Good and Evil
Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Eden because they ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. They were told they could eat anything they wanted, except for the fruit of that one tree. I asked God about that. Why give man free will but not the knowledge of good and evil? What would be the point of our being able to do whatever we want, but not know whether what we chose was good or evil?
It’s like Christmas he told me. Like the story of Santa Claus. We bring up our children telling them this fantastical tale of a man who is infinitely good, yet who will punish them if they are bad. We delight in watching them write their letters and address them to the North Pole. We take them to sit on his lap. We happily give him credit for the presents that we buy. Yet, through it all, we know that someday they will learn the truth, and that will just be the first lesson in how cold and heartless the world really is.
We spare them that lesson for as long as we can. We give them their innocence for as long as we can.
And God kept Adam and Eve from eating from the tree for as long as he could.
More confusion for me.
For starters, I fail to see that the knowledge we obtain about Santa’s lack of existance creates the impression of a ‘cold and heartless world’. We see, in my opinion, that instead of the myth, we have an actuality. Real people care so much about us, that they want to give us the things we desire. This is hardly cold, or heartless. Being that the holiday is supposed to be a celebration of Christ ( Santa, after all, can be viewed as an allegory to Christ ), it makes sense to see the gift-giving as a reflection of selflessness. It seems that you, Toby, might have mistaken God’s explanations do to some preconcieved prejudice. That’s what I’m seeing, anyway.
The Tree of Knowledge idea that God presented makes him out to be a imperfect god. It’s presented that he TRIED to give, as it’s posited, freedom from harm, but failed.
Also, what God said about the Tree gives me the impression that it wasn’t nessacery to have it at all – the seed was already placed inside of mankind. The Tree seems only catalytic.
Being that what you write can only be the impression that you’re getting from your conversations, it may well be that some of your interpretations may not translate well for me.
And by the way, I refer to God in the masculine simple because I hold onto the old rule about when the gender of the subject is unknown, it reverts to the masculine.
I’d like to respond to your statement that the idea as presented makes God out to be imperfect. Well, doesn’t just about everything? The story is that God created us and failed to make us perfect, so doesn’t that mean he’s less than perfect; wouldn’t a perfect God have made us perfect, too? Or should we just jump over to “the Lord acts in mysterious ways?”
Or maybe there’s a bigger picture.
Presumably, God had his reasons for not making us perfect and we’re just too imperfect to know what they are. However, just as you say that Toby may be misinterpreting God because what he wrote shows God to be imperfect, I think that you may be misinterpreting Toby because I don’t think that what he wrote shows God to be imperfect. I find it just as credible to read the story above as saying that God tried to keep us from harm but only as long as he could do it without violating any self-imposed rules that he felt were more important to his goals. I think it’s an issue of priorities and obviously there were higher priorities than keeping us safe and ignorant.
I, too, am only human, and I think I was right in stating that MY interpretation of what Toby is reporting is limited by not having had the same experiences. As far as the Santa Claus analogy goes, ‘that will just be the first lesson in how cold and heartless the world really is’, is purely Toby’s p.o.v. I don’t agree with that assessment, and stated how I felt about it.
When I present questions, or observations about what has been written, I’m consciously taking a Christain stand ( though I am not a Christian myself ). I do this because I’m most familiar with that religion, and because the way I’m seeing God represented appears to me to be the Western Judaeo-Christian image of God. In this sense, God IS infallable, and anyting that seems to be an error on his part is only our lack of understanding. That is my prejudice, and I own it.
I’ll certainly concede your points here. I was just trying to point out that there was a way to interpret what Toby wrote that didn’t violate the notion of an infallible God and that’s a point that I could have made in a less confrontational manner.
Of course I’m filtering God’s explanations through my own preconceptions and prejudices, I’m only human. Of course you should take everything I write with a grain of salt (thanks Mrs. Lot). But also take with a grain of salt everything that you read in the Bible and everything that you hear from a preacher and everything that anybody tells you came from God but that you didn’t hear from him with your own two ears.
Wait a minute! Toby, you’re not talking to the God of the OLD testament! The Old guy create Adam, then Eve, dropped them in Eden and said “Go to it, but Don’t Eat this!” and THEN allowed Satan to tempt them to make them feel good about it.
That’s a CON job.
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Don’t forget Lilith. I don’t know all the particulars, only that she was Adam’s first wife, who got banished from Eden, and became a tramp. What her indiscretions were, I don’t know, but it must have been pretty bad. But at least we can be pretty sure she didn’t come across that Tree…
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