God's Punishment Is Morally Unjustified

[Ray the atheist]

Preamble :
 
Like many people, when I first read the story of Adam and Eve, I focused on their lack of knowledge of good and evil. But the more I studied the passages, the more I noticed that the story portrays them as lacking an understanding of other important concepts, like death, shame, moral responsibility, lying, and whom they should trust.
As a father of two and grandfather of three, I interpret Eve’s apparent ignorance as resembling that of a child between three and five years old. A toddler or preschooler can follow instructions without fully understanding what those instructions mean or what might happen if they disobey.

In our society, we recognize that children of an extremely early developmental stage should not be held to the same moral standards as adults are.
I have seen progress in how children are treated, even within my own lifetime. My "Boomer" ways serve me as a warning about what can happen to kids when they are abused from an unrealistic moral code.

I didn't benefit much from how I was parented, sad to say. I look back and understand that I wasn't a bad boy at all.. I was a loving, kind boy who was treated very unfairly at times. I vowed that I would never do that to my kids.

Each and every day, I am honouring the pain that was made to suffer back then, the guilt, the shame and the physical punishments. It was the norm to inflict corporal punishment in my schools and I was not spared. This had a threatening, shaming effect on the whole class.. We even made fun of the kids being shamed.
The world has changed.

My religion never helped it change. In fact, my religion is still struggling to own up to it's systemic abuse of children as I write this.
Happily, I am in recovery now, and my PTSD is under control.. I feel lucky.. People who suffer from childhood trauma sometime never recover and ruin their own lives and sometimes, the lives of anyone who gets close.

As in children and lovers…. political constituents and people subjected to unjust laws and cruel enforcement.
A lack of empathy and understanding of modern psychology can cause a very vicious cycle. I want to stop those vicious cycles, I want a better world for my grandkids.
I tried my best to stop the abuse of children in my own family.  I am happy to say that my two daughters are spectacular parents and that my grandchildren are very happy kids. So, I somehow managed to start that necessary change.

Starting with a happy, nurturing childhood, a person can grow up to spread more empathy in our world. I see it happening in my own society… In my own neighbourhood.. Empathy is spreading.. It seems very slow… but we have to realize that we have been at this for thousands of years..

The Bible comes to us from a distant historical and cultural world, long before modern research into child development. When I read the story today, I cannot help comparing the treatment of Adam and Eve with what we now understand about children, their intellectual development, and their capacity for responsibility.
I have been studying the Adam and Eve story since July 2026, and I keep finding intellectual fruit in examining it, especially when it comes to morality, and child psychology.

I do not believe the story is a factual account. I read it as myth, a form of storytelling that can reveal the beliefs and assumptions of the culture that produced it.
In this part of my series on Adam and Eve, I want to examine what I see as God's extremely abusive parenting style.

If Eve is portrayed as having the understanding of a very young child, then I have to ask whether God's punishment of her was morally justified or helpful to the children. The punishment described in Genesis goes far beyond Eve herself to suffering and hardship in all human life, which makes the punishment even worse.
God punishes everyone on the planet who is innocent of Eve's sin until … he decides to stop the torture. This to me, speaks more about insanity than any morality.

Mental illness is real.
Sometimes, mental illness can have horrific consequences.

There were no known treatment for PTSD back then, but that doesn't mean that nobody suffered from trauma ... Scientists have been learning about PTSD since the first world war.. So all of this science is extremely new.. Back then, it was "spare the rod, spoil the child" ... If a parent today treated a young child with comparable severity for an action the child could not fully understand, we would question that parent's judgment and I would want to involve child-protection services. Let the experts decide if the children are being abused or not. I see a profound difference between the way children were understood in the ancient world and the growing recognition of their needs and rights today.
That progress gives me great hope for humanity's future.

I want to make it clear that I am not claiming that the bible explicitly states what Adam and Eve were ignorant about, and we can discuss my interpretations.

I made two arguments.
The first hopes to establish that Eve had the understanding of a 3-5 year old.
The second argument tries to show that God's punishment wasn't morally justified

The Arguments:

Argument 1: Eve’s Intellectual Age

P1: The Bible stories depict Eve as being ignorant of morality, death, shame, consequences, and deception.
P2: This ignorance resembles the intellectual development of a 3–5-year-old child.
C: Therefore, Eve is depicted as having the intellectual understanding of a 3–5-year-old child.

Argument 2: The Morality of God’s Punishment

P1: Punishing someone for an action they cannot fully understand is morally unjustified.
P2: In the previous argument, I showed that Eve is depicted as having the intellectual understanding of a 3–5-year-old child.
C: Therefore, God’s grossly disproportionate punishment of Eve was morally unjustified.

[bluegreenearth]

[Replying to Ray the atheist in post #1]

I suspect that one of the first questions you will receive from a theist about your argument is "What is the objective grounding of the morality you are using to judge God's behavior?" Of course, this will only function as a distraction because your argument can serve as an internal critique. Therefore, if we presume that morality is objectively grounded in the god described in the story for the sake of the argument, people can still consider how they subjectively feel about the consequences of those characters' behaviors and what objective morality means when anything the god does or commands is objectively moral by definition.

[Ray the atheist]

[Replying to bluegreenearth in post #2]

I suspect that one of the first questions you will receive from a theist about your argument is "What is the objective grounding of the morality you are using to judge God's behavior?" Of course, this will only function as a distraction because your argument can serve as an internal critique. Therefore, if we presume that morality is objectively grounded in the god described in the story for the sake of the argument, people can still consider how they subjectively feel about the consequences of those characters' behaviors and what objective morality means when anything the god does or commands is objectively moral by definition.

______________________________

I don't expect Christians to all say the same things about my arguments, but I agree that many might say that if God grounds morality, then anything the god does, by definition is morally perfect.

I usually reply that they are saying his might makes the moral righteousness.
Im also pretty sure that most normal Christians would never consider committing or commanding genocides.

These people seem to have no trouble worshipping and glorifying a documented mass child murderer. We also know by history that some Christians can also glorify human mass murderers