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Author Topic: Conscience and the Garden of Eden  (Read 2281 times)

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Offline RavynousHunter

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Conscience and the Garden of Eden
« on: November 19, 2012, 04:47:47 pm »
I've been thinking a lot about something recently, the Christian explanation for the evil that exists in man: him eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  Well, Yahweh punished man by making him mortal, experience pain, and all that jazz, but...why?

I think most of us here agree that Good and Evil can be roughly equated to Right and Wrong, and that gaining knowledge of a given subject implies a lack of knowledge beforehand.  Ergo, Adam and Eve couldn't tell right from wrong, they didn't understand what the two concepts were, and without them, lacked the basis upon which conscience is formed.

Yes, Yahweh said that they shouldn't eat from the Tree, that basically being the only rule around there, but...how would they know that breaking the rule was a bad thing?  If they didn't know what evil was, they couldn't have possibly known.  Its one of the few instances where ignorance of the law is truly an excuse because they didn't even have the basic framework around which they could understand the concept of wrong.  Which, in my mind, leads to the conclusion that Yahweh punished man because he acted within the parameters Yahweh himself had programmed into them.  Kinda throws a wrench into the whole "God is just" thing, don't it?

Thoughts?  Questions...comments?  Retorts?
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Offline Old Viking

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Re: Conscience and the Garden of Eden
« Reply #1 on: November 19, 2012, 04:50:27 pm »
You nailed it.
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Offline Material Defender

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Re: Conscience and the Garden of Eden
« Reply #2 on: November 19, 2012, 05:33:18 pm »
To some Biblical scholars (IE, the Non-literalists who try to see that it's metaphors for real world events), the knowledge isn't really good and evil, but of agriculture. The story of the Garden of Eden is basically longing for a simpler, hunter-gatherer path which they could never reclaim now that they have the knowledge of agriculture. Why the story is man centric as opposed to the previous creation story which is God-centric.

Some people infer it ties to the Flood stories of the region because there was an area between Iran and Arabia that used to not be water, but quite land based. This might have been more fertile and where most people hunted and gathered in that region before being pushed out by the rising water and the rise of agriculture forcing them to focus around rivers.
« Last Edit: November 19, 2012, 05:35:52 pm by Material Defender »
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Offline R. U. Sirius

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Re: Conscience and the Garden of Eden
« Reply #3 on: November 19, 2012, 08:03:35 pm »
When I read the Garden of Eden story, to me it reads more like a metaphor for growing up.

When Adam and Eve started out, they were naked. They had no moral sense, hence no nudity taboo, and probably no other taboos either. Everything they needed was taken care of by an all-powerful authority figure who loved them unconditionally. Their entire moral thought revolved around what this authority figure said.

Eventually, an event triggered something in their thought processes that made them start differentiating "right" and "wrong", as opposed to simpler judgments like "pleasant" and "unpleasant". At that point, they began making more complex moral judgments.

At a slightly later point, the all-powerful authority figure said he wasn't going to take care of them anymore; they were going to have to make their own way in the world. No matter how much they might want to return to the earlier time of innocence and simplicity, it would never happen.

Considering that back when Genesis was first written, you were expected to start making your own living in your early teens, not too long after beginning to form a real, independent moral sense.

Thoughts? Or am I just rambling out my ass?
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Re: Conscience and the Garden of Eden
« Reply #4 on: November 19, 2012, 09:32:13 pm »
Quote from: RavynousHunter on November 19, 2012, 04:47:47 pm
Thoughts?  Questions...comments?  Retorts?
It gets even more fun when you think about why God put the tree of knowledge in the garden in the first place. The thing served absolutely no purpose whatsoever other than as a means for Adam and Eve to fuck everything up.
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Offline Mechtaur

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Re: Conscience and the Garden of Eden
« Reply #5 on: November 19, 2012, 09:55:25 pm »
Whole idea of that being the source of evil in the universe flops when you do something as simple as A) look at the name of the tree and then B) read further when Yahweh himself states that he made evil himself.
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