God created Adam and Eve. They were placed in the Garden of Eden, allowed to live in luxury, as long as they obeyed God. And God was pretty easy going, all he expected of them was to tend the Garden, oh, and to remain ignorant. He placed among them a path to enlightenment and told them they must not partake in it or they will certainly die, which was, of course, a lie.
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And then, along came a serpent. The serpent, cast as role of bad guy, told Eve, “Hey look, that stuff that God told you, it’s lie. Number one, you won’t die, God loves to use fear to command submission. Number two, if you eat from that tree, you will acquire knowledge. God doesn’t want this, he wants ignorant, submissive fools as his subjects, people such as these are much easier to control. So go ahead, eat it if you want it.” So Eve ate it, and she brought it to Adam, and he ate it.
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Suddenly, Adam and Eve saw that they were like animals, naked and ignorant. With their newly acquired knowledge of good and evil, they saw that God was evil, for would a good God forbid his subjects to acquire knowledge? So they hid from Him when He called for them, because they were afraid of Him. And Adam, like a coward, snitched on Eve, “Sh…sh…she made me do it.”
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God, sadistic as he is, as a punishment, for Eve only for some reason, condemned all women, from then forward, to severe pain in childbirth, the one thing only women can do.
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And the God said, presumably to the other Gods of this supposedly monotheistic religion (see Genesis 1:26), “Well, they’ve gone and done it. I tried to scare them into not doing it, but they did it anyway. Since they have knowledge, we absolutely cannot allow them to eat of the Tree of Life and acquire immortality, for then what advantage would we have over them?” And so he banished them from the Garden of Eden.
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And so it goes with the evil, deceitful God of the Bible.
When people wrote the bible I believe that they projected things they expected to exist in God, such as king-like and even dictator-like qualities. These are only projections, though.
Dan: That’s probably true.
Statiktech: Thank you, and yes, correct. Popular Christianity claims that God is an all loving, merciful, beneficent father figure. Yet, the reality is that in the Bible, Old Testament anyway, God is portrayed as an extreme asshole.
Extreme asshole is actually a pretty nice way of putting it. I even find much of the preaching about hellfire and damnation in the New Testament pretty disgusting as well.
True, the New Testament has it’s fair share of sociopathic behavior, but still, nothing like the hardcore murder of the Old. I’m working on a series of these things, going through the Bible from the beginning. Maybe I’ll make a book out of it.
All my life I’ve been told that God is all powerful (omnipotent) all knowing (omniscient) and all loving (Omnibenevolent). Then I found, in God’s word, that God has a limitation :
Jdg 1:19 And the LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.
He can’t defeat chariots of iron. If one of His attributes falls down, so must all the others.
The difference between then and now is significant, because language back then was very literal. The only way people could be impressed by the fact that the way they understood God, as a punishing God, was the only way. Their behaviour did not understand God’s love, because they themselves had very little understanding of “love” apart from a very egotistical one.
People who thought their "knowledge" could supersede that of God, were really punishing themselves, throwing themselves out of any real "knowledge" and caused their own fall. But, if God would have tried to make them able to understand this, would have been ridiculed far more than even the Great Redeemer was humiliated then crucified. G
So how do you know the psychology of those back then? And God, as usual, perhaps, wasn’t completely happy with “the great redeemers” redemption. or … He would have lifted the curse He put on women, men, and the earth.
OK let’s take it from a different angle. Let’s say You are an atheist. You would not argue with the theory of anthropomorphism? If so, people back then just mirrored their own psychological understanding. If, this “knowledge” or understanding is maintained regarding the Redemption, they must have felt some need to be redeemed from a sense of guilt. However one has a sense of psychology of the early people, from the bible, even if one thinks I nothing but a written testament of some historical significance.,
James Ussher made this mistake, back in the 17th century, thinking the Bible made historical significance when he mistakenly came up with the creation of the earth on October 23, 4004. Historical significance? Poppycock …
Quibbles over the major problem of anthropomorphism as a mirror. Sorry will not do; bringing in a minor premise to overturn a major one. That case showed that it is impossible to apply a literal interpretation into a highly symbolic issue.
Yes, the God offenders died. But it takes a sick God to punish everyone thereafter. Why punish women today for something Eve did? Even the human justice system doesn’t do that. We punish the guilty, not the innocent. But God goes hog wild. He’s pathological. Or so the Bible paints Him. Surely these stories are mythological human projections upon God. Such a God is only worth fearing, not worship.
Well then how does one decide what is merely symbolic and what is to be taken literally? Also, many people seem to believe that the writing of the Bible was actually sanctioned by God. Why would God misrepresent himself, or at least allow such crude misrepresentations?
They went on to live approximately 900 years. They would have died either way because they hadn’t eaten from the tree of life. God s implication in saying “you will certainly die” is that the fruit itself will kill you.
I have two big questions. First, God warned about the wrong tree, but didn’t warn about the serpent. Also, he didn’t warn Adam about his “wife” (there was no marriage certificate mentioned) that she was his helpmeet, but was batshit crazy … running after the penis looking talking snake. Adam obviously didn’t satisfy her.
Second, if they could eat from all the trees but one, why didn’t they go directly to the tree of life? Instead, as the story goes, they went right away to the wrong tree. Seems there was a manufacturers defect in them both, or they would have made better smarter choices. And what was wrong with being naked, before or after the forbidden fruit?