The Basic Legend

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There are, of course many things about religion in general and Christianity in particular that fascinate because so many reasonably articulate and some what intelligent people invest so much of their interest and integrity in it without asking the basic questions that an inquisitive three year old of basic intellect would find curious. The original legend of Adam and Eve is rather important in that the initial difficulty with God appears for the first time and the whole purpose of the life of Christ and his sacrifice on the cross is crucial for rectifying this initial misstep in God's relationship to humanity.

It is important to start with God’s original creation of Adam and his playmate since this initial misstep in the relationship between man and God is crucial in the justification of the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross to mend the relationship.

Nowhere is there an indication of purpose for Adam and the Garden of Eden. The concept is perhaps similar to the attitude of a little girl furnishing her dollhouse and then putting in an inhabitant or two to sit in the cute little chairs and dine on the plastic food with the tiny forks, knives and spoons. The role of Adam was assumedly that of a gardener to care for the roses or whatever equivalents existed at that time. It apparently did not portend anything like the adventurous and capable future that mankind has experienced.

Since the garden was idyllic whatever lions and tigers were present dined, as did Adam, on vegetables whatever their dental equipment or digestive systems might have dictated. That they were so equipped raises the suspicion that God in his infinite wisdom made plans for a bloodier time to take fuller advantage of that equipment’s potentials.

The same holds for the reproductive equipment and auxiliary sexual attributes fixed into the oddly constructed physiology of Adam and Eve since, before the fruit tree encounter, they apparently occupied their free time with domestic chores and perhaps a bit of dominoes or poker or whatever came to mind. Since they were not officially married (or maybe I missed the ceremony), copulation was probably off limits. Perhaps they were permitted a hug or two or even an occasional nibble on the earlobe but not any groping as has now become stylish at US airports. Perhaps hormones had yet to be improvised by God, whatever crotch upholstery might have indicated.

The placement of the tree of knowledge in the garden is especially interesting. A tree with educational potentials would be particularly useful today considering how ineffectual standard methods seem to be becoming and it surely would solve a lot of current financial problems. But God, as with many fundamentalist Christians today, seemingly did not favor a knowing mind and, after all, what does a mere gardener have to know? Knowledge of good and evil seems especially elusive even today considering the way the world is administered even in the freest nations and perhaps God’s wisdom in preventing the spread of this basic information was well considered. After all, given this understanding, who could say humanity would choose the good? Experience seems to dictate otherwise. But again, given ignorance in the matter, how could anyone even make the choice? That remains a mystery. And if Adam had no way to know that gaining that understanding was evil and his wife offered him the fruit, whatever it might have been, Adam probably figured that God would surely understand for a man to accede to the wishes of a wife is the better path to domestic tranquility. A simpler solution would have been to make the fruit explosive so a bite would have blown Eve’s head off requiring a bit of emergency repair on God’s part but nothing outside his powers. That way, there would have been no expulsion from Eden, no progeny and resulting mankind to cause all sorts of hair-raising dilemmas, no death and necessary sacrifice of a rather decent rabbi on the cross whatever his origin, and Adam would still be raking leaves in the secure and safe Garden of Eden while Eve would be boiling turnips to feed to the lions and tigers.

Thus the history of a much-diminished mankind would have been simpler and pleasanter without all the hustle and bustle that is now doing terrible things to polar bears and penguins.

What to do with the snake is, something else again. Anytime God and the snake come around to ring my doorbell and have a cup of coffee and a slice of the chocolate cake that I make for congenial occasions, I’m sure we can work out something satisfactory. Whether God will listen to reason, of course, is in doubt. He seems something of an impetuous character and I have no experience with snakes at all. Basically it’s a matter of merely reversing entropy and rewinding history to start over.

Child’s play for God.

Beautiful story. I'd love to be the fly on the wall when that chocolate cake comes out.

Flies are always welcome. It's a simple recipe I invented and takes about 10 minutes to prepare and 50 minutes in the oven. God and the snake and at least a reasonable number of flies are always welcome.

The purpose of the Legend of the Fall is and was to answer the question: why is mankind perverse in its behavior at the same knowing the behavior is wrong and is also changeable and avoidable. Some people take the Christian answer as a sentence of damnation. I take it as a problem to be solved.

Are we genetically wired to be perverse? If so then we need to change our genome (and we are rapidly approaching the day that we can). If we are not genetically perverse then it is just a matter of breaking some bad habits. Hell! If I can kick a two pack a day smoking habit I can cure myself of any bad habit.

ruveyn

That's the crux of the story, really. Why Are We Like This? and Would We Be Better Off If Our Species Hadn't Changed? The wistful answer of the story of The Fall is yes, we were better off 200,000 years ago before that evolutionary change in brain structure catapulted us into Homo sapiens. The carnivores weren't vegetarian but life was simpler.

I happen to personally disagree that we would have been better off if that change hadn't happened. I think the positive accomplishments outweigh the negative destruction, on balance. But that's just my own value judgement. I think the story of The Fall is a stunningly insightful metaphor for our evolutionary history. When did we go from wandering around randomly in the Eden of an African veldt living an uneventful life to being a species driven with purpose and intense, conflicting feelings and worries? When our brains went through that spurt of evolutionary development. We ate fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and nothing was ever the same. We left the Garden of Eden both literally and figurateively as we walked all over the planet and also started worrying fearsomely about the future, impending death, and what happens after you die. Very worrying stuff. You can't frolic once you know that death exists.

Another consequernce of this intelligence fruit was that childbirth became very difficult for women (now that they were women, and not just females of the previous hominid species). When you combine a small pelvis for upright walking with a giant baby head to hold a giant baby brain...ouch.

How does the snake fit in? That's the ancient reptilian part of our brain; the part that governs aggression and impulsive violent acts. The snake (part of the brain) can get you to do stupid stuff that you later really regret. Ok, it wasn't our inner impulsive aggressor that pushed us to evolve our neocortex (unless it was, I wouldn't know). But still...it's a pretty elegant way to acknowledge that the reptilian part of us often causes us to do stupid stuff we later regret.

Brilliant, really. I stand in amazement of this metaphor every time I think about it. Even if they meant it literally, I think it still works as a metaphor. (It doesn't become metaphorical until the species learns a lot about evolution.) I think the ancient people who came up with this story spent a lot of time pondering the core difference between us and other species. They decided that the core difference is intelligence and that peripheral differences like difficult childbirth and worry are consequences of that core difference. They also took note of the differences between mammals and reptiles. Being surrounded by their recently domesticated goats and sheep it must have seemed like mellow amiability was purely mammalian (the warm fuzzy feelings that come with warm mammalian fuzz) but that there was a point of overlap with reptiles and that point of overlap was a remorseless aggression that we don't like to acknowledge, so it all got pushed onto a literal reptile, the snake. Why Eve talking Adam into something? Perhaps because women are now and presumably also were then more socially fluid and more used to using words to accomplish things. Assuming the story writers were men, they had no doubt had women talk them into things since talking men into things iis what women often have to do (and I am female and have talked my husband into things) so of course that went into the story. So they took all these very accurate observations and tied them all together into a neat story that only now can be seen as a fairly good guess at human evolution.

to paraphrase carl sagan, if you want to make a chocolate cake from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

how silly i would feel, as an atheist, when god and his pet snake came calling. especially when he explained that he really just wanted a nice piece of chocolate cake and was terribly sorry for the inconvenience it seems to have caused.

The story could be taken as being about mortality.

Or perhaps- not mortality- but about the awareness of mortality.
Humans supposidly are the only animals aware of our own mortality.
So it might be a tale of the loss of innocence when we crossed the threshold to being fully human.
Which would be ironic- that Genisis would imply evolution (that we transitioned to being human from something else not quite human).

Like Jannisey I cant help wondering if Genisis isnt actually about evolution- and perhaps like other ancient myths it might tap into some actual unconscious species-wide memories embedded into the wiring of our nervous systems of having evolved.

Other possibilities:

Many primitive peoples have the belief that snakes are immortal - because snakes are observed to shed their skins- so the belief evolved that they escape death and live forever.

That may have something to do with why a snake shows up in a tale about humans acquiring the knowledge of mortality.

Also- the story may really be about the transition from us living as hunter gathers to adopting agriculture. A transition that meant moving from living within nature (the garden of eden) to having to till the soil and subdue nature (being expelled from the garden of eden).

It really is an amazing story. There are so many different ways to approach it and each approach tells you something slightly different but important about the human condition

Yes it is.

Back in the early days of cable TV I saw a stand up comedian who doubled as a juggler "doing" the garden of eden story.

He juggled an apple and a single prop for each of the characters: God, adam, eve, and the serpent.

He would grab one of the props to do a character while keeping everything else in the air.

I forget how he conveyed adam and eve, but "god" was a mask of an orthodox jewish rabbi (beard, hat, and long locks)and would speak his lines with a new york jewish dialect.

The serpent,"the hippest creature in the garden", wore dark glasse and a wide brimmed superfly type hat and spoke in Black street jive.

It was all quite hilarious!

The climax came when he bits the apple. He'd grab the apple and take a single bit out of it with dramatic "crunch" once each rotation with other juggled objects- making a dramatic drum beat. He ended up with mashed up apple running down his chest.
Then the rabbi gets mad at them for "harkening unto the serpet".. it was brilliant.