Back to the Garden

[Tcg]

We are often admonished by some to not take literally the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden. It is to be understood as a story that represents a deeper truth we are told.

What would it mean if we could go back to the Garden?

What would we gain back that we have somehow lost?


Tcg

[JehovahsWitness]

I would have been far more impressed with a theology that had Adam and Eve plotting to reject and disobey God on their own. That would have placed the guilt squarely on them.

DOES GIVING IN TO TEMPTATION EXCUSE WRONG DOING?

Some have argued that disobedience following temptation excuses wrong, as if a theology that has Adam and Eve* sin following being tempted by the serpant* should excuses them of responsibility for their acts. But is this reasonable?



Can a husband guilty of adultery justify his actions because a beautiful woman offered him sex? Can a bank robber tell the judges that he only joined the robbers because he was invited by his brother-in-law and he should therefore not be held accountable? Can a woman blame her weight gain on the bakery for putting delicious cakes in its window. None of the above situations may have come about without the initiative of others but while the initiator* may bear a heavier burden of guilt for tricking or tempting others, every adult of sound mind is considered responsible for how he or she reacts to temptation.

CONCLUSION Adam and Eve* were given clear instruction, they cannot nor should not be excused because they were tempted to violate the law* by a third party.

*or whoever or whatever they/it represent(s)

Go to other posts related to...

FREE WILL, ORIGINAL SIN and ...THE PURPOSE OF LIFE

NOTE The above is written from the point of view if Adam and Eve being figurative representatives of all intelligent creatures.

[brunumb]

[Replying to post 19 by JehovahsWitness]

This explains why even quiet young children, with their limited life experience, know instinctively when they are being lied to.

People of all ages are lied to and taken in by lies all the time. This argument carries no weight at all.

Adam and Eve were not children and were not imperfect, they had a perfect *inner voice*, intuition, spirituality... which would warn them of danger and promt ghem help them to properly examine a situation.

This is nothing more than pure speculation chosen in an attempt to prop up your case. It too has no merit.[/quote]

[benchwarmer]

[Replying to post 19 by JehovahsWitness]

This explains why even quiet young children, with their limited life experience, know instinctively when they are being lied to.

People of all ages are lied to and taken in by lies all the time. This argument carries no weight at all.

Adam and Eve were not children and were not imperfect, they had a perfect *inner voice*, intuition, spirituality... which would warn them of danger and promt ghem help them to properly examine a situation.

This is nothing more than pure speculation chosen in an attempt to prop up your case. It too has no merit.

Agreed. How many young children believe in Santa Claus? The Easter Bunny? The tooth fairy? In fact, it seems that young children are the most susceptible to being lied to and subsequently believing it. They implicitly believe those they are close to and only later on learn that even those who love them are capable of lying to them.

The speculation about what was going on inside the minds of Adam and Eve, two fictional characters, is interesting. How exactly was this knowledge determined? Scientific evidence points to there being no "Adam and Eve". Thus speculating what characters in an ancient story had in their minds seems a bit of a stretch.

[Difflugia]

Could Adam and Eve be expected NOT to believe a lie, since they had never heard one before?

Even your premise doesn't hold up. Not only had they been told a lie before, but it was told by God, in whom they otherwise had complete trust:

And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, “Of every tree of the garden you are free to eat; but as for the tree of knowledge of good and bad, you must not eat of it; for as soon as you eat of it, you shall die.�

Why didn't anyone's spidey sense tingle at that one? Or is that why they ignored it and thus God was perhaps the one that corrupted their innate ability to discern lies, setting them up for failure?

[Avoice]

You must mean undo the original sin that Christians say they are infected with. Nonesense. It's an excuse. Blaming Adam and Eve for their sins. There is no such thing as original sin that man has inherited.
If I were in Eden i wouldn't have eaten from the tree. God said not to.

[wiploc]

What would it mean if we could go back to the Garden?

Asimov thought the garden story was a plaint about overpopulation. Used to be, you could walk around picking fruit off the trees, and there was plenty of game. But now that there are so many people, game is scarce, and we have to plow and plant and sow, earning our bread by the sweat of our brows.

To go back to the garden, then, would be to reduce the human population to, say, eight million or fewer, after which we could all become hunter gatherers again.

[JehovahsWitness]

You must mean undo the original sin that Christians say they are infected with. Nonesense. It's an excuse. Blaming Adam and Eve for their sins. There is no such thing as original sin that man has inherited.
If I were in Eden i wouldn't have eaten from the tree. God said not to.

If there was no "original siin" why did the Israelites have to offer animal sacrifices?

[Tcg]

What would it mean if we could go back to the Garden?

Asimov thought the garden story was a plaint about overpopulation. Used to be, you could walk around picking fruit off the trees, and there was plenty of game. But now that there are so many people, game is scarce, and we have to plow and plant and sow, earning our bread by the sweat of our brows.

To go back to the garden, then, would be to reduce the human population to, say, eight million or fewer, after which we could all become hunter gatherers again.

That's an interesting approach. Some recent studies suggest that hunter gatherers had more leisure time than farmers. Our "success" has become our curse.


Tcg

[Difflugia]

If there was no "original siin" why did the Israelites have to offer animal sacrifices?

Because “sacrifice� originally was occasioned merely by slaughtering an animal for meat. As the cultus became more ritualized and there grew a need to support priests and whatnot, sacrifice became much more legalistic in both form and theology. Originally, though, it was just a ritual that shared one’s bounty with one’s god.

[Mithrae]

That's an interesting approach. Some recent studies suggest that hunter gatherers had more leisure time than farmers. Our "success" has become our curse.

Better health and longer loves too, at least compared to many earlier civilizations, due to more varied diets. Agriculture and increasing social sophistication brought not only a greater awareness and dread of mortality (perhaps), but hastened its immanence too.

Asimov thought the garden story was a plaint about overpopulation. Used to be, you could walk around picking fruit off the trees, and there was plenty of game. But now that there are so many people, game is scarce, and we have to plow and plant and sow, earning our bread by the sweat of our brows.

That's how I read it also (loosely based on reading the views of Erich Fromm on Wikipedia). Notably, the theme of sedentary agriculture vs nomadic pastoralism (not quite hunter-gatherer, but a step closer to it) is found in several other Genesis stories, particularly that of Cain and Abel. Also, odds are that the transition towards agriculture would have been catalysed by the gatherers of a society rather than the hunters - they would have been the ones to notice that more and better fruits could be found concentrated where the group had left waste in previous seasons - and quite possibly those gatherers were mostly women. The curse on Adam of working the ground is obvious reference to agriculture. Perhaps even the curse on Eve of greatly increased pain in childbirth reflected an acknowledgement that physiologically, one of our distinctive features compared to other animals is an unusually large head, and its association with the thought and intelligence which made civilization possible.

To go back to the garden, then, would be to reduce the human population to, say, eight million or fewer, after which we could all become hunter gatherers again.

We can't really go back of course. But it may well be that this idea was part of the reason Jesus taught his disciples to give up their possessions and trust in God's daily provision like the birds of the field (Matt. 6:25ff).