker, it was acknowledging that while in real life, women are weaker then men, they are equal to us in every sense of the word and in many ways, like the creation-account, more advanced then us. After all... look at it this way:

1.) Man is created in just one verse, women is created in six.
2.) Adam is just made. God took dust and made man. But for women, It is as if God took more time and effort... and we see this in the poetic way that she is made
3.) Creation works progressively - in that what gets created later is a greater creation then was created before it(Man is a greater creation then Animal, Animal a greater creation then Vegetable, etc). So Woman is Gods greatest creation.
4.) Woman is the final creation of God, the final act before he looked upon his creation, saw that it was good, and rests.
5.) There is no reason for Adam's creation, other then to be the ruling and most intelligent of all animals. There is inherent worth in the creation of Woman - she makes life worth living.
6.) We have no other example in the ancient near-east of a creation-story of a women should be testament to what I'm saying - the importance of the worth of a women compared to parallel civilzations.

Eve was created from a superior source, not dust, but from a living being(made from life and giver of Life), and created with inherent meaning and worth in that she makes life possible for the human species not even including procreation, but that she makes life worth living - as noted in "It is not good for Man to be alone." After all... God could have created adam a community, but in life, the greatest partner and helper for a man is a women. An honest reading of the text notes the sanctity of the female.

She is a more advanced creature and just because she doesn't have Adam's brawn doesn't belittle her advantages one iota.

there you go you are a reform rabbi already.

No the more I look into it, the more I am realizing that both of us could be correct. I am arguing the judaism's position, I looked up Original Sin, and Judaism doesn't subscribe to it because The New Testament in Christianity is what gives Original Sin context. As I said, there are words for punishment in Judaism, but the text is specific in that God curses the earth on behalf of Adam and does not curse Eve. So the point is: The torah does acknowledge the fallen nature of man outright, but Original Sin is largely a Christian concept that requires the new testament. Judaism doesn't have the new testament which is why its understanding of the Adam & Eve narrative is the way it is.

Am I theologically correct? Or are there jews on here or Jewish movements who prescribe to Original sin as well?



tov V'ra - or good and evil, when used together in the torah tend to mean everything, or knowing everything. So it is, when taken together, The tree of knowledge of Everything.

The point in what you have emboldened is: We can know a lot. The problem is when we think we can know everything. The greeks call it hubris, it is a tremendous arrogance that the human can have... that we can play God. Adam has already eaten from the proverbial tree of knowledge on everything. The problem would be with be subsequent eatings his attempt to know everything and be fully God.

Only God is Immortal, Only God can know everything.

The other point of driving them out of the Garden of Eden and placing angel-like guardians in front of it is: The proverbial tree of immortality still exists but is guarded from us in the state that we are in. It wasn't destroyed, it is just guarded from our reach.

I don't know enough Jewish theology to comment, but I would still have to say that I don't see a reading of Genesis that backs up your interpretation. It is very clear that the tree of knowledge of good and evil was placed off limits to Adam and Eve. That was the only commandment God gave them; they disobeyed, and they suffered consequences for their disobedience. Now, the doctrine of Original Sin in Christianity does require the New Testament, but it goes somewhat farther than I need to go to disagree with your interpretation.



tov V'ra - or good and evil, when used together in the torah tend to mean everything, or knowing everything. So it is, when taken together, The tree of knowledge of Everything.


Right. This is exactly what I said previously when I claimed God kicked them out of the garden of Eden so that they would not attain immortality in addition to knowledge.

Original sin is a Christian Idea (one of their worst ones)
Jewish babies are sin free on their first breath at
which point the soul enters the body.

Right... and yet still the unborn would not be guilty of a capital crime. They would be innocent of a crime deserving execution.

Yet chickens and cows are innocent of a crime deserving execution.

but the same could be said of a percentage of people on death row.
for me abortion is an economic justice / education issue.
denmark for has a abortion rate of about half the u.s.a.

Well then perhaps I misread or read-into what you wrote incorrectly: I felt you were talking about two actual people named adam and eve who were our first parents wherein actually eating from a tree of knowledge could give them power to be gods, and so God didn't want them to be equal to them and cast them out of the garden. Correct that if I am misstating your position or understanding of it. I don't think these two people existed, I think they exist soley to tell the story of humanity, that we are imperfect beings and to attempt to be God is a foolish one.

Maybe they suffered... but the text doesn't say so. Immediately following their leaving Eden, Adam doesn't get mad at his wife, they don't break up, they don't fight, they don't have sex(I mean eventually, but not immediately), they don't go hunting snakes... it could have gone a lot of ways. Perhaps this reaction was because they didn't die... and they were just happy to be alive, or perhaps they were happy to live life on their own terms, who knows.

The first thing he does is name her Eve, the mother of all life. There is no protest from either of the two after leaving Eden and it doesn't say that they suffered from their decision - again, perhaps this is the Christian reading of this story.

It doesn't say they suffered. It doesn't say they were punished. The choice of a living as a highly-intelligent animal in a Utopia where you felt no pain, sex-less procreation, and lived forever was a meaningless existence and the story is constructed to show that given the option between the two types of life, mankind would have ultimately opted for the latter. It was a choice and it had consequences. There are times when the word suffer, or punished is applied in hebrew, and it is not done so in this case - only against the serpent to piss pagans off.

I do not believe that Adam and Eve were literal individuals, no. For sake of simplicity in discussing the story, I spoke of them as though they were. This part of your interpretation I agree with; that the point is largely the imperfection of humanity.


Really? Pain, toil, thorns and thistles, enmity, curses, and death don't sound like suffering to you?


"Who knows" indeed. You are speculating, projecting ideas into the text that simply are not there.


That God had to "drive them out" and post a guard with a flaming sword blocking the path back makes it rather clear that they did not leave voluntarily, and that they would have preferred to remain there.


Look, I just don't see where you're getting this interpretation at all. Could you post up what your text says and how you are getting this from it? I can't see this being anything other than an eisegesis.

It is indeed a strange and to me new interpretation. It is not at all clear to me where "sexless procreation" comes from - even buying the account literally, the rib > Eve process is clearly a one-off, and if "sexless procreation" was intended you could at least as easily have gone with the anti=homosexuals' "Adam and Steve".

Yes, choicers have consequences - And one consequence of a rule breaking is usually what is conventionally termed punishment.

As for meaningless existence - I am having to hold back, here, there is so much to say - but the fate of a reasonably intelligent being in this dystopia, entangled in time, distracted by the chase after the necessities of life that ends just as you are about ready to do something real - I would not be so sure that I for one would not opt for the painless deathless existence.

Maybe you do not suffer in this universe - maybe for all I KNOW Adam and Eve would not have - but right now my feet hurt and the pump needs replacing which will blow the little margin the Obama version of Paradise has left us, and I think I have done and seen enough suffering to suggest the Primal Pair MIGHT have suffered. Or maybe the bit about now childbearing will be a pain is not suffering by your standard?

The people who are on death row may or may not be innocent of a capital crime. Such is a failure of the legal system when an innocent person is sentenced to death. However, they, at least, have the chance to defend themselves. Only those who are born and learn a language around them are able to speak up for themselves. It is certainly horrible when the innocent are treated as though they are guilty, but I consider it worse when those who are innocent and unable to defend themselves are sentenced to death.

I don't know how you see it as an economic justice/education issue. How is that?

Denmark has half the abortion rate of the USA in real numbers or in percentages?

I looked it up apparently I was wrong denmark has 16.1 U.S has 22.9 finland on the other hand finland has 10 I would like to change the word denmark to finland. the dutch have 6.5.